What's New in Neurofeedback

• Surface Brain Stimulation May Ease Parkinson's Symptoms
• Brain Scan Helps Diagnose Bipolar Disorder
• Brain Scan Shows Differences in Truth, Lying
• Brain Abnormality Linked to Hyperactivity Disorder
• Obesity in Women Linked with Brain Tissue Loss
• Chronic Pain Shrinks People's Brains
• Brain Area Found to Be Smaller in Cocaine Addicts

  All links at: http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid=34&in=science&cat=brain_research

In the May 1999 issue, I reviewed brain science during the Decade of the Brain, as George Bush (Ws's father) and Congress officially christened the 1990s. During the 1990s, Science magazine reported an "explosive growth" in the number of scientists identifying themselves as neuroscientists, about a 1000 more each year. We've all witnessed the change in mass media reporting in the last few years. It is now common place for a major news weekly to feature a cover article on the brain, mental health, or related scientific issues. In fact, Newsweek ran one on memory just this week.

In May 1999, I asked whether the last decade of the millenium actually should have been designated the DOB " Decade of the Brain". When it came to the brain sciences, was the final decade of the second millenium really DOB -- or DOA?

For the initial survey, I randomly sampled five terms in neuroscience, five in mental health, and five in medicine for the baseline. In this update, I used all publications as the baseline, which is so much better:

So the scientific world experienced an increase of 30% more publications during the 1990s. Against this baseline, mental health research doubled and neuroscience nearly tripled its output, so it was a DOB using this line of argument. Neurofeedback exploded, but that wasn't hard, given the paucity of papers indexed in Medline. I suspect that only one-third or less of all peer-reviewed research in the field of neurofeedback is indexed by Medline at this moment. For instance I know more work appears in PsycInfo.

Since 1949, the first year of Medline indexing, there have been a total of 85 thousand EEG papers indexed. However, functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) has about 130 thousand in a much shorter timespan (the earliest technique papers appeared in 1985)

How has EEG research fared over the decades? A look at the percentage of EEG papers that make up Medline over the last half century reveals that we may have stablized at about one paper in 200, with a slight peak in the 1970s.

A review of Medline's history reveals the history of biomedical research and scientific writing (and presumably progress) in general.

This trend was surprising. We are so accustomed to information overload and geometric growth in the Information Age, that it is almost reassuring to see this linear trend in growth in publications. Unlike other sources of information, the peer-reviewed kind increases slowly. In fact, the doubling rate was 11 years in 1950 (1961 before the number of publications double). The doubling rate has slowed down ever since, taking 20 year to double in 1960, 31 years in 1970, and so on. Our current numbers won't double until 2061 or so. Compare this to Moore's Law, which has a twenty-fold increase in the number of transistors in the standard PC since the May 1999 article appeared. Or the rise of television. In 1949 there were one million TV sets in the US. This grew fifty-fold in the following decade (50 million in 1959). We had one cable channel 30 years ago (HBO), now we have a thousand, controlled by 60 cable networks.

By 2015, links to the home are predicted to rise to 2.5 Gigabits per second, 50,000 times faster than the modem I currently use (56K bit/s). By 2010, a typical disk drive will hold a 2 Terabytes of data (that's two million Megs) and move data around at 200 Gbyte/s. I recall the first computer I owned, a 1979 Trash-80 (TRS-80) from Radio Shack which had 4,000 bytes of memory, just enough to play Star Trek using keyboard characters as the elements (the Enterprise was an @, the Klingon Bird of Prey spaceship the letter V, stars * of course, and explosions a string of punctuation !@#%&). I envied my friend who owned a 16K Commodore... and sometimes still do.

The amount of information in one Sunday New York Times is greater than the amount of information an 18th century person in England was exposed to in his lifetime. Of course, few of us read through the entire 5-lb monster so it is still more written words than we are likely to consume in a lifetime. Of course if we count the bits of information flowing across our TV or computer screens any given minute, we are each exposed to more information in one day than the entire world's population encountered in its entire lifetime just last year. Or so it feels some days.

But that is information, not knowledge. Looking at the history of Medline, it appears that knowledge -- our understanding of the world and ourselves -- increases far more slowly than the Information Age would have us believe.

-DK

News & Reviews NEW BOOKS

Neuronal Substrates of Sleep and Epilepsy
by Mircea Steriade
Examines neuronal mechanisms underlying sleep and paroxysmal activities. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521817072/top100

Antisocial Behavior in Children and Adolescents
by John B. Reid, et al
Approaches to reduce antisocial behavior, from the earliest years in childhood onward. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1557988978/top100

Neuropsychological Assessment
by Muriel Deutsch Lezak
Thousand-page manual and reference of neuropsychological assessment tools. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195090314/top100

Navigating the Social World: for Asperger's Syndrome...
by Jeannie McAfee, Dr. Tony Attwood
Exercises and guides for the student with AS. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1885477821/top100

Fundamentals of Polysomnography and Sleep Disorders
by Thomas M. Kilkenny
The art of polysomnography is detailed in this training guide. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0972035702/top100

Birth of the Mind: How Tiny Number of Genes Creates Complexities of Human Thought
by Gary Marcus
Explains classic genetics and brain experiments to the layperson. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465044050/top100

Under the Influence : A Guide to the Myths and Realities of Alcoholism
by JR Milam, K Ketcham
Examines the physical factors that set alcoholics and non-alcoholics apart. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553274872/top100

Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children
by Jonathan Kellerman
Novelist views on "childhood criminality" and the moral development of children. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345429397/top100

Fundamental Neuroscience, 2nd Edition
Edited
Comprehensive textbook that both graduate and undergraduate students. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0126603030/top100

Interhemispheric transfer in high-functioning autism : Poor interhemispheric transfer may be involved in autism. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15230457

Is insomnia a neurophysiological disorder? Sleep EEG microstructure. : Insomnia may often be due to neurophysiological disturbance of regulatory mechanisms of sleep control which impact sleep duration, intensity, continuity and stability. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15245764

Frontal-subcortical circuitry in OCD : Left orbitofrontal volumes are smaller in OCD patients and size correlated negatively with symptom severity. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15377742

Reduction of EEG power during expectancy periods in humans. : All bands decreased in power during expectancy periods of a cognitive task. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15366247

Mortality attributable to harmful drinking in USA 2000. : 64,000 deaths were attributable to harmful drinking in the U.S. in 2000, 46,000 were men. Harmful drinking accounts for 4% of all deaths among men, 1.5% among women. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15376828

Diagnosing and treating attentional difficulties: a nationwide survey. : 94% of child psychiatrists and 29% of pediatricians routinely dealt with attentional difficulties. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15383433

Can left prefrontal rTMS be used as a maintenance treatment for bipolar depression? : One full year of weekly TMS may be used as an adjunctive maintenance treatment for some patients with bipolar depression. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15390210

Problematic alcohol and cannabis use in adolescence--risk of adult substance abuse? : Adolescent use of both cannabis and alcohol is more problematic than either alone with regard to escalation as an adult. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15385221

• Every dollar invested in drug treatment generates $7 in savings to taxpayers.

• The DSM-I in 1952 defined a mere 60 disorders; in 1994 the DSM-IV identified 410 disorders.

• In 1955, half a million Americans were institutionalized for mental illness. Today, it is only 65 thousand.

• Treatment reduces participants' illegal drug use by 40 percent.

• More schizophrenics are in jail than in psychiatric institutions.

• Providing treatment to all addicts in the US would save more than $150 billion in social costs over 15 years, while requiring just $21 billion in treatment costs.

• Criminal activity dropped by two-thirds after offenders completed drug treatment, and the more time spent in treatment, the greater the reduction in individual criminal activity. Client homelessness drops 43% after drug treatment.

• Nine in 10 adults have ever used alcohol; 4 in 10 marijuana. A million US residents were treated in substance abuse treatment facilities last year; 40% had problems with both drugs and alcohol

• Every year 1 in 4 adults in the US have a diagnosable mental disorder. Lifetime prevalence is 1 in 2.
  1 in 18 suffer with a serious mental Illness. 12.6% suffer from anxiety disorders, 9.5% substance use disorders (7.4% alcohol abuse/ 3.1% drug abuse), 9.5% affective disorders (5% major depression, 1.2% manic depression), 2.7% severe cognitive impairment, 2.1% obsessive-compulsive disorder, 1.5% antisocial personality disorder, and 1.1% schizophrenic disorders

• $28.3 billion were spent on mental health care in 1992; 40 percent came from State mental health agencies; 17 percent from client fees; 31 percent from Federal government sources including Medicaid & Medicare; 8 percent from local governments and 4 percent from all other sources.

• Women are twice as likely to suffer unipolar depression than men, nearly twice as likely to suffer an anxiety disorder, but men are twice as likely to suffer from an addiction or substance abuse problem.

• Serious mental illness is more common among women than men, is elevated among the unmarried, among persons with less than $20,000 family income, and among those with less than a college education.

• 1 in 9 children exhibit a serious emotional disturbance. 1 in 15 are significantly impaired by this condition (about 2 per classroom). There were 30,000 suicides in American last year, twice the homicide rate, and the 3rd leading cause of death in teenagers. The suicide rate has tripled in teens since 1950.

  Sources: CA Dept of Alcohol & Drug Programs, National Institute of Mental Health, RAND Corporation, Center for Mental Health Services, Office of Natl Drug Control Policy, and Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Admin

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