Could the progressively lucrative area of brain science also harbor a national political agenda behind it?

While many in the scientific community welcome the increasing interest in neuroscience, others are skeptical about recent government funded initiatives. Earlier this March, the Ontario government indicated it might pledge $100 million within the next 5 years to brain research. Such an investment follows recent efforts like the Obama administration’s $3 billion to create a national research project dubbed the Brain Activity Map. Following in step, other nationalized initiatives, particularly in European, are likewise seeking to produce a supercomputer simulation from the human brain’s gray matter.

Scholars, bloggers, and medical experts are weighing in around the globe with many finding similarities between such previous large-scale efforts, such as the Human Genome Project. Some scientists are concerned that diversity and academic freedom may be sacrificed as massive funds are funneled into directed research aims while other fundamental scientific approaches are potentially neglected.

To read more, please visit the University of Toronto's recent article on the "Neuroscience Arms Race."

A recent article published in the Wall Street Journal suggests that at least one joint venture company believes that playing video games could be used as a treatment for ADHD. The company Akili Interactive Labs Inc. of Boston is currently seeking FDA approval with the hope that clinicians might turn to utilizing it as a treatment option prior to prescribing meds.

Purportedly the company is basing its treatment theory on research conducted at the University of Toronto which suggested that playing video games led to heightened visual attention. Also, researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Minnesota in 2010 asserted that similar visual games could be used to train some individuals to make decisions faster.

Several critical challenges for developers remain open to question. Namely, will the video game treatment therapy actually produce a kind of attention that is useful and applicable to improving the lives of ADHD sufferers? Furthermore, if that particular kind of attention that is fostered by playing video games is useful, will the treatment create a sustained positive effect on the individual without intruding on other life activities?

Thus, it seems the time-honored question of concerned middle-class parents across America remains: Could video games, or in this case the video game "treatment," simply develop into yet another distraction?

Researchers examining the cognitive function of drosophila suggest that test subjects who are able to maintain adequate cognitive functionality while sleep-deprived may suffer a greater cognitive vulnerability to starvation. The cognitive trade-off of test subjects who remained functional while sleep-deprived appear to be that they experienced significantly greater short-term memory disruption after periods of starvation than subjects who did not function well while sleep-deprived.

By studying the link between sleep loss and brain function, researchers hope to gain insight into why an evolutionary alternative to sleep has not emerged.

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