Psychology Questions and Paper

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Psychologists study the human mind and human behavior and help people achieve and maintain mental and emotional health. Some specialize in research, while others focus on assisting companies and groups in managing conflict and operating more effectively.

But most serve as clinical psychologists and work in counseling centers, hospitals, and independent or group practices. Over 40% of all psychologists are self-employed, a rate five times higher than for most other professions.

The educational requirements are high. A doctoral degree and a state license are required for many positions. The work can be emotionally draining. But whether it's helping people kick a drug habit, come to terms with the loss of a loved one, or cope with chronic pain or illness, knowing you've helped alleviate suffering in someone's life can be very, very fulfilling.

Dr. Rainnier Centeno is a clinical psychologist who sees eight to 10 patients a day. His goal in these sessions is to help facilitate change in the individuals who see him.

It doesn't have to be a life-changing event for the person that you're working with. It's just helping them or being able to see them make minute changes. And somehow seeing them be able to live their life a little bit more positive than when they first saw you, I think is rewarding. And you see that on a regular basis.

Getting to the point where he could see actual patients, and help them make a difference in their lives, wasn't easy. This profession requires a great deal of education and practical experience.

You will need to definitely get a bachelor's degree. And after that, you will need a couple years' training getting your master's degree in the field of psychology or any social or behavioral sciences. And then after that, comes another step of applying to a doctoral program in psychology, where you will go through another four years of training or education. And a couple more years after that of postdoctoral training.

There are lots of opportunities for psychologists, including work in clinics, schools, and corporations. But regardless of where they work, the overall goal of the profession is the same.

It's understanding human nature. Being able to understand human behavior. Why do people act in the ways that they do? And to be able to help them maximize what their strengths are, whichever settings you're in. Whether you're in a clinical setting or whether you're working for a private sector or corporate setting. The goal there is to be able to maximize the person's behavior in terms of strengths and skills.

You have to be able to have a curiosity for individuals. In some way, you have to be like a detective. So if you like detective work, if you like being a sleuth, and you're a curious individual, it's a strength. It's an asset, in terms of getting into this kind of profession.

Being a psychologist can be emotionally draining. And, as a psychologist, you probably won't become rich but you'll make a good living. Plus, you're likely to always be in demand.

These days you can find psychologists not just in clinical settings. You find them in educational settings, you find them in corporations, you find them in law enforcement, doing various roles. But nonetheless, with the goal of really understanding human behavior and being able to help facilitate change. So there will always be a need for psychologists.

Finally tonight, the legacy of Sigmund Freud. Reported by Susan Dentzer of our Health Policy unit, a partnership with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

Sigmund Freud was the father of psychology. He delved into long-neglected territory, the human unconscious, and fashioned a new tool, psychoanalysis, to plumb its depths.

I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory.

Depending on whom you believe, Freud was either one of the leading lights of the 20th century, or something close to a fraud. The controversy over those competing views has dogged a current exhibition about Freud at Washington's Library of Congress. Even the exhibition's curator, historian Michael Roth, acknowledges that the debate surrounds Freud to this day.

We make the point in the exhibition that there is not scientific consensus on any of Freud's ideas. This exhibition is about Freud's place in the intellectual history of our century. If you're walking down the 20th century, the history of ideas, history of culture, Freud is someone to reckon with.

Psychoanalyst Dorothy Holmes agrees that Freud's influence has been profound.

Freudian thought, I would say, could hardly be more alive. Certainly as an intellectual enterprise, universities, departments of the humanities, the arts.

Some cultural analysts, like literary critic Frederick Crews, agree that Freud's influence has been pervasive. But as perhaps the leading Freud critic in the country, Crews also believes that much of Freudian theory is unsupportable, and even dangerous.

An apparently scientific doctrine, which in fact was medieval in its assumptions, was sold to the Western public, including its intellectuals, for almost 100 years. In an age of science, in an age of empiricism, in an age of technology. To my mind, this is one of the strangest and most interesting facts about the century that we live in, that we bought into Freud.

Crews is among a number of Freud critics who protested the Library's initial plans for the exhibition as being entirely too favorable to Freud. That protest almost derailed the exhibition, which finally opened this fall, a year later than originally expected.

The show draws heavily on the extensive collections of the Library of Congress, which is the world's largest repository of Freud's manuscripts, letters, and other memorabilia. The exhibition also demonstrates Freud's impact on the popular culture through television and film clips. One is this excerpt from the Alfred Hitchcock movie, "Spellbound."

I think this whole thing is ridiculous.

What whole thing, Mary?

Psychoanalysis. It bores the pants off me. Lying on a couch like some dreary nitwit telling all.

A tour through the exhibition raises scores of questions about Freud's life and work. For example, how much real scientific basis lay behind Freud's theories about the human psyche at the time he proposed them? And do the methods he used to treat his patients have any relevance to clinical practice today?

Since Freud's time, modern brain research has revolutionized our understanding of the underlying physical causes of many mental conditions. And a costly course of psychoanalysis seems obsolete in an era of medications like Prozac, or at a time when managed care is squeezing down on mental health care costs.

These hallmarks of modern psychology were scarcely imaginable when Freud was born in 1856 in what is now the Czech Republic. His family soon moved to Vienna, and it was there that Freud grew up, married, and trained in neurology.

I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients.

In 1885, he went to Paris to study with a famed neurologist of the time, Jean-Martin Charcot. Under Charcot's tutelage, he began using techniques like hypnosis to treat patients. He thus gained critical insight into the workings of the unconscious, the vital mental processes that seemed to go on beneath the level of day-to-day consciousness.

He says, human beings can keep no secrets. They reveal their innermost selves with their clothes, their twitches, with their unconscious mannerisms. That whatever we do, we're expressing things about ourselves for people who have eyes to see and ears to hear. And I think that this is really the fundamental orientation of Freud.

Among the things that Freud believed often lay buried in the unconscious were traumas that people suffered when they were infants or children. For example, for a while Freud thought that many of his patients' symptoms stemmed from long-repressed memories of being sexually abused. Later, as he wrote to a colleague, Freud abandoned that belief, apparently because it became clear even to him that the theory was without much, if any, foundation in reality.

Freud also eventually abandoned hypnosis is a technique for delving into the psyches of his patients, including famous ones, like Princess Marie Bonaparte.

Instead he encouraged patients to talk about themselves while awake, and to say everything that came to mind, however unimportant or unpleasant it seemed.

Let's see. I kept thinking while I was dreaming that all this meant something.

In Freud's words, patients would free-associate, even about such things as their dreams. In the process, Freud believed that the deepest and often darkest truths of the unconscious could be glimpsed.

Freud called the treatment psychoanalysis. Although later parodied, the therapy caught on, and its influence arguably helped to transform much of Western society into a system increasingly preoccupied with the self.

Freud doesn't set out to cure people or make them normal. Psychoanalysis is not about self-help, to become like everyone else. It's about finding something out about yourself. And then you have to decide what to do.

But was any of this treatment scientifically valid? Or, for that matter, helpful for patients? In his private papers, even Freud revealed his doubts, although by and large, he kept them from the public.

Several examples of the troubled course of Freud's treatment of patients are featured in the exhibition. One of the most notorious is the case of Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolfman. Pankejeff was a wealthy Russian emigre who was plagued with debilitating symptoms, ranging from obsessions to psychosis. To treat him, Freud analyzed a dream that Pankejeff had of wolves sitting in a tree outside his window. Based on his theories, Freud decided that the dream reflected a trauma that Pankejeff must have experienced at age one and a half when he saw his parents making love in their bedroom. But Pankejeff later insisted that the bedroom encounter Freud believed had occurred had in fact never happened.

You know, The Wolfman retained his personal affection for Freud, as so many people did, but he said, psychoanalysis is a disaster. "Psychoanalysts are a problem, no doubt about it," he said, quote, unquote.

He did say that. He also, at other times in his life, said very different things. One could select things from the Wolfman to show that he didn't like Freud. Or select things from the Wolfman that shows he did like Freud. and so that, I think, is not going to take us very far. What does, I think, take us far, and what the exhibit does say quite directly, is how difficult it is, if not impossible, to know whether anyone is helped by psychoanalysis. Just like it's difficult to know whether anyone is helped by a friendship, by a conversation, by being in love.

Whether or not psychoanalysis cured patients, its influence spread. Freud created an international network of psychoanalytic associations, even travelling to the United States at one point to drum up support for the movement.

In time, psychoanalysis became the treatment of choice of a well-heeled Western intelligentsia.

Great.

You sure?

No, I've got time. Sure. I've got nothing, uh, nothing until my analyst's appointment.

Oh. You see an analyst?

Yeah. Just for 15 years.

15 years?

Uh huh. I'm going to give him one more year and then I'm going to Lourdes.

Two decades have now passed since the movie "Annie Hall" made its debut. And although director Woody Allen may still be in Freudian-style psychoanalysis, he is one of only about 20,000 Americans who are. That's just over 1% of those in any ongoing type of psychotherapy.

Moreover, Freudianism has all but vanished from modern psychological research. Today, researchers look to fields like brain chemistry and physiology to explain phenomena that Freud once attributed to repressed memories.

If you consult psychology faculties in top American universities, you will find almost no one now who believes in the Freudian system of thought. As a research paradigm, it's pretty much dead.

Yet Dorothy Homes is one of a small group of psychoanalysts who are still treating patients. Fees for such treatment range as high as $200 an hour, and often are not fully covered by health insurance. Holmes says that, while many practicing psychoanalysts still use tools like the couch, they have rejected many other Freudian techniques, such as relying heavily on patient's memories.

We do not think that people retain memories of events as they happened, but rather that the mind is always active in the reformation of what we call memory. Psychoanalysis is not directed at recovery of memory, per se. Analysis is directed at reclaiming of capacities, to have meaningful relationships, to think clearly, to be able to think about one's thoughts, to have access to one's feelings.

Curator Roth says that, whatever the flaws in Freud's theories, he raised questions that are still important.

He drew attention to issues that remain for us puzzling, interesting, sometimes fascinating. And I think if we can use the exhibition to return to those questions and issues, we'll be well-served.

The exhibition is on display at the Library of Congress through mid-January. After that it will travel to the Jewish Museum in New York City, the Getty Institute in Los Angeles, and abroad.

Finally tonight, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, editor-at-large of US News and World Report, talks with Winifred Gallagher, science writer and author of ID-- How Heredity and Experience Make You Who You Are.

Nature versus nurture. That debate has raged over centuries. And as you point out, even in Shakespeare, in The Tempest, one finds the characters are arguing about whether one's basic nature can be changed by childhood or by nurture. And you've just written a book saying that in the last few years, we've actually come a long way in our understanding. Help us understand where we are.

OK. I think the important thing to realize is that there have been three basic ways to understand why we are the way we are. And the first is nature. And it's actually the oldest way. People since Hippocrates have understood that babies are born a certain way. And until the turn of the century the assumption was that they pretty much stay that way, too, and that how they were treated and what happens to you after you're born doesn't make a great deal of difference. That's temperament. That's your biological temperament, which is a basic orientation to the world. How you're going to react to life in very basic ways.

So for most of history people believed it was nature that determined your take on life, your emotional take on life.

Way before. Now we know that genes give us a great deal of that basic temperament. They didn't know it was genes, but they were on the right track.

Now, around the turn of the century, with Freud, we began to learn that what happened to you after you were born was also very important. This is nurture. Learning how your parents treated you. And in fact, what happened then was, the scientists got carried away with that idea and sort of forgot about temperament, that the genetic basis that you were born with was also important. So we had these two views that were sort of oil and water.

The third way of looking at this issue, which is what I've tried to write about--

That's the new way.

--is that we actually get a second nature. So that, rather than nature and nurture being oil and water, they're like the flour and water that make bread. And once you have bread, you can't pull apart the flour and the water anymore.

So that, in effect, you're born, genetically born, with a certain temperament.

You are born with a certain temperament--

But your experience in your early years, in your childhood, then modifies that temperament and can change that temperament?

Not just psychologically, in some sort of, airy fairy way, but in a very real, physiological, structural way. I'll give you an example. We can't do these kinds of experiments with children, for obvious reasons. But if scientists breed a very, very highly aggressive or highly anxious monkey, and give that infant to a very relaxed, competent, experienced mother to raise, that infant will grow up to resemble, not just behaviorally, but also neurochemically, an infant who was born with normal levels of those two traits. Now, that's a very profound finding. This isn't just like some sort of slick gloss on a basic trait. This is a profound change in that trait that's due to experience.

And this is what scientists have discovered over the past 20 years in a variety of fields?

This is going to be the cutting edge. This is going to be, I believe, the personality of psychology and the temperament research of the next century.

And you argue that essentially the nature versus nurture debate is over.

It's over. It's nature and nurture and this third thing that they create between them, which is something quite different.

And the fact that you can create your second nature through your own socialization, through your own childhood, so that if a child is born with a temperament that makes that child very bold, assertive, reckless, perhaps even violent, that that disposition can be changed through socialization?

Let's draw the line at violent. Let's take a little boy who's born very bold and feisty and aggressive. Now, that child can end up being the captain of the football team and a senator or a very successful entrepreneur. That same child, for the very same reasons, can end up seeking thrills in a criminal environment. And that is socialization. That's not genes.

So the research basically says in terms of criminals, it's overwhelmingly the socialization rather than genes.

Overwhelmingly. The scientists that I've talked to who are the most inclined to look for genetic and biological explanations for behavior make a big exception where socialization, which is teaching kids how to obey the law, is concerned. The overwhelming majority of criminals are criminals because of how they were brought up and not because of their genes.

What practical advice would you give to young parents about raising children. Let's say they note a certain disposition on the part of their child. That they find, this child is not going to be well-adapted to the world, for whatever reason, maybe in terms of disposition. What should they do? Where does this lead you?

The best advice is to look at who your child is. Look at the child's temperament. If you have a very shy child, accept that. This child is never going to be the life of the party. But that doesn't mean that this child can't be helped to have some friends. The child may not have 100 friends, but the child can have three or four friends. And it's really a very sensitive acceptance and recognition of the child's basic disposition, and then helping the child to live comfortably with that disposition.

So then, how much you can change your personally after adolescence? You say personality doesn't change very much. But even Henry V was very different from Prince Hal.

Right-- the perception. Well, that's an excellent example. Henry V, when he was Prince Hal, was kind of what we would call a juvenile delinquent, who liked to go out and raise Cain. When he became King Henry, he invaded France. So he's taking the same basic, let's go seek some thrills and get in some fights and mix it up. He's taking that same orientation, but when he's king, he's doing something very different with that orientation. And I think that's true--

So that there can be personality changes as you get older.

You can change what you decide to do with your traits, definitely.

You wouldn't change your traits so much as where the focus of your activity--

Well, you can do both. And this is going to sound hopelessly retro, but I'm actually a big believer in the power of psychotherapy to change, the power of insight to change traits. I don't think we necessarily have to take a drug to change.

Why is that so retro?

I think right now we're living through-- the health care system is being overhauled, and people don't want to pay for psychotherapy. It's much cheaper to take Prozac. But I think in terms of understanding a certain trait that you have and how maybe to sort of file down the rough edges on that a little bit, live with it a little more comfortably, experiment with different ways to be, I think it's a long process, a difficult process, and an expensive process. But much more so than when I started out the book, I now think that it also can be a very effective process.

It's interesting. I want to come back to this question that you pose at the end of your book. You said about the American culture, you quoted one source as saying we're probably living in the most civilized time ever in history. We really look at our children, we have all these kind of drugs, we have all these treatments, we have all this psychotherapy. And yet at the same time, you say we're going through an epidemic of depression, that one in 10 Americans is depressed. Twice as many women as men. What's really going on in the culture?

Well, it's the best of times and the worst of times. We do have an epidemic of depression. And a lot of people think that that has to do-- no one's quite sure how to explain it, but a lot of people think it might have to do with the fact that we have very high expectations and no longer the kind of economy that has the terrific boom, say, that prevailed right after the war where it seemed like anybody could do anything. So we have these very high post-war expectations, but we don't have the economy driving it underneath. And that can create a sense of, gee, well, why aren't I rich and famous?

That's putting a very superficial spin on it. But I think the risk here is that we raise up certain kinds of personalities and certain types of people as if they were an ideal. And in fact, the glory of our species, and I would argue of our nation, is that we have so many different types and they're all wonderful. And we need them all.

But your point also would be that, rather than turning to antidepressant drugs such as Prozac, that we ought to learn to build more support systems and let people be-- not try to change them so dramatically through drugs, but allow them to adapt more easily to the environment in which they find themselves.

I think we have to be very careful when we talk about anti-depressants, because they have been one of the greatest medical boons of the 20th century. And certainly someone who's suffering from the illness of depression, their whole life can be changed by these drugs.

On the other hand, sometimes the way the drugs are marketed, they seem more like a psychological [INAUDIBLE] tonic. I mean, who couldn't be a little more resilient, a little more cheerful, a little more optimistic, worry a little less? And I think sometimes those things, even if they're uncomfortable, they're actually signals that we need to think about something that's going on in our lives. Maybe if your job is that stressful, maybe you don't need to take a drug to deal with the stress. Maybe you need to have a different job. So I would just argue, let's think about what we're treating when we take a drug. Are we treating a trait, or are we treating an illness?

OK. Fine. Well, thank you very much.

Thank you for having me.

Skinner, I need that report.

I'm working as fast as I can, sir.

I need [INAUDIBLE] report, Skinner. Is that the report?

Yes, sir. It is.

Is it finished?

Not yet, sir.

Why not? Skinner, corporate has been on my back for this report for the last two weeks. And it's been on your desk the entire time and not in my hands. Skinner, I need to get that report in to corporate. Do you understand? Skinner, I want the report now. Skinner, finish the report. Will you get it done and give it to me? Skinner, I need the report. Skinner. Skinner, I need that-- Thank you.

Skinner.

Yes, sir?

Skinner, I'm proud of you.

Thank you, sir.

Sales are up, costs are down, morale is high. And it's all due to your diligence and hard work this past quarter.

Well, that's my job. I mean--

Ah, pish posh. I don't want to hear another word about corporate responsibility or your allegiance to our fine company. You did fantastic work this quarter. And as a thank you, I would like to present you with this bonus.

Wow. Thank you, sir.

It's nothing. Smile for the camera.

Skinner, where have you been?

Uh, I, uh, sorry, sir.

I don't want to hear any of that sorry malarkey or bunkum. You were late last Monday, you were late Wednesday, and today.

But, I can explain.

No, no, no. Hold it right there. You know what that sounds like?

Yes, sir.

A bunch of malarkey.

Yes, malarkey. Exactly. And this will not stand. You must be punished. Tonight, you will stay and shred every document that needs to be shredded.

The early bird-- Skinner, how did that phrase go?

Uh, the early bird doesn't have to do any shredding.

That's correct. Unless, of course, the early bird needed to make a nest. In which case, of course, the early bird could shred paper with which to make the nest for the little ones. Obviously, though, the early bird does not shred paper.

Yes. Very good, sir.

New research on dyslexia and [INAUDIBLE].

10 million Americans have a neurological disorder known as dyslexia. It's believed to affect as many as 80% of all those diagnosed with learning disabilities. People with dyslexia have difficulty learning to read, even though they have normal intelligence.

While many people may think of dyslexia as reversing letters, scientists say the basic problem is a person's inability to link words and parts of words with distinct sounds. For example, the word cat is made up of kuh, aa, and tuh. A person with dyslexia may recognize the sound kuh, but may not necessarily connect the written letter C with that sound.

Because there are no outward physical signs of dyslexia, early detection is often elusive. According to some estimates, as many as one in five American children may have dyslexia. Yet most are not identified until the third grade and beyond. Many are never diagnosed. And for those who are, programs that would help are frequently unavailable in public schools.

You need to read your biography with your partner.

Jenny Elementary in Washington, DC, is one school that does provide special instruction for dyslexic children. Its inclusion program allows kids with special needs to attend regular classes. Four children in this second and third grade class have dyslexia and other learning disabilities. A student teacher is on hand to help them when necessary. Other options sometimes offered in public schools are private classes and tutoring.

There are also less traditional methods of teaching. The Lab School of Washington is one of more than 1,000 private schools nationwide geared to the learning disabled. Although tuition here runs $16,000 a year, 85% of the students are fully subsidized by public funds. Sally Smith is founder and director.

95% of our kids are dyslexic and so we have to do what the latest research has shown, that we have to work with them on their phonemic awareness, on sound-symbol linkage. But, we don't stop educating them because they can't read.

At the Lab School, the arts are used to develop academic and social skills. In the dance class, students develop motor skills and coordination. Learning precision and building are part of the woodwork class. Budding filmmakers learn the trade in video classes. Students created and produced an animation of what it's like to be learning disabled.

There are also special so-called clubs where kids, appropriately costumed, study history.

What do you think this symbol would represent?

They're going to have to spend a lot of their lives problem-solving, because learning disabilities don't totally go away.

And, although dyslexia persists throughout life, reading skills can improve consistently with practice.

Now, there's been new research that people with dyslexia actually have different patterns of brain activity than people who are good readers. To explain those findings and their implications, we're joined by Dr. Sally Shaywitz, lead author of the study which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She's a professor of pediatrics at the Yale University School of Medicine.

And Reid Lyon, head of Child Development and Behavior at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. That's part of the National Institutes of Health. And welcome both.

Dr. Shaywitz, what did your study find?

Well, since dyslexia was first described over 100 years ago, we've learned a great deal about reading and reading difficulties. In particular, we learned that, in order to learn to read, a child must develop an awareness that the spoken word is made of smaller units of sounds, and that letters represent these sounds.

Based on this knowledge, we examined two groups of people, a group of good readers, and a group of dyslexic readers. And we found significant differences in brain activation patterns as each of these individuals performed a series of reading tests.

And tell us specifically how you went about finding out that there's different ways that the brain works in people who have dyslexia as opposed to people who can read well.

We used a remarkable new technology termed Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

Is that like a regular MRI?

Well, it is and it isn't. It is in terms of the basic hardware that's used. It's the same if you have a headache or a knee injury and you have an MRI. But that MRI only lets you see the structure. It doesn't let you see the brain in action.

And what did this MRI show you?

This MRI showed us-- what we did was ask each of these people to identify letters, to sound out letters, and then to sound out words. And what we found, as we looked in the brain, we found a pattern of activation in the back of the brain as good readers sounded out letters and words. A whole region in the back of the brain became active.

So here we're looking at a chart that sort of summarizes those findings. In the normal brain, you talked about the pattern of activation. That means the level of brain activity. And we see that there's activity in the back and also in the front. But in the dyslexic readers, what do we see?

We see a very different pattern. We see a pattern of relative under-activation in the back of the brain. And we see a pattern of over-activation in the front of the brain. And what we believe is this pattern of relative under- activation in the back of the brain, coupled with relative over-activation in the front of the brain, may represent a neural signature for the reading difficulties experienced by dyslexic readers.

So there is a telltale pattern that good readers exhibit that dyslexic readers do not.

Exactly.

And you think gives you a key as to the cause of dyslexia?

Well, I think these findings have several important implications. I think from the perspective of scientists, this confirms what we've learned from reading tests and language tests, that the difficulty occurs when people with dyslexia have to try to sound out words, get to the sound structure of words. And I think what this does, is for the community of scientists that have been dedicated to studying dyslexia, it tells us where to shine the light. It tells us which system is involved, which system is disrupted.

But right now, is there any answer as to why people with dyslexia tend to use just that front part of the brain?

Well, that's an interesting question. And that's the subject of future research. And indeed, there are investigations currently going on to address just that question.

Mr. Lyon, why is this study significant?

For a number of reasons. Number one, if you don't learn to read, you don't make it in life. The NIH has aggressively pursued research and supported research to try to understand three things. What does it take to learn how to read? If you don't read well, what gets in the way? And the most practical aspect, if you don't read well, what do you do about it?

Sally's study in the Yale group goes after the first two questions. What does it take to read? Sally has mentioned, we've been able to identify that reading requires an understanding that words are made up of sound parts that will be applied to print. That's how one deciphers the code in reading.

This study also shows that there is a neurobiological underpinning for the difficulty the kids show us. Their reading is slow, labored, hesitant. And it's primarily because they do not map these sounds well onto the print, this study indicates clearly that there are neurobiological features that explain that.

This, my understanding is, is the first map of a so-called reading path in the brain. Is that correct?

Well, it converges on a number of other studies quite nicely. This one is more complete in showing what we consider the most comprehensive system.

What this study also does, by applying a non-invasive camera, if you will, a non-invasive technology, is it allows us to study children as well as adults. Sally's group and other groups now are working on trying to understand a very critical question. If you don't learn to read, and we can get to you early enough with the right

kinds of intervention, as you gain in your reading capabilities, what happens to the brain? How does the neurophysiology change as well?

And these findings are going to give us significant understanding about how plastic the brain is. How young kids have to be in order to receive optimum kinds of gains. Whether interventions applied at five and six years of age are equally robust at 10, 11, and 12 years of age. And does the brain have something to say about that with respect to how open, or malleable, it might be to respond to the intervention?

Dr. Shaywitz, how important is to have some tangible evidence that dyslexia actually exists?

Well, I think it's incredibly important. Dyslexia is referred to as a hidden disability. And what that means is, there's no external sign that someone can point to and say, that's the source of the difficulties. If you break your arm, you can have an X-ray and point and say, ah, there's the fracture. There's the source of the difficulties.

What often happens is that young men and women who are dyslexic, sometimes the brightest young men and women, they work very hard and they accomplish a lot, but they have difficulty reading. And then they're told, well, it must be you're not trying hard enough. Maybe you're not motivated enough, or maybe it's your imagination.

So what these findings do, it allows these individuals to point to these brain activation patterns and say, look, here's the evidence. Here's concrete proof of the neurobiologic evidence, nature of dyslexia.

And Reid Lyon, what does one do with this proof, in terms of coming up with better treatment for people with dyslexia?

Well, part of the NIH program is clearly devoted to trying to figure out what in the world we can do. We now understand that the sound issue, these phoneme issues that Sally's study has identified--

By phoneme, you're referring to--

The sound structure that is difficult for the youngsters. That is, in the brain scans that Sally has shown you, those brain regions that should help kids understand that words are made of sound are under-activated. The task of the teacher is to make sure the youngsters develop that sound capability so that they can then map the sounds on the letters that they see.

So they can make a connection between what they hear and what they see on the written page.

Correct. We're working very hard to see which kids to respond to which kinds of teaching methods to increase reading behavior. But we are now clear that what the Shaywitz study has identified has to be improved in order for accurate and good reading to take place. It's not something we can circumvent in order to produce robust reading in children with difficulties.

Dr. Shaywitz, if one is a parent of a child with dyslexia, what should he or she take away from the study?

I think there are several things. One is that reading difficulties are real. They have a neurobiologic substrate.

But I think even more than that, these differences emerged when these dyslexic individuals were trying to get to the sound structure of the written word. That tells us, this is where the prime difficulty is. And that would direct us to, in terms of trying to improve someone's reading ability, to try to bring up that level of awareness so that children develop an understanding that words are made of sounds and that the letters represent these sounds.

There've been some wonderful studies carried out through NICHD that have indicated already that if you use these principles, teaching children about the basic nature of language, reading really improves. It makes a real difference.

Dr. Shaywitz, Mr. Lyon, thank you both for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

For Marco, it's a chance to watch his brain learn. That's why he volunteered for this experiment. For one hour, he'll listen to various sounds. He'll be lying in this MRT, Magnet Resonant Tomography, where he's not supposed to move. He's not even supposed to think of anything except what the scientist tells him. The scientist plays tone progressions, and Marco concentrates on listening to them. The MRT shows the active parts of the brain.

Basically, sound is processed in both parts of the brain. Here, a view into Marco's brain while he listens intensively. Now comes an additional task.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

OK.

Marco's brain not only has to listen, but also evaluate the tone progressions and make quick decisions. This process also shows up in his brain. His left side is less busy, just listening, than his right side is evaluating the sounds. After a short break, they continue. But, little by little, Marco learns to distinguish the notes faster and more precisely.

Only those parts of his brain important to decision-making are now active. A direct comparison shows the difference. On the left, Marco's brain activity after he was given the task. On the right, after some practice.

Learning a thing or two frees up more space for new things. And Marco will find those outside of this tube.

So, you are done.

If you're still wondering what to get your Valentine this year, here's a tip. Men and women are different. We've heard it before. But now neuroscientists can see the differences in our brains and our mental health.

Men in adulthood are more prone to certain psychiatric disorders, such as substance use disorders, like with alcohol or illicit drugs, schizophrenia, or anti-social personality disorder. And women are more prone to disorders such as anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.

In the journal Cerebral Cortex, researchers say men and women's brains are wired differently. Goldstein and her team studied this with a scanning technique called magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI.

Men and women differ in the size of particular brain structures, and that may reflect sex differences in the number of nerve cells, or the connections between them.

In this 3-D animation of the brain, the areas colored red are bigger in women, and those colored blue are bigger in men, relative to the total size of their brains.

We also know that brain regions that show sex differences in size have been found to be important for understanding a number of these disorders.

Goldstein says men and women's brains are different even before they're born, so understanding how your sex normally affects connections in the brain could explain sex differences in a number of psychiatric and neurological disorders.

We humans are creatures of habit, whether they're good--

I've been trying to do a regular exercise habit.

--Or not so good.

If I have a coffee in my hand I need a cigarette. If I have a cigarette in my hand I need a coffee in my other hand.

What's going on inside our brains to cause these habits?

Once these patterns get set, they're there, even if they're really difficult to find.

MIT neuroscientist Ann Graybiel studies how our brains make and break habits. As rats slowly learn the habits of following sounds to find the piece of chocolate, Graybiel used tiny electrodes to watch the electrical patterns in their brains.

If you think of neural activity as lights at night in a city going twinkling, the whole pattern of that has changed as a result of learning the habit.

As I report in the journal Nature, this brain pattern disappeared when the researchers broke the rats' habit by playing the sound without a chocolate reward. But when the chocolate was put back, the rats again followed the sounds, and the habitual brain pattern reappeared almost instantly.

It's as though all that time they spent trying to break the habit doesn't count. It's like it's gone.

Graybiel hopes this will lead to better understanding of destructive habits like addiction. As for changing our everyday routines, there's only one way out of that rat race-- willpower.

Lou Mills works through his son Matthew's struggle with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, but admits he's sometimes frustrated.

Today we're going to write thank you notes. It's going to be a struggle just getting him focused. I feel like a good parent, but I also feel like there's some things I just can't do.

Brain researcher Manzar Ashtari has studied ADHD in children for 20 years, and may have found a clue that helps explain physical differences in ADHD childrens' brains. She reported her findings at an annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Building on previous research on brain abnormalities in ADHD kids, Ashtari chose a new MRI-based technique called diffusion tenser imaging, or DTI, to look at childrens' brains in more detail. DTI tracks water motion along the fibers that connect brain parts. After scanning 18 ADHD-diagnosed kids and 15 children without ADHD, she compared the structure and function of fibers in each group's brains.

The motion of the water, the way it should be in normal control, is not in ADHD kids.

Three areas seem to form a key communication circuit that Ashtari believes may be malfunctioning in ADHD kids.

When you actually, literally connect the dots, you realize that, wow, maybe we are actually talking about a specific circuit in the brain that connects the front and the back of the brain along the path that, in several areas, we see the abnormality.

She stresses that her research won't diagnose individual cases of ADHD. Instead, she says the information could help doctors better understand how ADHD affects the brain.

You may not think gardening and brain development have much in common. But researchers say, like any well- pruned plot, our minds go through bouts of blossoming, followed by a trimming back of excess growth.

The brain is very dynamic. You have billions of nerve cells that normally have sites for receiving information that look like trees.

Research scientist Bonnie Firestein studies how a brain chemical called cypin acts like a fertilizer, helping nerve cells sprout new branches of communication.

The more of this protein cypin that you have, the more branches you have. So we think that, when you're learning something, for example, cypin might direct more branches.

Firestein's findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, explain how to cultivate a new crop of nerve connections.

But brain imaging expert Jay Giedd says too many branches bog down the brain.

Way more brain cells and connections for them than can possibly survive. But it's nature's way of making sure that those that do survive are healthy and robust and strong.

Giedd reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that nerve cells in young brains undergo two ways of intense branching. Then, as showing by the dark blue coloring, they're followed by a period of self-pruning as the brain matures.

This process of overproduction and pruning happen in the womb, maybe the first two years of life. And the second wave increases throughout childhood, peaks at about age 11 in girls, and 12 in boys.

Both Firestein and Giedd say understanding these mind-expanding mechanisms will lead to therapies for brain disorders like autism and Alzheimer's, which affect nerve cell growth. But such treatments will take time to cultivate.

10-year-old Vickie Haskopoulous takes regular violin lessons and practices three hours a week. It's long been known this kind of brain-building activity is vital for young children. But brain researcher Jay Giedd says it's just as important for teenagers to flex some mental muscle.

That first five years are very important. So are the next five, so are the next five after that. The brain doesn't grow smoothly and evenly. It grows in fits and starts, and different parts mature at different ages.

Giedd and his colleagues discovered this by creating a unique 3-D animation of the maturing brain. The dark coloring indicates regions of development. Using MRI technology, they scanned the brains of 13 healthy children and teenagers every two years over a 10 year span. The resulting images, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal for the first time the sequence of dynamic brain development between the ages of five and 20.

During these times, when the brain is undergoing these great changes, is the time when practice of a musical instrument, or a sport, or different studies, may have a much greater impact than in earlier or later years.

Just how much greater is yet to be seen, says UCLA neuroscientist Arthur Toga, who oversaw the brain animation. He says, "As we continue to chart the human brain, that map will continue to be better populated with more information."

So it doesn't matter if kids prefer science, sports, or strings. The important thing is that they keep using their heads.

John Ilog says he's not much of a multi-tasker.

I pretty much try to concentrate on one thing.

Psychologist Rene Marois thinks Ilog may have the right idea.

Unless you're very practiced at this multitasking, you're going to suffer.

The psychologist and his colleague James Todd came to that conclusion after they recorded the brain activity of 20 people as they were exposed to a barrage of visual information. They reported in the journal Neuron that the participants could recall only some of what they saw, even though a section of their brains registered everything they were exposed to.

We actually need to dwell on that object or event for a few hundred milliseconds, almost up to a second or a half a second. And that while our brain is busy processing one visual event, then we may not be able to process other visual events.

The researchers believe those fraction of a second delays cause a bottleneck in the brain where information gets slowed down. For Marois, the conclusion is simple.

Whenever you engage in two tasks that require attention, then it means you have less attention available for other tasks.

Something John Ilog seems to have figured out on his own.

If I work on other things, then either I'm not paying attention to the person on the phone, or I'm not paying attention to what I'm actually doing.

Is being shy something kids can learn to get over? Psychologists at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital studied shyness from early childhood to early adulthood.

Inhibited children were characterized by an aversion to novelty, an aversion to strangers, not liking things that were new. Whereas uninhibited children were children who sort of plunged in freely.

The researchers studied a group of toddlers through their teens and into their 20s. While using a scanning technique to measure their brain activity as adults, the researchers repeatedly showed the participants a set of faces so they would become familiar with them. Then they showed them either the same faces, or new ones.

Those who were shy as babies showed unusually high activity when they saw the new faces in a part of the brain, called the amygdala, that regulates emotion and basic instincts.

And we found to our amazement that we could still see this footprint of this very early temperamental difference after more than 21 years of development.

Suggesting that brain-wiring for certain traits like shyness may remain the same from infancy to adulthood. But Schwartz says parents don't have to worry if their kids are just quiet or shy.

If there were no people who were inhibited then there probably would be a lot less scientists in the world. People who kind of look inward to some extent.

But he recommends help for extreme cases, like kids with social anxiety disorders, because even if shyness may be etched in their brains, it need not be their destiny.

Any dreams?

Uh huh.

Yeah? What are you thinking about? What are you dreaming about?

I feel I designed a city and then I blew it out.

You built and designed a city and then blew it out? OK. You dream about anything?

Mm hmm. Something about school.

You were dreaming something about school?

Mm hmm.

Do you remember anything about it?

Um, I was in the cafeteria. I don't know.

You were in the cafeteria at school?

Mm hmm.

Was anybody with you?

Lauren.

What were you guys doing?

I don't remember.

I was dreaming. Yes.

OK. Can you tell me?

Yes. We were all sitting around crying and I got a phone call from a friend of mine. And they were having a party or a barbecue or something. And I thought I'd be invited but I wasn't invited. Then someone came to the door, but I don't know who.

OK. Anything else?

That's all I can remember at the moment.

How about you? Having any dreams?

Yeah.

Cool. Can you tell me?

I'm trying to think. [INAUDIBLE]. I actually was awake and I-- I heard Karen talking when I was dreaming. I'm trying to think what it was. I know I was in an argument.

You were having an argument with somebody?

Yeah. I can't-- Next when I woke up I could feel my heart was beating fast, like I was-- actually had it-- I can't-- I can't think of--

Is this about police?

Did I say something about the police?

Mm hmm. Yes, [INAUDIBLE]. That's typical of me dreaming. Right when I wake up, it's like it's gone.

Because people react differently to pain, doctors often have trouble deciding how much pain medication to prescribe. Now neuroscientists say they can measure the pain in our brains.

What you're doing, you are actually measuring their conscious experience.

Coghill heated a small patch of volunteers' skin and had them rate their sensitivity to pain. Then he repeated the process while his team scanned the volunteers' brains. Both the highly sensitive individuals and insensitive individuals were activating the thalamus, more or less in the same fashion.

The thalamus is the part of the brain that relays pain signals to other areas of the brain. While the activity there was similar for all the volunteers, it was different in the parts that interpret pain.

The highly sensitive individuals who say that our heat stimulus is very, very painful, had a lot of brain activation in areas that are important in the processing of pain. In contrast, individuals who are telling us that the stimulus hurt just a little bit had relatively low activation.

This suggests that the same pain signal coming in is interpreted differently in each of our brains.

It becomes colored by each individual's past history, each individual's present state. Given that difference, it really does seem that individuals are very capable of telling us what they're feeling.

So if doctors want to know how much pain you're really in, Coghill says it won't hurt to ask.

Christina Tour shops for a healthy snack, a choice that would have been different before she confronted her overeating. 70 pounds lighter, she likens her food struggle to other addictions.

With alcohol you can become abstinent. With food, you can't. It's a killer addiction, because if it gets out of control, you die.

Brain researcher Gene-Jack Wang is studying the striking parallel he's found between brain reactions to food and to substances like cocaine and alcohol.

A normal body weight subject, the moment they see the food, the same area of the brain light up. that area of the brain similar to the cocaine abuser.

Wang's 12 food study participants chose their favorite dishes. Then Wang had them fast for 16 hours. He used PET scans, a technique that allows researchers to observe brain activity as subject smelled and tasted, but didn't swallow, foods like this shrimp scampi. He reported in the journal NeuroImage that the same brain areas that lit up in a prior study he did on drug addicts also activated in the food study patients.

Psychiatrist Jonathan Stewart isn't surprised. He says patients with eating problems often view food as--

A rush, a thrill. Which sounds similar to, let's say, someone who uses cocaine or heroin.

Wang hopes his work will result in new drug treatments for those struggling with food, even as he urges people to exercise more and eat healthier.

That's how Tour says she intends to keep the pounds at bay.

The liquid in this jar, androstenone, drives neuroscientist Noam Sobel up the wall.

It smells very foul to me. It smells like dirty laundry, for lack of a better term.

In his lab, the jars are stored in other jars and kept in a refrigerator.

But once that refrigerator is opened, I can smell androstenone from about 30 feet away.

So why can't grad student Joe Mainland smell it?

So I can smell it slightly, but it's not much.

It's not a genetic difference, because people can learn to smell the substance with practice over time.

To test whether this learning was happening in the brain or nose, Mainland and Sobel trained subjects to smell androstenone while blocking one of their nostrils.

Once we completed this, indeed, the untrained, unexposed nostril learned just as well as the exposed one did. Which shows us that the brain is definitely involved in this plasticity.

Plasticity is when the brain changes and acquires a capability it previously did not have. Research like this might give insight into how damaged brains can be fixed.

If you want to repair the damaged nervous system, the best way to go about doing that is to figure out how the nervous system regenerates on its own.

To do that, scientists might have to follow other people's noses.

Please prepare to sniff at the tone. Two, one.

[HORN SOUNDS]

[INAUDIBLE] familiarity.

At speed dating events like this one, you have just a few minutes to judge a potential mate. Body language can tell a lot, but it can often be misjudged. Is that a smirk, or a smile?

Social psychologist David Dunning says what we all know as wishful thinking can also affect our seeing.

It's well-established from evidence in everyday life and in the laboratory, that people think what they want to think. We're taking this a step beyond. We're asking if desires and peers can influence literally what people physically see.

The researchers told volunteers that a computer game would assign them either a letter or number to decide whether they would drink orange juice or an intentionally disgusting smoothie.

Which was green, it was foul-smelling, it had pink flecks. It was just awful.

As they wrote in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the computer with flash this image, which could be seen as the letter B or the number 13. Volunteers told that a letter would get them orange juice most often reported seeing B. Those told the opposite most often saw 13. The researchers used a hidden camera to track people's eye movement to confirm they weren't lying.

Dunning says this altering of our perceptions is unconscious.

If our own perceptions can be influenced by things we don't know about, it's sometimes good to check with other people to see if they're seeing the same things, or if they have a different take the situation.

Meaning that beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

People perceive the world in their own ways. Each individual has a unique view of reality. To everyone, the world appears to be a solid and reliable place. But that could change.

For example, after large portions of the brain's right side are destroyed by a stroke, here, the nerve cells of a particular area in the brain are damaged, the area important to the perception of space.

People with this condition suffer from the so-called neglect syndrome. Their visual center is intact. But they can't process information from the side that still functions. Orientation is almost impossible. The left side no longer consciously exists.

Here is another example. It's triggered by cardiac arrest. The temporary lack of blood and oxygen destroy nerve cells in both sides of the occiput. Again, such an incident causes the world to appear in a different light. People with Balint's syndrome have a distorted view of their spatial environment. Their vision is intact, but the world appears as if seen from broken glass. These people can no longer calculate distances, and it's almost impossible to concentrate on a single object.

Yet a third case. A blood clot in the brain causes a stroke. A small area in the lower parietal lobe, responsible for seeing motion, is destroyed. This phenomenon is called akinetopsia. The perception of time is no longer in order. Movement can hardly be recognized as such. Whether it's the lips moving during a conversation, or other everyday situations, everything appears as if frozen. Directions and speed can't be estimated. The faster the movement, the less visible it becomes. When the interaction between nerve cells no longer functions, there's not much left of the world. Reality appears rather unstable.

There's just a split second to see the bee. Even though it takes place right in front of her eyes, she can't see it directly. The retina must first transform the light beams into nerve impulses. The brain then computes those impulses and reconstructs the image she's able to see. First, the impulses reach the primary cortex. Nerve cells are very responsive to curves and contours, where transitions to dark. Now, two processes take place at once. The process above controls what you see, below, where you see it. The where process might define the location of an object. It's shape is irrelevant. What's significant is that the image must be three dimensional.

Certain neurons respond to motion. Speed is calculated exactly, but the movement's actual location is only approximate. While one part of the brain only deals the where, the other part analyzes the what. The brain detects an outline and quickly determines an object's shape. The result is then compared in the brain's memory. If the object has been seen before, it's easier to recognize. Most people or objects are identified this way. It takes longer to analyze and reconstruct unknown objects. Meanwhile, other parts of the brain determine color. In a split second, the brain extracts the relevant information from the blast of neurons. But how it combines the different features is unknown. And it happens all at the same time. From there, the information is reported to the primary cortex. War It's the cortex that actually perceives the image. And after a quarter of a second, she can react accordingly.

[SPEAKING IN GERMAN]

The physicist William Strutt originally carried out this experiment, his variation of Blind Man's Bluff, on a lawn at Cambridge University. Our team plays the game by the Rhine River. Is one able to determine where a sound is coming from simply by listening?

Strutt used tuning forks. We just improvised.

This noise is coming from the right. The sound reaches the right ear before it reaches the left.

A low-pitched tone is harder to locate, but its direction is still clear.

Noises directly behind the listener cause confusion, just like the ones coming from in front of him. He can't make out where the noise is coming from. The sound waves are in the acoustical shadow of the head.

But we want to find out more. What happens when sound is produced above or below his ears? Here too, our sense of hearing has no trouble locating the sound source. It operates three-dimensionally. Just by hearing, a human is able to orient himself. We can trust our senses blindfolded. Especially our sense of hearing. William Strutt proved it.

From sound to hearing. What usually happens in a split second can easily be observed in this animation.

At the end of the auditory canal is the eardrum. Behind it is a tiny mechanical scanner consisting of three little bones. the malleus on the left picks up the vibrations. The incus transmits them to the stapes, which in turn relays them to the inner ear. Through the liquid-filled inner ear, a pressure wave rushes over the base of a membrane. Under that membrane, tiny hair cells move rhythmically. Each tone has specific hair cells. They transfer impulses to the hearing nerves. The brain then perceives these signals as sound.

So, you have a nice night?

No.

No?

Yes.

Yes?

Yes. It was terrible. My friend had their car stolen.

who were you with?

No one you know.

What kind of car was it?

Let me think.

Foreign or American made?

You know, it was a 2004, cobalt blue, three door hatchback Ford Focus, champagne interior, single disc player, anti-lock brakes, and a tilted, telescoping leather-wrapped steering wheel.

Oh, that's too bad.

That's not the worst part.

Oh?

Bickley was in the car when it was stolen.

I know Bickley. My god, Bickley was kidnapped?

Oh, no. Not Kyle. It was his cousin, Ryan. You don't know him.

You're right. I don't know Ryan.

I told you there was no one there you knew.

So Kyle's OK?

Oh, sure. Bickley's fine.

What about his cousin?

I don't know. They found the car, though.

Where was it?

Bottom of the river.

[CELL PHONE RINGS]

But what about--

Hold on. Hello? Yeah. Yeah, OK. Great. Great. Good. Cheers. That was Bickley.

Kyle?

No, Ryan. He's fine. He wasn't in the car. He was actually with us the whole time.

Well, that's good.

Yeah. You know, I forget how forgettable a person the other Bickley really is.

What are you going to eat?

This a restaurant?

Excuse me. How much for these?

Umm, $0.99.

Thanks.

Whether it's eating--

I live to eat. Sure. Yeah, I enjoy it.

--or exercise--

I literally lived at the gym. You know.

--scientists are studying all kinds of addictions. They know that underlying them all, whether it's good for you, like exercise, or bad for you, like drugs, is a reward system in the brain.

A lot of the similar brain chemicals that you see involved with drug addict are also going on with natural forms of rewards, such as exercise, and eating and sex, for example.

One of these is a naturally-occurring brain chemical called dopamine.

Dopamine in the brain is what motivates us to do things. It is what is traditionally associated with the pleasure from eating, with the pleasure from sex, and the pleasure for drugs.

Pablo Braskin battled drugs for 25 years.

I wanted to stop, but I really couldn't stop. I didn't like who I was. I didn't like where I was, who I was, or what I'd become. And I didn't know how to change it.

Braskin used traditional programs to become drug-free. But new studies are looking at how controlling dopamine might control the addiction.

And the theory was that, if you could help the brain shut off dopamine a little more, then a drug like cocaine or methamphetamine wouldn't increase dopamine to the point where you would get a euphoric response.

Researchers are looking at an epilepsy drug that might do that. After successfully testing it in monkeys, Stephen Dewey at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Jonathan Brody at New York University treated a few addicts in Mexico with the drug. Reporting in the journal Synapse, the researchers say the drug, when combined with counseling, seems promising.

Somewhere around the third week, those people who stayed in the study, reported the craving disappeared.

But they emphasize more tests are needed to study the side-effects.

but what about something that's good for you?

I've seen guys with injuries that get hurt and they won't stop working out.

At the Oregon Health and Science University, Justin Rhodes says the same reward system associated with other addictions is at play here. Rhodes studied the effects of exercise on brain cells, or neurons, in light mice.

The more they run, the more brain chemical they have that support and protect the neurons, the more growth of new neurons they get.

But Rhodes reported in the journal Behavioral Neuorscience that too much exercise did not necessarily mean better brains. He bred mice to be exercise addicts, seen on the left, and compared them to normal mice, shown on the right. The mice had to find this platform in a tank of colored water. To his surprise, the exercise addicts performed badly. He thinks over-activity could be damaging their brains.

There's only so many new neurons and so much brain chemical that you can get with a certain amount of running, and they reached that max.

He believes this may also be true for people. Even so, he agrees getting people off the couch will be harder than getting them off the treadmill.

Exercise? No, just lifting heavy sandwiches. That's about it.

So whatever the addiction, whether it leads to more weight, or more weights, scientists are finding new clues about the brain to help solve the riddle of addiction.

It's hard not to look when you pass an accident on the road. But doing so can be dangerous. Psychologist David Zald calls these emotional images, and he says they can briefly blind us to our surroundings.

Something that's emotional not only captures our attention, but it does it to such an extent that it's blocking information that comes in after we're no longer even looking at that image.

As published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, Zald and his colleagues trained 21 people to spot a neutral target image, like this one, out of a series flying by at 10 pictures per second, and then state whether it was rotated to the left or the right. The volunteers performed well, except when either a gory or erotic image, more graphic than can be shown here, appeared before the target image.

Co-author Stephen Most says in those cases, participants were far more likely to miss the target.

When an emotional picture appears, it seems to short-circuit that processing in the brain that will then help you construct a visual conscious perception.

Zald says these emotional blindings happen all the time in our daily lives, but are probably most important for drivers, since a lapse in attention of less than a second is enough to cause an accident.

A ball that's suddenly come out on the road, a child who's stepped into the street. So anything that could happen very quickly, we could easily miss it.

The researchers are planning additional studies to see what's actually happening in the brain when this temporary blindness occurs.

Herb Helsel has a lot of time on his hands. And walls, and shelves. But even this Langley, Washington, clock dealer sometimes loses track of time.

You get so deeply involved in what you do that whenever you look at your watch or whenever you check the time again, it's kind of surprising how many hours that have passed away.

Psychologist Anthony Chaston says the theory of how we track time begins with an internal timer ticking away.

So imagine there's clicks coming along, and there's a place where you're sort of storing them. If your attention is engaged in another activity, like a visual search task, that leaves a smaller amount of attention available to keep track of the ticks. So what happens is, over time, you miss some of the ticks.

But would mental activity alone make a person lose track of time? While at the University of Alberta, Chaston had students search for specific sets of squares within a large set of similar squares.

The manual task involved not even really moving their hands. They only had to move two fingers.

He reported in the journal Brain and Cognition that the harder the test, the more time flew.

People tended to underestimate more when their attention was engaged more heavily.

Chaston says scientists don't know what's going on in the brain to cause this time shift, or where in the brain this might happen. But he thinks those discoveries will be made with time.

Reading is a skill that, once learned, becomes automatic. But a study by brain researcher Amir Raz shows that a form of hypnotic suggestion can make some people view their native language as meaningless. He did this to see whether hypnosis can alter automatic mental processes like reading. Raz gave a confusing word test to eight volunteers who were susceptible to hypnosis, and eight who were not. The test is confusing because the words refer to colors, but are printed in another color ink.

You are reading the word, but you have to name a different ink color than what the word stands for.

Raz scanned volunteers' brains during the test. He hoped to erase confusion in a brain region that deals with conflict, called the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC, by using this hypnotic suggestion.

You are going to see things on the screen that are going to be in a language that you're not familiar with. It'll be very easy for you to crisply see and report the ink color.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Raz reported that the brains of highly suggestible people under hypnosis processed the words as foreign and screened only for color. They not only did better on the test, but their ACC no longer lit up in their brain scans.

As a result of the suggestion, they really perceived the world differently.

Raz says the study suggests that, for some, hypnosis may undo certain automatic behaviors, such as smoking. But he cautions that, for now, hypnosis is best as a companion to other therapies.

A very adult problem could be preventing this middle school student from doing her best in class.

A lot of times I don't have enough sleep and there is a math test, and then I usually do bad on the math test.

Evidence shows the problem is a common one. Psychologist Jean Rhodes conducted a sleep study that tracked more than 2,000 middle school students for three years. She reported in the journal Child Development that

more than 50% of 11 to 14-year-olds experienced a steady decline in sleep throughout the middle school years.

By the end of middle school, kids were getting just over seven hours of sleep. The recommended amount of sleep for a middle school student is about nine hours.

Rhodes also says that sleep deprivation is more common in girls, who often rise earlier to groom.

That's predicting an increase in depressive symptoms and a decrease in self-esteem.

If parents hope to curtail these ups and downs, Rhodes says there's a way.

Work backwards. If they need to be in bed by 10:00 o'clock, what time do we need to start homework? What time do we need to have dinner? What time do we need to end the after-school activities?

Keeping your middle school student from the pitfalls of sleeplessness could be as simple as making sure they hit the pillow as hard as they hit the books.

For Chris Caleo, a painter, martial artist, and businessman, meditation is exercise for his mind.

Meditation is kind of like my emotional gym to help me build from the inside out. It's kind of like emotional push ups.

But does meditation actually change our brains? At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Richard Davidson wanted to answer that question. So he randomly assigned 41 volunteers to two different groups. One group received meditation training and practiced it for eight weeks. The other served as a control group and did not meditate during the study. Then researchers used electrodes like these to measure electrical activity in the front part of participants' brains.

This is a very, very important part of the brain that is involved in the integration of thought and emotion, and the control and regulation of emotion.

They found the meditation group showed increased activity in the left frontal part of the brain, colored blue, compared to the control group. The changes appeared even four months after the study. Davidson thinks that means there's a lasting effect on people who meditate.

It means that they will be able to deal with negative emotion more effectively, and they will have a more hopeful and positive outlook, more positive expectations, about the future.

Chris Caleo agrees.

There is a great saying that, you can't stop the waves but you can learn how to surf. And I think that meditation is learning how to surf.

So he can ride the waves of life.

It takes about two minutes until alcohol reaches the brain. It spreads out and affects almost all areas of the brain at once. Just like fireworks. The ethanol molecules can attach to many different receptors, changing the course of action in the brain. In the reward system, alcohol releases neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and endorphin.

Everybody is familiar with the effect, feeling adventurous, happy. But sometimes also aggressive.

Alcohol not only amplifies but also changes the transmission of impulses, such as the glutamate system, which regulates brain activity. Ethynol molecules attach to the glutamate receptors, paralyzing them. The result is a slowing down of brain activity. This affects the reward system. Less neurotransmitters.

The euphoria dwindles, impaired vision sets in. It becomes difficult to estimate distances and reflexes slow, especially with red signals.

Alcohol alters another function of another common regulator in the brain, the GABA, gamma-aminobutyric acid, system. GABA molecules slow down brain activity. This damping action increases when ethanol molecules attach to the GAMA receptors. Here too, alcohol slows down brain activity. All these changes make it harder to speak and think. Articulation becomes unclear, thought processes uninhibited, and conversations incoherent.

Alcohol distorts the brain's natural balance. The more you drink, the more inactive the brain becomes. Brain performance continuously diminishes.

The entire body is affected. Vision, speech, movement, even memory. When the dose gets too high, the brain switches off. Blackout.

I'll push it down a little bit.

Reto Huber of the University of Wisconsin is watching how Sarah's brain connects learning and sleep. Sarah's head is hooked up to 256 electrodes, 10 times more than what's used in a normal EEG. Reto Huber and his colleagues must place the electrodes at very specific points.

The scientists developed a learning task which activates only a very small area in the brain. He knows exactly where the learning process takes place.

The task seems simple. Touch the flashing circles quickly and directly using the mouse. But Sarah has trouble doing that. What she doesn't know is this mouse is cheating. It alters Sarah's movements by 30 degrees. Sarah doesn't know it, but her brain learns how to compensate for the error. She doesn't realize, because she doesn't see her hand.

Reto Huber tracks Sarah's movements. This way, he can read the learning process. Sarah's first graphs, and after the third session.

Time to sleep, but Sarah needs to be connected. The scientist wants to find out whether the area shows any brain activity while Sarah sleeps.

OK?

OK.

Good night.

Good night.

Within an hour, Sarah is fast asleep, despite the electrodes.

Reto Huber is staying. He's monitoring the experiment, and he'll be here in case Sarah wakes up.

This EEG is very complex. The scientists can't interpret right away what exactly happened in this part of Sarah's brain. But the brain waves show she's in a deep sleep.

All is quiet now, and the scientist also tries to rest. But he won't get much sleep tonight.

After waking up the next morning, Sarah repeats the task. This time, it's even easier for her. Her movements with the cheating mouse are fast and confident.

The graph also confirms that her performance has improved, even without any further practice.

Now close your eyes.

OK.

For Sarah, the experiment is over.

So how did the data look like?

Good.

Reto Huber has analyzed Sarah's brain activities and those of nine other test subjects during their sleep periods. The brain area that was involved in the learning process does indeed act differently during deep sleep.

The learning part of the brain also fell into a deep sleep. These brain waves, indicating sleep, increased by 30%. The larger they become, the better the brain absorbs what it has learned.

Everywhere else in the brain, the waves remain normal.

Reto Huber has demonstrated for the first time how learning and deep sleep interact with each other. For now though, he needs a little sleep himself.

Finally tonight, the stuff of dreams. Susan Dentzer of our health unit begins a unit as a partnership with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

I kept thinking while I was dreaming that all this meant something.

Of all the things that float through our heads, dreams are among the most mysterious.

I can't make out just what sort of a place it was.

The ancients thought the images in dreams were a tip-off from the gods about impending events. But it was Sigmund Freud who recognized that, rather than being a form of telepathy, dreams came from within our heads. 100 years ago today, Freud published his treatise on the subject, The Interpretation of Dreams. He called dreams the royal road to the unconscious. Albeit a fairly dark and dangerous road at that.

In Freud's view, dreams were full of hidden meaning and repressed desires. Freud employed that theory in his own treatment of patients, called psychoanalysis. He told one disbelieving client that a dream he had had of wolves sitting in a tree stemmed from a traumatic childhood experience of watching his parents make love.

Freud's works spawned a movement. But later advances cast doubt on his theories. Today, neuroscientists have tools, like magnetic resonance imaging, that let them observe the brain at work and some of the physiological processes that produce dreams.

That evidence suggests a real biological basis for many of the dream phenomena Freud described, even if his analysis of what dreams mean still seems wide of the mark.

Many scientists believe that dreams occur mainly during regular sleep episodes, known as REM sleep, for rapid eye movement. Parts of the brain that control emotion are then highly active, while other parts, that control functions like logic, aren't. That could help explain some of the very hallmarks of dreams that Freud identified, such as strange imagery and a collapsed sense of time.

What still isn't clear is what, if anything, dreams mean, or what, if any, purpose they serve. And a century after Freud waded into the topic, it could still take years to find out.

Terence Smith takes it from there.

Our dream panel includes Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. And Robert Pyles, a psychoanalyst and president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Gentlemen, welcome to you both.

I'm curious what you both think. It's been 100 years since Freud published this seminal work, and he's still the source of great controversy. I wonder, beginning with you, Dr. Pyles, how you see Freud and his work today.

Well, Freud's work was at the time revolutionary in moving the treatment of mental illness into a humanitarian phase from the previous organic and descriptive phase. And so it was extremely important. Freud was the first to say that the associations, dreams, thoughts, symptoms, of patients have meaning and can be understood. And that the understanding of those symptoms and thoughts can be used in the treatment and alleviation of suffering. And I think that aspect of his work is still just as true today as it was then.

All right. Dr. Stickgold, how do you see him and his work?

I think he was a brilliant man who came up with some insights into the human mind that still are very valuable today. But when it comes to his attempts, and those after him, to explain scientifically how the mind works and how dreaming, for example, comes about, its purpose its mechanism, I really think it's time to give Papa Freud a rest. That the theories that he had are not, from a scientific perspective, of much use to us anymore today.

Is he being over-interpreted?

Well, I think a lot of people want to hold onto it. I think a lot of people feel that if we move towards a biological explanation of such phenomena as dreaming, that we're going to lose the mystery and wonder and the beauty of the human mind. And frankly, I don't think anything can be further from the truth. I think that as we move to a scientific understanding, that beauty and that wonder just gets more intense and more beautiful. And so I think the over-interpretation is sort of holding on to something it's OK to let go of now.

Dr. Pyles, what is dreaming? What are dreams?

I wonder if I could just comment on the last point.

Certainly.

I think that one of the reasons for holding onto some of Freud's thinking about dreams is that it is extremely useful clinically. And it is my hope, as new technological advances allow us to understand the workings of the mind, that there will be a true integration of the psychological aspects of the mind and physiological aspects of mind.

Dr. Stickgold, do you see it as useful clinically?

It probably is. But I think a lot of different approaches to looking at dreams are useful clinically. And I wouldn't begrudge the Freudian one. I think sometimes, if you lean too heavily on the concept that all dreams are wish fulfillment, you get stuck in a pattern that I would consider counterproductive. But it still has value as long as you leave room for that integration that Dr. Pyles is talking about, with the physiology and the biology.

Well, Dr. Stickgold, from what we know today, what is going on when we dream?

Well, I think what's going on when we dream is that the brain is trying to carry out the most difficult task it has in life, which is to make sense of the world. And in a way, this fits with what Freud has said, too.

But from my perspective, what's actually happening is, the brain is looking at different memory systems and different ways that we have memories stored. And literally going, like a Netscape or a web searcher, looking for connections that make sense, and trying to find out which kinds of memories it makes sense to biologically and physically connect to each other to help us deal better with the world. So we're forming new associations,

forming new connections in the brain. And that what we're doing when we're dreaming is watching the brain as it goes through that process.

Is that a description, Dr. Pyles, that you would agree with?

I think it's probably exactly right. And I think it's one that many psychoanalysts would agree with. I think many psychoanalysts view dreams as problem-solving mechanisms and attempts to cope with the world, just as was said. And the understanding of the dream and the use of it in clinical work really enables the therapist to assist the patient in his attempts to cope.

I know, Dr. Stickgold, that some people say they don't dream. I wonder, do they, in fact, not dream, or do they not remember the dreams?

The people who we all know who say they don't dream, in fact do. If we take those people and bring them into the sleep laboratory and wake them up out of their REM sleep periods, they can recall dreams with the same 80% or 90% probability that everybody else does. The people who tend to report that are people who sleep very soundly through the night and who wake up with an alarm clock. And both of those phenomena make it just that much less likely to actually recall your dreams.

Interestingly, in therapy we often get people who say they don't dream, but as soon as they start actually paying attention, they do remember their dreams.

And you think it is still useful, Dr. Pyles, to use these dreams and to interpret these dreams in therapy?

I think is extremely useful, because I think of it as being very much like the eye doctor who examines your retina. It's the only kind of examination that you can peer inside the body without some kind of surgical intervention. And I think with dreams, you get a very clear understanding of how the patient's unconscious works. And so from that point of view, it's not curative in itself, but it certainly helps the therapist and the patient understand how they are trying to cope with the world.

Dr. Stickgold, tell us what's going on today in dream research, and where you think it might take us in the next 100 years.

Well, there's two general directions that people go. And one is to try to understand more about the actual characteristics of dreams. The fact that they're bizarre, that they're hyper-emotional. That they tend to leap from one story to another, to try to understand the actual natural history of what dreams are like. And that we're then trying to use to play back onto the physiology, to understand the mechanisms underlying it.

The other way that research is growing is looking at actual processes of how the brain, when it's sleeping, modifies memories. And the role of the brain in both consolidating memories and integrating memories. And the function of this, for people, for animals in general. And then seeing how what we see in dreams themselves can reflect onto this biology.

So I think what we're starting to do is learn more about the function of it. It's true that you can use that information. You can use any information from a person's memory. And I'm not convinced that dreams are that much better than other approaches to the unconscious, whatever the unconscious might be. But that we're starting to really understand dreaming as part of a process of a biological system and a brain that's just wondrously complex, and which produces the mind and the consciousness that we all so much love.

All right. Thoughts-- Yes, go ahead, Dr. Pyles--

I would very much agree with that, and I think Freud would, too. But Freud--

But Freud said that the purpose of dreams was to keep us from waking up. And that the dream process involves disguising feelings and beliefs and libidinous drives from within us. And I don't know if you've moved beyond that. But the current biology gives no evidence or support for that kind of model of dreaming.

Dr. Pyles, the final word?

I think it has to be remembered that Freud was a neurobiologist and he had great faith that one day the neurobiological sciences and psychology would come together in a true psycho-bio-social understanding of the mind. And we are in great hopes that this is happening.

All right, gentlemen, thank you both very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next tonight, the tangled legacy of Timothy Leary. Charlayne Hunter-Gault has that.

Dr. Timothy Leary was a respected Harvard psychology professor in the early '60s when he began a series of experiments with mind-altering drugs like LSD. He was fired in 1963 for using students in his tests, then went on to become a guru of the psychedelic '60s revolution. At sit-ins, love-ins, and marijuana smoke-ins, he crusaded to turn the world on to LSD.

It was no accident that enormous crowds come out to hear me lecture. Whenever I go to a college, it's always sold out. It's not because I'm that clever. It's because they gave me the good lines in the show. Turn on, tune in, drop out.

But not everyone was turned on by Leary's message of drug-induced ecstasy. Then-president Richard Nixon called him the most dangerous man alive.

When Nixon called me that, I was thrilled. The President of the United States, who many Americans and the rest of the world thought was a crazed, psychotic, danger. For him to be calling me that, that's my Nobel Prize. That's my bumper sticker. That's my trophy on the wall.

Leary was arrested for drug possession dozens of times. He escaped from prison in 1970 and then spent several years on the run in Europe, Africa and Asia, only to be eventually arrested again and extradited back to the United States. He got out on parole in the late '70s, and found his fame had faded. But he found some success as an author, lecturer, and computer whiz

When Leary was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1995, he made his dying a public event, and even started a homepage on the internet to chronicle it. True to form, he turned on, right up to be end, and told us all about it.

Do you still? You sure?

Yes. I prefer illegal drugs to legal drugs.

Leary said he looked forward to dying, and called it, "the most fascinating part of my life."

I don't care if I come back or not. But it's my duty as a philosopher to go to these strange frontiers and then shout back or [INAUDIBLE] back what I've learned.

Tim Leary was 75.

For some thoughts on his life, we're joined now by Robert Coles, a Harvard psychiatrist and author of many books including, The Moral Life of Children, and Drugs and Youth.

And by one of our regular essayists, Anne Taylor Fleming.

Anne, starting with you, why did Tim Leary want everyone to tune in, turn on, and drop out?

Well, he was kind of the perverse Pied Piper for my generation, Charlayne. I mean, I remember being in one of those auditoriums in, I guess it was 1968, when he came and did his spiel. And I remember thinking even then that his message was pretty selfish, somewhat self-destructive, and a little bit thrilling. I mean, here was an adult coming to give you license and saying, hey, get high, dropout.

And I think we have to remember the times. Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was just about to be. The country was in turmoil. And in some ways, Leary's message was very popular. I mean, lots of people were sort of unbuckling, and indeed, finding a way out of their own moral pain.

But I do remember sitting in that auditorium and being really angry, thinking, this is an adult person. And it's a little bit like he's walking into a daycare center with a bottle of vodka. Because I didn't think that a whole lot of people were going to be able to handle the drugs. And I think a lot of people weren't able to.

Bob Coles, what's your take on that, why he wanted everybody to tune in, turn on, and drop out?

Well, I think he had an affair with craziness, of sorts. Remember, this message preceded the death of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy. He started this in the early '60s, and it's important to remember that when he was saying this, thousands of other people, including students from his Harvard, their Harvard, were leaving the University and other universities and colleges, to go South, to be in the Civil Rights movement, to work in the Peace Corps and VISTA and whatever else that they did that had to do with practical deeds to change this country.

And I think the contrast between this kind of 1960s behavior, beginning right in 1960 itself when President Kennedy was inaugurated, and Leary's behavior and the behavior of those who followed him is important to remember at this moment. LSD was, is, a very, very dangerous drug. This is not frivolous behavior. This is dangerous behavior. This is destructive behavior.

And I think the most interesting question of all is why we have paid so much attention to him and people like him, in the '60s and to this day. What is it in our society that has the slightest regard for this kind of person?

Let me ask you, Anne. You indicated how you personally felt about the message and somewhat ambivalent. But what's your answer to that question?

Well, I think one of the distinctions that Mr. Coles just made that I really value is to draw the distinction between what might be seen as the good '60s and the bad '60s. With Leary, certainly more, in my agreement, to the bad side. I mean, a lot of good things were going on. So we don't want to lambaste the '60s while we're trying to sort out Leary's legacy.

I think he was one of those geniuses of the media age, and he was hip to all of that very soon. He came along with television, again. He was perfect fodder for that. He worked hard at it right up until, as you just pointed out, until the day he died. He was sort of one of those people like, I suppose, Andy Warhol, that we create, we inflate, we do all these things for.

I must say, too, that bunches of the young people that I knew in the '60s were skeptical, sufficiently skeptical of Leary even then. It wasn't like the whole generation was trooping off like mice behind a Pied Piper.

But who was he having any impact on, then?

I think that the media did an enormous amount of blowing it up. And also, you just had that funny quote from Nixon. I mean, he became a real punching bag for the right wing. Or centrist right wing, whatever. And for parents who were scared that their kids are all running amok and acting out and dropping out and turning on and doing all of those things.

Some of them were, though, weren't they?

Some of them were, sure.

Was it Leary that-- I mean, how did he factor into that?

Leary was on an early swing with the drugs. I think that Robert Coles was right about that. He did start in the early '60s, and by the time that a whole bunch of the baby boomers were in college-- and remember, facing the draft and facing what Vietnam meant-- there was a tendency to want to seek refuge in drugs. And Leary, who can be quite charming, I must admit, he was quite a charismatic speaker. I mean, we can say satanic in a way. But he was very appealing in those crowds. I watched him work them and he was good at it.

Bob Coles, who do you think he was appealing to in those days, and how much of an affect did he have?

Well, I think frankly, he was appealing to a very small segment, but influential segment, of privileged people on various campuses and off campuses. I think it's correct to connect him to Andy Warhol and connect him to a certain slim segment of self-indulgent people who have the wherewithal, the political and economic power, to behave in this way. The ordinary working people of this country, black, white, whatever, the ordinary people of this country never got involved in this. And they were correctly disturbed by it.

I think that, frankly, Mr. Leary was Richard Nixon's best friend. The two of them tied together very beautifully for the purposes of the 1968 election. And he helped Nixon enormously and Nixon knew it.

Did you see anything positive in what he was doing? The release that Anne Taylor Fleming mentioned earlier, the unbuckling, and also, people have mentioned the challenging of authority, anger at authority?

Not this kind of crazy, inchoate challenging that doesn't direct itself at the real concrete problems of the country, of race and class, of privilege and poverty, and the disparity in this country between those who have and those who don't. He addressed none of that.

Anne Taylor Fleming, how did Leary, how has he worn with time? We saw him practically dying on the internet. He was trying to remake himself, apparently.

Yeah. I think sillier and sillier, really. It was clear that he was somebody who was grasping for fame right up until the end. I mean, that's what he become the metaphor for. And remember, he ran around for awhile there with Gordon Liddy, doing a sort of Frick and Frack act. It was all sort of pathetic, I thought, over the last 20- odd years.

More people were onto it. Certainly the country has become much more sophisticated about addiction and about drug abuse and all of those things. It's a far different time than it was when he started his u-with-drugs rant. So I think people were looking a lot more skeptically and hard at him, certainly in these last years.

So briefly, what do you think of the Leary legacy?

I don't think too much, in the overall scheme of things. I probably sound a lot more like Robert Coles in this. I think that he will seem like a perverse Pied Piper. Or in some ways, the willful, spoiled flank of this generation. Not the flank we need to remember that did do some good things.

I suppose that some people will remember him fondly for having seen him flit through their lives and sort of say some silly, unbuckling things at that point.

All right. Bob Coles, briefly, what do you think the legacy is?

Sad, dreary, uninteresting. And I wish the late Christopher Lasch were here to tell us, to remind us yet again, the culture of narcissism in it's most perverse form. And we do well to put this aside and get on with the real problems that face America today.

Bob Coles and Anne Taylor Fleming, thank you.

Make believe. That's what placebos are all about. Even so, our bodies do respond to these sugar pills and ointments without active ingredients. Why does simply believing in a medication have a healing effect?

The placebo effect probably originates in the brain, with the expectation the physician will cure us with this medicine or that therapy. Scientists in the US, Italy, and Germany, discovered different parts of the brain become active when patients receive placebos.

The placebo effect begins in the brain, perhaps explaining why placebos used in treating brain diseases are quite successful.

Parkinson's patients can't produce dopamine, a neurotransmitter. That means all nerve cells fire unnaturally in a common mode. When an Italian scientist administered a harmless saline solution to Parkinson's patients, the disorder disappeared. Dopamine was released, and the patient's brain cells fired normally in a random pattern.

The effect of placebos occurs mainly in our head. The effects on other parts of our body is probably controlled from here. But we don't know how this works. The scientists can only observe how the body reacts towards placebos.

The heart, for example. When we're in pain, it beats faster. But simply seeing a doctor or a syringe with medication can have a relaxing effect. Many studies prove that. The heart beats normally again. The heartbeat is controlled by our nervous system. No wonder the heart is particularly sensitive to a doctor's actions.

But why do placebos work even in those areas where our beliefs don't really play a role? Even in the body's bloodstream, as American scientists proved a few years ago, the anticipation of a cure caused changes in the blood. Immune cells were released, fighting infections.

Another example is the spinal, or vertebral, disk. When the gel cushion between the vertebrae is squeezed due to wear and tear, the sciatica nerve causes great pain. But in 1972, Swedish doctors discovered the pain of their patients went away, even after an unsuccessful operation. The sciatica nerve had apparently calmed down. The doctors believe this was caused by the placebo effect.

The human body is truly amazing, and the placebo effect only demonstrates how little of its inner strength we really comprehend. But we can be certain about one thing. The spirit has more power over the body than we once thought.

[GASPS]

The scary shadow instantly triggers a reaction. Before the brain can even begin to process the image, another reaction takes place. The hypothalamus releases large amounts of corticotropin-releasing hormones, or CRH. The CRH is absorbed by the pituitary gland. The gland releases the corticotropin into the blood steam. Within seconds, it finds its way to the adrenal cortex. The cortisol then puts the entire body on a state of alert. A rapid heart rate, goosebumps, and tense muscles, until the situation is recognized as harmless. The spontaneous reaction in the brain comes to a halt. It's you.

Once again, she was afraid to speak her mind. She'd always been afraid of her boss, and afterwards, frustration settled in. She just wished the good fairy would grant her three wishes.

First, she'd make her boss disappear. There you go. Great.

Her next wish? Make all her fears go away. She'd climb up the highest roofs to enjoy the view. She was afraid of doing that in the past. She'd felt dizzy, and had a funny feeling in her stomach. She felt like such a coward.

Being afraid of the dark bothered her. But she kept telling herself, there is nothing really lurking in the dark. Cars, and they're harmless. Above, on the street, or underground, what's the difference? She didn't want to be intimidated any more. She wanted to be brave, and she always wanted to fly in an airplane but was too scared.

But you shouldn't fly, if you don't have wings. Period. Especially in a tin box with no way to escape. To overcome her fear, and go up to see the world from a bird's perspective, she wouldn't want to miss that.

Even the zoo was a scary place for her. A ferocious roar and she felt like running away. Like a caveman. But in reality, she's stronger than she seems, and the fairy would help her prove it.

But then she realizes, true fairies are blonde, and her fairy might have exaggerated a little.

Without fear, there's no caution. Humans can't control everything. Their instincts tell them where it's safe.

And, humans live by day. There aren't any alarm devices for dangers that lurk in the dark.

Man is not made to fly. His sense of equilibrium isn't made for that, and tells him when something is not right.

Our adversaries from the time of cavemen are still our adversaries today. Even when they're in a cage. Fear also means understanding threatening gestures.

It was all the fake fairy's fault, so she just wishes she'd disappear.

Next tonight, the trauma that remains from September 11, reported by Susan Dentzer of our health unit, a partnership with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.

In many respects, life in New York is getting back to normal. But not for everybody.

I'm scared to death. Because I'm hearing so many rumors and things are going on and they're not keeping us posted.

Many New Yorkers are traumatized. Whether by anthrax attacks, or by memories of what happened on September 11.

I lost a couple very close friends. There's no closure.

Dr. Neal Cohen is New York City's Commissioner of Health and Mental Health.

This tragedy has impacted on us all in New York. That's 8 million people. We feel very sad. And it's leading to a mental health crisis of epidemic proportions, and one that we've never experienced before in a large city such as this.

You don't have to be standing here, about a block from Ground Zero, to know that what happened on September 11 was unprecedented. And just as people are struggling to name that experience, the attack, the event, mental health professionals are struggling to name what New Yorkers are experiencing.

The conventional diagnosis for some New Yorkers might be post-traumatic stress disorder. That's a condition that can occur a month or more after people survive a traumatic event. In other words, about now.

Clinical psychologist Marylene Cloitre, a specialist in anxiety and traumatic stress, tells about one patient she's treated since 9/11.

Well, I think for this person, the underlying question was, am I crazy? I've lived a normal life. I was a bond trader. And now, while I'm trying to work, I see a plane crash into the building as if it's real. And so I was just able to tell him that that's a post-traumatic stress symptom. That that is a flashback. It has a name. We know about it. And many people experience it.

Other survivors are suffering both physically and mentally, and are dogged by painfully vivid recollections of the event.

Vasana Mututanont was just entering the first Trade Center building when it was hit. She was severely burned before fleeing the scene, then looked back to see the towers collapse.

I'm so afraid, because I don't know, what is that sound all about? But then when I look up, smoke on the Tower One and I saw it with my eyes that the building shaking.

You were terrorized?

I think so. I kind of feel helpless.

The other part that belongs in this picture for people is a sense of tremendous grief. As they were escaping, what they saw on the ground were memos, and shoes, and personal effects that told them that there was life just 15 minutes before. And now they were basically in a battlefield of death.

And that leaves Cloitre to believe that a conventional diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder doesn't begin to capture what people are experiencing.

I would call this traumatic grief. This unusual amalgam of tremendous grief or overwhelming loss on a personal level of people, of our city being destroyed, of our way of life being challenged, are all losses. Along with the actual trauma of being there, seeing it, smelling it, feeling it on one's skin.

Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder can diminish in three weeks with treatment, psychotherapy and, in some cases, anti-depressant medication.

But anthrax attacks and other threats are continuing to traumatize many. As a result, psychologist Cloitre believes that some New Yorkers are experiencing, not post-traumatic stress disorder, but rather a normal reaction of anxiety that may persist for a while.

Can I in good conscience tell people that? No. That they are no longer in a situation that's threatening? I don't think I can.

A group that has been severely traumatized are relatives and colleagues of those killed in the World Trade Center.

Maureen Gilligan and Bill Dewan lost their younger brother, 35-year-old Gerard Dewan, who was one of 12 firefighters from this Manhattan firehouse killed that day.

We are actually praying to God that they find something or some part of him, that we can bring him home and bury him with our parents. So we're trying to hold off until that time comes. I don't know how much longer we can--

Do it. I know.

But as time goes on, I think it's getting worse. Just knowing that they're there and their bodies could be completely gone.

Firefighter Douglas DeGiorgio was one of Gerard Dewan's colleagues.

I lost my best friends. It gets harder every day. The more funerals we go to, the more young children we see crying and wives crying and mothers burying their sons. That's not right. There's something very wrong with that.

Working with the city's health department, the New York City Fire Department is helping firefighters and their families. Dr. Kerry Kelly and Malachy Corrigan are involved in that response.

Not only do we have 343 missing members of our units, but those members have approximately 280 spouses and moms and dads, brothers and sisters, and children. And we're close to 1,000 children without dads at this point.

We're going to be bringing in teams of peer counselors and clinicians to sit with the members and help them deal with the issues of bereavement, using that time to also identify members who need more than reassurance, and need more specific care for their emotional needs.

Then there are New York's children. There's particular concern that they may be highly vulnerable, based on the effects of the terrorist bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995. Dr. Stephen Hyman heads the National Institute of Mental Health.

In the research on Oklahoma City, it became clear that kids even 100 miles from the epicenter of this terrorist act suffered a great deal. But a year after the events, fully one in 6 kids 100 miles away had some significant symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Luce De Palchi is an eighth grader at Grace Church School in Manhattan.

I had a dream that I was falling the night of that. Falling from a tall building. Maybe that had to do something with it. Never ended. Until I woke up. I never stopped falling.

Some children are processing the experience through art. Third and fourth graders at Grace Church School were in the midst of designing new versions of the Statue of Liberty when the attack came. In this post-attack drawing, the statue cradles the towers of the World Trade Center in her arms.

Other children seem to have an instinctive grasp about one path to recovery.

Someone sent me this email, a little poem, and it had various comparisons of things we did on Monday and Tuesday. And so one of them was, on Monday we complained about waiting six minutes to get fast food. And on Tuesday we waited six hours to give blood. And so, it's things like that. It's just everyone wants to help and wants to give. It's great. It's very good.

That is really the only way people get through this, and I think, we as a nation will get through it, is to remember that despite the evil and the horror that we've experienced, that we need to search for and experience goodness with each other. [INAUDIBLE] Human beings can be good, as well as really terrible. That's the only path to recovery.

And the path that New Yorkers hope they can follow, despite all that has happened.

Finally tonight, a look at whether prayer can affect health. Richard Ostling, religion editor of Time magazine has our report.

[WOMAN SINGING A HYMN IN THE BACKGROUND]

Throughout history, people have turned to religious traditions in times of illness. In this weekly Catholic service in New York, the worshippers prayed for healing and received the laying on of hands, an ancient church practice for the sick.

And there were similar prayers and petitions at this monthly Jewish healing service at a nearby synagogue.

For much of the modern era, religion was considered a way to heal the soul, while medicine concentrated on ways to heal the body. But now science is beginning to examine the physical healing power of religious belief. The National Institute for Healthcare Research reviewed 158 professional studies. 3/4 showed that a religious commitment translated into benefits in psychological well-being, overall survival rates, for quality of life, for everyone from cancer patients to drug abusers.

Herbert Benson, a cardiologist at the Harvard Medical School who's studied the connection between mind and body for decades, says, for people of faith, religion is the most powerful healing tool. And in a new book, he goes so far as to say that we're wired for God, meaning faith is a survival trait that is virtually built in to human beings.

One had to ask, what is the most profound of belief systems? And that is, belief in an after-world. Belief in energies, powers, forces, God, if you will. There is something, and it brings great solace. It doesn't speak to the issue whether God really exists or not, or energies exist. But it does speak to the healthful benefits in such a belief.

I would prescribe, if you will, that you be evoking the relaxation response--

And the teaching of personal prayer, which is at the heart of most people's religious experience, has become part of Benson's cardiology practice. He started out instructing his patients in what he called the relaxation response. That involved repeating a word or phrase over and over again and disregarding other thoughts. He found most people chose to focus on a prayer.

The physiology of prayer that we've been able to study is the physiology of the relaxation response. And when that occurs, there's decreased metabolism, decreased heart rate, decreased blood pressure, decreased rate of breathing, slower brain waves, and feelings of control, peace, and tranquility. These cross all religions.

Benson and others have shown that prayer is good for the person who prays.

But what happens to someone else when you pray for them? Here, the scientific evidence is much less clear. This practice, known as intercessory prayer, is the subject of an emerging field of research.

Presbyterian layman Wayne Ciddio volunteered for a study on intercessory prayer. He and 49 others agreed to pray each day for patients they'd never met to see if such prayer had any effect.

We had some general instructions and some guidelines for prayer, but we were mostly asked to pray that God's will be done in the lives of these clients.

The volunteers prayed for alcoholism patients at the University of New Mexico Substance Abuse Center. Half of the 42 patients received the daily prayers and the others did not. The patients didn't know which of the two categories they were in, nor did their doctors.

How's the medication for you?

Psychiatrist Scott Walker, who directed the study, got inconclusive results. After six months, all of the patients greatly reduced their drinking. But those in the group who received organized prayers did no better than the others.

So you can see, for each day that was entered--

Surprisingly for Walker, patients who knew they were being prayed for before entering the study fared worse than those who didn't know whether anyone was praying for them. Walker speculated patients' awareness that people who care for them are praying could have a negative impact because of the tensions and guilt that surround alcoholism.

I think this study suggests that, perhaps, not all prayer is helpful. And my hope is that that stimulates lots of talking, lots of discussion, lots of deep thinking about, when you pray, what is going to be helpful? If my ego, if my issues, if my judgments, my feelings, enter into prayer, what does that do?

Then on the flip side of that is, if I'm getting prayer, am I someone who feels worthy to get prayer. We have to consider, can I possibly block prayer?

Walker's project was the first prayer study funded by the federal government. Ursula Goodenough, Professor of Biology at Washington University in Saint Louis, object's to government funding. She thinks it lends credibility to what she considers questionable therapies.

I understand why people are interested in it. But I see human beings as very interested in magic in general. We love magic shows, we love thinking about Uncle Harry and all of a sudden the phone rings and it's Uncle Harry. We like that kind of stuff. Science really can't talk about things like telepathy, belief, et cetera, in any kind of way. All that we know about physical worlds and the way things work, say completely, irrefutably that that just doesn't happen. That's not the way things work.

Psychologist Charles Tart, who spoke with producer Kate Olson, disagrees. He spent 30 years studying the unusual powers of the mind, such as mental telepathy.

The current scientific climate for many decades has been hostile to the study of experience. Science has evolved primarily in the physical sciences, sometimes called the hard sciences. But I like to call them the easy sciences.

Well, the problem with that was, while it was very objective, it left out all the most interesting things of life. I think the question of are we spiritual beings or just physical beings has enormous consequences for life. How do you live your life if you're a spiritual being, versus if you're nothing but sort of a biochemical accident?

In a rational world, that valued scientific inquiry, we'd have enormous amounts of research on questions like the efficacy of prayer, the reality of psychic abilities, and all that.

Psychiatrist Elizabeth Targ of the California Pacific Medical Center, thinks doctors must study prayer so they can answer their patients honestly.

We, as medical professionals, really have, I think, an ethical imperative to be able to answer their questions and to be able to say either yes, this is something that might be helpful for you, or no, this really isn't a good use of your time and we'd recommend something else. We're not beginning to answer the question, how does it work? Or is this prayer? Or is it subtle energy? Or is it-- we have no idea, and this study will not answer that question.

Targ is conducting a privately-financed study which uses people who believe they have a natural gift for healing. They are sending prayers and positive mental intentions long distance to help AIDS patients.

The bottom line is, we can set up trials for this, just like any other clinical trial. We're working within a cancer research institute and it's well understood how to do a trial of a new treatment and new intervention.

The use of prayer as treatment has aroused much interest in the medical mainstream. Cardiologist Benson organized the first major conference on spirituality and healing at Harvard, attended by health care workers, researchers, and religious leaders of all kinds. But he's quick to point out that seeking help alone is not a sufficient reason for faith.

For many, religion transcends its health benefits, and would even object to the fact that religion is being used to make me healthier. It's too focused. So, what I'm finding is that it is good for you. But it shouldn't be the reason why you approach religion, especially if religion has a much broader meaning for you.

Perhaps in the long run, medicine will create a partnership with religion, rather than relegating it to the margins. In the meantime, people of faith will do as they have always done. Turn to prayer for comfort and healing, for themselves and for others.

With swelling prison populations, researchers are trying to understand the biology behind aggressive behavior. National Institute of Mental Health scientist Andreas Meyer-Lindeberg is looking for clues to how genes wire our brains early in life.

That wiring, the way the brain is then wired, the brand and function, that is what will then presumably contribute to behaviors and emotions such as fear or aggression.

Previous research linked the common version of one gene to impulsive violence in certain populations of people. To focus on how this gene variation might affect the brain, Meyer-Lindenberg took MRI brain scans of more than 100 healthy volunteers, some with this gene variation and someone without.

We showed them pictures of faces that are angry or that are fearful, and we then look at the brain activity while people look at these pictures.

As he wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, those with the aggression-related form of the gene responded to the pictures with increased activity in a brain area that detects danger, but less activity in a region that controls aggression. These brain patterns have been linked to impulsive violence, but there are many other factors at work.

Violence, if you think about it, is an extremely complex behavior. Whether or not any given person in any given situation will become violent is known to be almost impossible to predict.

So, while this gene may contribute to aggressive behavior, that doesn't mean we're chained to our genetic makeup.

I'm very in love with my wife. I love her more than life itself.

Love may make the world go around, but is there more to amor than meets the eye? Anthropologist Helen Fisher says, when it comes to falling head over heels, each gender has its own agenda. Fisher and colleagues reported to the Society for Neuroscience their analysis of MRI brain scans of love-struck volunteers.

We ended up with 10 women who were madly in love and seven men who were madly in love. So it began to occur to us, why don't we see if there are any gender differences?

The scans revealed that gazing at a picture of a beloved triggers the reward centers in the brain. But in men, regions associated with visual stimuli and arousal also lit up, while women responded with brain regions corresponding to attention and memory recall.

And it seemed to make a great deal of sense to me. For millions of years, men had to size up a woman by looking at her. By looking at her to discover if she was healthy and young and able to bear him healthy babies. And for millions of years, women needed to size up a man to see whether he was going to be a good parent, a good father and good husband. And for that, she had to remember what he promised yesterday. Did he bring buffalo meat three weeks ago?

So, if you're smitten with someone, keep in mind that your brain is working behind the scenes to size up your sweetheart.

You may think living on the edge is a sure way to shorten your life. But too much caution could also be risky business. That's what behavioral scientist Sonia Cavigelli discovered by studying 14 pairs of brother rats, where one was cowardly and the other courageous.

We're interested in identifying individual differences in how animals respond to stress. And the way to best do that is to look at their stress hormones.

She tailed each rat as it explored an unfamiliar test arena, which stressed out the scaredy-rats. But the gutsy rats ran through the new habitat without any hesitation.

Our hypothesis was that different animals would perceive the exact same challenge, or stressor situation, differently, such that over a lifespan these two different physiological or stress responses might have different impacts on the body.

She and her colleagues report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the fearful rats produced more stress hormones than their brave brothers. If present for long, these chemicals wear heavily on the body. In the end, the worrisome rats withered and died nearly 60% sooner than their fearless siblings.

The difference in age between the two kinds of animals, if you compare it to humans, was approximately a difference of about 10 years.

So even if you're not a daredevil, remember that shying away from new challenges won't help you win the rat race.

Researchers know that exercise is not only good for the body, but also for the mind. So good, that scientists at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center think it can be an effective treatment for mild or moderate depression.

Exercise, I believe, is very likely to be, so to speak, a prescription that you can give or provide to a patient.

Exercising enough is the key.

If you exercise below a certain level it, doesn't seem to lead to any significant change in your depression

Writing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, psychiatrist Madhukar Trivedi and his colleagues reported that the same amount of exercise recommended for good physical well-being, known as the public health dose, can be as effective for some people with depression as taking medication.

To figure out the right dose of exercise, the researchers compared 80 patients with mild to moderate depression and randomly assigned them different exercise routines. They ranged from the public health dose, 30 to 40 minutes of aerobic activity three to five times a week, down to a very low dose of stretching three times a week.

Trivedi believes that exercise can provide an added benefit for patients that they don't get from medications.

When people exercise regularly, what we find from patients is they feel a sense of self-control.

Something many people with depression often feel they don't have.

Trading stocks, making money, and getting stressed.

Well, I think I've been stressed since September 11, truthfully. I have two children, both teenagers. Stay with me. One's a girl. Still with me? Tough job.

While this busy mom hangs in there, stress could be changing her brain. Neuroscientists say chronic stress can have devastating effects on our brain. They studied nerve cells in an area of the brain called the hippocampus, a hub for learning and memory.

It's a structure that is very important for remembering where you were and what you were doing when something important happens. In other words, providing context. For example, remembering where we were and what we were doing on September 11, 2001.

They compared brain cells of mice that were stressed and not stressed. Many of the cells in this brain area called the hippocampus show this shrinkage after repeated stress. Researchers found that the opposite was happening in another part of the brain, the part that regulates fear and emotion.

With a chronic stress, neurons in the amygdala grow. they become larger.

That could make you anxious and fearful. McEwan says the key to prevent this is to recognize when a danger has passed and return to our normal lives.

In some ways, animals seem to have it all over people when it comes to sensing danger. But psychologist Joshua Brown says we may have our own early warning system. He revealed in the journal Science that the brain region that helps with information processing, the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC, is better at picking up and signaling warnings than researchers previously thought.

It seemed to detect these subtle cues in the environment. And this was a kind of sensitivity of that area that we haven't previously observed.

Brown gauged this ability by taking MRI brain scans of 16 volunteers as they took a special test. As Brown demonstrates, the volunteers watch for a white or blue dash to change into an arrow, then quickly push the correct arrow key in response. Sometimes changing a lot of time responses or throwing in a larger arrow could cause them to make mistakes. During a mistake, ACC activity spiked in the MRI images.

We were able to catch the brain in the act of learning to detect situations in which they are more likely to make a mistake.

Brown says the ACC learns to interpret cues in conflict situations, like whether to slow down or speed up at a yellow light, then signals other parts of the brain to solve the conflict. Thereby allowing us to recognize and avoid making bad decisions. Brown says he's looking into how the ACC malfunctions, and that could help put the brakes on risky or dangerous behavior.

Many people who escaped life or death situations say they survived only because they believed they could. Scientists led by Steven Maier at the University of Colorado at Boulder wanted to know if something in the brain's circuitry might control this.

When you have no control over stress, all kinds of negative things happen. And when you do have control over the stressor, you're buffered or protected from those negative effects of stress.

They reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience that when a rat is in a stressful situation, it uses a decision- making part of the brain, called the medial prefrontal cortex, to decide if the situation is controllable. If it is, that section of the brain sends a message to a region deep in the brain stem where basic life functions like heart rate are controlled, and calms everything down.

What the prefrontal cortex does is, it detects when you have control and then says, cool it, brain. You don't need to get so aroused and agitated. Maier says other brain circuitry then organizes an escape plan. When the researchers chemically deactivate the medial prefrontal cortex in their lab rats--

Now they act as if they didn't have control.

--the researchers saw three things. The rats seemed helpless, they didn't try to escape, and they had high levels of fear hormones in their brains. Signs Maier says that rats can't control traumatic situations without this brain function. Maier adds this is not the only way the brain can control stress, but it is a mechanism most mammals, possibly including people, use in an emergency.

But of course. Men have always been the breadwinners. While women tended to the children and the household. When the family is hungry, Dad has to go hunting, because women can't do that. She's supposed to stay home. In the cave, that is.

That's why men and women are so fundamentally different. Men have to plan, cooperate, and find their way around the wilderness when they hunt. They bravely fight wild animals. That's not suitable for women.

The hunters did their job well. Now there's food on the table again. In the evening, the men are tried from all the hunting. They just want to rest, not talk.

But women can't stop talking. With gossip, they maintain social relationships. They also constantly chat with the children to educate them. But women and men can't talk with each other. Their worlds are simply too

different.

But that's exactly what did not happen. Humans evolved in Africa, and a few million years ago, life on the savanna looked more like this. Their habitat is the outdoors, not caves. Both women and men take care of the food. Women mainly gather, but they also participate in hunting trips. When they leave the camp, the grandparents take care of the children. Women gatherers and children over six head off with knives and tools. Women hunt smaller animals, too. They have to be familiar with their environment, plan their work, and also know about botany, seasons, soil, and what grows where. Catching fish is also part of their job.

This group is hunting for big game, and includes men, as well as strong women. Here, patience and skill are more important than strength.

But the tide can turn. It doesn't always work out. the hunters often return home empty-handed. Gathering is a better bet and yields 80% of the food source.

Everyone shares everything.

Above all, adults work only three to six hours per day. the rest leisure time. Sitting around the campfire and talking is what's most important. Where are good gathering spots or hunting grounds? This is how knowledge is passed on. Communication and cooperation. That's the true legacy of evolution.

True or lie? These four see things that are either funny or disgusting. But, no matter what they see, they smile. Real emotions, or just good acting? A person's eyes are considered the mirror of the soul. But are they really? People say that with a genuine smile, the eyes laugh, too. But with a fake smile, they don't. We think we can detect a lie, but mostly we don't. Did that small movement give it away?

Shall we take an even closer look? Detect the slightest wince? In Bremen, Germany, scientists research how facial expressions mirror emotions.

The sphincter around the eyes plays an important role when it comes to a smile. It tightens the eyes and pulls them upwards, resulting in those familiar laugh wrinkles. Real or fake smile, that muscle moving the corner of the mouth does its job.

In order to check, two electrodes are attached above the eyes. They measure muscle activity when we tighten our eyebrows. At the beginning of the experiment, the electrode signals are checked on a monitor. The red graph on the top refers to the eyebrows, the green graph, to the eyes, and the blue graph to the mouth.

First, the test subject watches funny film clips. And she's obviously having a good time. She's showing a typical honest smile. Her eye muscles above and her mouth muscles below are active.

Now the scientists show rather disgusting film clips. At first, there's the usual fake smile. Only the green graph of the mouth muscle is active. The scientists see this type of smile often.

But then there's a surprise. Despite images of what goes on in a slaughterhouse, her smile is real. The graphs show muscle activity of her mouth and eyes. The analysis will confirm their first impression.

[SPEAKING GERMAN]

Despite accurate electronics, the eyes also failed to prove a lie.

And as the sun set on that old Kentucky town, I knew everything would be OK. Yes, everything will be OK. The end. What do you think?

Well, it's very evocative.

Really?

Yep.

What's your favorite part? I mean, if you had to pick just one. What would it be?

I suppose if I had to pick just one part, I mean, there are so many great, fantastic scenes.

I know, I know. But you can only pick one.

Probably the part where the doctor says, I can't operate on this boy. He's my son.

Of course. What do you think made it so great?

Boy. I mean, I said it was evocative, right?

Yes, you said that about the novel as a whole, but what about this scene? What makes this scene stand out for you?

First it was your word choice.

Thank you.

And then there was this plot turn. Really a shocking plot turn. I mean, at that point, I didn't even know that the doctor had a son. Or that the doctor was even a woman, for that matter.

Yes, I know. Once I formulated that plot point, the whole piece just fell into place.

Yes, that's obvious. It's wonderful.

Thank you. You know, I really respect your opinion.

Where did you and Pat go together?

Went to Jasmine's Cafe.

And what route did you take to get to Jasmine's?

We took a right out of the classroom, we took another right down the hallway, we took a right on to the right stairwell, went down the stairs, we passed through the second floor hallway, we went downstairs to Jasmine's.

OK. Just out of curiosity, is that, like, the normal short route to get there?

No.

There's a long way?

Yeah, somewhat.

Yeah? Did-- did Pat ask to go the long way?

I walked past my last classroom because he wanted to see where my last class was.

Did you guys talk about your last class?

Yeah. We talked about how we had pizza and stuff like that and a party, because it's the last class.

Oh, it's literally the last class?

Yeah.

OK. Um, did he ask a lot of questions about that?

Not really. Just a few. Just like, what we did in class and why we had pizza.

So after you walked past that last classroom, you went on to Jasmine's?

Yep.

What was the first thing you guys did when you got there?

We just walked through, pretty much. And he asked me if I wanted something to drink but I said no.

He's really pushing those drinks. You know. Whatever. So, while you were there, did you talk about anything specific?

Not really.

Just stared at each other?

We went upstairs after-- we just walked through Jasmine's and we went upstairs. He just pretty much asked me if I liked the food there. And we played rock, paper, scissors by the see-in glass window upstairs.

And of course, the question is, who won in rock, paper, scissors?

I won. He said I'm the only one that did. So far.

So where did you and Pat go?

Jasmine's.

So of course, the ever-present what-route-did-you-take question.

We went down the hallway, and then we went to the ramp, but instead of going all the way down, we went halfway and then took the steps the rest, and right into Jasmine's.

And what was the first thing you did when you got to Jasmine's?

We went to go get me a water, because I was pretty thirsty. And he paid for it with cash.

Did he get a receipt?

Yes, he got a receipt.

Nice. All right. So, did-- let's see here, sorry. So, after you guys got your water, what did you do?

We played rock, paper, scissors next to the coffee.

Who won?

He did.

And the winning hand?

I really don't remember.

All right. Out of curiosity, do you remember, did he use scissors at any point?

Yes, he did use scissors.

I've got him next time when we play rock, paper, scissors. All right. So, you played rock, paper, scissors. And then what happened?

We went back to the room.

Where did you and Pat go?

Me and Pat went down to Jasmine's Cafe.

And what route did you take to get there?

We went out the doors, made the right and went straight down into, like, the uh, the path-- I guess the pathway to Jasmine's. Took the covered catwalk, or whatever it's called. And then took it all the way down to Jasmine's entrance.

What was the first that you guys did when you got to Jasmine's?

We walked in and Pat asked me if I wanted a drink, and I actually got a coffee.

Did you use cream and sugar?

Yes.

Did Pat get anything to drink?

Um, no. Pat didn't get anything.

So you got there and the first thing you did was you got coffee. How did Pat pay?

He paid in cash.

OK. And after you guys paid for the drink, what did you do then?

Then we walked around Jasmine's a little bit and looked at the different things that they offer. And then we went over to where the couches are in the middle and sat down.

What did you guys do once you were sitting down?

We were sitting down and then he challenged me to a game of rock, paper, scissors, shoot.

Who won?

Um, Pat did.

And do you remember what the winning hand was?

Um, I believe he had scissors and I had paper.

Where did you and Pat go together? I'm sorry.

We went to Jasmine's Cafe.

And how did you guys get to Jasmine's Cafe?

We went out the door and made a right, and made another right, and went straight down, um, actually, we went down the stairs, and then we went straight down the second floor hallway, and we made another right, went out the door, and down the ramps to Jasmine's.

What did you guys do first when you arrived at Jasmine's?

He asked if I wanted a drink. I said no. And then we went over to the Foosball table and played rock, paper, scissors.

And so, who won in rock,paper, scissors?

Pat won.

How many times did you guys rock, paper, scissor?

We played best out of three.

And, let's see. What was the winning choice? What was the last selection you guys made?

Um, I think he had a rock and I had scissors?

Now a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, Editor-at-Large of US News and World Report, engages Howard Gardner, Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Extraordinary Minds-- Portraits of Four Exceptional Individuals and an Examination of Our Own Extraordinariness.

Howard, you've been writing about extraordinary people now for 10 years. You're a development psychologist. Why write about extraordinary people?

First of all, because they're fascinating. And to be able to study somebody who really has made a difference in the history of the world is a privilege.

But I also am trying to do more than just describe individuals. I'm trying to understand the phenomenon of extraordinariness in general. It's as if I were an anthropologist or a naturalist and I discovered these funny individuals with names like Freud and Marx and Gandhi and Beethoven and Mozart. And I said, they're not only remarkable, but are there certain patterns that sort of run through all these people? And not, perhaps, can we make everybody into an Einstein. That's unlikely. But what can ordinary folks learn from people who really have made a difference in the history of the world?

Now, in this book you've focused on four individuals. You focused on Mozart, Freud, Virginia Woolf, and also Gandhi. Why these four?

Because they are representatives of what I think are the four principal species, you might say, of exploiting or carrying the naturalist metaphor forward.

Mozart I call a master. He is someone who does brilliantly what other people are doing in the domain, in this case music. But unlike Freud, whom I call a maker, Mozart had no desire, really, to create new genres, to do stuff that nobody else had done before. He just wanted to do magnificent works of music.

Freud, as a maker, was always trying to test the limits. Always trying to create something new. He went through one discipline after another, never happy until he finally created his own, called psychoanalysis. He made the rules, he decided who'd be a psychoanalyst. He was much more like a composer like Stravinsky or Schoenberg, who earlier in this century really created wholly new musics, or Elvis or the Beatles, if you want to use a popular kind of metaphor.

Then there are two other kinds of extraordinariness, which have to do with human beings. One, which I call the introspector, is someone who really studies his or her own condition as a human being and tries to understand it

very deeply. And Virginia Woolf, the novelist, is my introspector, because not only did she introspect about what it was like to be a woman, to live in England early in this century, but to my mind even more impressively, she introspected about what consciousness is like. What does it mean to be conscious of something? Her books tried to capture what we call the stream of consciousness.

And the final extraordinary person, also involved with human beings but in this case with other human beings, is Gandhi. I call Gandhi an influencer, because Gandhi may have spent time thinking about himself, but basically what he was doing was trying to change the beliefs and the actions of millions and millions of people. Initially in South Africa, then in India, and ultimately, he had effects all over the world. In this country, in the Civil Rights movement. In Russia and China. I think Nelson Mandela is inconceivable without the example of Gandhi, both in South Africa and in India.

Well, now, as a developmental psychologist, you've obviously looked closely at the early years of childhood and what impact they have on an individual. Are extraordinary people born, or are they made?

I think the only way in which extraordinary people are born, is that some of them have an easy time learning things.

Mozart had parents and a milieu which encouraged music-making, but he also learned music very easily. I don't think I could have been a Mozart.

But other than being able to master a domain, or an area, of expertise relatively quickly, I think extraordinary people are really made. They're made, in part, by their ambition, in part by their times, in part by luck, and in part by where the particular domain is at a historical moment.

Einstein, for example, came at exactly the right time, when all the assumptions of physics which had survived for two centuries under Newton were coming into question. Everybody knew it didn't quite work. He was the guy who could see things in a new way, in part because, what I would say, he had a particular blend of intelligence. He was able to think spatially about issues that people had often thought about just mathematically. If Einstein had been born 50 years earlier or 50 years later, it's quite likely he would not have been an outstanding physicist. He certainly would not have been as revolutionary as he was, coming into his prime at the beginning of the century.

One of the interesting points you make is about the classical story about the wound and the bow, and how that applies to extraordinary people.

All of us have things that go wrong in our lives. Sometimes we have so many things that go wrong that we can't deal with it and we just give up. Sometimes we shield them out. We ignore them. What people who are extraordinary often do, is they have a wound. They have something which is very painful, either physically, a disease, or psychologically very, very difficult experiences they've gone through. But rather than ignoring them or be defeated by them, they wrestle with them and they say, what can I learn from this?

I think there are three lessons of extraordinary people. And the one I find the most inspiring I call framing. Framing means, when something goes wrong, and all of us have things go wrong, can you turn it into an opportunity? Jean Monnet, the French economist whom I studied in some depth, said, "I regard every defeat as an opportunity." That's a prototypical framing thing to do. You don't give up. You say, what can I learn from this?

Here's, I think, where the rest of us can really learn from these people, particularly if we are teachers, or coaches, or talking to ourselves. When things go bad, don't ignore it. Don't be defeated by it. Say, what can I learn from it?

You worked closely with Richard Nixon, a very complicated person. I think it's no accident that the book that he wrote, actually early in his career, Six Crises, was a confrontation of what happens when something goes against you. Are you mobilized by it, do you learn from it, do you make it into a strength, or are you crippled

by it? Nixon, for all his wounds, so to speak, knew how to make them into strengths. And the great paradox, which historians will be scratching their heads about, is when things were going their best, in 1972 after he'd won everything, that's when he undid himself.

He was best dealing with adversity. He had very great trouble dealing with triumph. But Nixon also illustrates, as to these other extraordinary people, the other two lessons. Let's talk just a moment about those.

Reflecting and leveraging. Reflecting means, spending time thinking about what you're doing, taking stock, taking walks, taking baths, keeping journals, anything which allows you to have a distance from your enterprise.

Leveraging means figuring out what your strengths are and really pushing them. Everybody whom I've studied, the 25 or 30 extraordinary people, all have areas of amazing weakness. But they're not defeated by them. They instead say, what's my strength, and what's the niche that I can fill better than any other niche? And they really push those strengths. And the other people can help them with the things that they're not good at.

So if you have a combination of reflecting, figuring out your strengths and pushing them, and when things go badly, not giving up, but essentially learning from it and being energized, then I certainly think that you as an individual, or your kids, if you're thinking about it in terms of teaching or parents, are more likely to be able to be at least, you might say, if not capital E extraordinary, more extraordinary than they would be under other circumstances.

I wanted to ask you one last point. In addition to those three lessons, all four of the people here in this book seemed to become masters through enormous diligence in their fields. They worked hard at what they did.

One of the things that surprised me when I began to study people is, often they come from quite bourgeois backgrounds. Ones where their parents may not have smothered them with love, but where work and following a calling is very important. And they're not afraid to spend up to ten years mastering something, and then working for ten more years on a problem.

And one thing I worry about a great deal nowadays is, between the speed with which things change, and the multiplicity of opportunities, which even less affluent people have, the notion of sticking to something long enough to really master it and then to be able to get the distance so you can become a maker, so you can go beyond it, that's becoming more elusive. I think we need to, essentially, go against the time, and create spaces for individuals to spend the time needed to master.

Dr. Howard Gardener, thank you very much.

Thank you, David.

Dee Register strove for more than 40 years to understand simple words and phrases she read. Then she was diagnosed with dyslexia.

I avoided reading because I would have to read a sentence over and over and still not understand what I read.

Since then, Register has improved her reading through special teaching techniques. But how did an old brain learn new tricks? Researchers at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center believe they know. Using MRI brain scans, neuropsychologist Lynn Flowers saw that the brains of adult dyslexics processed information differently after they had been treated to improve reading skills.

Instead of using just left hemisphere, they're using both their right and left hemispheres, and increased areas in both.

Standard readers use only the left language-processing hemisphere of the brain when reading. As reported in the journal Neuron, Flowers and her colleagues treated half a group of adult dyslexics using a technique that

worked all five of the senses to reinforce the connections between printed and spoken words. Compared to the untreated volunteers, their reading skills improved significantly during the eight week study period.

The same kind of instruction that children respond to is also something that's effective for adults.

Judith Burch of the International Dyslexia Association thinks the study has revealed many important ideas about the biological basis of dyslexia.

It's a beginning that shows us that adults can learn the important processes that have to do with reading.

Reminding us that it's never too late to learn new tricks.

Steve Geller has stuttered since he was three. It's had a profound impact on his life, but it was particularly hard during adolescence.

When I was starting to, to, talk to, to girls and th-- things like that, that the stuttering definitely had a major impact.

Purdue University speech scientist Christine Weber-Fox and her team have found that, even when people who stutter are not speaking, their brains process language differently.

Activity over the right hemisphere was greater than the left hemisphere. And this is not what we found in our normal speakers. Their responses were more balanced across both hemispheres for this task.

As reported in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, they measured the activity of brain cells using what looks like a wired-up swimming cap with electrodes that sit on the scalp. The brain activity of adults who stutter was compared with non-stutterers. The test required them to respond silently, by pressing a button, indicating whether two words flashed one after the other on a screen rhymed or not.

Some word pairs, like flown and sown, look similar, while others did not.

What that forces you to do is say the words to yourself.

When the two words looked similar but didn't rhyme, the stutterers took longer to process the words and answer.

The complexity of the task really influenced them, or interfered with their processing, to a greater extent than it did the people that didn't stutter.

Although language is an important factor in stuttering, Weber-Fox reminds us that there are other factors involved, including emotion, anxiety, and genetics.

People shake hands for lots of reasons. Whether it's heads of state dealing with world politics, or your neighborhood car dealer trying to make a sale. As a car salesman, Bob Chambers knows a thing or two about shaking hands.

It'll give you a sense of confidence, or it'll give you a sense of frailty about the personality if the handshake is kind of drippy.

But, do such assumptions stand up to scientific testing? Yes, according to psychologists at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Handshakes were related, significantly and systematically, to several personality characteristics.

The researchers asked people to complete questionnaires about their personalities. What the volunteers didn't know was the real tests were the handshakes at the beginning and end of the meeting. The researchers looked

for several specific things.

And we found that five of those dimensions seem to go together. Completeness of grip, duration, strength, eye contact, and vigor.

When they compared the handshakes to the personality questionnaires, they confirmed that confident people do have firm handshakes. Researchers did not look at what happens if someone tries to change their handshake, but suspect it's hard to fake it.

I think that having a firm handshake is important for making a good impression. On the other hand, I'm not sure how easy it is for someone who doesn't have a firm handshake to suddenly develop one.

A handshake has to come from the heart, even for a hardened salesperson.

A handshake has to be real. It has to be spontaneous and real.

[BABY BABBLING]

Goo goo ga ga sounds like nonsense, but maybe baby wants to say something and can't find the words. Child development researcher Susan Hespos thinks this might be so.

We wanted to look at infants before they have language and see, do they have thoughts?

Hespos studied 32 five-month-olds as they watched hands place a cylinder into tight and loose-fitting containers. She wanted to see if the infants noticed a difference in how things fit together.

If you presented adult English speakers with it, they would gloss over the distinction. They wouldn't notice it. It's not captured in our language.

The babies watched as long as what they viewed was new, but looked away once the action was repeated. The results, published in the journal Nature, would suggest that pre-language infants notice concepts the English language fails to emphasize.

So this is adding new evidence towards the argument that thought does preceed language.

Hespos' work builds on previous studies of baby brain function. French brain scientist Stanislas Dehaene captured MRI brain scans of two-month-olds to peek inside the infant mind.

There's been a huge debate as to whether the infant brain is a blank slate.

His tiny test subjects listened to a recording played forward--

[WOMAN'S VOICE SPEAKING IN FRENCH]

--and in reverse.

[WOMAN'S VOICE SPEAKING GIBBERISH]

The brain scans showed that babies could discern between backward babble and structured sentences.

One of the things that we have learned from this study is that the brain of the infant is already well-organized.

And understanding brain development can help when things go wrong.

If we can figure out what is typical development, it will lead us to better understand what's atypical development.

And that's thinking ahead.

Thief. Thief.

[GRUNTS]

18. 22. 10. 39. 28. 43. 48. 30. 21. 6. 11. 37. 16. 20. 29. 17. 40. 33. 14. 32. 2. 19. 23. 8. 35.

Night. Soft. Blanket. Yawn. Bed. Tired. Pillow. Dream. Comforter. Dark.

There were trolley cars every place. Not very many people had automobiles.

Helene McLane remembers the old days as if thumbing through a mental scrapbook. The brain stores these long-term memories when nerve cells form new connections. Ironically, researchers are finding that what keeps those connections, and memories, intact, also causes brain-eating disorders, like mad cow disease. The culprit is a prion, a protein that can change its shape. Scientists thought prions were always harmful. Until now.

You can have a protein assume a prion form, and that prion form cannot be detrimental. It can be beneficial, the normal, the active form of the protein.

Neuroscientist Eric Kandel and colleagues reported in the journal Cell that a prion form of the protein called CPEB nurtures nerve connections to maintain memories. Studying sea slugs, Kandel's team found that, as a prion, CPEB triggers a mechanism to create more of itself. As long as this cycle continues, CPEB is available to preserve memory links between nerve cells.

It gives you a way of conceiving how a memory can be perpetuated 60, 70 years. In principle.

Just like Helene McLane's memories.

Well, Bill and I had a very good time in Paris.

Looking ahead, Kandel imagines his work with sea slugs leading to drugs to treat memory loss in people.

Some foods just aren't that popular with kids.

One strawberry? Try your salad. Did you hear me?

Instead, snack foods often rule, creating a world of obese adults. But researchers are finding that they can modify adult eating habits. They convinced volunteers that as children they either liked, or had a bad experience with, certain foods.

So now it looks like we can sometimes make people, using this suggestive manipulation, avoid certain foods, or embrace other foods that might be healthy for them.

Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, and her team gathered information from volunteers and used it to create fake stories about their childhoods. One story was that, as a child, they got sick after eating strawberry ice cream.

You make people believe they got sick eating strawberry ice cream, and they don't want to eat it as much later on.

Loftus has spent 25 years exploring how to influence people's memories. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she says entire events can be placed in memory, even though they didn't happen.

We made people believe that they were lost in a shopping mall for an extend time. Or, what other investigators have done is try to make people believe that they had an accident at a family wedding, or that they were a victim of a vicious animal attack.

Loftus adds that, so far, they know that planting false memories seems to change behavior about 30% of the time. But they don't know how long the changes last.

You meet someone and later try to remember his or her name. Sound familiar? Neuroscientists call this associative memory.

We are looking at that initial period when you go from, I've never met you before, I have no idea what your name is to link to your face, to the situation where you're able to say, ah ha, yes, I met that person, and that person's name is--

Researchers were able to measure what happens to nerve cells in a part of the brain as these connections are made and memory is born. They studied brain cells of rhesus monkeys, focusing on an area called the hippocampus, which is important for memory formation.

We were able to monitor the electrical activity of individual cells in the hippocampus as monkeys were playing, basically, a memory-based video game.

Each day, researchers showed the monkeys different complex images like these, and superimposed four identical targets, white dots, on the scenes. The monkeys' task was to learn to identify which target on which scene was associated with the reward.

So as the animals got better and better at performing this location-scene association, what we found is some cells increase their activity dramatically. It was kind of like being able to watch the formation or the birth of a new memory as we're seeing these cells.

So, if making a new memory feels like hard work, don't worry. It is.

The sound itself is enough to send shivers up your spine. But if you've heard that sound often without the pain that usually follows, you'd stop being scared by it. Extinction, as this ability is called, is important in helping us manage our fears.

Now, learning researchers have pinpointed chemicals in the brain, called cannabinoids, that are critical in helping to put those fears behind us. They found that mice genetically engineered to block these chemicals were always frightened by a sound they learned to associate with a shock. The scientists, who reported their work in the journal Nature, hope that a better understanding of how cannabinoids work leads to new drugs to aid stress disorders, anxiety, and phobias.

How does Riaz Ahmed, a cab driver in New York City, remember the best way to get from point A to point B?

It is the experience. when you start driving, day by day you learn more.

Now a taxi-based video game is helping neuroscientists study how we navigate.

We're talking about a memory system. We learn our environment, so that when we have to get from one place to another, we use some knowledge or some map which we have created in our own brain so that we can do it over and over again, probably with increasing efficiency.

Freid and his colleagues measured brain cell activity as virtual taxi drivers picked up passengers and took them where they wanted to go. The researchers reported in the journal Nature that three different types of brain cells showed increased activity.

One type really responded to particular locations in the environment. When you are in a certain place, then the particular cell may suddenly become very active.

The other type of cells fired to particular views to what was seen, to landmarks in the environment.

And the third type really fired to the particular goal. That is, getting to a particular store.

Freid says the place, view, and goal cells work together to get us where we want to go. And they may work more efficiently in taxi drivers' brains.

They're probably expert in special navigation, because they actually do it every day.

Understanding how these cells work may help to treat patients with memory disorders.

The sight and sound of a dentist's drill will make anyone cringe. But can watching a gory video of dental surgery help your memory?

To answer this question, Christie Nielsen showed students a list of ordinary words. Then they watched, either a bland video about proper tooth brushing, or the tooth extraction video. 24 hours later, Nielsen asked the students to recall as many of the words as possible.

What we found was that the people who had seen the dental extraction video remembered significantly more of those words than the people who saw the tooth brushing video.

It has nothing to do with this particular video, but the emotional response it produces. It causes the release of chemicals that help your brain store memories.

Nielsen has studied this process for a decade and published several papers on it. This latest research suggests that, since the emotional experience was unrelated to the word list, manipulating our emotions after learning something can help us remember even mundane things. And the emotion does not have to be negative.

In fact, there's a number of things one could do to take control of their own memory and learn to enhance it when you want to.

Positive emotional experiences produced the same chemical response. So does physical exercise.

But that doesn't mean you need to hit the weights after hitting the books. Prior studies show that just squeezing something like a stress ball can do the trick. Putting remembering what's important in to your own hands.

[BABY GURGLING]

You want to see a cool toy?

Oh.

[INAUDIBLE].

Joseph. Hey, take a look at this. That's pretty cool, huh? Oh, let's see. Where'd it go? All right. Let's try something else. How about this one? Hey, Joseph. Let me see. Just let me see. Can I see this? Where's the ball? Where's the ball?

We're trying to get the same amount of liquid in each of these glasses. All right, let's see. Cool color, huh? What do you think? They have the same amount in there now?

Yeah.

Yeah? OK. Same amount exactly, yeah?

Yeah.

All right. Let's try something here.

Pretty colors.

Isn't that cool?

Yeah.

Which glass has more in it now?

I don't like that one.

You don't like that one? Which one has more in it? This one here, or this one?

That one.

This one has more? Yeah? OK. Why do you think this one has more in it?

Because it's filled up.

It's filled up higher?

Yeah.

Oh, OK.

Need to look at these two balls right here. Do you think they have the same amount in them?

Yeah.

Yeah, they do? OK. I'm going to try something with one of them. See what happens. Are they the same amount now?

[INAUDIBLE] that one.

This one has more? Yeah? OK. Trying to get these things together here. Here we go. How about now? Are they the same?

Yep.

They're the same?

Try that one.

Oh, you want me to do something with this one?

Yeah.

OK. You're doing a great job here. It's fun to play with this. All right. Which one has more now?

That one.

This one does? Yeah? Hmm. OK. Get some pennies for you. I'm going to put 10 pennies in a row here. OK? I put 10 pennies in each row. Can you see them OK?

Yep.

Because you can sit up in your chair if you need to get closer. OK. So, do these two lines-- let's see. These two lines look the same to you? What do you think? Are they the same?

Yeah.

Yeah?

I want to play something else.

How about now?

Could I-- can I just try to pour?

Well, we'll play with that in a second, OK? But how about these right here? Which line has more in it?

That one.

That one does? Yeah? You are good at these.

OK. So let's try this. So these two things have the same liquid in them. What do you think? Does it look like they have the same amount to you?

Yeah.

Yeah? Let me just see. Gotta make sure it's definitely right. This one might need a little bit more, right? How about now? Is that the same amount?

Um, I think so.

You think so? If you think one needs more, let me know.

All right.

Yeah, you think they're good? OK. OK. Which one has more now?

That one.

That one has more? How come that one has more?

Because that's a wider cup.

That's a wider cup? OK. And even though they're the same amount of liquid, that one has More?

Yeah.

Yeah? And it's a wider cup. How did that happen if it's the same amount of liquid?

That's a lower and wider cup and that's a bigger [INAUDIBLE].

OK. OK. See these two balls of clay?

Yeah.

OK. They have the same amount of clay in them. All right? OK. They look the same to you?

Yeah.

Yeah. OK. Oops. I haven't played with these for a while. OK. All right, Billy. Tell me now. Which one has more? That one has more? How come that one has more?

Because that's more wide, and that one's the size of a ball, and that one's the size of-- I don't know.

The size of something, huh? OK. But even though they're the same amount of clay, when I do that, this one has more?

Yeah.

Yeah. OK. OK. Got one more for you. OK. So we've got 10 pennies in each row. Do the rows look equal to you? Right? 10 pennies in each row? OK. OK. Does one row have more pennies in it now?

Um, it looks like it, but it doesn't.

It looks like it but it doesn't. OK. So they both have how many pennies in them?

10.

10 pennies, right? So even though I make it look like there's more, you can tell that there's still 10 pennies in each row? OK. Good. All right.

See these two-- the water here? You're going to put them into these cups here. OK? You want to try and get them to be the same level. Boy, thanks for helping. Go ahead. You can pour all yours in. OK. Now help me with this one. Because we want to make sure they're the level they should be. Same amount.

Try again.

Little bit more?

Uh huh.

Are they exactly the same? Or does it need more in here, or are they the same?

Little more in this one.

Little bit more in here? Now we need a little bit more in here, right? What do you think? Are they the same now?

Mm hmm.

Which one do you want to take out of those? We'll put it in here. This one? Should we put this one in there or this one? Doesn't really matter. Want to take that one? How about I do it, just because of the way the top is, OK? OK. Now, is there more water in this one now than there is in this one? Or is it the same amount of water?

The same amount?

Why do you think they're the same amount?

Because they both started out the same.

Oh, OK. So we just put it in a different cup?

Yeah.

OK. All right. Thank you. Now, Glenn, these two balls of clay are the same, right? OK, put them together. The same amount in each of them? they should be the same because we took them out of the same container, right?

Yes.

OK. Now watch this. OK. Now, is there more clay in one of these now? Is there more clay here than there is in here? Or is there's the same amount of clay?

I'd say the same amount.

Same amount? OK. Now we're going to show you 10 pennies. Put these in a line together. OK. Then another 10 pennies over here. OK. Are there more pennies in one row than there is in another row?

Yeah?

No? They're the same amount of pennies As if I spread them apart?

Mm hmm.

OK. All right.

So Neve, why do you have toes?

I got big toes.

You have big toes? Why do you have big toes?

Because I have big toes, too.

One more question for you. Where does the sun go at night?

It goes to sleep and then things get dark.

It goes to sleep and then it gets dark?

Yeah.

Yeah? OK. Can I ask you one more question?

Yeah.

OK. Why do you eat breakfast in the morning instead of at night?

Because you get up and eat breakfast.

Because you get up and eat breakfast?

Yeah.

Oh, OK. All right. Well, thank you very much.

How did you learn how to talk?

Um, from my mom.

From your mom? Oh, OK. And can you tell me, why do dogs bark?

Because that's the way they talk.

That's the way they talk. OK. And now, where does the sun go at night?

Umm--

Isn't that kind of funny? Where does it go at night?

It goes under somewhere or something.

Under somewhere? OK. Good. These are hard questions. You ready for some more? OK. Why do you have toes?

Because that makes you walk.

Makes you walk. OK. And why do you eat breakfast in the morning instead of at night?

Because you can get energy before school or anything.

You get energy before school. OK. Let me ask you just one more. Why do birds fly?

Because they have wings.

Because they have wings. And how do they fly? Because of the wings?

Yeah.

Yeah? OK. I have one more. I promise this time just one more. OK? Why is the sky blue?

Um, because it helps the sun get lighter.

Helps the sun get lighter? OK. All right. Well, thank you very much.

You're welcome.

How did you learn how to talk?

I don't know.

You don't know? OK. some of these questions are going to sound a little silly, right? Why do you have toes?

To keep your balance.

Keep your balance. OK. And do you know why the sky is blue?

No.

Not sure? OK. How do birds fly?

Wings.

With their wings? OK. And why do you eat breakfast in the morning instead of at night?

I think to keep you going all day, so you don't starve.

OK. All right. Thank you.

Why do grandma and grandpa slow down? Neuroscientists at the University of Utah, and in China, turn to monkeys like these for the answer. They say a 30-year-old rhesus monkey's brain works a lot like a 90-year-old human's.

They have cognitive declines. They don't move as quickly. They have more difficulty doing complex tasks as they get older.

Leventhal explains that, as we age, nerve cells in the brain become less picky about which signals to respond to and which to ignore. The scientists think that's because we make less of a brain chemical called GABA. To test this, they showed images like these to both young and old monkeys and studied nerve cells related to their vision.

In young animals, the large majority of cells respond to specific aspects of visual stimuli. Like a certain color, or a certain direction of motion, or a certain shape.

Whereas old monkeys' nerve cells responded at random. Then they gave the old monkeys a drug to increase GABA.

We were able to have the cells respond more like cells do in young animals, as long as we were delivering the GABA.

And blocking GABA in the younger monkeys made their nerve cells less selective. Leventhal hopes to test GABA-boosting drugs in humans. That could make nerve cells more picky in the aging brain.

When it comes to kids' behavior, parenting can trump genetics. So say psychologists who studied rhesus monkeys on this island off South Carolina. Baby monkeys' mothers not only cared for them, but also corrected any bad behavior.

We've seen what mothers do to change behavior. But what mothers are best at doing is shaping the brain. Because that's why evolution put them there, was to take care of that.

The researchers separated some infants from all adults and raised them with other young monkeys. Then they looked at differences in a gene that controls a brain chemical called serotonin.

Higley says monkeys with a short version of the gene have less serotonin. That tends to lead to impulsive and aggressive behavior.

Serotonin appears to be the breaks of the brain. And if you look at monkeys who have low levels of this serotonin, they have difficulties getting along with other monkeys. They spend most of their time by themselves.

The researchers found monkeys who had the short gene and were raised by their peers had much lower levels of serotonin. But it was different for the monkeys raised by their mothers. They had high levels of the brain chemical, regardless of genetics.

Motherless monkeys showed no difference. If you had the short or long gene. So it wasn't just the gene, and it wasn't just the environment. It was an interaction between the two of them that produced that kind of outcome.

Higley hopes understanding how our genes and early environment interact--

That's not a trick. It's dangerous.

--could help keep youngsters out of trouble.

Play a game of I Spy with a four year old, and they'll know to look wherever your eyes go. But what about an infant?

Michelle Brooks played with infants after setting up toys on both sides of the room. When she turned to look at a toy, most kids followed her gaze, on one condition.

They would do it specifically when my eyes were open. They were very unlikely to do it if I turned like this with my eyes closed.

This is the first study to show that eye contact matters so much to 12-month olds. Brooks says it's an important indicator of social development.

It's a beginning, I think, of children beginning to understand that we share attention, that we're interested in things together.

Infants also pointed at the toy or babbled while looking at it. It seems they've learned body language before English.

It's that package of children's actions, where they point and talk and look, that really conveys that they're beginning to understand that we're sort of having a conversation, that we're indeed having social interaction.

Showing once again that the eyes have it.

Now you see it, now you don't. And now you see it. You know from experience that the ball will likely come out from behind the square on the other side. That's what psychologists call an object concept.

When babies start learning object concepts was not a question Scott Johnson set out to answer.

I had a new device called an eye tracker that I wanted to just try out with babies, and it was new to me. I'd never had one before. And so I just made some displays and showed them to babies just to learn how to use the eye tracker.

Johnson and his colleagues noticed a significant difference in what the eye tracker recorded, as seen on the lower right, as different babies watched an image that would be temporarily obscured as it moved across a television screen.

The six-month olds anticipated much more reliably than did four-month olds. The eye movements of the six- month olds, shown by the cross hairs, indicated that they already had an idea that the image would reappear. While the four-month olds did not.

Johnson was not very surprised by that. What did surprise him was how quickly four-month olds would learn object concepts. After just two minutes of practice watching the ball go back and forth--

Four-month olds showed much more reliable anticipation in this case, relative to the four-month olds who had not seen the unoccluded trajectory.

And began to learn there's more to life than meets the eye.

Kids love to see and touch toys. Now brain scientists say that sensory stimulation is key to forming the brain wiring they'll have as adults. That's because in childhood, the brain clears out half the connections we're born with to form new ones through learning. For the brain, loss is gain.

In early development you have a lot of connections, more than necessary, and you need a proper environment, stimulation, sensory inputs or learning, to get rid of these redundant connections.

Neuroscientist Wenbiao Gan took a closer look at this process by studying these brain connections in young mice. He disabled visual stimulation in some mice by trimming the whiskers that help them see and navigate at night. Then he compared their brains with young mice whose whiskers weren't trimmed.

You would normally see about 15% net loss of connections.

But Gan reported in the journal Nature that a special imaging microscope revealed a significant difference in the visually deprived group. They lost only 8% or 9% of their connections, a detriment to brain development. His advice to parents with young kids?

You don't want kids to watch the same thing over and over. You want to expose them to a variety of things.

So for children, mixing it up may be just what they need to grow their brains.

Scientists often turn to babies to find things out. But learning from them isn't easy.

Anybody who has raised an infant knows that it's very difficult to get this kind of information out of the baby.

Neuroscientist Patricia Kuhl uses infants to study the way people learn language. She says there are ways to learn from them.

They have to be very clever in the laboratory to capitalize on the things that kids do naturally.

One thing they do naturally, turn their heads. To get them to do it, Kuhl uses an adaptation of a procedure invented at the University of Washington originally designed to test infants for hearing loss.

In the original design, there wasn't a sound being played in the background. It was just silence in the background. And babies were encouraged to turn their heads when a sound was presented, because if they did so when the sound was presented, the animal in the box would light up and dance.

It worked so well--

So we were watching that success story and deciding that it would be a great way to test their ability to hear the sound distinctions in speech that are critical for word learning.

By teaching the babies to turn their heads when they hear a change from a repeating background sound to a target sound, Kuhl can measure what they remember. She says that if the infants turn their heads when they hear the sounds of change, they learned the target sound.

But how can she be sure she's getting accurate information?

We certainly have to build in what are called control trials. Some babies might just turn their head every 10 seconds to see whether the bear or the dancing monkey will turn on.

And those babies have to be taken into account so the others can tell her what she wants to know.

Playing special computer games like this one could help prepare some kids for school. Psychologists at the University of Oregon designed the games to train the network of brain areas involved in attention, which undergoes important development between ages three and seven.

This executive network, which tends to control the child's emotions and also allows them to continue to work on a particular task, it's also likely that that network is also deficit in ADHD children.

The team led by Mike Posner studied groups of children aged four to six. Those in the training group are given increasingly difficult attention tasks. Using caps wired with electrodes, the team recorded childrens' brain

waves at the beginning and end of the study. The researchers reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the network became more efficient after just five training sessions.

Part of the network developed a more mature response. It looked more like the adult subjects that we've also run in these experiments.

The researchers also found that even this brief attention training improved one measure of IQ involving non- verbal reasoning.

The intelligence test was quite different than any of the exercises we used for training. So we wanted to see, would there be an influence?

Posner says that while this study only looked for short-term effects, it shows that early childhood educators should pay attention to improving attention.

You hear that? Everyone's talking to us.

Finally tonight, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen, Editor-at-Large of US News and World Report, engages Robert Coles, Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanity at Harvard Medical School, and author of The Moral Intelligence of Children-- How to Raise a Moral Child.

Dr. Coles, we've known for a long time about rational intelligence, cognitive intelligence, IQ. We're learning about emotional intelligence. But what is moral intelligence?

Moral intelligence has to do, not with the intellectual capacity to discuss moral matters in a classroom, or to study them. But moral intelligence, at least as I've defined it in this book, and as it was defined for me by the pediatrician who taught me the phrase, moral intelligence means how we behave. It's moral behavior tested by life, lived out in the course of our everyday experience. That's--

So we should see human beings are in three compartments. Their intellectual capacity, their emotional intelligence, how well they deal with life, and then there's their conscience.

That's right. The conscience as it's lived and tested, again, by life. In this America that we now live in, our cognitive intelligence is constantly discussed and our scores determine, in many ways, our lives. What colleges we're going to get into, what graduate schools.

And emotional intelligence has now become a big subject and in fact has been for many years. The emergence really of the school psychologist as a major figure in educational life.

But it's interesting how little attention is paid in our schools and universities, never mind in our public discussions, to this aspect of life, namely character and moral development, meaning moral living as children learn it at home and in school.

For instance, Harvard University and some of the other universities where some of us teach were originally founded for the installation of character. If you read the early charter that got these schools going. And of course now, that isn't the primary function as it's defined. The primary function is the acquisition of knowledge.

And then there are the student health services where the students receive-- and I'm not saying they shouldn't receive-- they receive psychiatric or psychological counseling.

Then comes the question, how do we encourage lived moral experience in our students, in our children, and of course, ultimately in ourselves?

Well, how do we?

How do we? We do it by living it out. And I guess that's the message I'm trying to insist upon for myself as a parent and a teacher and for all of us, that we remember that any lesson offered a child in an abstract manner, that isn't backed up by deeds, is not going to work very well. We live out what we presumably want taught to our children. And our children are taking constant notice. And they're measuring us not by what we say, but what we do.

None of us is perfect, so as adults we do make mistakes. But I was struck by the phrase that you had about being a good enough parent.

Well, this is a taking off on the very wonderful English psychoanalyst Winnicott, who talked about the good enough mother. And by good enough, I mean, really good enough. Meaning good. Not just good enough in the sense of offering the child emotional sustenance, or that kind of support. But really good enough so the child learns to be good. Which means the child is, through his or her eyes and ears, watching very closely how we behave. And if we're good enough to inspire goodness in our children, that's quite a step for us. And, of course, for the children.

What about the importance of stories?

Stories are, we know from the Bible, they're the way to teach. Stories encourage the moral imagination to work, and they are concrete, and connected to everyday experience. Abstract formulations and lists are in one ear and out the next. And even if we memorize them, they don't have the flesh of daily life. Stories are the way we do it. And stories based on experience.

Do you have a particular story that you enjoy for that purpose?

Well, the story I have is the story of my own son and me going to a hospital. Because one day I was sitting at my desk writing, and he came into my study and he was bleeding. He'd done what he was told not to do, he'd got some of the tools in the barn and used them and cut himself, and badly. I had to get him to the hospital. I was driving him to the hospital on a rainy day, and I felt that he ought to get there fast. Although he had not severed an artery, nevertheless, he was bleeding. And in getting him to the hospital, I was speeding. I was going through red lights, frankly, splashing some people, because it was a rain-drenched day.

And he turned to me and he said, Dad, to get out of trouble we're going to make more trouble. And he really gave me a moral moment there. And a lesson. I slowed down. I took him to the hospital, and as I was driving, I thought, I am learning something from this nine-year-old boy, which I know he's learned from his mother, about moral behavior.

We get into the hospital, and because I'm a doctor and I knew the other doctors in this hospital, they were ready to do an end-run around other people who were waiting in order to attend to us. Not for a medical reason, but frankly out of friendship.

And my son was judging me. I felt it. He didn't say a word. But I said, Bobby, let's just wait. As they came to offer immediate attention. And I thought, I'm a student and he is a teacher. And he got this from his mother who had, again and again, taught him [INAUDIBLE] and in other places, to behave in a certain, decent way.

It's interesting to me that you spoke frequently in your book about the moral loneliness of children. They sometimes feel morally abandoned. And that they really do need moral guidance. They want it. You said that children very much need a sense of purpose and direction in life. A set of values grounded in moral introspection. A spiritual life that is given sanction by their parents and others in the adult world. They're born with that.

I think so. We're the creature of awareness. We're the creature of language. And we're the only creature on this planet, maybe in the whole universe, who asks why. Who wonders. Who knows that life is limited and that we will someday die. And this awareness is a fundamental, I think, moral aspect of ourselves.

The novelist Walker Percy did the best job I know of in this century discussing this in his writings and in those wonderful stories, which are really existentialist evocations of the moral condition that we all struggle with, namely, why am I here? Where did I come from? And where, if any place, am I going?

Children are very much into that. We all know. They ask these endless whys. And these are not to be dismissed as merely going through a psychological stage. These whys are affirming their humanity. And these whys show their moral hunger.

And we are to figure out, even as we we're wondering about how we're going to feed them correctly with the right amount of vitamins, we ought to be thinking about these moral aspects of their hunger. And try to figure out how to feed that. And by the way, feed ourselves.

Mary Pipher, who wrote this very popular book, Reviving Ophelia, says that many parents of adolescent children are doing the best they can to raise those children. But at a certain point, those children go out into the outer culture and are poisoned by it. And we need to reclaim the culture. How do you advise parents in that situation who are facing those problems?

I tell them what I guess I've told myself as a parent of three sons, that we have to be there for our children, to contend with that culture, and take it on directly. Not criticizing the children, but using the word we. It's both of us, the parents and the children, who are caught up in this. And we have to figure out how we're going to survive amidst it and what our position is in relationship to it.

And in that sense, we are a member of a community. And we hope that there are others who are going to be standing up with us, and sometimes against, this onslaught, which really is increasingly so for all of us. So in that sense, we are part of a community. And we have to find other members in the community.

You know, even before adolescence, children get on that school bus. Before the first day of school, they've already left home. They're on that bus. I think I mentioned that in the book. They're on that bus. It's a whole new world for them. And they're listening to other voices, and through the other children they're picking up what those kids have learned from their parents.

And so, we have to stand tall with our children. Using that word we. That we're part of something. And we have to be aware that they're hearing other voices from other rooms, so to speak.

Robert Coles, thank you very much.

Thank you.

So let's try some. On the left-hand side here, you have a stimulus line, and I want you pick out, either A, B, or C, that matches it to the right. Now, we're going to go around the room for your responses. When I call out your participant number, you'll respond.

You'll be participant number one, you'll be a participant number two, participant number three, participant number four, participant number five, and participant number six. OK? So when I call out your participant number, please respond with your answer, either A, B, or C, that matches the stimulus line to the left-hand side [INAUDIBLE].

OK, again, stimulus line on the left, please match with either A, B, or C to the right. Participant number one.

B.

Participant number two.

B.

Participant number three.

D.

Participant number four.

A.

Participant number five.

A.

Participant number six.

E.

Again, stimulus line to the left. Please match it with either A, B, or C to the right. Participant number one.

C.

Participant number two.

C.

Participant number three.

C.

Participant number four.

C.

Participant number five.

C.

Participant number six.

A.

Again, I'm going to show you a stimulus line to the left, and I want you to respond as to A, B, or C, which matches the stimulus line. Participant number one.

C.

Participant number two.

C.

Participant number three.

C.

Participant number four.

C.

Participant number five.

C.

Participant number six.

A.

OK. Couple more. Again, stimulus line on the left. Please choose either A, B, or C that matches it on the right. Participant number one.

A.

Participant number two.

A.

Participant number three.

A.

Participant number four.

A.

Participant number five.

A.

Participant number six.

B.

Participant number one.

A.

Participant number two.

A.

Participant number three.

A.

Participant number four.

A.

Participant number five.

A.

Participant number six.

A.

Participant number one.

C.

Participant number two.

C.

Participant number three.

C.

Participant number four.

C.

Participant number five.

C.

Participant number six.

A.

Participant number one.

B.

Participant number two.

B.

Participant number three.

B.

Participant number four.

B.

Participant number five.

A.

Participant number six.

B.

And this is the last one. Participant number one.

A.

Participant number two.

A.

Participant number three.

A.

Participant number four.

A.

Participant number five.

A.

Participant number six.

B.

Participant number six.

C.

B.

B.

That's it. Thank you very much.

Psychologist Christian End has studied sports science for seven years. He says there's a term for when fans gloat after their team wins. BIRG.

BIRGing is basking in the reflected glory. And basically what it is, it's a self-presentational tactic that people tend to use that that stresses, that publicly stresses, their association with a successful other.

A sports fan himself, End says basking in the glory of someone else's accomplishments makes fans feel good about themselves, even though they had nothing to do with the team's success.

It can also explain why one week you might see someone and they might be painted head to toe in their team's colors, be talking we, we, we, and then two weeks later you see that individual and they're referring to the team as they. The team's clothing is packed away in the attic. It's inaccessible, because they're on a losing streak. So I think it can help explain some behavior that to the outsider might seem absolutely irrational.

Now, how and why do apparently ordinary soldiers go bad? Margaret Warner has that.

Americans have been shocked by photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused by US military guards. The degrading treatment of the detainees is horrifying. So too, has been the apparent attitude of the guards. In one photo a female soldier grins as she points to several naked hooded men. In another, two smiling guards give the thumbs-up sign as they pose with a pile of naked prisoners.

Political leaders from President Bush on down expressed disgust, and a conviction that the behavior shown was a gross aberration for US soldiers, and for all Americans.

What took place in that prison does not represent America that I know. The America that I know is a compassionate country that believes in freedom. I keep repeating, but it's true. It doesn't reflect how we think. This is not America. America is a country of justice, and law, and freedom, and treating people with respect.

But the hometown paper for the military police company involved, the Cumberland, Maryland, Times-News, had a different take in an editorial Sunday.

"Visiting journalists search in vain," the paper said, "for some dark local element that gave birth to the monstrous actions in Abu Ghraib. We are America, for better and worse."

And for more on the psychology behind abusive behavior like this, we turn to Dr. Robert J. Lifton, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who studied Nazi doctors and Vietnam veterans among others. His latest book on violence is called Superpower Syndrome.

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a retired psychology professor at West Point. His new book is On Killing-- The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill.

Jay Winik, a professor and war historian and author of April 1865, The Month That Saved America.

And Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University. In 1971, he conducted a landmark study in which two dozen college students were directed to play the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated jail, with disturbing results.

Welcome to you all. And Professor Lifton, let me begin with you. Why do apparently ordinary people commit brutal acts like this?

I would understand it as what I call an atrocity-producing situation. In studying Vietnam and what happened there, and interviewing Vietnam veterans, I found that the situation they were in was so structured, psychologically and militarily, that ordinary people, no better or worse than you or me, could walk into it and commit atrocities.

And I think, as different as Iraq is, we have a parallel situation of a counter-insurgency war with great confusion as to who the enemy is, and difficulty in tracking him down or identifying him. Enormous fear and frustration, and hostility from the population. And this creates a group process, rather than any kind of individual aberration, a group process of atrocity.

And it works for many levels. Because as we heard, there are sometimes instructions given from those in charge of interrogation, people from military intelligence, or sometimes there's just a kind of indirect suggestion that softening up processes can be tough and abusive.

And then there's still a higher level of high-ranking officers and war planners, who demand information from interrogations and apply pressure on those military intelligence officers.

So here you have a three-tier dynamic. And the foot soldiers, the MPs and the civilian contractors, are caught in this atrocity-producing situation. They adapt to the group and they join in.

And of course, we don't know the actual situation in this case, because that will remain for further hearings and the courts martial.

But let me ask Professor Zimbardo. Your own studies, your own research, do you agree that there's the potential for, if not atrocity, certainly brutality, in just about anyone? And if so, what triggers it?

Well, I agree with everything my colleague Robert J. Lifton said. Human nature has the potential to be good or evil. It depends entirely on the situation around us. These young men and women who are being scapegoated, being rushed to trial, rushed to judgment, were embedded in an evil barrel.

What happened is, in my study, we took good young men, put them in an evil barrel with the simulated prison, and out came corrupted young men, who did sadistic acts very similar to what you see in Abu Ghraib. Chaining them, making them naked, putting bags over their heads, making them clean out toilet bowls with their hands. And at the end, simulating sodomy. Having the prisoners simulate sodomy. And these are college students to other college students.

And what drove that? What drove that? I mean, did you ask them?

No, no. Just the opposite. I was the superintendent of the person who said no physical violence. But they waited until I went to sleep. Because-- for a variety of reasons. First of all, prison situations are ones of enormous

power differentials. Guards have total power over prisoners, who have no power. Unless there is strict leadership, unless there is clear leadership that prevents the abuse of power, that power will seep out. That power, that sadistic impulse, will dominate. And that's what we saw in our prison and that's what we see in Abu Ghraib.

My sense is that these young men and women certainly didn't go in as bad apples. Just as in our prison, they went in as good American soldiers. And they've come out shamed, and their futures destroyed.

And what happens is, what the system is doing, is taking the blame away from those who created the barrel. From those who should have been in command, all of those who should have been in charge, the military intelligence that clearly, clearly influenced, suggested, pushed, enhanced, the use of these terrible tactics. But the system wants to be preserved. And that's why we're rushing to judgment on these young men and women.

Jay Winik, what's brought it out even further, even away from the United States? What does history tell us about what triggers atrocities?

What history tells us is that there's just a terrible logic of war, where ordinary or even extraordinary people can just do terrible things. Hannah Arendt, the philosopher, once called it the banality of evil.

And if we look at two powerful examples, for example, in France in the 1790s. They were the epicenter of the world. The most cultured and cultivated society. Their books were read everywhere. Their philosophers were widely renowned. And yet, when their revolution started, they thought nothing of beheading each other, and gave us the terror that swamped all of a continent.

To take another example throughout history, of a very different sort, if we look at Cambodia in the 1970s. Here was a gentle, kind, sweet people. They got new leadership, highly educated leadership, and they give us one of the worst nightmares that history has ever seen, akin to the Holocaust, called the killing fields.

This is the logic of war. The logic of psychic numbing. It's the logic of which, absent corrective mechanisms and institutions in societies, this sort of thing happens.

So Colonel Grossman, you've taught at West Point. How conscious is US military leadership in general of this potential, and what do they do to try to train and teach young soldiers to be-- to resist this sick culture that can develop?

Gwen, since My Lai, every single soldier is required by law to be repeatedly trained on a yearly basis on what is an illegal act, what is an illegal action. And not just how to identify illegal actions, but how to go about reporting them and how to disobey orders.

This is the first time in human history that an army has been taught to disobey certain orders. The potential for atrocity, all of my fellow speakers, tremendously eminent individuals, keep speaking of war as a situation which, by definition, has these problems.

But the reality is that it has the potential for these problems. The goal has to be a consistent, systematic process at every level. The individual must be held accountable. Must be held accountable. The leaders who were immediately responsible must be held accountable. The individuals who were responsible for establishing the framework must be held accountable.

The overall dynamic is that the American reputation-- I talk in my book on killing about an individual sending a letter. He was interviewing German soldiers in World War II. He said soldier after soldier said they were told by their uncles, their grandfathers, people who had experience in World War I, be brave, get in the front lines, and surrender to the first American you see. The American reputation for decency in World War I saved untold thousands of lives in World War II. And that's what we must struggle to maintain. And in a systematic process of making sure that at the individual level, the leadership level, that there will not be breakdowns like this. The reality is they're extraordinarily rare. And they must be made even more rare.

Jay Winik--

May I ask Phil a question?

Well, actually, let me just ask Jay Winik one point. And then I'll get back to you. The President-- I want to bring up this, is this American? Is there something special about Americans that makes it more likely that we will resist, at least, these impulses? You heard the President say it. Senator Lieberman said today, we're not like the terrorists who would behead someone and send out a video. Is there something different about Americans?

Well, we certainly think of it as un-American, because we don't see it as part of our nature, as part of our history. And when these kind of atrocities happen, we quickly try to correct them. But that's not to say in America that we haven't committed things that we would rather see as barbaric or as atrocities.

For example, Harry Truman, when he dropped the A-Bomb, he never lost a night's sleep over it. And he said, when you deal with a beast, you must treat him like a beast.

In the Civil War, we had a full-scale guerrilla war that was taking place in Missouri, which in terms of the scope and savagery of its death and destruction, was every bit what we see in Iraq today. I mean, terrorists would ride around wearing scalps with human ears and pieces of flesh as signs of their latest conquests. In the Union troops, in the southern, terrorists became literally indistinguishable from each other. And at the time, one of the generals watching what was happening, he said there was something in the hearts of good men that literally exploded.

And even Abraham Lincoln, watching all this said, "every foul reptile comes alive in this guerrilla war, and nothing we do can stop it."

Professor Lifton, I want to ask you about something you've written about, and ask you whether you think it might apply. And again, we don't want to prejudge these cases. But I think part of what was so chilling about these photographs are these big smiles on these people's faces. How do you explain that? And is your theory-- you've written about something called doubling, or the second self. Does that play into this here?

It does, I think. Sadism is potential in all of us. And it isn't the sadism that produces the atrocities. It's the process of the atrocity that releases the sadism. And the sadism is what we see on those pictures.

I would like to emphasize that, yes, we have atrocities even in civilian prisons and in all wars. There's no doubt about it. But you're more likely to have atrocities in this kind of war. In this kind of counter-insurgency war. And in this case, when it turns into an occupation, the atrocity potential is sustained.

In terms of doubling, I have described this in relation first to Nazi doctors. They could be loving husbands and fathers when they go on leave over weekends and spent their time in Auschwitz, from 9:00 o'clock to 5:00 o'clock, five or six days a week, killing people. It's as if they form a second self.

Or take Tony Soprano. A very fine, likable fellow most of the time. Except his business is killing people.

That kind of doubling occurs in relation to atrocity. We can say that, with these people in the prison, these foot soldiers, they formed temporarily a kind of abusive self, which functioned, and which was the only way to adapt to that environment. And that's what's so dangerous about creating environments like this. Because when the atrocities come to reflect the war that we're fighting.

Let me first get Professor Zimbardo. I'm Margaret, by the way, not Gwen.

But Professor Zimbardo, talk to us a little bit about your reaction when you saw the photos, and the fact that these men and women also didn't see-- there was nothing furtive. They were posing proudly. There was no sense that later they might get called to account, that they were doing something wrong. Yet, you hear their friends and neighbors talk about them as very decent young people. Explain the psychology of that.

Right. Before I answer, can I ask the Colonel whether army reservists get that same training that regular soldiers do?

Yes, they do--

These are Army reservists.

--in their basic training. Yes. And this is a really important point, because one of the variables in this equation is that these National Guard and reserve units are less trained and they're less disciplined. One of the safeguards in the system-- any army that went forth and killed and then came home and used its skills on its own nation, would be participating in the destruction of its own nation. This is a problem that's been resolved for millennia. And the solution is discipline.

In these National Guard and reserve units, there is a tendency to have less discipline. And you've put your finger on one of the key variables in the equation.

All right, so Professor Zimbardo, back to you. About the glee on these faces?

The glee on those faces, and I don't think anybody's said this, is I think they were trapped in what is considered an expanded present time zone. They would cut off from their past, and your past is your history, your personality, your obligations, your religion. And they cut off in the future, which is the consequences of your action.

They were in a kind of hedonistic revelry. Trapped in that moment, but like you get in drug addiction, like you get in Ecstasy, like you're getting in riots. It was a special kind of mentality where they were living in the moment. Therefore, not only did they do these terrible things, they were able to take what's called trophy pictures. Exactly like Americans used to do with lynchings, because they had no sense that these could be used against them. That they would be culpable. They would be found guilty because they had these pictures.

So I think they were involved in the ugliness of the hedonistic moment, and therefore, they were not thinking they were doing anything wrong. They were just living for that pleasure and the pain.

So, Colonel Grossman, finally to you. Go back to your training of young military-- you've spoken, I think, in the past about trying to create the bulletproof mind. How does that work?

One of the most important ingredients of all when I train my cops, my military, my-- Atrocity will entrap you. It is temporarily empowering, it is extremely desirable in its short-term gains. But the long-term destruction on the individual, on the culture, on the society, is enormous.

And one of the things I've put in place is the concept of what I call justice not vengeance. That we must dedicate ourselves ahead of time.

PTSD is the gift that keeps on giving. It destroys not just you, but your spouse and your kids in the years to come. And all of the research shows that one of the surest paths to psychological self-destruction is to commit an atrocity, to break the law, to do something other than the code.

And quite frankly, to answer your key question, is this unamerican? A free society, with an open press, makes this far less likely to happen. What we are participating in right now is an extraordinarily powerful process that makes damn sure that this is far less likely to happen again. And that's a good thing.

The quick point I would make is I would agree with that. That even as the collective sociopath reigns, in one hand, is what we've seen, the fact that we're going through this discussion, that there's a collective sense of shame throughout the nation, that's the corrective mechanism. That's ultimately what will be the good news in this whole terrible saga.

Thank you all four very much. Very interesting.

We're all hoping to improve. From the state of our desks to how we deal with others. If you've resigned yourself to being set in your ways, new research says that's not the case. Some aspects of your personality do change with age.

We're finding that personality changes as people get older. That personality is something that's fluid, that's something that is responsive to our environments, responsive to our life contexts.

Sri Vastava and his colleagues conducted a large internet-based personality survey of more than 130,000 people between ages 21 and 60. When they compared the average personality traits in each group, they found that, as people got older, some traits changed a lot.

One was that they were becoming better at keeping commitments, more responsible and more organized about their lives.

They also seemed to become warmer and more agreeable.

And so people were becoming more nurturing, more supportive of others, and things like that.

But is this change based on experience, or is it genetic?

Understanding how life experience and genetics work together. That's something we don't know yet, and that's something that's actually a very exciting thing for us to try to find out.

No matter whether it's nature, or the old school of hard knocks, Sri Vastava says your personality is certainly not set in stone.

Speaking about dogs, my dog is really a cute dog, and I take him everywhere--

Amateur night at the comedy club. Some jokes are funny, and some are not.

How the brain handles humor is a clue to how we handle things like stress, according to Stanford University's Alan Reese. He studies this by taking MRI brain scans while people look at cartoon drawings.

We can actually see the brain lighting up. Just specific areas of the brain lighting up in response to the person viewing the cartoon.

As he wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he scanned the brains of 10 women and 10 men. They showed that the fronts of women's brains lit up more than men's. That's the thinking part of the brain, where we make judgments and process language. Women's brains were also more active in another part of the brain associated with pleasure and reward.

What we think is that women showed greater activation of this reward area because they actually expected the reward or the punchline less than men.

Reese also reported that different regions of the brain light up among people with different personalities. He says these differences are clues into how we use humor to protect ourselves.

We are interested in this finding from the perspective of how can we perhaps help people develop better strategies for being resilient, more stress-proof.

Meaning, whether you simply smirk or laugh out loud, your laugh may actually be your way of handling stress.

Now, a pre-Father's Day look at what Dad may pass on to his daughter. New scientific research was reported this week in the British journal Nature. We begin with this report from Andrew Beach of Independent Television News.

The scientists have found that a gene, or a group of genes, probably acting directly on the brain, accounts for basic differences of behavior in men and women.

What we might call feminine intuition, as it were, the ability to suss out a social situation by observing non- verbal behavior, by observing nuances of expression, in voice, and so on, that that set of skills has a genetic origin.

The discovery comes from studying 80 patients who, like Kylie Smyth, have Turner syndrome, a genetic disorder which only affects women. It causes problems in social relationships, but it does not affect intelligence.

It's really just a problem. It's not my whole life. It doesn't really matter that much. [INAUDIBLE]

The cause of Turner syndrome is a missing X chromosome. Girls have two female X chromosomes, one from the father and one from the mother. In Turner syndrome, one or the other is missing. Today's discovery shows that the girls who retained the single X chromosome from their father were far better socially adjusted. The conclusion is that the gene for sociability is on the X chromosome from the father.

Females are, as it were, genetically programed to pick up socially appropriate behaviors in much the same way that we're programed genetically to pick up language. Nobody teaches us language. We learn how to speak our native tongue by observing other people. And so I'm suggesting that girls learn the social mores of their social group by observing other people. But boys don't have that advantage. They have to learn social skills.

It isn't disastrous for you guys. You know, you could be taught those skills which come so easily to us.

A boy gets an X chromosome from his mother and the male Y chromosome from his father. So he misses out on the sociability gene. In effect, he lacks female intuition. The finding may explain why far more boys than girls suffer from autism. Children find it so difficult to socialize that they appear to withdraw from the world. And why men are more likely to suffer speech disorders, language difficulties, and reading problems.

I think the pendulum is swinging now back to the idea that quite a few behavioral differences are influenced by genes. 20 years ago that was almost a shocking thing to say. I think most people would accept that that's now possible.

But we've got to remember that because something's influenced by genes, it doesn't mean to say the environment is not important. They're not separate. They always act together.

The lack of a sociability gene. These boys have to be taught how to behave. They're therefore more open to influence by a dominant personality. That, say the scientists, makes them better material for teams or indeed, armies. Perhaps that's why the gene evolved this way. Unsociable men make better soldiers.

I think that what we've found is some reason behind the fact that there are differences. But, no, I think that we as females have learned to live with you all since time began, and we wouldn't swap you, really, from the way you are.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault takes the story from there.

To tell us more about genetics, environment, and human behavior, we're joined by two specialists in this field. Dr. Fred Gilbert is the co-director of the Division of Human Genetics at Cornell Medical College in New York Hospital. He's also a clinical geneticist.

And Kathy Katz is a pediatric psychologist at Georgetown University Medical Center. She works with children with developmental disabilities.

And starting with you, Dr. Gilbert, what do you see as the significance of this genetic study?

Well, it reinforces the argument that genes contribute to behavior. And it does provide a little impetus for the argument that genes may affect the gender differences that we see in boys and girls.

So how does it exactly affect our understanding about human behavior?

Well, it doesn't affect our understanding, in that we haven't identified the gene and we don't know what its function is. It's an observation. And like all observations, it's subject to proof, to repetition, and expansion. This is a study based on a relatively small sample, 80-some odd cases. And also, the substrate are children with Turner syndrome. So they're not normal, in quotation marks. They're individuals who already start out with a biological problem, the fact that they have only one X chromosome, and they have hormonal differences from other girls at the same ages.

So it's more complicated than just saying that this defines a behavioral change. Behavior is probably-- is certainly affected by multiple genes. And this is the effect of only one gene.

Doctor Katz, what do you think-- what is your perspective on what this all says about human behavior and how genes-- what influences behavior?

Well, I think that we're at the beginning of a very exciting era in terms of gene research, because by studying differences in certain populations who have particular genetic problems, we develop a better understanding of what genes may contribute to certain kinds of behavior. And this kind of research with this group of girls who have a particular kind of learning profile has enabled us to begin to understand what the contribution of certain genes might be. And also that there will be differences in terms of the information that's given from genes that the father transfers onto the children, versus information that the mother's genes may transfer.

So given Dr. Gilbert's caveat, do you accept at least the beginning notion, that genes do influence social behavior?

I think that genes probably strongly influence certain kinds of learning behaviors. Whether it's specifically social, I'm not sure yet. I don't know that we can make that jump from the findings of this study. Because the girls that they looked at have a very particular learning problem and it's not specifically social.

Right. That's the point that Dr. Gilbert just made. But Dr. Gilbert, there's always been this debate about nature versus nurturing, that is, whether the environment contributes more to behavior or genes. Where does this finding, however narrow it is in terms of the study, where does it place that debate now?

Doesn't change it. The debate will still go on. And environment obviously affects the way these genes-- the word is the modulation of behaviors. Genes contribute to that, environment affects that. They interact in a way that we don't understand at this point in time. And there are many genes that contribute to this, not just the gene on the X chromosome.

In the taped piece, one of the people said that here is the beginning of the pendulum swinging back to the notion that behavior is influenced by genes. Do you see a pendulum swinging back?

I don't think the pendulum ever moved. The question is whether you're really arguing about genetic determinism. Whether you're thinking that genes absolutely determine or define your existence and limit you. As opposed to genes contributing to a total picture. They're only one aspect. Environment and the society in which you're brought up in, the number of siblings you have, they all affect the way you actually evolve. So genes are a part of this, but they're not the final and absolute determinant.

What possibilities, Dr. Katz, do you think that a study like this offers? What does it open up for scientific inquiry?

Well, it's beginning to help us better understand what areas of particular chromosomes may contribute to what kinds of behavioral differences. And by being able to tell nowadays, which we couldn't do just a few years ago,

whether the information is coming from the mother versus the father, that this gives us some better ideas of which kinds of traits may be linked to specific kinds of sex chromosomes.

And so what practical application do you see this having, Dr. Gilbert?

Practical, I don't know. But I do agree with Dr. Katz, that what this leads you to is the ultimate isolation of the gene itself. And once you have the gene in hand, it is hoped that one will be able to determine what its function is. Ultimately what these genes probably do is alter the wiring diagram in the brain in some way we don't completely understand now--

Alter what?

Alter the wiring diagram in the brain. And that that is affected by the environment, modulated by the environment, to produce the final behaviors that we see.

What we want to try to understand is what these genes are, how many there are, and how they do interact with each other.

So that, as we approach Father's Day this coming Sunday, what message does this send to fathers, or about fathers?

That they're very important. Obviously, they contribute half of their genes to their children, and that their genes are as valuable, including their X chromosome, as their Y and the other chromosomes that they contribute.

What do you think, Dr. Katz?

Well, I think fathers should appreciate that they are making a major genetic contribution. But I think it's probably equally important that they make an important social contribution of their own to their children. That they are involved with them personally.

Briefly, Dr. Gilbert, does this mean that men, boys, are doomed to be less social, or can things change if this proves to be the case-- if the research proves what you think?

No, because behavior, again, is determined by societal constraints and learned behaviors and the environment in which you grow up. So that's not going to change. Now, whether you feel you have to impinge more on a boy because-- or limit him more because he may have this genetic difference, I don't really know.

All right. Well, Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Katz, thank you.

How are you? Did you find everything you needed?

Hi, there. Mmm hmm. Oh, really? [INAUDIBLE]. Mm hmm. Wow.

Your total is $14.85. Paper or plastic, sir? Sir, paper or plastic? Sir, are you OK?

Hi. How are you?

[VOICES INSIDE THE MAN'S HEAD] OK. Do you realize you're sick?

Did you find everything you needed?

[VOICES INSIDE THE MAN'S HEAD] Do you see all these people here? You're going to make them sick, too.

What's he doing?

Hi there.

Hi.

[VOICES AND NOISE INSIDE THE MAN'S HEAD] Loser.

OK, your total is $14.85. Paper or plastic, sir?

[VOICES INSIDE THE MAN'S HEAD] You're trash. You're trash. You're trash. None of this will help you.

Sir? Paper or plastic?

[VOICES INSIDE THE MAN'S HEAD] You're sick. You're sick.

This is my house. My room's window. This is the basement and I'm not supposed to be in here.

I truly became addicted to throwing up by the time I was 13. I believe bulimia to be an addiction, but not only an addiction. Something that is extremely powerful and strong in its own right.

Bulimia is when you eat and after you eat, you throw up. Binging and purging is when you eat large amounts of food and then you throw them up. I have both.

Today, I've had one thing. It's 5:30, and I've had a venti skim, no-foam chai. And I feel disgusting.

Food is everywhere and it's also an addiction. It's like going into a pharmacy if you're a drug addict, and having any choice of heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy, that you like. Only for a couple dollars. People don't realize that about bulimics. Or anorexics. It's not something you just quit, because if you quit food, you die.

For me, food is my vice. Bulimia is my vice. It's the way I deal with things.

Yeah, there is nothing glamorous about eating disorders. It is a life-threatening disease and it can kill you at any time. And you are at risk every single minute that you live with an eating disorder. And, you know what? If you come and interview me in two weeks, I might not be here. So. Eating disorders put yourself at risk every single moment of your life that you have one.

I cut myself with glass from a mirror. And I cut myself always on my muscle. So I had to have three layers of stitches. And that was probably the worst cut I ever had.

They will think that, superficially, cutting themselves, but they don't realize that the arteries are very close to the surface sometimes, especially in the upper extremities. And they end up actually cutting one of the major arteries. That means that it could actually bleed profusely or uncontrollably and they have to be rushed to an emergency room. That's one of the serious complications that could happen.

The other one is that you're exposing your body to infection. So the wounds can get infected. And it can stay infected and the infection can go into the bloodstream, which can become a very serious issue.

Most people don't even know this is going on. And I've seen it, and I've seen a lot of bad things happen. I've seen injuries all the way to the bone, I've seen sticking out of bone, the tendons being cut, and they try to deny it. Or they say voices in their head has done it, but yet not to kill themselves.

A suicide attempt may by a cry for attention. But the person who cuts herself wants to keep her actions a secret. She doesn't want others to see her wound herself, and she definitely hides any scars.

I kept it secret for a very long time. I think some of my closest friends knew kind of what was going on. They'd see a mark here and there on my arm every once in a while. I was hospitalized for depression two years ago, and it came out that I had been-- that I had cut.

If a self-injurer thinks someone suspects what she's up to, she will become even more secretive.

Like, for example, I would have a little box by my nightstand. It would have a razor blade and a box of matches and an X-Acto knife, and some staples, thumbtacks.

Many self-injurers say that, in a strange way, hurting themselves makes them feel better. At least for a time. The pressures of life can build to unbearable tension. It's like inflating a balloon to the breaking point. When it can't expand any farther, it pops, releasing all the air. Making a mark on their body and drawing blood releases tension for the self-injurer.

That's the way you feel when you cut yourself. It's like you're letting out all the pain, all the problems, until the next time you feel like you're having problems.

Often while a person is harming themselves, they may not be totally aware of what they are doing. It's as if they separate themselves from the reality by going into a trance.

Graphic artist Judy Niosi recalls the scariest drive of her life.

My heart started pounding forcefully, to the point where I could-- my chest was going to explode. I had the constant thoughts that I was going to die.

After visiting a doctor, she was diagnosed with panic disorder, which brings bouts of intense fear that seem to come out of nowhere. Panic disorder can lead to depression if left untreated. Medications can significantly curtail attacks.

Psychiatrist Alexander Neumeister used brain imaging to study people with and without panic disorder. He looked at brain molecules called receptors that control the amount of a brain chemical, serotonin, that's known to affect mood. He wrote in the Journal of Neuorscience that people with panic disorder have fewer of those receptors.

What we found in the brain of people with panic disorder is that they have a reduction of about 30%, which is a dramatic reduction, in the number of receptors, compared to people who do not have panic disorder.

He says that deficiency makes the brain more vulnerable to anxiety.

Psychiatrist Eric Hollander says that imaging studies like Neumeister's could offer doctors better ways to treat patients.

One of the nice things about new imaging modalities that can tell us how sensitive specific serotonin receptors are on the brain in particular individuals is that, ultimately, this will help us tailor our treatments.

And that might mean fewer bouts of recurring fear for patients like Niosi.

This video shows how a schizophrenia patient experiences the world. Neuroscientists think multiple gene problems lead to the devastating brain disease. Now, these genetically-altered mice may help uncover the problematic genes.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied genetically engineered mice that showed symptoms of schizophrenia. What is interesting is, these are the behavioral impairments well known among psychiatrists that human schizophrenia patients also display.

This maze has a chocolate chip at the end of each of its arms. The normal mouse on the left finds the food in one try. But the mutant mouse gets confused.

They will revisit that corridor, which they visited before already, a few minutes ago, and then they will be very disappointed that the chip is not there.

The engineered mice lack a protein called calcineurin. So the MIT team and researchers at Rockefeller University in New York, studied the calcineurin gene in schizophrenic patients and their parents.

What we call bad [INAUDIBLE] or wrong [INAUDIBLE] of calcineurin gene is transmitted to schizophrenia children more frequently than to normal children.

The researchers say the gene may be a good target for designing effective anti-psychotic drugs.

Constance Niebuhr knows all too well the suffering caused by schizophrenia. She became the head of the Schizophrenia Research Foundation because her daughter Janice, seen here on the left, was diagnosed with the terrible mental illness 25 years ago.

They cannot think properly, they have horrible thoughts, and they hear voices, they have hallucinations. It's a devastating illness, because the person is not themselves.

Until now, research focused on chemical imbalances deep inside the brain. But Bill Greenough at the University of Illinois chose to look at the front of the brain behind the eyes, or the prefrontal cortex.

There's another change that takes place in the prefrontal cortex of the brain that, at least in principle, contributes to and is a part of schizophrenia.

Greenough's team examined the nerve cells in the brains of schizophrenics after they died. It's been known that a normal nerve cell has many branches, while nerve cells in schizophrenics have fewer. Greenough's team studied the tiny projections on those branches, called spines, and found that they were also abnormal.

The spines in the prefrontal cortex of the schizophrenic patients were shorter and fatter than in the normal patients. What this implies at the simplest level is that communication between nerve cells is abnormal in schizophrenic patients in this part of the brain.

He says that could affect the way people like Janice think. They hope further research on this part of the brain will lead to treatments that may reverse the symptoms of schizophrenia.

Three generations of women in the Zippern family used to treat what they call blue days as something to endure. But when grandmother Sidel moved out of her home of 50 years--

I really started to cry with tears, which never happened.

And granddaughter Carley was too depressed to leave her college dorm room.

They were both withdrawing from life, and it was only later that my sister pointed out that I was acting in much the same way.

Jill's sister was the first to suggest her family was suffering from more than just blue days. All three women were later diagnosed with depression.

Psychiatrist Myrna Weissman, who has published more than 450 scientific papers and 10 books on depression, says families like the Zipperns are not uncommon, and if multiple generations are affected by depression, then the youngest generations seem to be at an increased risk for the illness.

If two generations are affected with depression, the grandparents and the parents, those grandchildren who are still quite young have very high rates of psychiatric problems.

Over a 20 year period, Weissman and her colleagues followed 47 grandparents, their children and grandchildren, for signs of depression. They reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry that children in depressed families had more than a five-fold increased risk of any psychiatric disorder. The study showed a family history was the strongest predictor, but other factors must be considered.

Depression has a genetic component to it, but the environment is probably necessary to bring out the expression of it.

Weissman says major life changes, like the Zipperns faced, as well as stressful family relationships and financial situations, can trigger depression.

For fashion models on the runway, stars of the silver screen, and the ballet dancers who grace the stage, thin is in. A body image that is seemingly out of reach for the average person.

But that doesn't stop many people, most often women, from striving for it by starving for it.

People with anorexia very well can describe the kind of symptoms they have, the fear of being too fat, the drive for thinness.

Between five and 10 million people in the United States have eating disorders, the deadliest of all psychiatric illnesses. Many of those suffer from anorexia nervosa. They pursue thinness through diet and exercise to the point they drop to below 85% of their ideal body weight.

Genetic researchers now suspect that, like obesity, anorexia may be inherited. But which of the 31,000 genes in the human genome are the culprits? They've already narrowed their search to four regions. Now there's a study underway of family members who share the disease to find those genes.

We're trying to look at two or more family members that have anorexia and see which regions of the genome they may have in common.

But the lead researcher of the study points out it's not just about genetics.

Part of it is the culture and the environment that we grow up with.

There's currently no medical treatment for anorexia. Scientists are hopeful the four year study will help them find one.

Kay Redfield Jamison is a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She's written extensively on mood disorders and manic depressive illnesses. Her newest book is Night Falls Fast-- Understanding Suicide.

Dr. Jamison, welcome.

Thank you.

You're an expert on this subject in the most awful possible way. You tried to commit suicide yourself.

That's right. And I am therefore a great convert to try and prevent it. I mean, the kind of anguish that goes into a suicide attempt is really hard to describe. It's pretty terrible.

You wrote a book about the subject, An Unquiet Mind.

Right

And I wonder if, since it draws so much on that earlier writing, which was more difficult for you to write?

The book on suicide was much, much more difficult to write. An Unquiet Mind was a very personal book. It was a memoir about my own experience with manic depression. But the difficult thing was the decision to write it. It was very hard to make the decision to go public, given my profession and personal concerns. But the writing itself was not hard.

In Night Falls Fast, it was hard, because I was confronted everywhere, every day, with suicide. With stories of suicide, with figures of suicide, the medicine of suicide, the psychology of suicide. It was very ungluing, actually. I had no idea it would be that difficult.

One of the figures that struck me the most is when you wrote that once every 17 minutes, someone commits suicide. How can that be?

In the United States.

In the United-

Yep. Just in the United States. Because it's not an uncommon cause of death. One person in 100 in the United States will die by suicide. And almost two people in 100 will die worldwide. So it's not uncommon.

A new report that's coming out from the Surgeon General's office says that mental illness is the second leading cause of premature death and disability.

Right.

Does that square with your findings as well?

Very definitely. And it squares with World Health Organization, World Bank, and a series of studies at Harvard.

Right. We know what predisposes someone to suicide, but we don't really know why in the end it happens.

I think it's a hugely complicated act. I mean, we know that mental illness is almost always involved. We know that one of several psychiatric illnesses, manic depression, depression, schizophrenia, severe anxiety disorders, some of the personality disorders, are almost always involved. And if you compound those with alcohol or drug use, and if you have a volatile temperament and a tendency toward impulsive behavior, then you are particularly prone to suicide. Obviously, not everyone that does that will commit suicide. But the real risk factors are very severe depression. There's a genetic component as well.

One of the things we imagine about suicide is that it happens in the middle of the night. That people are more likely to commit suicide during the holidays, for instance. But those things aren't necessarily true, are they?

No, they're not. One of the misconceptions, many, many misconceptions about suicide, is that it's much more common around the Christmas holidays, for example. In fact, suicide is much more common in April, May, and summer months. And it is lowest in the winter months.

And it's much more common at 7:00 in the morning than in--

Yeah, in the early morning hours. Right. It's a complicated, it's an elusive sort of thing in a way.

Another startling number. One in five high school students seriously considered suicide in the year 1997. That's a growing number, isn't it?

It's a growing number, and what's even more concerning is that same study, which came out of the CDC, is that one high school student in 10 said that he or she had actually attempted suicide. That's just a horrifying statistic. When you think about it, and there are more than half a million suicide attempts every year in this country that are serious enough to end up in an emergency room.

The Centers for Disease Control when you say CDC.

Yes. that's right.

Why? I guess I'm not sure you even have the answer to the question, but especially among young people, which this book focuses on, why are the numbers increasing?

Well, I think there's a lot of things. One is that we know depression is increasing in younger people, and hitting younger. And we also know that when you combine depression with alcohol use, which alcohol and drug abuse seem to be also hitting younger, puberty is hitting younger, the actual age of puberty, and the major mental illnesses, hit younger. So that you have all sorts of risk factors kicking in to increase the rate.

When you take this apart a little bit more, are you finding it's more likely to be girls than boys, more likely to be Hispanics than African Americans or whites? Why is that? Is there any way of knowing? Is it a cultural influence--

Well, there are more suicide attempts in girls, and more completed suicides in men, by a ratio of almost three or four in this country. So there's a very real discrepancy between the sexes. And one of the most concerning statistics, I think from any public health point of view, is it used to be almost all the suicides were white men. But in the last 15 years or so, 20 years, there's been a doubling of the rates of suicide in young African American men. Which is a very, very concerning statistic if you look at the rate of increase.

And where do we begin to get to the bottom of it? How do we know why that's-- how do you stop it if you can't figure out why it's happening?

Well, I think we know some of the reasons why. I mean, some of it certainly is the abject hopelessness surrounding many people. And particularly when you don't have access to the same kind of health care. I don't think we can pretend there's equity of health insurance for people in this country. There clearly Isn't. That's true for the mentally ill in general. They don't have the same access to health care, and certainly people who are poor or minorities don't begin to have the same kind of access to good care. And we know that a lot of the violence from firearms is self-inflicted.

That was my next-- 60 percent of the suicides, the weapon of choice is a gun.

That's right. In this country.

And so what is it that this country should be doing about these things, now that it knows those numbers?

I think we should be doing a lot. I think we need to be much more proactive. I think the Surgeon General has done a tremendous job by making the recommendations, and making suicide a national health priority. We just haven't even talked about it in this country. We need to start talking about suicide. We need to realize it's a public health crisis. That it's the second killer of college students. It's a very dangerous problem.

We need to start educating kids, not so much about suicide, but about depression. We need to educate parents. What are the symptoms of depression? How do you get people into treatment? The school systems become more aware. The churches become more aware, that these are preventable illnesses. Treatable illnesses. And we've got really good treatments out there for depression and manic depression, schizophrenia. It's a matter of getting people into treatment and being aware.

So if someone close to you, your child, your friend, your lover, your spouse, you feel that they are considering suicide or are in some way suicidal, what do you do?

First of all, be direct. Ask them, tell them why you're concerned, what it is that makes you feel like you're concerned about why they might be thinking about suicide. If it is an acute situation, take away anything that could be dangerous, like a gun, a knife, medications. If necessary, walk the person to an emergency room. Sit with them. Talk to them. And try to line up care.

If there's a question of violence involved, which there not infrequently is, call 911 and get help. You don't want to be alone with it. But for sure you want to talk about it. And you want to deal with it in a very direct sort of

way.

And if there's a question of alcoholism and drug abuse involved?

Same thing. And often it's difficult on a one-to-one basis to talk to somebody. But sometimes it works a little bit better to sit down with a friend or a colleague or somebody from work and a family member as a group, and say look, we're concerned. We really love you, we really care about you. And we've got a list of people we hope you'll go see. And make those provisions.

And if you're a parent and your kid's going off to college, for heaven's sake, sit down and talk about what are the illnesses that are likely to hit in college. It's depression. It's not leukemia, that's for sure.

Kay Redfield Jamison, author of Night Falls Fast-- Understanding Suicide. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

How has your week been?

Uneventful.

Uneventful?

Mm hmm.

What does uneventful mean?

Um, well, I didn't do that much. I mean, I went to work. Like I usually do, I went to work. And I just really didn't do much this week. I slept a lot, I guess.

Mm hmm. Did you sleep well?

Um, I guess. I mean, I seem-- you know, when I-- when I fall asleep I just kind of-- I'm out and then I can't-- I've been having a hard time just getting up. I just don't want to get up. But, I guess I sleep OK. I do it a lot, so--

Mm hmm. And after you sleep a lot, tell me about how hard it is to get up.

Well, it's pretty hard. I keep-- I'll set my alarm and sometimes I don't-- I don't even know if I hear it. I'll wake up and figure out I hit the snooze button like six times. And it's just been really difficult to get out of bed. I just don't-- I just don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to go to work. Um, I've been late to work a couple times.

Is being late to work a problem?

Yeah. Yeah, it's a problem. I mean, they expect me to be there. You know. I've been showing up about 20 minutes late, and it's-- it's-- it's not good.

Will it create problems for you at work if you're late?

Yeah. I'm afraid they're going to-- I'm afraid they're going to call me in for a meeting or something. And talk to me about it. I don't really know what to tell them. I mean, it's not like-- I don't know why can't get up. Like, it's just very hard to get up anymore. So I'm afraid they're going to ask me a bunch of questions and I don't know-- I don't really know what to say. I don't know what to tell them.

Well, would you ever tell them that you're depressed?

I don't think so, because then they'll-- then they'll probably fire me because they'll think I'm weird or sick, or something. And I don't want people at the office to know. And they'll talk about me and say bad things about

me. I don't want people to know that, I mean.

What would happen if anybody knew?

I don't know. Maybe they'd fire me, or maybe they won't want to be my friend anymore, or wouldn't want to work with me and-- or they'd think, like, I couldn't handle my job, or something. I don't want to lose my job. I need my job. I don't want to get fired. So. I don't really want to go to work, either. I'm just tired.

How did all this start for you, with this feeling that you're so tired and you've lost interest in a lot of things, and it's hard to have fun? How did that get started?

I don't even remember. I mean, it's not like I can look at something and say, oh, this happened and I got sad, and it-- it felt like it was something that just kind of crept in that I didn't even notice until I realized, you know, that I'd been in tears every day for about three weeks and didn't really have any reason why, and couldn't explain. It just kind of like snuck up on me. You know, I don't-- I feel like I don't know how to get out of it now. I don't--

Mm hmm.

Hi, Amanda. How are you doing today?

OK.

Well, since I saw you last, have you had any dreams?

Yeah. Actually, I-- I've been having this dream. I've had it on several occasions, and I'm not-- it's very, um-- makes me feel like, very panicked when I wake up. I'm having this dream that I'm moving into, like, a new house, or a new apartment, you know?

Mm hmm.

And that I'm moving in with a guy. Which is not true, but in this dream I'm moving in with this guy. And it occurs to me, I have all of this stuff. I just have so much stuff.

What-- what kind of stuff?

Like, um, like more clothes than you could possibly imagine. And just, my papers, and everything. It Just seems like there's just so much of it. And, uh, and I'm trying to move all this stuff into the house before he gets there, because I don't want him to know that I have all this-- all these things. And I'm trying to go through them and get rid of them, like, the stuff that I don't need. But I can't-- I can't seem to get rid of stuff, so I'm trying to hide it in different rooms. And the house will kind of-- it kind of changes, you know, as I'm in there.

Mm hmm.

And there'll be these rooms that I didn't know were in there that are filled with more stuff. And I just feel like, um, I just feel very, very overwhelmed with all of the things in there. And I'll wake up before I can really go through and weed anything out. And I wake up feeling very panicked and vary, like, a lot of anxiety.

Now, this stuff that you have. What would that-- could that possibly mean for you?

I don't know. I mean, a lot of the-- a lot of things in the dream are things that I've actually had in real life. Which, you know, in my dreams it's not always like that. But they're my-- they're actual things that I've had since I was a teenager. And I can't seem to let them go. Like, I can't get rid of them.

Mm hmm. Do they remind you of anything in particular? Maybe something from that time?

A lot of my clothing reminds me of just a-- when I was just a different person as a kid, and I used to be a lot-- a lot happier. Just more carefree. I was-- I was pretty popular in high school. Got along with everybody.

Would that have anything to do with why you don't want to get rid of those things that remind you of that time?

Probably. But at the same time, they're kind of hurtful to look at.

How are they hurtful?

I kind of feel like that person is just gone. She's just-- just gone.

Mm hmm.

So.

Just a memory?

Yeah.

Or just a fragment of a dream?

Yeah.

All right. Well, one of the things that can be helpful with people is for me to just say some words, and then for you to just associate with whatever comes up for you with those words.

Like anything?

Anything at all that comes up. So let's start with school.

Bus.

Automobile.

Roll top. Or what do they call-- You know what I mean? Convertibles, that's what I was thinking.

OK. How about sibling?

Jen.

And who's Jen?

My sister.

Mm hmm. Is she older or younger than you?

She's older than me.

How much older than you?

Two and a half years.

So, were you close when you were younger?

Yeah, we were pretty close.

Uh huh. We didn't really fight or anything.

Uh huh. OK. Did she show you the ropes when you got to high school?

No.

No? She left you on your own?

She was really smart and she was into-- she was really very driven, and didn't really do a lot of kind of social stuff that I did. In some ways I might have shown her some ropes.

Uh huh. OK. Mother.

Ow. Uh, sad.

Mm hmm. Can you say more about that feeling?

Uh, I-- I guess I just feel our relationship has changed than when I was a kid. I just feel somehow that we were much closer when I was a kid. But I don't think that we understand each other as much as we used to, and I don't feel the same kind of support, I guess, as I used to.

Mm hmm. Feels like some of the closeness isn't there.

Yeah. Do your parents live far from where you are now?

No, they're about 45 minutes to an hour away.

Mm hmm. And do you see them?

Not so much.

Mm hmm. Is that your choice, or theirs?

Um, probably mutual. I think we just rub each other the wrong way.

Mm hmm. Back to what we were talking about before, with your father having strong opinions, and your mother thinking they were all correct.

Yeah.

Mm hmm. OK.

Hi, Amanda. How are you today?

OK. That's a kind of low key OK. So how are things going for you?

Um, OK, I guess.

Sleeping a lot still? Mm hmm?

Yeah.

Yeah? But do you wake up rested? No.

No. How about eating? Are you eating as much?

Not really.

Not really.

I just don't have much interest in it, I guess.

Uh huh. OK. Now tell me more about what's going on with you and your friends. You said that sometimes you go out with them and--

Yeah. We don't go-- I mean, we don't go out as much as we used to. Because I just don't-- I just don't feel like going out most of the time. But the last time we went out, just, I guess I drank too much, and especially since I've just not been very hungry and I probably didn't eat as much as I should've for the amount that I was drinking.

And just kind all of a sudden, I was just really intoxicated, I guess. And I wound up getting in an argument with my friend. I don't even know what it was about. She was just making me very mad. I felt like she was just somehow insulting me. I don't even know what-- I don't even know what she said that set me off. I just-- we got in a fight and--

Have you spoken with her since?

Yeah, she's called me a couple of times and we just kind of talked about, not much. But she's called me.

So I guess she's not sitting at home holding a grudge?

I guess not.

Mm hmm.

I feel like she should, because I feel--

Mm hmm. Well, what would help that feeling for you to dissipate a little bit?

I think I'd almost feel better if she just called me and let me have it.

Oh. Well, it sounds like she's maybe not going to do that. But you still need to deal with your feelings about it. What could you do that would make your feelings a little lighter about contact with her?

I don't know.

Well, you said you feel like you should apologize. Are there different ways that you might apologize?

Maybe I could write her an email or something, but I feel like that's kind of taking the easy way out.

Mm hmm.

I just feel very, uh, embarrassed about it.

Mm hmm. Could you tell her in person?

I don't know.

Mm hmm. Maybe you could find a funny little card that you could send her along with a little note in it.

One that says, I'm a jerk?

No. One that says, you know, thanks for being my friend in spite of my, um, saying things that I don't even remember. You know, kind of a thanks for hanging in with me there. And apologizing at the same time. And then maybe you'll feel a little bit better about seeing her again.

Because every now and again, we all do something stupid, you know, that we regret later. But if we can't find a way to get past that, then it interferes with our relationships. It sounds like she's a pretty good friend.

Yeah. She is.

Mm hmm. So maybe keeping those friendships on a better basis would help you to feel a little better. You wouldn't be avoiding her so much.

We have to work with all the little things that we can. Depression is one of these things that, you know, this piles up and that piles up and that piles up, and-- Start with some of the smaller things that we can work with. Start working on those.

More than two million Americans are affected by schizophrenia, and Constance Leiber's daughter Janice is one of them.

She often hears strange voices and thinks people are out to harm her. You feel a great loss, because this was a very bright, very talented, young woman. And this robbed her of all the wonderful things she could have done with her life.

Janice is fortunate to have the support of her family. Others are not so lucky.

People like my father said that they didn't hear voices, and my father even beat me up for hearing voices.

Patients often go on and off medication because of the side effects.

They're also often not completely effective, and sometimes they're ineffective. So people very often are left with symptoms that are difficult to live with.

But a new therapy practiced in Great Britain could help people like Janice and Louis function better. Philippa Garrity treats schizophrenics with cognitive behavioral therapy.

So the therapy works with people to discuss with them what they are experiencing in a lot of detail. And that helps them to explore alternative interpretations from the ones they've first came up with.

Garrity says schizophrenics who combine such in-depth discussions and medication will have better results.

It particularly helps in schizophrenia, because the experience of your own thoughts is the very problem. And so it really helps people if they can think in a new way about what's happening to their thinking.

The therapy could soon be available to people affected by schizophrenia in the US.

Severe burn victims like Nathan Neisinger endure months of painful skin scrubbing and stretching that safe doses of painkillers can't relieve.

The actual process of going through that physical therapy can be anxiety-producing to anyone, much less a six- year old.

So while physical therapists treat his burns, Nathan's mind cools off playing a 3D virtual reality game called Snow World. The program was created by University of Washington psychologists Hunter Hoffman and David Patterson to help patients exercise mind over matter.

They are now focusing their attention into the virtual world, and that leaves less attention available to process the incoming pain signal.

To prove that, Hoffman looked at MRI brain scans of people wearing the virtual reality helmet with Snow World either turned on or off. Parts of the brain associated with pain lit up much less while subjects were

playing the game.

The amount of reduction in pain-related brain activity ranged from 50% to 97%.

Hoffman says a separate study comparing Snow World to a traditional home video game system showed virtual reality to be much more effective, even if it's just a high-tech twist on an old trick.

American Pain Society President Dennis Turk, who is also a UW professor, says, "people have used distraction techniques for a long time. Virtual reality allows you to get totally immersed, and the more engaged and distracted they are the higher the benefit will be."

Nathan's mom, Heidi, can relate.

Just like when you're pregnant and you're giving birth. If you had your mind on something else. They tell you concentrate on something else.

For Nathan, that something was pretty cool.

Luz Santiago has tried many times to quit smoking. She hopes that doing this support group will make a difference.

I've been smoking for a very long time. And it's something that was so addictive and you feel powerless over, and that's why I joined the group.

Addiction psychologist Sharon Hall from the University of California, San Francisco, think Santiago may be on the right track. Hall has shown that, for some smokers, a full year of medication and counseling, in addition to early nicotine replacement, may offer the best hope of quitting.

With long-term psychological treatment, we can achieve very high abstinence rates in smokers. Adding an active drug helps, and makes the rates even higher.

As reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Hall's team followed 160 volunteers who all smoked more than 10 cigarettes a day. They all wore nicotine patches for eight weeks, along with counseling and medication for either 12 weeks or 12 months. 50% of the 12-month group stayed smoke-free, but only 18% of the 12-week group were smoke-free after a year.

Even so, Hall believes people wanting to quit should first try over-the-counter treatments, or talk to their doctor.

But if that doesn't work, they really should consider long-term treatment. And realize that it may be-- it may go on for a while. It may take a lot of their time. It's not a simple process because it's not a simple addiction.

And it's never too late to reap the health benefits of kicking the habit.

Retired New York City firefighter Stephen King got out of the World Trade Center alive. But soon after 9/11 it seemed he had lost his life.

I was like a walking zombie, literally. All of the things that always kept me occupied and busy, just nothing seemed to matter anymore.

King suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. But the standard therapy didn't help.

You want the person to relive their experience and process the memories. If they can't access their memories, then they really can't process it and get better.

JoAnn Difede directs the anxiety and stress program at Weill Cornell Medical College. She asked virtual reality researchers at the University of Washington to design a 9/11 simulation.

And we had to design it such that the therapist would be able to use it even if she's not a VR expert.

Hoffman wrote in Scientific American how virtual reality can help PTSD patients confront their memories at a tolerable pace.

You start out just looking at the World Trade Center towers as it was that day. Blue skies, sunny September day. That's it.

All right. Here we go again. How's the stress starting out?

Uh, still low. One or two.

That's good.

And only when they're able to tolerate their experience, if you will, the processing of their memories, do you move on to the next sequence.

While Difede's research is preliminary, she says she's successfully treated 10 stubborn cases, including King.

I'm sleeping better. I feel like I'm well on my way now to getting back to the person I was before 9/11.

King says it gave him his life back, and hopes others who are still suffering will reach out for help.

We don't have a good predictor of who will respond to any particular medicine. So we have to try something, and wait and see.

Now researchers say a scanning technique will measure brain waves and predict whether a patient will respond to an antidepressant or not.

The technique that we used is called quantitative electroencephalography, or QEEG. And this involves using a computer to help monitor the brain's electrical activity.

Electrodes are pasted to the patient's scalp with a gel and activity in the front of the brain is measured. This area, called the prefrontal cortex, controls motivation and judgment. The signals are then converted into color brain maps.

Here, the blue color indicates less activity in the prefrontal cortex, showing that the drug is effective.

And individuals who ended up failing to respond to treatment, didn't show that change.

Doctors could then change the medication to better suit the patient's brain chemistry.

So this could dramatically shorten the amount of time it takes to get effective treatment.

Cook says, when others have successfully repeated the study, this scan could help people like [INAUDIBLE] get better much faster.

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