Editorial
In ‘Keeping the media in mind’ (page 304), John Cornwell reviews Eric Kandel's In Search of Memory: the Emergence of a New Science of the Mind (2007), gauging evidence for the success achieved by experts in explaining their science to the public through the works of novelists, playwrights and film-makers. For John Cornwell, popular culture—reaching its zenith in Arnold Schwarzeneger's Terminator Two—now regards ‘passive reception of neuroscientific ideas as even more to be feared than drugs, booze and passive smoking’. He needs to cite very few examples to reveal how, through a multiplicity of reference points, journalism can lead the unwary neuroscientist by the nose into the extravagant world of hyperbole and false expectation. He worries that neuroscience is happy to breathe the oxygen of publicity and trade in sound bites, not only in briefing the media but also in the promissory notes that sustain publications and grant income. From this analysis emerges both an opportunity and a responsibility for scientists to influence the values that society places on their work by issuing more authentic and accessible popular expositions. Therefore, the spokesmen (and women) for neuroscience need to espouse a new genre of writing—generous, honest and celebratory—if popular culture is to be won over. No better example of how to do this can be offered than Sir Charles Sherrington's Man on His Nature (1940: and see Brain 2007; 130: 1981–1983, 1984–1987); and John Cornwell concludes that In search of memory also provides insights into the workings of a wide-ranging science achieved within the scope of a sensitive and honest autobiographical narrative. He is qualified to comment. John Cornwell is Director of the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge and an historian and journalist known for his writings on science and the Papacy, works that are often critical of the Catholic hierarchy. His own autobiography (Seminary Boy) was published to wide acclaim in 2006; and most recently, in Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion (2007) John Cornwell answers back on behalf of God and (as Salley Vickers comments in The Times) ‘kicks the atheist Richard Dawkins's polemic into touch with feather-light footwork’ concluding that ‘civility, education, scholarship, moral and intellectual life, care of the poor and sick, the arts of husbandry, and community building’ survived the barbarism of the Dark Ages, not unlike the fragmentations of the world today, because of Faith and the work of the monasteries.Amongst four papers in the current issue describing aspects of cognition in a variety of contexts, Bon-Mi Gu and colleagues from Seoul (Korea) show that the cognitive inflexibility of individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder is associated with failure to activate the normal sequence of neural interactions between dorsal and ventral frontal-striatal circuits under conditions that require task-switching (page 155). Conversely, Carol Baym and investigators from California and Illinois (USA) examine individuals with Tourette's syndrome, who cannot stick to one motor task, to show that unmedicated children with severe involuntary physical movements also do badly on cognitive tasks requiring task-switching or selecting between competing responses—emphasizing that impaired cognitive control is part of this disorder associated with increased dopaminergic activity in cortical, striatal and thalamic connections, perhaps with compensatory activity in the prefrontal cortex and subthalamic nucleus (page 165).
The theme of clinico-pathological correlation runs through many papers that we publish in Brain, including several in the current issue. On page 218, Rita Machaalani and Karen Waters from Sydney (Australia) report that, by comparison with other causes, children dying with sudden infant death syndrome show increased apoptotic abnormalities of brainstem nuclei (especially the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus, hypoglossal and arcuate nuclei); these pathological changes correlate with risk factors including post-conceptional age, sleep in the prone position and passive exposure to cigarette smoke. Thomas Zeis and investigators from Basel (Switzerland) and Imperial College (London, UK) use material available through the UK Multiple Sclerosis Tissue Bank to show that gene expression in the normal appearing white matter of 11 individuals with progressive multiple sclerosis reflects an interplay between anti-inflammatory responses involving oligodendrocytes and pro-inflammatory activity in microglia, differences that might account for restriction of new focal lesions at the expense of diffuse axonal loss and disease progression (page 288). Stephen Kish and colleagues from Toronto, Saskatoon and Markham (Canada) and Vienna (Austria) test directly the hypothesis, derived from radioligand brain imaging studies, that motor dyskinaesias in treated cases of Parkinson's disease result from release of dopamine, acting as a false transmitter, by surviving serotonergic neurones (page 120); as expected, they show significant depletion of serotonin (especially in raphe neurones of the caudate) although this is less marked and has a different distribution to the more or less complete loss of dopaminergic neurones but—in the absence of a demonstrable link to dyskinesias—the neuropharmacological explanation for dyskinesias is not, as yet, finally resolved. Starting from the position that synaptic acetylcholinesterase accelerates amyloid fibril formation, Amit Berson and investigators from Jerusalem (Israel), Zurich (Switzerland), Arizona (USA) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands) show that a splice variant of acetylcholinesterase (‘Readthough’ acetylcholinesterase, AchE-R) inhibits β-amyloid toxicity in vitro and is neuroprotective in transgenic mice; and they provide evidence that the distribution of neuronal depletion in Alzheimer's disease may reflect regional loss of AchE-R providing a link between cholinergic and amyloid-related events in the pathogenesis (page 109). Salvatore Spina and colleagues from Indianapolis (USA) and Cambridge (UK) describe the natural clinical history over 13 years in 51 affecteds from seven generations, and the evolution of neuropsychological and neuroimaging deficits together with the biochemical and neuropathological characteristics, in one of the original FTDP-17T kindreds—subsequently characterized as ‘multiple system tauopathy with presenile dementia’ resulting from a point mutation at position +3 within intron 10 of Tau and leading to overproduction of tau isoforms with four microtubule-binding repeats (page 72).
Despite our high editorial threshold for publishing single family or case reports, William Seeley and colleagues from San Francisco (USA) and Vancouver (Canada) describe one person with corticobasal degeneration (page 39, and see page 6 and cover). The late Anne Adams showed enhanced artistic ability in the context of primary progressive aphasia, depicting Maurice Ravel's ‘Bolero’ in her increasingly creative paintings despite previously having had no special knowledge of the French composer, his work or that he also suffered from aphasia. More generally, the case illuminates the functional anatomy of morbid gain of artistic function and human creativity. The case history of Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) was described by his neurologist, Théophile Alajouanine, in 1948, 11 years after Ravel died from a neurodegenerative disorder manifesting as progressive aphasia. The late Luigi Amaducci suggested that the structure of ‘Bolero’, written soon before Ravel's illness presented, is a symptom of that disease. Macdonald Critchley has left a charming and affectionate account of Théophile Alajouanine (The Ventricle of Memory, 1990, pp. 13–21) recalling a bygone age of lunching in Parisian restaurants, diagnosing ‘la paralysie des amoureux’, and celebrating a man whose sole motor activity was perpetual rolling of cigarettes—inter alia, adding details to the 1948 paper which, in addition to Ravel, features an anonymous writer and painter: ‘it is no secret that he was referring to Valery-Radaud and Verniez respectively’. Alajouanine attracted such patients not only in his capacity as Charcot Professor of Neurology at the Salpêtrière (from 1947) and founder of the Centre du Langage, but through his many contacts with the Parisian community active in letters and the arts. In From the Archives, we review ‘Aphasia and artistic realization’ by Th. Alajouanine (Brain 1948: 71; 229–241).
Cambridge
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||