A compendium of news from the XVII World Neurology Conference:

Left-Right asymmetry found in emotion. “Theories that dubbed math- and

art-types as left- and

right-brainers have long grown

out of fashion in academia, but

new research suggests a

surprising role for brain

asymmetry in emotion.” Preeminent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, a skeptic about emotional asymmetry, was surprised by his findings: essentially, the right hemisphere is more active in reacting to experiences with negative emotional valences and the left hemisphere to those that are more pleasant.

Mad leader disease threatens world: “Neuroscientists need to develop tools to identify mental

illness in world leaders, the president of the World

Federation of Neurology told thousands of neurologists

assembled at the opening ceremony of the World Congress

of Neurology last night.”

Putting numbers into words: “The brain circuits for

mathematical approximations

and for exact calculations

have been shown to be

separate and distinct. The

architecture for the former is

specialized and also appears

to exist in monkeys, but the

latter is embedded in language

systems and may be uniquely

human.”

Lip service to phantom limbs: “German researchers

may have found a way

to prevent the cortical

reorganization that

occurs following

amputation, and block

the phantom limb pain

associated with it.”

BioMedNet [registration required]