PITTSBURGH (April 10, 1997 01:13 a.m. EDT) -- Call directory information,
get a phone number, make the call. Congratulations. You've just exercised
your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that helps separate man from
beast. Using new imaging techniques that let them watch the brain in action,
researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University
showed that cells in the prefrontal cortex fire and remain active while
you hold information in your working memory. By contrast, many neuroscientists
have suspected that this area might process working memory only momentarily.
The implications are hard to predict, he acknowledged, but might well lead
to improved treatments for schizophrenia. The prefrontal cortex is more
highly developed in humans than in other animals, Cohen said, and "is
the core of what makes us human." The ability to make plans and solve
problems resides here; so, too, may schizophrenia, a disease unique to
humans. Beginning this week, he and his colleagues will be using the imaging
technique, called functional magnetic resonance imaging, to study schizophrenic
patients. The hope is that by comparing what they now know about working
memory in healthy people with what they see in schizophrenics, they might
understand the nature of the memory defect, or find differences between
schizophrenics that might explain variations in the disease. The findings
reported by the Pittsburgh researchers, as well as a separate study in
Nature by Susan Courtney at the National Institutes of Health, confirm
earlier studies in monkeys (That's one reason we have to support animal
research-dj). (Thanks to Mike Miller for the above)