Animal Languages - Reading Minds - Sustain Emotion - Aging Anorexia
Breedlove, S
We’re close to translating animal languages – what happens then?
David Farrier
Charles Darwin suggested that humans learned to speak by mimicking birdsong: our ancestors’ first words may have been a kind of interspecies exchange. Perhaps it won’t be long before we join the conversation once again.
The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy.
Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026.
The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals’ interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another’s native vocabulary.
The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic “conversation” with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as “whup/throp” with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U.
© 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01679-8
Brain-reading devices raise ethical dilemmas — researchers propose protections
Kristel Tjandra
For two decades, Ann Johnson has been unable to walk or talk after she experienced a stroke that impaired her balance and her breathing and swallowing abilities. But in 2022, Johnson was finally able to hear her voice through an avatar, thanks to a brain implant.
The implant is an example of the neurotechnologies that have entered human trials during the past five years. These devices, developed by research teams and firms including entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Neuralink, can alter the nervous system’s activity to influence functions such as speech, touch and movement. Last month, they were the topic of a meeting in Paris, hosted by the United Nations scientific and cultural agency UNESCO, at which delegates finalized a set of ethical principles to govern neurotechnologies.
The recommendations focus on protecting users from technology misuse that could infringe on their human rights, including their autonomy and freedom of thought. The delegates, who included scientists, ethicists and legal specialists, decided on nine principles. These include recommendations that technology developers disclose how neural information is collected and used, and that they ensure the long-term safety of a product on people’s mental states.
“This document clarifies how to protect human rights, especially in relation to the nervous system,” says Pedro Maldonado, a neuroscientist at the University of Chile in Santiago who was one of 24 experts who drafted the recommendations in 2024. The principles are not legally binding, but nations and organizations can use them to develop their own policies. In November, UNESCO’s 194 member states will vote on whether to adopt the standards.
The meeting considered a range of neurotechnology applications, including devices designed to be implanted into the body and non-invasive devices, which are being explored in medicine, entertainment and education.
© 2025 Springer Nature Limited
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To get from experience to emotion, the brain hits 'sustain'
Jon Hamilton
Get cut off in rush-hour traffic and you may feel angry for the whole trip, or even snap at a noisy child in the back seat.
Get an unexpected smile from that same kid and you may feel like rush hour — and even those other drivers — aren't so bad.
"The thing about emotion is it generalizes. It puts the brain into a broader state," says Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a psychiatrist and professor at Stanford University.
Deisseroth and a team of researchers have come up with an explanation for how that happens.
The process involves a signal that, after a positive or negative experience, lingers in the brain, the team reports in the journal Science.
Experiences themselves act a bit like piano notes in the brain. Some are staccato, producing only a brief burst of activity that may result in a reflexive response, like honking at another driver, or smiling back at a child.
But more profound experiences can be more like a musical note that is held with the sustain pedal and still audible when the next note is played, or the one after that.
"You just need it to be sustained long enough to merge with and interact with other notes," Deisseroth says. "And from our perspective, this is exactly what emotion needs."
If the team is right, it could help explain the emotional differences seen in some neuropsychiatric conditions.
People on the autism spectrum, for example, often have trouble recognizing emotions in others, and regulating their own emotions. Schizophrenia can cause mood swings and reduced emotional expression.
© 2025 npr
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Debunking Dangerous Views of Autism
By Lina Zeldovich
When Catherine Lord was a psychology student a half century ago, she took part in a pioneering effort to move kids with autism from psychiatric institutions into the community. Lord was inspired by positive changes in the kids and devoted her life to developing therapies for people with autism and understanding the biology of the condition.
Today, Lord is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and renowned worldwide for developing tools to diagnose autism, which have become clinical standards, and for her efforts to improve the lives of people with autism and their families. Along with her research, Lord maintains a clinical practice where she works with people with autism, from toddlers to adults.
So I couldn’t think of a better scientist to address the views of autism espoused by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Since being appointed as the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has continued to spread misinformation about the condition, a pattern that began two decades ago when he claimed childhood vaccines cause autism, a charge long ago proven to be false.
Earlier this year, Kennedy announced the National Institutes of Health would launch a new study to investigate the causes of autism. To conduct its study, he said, the NIH would gather medical records of Americans with autism from federal and commercial databases.
In conversation, Lord spoke with authority and concern as she pointed out the mendacity and danger of Kennedy’s comments, and clarified the state of autism research and science.
He has made a variety of statements about autism that suggests he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.
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‘Understudied secret’ in brain dampens nicotine drive in mice
By Lauren Schenkman
Addiction may be known as a disease of “more,” but drug-taking also taps a powerful drive for less that can suppress reward in the brain, even at low doses, according to a new study of nicotine responses in mice. The results suggest that the systems of reward and aversion that regulate addiction are more intertwined than previously thought.
“That’s absolutely fascinating, because the field has been dominated by this notion of the go, the drive to get drug, but the drive is moderated by the stop,” says Paul Kenny, professor of neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who was not involved in the work. A faulty “stop” signal could be one of the culprits in addiction, he adds.
Recent studies have begun to explore this stop signal. Intravenous nicotine activates nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on dopamine neurons in the midbrain’s ventral tegmental area (VTA), generating a rewarding effect that promotes more drug consumption. And high doses activate a tiny adjacent area, the interpeduncular nucleus (IPN), which drives aversion, previous studies have suggested.
But doses too low to excite the VTA also activate the IPN in mice, the new work shows. In another experiment, the team used fluorescent proteins to find where axons from the IPN terminate and to identify the intermediate player connecting the IPN and the VTA: the laterodorsal tegmental nucleus (LDTg). The findings were published in Neuron in April.
“This was very thrilling,” says the study’s principal investigator, Alexandre Mourot, research director in brain plasticity at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM). It suggests that at very low doses, the VTA does not respond because the IPN “erases the rewarding properties of the drug,” he says.
© 2025 Simons Foundation
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/health/anorexia-older-women-eating-disorders.html
Anorexia in Middle Age and Beyond
By Abby Ellin
Sally Odenheimer starved herself because she was an athlete and thought she’d run faster on an empty stomach.
Karla Wagner starved herself because she wanted to be in charge of at least one aspect of her life.
Janice Bremis simply felt too fat.
They all sought perfection and control. Not eating helped.
They are women in their 60s and 70s who have struggled with anorexia nervosa since childhood or adolescence. Years later, their lives are still governed by calories consumed, miles run, laps swum, pounds lost.
“It’s an addiction I can’t get rid of,” said Ms. Odenheimer, 73, a retired teacher who lives outside Denver.
For decades, few people connected eating disorders with older people; they were seen as an affliction of teenage girls and young women. But research suggests that an increasing number of older women have been seeking treatment for eating disorders, including bulimia, binge eating disorder (known as BED) and anorexia, which has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, and brings with it an elevated risk of suicide.
In a 2017 paper in the journal BMC Medicine, researchers reported that more than 15 percent of 5,658 women surveyed met the criteria for a lifetime eating disorder while in their 30s and 40s. A 2023 review of recent research reported that the prevalence rates among women 40 and older with full diagnoses of eating disorders were between 2.1 and 7.7 percent. (For men, they were less than 1 percent.)
© 2025 The New York Times Company
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