Jonathan Moreno writes another insightful piece, Intelligence on the Brain which discusses the need for a new dialogue on neuroresearch and national security.

Neuroscience is increasingly relevant to a number of professions and academic disciplines beyond its traditional medical applications. Indeed, for any field in which it is important to understand, predict or influence human behavior, neuroscience will play an increasing role. The Penn Neuroscience Boot Camp is designed to give participants a basic foundation in cognitive and affective neuroscience and to equip them to be informed consumers of neuroscience research. The Boot Camp faculty consists of leaders in the fields of cognitive and affective neuroscience who are committed to the goal of educating non-neuroscientists.

Lawyers, educators, economists and businesspeople, as well as scholars of sociology, philosophy, applied ethics and policy, are incorporating the concepts and methods of neuroscience into their work. Graduate and professional students, working professionals and college and university faculty are encouraged to apply. The only prerequisites are a grasp of basic statistics and at least a dim recollection of high school biology and physics. (A short set of readings will be made available prior to the Boot Camp to remind you about the essentials.) Participants will be housed on campus in air-conditioned apartment-style suites with private bedrooms.

Here are ten emerging areas of neuroscience that will impact the future of treatments for brain and nervous system which were published as a result of the cutting edge research being presented at the Society for Neuroscience Conference held in Washington DC last week. Top 10 Trends of 2009:

1. Epigenetics leading to new treatment targets: New research highlights the critical interactions of genes and the environment in brain health and development revealing new treatment strategies and potential therapeutic targets for obesity, memory loss, addiction and mental illness.

2. National Neurotechnology Initiative Act: Momentum for this recently introduced legislation which provides $200M a year for federal R&D aimed at accelerating translational neurotech innovation and improving the effectiveness of FDA review process for neuroscience drugs, devices and diagnostics grows.

3. New Sources of Stem Cells: The discovery of new sources of neural stem cells are opening up new avenues and potentially whole new treatment strategies for stroke, vision loss, hearing loss, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and ALS.

4. Deep Brain Stimulation: New clinical research into the use of deep brain stimulation devices for the treatment of neurological diseases and psychiatric illnesses continues to provide new hope to those suffering from drug treatment forms of these illnesses.

5. Addiction advances: New research that clarifies the role of impulsivity in treating cocaine addiction and synaptic plasticity in the control of inhibitory circuits could potentially lead to new treatment strategies for this epidemic impacting over 1.1 billion worldwide.

6. Stress prevention: New research shows that even a few hours of stress can reduce neural connectivity and that chronic stress, in particular early in life, can shrink critical areas of the brain. These findings may lead to new treatment strategies for PTSD and other anxiety-related disorders.

7. Traumatic brain injury advances: Early detection proves important for effective treatment while new research into inflammation may provide new treatments for people with brain injuries and stroke.

8. Get your sleep: More research points to the critical role that a proper night’s sleep plays in the memory consolidation, learning and mental illness further validating the need for effective therapeutics which engender healthy sleep patterns.

9. Discovery tools underpin innovation: New imaging techniques coupled with advances in neuroinformatics, image-based neural circuit analysis, and neural computation are accelerating the pace of neuroscientific discovery beyond what was imagined a decade ago.

10. Neuroscience infiltrates society: From neurofinance, neuroeconomics to neuroesthetics to neuroethics and neurolaw, the influence of neuroscience on society continues to grow.

Yesterday, I hosted NIO's annual public neurotech company CEO media tour here in NYC with Uli Hacksell, CEO of Acadia Pharmaceuticals, Ron Cohen, CEO of Acorda Therapeutics and Joern Aldag, CEO of Evotec joining me in hour long discussions with reporters at the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, PharmaWire (Financial Times), Discover Magazine, and Forbes. The discussions were lively and revolved around the impact of the current financial crisis as well as the lack of adequate regulatory resources. The Wall Street Journal picked up on our conversation and posted some of it on the WSJ Health Blog: FDA Delays Take Toll on Neuroscience Drug Developmentposted by Shirley S. Wang.

"The FDA has even the neuroscience crowd scratching their heads.

Some folks from the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group for neuroscience companies, and three of its members stopped by Health Blog HQ today. Our chat really heated up when it turned to the current regulatory environment...(more)

O, The Oprah Magazine, has an article written by Tim Jarvis in the mindwise section this month titled, The Brain Age. The article explores how "cutting-edge neuroscience has escaped from the lab and is suddenly showing up everywhere, changing the way we practice law, go shopping and possibly, fall in love. Tim interviewed me extensively for the article over a year ago and it's nice to see it finally his the newstand in the November issue. In a side bar, Tim asked me to forecast some neuroscientific advancements that would ring with O readers, here are a few I posit:

Neuroentertainment: Current technologies such as video games will merge with future one (such as those involving neural feedback) so gamers might wear EEG-type caps that read their brainwaves and pick up their emotions. Conceivably, story lines would move forward in real time, the plot changing based on each person's response, says Zack Lynch.

Neuroeducation: The more we learn about the neurobiology of learning - how the mind develops, what to make of differences between individual brains - the better we can "sculpt" teaching methods. Lynch predicts educational software will be tailored to students' individual brain patterns to improve math and language acquisition as well as creative thinking.

Neurospirituality: New tools such as real-time FMRI technology, Lynch says, promise to accelerate our capacity to access deeply meditative and spiritual states.

Check out the article as it scans several areas of the neurosociety.

Where do I start? It's been an amazing journey, but the book I've been working on for the past eight years is finally off the type setter at St. Martin's Press. Moreover, this morning I sent the manuscript off to my publisher in Japan. So if you have been wondering why the blog posting has been so slow the past couple of months, or more like over the past year, this is why. I've been heads down in the future. I'm looking forward to announcing the title of the book a little bit further down, but let me just say, it's pretty cool. Of course, I'm biased, so you'll have to let me know once it hits the book stores, which right now looks like June 2009. I know, an infinite amount of time.

Stem cell approaches in neurology and psychiatry is the focus of a new report released today by NeuroInsights, the neurotech market authority. The industry insider report on innovative research and development in stem cell technology for the brain and nervous system provides unique insights into the key players and competitive dynamics in this rapidly evolving field.

Stem cell companies focused on the central nervous system (CNS) have the potential to address some of the largest unmet healthcare markets including: Alzheimer's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, depression, hearing loss, Huntington's disease, lysosomal storage disorders, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, retinal disorders, spinal cord injury, stroke, traumatic brain injury, and other brain and nervous system disorders.

The report analyzes the scientific approaches and challenges to utilizing stem cells in the CNS, discusses trends and drivers including funding and regulatory issues, reveals promising treatment indications and pipelines, examines business models leveraging the promise of stem cells, and sheds light on investment opportunities and risks. It provides in-depth profiles of twenty seven companies that are shaping the field and spearheading the use of stem cells in the brain and nervous system.

The twenty seven trend setting companies reviewed in the report include: Aastrom Biosciences, Advanced Cell Technology, ArunA Biomedical, Athersys (Nasdaq: ATHX), Beike Biotechnology Company, BrainCells, Inc., BrainStorm Cell Therapeutics, California Stem Cell Inc., Cell Cure Neurosciences, CellMed AG, Geron Corporation (Nasdaq: GERN), International Stem Cell Corporation, NeuralStem, NeuroGeneration, NeuroNascent, NeuroNova AB, Neuronyx, NsGene A/S, Pfizer Regenerative Medicine, Q Therapeutics, ReNeuron Group (LSE: RENE.L), RhinoCyte, Stem Cell Sciences (LSE: STEM.L), Stem Cell Therapeutics (TSX: SSS.V), Stem Cell Technologies, StemCells, Inc. (Nasdaq: STEM), and Theradigm, Inc.

The 175 page report, "Stem Cell Approaches in Neurology and Psychiatry: 27 Trendsetters for 2009" is available immediately.

The House of Representatives, moments ago, voted to approve, by a vote of 263 to 171, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (H.R. 1424), which includes a new financial rescue bill, tax extenders package and mental health and substance use disorder parity legislation, the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 (introduced as H.R. 6983). The same package cleared the Senate on October 1 by a vote of 74 to 25. The bill will now be sent to the White House where the President is expected to sign the legislation.

During the House floor debate, a number of those in support of the package applauded the work of Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) and Rep. Jim Ramstad (R-MN), the lead sponsors of the parity bill, for their leadership. In his floor statement, Rep. Kennedy celebrated passage of the parity bill and called on observers to remember the incredible life and contributions of the late Paul Wellstone. Leaders also recognized the tireless work of Senator Domenici (R-NM), a Senate champion who is retiring from public service this year, and Senator Kennedy (D-MA), another champion in the Senate, who is battling cancer. Speaker Pelosi, in her floor statement before the vote, said of the House action, “We are helping to end discrimination” for those seeking treatment for substance use disorders.

Emotions are riding very high. Herd behavior is everywhere. And if you listen to Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chief Bernanke the primary reason for such a high bailout amount of $700B is to inspire "confidence" in the market. So are our brains to blame for this market mess? Yes, at least according leading neuroeconomist interviewed by Forbes Matthew Herper in his recent piece, Market Mess, Blame Your Brain.

"Fear plus herding equals panic," says Gregory Berns, a neuroeconomist at Emory University. "You bet it's biologically based."

At the core of the market mess are securities that were backed by extremely risky mortgages. The theory was that slicing and dicing mortgages diluted the risk away.

But the ratings agencies were being compensated by issuers of the mortgage-backed securities, and neuroeconomics says that created big problems. "You don't get mistakes this big based on stupidity alone," says George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University. "It's when you combine stupidity and people's incentives that you get errors of this magnitude."

Consider this forthcoming research by Loewenstein, Roberto Weber and John Hamman, all of Carnegie Mellon. They organized volunteers into partners. One partner is given $10 and told to split it however he sees fit. On average, the deciding partner keeps $8 and gives away $2.

Then researchers repeat the game. This time, the decider pays an "analyst" to decide how to split the money fairly. The game continues for multiple rounds and the decider can fire the analyst. With this change, the decider gets everything. Paying somebody else to ensure assets are divided fairly actually makes things less fair.

So what's a regulator to do? Read about that in Herper's full article here.

A new Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University will focus on how the biology of the brain influences decision-making in politics, policy and business. As a partnership among researchers in the Emory School of Medicine, Emory College and the Goizueta Business School, the center will create an ideal environment to accelerate discovery in this emerging field. The Center is the vision of Gregory S. Berns, MD, PhD, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine. Berns specializes in the use of brain imaging technologies to understand human motivation and decision-making, with a special interest in neuroeconomics and social neuroscience. There are a whole host of emerging neuropolicy issues that need analyzing including: neurolaw, neuromarketing and neurowarfare.

Do you have what it takes to start your own neurotech venture? If you think so, then I'd highly recommend getting over to MIT to enroll in this year's Neurotechnology Ventures seminar put on by Ed Boyden, Joost Paul Bonsen and Rutledge Ellis-Behnke. Each 2-hour class begins with a survey of a broad topic area, and continues with a live-case study of a current, specific, development or commercialization effort in that area. Explorations will cover a broad array of issues ranging from the deeply technical, to the analysis of market realities from across the neurotechology industry. Topics Include: neuroimaging, neurology/psychiatry diagnosis, rehabilitation, neurosurgery, neuropharmacology, brain Stimulation, prosthetics, sensory and motor augmentation, regenerative neuromedicine, and more. I'll be back there next week for the kick off meeting giving an overview of the neurotech industry while following weeks are full of exciting emerging neurotech innovators.

Casey and I recently met up in SF with Jason Davis, Assistant Professor of Strategy in the MIT Sloan School of Management, to explore his neurotech innovation project whose goal is to understand what makes neurotechnology innovations and ventures successful. It's great to see a serious innovation strategy expert excited about analyzing the rapidly evolving neurotech economy.

I just spent the past week in Big Sky Montana participating in a five day conference on governing emerging technologies. There was far too much to begin to cover here, but I have to give kudos to the organizers David Guston and Rachel Ankeny for bringing together a broad group of speakers and contributors from across the globe. Three key emerging techs highlighted throughout the conference were neurotech, synthetic biology and nanotech.

Overall, it seems that the science and technology policy community (including industry) has the most comprehensive grasp of current and future emergent issues pertaining to nanotech. Developing dilemmas related to synthetic biology and its applications in biowarfare and implications for global security pose an ongoing, vexing problem for S&T policy. S&T policy issues related to advancing neurotechnologies seemed most fragmented with little coherence on what can or should be done with respect to the development and application of these technologies beyond therapy. Rightly so, many participants were quite alarmed with what could be on the neurotech horizon in terms of "perception shifting", neurolegal implications and the squelching of neurodiversity. Several participants, especially LSE's Scott Vrecko (who I met at last November's Neurosocieties conference in London), reminded the policy community to identity current issues in neuroscience rather than pondering "what ifs." That said, it was great to hear Natasha Schull's thoughts on the potential public policy implications of neuroeconomics research, George Khushf's presentation on the ethical implication of neural implants and Mike Chorost's pontifications on the future of neurodevice development.

Back in March of 2003, I blogged here about neurowarfare and how the latest national intelligence reports were completely missing the boat on neurowar.

It took a few years, but after Jonathan Moreno wrote Mind Wars, the US defense community woke up and put together a committee, lead by Moreno. Last year I had the opportunity to speak on the current and future state of neurotechnology with the National Research Council committee convened by the Department of Defense who were focused on Military and Intelligence Methodology for Emergent Neurophysiological and Cognitive/Neural Science Research in the Next Two Decades.

The committee's report, "Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies," was released yesterday, highlighting some emerging possibilities including pharmacological landmines, lie detection, mind reading, cognitive enhancement and more. In my forthcoming book, Neurosociety, which is being published by St. Martin's Press in late spring 2009, I cover many of these ideas and more. Until then, I recommend reading the report.

Benedict Carey at the NYTimes writes an entertaining piece today, While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks, which dives deeper into a recent article published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience that highlights how magicians "take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality."

One great illusion explained in the article revolves around how our visual cortex processes stimuli has is seen in this trick by the Great Tomsoni. "The magician has an assistant appear on stage in a white dress and tells the audience he will magically change the color of her dress to red. He first does this by shining a red light on her, an obvious ploy that he turns into a joke. Then the red light flicks off, the house lights go on and the now the woman is unmistakably dressed in red. The secret: In the split-second after the red light goes off, the red image lingers in the audience’s brains for about 100 milliseconds, covering the image of the woman. It’s just enough time for the woman’s white dress to be stripped away, revealing a red one underneath."

The paper with many more explanations and links to video of a magician's performance can be found here.

Just discovered this site which aggregates videos of surgical procedures including a seventeen neurosurgical procedures. So if you are interested in watching a microneurosurgical microvascular decompression in trigeminal neuralgia go to SurgyTec.

Casey, Dan and I met with Marty Tenenbaum founder of CollabRx and Tony Ley its CEO last week to get up to speed on their strategy for providing tools to patient groups and virtual biotechs to accelerate the development of treatments for diseases that don't attract major pharmaceutical company research funding. Today's WSJ details Marty's personal cancer stories and the goals of CollabRx. We discussed several ways that NIO and the broader neurotech research community could benefit from CollabRx. More on that as things get solidified. In the meantime, I highly recommend getting up to speed on the company. If anyone can instigate a sea change in this arena, it's Marty and the amazing ecosystem of relationships he wields.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science on Thursday unveiled the Allen Spinal Cord Atlas, an online resource that shows how a mouse's complete set of 20,000 genes influences spinal cord development. The project should help scientists develop gene-based treatments and techniques to boost regeneration of damaged spinal cords.

If you missed the 38th Neural Interface Conference in Ohio last month, you can see all the presentations via webcast here. The general structure of the conference focuses on the DBS for day one; day two focuses on neural prostheses for restoration of motor and sensory function; and day three describes advances in cochlear prostheses and therapeutic effects of stimulation.

The NASDAQ NeuroInsights Neurotech Index (NERV) underwent its biannual assessment resulting in the addition of three companies Adolor (ADLR), Noven (NOVN) and Somanetics (SMTS) and the loss of seven whose market cap dropped below the $200 million minimum, namely Alexza (ALXA), Aspect Medical (ASPM), Javelin (JAV), Micrus (MEND), Neurocrine (NBIX), Northstar Neuroscience (NSTR), and Vanda Pharmaceuticals (VNDA). Realtime quote of NERV.

Index Performance: As of June 30, historical back-testing indicates that ^NERV is up 9% from a theoretical start date of June 2005, compared to respective gains of 7.5% and 17% for the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ Biotech Index. The historical values prior to the Index launch are based on NASDAQ’s calculation of how the index may have performed over time if it existed. The back-tested Index Values are purely hypothetical and are solely for information purposes only. Back-tested Index Values do not represent actual Index performance and are not indicative of actual Index performance. The index began calculation on September 25, 2007.

Jeffrey Goldberg undergoes a pretty extensive neuromarketing brain scanning process with the people at FKF Research which he explains in a most hilarious fashion in his new article My Amygdala, My Self in this month's The Atlantic.

The King of Trust, Paul Zak, touts oxytocin as a potential drug for shyness: "Tests have shown that oxytocin reduces anxiety levels in users. It is a hormone that facilitates social contact between people. What's more, it is a very safe product that does not have any side effects and is not addictive." The article contends that millions of people in the UK suffer from shyness, and one-in-10 people say it seriously affects their daily life.

NIO member Cognitive Drug Research teamed up with Portfolio to develop an online test to determine your brain age (it takes 7 minutes). Very cool, but pay attention, you might be surprised to learn how old your brain is, I was 74. Might want to try a brain fitness product.

Check out Brain Stimulant a new blog covering neurodevices, cognitive enhancement, artificial intelligence and even happiness.

The Center for Drugs Evaluation and Research is about halfway through its planned hire of 663 employees this year, and a significant portion of the new employees are division-level medical reviewers in the Office of New Drugs. So far the Division of Neurology Products has hired 8 new team members for a total of 51 while the Division of Psychiatric Products has added 7 for a total of 40. This is important progress as CDER currently fighting a wave of attrition, as long-time FDA employees leave the agency, either for retirement or for more lucrative jobs in industry and academia.View a division-by-division breakdown of the new hire, also for all of CDER.

In the "The Stem Cell Dilemma: Beacons of Hope or Harbingers of Doom?", co-authors Leo Furcht and William Hoffman tell the story of stem cell science and explains the latest developments and how research will give new meaning to human sexuality and reproduction. I recommend reading the book and if time taking a look at the authors discussing their book on C-SPAN Book TV. Here they discuss transplants, Leonardo da Vinci's role in biomedical engineering and about how neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's will "break the bank" given the aging boomer population.

Early-stage neurodiagnostics company NeuroVigil was awarded $250,000 in seed funding, the top prize of the DFJ Venture Challenge held last week. The La Jolla-based company works to analyze brain activity using a single, non-invasive probe. The company ultimately plans to apply its findings toward the sleep, transportation and pharmaceutical industries. The competition consisted of 16 teams gathered from 12 West Coast universities. The teams were judged by a panel of 10 venture capitalists from DFJ's network. Congrats to the NeuroVigil team@

Don't miss David Ewing Duncan's ongoing experiments on himself at ExperimentalMan.com

With the recent introduction of the National Neurotechnology Initiative (NNTI) Act in the House (H.R. 5989) and the Senate (S.2989) earlier this month, the time has come to ramp up a national grassroots campaign in support of the NNTI and I would like to ask for your help. It is imperative that we get a substantive amount of Congressional support as quickly as possible as we are targeting Congressional hearings prior to the August break.

Take action: We need to flood Congressional fax machines and mail boxes with individual letters of support from key constituents like you over the next four weeks. I urge you to visit NIO's Take Action webpage

Here you can download sample letters to customize and send. Full instructions appear on that webpage, as well as a link to help access your representatives' contact information and fax numbers.

Spread the word: Because of limited resources and an aggressive legislative schedule, it is absolutely vital that we build a network of support for this bill. Please forward this appeal along with a personal note of support to your network of contacts and ask that they express their support to Congress and share with their networks as well. Please forward onto co-workers, board members, researchers, clinicians, nurses, patients, advocacy groups, friends, family, anyone with a stake in elevating therapies and cures for brain related illnesses.

We need your help - and ten minutes of your time - to secure Congressional support for newly introduced legislation designed to dramatically accelerate new treatments for brain and nervous system injuries and illnesses. This legislation stands to significantly improve the lives of more than 100 million Americans. Take 10 minutes to protect your future brain.

The Wall Street Journal hired Jason Zweig, a senior writer and columnist for Money magazine, to be its new personal finance columnist. Zweig is also currently a guest columnist for Time magazine, and he was the mutual funds editor for Forbes before joining Money magazine in 1995. He is the author of the recently published Your Money & Your Brain: How The New Science Of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich (Simon & Schuster, 2007), which looks at how neuroscience can be applied to investing.

The NYTimes reports in Monkey's Control A Mechanical Arm with Their Thoughts that two monkeys learned how to feed themselves with the use of robotic arms, which were attached to electrical sensors in their brains that transmitted signals to control movement. "The more we understand about the brain, the better we'll be able to treat a wide range of brain disorders, everything from Parkinson's disease and paralysis to, eventually, Alzheimer's disease and perhaps even mental illness," said the device creator.

David Ewing Duncan, columnist at Conde Nast Portfolio, writes the most comprehensive article on the neurotech industry written to date in a major publication. The Ultimate Cure comes complete with overviews of neuropharma and neurodevice treatments in development, detailed discussions with Casey and I about NeuroInsights, NERV, NIO, and the NNTI, as well as great interviews with many of my favorite characters from across neurotech including Don DeBethizy and Sam Barondes.

A new study suggests that heavy adults have higher rates of psychiatric disorders. Using data from a national health survey of more than 40,000 Americans, researchers found that obese adults were up to twice as likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions as normal-weight adults.

I spoke with Joe Pancrazio yesterday who brought me up to speed on the the NINDS Cooperative Program in Translational Research. The program is intended to catalyze the development of partnerships between basic and clinical investigators, and to stimulate agreements between the academic and industrial sectors, so that translational research in neuroscience can flourish as a cooperative, iterative process leading to new and effective interventions for neurological disorders. The program in Translational Research is implemented through three coordinated cooperative agreements mechanisms, and NINDS program staff will have a significant, although not dominant, role in the planning and execution of the supported activities. It is intended for the extramural research community to use the translational research initiatives flexibly and creatively, and in whatever combinations are necessary, to achieve the most rapid and effective development of clinical interventions for neurological disorders. NINDS is the only neuroscience institute that participates in this program, although other institutes have some kind of translational activities.

David Brooks continues his quest to discuss everything in terms of neuroscience. This week in The Neural Buddhists he declares, "Just as 'The Origin of Species' reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.

He goes on, "This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism." The implications of which he suggest will be the following. "First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is."

And he so aptly ends with, "We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects." I think Brooks will be a fan of The Brain Wave when it is released next May.