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. But remember, genes are not everything.

. And that somewhere else is our

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behavior

If 40-80% of BMI comes from genes, then 20-60% comes from somewhere else

possibly tell how much of someone's weight is due to genes? And how much is due to life style choices? One way scientists try to pick apart genetic and environmental causes is to study sets of identical twins. Identical twins have the same DNA but can be put in different environments. This lets scientists directly tell what is due to genetics and what is due to genes. For example, in one study of obesity, sets of identical twins were fed extra food and forced to behave similarly (same amount of exercise, eating, etc.). During the study both twins in an identical twin pair gained about the same weight. But there were huge differences in the amounts of weight gained between sets of twins. This kind of study tells us that the tendency to gain more or less weight is in our genes. But twin studies can also show that some aspects of weight have to do with behavior too. For instance, scientists looked at identical twin pairs that exercised different amounts. As expected, the twin that exercised more weighed less. This shows that weight is not just genetic and that behavior is not all genetic. The fact that the twins had different exercise patterns definitely suggests that what we weigh has a large environmental component. So how much we weigh has to do with both our genes and our behavior. Just because someone's parents are heavy that does not mean their children will be heavier too. But it might mean that they will have trouble keeping the weight off. Good exercise habits and eating healthy foods can help maintain a normal weight. The opposite is also true. Your genes can predispose you to be normal weight. But if you eat too much food and do not exercise enough to use up the extra energy, then you will gain weight and eventually become overweight. Weight is really just a product of energy taken in (food you eat) minus energy used (for exercise, for heating our bodies, for helping digest our food, etc). So to lose weight, all you have to do is use more energy than you eat. And to gain weight, you just have to eat more food than you use up. Sounds simple, right? But of course it isn't--partly because of genes. Our genes can affect the amount of weight lost from dieting and exercise. They can also affect how much weight is gained when we eat too much. Our genes make proteins that work together to control everything from how often we get hungry to how we use energy from food. They even control how much exercise we can do at a time. Because our genes tell our bodies how to handle the food we eat, it's often hard for us to achieve a certain target weight. But what we weigh isn't only due to our genes. Katie Cunningham More Information How identical twins can look different even with the same genes.Obesity genesAppetite genes Back to Conditions Search Ask a Geneticist His parents were probablyoverweight. But notnecessarily.Identical twin studies showthat our weight is partgenetic and part en

Extensive and unusual loss of memory pertaining to personal information another feature of DID

Differential diagnosis generally involves ruling out the effects of chemical substances and medical (as opposed to psychological) conditions. When evaluating children, it is also important to ensure that symptoms are distinguishable from imaginary play (American Psychiatric Association, 2000).

In clinical populations, the estimated prevalence of DID ranges from 0.5 to 1.0% (Maldonado, Butler, & Spiegel, 2002). In the general population, estimates of prevalence are somewhat higher, ranging from 1-5% (Rubin & Zorumski, 2005). Females are more likely to receive a diagnosis of DID, at a ratio of 9:1 (Lewis-Hall, 2002

High percentages of individuals with DID have comorbid diagnoses of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorde

DID commonly have a previous diagnosis of Schizophrenia. However, this most likely represents a misdiagnosis rather than comorbidity, du

Other possible comorbid disorders involve substance abuse, eating disorders, somatoform disorders, problems of anxiety and mood, personality disorders, psychotic disorders, and organic mental disorders (ISSD, 2005), OCD, or some combination of conversion and somatoform disorder

Other factors influencing a poor prognosis include remaining in abusive situations, involvement with criminal activity, substance abuse, eating disorders, or antisocial personality features

the average age of diagnosis is thirt

One study found that the risk of developing a dissociative disorder (DD) increased seven times with a child’s exposure to trauma.

Dissociative Identity Disorder is linked to childhood abuse in 95-98% of the cases

Studies on genetic factors contributing to DID present mixed findings. However, one study involving dyzogotic and monozygotic twins found that considerable variance in experiences of pathological dissociation could be attributed to both shared and non-shared environmental experiences, but heritability appeared to have no effect (Waller & Ross, 1997).

Treatment most commonly follows a framework of “1) safety, stabilization and symptom reduction, 2) working directly and in depth with traumatic memories, and 3) identity integration and rehabilitation” (p. 89).

A study involving 280 outpatient participants (98% DID diagnosis) from five different races (Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Asian, and Other) demonstrated the effectiveness of a similar five-phase model in reducing symptoms of dissociation.

absorb the movements that match basic sounds

first birthdays, babies start shifting back to look you in the eye again

University of Iowa psychology professor Bob McMurray, who also studies speech development.

quality face-time with your tot is very important for speech development – more than, say, turning on the latest baby DVD.

Other studies have shown that babies who are best at distinguishing between vowel sounds like "ah" and "ee" shortly before their first birthday wind up with better vocabularies and pre-reading skills by kindergarten.

babies also look to speakers' faces for important social cues about what they're hearing

So he and doctoral student Amy Hansen-Tift tested nearly 180 babies, groups of them at ages 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 months. How? They showed videos of a woman speaking in English or Spanish to babies of English speakers. A gadget mounted on a soft headband tracked where each baby was focusing his or her gaze and for how long.

They found a dramatic shift in attention: When the speaker used English, the 4-month-olds gazed mostly into her eyes. The 6-month-olds spent equal amounts of time looking at the eyes and the mouth. The 8- and 10-month-olds studied mostly the mouth.

At 12 months, attention started shifting back toward the speaker's eyes.

at 6 months, babies begin observing lip movement, Lewkowicz says, because that's about the time babies' brains gain the ability to control their attention rather than automatically look toward noise.

Duke University cognitive neuroscientist Greg Appelbaum

The model examines the looking-learning behavior of infants as young as 6 weeks through one year of age, through 4,800 simulations at various points in development involving multiple stimuli and tasks. As would be expected, most infants introduced to new objects tend to look at them to gather information about them; once they do, they are “biased” to look away from them in search of something new

an infant will linger on something that’s being shown to it for the first time as it learns about it, and that the “total looking time” will decrease as the infant becomes more familiar with it.

infants who don’t spend a sufficient amount of time studying a new object—in effect, failing to learn about it and to catalog that knowledge into memory—don’t catch on as well, which can affect their learning later on.

Sammy Perone, a post-doctoral researcher in psychology at the UI and corresponding author on the pape

To examine why infants need to dwell on objects to learn about them, the researchers created two different models. One model learned in a "responsive" world: Every time the model looked away from a new object, the object was jiggled to get the model to look at it again. The other model learned in a "nonresponsive" world: when this model looked at a new object, objects elsewhere were jiggled to distract it. The results showed that the responsive models“learned about new objects more robustly, more quickly, and are better learners in the end,

infants can familiarize themselves with new objects, and store them into memory well enough that when shown them again, they quickly recognized them

“if that’s the case, we can manipulate and change what the brain is doing” to aid infants born prematurely or who have special needs, Perone adds.

2009 by anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee,

But the Falk study was based on only a handful of photographs that had been previously made available by Harvey, who died in 2007.

several regions feature additional convolutions and folds rarely seen in other subjects.

and his prefrontal cortex—linked to planning, focused attention, and perseverance in the face of challenges—is also greatly expanded.

Albert Galaburda, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, says that "what's great about this paper is that it puts down … the entire anatomy of Einstein's brain in great detail.

he study raises "very important questions for which we don't have an answer."

whether Einstein started off with a special brain that predisposed him to be a great physicist, or whether doing great physics caused certain parts of his brain to expand

"some combination of a special brain and the environment he lived in."

Falk agrees that both nature and nurture were probably involved

"he had the right brain in the right place at the right time."

ested the learning abilities of sleeping newborns by repeating tones that were followed by a gentle puff of air to the eyelids.

After about 20 minutes, 24 of the 26 babies squeezed their eyelids together when the tone was sounded without the puff of air.

The brain waves of the 24 infants were found to change, providing a neural measurement of memory updating.

While past studies find this type of learning can occur in infants who are awake, this is the first study to document it in their most frequent state, while they are asleep

Learned eyelid movement reflects the normal functioning of the circuitry in the cerebellum, a neural structure at the base of the brain. This study's method potentially offers a unique non-invasive tool for early identification of infants with atypical cerebellar structure, who are potentially at risk for a range of developmental disorders, including autism and dyslexia, she said.

Newborn infants' sleep patterns are quite different than those of older children or adults in that they show more active sleep where heart and breathing rates are very changeable," she said. "It may be this sleep state is more amenable to experiencing the world in a way that facilitates learning."

Another factor is that infants' brains have greater neural plasticity, which is the ability for the neural connections to be changed

ADHD diagnoses depend on a child's age relative to classmates and the teacher's perceptions of whether the child has symptoms.

ADHD is the most commonly diagnosed behavioral disorder for kids in the United States, with at least 4.5 million diagnoses among children under age 18, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

However, there are no neurological markers for ADHD

Overall, the study found that about 20 percent -- or 900,000 -- of the 4.5 million children currently identified as having ADHD likely have been misdiagnosed.

Jason Babcock is the founder of Positive Science, a New York company that has developed eye-tracking devices over the last decade

John Franchak, a doctoral student at NYU and leader of the project

infants would be looking at their mothers constantly because that was common knowledge within [the field of] social cognition with infants." But in a room full of toys scattered everywhere and obstacles to climb on and crawl on, the infants only looked toward their mothers about half the time.  And even if they did look at their mothers, they looked at their mothers' faces only about 15 percent of the time.

toddlers almost always look directly at the object when reaching for it.

Toddlers are able to use information from their peripheral vision and still walk very well.

Another interesting finding was that while infants look directly at an obstacle before walking onto or over it, 75 percent of the time they don't always have to.

According to Franchak, down the line it could offer more research applications that could help infants with developmental disorders, medical research and applied research.