by Linda Geddes There's little doubt that smoking during pregnancy is bad for the baby. But besides stunting growth and boosting the risk of premature birth, it seems that tobacco smoke leaves a lasting legacy on the brain. Children whose mothers smoked during pregnancy have altered brain growth, which may put them at greater risk of anxiety and depression. Hanan El Marroun at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and her colleagues had previously seen impaired brain growth in babies born to women who smoked throughout their pregnancy, although no differences were seen if women stopped smoking soon after learning that they were pregnant. The question was whether these changes were permanent, or would correct themselves as the child developed. So El Marroun's team used MRI to look at the brains of 113 children aged between 6 and 8 years old whose mothers smoked during pregnancy, and another 113 children whose mums did not. The children's behavioural and emotional functioning was also tested. Depression link Those whose mothers smoked throughout pregnancy had smaller total brain volumes and reduced amounts of grey and white matter in the superior frontal cortex, an area involved in regulating moods. What's more, these structural differences correlated with symptoms of depression and anxiety in the children. Not every child whose mother smoked showed these symptoms, and the study could not definitively prove cause and effect. However, because we already know that smoking is bad for babies, pregnant women should continue to be advised not to smoke, El Marroun says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18760 - Posted: 10.08.2013

By Scicurious When most of us hear birds twittering away in the trees, we hear it as background noise. It’s often hard to separate out one bird from another. But when you can, you begin to hear just how complex birdsong can be, a complex way of male signaling to a female how THEY are the best, and THEY are the one they should clearly pick. You hear ups and downs and trills and repeating themes. We used to think that birdsong was a relatively simple gene by environment interaction. The big males with the big songs get the best females, and then it’s a matter of also getting the best food, and the then healthy bird teaches its offspring to sing, and the health offspring goes on to display the best song. The song is therefore an “honest signal” of the bird’s fitness, it’s got good genes and good food and it is ready to MATE, baby! But how much of it is really training and how much is genetic? To find out, we go to what may possibly be the cutest of research subjects…the zebra finch. To look at the relationship between genes and environment in song learning, the authors turned to the zebra finch. Many other studies have also looked at the zebra finch and how it learns song, and how environmental pressures (like say, not enough food) change the way the song is displayed. But those experiments usually bred the birds and looked at the environment…they didn’t look at the teachers. The father birds, who were “teaching” their offspring to sing. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18759 - Posted: 10.08.2013

by Colin Barras Male marsupial mice just don't know when to stop. For Antechinus stuartii, their debut breeding season is so frenetic and stressful that they drop dead at the end of it from exhaustion or disease. It may be the females of the species that are driving this self-destructive behaviour. Suicidal breeding, known as semelparity, is seen in several marsupials. This is likely linked to short breeding seasons and the fact that the marsupial mice only breed once a year. It is not clear why this is, but it may be that females can only breed when the population of their insect prey reaches its peak. A year is a long and dangerous time for a small animal, so under these circumstances males might do best to pump all their resources into a single breeding season. To test this idea, Diana Fisher of the University of Queensland in St Lucia, Australia, and her colleagues tracked how insect abundance changed with the seasons in the marsupials' home forests. Sure enough, they found that the marsupials' breeding seasons were shortest where insect abundance followed a predictable annual pattern. But the insects are not the whole explanation. It turns out that females do sometimes survive the year and breed again. So why do the males always die? The key factor is that the females are highly promiscuous, says Fisher. Coupled with the short breeding season, this leads to intense competition between males. "Males that exert extreme effort in this short time are at an advantage." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Stress; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18758 - Posted: 10.08.2013

By Cat Bohannon Halos, auras, flashes of light, pins and needles running down your arms, the sudden scent of sulfur—many symptoms of a migraine have vaguely mystical qualities, and experts remain puzzled by the debilitating headaches' cause. Researchers at Harvard University, however, have come at least one step closer to figuring out why women are twice as likely to suffer from chronic migraines as men. The brain of a female migraineur looks so unlike the brain of a male migraineur, asserts Harvard scientist Nasim Maleki, that we should think of migraines in men and women as “different diseases altogether.” Maleki is known for looking at pain and motor regions in the brain, which are known to be unusually excitable in migraine sufferers. In one notable study published in the journal Brain last year, she and her colleagues exposed male and female migraineurs to painful heat on the backs of their hands while imaging their brains with functional MRI. She found that the women had a greater response in areas of the brain associated with emotional processing, such as the amygdala, than did the men. Furthermore, she found that in these women, the posterior insula and the precuneus—areas of the brain responsible for motor processing, pain perception and visuospatial imagery—were significantly thicker and more connected to each other than in male migraineurs or in those without migraines. In Maleki's most recent work, presented in June at the International Headache Congress, her team imaged the brains of migraineurs and healthy people between the ages of 20 and 65, and it made a discovery that she characterizes as “very, very weird.” In women with chronic migraines, the posterior insula does not seem to thin with age, as it does for everyone else, including male migraineurs and people who do not have migraines. The region starts thick and stays thick. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18757 - Posted: 10.08.2013

By Rebecca Lanning, Everywhere I went, people asked me about my son Will. They knew he’d graduated from high school, and they wanted to know what he was doing. Smiling politely, I told them that Will had been accepted to his first-choice college. But, I always added — in case someone saw him around town — that he had deferred enrollment. He was taking a gap year, I’d say. “So what’s your son doing with his windfall of free time? Traveling abroad? Doing research?” My cheeks burned as I played along, offering sound bites. A start-up venture. A film project. Independent study. Anything to avoid the truth: that my handsome, broad-shouldered son was, probably, at that very moment, home in bed with the shutters drawn, covers pulled over his head. Officially, Will was taking a gap year. But after 13 years of school, what he needed, what he’d earned, was a nap year. Will has long suffered from learning difficulties. It took years to pinpoint a diagnosis — and even when we did, figuring out how to manage it wasn’t easy. He needed a break. So did I. Will’s problems began to surface when he was in kindergarten. “He’s not where the other children are,” his teacher whispered to me one morning. I knew what she meant. Clumsy and slow to read, Will rested his head on his desk a lot. His written work, smudgy from excessive erasing, looked like bits of crumpled trash. School was torture for Will. He couldn’t take notes, failed to turn in homework, forgot when tests were coming up. Yet on standardized tests, his verbal scores consistently exceeded the 99th percentile. I wondered why he struggled, when clearly he was bright. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: ADHD; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18756 - Posted: 10.08.2013

At the TEDx conference in Detroit last week, RoboRoach #12 scuttled across the exhibition floor, pursued not by an exterminator but by a gaggle of fascinated onlookers. Wearing a tiny backpack of microelectronics on its shell, the cockroach—a member of the Blaptica dubia species—zigzagged along the corridor in a twitchy fashion, its direction controlled by the brush of a finger against an iPhone touch screen (as seen in video above). RoboRoach #12 and its brethren are billed as a do-it-yourself neuroscience experiment that allows students to create their own “cyborg” insects. The roach was the main feature of the TEDx talk by Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo, co-founders of an educational company called Backyard Brains. After a summer Kickstarter campaign raised enough money to let them hone their insect creation, the pair used the Detroit presentation to show it off and announce that starting in November, the company will, for $99, begin shipping live cockroaches across the nation, accompanied by a microelectronic hardware and surgical kits geared toward students as young as 10 years old. That news, however, hasn’t been greeted warmly by everyone. Gage and Marzullo, both trained as neuroscientists and engineers, say that the purpose of the project is to spur a “neuro-revolution” by inspiring more kids to join the fields when they grow up, but some critics say the project is sending the wrong message. "They encourage amateurs to operate invasively on living organisms" and "encourage thinking of complex living organisms as mere machines or tools," says Michael Allen Fox, a professor of philosophy at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. © 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 18755 - Posted: 10.08.2013

by Linda Geddes They are identical in almost every way, except one twin is fat and the other is thin. Now a study of this rare group is shedding light on a medical mystery: how some people can be obese and perfectly healthy. Obesity usually goes hand in hand with metabolic syndrome – high blood pressure, high cholesterol and type 2 diabetes – but a minority of obese people escape this fate. To probe the fit fat phenomenon, Jussi Naukkarinen at the University of Helsinki in Finland and his colleagues turned to a registry of identical twins, picking 16 pairs whose body weight differed by 17 kilograms on average. They are a perfect model for studying such differences because they are genetically identical and have usually been raised in very similar environments. Naukkarinen's team started by looking at the siblings' body fat distribution and quickly saw that the fat twins fell into two groups: those that tended to accumulate fat within their livers, and those whose liver fat resembled that of their thin twin. Suppressed activity Next, they looked at other markers of ill-health, including insulin resistance, cholesterol, inflammation and blood pressure. These measures also divided the group. "Basically all the hallmarks of the metabolic syndrome were lacking in the group where there was no liver fat," Naukkarinen says. Researchers also compared samples of the twins' abdominal fat, or adipose tissue. In unhealthy obese twins, genes involved in inflammation were activated – genes that were not activated in their thin twin. The activity of cellular powerhouses called mitochondria seemed to be suppressed as well. But in healthy obese twins, gene expression was similar to that of the thin twin. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18754 - Posted: 10.07.2013

By John Horgan Last spring, I kicked up a kerfuffle by proposing that research on race and intelligence, given its potential for exacerbating discrimination, should be banned. Now Nature has expanded this debate with “Taboo Genetics.” The article “looks at four controversial areas of behavioral genetics”—intelligence, race, violence and sexuality—”to find out why each field has been a flashpoint, and whether there are sound scientific reasons for pursuing such studies.” Behavioral genetics has failed to produce robust evidence linking complex traits and disorders to specific genes. The essay provides a solid overview, including input from both defenders of behavioral genetics and critics. The author, Erika Check Hayden, quotes me saying that research on race and intelligence too often bolsters “racist ideas about the inferiority of certain groups, which plays into racist policies.” I only wish that Hayden had repeated my broader complaint against behavioral genetics, which attempts to explain human behavior in genetic terms. The field, which I’ve been following since the late 1980s, has a horrendous track record. My concerns about the potential for abuse of behavioral genetics are directly related to its history of widely publicized, erroneous claims. I like to call behavioral genetics “gene whiz science,” because “advances” so often conform to the same pattern. Researchers, or gene-whizzers, announce: There’s a gene that makes you gay! That makes you super-smart! That makes you believe in God! That makes you vote for Barney Frank! The media and the public collectively exclaim, “Gee whiz!” © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18753 - Posted: 10.07.2013

By Matthew D. Lieberman The popular conception of human nature emerging from psychology over the last century suggests that we are something of a hybrid, combining reptilian, instinct-driven motivational tendencies with superior higher-level analytic powers. Our motivational tendencies evolved from our reptilian brains eons ago and focus on the four Fs: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fooling around. In contrast, our intellectual capacities are relatively recent advances. They are what makes us special. One of the things that distinguishes primates from other animals, and humans from other primates, is the size of our brains—in particular, the size of our prefrontal cortex, that is, the front part of the brain sitting right behind the eyes. Our big brains allow us to engage in all sorts of intelligent activities. But that doesn’t mean our brains evolved to do those particular things. Humans are the only animals that can learn to play chess, but no one would argue that the prefrontal cortex evolved specifically so that we could play the game of kings. Rather, the prefrontal cortex is often thought of as an all-purpose computer; we can load it up with almost any software (that is, teach it things). Thus, the prefrontal cortex seems to have evolved for solving novel hard problems, with chess being just one of an endless string of problems it can solve. From this perspective there might not be anything special at all about our ability and tendency to think about the social world. Other people can be thought of as a series of hard problems to be solved because they stand between us and our reptilian desires. Just as our prefrontal cortex can allow us to master the game of chess, the same reasoning suggests that our all-purpose prefrontal cortex can learn to master the social game of chess—that is, the moves that are permissible and advantageous in social life. From this perspective, intelligence is intelligence whether it’s being applied to social life, chess, or studying for a final exam. The creator of one of the most widely used intelligence tests espoused this view, arguing that social intelligence is just “general intelligence applied to social situations.” This view implies social intelligence isn’t special and our interest in the social world is just an accident—a consequence of the particular problems we are confronted with. © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 18752 - Posted: 10.07.2013

Alice Roberts It's the rutting season. From Richmond Park to the Isle of Rum, red deer hinds will be gathering, and the stags that have spent the past 10 months minding their own business in bachelor groups are back in town, with one thing on their minds. A mature male that has netted himself a harem is very dedicated. He practically stops eating, focusing instead on keeping his hinds near and his competitors at bay. If you're a red deer stag, one of the ways you make sure that your adversaries know you mean business – and that you're big – is roaring. And you don't let up. You can keep roaring all day, and through the night too, twice a minute, if necessary. While female red deer prefer the deeper roars of larger stags, roaring also appears to be part of how stags size one another up, before deciding whether or not to get engaged in a full-on physical fight. Most confrontations are settled without locking antlers. In male red and fallow deer, the voicebox or larynx is very low in the throat – and gets even lower when they roar. Strap-like muscles that attach to the larynx contract to drag it down towards the breastbone – lengthening the vocal tract and deepening the stag's roar. Deepening the voice exaggerates body size. Over generations, stags with deeper roars presumably had more reproductive success, so the position of the larynx moved lower and lower in the neck. When a red deer stag roars his larynx is pulled down so far that it contacts the front of his breastbone – it couldn't get any lower. In human evolution, much is made of the low position of the larynx in the neck. So much, in fact, that it has been considered to be a uniquely human trait, and intrinsically linked to that other uniquely human trait: spoken language. But if red and fallow deer also have low larynges, that means, first, that we're not as unusual as we like to think we are, and second, that there could be other reasons – that are nothing to do with speaking – for having a descended larynx. © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hearing
Link ID: 18751 - Posted: 10.07.2013

Smart, successful, and well-connected: a good description of Albert Einstein … and his brain. The father of relativity theory didn’t live to see modern brain imaging techniques, but after his death his brain was sliced into sections and photographed. Now, scientists have used those cross-sectional photos to reveal a larger-than-average corpus callosum—the bundle of nerve fibers connecting the brain’s two hemispheres. Researchers measured the thickness of the famous noggin’s corpus callosum (the lighter-colored, downward-curving region at the center of each hemisphere, above) at various points along its length, and compared it to MRIs from 15 elderly men and 52 young, healthy ones. The thickness of Einstein’s corpus callosum was greater than the average for both the elderly and the young subjects, the team reported online last week in the journal Brain. The authors posit that in Einstein’s brain, more nerve fibers connected key regions such as the two sides of the prefrontal cortex, which are responsible for complex thought and decision-making. Combined with previous evidence that parts of the physicist’s brain were unusually large and intricately folded, the researchers suggest that this feature helps account for his extraordinary gifts. © 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Intelligence; Laterality
Link ID: 18750 - Posted: 10.07.2013

By EILEEN POLLACK Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts. The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women. The numbers of black and Hispanic scientists are even lower; in a typical year, 13 African-Americans and 20 Latinos of either sex receive Ph.D.’s in physics. The reasons for those shortages are hardly mysterious — many minority students attend secondary schools that leave them too far behind to catch up in science, and the effects of prejudice at every stage of their education are well documented. But what could still be keeping women out of the STEM fields (“STEM” being the current shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics”), which offer so much in the way of job prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income? As one of the first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics from Yale — I graduated in 1978 — this question concerns me deeply. I attended a rural public school whose few accelerated courses in physics and calculus I wasn’t allowed to take because, as my principal put it, “girls never go on in science and math.” Angry and bored, I began reading about space and time and teaching myself calculus from a book. When I arrived at Yale, I was woefully unprepared. The boys in my introductory physics class, who had taken far more rigorous math and science classes in high school, yawned as our professor sped through the material, while I grew panicked at how little I understood. The only woman in the room, I debated whether to raise my hand and expose myself to ridicule, thereby losing track of the lecture and falling further behind. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18749 - Posted: 10.05.2013

The discovery of "missing" genes could help scientists understand how autism develops, a study suggests. US researchers looked at the genetic profiles of more than 431 people with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and 379 without. They found those with an ASD were more likely to have just one copy of certain genes, when they should have had two. UK experts said genetic factors were one promising area of research into the causes of autism. About 1% of the population has an ASD. They can run in families - but scientists have not identified a cause. Gene deletions or additions happen in everyone - it is why people are different. It is which genes are affected that determines what the effect is. 'Mis-wiring' There were far more gene deletions in the ASD group, and they were more likely to have multiple deletions. Writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the team from Mount Sinai suggests this "mis-wiring" could alter the activity of nerve cells in the brain. Prof Joseph Buxbaum, who led the research team, said: "This is the first finding that small deletions impacting one or two genes appear to be common in autism, and that these deletions contribute to risk of development of this disorder." BBC © 2013

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18748 - Posted: 10.05.2013

By Gary Stix Psychological depression is more than an emotional state. Good evidence for that comes from emerging new uses for a technology already widely prescribed for Parkinson’s patients. The more neurologists and surgeons learn about the aptly named deep brain stimulation, the more they are convinced that the currents from the technology’s implanted electrodes can literally reboot brain circuits involved with the mood disorder. Thomas Schlaepfer, a psychiatrist from the University of Bonn Hospital and a leading expert in researching deep brain stimulation, describes in the interview that follows the workings of the technique and why it may help the severely depressed. Can you explain what deep brain stimulation is and what it is currently used for? Deep brain stimulation refers to the implantation of very small electrodes in both hemispheres of the brain, which are connected to a neurostimulator, usually placed under the skin on the right chest. This device is in size and function very similar to a heart pacemaker. It allows stimulations of different pulse width and frequency. Depending on the chosen stimulation parameters the electrodes in the brain are able to “neuromodulate” – to reversibly alter the function – of the surrounding brain tissue. Deep brain stimulation has gained widespread acceptance as a successful treatment for tremor associated with Parkinson’s disease. More than 80,000 patients worldwide have been treated with this method. Some see deep brain stimulation as a much less invasive and fully reversibly alternative to historical neurosurgical interventions, which require tiny amounts of brain tissue to be destroyed in order to have clinical effects. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 18747 - Posted: 10.05.2013

by Laura Sanders When I started to get out and about with Baby V, I occasionally experienced a strange phenomenon. Women would approach and coo some pleasant little noises. After an appropriate amount of time had passed, these strangers would lean in close and ask to smell my baby. I’m the first to admit that this sounds creepy. Truth be told, it is a little creepy. But now I completely get it. The joy from a single whiff of newborn far outweighs any trifling social conventions about personal space and body odors. So when women approach looking for a little hit of eau de bebe, I get sharey. By all means, ladies, lean in and smell away. Tiny babies smell very, very good. So good that I’m getting a little high from just thinking about how good babies smell. So good that people attempt to bottle and sell this scent (like this baby-head-scented spray— pleasant, but pales in comparison). So good that scientists really want to know why some women find this smell irresistible. Scientists recently studied the brains of women as they sniffed new baby scent. Two-day-old babies delivered the good stuff by wearing the same pajamas for two nights. Women then sniffed the odor extracted from the outfit while brain scans assessed neural activity. Overall, the 30 women in the study (who weren’t told what they were sniffing, by the way) rated the scent as mildly pleasant. As the intoxicating scent of newborn wafted into their brains, neural activity increased in areas of the brain linked to good feelings, called neostriate areas. In the brains of the 15 women who also happened to be mothers, the brain activity seemed stronger. (No word yet on what new baby smell does to dads’ brains.) © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18746 - Posted: 10.05.2013

by Ed Yong I’ve just arrived home from 14 hours of flying. The clocks on my phone and laptop have been ticking away the whole time, and it takes a few seconds to reset them to British time. The clocks in my body are more difficult. We run on a daily 24-hour body clock, which controls everything from our blood pressure to our temperature to how hungry we feel. It runs on proteins rather than gears. Once they’re built, these proteins stop their own manufacture after a slight delay, meaning that their levels rise and fall with a regular rhythm. These timers tick away inside almost all of our cells, and they’re synchronised by a tiny collection of 10,000 neurons at the bottom of our brain. It’s called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). It’s the master clock. It’s the conductor that keeps the orchestra in sync. The SCN is also sensitive to light. It gets signals from our eyes, which allows it to synchronise its ticking with the 24-hour cycle of day and night outside. The SCN is what connects the rhythms of our bodies with those of the planet. But when we travel far and fast, and suddenly land in a new time zone, the SCN becomes misaligned with the environment. It takes time to re-adjust, typically one day for every time zone crossed. In the meantime, our sleep is disrupted and our physiology goes weird. In other words: jet lag. But at Kyoto University, Yoshiaki Yamaguchi and Toru Suzuki have engineered mice that break this rule. They are, with apologies for the awful word, unjetlaggable. If you change the light in their cages to mimic an 8-hour time difference, they readjust almost immediately. Put them on a red-eye flight from San Francisco to London and they’d be fine.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 18745 - Posted: 10.05.2013

Answer by Paul King, computational neuroscientist: The emerging view in neuroscience is that dreams are related to memory consolidation happening in the brain during sleep. This may include reorganizing and recoding memories in relation to emotional drives as well as transferring memories between brain regions. During the day, episodic memories (memories for events) are stored in the hippocampus, a region of the brain specialized for long-term memory that learns particularly quickly. At night, memories from this region appear to be transferred to the cerebral cortex, the region specialized for information processing, cognition, and knowledge. Studies in animals have found that during sleep, the neural activity of the hippocampus "replays" the events of the day. This replay happens faster than real-time, and sometimes happens in reverse. The activity replay is correlated with neural activity patterns in both the visual cortex (responsible for visual experience) and the prefrontal cortex (responsible for strategy, goals, and planning). The memory replay occurs during REM sleep and dreaming. Philosopher Daniel Dennett proposes the Dream Weaving party game: One person, the Dream Guesser is asked to leave the room, and while away, someone will share a dream with the group. When the Dream Guesser returns, their job will be to ask yes/no questions of random people in the group to attempt to reconstruct the plot of the dream. © 2013 The Slate Group, LLC.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 18744 - Posted: 10.05.2013

By R. Douglas Fields Human beings are utterly dependent on a complex social structure for their survival. Since all behavior is controlled by the brain, human beings may have evolved specialized neural circuits that are responsible for compliance with society’s rules. A new study has identified such a region in the human brain, and researchers can increase or decrease a person’s good behavior by electrodes on the scalp that stimulate or inhibit this brain circuit. Individuals must adhere to rules of society, which are ultimately enforced by punishments ranging from peer criticism to severe legal sanctions. “Our findings suggest a neural mechanism that is specialized for social norm compliance,” says Christian Ruff, one of the researchers in this new study published in the October 4, 2013 edition of the journal Science. In addition to illuminating the neurobiological basis for the evolution of social structure in humans, this new finding suggests new therapeutic treatments for people who have problems complying with normal social behavior. “That this mechanism can be upregulated by brain stimulation indeed suggests that targeted influences on these neural processes (by brain stimulation or pharmacology) may help to ameliorate problems with social norm compliance in medical and forensic contexts,” he says. It was already known from fMRI studies that neural activity increased in a specific part of the human cerebral cortex when participants comply with social norms. This region is located in the prefrontal region of the right cerebral hemisphere, called the right lateral prefrontal cortex (rLPFC). However, a correlation between brain activity and behavior does not prove that this neural circuit causes people to comply with social norms. Such proof would require manipulating electrical activity in this brain region to see if people altered their behavior in terms of complying with social expectations. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 18743 - Posted: 10.05.2013

By PAM BELLUCK Say you are getting ready for a blind date or a job interview. What should you do? Besides shower and shave, of course, it turns out you should read — but not just anything. Something by Chekhov or Alice Munro will help you navigate new social territory better than a potboiler by Danielle Steel. That is the conclusion of a study published Thursday in the journal Science. It found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking. The researchers say the reason is that literary fiction often leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity. “This is why I love science,” Louise Erdrich, whose novel “The Round House” was used in one of the experiments, wrote in an e-mail. The researchers, she said, “found a way to prove true the intangible benefits of literary fiction.” “Thank God the research didn’t find that novels increased tooth decay or blocked up your arteries,” she added. The researchers, social psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York City, recruited their subjects through that über-purveyor of reading material, Amazon.com. To find a broader pool of participants than the usual college students, they used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, where people sign up to earn money for completing small jobs. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 18742 - Posted: 10.05.2013

by Colin Barras SHAKEN, scorched and boiled in its own juices, this 4000-year-old human brain has been through a lot. It may look like nothing more than a bit of burnt log, but it is one of the oldest brains ever found. Its discovery, and the story now being pieced together of its owner's last hours, offers the tantalising prospect that archaeological remains could harbour more ancient brain specimens than thought. If that's the case, it potentially opens the way to studying the health of the brain in prehistoric times. Brain tissue is rich in enzymes that cause cells to break down rapidly after death, but this process can be halted if conditions are right. For instance, brain tissue has been found in the perfectly preserved body of an Inca child sacrificed 500 years ago. In this case, death occurred at the top of an Andean mountain where the body swiftly froze, preserving the brain. However, Seyitömer Höyük – the Bronze Age settlement in western Turkey where this brain was found – is not in the mountains. So how did brain tissue survive in four skeletons dug up there between 2006 and 2011? Meriç Altinoz at Haliç University in Istanbul, Turkey, who together with colleagues has been analysing the find, says the clues are in the ground. The skeletons were found burnt in a layer of sediment that also contained charred wooden objects. Given that the region is tectonically active, Altinoz speculates that an earthquake flattened the settlement and buried the people before fire spread through the rubble. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18741 - Posted: 10.05.2013