by Michael Marshall Life is tough when you're small. It's not just about getting trodden on by bigger animals. Some of the tiniest creatures struggle to make their bodies work properly. This leads to problems that us great galumphing humans will never experience. For instance, the smallest frogs are prone to drying out because water evaporates so quickly from their skin. Miniature animals can't have many offspring, because there is no room in their bodies to grow them. One tiny spider has even had to let its brain spill into its legs, because its head is too small to accommodate it. Gardiner's Seychelles frog is one of the smallest vertebrates known to exist, at just 11 millimetres long. Its tiny head is missing parts of its ears, which means it shouldn't be able to hear anything. It can, though, and that is thanks to its big mouth. One of only four species in the genus Sechellophryne, Gardiner's Seychelles frog is a true rarity. It is confined to a few square kilometres of two islands in the Seychelles, and even if you visit its habitat you're unlikely to see it. That's because the frog spends most of its time in moist leaf litter, so that it doesn't dry out. It eats tiny insects and other invertebrates. When it comes to hearing, it is sadly under-equipped. Unlike most frogs, it doesn't have an external eardrum. Inside its head, it does have the amphibian equivalent of a cochlea, which is the bit that actually detects sounds. But it doesn't have a middle ear to transmit the sound to the cochlea, and is also missing a bone called the columella that would normally help carry the sound. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 18599 - Posted: 09.03.2013

By STUART ELLIOTT Electronic cigarettes may be a creation of the early 21st century, but critics of the devices say manufacturers are increasingly borrowing marketing tactics that are more reminiscent of the heady days of tobacco in the mid-1900s. With American smokers buying e-cigarettes at a record pace — annual sales are expected to reach $1.7 billion by year’s end — e-cigarette makers are opening their wallets wide, spending growing sums on television commercials with celebrities, catchy slogans and sports sponsorships. Those tactics can no longer be used to sell tobacco cigarettes, but are readily available to the industry because it is not covered by the laws or regulations that affect the tobacco cigarette industry. The e-cigarette industry is also spending lavishly on marketing methods that are also still available to their tobacco brethren, including promotions, events, sample giveaways and print ads. The Blu eCigs brand — which recently added the actress Jenny McCarthy to its roster of star endorsers, joining the actor Stephen Dorff — spent $12.4 million on ads in major media for the first quarter of this year compared with $992,000 in the same period a year ago, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. And ad spending in a category that Kantar Media calls smoking materials and accessories, which includes products like pipes and lighters in addition to e-cigarettes, has skyrocketed: from $2.7 million in 2010 to $7.2 million in 2011 to $20.8 million last year. In the first quarter of 2013, Kantar Media reported, category ad spending soared again, reaching $15.7 million, compared with $2 million in the same period a year ago. In fact, that $15.7 million total exceeded the spending for ads in major media for tobacco cigarettes, at $13.9 million, according to Kantar Media. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 18598 - Posted: 09.03.2013

By Michele Solis Loneliness is bad for our health, according to a robust body of research. And isolation is known to shorten lives—but experts were not sure if the real culprit was the pain and stress of loneliness, as opposed to a lack of social connectedness. Now psychologists have untangled the two factors and discovered that even superficial contact with other people may improve our health. Led by Andrew Steptoe of University College London, the study surveyed 6,500 people aged 52 or older about their social contacts and experiences of loneliness. After seven years, the researchers followed up to see who had died. Initially, people rated as highly lonely seemed to die at a higher rate than those with low or average scores. Yet this difference disappeared when taking into account a person's health. Greater social isolation, however, came with an increased incidence of death: 21.9 percent of people ranked as highly isolated died compared with 12.3 percent of less isolated people. After taking into account health and other demographic factors, this difference amounted to a 1.26-fold increase in mortality associated with high social isolation. The findings, published online on March 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, suggest that even brief social contact that does not involve a close emotional bond—such as small talk with a neighbor or a bus driver—could extend a person's life. Although the results hint that city living or group homes may be beneficial, Steptoe says they do not negate the downside of loneliness. “There's ample evidence that loneliness relates to well-being and other health outcomes besides death,” he says. “But our study suggests a broader view of beneficial social relationships. They're not simply to do with close emotional relationships.” © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 18597 - Posted: 09.03.2013

By TOM FIELDS-MEYER I was looking in my closet, choosing a shirt, when I lost my mind. Four hours later, I’m in the E.R., and I don’t know how I got here. My wife, Shawn, stands at my bedside, her expression alternating between reassuring and dismayed. Next to her, a doctor in his mid-50s calmly tells me he’s going to name three objects. “I want you to hold these in your mind,” he says. “Apple, table, penny.” I nod, noticing a semicircle of young interns behind him, listening intently. Then the doctor asks me to multiply 17 times 3. “I’m not very good at math,” I say. He waits. “Let’s see. Twenty times 3 is 60, minus 6.” I pause, correcting myself. “No, minus 9. Fifty-one?” “Good.” He smiles. “Now, what were those three objects I named?” I can’t recall the objects. I barely remember that he listed them. Flustered, I purse my lips and slowly shake my head, looking at Shawn. She fills in the blanks for me: I woke up, took a shower, and when I stepped out, I seemed disoriented. I sat down on the bed. “Wait, remind me, what are we doing today?” I asked her. “Do I need to remind you again? We’re having lunch at the Swerdlows’.” I didn’t remember that. I put a hand on my forehead, then lay on my back. “What day is it?” I asked her. Concerned by my blank stare, Shawn shot me questions: Do you know who came over last night? (I didn’t.) Do you remember what we argued about yesterday morning? (I couldn’t.) © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18596 - Posted: 09.02.2013

Alison Abbott Like humans, Drosophila fruitflies become forgetful with age. But at least their memory deficits can be reversed by eating a diet rich in polyamines, according to a study published online today1 in Nature Neuroscience. “There’s a great need for cognitive enhancers to keep us healthy into old age — now polyamines are offering a new approach,” says learning and memory specialist Ronald Davis at the Scripps Research Institute Florida in Jupiter, who was not involved in the study. “There are reasons for optimism that this fly work will translate into human.” Polyamines — which include the graphically named putrescine, cadaverine and spermidine — are small molecules that are essential for cells to survive and grow. But their cellular levels decline with age. Some foods that are popularly considered to have health benefits — such as wheatgerm and fermented soya beans — contain high levels of polyamines. Japanese scientists have shown that natto, a fermented soya-bean product, raises the level of polyamines in the blood in humans2. But there is a long way to go before anyone can say that polyamines can help to stave off memory decline in ageing people, cautions Stephan Sigrist of the Free University of Berlin, one of the study's principal investigators. “Still, the polyamine system does offer a new target for those interested in developing therapies.” © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18595 - Posted: 09.02.2013

By Maia Szalavitz That little zing you get when someone “likes” your picture or sings your praises on Facebook? That’s the reward center in your brain getting a boost. And that response can predict how much time and energy you put into the social media site, according to new research. In one of the first studies to explore the effects of social media on the brain, scientists led by Dar Meshi, a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität in Berlin, imaged the brains of 31 Facebook users while they viewed pictures of either themselves or others that were accompanied by positive captions. The research was published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. “We found that we could predict the intensity of people’s Facebook use outside the scanner by looking at their brain’s response to positive social feedback inside the scanner,” says Meshi. Specifically, a region called the nucleus accumbens, which processes rewarding feelings about food, sex, money and social acceptance became more active in response to praise for oneself compared to praise of others. And that activation was associated with more time on the social media site. Social affirmation tends to be one of life’s great joys, whether it occurs online or off, so it’s not surprising that it would light up this area. Few people are immune to the lures of flattery, after all. But do these results suggest that the “likes” on Facebook can become addictive? While all addictive experiences activate the region, such activation alone isn’t sufficient to establish an addiction. © 2013 Time Inc

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18594 - Posted: 09.02.2013

by Nancy Shute It was hard to ignore those headlines saying that people with migraine have brain damage, even if you're not among the 12 percent or so who do suffer from these painful, recurring headaches. Don't panic, says the neurologist whose work sparked those alarming headlines. "It's still not something to stay up nights worrying about," says Dr. Richard Lipton, director of the Montefiore Headache Center in New York. But knowing about the brain anomalies that Lipton and his colleagues found might help people reduce their stroke risk. Some people who get do have a slightly . And some of the brain changes identified in the study look like mini-strokes. "On the MRI they look like very tiny strokes," Lipton tells Shots. But the people aren't having any stroke symptoms. Still, Lipton is convinced that the process is the same. "We now know it's a risk factor for these very small silent strokes," he says. The scientists evaluated data from 19 studies in which people with migraine headaches got MRI scans of their brains. Just about everybody is going to have some abnormalities show up in a scan. But the people who had migraines were more likely to have two common abnormalities: white matter abnormalities and infarct-like lesions. The were published in the journal Neurology. ©2013 NPR

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Stroke
Link ID: 18593 - Posted: 09.02.2013

by Bob Holmes It's the cruel cycle of poverty. The many challenges that come with being poor can sap people's ability to think clearly, according to a new study. The findings suggest that governments should think twice before tying up social-assistance programmes in confusing red tape. Sociologists have long known that poor people are less likely to take medications, keep appointments, or be attentive parents. "Poor people make poorer decisions. They do. The question is why," says Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But does bad decision-making help cause poverty, or does poverty interfere with decision-making? To explore this question, psychologist Eldar Shafir at Princeton University and his colleagues took advantage of a natural experiment. Small-scale sugar-cane farmers in Tamil Nadu in southern India receive most of their year's income all at once, shortly after the annual harvest. As a result, the same farmer can be poor before harvest and relatively rich after. And indeed, Shafir's team found that farmers had more loans, pawned more belongings, and reported more difficulty paying bills before the harvest than after. The researchers visited 464 farmers in 54 villages both before and after harvest. At each visit, they gave the farmers two tests of their cognitive ability: a multiple-choice pattern-matching test, and one in which they had to declare the number of digits shown rather then their value: seeing "5 5 5" but saying "three", for example. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 18592 - Posted: 08.31.2013

By Susan Milius Here’s a lesson on road trips from whooping cranes: For efficient migration, what matters is the age of the oldest crane in the group. These more experienced fliers nudge youngsters away from going off course on long flights. “The older birds get, the closer they stick to the straight line,” says ecologist Thomas Mueller of the University of Maryland in College Park, who crunched data from 73 Grus americana migrating between Wisconsin and Florida. One-year-olds traveling with other birds of the same age, the analysis says, tend to deviate about 76 kilometers from a direct route. But if they fly in a group with an 8-year-old crane, they stray 38 percent less, or about 47 kilometers, Mueller and his colleagues report in the August 30 Science. Eight years of data on these endangered cranes summering in Wisconsin’s Necedah National Wildlife Refuge offered a rare chance to parse how birds find their way. Conservationists have been rebuilding this eastern migratory population of the once widespread birds. Researchers release captive-bred cranes in Wisconsin and lead each class of newbies, just once, with an ultralight aircraft to Florida’s Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge for the winter. Cranes navigate back to Wisconsin on their own. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Animal Migration; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18591 - Posted: 08.31.2013

Charlie Cooper Scientists have moved a step closer to creating a specialist pill for jet lag, after research in mice revealed a possible mechanism for speeding up the body's natural response to moving across time zones. Researchers at the University of Oxford found they could improve the recovery time of mice exposed to irregular patterns of light and dark by blocking a particular gene in the brain, responsible for regulating the body's internal clock. Nearly all living things have an internal, subcellular mechanism - known as the circadian clock - that synchronises a variety of bodily functions to the 24-hour rhythm of the Earth's rotation. The circadian clock is regulated by a number of stimuli - chief among them light detected by the eye. But when daily patterns of light and dark are disrupted - as when we travel across several time-zones - the body clock falls out of synch, resulting in several days of fatigue and discomfort as our cells adjust to new daily patterns - experienced by long-haul fliers as jet lag. The body takes about one day to adjust for every time zone crossed. To understand the effect this has on the brain, researchers at the University of Oxford exposed mice to irregular patterns of light and dark to simulate moving across time zones. They monitored the activity of genes in the part of the brain responsible for setting the circadian clock - the suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN) and observed that hundreds of genes were activated by light detected from the eye, all of which helped the body adjust to a new day-night rhythm. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 18590 - Posted: 08.31.2013

Brain scans of people who say they have insomnia have shown differences in brain function compared with people who get a full night's sleep. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, said the poor sleepers struggled to focus part of their brain in memory tests. Other experts said that the brain's wiring may actually be affecting perceptions of sleep quality. The findings were published in the journal Sleep. People with insomnia struggle to sleep at night, but it also has consequences during the day such as delayed reaction times and memory. The study compared 25 people who said they had insomnia with 25 who described themselves as good sleepers. MRI brain scans were carried out while they performed increasingly challenging memory tests. One of the researchers, Prof Sean Drummond, said: "We found that insomnia subjects did not properly turn on brain regions critical to a working memory task and did not turn off 'mind-wandering' brain regions irrelevant to the task. "This data helps us understand that people with insomnia not only have trouble sleeping at night, but their brains are not functioning as efficiently during the day." BBC © 2013

Keyword: Sleep; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18589 - Posted: 08.31.2013

By MIKE STOBBE / AP Medical Writer ATLANTA (AP) — Can’t get enough shuteye? Nearly 9 million U.S. adults resort to prescription sleeping pills — and most are white, female, educated or 50 or older, according to the first government study of its kind. But that’s only part of the picture. Experts believe there are millions more who try options like over-the-counter medicines or chamomile tea, or simply suffer through sleepless nights. ‘‘Not everyone is running out to get a prescription drug,’’ said Russell Rosenberg, an Atlanta-based sleep researcher. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study was based on interviews with about 17,000 adults from 2005 through 2010. Study participants were even asked to bring in any medicines they were taking. Overall, 4 percent of adults said they'd taken a prescription sleeping pill or sedative in the previous month. The study did not say whether use is increasing. But a CDC researcher calculated that use rose from 3.3 percent in 2003-2006 to 4.3 percent in 2007-2010. That echoes U.S. market research — as well as studies in some other countries — that indicate an increase in insomnia in recent decades. ‘‘Sleep disorders overall are more prevalent than what they were,’’ said Dr. Ana Krieger, medical director of New York’s Weill Cornell Center for Sleep Medicine. © 2013 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 18588 - Posted: 08.31.2013

by Jacob Aron DOES your brain work like a dictionary? A mathematical analysis of the connections between definitions of English words has uncovered hidden structures that may resemble the way words and their meanings are represented in our heads. "We want to know how the mental lexicon is represented in the brain," says Stevan Harnad of the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. As every word in a dictionary is defined in terms of others, the knowledge needed to understand the entire lexicon is there, as long as you first know the meanings of an initial set of starter, or "grounding", words. Harnad's team reasoned that finding this minimal set of words and pinning down its structure might shed light on how human brains put language together. The team converted each of four different English dictionaries into a mathematical structure of linked nodes known as a graph. Each node in this graph represents a word, which is linked to the other words used to define it – so "banana" might be connected to "long", "bendy", "yellow" and "fruit". These words then link to others that define them. This enabled the team to remove all the words that don't define any others, leaving what they call a kernel. The kernel formed roughly 10 per cent of the full dictionary – though the exact percentages depended on the particular dictionary. In other words, 90 per cent of the dictionary can be defined using just the other 10 per cent. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 18587 - Posted: 08.31.2013

By Felicity Muth In my previous post, I talked about how crickets were influenced by who was watching them when they performed a victory dance after winning a fight. Although this is a unique finding, it fits into a larger picture of many animals (including insects) being affected by their social context. At the animal behaviour conference I went to in Colorado (where I heard both about the cricket research and about the study I’m going to write about today), you could see how people were affected by what others were doing around them. When one person sneaked out before the end of a talk to go to a talk in a different room, a load of other people would follow. When chatting with a friend, a person would modify what they were saying depending on who else was in the vicinity. Whether we are aware of it all of the time or not, we constantly modify our behaviour depending on the social context we’re in. Well, in addition to crickets, it turns out that honeybees are affected by social context too. This isn’t surprising, given that these bees are highly social animals, but quite how they are affected is rather interesting. Honeybees live in colonies of up to 40, 000 – 80, 000 individuals, almost all females. Like humans, honeybees like to keep their dwelling at constant temperature, not least to make sure that their brood can develop. Unlike humans however, bees think around 36°C (96.8°F) is a great temperature to have their home at. In the winter, honeybees shiver to produce heat, pressing their abdomens against their brood (stored in cells) to distribute the heat more evenly. In the summer however, it can get pretty hot, and so the bees use some strategies to cool down that are not dissimilar to our own. They collect water that can evaporate in the colony and cool it down. They also fan to circulate air around the colony. However, until recently it was not clear how bees decide to start fanning, and whether this might be influenced by what others are doing. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18586 - Posted: 08.31.2013

By Katherine Harmon The past couple posts have described some pretty severe experiments on octopuses, including: showing how octopus arms can grow back after inflicted damage and how even severed octopus arms can react to stimuli. (For the record, animals in the studies were anesthetized and euthanized, respectively.) Without getting too far into the woods (or reefs) of animal treatment ethics, the question remains: How much pain and distress can these relatively short-lived invertebrates experience? Luckily for us, a new paper deals with that very question. Researchers from Europe, the UK and Japan teamed up to explore what we know about pain, perception and cognition in octopuses. The findings are described in the special “Cephalopod Research” issue of September’s Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology. And the issue is not just philo-scientific cloud (or wave) gazing. Starting this year the European Union asks researchers to make similarly humane accommodations for cephalopods as they do for vertebrates (Directive 2010/63/EU, pdf). But, do octopuses experience would-be painful experiences the same way mice do? As the researchers note in their paper, we know very little about whether cephalopods recognize pain or experience suffering and distress in a similar way that we humans—or even we vertebrates—do. Previous (as well as much current) research has looked largely to behavioral clues as an indication to an octopus’s internal state. For example, researchers have observed an octopus’s color changing and activity patterns and looked for any self-inflicted harm (swimming into the side of a tank or eating its own arms) to judge whether the animal is “stressed.” And to tell whether an animal has “gone under” anesthesia, they often look for movements, lack of response, posture change or, at the most, measure heart rate and breathing. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Evolution
Link ID: 18585 - Posted: 08.31.2013

by Colin Barras Familiarity may breed contempt, and it also makes it easier to ignore our nearest and dearest. The human brain has an uncanny ability to focus on one voice in a sea of chatterSpeaker, for example, at a party, but exactly how it does so is still up for debate. "In the past, people have looked at the acoustic characteristics that enable the brain to do this," says Ingrid Johnsrude at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. "Things like differences in voice pitch or its timbre." Johnsrude and her colleagues wondered if the familiarity of the voice also plays a role. Can people focus on one voice in a crowd more effectively if it belongs to a close relation? And is a familiar voice more easily ignored if we want to listen to someone else? To find out, the team recruited 23 married couples. Each had been married and living together for at least 18 years. Individuals were played two sentences simultaneously and asked to report back details about one of them, such as the colour and number mentioned. They did this correctly 80 per cent of the time when their spouse spoke the target sentence and a stranger spoke the decoy sentence. If strangers spoke both, the success rate dropped to 65 per cent. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Attention; Hearing
Link ID: 18584 - Posted: 08.31.2013

American researchers say they’ve performed what they believe is the first ever human-to-human brain interface, where one person was able to send a brain signal to trigger the hand motions of another person. “It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined section from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain,” said Rajesh Rao, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, in a statement. Previous studies have done brain-to-brain transmissions between rats and one was done between a human and a rat. Rao was able to send a brain signal through the internet – utilizing electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation – to the other side of the university campus to his colleague Andrea Stocco, an assistant professor of psychology, triggering Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard. “The internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” said Stocco. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.” On Aug. 12, Rao sat in his lab with a cap on his head. The cap had electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads the brain’s electrical activity. Meanwhile, Stocco was at his lab across campus, wearing a similar cap which had a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil place over his left motor cortex – the part of the brain that controls hand movement. Rao looked at a computer and in his mind, he played a video game. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand, which stayed motionless. Stocco, almost instantaneously, moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him. Only simple brain signals, not thoughts “This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his,” said Rao. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Robotics; Brain imaging
Link ID: 18583 - Posted: 08.29.2013

Amanda Mascarelli It’s an inconvenient truth of aging: In our 30s and up, it gets increasingly harder for most of us to recall names, faces, and details from the past. Scientists have long debated whether this gradual decline is an early form of Alzheimer’s disease—a neurodegenerative condition that leads to severe dementia—or a distinct neurological process. Now, researchers have found a protein that distinguishes typical forgetfulness from Alzheimer’s and could lead to potential treatments for age-related memory loss. Previous studies have shown that Alzheimer’s disease and age-related memory loss involve different neural circuits in the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure in the brain where memories are formed and organized. The hallmark signs of Alzheimer’s disease are well established—tangled proteins and plaques accumulate over time, and brain tissue atrophies. But little is known about what occurs when memory declines during normal aging, except that brain cells begin to malfunction, says Scott Small, a neurologist at Columbia University and senior author to the study. “At the molecular level, there’s been a lot of uncertainty about what is actually going wrong, and that’s what this paper isolates.” To tease apart the biological processes involved in memory loss in normal aging, Scott and other researchers from Columbia University in New York examined postmortem brain tissue from eight healthy people ranging in age from 33 to 86. They looked for differences in gene expression—the proteins or other products that a gene makes—between younger and older people. They also looked for age-related changes in the brains of mice. © 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18582 - Posted: 08.29.2013

by Douglas Heaven Why rely on mouse brains to help us understand our most complex organ when you can grow a model of a human one? Tiny "brains" that include parts of the cortex, hippocampus and even retinas, have been made for the first time using stem cells. The 3D tissue structures will let researchers study the early stages of human brain development in unprecedented detail. Because human brains are so different from those of most animals, looking at how animal brains develop only gives us a crude understanding of the process in humans. "Mouse models don't cut it," says Juergen Knoblich at the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB) in Vienna, Austria. To grow their miniature brains, Knoblich and colleagues took induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells – adult cells reprogrammed to behave like embryonic stem cells – and gave them a mix of nutrients thought to be essential for brain development. The stem cells first differentiated into neuroectoderm tissue, the layer of cells that would eventually become an embryo's nervous system. The tissue was suspended in a gel scaffold to help it develop a 3D structure. Right food, right structure In less than a month, the stem cells grew into brain-like "organoids" 3 to 4 millimetres across and containing structures that corresponded to most of the regions of the brain. For example, all the organoids they made appeared to contain parts of the cortex, about 70 per cent contained a choroid plexus – which produces spinal fluid – and about 10 per cent contained retinal tissue. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18581 - Posted: 08.29.2013

By Shinnosuke Nakayama and The Conversation In our society, not many people are lucky enough to have an ideal boss who they would want to follow faithfully for the rest of their lives. Many might even find their boss selfish and arrogant or complain that they don’t listen to their opinions. We humans push the concept of leaders and followers to the extreme but they exist throughout the animal kingdom. These leaders and followers of the natural world could help us decide whether that unpopular boss can learn to be part of the team. Leaders and followers are found in many group-living animals, such as fish, birds and primates. Group living can offer many benefits to group members, such as increasing the chances of finding food or avoiding predators. Unlike some human workplaces, groups of animals know that they need to agree on where to go and when to go there in order to take full advantage of group living. Leaders share common characteristics, so are to some extent predictable. In humans, leaders generally show higher scores in certain personality traits, notably extraversion. Similarly, in animals, bolder and more active individuals tend to be found as leaders. Evolutionary theories suggest that boldness and leadership can coevolve through positive feedback. Individuals who force their preferences on others are more likely to be followed, which in turn encourages these individuals to initiate more often. This feedback results in distinct social roles for leaders and followers within a group, as shown by several experimental studies. It would therefore seem that leaders and followers are born through natural selection, and that you have no chance of becoming a leader if you are born a follower. But our work with stickleback fish suggests that while followers may not have what it takes to lead, leaders can learn to follow. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 18580 - Posted: 08.29.2013