By Susan Milius Male killer whale thirtysomethings appear to live longer when mom’s nearby, especially if mom has stopped reproducing. This survival bonus for mama’s boys could be the first evidence from nonhuman animals for an evolutionary advantage to living long after reproduction stops. In the Pacific Northwest, a male killer whale’s risk of disappearing, presumably from dying, seems to jump almost 14-fold if he’s older than 30 and his post-reproductive mom dies, says marine biologist Emma Foster of the University of Exeter in England. Daughters get a more modest fivefold boost, Foster and her colleagues report in the Sept. 14 Science. Both sons and daughters typically spend their lives swimming with mom and other maternal relatives. Even though a female killer whale may stop having babies in her 30s or 40s, she can live into her 90s. Males typically don’t live as long, but they can keep siring offspring throughout their lives. Keeping sons alive as long as possible should therefore maximize the chances that the mom’s genes will be carried into further generations. So, Foster says, the whale survival boost may help explain how female killer whales have evolved the longest post-reproductive life span known among nonhuman animals. “Menopause is still one of the great mysteries of biology,” Foster says. Evolution works as genes for traits multiply through greater numbers of offspring, so what drives the evolution of a no-babies phase of adulthood has been a puzzle. Some theorists have argued that this post-reproductive life span is just a side effect of other survival-boosting traits, but other biologists have searched for some benefit in staying alive post-baby-bearing. The evidence is “quite heavily debated,” as Foster puts it. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 17261 - Posted: 09.15.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV It's not yet possible to make Silvio Berlusconi disappear, but now a new illusion can shrink his head. Created by Tim Meese and colleagues at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, the animation tricks our brain with moving circles of different sizes before presenting the mind-altering images of his face. To perceive the effect, fix your eyes on the cross in the center of the video. Once the motion stops and the head pictures are flashed on-screen, the image on the left should appear smaller than the one on the right. If you pause the video, you'll notice that in fact both heads are the same size. According to Daniel Baker, a member of the team, the trick occurs because our brain adapts to the size of the moving circles, tiring out the mechanisms that respond to those sizes. So after viewing the large circle on the left, the head presented in its place looks smaller and vice versa. The same type of effect can also alter an object's orientation after staring at tilted patterns. The team was surprised to find that the illusion takes place with any image, regardless of the pattern it's filled in with. "It's rare for an effect to be so general," says Baker. "You could adapt to pictures of kittens and it would still work." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 17260 - Posted: 09.15.2012

By Laura Sanders Changes in the brains of mice that were isolated as young pups may help explain the profound behavioral problems of severely neglected children. The mouse experiments suggest that neglect during a specific developmental window irreversibly stunts brain development, researchers report in the Sept. 14 Science. Over the last decade, researchers have catalogued brain deficits and behavioral problems in Romanian orphans who were raised in bare-bones environments with little social stimulation. Many of these children display hyperactivity, impulsivity and compulsive behavior such as arm flapping. Although superficially friendly, these kids have trouble forming meaningful relationships. By studying mice that had been isolated early in life, researchers led by Gabriel Corfas of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School hoped to uncover how social deprivation can affect the developing brain. After the mice had weaned, the researchers put them into one of three environments: One was a deluxe suite, enriched with fresh toys every other day and populated by friends of similar ages, one was a standard laboratory cage holding four mice, and one was a holding cell for total isolation. After two weeks, mice in the deluxe suite and the regular cage showed no abnormalities in their behavior or brains. But mice that were isolated showed big changes. These animals were socially stunted, showing less signs of exploratory behavior and a diminished working memory. What’s more, the researchers uncovered stunted development in the brain’s white matter, which helps nerve cells communicate. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Stress; Glia
Link ID: 17259 - Posted: 09.15.2012

By Judy Stone In one sense, it is refreshing to see men being the target of pharma, after all these years of women being the focus of relentless—and misleading—advertising. On the other, we’re seeing the start of yet another pharma campaign to dupe the public by the unnecessary medicalization of symptoms to create new drug markets. I used to be a fairly enthusiastic pharma fan, but over recent years have become increasingly disillusioned. The hype over testosterone is the latest example of why. With so many pressing problems in the world, I wish pharma would focus their attention on doing something more useful with their energies. I thought it started with drugs for “hot flashes,” but Karen Roush set me straight about hormone therapy, reporting that “It all started with men in ancient civilizations eating the penis and testicles of animals as a cure for impotence.” (And to think that Maryn McKenna just warned us of the dangers of kissing cats! This early hormone therapy sounds a bit dicier.) In the 1940s, estrogen was able to be extracted from horse urine in large quantities, enabling a supply for treating women “suffering from estrogen deficiency.” Dr. Robert Wilson, a prominent New York gynecologist, founded a private trust in 1963 to promote estrogen use. Pharmaceutical companies provided $1.3 million to this “trust;” they, of course, stood to profit handsomely from their investment in Wilson’s endeavor. Wilson is described as being “evangelical” in his crusade to save women from the “decay” of menopause. He was quite successful, with his 1966 book, Feminine Forever, selling 100,000 copies in the first seven months alone. His theme, “A Plea for the Maintenance of Adequate Estrogen from Puberty to Grave,” expounded in a mainstream medical journal, was adopted both by the medical profession and by the popular press. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17258 - Posted: 09.15.2012

Excerpted from The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction, by Larry Young, PhD, and Brian Alexander, by arrangement with Current, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright © Larry J. Young and Brian Alexander, 2012. To investigate the rodent version of getting hugs, and what happens in the absence of hugs from a bonded partner, Bosch took virgin males and set them up in vole apartments with roommates—either a brother they hadn't seen in a long time or an unfamiliar virgin female. As males and females are wont to do, the boy-girl roommates mated and formed a bond. After five days, he split up half the brother pairs, and half the male-female pairs, creating what amounted to involuntary vole divorce. Then he put the voles through a series of behavioral tests. The first is called the forced-swim test. Bosch likens it to an old Bavarian proverb about two mice who fall into a bucket of milk. One mouse does nothing and drowns. The other tries to swim so furiously the milk turns into butter and the mouse escapes. Paddling is typically what rodents will do if they find themselves in water; they'll swim like crazy because they think they'll drown if they don't. (Actually, they'll float but apparently no rodent floaters have ever returned to fill in the rest of the tribe.) The voles that were separated from their brothers paddled manically. So did the voles who stayed with their brothers and the voles who stayed with their female mates. Only the males who'd gone through vole divorce floated listlessly as if they didn't care whether they drowned. "It was amazing," Bosch recalls. "For minutes, they would just float. You can watch the video and without knowing which group they were in, you can easily tell if it's an animal separated from their partner, or still with their partner." Watching the videos of them bob limply, it's easy to imagine them moaning out "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone" with their tiny vole voices. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17257 - Posted: 09.15.2012

Drivers who take certain antidepressants, anti-anxiety or sleeping pills could be at higher risk for motor vehicle collisions. Psychotropic drugs can impair a driver's ability to control a vehicle, but there's been less research on newer drugs used to treat insomnia. To learn more, researchers in Taiwan compared drug use among 5,183 people involved in motor vehicle accidents with a second group of 31,093 people of the same age and gender who went for outpatient care between 2000 and 2009. In Thursday's issue of the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, they concluded that those taking two types of antidepressants, sleep aids known as Z-drugs, and benzodiazepines used to treat anxiety and insomnia, face increased risk of motor vehicle accidents compared with people not taking those types of drugs. The antidepressants studied included selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors or SSRIs like paroxitine or Paxil and fluoxetine or Prozac and tricyclic or TCA antidepressants such as amiptriptyline. "The findings underscore that subjects taking these psychotropic medications should pay increased attention to their driving performance in order to prevent …motor vehicle accidents," lead researcher Hui-Ju Tsai, of the National Health Research Institutes in Zhunan, Taiwan, and co-authors concluded. © CBC 2012

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 17256 - Posted: 09.13.2012

by Douglas Heaven The versatile cannabis plant may have a new use: it could be used to control epileptic seizures with fewer side effects than currently prescribed anti-convulsants. Ben Whalley at the University of Reading, UK, and colleagues worked with GW Pharmaceuticals in Wiltshire, UK, to investigate the anti-convulsant properties of cannabidivarin (CBDV), a little-studied chemical found in cannabis and some other plants. There is "big, historical, anecdotal evidence" that cannabinoids can be used to control human seizures, says Whalley, but the "side-effect baggage" means there have been relatively few studies of its pharmaceutical effect on this condition. The team investigated the effectiveness of CBDV – one of around 100 non-psychoactive cannabinoids found in cannabis – as an anti-convulsant. They induced seizures in live rats and mice that had been given the drug. These animals experienced less severe seizures and lower mortality compared with animals given a placebo. The drug also had fewer side effects and was better tolerated than three of the most widely prescribed anticonvulsants. Epileptic seizures affect about one per cent of the population. Left uncontrolled, they can lead to depression, cognitive decline and death. If you control the seizures, says Whalley, "the chances of death drop away completely". The decision about whether to test the drug in humans will be made next year. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Epilepsy; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 17255 - Posted: 09.13.2012

The U.S. national campaign to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome has entered a new phase and will now encompass all sleep-related, sudden unexpected infant deaths, officials of the National Institutes of Health announced today. The campaign, which has been known as the Back to Sleep Campaign, has been renamed the Safe to Sleep Campaign. The NIH-led Back to Sleep Campaign began in 1994, to educate parents, caregivers, and health care providers about ways to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). The campaign name was derived from the recommendation to place healthy infants on their backs to sleep, a practice proven to reduce SIDS risk. SIDS is the sudden death of an infant under 1 year of age that cannot be explained, even after a complete death scene investigation, autopsy, and review of the infant's health history. Sudden unexpected infant death (SUID) includes all unexpected infant deaths: those due to SIDS, and as well as those from other causes. Many SUID cases are due to such causes as accidental suffocation and entrapment, such as when an infant gets trapped between a mattress and a wall, or when bedding material presses on or wraps around an infant’s neck. In addition to stressing the placement of infants on their backs for all sleep times, the Safe to Sleep Campaign emphasizes other ways to provide a safe sleep environment for infants. This includes placing infants to sleep in their own safe sleep environment and not on an adult bed, without any soft bedding such as blankets or quilts. Safe to Sleep also emphasizes breast feeding infants when possible, which has been associated with reduced SIDS risk, and eliminating such risks to infant health as overheating, exposure to tobacco smoke, and a mother’s use of alcohol and illicit drugs.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 17254 - Posted: 09.13.2012

By Ingrid Wickelgren In a room tucked next to the reception desk in a colorful lobby of a Park Avenue office tower, kids slide into the core of a white cylinder and practice something kids typically find quite difficult: staying still. Inside the tunnel, a child lies on her back and looks up at a television screen, watching a cartoon. If her head moves, the screen goes blank, motivating her to remain motionless. This dress rehearsal, performed at The Child Mind Institute, prepares children emotionally and physically to enter a real magnet for a scan of their brain. The scan is not part of the child’s treatment; it is his or her contribution to science. What scientists learn from hundreds to thousands of brain scans from children who are ill, as well as those who are not, is likely to be of enormous benefit to children in the future. The Child Mind Institute is a one-of-a-kind facility dedicated to the mental health of children. Its clinicians offer state-of-the-art treatments for children with psychiatric disorders. (For more on its clinical services see my previous post, “Minding Our Children’s Minds.”) In addition to spotting and treating mental illness, The Child Mind Institute is dedicated to improving both through science. Its researchers are helping build a repository of brain scans to better understand both ordinary brain development and how mental illness might warp that process. Tracking the developmental trajectory of mental illness is a critical, overlooked enterprise. Almost three quarters of psychiatric disorders start before age 24 and psychological problems in childhood often portend bona fide, or more severe, diagnoses in adults. If scientists can pinpoint changes that forecast a mental disorder, they might be able to diagnose an incipient disease, when it might be preventable, and possibly target the troublesome circuits through therapy. Certain brain signatures might also provide information about disease risk and prognosis, and about what types of treatments might work best for an individual. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 17253 - Posted: 09.13.2012

by Sarah C. P. Williams Scientists have enabled deaf gerbils to hear again—with the help of transplanted cells that develop into nerves that can transmit auditory information from the ears to the brain. The advance, reported today in Nature, could be the basis for a therapy to treat various kinds of hearing loss In humans, deafness is most often caused by damage to inner ear hair cells—so named because they sport hairlike cilia that bend when they encounter vibrations from sound waves—or by damage to the neurons that transmit that information to the brain. When the hair cells are damaged, those associated spiral ganglion neurons often begin to degenerate from lack of use. Implants can work in place of the hair cells, but if the sensory neurons are damaged, hearing is still limited. "Obviously the ultimate aim is to replace both cell types," says Marcelo Rivolta of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, who led the new work. "But we already have cochlear implants to replace hair cells, so we decided the first priority was to start by targeting the neurons." In the past, scientists have tried to isolate so-called auditory stem cells from embryoid bodie—aggregates of stem cells that have begun to differentiate into different types. But such stem cells can only divide about 25 times, making it impossible to produce them in the quantity needed for a neuron transplant. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Hearing; Stem Cells
Link ID: 17252 - Posted: 09.13.2012

by Alex Stone In magic, choices are rarely what they seem. Magicians know how to manipulate us into a false sense of free will while really holding the puppet strings. Here’s a simple but clever example of a false choice used in magic. Imagine, if you will, the face of an analog clock and think of any hour on the dial (one, two, three….all the way to twelve.) You have a totally free choice. You can even change your mind if you like. Now we’re going to inject some randomness into your decision. Imagine that your finger is the hour hand and, starting at midnight, spell out the hour you chose, moving your finger clockwise by one step for each letter. (For instance, if you thought of seven, you’d spell out s-e-v-e-n, moving the time forward a total of five hours.). After you’ve done that, your finger will be on a new number. Starting there, spell this number, following the same procedure as before, moving your finger around the dial until you land on yet another number. Repeat the procedure one last time, starting where you left off. Remember the hour on which your finger finally lands. This is your selection. You arrived at this number randomly after making a free choice, so I think it’s fair to say that it would be impossible for me to know where your finger ended up. And yet I’m getting an impression right now. In my third eye, a vision of an old mahogany grandfather clock with a swinging pendulum and hand-painted Roman numerals on the dial. The image is ghostly and pale. I can barely make out the face. The hour-hand reads: One o’clock. This elementary ruse is known as a force. (Try starting with another number and you’ll see why it’s a force.) A force is a way to control a spectator’s selection, be it of a card, number, word, letter—just about anything—and it’s one of the most powerful weapons in magic. There are hundreds of methods. (See for instance, 202 Methods of Forcing, by the great mentalist Ted Annemann.) Forcing gets way more sophisticated, but the basic idea is always the same. © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 17251 - Posted: 09.13.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS It’s widely accepted among scientists that regular exercise transforms the brain, improving the ability to remember and think. And a growing and very appealing body of science has established that exercise spurs the creation of new brain cells, a process known as neurogenesis. But just how jogging or other workouts affect the structure of the brain has remained enigmatic, with many steps in the process unexplained. A new study published last month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may fill in one piece of the puzzle, by showing that male sex hormones surge in the brain after exercise and could be helping to remodel the mind. The research was conducted on young, healthy and exclusively male rats – but scientists believe it applies to female rats, too, as well as other mammals, including humans. The decision to use only males was carefully considered. “We’ve known for a while that estrogen,” the female sex hormone, “is produced in the brain” not just of female animals but also, to some degree, in males, says Bruce S. McEwen, the director of the Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at Rockefeller University in New York and an author of the study, which also involved scientists from the University of Tsukuba in Japan and other institutions. Estrogen has been well studied and has many effects, he said, including, scientists suspect, new brain cell growth. But far less has been known about the role of male sex hormones in mammalian brains, particularly after exercise. While both sexes produce male sex hormones, males produce far more of it – mostly in the gonads but, the researchers suspected, also in the brain. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17250 - Posted: 09.13.2012

by Sari van Anders of the University of Michigan is an assistant professor of neurosciences; reproductive sciences; and science, technology and society. Her lecture is called “Beyond Sexual Orientation: Testosterone and Sexuality Diversity in Humans.” What do you mean by “beyond” sexual diversity? Sexual orientation is often assumed to refer to same-gender, other-gender, or mixed-gender sexual attractions. Despite this, we tend to lump sexual minority individuals and communities together whether they fit into this traditional sexual orientation model (lesbian, bisexual, gay) or not (kink, polyamory). With my talk, I plan to discuss how sexual orientation connects with other sexual minority categories and how testosterone research helps to reframe thinking about sexual diversity. What role does testosterone play in sexual orientation? I study adult circulating testosterone. I’ve found evidence that testosterone is related to something I call “relationship orientation” in men, and “relationship status” in women. In my talk I’ll be discussing how sexual diversity — including interest in multiple partners vs. one partner — might be more meaningfully studied in testosterone research. What’s the most interesting aspect of your research? My research moves across a lot of levels. I will be discussing really science-y stuff like hormones, really cultural stuff like identity and lots in between. © 2009 City Pulse

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17249 - Posted: 09.13.2012

By Susan Milius Snakes in the wild sometimes forgo the mom-and-dad method of reproducing and have babies without having sex, researchers have confirmed with genetic testing. Occasional no-sex reproduction has been seen in captivity among snakes, Komodo dragons and sharks. But until now there has been no conclusive evidence for wild virgin birth among species that normally reproduce sexually, says Warren Booth of the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. (In about 80 kinds of vertebrates, a single sex carries on the species quite well on its own.) Booth and his colleagues examined dozens of litters of wild-caught copperheads and cottonmouths. The team found one case in each species of a male baby born without littermates. Genetic testing showed that these babies’ maternal and apparently paternal DNA was identical at multiple locations, making the chances that a daddy snake actually was involved in the reproductive process vanishingly small. The researchers report their findings online September 12 in Biology Letters. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 17248 - Posted: 09.13.2012

By Scicurious Scientists like to study choice behavior. It’s an important area of study for lots of different applications, including things like, say, marketing, but also things including mate choice, nutrition, drug addiction, and well…your life is FULL of choices. When you’re at the store facing that huge freaking WALL full of different kinds of cereal? When you decide to hit snooze on your alarm? When you decide to see the dessert menu after dinner? All of these are different kinds of choices, and our brain has different ways of calculating the cost and benefits of each one (or, in the case of mine, going into complete shut down at the sight of that gigantic cereal aisle. I hate that thing). But when scientists study choice and decision making, they often study it in something of a vacuum. Not a literal vacuum, but in an environment with very few variables. You have a rat with a choice of levers or in a maze with a choice of directions. You have a human in a scanner making a choice of two different objects or how much to wager. This is really great for studying how different kinds of decisions are made, but as we get to know more about choice, we have to begin adding more variables. And with choice in real life comes something else: competition. A lot of the most important decisions are made in the presence of competition, like decisions for resources. Find a good patch of berries? Someone was probably there before you. Come across a lovely lady or boy vole you’d like to woo? There’s probably another suitor knocking at the door. So the question now becomes, how does the brain deal with decision making in the presence of competition? © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 17247 - Posted: 09.11.2012

By TARA PARKER-POPE How do we decide whether to trust somebody? An unusual new study of college students’ interactions with a robot has shed light on why we intuitively trust some people and distrust others. While many people assume that behaviors like avoiding eye contact and fidgeting are signals that a person is being dishonest, scientists have found that no single gesture or expression consistently predicts trustworthiness. But researchers from Northeastern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell recently identified four distinct behaviors that, together, appear to warn our brains that a person can’t be trusted. The findings, to be published this month in the journal Psychological Science, may help explain why we are sometimes quick to like or dislike a person we have just met. More important, the research could one day be used to develop computer programs that can rapidly assess behavior in airports or elsewhere to flag security risks. In the first experiment, 86 undergraduates from Northeastern were given five minutes to get to know a fellow student they hadn’t met before. Half the pairs met face to face; the other half interacted online by instant message. Then the students were asked to play a game in which all the players got four tokens and the chance to win money. A token was worth $1 if a player kept it for himself or $2 when he gave it to his partner. Players could win $4 each if both partners kept their tokens, but if they worked together and traded all four tokens, then each partner could win $8. But the biggest gain — $12 — came from cheating a partner out of his tokens and not giving any in return. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 17246 - Posted: 09.11.2012

By Amr Abouelleil Twenty years ago I joined my high school’s football team and over the next four years became intimately acquainted with pasta – the delicious flavor and al dente texture, the margherita and alfredo sauces that could drown it, and the marvelous butter and garlic soaked breads that could accompany it. I owed the joys of these team-bonding dinners to one of the coaches of my team. What I was too meatball-addled to realize then was that like a pig for Christmas dinner, we were being fattened up – not for the December dinner table, but for the football field. All this because my high school football team had a size problem. Our affluent little town – full of band geeks, video game nerds and lean soccer stars, couldn’t find but a few mountains to hold the line of scrimmage (and those few were bused in from the city). Most of our players were smaller than our opponents – some who produced players who’d later play for Notre Dame. Though it took years of parental indoctrination, I was finally convinced – my coaches had decided to solve the team’s size problem by fattening us up with all-you-can-eat pasta dinners. Ever since then, it’s been my size problem. I’ve done battle with the self-esteem and social issues obesity presents. I’ve had surgery on a disc that ruptured simply because I bent to pick up my jacket from the floor, and every backache since has me worried that I’ll end up under the knife again. Last year, I was diagnosed with sleep apnea. Then there are the risks I have yet to experience: diabetes, stroke, and coronary artery disease, to name a few. I don’t blame my coaches for this – I doubt they knew any better. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Obesity; Emotions
Link ID: 17245 - Posted: 09.11.2012

Moms suffering the blues in the months after giving birth may be more likely to end up with kids who are shorter than their peers, a new study shows. Researchers who followed more than 6,000 mothers and babies found that when moms reported moderate to severe symptoms of depression in the nine months following delivery, their children were more likely to be shorter than others as kindergarteners, according to the report published in the journal Pediatrics. In fact, 5-year-olds with moms who’d suffered symptoms of postpartum depression were almost 50 percent more likely than their peers to be in the shortest 10 percent of kids that age. The new research doesn’t explain how kids with depressed moms end up shorter. That’s something the researchers are looking into right now, said the study’s lead author Pamela J. Surkan, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Surkan suspects, however, that depression might get in the way of nurturing. “We think that mothers who are depressed or blue might have a hard time following through with caregiving tasks,” Surkan said. “We know that children of depressed mothers often suffer from poor attachment and the depression seems to have effects on other developmental outcomes. It makes sense that mothers who have depressive symptoms might have reduced ability to take care of infants, that they might not always pick up cues from their kids.” © 2012 NBCNews.com

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17244 - Posted: 09.11.2012

by Sara Reardon You can run from a crow that you've wronged, but you can't hide. Wild crows remember human faces in the same way that mammals do. Crows can distinguish human faces and remember how different people treated them, says John Marzluff of the University of Washington in Seattle. To work out how the crows process this information, Marzluff had members of his team wear a latex mask as they captured 12 wild American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos). The crows learned to associate the captor's mask with this traumatic experience. While in captivity, the crows were fed and looked after by people wearing a different mask. After four weeks, the researchers imaged the birds' brains while they were looking at either the captor or feeder mask. The brain patterns looked similar to those seen in mammals: the feeder sparked activity in areas involved in motivation and reward, whereas the captor stimulated regions associated with fear. The result makes sense, says Kevin McGowan of Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. Crows don't mind if humans are in their habitat – but they need to keep a close eye on what we do. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1206109109 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 17243 - Posted: 09.11.2012

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. When children learn to play a musical instrument, they strengthen a range of auditory skills. Recent studies suggest that these benefits extend all through life, at least for those who continue to be engaged with music. But a study published last month is the first to show that music lessons in childhood may lead to changes in the brain that persist years after the lessons stop. Researchers at Northwestern University recorded the auditory brainstem responses of college students — that is to say, their electrical brain waves — in response to complex sounds. The group of students who reported musical training in childhood had more robust responses — their brains were better able to pick out essential elements, like pitch, in the complex sounds when they were tested. And this was true even if the lessons had ended years ago. Indeed, scientists are puzzling out the connections between musical training in childhood and language-based learning — for instance, reading. Learning to play an instrument may confer some unexpected benefits, recent studies suggest. We aren’t talking here about the “Mozart effect,” the claim that listening to classical music can improve people’s performance on tests. Instead, these are studies of the effects of active engagement and discipline. This kind of musical training improves the brain’s ability to discern the components of sound — the pitch, the timing and the timbre. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17242 - Posted: 09.11.2012