By Charles Q. Choi and LiveScience The order in which colors are named worldwide appears to be due to how eyes work, suggest computer simulations with virtual people. These findings suggest that wavelengths of color that are easier to see also get names earlier in the evolution of a culture. A common question in philosophy is whether or not we all see the world the same way. One strategy that scientists have for investigating that question is to see what colors get names in different cultures. Intriguingly, past research has found that colors familiar to one culture might not have names in another, suggesting different cultures indeed have distinct ways of understanding the world. One mystery scientists have uncovered is that color names always seem to appear in a specific order of importance across cultures—black, white, red, green, yellow and blue. "For example, if a population has a name for red, it also has a name for black and for white; or, if it has a name for green, it also has a name for red," said researcher Francesca Tria, a physicist at the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy. But if a population has a name for black and white, that doesn't necessarily mean they have a name for red. To solve the puzzle of this color-name hierarchy, Tria and her colleagues devised a computer simulation with pairs of virtual people, or "agents," who lacked the knowledge of names for colors. One agent, the speaker, is shown two or more objects, invents a name for a color to describe one of the objects, and refers to the item by that color. The other agent, the hearer, then has to guess which item, and thus color, the speaker referred to. Scientists repeated this until all the agents came to a consensus on color names. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Language
Link ID: 16662 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Some people respond to exercise by eating more. Others eat less. For many years, scientists thought that changes in hormones, spurred by exercise, dictated whether someone’s appetite would increase or drop after working out. But now new neuroscience is pointing to another likely cause. Exercise may change your desire to eat, two recent studies show, by altering how certain parts of your brain respond to the sight of food. In one study, scientists brought 30 young, active men and women to a lab at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo for two experimental sessions, where they draped their heads in functional M.R.I. coils. The researchers wanted to track activity in portions of the brain known as the food-reward system, which includes the poetically named insula, putamen and rolandic operculum. These brain regions have been shown to control whether we like and want food. In general, the more cells firing there, the more we want to eat. But it hasn’t been clear how exercise alters the food-reward network. To find out, the researchers had the volunteers either vigorously ride computerized stationary bicycles or sit quietly for an hour before settling onto the M.R.I. tables. Each volunteer then swapped activities for their second session. Immediately afterward, they watched a series of photos flash onto computer screens. Some depicted low-fat fruits and vegetables or nourishing grains, while others showcased glistening cheeseburgers, ice cream sundaes and cookies. A few photos that weren’t of food were interspersed into the array. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 16661 - Posted: 04.17.2012

by Jane J. Lee Waking up from surgery can be disorienting. One minute you're in an operating room counting backwards from 10, the next you're in the recovery ward sans appendix, tonsils, or wisdom teeth. And unlike getting up from a good night's sleep, where you know that you've been out for hours, waking from anesthesia feels like hardly any time has passed. Now, thanks to the humble honeybee (Apis mellifera), scientists are starting to understand this sense of time loss. New research shows that general anesthetics disrupt the social insect's circadian rhythm, or internal clock, delaying the onset of timed behaviors such as foraging and mucking up their sense of direction. Putting insects to sleep is nothing new. Researchers have used the animals for decades to figure out how anesthetics work, because the drugs elicit the same effects, at the same concentrations, in many different organisms. "You can give the anesthetic to a monkey and a snail, and they'll fall over and stop moving," says study co-author Guy Warman, a chronobiologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. The circadian rhythm's daily cycles are also common across organisms. So-called clock genes help regulate the rhythms that make us feel awake during the day and tired at night, while also prompting honeybees to search for nectar at certain times of day. External inputs, such as light, fine-tune those cycles. In our case, they keep us on a roughly 24-hour schedule. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Sleep
Link ID: 16660 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Researchers have found further experimental evidence that inadequate sleep can increase the risk of obesity and diabetes. A five-week study showed that sleep disruption decreases insulin secretion, increases blood glucose levels and slows metabolism enough to lead to significant weight gain. Scientists kept 24 male and female volunteers in a sleep laboratory for 39 days. After an initial period of normal sleep, the volunteers were put on a schedule by which they slept for 5.6 hours and were kept awake for 21.5 hours, for three weeks. Then the participants had nine days to re-establish normal sleep patterns. Disturbed sleep resulted in a 27 percent average decrease in insulin secretion after eating, and higher glucose levels over a longer period of time, sometimes high enough to make the subject prediabetic. In addition, there was an average 8 percent decrease in resting metabolism rate, a measure of how much energy the body consumes at rest, that translates into a theoretical weight gain of more than 12 pounds a year. Orfeu M. Buxton, the lead author and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard, said the key for people who must work nights, or rapidly change time zones, is to “get better sleep during the day by sleeping in a dark, silent, cool room.” © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Obesity
Link ID: 16659 - Posted: 04.17.2012

By KATE MURPHY Diagnoses of attention hyperactivity disorder among children have increased dramatically in recent years, rising 22 percent from 2003 to 2007, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But many experts believe that this may not be the epidemic it appears to be. Many children are given a diagnosis of A.D.H.D., researchers say, when in fact they have another problem: a sleep disorder, like sleep apnea. The confusion may account for a significant number of A.D.H.D. cases in children, and the drugs used to treat them may only be exacerbating the problem. “No one is saying A.D.H.D. does not exist, but there’s a strong feeling now that we need to rule out sleep issues first,” said Dr. Merrill Wise, a pediatric neurologist and sleep medicine specialist at the Methodist Healthcare Sleep Disorders Center in Memphis. The symptoms of sleep deprivation in children resemble those of A.D.H.D. While adults experience sleep deprivation as drowsiness and sluggishness, sleepless children often become wired, moody and obstinate; they may have trouble focusing, sitting still and getting along with peers. The latest study suggesting a link between inadequate sleep and A.D.H.D. symptoms appeared last month in the journal Pediatrics. Researchers followed 11,000 British children for six years, starting when they were 6 months old. The children whose sleep was affected by breathing problems like snoring, mouth breathing or apnea were 40 percent to 100 percent more likely than normal breathers to develop behavioral problems resembling A.D.H.D. Copyright 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Sleep
Link ID: 16658 - Posted: 04.17.2012

A Glasgow-based doctor is to lead the world's biggest research study into the cause of Parkinson's disease. The brain condition affects almost 130,000 people in the UK. Dr Donald Grosset, a neurologist at Glasgow University, said he hoped to find better ways of both diagnosing and treating the disease. Charity Parkinson's UK is looking for 3,000 volunteers with the condition - and their siblings - to take part in the study. Parkinson's is a debilitating condition with symptoms which include tremors, mood changes, movement difficulties, loss of smell and speech problems. The charity said it was investing more than £1.6m in the Tracking Parkinson's study with the long-term aim of boosting the chances of finding a cure. The study will follow 3,000 volunteers - people recently diagnosed with the disease, people diagnosed aged under 50 and their brothers and sisters. The aim is to identify markers in the blood which could be used to create a simple diagnostic test for the disease, something which does not yet exist. Parkinson's UK said early diagnosis is crucial if doctors are to be able to prescribe the right drugs for people with the condition. BBC © 2012

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 16657 - Posted: 04.16.2012

Chris McManus, professor of psychology and medical education at University College London, responds: if by intelligent you mean someone who performs better on IQ tests, the simple answer is no. Studies in the U.K., U.S. and Australia have revealed that left-handed people differ from right-handers by only one IQ point, which is not noteworthy. If by intelligent you mean someone who performs better on IQ tests, the simple answer is no. Studies in the U.K., U.S. and Australia have revealed that left-handed people differ from right-handers by only one IQ point, which is not noteworthy. Left-handedness is, however, much more common among individuals with severe learning difficulties, such as mental retardation. A slightly higher proportion of left-handers have dyslexia or a stutter. Other problems, such as a higher rate of accidents reported in left-handers, mostly result from a world designed for the convenience of right-handers, with many tools not made for left-handed use. Although some people claim that a higher percentage of left-handers are exceptionally bright, large research studies do not support this idea. If by smarter you mean more talented in certain areas, left-handers may have an advantage. Left-handers’ brains are structured differently from right-handers’ in ways that can allow them to process language, spatial relations and emotions in more diverse and potentially creative ways. Also, a slightly larger number of left-handers than right-handers are especially gifted in music and math. A study of musicians in professional orchestras found a significantly greater proportion of talented left-handers, even among those who played instruments that seem designed for right-handers, such as violins. Similarly, studies of adolescents who took tests to assess mathematical giftedness found many more left-handers in the population. The fact that mathematicians are often musical may not be a coincidence. © 2012 Scientific American,

Keyword: Laterality; Intelligence
Link ID: 16656 - Posted: 04.16.2012

by Andy Coghlan THE blind hunter sees. It may not have eyes, but the hydra - a centimetre-long relative of the jellyfish - still senses light to detect and kill its prey. This finding is part of efforts to uncover the evolutionary origins of sight. Two years ago, David Plachetzki of the University of California at Davis showed that Hydra magnipapillata has genes that are involved in light detection. These include the gene coding for opsin, a protein that is key to all animal vision. To find out how the hydra uses these genes, Plachetzki and his colleagues looked at which cells expressed them. This pointed to a complex of cells that is connected to the hydra's hunting equipment. The hydra kills its prey with stings that are propelled like harpoonsMovie Camera. When Plachetzki's team exposed tanks of hydra to periods of bright and dim light, the hydra ejected twice as many stings under dim conditions. This, the team says, shows that hydra use light levels to hunt (BMC Biology, DOI: 10.1186/1741-7007-10-17). H. magnipapillata may have been one of the first creatures to develop sensitivity to light. Possible explanations for this sensitivity could be that the hydra hunts at dusk when food is more plentiful or by sensing changes in light intensity - releasing stings when the shadows of prey pass overhead. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 16655 - Posted: 04.16.2012

By Michele Solis Your personality says a lot about you. To categorize people by their disposition, psychologists have long relied on questionnaires. Now, however, researchers may be closing in on a tangible view of character in the brain. According to a recent study in PLoS One, resting brain activity varies with a person’s scores on a well-established personality test. When awake but not engaged in a task, each subject displayed activity patterns distinct from those found in someone with different traits. Even at rest, the brain hums with neural activity. Re­search­ers think these resting-state patterns reflect how the brain typically operates when we interact with the world. “You can think of it as showing which connections in the brain are on speed dial and which ones aren’t,” says Michael Milham, a psychiatrist at the Child Mind Institute in New York City, who led the study. Using functional MRI, the researchers monitored the resting state of 39 healthy participants and looked for regions that tended to activate together. How tightly coord­inated the activity was between a pair of regions—completely in sync or only somewhat the same—correl­ated with scores from one of five personality domains: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, agree­ableness and conscientiousness. For example, neuroti­cism was associated with areas related to self-evaluation and fear. Other results were more surprising, suggesting an unexpected role in personality for the visual cortex and cerebellum—areas better known for visual processing and movement, respectively. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16654 - Posted: 04.16.2012

By Maria Konnikova When I was seven years old, my mom took me to see Curly Sue. Though I don’t remember much of the movie, two scenes made quite the impression: the first, when James Belushi asks Alisan Porter to hit him on the head with a baseball bat, and the second, when Bill, Sue, and Grey sit in the 3-D movie theater. At first glance, that second one doesn’t seem to pack quite the same punch–insert pun grimace here–as a little girl swinging a huge bat at a man’s forehead. But I found it irresistible. A wide shot of the entire movie theater, and all of the faces—in 3-D glasses, of course—moving and reacting in perfect unison. Heads swerve left. Heads swerve right. Gasps. Ducks. Frowns. All in a beautifully choreographed synchronicity. What made the scene so memorable to me? I’m not entirely sure, but I can only imagine that it was awe at the realization that, at certain moments, we can all be made to experience the same emotions in similar fashion. I don’t think I ever understood before that when I watched a movie, it wasn’t just me watching and reacting. Everyone else was watching and reacting along with me. And chances are, they were doing it in much the same way. Twenty years later, researchers are finally beginning to understand what it is that makes the present-day film experience so binding on a profound level—and why it’s often difficult for older movies to keep up. It seems that filmmakers have over the years perfected the way to best capture—and keep—viewers’ attention. Through trial, error, and instinct, Hollywood has figured out how best to cater to the natural dynamic of our attention and how to capitalize on our naïve assumptions about the continuity of space, time, and action. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 16653 - Posted: 04.16.2012

By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times Scientists have published a new map of gene variations that influence the risk for various brain diseases and conditions, including Alzheimer’s. More than 200 researchers involved in Project ENIGMA (for Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis) pored over thousands of MRI images and DNA screens from 21,151 healthy people. They looked for specific, heritable gene variations that appeared to cause disease. They sought out gene variants associated with reduced brain size, which is a marker for Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, as well as mental health disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They also discovered gene variants associated with larger brain size and increased intelligence. The collaboration was led by the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA and researchers in Australia and in the Netherlands, who recruited scientists at more than 100 institutions to pool brain scans and genetic information. “By sharing our data with Project ENIGMA, we created a sample large enough to reveal clear patterns in genetic variation and show how these changes physically alter the brain,” Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at UCLA who helped lead the effort, said in a statement. The research was published online Sunday by the journal Nature Genetics. Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Brain imaging
Link ID: 16652 - Posted: 04.16.2012

William G. Eberhard, William T. Wcislo A basic fact of life is that the size of an animal’s brain depends to some extent on its body size. A long history of studies of vertebrate animals has demonstrated that the relationship between brain and body mass follows a power-law function. Smaller individuals have relatively larger brains for their body sizes. This scaling relationship was popularized as Haller’s Rule by German evolutionary biologist Bernhard Rensch in 1948, in honor of Albrecht von Haller, who first noticed the relationship nearly 250 years ago. Little has been known, however, about relative brain size for invertebrates such as insects, spiders and nematodes, even though they are among Earth’s more diverse and abundant animal groups. But a recent wave of studies of invertebrates confirms that Haller’s Rule applies to them as well, and that it extends to much smaller body sizes than previously thought. These tiny animals have been able to substantially shift their allometric lines—that is, the relationship between their brain size and their overall body size—from those of vertebrates and other invertebrates. Animals that follow a given allometric line belong to the same grade and changes from one grade to another are known as grade shifts. The result is that different taxonomic groups have different, variant, versions of Haller’s Rule. The mechanisms that are responsible for grade shifts are only beginning to be understood. But this combination of generality and variability in Haller’s Rule appears to call into question some basic assumptions regarding the uniformity of how the central nervous system functions among animals. It also reveals a number of overlooked design challenges faced by tiny organisms. Because neural tissue is metabolically expensive, minute animals must pay relatively higher metabolic costs to power their proportionally larger brains, and they thus face different ecological challenges. © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 16651 - Posted: 04.16.2012

By Erica Westly Nerve cells in our limbs can regenerate after injury, but neurons in the central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord, cannot. Figuring out why this is the case is critical to helping brain and spinal cord injuries heal. A study published in the January 26 issue of Neuron may offer a promising solution. Not only did the researchers, Rachid El Bejjani and Marc Hammarlund of Yale University, identify what appears to be a key chemical regulator of neuron repair, but drugs that target this regulator already exist, making the path to clinical treatments easier. The molecule they identified, called Notch, is a receptor that influences many biochemical pathways inside cells. Scientists used to think that Notch was active only during fetal and childhood development, but increasing evidence suggests that Notch is also involved in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and stroke. Using C. elegans, a microscopic worm, El Bejjani and Hammarlund showed that Notch impeded neurons from healing themselves. When they blocked Notch’s activity with a drug, the neurons’ growth improved. The drug used in the study is already being tested in rodents and humans for potential use in Alz­hei­mer’s and other disorders, although whether it can help damaged neurons regenerate in mammals is unclear. “We know that the Notch pathway is con­served in vertebrates, but we don’t know if the re­generation mechanism is conserved,” Hammarlund says. If Notch stops neurons from growing back in humans as it does in C. elegans, it could be a major breakthrough in spinal cord medicine. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Regeneration; Alzheimers
Link ID: 16650 - Posted: 04.14.2012

Mo Costandi Researchers have come up with a way to help prevent recovering drug addicts from relapsing — without using other pharmaceuticals to help. The approach involves modifying addicts' behaviour by weakening their memory of drug taking, which relieves their cravings and might help to prevent relapse. Addicts tend to associate a drug's effects with drug-taking equipment and a certain environment, which can make them vulnerable to relapse if they encounter those conditions. The technique, studied by Lin Lu of the National Institute of Drug Dependence at Peking University in Beijing and his colleagues, aims to break that link by briefly reactivating the memory of drug taking and following it with an 'extinction session' of repeated exposure to the same memory cues. The short reminder of drug-taking seems to take the memory out of storage and make it easier to overwrite. Existing therapies try to help addicts to unlearn their habit by, for example, showing them videos of people injecting, and having them handle syringes while not under the influence of the drug. This reduces cravings in the clinic, but not when addicts return to their usual surroundings. Other approaches tested in rats involved using memory-blocking drugs to change memories of past drug use, but these are not approved for use in humans. To boost the technique's effectiveness, Lu and his team combined the approach with a process called memory reconsolidation. During reconsolidation, information is retrieved from long-term storage and reactivated to strengthen the memory. After retrieval, however, the information becomes temporarily unstable and thus prone to alteration. Their work is published today in Science1. © 2012 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 16649 - Posted: 04.14.2012

Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV An illusion that tricks your brain twice is helping to uncover how we perceive ghostly images. The new animation, created by Irene Sperandio from the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, and colleagues, combines an after-image effect with a common size illusion to investigate how these colourful apparitions are generated. While watching the video above, fix your eyes on the dot in the centre. A bluish contour should start to emerge around the red circle, which is the beginning of the after-image. At the same time, the second effect alters your perception of the static circle's size. Since the main circle is surrounded by a group of smaller ones, it appears to be larger than it actually is. Once the animation stops, a ghostly blue circle should appear when you look at the grey background. But instead of being the same size as the original circle, it should appear to be slightly larger due to adaptation induced by viewing it in the context of the surrounding discs. "The size of the after-image should correspond to the perceived size of the static inner circle which is affected by the flickering stimuli," says Sperandio. Since the flashing circles don't produce an after-image, this suggests that the effect is residual. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 16648 - Posted: 04.14.2012

by Erin Loury Monkeys banging on typewriters might never reproduce the works of Shakespeare, but they may be closer to reading Hamlet than we thought. Scientists have trained baboons to distinguish English words from similar-looking nonsense words by recognizing common arrangements of letters. The findings indicate that visual word recognition, the most basic step of reading, can be learned without any knowledge of spoken language. The study builds on the idea that when humans read, our brains first have to recognize individual letters, as well as their order. "We're actually reading words much like we identify any kind of visual object, like we identify chairs and tables," says study author Jonathan Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at France's National Center for Scientific Research, and Aix-Marseille University in Marseille, France. Our brains construct words from an assembly of letters like they recognize tables as a surface connected to four legs, Grainger says. Much of the current reading research has stressed that readers first need to have familiarity with spoken language, so they can connect sounds (or hand signs for the hearing-impaired) with the letters they see. Grainger and his colleagues wanted to test whether it's possible to learn the letter patterns of words without any idea of what they mean or how they sound—that is, whether a monkey could do it. The scientists used a unique testing facility, consisting of a trailer with computers set up next to a baboon enclosure, which the animals could enter at will and perform trials on the touch-screen computers for as long as they pleased. The computers cued up the appropriate test for each of the six study baboons using microchips in their arms. When letters appeared on the monitor, the baboons got wheat rewards for touching the correct shape on the screen: an oval on the right of the screen if the word was real, and a cross on the left if it was nonsense (see video). © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 16647 - Posted: 04.14.2012

By Bruce Bower PORTLAND, Ore. — In a cooperative venture aimed at understanding the most uncooperative of acts, researchers studying different African communities of wild chimpanzees have pooled their data and found that the apes sometimes kill each other nearly everywhere they’ve been studied. Chimp homicides occurred most frequently in groups with the most adult males, anthropologist Michael Wilson of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis reported April 12 at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists’ annual meeting. Wilson persuaded researchers at 10 wild chimp sites, containing a total of 17 communities, to contribute their findings on lethal attacks collected over the past several decades. Chimps spend most of their time in peaceful pursuits, such as playing, foraging and grooming each other. Yet researchers, beginning with Jane Goodall more than 40 years ago, have described occasional chimp homicides. Some investigators have speculated that these animals get lethally riled up by human intrusions, such as deforestation, hunting and feeding of chimps by eco-tourists. But the new study found that chimp communities with the most documented killings had no or only rare encounters with humans. Groups of males carried out most killings, and most victims were male adults and infants in neighboring communities. “The new findings suggest that killing is an evolved strategy, mainly for adult males to eliminate rivals and competitors for mates,” Wilson said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 16646 - Posted: 04.14.2012

By JAMES GORMAN The puzzle of consciousness is so devilish that scientists and philosophers are still struggling with how to talk about it, let alone figure out what it is and where it comes from. One problem is that the word has more than one meaning. Trying to plumb the nature of self-awareness or self-consciousness leads down one infamous rabbit hole. But what if the subject is simply the difference in brain activity between being conscious and being unconscious? Scientists and doctors certainly know how to knock people out. Michael T. Alkire at the University of California, Irvine, put it this way in an article in Science in 2008: “How consciousness arises in the brain remains unknown,” he wrote. “Yet, for nearly two centuries our ignorance has not hampered the use of general anesthesia for routinely extinguishing consciousness during surgery.” And a good thing, too. Setting aside what philosophers call “the hard problem” (self-awareness), a lot has been learned about the boundary between being awake and alert and being unconscious since ether was used in 1846 to put a patient under for surgery. Researchers have used anesthesia, recently in combination with brain scans, as a tool to see what happens in the brain when people fade in and out of consciousness — which parts turn on and which turn off. For instance, in a recent study, investigators showed that a person could respond to a simple command to open his eyes (the subjects were all right-handed men) when the higher parts of the brain were not yet turned on. The finding may be useful in deciding how to measure the effects of anesthetics, and it adds another data point to knowledge of what’s going on in the brain. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness; Sleep
Link ID: 16645 - Posted: 04.14.2012

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News People with Huntington's disease, a debilitating brain condition, appear have a "protection" from cancer, according to a study in Sweden. Nearly 40 years of medical records showed patients with Huntington's had half the normal expected risk of developing tumours. Researchers, writing in The Lancet Oncology, said the reason was unclear. Cancer Research UK said the findings presented another avenue to explore in tackling cancer. Academics at Lund University analysed Swedish hospital data from 1969 to 2008. They found 1,510 patients with Huntington's disease. During the study period, 91 of those patients subsequently developed cancer. The authors said that was 53% lower than the levels expected for the general population. Huntington's is one of a group of illnesses called "polyglutamine diseases". Data from other polyglutamine diseases also showed lower levels of cancer. The authors said: "We found that the incidence of cancer was significantly lower among patients with polyglutamine diseases than in the general population. "The mechanisms behind the protective effects against cancer are unclear and further research is warranted." BBC © 2012

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 16644 - Posted: 04.12.2012

by Chris Mooney JOHN HIBBING used to be a traditional political scientist. He studied elections, ran opinion polls and researched why some politicians opt to retire rather than wait around to be defeated by challengers. "About as traditional as it gets," he says. Roughly a decade ago, though, Hibbing shifted to a new approach that is starting to revolutionise how we think about politics. He began to explore whether political preferences might be partly based in biology. The idea initially met with great scepticism from his peers. But Hibbing and his collaborators at the Political Physiology Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln now have a stack of scientific publications backing the idea. For example, when they measure the physical reactions of liberals and conservatives to aversive stimuli, they find major differences. Tough-on-crime, pro-military conservatives have a more pronounced startle reflex after hearing a sudden loud noise. They also show stronger skin responses when shown threatening images and look at them more rapidly and for longer. It is conventional to think about political ideology as a set of ideas people consciously hold about the way society should be ordered. A tacit assumption is that we come to these beliefs rationally, by reading and thinking about the issues. If we differ, it is because we reason to different conclusions. Hibbing's results suggest otherwise. "One of the things we're trying to get people to realise is that those who disagree with them politically really do experience the world in a different fashion," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 16643 - Posted: 04.12.2012