By TARA PARKER-POPE The news that the presidential candidate Michele Bachmann suffers from severe migraines has touched off a national discussion about a surprisingly common disorder that is little understood and often undertreated. Migraine patients are coming forward with their stories. And while each one is different, they have two common threads: suffering and trying to cope. For some, a migraine represents throbbing head pain and nausea so severe they retreat to a darkened room for a day or more. For others, it’s about a scary moment, driving on the highway when a migraine-induced aura or vision change forces them to pull over. “Imagine someone having driven a nail straight through your head,” said Craig Partridge, 50, chief scientist for a high-tech research company in East Lansing, Mich., who began having migraines in his late teens. “And then they periodically tap on it to remind you it’s there. It’s that painful.” More than 10 percent of adults and children suffer from migraine — which is three times as common in women and girls as in men and boys — and the Migraine Research Foundation reports that nearly a quarter of households are affected. The World Health Organization ranks migraine among the top 20 most debilitating health conditions; more than 90 percent of sufferers are unable to work or function normally during an attack, which can last for hours or even days. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15601 - Posted: 07.26.2011

A swine flu jab has been linked to rare cases of a sleeping disorder and should be the last line of protection for young people, European regulators say. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said Pandemrix should only be given to children and teenagers at risk of H1N1 flu if other jabs are unavailable. More than six million doses of the vaccine have been given in the UK. Ten suspected cases of narcolepsy linked to the vaccine have been reported to the UK's drug regulator. Pandemrix, made by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), was the most widely used in the UK during the 2009/10 flu pandemic. However, the vaccine is no longer in use and the remaining stocks will be destroyed this autumn. The EMA's investigation followed reports, mainly from Finland and Sweden but also from Iceland and the UK, of children and adolescents suffering the sleep disorder narcolepsy, which causes people to fall asleep suddenly and unexpectedly. It said studies had shown a six to 13-fold increased risk of narcolepsy in children and adolescents vaccinated with Pandemrix compared with unvaccinated children. In a statement, the EMA said it had "noted that the vaccine is likely to have interacted with genetic or environmental factors which might raise the risk of narcolepsy, and that other factors may have contributed to the results." BBC © 2011

Keyword: Narcolepsy; Sleep
Link ID: 15600 - Posted: 07.26.2011

By JoNel Aleccia Health writer A cluster of cases of a rare illness that can lead to nerve damage and paralysis has been identified along a small stretch of the United States-Mexico border. An outbreak of food poisoning is the likely culprit, health officials in the two countries said. At least two dozen people in Yuma County, Ariz., and San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, Mexico, have been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome in the past month, with some left drastically impaired by the illness that triggers the body's auto-immune reaction. “It’s really attacking the nerves,” said Shoana Anderson, office chief of infectious disease at the Arizona Department of Health Services. “All of the patients I’ve seen are not able to walk.” Most of the victims, including 17 from Mexico and seven from the U.S., are adults who range in age from 40 to 70, although younger people also have been affected, Anderson said. Some patients have muscle weakness in their upper bodies as well as in their legs, she added. It's not clear how quickly they may recover. Guillian-Barré Syndrome, or GBS, typically affects only about 1 in 100,000 people, according to government health statistics, so a cluster of 24 cases is cause for alarm, officials said. Although the condition often resolves on its own, recovery can be long and painful. And in rare cases, the illness can cause permanent disability and even death. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 15599 - Posted: 07.26.2011

by Kathleen McAuliffe Elijah Stommel, a neurologist at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock medical center in New Hampshire, often has to deliver bad news to his patients, but there is one diagnosis he particularly dreads. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, kills motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, progressively paralyzing the body until even swallowing and breathing become impossible. The cause of ALS is unknown. Though of little solace to the afflicted, Stommel used to offer one comforting fact: ALS was rare, randomly striking just two of 100,000 people a year. Then, a couple of years ago, in an effort to gain more insight into the disease, Stommel enlisted students to punch the street addresses of about 200 of his ALS patients into Google Earth. The distribution of cases that emerged on the computer-generated map of New England shocked him. In numbers far higher than national statistics predicted, his current and deceased patients’ homes were clustered around lakes and other bodies of water. The flurry of dots marking their locations was thickest of all around bucolic Mascoma Lake, a rural area just 10 miles from Dartmouth Medical School. About a dozen cases turned up there, the majority diagnosed within the past decade. The pattern did not appear random at all. “I started thinking maybe there was something in the water,” Stommel says. That “something,” he now suspects, could be the environmental toxin beta-methylamino-L-alanine, or BMAA. This compound 
is produced by cyanobacteria, the blue-green algae that live in soil, lakes, and oceans. Cyanobacteria are consumed by fish and other aquatic creatures. Recent studies have found BMAA in seafood, suggesting that certain diets and locations may put people at particular risk. More worrisome, blooms of cyanobacteria are becoming increasingly common, fueling fears that their toxic by-product may be quietly fomenting an upsurge in ALS—and possibly other neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s as well. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Neurotoxins; ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 15598 - Posted: 07.25.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer Stare at the spinning patterns in this animation and it will seem like you're looking into a deep tunnel. The new depth illusion, created by Hiroyuki Ito from Kyushu University, occurs with certain circular patterns that rotate around a line of sight. To experience the most pronounced effect, this video should be viewed up close, with one eye closed. "Sometimes, the perceived depth is reversed spontaneously, so that a tunnel changes into a mountain," says Ito. The illusion is similar to what we experience when we look at a scene from a moving vehicle. Distant objects move across our field of view much more slowly than those that are close by. Ito recreated this effect by making the texture near the edges rotate much faster than the dots close to the center. Our brain infers that the edges of the pattern are closer than the middle and so we perceive a 3D tunnel. In the second animation in this video, you can see that the effect doesn't occur with the pattern on the left. In this case, a flat disk is perceived since the speed of the moving dots increases steadily from the center to the edges. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15597 - Posted: 07.25.2011

By Laura Sanders Almost a minute after a rat’s head is severed from its body, an eerie shudder of activity ripples through the animal’s brain. Some researchers think this post-decapitation wave marks the border between life and death. But the phenomenon can be explained by electrical changes that, in some cases, are reversible, researchers report online July 13 in PLoS ONE. Whether a similar kind of brain wave happens in humans, and if so, whether it is inextricably tied to death could have important implications. An unambiguous marker could help doctors better decide when to diagnose brain death, knowledge that could give clarity to loved ones and boost earlier organ donation. In a PLoS ONE paper published in January, neuroscientist Anton Coenen and colleagues at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands described this wave of electrical activity in the rat brain occurring 50 seconds after decapitation. The Nijmegen team, which was exploring whether decapitation is a humane way to sacrifice lab animals, wrote that this brain activity seemed to be the ultimate border between life and death. They dubbed the phenomenon the “wave of death.” But neurologist Michel van Putten of the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, wasn’t convinced. “We have no doubt the observation is real,” he says. “But the interpretation is completely speculative.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 15596 - Posted: 07.25.2011

By Melinda Wenner Moyer It used to be tough to get porn. Renting an X-rated movie required sneaking into a roped-off room in the back of a video store, and eyeing a centerfold meant facing down a store clerk to buy a pornographic magazine. Now pornography is just one Google search away, and much of it is free. Age restrictions have become meaningless, too, with the advent of social media—one teenager in five has sent or posted naked pictures of themselves online, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. With access to pornography easier than ever before, politicians and scientists alike have renewed their interest in deciphering its psychological effects. Certainly pornography addiction or overconsumption seems to cause relationship problems [see “Sex in Bits and Bytes,” by Hal Arkowitz and Scott O. Lilienfeld; Scientific American Mind, July/August 2010]. But what about the more casual exposure typical of most porn users? Contrary to what many people believe, recent research shows that moderate pornography consumption does not make users more aggressive, promote sexism or harm relationships. If anything, some researchers suggest, exposure to pornography might make some people less likely to commit sexual crimes. The most common concern about pornography is that it indirectly hurts women by encouraging sexism, raising sexual expectations and thereby harming relationships. Some people worry that it might even incite violence against women. The data, however, do not support these claims. “There’s absolutely no evidence that pornography does anything negative,” says Milton Diamond , director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “It’s a moral issue, not a factual issue.” © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15595 - Posted: 07.25.2011

By Mandy Van Deven We all have things that disgust us irrationally, whether it be cockroaches or chitterlings or cotton balls. For me, it's fruit soda. It started when I was 3; my mom offered me a can of Sunkist after inner ear surgery. Still woozy from the anesthesia, I gulped it down, and by the time we made it to the cashier, all of it managed to come back up. Although it is nearly 30 years later, just the smell of this "fun, sun and the beach" drink is enough to turn my stomach. But what, exactly, happens when we feel disgust? As Daniel Kelly, an assistant professor of philosophy at Purdue University, explains in his new book, "Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust," it's not just a physical sensation, it's a powerful emotional warning sign. Although disgust initially helped keep us away from rotting food and contagious disease, the defense mechanism changed over time to effect the distance we keep from one another. When allowed to play a role in the creation of social policy, Kelly argues, disgust might actually cause more harm than good. Salon spoke with Kelly about hiding the science behind disgust, why we're captivated by things we find revolting, and how it can be a very dangerous thing. What exactly is disgust? Simply speaking, disgust is the response we have to things we find repulsive. Some of the things that trigger disgust are innate, like the smell of sewage on a hot summer day. No one has to teach you to feel disgusted by garbage, you just are. Other things that are automatically disgusting are rotting food and visible cues of infection or illness. We have this base layer of core disgusting things, and a lot of them don't seem like they're learned. ©2011 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15594 - Posted: 07.25.2011

Alison Abbott The increasingly sophisticated blending of different species to create chimaeras is pushing biology into a new ethical dimension. Last year, scientists used new stem-cell technologies to create a mouse with a functioning pancreas composed entirely of rat cells. So might it soon be possible to create a monkey with a brain composed entirely of human neurons? And would it think like a human? Such an animal might be useful to researchers studying human cognition or human-specific pathogens. But it would be ethically unacceptable and should be banned, argues a government-commissioned report from the UK Academy of Medical Sciences, a body that promotes medical research. The document, Animals Containing Human Material , says that genetic and stem-cell technologies are now so advanced that the creation of such animals is already on the horizon. But no country has yet devised a broad regulatory framework for the research. The report, released on 22 July, calls for the United Kingdom to take the lead in putting in place specific safeguards. "We are not proposing a new tier of regulation that will hold up important research," says Robin Lovell-Badge, a developmental biologist at the Medical Research Council's National Institute for Medical Research in London, and a member of the working group that drew up the report. At the same time, he says, "we don't want scientists to cause problems for the future by overstepping the mark of what is publicly acceptable". Unlike the hypothetical monkey with a human brain, many animals containing human material (ACHMs) are likely to advance basic biology and medicine without transgressing ethical boundaries, the report concludes. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Animal Rights; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15593 - Posted: 07.25.2011

By Stephanie Pappas Ever since the second day her son went to kindergarten, Penny Williams has worried about him. That's the day Williams, a real estate broker in Asheville, N.C., got her first call from her child's teacher. Luke wasn't ready for school, the teacher told Williams. He couldn't sit still and didn't want to participate. The insinuation, Williams said, was that she had failed as a parent. Luke, now 8, would later be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a neurological disorder marked by distraction, disorganization, impulsivity and, as the name suggests, hyperactivity. About 3 percent to 5 percent of school-age children in the U.S. have ADHD. Since the diagnosis, Williams has immersed herself in those children's worlds. She edits a group blog of parents with ADHD kids at adhdmomma.blogspot.comand devours books about ADHD, trying to understand her child's mind. "He has a really high IQ and he's really gifted, and he comes home from school and says how stupid he is," Williams told LiveScience, referring to Luke. "It's hard to watch your kid struggle … It adds stress and anxiety." A new study finds that Williams is far from alone in her sensitivity to her son's moods and needs. Parents of children with ADHD are more in tune to their child's behaviorthan parents with neurotypical children, according to research published in June in the Journal of Family Psychology. All parents' moods ebb and flow based on how their children are behaving, said study researcher Candice Odgers, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. But the link between a mother's mood and her child's behavior is stronger when the kid has ADHD. © 2011 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: ADHD; Stress
Link ID: 15592 - Posted: 07.25.2011

by Greg Miller According to some estimates, more than 300,000 United States troops have suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of these injuries have resulted from blasts from roadside bombs and other explosives planted by insurgents. The lack of knowledge about how an explosive blast injures the brain has hampered efforts to treat these injuries. Now, two studies offer a potentially important insight, pointing to a mechanism that hadn't been considered before. The lead author of the studies, Harvard University bioengineer Kevin Kit Parker, says he had a vested interest in the research. Parker shifted his focus from cardiac to brain research after two tours in Afghanistan as a U.S. Army infantry officer. "I kept seeing buddies of mine get hit and thought, 'All right, I'll take a look at this and see if I can get an angle on it.' " Back at Harvard, Parker and his lab devised a blast simulator for cells. In one study, published today in PLoS ONE, the researchers grew rat neurons in a culture dish and then attached them to a sheet of stretchy polymer. A high-precision motor gave a carefully calibrated tug to the sheet to subject the neurons to mechanical forces Parker calculated to be comparable to those produced by an explosion. Through a microscope, the researchers saw that the "blast" caused swelling, breakage, and other signs of injuries to the neurons' spindly axons and dendrites, which send and receive signals from other neurons. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 15591 - Posted: 07.25.2011

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News A 'molecular scalpel' shows promise in patients with a deadly muscle wasting condition, according to researchers. The gene for the protein dystrophin is damaged in people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. A drug trial on 19 children, published in the Lancet, used the 'scalpel' to removed the damage and restore dystrophin production. The charity Muscular Dystrophy Campaign said there was "real hope for the future". Duchenne muscular dystrophy affects one in every 3,500 newborn boys. Throughout life the muscle wastes away and children can need a wheelchair by the age of 10. The condition can become life-threatening before the age of 30, when it affects the muscles needed to breathe and pump blood around the body. New approach The instructions for making a protein are in the genetic code, but this can be disrupted by mutations or deletions in the code. Stem cell and gene therapy research has tried to find ways of introducing a functional dystrophin gene. This study tried to do the best it could with the damaged code. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Muscles; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15590 - Posted: 07.25.2011

By Julie Steenhuysen PARIS — As a boy, Gary Reiswig would take his grandfather by the hand and guide him on walks around the family farm in western Oklahoma. At 5, Gary knew to avoid the prairie dog town, fearful that his grandfather might stumble over one of the holes that the rodents burrowed into the grassy plain. Occasionally, his grandfather would stop. His eyes took on an eerie stare that spoke of an empty place -- one that once was filled with memories, laughter and toil. In 1945, nobody knew that Gary's grandfather had a rare form of Alzheimer's disease that would strike 10 of Gary's 14 aunts and uncles, his father and his only brother and sister in the prime of their lives. Gary's family has dominantly inherited Alzheimer's disease. It is rare, and it afflicts the young. In his family, symptoms can appear in the early 40s. Story: Predicting Alzheimer's: Would you want to know? This inherited form of Alzheimer's is caused by mutations in one of three genes: amyloid precursor protein, presenilin 1 or presenilin 2. It is the only form of Alzheimer's for which there is a diagnostic test that can predict with certainty whether Alzheimer's will ensue. That may change. Researchers, patient advocates and policy makers are pushing for earlier testing of Alzheimer's, in part because it will help the search for a cure. That means more people could find out if they will succumb to the disease. But without a treatment or a cure, would people want to know? Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15589 - Posted: 07.21.2011

By KEN BELSON The Ivy League will announce on Wednesday that, in an effort to minimize head injuries among its football players, it will sharply reduce the number of allowable full-contact practices teams can hold. The changes, to be implemented this season, go well beyond the rules set by the N.C.A.A. and are believed to be more stringent than those of any other conference. The league will also review the rules governing men’s and women’s hockey, lacrosse and soccer to determine if there are ways to reduce hits to the head and concussions in those sports. The new rules will be introduced as a growing amount of research suggests that limiting full-contact practices may be among the most practical ways of reducing brain trauma among football players. According to a study of three Division I college teams published last year in the Journal of Athletic Training, college players sustain more total hits to the head in practices than in games. “Because of the seriousness of the potential consequences, the presidents determined the league needed to take proactive steps in protecting the welfare of our student-athletes,” said Robin Harris, the executive director of the Ivy League. According to the new rules, teams will be able to hold only two full-contact practices per week during the season, compared with a maximum of five under N.C.A.A. guidelines. On the other days of the week, practices cannot include contact or live tackles, and no player may be “taken to the ground.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 15588 - Posted: 07.21.2011

By Katherine Harmon Just like our animal skin–clad ancestors, we gather food with zeal, lust over the most capable mates, and have an aversion to scammers. And we do still wear plenty of animal skins. But does more separate us from our Stone Age forebears than cartoonists and popular psychologists might have us believe? At first blush, parsing the modern human in terms of behaviors apparently hardwired into the brain over eons of evolution seems like a tidy, straightforward exercise. And 30 years ago, when the field of evolutionary psychology was gaining steam, some facile parallels between ancient and modern behaviors lodged themselves in the popular conceptions of human evolution. "It's very easy to slip into a very simplistic view of human nature," says Robert Kurzban, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, citing the classic Flintstones stereotype. Advances in neuroscience and genetics now suggest that the human brain has changed more rapidly—and in different ways—than was initially thought, according to a new paper published online July 19 in PLoS Biology. "There's been a lot of recent evolution—far more than anyone envisioned in the 1980s when this idea came to prominence," says Kevin Laland, a professor at the University of Saint Andrew's School of Biology in Scotland and co-author of the new paper. He and his colleagues argue that today's better understanding of the pace of evolution, human adaptability and the way the mind works all suggest that, contrary to cartoon stereotypes, modern humans are not just primitive savages struggling to make psychological sense of an alien contemporary world. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15587 - Posted: 07.21.2011

by Virginia Morell In 1991, researchers spotted dolphins doing something unusual in Shark Bay, Western Australia. When the animals got hungry, they ripped a marine basket sponge from the sea floor and fitted it over their beaks like a person would fit a glove over a hand. The scientists suspected that as the dolphins foraged for fish, the sponges protected their beaks, or rostra, from the rocks and broken chunks of coral that litter the sea floor, making this behavior the first example of tool use in this species. But why do dolphins go to all of this trouble when they could simply snag a fish from the open sea? The answer, researchers report online today in PLoS ONE, is that the bottom-dwelling fish are a lot more nutritious. Some species also don't have swim bladders, gas chambers that help other fish control their buoyancy as they travel up and down the water column. In the Bahamas, where dolphins are also known to forage for bottom-dwelling fish, dolphins hunt partly by echolocating these bladders, which give off a strong acoustic signal. That helps the cetaceans find prey even when it's buried in sea sand. But bottom-dwelling fish, such as barred sandperch, which are favored by some Shark Bay dolphins, don't have swim bladders and so are harder to find with echolocation. The sea floor is not nearly as soft here as it is in the Bahamas, so if dolphins want to probe for these fish, they risk injuring their rostra. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15586 - Posted: 07.21.2011

By Nadia Drake Beware the full moon, for as it fades, hungry lions emerge to reclaim the night — and prowl for human flesh. Scientists studying lion attack trends in Tanzania found that predation peaks in the evenings after a full moon. The finding is the first to link lunar cycles with predation on humans, long a source of superstition and lore. The study, led by Craig Packer of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus, looked at the relationship between lunar cycles, lion attacks and lion feeding behavior. Researchers used records of more than 1,000 lion attacks on Tanzanian villagers that occurred between 1988 and 2009. Of these, nearly two-thirds were fatal, and most occurred after dark. Researchers were able to pinpoint a precise time of day for 474 attacks, and found that attacks clustered between 6 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. They also found that attack rates were two to four times higher in the 10 days after a full moon. But periods of waxing lunar light were not similarly bloody. That's because lions hunt best in darkness, the researchers report, and are hungry after nights of blazing, brilliant moonlight. Measuring lions' belly sizes — and relative fullness — reveals a dip in food consumption during the full moon. So, as the lunar cycle wanes and nights slip toward inky darkness, lions compensate for their full moon fast by attacking humans. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 15585 - Posted: 07.21.2011

by Adam Piore On a cold, blustery afternoon the week before Halloween, an assortment of spiritual mediums, animal communicators, and astrologists have set up tables in the concourse beneath the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. The cavernous hall of shops that 
connects the buildings in this 98-acre complex is a popular venue for autumnal events: Oktoberfest, the Maple Harvest Festival, and today’s “Mystic Fair.” Traffic is heavy as bureaucrats with ID badges dangling from their necks stroll by during their lunch breaks. Next to the Albany Paranormal Research Society table, a middle-aged woman is solemnly explaining the workings of an electromagnetic sensor that can, she asserts, detect the presence of ghosts. Nearby, a “clairvoyant” ushers a government worker in a suit into her canvas tent. A line has formed at the table of a popular tarot card reader. Amid all the bustle and transparent hustles, few of the dabblers at the Mystic Fair are aware that there is a genuine mind reader in the building, sitting in an office several floors below the concourse. This mind reader is not able to pluck a childhood memory or the name of a loved one out of your head, at least not yet. But give him time. He is applying hard science to an aspiration that was once relegated to clairvoyants, and unlike his predecessors, he can point to some hard results. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 15584 - Posted: 07.21.2011

By DUFF WILSON Warnings for Seroquel will soon recommend that the drug be avoided in combination with 12 drugs linked to arrhythmia. The revised label, posted without fanfare last week on the F.D.A. Web site, says Seroquel and extended-release Seroquel XR “should be avoided” in combination with at least 12 other medicines linked to a heart arrhythmia that can cause sudden cardiac arrest. Sandy Walsh, a spokeswoman for the F.D.A., said the statement was only a precaution for doctors, and should not be considered a complete ban against prescribing Seroquel with the other drugs. Ms. Walsh said the label was changed after the F.D.A. received new information about reports of arrhythmia in 17 people who took more than the recommended doses of Seroquel. Though it should not be a problem at a normal dosage, she said, it may still be good advice to avoid using the drugs together. The arrhythmia, known as prolongation of the QT interval, referring to two waves of the heart’s electrical rhythm, is estimated to cause several thousand deaths a year in the United States. As AstraZeneca prepares to report its second-quarter earnings at the end of this month, it faces additional scrutiny this week. The F.D.A. is considering the London-based company’s dapagliflozin, a proposed diabetes drug with Bristol-Myers Squibb, and is expected to decide soon on Brilinta, an anticoagulant. The company is facing the loss of patents for Seroquel next year and for the heartburn drug Nexium in 2014. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 15583 - Posted: 07.19.2011

By KATHERINE BOUTON Two ring-tailed lemurs, perhaps a pair, perhaps just two guys out to catch a few rays, sit side by side tilted back as if in beach chairs, their white bellies exposed, knees apart, feet splayed to catch every last drop of the Madagascar sun. All they need are cigars to complete the picture. There’s a perfectly good evolutionary explanation for this posture. Scientists use the term “behavioral thermoregulation” to describe how an animal maintains a core body temperature. But as the animal behaviorist Jonathan Balcombe points out in his exuberant look at animal pleasure, “The Exultant Ark,” they are also clearly enjoying themselves. A scientist through and through, Dr. Balcombe can’t help giving the study of animal pleasure a properly scientific name: hedonic ethology. True to its subtitle — “A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure” — “The Exultant Ark” showcases surprising, funny, touching, sad, heartwarming pictures by photographers all over the world. Dr. Balcombe’s text is a serious examination of the subject of animal pleasure, a study that “remains nascent and largely neglected in scientific discourse.” But it also delights us along the way with Dr. Balcombe’s observations and examples. On the subject of food as pleasure, for instance, he tells us, “Rats will enter a deadly cold room and navigate a maze to retrieve highly palatable food (e.g., shortbread, pâté or Coca-Cola).” If they happen to find rat chow instead, “they quickly return to their cozy nests, where they stay for the remainder of the experiment.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 15582 - Posted: 07.19.2011