By TARA PARKER-POPE Most doctors view pain as a symptom of an underlying problem — treat the disease or the injury, and the pain goes away. But for large numbers of patients, the pain never goes away. In a sweeping review issued last month, the Institute of Medicine — the medical branch of the National Academy of Sciences — estimated that chronic pain afflicts 116 million Americans, far more than previously believed. The toll documented in the report is staggering. Childbirth, for example, is a common source of chronic pain: The institute found that 18 percent of women who have Caesarean deliveries and 10 percent who have vaginal deliveries report still being in pain a year later. Ten percent to 50 percent of surgical patients who have pain after surgery go on to develop chronic pain, depending on the procedure, and for as many as 10 percent of those patients, the chronic postoperative pain is severe. (About 1 in 4 Americans suffer from frequent lower back pain.) The risk of suicide is high among chronic pain patients. Two studies found that about 5 percent of those with musculoskeletal pain had tried to kill themselves; among patients with chronic abdominal pain, the number was 14 percent. “Before, we didn’t have good data on what is the burden of pain in our society,” said Dr. Sean Mackey, chief of pain management at the Stanford School of Medicine and a member of the committee that produced the report. “The number of people is more than diabetes, heart disease and cancer combined.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15581 - Posted: 07.19.2011

By SINDYA N. BHANOO Object agnosia is a rare disorder in which an individual cannot visually recognize objects. In the case of a patient known as SM, he mistook a harmonica for a cash register. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Princeton University studied SM’s brain and discovered that it was affected not only in the portion of the right hemisphere that had been damaged in a car accident, but also in his structurally intact left hemisphere. They performed functional M.R.I. brain scans on the patient and report their findings in the journal Neuron. The part of the brain where an image is processed, known as the lower visual cortex, was similar in SM and in normal test subjects. But in and around the area where SM had a lesion, he had decreased brain activity. “It’s not that his brain does not respond at all to visual input — it certainly does,” said Marlene Behrmann, a neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon and one of the study’s authors. Rather, the problem is that his brain is unable to uniquely assign that visual input to a known object, like a harmonica. But the most surprising finding was that there was also abnormal activity in the patient’s intact left hemisphere, in the same small area where the lesion was on the right side. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 15580 - Posted: 07.19.2011

By Linda Carroll Two new studies — one in veterans and the other in retired football players — add to the mounting evidence linking head injuries to an increased the risk of dementia Veterans who had been diagnosed with a brain injury, anything from a concussion to a severe head wound, were more than twice as likely to develop dementia compared to those with no injury to the brain, researchers reported today at the Alzheimer’s Association’ International Conference in Paris. The results were even more striking in a study of retired football players: 35 percent of the former National Football League players had signs of dementia, which compares to a 13 percent Alzheimer’s rate in the general population. For the veterans study, researchers reviewed the medical records of 281,540 military personnel age 55 and older who received care at Veterans Administration hospitals from 1997 to 2000 and who had at least one follow-up visit from 2001 to 2007. None of the veterans in the study were diagnosed with dementia at the beginning of the seven year study. Almost 5,000 of the veterans had been diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Their risk of developing dementia by the end of the study was 15.3 percent. That’s compared to 6.8 percent of those with no TBI diagnosis. The football player study is a follow-up of earlier research that included a survey of nearly 4,000 retired NFL players in 2001. In 2008, new surveys were sent to the 905 players who were over 50 years old. © 2011 msnbc.com.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15579 - Posted: 07.19.2011

By Ella Davies Reporter, BBC Nature Stick insects have lived for one million years without sex, genetic research has revealed. Scientists in Canada investigated the DNA of Timema stick insects, which live in shrubland around the west coast of the US. They traced the ancient lineages of two species to reveal the insects' lengthy history of asexual reproduction. The discovery could help researchers understand how life without sex is possible. Scientists from Simon Fraser University, Canada, published their results in the journal Current Biology. Certain species of Timema stick insects were known to reproduce asexually, with females producing young in "virgin births" without the need for egg fertilisation by males. The insects instead produce genetic clones of themselves. Dr Tanja Schwander and her team set out to test how old these species were, and therefore to find out how long they had reproduced in this way. By analysing the DNA of the insects, scientists were able to trace back their lineages to identify when they became a distinct species. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Evolution; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15578 - Posted: 07.19.2011

by David Robson Nearly 100 years of linguistics research has been based on the assumption that words are just collections of sounds - an agreed acoustic representation that has little to do with their actual meaning. There should be nothing in nonsense words such as "Humpty Dumpty" that would give away the character's egg-like figure, any more than someone with no knowledge of English could be expected to infer that the word "rose" represents a sweet-smelling flower. Yet a spate of recent studies challenge this idea. They suggest that we seem instinctively to link certain sounds with particular sensory perceptions. Some words really do evoke Humpty's "handsome" rotundity. Others might bring to mind a spiky appearance, a bitter taste, or a sense of swift movement. And when you know where to look, these patterns crop up surprisingly often, allowing a monoglot English speaker to understand more Swahili or Japanese than you might imagine (see "Which sounds bigger?" at the bottom of this article). These cross-sensory connections may even open a window onto the first words ever uttered by our ancestors, giving us a glimpse of the earliest language and how it emerged. More than 2000 years before Carroll suggested words might have some inherent meaning, Plato recorded a dialogue between two of Socrates's friends, Cratylus and Hermogenes. Hermogenes argued that language is arbitrary and the words people use are purely a matter of convention. Cratylus, like Humpty Dumpty, believed words inherently reflect their meaning - although he seems to have found his insights into language disillusioning: Aristotle says Cratylus eventually became so disenchanted that he gave up speaking entirely. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 15577 - Posted: 07.19.2011

By Karen Weintraub Out for a run six years ago, Molly Birnbaum was struck by a car. Recovering from surgeries to repair a broken pelvis and torn tendons, she realized the blow had also left her completely unable to smell. Then a recent college graduate and aspiring chef, Birnbaum said it was as if all the color drained out of life. Without the scent of roses, fresh bread, a spring rain, or even trash, she felt like she was living in a black and white world. Estimates are that 1-2 percent of Americans under 65 have a limited sense of smell; that percentage rises to as high as 50 percent of those over 65. And doctors are just beginning to realize how important smell is to our well-being and our perceptions of the world. “Your nose, sitting there in the middle of your face, is arguably the best chemical detector on the planet, but we usually fail to realize its importance until it goes missing due to illness or injury,’’ said Stuart Firestein, a scientist who studies the sense of smell, and the chairman of the biological sciences department at Columbia University. Research into the olfactory process has increased dramatically in recent years, with the first smell-related Nobel Prize awarded in 2004, to an American team; the discovery that smell plays a role in some brain disorders; and the hope that a better understanding of smell may offer insights into how the brain works. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 15576 - Posted: 07.19.2011

By Dave Mosher The brain is an exceedingly complex machine that harbors about 100 trillion neural connections. So it comes as no surprise that neuroscientists make great efforts to reduce or represent that complexity in their research with innovative imaging techniques. For all the time and creativity poured into publication-worthy imagery, however, most of it never leaves the pages of academic journals. Daniel Margulies of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and other neuroscientists thought it was time for a change. "We wanted to create a forum where neuroscientists could be credited for their innovations and engage in dialogue about the aesthetic possibilities of our fields," Margulies says. Along with several colleagues from The Neuro Bureau—an "open neuroscience" forum on the Web—he helped found the inaugural Brain-Art Competition this year. The event's aims were not simply focused on bragging rights and artistic merit. The organizers wanted to bring new imaging techniques and ideas to the fore and help colleagues think about brain research in new ways. "This whole thing started out as a joke in a bar. We knew of other neuroimaging data competitions in our respective fields, and we wondered, 'What could we do that would bring everyone to the table, even artists?'" Margulies says. The competition accepted 55 entries sprinkled across four categories: 3-D brain renderings, representations of the human "connectome" (the brain's connections), abstract illustrations and a humor category. Twenty judges then picked the best entry in each group. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Miscellaneous
Link ID: 15575 - Posted: 07.19.2011

by Rebecca Kessler Elephant seals are renowned for their rather brutish breeding system, in which one big, pumped-up male jealously defends a harem of females from would-be usurpers in thunderous, bloody battles. The so-called beachmaster wins exclusive mating rights to the comparatively tiny females in his domain, who can get roughed up or killed in his throes of passion. The system is often touted as a textbook example of polygyny in the animal kingdom, but a new study shows that reality is more complex. Female elephant seals often steer clear of the appointed beach during breeding season, sticking to the high seas where they mate on the sly. Southern elephant seals haul out on sub-Antarctic beaches only twice a year, once to molt and once to mate. During the spring breeding season, the males arrive early to stake out their territories. Females, returning to the beaches where they were born, show up a few weeks later and give birth. After the pups are weaned, the males mate with dozens or even hundreds of females in their domain, duking it out with any challengers. The females depart soon after, followed by the males. For the few beachmasters, the system's evolutionary advantage is clear: each one gets to mate with plenty of females. As for the females, researchers have presumed that the opportunity to mate with primo males keeps them returning faithfully to the breeding colony each year. But there was one little problem with the idea. When adult females make their breeding-colony debut, at age 3 or 4, they give birth to a pup—one obviously conceived outside the harem system. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 15574 - Posted: 07.19.2011

by Daniel Strain Even ants can't completely swear off sex. A new survey of a Latin American species famed for being one of the world's few asexual ants has uncovered a surprising find: secret nooky. And that could explain why the insect has managed to survive for so long. The species in question, Mycocepurus smithii, is a fungus-harvesting ant that, like a farmer, sows fungi for food. Researchers didn't suspect anything unusual about it until a 2005 study reported that colonies of M. smithii in Puerto Rico seemed to be missing something important: males. Two 2009 studies discovered similar societies made up entirely of female workers and one or more queens. These matriarchs were reproductively mature, but their spermatheca, chambers that store sperm postmating, remained bone dry, says Christian Rabeling, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University and a co-author of one of the 2009 studies. "When I did the first dissections, ... I suspected that I made a mistake," he says. Rabeling's surprise was understandable. With males a no-show, queens would have to reproduce asexually, somehow turning eggs into larvae without fertilization from sperm. Of the more than 10,000 known species of ants, researchers have identified only a handful that could boast similar skills. And most of those seemed to mix sexual and asexual reproduction. Celibate animal species are rare for a reason, Rabeling says. Because asexual populations can't mix and match genes through mating, they often lack the genetic diversity to respond to unexpected challenges like disease. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 15573 - Posted: 07.19.2011

by Sarah C.P. Williams Lab mice usually take only an occasional jaunt on their exercise wheels. But mice missing a gene called IL-15Rα run for hours each night, a new study reveals. And the gene doesn't just make a difference to mice—it might also be linked to the ability of long-distance athletes to outperform the rest of us. Previous studies had suggested that IL-15Rα is important for muscle strength. In experiments on cells grown in a Petri dish, the gene seemed to control the accumulation of proteins necessary for muscle contraction. But IL-15Rα had never been studied in a living animal. In the new research, physiologist Tejvir Khurana of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues genetically engineered mice to lack the IL-15Rα gene. The changes were dramatic. Each night, according to sensors on the wheels in the mice's cages, the modified mice ran six times farther than normal mice. But these behavioral quirks weren't quite enough to convince Khurana of the effect on muscles. Lack of the IL-15Rα gene could just be making the mice jittery or giving them extra energy. So the researchers dissected muscles from the longer-running mice. The muscles sported increased numbers of energy-generating mitochondria and more muscle fibers, indicating that they tired less easily. And when the researchers stimulated them with electricity, the muscles continued to contract for longer than normal, taking longer to use up their energy stores, the team reports today in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Muscles
Link ID: 15572 - Posted: 07.19.2011

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA Irvina Booker makes a most unlikely criminal. She lives in constant pain, disabled by multiple sclerosis and arthritis, a grandmother whose limited mobility depends on her walker, her daughter and marijuana. “I never smoked it before I got sick, and I don’t smoke it for fun,” said Ms. Booker, 59, who lives in Englewood, N.J. She would not divulge how she obtains her marijuana, but said, “I don’t want to be sneaking around, afraid someone is going to get arrested getting it for me.” Like many people who contend that marijuana eases pain and appetite loss from serious diseases, Ms. Booker cheered in January 2010, when New Jersey legalized its use in cases like hers. But a year and a half later, there is still no state-sanctioned marijuana available for patients, and none being grown, and there is no sign of when there might be. In the last few months, officials in New Jersey, as well as several other states, have said that mixed signals from the Obama administration have left them unsure whether their medical marijuana programs could draw federal prosecution of the people involved, including state employees. A Justice Department memorandum issued late last month left unanswered questions, and Gov. Chris Christie has not said how he will proceed. But medical marijuana advocates say that in New Jersey, at least, the state law is stringent enough not to run afoul of federal policy, and that the governor’s true goal has been to block the program. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15571 - Posted: 07.18.2011

By Julie Steenhuysen PARIS — For many years, an autopsy done by a pathologist was considered the best way to confirm the presence of Alzheimer's disease. But new guidelines proposed on Sunday by the U.S. National Institute on Aging and the Alzheimer's Association seek to distinguish between memory changes or dementia diagnosed by doctors when people are alive, and the changes pathologists can see in an autopsy. The proposed guidelines will offer additional information about the disease that will help as scientists develop tests that measure biological changes in the brain, blood or spinal fluid to diagnose Alzheimer's at an earlier stage. Several companies, including Eli Lilly and Co, Bayer and General Electric Co, are working on compounds to identify Alzheimer's-related brain changes on positron emission tomography scans. Many other companies and researchers are working on other types of biomarkers as well. "Someday biomarkers are probably going to replace pathology," Dr. Creighton Phelps of the National Institute on Aging's division of neuroscience, said in an interview at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Paris. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15570 - Posted: 07.18.2011

By Jane Hughes Health correspondent, BBC News Many dementia patients being prescribed "chemical cosh" antipsychotic drugs could be better treated with simple painkillers, research says. The British and Norwegian study, published on the BMJ website, found painkillers significantly cut agitation in dementia patients. Agitation, a common dementia symptom, is often treated with antipsychotic drugs, which have risky side effects. The Alzheimer's Society wants doctors to consider other types of treatment. Experts say that each year about 150,000 patients in the UK are unnecessarily prescribed antipsychotics, which have a powerful sedative effect, and can worsen dementia symptoms, and increase the risk of stroke or even death. They are often given to patients whose dementia makes them aggressive or agitated. But researchers from Kings College, London, and Norway speculated that the behaviour may sometimes be caused by pain, which patients were unable to express in other ways. They studied 352 patients with moderate or severe dementia in nursing homes in Norway. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Alzheimers; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15569 - Posted: 07.18.2011

By Katherine Harmon As we age, all sorts of things may start to break down. Joints ache, or vision fails, and or maybe cognitive abilities falter. The leading known risk for getting Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia is simply getting older, followed, some studies suggest, by major illnesses, such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke. But new research suggests that many of the littler aches, pains or minor disabilities that often pile on with age are linked to increased risk for Alzheimer's and dementia. The new study compared data from 7,239 Canadian adults 65 or older who were dementia-free. After five and 10 years, those in the study were asked about cognitive clarity and asked to report on 19 different health and wellbeing factors (including hearing, foot problems and how well their dentures fit). After the full decade, of the 4,324 people who were still alive, 416 had Alzheimer's disease, 191 had another sort of dementia and 677 had other cognitive problems (1,023 were of uncertain cognitive ability). The findings were described online July 13 in Neurology. Each individual health complaint increased the risk of having dementia by an average of about 3 percent. But as issues accumulated, one's risk for cognitive decline grew, too. A healthy older adult had about an 18 percent chance of having dementia after 10 years, whereas those who reported poor health on a dozen of the health and wellbeing measures had, on average, closer to a 40 percent chance. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15568 - Posted: 07.18.2011

David Gems The 20th century brought both profound suffering and profound relief to people around the world. On the one hand, it produced political lunacy, war and mass murder on an unprecedented scale. But there were also extraordinary gains—not least in public health, medicine and food production. In the developed world, we no longer live in constant fear of infectious disease. Furthermore, a Malthusian catastrophe of global population growth exceeding food production—a terrifying prospect predicted first in the 18th century—did not materialize. This is largely due to a steep decline in birth rates, for which we can thank the education, emancipation and rationality of women. Most people in the developed world can now expect to live long lives. Yet, as too often happens, the solution of one problem spawns others. Because we are having fewer children and living longer, the developed world is now filling up with old people. In Japan, for example, where the population is aging particularly quickly, the ratio of people less than 20 years old to those over 65 is plummeting, from 9.3 in 1950 to a predicted 0.59 in 2025. In Europe and the United States, we see ever more bald and grey heads on streets and in parks and shopping malls. Although this is something to celebrate, old age unfortunately has myriad ways of making us ill. It brings cardiovascular disease that leads to heart attacks and strokes; neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s that erode the self; and macular degeneration, which blinds. And, of course, there is cancer. Aging has been described as the greatest of all carcinogens. Like the pandemic of obesity, the increasing number of people living long enough to experience these illnesses is, in some ways, a side effect of progress. Now we face this challenging question: Should we attack the underlying cause of this suffering? Should we try to “cure” aging? © Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15567 - Posted: 07.18.2011

Ian Tucker Tanya L Chartrand is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business in North Carolina. With David T Neal from the University of Southern California she recently published a paper entitled "Embodied Emotion Perception: Amplifying and Dampening Facial Feedback Modulates Emotional Perception Accuracy", which found that using Botox – a neurotoxin injected into muscles to reduce frown lines – reduces a person's ability to empathise with others. It wouldn't surprise people to hear that it's difficult to tell what the Botoxed are feeling, but your study found that the Botoxed have little idea what we are feeling? Yes, we always assume that you can't tell what the Botoxed people are feeling because their faces are somewhat paralyzed and can appear frozen, but what is less intuitive is that being injected with Botox impairs their ability to understand what other people around you are feeling. To demonstrate this you asked women to look at photographs of people's eyes and match them to human emotions… Yes, it's called the "Reading the mind in the eyes test", and it's sometimes given to people on the autism spectrum. The people who had a Botox treatment in the previous two weeks were not as accurate as our control group, who had been treated with Restylane – a skin filler – whose results were similar to untreated adults. Why did you choose a control group who had used filler, rather than a random group? We wanted to match the two groups on everything we could except that one had the paralysing agent and the other hadn't. The Restylane group are demographically similar to the Botox group – in terms of age and gender, socio-economic status, and had the same concerns with looking good. So if we got a random group of people who would never have one of these cosmetic procedures then they could differ in a lot of other ways. This way we made sure that we were just isolating the fact that Botox is the cause. © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 15566 - Posted: 07.18.2011

By Laura Sanders Peer out the window of a plane landing at LaGuardia Airport, and the tiny people scurrying around the streets of New York City all look the same. But take a stroll down Fifth Avenue and a new view emerges: Up close, New Yorkers are very different. A street view of the brain also reveals a new perspective: No two cells are the same. Zoom in, and the brain’s wrinkly, pinkish-gray exterior becomes a motley collection of billions of cells, each with personalized quirks and idiosyncrasies. Powerful new techniques are giving researchers a glimpse of this staggering diversity — especially among nerve cells, the brain’s information brokers. Even nerve cells presumed to do the same job come in a range of shapes and sizes and display a host of behaviors, sending their electrical messages in unpredictable ways, new studies reveal. The closer scientists scrutinize nerve cells, called neurons, the more differences turn up. This cellular menagerie has left researchers puzzling over how best to categorize what neuroscientist Rafael Yuste of Columbia University calls these “living creatures.” So far, systematic methods are lacking. “Even after 100 years of research, we have no clue how many classes of neurons there are,” says Yuste, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher. He and other scientists are developing new algorithms to automate neuron classification, in the hope of someday compiling a standard “parts list” of the brain. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15565 - Posted: 07.16.2011

By Laura Sanders When a woman born without limbs watches someone else sew, copycat regions in her brain activate even though she can’t hold a needle herself. Additional brain regions also lend support, demonstrating how flexible the brain is when it comes to observing and understanding the actions of others. Scientists have known for over a decade about the mirror system, a network of brain regions usually activated by watching and performing an action. But just how the brain smoothly and quickly intuits what other people are doing, particularly when the action isn’t something the observer can do, has been unclear, says study coauthor Lisa Aziz-Zadeh of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. In the study, a middle-aged, healthy woman born with no arms and legs underwent brain scans as she watched videos of people performing actions such as holding and eating an apple slice, sewing with a needle and tapping a finger. Actions that the woman was capable of performing herself activated the mirror system, including parts of the brain that control movement. Mirror areas kicked in even for tasks the woman accomplishes in a different way, such as picking up food using her mouth instead of hands. (The participant had prosthetics briefly as a teenager but hadn’t used them in the past 40 years.) When the woman witnessed actions that were impossible for her, such as using scissors, her brain’s mirror system still kicked in, but additional brain regions were recruited to help. These extra regions aren’t normally needed when people watch a task they’re able to perform, the researchers write in an upcoming Cerebral Cortex. These regions are thought to be involved in a process called “mentalizing,” in which a person tries to understand what someone else is thinking. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 15564 - Posted: 07.16.2011

by Nic Fleming At high altitude, even the fittest mountaineer's ability to move freely can vanish in the thin air. But it's not the fault of your muscles. In fact, this drop-off in athletic performance in low-oxygen conditions may be mostly in the mind: the brain kicks in to prevent potentially damaging overexertion. The cause of muscle fatigue has been the subject of much debate. Some researchers emphasise the importance of physical changes such as lactic acid build-up, while others back a "central governor" theory whereby fatigue is a sensation generated by the brain. Emma Ross of the University of Brighton, UK, and colleagues asked 11 men to carry out knee extensor muscle exercises while breathing normal air – which has 21 per cent oxygen – as well as mixes with 16 per cent, 13 per cent and 10 per cent oxygen to represent mild, moderate and severe hypoxia. As the oxygen levels fell, so did the forces the participants could generate voluntarily. To assess the role of the brain in muscle fatigue, the team repeated the experiment using non-invasive brain stimulation to artificially generate motor cortex signals, overriding voluntary control and triggering knee muscle contraction. Measuring the difference between the forces participants could generate voluntarily and those created by the brain stimulation helped Ross and colleagues establish that the brain contributes 18 per cent to muscle fatigue with normal oxygen, 25 per cent for mild to moderate hypoxia and 54 per cent for severe hypoxia (Journal of Applied Physiology, DOI: 10.1152/japplphysiol.00458.2010). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Muscles
Link ID: 15563 - Posted: 07.16.2011

By Larry Greenemeier Internet,memory,trivia TOTAL RECALL?: The advent of the Internet and near-ubiquitous information at our fingertips makes it less critical for us to commit items to memory. Using the Internet as a mental crutch is not necessarily a bad thing, according to researchers. Image: IMAGE COURTESY OF ALEX HINDS, VIA ISTOCKPHOTO.COM Has the Internet dumbed down society or simply become an external storage unit that enhances the human brain's memory capacity? With Google, Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia at our beck and call via smart phones, tablets and laptops, the once essential function of committing facts to memory has become little more than a flashback to flash cards. This shift is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it irreversible, according to a team of researchers whose study on search engines and learning appears in the July 15 issue of Science. Led by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow, the researchers conducted a series of experiments whose results suggest that when people are faced with difficult questions, they are likely to think that the Internet will help them find the answers. In fact, those who expect to able to search for answers to difficult questions online are less likely to commit the information to memory. People tend to memorize answers if they believe that it is the only way they will have access to that information in the future. Regardless of whether they remember the facts, however, people tend to recall the Web sites that hold the answers they seek. In this way, the Internet has become a primary form of external or "transactive" memory (a term coined by Sparrow's one-time academic advisor, social psychologist Daniel Wegner), where information is stored collectively outside the brain. This is not so different from the pre-Internet past, when people relied on books, libraries and one another—such as using a "lifeline" on the game show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?—for information. Now, however, besides oral and printed sources of information, a lion's share of our collective and institutional knowledge bases reside online and in data storage. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15562 - Posted: 07.16.2011