By Devin Powell SEATTLE — About a year and a half after her stroke, a 36-year-old professor started to feel sounds. A radio announcer’s voice made her tingle. Background noise in a plane felt physically uncomfortable. Now Tony Ro, a neuroscientist at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, might have figured out the cause of this synesthesia. Sophisticated imaging of the woman’s brain revealed that new links had grown between its auditory part, which processes sound, and the somatosensory region, which handles touch. “The auditory area of her brain started taking over the somatosensory area,” says Ro, who used diffusion tensor imaging, which focuses on the brain’s white matter connections, to spot the change. This connection between sound and touch may run deep in the rest of us as well, Ro and colleagues said during presentations May 25 at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Both hearing and touch, the scientists pointed out, rely on nerves set atwitter by vibration. A cell phone set to vibrate can be sensed by the skin of the hand, and the phone’s ring tone generates sound waves — vibrations of air — that move the eardrum. Elizabeth Courtenay Wilson, a neuroscientist who did not attend the Seattle meeting, has also seen strong connections between areas of the brain that process hearing and touch. “We’re suggesting that the ear evolved out of the skin in order to do more finely tuned frequency analysis,” adds Wilson, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Hearing; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15373 - Posted: 05.28.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, video producer In this video, Harry Potter can appear to pass through Dobby the elf, but it's not magic. The illusion, created by Arthur Shapiro and Gideon Caplovitz from the American University in Washington DC, is an example of the different ways our brain can link separate objects in a scene. When watching the video above, focus on the spot where Harry and Dobby meet during the collision. What do you see? The two figures should appear to bounce off each other and return their separate ways. Now take a look at the scene again, this time while looking at something just above the video but keeping the characters in your peripheral vision. This time, Harry and Dobby should appear to pass through each other, even though they are actually bouncing. We experience this phenomenon because our brain processes different features of a scene in parallel. Colour and motion, for example, are analysed separately, even though a moving coloured object would be perceived as a whole. In this case, it shows that features can bind to moving objects in different ways. Shapiro writes: The apparent transfer of features contradicts what would be expected from theories that propose that perception is guided by intelligent inferences about how objects behave in the world © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 15372 - Posted: 05.28.2011

By Laura Helmuth 1. We use only 10 percent of our brains. This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during fetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception, movement or emotion. True, we have some brain reserves. Autopsy studies show that many people have physical signs of Alzheimer’s disease (such as amyloid plaques among neurons) in their brains even though they were not impaired. Apparently we can lose some brain tissue and still function pretty well. And people score higher on IQ tests if they’re highly motivated, suggesting that we don’t always exercise our minds at 100 percent capacity. 2. “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed and persistent. We all have memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a snapshot, usually of some shocking, dramatic event—the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks of September 11, 2001. People remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they saw or heard. But several clever experiments have tested people’s memory immediately after a tragedy and again several months or years later. The test subjects tend to be confident that their memories are accurate and say the flashbulb memories are more vivid than other memories. Vivid they may be, but the memories decay over time just as other memories do. People forget important details and add incorrect ones, with no awareness that they’re recreating a muddled scene in their minds rather than calling up a perfect, photographic reproduction.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 15371 - Posted: 05.28.2011

By Laura Sanders Though autism and related disorders vary widely from person to person, certain brain changes may be at the root of the disorder. Changes in genes important for brain-cell development and function contribute to the poorly understood disorder, a study published online May 25 in Nature shows. Finding genetic contributors to the multifaceted disease might help scientists design better ways to treat it. “For us to be able to develop specific therapies that treat the cause, you have to understand the genetics,” says pediatrician and autism researcher Hakon Hakonarson of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. In the study, a team led by Daniel Geschwind of UCLA analyzed post-mortem tissue from the brains of 19 people with autism and 17 without. Patterns of gene activity differed in the two types of brains, as measured by levels of RNA molecules, which shuttle information from DNA to the protein factories in cells. In the healthy brains, hundreds of genes behaved differently depending whether they were found in the frontal or the temporal region of the brain. But in the autistic brains, only a handful of genes acted differently in the two areas. This lack of distinction may be set on course very early in a child’s life, Geschwind says. Many of the genes identified by the research are important for brain development and behavior. What’s more, the changes in the autism spectrum disorder brains were very similar to each other. “It looks like there’s a common pathology in autism, which is a surprising thing,” Geschwind says. “In spite of having many different causes, there’s some shared convergence.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 15370 - Posted: 05.26.2011

by Jim Giles YOU are playing a video game, and your avatar is creeping into a haunted house at the dead of night. Suddenly, you freeze in your chair. Something is crawling up your back... Whether this idea appeals or not, researchers at Disney have made such sensations possible by inventing a system that fools players into thinking that objects are moving against their skin. Their brainchild, known as Tactile Brush, creates the illusion of being touched by anything from falling rain to crawling insects. One of the illusions the team employs is called apparent tactile motion. If two vibrating objects are placed close together on skin in quick succession, people often experience this as a single vibration moving between the two points of contact. In a related illusion, known as a phantom tactile sensation, a pair of stationary vibrations is sensed as a single stimulus placed in between the two. Apparent motion has been around since the early 1900s and phantom sensation since 1957, but this is the first time anyone has used them to provide precise tactile feedback. Ali Israr and Ivan Poupyrev at Disney Research Pittsburgh studied these illusions with the help of volunteers who sat in a chair backed by a grid of 12 vibrating coils. By operating the coils in different sequences and at different intensities, they worked out how to induce the sensations of apparent motion and also persuade the volunteers that they were feeling extra coils that didn't exist, which creates a more realistic effect. Israr and Poupyrev incorporated these two illusions into software that controlled the coils, which convinced the person sitting in the chair that shapes were moving across their back. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15369 - Posted: 05.26.2011

By Emily Chung, CBC News Blind people who navigate using clicks and echoes, like bats and dolphins do, recruit the part of the brain used by sighted people to see, a new study has found. While few blind people use echolocation — emitting a sound and then listening for the echo to get information about objects in the surroundings — some that do are so good at it that they can use the ability to hike, mountain bike and play basketball, said Melvyn Goodale, one of the co-authors of the study published Wednesday in PloS One. Daniel Kish, 43, went blind at the age of 13 months from retinoblastoma, the same eye cancer that affected the late Canadian musician Jeff Healey. Melvyn Goodale says Kish can't remember a time when he didn't echolocate, and seems to have taught himself at a very young age. "His parents say that when he was about 18 months old, they noticed he was making these clicking noises." Kish is now president of World Access for the Blind, a non-profit group based in Encino, Calif., that teaches echolocation or Flash Sonar, mobility and life skills to blind youth and adults. He has taught echolocation in many countries around the world, including Canada, the U.K., and India. Goodale, a psychology professor and the director of the Centre for Brain and Mind at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., said he was amazed by the abilities of the two blind men in the study. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Hearing; Vision
Link ID: 15368 - Posted: 05.26.2011

A man walks into a bar, catches a girl's eye, and immediately looks gloomy, moody and averts his eyes. The woman is overcome with sexual attraction. Not your usual love story but maybe a more realistic one. Turns out, a winning smile isn't the way to a woman's heart; men who swagger and look gloomy are more likely to set pulses raising. That's according to Jessica Tracy at the University of British Columbia, Canada, who asked more than 1000 adults to rate the sexual attractiveness of hundreds of photos of the opposite sex. The images showed men and women in various displays of happiness, with big smiles and puffed out chests or shameful glances, lowered heads and averted eyes. In an interview with UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, co-author Alec Beall, also at British Columbia said: "We did not ask participants if they thought these targets would make a good boyfriend or wife - we wanted their gut reactions on carnal, sexual attraction." The study found that women were not attracted to smiling, happy men, preferring those who looked proud and powerful or moody and ashamed. In an interview with Reuters, Tracy said: "To the extent that men think that smiling is a good thing to do if they want to be found sexually attractive our findings suggest that's not the case." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 15367 - Posted: 05.26.2011

By Rachael Rettner In a finding that won't surprise many mothers, a new study says breast-feeding may help secure the bond between mother and child. But the study also offers one explanation how: through a change in the mother's brain. The brains of breast-feeding mothers show a greater response to the sound of their babies' cries than do the brains of mothers who do not breast-feed, the study researchers say. This boost in brain activity is seen in brain regions associated with mothering behaviors. The finding adds to a growing list of the benefits of breast-feeding. Breast milk is considered the best source of nutrition for babies, and breast-feeding has been linked with better test scores and better health for the child later in life. The results suggest this brain activity facilitates greater sensitivity from the mother toward her infant as the baby begins to socially interact with the world, the researchers say. The study may help people to "recognize that it's important to support mothers who do want to breast-feed," said study researcher Pilyoung Kim, of the National Institute of Mental Health. © 2011 msnbc.com

Keyword: Attention; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15366 - Posted: 05.26.2011

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS Why, as we grow older, do we forget where we parked the car, and could exercise sharpen our recall? Those questions, of considerable interest to any of us who possess a brain as well as those with cars, is motivating a series of remarkable new experiments by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine, during which young and older volunteers watch pictures flash onto a screen, while the scientists watch their brains. Creating and accessing memories are complicated processes, with the specific physiological mechanisms still largely unknown. But, using brain scans, neuroscientists already have established that quite a bit of the electrical activity and blood flow associated with memory processing occurs in the dentate gyrus, a part of the brain within the hippocampus, a larger portion of the brain known to be involved with learning and thinking. So for their latest study, published this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers used advanced magnetic resonance imaging machines to scan the dentate gyrus and other areas within the brains of people at the very moment that they were in the process of trying to create and store certain new memories. Specifically, the volunteers, wearing head sensors, were shown a series of pictures of everyday objects, like computers, telephones, pineapples, pianos and tractors, and asked to press a button indicating whether each object typically was found indoors or outside. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Alzheimers
Link ID: 15365 - Posted: 05.26.2011

By SUSAN DOMINUS It was bedtime for Krista and Tatiana Hogan, and the 4-year-old twin girls were doing what 4-year-olds everywhere do at bedtime. They were stalling, angling for more time awake. Their grandmother, Louise McKay, who lives with the girls and their parents in Vernon, a small city in British Columbia, was speaking to them in soothing tones, but the girls resorted to sleep-deferring classics of the toddler repertory. “I want one more hug!” Krista said to their grandmother, and then a few minutes later, they both called out to her, in unison, “I miss you!” But in the dim light of their room, a night light casting faint, glowing stars and a moon on the ceiling, the girls also showed bedtime behavior that seemed distinctly theirs. The twins, who sleep in one specially built, oversize crib, lay on their stomachs, their bottoms in the air, looking at an open picture book on the mattress. Slowly and silently, in one synchronized movement, they pushed it under a blanket, then pulled it out again, then back under, over and over, seeming to mesmerize each other with the rhythm. Suddenly the girls sat up again, with renewed energy, and Krista reached for a cup with a straw in the corner of the crib. “I am drinking really, really, really, really fast,” she announced and started to power-slurp her juice, her face screwed up with the effort. Tatiana was, as always, sitting beside her but not looking at her, and suddenly her eyes went wide. She put her hand right below her sternum, and then she uttered one small word that suggested a world of possibility: “Whoa!” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 15364 - Posted: 05.26.2011

by Greg Miller Any would-be cure for Alzheimer’s disease or other brain disorder faces a daunting obstacle: the blood-brain barrier. This nearly impenetrable lining in the capillaries of the brain keeps out viruses and other bad guys, but it also denies entry to many potential drugs and other treatments. Now researchers have devised a way to trick one of the gatekeepers in this cellular defense system into escorting a potentially beneficial antibody into the brain. They report that their method can reduce levels of amyloid-β, the prime suspect in Alzheimer’s disease, by up to 50% in the brains of mice. The new strategy targets an enzyme that helps produce amyloid-β. Efforts to inhibit this enzyme, called β-secretase 1 (BACE1), with small molecule drugs have met with limited success so far, says Ryan Watts, a neurobiologist at the biotech company Genentech in South San Francisco, California, and one of the leaders of the new research. That’s partly because these drugs also interfere with other enzymes and cause side effects. A better strategy, Watts and colleagues reasoned, might be to target BACE1 with antibodies, immune system sharpshooters that can be designed to attack very specific molecular targets. There’s a big problem with that idea, though: antibodies are too big to cross the blood-brain barrier. To overcome that obstacle, the Genentech team tried a strategy first demonstrated about 20 years ago. It took advantage of the brain’s own mechanism for getting a necessary nutrient, iron, across the lining of endothelial cells that form the blood-brain barrier. Iron in the bloodstream is bound to a bulky molecule called transferrin. The endothelial cells have a receptor for transferrin that acts like a gatekeeper: When transferrin binds to a receptor on the blood side of the barrier, the endothelial cell transports it (and its iron cargo) to the other side and spits it out into the brain. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15363 - Posted: 05.26.2011

By Jason Castro With age and enough experience, we all become connoisseurs of a sort. After years of hearing a favorite song, you might notice a subtle effect that’s lost on greener ears. Perhaps you’re a keen judge of character after a long stint working in sales. Or maybe you’re one of the supremely practiced few who tastes his money’s worth in a wine. Whatever your hard-learned skill is, your ability to hear, see, feel, or taste with more nuance than a less practiced friend is written in your brain. But where, and how, exactly? What are the biological pen strokes that spell perceptual expertise? One classical line of work has tackled these questions by mapping out changes in brain organization following intense and prolonged sensory experience. In rough overview, many of these studies support a model of learning that might be in line with your intuition. Namely, the parts of the brain allotted for discrete sensory skills - hearing the note middle C, feeling a piano key on your thumb tip - expand when those skills are repeatedly called upon. Or, shamelessly dispensing with the biological details: practice makes bigger, and bigger means better. But don’t adopt that slogan quite yet. In a recent study from the University of Texas at Dallas, Dr. Michael Kilgard’s lab questions the tidy relationship between altered size and enhanced skill. Studying the auditory cortex of rats, they found that the expansion of a ‘skill-specific’ brain area with training is only short lived, even when changes in ability are long lasting. Instead of working like a muscle, where training adds size and size begets prowess, learning seems to involve some heavy duty trimming as well. In fact, if Kilgard’s theory of learning holds up, both the biology of learning and our experience of it share a common principle: skill must be culled from a string of mistakes. Lots of them. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15362 - Posted: 05.26.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey NEW ORLEANS — Brain cells may be the latest victim of a bacterial bad guy already charged with causing ulcers and stomach cancer. Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that lives in the stomachs of about half the people in the world, may help trigger Parkinson’s disease, researchers reported May 22 at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. Parkinson’s disease is a neurological disorder that kills dopamine-producing cells in some parts of the brain. People with the disease have trouble controlling their movements. About 60,000 new cases of the disease are diagnosed each year in the United States. Some previous studies have suggested that people with Parkinson’s disease are more likely than healthy people to have had ulcers at some point in their lives and are more likely to be infected with H. pylori. But until now those connections between the bacterium and the disease have amounted to circumstantial evidence. Now researchers are gathering evidence that may pin at least some blame for Parkinson’s disease on the notorious bacterium. Middle-aged mice infected with the ulcer-causing bacterium developed abnormal movement patterns over several months of infection, said Traci Testerman, a microbiologist at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport. Young mice infected with the bacterium didn’t show any signs of movement problems. Testerman’s colleague, neuroscientist Michael Salvatore, found that Helicobacter-infected mice make less dopamine in parts of the brain that control movement, possibly indicating that dopamine-making cells are dying just as they do in Parkinson’s disease patients. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 15361 - Posted: 05.24.2011

By Rachel Ehrenberg Chemists have synthesized in the lab a pain-relieving extract from the bark of a tropical shrub, paving the way for new drugs that lack the unwanted side effects of many opiate-based pain meds. There were hints that the compound, called conolidine, might be an effective pain medication, but studying the stuff has been tough. Isolating conolidine from the bark of the crepe jasmine plant returns pathetically meager yields, and the compound’s particular ringed structure has made lab synthesis difficult. Now researchers have overcome those difficulties and constructed conolidine in the lab from a cheap and readily available chemical building block. The molecular Tinkertoy-like construction is accomplished in just nine steps and yields large quantities of the compound, researchers report online May 23 in Nature Chemistry. Extracts from crepe jasmine, Tabernaemontana divaricata, have long been used in traditional medicine, but how this particular compound alleviates pain remains a puzzle. Despite its name, the plant isn’t closely related to scented jasmine. Instead it comes from a plant family rich in alkaloids, compounds that are often poisonous but have been commandeered as medicine for treating malaria, cancer and other maladies. Various tests designed to elucidate where and how conolidine does its stuff in mice suggest that the compound doesn’t hit the same cellular machinery as the classic pain-relieving alkaloids codeine and morphine. Yet conolidine does lessen both acute pain and pain from inflammation, the team from Scripps Research Institute’s campus in Jupiter, Fla., reports. The compound might be hitting one unknown cellular target or perhaps several, says organic chemist Glenn Micalizio, a coauthor of the new work. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15360 - Posted: 05.24.2011

By Jesse Bering It may seem to you that, much like their barnyard animal namesake, men’s reproductive organs the world over participate in a mindless synchrony of stiffened salutes to the rising sun. In fact, however, such "morning wood" is an autonomic leftover from a series of nocturnal penile tumescence (NPT) episodes that occur like clockwork during the night for all healthy human males—most frequently in the dream-filled rapid eye movement (REM) periods of sleep from which we’re so often rudely awakened in the A.M. by buzzers, mothers, or others. For those with penises, you may be surprised to learn how frequently your member stands up while the rest of your body is rendered catatonic by the muscular paralysis that keeps you from acting out your dreams. (And thank goodness for that. Carlos Schenck and his colleagues [pdf] from the University of Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center describe the case of a 19-year-old with sleep-related dissociative disorder crawling around his house on all fours, growling, and chewing on a piece of bacon—he was ‘dreaming’ of being a jungle cat and pouncing on a slab of raw meat held by a female zookeeper.) Scientists have determined that the average 13- to 79-year-old penis is erect for about 90 minutes each night, or 20 percent of overall sleep time. With your brain cycling between the four sleep stages, your "sleep-related erections" appear at 85-minute intervals lasting, on average, 25 minutes. (It’s true; they used a stopwatch.) I didn’t come upon any evolutionary theories or a proposed "adaptive function" of NPT, but we do know that it’s not related to daytime sexual activity, it declines (no pun intended) with age, and it’s correlated positively with testosterone levels. Females similarly exhibit vaginal lubrication during their REM-sleep, presumably with many dreaming of erect penises. Now, you may not think that such tedious biological details would be fodder for a moral quandary, but you underestimate our species’ massive confusion when it comes to understanding how its coveted free will articulates with its genitalia. © 2011 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 15359 - Posted: 05.24.2011

By Larry Greenemeier Nanoparticles have been investigated in recent years as tools for defending the brain against neurotoxic proteins that may contribute to the onset of several different neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease. Such proteins, in particular amyloid-beta peptides, are thought to play a role depositing fibrous plaques on the brain that damage synapses (the contact points between neurons) and lead to a decline in cognitive capabilities. During the onset of Alzheimer's, amyloid beta collects in the brain centers that form new memories. As the disease progresses, these toxic protein fragments block neurotransmitters from reaching receptors on neurons. The promise of nanoparticles is that their capacity to mimic some biological functions as well as penetrate the blood–brain barrier will enable them to stop the growth of neuron-blocking fibrils better than drug compounds that might contain some variation of short peptides, antibodies or proteins—such as human serum albumin (HSA) protein. (There currently are no anti-Alzheimer's drugs on the market.) Whereas such compounds have been shown to interfere with fibril formation, researchers are hoping that inorganic nanoparticles can do so more effectively. Although the nanotech approach has great potential, the challenges are many, including finding a nanoparticle material that is effective yet also biocompatible and nontoxic. Another source of controversy: some nanoparticles that have been studied, including quantum dots and carbon nanotubes, seem to actually promote or accelerate fibrillation rather than prevent it. © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 15358 - Posted: 05.24.2011

Crossing your arms across your body after injury to the hand could relieve pain, researchers suggest. The University College London team, who undertook a proof-of-concept study of 20 people, say the brain gets confused over where pain has occurred. In the journal Pain, they suggest this is because putting hands on the "wrong" sides disrupts sensory perception. Pain experts say finding ways of confusing the brain is the focus of many studies. The team used a laser to generate a four millisecond pin-prick of pain to participants' hands, without touching them. Each person ranked the intensity of the pain they felt, and their electrical brain responses were also measured using electroencephalography (EEG). The results from both participants' reports and the EEG showed that the perception of pain was weaker when the arms were crossed over the "midline" - an imaginary line running vertically down the centre of the body. Dr Giandomenico Iannetti, from the UCL department of physiology, pharmacology and neuroscience, who led the research, said: "In everyday life you mostly use your left hand to touch things on the left side of the world, and your right hand for the right side of the world. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 15357 - Posted: 05.24.2011

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. No sooner had Dominique Strauss-Kahn been arrested on sexual assault charges in New York than a parade of psychiatrists stepped forward to offer their expert opinion in the news media. Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who subsequently resigned as chief of the International Monetary Fund, will experience “a terrible grief because he is in prison,” said one. Another offered that he would have “terrible mourning” for “the loss of social status, image and glory.” Of course, it’s only natural for the media to seek comment from experts. But as a psychiatrist, I cringe at statements like these, for they cross an ethical line that goes back to a presidential campaign nearly half a century ago. Just before the 1964 election, a muckraking magazine called Fact decided to survey members of the American Psychiatric Association for their professional assessment of Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican nominee against President Lyndon B. Johnson. Ralph Ginzburg, the magazine’s notoriously provocative publisher, had heavily advertised the issue in advance, saying it would call Mr. Goldwater’s character into question. A.P.A. members were asked whether they thought Mr. Goldwater was fit to be president and what their psychiatric impressions of him were. It was not American psychiatry’s finest hour. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 15356 - Posted: 05.24.2011

By SEAN B. CARROLL I am not a big fan of reality TV, but I will confess that I am a loyal viewer of the Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch” series. The show chronicles the adventures of the crews of several crabbing boats of the Alaskan fleet as they pursue red king crabs on the Bering Sea. What fascinates me, and I suspect other viewers, is the vicarious experience of watching the crews working for long stretches in unimaginable conditions. I know that this landlubber would not last an hour on any boat as it heaved in 30-foot seas, let alone while hauling 800-pound crab pots on an ice-covered deck, in 60-mile-an-hour winds, for 20 to 30 hours straight. That’s definitely not for me. My crab-catching is limited to plucking hermit crabs the size of golf balls off the sands of some quiet Florida beach in 80-degree weather. One might think that not only is there no comparison between my beachcombing and the dangerous business of Alaska crab fishing, but that the two kinds of crabs involved have very little in common. The typically diminutive hermit crabs have to contort their bodies into abandoned snail shells, while the four- to nine-pound red king crabs, the largest of the more than 100 species of king crabs, freely prowl the ocean bottom in search of worms, clams, mussels, starfish and other prey. Looking at those monsters of the deep, safely steamed on your plate at Red Lobster, one might think that such tasty beauties would be more closely related to other crabs on the menu, like stone crabs, than to the largely inedible hermit crabs. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15355 - Posted: 05.24.2011

by Sara Reardon The pianist's languid solo entwines itself with the smoke and the muffled laughter from the bar. Like a shadow, the musician's fingers glide effortlessly across the keys, and he has no sheet music in front of him. Has he memorized the piece, or is he making it up as he goes along? It’s almost impossible to tell, but if you're a jazz musician and can imagine yourself playing the music, your brain’s emotional centers might help you answer this question, a new study suggests. The ability to distinguish planned actions from spontaneous ones helps us judge whether a person is deliberately lying and might also help us value creativity. But it’s unclear how the brain makes these judgment calls, especially when it has little context to work with. To study how musicians judge spontaneity, psychologists Annerose Engel and Peter Keller of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, recorded six jazz pianists as each one played improvised jazz over a backing track. Then the researchers transcribed the pieces, handed out the sheet music, had the pianists practice until they could replicate their colleagues’ improv perfectly, and recorded their performances. A computer analysis of the recordings showed that each improvised piece was more erratic in its loudness and speed than its rehearsed counterpart. So a machine could tell the difference between the improvised solos and the rehearsed reproductions. But could another musician? When a second set of 22 jazz musicians listened to all the improvised and rehearsed pieces in a random order, they could correctly guess which was which only about 55% of the time—only slightly better than chance—the researchers report in Frontiers in Psychology this month. However, the guessers who rated themselves in a questionnaire as more “empathetic” were better at picking out the improvisations. Similar correlations held true of those who had played with bands, as opposed to playing only as soloists. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Hearing
Link ID: 15354 - Posted: 05.24.2011