by Michael Marshall Some animals have all the luck. Many of us would envy a life spent flitting around the northern Mediterranean coast, with ample tasty food all year round. And if that weren't enough, if any major problems crop up you can just go to sleep for a few months. This is how large white butterflies live, or at least those that have made their homes in southern Spain. Readers with a less congenial lifestyle should feel free to despise them, as they are major agricultural pests. But they are also remarkable, because they "sleep" not just to get through bad weather and food shortages, but to avoid swarming parasites. You might think that all that sleeping leaves little time for reproducing, but large whites make rabbits look like pandas. In a warm climate with plenty of food, nine generations can be born in a year: a single life cycle takes about four weeks. Twelve years ago, Hubert Spieth of Bielefeld University in Germany noticed something strange. Caterpillars in southern Spain that went into cocoons around the end of May did not come out again when expected. Instead, they remained dormant for three months, emerging only in September. This happened only in response to longer days. Many animals that become dormant – a phenomenon called hibernation when it happens in winter and aestivation in summer – do so to avoid cold or drought, both of which make food scarce. But in southern Spain there is plenty of food all summer, so the three-month nap meant the butterflies were missing out three generations of breeding for no apparent reason. Spieth and his student Ulrich Pörschmann think they may now have an explanation. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 14864 - Posted: 01.13.2011

NIH-funded researchers were able to eliminate tinnitus in a group of rats by stimulating a nerve in the neck while simultaneously playing a variety of sound tones over an extended period of time, says a study published today in the advance online publication of the journal Nature. The hallmark of tinnitus is often a persistent ringing in the ears that is annoying for some, debilitating for others, and currently incurable. Similar to pressing a reset button in the brain, this new therapy was found to help retrain the part of the brain that interprets sound so that errant neurons reverted back to their original state and the ringing disappeared. The research was conducted by scientists from the University of Texas at Dallas and MicroTransponder Inc., in Dallas. "Current treatments for tinnitus generally involve masking the sound or learning to ignore it," said James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), which funded a large part of the research. "If we can find a way to turn off the noise, we’ll be able to improve life substantially for the nearly 23 million American adults who suffer from this disorder." Tinnitus is a symptom some people experience as a result of hearing loss. When sensory cells in the inner ear are damaged, such as from loud noise, the resulting hearing loss changes some of the signals sent from the ear to the brain. For reasons that are not fully understood, some people will develop tinnitus as a result. "We believe the part of the brain that processes sounds — the auditory cortex — delegates too many neurons to some frequencies, and things begin to go awry," said Michael Kilgard, Ph.D., associate professor of behavior and brain sciences at UT-Dallas, and a co-principal investigator on the study. "Because there are too many neurons processing the same frequencies, they are firing much stronger than they should be."

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 14863 - Posted: 01.13.2011

By Susan Milius SALT LAKE CITY — As summer heats up, the sight of blooming thistles may give male goldfinches a testosterone kick. Thistle flowers could signal to American goldfinches that the seeds the songbirds prize for baby food and parent food will soon be abundant, proposes Thomas Luloff of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. And in lab setups, male goldfinches housed among blooming Canadian thistles underwent physiological changes that indicate the birds got the “breed now” message from the combination of summery heat and thrilling thistles, Luloff reported January 6 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. What particularly impressed George Bentley of the University of California, Berkeley was that the birds “don’t eat the flower — they eat the seeds,” he says. Yet the precursor to food still appeared to have an effect. Biologists still have much to learn about what tips off birds that it’s time to breed, says Bentley, who was not part of the research project. Yet, he says, the need to understand those cues is growing as climate change threatens to knock signals out of sync. Many birds lose what they don’t use during the winter, letting hormone concentrations dwindle and reproductive organs shrink. When the breeding season returns, both males and females typically have to recharge and regrow. Much of the earlier work on breeding signals has focused on the broad role of day length or temperature, yet birds can react to other cues too. Species differ in what cues or mixes of cues rev up their breeding biology again. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14862 - Posted: 01.13.2011

by Amber Angelle Researchers have long known that laughter boosts the immune system, lowers cholesterol and blood pressure, and reduces stress. In a preliminary new study, psychoneuro-immunologist Lee Berk and his team at Loma Linda University in California show that the parallels between laughing and exercise go even further: Shifts in appetite hormones following a case of the giggles resemble the effects of a moderate session at the gym. Berk measured blood levels of ghrelin, a hunger-regulating hormone, before and after 14 study participants watched 20 minutes of humorous TV (selected from a menu including Saturday Night Live, Bill Cosby’s stand-up, and Seinfeld). He then compared the data with hormone levels recorded before and after the test subjects watched the distressing opening battle scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Regardless of the order in which they saw the clips, people’s ghrelin concentrations spiked after the funny session, “just like after a workout,” Berk says. Elevated levels of ghrelin signal the brain that the body is using energy and will soon need more fuel. Laugh therapy will not replace exercise for weight loss, then, but it could help people with conditions that cause appetite loss, such as depression and chronic pain. Berk is now studying whether laughter can also reduce inflammation associated with many illnesses, including cancer and heart disease. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Emotions; Obesity
Link ID: 14861 - Posted: 01.13.2011

By Belinda Luscombe Contrary to popular opinion, people who say they are still madly in love with their spouses after more than two decades are not crazy. At least, some of them aren't. And in answer to your next question, apparently they're not lying either. This is the proposition of a new study published in the December issue of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience that took brain scans of long-married people who claimed to still be besotted with their marital partner. The prevailing theory on romantic love is that it more or less serves the same purpose as the booster rocket in expeditions into outer space. The initial tingly can't-think-about-anything-else swooning launches the couple into orbit, but falls away after the spacecraft reaches a certain altitude, to be replaced by "companionate love," a more regulated, less passionate affection that binds two people together, bolted together with shared history and interests. (More on TIME.com: 5 Reasons to Get or Stay Married This Year) Companionate love gets a bit of a bad rap in some corners, since it can feel to some a little too much like orbiting outer space: cold, airless and seemingly interminable. But there are couples who claim more than this, who claim to still be knee-bucklingly in love with their partners, for whom the orbit is not dreary, but a wonderful journey with their North Star. One of the theories on these individuals is that they're kidding themselves, or fronting. Another is that they're mentally unhealthy, or generally obsessive.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14860 - Posted: 01.13.2011

Amy Maxmen By watching countless hours of hermaphroditic worm sex, Lukas Schärer and his wife Dita Vizoso, evolutionary biologists at the University of Basel in Switzerland and their colleagues, have discovered evidence for a theory that has eluded testing for nearly a century: sex shapes sperm. Their findings, including videos of the mating worms, are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Sperm are the most diverse of animal cells, variously adorned with tails, hairs, hooks, bristles and more. "But we don't know what any of those doodads do," says Scott Pitnick, an evolutionary biologist at Syracuse University in New York. Fertilization is not easy to observe, and predictions about the function of sperm design are even harder to test, so it took a group of transparent and rather kinky flatworms to unravel a piece of the puzzle. The creatures are simultaneous hermaphrodites: each has both male and female genitalia. The worms are about the size of a comma, but readily mate under a microscope. The heterosexual world of animal reproduction is populated primarily by males eager to mate and females more concerned with finding a superior partner, but simultaneous hermaphrodites face antagonistic desires at the same time. Flatworm species in the genus Macrostomum solve the conflict by allowing eager sex to come first, and selectivity to follow. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14859 - Posted: 01.11.2011

By David Biello In the case of traumatic brain injury—such as the bullet wound sustained by U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Saturday's assault outside a Tucson supermarket that killed six people and wounded 13 others—doctors sometimes induce a coma. This effective shutdown of brain function naturally occurs only in cases of extreme trauma, so why would doctors seek to mimic it in patients, as they have with the congresswoman, already suffering from head wounds and other issues? The answer lies in the science behind general anesthesia, which some 60,000 patients undergo every day. A review paper in the December 30, 2010, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine reveals that such anesthesia is, essentially, a reversible coma. That is exactly what doctors are aiming for in the case of a true medically induced coma, often using the same drugs or extreme hypothermia induced by exposure to a cold environment to halt blood flow entirely and permit surgery on the aorta. Shutting down function can give the brain time to heal without the body performing radical triage by shutting off blood flow to damaged sections. To find out more about such medically induced comas and the reasons why doctors employ them, Scientific American spoke with anesthesiologist Emery Brown of Harvard Medical School, co-author of the NEJM review. What is a medically induced coma? So basically what happens with a medically induced coma is that you take a drug and administer it until you see a certain pattern in the monitor that follows the patient's brain waves, the EEG [electroencephalogram]. Patients with brain injuries who are in a coma have a similar pattern. If that pattern is there, then you feel comfortable that the patient is in a drug-induced coma. You are doing it so that you can hopefully protect the brain. © 2011 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14858 - Posted: 01.11.2011

by Michael Bond Mystics will tell you that meditation transforms the mind and soothes the soul. But what does science have to say? MANY people see meditation as an exotic form of daydreaming, or a quick fix for a stressed-out mind. My advice to them is, try it. It's difficult, at least to begin with. On my first attempt, instead of concentrating on my breathing and letting go of anything that came to mind as instructed by my cheery Tibetan teacher, I got distracted by a string of troubled thoughts and then fell asleep. Apparently this is normal for first-timers. Experienced meditators will assure you that it is worth persisting, however. "Training allows us to transform the mind, to overcome destructive emotions and to dispel suffering," says Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard. "The numerous and profound methods that Buddhism has developed over the centuries can be used and incorporated by anyone. What is needed is enthusiasm and perseverance." It all sounds very rewarding, but what does science have to say on the subject? Stories abound in the media about the transformative potential of meditative practice, but it is only in recent years that empirical evidence has emerged. In the past decade, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains of experienced meditators such as Ricard as well as beginners, and tested the effects of different meditative practices on cognition, behaviour, physical and emotional health and brain plasticity. A real scientific picture of meditation is now coming together. It suggests that meditation can indeed change aspects of your psychology, temperament and physical health in dramatic ways. The studies are even starting to throw light on how meditation works. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention; Stress
Link ID: 14857 - Posted: 01.11.2011

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. Fever is common, but fever is complicated. It brings up science and emotion, comfort and calculation. As a pediatrician, I know fever is a signal that the immune system is working well. And as a parent, I know there is something primal and frightening about a feverish child in the night. So those middle-of-the-night calls from worried parents, so frequent in every pediatric practice, can be less than straightforward. A recent paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association pointed out one reason, and a longstanding discussion about parental perceptions reminds us of the emotional context. The JAMA study looked at over-the-counter medications for children, including those marketed for treating pain and fever: how they are labeled, and whether the droppers and cups and marked spoons in the packages properly reflect the doses recommended on the labels. The article concluded that many medications are not labeled clearly, that some provide no dosing instrument, and that the instruments, if included, are not marked consistently. (A dosing chart might recommend 1.5 milliliters, but the dropper has no “1.5 ml” mark.) “Basically, the main message of the paper is that the instructions on the boxes and bottles of over-the-counter medications are really confusing,” said the lead author, Dr. H. Shonna Yin of New York University Medical Center, who is a colleague of mine and an assistant professor of pediatrics. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14856 - Posted: 01.11.2011

By NICHOLAS WADE Oxytocin has been described as the hormone of love. This tiny chemical, released from the hypothalamus region of the brain, gives rat mothers the urge to nurse their pups, keeps male prairie voles monogamous and, even more remarkable, makes people trust each other more. Yes, you knew there had to be a catch. As oxytocin comes into sharper focus, its social radius of action turns out to have definite limits. The love and trust it promotes are not toward the world in general, just toward a person’s in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood. Psychologists trying to specify its role have now concluded it is the agent of ethnocentrism. A principal author of the new take on oxytocin is Carsten K. W. De Dreu, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam. Reading the growing literature on the warm and cuddly effects of oxytocin, he decided on evolutionary principles that no one who placed unbounded trust in others could survive. Thus there must be limits on oxytocin’s ability to induce trust, he assumed, and he set out to define them. In a report published last year in Science, based on experiments in which subjects distributed money, he and colleagues showed that doses of oxytocin made people more likely to favor the in-group at the expense of an out-group. With a new set of experiments in Tuesday’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he has extended his study to ethnic attitudes, using Muslims and Germans as the out-groups for his subjects, Dutch college students. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 14855 - Posted: 01.11.2011

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D. WASHINGTON — The bullet that a gunman fired into Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s head on Saturday morning in Arizona went straight through the left side of her brain, entering the back of her skull and exiting the front. Trauma surgeons spent two hours on Saturday following an often-performed drill developed from extensive experience treating gunshot wounds in foreign wars and violence in American homes and streets. On Saturday, that drill really began outside a supermarket, with paramedics performing triage to determine the seriousness of the wounds in each of the 20 gunshot victims. Ms. Giffords, 40, was taken to the University Medical Center in Tucson, where, 38 minutes after arrival, she was whisked to an operating room. She did not speak at the hospital. As part of the two-hour operation, her surgeons said on Sunday, they removed debris from the gunshot, a small amount of dead brain tissue and nearly half of Ms. Giffords’s skull to prevent swelling that could transmit increased pressure to cause more extensive and permanent brain damage. The doctors preserved the skull bone for later replanting. Since surgery, they have used short-acting drugs to put Ms. Giffords in a medical coma that they lift periodically to check on her neurological responses. They said early signs made them cautiously optimistic that Ms. Giffords would survive the devastating wound. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 14854 - Posted: 01.11.2011

by Helen Thomson From phantom limbs and sick brains, through mirror neurons, synaesthesia, metaphor and abstract art, the ability of Vilayanur S. Ramachandran to generate new ideas about the human brain has made him a superstar. Just talking to him, Helen Thomson found out, puts your brain through a strenuous workout "HE knows his leg belongs to him, he's not crazy. He just doesn't want it anymore," says Vilayanur Ramachandran. He calls this odd state of affairs "spooky". Downright terrifying seems more like it. Another of his patients believes he is, rather inconveniently, dead. "He says he can smell decaying flesh but doesn't bother committing suicide because what's the point? In his mind he's already dead." Ramachandran is regaling me with these disturbing anecdotes at a recent Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego, California. As one of the most prolific neuroscientists of our time, everyone wants a piece of him. I sneak a glance at the other reporters looking on as I whisk him out of the press room. He seems endearingly unaware of his popularity, shaking hands with "fans" at every turn. Then again, investigating strange neurological conditions and asking what they can tell us about the human mind has allowed him to develop special insights into the qualities of human uniqueness, something he is eager to share not only with his peers at the conference but with a wider audience through his books and lectures. In person, Ramachandran sparkles, his hands shake with a slight, odd, quiver, but his smile suggests he is on the verge of either telling you something very wise - or very silly. But today there is no silliness: we talk about the complex topic of metaphor. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14853 - Posted: 01.11.2011

Whether it's the Beatles or Beethoven, people like music for the same reason they like eating or having sex: It makes the brain release a chemical that gives pleasure, a study says. The brain substance is involved both in anticipating a particularly thrilling musical moment and in feeling the rush from it, researchers found. Previous work had already suggested a role for dopamine, a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other. But the new work, which scanned people's brains as they listened to music, shows it happening directly. While dopamine normally helps us feel the pleasure of eating or having sex, it also helps produce euphoria from illegal drugs. It's active in particular circuits of the brain. The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal write in an article posted online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience. Voices unnecessary for response The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren't necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to study how voices might contribute to the pleasure effect, she said. © CBC 2011

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Hearing
Link ID: 14852 - Posted: 01.11.2011

By Gareth Cook For more than 15 years, I have had a secret. My wife knows. My family knows, as do a few close friends. But what would my co-workers think? My editors? My sources on the science beat? more stories like this When I imagine them knowing, I can't get an image out of my head: My seventh-grade English teacher, glaring at me, with a look that needed no words. You are lazy and stupid, Gareth. Why are you even wasting my time? I am dyslexic. Reading is slow for me. If I try to read aloud, it is halting, even with children's books. I can't spell. I was never able to learn cursive, and I am virtually unable to take handwritten notes while someone is talking. If it weren't for a strange quirk in the disorder -- I can type notes and listen -- I could never have hidden my struggles at work, because I wouldn't be able to do my job at all. In the last few months, there has been a burst of interest in dyslexia, with cover stories in Time and Newsweek inspired by a new book, Overcoming Dyslexia. The author, Dr. Sally Shaywitz, is one of a group of scientists who have made tremendous progress in understanding the disorder over the last few years. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Dyslexia
Link ID: 14851 - Posted: 01.11.2011

Giving stroke patients Prozac soon after the event could help their recovery from paralysis, a study has found. Researchers discovered more improvement in movement and greater independence after three months in patients taking the antidepressant (also known as fluoxetine), compared to placebo. The Lancet Neurology study was based on research on 118 patients in France. UK stroke experts said the findings were "promising". This was the largest study of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and stroke recovery to date. Tests on stroke patients 90 days after being given the drug found that patients taking fluoxetine had gained significantly more function in their upper and lower limbs than patients who were not given the drug. Patients in the fluoxetine group were also more likely to be coping independently. All patients in the study had moderate to severe motor disabilities following their stroke. The study noted that the side-effects from the antidepressant were generally mild and infrequent, although this group did notice more instances of nausea and diarrhoea. BBC © MMXI

Keyword: Stroke; Depression
Link ID: 14850 - Posted: 01.10.2011

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO — Although first approved to treat schizophrenia, new antipsychotic medications are increasingly being prescribed for a host of other uses, even when there is little evidence they work, U.S. researchers said on Friday. The drugs, known as "atypical antipsychotics," have quickly eclipsed older-generation or "typical" antipsychotics and are increasingly used to treat conditions like bipolar disorder, depression and even autism. "What we see is wide adoption for the use of these medications far beyond the evidence base to support it," said Dr. Caleb Alexander of the University of Chicago and a consultant for IMS Health, a company that collects data on prescription drugs. He said more than half of all atypical antipsychotic prescriptions written in 2008 were based on flimsy evidence. "We're talking millions of prescriptions a year for antipsychotics in settings where there is uncertain evidence to support them," said Alexander, whose study appears in the journal Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. The drugs are not harmless, Alexander said in a telephone interview. They can cause weight gain, diabetes and heart disease and are far more costly than the older antipsychotics, which cause disorders such as involuntary movements. Atypical antipsychotics accounted for more than $10 billion in U.S. retail pharmacy drug costs in 2008 — nearly 5 percent of all prescription drug spending. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 14849 - Posted: 01.10.2011

By RONI CARYN RABIN Antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil are widely used to treat depression, but a much less costly alternative called bright light therapy, in which a patient sits under an artificial light for a set period of time each day, is not. Light therapy is typically recommended for seasonal affective disorder, the “winter blues” brought on by shorter days and limited sun. Some psychiatrists prescribe it for this condition, often as a last resort when patients fail to respond to drugs. One reason light therapy hasn’t been used in more people with depression is that there aren’t many good clinical trials of the therapy in depressed patients without seasonal affective disorder. There isn’t much money to be made from the treatment — all it involves is a one-time purchase of a special lamp. The upside is that it has few, if any, side effects (though, doctors note, it should always be done in consultation with a physician). Now a new, carefully designed randomized controlled trial — of the kind considered the gold standard in medicine — suggests bright light therapy deserves a closer look. The study was small, involving only 89 patients ages 60 and older, but the results were remarkable. Compared with a placebo, light therapy improved mood just as well as conventional antidepressant medications, said Dr. Ritsaert Lieverse, the paper’s lead author and a psychiatrist at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Depression
Link ID: 14848 - Posted: 01.10.2011

By Marissa Cevallos A quantum effect known as entanglement may be part of the compass that birds use to sense Earth’s magnetic field, researchers report in an upcoming Physical Review Letters. Critters from bacteria to mole rats use tiny variations in the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate, but exactly how they sense the magnetism is a mystery. One idea is that magnetic fields disrupt pairs of entangled electrons in a light-sensitive protein in the retina. In quantum entanglement, particles are linked to each other so that one always knows instantly what the other is doing, even if they get separated. In the new research, physicists at the University of Oxford and the National University of Singapore calculated that quantum entanglement in a bird’s eye could last more than 100 microseconds — longer than the 80 microseconds achieved in physicists’ experiments at temperatures just above absolute zero, says Elisabeth Rieper, a physicist at the National University of Singapore. That would be a surprising feat for a bird warbling at room temperature, which people thought was too hot to see quantum effects. “It may all be right, but I would personally like to be cautious about this,” says Thorsten Ritz, a biophysicist at University of California, Irvine, who is a proponent of the model but wasn’t involved in this research. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Animal Migration
Link ID: 14847 - Posted: 01.10.2011

by Debora MacKenzie Hands up everyone whose new year's resolution is to lose weight. Wouldn't it be great if we could just take a pill to shed fat? Time and again "diet pills" have turned out to be useless, dangerous or both – but now there may finally be a safe one that works. Zafgen, a start-up drug company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has announced that its first human test of a drug named ZGN-433 caused 24 obese women to lose, on average, a kilogram a week for a month – with no harmful side effects. The trial could not be extended past a month without initial safety tests at a range of doses – which was the purpose of this trial. The detailed results will be reported next week at a conference on obesity in Keystone, Colorado. This is a stunning rate of weight loss, especially as the women ate normally and were not given exercise advice. It is almost the maximum rate considered safe, and nearly as effective as surgery to reduce stomach sizeMovie Camera. Many companies are searching for drugs to combat the rich world's obesity epidemic, but the researchers say no other tested so far has worked as well. It isn't all your fault that it is so hard to lose weight. When you initially become fat, your body adapts in ways that make it harder to lose that fat. Some involve the brain's control of appetite, but others involve the molecular controls that determine how much of that food you turn into fat, or whether you burn fat for energy. "We believe we are overcoming these adaptations," says Zafgen CEO Tom Hughes. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 14846 - Posted: 01.10.2011

Catherine de Lange, reporter First you see it, then suddenly it's gone. A new illusion (see video, above) shows how our perception of objects changes as soon as they start moving. At first, the ring of dots is motionless and it's easy to tell that the dots are changing color. When the ring begins to rotate, however, the dots suddenly appear to stop changing. The faster the ring moves, the less the colours appear to change. But in reality, they were changing the whole time, at the same rate. As the video shows, the illusion also works for brightness, shape and size. The phenomenon - change blindness - by which observers don't notice that an image is changing in front of their eyes, isn't new. Nor is the notion that motion affects the way we see objects - watch our video special on moving illusions for lots of other cool examples - this new illusion designed by Jordan Suchow and George Alvarez at Harvard University demonstrates the principle especially well. The pair believe the illusion occurs because the areas of the brain responsible for detecting these changes are organised locally - each part of the visual field is monitored by a specific part of the brain. Because a fast moving object spends little time at any one location, a local detector only has a small window of time in which to assess the changing object - and therefore fails to detect the change. Journal Reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.12.019 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Vision; Attention
Link ID: 14845 - Posted: 01.10.2011