Ewen Callaway A new blood test diagnoses Alzheimer's disease by sensing molecules produced by the immune systems of people with the neurodegenerative condition. So far, the test has been applied to just a small number of blood samples, but if proven on a larger scale, the assay could help diagnose Alzheimer's disease in combination with other tests, says Thomas Kodadek, a professor of chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida. It could also be used to identify patients for trials of experimental Alzheimer's drugs, he adds. His team published its results online today in Cell1. Currently, the only way to conclusively distinguish Alzheimer's from other dementias by examining the gnarled plaques and tangles of protein found in the brains of those with the condition. This can only be done after death. A furious search is under way for earlier, less-invasive tests using brain scans, blood draws and spinal taps, for instance. Globally, over 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer's. There are no effective treatments for the disease or proven means of preventing it. Most trawls for blood biomarkers typically whittle down a list of potential molecules to a few that differ between people with a condition and healthy people. For instance, Tony Wyss-Coray's team at Stanford University in California screened 120 proteins involved in cell communication and found 18 of the proteins present at higher levels in the blood of people with Alzheimer's disease than others2. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14844 - Posted: 01.07.2011

By Susan Milius SALT LAKE CITY — When pairs of young comb-footed spiders engage in an arachnid version of heavy petting, the males gain experience that appears to pay off later. A male spider that repeatedly courts and mock-mates with a not-quite-mature female ends up reaping benefits later, said Jonathan Pruitt of the University of California, Davis. Speaking January 4 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, he proposed that such seemingly pointless spider encounters, which can’t produce offspring, may resemble other young animals’ racing and wrestling by providing practice for life’s future tasks. “I thought it would sound silly if I called my talk ‘Spider Sex Play,’” Pruitt said, “but that’s essentially what it is.” And he ranked it as the first example of any kind of play behavior demonstrated in spiders. Among the Anelosimus studiosus spiders, which live and spin webs along rivers and under bridges from Maine to Patagonia, females don’t develop an opening to their reproductive tract until their final molt. Males mature faster and hang around not-quite-mature females, often going through most of the mating routine. During almost-sex, the male doesn’t load his sex organs with sperm but performs a courtship display by drumming the female’s web with his legs and sex organs. If she assumes a cooperative posture, he approximates a mating position too. He then taps her body where the reproductive tract will eventually open. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14843 - Posted: 01.07.2011

By Bruce Bower Crying women may literally turn men off. Odorless chemical signals in a woman’s waterworks lessen any stirrings of sexual interest in a guy who whiffs her tear-stained cheeks, a new study suggests. In a paper published online January 6 in Science, a team led by neuroscientists Shani Gelstein and Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, presents the first evidence that human tears contain pheromones, substances that influence behavior via smell. “Our experiments suggest that women’s emotional tears contain a chemosignal that reduces sexual arousal in men,” Sobel says. Chemical compounds in tears that douse men’s desire have yet to be identified. “This new report makes a strong case for pheromones in women’s tears, but the results clearly warrant replication,” comments neuroscientist Robert Provine of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. The reasons why people, but not any other animal, cry at sad thoughts or events remain poorly understood. Tears provide key visual cues to a person’s inner emotional distress, Provine says. In a 2009 study that he directed, men and women rated the faces of crying people with visible tears as much sadder than the same faces digitally altered to remove tears. Tear removal made faces appear emotionally ambiguous, with participants saying that awe, concern or puzzlement often outweighed sadness. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14842 - Posted: 01.07.2011

by Greg Miller A small study of 30 people with the most common inherited form of mental retardation has found encouraging evidence that some symptoms of the disorder can be alleviated with drugs. Some patients with Fragile X syndrome who received an experimental drug showed reductions in repetitive behaviors, hyperactivity, inappropriate speech, and social withdrawal. However, the drug affected only patients with a particular genetic alteration—a discouraging sign, perhaps, for those without that marker, but a potentially useful tool for identifying the patients most likely to respond to treatment. As recently as 10 years ago, the idea of reversing mental retardation was unthinkable. That's because many of these conditions result from genetic glitches that derail brain development even before birth. But recent studies with mice and other animals have given researchers hope that it may be possible to develop treatments that improve cognition and behavior in conditions like Fragile X syndrome, in which a mutation to a gene on the X chromosome makes part of the chromosome look unusually thin, and Rett syndrome, another common cause of mental retardation. One of the hottest prospects to emerge for treating Fragile X syndrome is a class of drugs that block a receptor in the brain called metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGluR5). This receptor plays a role in protein synthesis at the junctions between nerve cells, and it becomes hyperactive as a result of the gene mutation that causes Fragile X. Blocking this receptor, the thinking goes, helps restore its activity to a normal level. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14841 - Posted: 01.07.2011

Catherine de Lange, reporter Andrew Wakefield has been called many things since publishing his paper linking the MMR vaccine and autism in 1998. Now, he can add "'fraud" to the list, as BMJ this week publishes a series of papers claiming that the work was not only misleading, but also fraudulent. In his BMJ blog post, the journalist responsible for investigating Wakefield's claims - The Sunday Times's Brian Deer - goes as far as to say the research, which "triggered a decade-long health scare" was a "fix". Deer compared it to the "Piltdown Man", a famous scientific hoax in which archaeologist Charles Dawson combined the jaw of an orang-utan with the skull of a modern man, claiming it to be the fossilised remains of early man. In 1998, Wakefield, who worked at the Royal Free Hospital in London, published a controversial paper linking the MMR vaccine with autism. The paper was retracted from The Lancet in February 2010 because it turned out that, among other things, Wakefield had undisclosed conflict of interests and that the children in the study had been preselected. The British General Medical Council ruled later in the year that Wakefield should be banned from practising medicine. In the BMJ papers, Deer claims that Wakefield doctored details of the patients used in the study. He compared the medical records from the patients, which were presented at a General Medical Council hearing, with the paper's findings and found major discrepancies. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 14840 - Posted: 01.07.2011

by Deborah Kotz No question that a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig's disease -- as former Massachusetts governor Paul Cellucci announced Thursday -- is devastating. The disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, targets the brain and spine, causing muscle weakness that progresses to complete paralysis. There's no cure, and it's always fatal, usually within a decade of diagnosis. Yet Cellucci, who's currently the US ambassador to Canada, says his ALS is progressing slowly: "I've had symptoms for four years," the 62-year-old told the Associated Press. He said he has some muscle weakness, but other than that, he's "feeling quite well." Of course, one of the most famous ALS sufferers, besides Lou Gehrig himself, is physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who was diagnosed with the disease more than 45 years ago and is still living despite decades of complete paralysis. Some experts, though, say Hawking doesn't have true ALS but a similar type of motor neuron disease that progresses much more slowly. Unfortunately, no test can provide a definitive diagnosis of ALS, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Doctors make the diagnosis based on symptoms by looking at loss of nerve function in the limbs and ruling out other more common diseases.They also look for progression of symptoms over time. © 2011 NY Times Co.

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 14839 - Posted: 01.07.2011

By Susan Milius Parasitic worms may be saving their own little hides when they induce the caterpillars they infest to glow a little and blush a furious red. As the parasitic nematode Heterorhabditis bacteriophora infects caterpillars of the greater wax moth, the normally pale caterpillars temporarily bioluminesce and also turn persistently pink-red. In outdoor taste tests with 16 European robins, birds overall preferred uninfected waxmoth caterpillars to ones that had been infected for at least three days. By day seven of infection, odd-colored caterpillars barely even got tentatively picked up by the birds, Fenton and his colleagues report in an upcoming paper in Animal Behaviour. “I think the cool thing is that it’s the first example, to our knowledge, of a parasite manipulating its host to avoid being eaten,” says Andy Fenton of the University of Liverpool in England. It’s to the parasite’s advantage not to be eaten, Fenton explains, because these nematodes don’t infect vertebrates. So if a bird happens to eat a parasitized caterpillar, it’s bye-bye wormy. Biologists have already uncovered weird examples of the opposite approach, in which other parasites change the appearance or behavior of hosts in ways that attract predators. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 14838 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By Jessica Marshall Maggots. Rotten meat. Pus-oozing sores. Grossed out yet? Probably. The emotion of disgust is universal, strong and easy to invoke. A single disgusting photo is all it takes to make most of us say, "Ick." And that's for a good reason. Just as fear protects us from a lion that would eat us, "disgust is quite similar. It keeps us away from tiny little animals that would eat us up from the inside," said Valerie Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the lead author of a paper published today in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society . "We evolved to stay away from poo, from bodily fluids, from mucous, from foods that have gone off, from worms in the garden." It's not just humans that have this reaction. Even nematode worms can recognize parasitic bacteria in a petri dish and crawl the other away, Curtis said. "It's a simple animal with only 302 neurons and it's got a disgust reaction." While the emotion is universal, it is flexible -- we can learn to be disgusted by new things -- and its intensity varies from person to person and depending on the circumstances. Individual differences can be measured by tests of "disgust sensitivity," which scores how disgusted people are by typical gross things like feces or rotten meat. Disgust may have evolved to protect us from pathogens, but it can go too far. Types of obsessive-compulsive disorders are thought to result from disgust sensitivity taken to the extreme, Curtis said, such as obsessive hand washing or boiling tea water multiple times before drinking. © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 14837 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Catching up with e-mail while you eat lunch? Watching television? You may end the day eating more than you think. Researchers had 22 volunteers eat a meal while playing computer solitaire and 22 others eat the same meal in the same amount of time while undistracted. They told the subjects it was a test of the effect of food on memory, but actually they were testing how full people felt after a meal, how much they ate at a “taste test” 30 minutes later, and how successfully they could recall exactly what they ate. Their results appear online in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Not only were distracted eaters worse at remembering what they had eaten, but they felt significantly less full just after lunch, even after the researchers controlled for height and weight. And at the taste-test session a half-hour later, they ate about twice as many cookies as those who had lunch without playing games. “If you can avoid eating in front of a computer screen or any other activity that distracts you, that might temper the tendency to snack later in the day,” said Jeffrey M. Brunstrom, the senior author. Dr. Brunstrom, a researcher in behavioral nutrition at the University of Bristol in England, said the problem lay in recalling what one has eaten. “Memory plays an important role in the regulation of food intake,” he said, “and distractions during eating disrupt that.” © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Attention
Link ID: 14836 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By NATALIE ANGIER In his 20 years as a firefighter and paramedic in Colorado Springs, Bruce Monson, 43, has had his little fist-bumps with death: a burning roof collapsing on top of him, toxic fumes nearly suffocating him. Yet far more terrifying than any personal threats are what Mr. Monson describes as the “bad kid calls,” like the one from a mother who had put her 18-month-old son down in his crib right next to a window with a Venetian blind and its old-fashioned cord. “The kid had grabbed the cord and gotten it twisted around his neck, and the mother came in and found him hanging there,” said Mr. Monson. “I’m the first one in the door, she’s in a panic, and she shoves the kid into my arms, crying, ‘Please save him, please save him!’ ” The child’s body was blue, but Mr. Monson and his fellows met parental despair with professional focus and did everything they could. “We worked on him for over an hour,” said Mr. Monson. “It’s like a state of calm. You’re so tuned in to what you’re doing, you’re not thinking about the reality of the situation.” Their best was not enough, however, and later, at the hospital, the terrible sadness settled in. As Mr. Monson filled out his report, the mother sat in the trauma room’s designated “bereavement rocking chair,” rocking her dead son, saying her goodbyes, while family members filed in and wailed at the sight. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 14835 - Posted: 01.04.2011

This would be a whole lot easier—this quest for ways to improve our brain—if scientists understood the mechanisms of intelligence even half as well as they do the mechanisms of, say, muscular strength. If we had the neuronal version of how lifting weights increases strength (chemical and electrical signals increase the number of filament bundles inside muscle cells), we’d be good to go. For starters, we could dismiss claims for the brain versions of eight-second abs—claims that if we use this brain-training website or practice that form of meditation or eat blueberries or chew gum or have lots of friends, we will be smarter and more creative, able to figure out whether to do a Roth conversion, remember who gave us that fruitcake (the better to retaliate next year), and actually understand the NFL’s wild-card tiebreaker system. But what neuroscientists don’t know about the mechanisms of cognition—about what is physically different between a dumb brain and a smart one and how to make the first more like the second—could fill volumes. Actually, it does. Whether you go neuro-slumming (Googling “brain training”) or keep to the high road (searching PubMed, the database of biomedical journals, for “cognitive enhancement”), you will find no dearth of advice. But it is rife with problems. Many of the suggestions come from observational studies, which take people who do X and ask, are they smarter (by some measure) than people who do not do X? Just because the answer is yes doesn’t mean X makes you smart. People who use their gym locker tend to be fitter than those who don’t, but it is not using a gym locker that raises your aerobic capacity. Knowing the mechanisms of exercise physiology averts that error. Not knowing the mechanism of cognitive enhancement makes us sitting ducks for dubious claims, since few studies claiming that X makes people smarter invoke any plausible mechanism by which that might happen. “There are lots of quick and dirty studies of cognitive enhancement that make the news, but the number of rigorous, well-designed studies that will stand the test of time is much smaller,” says neuroscientist Peter Snyder of Brown University Medical School. “We’re sort of in the Wild West.” © 2011 Harman Newsweek LLC

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14834 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By Emily Sohn Signs of impending obesity are showing up in babies as young as nine months, found one of the first studies to look at weight concerns in the first two years of life. About a third of barely crawling infants are overweight or at risk for being obese, according to the study. And weighing too much at nine months increases the chances of weighing too much in the child's early years. While no one is suggesting that parents put their infants on diets to get rid of those adorable rolls, the findings might help researchers identify kids at risk for obesity as early in life as possible. "I don't think anyone is willing to say that if your kids are overweight at nine months, they're doomed to be obese adults," said Brian Moss, a sociologist at Wayne State University in Detroit. "One of the things we're looking at is whether there are maybe life circumstances between nine months and two years that can influence the odds of a child becoming an undesirable weight." "It could be the time when people introduce table foods, the quality or quantity of table foods, or the types of things they're exposed to," he said. "It could be the type of childcare or changes in their parents' employment status. Maybe certain types of foods are more expensive. Or there might be cultural differences that we didn't look into. It's pretty complex." © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Obesity; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14833 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By Randy Dotinga -- Doctors can learn more about anesthesia, sleep and coma by paying attention to what the three have in common, a new report suggests. "This is an effort to try to create a common discussion across the fields," said review co-author Dr. Emery N. Brown, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. "There is a relationship between sleep and anesthesia: could this help us understand ways to produce new sleeping medications? If we understand how people come out of anesthesia, can it help us help people come out of comas?" The researchers, who compared the physical signs and brain patterns of those under anesthesia and those who were asleep, report their findings in the Dec. 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. They acknowledged that anesthesia, sleep and coma are very different states in many ways and, in fact, only the deepest stages of sleep resemble the lightest stages of anesthesia. And people choose to sleep, for example, but lapse into comas involuntarily. But, as Brown puts it, general anesthesia is "a reversible drug-induced coma," even though physicians prefer to tell patients that they're "going to sleep." "They say 'sleep' because they don't want to scare patients by using the word 'coma,'" Brown said. But even anesthesiologists use the term without understanding that it's not quite accurate, he said. "On one level, we truly don't have it clear in our minds from a neurological standpoint what we're doing." © 2010 HealthDay.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14832 - Posted: 01.04.2011

By Steven E. Hyman It can fairly be said that modern psychiatric diagnosis was “born” in a 1970 paper on schizophrenia. The authors, Washington University psychiatry professors Eli Robins and Samuel B. Guze, rejected the murky psychoanalytic diagnostic formulations of their time. Instead, they embraced a medical model inspired by the careful 19th-century observational work of Emil Kraepelin, long overlooked during the mid-20th-century dominance of Freudian theory. Mental disorders were now to be seen as distinct categories, much as different bacterial and viral infections produce characteristic diseases that can be seen as distinct “natural kinds.” Disorders, Robins and Guze argued, should be defined based on phenomenology: clinical descriptions validated by long-term follow-up to demonstrate the stability of the diagnosis over time. With scientific progress, they expected fuller validation of mental disorders to derive from laboratory findings and studies of familial transmission. This descriptive approach to psychiatric diagnosis -- based on lists of symptoms, their timing of onset, and the duration of illness -- undergirded the American Psychiatric Association’s widely disseminated and highly influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, first published in 1980. Since then, the original “DSM-III” has yielded two relatively conservative revisions, and right now, the DSM-5 is under construction. Sadly, it is clear that the optimistic predictions of Robins and Guze have not been realized. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14831 - Posted: 12.29.2010

By Joe Churcher, Neuroscientists are examining whether political allegiances are hard-wired into people after finding evidence that the brains of conservatives are a different shape to those of left-wingers. Scans of 90 students' brains at University College London (UCL) uncovered a "strong correlation" between the thickness of two particular areas of grey matter and an individual's views. Self-proclaimed right-wingers had a more pronounced amygdala - a primitive part of the brain associated with emotion while their political opponents from the opposite end of the spectrum had thicker anterior cingulates. The research was carried out by Geraint Rees director of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience who said he was "very surprised" by the finding, which is being peer reviewed before publication next year. It was commissioned as a light-hearted experiment by actor Colin Firth as part of his turn guest editing BBC Radio 4's Today programme but has now developed into a serious effort to discover whether we are programmed with a particular political view. Professor Rees said that although it was not precise enough to be able to predict someone's stance simply from a scan, there was "a strong correlation that reaches all our scientific tests of significance". ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Emotions; Brain imaging
Link ID: 14830 - Posted: 12.29.2010

A multinational research team led by scientists at the National Institutes of Health has found that a genetic variant of a brain receptor molecule may contribute to violently impulsive behavior when people who carry it are under the influence of alcohol. A report of the findings, which include human genetic analyses and gene knockout studies in animals, appears in the Dec. 23 issue of Nature. "Impulsivity, or action without foresight, is a factor in many pathological behaviors including suicide, aggression, and addiction," explains senior author David Goldman, M.D., chief of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics at the NIH’s National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). "But it is also a trait that can be of value if a quick decision must be made or in situations where risk-taking is favored." In collaboration with researchers in Finland and France, Dr. Goldman and colleagues studied a sample of violent criminal offenders in Finland. The hallmark of the violent crimes committed by individuals in the study sample was that they were spontaneous and purposeless. "We conducted this study in Finland because of its unique population history and medical genetics," says Dr. Goldman. "Modern Finns are descended from a relatively small number of original settlers, which has reduced the genetic complexity of diseases in that country. Studying the genetics of violent criminal offenders within Finland increased our chances of finding genes that influence impulsive behavior."

Keyword: ADHD; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14829 - Posted: 12.29.2010

by Tim Wall When someone starts getting a little too sloshed at a New Year's Eve party, you can tell them to stop acting like an animal, literally. Many animals seem to enjoy getting a good buzz on just as much as humans. In fact, some animals may have introduced humans to a number of drugs, including psychedelic mushrooms, alcohol, caffeine, and cocaine. Even the legend behind Santa's flying reindeer may have its roots in a psychedelic experience. Reindeer are known to feed on the fly agaric mushroom (Amanita muscaria), then stumble about, twitching and making strange noises. The mushrooms contain the hallucinogen muscimol. It is unknown whether the reindeer also enjoy listening to eight hours of Grateful Dead recordings while playing with glow-in-the-dark objects. Humans can trip on fly agaric mushrooms as well, but the fungi can also be poisonous. Long ago, people noticed that the reindeer's bodies filter out the toxins, leaving only the hallucinogen. So reindeer herders in the far north learned to collect the urine from mushroom-munching reindeer. The llamas of Peru may have introduced the people of South America to the use of coca leaves about 7000 years ago. Legend holds that the llamas ate coca leaves when their normal foods were unavailable, wrote Haynes. The llama herder, like Khaldi the goatherd, noticed the friskiness of his animals after they partook. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 14828 - Posted: 12.29.2010

By ASHLEE VANCE CAMBRIDGE, Mass — Dr. Jeff Lichtman likes his brains sliced thin — very, very thin. Dr. Lichtman and his team of researchers at Harvard have built some unusual contraptions that carve off slivers of mouse brains as part of a quest to understand how the mind works. Their goal is to run slice after minuscule slice under a powerful electron microscope, develop detailed pictures of the brain’s complex wiring and then stitch the images back together. In short, they want to build a full map of the mind. The field, at a very nascent stage, is called connectomics, and the neuroscientists pursuing it compare their work to early efforts in genetics. What they are doing, these scientists say, is akin to trying to crack the human genome — only this time around, they want to find how memories, personality traits and skills are stored. They want to find a connectome, or the mental makeup of a person. “You are born with your genes, and they don’t change afterward,” said H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on the computer side of connectomics. “The connectome is a product of your genes and your experiences. It’s where nature meets nurture.” The task is arduous and years from fruition, and even the biggest zealots acknowledge that their work may not pay off. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 14827 - Posted: 12.29.2010

by Eliza Strickland Love is celebrated as a many-splendored thing, while lust is commonly regarded as downright primitive. Leave it to a Frenchwoman to discover that sexual desire is actually quite brainy. Stephanie Ortigue, an assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University, uses brain scans to examine the divine madness of love and the blinding imperative of lust. Her goal: illuminating how these two forms of attraction work by mapping out which brain regions are active when we experience them. Her findings counter the assumption that desire is a simple animal urge motivated primarily by biochemistry and evolutionary directives. Working with her frequent collaborator, psychiatrist Francesco Bianchi-Demicheli of Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland, Ortigue has found that lust involves complicated cognitive processing. Love, too, is not quite what we thought. Both romance and desire, she says, may be expressions of a “top-down” process in which intellect rules over instinct, not the other way around. Love may even make you smarter, by helping your brain process information more quickly. Why do you study the neuroscience of love and sex? I’ve always been interested in the big questions of science, and love is one of the biggest questions in the world. Everyone feels it, knows what it is, but we can’t really define it. I like challenges, and I like to bring some rationality to things that seem irrational. Also, I’ve always been interested in the unconscious and consciousness and how the two interact in our daily life. We’ve found that a lot of unconscious processes are involved in love and desire. © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14826 - Posted: 12.29.2010

by Carl Zimmer When Charles Darwin listened to music, he asked himself, what is it for? Philosophers had pondered the mathematical beauty of music for thousands of years, but Darwin wondered about its connection to biology. Humans make music just as beavers build dams and peacocks show off their tail feathers, he reasoned, so music must have evolved. What drove its evolution was hard for him to divine, however. “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed,” Darwin wrote in 1871. Today a number of scientists are trying to solve that mystery by looking at music right where we experience it: in the brain. They are scanning the activity that music triggers in our neurons and observing how music alters our biochemistry. But far from settling on a single answer, the researchers are in a pitched debate over music. Some argue that it evolved in our ancestors because it allowed them to have more children. Others see it as merely a fortunate accident of a complex brain. In many ways music appears to be hardwired in us. Anthropologists have yet to discover a single human culture without its own form of music. Children don’t need any formal training to learn how to sing and dance. And music existed long before modern civilization. In 2008 archaeologists in Germany discovered the remains of a 35,000-year-old flute. Music, in other words, is universal, easily learned, and ancient. That’s what you would expect of an instinct that evolved in our distant ancestors. © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Hearing; Evolution
Link ID: 14825 - Posted: 12.29.2010