by Liz Else What's so special about this centre? It opens this week at the University of Sussex, a university founded along interdisciplinary lines in the 1960s. Instead of single-discipline schools, there was, for example, the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, where I studied. It had a mixture of philosophers, psychologists, linguists and artificial intelligence researchers. Which disciplines are you bringing together? Mainly psychology, neuroscience, medical sciences including psychiatry, and informatics, computer science and AI. A key feature of the centre will be to integrate theoretical research and practical work into treatments for conditions ranging from coma to schizophrenia. One of the dominant theoretical approaches was championed by Francis Crick and Christof Koch, who wanted to take a pure, simple, conscious experience and match it to something going on in the brain. This correlational approach can leave you dissatisfied, however, because while someone can be conscious of, say, the redness of something, and we can see activity in a region of their brain, it doesn't tell us why that activity and the redness go together. It is very challenging. We think there is no such thing as an experience of pure redness. Every experience is composed of many different parts and influenced by many common things, but they are all bound together into an integrated whole - you, the person having the conscious experience. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14021 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Studying chilli peppers is helping scientists create a new type of painkiller which could stop pain at its source. A team at the University of Texas says a substance similar to capsaicin, which makes chilli peppers hot, is found in the human body at sites of pain. And blocking the production of this substance can stop chronic pain, the team found. They report their findings in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. Capsaicin is the primary ingredient in hot chilli peppers which causes a burning sensation. It does this by binding to receptors present on the cells inside the body. Similarly, when the body is injured, it releases capsaicin-like substances - fatty acids called oxidized linoleic acid metabolites or OLAMs - and these, via receptors, cause pain, the researchers have found. Dr Kenneth Hargreaves, senior researcher at the Dental School at the University of Texas, and his team next set out to see if they could block these newly discovered pain pathways. Lab work on mice showed that by knocking out a gene for the receptors, there was no sensitivity to capsaicin. Armed with this knowledge they set about making drugs to do the same. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14020 - Posted: 04.27.2010

Janelle Weaver Mammals may possess the biochemical machinery to produce morphine — a painkiller found in the opium poppy, according to a new study. Meinhart Zenk of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St Louis, Missouri, and colleagues detected traces of morphine in the urine of mice after injecting chemical precursors of the drug. They report their findings today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Like other opioids, morphine is a potent, potentially addictive pain reliever. Scientists have speculated for decades that animals naturally synthesize morphine because specialized receptors in the brain respond to the drug. Trace amounts of morphine had been found in human urine and cells2. But studies using living animals yielded inconclusive results because of possible contamination from external sources of morphine in their food or in the environment. "This paper seems to be one of the most definitive I've seen," says Chris Evans, a neurobiologist and expert on opioid drugs at the University of California, Los Angeles. "They've convincingly shown that there's a pathway there which could possibly produce morphine." Alkaloids are ring-shaped chemical compounds that contain nitrogen. The presence of an alkaloid called tetrahydropapaveroline (THP) in brain tissue and urine has led to speculation that it may be a precursor to morphine made naturally inside the body. Opium poppyThe mouse pathway for making morphine is likely to have evolved independently from that of the opium poppy.A. Kohlberg, Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14019 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By S.I. Rosenbaum BELMONT — The tiny red eye of the Quotient diagnostic device can’t see a child’s face. It can’t see him fidget in class. It doesn’t know what his grades are. But it can see even the subtle moves a child makes, down to the millimeter. According to the company that manufactures the device and the McLean Hospital psychiatrist who invented it, the Quotient’s motion tracker can help a doctor determine whether a child has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. The makers call it the first objective test for ADHD. But BioBehavioral Diagnostics must overcome skepticism among many doctors, who have seen other diagnostic tests for ADHD flop. The absence of a reliable test, combined with the wide use of behavior-modifying drugs, has made ADHD a controversial disorder. Often, parents are left unsure about what to do when their child is one of the 5 to 10 percent of children diagnosed with ADHD, which is characterized by hyperactivity, inattention, and impulsivity. “These diagnoses are based on behavioral descriptors, or subjective states of being,’’ said Judith Warner, author of “We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication.’’ “That makes it suspect in the eyes of people who don’t understand it.’’ BioBehavioral Diagnostics, of Westford and Philadelphia, says its device can change that, by distinguishing between the restlessness and jitters of a child with ADHD and the movements of one who does not have the disorder. © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 14018 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Virginia Morell East Africa’s elephants face few threats in their savanna home, aside from humans and lions. But the behemoths are terrified of African bees, and with good reason. An angry swarm can sting elephants around their eyes and inside their trunks and pierce the skin of young calves. Now, a new study shows that the pachyderms utter a distinctive rumble in response to the sound of bees, the first time an alarm call has been identified in elephants. “It’s an important finding,” says Karen McComb a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. “It not only provides the first demonstration that elephants use alarm calls but also shows that these may have very specific meanings.” Indeed, the study suggests that this alarm call isn’t just a generalized vocalization but means specifically, “Bees!” says Lucy King, a postgraduate zoologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the study’s lead author. Several other species, including primates and birds, make calls that warn others of danger. Because elephants also have an extensive repertoire of vocalizations, researchers have long suspected that certain calls have specific meanings. But it’s not easy for researchers to link the pachyderms’ calls—many of which are beyond the range of human hearing—to particular events. A few years ago, however, King and colleagues documented the fear elephants have of bees via a series of playback experiments: When they hear buzzing bees, the pachyderms turn and run away, shaking their heads while making a call that King terms the “bee rumble." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Evolution
Link ID: 14017 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By TARA PARKER-POPE Parents and teachers often tell children to pay attention — to be a “good listener.” But what if your child’s brain doesn’t know how to listen? That’s the challenge for children with auditory processing disorder, a poorly understood syndrome that interferes with the brain’s ability to recognize and interpret sounds. It’s been estimated that 2 to 5 percent of children have the disorder, said Gail D. Chermak, an expert on speech and hearing sciences at Washington State University, and it’s likely that many cases have gone undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. The symptoms of A.P.D. — trouble paying attention and following directions, low academic performance, behavior problems and poor reading and vocabulary — are often mistaken for attention problems or even autism. But now the disorder is getting some overdue attention, thanks in part to the talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell and her 10-year-old son, Blake, who has A.P.D. In the foreword to a new book, “The Sound of Hope” (Ballantine) — by Lois Kam Heymann, the speech pathologist and auditory therapist who helped Blake — Ms. O’Donnell recounts how she learned something was amiss. It began with a haircut before her son started first grade. Blake had already been working with a speech therapist on his vague responses and other difficulties, so when he asked for a “little haircut” and she pressed him on his meaning, she told the barber he wanted short hair like his brother’s. But in the car later, Blake erupted in tears, and Ms. O’Donnell realized her mistake. By “little haircut,” Blake meant little hair should be cut. He wanted a trim. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention; Hearing
Link ID: 14016 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Wendy Zukerman Rats with damaged spines can walk again thanks to acupuncture. But it's not due to improvements in their energy flow or "chi". Instead, the ancient treatment seems to stop nerve cell death by reducing inflammation. Acupuncture's scientific credentials are growing. Trials show that it improves sensory and motor functions in people with spinal cord injuries. To find out why, Doo Choi and his colleagues at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea, damaged the spines of 75 rats. One-third were given acupuncture in two locations: Shuigou – between their snout and mouth, and Yanglingquan – in the upper hind leg. Others received no treatment or "simulated acupuncture". After 35 days, the acupuncture group were able to stand at a steeper incline than the others and walk better. Staining their paws with ink revealed that their forelimb-hindlimb coordination was fairly consistent and that there was very little toe dragging, whereas the control groups still dragged their feet. The rats in the acupuncture group also had less nerve cell death and lower levels of proteins known to induce inflammation after spinal cord injury and make neural damage worse. One explanation is that sharp needles prompt a stress response that dampens down inflammation. In humans, the inflammation that follows spinal cord injury is known to be responsible for nerve cell death. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 14015 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Pansy the chimpanzee died surrounded by friends and family who cared for her as best they could and reacted to her demise with silent somberness. Pansy’s story, as well as those of two mothers unable to let go of their deceased infants, raises the possibility that chimpanzees know when a companion has died and realize that he or she will never return, two new studies report in the April 27 Current Biology. “Chimpanzees may have greater awareness of the finality of death than has previously been believed,” says psychologist James Anderson of the University of Stirling in Scotland, who directed the study of Pansy’s death. Pansy’s case provides the first glimpse of chimps’ responses to a companion’s natural death, Anderson says. Two video cameras in an indoor enclosure at a safari park recorded what happened before and after Pansy’s death on December 7, 2008. In the days before Pansy’s demise three adult chimps, including her daughter, groomed her regularly. Grooming increased as Pansy’s breathing became labored in the 10 minutes preceding death. A male chimp stood over Pansy’s lifeless body and pulled at her left arm and then tried to open her mouth. He jumped onto the platform where Pansy lay and charged in an aggressive display. After pounding on Pansy’s body, he ran off. The next day, the three chimps watched silently as keepers removed Pansy’s body. None of them slept on Pansy’s deathbed for five days. For several weeks, survivors did little and ate less than usual. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 14014 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have identified new genes and pathways that influence an individual's typical pattern of brain electrical activity, a trait that may serve as a useful surrogate marker for more genetically complex traits and diseases. One of the genes, for example, was found to be associated with alcoholism. A report of the findings by researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health, appears online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This important advance sustains our hope for the potential of genome-wide association techniques to further the study of complex genetic disorders such as alcoholism," notes NIAAA Acting Director Kenneth R. Warren, Ph.D. Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) allow researchers to rapidly scan the complete set of DNA of many individuals to find genetic variations associated with a particular disease or condition. "One of the challenges in identifying the genes that underlie alcoholism is the large degree of genetic and environmental variability associated with the disease," explains first author Colin A. Hodgkinson, Ph.D., a geneticist in the NIAAA Laboratory of Neurogenetics. "Such variability has impeded even GWAS efforts to identify alcoholism genes. To overcome those difficulties, we used GWAS techniques to search for genetic variants related to EEG, or brain wave, patterns in a comparatively small sample of several hundred Native American individuals." As unique as an individual's fingerprints, EEG (electroencephalogram) patterns are highly heritable, and have been associated with alcoholism and other psychiatric disorders.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14013 - Posted: 04.27.2010

By Terry Sejnowski When physicists puzzle out the workings of some new part of nature, that knowledge can be used to build devices that do amazing things -- airplanes that fly, radios that reach millions of listeners. When we come to understand how brains function, we should become able to build amazing devices with cognitive abilities -- such as cognitive cars that are better at driving than we are because they communicate with other cars and share knowledge on road conditions. In 2008, the National Academy of Engineering chose as one of its grand challenges to reverse-engineer the human brain. When will this happen? Some are predicting that the first wave of results will arrive within the decade, propelled by rapid advances in both brain science and computer science. This sounds astonishing, but it’s becoming increasingly plausible. So plausible, in fact, that the great race to reverse-engineer the brain is already triggering a dispute over historic “firsts.” The backdrop for the debate is one of dramatic progress. Neuroscientists are disassembling brains into their component parts, down to the last molecule, and trying to understand how they work from the bottom up. Researchers are racing to work out the wiring diagrams of big brains, starting with mice, cats and eventually humans, a new field called connectomics. New techniques are making it possible to record from many neurons simultaneously, and to selectively stimulate or silence specific neurons. There is an excitement in the air and a sense that we are beginning to understand how the brain works at the circuit level. Brain modelers have so far been limited to modeling small networks with only a few thousand neurons, but this is rapidly changing. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 14012 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have shed new light on the mechanism behind epilepsy attacks in the brain, revealing a potential new target for drug treatment. Around half a million people in the UK have some form of epilepsy. Until recently the focus of research has been on cells called neurons, but a US study points to a completely different cell. Nature Neuroscience journal reports its behaviour may be key to uncontrolled brain activity behind the condition. Epilepsy attacks, which can manifest as fits in some people, or "absences" in others, are caused by too much electrical signalling from the brain's neurons. However, in many cases, the reason for this over-activity is poorly understood. Scientists now believe that, in some cases, although the problem happens at the neuron the underlying reason may be the failure of surrounding cells to help control this activity. The latest study, from the Tuft University School of Medicine and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, provides the strongest evidence yet that a cell called an astrocyte is the culprit. The astrocyte is known to have a wide range of functions, including supplying nutrients to other brain cells, and even helping the brain cope with damaged nerve cells. In some brain diseases, the astrocytes swell up and behave differently, and it is this condition which the researchers believe is linked to epilepsy. They induced this swelling in brain samples from mice, then tested whether this made a difference to the ability of the brain cells to "turn down", or inhibit, the brain signals from specific neurons. They found that the enlarged astrocytes led to reduced levels of a brain chemical known to inhibit electrical signalling from the neurons. (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy; Glia
Link ID: 14011 - Posted: 04.26.2010

By DANIEL CARLAT One day several years ago, I was reaching the end of my first visit with a patient, J.J., who had come to see me for anxiety and insomnia. He was a salesman for a struggling telecommunications company, and he was having trouble managing the strain on his finances and his family. He was sleeping poorly, and as soon as he opened his eyes in the early morning, the worries began. “I wake up with a list of things to worry about,” he said. “I just go through the list, and it seems to get longer every day.” A psychiatric interview has a certain rhythm to it. You start by listening to what your patient says for a few minutes, without interrupting, all the while sorting through possible diagnoses. This vast landscape of distress has been mapped into a series of categories in psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, DSM-IV. The book breaks down mental suffering into 16 groups of disorders, like mood disorders, anxiety disorders, psychotic disorders, eating disorders and several others. As I listened to J.J. (a nickname that he agreed I could use to protect his privacy), it was clear to me that he had one of the anxiety disorders, but which one? In order to systematically rule in or rule out the disorders, I asked J.J. dozens of questions. “Do you have panic attacks?” “Do you get fearful in crowded situations?” “Have you ever experienced a traumatic event that later caused flashbacks or nightmares?” Each of J.J.’s answers provided me with a clue, closing off one possibility while opening up others. At its best, when you are working with an intelligent, insightful patient, the process is fun, involving a series of logical calculations, much like working a Sudoku puzzle. Finally, toward the end of the hour, I felt confident that I had arrived at J.J.’s diagnosis. “I think you have what we call ‘generalized anxiety disorder,’ ” I told him. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 14010 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Richard Cytowic, contributor CAN you really see what I'm saying? In this entertaining book, perceptual psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum goes beyond this metaphorical catchphrase to show that everyone can and does. This is not a book about synaesthesia, nor one about super-senses that make individuals see the world in curious ways. Rather, it shows how the scope of everyone's perception is greater than we realise, thanks to the ways that senses reinforce one another, giving us a unified picture of everyday reality taken from multiple perspectives. While it makes for a fascinating read, the research Rosenblum draws on is not always new. For example, we have long known that hearing is strongly influenced by sight, and that hearing-impaired people are not alone in having lip-reading skills. We all lip-read to some extent when we strain to understand what others are saying at noisy cocktail parties, and even in private one-on-one conversations. Sight and sound are so tightly joined that even bad ventriloquists convince us that the dummy moving its lips is doing the talking. At the cinema, we likewise believe that dialogue comes from actors' mouths and ambient sounds from objects on the screen rather than the surrounding loudspeakers. Smell can also affect the gist of what we hear, biasing attitudes toward the speaker. Even scents we cannot consciously detect shade attitudes, judgements and overt behaviours. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Vision; Hearing
Link ID: 14009 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Judith Horstman What ethical concerns will arise from new technology and medicine that can reveal our thoughts and enhance our brains? To comment on this issue, please use our forum. Back in the 1980s – in a place long ago and far away called the U.S. House of Representatives – I was a Washington correspondent covering health policy issues, and a young Congressman from Tennessee named Al Gore was chairman of a subcommittee on science and technology. That oversight and investigations subcommittee was wrestling with troublesome questions surrounding organ transplantation. A new anti-rejection drug, cyclosporine, had raised survival rates for recipients to 80 percent, a tremendous advance in life-saving medical technology that resulted in a massive demand for donor organs – already in short supply – and set off a flood of legal, moral and ethical issues. Kidneys were being sold and bought from living donors, the wealthy were getting to the head of waiting lists after making huge donations to hospitals, and desperate parents were launching media campaigns for hearts, livers and lungs for their dying children. In the most notorious and bizarre case, a baboon heart was transplanted into a 7-month-old infant, Baby Fae, who did not survive. Gore's subcommittee waded into this morass and produced landmark legislation: The National Organ Transplant Act prohibited the sale of human organs and set up a policy and structure for allocation of donor organs. More legislation followed and so did more bioethical issues, such as those involving embryonic stem cells, gene therapy, and the ownership of your own body tissue and genes – and foreshadowed the increasingly complex ethical issues to come. © Copyright The Sacramento Bee.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14008 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ROBIN POGREBIN ANDREW AVRIN sits on a beige couch in a nondescript room, a fruit still-life partly visible on the wall behind him, twisting his fingers while, off-camera, an unseen interviewer prompts him to talk about his sister, Melissa, who died last year at the age of 19 after a long battle with bulimia. “There was no food in the house,” he says, looking off to the side as his eyes fill. “If I went out with friends, I could not bring leftovers home because they would be gone by the next morning.” Once, he explains, in the middle of a bitterly cold night, he looked out the window and saw Melissa on the curb, going through the garbage. “I went outside and I yelled her name,” he recounts in the interview, his voice breaking. “Just the way she looked back at me — it was so empty, vacant. It was a deer in the headlights, but that doesn’t even explain it.” It is a hard scene for anyone to watch, but even more so for the film’s producer — Judy Avrin, Melissa’s mother, who decided to make a documentary about her daughter’s life and, ultimately, her death. People deal with grief in their own ways, and those who have been spared the loss of a daughter or a son can only imagine how they would choose to try to cope. For Ms. Avrin, coping meant confronting her anguish and trying to make something good come out of it. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 14007 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower People who have nap-time dreams about a task that they’ve just practiced get a big memory boost on the task upon awakening, Harvard researchers report. Those who dream about anything else have no such enhanced recall, the team reports in a paper published online April 22 in Current Biology. Neither do those who stay awake, even if they think about the task. “I was startled by this finding,” says study coauthor Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School. “Task-related dreams may get triggered by the sleeping brain’s attempt to consolidate challenging new information and to figure out how to use it.” His new findings elaborate on research suggesting that sleep generally enhances memory and learning (SN: 4/28/07, p. 260). Dreaming about a demanding undertaking doesn’t cause enhanced memories for that experience, Stickgold emphasizes. Rather, memory-fortifying brain processes during sleep cause the dreams, he proposes. During slumber, Stickgold posits, a structure called the hippocampus integrates recently learned information, such as how to navigate a virtual maze, while other brain regions apply this information to related but broader situations, such as how to navigate a maze of job application forms. That’s a “tempting speculation,” remarks physiological psychologist Jan Born of the University of Lübeck in Germany. Stickgold’s idea has much potential for fostering advances in dream research, Born says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14006 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Emily Sohn After 24 hours in a coma, a Croatian girl woke up speaking only German, according to reports that spread across the Internet last week. The 13-year-old had been studying German in school and watching German television shows on her own, according to various versions of the story, but she was not fluent until after the incident. Meanwhile, she lost the ability to speak her native language. Discovery News did not confirm the report with the girl's doctors or parents, but experts say the story is plausible -- to some extent. In a condition called bilingual aphasia, people often lose one of their two languages because different parts of the brain are involved in remembering each one, explained Michael Paradis, a neurolinguist at McGill University in Montreal. Even if a brain injury affected the Croatian teenager's memory of her native language, the brain areas that were learning German could have remained untouched. "This has been observed thousands of times," Paradis said. "It's not surprising at all. I'd like to know all the facts, but it's quite possible that after a coma, you'd have problems which might be located in such a way in the brain that they affect one language but not another." What can't be true, though, is the claim that the coma gave the girl fluency that she didn't have before. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 14005 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Graham Lawton On 28 December 1963, Randy Gardner, a 17-year-old schoolboy in San Diego, California, got up at 6 am feeling wide awake and raring to go. He didn't go back to sleep again until the morning of 8 January 1964. That's 11 days without sleep. Gardner's 264 hours remains the longest scientifically verified period without sleep, breaking the previous record of 260 hours. It was described in a 1965 paper by sleep researcher William Dement of the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, who stayed awake with Gardner for the final three days. Gardner experienced mood swings, memory and attention lapses, loss of coordination, slurred speech and hallucinations, but was otherwise fine. His first sleep after those 11 days lasted just 14 hours. According to Dement, Gardner did not consume any stimulants during his "wakeathon". He did, however, have people around him keeping him awake. Without such help you would be fighting hard to stay awake after 36 hours, and would find the urge to sleep near-irrepressible by 48. But you'd probably be snatching subtle bursts of sleep even before you finally went to bed: sleep-deprived people slip in and out of "microsleeps" - seconds of sleep that occur without you noticing them, often with your eyes open. Microsleeps aside, how long could Gardner have gone on for? Nobody knows for sure, but we do know that sleep deprivation is eventually fatal. Rats that are kept awake die after two weeks, less time than it takes them to starve to death. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14004 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway Decaf coffee and nicotine-free tobacco aren't just for the health-conscious. Giving them to flies with a form of Parkinson's disease has revealed that although coffee and cigarettes protect the brain, caffeine and nicotine aren't responsible for the benefit. If the compounds that put up this brain defence can be identified, they may offer a preventive Parkinson's treatment where none currently exists, says Leo Pallanck, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose team led the new study. "We think that there's something else in coffee and tobacco that's really important," he says. Evidence for the protective effect of coffee and tobacco comes mostly from epidemiological studies which suggest that coffee-drinkers and smokers are less likely to develop Parkinson's than abstainers. "A lot of the field has gravitated to the idea that it's caffeine and nicotine [that protects their brains]," says Pallanck. But because these drugs are harmful in large amounts, it would be tough to find a way of using them as therapies. To see if ingredients other than caffeine and nicotine might be providing the benefit, Pallanck's team turned to fruit flies with a condition similar to Parkinson's disease. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Parkinsons; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 14003 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By John Horgan Do some soldiers enjoy killing? If so, why? This question is thrust upon us by the recently released video of U.S. Apache helicopter pilots shooting a Reuters cameraman and his driver in Baghdad in 2007. Mistaking the camera of the Reuters reporter for a weapon, the pilots machine-gunned the reporter and driver and other nearby people. The most chilling aspect of the video, which was made public by Wikileaks, is the chatter between two pilots, whose names have not been released. As Elizabeth Bumiller of The New York Times put it, the soldiers "revel in their kill." "Look at those dead bastards," one pilot says. "Nice," the other replies. The exchange reminds me of a Times story from March 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. The reporter quotes Sgt. Eric Schrumpf, a Marine sharpshooter, saying, "We had a great day. We killed a lot of people." Noting that his troop killed an Iraqi woman standing near a militant, Schrumpf adds, "I'm sorry, but the chick was in the way." Does the apparent satisfaction—call it the Schrumpf effect—that some soldiers take in killing stem primarily from nature or nurture? Nature, claims Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard University and an authority on chimpanzees. Wrangham asserts that natural selection embedded in both male humans and chimpanzees—our closest genetic relatives—an innate propensity for "intergroup coalitionary killing" [pdf], in which members of one group attack members of a rival group. Male humans "enjoy the opportunity" to kill others, Wrangham says, especially if they run little risk of being killed themselves. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Aggression; Stress
Link ID: 14002 - Posted: 06.24.2010