By Nathan Seppa Carrying a variant form of the CETP gene is looking more and more like holding a winning genetic lottery ticket. This version of the gene might protect against Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, researchers report in the Jan. 13 Journal of the American Medical Association. Earlier research linked the variant to impressive longevity and high levels of HDL, the “good” cholesterol. But before running out to get your genes tested, be aware that the scientists reporting the most recent discovery don’t know for certain how the genetic variant might achieve any of these salutary effects, particularly dementia prevention. They do know that people harboring the variant form of CETP make less of the CETP protein, and apparently less is better. “What CETP does in the brain is less clear,” says study coauthor Richard Lipton, a neurologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York City. In the new study, Lipton and his colleagues identified 523 people, average age 78. Blood samples showed that roughly one-fifth carried two copies of the variant form of CETP (one copy comes from each parent). About 45 percent harbored a single variant copy (from one parent) and one-third had two copies of the standard version of CETP (no variant). © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13670 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ann Gibbons The Y chromosome has long been thought of as a stagnant part of the genome, where genes are slowly decaying in males of all species. But the first comprehensive comparison of the Y chromosome in two species--specifically, humans and chimpanzees--shows that in fact, it is a hot spot of evolution. "It's really exciting; it's totally well-documented; it's really dramatic," says population geneticist Andrew Clark of Cornell University. As is well-known, humans and chimps share 98% of their DNA. But more than 30% of the DNA differs between chimps and humans in the region of the Y chromosome that determines sex. This suggests that the Y chromosome has undergone "extraordinary" remodeling in both species in the 6 million years or so since they split from a common ancestor, says geneticist David Page of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and director of the Whitehead Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. For almost a century, researchers have thought that the Y chromosome, with far fewer genes than the X, was decaying. Both sex chromosomes evolved from an ordinary pair of chromosomes more than 200 million years ago (Science, 29 October, 1999, p. 964). But since then, the Y has steadily lost genes as well as its ability to recombine and swap genes with the X chromosome. This suggested that the Y has long been an isolated chromosome with little left to lose--just a couple of hundred genes, at most, whose job is to produce sperm and determine the sex of offspring. As a result, researchers predicted that the Y chromosome should be nearly identical in humans and chimpanzees, like the rest of the genome. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 13669 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by David Jay Brown Post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD—can linger years after someone has experienced or witnessed something extremely upsetting. It may be accompanied by panic attacks, flashbacks, and nightmares, and it can be fiendishly difficult to treat. But experimental types of treatment could soon lend a hand. In a pilot study, South Carolina psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer is targeting PTSD with a controversial drug: methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, commonly known as Ecstasy. He gave MDMA, along with psychotherapy, to 21 participants who had developed treatment-resistant PTSD as a result of experiences with crime or war. Only 15 percent of the MDMA-treated subjects continued to experience PTSD afterward, as opposed to 85 percent of the subjects who received psychotherapy with a placebo. Mithoefer considers the findings especially notable given that 20 of the 21 participants had previously failed to obtain relief from FDA-approved treatments. “The next step is to find out if this can be replicated elsewhere,” he says. The study, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, was the first FDA-approved trial evaluating MDMA’s therapeutic applications. Additional clinical tests examining MDMA-based treatments for PTSD are under way in Switzerland and Israel. Other potential PTSD drugs also show promise. Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City report that one or two treatments with a compound called RU38486 can disrupt traumatic memories in rats without affecting normal memories. And investigators at Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University in Israel find that an injection of the steroid cortisol immediately following a trauma reduces PTSD-like effects in mice. Both of these therapies are slated for human clinical trials.

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13668 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Why are we asking this now? New research has shed light on why migraine sufferers are often sensitive to light. Specialised nerve cells in the eye appear to trigger migraine headaches even in people who are registered blind. Scientists identified specialised, light-sensitive cells in the retina of the eye. They are involved in sending signals to the brain via the optic nerve and appear to be involved in "photophobia", when people react badly to light. Although still at an early stage, it is hoped that the research into these light-sensitive cells, called melanopsin photoreceptors, may lead to new ways of treating migraine attacks. What is migraine? It is more than just a splitting headache. A migraine attack involves a pulsing or throbbing pain in an area of the head, often on one side but not always the same side, and can be accompanied by extreme sensitivity to light, nausea and vomiting. The attacks can last for between four and 24 hours, although 72-hour attacks are not unknown. They are extremely debilitating. Normal, over-the-counter painkillers may not always be effective, especially if they are taken when the migraine attack has already started. Classic migraine, now known as migraine with aura, involves some kind of visual disturbance, such as flashing lights, blind spots, tunnel vision, zig-zag lines or even temporary blindness. Common migraine, or migraine without aura, does not involve visual disturbances but often results in photophobia and increased sensitivity to noise, sounds and even smells. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 13667 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Carolyn Butler So, be honest: Is that glass half-full or half-empty? Personally, I tend toward the latter, though I secretly long to be one of those Pollyannas who always look on the bright side of things and can remain hopeful through a family crisis, two hours of downtown gridlock or any other challenge. In fact, my New Year's resolution for '10 is to be more positive. (Meanwhile, the pessimist in me is well aware that studies have shown that roughly 80 percent of those who make such pledges give them up by Valentine's Day.) My hope is that positive thinking will make me not only happier but healthier, in the long run. A recent study published in the journal Circulation showed that a sunnier outlook on life is associated with a lower risk of heart disease and mortality. The research, which tracked more than 97,000 women older than 50 for eight years, found that optimists were 9 percent less likely to develop heart disease and 14 percent less likely to die from any cause than their pessimistic counterparts. Those with a high degree of "cynical hostility" were 16 percent more likely than all others to die during that same period. "This is really consistent with a number of other studies in the past, with the strongest findings in the realm of coronary heart disease: There is good evidence to suggest optimism is protective and that pessimism seems to be detrimental, when it comes to the development of disease and future outcomes," says Laura Kubzansky, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who has focused on these issues. "But what's a little less clear is what the mechanisms are, or how that protective effect occurs." © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 13666 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By M. A. Woodbury President Franklin D. Roosevelt admonished in a 1932 commencement address that “it is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.” FDR had the revival of a depressed U.S. economy in mind, but scientists experimenting with treating brain disorders with fetal cell transplants have taken his aphorism to heart. New methods are transforming past failures, and the results seem far more promising this go-round. Fetal cell therapy began in earnest in the mid-1980s, among researchers hoping to treat Parkinson’s disease. These patients have trouble controlling their movements partly because their brains lack the neurotransmitter dopamine. The hope was that tissue from fetal midbrains placed into patients’ brains would turn into dopamine-making cells. Shortly after the turn of the century, however, the work foundered when a subset of transplant patients developed disabling movement disorders termed runaway dyskinesias. But amid the setbacks was the fact that some subjects—especially those who were younger and less afflicted—did well with the fetal cells. “The question is, How do we reconcile all these disparate strands and problems with these trials and move the field forward?” says Roger Barker, a neurologist at the University of Cambridge who is meta-analyzing prior transplant data in hopes of devising a better trial. One possible explanation for the mixed findings is contamination: transplant tissue containing serotonin-secreting neurons could have muddied the results. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Parkinsons; Stem Cells
Link ID: 13665 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D. Last week, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study questioning the effectiveness of antidepressant drugs. The drugs are useful in cases of severe depression, it said. But for most patients, those with mild to moderate cases, the most commonly used antidepressants are generally no better than a placebo. For the millions of people who take these drugs, and the doctors who prescribe them, this provocative claim had to be confusing, if not alarming. It contradicted literally hundreds of well-designed trials, not to mention considerable clinical experience, showing antidepressants to be effective for a wide array of depressed patients. But on close inspection, the new study does not stand up to that mountain of earlier evidence. To understand why, it helps to look at the way it was conducted. The study is a so-called meta-analysis — not a fresh clinical trial, but a combined analysis of previous studies. A common reason for doing this kind of analysis is to discover potential drug effects that might have been missed in smaller studies. By aggregating the data from many studies, researchers gain the statistical power to detect broad patterns that may not have been evident before. But meta-analyses can be tricky. First, they are only as good as the smaller studies they analyze. And when there are hundreds of studies out there, how to decide which ones to include? Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 13664 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Joshua K. Hartshorne When I tell people I study whether birth order affects personality, I usually get blank looks. It sounds like studying whether the sky is blue. Isn’t it common sense? Popular books invoke birth order for self-discovery, relationship tips, business advice and parenting guidance in titles such as The Birth Order Book: Why You Are the Way You Are (Revell, 2009). Newspapers and morning news shows debate the importance of the latest findings (“Latter-born children engage in more risky behavior; what should parents do?”) while tossing in savory anecdotes (“Did you know that 21 of the first 23 astronauts into space were firstborns?”). But when scientists scrutinized the data, they found that the evidence just did not hold up. In fact, until very recently there were no convincing findings that linked birth order to personality or behavior. Our common perception that birth order matters was written off as an example of our well-established tendency to remember and accept evidence that supports our pet theories while readily forgetting or overlooking that which does not. But two studies from the past three years finally found measurable effects: our position in the family does indeed affect both our IQ and our personality. It may be time to reconsider birth order as a real influence over whom we grow up to be. Before discussing the new findings, it will help to explain why decades of research that seemed to show birth-order effects was, in fact, flawed. Put simply, birth order is intricately linked to family size. A child from a two-kid family has a 50 percent chance of being a firstborn, whereas a child from a five-kid family has only a 20 percent chance of being a firstborn. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 13663 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By PERRI KLASS, M.D. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a 5-year-old girl who was still wetting the bed every night. It’s a common complaint: at least 15 percent of healthy 5-year-olds are not reliably “dry” at night. And bed-wetting is quite common even in older children. But what may be most surprising about primary nocturnal enuresis, to use the clinical term for urinary incontinence in a child who does fine by day but has never been reliably dry through the night, is that it is often genetically based. In other words, it is not about emotional problems, or mistakes a parent made during potty training, or laziness, which some still attribute to the bed-wetter himself. (The problem is about three times as common in boys as in girls.) Indeed, one of the worst things about bed-wetting is the stigma. Sufferers and their families have been accused of everything from poor parenting to latent criminality. (In 1945, The New York Times reported on a psychological study of the backgrounds of 500 men who got into disciplinary trouble in the wartime Navy. The most powerful predictor of failure in the Navy, the article reported, was a combination of three factors: expulsion from school, civilian arrest and enuresis beyond age 5.) Enuresis can have a number of physiological causes. Some children lack a hormone that decreases urine production at night. Others wet the bed simply because their bladder capacity is small. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 13662 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS WADE Walking through the Tai forest of Ivory Coast, Klaus Zuberbühler could hear the calls of the Diana monkeys, but the babble held no meaning for him. That was in 1990. Today, after nearly 20 years of studying animal communication, he can translate the forest’s sounds. This call means a Diana monkey has seen a leopard. That one means it has sighted another predator, the crowned eagle. “In our experience time and again, it’s a humbling experience to realize there is so much more information being passed in ways which hadn’t been noticed before,” said Dr. Zuberbühler, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species, and by listening to animals in the wild. The first approach has been propelled by people’s intense desire — perhaps reinforced by childhood exposure to the loquacious animals in cartoons — to communicate with other species. Scientists have invested enormous effort in teaching chimpanzees language, whether in the form of speech or signs. A New York Times reporter who understands sign language, Boyce Rensberger, was able in 1974 to conduct what may be the first newspaper interview with another species when he conversed with Lucy, a signing chimp. She invited him up her tree, a proposal he declined, said Mr. Rensberger, who is now at M.I.T. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 13661 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Cristen Conger Caffeine has a stronger effect on boys than on girls, finds a new study that zeros in on the drug's health impacts on adolescents. More kids are consuming more and more caffeinated drinks, but the stimulant's effects on their growing bodies are still largely unknown. The study, which was published in Behavioural Pharmacology, looked at how consuming caffeinated beverages affected children between 12 and 17 years old. It found that boys would work significantly longer at a computer game to win a caffeinated soda than girls would. The study also controlled for factors including regular caffeine consumption, thirst and boredom. Jennifer R. Temple, lead researcher and neurobiologist at University of Buffalo, said she expected caffeinated drinks to work most strongly on those in the study who routinely consumed the most caffeine, regardless of sex. Instead, the results revealed a relationship between gender and the desire for caffeinated soda. "We aren't sure (why boys responded more), but we speculate that it could have to do with circulating hormones and their effect on the metabolism of caffeine," Temple said. © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13660 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Bob Holmes Sometimes it pays to give underlings a treat. Dominant male chacma baboons allow lower-ranking males to mate with their females as a way to protect the dominant male's own offspring in their absence. That's the conclusion reached by Louise Barrett of the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, who studied 11 years of observations from a baboon troop in De Hoop Nature Reserve, South Africa. Chacma baboons have a despotic social structure in which a single alpha male can almost completely monopolise mating opportunities by guarding females during their oestrus periods. Yet Barrett found that subordinate males in the De Hoop troop fathered 23 of 64 offspring during that time. Closer analysis showed that this was not because the alpha male was too tired, too busy, or too inexperienced to guard the females. Instead, he appeared to be willingly ceding copulations to subordinate males Spare dads The alpha male's apparent generosity may be a strategy for protecting his young after he is no longer around. When an alpha male dies or wanders off, new alpha males – usually from an outside group – move in, and tend to try to kill infants from the previous regime. Having "spare dads" in the troop may help ensure that these infants receive protection, says Barrett. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13659 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Benjamin Radford Earlier this week, research published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Pediatrics found no evidence that special diets have any influence on autistic children. This was a blow to some parents of autistic children who had hoped for a cure, but things took a more tragic twist when Diane Sawyer of "ABC Nightly News" followed a report of the autism study with,"We asked Jenny McCarthy, the actress and activist for a response." Um, okay. The news directors at ABC News presumably have some of the world's top experts on hand to provide context and commentary to the new study by scientists and researchers who have spent decades studying autism. Instead, they asked McCarthy, a former model and actress who has no formal education in medicine or autism. Her expertise comes from being the mother of an autistic child -- a sort of “Mommy Doctorate” M.D., which is sort of like saying that owning a car qualifies a person as a mechanic. McCarthy has managed to tap into a strong anti-science, anti-medicine conspiracy theory sentiment that made convicted felon Kevin Trudeau (best-selling author of "Natural Cures ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About") a rich man. You might think that I'm too harsh on McCarthy. But who knows how many parents buy her best-selling books or see her on "Larry King Live" or ABC News and decide she must be right, and refuse to vaccinate their children for measles, chicken pox, mumps, influenza, polio, hepatitis and more, fearing the vaccine will make them autistic? © 2009 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 13658 - Posted: 06.24.2010

(HealthDay News) -- A new study adds to growing evidence that autism is caused by a miswiring of connections in a child's developing brain, resulting in impaired information flow. According to researchers at Children's Hospital Boston, it may be possible to one day treat the problem with drugs that target the molecular pathways that cause the miswiring. The study authors looked at a rare disorder called tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), which causes benign tumors throughout the body, including the brain. Many people with TSC have epilepsy and intellectual disabilities, and about 25 percent to 50 percent of TSC patients have autism spectrum disorders. In this study, the researchers found that mutations in one of TSC's causative genes (TSC2) prevent growing nerve fibers (axons) from locating their proper targets in the developing brain. The team focused on a nerve fiber (axon) route between the eye's retina and the visual processing area of the brain in mice. When neurons were deficient in TSC2, their axons failed to end up in the correct locations. That's because the axons' tips, called growth cones, didn't respond to navigation cues from molecules called ephrins. "Normally, ephrins cause growth cones to collapse in neurons, but in tuberous sclerosis the axons don't heed these repulsive cues, so keep growing," senior investigator Dr. Mustafa Sahin, of the hospital's neurology department, said in a news release. © 2010 ScoutNews, LLC

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 13657 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The visual pathway that underlies a migraine sufferer's sensitivity to light has been uncovered by Harvard scientists. The researchers studied two groups of blind people who suffered migraine headaches. They found light triggered a reaction in a group of brain neurons that remained active for some time. Migraines are one-sided throbbing headaches that cause nausea and affect up to six million people in the UK. The researchers, writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, said they noted that even blind people who had migraines experienced sensitivity to light or photophobia. The observation led them to the idea that the signals transmitted from the retina via the optic nerve were somehow triggering worsening of the pain. They looked at 20 blind people who fell into two groups - the first were totally blind due to eye diseases such as retinal cancer and glaucoma. They were unable to see images or to sense light and therefore could not maintain normal sleep-wake cycles. Patients in the second group were legally blind due to retinal degenerative diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa. Although they were unable to perceive images, they could detect the presence of light and maintain normal sleep-wake cycles. The patients in the second group described intensified pain when they were exposed to light, in particular to blue or grey wavelengths. Rami Burstein, professor of anaesthesia and critical care medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, US, led the study. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Vision
Link ID: 13656 - Posted: 01.11.2010

by Peter Aldhous IF YOU'RE hoping to find out about using pills to treat alcohol addiction, the Alcoholics Anonymous website is the wrong place to look. Search there for "medication" and the closest you'll come is a warning about the dangers of turning to prescription drugs or narcotics as a substitute for alcohol. The website of the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, California, reveals little more. It does at least discuss one possible medication to treat alcoholism, but the drug is curtly dismissed. "Naltrexone is not a cure for alcoholism nor is it in any way a treatment," writes James West, the centre's former medical director. "The treatment of alcoholism involves a complete psychological, spiritual and emotional shift, whereby victims of the disease are released at the core of their being from the compulsion to drink." Dig through the wealth of addiction support groups online and you'll come across two responses again and again - pharmacological treatments to alcohol addiction are either ignored, or they are actively rejected as a crutch that must be abandoned. "The dogma has been that you can't treat a chemical addiction with another chemical," says Markus Heilig of the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) in Bethesda, Maryland. "It's well-meaning but naive, and in the end very destructive." © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13655 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers have identified a key epigenetic mechanism in the brain that helps explain cocaine's addictiveness, according to research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study, published in the January issue of the journal Science, shows how cocaine affects an epigenetic process (a process capable of influencing gene expression without changing a gene's sequence) called histone methylation. These epigenetic changes in the brain's pleasure circuits, which are also the first impacted by chronic cocaine exposure, likely contribute to an acquired preference for cocaine. "This fundamental discovery advances our understanding of how cocaine addiction works," said NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow. "Although more research will be required, these findings have identified a key new player in the molecular cascade triggered by repeated cocaine exposure, and thus a potential novel target for the development of addiction medications." Researchers gave one group of young mice repeated doses of cocaine and another group repeated doses of saline with a final dose of cocaine to determine how the effects of chronic cocaine exposure differed from one-time exposure. The study confirms that one of the mechanisms by which cocaine alters the reward pathway is by repressing G9A, a histone demethylating enzyme that plays a critical role in epigenetic control of gene expression.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13654 - Posted: 01.11.2010

By Ford Vox Late last year, the world was captivated by the story of Rom Houben, a Belgian man who suffered a traumatic brain injury and was misdiagnosed for 23 years as being in a vegetative state. In fact, media outlets reported breathlessly, Houben had been conscious the whole time, trapped inside his motionless body, until a heroic doctor used cutting-edge scans to find normal brain activity. What's more, that doctor discovered a way for Houben to communicate, allowing the "locked-in" man to tell his harrowing tale to visiting reporters (Houben reportedly has a book on the way). It was a fantastic story that ruled the headlines for a few days, but unfortunately, it was only partly true, and the resulting media circus distorted the work of Houben's doctor, Steven Laureys. In reality, Laureys didn't need advanced technology to diagnose Houben, who doesn't meet the definition of a locked-in patient. Laureys actually can't verify that the patient was fully conscious for all those 23 years. Nor did Laureys acquaint Houben with "facilitated communication," a controversial aided-speech method that has Houben reliant on the hand of a therapist to peck out letters on a keyboard. (This method has been debunked time and again, including in a famous series of child-abuse trials involving severely autistic children.) But as the story gained more and more media attention, the narrative changed, and Laureys's work was increasingly misinterpreted. The doctor now sees his name linked to facilitated communication and seems driven to defend the method, even though the case is more accurately seen as a vindication for a simple but elegant observational test that can be used to determine a patient's level of consciousness. Laureys, who directs the Coma Science Group at the University of Liege, Belgium, is well regarded for his research on consciousness in brain-injury patients, especially for devising new ways to distinguish patients in a vegetative state from a minimally conscious one (the latter sees waxing and waning of awareness). It's an important distinction: minimally conscious patients have a better chance of recovery than vegetative ones. © 2010 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13653 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Coloured lights could be used to find treatments for brain disorders such as epilepsy, a study has suggested. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team discovered a way to shut down brain activity using flashes of yellow and blue lasers. They hope to adjust this to switch off neurons that generate an electrical impulse abnormally, causing seizures. This could help experts understand how the brain works and, ultimately, offer treatment targets, Nature reports. The work relies on two genes found in natural organisms like algae that need light to make energy. These genes, known as Arch and Mac, contain the genetic code for light-activated proteins. The MIT team engineered brain neurons to express Arch and Mac. By doing this, they were able to control the brain cells of mice and monkeys using light. Light activates proteins which, in turn, lowers the voltage in the neurons and prevents them from generating an electrical signal, known as firing. Arch responds to blue light, Mac to yellow, and both recover afterwards. Now the researchers plan to closely examine the neural circuits of the brain in the lab to find targets that, when shut down, could treat epilepsy as well as other conditions including Parkinson's disease and chronic pain. Ed Boyden, who led the research, said: "Silencing different sets of neurons with different colours of light allows us to understand how they work together to implement brain functions. These tools will help us understand how to control neural circuits, leading to new understandings and treatments for brain disorders." (C)BBC

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 13652 - Posted: 01.09.2010

Philip Ball Why does Handel's Water Music and The Beatles' 'Here Comes The Sun' sound happy, while Albinoni's Adagio and 'Eleanor Rigby' sound sad? Some might say it's because the first two are in major keys, while the second two are in minor keys. But are the emotional associations of major and minor intrinsic to the notes themselves, or are they culturally imposed? Many music psychologists suspect the latter, but a new study now suggests that there's something fundamentally similar about major or minor keys and the properties of happy or sad speech, respectively. Neuroscientist Daniel Bowling and colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, compared the sound spectra — the profiles of different acoustic frequencies – of speech with those in Western classical music and Finnish folk songs. They found that the spectra in major-key music are close to those in excited speech, while the spectra of minor-key music are more similar to subdued speech 1. Most cultures share the same acoustic characteristics of happy or sad speech, the former being relatively fast and loud, and the latter slower and quieter. There's good reason to believe that music mimics some of these universal emotional behaviours, supplying a universal vocabulary that permits listeners sometimes to deduce the intended emotion in unfamiliar music. References 1. Bowling, D. L. et al. Acoust. Soc. Am. 127, 491- 503 (2010). © 2010 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 13651 - Posted: 06.24.2010