By Deborah M. Gordon Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology by Richard C. Francis Princeton University Press, 2003; $29.95 EVERYONE KNOWS THE STEREOTYPE: Even when lost, men grimly drive on without asking for directions. Evolutionary psychologists would like to explain this behavior by appealing to the romantic lives of ancient hunter-gatherers and, even further back, to the hippocampus of small rodents. The analogy between lost men and lost voles may be silly, but there seem to be intriguing links between human and animal behavior. In Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions, Richard C. Francis suggests that physiological explanations of behavior—about how brains work—are often more informative than accounts of why the behavior evolved. Evolutionary psychology, which focuses on the evolution of human cognition, emerged in the 1980s out of sociobiology, a perspective that encompasses all behavior. Both sociobiology, which the evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University introduced in the 1970s, and evolutionary psychology adhere to the idea that every characteristic of every species is adaptive—that is, each characteristic has enhanced reproductive success. Applied to explain the evolution of human behavior, the idea proceeds with appealing but misleading simplicity: Animals are depicted as doing something people also do. Next comes an account of the evolutionary advantage of the behavior for the animals. The conclusion is that it is natural, and therefore inevitable, for people to behave that way, too. Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2004

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 5925 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Independent research groups have discovered novel therapeutic targets in the battle of the bulge. By altering the expression of a single -- albeit different – gene, Drs. Roger Davis (UMASS Medical School, USA) and Ying-Hue Lee (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) have succeeded in creating two different strains of transgenic mice that don't gain weight, even when fed fat-laden, high calorie diets. Their reports will be published in the August 15th edition of Genes & Development. Dr. Ying-Hue Lee and colleagues at Academia Sinica took a different approach towards the obesity epidemic, analyzing the effects of C/EBP gene replacement in mice. The C/EBP protein family consists of 5 members, 3 of which (alpha, beta, and delta) have established roles in promoting adipogenesis (fat cell differentiation). The researchers were specifically interested in determining the physiological impact of replacing the C/EBPalpha gene with the C/EBPbeta gene. "No doubt, C/EBPalpha is very important for life as indicated by many excellent studies related to its physiological function. Still, we wondered that its cousin, C/EBPbeta, might do the job well as well if given a chance," explains Dr. Lee. Dr. Lee and colleagues utilized an existing strain of mice that contains the alpha-to-beta gene substitution, referred to in the paper as "beta/beta mice." They found that beta/beta mice not only live an average of 5 months longer than wild-type mice, but are markably leaner, apparently burning fat at a much higher rate than normal mice.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 5924 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jeff Stryker Director Jonathan Demme fiddles with the classics again. After a remake of "Charade," he now offers up "The Manchurian Candidate" for a nervous, post Sept. 11 era. The original 1962 film featured Angela Lansbury as a political Svengali and Frank Sinatra as an Army major who tracks down Laurence Harvey, an American soldier captured during the Korean War and programmed through hypnotism for assassination by Chinese Communists. The film was based on a 1959 best-selling book by Richard Condon. For all the critical acclaim and subsequent political attention (Did Lee Harvey Oswald see it or not?), the movie flopped initially and was withdrawn from release after John F. Kennedy's assassination. "The Manchurian Candidate" remake brings to a wider audience questions about the role of the state in brainwashing and mind control, a topic usually reserved for the "nutters" on the Internet, as a character in the new movie puts it succinctly. Updating the politics of the era, the Communist evil empire has been replaced by a multinational corporation, Manchurian Global. Updating the science, hypnosis and brainwashing have been augmented with electrodes in the brain, microchips implanted in the body and electroshock. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5923 - Posted: 06.24.2010

The new science of decision making. It's not as rational as you think. By Jerry Adler issue - In the control room next door are Steven Quartz, a Caltech neuroscientist, and Colin Camerer, an economist, who are looking inside my brain to help understand some of the most vexing problems in postmodern society—irrational market bubbles, intractable Third World poverty and loser brothers-in-law who want to borrow $5,000 to open a franchised back-rub parlor. My brain was helping science explain why, despite centuries of progress in economic theory since Adam Smith, actual human beings so often refuse to behave as equations say they should. For all its intellectual power and its empirical success as a creator of wealth, free-market economics rests on a fallacy, which economists have politely agreed among themselves to overlook. This is the belief that people apply rational calculations to economic decisions, ruling their lives by economic models. Of course, economists know that the world doesn't actually work this way; if it did, you wouldn't need a financial adviser to remind you to save for retirement. But until recently the anomalies were chalked up to the pernicious influence of emotions, emanations from the primitive regions of the brain, a kind of mental noise interfering with the pure, rational expression of economic self-interest. © 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 5922 - Posted: 06.24.2010

When experiencing a severe, throbbing headache, a person often places his hands on both sides of his head and claims, "It feels like my brain is pushing to get out, so it feels better to hold it in." This sensation gives a false impression that the brain itself is enlarging and causing the pain sensation. Interestingly, brain tissue does not feel pain in the same way skin or other organs do. Because the brain is encased in a hard, protective covering, it has not developed to respond to touch or pressure sensations like other, more exposed parts of our bodies have. Indeed, a brain surgeon can actually cut brain tissue in an awake patient without the patient feeling the knife. Head pain instead occurs because of activation or irritation of structures that do sense pain: skin, bone or neck joints, sinuses, blood vessels or muscles. When a person has a brain tumor, pain is usually a late symptom to develop--brain tumors generally only cause pain when they have grown large enough to damage bone or stretch blood vessels or nerves. Neck problems may also result in head pain, with pain from the neck and back of the head often radiating over the top of the head to an eye. Sinus infection or inflammation (usually occurring as part of an allergy reaction), however, is an uncommon cause of recurring headaches. Interestingly, Roger Cady and Curtis Schneider of the Headache Care Center in Springfield, Mo., have shown that 25 to 30 percent of migraine sufferers report nasal symptoms during their typical migraine episodes, and nearly 98 percent of people who believed they had sinus headaches were actually experiencing a migraine. © 1996-2004 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 5921 - Posted: 06.24.2010

As ants roam around on a plant, they can help their leafy companion by killing any herbivores they find. Ants often do just that, because many ants need meat in their diets. Some species of ants are more aggressive than others, and many plants don't have any choice about which species visit. Researchers report for the first time that when plants supply ants with nectar, it boosts the ants' desire for meat, potentially making them better bodyguards for the plant. "If you have enough birthday cake or soda pop, you're eventually going to want something of substance," said team leader Joshua A. Ness, an ecologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The same is true of ants, he said. And the most convenient protein packets for ants on plants are often insects that are there to munch on the plant. Nectar isn't just found in flowers. Many plants exude nectar from little pores on the plant, called extrafloral nectaries, that attract ants. "The plant wants ants to be protein eaters while they are on the plant," said team member Judith L. Bronstein, a professor in UA's department of ecology and evolutionary biology. "The plant gets them really jacked up on carbs so they're desperate for protein."

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 5920 - Posted: 08.01.2004

Mouse mothers become fearless when levels of a particular hormone drop, reveals a new study. This gives mothers the courage to ferociously attack any would-be assailants to their offspring. In response to scary or stressful situations, the brain secretes corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), which triggers a complex cascade of hormones that ready the body for action, such as raising blood sugar levels. It also feeds into the part of the brain which generates feelings of fear and anxiety. Elevated levels of CRH have been linked with symptoms of depression in both rodents and humans. But lactating females have chronically low levels of CRH in the brain, which is thought to make them generally less anxious. For example, studies in humans show that nursing women are less perturbed, both physiologically and emotionally, by stressful situations. Stephen Gammie and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, US wondered if lowered CRH might also be responsible for a mother’s fearless bravery. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 5919 - Posted: 06.24.2010

St. Paul, Minn. – As many as 65 percent of stroke patients are likely to be treated with antihypertensive medications during the first four days of hospitalization, despite current guidelines of the American Stoke Association that recommend against treating all but the most severe cases of hypertension during the first few days following a stroke. A recent retrospective study found that nearly all stroke patients who were being treated for hypertension prior to admission had their medication regimens continued or intensified, and a third who were not taking medications for hypertension had antihypertension treatment initiated during the hospitalization. Study details are published in the July 27 issue of Neurology. Hypertension (high blood pressure) is common at the time of an ischemic stroke and is believed to be the body’s response that maintains adequate blood flow to the area immediately around the stroke site. Lowering elevated blood pressure through medication, while an appropriate measure in stroke prevention, can result in the extension and worsening of acute stroke symptoms, and has even been shown to result in worse short- and long-term outcomes. The dangers of antihypertensive therapy in the setting of acute ischemic stroke have been recognized for some time. Despite active efforts to promote clinical guidelines, first established in 1994, little is known about how often, and under what circumstances, antihypertensive agents are used in the treatment of patients with acute ischemic stroke. “We sought to determine whether the use of antihypertensive agents was consistent with guidelines, and if such use placed patients at further risk of negative outcomes,” noted study author Peter Lindenauer, MD, MSc, of Baystate Medical Center and Tufts University School of Medicine, Springfield.

Keyword: Stroke
Link ID: 5918 - Posted: 06.24.2010

St. Paul, Minn. – Approximately half of all women who seek clinical treatment for migraines have reported an association between migraine and menstruation, and a recent study confirms their experience. In another, unrelated study researchers have identified a drug therapy that is effective in reducing the occurrence or the severity and duration of menstruation associated migraines. Details and outcomes of both studies, and a related editorial, are published in the July 27 issue of Neurology. Nearly one in five adult women experience migraine headaches, compared with one in twenty adult men. Menstrual migraine is defined as headache that occurs regularly in close relationship to the onset of menstruation (between two days prior to and during the first three days of bleeding). Until recently, studies documenting migraine and menstruation have included small numbers of women over few cycles, often combining data from women using hormonal treatments with those who were not. Also, data has not been collected regarding the difference between menstrual versus non-menstrual migraine attacks within the same woman, rather than comparing attacks within a total population. Researchers from the City of London Migraine Clinic analyzed diary data from 155 women patients. All of the women tracked at least two cycles, with nearly half of the patients keeping diary cards over the course of four or more menstrual cycles.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 5917 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Psychologists try to learn how to spot a liar Carrie Lock "Is he lying?" Odds are, you'll never know. Although people have been communicating with one another for tens of thousands of years, more than 3 decades of psychological research have found that most individuals are abysmally poor lie detectors. In the only worldwide study of its kind, scientists asked more than 2,000 people from nearly 60 countries, "How can you tell when people are lying?" From Botswana to Belgium, the number-one answer was the same: Liars avert their gaze. "This is . . . the most prevalent stereotype about deception in the world," says Charles Bond of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, who led the research project. And yet gaze aversion, like other commonly held stereotypes about liars, isn't correlated with lying at all, studies have shown. Liars don't shift around or touch their noses or clear their throats any more than truth tellers do. For decades, psychologists have done laboratory experiments in an attempt to describe differences between the behavior of liars and of people telling the truth. Some researchers, however, are now moving away from those controlled conditions and are inching closer to understanding liars in the real world. The researchers are examining whether several behaviors that have emerged as deception signals in lab tests are associated with real-life, high-stake lies. The psychologists are also testing how well professional sleuths, such as police and judges, can detect deceptions. Copyright ©2004 Science Service.

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 5916 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nathan Seppa Even as scientist Stanley B. Prusiner was accepting a Nobel prize in 1997 for linking misfolded proteins to certain brain diseases, doubters were pointing out that no one had ever actually shown that these proteins—which Prusiner dubbed prions—could cause infection. Prusiner, a neurologist and biochemist at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and his colleagues now report results that could silence many of his critics. The study, published in the July 30 Science, shows that purified prions can cause disease when injected into the brains of genetically engineered mice. Previous work by Prusiner and others had implicated prions in human-brain ailments that include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and kuru, as well as mad cow disease, chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, and scrapie in sheep. Suggesting that proteins, misfolded or not, can be infectious is "a radical notion," says Neil R. Cashman of the University of Toronto. Nevertheless, to Cashman and others, the new research supplies the proof. Copyright ©2004 Science Service.

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 5915 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Test-tube 'prions' could advance study of mad cow disease David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Scientists at UCSF have created synthetic prions -- tiny protein particles -- and shown they can cause brain disease in laboratory animals and replicate without any genetic material inside them. The achievement could lead to new tools for early detection of the faulty forms of prions that are known to cause mad cow disease in cattle and the rare, apparently spontaneous Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in humans, the researchers say. The work may also advance research into more common degenerative nervous system disorders such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known commonly as Lou Gehrig's disease, according to the UCSF scientists. The new research is being reported today in the journal Science by Dr. Giuseppe Legname, a neurologist in the laboratory of senior author Dr. Stanley Prusiner, who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of prions nearly 25 years ago and has been working on their puzzles ever since. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 5914 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By ROWAN HOOPER There can be few things more likely to provoke horrific fascination -- and guarantee massive media coverage -- than a mother who murders her babies. We find the act repugnant because nothing is more contrary to natural selection. But there can surely be nothing worse than suffering the tragedy of your babies dying and then being falsely accused of their murders. This is exactly what happened to a woman in Britain last year, but thankfully the story has a happy ending, or at least a just one. A pharmacist, Trupti Patel, was accused of murdering her three babies, Amar, Jamie and Mia. She was arrested and prosecuted largely on the evidence of Professor Sir Roy Meadow, a consultant pediatrician. "Sudden, unexpected death does not run in families," Meadow told the court. But he was wrong, as the Patel jury found -- and as scientists have demonstrated this week. Meadow (now retired and discredited) is the man responsible for the widespread belief that one infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder. As an "expert witness," Meadows came close to reversing the "innocent until proven guilty" creed. Despite this -- or more likely because of it -- he was popular with prosecution lawyers, acting as an expert witness in more than 5,000 cases. The Japan Times(C) All rights reserved

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 5913 - Posted: 07.30.2004

Two intelligent humans assess the mental feats of wild creatures and come to opposite conclusions By Sy Montgomery Betty, a New Caledonian crow at the University of Oxford, needed a hooked wire to retrieve a bucket containing a treat. So she wedged a straight wire into a crack in the lab’s table and bent it, creating the right tool. Sheba, a chimp at Ohio State University, was trained to collect up to four oranges and then choose a numeral—1, 2, 3, or 4—to show how many she’d found. Kanzi, a bonobo chimp at the Georgia State University Language Research Center in Atlanta, communicates with his trainers using symbols on a keyboard. He understands the difference between sentences like “Pour the lemonade in the Coke” and “Pour the Coke in the lemonade.” What’s going on here? Are these animals thinking or using language? Or are we projecting human abilities onto nonhuman animals? Two new books that grapple with the nature of intelligence in the nonhuman world offer vastly different conclusions. In Do Animals Think? University of Florida psychologist Clive Wynne argues that the mental feats of nonhuman animals are all in our heads—not theirs. He claims that language is ours alone and that animals’ seemingly complex responses to problems are achieved by automatic mechanisms, not by thought. But how did humans acquire the ability to use language and practice culture? Not through some “mutational miracle,” writes journalist Tim Friend. In Animal Talk, he argues that culture, language, and mathematical skills emerged thanks to a process common to all living creatures: evolution. We think because thinking is adaptive. Therefore we should expect to see similar cognitive abilities in both human and nonhuman animals. (C) 2003 The Walt Disney Company.

Keyword: Intelligence; Animal Communication
Link ID: 5912 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Fatigue is in the mind, not the muscles, suggests a new study. But it can still have a serious impact on athletic performance. The finding could lead to treatments for conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, or the development of illicit performance-enhancing drugs. Traditionally, fatigue was viewed as the result of over-worked muscles ceasing to function properly. But evidence is mounting that our brains make us feel weary after exercise (New Scientist print edition, 20 March). The idea is that the brain steps in to prevent muscle damage. Now Paula Robson-Ansley and her colleagues at the University of Cape Town in South Africa have demonstrated that a ubiquitous body signalling molecule called interleukin-6 plays a key role in telling the brain when to slow us down. Blood levels of IL-6 are 60 to 100 times higher than normal following prolonged exercise, and injecting healthy people with IL-6 makes them feel tired. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 5911 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Helen Pilcher Researchers have created a synthetic protein that makes mice display symptoms similar to those of mad cow disease. The protein, called a prion, helps to resolve a long-standing debate on the cause of certain degenerative brain conditions, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle. Being able to manufacture the rogue protein in the lab may also aid the development of new therapies and speedy diagnostic tests. Sporadic CJD, which accounts for 85% of prion diseases in humans, is thought to develop spontaneously. Researchers believe that healthy brain prions somehow become twisted out of shape and go on to trigger the production of more misshapen proteins. As the brain degenerates, patients lose the power of speech and movement. As there is no effective treatment, the disease is invariably fatal. But there is controversy over whether a protein alone can trigger the disease. Many researchers believe that the infectious agent must also contain genetic material, such as DNA or RNA, in order to instruct the healthy proteins to turn bad. ©2004 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 5910 - Posted: 06.24.2010

PITTSBURGH—A team of brain scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have made a groundbreaking discovery into the biological basis for autism, a mysterious brain disorder that impairs verbal and non-verbal communications and social interactions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, the researchers have found numerous abnormalities in the activity of brains of people with normal IQs who have autism. The new findings indicate a deficiency in the coordination among brain areas. The results converge with previous findings of white matter abnormalities in autism. (White matter consists of the "cables" that connect the various parts of the brain to each other). The new findings led the researchers to propose a new theory of the basis of autism, called underconnectivity theory, which holds that autism is a system-wide brain disorder that limits the coordination and integration among brain areas. This theory helps explain a paradox of autism: Some people with autism have normal or even superior skills in some areas, while many other types of thinking are disordered. The team's study will be published in the August edition of the British journal Brain and is available online at www.brain.oupjournals.org. In explaining the theory, Marcel Just, one of the study's lead authors and director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging, compared the brain of a normal person to a sports team in which the members cooperate and coordinate their efforts.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 5909 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Connor, Science Editor Squirrels have been recorded using high-pitched ultrasonic "whispers" that are inaudible to the human ear but warn each other of danger. It is the first time that any animal has been found to use ultrasound for an alarm call although high-frequency sounds well beyond the range of human hearing are widely used by bats. The discovery that squirrels communicate using ultrasound was made by James Hare, professor of zoology at the University of Manitoba in Canada, and his student David Wilson. They were studying the audible alarm calls of the Richardson's ground squirrel, a social animal that lives in burrows of closely related females and their offspring. This species of squirrel - sometimes called a gopher - lives on the prairies of North America and has developed a sophisticated communication system to warn of approaching predators. Professor Hare noticed a female opening its mouth as if in alarm and emitting faint sounds of rushing air, an apparently noiseless whisper which nevertheless triggered a vigilant posture in her nearby relatives. © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 5908 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Amy Norton NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new gene study may help explain why she sees crimson, vermilion and tomato, but it's all just red to him. In an analysis of the DNA of 236 men from around the globe, researchers found that the gene that allows people to see the color red comes in an unusually high number of variations. And that may be a boon to women's color perception in particular, study co-author Dr. Brian C. Verrelli told Reuters Health. That's because the gene, known as OPN1LW, sits on the X sex chromosome. Women have two X chromosomes, one from each parent, while men have one X and one Y chromosome. Because women have two different copies of the "red" gene, the fact that the gene can have so many variations means it may especially aid women's perception of the red-orange spectrum. Verrelli, an assistant professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, and colleague Dr. Sarah Tishkoff report the findings in the American Journal of Human Genetics. Among the 236 samples of DNA they studied, the researchers found 85 variations in the OPN1LW gene. That's about three times the number of variations one would see in any other "random gene" pulled from the human genome, Verrelli said. SOURCE: American Journal of Human Genetics, September 2004. © Reuters 2004.

Keyword: Vision; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 5907 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY Psychosurgery. Brain implants. Mind control. The stuff of movies — as in The Manchurian Candidate, which opens Friday — or a glimpse of the future? Maybe both, says neurologist Jay Lombard of the Brain Behavior Center in Nyack, N.Y., who was science adviser for the film. The political thriller stars Denzel Washington as Maj. Bennett Marco, a Gulf War veteran who is tormented by dreams that suggest he was surgically brainwashed during the war. When a sergeant from his unit emerges years later as a candidate for vice president, Marco attempts to find out the truth about his dreams and the candidate. "If you look at where things are heading in neuroscience," Lombard says, "it's not that far a stretch." The future of neuroscience is under study this year by the President's Council on Bioethics. Opponents of "neuromarketing," the study of consumer choice using brain scans, have raised alarms about the possibility of the advertising industry using science to sell people unneeded or harmful products. "We have capabilities we never had before," says neuroethicist Judy Illes of Stanford University. For example, imaging studies are now examining judgment and emotion in the brain, she says, and brain chip implants are treating Parkinson's and obsessive-compulsive disorder. © Copyright 2004 USA TODAY,

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 5906 - Posted: 06.24.2010