By NATALIE ANGIER I was walking through the neighborhood one afternoon when, on turning a corner, I nearly tripped over a gray squirrel that was sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, eating a nut. Startled by my sudden appearance, the squirrel dashed out to the road — right in front of an oncoming car. Before I had time to scream, the squirrel had gotten caught in the car’s front hubcap, had spun around once like a cartoon character in a clothes dryer, and was spat back off. When the car drove away, the squirrel picked itself up, wobbled for a moment or two, and then resolutely hopped across the street. You don’t get to be one of the most widely disseminated mammals in the world — equally at home in the woods, a suburban backyard or any city “green space” bigger than a mousepad — if you’re crushed by every Acme anvil that happens to drop your way. “When people call me squirrely,” said John L. Koprowski, a squirrel expert and professor of wildlife conservation and management at the University of Arizona, “I am flattered by the term.” The Eastern gray tree squirrel, or Sciurus carolinensis, has been so spectacularly successful that it is often considered a pest. The International Union for Conservation of Nature includes the squirrel on its list of the top 100 invasive species. The British and Italians hate gray squirrels for outcompeting their beloved native red squirrels. Manhattanites hate gray squirrels for reminding them of pigeons, and that goes for the black, brown and latte squirrel morphs, too. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 14233 - Posted: 07.06.2010

By SINDYA N. BHANOO It takes an elephant much longer to notice a fly and flick it away than it takes a shrew, and the reason is not that the elephant’s great brain is too busy with philosophy, or that it simply does not concern itself with flies. It’s a matter of round-trip travel time — in the nervous system. The trip from the elephant’s skin to the brain and back again to the muscles to flick the tail is 100 times as long as the same trip in a shrew, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The nervous system acts like an information superhighway, sending messages back and forth from the brain throughout the body. The bigger the animal, the greater the distance traveled. Nerves have a maximum speed limit of about 180 feet per second, said Maxwell Donelan, the study’s lead author. “It makes sense that in a large animal, like an elephant, messages have a longer way to travel,” he said. Dr. Donelan believes that large animals may have to compensate for this handicap by thinking ahead, and avoiding risky situations. “That’s what we want to study next,” he said. “It could be that the nervous systems of large animals have evolved to become excellent predictive machines.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14232 - Posted: 07.06.2010

By SINDYA N. BHANOO When it comes to singing, male zebra finches outdo prima donnas, singing over a wide range that starts almost an octave above middle C but soars higher than any coloratura soprano. Female zebra finches, on the other hand, are limited to a few one-note low frequency calls. The vocal range is critical for males during mating season, when they use their songs to attract females. Scientists have known that the vocal muscles in a male bird’s syrinx, or voice box, are about twice the size of those in a female bird’s. Now, a study finds that male birds are able to better control their vocal muscles than female birds. It is this ability that allows them such a wide range. The study appears in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE. Researchers operated on male and female birds, cutting the nerves that control vocal muscles in the syrinx. The males still sang, but they could no longer produce high frequencies in their songs. Instead, they had the same low frequency range of females. Further research into how the vocal muscles of zebra finches remain strong and hardy over time may help lead to treatments for humans who use their vocal chords extensively, said Tobias Riede, a biologist at the University of Utah and the study’s lead author. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14231 - Posted: 07.06.2010

by Bob Holmes, Eugene, Oregon EXTROVERTS are born not made - or at least, that's what they say. But what if it's more subtle than that? What if we tailor our personalities to our surroundings to make the most of our genes? Conventional comparisons between identical and fraternal twins indicate that nearly half of individual differences in personality traits have some underlying genetic cause. So people have tended to think of personality traits as largely determined by genes, says evolutionary psychologist Aaron Lukaszewski of the University of California at Santa Barbara. He felt there was a flaw in this thinking: if personality were rigidly determined, individuals could end up with the "wrong" personality type for their circumstances. Being extrovert, for instance, exposes people to social conflict. Wimpy men are more likely to suffer in such encounters, while hunkier men may benefit from putting good genes on display. To avoid mismatches, Lukaszewski reasoned, evolution must have favoured a more flexible system. To test this idea, he measured the strength of 85 male and 89 female students and asked them to rate their own attractiveness relative to their peers. Then he gave each a standard personality test to measure how extrovert they were. Sure enough, stronger and more attractive men, and more attractive women, were more extrovert, Lukaszewski reported at a June meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society in Eugene, Oregon. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 14230 - Posted: 07.06.2010

Genetic engineers, move over: the latest scheme for creating children to a parent’s specifications requires no DNA tinkering, but merely giving mom a steroid while she’s pregnant, and presto—no chance that her daughters will be lesbians or (worse?) ‘uppity.’ Or so one might guess from the storm brewing over the prenatal use of that steroid, called dexamethasone. In February, bioethicist Alice Dreger of Northwestern University and two colleagues blew the whistle on the controversial practice of giving pregnant women dexamethasone to keep the female fetuses they are carrying from developing ambiguous genitalia. (That can happen to girls who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a genetic disorder in which unusually high prenatal exposure to masculinizing hormones called androgens can cause girls to develop a deep voice, facial hair, and masculine-looking genitalia.) The response Dreger got from physicians and scientists who were outraged over this unapproved use of dexamethasone caused her to dig deeper into the scientific papers of the researcher who has promoted it. The result of that digging is a discovery that is much less outrageous than the PR push, and some media coverage, would have you believe, but one that nonetheless raises important questions about gender, sexuality, and research on unknowing patients. In an essay titled “Preventing Homosexuality (and Uppity Women) in the Womb?” and posted on the bioethics forum of The Hastings Center, a think tank in Garrison, N.Y., Dreger and her colleagues pluck numerous brow-raising statements from the writings of pediatric endocrinologist Maria New of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, who has long promoted prenatal dexamethasone to treat CAH. But if that position is controversial (as I’ll explain below), what Dreger and her colleagues claim to have uncovered is even more so. New, they say, wants to use dexamethasone to prevent CAH girls from becoming lesbians, from rejecting motherhood, and from choosing traditionally masculine careers. © 2010 Newsweek, Inc

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 14229 - Posted: 07.06.2010

by Michael Balter Want to live a long life? Have lots of friends. Studies in humans have made clear that people with stronger social networks have greater longevity. Now a new analysis shows the same is true for baboons. The research adds to growing evidence that friendship is an adaptation with deep evolutionary roots. Little is known about how social bonds influence longevity in nonhuman animals, in part because tracking animal relationships over many years is very difficult. Nevertheless, recent evidence shows that social bonding enhances reproductive success, an important indicator of evolutionary fitness. A study last year of female horses, led by Elissa Cameron, a zoologist at the University of Pretoria, showed that mares with the weakest social ties had about half as many surviving foals as those who were most sociable. And in 2006, a team led by University of California, Los Angeles, anthropologist Joan Silk reported that the infants of female baboons with close social ties to unrelated females survive longer than those that do not have such ties. In the new work, a team led by Silk looked at the correlation between social bonding and longevity, another important indicator of fitness. Silk studied wild baboons in Botswana's Moremi Game Reserve, teaming up with a long-term project led by University of Pennsylvania biologist Dorothy Cheney and psychologist Robert Seyfarth. From 2001 to 2007, the researchers closely watched 44 female baboons, recording how often they approached each other, how long they groomed each other, and other measures of social interaction. (The researchers looked at females because, in many species, only females form these kinds of social bonds, whereas males are off doing other things and are competitive with each other rather than cooperative.) From these data, the researchers determined each baboon's top three partners in any given year. Thus the team could estimate the strength of each baboon's relationships with its closest partners over the years and the extent to which each baboon stuck to her best buddies. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 14228 - Posted: 07.03.2010

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue. Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity. "The scores range from zero to 40," Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. "The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile." "Brian" is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. Last July, Dugan pleaded guilty to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation. On screen, Dugan is dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He seems calm, even normal — until he lifts his hands to take a sip of water and you see the handcuffs. Dugan is smart — his IQ is over 140 — but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he's developed a sense of remorse. Copyright 2010 NPR

Keyword: Aggression; Emotions
Link ID: 14227 - Posted: 07.03.2010

By Christine Soares A restful night’s sleep might make a cup of coffee less of a desperate need first thing in the morning. But pharmaceutical companies are looking into whether the latest pills to promise sound, natural sleep could also play an active role in overcoming even the most powerful addictions. The new sleep aids block the activity of brain peptides called orexins. These tiny proteins keep us wide awake and attentive during the day, and they also govern some stimulating effects of addictive drugs. Orexins do not cause addiction or relapse directly, but neither happens without the peptides’ participation. The intriguing connection between sleep and addiction has long been observed in people who suffer from narcolepsy—a disorder that causes sudden-onset sleep. Although narcoleptics were sometimes treated with potent amphetamines to help them stay awake, they never became addicted to the drugs. By 1998 genetic detective work had traced the cause of narcolepsy to mutations in the genes for orexins or their receptors—discoveries that revealed both the peptides’ existence and their critical role in keeping the brain awake. Efforts to turn those insights into novel insomnia treatments have led to several compounds that are now in late-stage clinical trials. The same companies developing these sleep aids are also investigat-ing orexins’ role in addiction through research in animals. In a recent study Davide Quarta and his co-workers at Glaxo­SmithKline Medicines Research Center in Verona, Italy, confirmed that when the company’s experimental orexin blocker SB-334867 was admin­istered to rats along with amphetamine their brains released less dopamine and they became less sensitized to the stimulant than controls did, even with repeated doses. Sensitized neurons grow extra receptors for the craved drug, demanding more of it to achieve stimulation, thereby fueling a cycle that leads to addiction. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sleep
Link ID: 14226 - Posted: 07.03.2010

By Bruce Bower Botox treatment to erase unsightly frown lines may cause unforeseen emotional wrinkles. First-time Botox patients become slower at evaluating descriptions of negative emotions, possibly putting the patients at a social disadvantage, a new study indicates. For more than a century, scientists have posited that facial expressions trigger and intensify relevant feelings, rather than simply advertise what an individual already feels. Botox patients provide a novel line of support for this idea, as well as for the notion that facial expressions activate links between brain regions responsible for emotions and language, says psychology graduate student David Havas of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Botox is short for botulinum toxin-A, a neurotoxic protein that causes temporary muscle paralysis beginning one to three days after an injection and lasting for three to four months. Two weeks after their first Botox injections, 40 women took an average of about one-third of a second longer to read sentences describing angry and sad situations than they did immediately before the procedure, Havas and his colleagues found. Critically, Botox patients show no decline in the speed with which they read sentences about happy situations, Havas’ team reports in an upcoming Psychological Science. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 14225 - Posted: 07.03.2010

by Bob Holmes Which face is more attractive? If you chose the face on the left, you share the tastes of most heterosexual men. It is a composite face, or "morph", made from the faces of eight women with unusually small feet. The face on the right is a morph of eight women with unusually large feet. It's quite a difference, isn't it? Women with smaller feet have prettier faces, at least according to the men who took part in this study. So do women with longer thigh bones and narrower hips, as well as women who are taller overall. And the contest isn't even a close one. "These are the most strikingly different morphs I've ever seen," says Jeremy Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University at Albany, New York. Atkinson and his colleague Michelle Rowe measured hand length, foot length, thigh length and hip width on 60 white female college students, then adjusted each measurement to account for individual differences in overall height. For each of 16 body-part measurements, they selected the eight women with the shortest lengths and the eight with the longest, and constructed morphs of their faces. These morphs were then rated for attractiveness by 77 heterosexual male students. The men were three-and-a-half times as likely to pick the short-footed morph as more attractive, and almost 10 times as likely to say it was more feminine, Atkinson and Rowe found. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14224 - Posted: 07.03.2010

by Laurie Rich, Jane Bosveld, Andrew Grant, Amy Barth The brain is a castle on a hill. Encased in bone and protected by a special layer of cells, it is shielded from infections and injuries—but also from many pharmaceuticals and even from the body’s own immune defenses. As a result, brain problems are tough to diagnose and to treat. To meet this challenge, researchers are exploring unconventional therapies, from electrodes to laser-light stimulation to mind-bending drugs. Some of these radical experiments may never pan out. But, as frequently happens in medicine, a few of today’s improbable approaches may evolve into tomorrow’s miraculous cures. 1. Man Meets Machine In a sense, cyborgs already walk among us: Nearly 200,000 deaf or near-deaf people have cochlear implants, electronic sound-processing machines that stimulate the auditory nerve and link into the brain. But even by the fanciful science fiction definition, the age of cyborgs is just around the corner. In the last decade, researchers have become increasingly skilled at detecting and interpreting brain signals. Technologies that allow people to use their thoughts to control machines—computers, speaking devices, or prosthetic limbs—are already being tested and could soon be available for widespread applications.

Keyword: Robotics; Hearing
Link ID: 14223 - Posted: 07.03.2010

Martin Enserink It was just a snippet of news, reported by an obscure journal in the Netherlands. And yet it lit up the Internet. Twitter was all atwitter, scientists' mailboxes on both sides of the Atlantic began filling up, and dozens of bloggers started jubilating. "It's happened. I cannot tell you all how this changes the world as we have known it for 25+ years," one patient wrote on her blog. "Now to work on the vindication part!" The reason for all the excitement? Scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were reported to have confirmed the link, first published in Science last year, between a human retrovirus and the elusive condition called chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Earlier this year, three other groups reported being unable to replicate such a connection. That federal scientists now confirmed it was a huge mood-lifter for patients, many of whom are desperate to find a biological cause, and a cure, for their debilitating ailment. But the story wasn't as simple as that. Science has learned that a paper describing the new findings, already accepted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), has been put on hold because it directly contradicts another as-yet-unpublished study by a third government agency, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That paper, a retrovirus scientist says, has been submitted to Retrovirology and is also on hold; it fails to find a link between the xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) and CFS. The contradiction has caused "nervousness" both at PNAS and among senior officials within the Department of Health and Human Services, of which all three agencies are part, says one scientist with inside knowledge. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 14222 - Posted: 07.03.2010

Greg Miller Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf work in the same Canadian city, but it took a chance meeting at a Spanish pub more than 15 years ago to jump-start a collaboration that helped create a new discipline. Meaney, a neuroscientist at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal, studies how early life experiences shape behavior later in life. Across town at McGill University, Szyf is a leading expert on chemical alterations to DNA that affect gene activity. Sometime in the mid-1990s, both men attended the same meeting in Madrid and ended up at a bar talking and drinking beer. "A lot of it," Szyf recalls. Meaney told Szyf about his findings that rat pups raised by inattentive mothers tend to be more anxious as adults than pups raised by more nurturing mothers. He also described how the activity of stress-related genes was altered in the undernurtured pups. At some point in the conversation, Szyf had a flash of insight: This difference must be due to DNA methylation—the chemical alteration he had been studying in stem cells and tumor cells. The idea cut against the conventional thinking in both fields. In neuroscience, the prevailing wisdom held that long-term changes in behavior result from physical changes in neural circuits—such as when neurons build new synapses and become more sensitive to messages from their neighbors. And most scientists who studied DNA methylation thought the process was restricted to embryonic development or cancer cells. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Stress
Link ID: 14221 - Posted: 07.03.2010

Beds that cost up to $60,000 each are now available, note Dr. Michael Thorpy and Shelby Freedman Harris of the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. But is a better mattress the secret to curing insomnia? Drs. Thorpy and Harris recently responded to questions about insomnia on the Consults blog. Here, they address which type of mattress is best for a sound night’s sleep and whether light or noise might be reasons for sleeping poorly. Q. Is there any research that shows if the kind of mattress you have affects sleep? Dee, Western New York A. It is common for people with insomnia to wonder if their bed, or some other environmental factor like light or noise, is the reason for their sleeping poorly. Sometimes an uncomfortable mattress is the cause of the sleep disturbance, but most often it is not. Very few studies have analyzed how the type of mattress affects sleep quality, and they’ve generally involved a small number of healthy subjects or patients who are in pain. The results have been variable, with some preferring a soft surface and others preferring a hard surface. No clear benefit of any mattress type has been shown. People in some jungle cultures, or even hikers or campers, who sleep on mats on the hard ground can usually get a good night’s sleep if they do it often enough. It is largely a matter of conditioning to the environment that allows a person to sleep comfortably. Problems can arise, however, with sudden changes, like staying in a hotel overnight, when a new bed or environment can be a factor in disrupting sleep. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14220 - Posted: 07.01.2010

Exercise has previously been linked to possible benefits in staving off dementia, but a new look at the topic suggests the earlier the better. The prevalence of cognitive impairment was significantly lower in women aged 65 and older who reported they were physically active as teens than in those who were inactive in their teen years, the study found. "If we want to optimally prevent dementia, it's important to start physical activity as early in life as possible," said principal investigator Laura Middleton of the Heart and Stroke Foundation Centre for Stroke Recovery at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. "More and more people are starting to recognize physical activity as one of the most promising means to prevent cognitive impairment and dementia. And what this study adds is that it's not only important in mid and late life — that we really have to start as early as possible." The study was published Wednesday appears in the July issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Middleton worked on the project while she was at the University of California in San Francisco, and used data from the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures. She analyzed the responses of 9,704 women in four U.S. cities: Baltimore, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., and Monongahela Valley, Pa. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14219 - Posted: 07.01.2010

Scientists at Penn State University say they have developed a mouse that gets depressed in a similar fashion to humans, which could led to better treatment for the condition among people. Biology professor Bernhard Luscher, the project's leader, said that is because scientists will be able to test different drugs for various mental conditions and observe the mice to see the results. "A mouse can't tell us if it is feeling depressed, so we used a number of different kinds of tests to gauge ... changes ... of a type of depression that, in humans, does not respond well to some antidepressant drugs," Luscher said. Drug trials Researchers essentially created a rodent with a genetic defect that interferes with the development of a protein in the brain, called the GABA-A receptor. The lack of that protein allows the mice to mimic brain disorders among humans but lets the researchers reach different conclusions, the scientists noted. For example, a GABA-A deficiency had been linked to anxiety disorders but not directly to depression. In a paper to be published in Biology Psychiatry, however, Luscher used the genetically-modified mouse to show that the protein is in fact important to proper brain function and that whatever cerebral problems cause anxiety also have a hand in the appearance of depression. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 14218 - Posted: 07.01.2010

by Debora MacKenzie INFECTIOUS disease is taking an unexpected toll by sapping people's brainpower in the world's poorest countries. So say Christopher Eppig and colleagues at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, who found that a country's disease burden is strongly linked to the average IQ of its population. Building and maintaining the brain requires 87 per cent of all the body's energy in newborns and 44 per cent in 5-year-old children. Fighting infection also takes enormous amounts of energy, so children may struggle to do both at the same time. Eppig reasoned that an increased risk of catching an infectious disease during critical developmental stages may affect subsequent IQ levels. His team matched three sets of IQ estimates of healthy people in 192 countries, against the World Health Organization's estimate of the burden of 28 infectious diseases in those countries. With only a few exceptions, they found very high correlations: the more disease, the lower the IQ. Disease was more closely related to IQ than any other variable they tested. IQ differences are known to correlate with GDP, and educational and nutritional levels, but when variation in IQ due to disease was accounted for, IQ showed no correlation with these other factors (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.0973). This may explain the effect discovered by the political philosopher James Flynn, who noted that IQ soars following economic development. "Others have suggested that it is caused by better education, but we found that infectious disease is a much better predictor," Eppig says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 14217 - Posted: 07.01.2010

By Susan Milius PORTLAND, Ore. — A tendency for daughters to fall for guys that are like their dads helps keep two species of fish from interbreeding. Two distinct species of the threespine stickleback dart about in several lakes of British Columbia, where the two fishes could easily mate with each other. But they don’t; the slimmer ones, which feed on plankton in open water, mate with their own kind, while the larger, bottom-feeding ones mate with theirs. Experiments now show that early in life, females of both kinds pick up some cue from their fathers, probably his odor, that provides a guide later on when it comes time to choose a mate, according to Genevieve Kozak of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The experiments suggest that this process, known as imprinting, may help the stickleback species stay separate even though they live in the same lakes, Kozak said June 27 at the Evolution 2010 meeting. “One of the coolest talks I've seen,” said evolutionary biologist Daphne Fairbairn of the University of California, Riverside. Just how new species form and stay separate while sharing space remains a lively topic in biology, and for some creatures, such as the extraordinarily diverse cichlid fish in African lakes, biologists are still looking for a good explanation. “I think the cichlid people are going to jump on this,” Fairbairn said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14216 - Posted: 06.29.2010

Even if you haven't taken the invisible gorilla test, you've probably heard of it. It consists of a short video of two teams of students moving around while they pass basketballs. The idea is to count the number of passes made by one team while ignoring those made by the other. Roughly half of those who take the test fail to notice a person dressed as a gorilla who strolls into the middle of the players and beats its chest at the camera. The viewers are concentrating so hard on counting the passes that they're blind to the unexpected, even though it is staring them in the face. This book is by the psychologists who devised that experiment (see Gorilla psychologists: Weird stuff in plain sight). Their aim is to show how easy it is to miss things that are right in front of us when we're not looking out for them, and how illusions and distorted beliefs lead us astray every day. They cover what they consider to be six of the most common intuitive errors: Some of these biases have been widely written about, but it is worth reading them again here for the clarity with which Chris Chabris and Dan Simons explain them and their talent for making them relevant to everyday situations. They demonstrate, for example, how over-confidence in one's abilities can be hilarious in a talent show contestant or an incompetent criminal caught on camera, but worrying when it dissuades other members of a group from sharing their own - less confidently held but nonetheless important - opinions. And such over-confidence can be positively dangerous in a witness whose apparently credible evidence is given undue weight by jurors or police. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14215 - Posted: 06.29.2010

by Eliza Strickland When the housing market crashed in late 2008, most people were surprised by the sudden collapse. John Coates was not among them. He had spent 12 years trading derivatives for New York’s biggest banks—and had left finance for neuroscience, studying what happens in the brains of traders who put billions of dollars on the line in risky financial decisions. Coates, who now studies neuroscience and behavioral economics at the University of Cambridge, has made the London stock market his laboratory. His experiments seem to show that a trader’s success may be determined not by his wits but by the hormones that course through his brain. Hormone-fueled decision making can have powerful effects, intensifying market booms and busts and destabilizing the economy, Coates suggests. The markets’ operations are determined by legions of young men governed by confidence-boosting testosterone and the stress-related hormone cortisol. When hormones spiral out of control, economic behavior can do so as well. How did you get inside the heads of the people working in the financial markets? In our first experiment, we were on a trading floor in London with 250 traders, of which only three were women; the average age was maybe 28. They traded in and out very quickly, which means they would hold positions for minutes or even seconds. They would spot a price anomaly and jump on it, then quickly unwind. And they would make trades of huge value —$1 billion or $2 billion at a crack. We wanted to find out what was going on in the brains and bodies of these men who were taking such huge risks. So we collected saliva samples from the traders to measure their levels of testosterone and cortisol in the morning and the afternoon, bracketing the bulk of the day’s trading. Our hypothesis was that when traders had above-average testosterone their profits would go up, and in fact that’s exactly what we saw. It turned out that their morning testosterone levels were actually predicting their afternoon profits.

Keyword: Emotions; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14214 - Posted: 06.29.2010