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

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

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

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 14012 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 14008 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

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

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

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

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

Keyword: Language
Link ID: 14005 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14004 - Posted: 06.24.2010

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

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

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

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

By Charles Q. Choi The blast waves from explosions could jolt the skull into generating electricity, potentially damaging the brain, scientists now suggest. Although the burns and shrapnel wounds that explosions can inflict are their most obvious hazards, perhaps the greatest danger comes from a blast's shock wave. These rapidly generate ripples in a person's innards, potentially causing traumatic brain injuries with deleterious effects ranging from a simple concussion to long-term impaired mental function. Now scientists have uncovered a surprising possible way by which a blast might affect the brain — electric fields created when bone is hit by a shock wave. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here "It's always exciting to look at a phenomenon that may have been missed in the past," said researcher Steven Johnson, a theoretical physicist at MIT. "Moreover, this is potentially an issue that can directly affect the lives of our soldiers , which gives it a special interest for all of us who are involved." A variety of materials generate electricity when mechanically stressed. This effect, known as piezoelectricity, is commonly seen in guitar pickups and loudspeakers. Johnson and his colleagues developed a new computer model of the electric fields generated in the skull by an improvised explosive device (IED) — the kind often rigged up nowadays in combat zones. The model results suggest the generated electric fields could exceed electrical safety guidelines by a factor of 10. In fact, they might be comparable in magnitude to medical procedures employing electromagnetic fields that can disrupt brain function. © 2010 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 14001 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carolyn Y. Johnson Physically, Tripp was fine, crawling, standing, and walking on schedule. But language eluded him. Lee Black vividly recalled when Tripp, nearly 2, sat in his highchair and tried to sing a children’s song. He started to say “head,’’ then faltered, as if the word had crumbled out of his grasp. “I watched him freeze,’’ his father said. “That was the ultimate moment.’’ Tripp was later diagnosed with autism, a disorder that can impair children’s ability to speak. Despite years of therapy, he did not talk. Then last fall, at age 8, he began an experimental program that coaxes speech using singing, movement, and imitation. After 10 weeks, he could say “mama,’’ “dada,’’ “bubbles,’’ and “bye.’’ One evening, his brother, Luke, was having trouble getting the family dog onto his bed. “Journey, up!’’ he called. “Up, up, up!’’ Tripp chimed in. For his mother, that simple exchange was huge — Tripp had spontaneously used his voice, joining in a bedtime ritual. “That’s what a family is supposed to feel like; when you’re putting your kids to bed, everybody’s supposed to be participating,’’ she said later. “A little thing like that can carry me for a month.’’ © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Autism; Language
Link ID: 14000 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists have developed a brain implant that essentially melts into place, snugly fitting to the brain’s surface. The technology could pave the way for better devices to monitor and control seizures, and to transmit signals from the brain past damaged parts of the spinal cord. “These implants have the potential to maximize the contact between electrodes and brain tissue, while minimizing damage to the brain. They could provide a platform for a range of devices with applications in epilepsy, spinal cord injuries and other neurological disorders,” said Walter Koroshetz, M.D., deputy director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study, published in Nature Materials*, shows that the ultrathin flexible implants, made partly from silk, can record brain activity more faithfully than thicker implants embedded with similar electronics. The simplest devices for recording from the brain are needle-like electrodes that can penetrate deep into brain tissue. More state-of-the-art devices, called micro-electrode arrays, consist of dozens of semi-flexible wire electrodes, usually fixed to rigid silicon grids that do not conform to the brain’s shape. In people with epilepsy, the arrays could be used to detect when seizures first begin, and deliver pulses to shut the seizures down. In people with spinal cord injuries, the technology has promise for reading complex signals in the brain that direct movement, and routing those signals to healthy muscles or prosthetic devices.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 13999 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway Brain-training software may be a waste of time. People who played "mind-boosting" games made the same modest cognitive gains as those who spent a similar amount of time surfing the web. "It didn't really make any difference what people did," says Adrian Owen of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, who tested brain-training software on volunteers recruited through a BBC television programme. Over the past five years, there has been an explosion in the market for brain-training software, which supposedly keeps the brain youthful. The BBC approached Owen with the idea of testing such software after he wrote a review of the scientific literature on it. Only a handful of studies existed on the topic, many lacking good controls or enough volunteers, he says. "The scientific evidence for it was extremely weak." Owen and his colleagues asked 11,000 volunteers to take tests to gauge their reasoning ability and verbal and spatial memory. Participants then spent six weeks playing on one of two computer programs, or just surfing the web for trivia. In one program, which mimics commercial brain-training software, the volunteers solved simple mathematics problems and puzzles that tested their memories. The other was designed specifically to boost cognitive abilities such as reasoning and planning. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Intelligence
Link ID: 13998 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Gisela Telis Called “feathered apes” for their simianlike smarts, crows use tools, understand physics, and recognize themselves and humans. But new research suggests that the brainy birds may be even smarter than was previously thought. Given a complex problem and an assortment of tools, New Caledonian crows came up with a creative solution that hints at higher-order thinking. A native of New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands in the Pacific Ocean, the New Caledonian crow makes tools from sticks or leaves and uses these to draw tasty grubs from hollows in trees. That in itself wouldn’t be so impressive—even some insects use tools this way—but the crows also combine tools when they needed to. In a 2007 experiment conducted by graduate student Alex Taylor and colleagues at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, the crows used a shorter stick to grab another that was long enough to get food outside their reach. This kind of action seems to indicate insight or reasoning. But not everyone was convinced, says Taylor. “Some scientists suggested the tools became valuable in themselves because they were associated with food,” he says. That would mean the birds sought each stick because they wanted it, not because they understood the stick’s potential function. The distinction, although subtle, marks the difference between high- and low-level learning, and it speaks to a central question of cognition research: How do you determine whether an animal is thinking through its actions, or simply learning through association a series of behaviors and combining them? © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 13997 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By OLIVIA JUDSON Being fat is bad for your brain. That, at least, is the gloomy conclusion of several recent studies. For example, one long-term study of more than 6,500 people in northern California found that those who were fat around the middle at age 40 were more likely to succumb to dementia in their 70s. A long-term study in Sweden found that, compared to thinner people, those who were overweight in their 40s experienced a more rapid, and more pronounced, decline in brain function over the next several decades. Consistent with this, the brains of obese people often show signs of damage. One study of 60 healthy young adults (in their 20s and 30s) found that the fatter members of the group had significantly lower gray-matter densities in several brain regions, including those involved in the perception of taste and the regulation of eating behavior. A study of 114 middle-aged people (aged between 40 and 66) found that the obese tended to have smaller, more atrophied brains than thinner people; other studies have found similar results. Brains usually atrophy with age, but being obese appears to accelerate the process. This is bad news: pronounced brain atrophy is a feature of dementia. Why fatness should affect the brain in this way is not clear, although a host of culprits have been suggested. A paper published this week in the early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has identified a gene that seems to be involved. FTO, as the gene is known, appears to play a role in both body weight and brain function. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 13996 - Posted: 04.22.2010

by Dan Ferber The smell of a Big Mac makes your mouth water, but your arteries are safe if you buy the salad, right? Maybe not. A new study has identified a specific food odor that makes dieting fruit flies die young. The results suggest that certain odors—or drugs that block us from sensing them—might one day help prevent disease and extend lives. For more than a decade, scientists have known that a low-calorie diet lengthens the lives of many organisms, including yeast, fruit flies, monkeys, and perhaps humans. But the connection may have as much to do with smelling as it does with eating. In 2004, for example, molecular geneticist Cynthia Kenyon of the University of California, San Francisco, discovered that removing certain olfactory neurons not only blocks roundworms’ sense of smell but also prolongs their lives. And a few years later, geneticist Scott Pletcher of the University of Michigan Medical School, biologist Gregg Roman of Baylor College of Medicine, and their colleagues shortened the life span of fruit flies by wafting the smell of live yeast—a tasty treat—toward them while they were on a diet. Pletcher and colleagues suspected that a specific odor was at work, but they didn't know which one. In the meantime, other scientists had identified a receptor in a group of neurons that enable fruit flies to smell carbon dioxide, which signals the presence of a good meal of tasty yeast. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Obesity
Link ID: 13995 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Ingrid Wickelgren MONTREAL—Rational calculations do not dictate financial decisions, as psychologists have revealed in recent years. Emotions often sway our spendthrift or miserly ways. In particular, positive feelings promote risk taking—gambling in Vegas, say, or going on a shopping spree—whereas bad moods prompt protective selling or saving. In some cases, our feelings may have an obvious origin: studies show that sunshine breeds stock surges, whereas clouds curtail purchasing. But much of what influences our spending is far more subtle—subliminal, in fact. Now psychology graduate student Julie L. Hall of the University of Michigan reports at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society 2010 annual meeting that subconscious emotional cues have a far greater impact on financial risk taking than conscious ones do. What is more, one particular brain region mediates the connection between what influences our feelings and the financial decisions we make. Hall and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of 24 men and women while the subjects glanced at happy, angry and neutral faces of the sort that, according to previous research, can affect an onlooker's mood. Some of these faces were clearly visible, whereas others flashed so briefly—appearing for a mere 30 milliseconds—that the subjects could not consciously see their expressions. After viewing each face, the men and women were supposed to perform a simulated investment task: choosing between two risky, high-payoff stocks and a safe, low-payoff bond. As expected, the investigators found that viewing the happy faces caused the subjects to pick the riskier financial alternative—that is, the stocks—far more often than seeing the neutral faces did. © 2010 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 13994 - Posted: 06.24.2010