By Eric Bland The scent of a single chemical can turn peaceful, happy fruit flies into flying fists of fury. For the first time, scientists have found a rage-inducing pheromone and the neuron that detects it in fruit flies. The research, detailed in the journal Nature, could help explain everything from bar fights to species-wide population control. "Not only did we identify the pheromone that leads to aggression and its neuron," said David Anderson, a scientist at Cal Tech and co-author of the Nature study, "but we were able to manipulate the ability of the flies to increase aggression." For the most part, fruit flies are a peaceful species. Give a group of flies a piece of food, and they graze peacefully. Give them some land, and they usually share the territory without incident. These idyllic scenes, however, can quickly turn violent. Drop filter paper soaked in artificially produced pheromone, known as 11-cis-vaccenylacetate, into the air around six flies, and they quickly start karate chopping and judo wrestling their opponents, rearing up on their hind legs and snapping down violently, and grappling with their forelegs. Eventually one fly dominates, scaring all other flies away. © 2009 Discovery Channel

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 13613 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jeff Wise Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger by Jeff Wise, published on December 8 by Palgrave Macmillan (Scientific American is a Macmillan publication). Extreme Fear explores the neural underpinnings of this powerful and primitive emotion by relating instances in which people were forced to act under duress and presenting the latest findings from cognitive science. In the following passage from the chapter entitled "Superhuman" a seemingly ordinary man performs an extraordinary feat of strength to rescue a cyclist who has been run over by a car. Here's how it is: one minute, you're going through your daily routine, only half paying attention. And the next you're sucked into a vivid, intense world, where time seems to move slower, colors are brighter, sounds more perceptible, as though the whole universe has suddenly come into focus. It was about 8:30 P.M. on a warm summer evening in Tucson. Tom Boyle, Jr., was sitting in the passenger's seat of his pickup truck, his wife Elizabeth at the wheel, waiting to pull out into traffic from the shopping mall where they'd just had dinner. The Camaro ahead of them hit the gas, spun his wheels, and jerked out onto the avenue with a squeal of rubber. "Oh my God," Elizabeth said. "Do you see that?" Boyle glanced up to see a shower of red sparks flying up from beneath the chassis of the Camaro. And something else: A bike, folded up from impact. The Camaro had hit a cyclist, and the rider was pinned underneath the car. Boyle threw open the door of the truck and started running after the car.

Keyword: Emotions; Stress
Link ID: 13612 - Posted: 12.29.2009

by Douglas Fox CONTAINS zero calories! Countless soft drinks are emblazoned with that slogan as a come-on for those of us locked in a never-ending battle to rein in a spreading waistline. Calorie-free sweeteners certainly have a lot to offer. Food and drink manufacturers have become so good at blending sugar substitutes into their products that it can be almost impossible to tell them apart from the real thing - sucrose - in taste tests. But while artificial sweeteners may be able to confuse our taste buds, the suspicion is growing that our brain is not so easily fooled. Could it be that our cravings for sugary foods run deeper than a liking for sweetness? If so, a whole bunch of weight-loss strategies may need rethinking. Non-sugar sweeteners have come a long way. One of the first, and perhaps the worst, was lead. Romans boiled grapes in lead pots, leaching the sweet-tasting metal into their food. The practice outlived the Roman empire by many centuries, and is thought to have led to the deaths of a number of notables, including Pope Clement II, who perished in 1047. Indigenous peoples in South America use a herb called stevia, which contains chemicals that taste sweet but aren't metabolised in the human gut. These early experimenters weren't worried about shedding the kilos - just searching for a way to sweeten food in a world where refined sugar was scarce. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste); Obesity
Link ID: 13611 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A "molecular switch" that can prevent Huntington's disease from developing has been found in mice. A US study concluded the mutated huntingtin protein, which causes the disease, could be stopped in its tracks by a subtle chemical modification. It is hoped the work could lead to much-needed treatments for the inherited disorder. The study, by the University of California, Los Angeles, is published in the journal Neuron. It is thought between 6,000 and 8,500 people in the UK have Huntington's disease - a neurological condition that starts to show in mid-life and slowly impairs a person's ability to walk, talk and reason. Children who have one parent with the condition have a 50% chance of developing it themselves and often it is passed on before people are aware that they have it. There is no cure for the illness and treatment focuses on managing the symptoms. Although it is known that a protein mutation underpins the disease, it is not exactly clear how that mutation causes the damage seen in those with the condition. In the latest study, researchers found a small section of the mutated protein that can be modified by phosphorylation - a chemical process in the body that alters how proteins function. In mice they found blocking this phosphorylation caused the animals to develop disease symptoms. But when they tried to mimic the process the disorder did not develop. BBC © MMIX

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 13610 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Minute organs hidden deep within the ear appear to directly alter blood flow to the brain, scientists have revealed. Until now, experts thought the inner ear's job was to control balance alone. But the Harvard Medical School team, working with Nasa, found the balance organs also affect brain blood flow in their study involving 24 people. They told BMC Neuroscience journal that the connection probably evolved to enable man to stand upright and still get enough blood up to the brain. The organs of balance are deep within the ear, inside a maze of bony chambers. Two sacs, called the utricle and saccule, make up the inner ear's vestibule and three fluid-filled loops, known as the semi-circular canals, detect the rotation and tilting movements of the head. Dr Jorge Serrador and his team from Harvard Medical School asked 24 healthy people to undergo a range of tests normally used on astronauts. These included a tilt test where the individual sits strapped to a chair that is then tilted to different angles, plus a ride inside a giant, spinning centrifuge. In this way, the researchers were able to stimulate the different parts of the balance organs and monitor the effects on blood flow around the body. This revealed that the utricle and saccule, also known as the otoliths, directly affected brain blood flow regulation, independent of other factors, such as blood pressure. BBC © MMIX

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 13609 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Victoria Gill In Africa and in the tropics, armies of tiny creatures make the twisting stems of acacia plants their homes. Aggressive, stinging ants feed on the sugary nectar the plant provides and live in nests protected by its thick bark. This is the world of "ant guards". The acacias might appear overrun by them, but the plants have the ants wrapped around their little stems. These same plants that provide shelter and produce nourishing nectar to feed the insects also make chemicals that send them into a defensive frenzy, forcing them into retreat. Nigel Raine, a scientist working at Royal Holloway, University of London in the UK has studied this plant-ant relationship. Dr Raine and his colleagues from the universities of St Andrews, Edinburgh and Reading in the UK and Lund University in Sweden have been trying to work out some of the ways in which the insects and the acacias might have co-evolved. "They guard the plants they live on," said Dr Raine. "If other animals try to come and feed on the rich, sugary nectar, they will attack them. In Africa, one type of ant-guard, known as Crematogaster , will even attack large herbivores that attempt to eat the plant. If a giraffe starts to eat the leaves of an acacia that is inhabited by ants, the ants will come out and swarm on to its face, biting and stinging," says Dr Raine. BBC © MMIX

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13608 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JUDITH SHULEVITZ How is a church like a can opener? Among the pleasures of using evolutionary logic to think about matters nonbiological, one is getting to ask questions like that. The evolutionary take on a cultural fact like religion or warfare can cut through the fog of judgment and show how a social institution solves some mechanical problem of human co-existence. What function did intergroup violence serve? What are gods good for? Nicholas Wade’s book “The Faith Instinct” is at its best when putting us through such exercises and sidelining the by-now tiresome debates about religion as a force for good or evil. According to Wade, a New York Times science writer, religions are machines for manufacturing social solidarity. They bind us into groups. Long ago, codes requiring altruistic behavior, and the gods who enforced them, helped human society expand from families to bands of people who were not necessarily related. We didn’t become religious creatures because we became social; we became social creatures because we became religious. Or, to put it in Darwinian terms, being willing to live and die for their coreligionists gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for resources. Wade holds that natural selection can operate on groups, not just on individuals, a contentious position among evolutionary thinkers. He does not see religion as what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called a spandrel — a happy side effect of evolution (or, if you’re a dyspeptic atheist, an unhappy one). He does not agree with the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer that religion is a byproduct of our overactive brains and their need to attribute meaning and intention to a random world. He doesn’t perceive religious ideas as memes — that is to say, the objects of a strictly cultural or mental process of evolution. He thinks we have a God gene. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 13607 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Liz Kowalczyk Busy Americans are famous for claiming they don’t need much sleep, disregarding years of medical advice that eight hours is best. President Bill Clinton boasted that he required just four hours of shut-eye a night. Martha Stewart reportedly bakes and decorates on four to five hours, while inventor Thomas Edison spent just three or four hours in bed, believing sleep was wasted time. Well, as it turns out, some - but just some - of these super-productive types might be right. A growing body of research suggests that certain people may be able to withstand sleep deprivation better than others, and that the ability to perform relatively well on little sleep - at least for a short period - could be an inherited trait, like eye color and height. At least two laboratories have reported discovering genes that might bestow an ability to thrive on less-than-average sleep, and more are searching for such genes. “Some people tolerate a lack of sleep, while others fall apart,’’ said Dr. Christopher Landrigan, a sleep researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Researchers have found, however, that just because a person thinks he or she can function on little or no sleep does not necessarily mean that it’s true. During studies in sleep labs, some people who claim they need only a few hours a night did poorly on performance tests, and vice versa. “There is a huge discrepancy between self-assessment and how alert people actually are,’’ said Dr. Elizabeth Klerman, who also studies sleep at the Brigham. © 2009 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 13606 - Posted: 06.24.2010

US scientists believe they have uncovered one of the mechanisms that enables the brain to form memories. Synapses - where brain cells connect with each other - have long been known to be the key site of information exchange and storage in the brain. But researchers say they have now learnt how molecules at the site of the synapse behave to cement a memory. It is hoped the research, published in Neuron, could aid the development of drugs for diseases like Alzheimer's. The deteriorating health of the synapses is increasingly thought to be a feature of Alzheimer's, a disease in which short-term memory suffers before long-term recollections are affected. A strong synapse is needed for cementing a memory, and this process involves making new proteins. But how exactly the body controls this process has not been clear. Now scientists at the University of California Santa Barbara say their laboratory work on rats shows the production of proteins needed to cement memories can only happen when the RNA - the collection of molecules that take genetic messages from the nucleus to the rest of the cell - is switched on. Until it is required, the RNA is paralysed by a "silencing" molecule - which itself contains proteins. When an external signal comes in - for example when one sees something interesting or has an unusual experience - the silencing molecule fragments and the RNA is released. Kenneth Kosik of the university's neuroscience research institute said: "One reason why this is interesting is that scientists have been perplexed for some time as to why, when synapses are strengthened, you have the degradation of proteins going on side by side with the synthesis of new proteins. So we have now resolved this paradox. We show that protein degradation and synthesis go hand in hand. The degradation permits the synthesis." (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13605 - Posted: 12.24.2009

By Nathan Seppa Text messaging while driving leads to slowed reaction time, unplanned lane changes and more collisions, according to a new study published online December 21 in Human Factors. The finding bolsters other research showing that texting and even using MP3 players don’t mix well with driving. This finding might seem like a no-brainer, and in some states texting while driving is illegal. But the effects of texting while driving have not been extensively studied, says study coauthor Frank Drews, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. The practice is certainly widespread among young drivers. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that one-fourth of adolescents age 16 or 17 reporting having texted while driving and nearly half of teenagers of all ages report having been in a car while the driver was texting. To identify whether texting while driving is inherently dangerous, Drews and his colleagues enrolled 20 pairs of friends who ranged in age from 19 to 23 and averaged nearly five years of driving experience. These friends commonly texted each other and read text messages while driving. Nearly all had sent text messages while behind the wheel. Each volunteer took a turn “driving” in a simulator that replicated 32 miles of urban and rural freeway with on- and off-ramps, overpasses and cars passing on the left. The drivers were instructed to obey traffic rules and follow a car in front of them in the right lane. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13604 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Boonsri Dickinson Four years ago, when Lawrence Summers suggested that the scarcity of prominent female scientists and engineers was in part because there are fewer women on the extremes of the range of innate math ability—fewer geniuses and fewer duds—he stirred up a lot of misguided arguments about gender differences in the brain. Although the former president of Harvard University and current director of the National Economic Council may have been right on a few details, he was wrong on his major point. Men’s and women’s brains are different, but those distinctions are much smaller than we typically think, and few of them are innate. Rather, the slight asymmetries present at birth, shaped and molded by interests, predilections, and the cues of parents and teachers, grow into more significant gender gaps in adulthood. This divergence is an example of plasticity, the brain’s marvelous ability to adapt and change. “Most differences in behavior develop through experience,” says neuroscientist Lise Eliot of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago. “Nature sets the ball rolling, biasing boys and girls toward different interests, but the gaps themselves are largely due to learning and plasticity.” In her new book, Pink Brain Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps and What We Can Do About It, Eliot dispels many myths about male and female brain development. “In parenting literature, there’s a lot of stuff that’s made up,” she says. When the toddler son of peaceniks pines for a toy army truck, she argues, he is expressing an inborn tendency toward active, physical play that has been shaped by social influences, not by the effects of a “gun gene” on the Y chromosome. Until about 1 year of age, boys and girls are equally drawn to dolls; it is only later, when boys become more active, that they strongly prefer balls and cars. Parents also play a role in shaping their children’s interests, often in ways that they may not be fully aware of.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 13603 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Leeaundra Keany On the scorecard the play is marked simply as an “error.” But that hardly conveys the magnitude of the blunder committed by Chicago Cubs outfielder Milton Bradley. It is June 12, 2009, in a home game against the Minnesota Twins. Top of the eighth, one out. Bradley catches a routine fly ball. Thinking he has just ended the inning, he tosses the ball into the stands and poses for pictures. Only then does he remember that there are three outs in an inning, not two. The Twins score a run. The Cubbies eventually lose the game. A rookie mistake? Actually, Bradley was a seasoned pro executing moves he had performed thousands of times. Rather, it is a classic example of a brain fart—an inexplicably stupid error in a straightforward task made by someone with abundant skill and experience. We are all prone to them, although most brain farts are less spectacular (and less humiliating) than Bradley’s—calling your spouse by your ex-spouse’s name, for instance, or zipping straight past the freeway exit that you take every day on your way home from work. Neuroscientists, a more refined bunch, call these episodes “maladaptive brain activity changes.” But they wonder the same thing we all do: Why does the brain fail to execute on something that should be so easy?

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13602 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jon Cohen When primatologist Jill Pruetz found herself threatened by wildfires in the savannas of Fongoli, Senegal, in 2006 she had two options: stay with the chimpanzees she was studying, or run. She chose the chimps. The primates were calm, and--with her in tow--they carefully made their way around the blaze. "I was very surprised at how good they were at judging the threat and predicting the behavior of fire," says Pruetz. The chimps' actions, she would later report, set them apart from other nonhuman animals--and they may reveal the evolutionary origins of how we came to master fire. According to Pruetz, who works at Iowa State University in Des Moines and has studied the Fongoli chimps since 2001, there are three steps to mastering fire: conceptualizing it, starting it, and containing it. Most animals fail the first step, reacting by instinct. West African reed frogs flee at the sound of fire, brush-tailed bettongs in Australia become dazed and confused, and stress hormones jump in African elephants. Chimps, on the other hand, take a more nuanced approach. Pruetz witnessed the primates calmly moving around wildfires on two occasions. Other times, the chimps rested and groomed while smoke began to obscure the sun. They seem to realize, says Pruetz, that fire has a behavior--just like another forest animal--and that its movements can be predicted. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 13601 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Philip Yam The man who could recite whole books by heart but could not button his own shirt has died. Kim Peek, born November 11, 1951 (on a Sunday, he will tell you) passed away last weekend from a heart attack. The inspiration for Dustin Hoffman's autistic character in the movie Rain Man, Peek provided scientists with an extraordinary window into the human brain and the nature of memory. Peek suffered from many developmental problems--besides the inability to button up, he also walked with a sideways gait, could not handle the mundane tasks of everyday life and had trouble with abstraction: once told as a child to lower his voice, he slumped deeper into his chair to move his voice box physically lower. Yet he displayed phenomenal abilities. He memorized thousands of books, could read a page in 10 seconds or less and could recite passages verbatim after just one reading. Peek's brain had several abnormalities, the strangest being the lack of a corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers that enable the left and right hemispheres of the brain to communicate with each other. Just how that abnormality may have conferred savant syndrome to Peek is not known. An absent corpus callosum is not unique, and some people lacking the structure suffer no disabilities. In savant cases, it's not clear if brain damage stimulates compensatory development in some other neural area or whether it enables otherwise latent abilities to emerge. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Autism; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13600 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Darold A. Treffert and Daniel D. Christensen Editor's Note: The main text of this story, originally published in the December 2005 issue of Scientific American, is being made available in light of the recent death of Kim Peek. When J. Langdon Down first described savant syndrome in 1887, coining its name and noting its association with astounding powers of memory, he cited a patient who could recite Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire verbatim. Since then, in almost all cases, savant memory has been linked to a specific domain, such as music, art or mathematics. But phenomenal memory is itself the skill in a 54-year-old man named Kim Peek. His friends call him “Kim-puter.” He can, indeed, pull a fact from his mental library as fast as a search engine can mine the Internet. He read Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October in one hour and 25 minutes. Four months later, when asked, he gave the name of the Russian radio operator in the book, referring to the page describing the character and quoting several passages verbatim. Kim began memorizing books at the age of 18 months, as they were read to him. He has learned 9,000 books by heart so far. He reads a page in eight to 10 seconds and places the memorized book upside down on the shelf to signify that it is now on his mental “hard drive.” Kim’s memory extends to at least 15 interests—among them, world and American history, sports, movies, geography, space programs, actors and actresses, the Bible, church history, literature, Shakespeare and classical music. He knows all the area codes and zip codes in the U.S., together with the television stations serving those locales. He learns the maps in the front of phone books and can provide Yahoo-like travel directions within any major U.S. city or between any pair of them. He can identify hundreds of classical compositions, tell when and where each was composed and first performed, give the name of the composer and many biographical details, and even discuss the formal and tonal components of the music. Most intriguing of all, he appears to be developing a new skill in middle life. Whereas before he could merely talk about music, for the past two years he has been learning to play it. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Autism; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 13599 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Twomey Jack and Beverly Wilgus, collectors of vintage photographs, no longer recall how they came by the 19th-century daguerreotype of a disfigured yet still-handsome man. It was at least 30 years ago. The photograph offered no clues as to where or precisely when it had been taken, who the man was or why he was holding a tapered rod. But the Wilguses speculated that the rod might be a harpoon, and the man’s closed eye and scarred brow the result of an encounter with a whale. So over the years, as the picture rested in a display case in the couple’s Baltimore home, they thought of the man in the daguerreotype as the battered whaler. In December 2007, Beverly posted a scan of the image on Flickr, the photo-sharing Web site, and titled it “One-Eyed Man with Harpoon.” Soon, a whaling enthusiast e-mailed her a dissent: that is no harpoon, which suggested that the man was no whaler. Months later, another correspondent told her that the man might be Phineas Gage and, if so, this would be the first known image of him. Beverly, who had never heard of Gage, went online and found an astonishing tale. In 1848, Gage, 25, was the foreman of a crew cutting a railroad bed in Cavendish, Vermont. On September 13, as he was using a tamping iron to pack explosive powder into a hole, the powder detonated. The tamping iron—43 inches long, 1.25 inches in diameter and weighing 13.25 pounds—shot skyward, penetrated Gage’s left cheek, ripped into his brain and exited through his skull, landing several dozen feet away. Though blinded in his left eye, he might not even have lost consciousness, and he remained savvy enough to tell a doctor that day, “Here is business enough for you.” Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/78437017.html#ixzz0aS9xDjNH

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 13598 - Posted: 06.24.2010

JoNel Aleccia For every woman who has ever obsessed that her chin was too long or that her eyes were set too close together, scientists appear to have a new message: You might be right. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, claim they’ve discovered the ideal alignment of female facial features, a pair of measurements that explain why one woman is perceived as attractive and the other, well, isn’t. It all has to do with the horizontal distance between the eyes and the vertical distance between the eyes and the mouth, says Pamela M. Pallett, a researcher who believes she has identified new “golden ratios” for facial beauty. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here That may be bad news for gals who don’t conform, but the upside, says Pallett, is that even if your face isn’t perfectly proportioned, a strategic haircut can help. “Everybody can achieve these golden ratios,” said Pallett. “For most people, it might be just as simple as pulling your hair back, or having it hang down in front of your ears. If they have bangs, that can affect the length you perceive of the face.” Faces were judged as most attractive when the distance between the eyes was 46 percent of the face’s width and when the distance from eyes to mouth was 36 percent of the face’s length, according to the study published in the most recent issue of the journal Vision Research. © 2009 msnbc.com

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 13597 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham. A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. I still eat fish and poultry, however and pour eggnog in my coffee. My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I’m willing to try the duck but not the lamb, I don’t have a good answer. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held. And lately, debates over food choices have flared with particular vehemence. In his new book, “Eating Animals,” the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets” to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “eternal Treblinka.” But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 13596 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By JASCHA HOFFMAN Psychologists have many ways to get inside our heads: they can give us questionnaires, track our eyes, time how long we take to respond to cues and measure the blood flow to our brains. But how close can these methods get to the texture of our inner lives? Russell T. Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has spent decades refining another way to study the mind. Dr. Hurlburt, a former aeronautical engineer, took up the study of psychology while playing trumpet at military funerals during the Vietnam War. Frustrated by the lack of attention to everyday experiences in the field of psychology, he arrived at the university in 1976 with an unconventional plan to investigate the mental lives of his subjects: ask them for descriptions. In “Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic” (M.I.T. Press, 2007), Dr. Hurlburt, 64, presents the case of Melanie, a young woman who was fitted with a beeper that randomly prompted her to record everything in her awareness several times a day. In later interviews, she reconstructed these moments, often under rigorous cross-examination. The resulting mental freeze-frames are remarkably diverse. On the third day of Melanie’s experiment, as her boyfriend was asking her a question about insurance, she was trying to remember the word “periodontist.” On the fourth day, she was having a strong urge to go scuba diving. On the sixth day, she was picking flower petals from the sink while hearing echoes of the phrase “nice long time” in her head. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 13595 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carolyn Butler Of all the relationships in my life, by far the most on-again, off-again has been with coffee: From that initial, tentative dalliance in college to a serious commitment during my first real reporting job to breaking up altogether when I got pregnant, only to fail miserably at quitting my daily latte the second time I was expecting. More recently the relationship has turned into full-blown obsession and, ironically, I often fall asleep at night dreaming of the delicious, satisfying cup of joe that awaits, come morning. While I love the mere ritual of drinking coffee, I have definitely come to rely on the caffeine to make me feel more alert, energetic and often just plain better, every single day. And yet because I don't like feeling dependent on anything, I occasionally wonder whether I should give it up for good, especially when I have a particularly jittery afternoon. Can something that tastes and feels this good not be bad for you? Rest assured: Not only has current research shown that moderate coffee consumption isn't likely to hurt you, it may actually have significant health benefits. "Coffee is generally associated with a less health-conscious lifestyle -- people who don't sleep much, drink coffee, smoke, drink alcohol," explains Rob van Dam, an assistant professor in the departments of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He points out that early studies failed to account for such issues and thus found a link between drinking coffee and such conditions as heart disease and cancer, a link that has contributed to java's lingering bad rep. "But as more studies have been conducted -- larger and better studies that controlled for healthy lifestyle issues -- the totality of efforts suggests that coffee is a good beverage choice." © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 13594 - Posted: 06.24.2010