By Mike Jay The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word "anesthesia" itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city's physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever. But what precisely was invented that day? Not a chemical - the mysterious substance used by William Morton, the local dentist who performed the procedure, turned out to be simply ether, a volatile solvent that had been in common use for decades. And not the idea of anesthesia - ether, and the anesthetic gas nitrous oxide, had both been thoroughly inhaled and explored. As far back as 1525, the Renaissance physician Paracelsus had recorded that it made chickens "fall asleep, but wake up again after some time without any bad effect," and that it "extinguishes pain" for the duration. What the great moment in the Ether Dome really marked was something less tangible but far more significant: a huge cultural shift in the idea of pain. Operating under anesthetic would transform medicine, dramatically expanding the scope of what doctors were able to accomplish. What needed to change first wasn't the technology - that was long since established - but medicine's readiness to use it. © 2009 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 12936 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Matt Walker Chimpanzees remember the exact location of all their favourite fruit trees. Their spatial memory is so precise that they can find a single tree among more than 12,000 others within a patch of forest, primatologists have found. More than that, the chimps also recall how productive each tree is, and decide to travel further to eat from those they know will yield the most fruit. Acquiring such an ability may have helped drive the evolution of sophisticated primate brains. Emmanuelle Normand and Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany teamed up with Simone Ban of the University of Cocody in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire to investigate the spatial memory of chimpanzees in the wild. "We were amazed by the apparent easiness by which chimpanzees discover highly productive fruit trees. Or how after being separated from other group members for hours or days, they could join each other silently at a large fruit tree, like if they would have had an appointment at this place," says Normand. To find out how they do it, Normand's team first mapped the location of 12,499 individual trees growing within the home range of a group of chimpanzees living in the Tai National Park in the Cote d'Ivoire. They identified each tree and used GPS to map its precise position. (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 12935 - Posted: 06.09.2009

By Carolyn Y. Johnson Scientists are trying a new approach to unravel the workings of the autistic brain: the neurological equivalent of banging a patient's knee with a hammer to test reflexes. Instead of a hammer, though, researchers are pressing a flat paddle against patients' heads and creating a magnetic field that triggers brain cell activity. As the quest to understand autism has grown more urgent, researchers have used brain scanners to peer into autistic minds, searched for faulty genes, and scrutinized the play of 1-year-olds. The work has provided theories - but few concrete answers - about what goes awry to cause social isolation, repetitive behaviors, and communication problems that afflict an estimated one in 150 children with autism spectrum disorders. The hunt has focused on everything from "mirror neurons," brain cells some re searchers think enable people to understand other's actions and intentions, to an overgrowth of local connections in the brain. Now a small but growing number of researchers see hope in a tool called transcranial magnetic stimulation, which lets scientists spark activity in specific areas of the brain and watch what happens to patients' behavior. The technology may illuminate some of the biology behind the disease, and some specialists speculate it may one day offer a treatment. © 2009 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12934 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carolyn Y. Johnson Little Joe clutched the mesh fence that separated him from the outside world. But the 16-year-old western lowland gorilla, famed for his 2003 escape from the Franklin Park Zoo, wasn't contemplating another jailbreak. He was doing business. Senior zookeeper Brandi Baitchman had presented him with two colored dowels - gorilla cash in an experiment to see whether Joe could grasp the concept of money. The blue dowel could be traded for monkey chow, a favorite delicacy. The white one was worth nothing. Without a hint of hesitation, and quicker than a stock floor trader, Joe picked blue. Baitchman slipped a chow pellet into his mouth. For nearly a year, Joe and other gorillas at the Boston zoo's tropical forest exhibit have been guinea pigs in experiments exploring the reasoning of gorillas - and the origins of human economic behavior. For years, scientists have examined when and why people take risks, delay gratification, or work for a reward. Harvard University scientists have been visiting the zoo three days a week to learn whether there are roots of such human traits even in a species that never developed its own stock exchange or global monetary system. "Right now, we're focusing on what we're calling gorilla economics," said Katherine McAuliffe, a Harvard graduate student in the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory who began working with Joe last summer. "What sort of ecological context might select for certain kinds of decision-making?" © 2009 NY Times Co

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 12933 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER If you wanted to push yourself to the outermost chalk line of human endurance, you might consider an ultramarathon, or a solo row across the Atlantic Ocean, or being nominated to the United States Supreme Court. Muse Opiang was working as a field research officer when he became seized by a passion for the long-beaked echidna. Or you could try studying the long-beaked echidna, one of the oldest, rarest, shyest, silliest-looking yet potentially most illuminating mammals on earth. Muse Opiang was working as a field research officer when he became seized by a passion for the long-beaked echidna, or Zaglossus bartoni, which are found only in the tropical rain forests of New Guinea and a scattering of adjacent islands. He had seen them once or twice in captivity and in photographs — plump, terrier-size creatures abristle with so many competing notes of crane, mole, pig, turtle, tribble, Babar and boot scrubber that if they didn’t exist, nobody would think to Photoshop them. He knew that the mosaic effect was no mere sight gag: as one of just three surviving types of the group of primitive egg-laying mammals called monotremes, the long-beaked echidna is a genuine living link between reptiles and birds on one branch, and more familiar placental mammals like ourselves on the next. Mr. Opiang also knew that, whereas members of the two other monotreme genuses, the duck-billed platypus and short-beaked echidna, had been studied for years — last May, the entire genetic code of the platypus was published to great fanfare — the life of the long-beaked echidna remained obscure and unsung. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 12932 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Michael Shermer FULLERTON, CALIF.—If you want to wait by the phone for your next college-aged daughter's call home, you should mark the days of her menstrual cycle on your calendar. Well, not exactly. But that was one reasonable conclusion of research presented here last week at the 21st annual conference of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) at California State University, Fullerton, by Elizabeth Pillsworth, a graduate student in Martie Haselton's lab at the University of California, Los Angeles. Haselton studies sexual attraction, relationships, and how fertility cycles influence mate preferences and choices (for instance, women dress in a more sexually provocative manner during the high fertility phase of the month). In an interesting twist on this body of research, Pillsworth studied the effects of the fertility phase in women on the incest taboo—specifically, how often college-aged women phoned their dads (versus their moms) during the month. Wow. It never ceases to amaze me how clever scientists can be in thinking up new research paradigms: Who would have ever thought of correlating cell phone calls with estrus cycles? Pillsworth and Haselton (and their colleague Debra Lieberman) did! And the results were most revealing. But first, some background. On the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, Darwinian principles have finally come online in mainstream psychology. HBES is the official organization of evolutionary psychologists and a champion of applying Darwinian thinking to human psychology, and its conferences seem to be gaining steam. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Evolution; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 12931 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sleep deprivation is known to impair memory and may cause other health problems. On the other hand, dreaming has long been credited for creative thinking, from Kekule’s famed discovery of the ring structure of the chemical benzene to Paul McCartney’s song "Yesterday." Now new research is illuminating the role of REM sleep — the sleep stage in which dreams occur– in creative problem solving. In their study of 77 healthy volunteers, University of California, San Diego sleep researchers researchers Sara Mednick, Denise Cai, and their colleagues found that a daytime nap boosts performance on a standard test of creative problem solving, but only if the nap includes REM, or rapid-eye-movement sleep. "This is the first time that REM sleep has ever been shown to be directly connected to a boost in creativity, and also that this is done in a daytime nap," says Mednick. She hopes the study adds some insight into insight for scientists and the public. "If REM sleep is helping solve creative problems, then there’s something specific about the associative networks that occurs during REM sleep that allows these unconnected bits of information to finally connect and associate," she says. "That’s interesting from its own basic science perspective." ©2009 ScienCentral

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 12930 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway Most of the time the brain works as it ought to: limbs move, memories are retrieved and experiences processed. But occasionally things go awry. In tip-of-the-tongue experiences, for instance, words suddenly and perplexingly go missing only to reappear seconds or minutes later. Another brain quirk – déjà vu – confirms the fallibility of memory. Now two new studies have shed light on both phenomena. Nearly everyone has tip-of-the-tongue moments, but bilinguals seem especially prone to these momentary lapses in vocabulary, says Jennie Pyers, a psychologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. One possible explanation is that similar-sounding words compete for our brain's attention. Since bilinguals know twice as many words as monolinguals, there's more chance for tip-of-the-tongue experiences. "Often when we're having tip-of-the-tongue experiences, words that sound the same come to mind," Pyers says. "There's a sense that you do know the first letter; there's a sense that you might know how many syllables it is." Alternatively, they could occur when our brains recall rarely used words, Pyers says. "It's much easier to retrieve a word like 'knife' than 'guillotine'." It's a…, it's a… Since bilinguals, by definition, speak two languages, they are bound to use many individual words less frequently than monolinguals. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Language; Attention
Link ID: 12929 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Adrian Morrison, DVM, PhD. Throughout history, humanity has associated with animals in ways that have benefited human beings. Animals have been hunted for food and clothing, accepted at our hearths for companionship, and brought into our fields to produce and provide food. Only during the latter two-thirds of the last century could most people – in the developed, wealthy West — begin to imagine living without animals as part of our daily lives. We were completely dependent on them. As the twentieth century progressed, though, technological advances rendered animals’ visible presence in our lives unnecessary. We can eat a steak without coming close to a living cow, or wear a wool sweater without having to shear any sheep. But now, according to some, we have no need, indeed no right, to interfere in animals’ lives, even to the extent of abandoning their use in life-saving medical research. This belief motivates the animal rights/liberation movement, which follows the thinking of a small group of vocal philosophers. But what does the term “animal rights” mean in a practical way to most in our society? All of us do use the word “rights” quite commonly: the right to decent, humane treatment when animals are in our charge. This is our obligation as humane human beings. Indeed, this duty is embodied in law, and we can be prosecuted and punished if we ignore it as lawyer/ethicist Jerry Tannenbaum from the University of California-Davis pointed out to me years ago when I was focused on the depredations of the “animal rights movement” against biomedical researchers and blinded to the obvious. Thus, the ongoing debate – and recent violence in some California universities for example – is about a more radical (and unworkable view) of rights. To clarify things in my own mind, I have come up with a ranking of views/behavior from the extreme to the reasonable as I see it. © Copyright Oxford University Press USA 2006-2008

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 12928 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Boys who have a so-called "warrior gene" are more likely to join gangs and also more likely to be among the most violent members and to use weapons, a new study finds. "While gangs typically have been regarded as a sociological phenomenon, our investigation shows that variants of a specific MAOA gene, known as a 'low-activity 3-repeat allele,' play a significant role," said biosocial criminologist Kevin M. Beaver of Florida State University. In 2006, the controversial warrior gene was implicated in the violence of the indigenous Maori people in New Zealand, a claim that Maori leaders dismissed. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here But it's no surprise that genes would be involved in aggression. Aggression is a primal emotion like many others, experts say, and like cooperation, it is part of human nature, something that's passed down genetically. And almost all mammals are aggressive in some way or another, said Craig Kennedy, professor of special education and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, whose research last year suggested that humans crave violence just like they do sex, food or drugs. "Previous research has linked low-activity MAOA variants to a wide range of antisocial, even violent, behavior, but our study confirms that these variants can predict gang membership," says Beaver, the Florida State researcher. "Moreover, we found that variants of this gene could distinguish gang members who were markedly more likely to behave violently and use weapons from members who were less likely to do either." © 2009 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Aggression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 12927 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Andy Coghlan The transmission of abnormal proteins that form tangles in cells may explain how Alzheimer's spreads throughout a patient's brain, research shows. "We've shown how it probably progresses within an individual person," says co-leader of the research team, Michel Goedert of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. Goedert and his colleagues demonstrated the key role played by the "tau" protein tangles by injecting the brains of healthy mice with brain material from mice which make the abnormal form of the protein. By the end of the experiment, the tangles had spread beyond the sites where they had originally been injected to many distant parts of the brain. Drug hope Because the healthy mice were incapable of making the tau tangles themselves, the only explanation is that the tangles somehow spread or dispersed to neighbouring tissue from the site where they were injected. "They never usually develop these tangles," says Goedert. The researchers hope to use the same system to identify which forms of the tau protein spread the symptoms, and how to block them with drugs. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12926 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Mike Stobbe ATLANTA - Tourette's syndrome occurs in 3 out of every 1,000 school-age children, and is more than twice as common in white children as in blacks or Hispanics, according to the largest US study to estimate how many have the disorder. Tourette's - known for its physical tics and, in some cases, shouted obscenities - has long been considered a rare condition. The new number means it's more common than some past estimates, but confirms that it's far less common than other neurological conditions such as autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The racial gaps are probably the most surprising finding, the study's authors said. "Prior to this, we really had very little information about minorities," said Lawrence Scahill, a Yale University researcher. The study was released yesterday. It's not clear why whites have a higher rate or whether future studies will find the same disparity, specialists said. Some suspect it has less to do with genetics than with a difference in access to medical care or in attitudes about whether repetitive blinking or other tics require medical care. The study, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates there are about 150,000 US children with Tourette's. The researchers also found that: Most cases were mild, but 1 in 4 were - in the parent's opinion - moderate or severe. Boys had a rate three times higher than girls. © 2009 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Tourettes
Link ID: 12925 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Victoria Gill As if flying around in the dark swooping and diving to catch insects was not tricky enough, bats also listen for their fellow hunters. A study has revealed how these winged mammals recognise other bats' voices. They are able to differentiate the ultrasonic "echolocation" calls that other bats make as they navigate. In the journal PLoS Computational Biology, the scientists report that the bats have an internal "reference" call to which they compare others. Yossi Yovel from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and his colleagues in Germany recorded the echolocation calls of five greater mouse-eared bats The bats use these brief bursts of sound in sonar navigation - bouncing sound waves off their surroundings to find their way and locate prey. Dr Yovel's team tested the bats' ability to identify the others by playing the recorded sounds to them. "Each bat was assigned two others it had to distinguish between," Dr Yovel explained. "So we trained bat A on a platform, playing a sound from bat B on one side and from bat C on the other. He had crawl to where the 'correct' sound was coming from." Each of the subjects was taught that a call from just one of the other bats was correct. So during this training exercise, if the bat A made the right choice, and crawled towards the sound from bat B, it was rewarded with its favourite food - a mealworm. "Then, in the next stage - the test - we rewarded them no matter what choice they made, and they still chose correctly more than 80% of the time," said Dr Yovel. (C)BBC

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 12924 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LISA SANDERS, M.D. “Mommy, I’m afraid. Tell me what to do.” The child’s mother looked up at her 8-year-old daughter. “It’s going to be O.K.,” she said. “Just go get some help.” The woman watched as her daughter left the public bathroom, where she now lay. She and her daughter had come to this store to pick up some new towels. But once inside the mother began to feel hot and dizzy. Her heart fluttered in her chest, and she felt as if she was going to be sick. She grabbed her daughter’s hand and hurried to the bathroom. Once there she suddenly felt as if she was going to pass out and laid down on the bathroom floor. That’s when she sent her daughter to get help. Finally a store clerk came into the bathroom holding the little girl’s hand. The last thing the woman remembered was the look of horror on the clerk’s face as she saw the middle-aged woman lying on the floor in a pool of her bloody stool. When the E.M.T.’s arrived at the store, the woman was unconscious. Her heart was racing, and her blood pressure was terrifyingly low. She was rushed to the emergency department of Yale-New Haven Hospital. By the time she arrived at the emergency room, her blood pressure had come up and heart rate gone down, and she was no longer bleeding from her rectum. A physical exam uncovered nothing unusual, and all of the testing she had was normal, with one important exception: her blood seemed to have lost its ability to clot. If that problem persisted, she would be in danger of bleeding to death after even the smallest cut or abrasion. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 12923 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Connor, Science Editor One of the defining characteristics of being human is the supreme act of personal sacrifice needed to lay down one's life for the good of the group – but could such altruism be hard-wired in our genes as a result of Darwinian evolution? Biologists have argued for decades about the evolution of altruism and long ago came to the conclusion that Darwinian natural selection cannot explain acts of supreme personal sacrifice except those directly connected with helping the survival of close blood relatives who share similar genes. But now a study has suggested that altruism in prehistoric human societies may after all have resulted from a form of natural selection caused by a state of near-continual warfare between competing tribes of hunter gatherers, an idea that Charles Darwin himself first suggested in his 1873 book The Descent of Man. A scientist has suggested that because so many of the 200,000 years of human history were spent during our hunter-gatherer phase, before the invention of agriculture, less than 10,000 years ago, this long period in our evolutionary history shaped our social behaviour. Moreover, he believes that altruism may have evolved directly as a result of tribal warfare because personal sacrifice was the key that enabled one group to be victorious over another. Samuel Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, said: "Warfare was sufficiently common and lethal among our ancestors to favour the evolution of what I call parochial altruism, a predisposition to be co-operative towards group members and hostile towards outsiders. ©independent.co.uk

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 12922 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LESLEY ALDERMAN If the sleep peddlers have their way, quite a bit. Sleep is a $23.9 billion industry — if you count things as diverse as mattresses, white noise machines and prescription pills — and it has more than doubled in the last decade, according to Marketdata Enterprises, a research firm in Tampa, Fla. The market for insomnia drugs alone is expected to grow 78 percent, to nearly $3.9 billion, by 2012, as drug makers scramble to bring more pills to market to compete with name brands like Lunesta, Sonata and Ambien CR. There is even a new event, the National Sleep Foundation’s Big Sleep Show, to promote sleep-inducing products and services to the tired masses. It occurs several times a year, and the next one is set for August in Dallas. Sleeping is a serious problem for millions of people. The National Sleep Foundation (which receives financial support from pharmaceutical companies) estimates that 20 percent of Americans, up from 13 percent eight years ago, sleep fewer than six hours a night. The lucky few who sleep a full eight hours or more dropped to 28 percent, from 38 percent, the foundation said. Being chronically sleep-deprived is more than just tiring. It can lead to depression, high blood pressure and lower productivity, both on and off the job. If the problem is pure insomnia — rather than sleep apnea or another medical issue — there are smart and affordable options. Here are some of the most cost-effective ways to get the sleep you need, and a few things you should avoid altogether. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 12921 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower PARK CITY, Utah — Mothers with teenagers or young adults living at home face plenty of stress. If the young home-dwellers have been diagnosed with autism, the emotional intensity of caregiving surges dramatically in the mothers and may undermine the functioning of a critical stress hormone, a long-term study suggests. Over a five-year span, women who had children with autism living at home reported many more challenges in their daily lives than women caring for typically developing teens and young adults, reported psychologist Marsha Seltzer of the University of Wisconsin–Madison on June 4 at the annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society. Moms of children with autism spent nearly all of their time on caregiving activities, experienced an inordinate amount of daily fatigue, often got into arguments at home and at work, and reported having negative feelings far more often than positive ones. Analyses of saliva samples collected from women near the end of the study period showed that those caring for offspring with autism produced unusually low levels of the stress hormone cortisol throughout the day. In mothers caring for teenage or young adult children free of developmental problems, cortisol levels rose sharply throughout the morning and then declined to a level that still remained well above that of mothers tending to kids with autism. “We’re seeing remarkably low levels of cortisol activation in mothers caring for their children with autism, which may reflect the toll taken by chronic stress and fatigue in their lives,” Seltzer said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 12920 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brendan Borrell Seated in the bed of a pickup truck, Joshua Tewksbury cringes with every curve and pothole as we bounce along the edge of Amboró National Park in central Bolivia. After 2,000 miles on some of the worst roads in South America, the truck's suspension is failing. In the past hour, two leaf springs—metal bands that prevent the axle from crashing into the wheel well—jangled onto the road behind us. At any moment, Tewksbury's extraordinary hunting expedition could come to an abrupt end. A wiry 40-year-old ecologist at the University of Washington, Tewksbury is risking his sacroiliac in this fly-infested forest looking for a wild chili with a juicy red berry and a tiny flower: Capsicum minutiflorum. He hopes it'll help answer the hottest question in botany: Why are chilies spicy? Bolivia is believed to be the chili's motherland, home to dozens of wild species that may be the ancestors of all the world's chili varieties—from the mild bell pepper to the medium jalapeño to the rough-skinned naga jolokia, the hottest pepper ever tested. The heat-generating compound in chilies, capsaicin, has long been known to affect taste buds, nerve cells and nasal membranes (it puts the sting in pepper spray). But its function in wild chili plants has been mysterious. Which is why Tewksbury and his colleagues have made multiple trips to Bolivia over the past four years. They're most interested in mild chilies, especially those growing near hot ones of the same species—the idea being that a wild chili lacking capsaicin might serve as a kind of exception that proves the rule, betraying the secret purpose of this curiously beloved spice.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 12919 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Researchers may have discovered how a neuron-killing protein selects its victims — it has an accomplice. Scientists identified a mutant form of the protein huntingtin as the culprit in Huntington’s disease in 1993. The protein is found in every cell in the body, but it only turns deadly in brain cells — particularly cells in the striatum, a part of the brain that helps control movement. Why mutant huntingtin preferentially kills those cells has been a mystery. Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore report in the June 5 Science that a protein called Rhes may goad huntingtin into killing brain cells in the striatum, leading to Huntington’s disease. If confirmed, the finding could provide new avenues for developing therapies to treat the fatal neurodegenerative disease, says Nancy Wexler, president of the Hereditary Disease Foundation and a Huntington’s disease researcher at Columbia University. “This study really gave me a peek into what the future of the field might look like,” says William Seeley, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. Many researchers study the role of individual proteins in causing or preventing disease, but few studies before this one go beyond the molecular level and explain why neurodegenerative diseases attack only certain parts of the brain. “What makes it so special for me is that it builds a bridge back to the anatomy of the disease,” Seeley says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 12918 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY As if splitting a pair of pants, telling a transparent lie or mispronouncing the word “epitome” weren’t humiliation enough, nature has provided humans, especially the fair-skinned kind, with a built-in scarlet letter. Jane Austen heroines may pink endearingly at a subtle breach in manners; millions more glow like a lava lamp in what feels like a public disrobing: the face, suddenly buck-naked. People who become severely anxious in social situations often swear that the blush itself is the source of their problems, not a symptom. Doctors may even perform surgery — severing a portion of the sympathetic nerve chain, which runs down the back — to take the red out. Yet even this operation usually doesn’t short-circuit the system entirely, because a blush is far more than a stigmata of embarrassment. It is a crucial signal in social interactions — one that functions more often to smooth over betrayals and blunders than to amplify them. In a series of recent studies, psychologists have found that reddening cheeks soften others’ judgments of bad or clumsy behavior, and help to strengthen social bonds rather that strain them. If nothing else, the new findings should take some of the personal sting out of the facial fire shower when it inevitably hits. “We are this hypersocial species that settles conflicts and misunderstandings face to face, and we need a way to repair daily betrayals and transgressions quickly,” said Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life” (Norton, 2009). “A blush comes online in two or three seconds and says, ‘I care; I know I violated the social contract.’ ” Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12917 - Posted: 06.24.2010