Discover Magazine: Mind & Brain

Discover Mind & Brain

• Isolated in the Farallons, Biologists Have Bizarre “Island Invasion Dreams” | Discoblog
  Scientists stationed on Farallon Islands, which has one of the world’s most delicate ecosystems, don’t just keep tabs on native species such as sea lions and puffins–they’ve also have been recording their dreams for the past two decades. The findings? Dreams that are “eerily similar,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle: “Whether scientists are on the island for [...]
  
  
• You Think You (And Your Parents) Are Hot | Discoblog
  Is the taboo against incest really just a psychological device to keep us from people we subconsciously find attractive? Could be, since apparently, these hotties are our parents, and even ourselves, according to research published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Studies have shown that people are more turned on by photographs of faces [...]
  
  
• Study: The Brains of Storytellers And Their Listeners Actually Sync Up | 80beats
  You may be talking and I may be listening, but our brains look strikingly similar. That’s the conclusion of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. After conducting brain scans of a woman telling a story off the cuff and then of 11 people listening to a recording of her, [...]
  
  
• Sniff-detector allows paralysed people to write messages, surf the net and drive a wheelchair | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  In Israel’s Loewenstein Rehabilitation Hospital, the patient known as LI1 is a prisoner of her own body. She is a 51-year-old woman who was paralysed by a stroke several months ago. Suffering from “locked-in syndrome”, she is completely aware but unable to move or speak. She cannot even control the blinks of her eyes. And [...]
  
  
• Comic-Con Gauntlet Thrown: Fringe Producer Says Scientific Fact Must Yield to Story | Science Not Fiction
  Spring boarding from Amos’ post on Thursday’s Discover panel, I want to delve into some unexplored tension. The panel focused on how science could make storytelling better, and it included a mix of scientists and TV writers. Jamie Paglia (Co-creator of Eureka) conceded that sometimes he’s had to “stretch the boundaries a little thin for my [...]
  
  
• Underappreciated Star-Shaped Brain Cells May Help Us Breathe | 80beats
  Astrocytes, it was long believed, were little more than the scaffolding of the brain—they provided a support structure for the stars of the show, the neurons. But a study out in this week’s Science is the latest to suggest that this is far from the whole story. The study says that astrocytes (whose “astro” name [...]
  
  
• Danger! Car Salesmen Now in Possession of “Perfect Handshake” Equation | Discoblog
  To seal more car deals, Chevrolet UK looked to arm its salesmen with the perfect weapon of confidence: an unstoppable handshake. Here’s the secret they received from Geoffrey Beattie, Head of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester: PH (Perfect Handshake)= √ (e^2 + ve^2)(d^2) + (cg + dr)^2 + π{(4<s>^2)(4<p>^2)}^2 + (vi + [...]
  
  
• When Sci-Fi Plays Play With Your Identity | Science Not Fiction
  Science fiction is often associated with depictions of technology which, to quote Arther Clarke’s third law, is “so advanced that it seems like magic to us.” But science fiction’s other side is less about techno-gizmology and more about pushing us to think about what it is to be human. It asks what it would be [...]
  
  
• Inception: Rarely Is Getting Your Mind So Messed With So Fun | Science Not Fiction
  You’ve been running for hours, chased by a crazed grizzly bear. Suddenly you lose your footing, and you’re balancing on the edge of a cliff. Your stomach lurches as gravity pulls you down. Instantly you’re jolted awake and find yourself teetering precariously over the edge of your bed in your New York apartment. You’ve been [...]
  
  
• Caring with cash, or How Radiohead could have made more money | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  In October 2007, the British band Radiohead released their seventh album – In Rainbows – as a digital download that customers could pay whatever they liked for. The results of this risky venture are a guarded secret, but the album’s popularity was clear. It topped the charts and allegedly sold 1.2 million copies in the [...]
  
  
• Could an Oversized Noggin Help Stave Off the Effects of Alzheimer’s? | 80beats
  Finally, a big head comes in handy. For a study out this week in Neurology, scientists looked at 270 Alzheimer’s patients from the Multi-Institutional Research in Alzheimer’s Genetic Epidemiology study (MIRAGE) and found that a larger head size was correlated with better-preserved cognitive and memory skills. The team, led by Robert Perneczky, argues that a bigger [...]
  
  
• The Growth of a Baby’s Brain Looks Like Human Evolution in Fast-Forward | 80beats
  It’s what happens to your brain after you’re born that makes you human. Jason Hill and colleagues were comparing the structure of newborn brains to those of adults when they came upon a striking find, documented this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Clearly, the brain expands greatly as you grow from [...]
  
  
• Legal, Synthetic Marijuana Pleases Pot-Heads, Upsets State Governments | 80beats
  Around the United States, state governments are rushing to enact bans on K2, the hot new (and still mostly legal) drug made with synthetic cannabinoids: lab-created compounds designed to mimic the effects of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Often marketed as incense, K2 — which is also known as Spice, Demon or Genie — is [...]
  
  
• Genetic Switch Makes Female Mice Try to Mate With Other Females | 80beats
  Geneticists have found a way to alter the sexual preference of lab mice. When they bred mice that had one gene deleted, the females declined male companions and preferred instead to court other females, according to a study published yesterday in BMC Genetics. But whether these results have any implications for humans is still far [...]
  
  
• Male Fireflies Flicker in Sync to Catch a Female’s Eye | 80beats
  Teamwork: That’s what it takes to get lucky (if you’re a certain kind of firefly). Suppose you’re a single male firefly, fluttering about on a muggy night. You flash your bioluminescent signal to try to catch a lady’s attention, but how is she going to pick out your blip from all the other points of light [...]
  
  
• Hairshirted Eye for the Irritable Guy: New Study Shows How the Feel of Things Affects Thought | Science Not Fiction
  Athanasius (b. 293) was an ascetic known not only for his piety but—like many ascetics– for his penchant for wearing hairshirts (these were also available as underwear for the truly hard core). Hairshirts are made from goats’ hair, and they are as itchy as they sound, although the true test of your fealty to God [...]
  
  
• Scientists’ Mouse Fight Club Demonstrates the Home Field Advantage | 80beats
  It feels good to win. And it feels even better to win at home. For a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Matthew Fuxjager and his colleagues investigated the winner effect, wherein animals (and perhaps humans) build up testosterone in advance of a confrontation, and the fight’s winner maintains that elevated [...]
  
  
• Psychology’s New Phobia-Fighting Tool: An Augmented Reality Cockroach | Discoblog
  Looking for a midnight snack, you open a Tupperware container. Inside you find not your dinner leftovers, but a nasty cockroach. You stick your hand in. Welcome to augmented reality psychology. The cockroach in the Tupperware is only in your mind–or your virtual reality goggles–and is part of an exposure therapy technique meant to treat those [...]
  
  
• Sports results can affect election results | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Anyone currently following the World Cup, Wimbledon, or any of the many sporting events around the world will know the emotional highs and lows that they can produce. But these events wield even more power than we think. According to Andrew Healy­ from Loyola Marymount University, sports results can even swing the outcome of an [...]
  
  
• Could "Hormonal Diversity" Help Prevent Another Financial Meltdown? | DISCOVER
  

  When the housing market crashed in late 2008, most people were surprised by the sudden collapse. John Coates was not among them. He had spent 12 years trading derivatives for New York’s biggest banks—and had left finance for neuroscience, studying what happens in the brains of traders who put billions of dollars on the line in risky financial decisions. Coates, who now studies neuroscience and behavioral economics at the University of Cambridge, has made the London stock market his laboratory. His experiments seem to show that a trader’s success may be determined not by his wits but by the hormones that course through his brain. Hormone-fueled decision making can have powerful effects, intensifying market booms and busts and destabilizing the economy, Coates suggests. The markets’ operations are determined by legions of young men governed by confidence-boosting testosterone and the stress-related hormone cortisol. When hormones spiral out of control, economic behavior can do so as well.

  How did you get inside the heads of the people working in the financial markets?
  In our first experiment, we were on a trading floor in London with 250 traders, of which only three were women; the average age was maybe 28. They traded in and out very quickly, which means they would hold positions for minutes or even seconds. They would spot a price anomaly and jump on it, then quickly unwind. And they would make trades of huge value —$1 billion or $2 billion at a crack. We wanted to find out what was going on in the brains and bodies of these men who were taking such huge risks. So we collected saliva samples from the traders to measure their levels of testosterone and cortisol in the morning and the afternoon, bracketing the bulk of the day’s trading. Our hypothesis was that when traders had above-average testosterone their profits would go up, and in fact that’s exactly what we saw. It turned out that their morning testosterone levels were actually predicting their afternoon profits...

  
  

  
  
  
• 5 Ways Scientists Are Hacking the Brain to Cure Disease, Improve Memory & Increase Libido | DISCOVER
  

  The brain is a castle on a hill. Encased in bone and protected by a special layer of cells, it is shielded from infections and injuries—but also from many pharmaceuticals and even from the body’s own immune defenses. As a result, brain problems are tough to diagnose and to treat.

  To meet this challenge, researchers are exploring unconventional therapies, from electrodes to laser-light stimulation to mind-bending drugs. Some of these radical experiments may never pan out. But, as frequently happens in medicine, a few of today’s improbable approaches may evolve into tomorrow’s miraculous cures.

  1. Man Meets Machine
  In a sense, cyborgs already walk among us: Nearly 200,000 deaf or near-deaf people have cochlear implants, electronic sound-processing machines that stimulate the auditory nerve and link into the brain. But even by the fanciful science fiction definition, the age of cyborgs is just around the corner. In the last decade, researchers have become increasingly skilled at detecting and interpreting brain signals. Technologies that allow people to use their thoughts to control machines—computers, speaking devices, or prosthetic limbs—are already being tested and could soon be available for widespread applications...

  
  

  
  
  
• Want Someone to Take a Decision Seriously? Hand Them Something Heavy | 80beats
  Touch comes first. It’s the first way that people interact with the world, MIT’s Josh Ackerman says, and touch can change the way you feel about the world or engage with it. Ackerman and colleagues published a study in Science this week further uncovering the ways that what we touch influences what we think. In a [...]
  
  
• Heavy, rough and hard – how the things we touch affect our judgments and decisions | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  When you pick up an object, you might think that you are manipulating it, but in a sense, it is also manipulating you. Through a series of six psychological experiments, Joshua Ackerman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that the properties that we feel through touch – texture, hardness, weight – can all [...]
  
  
• Can a Brain Scan Predict Your Behavior Better Than You Can? | Discoblog
  It would be an advertiser’s dream: knowing the exact location in your brain that indicates whether an ad has worked, and whether you intend to buy that cat food or wear that suntan lotion. Now, some researchers claim they’ve found a region which might predict whether viewers will act on what a commercial tells them. For [...]
  
  
• Did Michelangelo Hide a Brain Drawing in a Sistine Chapel Fresco? | Discoblog
  What do you see in this detail from the Sistine Chapel frescos? We’ll give you a hint: Look at God’s neck. Still can’t see it? Take a look in a May issue of the journal Neurosurgery. What do a medical illustrator and a neurosurgeon see when they look at a Michelangelo masterpiece? We propose that in the Separation [...]
  
  
• New Nicaraguan sign language shows how language affects thought | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  One of the signs for “Nicaragua”. Photo by Ann Serghas In the 1970s, a group of deaf Nicaraguan schoolchildren invented a new language. The kids were the first to enrol in Nicaragua’s new wave of special education schools. At first, they struggled with the schools’ focus on Spanish and lip-reading, but they found companionship in each [...]
  
  
• E-focals: Electric Eyeglasses Are the New Bifocals | Discoblog
  Benjamin Franklin would be proud. The tinkerer who loved playing with electricity and allegedly invented the bifocals might have been glad to know that one company has now brought the two things together: PixelOptics has designed a pair of powered specs that can track users’ eyes and automatically adjust the glasses’ focal length, depending on [...]
  
  
• Your Clue Is: “This Robot Will Attempt to Crush Humans in ‘Jeopardy!’” | 80beats
  Is the human brain in final jeopardy? Last April IBM announced its newest plan to crush humans in the gaming sphere: After taking us to task at chess, it would conquer us at “Jeopardy!” Since then the game show-playing robot, Watson, has been in development (cue 80’s training montage featuring computer programmers). J-Day approaches, and this [...]
  
  
• Epigenetics and the Brain: Woo-free Coolness | The Loom
  In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at epigenetics and the brain. Along with the genetic circuitry in the DNA of our brain cells, we also have an additional layer of molecules that can switch genes on and off. A lot of this so-called epigenome gets locked into place when our brains [...]
  
  
• New Study: If a Dude Sounds Strong, He Probably Is | Discoblog
  It’s pretty clear that–in a fight–Darth Vader would crush Jar Jar Binks, Optimus Prime would beat Starscream, and Batman could pummel the Joker. Though some of these fictional characters don’t even look like humans, when it comes to strength, their voices give it all away. New research seems to confirm this: humans, like other animals, [...]
  
  
• The Brain: The Switches That Can Turn Mental Illness On and Off | DISCOVER
  
  Image: iStockphoto

  This month’s column is a tale of two rats. One rat got lots of attention from its mother when it was young; she licked its fur many times a day. The other rat had a different experience. Its mother hardly licked its fur at all. The two rats grew up and turned out to be very different. The neglected rat was easily startled by noises. It was reluctant to explore new places. When it experienced stress, it churned out lots of hormones. Meanwhile, the rat that had gotten more attention from its mother was not so easily startled, was more curious, and did not suffer surges of stress hormones.

  The same basic tale has repeated itself hundreds of times in a number of labs. The experiences rats had when they were young altered their behavior as adults. We all intuit that this holds true for people, too, if you replace fur-licking with school, television, family troubles, and all the other experiences that children have. But there’s a major puzzle lurking underneath this seemingly obvious fact of life. Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes. Each of our brain cells contains the same set of genes we were born with and uses those genes to build proteins and other molecules throughout its life. The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work.

  Neuroscientists are now mapping that mechanism. Our experiences don’t actually rewrite the genes in our brains, it seems, but they can do something almost as powerful. Glued to our DNA are thousands of molecules that shut some genes off and allow other genes to be active. Our experiences can physically rearrange the pattern of those switches and, in the process, change the way our brain cells work. This research has a truly exciting implication: It may be possible to rearrange that pattern ourselves and thereby relieve people of psychiatric disorders like severe anxiety and depression. In fact, scientists are already easing those symptoms in mice.

  
  

  
  
  
• Soul Made Flesh Plus Four | The Loom
  Uta Frith, a world expert on autism, has listed Soul Made Flesh as one of her favorite books about the mind over at the web site Five Books: I admire communicators who tell you about complex matters, which you would otherwise have little hope of learning about. I write scientific books so I understand how difficult [...]
  
  
• Vuvuzela vs Sound Engineer: Has the World Cup Stadium Horn Met Its Match? | Discoblog
  Though these multicolored horns might look like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, World Cup followers can attest that the vuvuzela is a loud and droning reality. South Africa’s soccer stadiums are resounding with their buzzing calls, driving TV audiences to distraction and causing many a viewer to reach for the mute button. Some spectators [...]
  
  
• Your brain sees your hands as short and fat | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Knowing something like the back of your hand supposedly means that you’re very familiar with it. But it could just as well mean that you think it’s wider and shorter than it actually is. As it turns out, our hands aren’t as well known to us as we might imagine. According to Matthew Longo and [...]
  
  
• Your Hidden Sense of Touch | DISCOVER
  You are more sensitive than you realize, neuroscientist Frank Rice of Albany Medical College has discovered. His study of patients whose skin lacks normal nerve fibers has revealed a previously unknown source of perception that contributes to the familiar ability to feel texture, temperature, pressure, and pain: the nerve endings surrounding blood vessels and sweat glands in human skin. Rice, neurologist David Bowsher of the University of Liverpool, and their colleagues were studying two patients who were unable to feel pain, yet somehow retained a rudimentary ability to distinguish hot from cold and rough from smooth. On examining skin samples and other biopsies, the researchers found that all of the usual nerve endings associated with skin sensation were missing. The only possible sources of feeling were the nerves of the blood vessels and glands...

  
  

  
  
  
• Big Autism Study Reveals New Genetic Clues, but Also Baffling Complexity | 80beats
  Researchers have published the largest-existing study on the genetic causes of autism, comparing 996 autistic individuals to 1,287 people without the condition. Their results, which appear today in Nature, may provide unexplored avenues for treatment research, but also show in new detail the disorder’s sheer genetic complexity. For example, they have found “private mutations” not shared [...]
  
  
• Psychologist Says Antidepressants Are Just Fancy Placebos | DISCOVER
  Depression is a chemical imbalance, most people think. Researchers, drug manufacturers, and even the Food and Drug Administration assert that antidepressants work by “normalizing” levels of brain neurotransmitters—chemical messengers such as serotonin. And yet hard science supporting this idea is quite poor, says Irving Kirsch, professor of psychology at the University of Hull in the U.K. An expert on the placebo effect, Kirsch has unearthed evidence that antidepressants do not correct brain chemistry gone awry. More important, the drugs are not much more effective against depression than are sugar pills, he says. To support these controversial claims, Kirsch conducted a meta-analysis, digging up data from unpublished clinical trials. When all the evidence is weighed together, Prozac, Paxil, and other such popular pills seem to be at best weakly effective against depression—an argument Kirsch presses in his new book, The Emperor’s New Drugs. Other research backs up his claims. A study published this winter in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that psychoactive drugs are no better than placebos for people suffering from mild to moderate depression. As for the studies that do find effectiveness in antidepressants, Kirsch says that's merely the placebo effect sneaking its way in: "When you do a clinical trial, you tell people that they might get a placebo. When researchers give placebos, what they are trying to control for is the expectancy of improvement, which can produce a sense of hope. You also tell them that the active drug causes side effects and what those side effects are. If I were a patient in one of these trials, I’d be wondering, well, what am I getting? And if I’ve started noticing side effects, and especially the side effects that had been described to me, I would no longer be 'blind.' I would think, 'Oh, my mouth is dry, that’s great—that means I got the active drug.' That would further increase my expectation that the drug was going to help. In the few studies where that has been assessed, about 80 percent of patients do figure out what group they are in. So it’s actually the side effects, the undesirable chemical effects of these drugs, that cause subjects on antidepressants to do a little better than those on the placebo."

  
  

  
  
  
• Just Kick The Ball: The Scientific Secret to World Cup Penalty Shots | 80beats
  If you relax and concentrate, you’re more likely to make a goal. Seems pretty logical, but researchers at Britain’s Exeter University have tracked soccer players eye-movements to make sure. They have confirmed that players who ignore goalies’ distracting antics are more likely to make the shot. The latest in the why-Britain-hasn’t-won-the-World-Cup-since-1966 line of research–which has also [...]
  
  
• World Science Festival: Telling Scary Stories of Strangelets | Discoblog
  Serious scientists may disdain anecdotal evidence, but we have evidence that some of them are pretty good with an anecdote. Last Thursday, the World Science Festival brought a collection of science geeks to The Moth, where the brave souls took the stage not to explain their work, but to tell stories of their lives in science. [...]
  
  
• Superstitions can improve performance by boosting confidence | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Superstitions run rampant in our daily lives. Sportsmen wear lucky clothes that they refuse to wash during tournaments. Actors refer to Shakespeare’s Macbeth as “The Scottish Play” within the confines of a theatre, because the name is said to be cursed. Everywhere, people knock on wood, cross their fingers and carry lucky mascots. It’s easy enough [...]
  
  
• World Science Festival: Listening to Illusions of Sound | Discoblog
  Do you see a hovering white triangle in this picture? This optical illusion employs “illusory contours”–pieces of an image purposefully arranged to trick your brain into seeing the whole thing. Neuroscientist Jamshed Bharucha says that we play similar tricks with our ears: “The brain is basically a pattern-recognition machine. We are desperate to find patterns.” Bharucha [...]
  
  
• Huge Mirrors, DNA Robots, & Brain Communication Win 2010 Kavli Prizes | 80beats
  Show them the money: The winners of the Kavli Prizes have been announced, and the eight scientists will split a total of $3 million in prize money. No, these aren’t the Nobels. The Kavlis are a relatively new award created to award scientists whose fields don’t get much recognition in Stockholm: These are only the second ever [...]
  
  
• “See You in 520 Days!” Pretend-Astronauts Begin Simulated Trip to Mars | 80beats
  All aboard for fake Mars! Earlier today, a six-man crew battened down the hatches on an 1,800-square-foot module for 520 days of isolation as they pretend to go to Mars and back again. The Mars-500 project, run by the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) and funded in part by the European Space Agency, hopes to [...]
  
  
• Did Dining on Seafood Help Early Humans Grow These Big Brains? | 80beats
  Your brain is hungry. That big gray calculating machine in your head is an energy hog that needs lots of calories—more than the diet of fruits and plants that our distant hominin ancestors probably ate could provide. It’s a mystery, then, just how human ancestors like Homo erectus—who were around when our craniums started [...]
  
  
• Einstein’s Brain, Einstein’s Glia | The Loom
  NPR’s Jon Hamilton has a nice piece on Einstein’s brain, and what might have made it special. The difference doesn’t seem to have to do with its neurons, but with the other cells of the brain, the glia. I wrote about the glia–what I called the dark matter of the brain–in this Discover column last [...]
  
  
• Drunken monkeys reveal how binge-drinking harms the adolescent brain | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Most of us will be all too familiar with the consequences of night of heavy drinking. But alcohol’s effects on our heads go well beyond a mere hangover. The brain suffers too. A penchant for incoherent slurring aside, alcohol abusers tend to show problems with their spatial skills, short-term memory, impulse control and ability to [...]
  
  
• A biological basis for acupuncture, or more evidence for a placebo effect? | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  In the past, I have criticised science journalists for not providing enough background in their reports. Both news stories and scientific papers obviously focus on new events and achievements, but they do so in the knowledge that new discoveries stand on giant shoulders. For this reason, when I cover new papers for this blog, I [...]
  
  
• The development of fairness – egalitarian children grow into meritocratic teens | Not Exactly Rocket Science
  Two children, Anne and Carla, have worked together to make a cake and they have to split it between them. Anne says that she’s the bigger cake aficionado and deserves the lion’s share. But Carla demands the bigger slice since she did most of the cooking. A nosy third party, Brenda, argues that the only [...]
  
  
• Genetically Engineered Bugs Can Smell Blue Light | Discoblog
  Do I smell a banana? Nope. It’s a blue light I’m smelling. Fruit fly larvae made this mistake while participating in a study recently published in Frontiers in Neuroscience Behavior. By adding a light-sensitive protein to certain smell receptors in the larvae, German scientists allowed the genetically engineered bugs to essentially smell light. The team, under the [...]
  
  
• Punked! Slate’s Doctored Photos Mess With Readers’ Memories | Discoblog
  “How will we remember the 2000s? What were the high and low points? Who were the heroes and villains?” William Saletan asked in a Slate article last week. Do you remember when Senator Joe Lieberman voted to convict President Clinton at his impeachment trial, when President George W. Bush chilled at his Texas ranch [...]