When we change our appearance, for example, by getting a haircut, friends will often note that we look different, but they may not be able to pinpoint exactly what has changed. This may result from our tendency to process faces holistically rather than by individual features.

In a recent study published in Psychological Science, volunteers were shown an image of a face or a house, followed by a similar image that may or may not have changed [images]. The volunteers were better at detecting that a change had occurred in faces than in houses, but they were surprisingly better at identifying which feature had changed in houses than in faces.

These findings suggest that holistic and feature-specific processing may be both advantageous and disadvantageous, depending on the nature of the task.

{ APS }

related { Questions about the safety of the latest sensation in hair care, the so-called Brazilian hair-relaxing treatment | NY Times | full story }

Raymond Moore recently described a study about the influence of romance novels on condom use. Erotic romance as a genre generally focuses on spontaneous and passionate sex. Since rubbers don’t exactly scream passion, love scenes rarely mention their use.

Researchers at Northwestern University were interested in how novels affected attitudes toward condom use in readers. They surveyed college students about their reading habits and found that students who read more romance novels had more negative attitudes towards condom use and less intention to use condoms.

{ Livia Blackburne | Continue reading }

photo { Barnaby Roper }

Eighty per cent of adults in the US and the UK are moderate users of the psychoactive drug, caffeine.

Of all the effects it has on our minds—enhanced attention, vigilance and cognition—perhaps least known is its tendency to make us more susceptible to persuasion.

This was demonstrated in a study by Pearl Martin and colleagues at the University of Queensland in Australia (Martin et al., 2005). In their experiment they tried to convince participants to change their minds about the controversial issue of voluntary euthanasia.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

photo { Charles Brittin, Arrest at Los Angeles Federal Building Protest, 1965 }

What is electricity? It’s moving electrons.

Every living thing moves electrons around, not just in nerves but also in metabolism (oxidize one thing, reduce another).

Is it possible to use this metabolic electricity to communicate with man-made devices? If you could, you might be able to make very sensitive biosensors, or even use bacteria to charge your batteries.

The first question you would need to address is whether you could get the electrons generated by metabolism out to the surface of the cell where they could be captured by a metal electrode.

Several species of bacteria do this naturally. One of the best-studied of these is Shewanella oneidensis, and the reason it needs to move electrons to the surface of the cell is so that it can use metal oxides as electron acceptors when there’s no oxygen around: in effect, these bacteria “breathe” metal.  Lots of applications have been suggested based on this unusual property, including uses in bioremediation.

{ It Takes 30 | Continue reading }

photo { Lina Scheynius }

The best poker players are masters of deception. They’re good at manipulating the actions of other players, while masking their own so that their lies become undetectable. But even the best deceivers have tells, and Meghana Bhatt from Baylor University has found some fascinating ones. By scanning the brains and studying the behaviour of volunteers playing a simple bargaining game, she has found different patterns of brain activity that correspond to different playing styles. These “neural signatures” separate the players who are adept at strategic deception from those who play more straightforwardly.

{ Discover Magazine | Continue reading }

photo { Helen Korpak }

At the forefront of early psychedelic research was a British psychiatrist by the name of Humphry Osmond (1917-2004). In 1951, Osmond moved to Canada to take the position of deputy director of psychiatry at the Weyburn Mental Hospital and, with funding from the government and the Rockefeller Foundation, established a biochemistry research program. The following year, he met another psychiatrist by the name of Abram Hoffer. (…)

The pair hit upon the idea of using LSD to treat alcoholism in 1953, at a conference in Ottawa. (…)

By 1960, they had treated some 2,000 alcoholic patients with LSD, and claimed that their results were very similar to those obtained in the first experiment. Their treatment was endorsed by Bill W., a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous who was given several sessions of LSD therapy himself, and Jace Colder, director of Saskatchewan’s Bureau on Alcoholism, who believed it to be the best treatment available for alcoholics.

Osmond also “turned on” Aldous Huxley to mescaline, by giving the novelist his first dose of the drug in 1953, which inspired him to write the classic book The Doors of Perception. The two eventually became friends, and Osmond consulted Huxley when trying to find a word to describe the effects of LSD. Huxley suggested phanerothyme, from the Greek words meaning “to show” and “spirit”, telling Osmond: “To make this mundane world sublime/ Take half a gram of phanerothyme.” But Osmond decided instead on the term psychedelic, from the Greek words psyche, meaning “mind”, and deloun, meaning “to manifest”, and countered Huxley’s rhyme with his own: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic/Just take a pinch of psychedelic.” The term he had coined was announced at the meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957.

LSD therapy peaked in the 1950s, during which time it was even used to treat Hollywood film stars, including luminaries such as Cary Grant.

LSD hit the streets in the early 1960s, by which time more than 1,000 scientific research papers had been published about the drug, describing promising results in some 40,000 patients. Shortly afterwards, however, the investigations of LSD as a therapeutic agent came to an end.

{ ScienceBlogs/Neurophilosophy | Continue reading }

photo { Lina Scheynius }

Researchers create ‘lesbian’ mice by deleting a single gene.

Deletion of a single gene switches the sexual orientation of female mice, causing them to engage in sexual behaviour that is typical of males. Korean researchers found that deleting the appropriately named FucM gene causes masculinization of the mouse brain, so that female mice lacking the gene avoid the advances of males and try to mate with other females instead. The findings probably have little relavence to human sexual orientation, however.

{ ScienceBlogs/Neurophilosophy | Continue reading }

painting { Atilla Adorján }

A new theory of the brain attempts to explain one of the great puzzles of evolutionary biology: why we laugh.

One of the more complex aspects of human behaviour is our universal ability to laugh. Laughter has puzzled behavioural biologists for many years because it is hard to imagine how this strange behaviour has evolved.
Why would laughing individuals be fitter in reproductive terms? And why is this ability is built-in, like sneezing, rather than something we learn, like hunting?

Today, we get an interesting insight into these questions along with some tentative answers from Pedro Marijuán and Jorge Navarro at the Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud in Spain.

The evolution of laughter, they say, is intimately linked with the evolution of the human brain, itself a puzzle of the highest order. There is widespread belief that the brain evolved rapidly at the same time as human group sizes increased.

Bigger groups naturally lead to greater social complexity. And it’s easy to imagine that things like language and complex social behaviours are the result of brain evolution. But the latest thinking is more subtle.

Known as the social brain hypothesis, this holds that the brain evolved not to solve complicated ecological problems such as how to use tools, how to hunt more effectively and how to cook. Instead, the brain evolved to better cope with the social demands of living in larger groups.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

quote { Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic, 1911 | full text }

A researcher at New York University called Moran Cerf has produced an article for the science journal Nature [On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons, Nature 467] in which he claims it may soon be possible to create a device that records our dreams and plays them back later.

Obviously, the reality is 909% less exciting than it initially appears. It won’t be a magic pipe you stick in your ear that etches your wildest imaginings directly onto a Blu-Ray disc for you to enjoy boring your friends with later.

What Cerf is actually proposing is a way to make other people’s dreams seem even more boring. But first: the business of capturing them, which all boils down to neurons. After studying the brains of people with electronic implants buried deep in their noggins, Cerf discovered that certain groups of neurons “lit up” when he asked his subjects to think about specific things, such as Marilyn Monroe or the Eiffel Tower. Therefore, he postulates, by recording these subjects’ sleeping brain activity, then studying the patterns generated, it should be possible to work out whether they were dreaming about starlets or landmarks. In other words, he’s isolated the stuff that dreams are made of. And it turns out to be a few blips on a chart.

{ The Guardian | BBC }

Imagine being able to control a computer with your mind. It’s not fantasy, that just happened.

Twelve subjects sat in front of a computer and looked at two superimposed images on a screen, focusing their mind on one of the pictures. The computer responded by making the image stronger while fading the other image away until only one was visible. They picked the image they wanted to look at, and made it so.

All the subjects had epilepsy, and had fine wires inside their brains to monitor seizures. These wires were attached to neurons and connected to the computer.

This new research published in Nature [On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons, Nature 467] could shed light on how information is used in the brain, and how interactions between single brain cells let us make decisions.

{ A Shooner of Science | Continue reading }

Words do hurt. Ridicule, distain, humiliation, taunting, all cause injury, and when it is delivered in childhood from a child’s peers, verbal abuse causes more than emotional trauma. It inflicts lasting physical effects on brain structure.


The remarkable thing about the human brain is that it develops after birth. Unlike most animals whose brains are cast at birth, the human brain is so underdeveloped at birth that we cannot even walk for months. Self awareness does not develop for years. Personality, cognitive abilities, and skills, take decades to develop, and these attributes develop differently in every person. This is because development and wiring of the human brain are guided by our experiences during childhood and adolescence. From a biological perspective, this increases the odds that an individual will compete and reproduce successfully in the environment the individual is born into, rather than the environment experienced by our cave-man ancestors and recorded in our genes through natural selection. Developing the human brain out of the womb cheats evolution, and this is the reason for the success of our species.


When that environment is hostile or socially unhealthy, development of the brain is affected, and often it is impaired. Early childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse, or even witnessing domestic violence, have been shown to cause abnormal physical changes in the brain of children, with lasting effects that predisposes the child to developing psychological disorders.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

photo { Ken Rosenthal }

My problem is Judy loves chick flicks.

I can’t forget when she forced me to see Brokeback Mountain and insisted that I look at icky scenes that no red-blooded American boy like me should have to see.

No man (and that includes Alan Alda) is so sensitive that he can sit through these long-winded duller-than-dirt chick movies. And yet no man is ready to admit how much he hates these films. Why? For fear of sexual reprisals delivered in the form of “Not this year, dear. I have a headache.”

And do you want to know how far this sexual intimidation has come? I still have nightmares about the night in 1996 when we went to see The English Patient (the single worst movie I ever sat through in my life).

I remember the night Judy and I went to see this movie. The East Hampton Cinema was filled with couples. The women all fluttery . . . the men all reserved.

I remember looking at Judy and, quite frankly, I was turned on. I figured it was an early movie and the night was young and so was Judy. I planned on drinks and soft music and, you know . . .

Judy gets very emotional at movies and that night she was in fine form. She started to sob the minute they put on that computer-animated horror that tells you to eat popcorn and drink Coca-Cola but don’t talk, etc., etc.

“Judy,” I whispered. “Why are you crying? The movie hasn’t started yet.”

“I know but it’s going to be so . . . so . . . sad.”

Well, in The English Patient, Ralph Fiennes plays a Nazi who is badly burned in a plane crash. So the whole movie consists of this guy who I swear is so burned that he looks exactly like the creature in that monster film of the ’50s, Creature from the Black Lagoon.

I knew from the beginning of the movie he was going to die. Spending three hours watching a guy who is made up to look like a burned-to-a-crisp monster dying is not my idea of a fun Saturday night.

There were a lot of other story lines and characters in the movie – one duller than the other. The burned guy kept remembering this love affair he had with this married woman who was, you guessed it, his best friend’s wife.

Well, this was not one of those wham-bam affairs. No sir. This was slow. So slow that they managed to do the impossible . . . make sex boring. And the more the nurse who was taking care of the guy who was burned to a crisp heard the story of the affair, the more she was interested in climbing into bed with the crisp.

At one point I said to myself, “If she goes near this guy, I’m going to be sick. The only thing that is going to save me from throwing up is that this movie is so boring I’m starting to doze off.”

That’s when Judy poked me.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” she declared with tears streaming down her face. Her tone told me that if I told the truth I could forget about the drinks and soft music later. So I did what any red-blooded young man would do under the circumstances. I lied. “It’s wonderful . . . wonderful. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in years,” I said.

“How come you’re not crying?” she whispered.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I was so caught up in the story that I guess I forgot to cry,” I said.

{ Jerry Della Femina | Continue reading }

We may think of scorpions as all bad ass, but scorpions still have to be careful. They have a painful sting, but some animals have evolved immunity to that. Even if they can drive off a predator with a sting, a scorpion close enough to sting its attacker is close enough to be damaged by its attacker.


In many cases, the best bet for a scorpion is to run away.

Temperature could play a big part whether scorpions get away from an attacker. Scorpions are ectotherms, so their performance is profoundly shaped by the external temperature. Daily temperatures can vary quite widely where scorpions live, particularly in desert regions.


Carlson and Rowe took a look at how temperature and drying affected bark scorpions (Centruroides vittatus). (…)

The authors did not test whether scorpions’ stinging behaviour was affected by drying them out. This is an odd omission, given that the title of this paper promising an examination of both temperature and drying on antipredator behaviours in general.

{ NeuroDojo | Continue reading }

Light swearing at the start or end of a persuasive speech can help influence an audience.

The problem is that we run the risk of losing credibility and appearing unprofessional.

To see whether swearing can help change attitudes, Scherer and Sagarin (2006) divided 88 participants into three groups to watch one of three slightly different speeches. The only difference between the speeches was that one contained a mild swear word at the start: “…lowering of tuition is not only a great idea, but damn it, also the most reasonable one for all parties involved.” The second speech contained the ‘damn it’ at the end and the third had neither.

When participants’ attitudes were measured, they were most influenced by the speeches with the mild obscenity included, either at the beginning or the end.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

Is expressing thanks a powerful motivator or just a social nicety?

According to positive psychologists, saying ‘thank you’ is no longer just good manners, it is also beneficial to the self.

Studies have suggested that being grateful can improve well-being, physical health, can strengthen social relationships, produce positive emotional states and help us cope with stressful times in our lives.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }

artwork { Roy Lichtenstein, Grrrrrrrrrrr, 1965 }

Speakers with a foreign accent are perceived as less believable than native speakers. A new study shows this isn’t just because of prejudice towards ‘outsiders’. It also has to do with the fluency effect, one manifestation of which is our tendency to assume that how easily a message is processed is a mark of its truthfulness. The effort required to understand an accented utterance means that the same fact is judged as less credible when uttered by an accented speaker, compared with a native speaker. This remains true even if the accented speaker is merely passing on a message from a native speaker.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

photo { Christophe Kutner }

Cars kill a lot more people than spiders, bats, snakes and wolves, but why don’t we fear them in the same visceral way? (…)

Although some of us fear snakes more than others, all baby humans, chimps and monkeys are equally jumpy when confronted with a black plastic snake. That aversion probably grew out of the pressures of life in the jungle eons ago. Back then, encounters with certain snakes were a matter of life and death, and a healthy fear of snakes kept our ancestors alive long enough to procreate.

In the field of evolutionary psychology, the belief is that instinctive fears became hard-wired in our biology, through genes or other inheritance, during the time (the Stone Age) and place (the African jungle and savannah) of our development into the Homo sapiens we are today.

But some new thinking suggests that these adaptations might date back before the Stone Age, and some, perhaps, to more recent times. (…)

Fear of heights is so widespread and understandable that psychologists consider it a normal fear. (…) Other phobias that persist into modern times may have been fixed much more recently than snakes and spiders, say in the late Paleolithic age, about 100,000 years ago, or even more recently.

Take fainting in response to seeing blood or surgical instruments. Fainting, Bracha posits, might have been an adaptive female response to the frequent raiding bands in the early hunting-and-gathering societies. You might have been less likely to be murdered if you fainted at the sight of a sharp stick.

Then there are the fears that point to inherently dangerous things and that no doubt have an “adaptive” function, except that they’ve gotten out of hand. Fears of dirt, rats, mice and insects are obviously self-protective, since all these carry diseases. But most vermin-spread diseases probably were not a serious problem before people began creating cities several thousand years ago.

Instinctual repulsion to some of these critters, Bracha hypothesizes, might have arisen in the Neolithic period, which started about 10,000 years ago.

So why do some of us appear to be addicted to fear, as evidenced by the popularity of increasingly horrifying horror movies? (…)

“They are people who need strong feelings of arousal, and they get those from horror movies as well as sexy movies. Low-sensation-seekers don’t like to be aroused by unpleasant things. High-sensation-seekers can enjoy any vicarious experience if it’s strong enough.”

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { Helmut Newton }

{ Few recent thinkers have woven such a beautiful braid of art and science as Benoît B Mandelbrot, who has died aged 85 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (The B apparently doesn’t stand for anything. He just felt like adding it.) Mandelbrot was a provocative mathematician, a subversive geometer. He left a beautiful legacy in visual art, for Mandelbrot was the man who named and explained fractals – those complex, apparently chaotic yet geometrically ordered shapes that delight the eye and fascinate the mind. They are icons of modern understanding of the universe’s complexity. The Mandelbrot set, one of the most famous fractal designs, is named after him. With its fizzing fringe of crystal-like microforms blossoming out of a conjunction of black circles, this fractal pattern looks crazy but is the outcome of geometrical calculations. | The Guardian | full story }

Placebos – the inert substances taken by control groups in clinical trials – are often assumed to be harmless sugar pills or something along those lines. New research has found that actually it’s impossible to know what’s in placebos because there’s precious little documentation of what exactly is used in clinical trials.

Out of 176 research studies published in four of the biggest international medical journals, only one in five fully disclosed the composition of the placebo treatment. This lack of transparency suggests that all sorts of things could be being used, some of which might be having some sort of physiological effect and compromising the validity of findings on the study drug.

Placebo controlled clinical trials investigate the effects of a particular drug on a disease by comparing people who receive the treatment against patients receiving a placebo, which looks, smells, and tastes the same as the study drug but has no active ingredients. This design accounts for the placebo effect.

{ Helen Jacques | Continue reading | Science Daily }

image { Ofri Cnaani }

Just ask yourself: Which colour do you prefer ? Have you always preferred it, or did your preference change ? Can you tell why you prefer pink to, let’s say, yellow ? If you have no answer to these questions, you may wonder what’s so interesting about colour preferences. And if you have no answer, or no interest in the questions, it’s perhaps because they are not very well shaped.

Let’s first agree that color preference is an important aspect of human behavior. It influences a large number of decisions people make on a daily basis, including the clothes and make up they wear, the way they decorate their homes, the artifacts they buy or create, to name but a few examples. What is more interesting is that color is, in some sense, a superficial quality that seldom influences the practical function of artifacts. What’s more interesting for psychologists, is that we still know very little on which factors actually determine these preferences. We still don’t have a good grasp on what they are, and how to capture them descriptively: some studies have reported universal preferences (for blue rather than red); others. for highly saturated colors ; some, finally, stress cultural and individual differences.

The problem may be that testing for colour preferences has something to do with colour perception, colour labeling and cultural associations - and all these problems are hard to disconnect. Elderly people for instance tend to change their colour preferences, but this may have to do with visual impairement. (…)

Another theory suggests that women, as caregivers who need to be particularly sensitive to, say, a child flushed with fever, have developed a sensitivity to reddish changes in skin color, a skill that enhances their abilities as the “emphathizer.”

Other arguments for innate colour preferences come from animal studies - with some recent surprising discoveries.  Animal colour preferences from sexual or social contexts are assumed to have arisen owing to preferences for specific kinds of food, representing a sort of sensory bias.

{ Cognition and Culture | Continue reading }

photo { Tim Barber }

A new meta-analysis study reveals falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second.

Results from Ortigue’s team revealed when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image. (…)

The findings have major implications for neuroscience and mental health research because when love doesn’t work out, it can be a significant cause of emotional stress and depression. “It’s another probe into the brain and into the mind of a patient,” says Ortigue. “By understanding why they fall in love and why they are so heartbroken, they can use new therapies.” By identifying the parts of the brain stimulated by love, doctors and therapists can better understand the pains of love-sick patients.

The study also shows different parts of the brain fall for love. For example, unconditional love, such as that between a mother and a child, is sparked by the common and different brain areas, including the middle of the brain. Passionate love is sparked by the reward part of the brain, and also associative cognitive brain areas that have higher-order cognitive functions, such as body image.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

photo { Chris Verene }

{ 1. Linnea Strid | 2. Amanda Lepore by David LaChapelle }

quote { When the Key to Good Genetics Research Isn’t in the Genes | Newsweek | full story }