The flip of a single molecular switch helps create the mature neuronal connections that allow the brain to bridge the gap between adolescent impressionability and adult stability. Now Yale School of Medicine researchers have reversed the process, recreating a youthful brain that facilitated both learning and healing in the adult mouse.
New research examines the role of trust in biasing memories of transgressions in romantic partnerships.
People who are highly trusting tended to remember transgressions in a way that benefits the relationship, remembering partner transgressions as less severe than they originally reported them to be. People low on trust demonstrated the opposite pattern, remembering partner transgressions as being more severe than how they originally reported them to be.
How did we become neurochemical selves? How did we come to think about our sadness as a condition called “depression” caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and amenable to treatment by drugs that would “rebalance” these chemicals? How did we come to experience our worries at home and at work as “generalized anxiety disorder” also caused by a chemical imbalance which can be corrected by drugs?
{ Nikolas Rose | PDF | More: The rise of everyday neuroscience }
For example, if a doctor tells a non-smoking, slightly overweight 50-year-old he has an 8% chance of having a heart attack, the patient may think, “Well, I don’t smoke, so it’s probably less for me.” The only problem is that the 8% already takes that into account. Similarly, when a resident of Atlanta hears a climate scientist say that in the next 30 years there’s a 2% chance a climate catastrophe will strike their city, they may think, “Well, we’re not near any major bodies of water so the chances are probably less than that.” But once again the 2% already takes that into account. […]
Another way people can miscalculate risk is by failing to fully grasp measurements in unfamiliar units. […] For example, an increase from 0 to 500 calories is different than an increase from 500 to 1000 calories. With regular numbers that’s not the case. In different units quantities relate to other quantities in different, non-linear ways. […]
New research shows that terms like “improbable” and “unlikely” are so ambiguous it may not be worth using them at all.
Most living things have an innate immune system: a set of mechanisms that fight off potential infections. Humans, for instance, have cells called phagocytes that eat invading bacteria, and bacteria have special enzymes that latch onto viral DNA and cut it to pieces.
But some organisms also have an adaptive immune system, which “remembers” diseases it has been exposed to, so the next time it meets them it can handle them better. This is the basis for vaccination, which uses weakened versions of a disease to prime us for the real thing. Until 2007, it was thought that only vertebrates had an adaptive immune system.
In fact, many single-celled organisms have one. Bacteria often carry repetitive genetic sequences called CRISPRs, which protect them against viruses.
When a bacterium is attacked by a virus, it copies a small piece of the virus’s DNA and stores it among the CRISPRs. The bacterium will then be better at fighting off the virus: the bacterium can acquire resistance, just like a human acquiring resistance to a disease.
The CRISPRs are a library of diseases, storing samples of past infections. If the same kind of virus attacks again, the bacterium is ready. Any viral genes that enter the cell are quickly marked for destruction. […]
But the war isn’t over. Viruses are notoriously adaptable. According to Andrew Camilli of Tufts University in Boston and colleagues, ICP1 has managed to turn the CRISPR system to its own advantage. […] At some point, the virus must have stolen part of the bacterium’s arsenal and re-programmed it to target what was left.
art { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Two Heads on Gold), 1982 (detail) }
In Proust’s novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu the narrator, Marcel, is overwhelmed by an unexpectedly vivid memory triggered by dipping a madeleine into a cup of tea. Such experiences are now being classified as involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs), coming to mind without any deliberate attempt at retrieval. Ebbinghaus (1885/1964) was first to define them as a distinct type of memories. […]
In this article we review the results of recent research programmes offering insights into IAMs in psychopathology, ageing, and their relevance to the real world, and other subjective experiences, such as déjà vu. […]
Involuntary memories come in different forms. Some occur in pathological and drug-induced states, such as ‘flashbacks’ experienced by LSD users sometime after the original trip, triggered by auditory and visual cues. These flashbacks have been defined as ‘transient, spontaneous reoccurrences of the psychedelic drug effect.’ Generally, they decrease in intensity and frequency once drug taking ceases, but are often distressing and debilitating when they occur. Some of the defining features of memories in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are that they repeatedly intrude upon consciousness, are extremely distressing and are difficult to control. Spontaneous recurrence of past memories has also been noted in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy shortly before or during simple partial seizures.
However, more contemporary strands of research suggest that IAMs are actually a relatively normal part of our mental lives, and that they form a useful and important directive function, guiding present and future thinking and behaviour. Cues in the environment can provide rapid access to past experiences, which may have survival value in situations that could be life threatening, or require problems to be solved quickly.
IAMs occur spontaneously without any deliberate intention to recall anything. In fact they are most likely to occur when individuals are engaged in regular, automatic activities that are not attentionally demanding, such as walking, driving or eating. It is estimated that they occur on average three to five times a day, and up to three times as frequently as voluntary memories. So for most people they are common, unexceptional occurrences, but occasionally they can be extremely meaningful, as described by Proust, or surprising.
photo { Tereza Zelenkova, Cometes, 2012 }
I next proposed a triangular theory of love, which holds that love can be understood in terms of three components that together can be viewed as forming the vertices of a triangle. The triangle is used as a metaphor, rather than as a strict geometric model.
These three components are intimacy (top vertex of the triangle), passion (left-hand vertex of the triangle), and decision/commitment (right-hand vertex of the triangle).
Intimacy refers to feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness in loving relationships.
Passion refers to the drives that lead to physical attraction and excitement.
Decision/commitment refers, in the short-term, to the decision that one loves a certain other, and in the long-term, to one’s commitment to maintain that love.
More of each component leads to different sizes of love triangles, and different balances of the three components give rise to different shapes of triangles.
“Married people are happier than unmarried people. They are healthier, live longer, have more sex,” and do better on nearly every indicator of happiness, Gilbert noted. […]
“Of course money buys happiness,” he said. “A little money can buy you a lot of happiness, though a lot of money buys you only a little more happiness.” […] What’s the sweet spot where each dollar buys the most happiness? Gilbert cited a per capita income between $50,000 to $75,000. […]
Time spent resting, for example, the dream of so many working people, simply doesn’t deliver happiness. “People are happiest when the mind is engaged,” Gilbert said, whether talking, creating, or having sex (another point for marriage). “People are [also] happier when they give money away rather than spending it on themselves.” […]
“[Children] are not a source of happiness. […] Once people have kids, there’s a downturn in happiness.” […] “Of course we love our kids,” said Gilbert. “I never said don’t have kids,” but the scientific data is tough to refute.
All kinds of things go into a woman’s vagina. Some are friendly (like sperm and vaginal microbes), and some are very bad (STDs). The immune system in the vagina has to be able to tell the difference and react appropriately. As you can imagine, the system isn’t perfect and sometimes things go terribly wrong.
An article published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Immunology reviewed the current state of knowledge of the vaginal immune system. […]
if a woman should become pregnant, her immune system has to know that it can’t attack the growing fetus, even though it’s technically a foreign object. […] When sperm enter the vagina, it sets off a rapid response in the cervix called the leukocyte reaction. A whole slew of immune cells rushes to attack and kill the invading cells, also known to the future baby as ‘dad’. This might be partly why millions of sperm are needed in order for just one to fertilize an egg.
Worldwide, over US$100 billion is invested every year in supporting biomedical research, which results in an estimated 1 million research publications per year. […]
An efficient system of research should address health problems of importance to populations and the interventions and outcomes considered important by patients and clinicians. However, public funding of research is correlated only modestly with disease burden, if at all. Within specific health problems there is little research on the extent to which questions addressed by researchers match questions of relevance to patients and clinicians. […]
Although some waste in the production and reporting of research evidence is inevitable and bearable, we were surprised by the levels of waste suggested in the evidence we have pieced together. Since research must pass through all four stages shown in the figure, the waste is cumulative. If the losses estimated in the figure apply more generally, then the roughly 50% loss at stages 2, 3, and 4 would lead to a greater than 85% loss, which implies that the dividends from tens of billions of dollars of investment in research are lost every year because of correctable problems.
“There’s a huge amount of vodka that’s sold for drinking at home,” Lieskovsky says. “But no one knew where it was really going”—apart from down someone’s throat eventually, and on a bad night perhaps back up again. Was it treated as a sacred fluid, not to be polluted or adulterated except by an expert mixologist? Some Absolut advertising and iconography suggested exactly this, assuming understandably that buyers of a “premium” vodka would want laboratory precision for their cocktails. Another possibility was that the drinkers might not care much about the purity of the product, and that bringing it to a party merely lubricated social interaction. “We wanted to know what they are seeking,” Lieskovsky says. “Do they want the ‘perfect’ cocktail party? Is it all about how they present themselves to their friends, for status? Is it collaboration, friendship, fun?”
Over the course of the company’s research, the rituals gradually emerged. “One after another, you see the same thing,” Lieskovsky told me. “Someone comes with a bottle. She gives it to the host, then the host puts it in the freezer and listens to the story of where the bottle came from, and why it’s important.” And then, when the bottle is served, it goes right out onto the table with all the other booze, the premium spirits and the bottom-shelf hooch mixed together, in a vision of alcoholic egalitarianism that would make a pro bartender or a cocktail snob cringe.
What mattered most, to the partygoers and their hosts, were the narratives that accompanied the drinks. […]
The corporate anthropology that ReD and a few others are pioneering is the most intense form of market research yet devised, a set of techniques that make surveys and dinnertime robo-calls (“This will take only 10 minutes of your time”) seem superficial by comparison. ReD is one of just a handful of consultancies that treat everyday life—and everyday consumerism—as a subject worthy of the scrutiny normally reserved for academic social science.
{ The Atlantic | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }
The concept “superiority illusion” refers to the fact that people tend to judge themselves as being superior to the average person when it comes to positive traits such as intelligence, desirability or other personality traits. This is mathematically not possible, because in a normally distributed population, most people cannot be above average. The “superiority illusion” belongs to a family of positive illusions, such as the “optimism bias,” which is characterized by an unrealistic positive outlook regarding our future. It is thought that such positive illusions may help ward off depressive symptoms and promote mental health. […]
[A recent study suggests] that the degree of superiority illusion correlates negatively with functional connectivity between two parts of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex and the striatum) and that the proposed mediator is the neurotransmitter dopamine. This would mean that increasing dopamine levels in the striatum could promote a person’s superiority illusion.
One limitation of the study was that the findings were purely associative and did not prove an actual causal link between dopamine levels and the superiority illusion.
The researchers also found that men require a slightly longer wavelength to see the same hue as women; an object that women experience as orange will look slightly more yellowish to men, while green will look more blue-green to men.
This last part doesn’t confer an advantage on either sex, but it does demonstrate, Abramov says, that “the nervous system that deals with color cannot be wired in the exact same way in males as in females.” He believes the answer lies in testosterone and other androgens.
photo { Nicholas Nixon }
On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard collided with the glass façade of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam and died. An other drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes. Then the author [of this paper] disturbed the scene and secured the dead duck. Dissection showed that the rape-victim indeed was of the male sex. It is concluded that the mallards were engaged in an ‘Attempted Rape Flight’ that resulted in the first described case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard.
Blinking is a spontaneous action that serves an important role: it spreads tears across the surface of the eye, keeping it moist and clean so that it can work properly. Yet most of us blink every three or four seconds, far more frequent than is needed for lubrication and cleaning, and exactly why is unknown. New research now suggests that blinking may also play an active role in brain function – it may “reset” our attention mechanism, enabling us to switch our focus from one thing to another.
Attention has a limited capacity and is highly selective. We can only attend to a maximum of three or four things at any one time, and doing so can make us completely oblivious to everything else in our surroundings. In order to notice something, we have to focus our attention onto it, and this involves disengaging our attention from what we are already focused on, then shifting our gaze and re-allocating our attentional resources onto something new.
One in four of us will struggle with a mental illness this year, the most common being depression and anxiety. The upcoming publication of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) will expand the list of psychiatric classifications, further increasing the number of people who meet criteria for disorder. But will this increase in diagnoses really mean more people are getting the help they need? And to what extent are we pathologising normal human behaviours, reactions and mood swings?
The revamping of the DSM – an essential tool for mental health practitioners and researchers alike, often referred to as the ‘psychiatry bible’ – is long overdue; the previous version was published in 1994. This revision provides an excellent opportunity to scrutinise what qualifies as psychiatric illness and the criteria used to make these diagnoses. But will the experts make the right calls?
The complete list of new diagnoses was released recently and included controversial disorders such as ‘excessive bereavement after a loss’ and ‘internet use gaming disorder’. The inclusion of these syndromes raises the important question of what actually qualifies as pathology.
photo { Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island (Self-portrait on the telephone), 1975-1976 }
Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of an existing or previously existing human. The term is generally used to refer to artificial human cloning; human clones in the form of identical twins are commonplace, with their cloning occurring during the natural process of reproduction. There are two commonly discussed types of human cloning: therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. Therapeutic cloning involves cloning adult cells for use in medicine and is an active area of research. Reproductive cloning would involve making cloned humans. A third type of cloning called replacement cloning is a theoretical possibility, and would be a combination of therapeutic and reproductive cloning. Replacement cloning would entail the replacement of an extensively damaged, failed, or failing body through cloning followed by whole or partial brain transplant.
{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }
The biodesign movement builds on ideas in Janine Benyus’ trailblazing 1997 book Biomimicry, which urges designers to look to nature for inspiration. But instead of copying living things biodesigners make use of them. […]
Alberto Estévez, an architect based in Barcelona, wants to replace streetlights with glowing trees created by inserting a bioluminescent jellyfish gene into the plants’ DNA.
{ Smithsonian | Continue reading }
The most radical figure in the biodesign movement is Eduardo Kac, who doesn’t merely incorporate existing living things in his artworks—he tries to create new life-forms. “Transgenic art,” he calls it.
There was Alba, an albino bunny that glowed green under a black light. Kac had commissioned scientists in France to insert a fluorescent protein from Aequoria victoria, a bioluminescent jellyfish, into a rabbit egg. The startling creature, born in 2000, was not publicly exhibited, but the announcement caused a stir, with some scientists and animal rights activists suggesting it was unethical. […] Then came Edunia, a petunia that harbors one of Kac’s own genes.
Convincing somebody to follow your advice can be a grueling task. Though it may often seem like the only thing to do is continue stating your spectacularly rational argument and hope they eventually see the light, some new research suggests a counter-intuitive twist on that strategy: Initially recommending what you don’t want them to do and then contradicting yourself.
Researchers have in recent years come to realize that genes aren’t a fixed, predetermined program simply passed from one generation to the next. Instead, genes can be turned on and off by experiences and environment. What we eat, how much stress we undergo, and what toxins we’re exposed to can all alter the genetic legacy we pass on to our children and even grandchildren. In this new science of ”epigenetics,” researchers are exploring how nature and nurture combine to cause behavior, traits, and illnesses that genes alone can’t explain, ranging from sexual orientation to autism to cancer. “We were all brought up to think the genome was it,” said Rockefeller University molecular biologist C. David Allis. “It’s really been a watershed in understanding that there is something beyond the genome.”
One of the increasingly famous paradoxes in science is named after the German mathematician Dietrich Braess who noted that adding extra roads to a network can lead to greater congestion. Similarly, removing roads can improve travel times.
Traffic planners have recorded many examples of Braess’ paradox in cities such as Seoul, Stuttgart, New York and London. And in recent years, physicists have begun to study how it might be applied in other areas too, such as power transmission, sporting performance where the removal of one player can sometimes improve a team’s performance and materials science where the network of forces within a material can be modified in counterintuitive ways, to make it expand under compression, for example.
Today, Krzysztof Apt at the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands and a couple of pals reveal an entirely new version of this paradox that occurs in social networks in which people choose products based on the decisions made by their friends.
They show mathematically that adding extra products can reduce the outcome for everyone and that reducing product choice can lead to better outcomes for all. That’s a formal equivalent to Braess’ paradox for consumers.
