Scientific American - Mind Matters

The New Science of Temptation

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

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The Root of Thought: What Do Glial Cells Do?

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EST

Andrew Koob received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Purdue University in 2005, and has held research positions at Dartmouth College, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Munich, Germany. He's also the author of The Root of Thought , which explores the purpose and function of glial cells, the most abundant cell type in the brain. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Koob about why glia have been overlooked for centuries, and how new experiments with glial cells shed light on some of the most mysterious aspects of the mind.

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Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 EST

For years, many educators have championed “errorless learning," advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors. For example, a classroom teacher might drill students repeatedly on the same multiplication problem, with very little delay between the first and second presentations of the problem, ensuring that the student gets the answer correct each time.

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The Chemistry of Information Addiction

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:00:00 EST

My mother is a more patient human being after having raised a child who incessantly asked, “Are we there yet?” That information, often out of reach for a frustrated toddler, carries with it a feeling of reward. The majority of us are all too familiar with the urge to know more about the future, whether it is an exam grade, an experimental result, or the status of a new job. Prior knowledge frequently has no effect on the actual outcome of the event – we’ll get the same grade regardless – and yet we still desperately want to know. This leads to what scientists refer to as “information-seeking behavior” – our mind craves relevant information. The neural basis behind this seemingly universal desire has eluded scientists for some time, but the wait is over. [More]

Illusions: What's in a Face?

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:15:00 EST

Our brains are exquisitely tuned to perceive, recognize and remember faces. We can easily find a friend’s face among dozens or hundreds of unfamiliar faces in a busy street. We look at each other’s facial expressions for signs of appreciation and disapproval, love and contempt. We carefully select the images to go with our Facebook profiles. And even after we have corresponded or spoken on the phone with somebody for a long time, we are often relieved when we meet him or her in person and are able to put “a face to the name.”

The neurons responsible for our refined “face sense” lie in a brain region called the fusiform gyrus. Lesions or trauma to this brain area result in a rare neurological condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. Prosopagnostics fail to identify celebrities, close relatives, and even themselves in the mirror. But even those of us with normal face recognition skills are subject to many illusions and biases in face perception.

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Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative?

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EST

Love has inspired countless works of art, from immortal plays such as Romeo and Juliet , to architectural masterpieces such as the Taj Mahal, to classic pop songs, like Queen's “Love of My Life”. This raises the obvious question: why is love such a stimulating emotion? Why does the act of falling in love – or at least thinking about love – lead to such a spur of creative productivity?

One possibility is that when we’re in love we actually think differently. This romantic hypothesis was recently tested by the psychologists Jens Förster, Kai Epstude, and Amina Özelsel at the University of Amsterdam. The researchers found that love really does alter our thoughts, and that this profound emotion affects us in a way that is different than simply thinking about sex.

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The Pigeon as Art Critic

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EST

Consider how mystifying a walk through an art museum can be. Although dramatic changes in style are simple for anyone to spot, imagine asking someone, on their very first visit: “which of these paintings are the best and which are the worst?” Yet a connoisseur, after learning to identify the finer points of various styles, would have no trouble picking out his or her favorite pieces. [More]

Why Does Music Make Us Feel?

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EST

As a young man I enjoyed listening to a particular series of French instructional programs. I didn’t understand a word, but was nevertheless enthralled. Was it because the sounds of human speech are thrilling? Not really. Speech sounds alone, stripped of their meaning, don’t inspire. We don’t wake up to alarm clocks blaring German speech. We don’t drive to work listening to native spoken Eskimo, and then switch it to the Bushmen Click station during the commercials. Speech sounds don’t give us the chills, and they don’t make us cry – not even French.

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Girl Brain, Boy Brain?

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EST

Sex differences in the brain are sexy. As MRI scanning grows ever more sophisticated, neuroscientists keep refining their search for male-female brain differences that will answer the age-old question, “Why can’t a woman think like a man?” (and vice-versa).

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Depression's Evolutionary Roots

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:00:00 EST

Depression seems to pose an evolutionary paradox. Research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare -- why isn’t depression?

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Does Language Shape What We Think?

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:00:00 EST

My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds -- called "Whorfianism" after its academic evangelist, Benjamin Lee Whorf -- is so pervasive in modern thought as to be unremarkable. [More]

Why We Get lost

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:00:00 EST

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From 2-D to 3-D Sight: How One Scientist Learned to See

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 06:00:00 EST

Sue Barry is a neuroscientist at Mount Holyoke College. She's also the author of the newly released book Fixing My Gaze , which tells the story of how Barry, at the age of 48, finally learned to see in 3-D. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Barry about what a flat world looks like and what her own experience can teach us about brain plasticity and education.

LEHRER: You begin your new book, Fixing My Gaze , by describing the moment you realized that you lacked stereoscopic vision, which underlies the ability to see in 3-D. Could you describe that moment?

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Imaginary Friends

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:00:00 EST

Stomach growling, but have no time for a meal? A snack will do. Drowsy and unable to concentrate? A short nap can be reviving when a good night’s rest is unavailable. But what should you do when you are alone and feeling lonely ?

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An Easy Way to Increase Creativity

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 12:00:00 EST

Creativity is commonly thought of as a personality trait that resides within the individual. We count on creative people to produce the songs, movies, and books we love; to invent the new gadgets that can change our lives; and to discover the new scientific theories and philosophies that can change the way we view the world. Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context. The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others?

One answer is psychological distance. According to the construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance, anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the “psychologically distant” category. It’s also possible to induce a state of “psychological distance” simply by changing the way we think about a particular problem, such as attempting to take another person's perspective, or by thinking of the question as if it were unreal and unlikely. In this new paper , by Lile Jia and colleagues at Indiana University at Bloomington, scientists have demonstrated that increasing psychological distance so that a problem feels farther away can actually increase creativity.

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What If I'd Never Met My Husband

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:00:00 EST

I met my husband, Peter, rather randomly, at all-the-Absolut-you-could- drink benefit for the Museum of Contemporary Art . We have often observed that had we not met that night, there is no particular reason to think we would have ever chanced on each other in the future, as we did not inhabit the same professional or social spheres. From time to time, I contemplate the fantastic possibility that had one of us ventured several footsteps to the right or the left that evening, my husband, my children and my home might be subtracted from the life I lead today. Counterintuitively, this counterfactual exercise in considering how much worse off I could be today brings me not distress, but pleasure. Then again, a series of elegant studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggest that my experience is not so counterintuitive after all.

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What Can Singing Mice Teach Us about Language?

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:00:00 EST

A great deal of scientific research is driven by a very fundamental question: What makes us human? And what are the properties of the human brain that make these talents possible? One challenge facing scientists is that answering these questions often requires the use of nonhuman animals as subjects. In fact, animal models have even proved essential when it comes to studying uniquely human talents, such as language.

In 2001 Cecilia S. L. Lai and colleagues at the University of Oxford identified FOXP2 as the first gene specifically involved in speech and language development in humans. The gene was discovered when researchers began studying members of a family that exhibited severe language deficits: they struggled to speak in grammatically correct sentences and often failed to comprehend the language of others, although they demonstrated no other cognitive handicaps. A genetic analysis of the family linked these severe linguistic deficits to a mutation in the FOXP2 gene. Interestingly, the FOXP2 gene is highly conserved among vertebrates, including humans, songbirds, bats and rodents, perhaps indicating a shared function. Experimental evidence from a variety of animals suggests a general role in communication for FOXP2 . For instance, mice that lack the gene produce abnormal ultrasonic vocalizations, while the expression of the gene changes in the brains of songbirds during vocal learning.

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Take two video games and call me in the morning

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:00:00 EST

Parents often complain that their children are spending increasing amounts of time playing computer-based video games. Kids get together and just sit in front of a computer or a television with a gaming console, and they do not talk to each. They just watch the screen, which is probably damaging to their eye sight. They don’t get out enough and do not get enough exercise. Etc.

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Can Alzheimer's Be Cured?

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:00:00 EST

P. Murali Doraiswamy is the head of biological psychiatry at Duke University and is a Senior Fellow at Duke’s Center for the Study of Aging. He’s also the co-author of The Alzheimer’s Action Plan , a guide for patients and family members struggling with the disease. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Doraiswamy about recent advances in Alzheimer’s research and what people can do to prevent memory loss. [More]

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