Scientific American - Mind & Brain

What Happens in the Amygdala... Damage to Brain's Decision-Making Area May Encourage Dicey Gambles

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:00:00 EST

Imagine you've lost your job. You have some money saved, and a chance to double it with a gamble. But if you lose the bet, you'll forfeit everything. What would you do? [More]

Distracted Customers' Wait Times Fly

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:05:08 EST

You know what it’s like. Sit chatting with a friend, and the hours can zip by. But once someone puts you on hold [audio: bad on-hold music] or makes you wait in line, each second feels interminable. But Dan Zakay of Tel Aviv University has some tricks for businesses to keep waiting customers happy. He published the psychology research in the journal NeuroQuantology . [More]

The Advantages of Being Helpless

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 EST

At every stage of early development, human babies lag behind infants from other species. A kitten can amble across a room within moments of birth and catch its first mouse within weeks, while its wide-eyed human counterpart takes months to make her first step, and years to learn even simple tasks, such as how to tie a shoelace or skip a rope, let alone prepare a three-course meal. Yet, in the cognitive race, human babies turn out to be much like the tortoise in Aesop’s fable: emerging triumphant after a slow and steady climb to the finish. As adults, we drive fancy sports cars, leap nimbly across football fields and ballet stages, write lengthy dissertations on every conceivable subject, and launch rockets into space. We have a mastery over our selves and our environments that is peculiar to our species.

Yet, this victory seems puzzling. In the fable, the tortoise wins the race because the hare takes a nap. But, if anything, human infants nap even more than kittens! And unlike the noble tortoise, babies are helpless, and more to the point, hopeless . They could not learn the basic skills necessary to their independent survival even if they tried. How do human babies manage to turn things around in the end?

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Third-hand smoke contains carcinogens too, study says

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:01:00 EST

Anyone walking into a smoker's abode can tell you that the traces of tobacco use don't vanish when a cigarette or cigar is extinguished. But just what happens to this "third-hand" smoke once the air has cleared--and can it still be harmful? [More]

Botoxed Face Impairs Bad Feelings

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:17:08 EST

At one time or other, someone has probably told you “it’s written all over your face.” That’s because your emotions can influence your expressions. Well, a study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that the reverse is also true: that the look on your face may influence your ability to process emotions. [More]

Dealing with Super Bowl XLIV Pressure

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:30:08 EST

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Readers Respond on "Squeezing More Oil from the Ground"

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

End or No End? In “ Squeezing More Oil from the Ground ,” Leonardo Maugeri, director of strategies and development of an international oil company, expresses the conventional view of his profession, assuming a world of near-infinite oil resources to be produced under market forces. Maugeri is particularly dismissive of our Scientific American article “The End of Cheap Oil” [March 1998]. It is difficult to find fault with at least its title, considering that the average price of oil over the preceding 10 years was $28 a barrel but rose to $45 over the ensuing decade to reach a peak of almost $150 in 2008.

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Fixing the Broken Government Policy Process

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

The breakdown of the Washington policy process has four manifestations. First is a chronic inability to focus beyond the next election. “Shovel-ready” projects squeeze out attention to vital longer-term strategies that may require a decade or more. Second, most key decisions are made in congressional backrooms through negotiations with lobbyists, who simultaneously fund the congressional campaigns. Third, technical expertise is largely ignored or bypassed, while expert communities such as climate scientists are falsely and recklessly derided by the Wall Street Journal as a conspiratorial interest group chasing federal grants. Fourth, there is little way for the public to track and comment on complex policy proposals working their way through Congress or federal agencies.

These failings take a special toll on the challenges of sustainable development because there is no quick fix, for example, for the challenge of large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Instead of getting long-term strategies for adopting low-carbon energy sources, upgrading the power grid, encouraging electric transportation and so on, we are getting cash for clunkers, subsidies for corn-based ethanol, and other ineffective and highly costly nonsolutions delivered by large-scale lobbying.

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Gunfight Tip: Faster to Draw Second

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 12:41:08 EST

(Gunshot.) Shhhh, just lie still, son, don’t try to talk. I know what you’re wondering. You come into town with the fastest draw in the West and I let you draw first and still you’re still the one lying here a bullet in ya. Well, if only you’d studied some neuroscience you’d know that being the fastest ain’t necessarily gonna help you, son. Why, a study just come out in the Proceedings of the Royal Society . That’s a Brit journal, don’t worry about it. Showed that I can go 10 percent faster reactin’ to you drawing your gun than if I just tried to draw my own gun first. Has to do with the way the nervous system’s set up. And that 10 percent more, why it more than made up for your puny advantage. They say the great physicist Neils Bohr wondered why the ones who drew second always seemed to win in Western movies. Well, now we know. Now gimme back my issue of Scientific American what you stole, you magazine rustler.

--Steve Mirsky

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Better Broadband: New Regulatory Rules Could Change the Way Americans Get Online

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

At the turn of the millennium, the U.S. had some of the best broadband access in the world. It reached more homes, and at a lower price, than most every other industrial country. Ten years later the U.S. is a solid C-minus student, ranking slightly below average on nearly every metric.

Just how the U.S. lost its edge and how it plans to get it back are the issues before the Federal Communications Commission as it prepares to launch the most significant overhaul of network policy since the birth of the Web. As part of last year’s stimulus package, Congress provided $7.2 billion to expand broadband access to every American. It also required the FCC to outline a plan for how to make that happen. The outcome of the FCC’s deliberations, due February 17, could determine not just control over the broadband infrastructure but also the nature of the Internet itself.*

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Low serotonin levels may prompt mysterious sudden infant death syndrome

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:01:00 EST

The most common cause of death of U.S. infants before their first birthday is the nebulous complication known as sudden infant death syndrome (or SIDS), according to the Mayo Clinic. The underlying causes of this condition , in which no immediate cause of death is revealed in an autopsy, remain unknown, vexing scientists and parents alike. [More]

Microsoft's Hands-Free Answer to the Nintendo Wii

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:00:00 EST

Editor's note: The online version of this story was posted on January 7.

When Nintendo’s Wii game console debuted in November 2006, its motion-sensing handheld “Wiimotes” got players off the couch and onto their feet. Now Microsoft hopes to outdo its competitor by eliminating the controller altogether: this past January it revealed details of Project Natal, which will give Xbox 360 users the ability to manipulate on-screen characters via natural body movement. The machine-learning technology will enable players to kick a digital soccer ball or swat a handball simply by mimicking the motion in their living room.

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Bonobo Chimps Stay Childlike

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:03:08 EST

When your kids misbehave, maybe you tell them to stop acting like a bunch of chimps. Well, that would be an insult to the familiar common chimp, Pan troglodytes , which actually grows up pretty fast. Now bonobos, the other chimp species, or Pan paniscus , enjoy horsing around well into adulthood. And a study in the journal Current Biology suggests that their laid-back development keeps bonobos forever young. [More]

Can a Brain Scan Predict a Broken Promise?

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 EST

Last time you told someone “I’ll call you,” did you mean it? [More]

Less than a pretty face: Brain scans show how a disorder leads individuals to perceive themselves as ugly

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:01:00 EST

Despite living in a culture obsessed with physical flawlessness, most people in the U.S. have a relatively realistic perception of their own form and face--blemishes, bulges and all. About one to two percent of the population, however, suffers from a recognized psychological illness, known as body dysmorphic disorder (or BDD), which causes them to be preoccupied with physical defects that they think make them look repugnant. Such tendencies can lead some people to extreme and frequent plastic surgeries and even suicide. [More]

Bees Can Recognize Human Faces

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:08:08 EST

Bees’ bread and butter is flowers--there’s no reason they should be able to distinguish human faces. But they can. Back in 2005, Arian Dyer at Monash University showed that bees could identify people who they associated who with sugary snacks. But could they recognize humans, or did they just see them as weird flowers?

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Chemical Exposure Linked to Attention Deficit Disorder in Children

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:30:00 EST

Children exposed in the womb to chemicals in cosmetics and fragrances are more likely to develop behavioral problems commonly found in children with attention deficit disorders, according to a study of New York City school-age children published Thursday. [More]

Sex Differences in Jealousy

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:00:08 EST

Studies from around the world have reported that men are more jealous of sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity. And women are the opposite--they’re more jealous of emotional cheating than sexual cheating. Experts often lean on an evolutionary cause for this gender difference: Men can never be sure they are the baby-daddy and women are most concerned with securing a genuinely loyal father to care for the children.

Well, authors of a recent study in Psychological Science question the strength of the evolutionary just-so theory--realizing that there are men who find emotional cheating far worse than sexual cheating. The study reports that personality patterns, shaped by one’s relationship history, can have an impact on jealousy.

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Jumping Neural DNA Key to Brain Plasticity?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:00:00 EST

In high school biology you probably learned that every one of our body’s cells contains the same genome, or pattern of DNA--but it turns out that this is not true of the brain. Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies recently found that the DNA sequence in human neurons can vary not only from that of the rest of the body but even from one brain cell to the next.

The reason is “jumping genes,” DNA elements that can copy and reinsert themselves in different places within the genome. These mutations increase the total amount of DNA in each neuron. Geneticist Fred H. Gage and his team at Salk looked at a type of mobile element called LINE-1. Although LINE-1s are present in all cells of the body, they appeared to be active only in developing brain cells, the researchers found.

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Negating "Climategate": Copenhagen Talks and Climate Science Survive Stolen E-Mail Controversy

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST

Copenhagen--Even under this city’s low, leaden skies, at least one thing remained clear as leaders from 193 countries gathered to negotiate climate agreements: one ton of carbon dioxide emitted in the U.S. has the same effect as one ton emitted in India or anywhere else. That simple truism is part of a huge body of data pointing to humanity’s effect on climate, and for most negotiators, the weight of that evidence seems to have crushed any doubt they may have felt in the wake of the 1,000-plus e-mails and computer code stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

The theft made headlines as “Climategate” in November, and many private correspondences among scientists became public. Climate contrarians and politicians, including Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, have claimed that the messages show that climate science was far from settled, that “tricks” were used and that researchers hid unfavorable data.

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