Scientific American - Mind & Brain

Babies Already Have An Accent

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:51:08 EST

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

How can you tell the difference between a French baby and a German baby? No, it’s not that one is wearing a saucy little beret while the other is tucked into tiny pair of lederhosen. Well, maybe that’s part of it. But a new study in the journal Current Biology shows that the babies actually sound different. Because the melody of an infant’s cry matches its mother tongue. [More]

MIND Reviews: The Human Spark

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

TELEVISION The Human Spark [More]

MIND Reviews: Brainy Gifts

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Catch Some Slow Waves Zeo sleep monitor ($399) [More]

True Love: How to Find It (preview)

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Adapted from the book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives , by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. Copyright © 2009 by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. http://www.connectedthebook.com/

Nicholas and his wife, Erika, like to joke that they had an arranged marriage, South Asia–style. Although they lived within four blocks of each other for two years and were both students at Harvard, their paths never crossed. Erika had to go all the way to Bangladesh so that Nicholas could find her. In the summer of 1987 he went to Washington, D.C., where he had grown up and gone to high school, to care for his ailing mother. He was a medical student, single and, he foolishly thought, not ready for a serious relationship. His old high school friend, Nasi, was also home for the summer. Nasi’s girlfriend, Bemy, who had come to know Nicholas well enough that her gentle teasing was a source of amusement for all of them, was also there. She had, as it turned out, just returned from a year in rural Bangladesh, doing community development work.

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How You Learn More from Success Than Failure

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Have you ever bowled a string of strikes that seems like it came out of nowhere? There might be more to such streaks than pure luck, according to a study that offers new clues as to how the brain learns from positive and negative experiences.

Training monkeys on a two-choice visual task, researchers found that the animals’ brains kept track of recent successes and failures. A correct answer had impressive effects: it improved neural processing and sent the monkeys’ performance soaring in the next trial. But if a monkey made a mistake in one trial, even after mastering the task, it performed around chance level in the next trial--in other words, it was thrown off by mistakes instead of learning from them.

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Sneezes Provoke Fears Beyond Illness

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:00:08 EST

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

With H1N1 on the rise and flu shots hard to find, few things are as terrifying as [sneeze sound]. But now a report in the journal Psychological Science suggests that coughing and sneezing can spread more than viruses. They also spread fear, of germs and more. [More]

Hearing Our Heartbeats

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:00:08 EST

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Dangerous Liaisons: How to Deal with a Drama Queen

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

Sam paged me at 9 p.m., crying. It had started with his hair, which he was convinced was falling out. And although his work as a teacher’s aide had “filled him with love and joy,” he was sure his boss had given him a nasty look at the lunch break, and he felt utterly sick inside. Later Sam had phoned his partner, who had seemed distant. Afraid he was about to be dumped, Sam locked himself in the staff bathroom and cried for almost an hour, failing to finish his work and preventing others from using the facilities.

Sam is a drama queen--a person who reacts to everyday events with excessive emoton and behaves in theatrical, attention-grabbing ways. This type is the friend who derails a casual lunch to tell you a two-hour story about the devastating fight she had with her partner or the co-worker who constantly obsesses about how he is about to lose his job and needs your support to make it through the day. The drama queen worships you one minute and despises you the next, based on overreactions to minor events.

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The New Science of Temptation

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

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How the Brain Reveals Why We Buy

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:35:00 EST

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Mindfield: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World by Lone Frank , to be released in the U.S. November 10. [More]

Does Vitamin D Improve Brain Function?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:00:00 EST

The push to prevent skin cancer may have come with unintended consequences--impaired brain function because of a deficiency of vitamin D. The “sunshine vitamin” is synthesized in our skin when we are exposed to direct sunlight, but sunblock impedes this process. And although vitamin D is well known for promoting bone health and regulating vital calcium levels--hence its addition to milk--it does more than that. Scientists have now linked this fat-soluble nutrient’s hormonelike activity to a number of functions throughout the body, including the workings of the brain.

“We know there are receptors for vitamin D throughout the central nervous system and in the hippocampus,” said Robert J. Przybelski, a doctor and research scientist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “We also know vitamin D activates and deactivates enzymes in the brain and the cerebrospinal fluid that are involved in neurotransmitter synthesis and nerve growth.” In addition, animal and laboratory studies suggest vitamin D protects neurons and reduces inflammation.

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Zombie Creatures: What Happens When Animals Are Possessed by a Parasitic Puppet Master? [Slide Show]

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EST

A spider, seemingly possessed, spins an uncharacterisitic web--just before wasp larvae nesting on its abdomen suck the last nourishing juices from the spider's dying body and make a cocoon in the weird web. [More]

Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss (preview)

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EST

No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who just don’t seem all that sharp. The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities. I coined the term “dysrationalia” (analogous to “dyslexia”), meaning the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence, to draw attention to a large domain of cognitive life that intelligence tests fail to assess. Although most people recognize that IQ tests do not measure important mental faculties, we behave as if they do. We have an implicit assumption that intelligence and rationality go together--or else why would we be so surprised when smart people do foolish things?

It is useful to get a handle on dysrationalia and its causes because we are beset by problems that require increasingly more accurate, rational responses. In the 21st century, shallow processing can lead physicians to choose less effective medical treatments, can cause people to fail to adequately assess risks in their environment, can lead to the misuse of information in legal proceedings, and can make parents resist vaccinating their children. Millions of dollars are spent on unneeded projects by government and private industry when decision makers are dysrationalic, billions are wasted on quack remedies, unnecessary surgery is performed and costly financial misjudgments are made.

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Dogs Can't Smell a Liar

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:16:08 EST

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

You can teach your dog to lie down. But you can’t teach him to lie, or to know when you’re lying. Because a new report shows that Spot can’t spot deception. The study’s in the journal Behavioural Processes . [More]

Does Morning Sickness Mean Smart Kids?

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EST

A new study shows a correlation between nausea and vomiting during pregnancy and the long-term neurocognitive development of those kids. [More]

Are there asexuals among us? On the possibility of a "fourth" sexual orientation

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:15:00 EST

Gay people are often asked by the curious: When did you first realize you were gay ?” In my case, I remember undressing my Superman doll--and being terribly disappointed at the result--as well as being motivated to befriend the more attractive boys in third grade. But hormonally speaking, it wasn’t until I was about fourteen that I first looked in the mirror and thought to myself, ah, that’s what I am all right, it all makes perfect sense now.

It wasn’t much of a mystery. After all, lust isn’t exactly a subtle thing. Back then I derived as much pleasure from making out with my “girlfriend” as I might have from scraping the plaque from my dog’s teeth. In contrast, barely touching legs with a boy I had a crush on sparked an electric, ineffable ecstasy. In the locker room after high school gym class, I forced myself to picture naked girls in my head (particularly my girlfriend) as a sort of cognitive cold shower, a pre-emptive strike against an otherwise embarrassing physical response. I could go on but you get the idea: whether or not we like, hide or accept what we are, our true identities--gay, straight, bisexual --consciously dawn on each of us at some point in adolescence. We all have a natural “orientation” towards sexual contact with others, and for the most part we’re just hopeless pawns, impotent onlookers, to our body’s desires.

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What Does a Smart Brain Look Like?: Inner Views Show How We Think (preview)

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:01:00 EST

We all know someone who is not as smart as we are--and someone who is smarter. At the same time, we all know people who are better or worse than we are in a particular area or task, say, remembering facts or performing rapid mental math calculations. These variations in abilities and talents presumably arise from differences among our brains, and many studies have linked certain very specific tasks with cerebral activity in localized areas. Answers about how the brain as a whole integrates activity among areas, however, have proved elusive. Just what does a “smart” brain look like?

Now, for the first time, intelligence researchers are beginning to put together a bigger picture. Imaging studies are uncovering clues to how neural structure and function give rise to individual differences in intelligence. The results so far are confirming a view many experts have had for decades: not all brains work in the same way. People with the same IQ may solve a problem with equal speed and accuracy, using a different combination of brain areas. [For more on IQ and intelligence, see “ Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss ,” by Keith E. Stanovich]

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Smart Set: Exploring Intelligence in the Brain

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EST

We’ve all seen the pretty pictures. Colored scans, produced by techniques that measure blood flow or the movement of a tracer chemical, reveal the activity of areas of the brain when we are thinking about something. The revolution in imaging in the past couple of decades has taught us a lot about what the brain is doing while we cogitate. One thing we’ve learned is that those more active areas aren’t always the same from brain to brain when considering a certain problem. Not all brains are the same size or shape, as you might expect, but they also think differently.

So where does intelligence arise? Neuroscientist Richard J. Haier poses that question in our cover story, “ What Does a Smart Brain Look Like? ” Just as occurs with other types of processing, how we think when we are solving tasks differs among individuals. “Two people with the same IQ may solve a problem with equal speed and accuracy, each using a very different network of brain areas,” Haier writes. It may be time for a new definition of intelligence, he proposes, based on the size of key brain areas and how efficiently they manage information flow. Could brain scans someday show our aptitude for a given subject, helping us figure out what topics to focus on for our best success?

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Clean Smell Promotes Good Deeds

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:39:08 EST

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

When you’re done listening to this podcast, grab whatever product you use to clean. Maybe it’s something that smells really citrusy. Do a bit of cleaning. Then take a few deep breaths. Believe it or not the odds are now higher that you’ll make decisions that are both more fair and more generous than you would have without smelling the cleanser. That’s according to research published in the journal Psychological Science .

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A Pretty Face or a Hot Body?

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:00:08 EST

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