Tom Marcinko @ 19-09-2008
Why do people love stories, anyway? Scientific American reviews recent research and speculation, rounding up ideas — stories, really — from psychology, neurology, anthropology, and evolutionary theory. A taste:
In support for the idea that stories act as practice for real life are imaging studies that reveal similar brain activity during viewings of real people and animated characters. In 2007 [Raymond A. Mar, assistant professor of psychology at York University in Toronto] conducted a study using Waking Life, a 2001 film in which live footage of actors was traced so that the characters appear to be animated drawings. Mar used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan volunteers’ brains as they watched matching footage of the real actors and the corresponding animated characters. During the real footage, brain activity spiked strongly in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporoparietal junction, areas associated with processing biological motion. The same areas lit up to a lesser extent for the animated footage. “This difference in brain activation could be how we distinguish between fantasy and reality,” Mar says.
[Story Corps van: photo by Omar Omar]
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Tom Marcinko @ 05-08-2008
Synesthesia is that odd blending-together of senses. Those of us who don’t have it would probably pay to “taste” shapes or “hear” colors, at least temporarily. A new form of synesthesia has been discovered: “hearing-motion.” Cal Tech researchers set out to create a task in which synesthetes would have the advantage.
The researchers presented four self-professed synesthetes and 10 nonsynesthetes with 100 pairs of Morse codelike rhythmic sequences, each composed of either auditory beeps or flashes of white on a black background. The participants judged whether the two sequences in each pair were the same or different.
Both groups judged auditory patterns accurately about 85 percent of the time, the researchers report in the August 5 issue of Current Biology. On the visual trials, nonsynesthetes judgments fell to nearly chance levels, a result that corroborates other research showing that most people are better at judging auditory patterns than assessing visual patterns. In contrast, synestheteswho reported hearing sounds such as beeps or taps in time with the visual signalsdistinguished matching from nonmatching rhythms 75 percent of the time.
The writer’s assignment is to invent a job in which synesthesia would be a requirement.
[Story: Scientific American; image: Charkrem]
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Tom Marcinko @ 14-07-2008
Think your schedule is crazy? Spare a thought for the 150 Phoenix Mars lander scientists:
“Living on a Martian day is like traveling two time zones every three days over and over,” said [Laura] Barger, who is an instructor of medicine in Harvard’s Division of Sleep Medicine. “Everyone has a circadian clock. . . . When it isn’t able to synchronize with a Martian day, you get sleep disorders, decreased alertness and decremented performance.”
NASA is experimenting with soft-light boxes and an adjusted sleep schedule to help the Mars explorers stay alert. And it’s funding the two-year, $350,000 Harvard study in the hopes that results might help doctors, police, firefighers, and other earthlings who work skewed shifts.
[Mars image: jasonb42882]
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Tom Marcinko @ 14-07-2008
It’s, well, possible, but not sustainable, says University of Victoria, British Columbia movement researcher, neuroscientist, and martial arts practitioner E. Paul Zehr, author of the forthcoming Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero (Johns Hopkins University Press [!]). The most plausible thing about Bruce Wayne, the comics-savvy Zehr told Scientific American:
You could train somebody to be a tremendous athlete and to have a significant martial arts background, and also to use some of the gear that he has, which requires a lot of physical prowess. Most of what you see there is feasible to the extent that somebody could be trained to that extreme. We’re seeing that kind of thing in less than a month in the Olympics.
Least plausible:
Most of the time, in the comics and in the movies, even when he wins, he usually winds up taking a pretty good beating. There’s a real failure to show the cumulative effect of that.
If you’re thinking of superheroing, stay off the steroids.
There is one comic where he did go on steroids. He went a little crazy and he went off them again.
[Image: Srgio Savaman Savarese]
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Tom Marcinko @ 11-07-2008
U. of Chicago researchers used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans to study the responses of 17 children ages 7-12 to images of pain in others.
When children see an image of a person in pain, portions of their brain register that pain on a fMRI scan. When the children see a person intentionally hurt, portions of the brain associated with moral reasoning are also activated.
The scans showed the kids’ brains light up just like those of adults in previous research: Empathy activates the insula, somatosensory cortex, anterior midcigulate cortex, periaqueductal gray, and supplementary motor area; a moral reaction seems to turn on the temporo-parietal junction, the paracigulate, orital medial frontal cortices, and the amygdala.
Psychologist-psychiatrist Jean Decety suggests that empathy is not entirely the product of nurture, and that future studies could shed light on how children learn right from wrong, and give insights into the roots of violence and bullying. (Science-fiction writers, of course, are assigned to write about how this knowledge can be abused by marketing and propaganda.)
[Image: U. Chicago]
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Jeremiah Tolbert @ 16-07-2007
Researchers working out of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have identified an enzyme, Cdk5, that can inhibit in rats to prevent learned fear responses. The research has practical applications in the areas of phobia and post traumatic stress treatment. This is just the latest in a series of research in the neurosciences that are leading to a near-complete mastery of how we feel and even what we think. A future is possible in which our descendants will look back at us in amazement that we ever felt an emotion that we didn’t wish to feel.
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