As the presidential primary race has unfolded over the last few months, curious Americans have angled for a look at the candidates' wallets - and observed that they are bulging. There's Newt Gingrich, with his $7 million fortune and an up to $1 million revolving line of credit at Tiffany. The relentlessly anti-elitist Rick Santorum disclosed last week that he earns roughly $1 million a year. Mitt Romney built an immense $200 million fortune through his "corporate raider" work at Bain Capital; even Ron Paul, who claimed in one debate that he was embarrassed to show his tax forms because he made so much less money than his rivals, is worth as much as $5.2 million.

This striking wealth among politicians goes beyond the GOP. One of these four men will face off against the now wealthy Barack Obama, whose book royalties alone ran to $2.5 million in 2008. Beyond the Oval Office, there's Congress, whose members have a median net worth of $913,000, compared with $100,000 for the rest of us, according to a recent New York Times report. (Massachusetts' own John Kerry is one leader of the pack, with a fortune that in 2009 was estimated at $167 million.)

Politicians would like us to believe that all this money doesn't matter in a deeper sense - that what matters is ideas, skills, and leadership ability. Aside from a little extra business savvy, they're regular people just like the rest of us: They just happen to have more money.

But is that true? In fact, a number of new studies suggest that, in certain key ways, people with that much money are not like the rest of us at all. As a mounting body of research is showing, wealth can actually change how we think and behave - and not for the better. Rich people have a harder time connecting with others, showing less empathy to the extent of dehumanizing those who are different from them. They are less charitable and generous. They are less likely to help someone in trouble. And they are more likely to defend an unfair status quo. If you think you'd behave differently in their place, meanwhile, you're probably wrong: These aren't just inherited traits, but developed ones. Money, in other words, changes who you are.

Neurons develop a relationship that facilitates future coordinated activation as a response to being repeatedly stimulated.

This is how networks are constructed.

While it is quaint to consider the beauty of Tiger Woods' golf swing as representing a pinnacle in the development of "muscle memory," the real credit for his performance lies in the memory encoded in the neural networks in his brain that have been refined through years of practice.

But it takes more than simple repetition of a stimulation or activity to create the brain connections that lead to the formation of neural networks. Dr. Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, performed a series of experiments in the mid 1990s demonstrating the importance of attention in the formation of neural networks.

I was thinking about the state of the world yesterday, having gotten off the phone with my sister. She was once again reminding me that even though she and her husband both work, they barely make it most months and things just keep getting worse. She said that they feel they have no connection to anything, since fewer things just make common sense - that she has no control - that no matter how hard they work, for so many years, the rules keep shifting and the liars keep making more money while normal people drown a little more every day. She's right. The rules have changed and they changed while no one was watching. In fact, I'd say they changed because no one was watching.

A little while back, I sat Tucker Max -- one of the world's best-known self-proclaimed narcissists -- on my couch and revealed his psychological test results. Unsurprisingly, he scored high (31/40) on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI; you can take the test here). He scored the highest, though, on the exploitative dimension, which has items such as "I find it easy to manipulate people" and "I can read people like a book." I also gave him the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, which assesses the ability to accurately perceive how someone is feeling based solely on looking at their eyes (you can take the test here). Consistent with his NPI scores, he scored extremely high on this test, getting 33 out of 36 correct.

But then I noticed something else. On the Big Five personality test, he scored extremely low in Compassion, a dimension of Agreeableness. Of course, this will come to no surprise to his fans -- who like him for his humor, not his compassion. In his latest book "Hilarity Ensues", he states right in the acknowledgements, "I'm sure I'm forgetting a ton of people. What do you want from me, compassion and empathy? Have you read my book?" Fair enough. But at least I had empirical support.

On a somewhat serious note today because of a conversation the other day:

I am sure every girl can recall, at least once as a child, coming home and telling their parents, uncle, aunt or grandparent about a boy who had pulled her hair, hit her, teased her, pushed her or committed some other playground crime. I will bet money that most of those, if not all, will tell you that they were told "Oh, that just means he likes you". I never really thought much about it before having a daughter of my own. I find it appalling that this line of b******t is still being fed to young children. Look, if you want to tell your child that being verbally and/or physically abused is an acceptable sign of affection, I urge you to rethink your parenting strategy. If you try and feed MY daughter that crap, you better bring protective gear because I am going to shower you with the brand of "affection" you are endorsing.

When the f*** was it decided that we should start teaching our daughters to accept being belittled, disrespected and abused as endearing treatment? And we have the audacity to wonder why women stay in abusive relationships? How did society become so oblivious to the fact that we were conditioning our daughters to endure abusive treatment, much less view it as romantic overtures? Is this where the phrase "hitting on girls" comes from? Well, here is a tip: Save the "it's so cute when he gets hateful/physical with her because it means he loves her" asshattery for your own kids, not mine. While you're at it, keep them away from my kids until you decide to teach them respect and boundaries.

While his mother is cooing "Does baybee want his bahbah?" that 6- to 9-month-old infant may just be thinking something along the lines of "Yes, I do want my bottle!" New research indicates that infants as young as 6 months can understand the meaning of many spoken words.

"Kids at this age aren't saying anything, they're not pointing, they're not walking," study researcher Erika Bergelson, of the University of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. "But actually, under the surface, they're trying to put together the things in the world with the words that go with them."

This is the first demonstration that children of this age can understand such words. "There had been a few demonstrations of understanding before, involving words like 'mommy' and 'daddy'," study researcher Daniel Swingley, of the University of Pennsylvania, said in a statement. "Our study is different in looking at more generic words, words that refer to categories," like apple or mouth, which come in different shapes and sizes.

New connections between brain cells emerge in clusters in the brain as animals learn to perform a new task, according to a study published in Nature on February 19 (advance online publication). Led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the study reveals details of how brain circuits are rewired during the formation of new motor memories.

The researchers studied mice as they learned new behaviors, such as reaching through a slot to get a seed. They observed changes in the motor cortex, the brain layer that controls muscle movements, during the learning process. Specifically, they followed the growth of new "dendritic spines," structures that form the connections (synapses) between nerve cells.

"For the first time we are able to observe the spatial distribution of new synapses related to the encoding of memory," said Yi Zuo, assistant professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz and corresponding author of the paper.

Children who play with puzzles between ages 2 and 4 later develop better spatial skills, a study by University of Chicago researchers has found. Puzzle play was found to be a significant predictor of spatial skill after controlling for differences in parents' income, education and the overall amount of parent language input.

In examining video recordings of parents interacting with children during everyday activities at home, researchers found children who play with puzzles between 26 and 46 months of age have better spatial skills when assessed at 54 months of age.

"The children who played with puzzles performed better than those who did not, on tasks that assessed their ability to rotate and translate shapes," said psychologist Susan Levine, a leading expert on mathematics development in young children.

The ability to mentally transform shapes is an important predictor of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) course-taking, degrees and careers in older children. Activities such as early puzzle play may lay the groundwork for the development of this ability, the study found.

Levine, the Stella M. Rowley Professor in Psychology at UChicago, is lead author on a paper, "Early Puzzle Play: A Predictor of Preschoolers' Spatial Transformation Skill," published in the current early view issue of Developmental Science.

Mediation, an eastern philosophy which was once dismissed as pretentious, can be effective in treating mental illness, brain scans have proved.

The buzzword is mindfulness. Meditation, which is practised a lot in India and in parts of Islington, is an NHS-approved treatment that combines conventional psychotherapy with meditation techniques, breathing and yoga. It is sitting around trying to think about nothing and letting out the occasional "ommmm".

Meditation has been around since the Seventies, but in the past decade there has been growing evidence that it is highly effective. Researchers at Britain's most respected medical centres have found that it can halve the risk of relapse for those with depression.

"Psychotherapy involves patients analysing thoughts and feelings, with the hope that by understanding them some kind of change can be made. Mindfulness has some of this but it also involves meditation," the Daily Mail quoted Mark Williams, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford's Department of Psychiatry and co-developer of one of the many variants, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), said.

"That's not fair!" It's a common playground complaint. But how early do children acquire this sense of fairness? Before they're 2, says a new study. "We found that 19- and 21-month-old infants have a general expectation of fairness, and they can apply it appropriately to different situations," says University of Illinois psychology graduate student Stephanie Sloane, who conducted the study with UI's Renée Baillargeon and David Premack of the University of Pennsylvania. The findings appear in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

In each of two experiments, babies watched live scenarios unfold. In the first, 19-month-olds saw two giraffe puppets dance around at the back of a stage. An experimenter arrived with two toys on a tray and said, "I have toys!" "Yay!" said the giraffes. Then the experimenter gave one toy to each giraffe or both to one of them. The infants were timed gazing at the scene until they lost interest. Longer looking times indicated that something was odd - unexpected - to the baby. In this experiment, three-quarters of the infants looked longer when one giraffe got both toys.