Science of the SpiritS


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Baby Brains May 'Wake Up' Before Birth

Chicken Embryo
© Balaban et al. Current BiologyThis image of the chicken embryo skeleton inside an egg shows the developmental stage, and the colors indicate nervous system activity in the brain.
Long before they are ready to hatch, baby birds are awake and their brains churning, a new study suggests.

As for what wakes them up, the researchers found loud, meaningful sounds, like the squawks of other chickens, will rouse the sleeping embryos once they are more than 80 percent gestated.

"This work showed that embryo brains can function in a waking-like manner earlier than previously thought - well before birth," study researcher Evan Balaban of McGill University said in a statement.

"Like adult brains, embryo brains also have neural circuitry that monitors the environment to selectively wake the brain up during important events."

During this same time period - the last 20 percent of embryonic life - sleeplike brain patterns also emerge, the researchers said.

"Unfortunately, no one yet understands exactly what sleep-brain activity patterns are controlling, and why they exist," Balaban told LiveScience. "Once embryo brains reach this state, we found that they could be awakened; we think the waking-like" pattern of activity is an immature version of what is seen in awake animals after birth."

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Odd Ways the Mind Warps Time

Time Wrap
© Robert Kyllo | ShutterstockMany factors can make time seem to speed up or slow down, researchers are finding, even whether a person feels accepted or rejected by others.
London - Time, arguably our most precious nonrenewable resource, has a slippery nature in our minds. Sometimes it flows quickly. In other situations, it trickles at an unbearably slow pace. And, to the horror of many, it speeds as we age.

Why should something as reliable as a ticking clock be perceived with such inconsistency? Claudia Hammond, science author and broadcaster, explores this question in her new book, Time Warped (Canongate Books Ltd, 2012), out today (May 3).

She presented some of her findings at the British Psychology Society Annual Conference here in April, where she won the Society's Public Engagement and Media Award.

The present

Humans are remarkably good at measuring time in general. That is, when asked to estimate the length of, say, an hour, minute or second, we tend to be accurate, although scientists have yet to find a neuronal clock helping us with these measurements, Hammond said.

But our estimates can be greatly affected by psychological factors, including emotion.

In one experiment noted by Hammond, researchers asked people to mill about a room and socialize before telling the researchers, in confidence, which person they'd like as a partner in a subsequent task. Each participant was then individually taken behind closed doors and told one of two things: "We are sorry, but no one wants to be your partner; can you please work on your own?" or "Everyone chose you and now the only way to be fair is to have you work solo." The participants were then asked to estimate how much time they spent on the given task.

If the subjects thought popularity caused their seclusion, time seemed to pass very quickly. But for those who felt rejected, time stretched on and on.

Attention and memory also have powerful effects on time perception, Hammond said. For instance, novel experiences, because they require more mental processing, seem to last longer than familiar situations.

"This is why walking somewhere new seems to take longer than the walk back," she said.

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Matters of the Brain: Why Men and Women Are So Different

Male Female
© Adrian Niederhà | ShutterstockScientists now debate how much, rather than whether, biology contributes to sex differences in cognition.
London - A prevalent understanding, particularly in the 1980s, was that boys and girls are born cognitively the same. It was the way parents and society treated them that made them different.

Since then, a preponderance of research has called this belief into question. The majority of today's psychologists agree that some of the differences exhibited by male and female brains are innate.

"We do socialize our boys and girls differently, but the contribution of biology is not zero," said Diane Halpern, a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College in California, who has been studying cognitive gender differences for 25 years. Halpern was a keynote speaker at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference here last Thursday (April 19).

How much, rather than whether, biology contributes is where the unusually heated debate is now focused, she said.

Differences confirmed (so far)

Some of the many gender differences that float in popular consciousness have more support than others.

The ones that have been consistently found across cultures, life spans and even across species are the most likely - but by no means guaranteed - to have some biological underpinning.

Across age groups, species and nations, males tend to be better at various spatial skills. For example, male dominance in rotating an object in their minds, a quite large difference that has been reliably found for the last 35 years, has recently been documented in infants as young as 3 months old. Similarly, on average, males across cultures and species are better at judging angle orientation and navigating by cardinal direction.

Females, on the other hand, tend to have more verbal fluency and greater memory for objects - that is, "they are better at remembering where things are," Halpern said during her talk. Women and females from other species are more likely to navigate by using landmarks than cardinal direction.

"But you can get there using both," Halpern told LiveScience, pointing out that having different skills does not mean that men and women have different levels of intelligence. "There is not a smarter sex," she said.

In general, across a variety of tests, differences seem to fall particularly at the tails of distribution curves, with more males doing very poorly and more males doing exceedingly well.

Bomb

People Pleasing: How Other People's Unspoken Expectations Control Us

behaviour modifications
© Flicker/Reinhard
We quickly sense how others view us and play up to these expectations.

A good exercise for learning about yourself is to think about how other people might view you in different ways. Consider how your family, your work colleagues or your partner think of you.

Now here's an interesting question: to what extent do you play up to these expectations about how they view you?

This idea that other people's expectations about us directly affect how we behave was examined in a classic social psychology study carried out by Dr Mark Snyder from the University of Minnesota and colleagues (Snyder et al., 1977). They had a hunch that people automatically sense how others view them and immediately start exhibiting the expected behaviours.

Pi

Obsessed with Geometry: College Dropout Became Mathematical Genius After Brain Injury


Working behind the counter at a futon store in Tacoma, Wash., is not the place you would expect to find a man some call a mathematical genius of unprecedented proportions.

Jason Padgett, 41, sees complex mathematical formulas everywhere he looks and turns them into stunning, intricate diagrams he can draw by hand. He's the only person in the world known to have this incredible skill, which he obtained by sheer accident just a decade ago.

Comment: You can see more of Mr. Padgett's work here.


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Teen Drug Abuse Linked to 'Impulsive' Brains

Brain Scan
© Robert Whelan, University of Vermont, Nature Neuroscience, 2012Newly discovered networks in the brain, shown here in color, go a long way toward explaining why some teenagers are more likely to start experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Diminished activity in some of these networks, discovered by two scientists at the University of Vermont and their European colleagues, makes some teens more impulsive -- and less able to inhibit urges to try alcohol, cigarettes and illegal drugs in early adolescence.
A brain network associated with impulsivity is linked to teen drug abuse, new research finds.

Teens with diminished activity in a neural network in the front part of the brain are more likely to experiment with drugs, cigarettes and alcohol in early adolescence, the researchers found. Interestingly, this network is not the same one that is linked to the impulsivity of teens with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). That could mean that ADHD is not as much of a risk factor for drug abuse as researchers have worried.

"The take-home message is that impulsivity can be decomposed, broken down into different brain regions," study researcher Hugh Garavan of the University of Vermont said in a statement, "and the functioning of one region is related to ADHD symptoms, while the functioning of other regions is related to drug use."

Garavan and his colleagues scanned the brains of 1,896 14-year-olds as part of a large international project called IMAGEN. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they identified parts of the brain that were linked into networks by determining which areas became more active at the same time as one another. During the scans, the teens did a task that involved pressing a button and then having to keep themselves from pressing that button at a certain cue. This task requires the brain to inhibit behavior.

Eye 1

Troubling Study: Psychologists Demonstrate Implanting Non-Believed False Memories

memories graphic
© n/a
A recent study has found that people can have memories of events that never occurred implanted in a laboratory setting, even when they know that it never actually happened. Combining these findings with the reality of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA's) hallucination-inducing technology and you have the potential for both the reliability of our memory and perception to be manipulated and thus become completely unreliable.

In 2010, Giuliana Mazzoni and Lucy Harvey of the University of Hall in the UK along with Alan Scoboria of the University of Windsor conducted a survey of over 1,500 undergraduate students.

These researchers found that almost an entire quarter of the individuals surveyed reported having a memory of an event which they know or believe did not actually happen.

Now a group of psychologists including Andrew Clark, Robert Nash, Gabrielle Fincham, and Giuliana Mazzoni have conducted a three-stage study which was actually able to produce false memories which persisted despite the fact that the participants knew, and no longer believed, they had ever performed the actions.

Bulb

Critical Thinking: Why You Can't Help Believing Everything You Read

reading book
© Unknown
You shouldn't believe everything you read, yet according to a classic psychology study at first we can't help it.

What is the mind's default position: are we naturally critical or naturally gullible? As a species do we have a tendency to behave like Agent Mulder from the X-Files who always wanted to believe in mythical monsters and alien abductions? Or are we like his partner Agent Scully who was the critical scientist, generating alternative explanations, trying to understand and evaluate the strange occurrences they encountered rationally?

Do we believe what the TV, the newspapers, blogs even, tell us at first blush or are we naturally critical? Can we ignore the claims of adverts, do we lap up what politicians tell us, do we believe our lover's promises?

It's not just that some people do and some people don't; in fact all our minds are built with the same first instinct, the same first reaction to new information. But what is it: do we believe first or do we first understand, so that belief (or disbelief) comes later?

Einstein

Body of Thought: Five Postures for Creative Thinkers

Sit outside the box
© Holgar EilebyThink outside the box
Literally sitting outside a box, rather than in it, makes you more creative, according to new psychological research.

There are lots of metaphors floating around in creativity. We talk about 'thinking outside the box', 'putting two and two together' and 'seeing both sides of the problem'.

But are these only metaphors or can we boost our creativity by taking them literally? We know our minds interact in all sorts of interesting ways with our bodies, so what if we enacted these metaphors physically?

That's the question Leung et al. (2012) examine in a new study published in the journal Psychological Science. This brings together two of my favourite topics here on PsyBlog: creativity and embodied cognition. Across five studies they tested ways of making people more creative by simply changing postures.

Magic Wand

People with 'balanced time perspective' more likely to call themselves content

Do you look fondly at the past, enjoy yourself in the present, and strive for future goals? If you hold these time perspectives simultaneously - and don't go overboard on any one of them - you're likely to be a happy person.

A new study by San Francisco State University researcher Ryan Howell and his colleagues demonstrates that having this sort of "balanced time perspective" can make people feel more vital, more grateful, and more satisfied with their lives. Their findings are reported online in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

"If you are too extreme or rely too much on any one of these perspectives, it becomes detrimental, and you can get into very destructive types of behaviors," Howell said. "It is best to be balanced in your time perspectives."

While it may seem obvious that people who have a positive attitude about their past, enjoy the present, and focus on goals for the future would be the happiest, Howell said that a sense of well-being depends on the balance between these elements.

"If you're really dominant in one type of perspective, you're very limited in certain situations," he added. "To deal well when you walk into any situation, you need to have cognitive flexibility. That is probably why people with a balanced time perspective are happiest."