Arquivo da tag: Cognição

Books Change How a Child’s Brain Grows (Wired)

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By Moheb Costandi, ScienceNOW – October 18, 2012

Image: Peter Dedina/Flickr

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA — Books and educational toys can make a child smarter, but they also influence how the brain grows, according to new research presented here on Sunday at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The findings point to a “sensitive period” early in life during which the developing brain is strongly influenced by environmental factors.

Studies comparing identical and nonidentical twins show that genes play an important role in the development of the cerebral cortex, the thin, folded structure that supports higher mental functions. But less is known about how early life experiences influence how the cortex grows.

To investigate, neuroscientist Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania and her colleagues recruited 64 children from a low-income background and followed them from birth through to late adolescence. They visited the children’s homes at 4 and 8 years of age to evaluate their environment, noting factors such as the number of books and educational toys in their houses, and how much warmth and support they received from their parents.

More than 10 years after the second home visit, the researchers used MRI to obtain detailed images of the participants’ brains. They found that the level of mental stimulation a child receives in the home at age 4 predicted the thickness of two regions of the cortex in late adolescence, such that more stimulation was associated with a thinner cortex. One region, the lateral inferior temporal gyrus, is involved in complex visual skills such as word recognition.

Home environment at age 8 had a smaller impact on development of these brain regions, whereas other factors, such as the mother’s intelligence and the degree and quality of her care, had no such effect.

Previous work has shown that adverse experiences, such as childhood neglect, abuse, and poverty, can stunt the growth of the brain. The new findings highlight the sensitivity of the growing brain to environmental factors, Farah says, and provide strong evidence that subtle variations in early life experience can affect the brain throughout life.

As the brain develops, it produces more synapses, or neuronal connections, than are needed, she explains. Underused connections are later eliminated, and this elimination process, called synaptic pruning, is highly dependent upon experience. The findings suggest that mental stimulation in early life increases the extent to which synaptic pruning occurs in the lateral temporal lobe. Synaptic pruning reduces the volume of tissue in the cortex. This makes the cortex thinner, but it also makes information processing more efficient.

“This is a first look at how nurture influences brain structure later in life,” Farah reported at the meeting. “As with all observational studies, we can’t really speak about causality, but it seems likely that cognitive stimulation experienced early in life led to changes in cortical thickness.”

She adds, however, that the research is still in its infancy, and that more work is needed to gain a better understanding of exactly how early life experiences impact brain structure and function.

The findings add to the growing body of evidence that early life is a period of “extreme vulnerability,” says psychiatrist Jay Giedd, head of the brain imaging unit in the Child Psychiatry Branch at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. But early life, he says, also offers a window of opportunity during which the effects of adversity can be offset. Parents can help young children develop their cognitive skills by providing a stimulating environment.

Language is shaped by brain’s desire for clarity and ease (University of Rochester)

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Public release date: 15-Oct-2012
By Susan Hagen
University of Rochester

 VIDEO: Translation: “Referee statue pick up. ” Above is one of the 80 animated video clips used to teach an artificial language to study participants. Cognitive scientists are just beginning to use…

Cognitive scientists have good news for linguistic purists terrified about the corruption of their mother tongue.

Using an artificial language in a carefully controlled laboratory experiment, a team from the University of Rochester and Georgetown University has found that many changes to language are simply the brain’s way of ensuring that communication is as precise and concise as possible.

“Our research shows that humans choose to reshape language when the structure is either overly redundant or confusing,” says T. Florian Jaeger, the Wilmot Assistant Professor of the Sciences at Rochester and co-author of a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesOct. 15. “This study suggests that we prefer languages that on average convey information efficiently, striking a balance between effort and clarity.”

The brain’s tendency toward efficient communication may also be an underlying reason that many human languages are structurally similar, says lead author Maryia Fedzechkina, a doctoral candidate at Rochester. Over and over, linguists have identified nearly identical grammatical conventions in seemingly unrelated languages scattered throughout the globe. For decades, linguists have debated the meaning of such similarities: are recurrent structures artifacts of distant common origins, are they simply random accidents, or do they reflect fundamental aspects of human cognition?

This study supports the latter, says co-author Elissa L. Newport, professor of neurology and director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown, and the former George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Rochester. “The bias language learners have toward efficiency and clarity acts as a filter as languages are transmitted from one generation of learners to another,” she says. Alterations to language are introduced through many avenues, including the influence of other languages and changes in accents or pronunciation. “But this research finds that learners shift the language in ways that make it better – easier to use and more suitable for communication,” says Newport. That process also leads to the recurrent patterns across languages.

To observe the language acquisition process, the team created two miniature artificial languages that use suffixes on nouns to indicate subject or object. These “case markers” are common to Spanish, Russian, and other languages, but not English. In two experiments, 40 undergraduates, whose only language was English, learned the eight verbs, 15 nouns, and grammatical structure of the artificial languages. The training was spaced over four 45-minute sessions and consisted of computer images, short animated clips, and audio recordings. Then participants were asked to describe a novel action clip using their newly learned language.

 VIDEO: Translation: “Singer hunter chop. ” Unlike English, the artificial languages used in the study have free word order. When the subject and object could be easily confused, participants chose to reshape…

When faced with sentence constructions that could be confusing or ambiguous, the language learners in both experiments chose to alter the rules of the language they were taught in order to make their meaning clearer. They used case markers more often when the meaning of the subject and object might otherwise have caused unintended interpretations. So for example, a sentence like “Man hits wall,” is typical because the subject is a person and the object is a thing. But the sentence “Wall hits man,” as when a wall falls on top of a man, is atypical and confusing since the subject is a thing and the object is a person.

The results, write the authors, provide evidence that humans seek a balance between clarity and ease. Participants could have chosen to be maximally clear by always providing the case markers. Alternatively, they could have chosen to be maximally succinct by never providing the case markers. They did neither. Instead, they provided case-markers more often for those sentences that would otherwise have been more likely to be confused.

The findings also support the idea that language learners introduce common patterns, also known as linguistic universals, conclude the authors. The optional case marking that participants introduced in this experiment closely mirrors naturally occurring patterns in Japanese and Korean—when animate objects and inanimate subjects are more likely to receive case markings.

The history of English itself might reflect these deep principles of how we learn language, says Jaeger. Old English had cases and relatively free word order, as is still true for German. But at some point pronunciation changes began to obscure the case endings, creating ambiguity. In contemporary English, word order has become the primary signal by which speakers could decode the meaning, he says.

“Language acquisition can repair changes in languages to insure they don’t undermine communication,” says Fedzechkina. In light of these findings, new generations can perhaps be seen as renewing language, rather than corrupting it, she adds.

By the same token, says Jaeger, many elements of informal speech can be interpreted as rising from the brain’s bias toward efficiency. “When people turn ‘automobile’ into ‘auto,’ use informal contractions, swallow syllables, or take other linguistic shortcuts, the same principles are at work,” he says. Recent research has shown that these types of shortcuts appear only when their meaning is easily inferable from the context, he adds.

When Do We Lie? When We’re Short On Time and Long On Reasons (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Sep. 5, 2012) — Almost all of us have been tempted to lie at some point, whether about our GPA, our annual income, or our age. But what makes us actually do it?

In a study forthcoming inPsychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientists Shaul Shalvi of the University of Amsterdam and Ori Eldar and Yoella Bereby-Meyer of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev investigated what factors influence dishonest behavior.

Previous research shows that a person’s first instinct is to serve his or her own self-interest. And research also shows that people are more likely to lie when they can justify such lies to themselves. With these findings in mind, Shalvi and colleagues hypothesized that, when under time pressure, having to make a decision that could yield financial reward would make people more likely to lie. They also hypothesized that, when people are not under time pressure, they are unlikely to lie if there is no opportunity to rationalize their behavior.

“According to our theory, people first act upon their self-serving instincts, and only with time do they consider what socially acceptable behavior is,” says Shalvi. “When people act quickly, they may attempt to do all they can to secure a profit — including bending ethical rules and lying. Having more time to deliberate leads people to restrict the amount of lying and refrain from cheating.”

The researchers first tested participants’ tendency to lie when doing so could be easily justified: Approximately 70 adult participants rolled a die three times such that the result was hidden from the experimenter’s view. The participants were told to report the first roll, and they earned more money for a higher reported roll.

Seeing the outcomes of the second and third rolls provided the participants with the opportunity to justify reporting the highest number that they rolled, even if it was not the first — after all, they had rolled that number, just not the first time they rolled the die. Some of the participants were under time pressure, and were instructed to report their answer within 20 seconds. The others were not under time pressure, and had an unlimited amount of time to provide a response.

The experimenters were not able to see the actual die rolls of the participants, to ensure all rolls were private. Instead, in order to determine whether or not the participants had lied about the numbers they rolled, Shalvi and colleagues compared their responses to those that would be expected from fair rolls. They found that both groups of participants lied, but those who were given less time to report their numbers were more likely to lie than those who weren’t under a time constraint.

The second experiment followed a similar procedure, except that the participants were not given information that could help them justify their lies: instead of rolling their die three times, they only rolled it once and then reported the outcome. In this experiment, the researchers found that participants who were under time pressure lied, while those without a time constraint did not.

Together, the two experiments suggest that, in general, people are more likely to lie when time is short. When time isn’t a concern, people may only lie when they have justifications for doing so.

One implication of the current findings is that to increase the likelihood of honest behavior in business or personal settings, it is important not push a person into a corner but rather to give him or her time,” explains Shalvi. “People usually know it is wrong to lie, they just need time to do the right thing.”

Violent Video Games Not So Bad When Players Cooperate (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2012) — New research suggests that violent video games may not make players more aggressive — if they play cooperatively with other people.

In two studies, researchers found that college students who teamed up to play violent video games later showed more cooperative behavior, and sometimes less signs of aggression, than students who played the games competitively.

The results suggest that it is too simplistic to say violent video games are always bad for players, said David Ewoldsen, co-author of the studies and professor of communication at Ohio State University.

“Clearly, research has established there are links between playing violent video games and aggression, but that’s an incomplete picture,” Ewoldsen said.

“Most of the studies finding links between violent games and aggression were done with people playing alone. The social aspect of today’s video games can change things quite a bit.”

The new research suggests playing a violent game with a teammate changes how people react to the violence.

“You’re still being very aggressive, you’re still killing people in the game — but when you cooperate, that overrides any of the negative effects of the extreme aggression,” said co-author John Velez, a graduate student in communication at Ohio State.

One study was recently published online in the journalCommunication Research, and will appear in a future print edition. The second related study was published recently in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking.

The CBSN study involved 119 college students who were placed into four groups to play the violent video game Halo II with a partner. The groups differed in whether they competed or cooperated in playing the game.

First, all participants filled out a survey about their video game history and a measure of their aggressiveness.

Those in direct competition played in multiplayer mode and were told that their task was to kill their opponent more times than they were killed.

Those in indirect competition played in single-player mode, but were told their task was to beat their opponent by getting further in the game.

In the cooperative condition, participants were told to get as far as they could through the game by working with their partner in Halo II’s cooperative campaign mode. In this case, the pair worked together to defeat computer-controlled enemies.

The final group simply filled out the measures and played the game at the end of the study. Their game playing was not recorded.

After playing the violent video game, the same pairs of participants who played with or against each other took part in a real-life game where they had the opportunity to cooperate or compete with each other.

In this game, they played multiple rounds where they were given dimes which they could keep or share with their partner. The researchers were looking to see if they engaged in “tit for tat” behavior, in which the players mirrored the behaviors of their partner. In other words, if your partner acts cooperatively towards you, you do the same for him. Tit for tat behavior is seen by researchers as a precursor to cooperation.

The results showed that participants who played the video game cooperatively were more likely than those who competed to show cooperative tendencies in this later real-life game.

“These findings suggest video game research needs to consider not only the content of the game but also how video game players are playing the game,” Velez said.

The second study, published in Communication Research, extended the findings by showing that cooperating in playing a violent video game can even unite people from rival groups — in this case, fans of Ohio State and those of their bitter rival, the University of Michigan.

This study involved 80 Ohio State students who, when they came to the lab for the experiment, were paired with a person who they thought was another student participant. In fact, it was one of the experimenters who was wearing an Ohio State t-shirt — or one from the rival University of Michigan.

One of the researchers made sure to point out the t-shirt to the student participant.

The student and confederate then played the highly realistic and violent first-person-shooter video game Unreal Tournament III together — either as teammates or as rivals.

After playing the video game, the participants played the same real-life game used in the previous study with their supposed partner, who was really one of the researchers.

They also completed tasks that measured how aggressive they felt, and their aggressive tendencies.

The results showed the power of cooperatively playing violent video games in reducing aggressive thoughts — and even overcoming group differences.

As in the first study, players who cooperated in playing the video game later showed more cooperation than did those who competed against each other.

It even worked when Ohio State participants thought they were playing with a rival from the University of Michigan.

“The cooperative play just wiped out any effect of who you were playing with,” Velez said. “Ohio State students happily cooperated with Michigan fans.”

Also, those participants who played cooperatively showed less aggressive tendencies afterwards than those who played competitively, at least at first. In fact, those who played competitively with a rival actually showed less aggression than those who played with a supporter of their own team.

“If you’re playing with a rival, and that rival is cooperating with you, that violates your expectations — you’re surprised by their cooperation and that makes you even more willing to cooperate,” Ewoldsen said.

Eventually, even those who competed with each other in the video games started cooperating with each other in the real-life games afterwards.

“The point is that the way you act in the real world very quickly overrides anything that is going on in the video games,” Ewoldsen said. “Video games aren’t controlling who we are.”

These results should encourage researchers to study not only how the content of violent video games affects players, but also how the style of play has an impact.

“What is more important: cooperating with another human being, or killing a digital creature?” Ewoldsen said.

“We think that cooperating with another human overrides the effects of playing a violent video game.”

Other authors of the CBSN paper were Cassie Eno of Waldorf College; Bradley Okdie of Ohio State’s Newark campus; Rosanna Guadagno of the University of Alabama; and James DeCoster of the University of Virginia.

Other authors of the Communication Research paper were Chad Mahood and Emily Moyer-Guse, both of Ohio State.

Journal References:

  1. J. A. Velez, C. Mahood, D. R. Ewoldsen, E. Moyer-Guse.Ingroup Versus Outgroup Conflict in the Context of Violent Video Game Play: The Effect of Cooperation on Increased Helping and Decreased Aggression.Communication Research, 2012; DOI:10.1177/0093650212456202
  2. David R. Ewoldsen, Cassie A. Eno, Bradley M. Okdie, John A. Velez, Rosanna E. Guadagno, Jamie DeCoster. Effect of Playing Violent Video Games Cooperatively or Competitively on Subsequent Cooperative Behavior.Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 2012; 15 (5): 277 DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2011.0308

Reciprocity an Important Component of Prosocial Behavior: Scorekeeping of Past Favors Isn’t, However, a Factor (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Sep. 3, 2012) — While exchanging favors with others, humans tend to think in terms of tit-for-tat, an assumption easily extended to other animals. As a result, reciprocity is often viewed as a cognitive feat requiring memory, perhaps even calculation. But what if the process is simpler, not only in other animals but in humans as well?

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have determined monkeys may gain the advantages of reciprocal exchange of favors without necessarily keeping precise track of past favors. Malini Suchak, a graduate student at Emory University, and Frans de Waal, PhD, director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes and C.H. Candler Professor of Psychology at Emory, led the study. Their findings will appear in an Early Online Edition of theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week.

“Prosocial is defined as a motivation to assist others regardless of benefits for self, explained Suchak. “We used a prosocial choice test to study whether direct reciprocity could promote generosity among brown capuchin monkeys. We found one monkey willing to do another favors if the first monkey was the only one to choose, and we found the monkeys became even more prosocial if they could alternate and help each other. We did not find any evidence that the monkeys paid close attention to each other’s past choices, so they were prosocial regardless of what their partner had just done,” she continued.

Suchak and de Waal suggest the synchronization of the same actions in alternation creates a more positive attitude the same way humans who row a boat together or work toward a shared goal develop a more positive attitude about each other.

Another interesting finding according to the researchers is the capuchin monkeys were prosocial whether they were paired with a familiar partner from their own group {in-group} or a partner from a different social group {out-group}.

According to de Waal, “This research has several implications for better understanding human behavior. First, we observed an increase in prosocial behavior as a result of reciprocity, but the monkeys did not develop a contingency between their own and their partners’ behaviors. Like humans, the capuchins may have understood the benefits of reciprocity and used this understanding to maximize their own benefits. Second, that the capuchins responded similarly to in-group and out-group partners has implications for the commonly held view that humans are unique in their ability to cooperate with strangers,” de Waal explained.

According to the researchers, capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) are ideal subjects for this type of study given the numerous observations of cooperative and prosocial behavior in the field, their sensitivity to other monkeys’ efforts in coordination experiments, and their robust, spontaneous prosocial behavior in the prosocial choice test compared with, for example, chimpanzees, which seem more sensitive to methodological variables.

In this study, the researchers tested 12 brown capuchin monkeys in pairs on a prosocial choice task. The monkeys had the choice between a selfish token that benefited only them and a prosocial token that benefited themselves and a partner. By comparing each monkey’s behavior with a familiar partner from the monkey’s own group and a partner from a different social group, the researchers examined the influence of each monkey’s relationship outside the experimental context on prosocial behavior. There was no difference between in-group and out-group pairs in any of the test conditions. To test the role of reciprocity, the researchers allowed the monkeys to take turns making choices and found this greatly increased prosocial behavior, but the researchers did not observe any tit-for-tat behavior. The researchers also tested whether the monkeys could overcome their aversion for inequity by creating a situation in which both individuals could provide each other with superior rewards, making reciprocity an even more attractive strategy. The monkeys did, but again without keeping track of each other’s choices. Finally, through a series of control conditions, the researchers established the monkeys were responding to their partners’ behaviors, rather than the rewards delivered by their partners, and that the monkeys understood the values of the tokens and were flexibly responding to changing conditions throughout the test sessions.

This research opens several avenues for future research, including further examining the emergence of reciprocity among humans without the cognition required for tit-for-tat and the tendency to cooperate with out-group partners.

Journal Reference:

  1. Malini Suchak and Frans B. M. de Waal. Monkeys benefit from reciprocity without the cognitive burden.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1213173109

Mathematics or Memory? Study Charts Collision Course in Brain (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Sep. 3, 2012) — You already know it’s hard to balance your checkbook while simultaneously reflecting on your past. Now, investigators at the Stanford University School of Medicine — having done the equivalent of wire-tapping a hard-to-reach region of the brain — can tell us how this impasse arises.

The area in red is the posterior medial cortex, the portion of the brain that is most active when people recall details of their own pasts. (Credit: Courtesy of Josef Parvizi)

The researchers showed that groups of nerve cells in a structure called the posterior medial cortex, or PMC, are strongly activated during a recall task such as trying to remember whether you had coffee yesterday, but just as strongly suppressed when you’re engaged in solving a math problem.

The PMC, situated roughly where the brain’s two hemispheres meet, is of great interest to neuroscientists because of its central role in introspective activities.

“This brain region is famously well-connected with many other regions that are important for higher cognitive functions,” said Josef Parvizi, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences and director of Stanford’s Human Intracranial Cognitive Electrophysiology Program. “But it’s very hard to reach. It’s so deep in the brain that the most commonly used electrophysiological methods can’t access it.”

In a study published online Sept. 3 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Parvizi and his Stanford colleagues found a way to directly and sensitively record the output from this ordinarily anatomically inaccessible site in human subjects. By doing so, the researchers learned that particular clusters of nerve cells in the PMC that are most active when you are recalling details of your own past are strongly suppressed when you are performing mathematical calculations. Parvizi is the study’s senior author. The first and second authors, respectively, are postdoctoral scholars Brett Foster, PhD, and Mohammed Dastjerdi, PhD.

Much of our understanding of what roles different parts of the brain play has been obtained by techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures the amount of blood flowing through various brain regions as a proxy for activity in those regions. But changes in blood flow are relatively slow, making fMRI a poor medium for listening in on the high-frequency electrical bursts (approximately 200 times per second) that best reflect nerve-cell firing. Moreover, fMRI typically requires pooling images from several subjects into one composite image. Each person’s brain physiognomy is somewhat different, so the blending blurs the observable anatomical coordinates of a region of interest.

Nonetheless, fMRI imaging has shown that the PMC is quite active in introspective processes such as autobiographical memory processing (“I ate breakfast this morning”) or daydreaming, and less so in external sensory processing (“How far away is that pedestrian?”). “Whenever you pay attention to the outside world, its activity decreases,” said Parvizi.

To learn what specific parts of this region are doing during, say, recall versus arithmetic requires more-individualized anatomical resolution than an fMRI provides. Otherwise, Parvizi said, “if some nerve-cell populations become less active and others more active, it all washes out, and you see no net change.” So you miss what’s really going on.

For this study, the Stanford scientists employed a highly sensitive technique to demonstrate that introspective and externally focused cognitive tasks directly interfere with one another, because they impose opposite requirements on the same brain circuitry.

The researchers took advantage of a procedure performed on patients who were being evaluated for brain surgery at the Stanford Epilepsy Monitoring Unit, associated with Stanford University Medical Center. These patients were unresponsive to drug therapy and, as a result, suffered continuing seizures. The procedure involves temporarily removing small sections of a patient’s skull, placing a thin plastic film containing electrodes onto the surface of the brain near the suspected point of origin of that patient’s seizure (the location is unique to each patient), and then monitoring electrical activity in that region for five to seven days — all of it spent in a hospital bed. Once the epilepsy team identifies the point of origin of any seizures that occurred during that time, surgeons can precisely excise a small piece of tissue at that position, effectively breaking the vicious cycle of brain-wave amplification that is a seizure.

Implanting these electrode packets doesn’t mean piercing the brain or individual cells within it. “Each electrode picks up activity from about a half-million nerve cells,” Parvizi said. “It’s more like dotting the ceiling of a big room, filled with a lot of people talking, with multiple microphones. We’re listening to the buzz in the room, not individual conversations. Each microphone picks up the buzz from a different bunch of partiers. Some groups are more excited and talking more loudly than others.”

The experimenters found eight patients whose seizures were believed to be originating somewhere near the brain’s midline and who, therefore, had had electrode packets placed in the crevasse dividing the hemispheres. (The brain’s two hemispheres are spaced far enough apart to slip an electrode packet between them without incurring damage.)

The researchers got permission from these eight patients to bring in laptop computers and put the volunteers through a battery of simple tasks requiring modest intellectual effort. “It can be boring to lie in bed waiting seven days for a seizure to come,” said Foster. “Our studies helped them pass the time.” The sessions lasted about an hour.

On the laptop would appear a series of true/false statements falling into one of four categories. Three categories were self-referential, albeit with varying degrees of specificity. Most specific was so-called “autobiographical episodic memory,” an example of which might be: “I drank coffee yesterday.” The next category of statements was more generic: “I eat a lot of fruit.” The most abstract category, “self-judgment,” comprised sentences along the lines of: “I am honest.”

A fourth category differed from the first three in that it consisted of arithmetical equations such as: 67 + 6 = 75. Evaluating such a statement’s truth required no introspection but, instead, an outward, more sensory orientation.

For each item, patients were instructed to press “1” if a statement was true, “2” if it was false.

Significant portions of the PMC that were “tapped” by electrodes became activated during self-episodic memory processing, confirming the PMC’s strong role in recall of one’s past experiences. Interestingly, true/false statements involving less specifically narrative recall — such as, “I eat a lot of fruit” — induced relatively little activity. “Self-judgment” statements — such as, “I am attractive” — elicited none at all. Moreover, whether a volunteer judged a statement to be true or false made no difference with respect to the intensity, location or duration of electrical activity in activated PMC circuits.

This suggests, both Parvizi and Foster said, that the PMC is not the brain’s “center of self-consciousness” as some have proposed, but is more specifically engaged in constructing autobiographical narrative scenes, as occurs in recall or imagination.

Foster, Dastjerdi and Parvizi also found that the PMC circuitry activated by a recall task took close to a half-second to fire up, ruling out the possibility that this circuitry’s true role was in reading or making sense of the sentence on the screen. (These two activities are typically completed within the first one-fifth of a second or so.) Once activated, these circuits remained active for a full second.

Yet all the electrodes that lit up during the self-episodic condition were conspicuously deactivated during arithmetic calculation. In fact, the circuits being monitored by these electrodes were not merely passively silent, but actively suppressed, said Parvizi. “The more a circuit is activated during autobiographical recall, the more it is suppressed during math. It’s essentially impossible to do both at once.”

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, with partial sponsorship from the Stanford Institute for NeuroInnovation and Translational Neuroscience.

The eyes have it: Men do see things differently to women (BioMed Central)

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By Hilary Glover

BioMed Central

The way that the visual centers of men and women’s brains works is different, finds new research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Biology of Sex Differences. Men have greater sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving stimuli, but women are better at discriminating between colors.

In the brain there are high concentrations of male sex hormone (androgen) receptors throughout cerebral cortex, especially in the visual cortex which is responsible for processing images. Androgens are also responsible for controlling the development of neurons in the visual cortex during embryogenesis, meaning that males have 25% more of these neurons than females.

Researchers from Brooklyn and Hunter Colleges of the City University of New York compared the vision of men and women aged over 16 from both college and high school, including students and staff. All volunteers were required to have normal color vision and 20/20 sight (or 20/20 when corrected by glasses or contact lenses).

When the volunteers were required to describe colors shown to them across the visual spectrum it became obvious that the color vision of men was shifted, and that they required a slightly longer wavelength to experience the same hue as the women. The males also had a broader range in the center of the spectrum where they were less able to discriminate between colors.

An image of light and dark bars was used to measure contrast-sensitivity functions (CSF) of vision; the bars were either horizontal or vertical and volunteers had to choose which one they saw. In each image, when the light and dark bars were alternated the image appeared to flicker.

By varying how rapidly the bars alternated or how close together they were, the team found that at moderate rates of image change, observers lost sensitivity for close together bars, and gained sensitivity when the bars were farther apart. However when the image change was faster both sexes were less able to resolve the images over all bar widths. Overall the men were better able to resolve more rapidly changing images that were closer together than the women.

Prof Israel Abramov, who led this study commented, “As with other senses, such as hearing and the olfactory system, there are marked sex differences in vision between men and women. The elements of vision we measured are determined by inputs from specific sets of thalamic neurons into the primary visual cortex. We suggest that, since these neurons are guided by the cortex during embryogenesis, that testosterone plays a major role, somehow leading to different connectivity between males and females. The evolutionary driving force between these differences is less clear.”

Sources

Sex & vision I: Spatio-temporal resolution Israel Abramov, James Gordon, Olga Feldman and Alla Chavarga Biology of Sex Differences (in press)

Sex and vision II: Color appearance of monochromatic lights Israel Abramov, James Gordon, Olga Feldman and Alla Chavarga Biology of Sex Differences (in press)

People Merge Supernatural and Scientific Beliefs When Reasoning With the Unknown, Study Shows (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 30, 2012) — Reliance on supernatural explanations for major life events, such as death and illness, often increases rather than declines with age, according to a new psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin.

Reliance on supernatural explanations for major life events, such as death and illness, often increases rather than declines with age, according to a new psychology study. (Credit: © Nikki Zalewski / Fotolia)

The study, published in the June issue of Child Development, offers new insight into developmental learning.

“As children assimilate cultural concepts into their intuitive belief systems — from God to atoms to evolution — they engage in coexistence thinking,” said Cristine Legare, assistant professor of psychology and lead author of the study. “When they merge supernatural and scientific explanations, they integrate them in a variety of predictable and universal ways.”

Legare and her colleagues reviewed more than 30 studies on how people (ages 5-75) from various countries reason with three major existential questions: the origin of life, illness and death. They also conducted a study with 366 respondents in South Africa, where biomedical and traditional healing practices are both widely available.

As part of the study, Legare presented the respondents with a variety of stories about people who had AIDS. They were then asked to endorse or reject several biological and supernatural explanations for why the characters in the stories contracted the virus.

According to the findings, participants of all age groups agreed with biological explanations for at least one event. Yet supernatural explanations such as witchcraft were also frequently supported among children (ages 5 and up) and universally among adults.

Among the adult participants, only 26 percent believed the illness could be caused by either biology or witchcraft. And 38 percent split biological and scientific explanations into one theory. For example: “Witchcraft, which is mixed with evil spirits, and unprotected sex caused AIDS.” However, 57 percent combined both witchcraft and biological explanations. For example: “A witch can put an HIV-infected person in your path.”

Legare said the findings contradict the common assumption that supernatural beliefs dissipate with age and knowledge.

“The findings show supernatural explanations for topics of core concern to humans are pervasive across cultures,” Legare said. “If anything, in both industrialized and developing countries, supernatural explanations are frequently endorsed more often among adults than younger children.”

The results provide evidence that reasoning about supernatural phenomena is a fundamental and enduring aspect of human thinking, Legare said.

“The standard assumption that scientific and religious explanations compete should be re-evaluated in light of substantial psychological evidence,” Legare said. “The data, which spans diverse cultural contexts across the lifespan, shows supernatural reasoning is not necessarily replaced with scientific explanations following gains in knowledge, education or technology.”

Journal Reference:

  1. Cristine H. Legare, E. Margaret Evans, Karl S. Rosengren, Paul L. Harris. The Coexistence of Natural and Supernatural Explanations Across Cultures and Development. Child Development, 2012; 83 (3): 779 DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01743.x

Leaders’ Emotional Cues May Predict Acts of Terror or Political Aggression (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 30, 2012) — Leaders often use rousing speeches to evoke powerful emotions, and those emotions may predict when a group will commit an act of violence or terrorism, according to new research published in the journal Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression.Analysis of speeches delivered by government, activist and terrorist leaders found that leaders’ expressions of anger, contempt and disgust spiked immediately before their group committed an act of violence.

“When leaders express a combination of anger, contempt and disgust in their speeches, it seems to be instrumental in inciting a group to act violently,” said David Matsumoto, professor of psychology at San Francisco State University.

As part of a five-year project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative, Matsumoto and colleagues studied the transcripts of speeches delivered by the leaders of ideologically motivated groups over the past 100 years. The analysis included such speeches as Osama bin Laden’s remarks leading up to the bombings of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The researchers analyzed the pattern of emotions conveyed when leaders spoke about their rival group and examined speeches given at three points in time before a specific act of aggression. They compared the results with the content of speeches delivered by leaders whose groups engaged in nonviolent acts of resistance such as rallies and protests.

Among leaders of groups that committed aggressive acts, there was a significant increase in expressions of anger, contempt and disgust from 3 to 6 months prior to the group committing an act of violence. For nonviolent groups, expressions of anger, contempt and disgust decreased from 3 to 6 months prior to the group staging an act of peaceful resistance.

Matsumoto says the findings suggest a leader’s emotional tone may cause the rest of the group to share those emotions, which then motivates the group to take part in violent actions.

“For groups that committed acts of violence, there seemed to be this saturation of anger, contempt and disgust. That combination seems to be a recipe for hatred that leads to violence,” Matsumoto said.

Anger, contempt and disgust may be particularly important drivers of violent behavior because they are often expressed in response to moral violations, says Matsumoto, and when an individual feels these emotions about a person or group, they often feel that their opponent is unchangeable and inherently bad.

“Understanding the preceding factors that lead to terrorist attacks and violent events may help predict these incidents or prevent them occurring in the first place,” Matsumoto said. “Studying the emotions expressed by leaders is just one piece of the puzzle but it could be a helpful predictor of terrorist attacks.”

This study was one of the first seven projects funded by the U.S. Department of Defense Minerva Initiative. The Initiative was established in 2008 to fund social science research on areas of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy.

Journal Reference:

  1. David Matsumoto, Hyisung C. Hwang, Mark G. Frank.Emotions expressed in speeches by leaders of ideologically motivated groups predict aggression.Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, 2012; : 1 DOI: 10.1080/19434472.2012.716449

Fear and Driving Opportunity Motivated Changes in Driving Behavior After 9/11 (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 31, 2012) — A catastrophic event — such as a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, or market collapse — often strikes twice. There is the damage caused by the event itself, as lives are lost or left in ruin. But there is also the second act, catalyzed by our response to the catastrophic event. This second act has the potential to cause just as much damage as the first.

In the year following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, there were approximately 1,600 more traffic fatalities in the United States than expected. This figure suggests the possibility that fear may have been a strong motivator for many people, leading them to choose driving over flying. This change in behavior, motivated by fear, may have ultimately led to additional deaths through traffic fatalities.

But fear does not tell the whole story. As Wolfgang Gaissmaier and Gerd Gigerenzer of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, observe, the changes in driving behavior observed after 9/11 varied widely across different regions of the United States and did not just occur in those states closest to the attacks where fear was presumably strongest.

Gaissmaier and Gigerenzer hypothesized that another factor might have played a central role: driving opportunity. While fear provides a motivational explanation, in order for people to substitute driving for flying there had to be an environmental structure that allowed fear to manifest in a behavior change.

The researchers explore this hypothesis in a new research article to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

They collected data on the number of miles driven and the number of traffic fatalities per month from each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They also gathered data on fear and driving opportunity. They used proximity to New York City to get an approximate measure of post-9/11 fear, as previous research had shown that proximity was linked with substantial stress reactions after the attacks. To measure driving opportunity, they assessed the length of nationally significant highways in each state in the National Highway System, divided by the number of state inhabitants and they also looked at the number of car registrations per inhabitant.

The results of the analyses show that people did in fact drive more following 9/11: Across all states, the average monthly increase in miles driven per inhabitant was 27.2 miles in the three months following the attacks. This increase was significantly greater than that observed in the same three-month period in the five years leading up to 2001.

Interestingly, people who were closer to New York City showed only a slight increase in driving. Increase in miles driven was strongly associated, however, with greater driving opportunity. Most importantly, increased driving was associated with an increase in traffic fatalities. These findings suggest that fear can lead people to engage in potentially dangerous behaviors, such as increased driving, but that understanding fear is not enough.

“To be able to foresee where the secondary effects of catastrophic events could have fatal consequences, we need to look at the environmental structures that allow fear to actually manifest in dangerous behaviors.”

According to Gaissmaier, understanding citizens’ behavior as a function of both the mind and the environment ultimately allows for two routes toward behavior change: altering people’s minds (through education or awareness campaigns) or altering people’s environments.

Chimpanzees Create ‘Social Traditions’: Unique Handclasp Grooming Behavior Reveals Local Difference (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2012) — Researchers have revealed that chimpanzees are not only capable of learning from one another, but also use this social information to form and maintain local traditions.

Wrist-to-wrist grooming handclasp. (Credit: Mark Bodamer)

A research collaboration between the Gonzaga University and the Max Planck Institute shows that the way in which chimpanzees groom each other depends on the community to which they belong. Specifically, it is the unique handclasp grooming behaviour that reveals this local difference.

The specific behaviour that the researchers focused on was the ‘grooming handclasp’, a behaviour where two chimpanzees clasp onto each other’s arms, raise those arms up in the air, and groom each other with their free arm. This behaviour has only been observed in some chimpanzee populations. The question remained whether chimpanzees are instinctively inclined to engage in grooming handclasp behaviour, or whether they learn this behaviour from each other and pass it on to subsequent generations.

Edwin van Leeuwen and Katherine Cronin of the Comparative Cognitive Anthropology research group of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics led by Daniel Haun conducted their observations between 2007 and 2012 at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia. At Chimfunshi, a mix of wild- and captive-born chimpanzees live in woodlands in some of the largest enclosures in the world. The Max Planck team collaborated with students from Gonzaga University led by Mark Bodamer, a team of local chimpanzee caretakers, and Roger Mundry of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in order to collect and comprehend the detailed chimpanzee data.

Previous research suggested that the grooming handclasp might be a cultural phenomenon, just like humans across cultures engage in different ways of greeting each other. However, these suggestions were primarily based on observations that some chimpanzee communities handclasp and others don’t — not whether there are differences between communities that engage in handclasping. Moreover, the early observations could have been explained by differences in genetic and/or ecological factors between the chimpanzee communities, which precluded the interpretation that the chimpanzees were exhibiting ‘cultural’ differences.

The present research shows that even between chimpanzee communities that engage in the grooming handclasp, subtle yet stable differences exist in the styles that they prefer: one chimpanzee group highly preferred the style where they would grasp each other’s hands during the grooming, while another group engaged much more in a style where they would fold their wrists around each other’s wrists.

“We don’t know what mechanisms account for these differences,” van Leeuwen says. “But our study at least reveals that these chimpanzee communities formed and maintained their own local grooming traditions over the last 5 years. Our observations may also indicate that chimpanzees can overcome their innate predispositions, potentially allowing them to manipulate their environment based on social constructs rather than on mere instincts.”

Apart from the different style preferences of the chimpanzee communities, the research team also observed that the grooming handclasp behaviour was a long-lasting part of the chimpanzees’ behavioural repertoire: the behaviour was even transmitted to the next generation of potential handclaspers.

“By following the chimpanzees over time, we were able to show that 20 young chimpanzees gradually developed the handclasp behaviour over the course of the five-year study. The first handclasps by young individuals were mostly in partnership with their mothers. These observations support the conclusion that these chimpanzees socially learn their local tradition, and that this might be evidence of social culture,” Bodamer explains.

“Continued monitoring of these groups of chimpanzees will shed light on the question of how these group-traditions are maintained over time and potentially even why the chimpanzees like to raise their arms up in the air during social grooming in the first place,” van Leeuwen adds.

Journal Reference:

  1. Edwin J. C. van Leeuwen, Katherine A. Cronin, Daniel B. M. Haun, Roger Mundry and Mark D. Bodamer. Neighbouring chimpanzee communities show different preferences in social grooming behaviour. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, August 29, 2012

Gene That Predicts Happiness in Women Discovered (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2012) — A new study has found a gene that appears to make women happy, but it doesn’t work for men. The finding may help explain why women are often happier than men, the research team said.

A new study has found a gene that appears to make women happy, but it doesn’t work for men. The finding may help explain why women are often happier than men. (Credit: © Yuri Arcurs / Fotolia)

Scientists at the University of South Florida (USF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute reported that the low-expression form of the gene monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) is associated with higher self-reported happiness in women. No such association was found in men.

The findings appear online in the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry.

“This is the first happiness gene for women,” said lead author Henian Chen, MD, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, USF College of Public Health.

“I was surprised by the result, because low expression of MAOA has been related to some negative outcomes like alcoholism, aggressiveness and antisocial behavior,” said Chen, who directs the Biostatistics Core at the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine’s Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. “It’s even called the warrior gene by some scientists, but, at least for women, our study points to a brighter side of this gene.”

While they experience higher rates of mood and anxiety disorders, women tend to report greater overall life happiness than do men. The reason for this remains unclear, Chen said. “This new finding may help us to explain the gender difference and provide more insight into the link between specific genes and human happiness.”

The MAOA gene regulates the activity of an enzyme that breaks down serontin, dopamine and other neurotransmitters in the brain — the same “feel-good” chemicals targeted by many antidepressants. The low-expression version of the MAOA gene promotes higher levels of monoamine, which allows larger amounts of these neurotransmitters to stay in the brain and boost mood.

The researchers analyzed data from a population-based sample of 345 individuals — 193 women and 152 men — participating in Children in the Community, a longitudinal mental health study. The DNA of study subjects had been analyzed for MAOA gene variation and their self-reported happiness was scored by a widely used and validated scale.

After controlling for various factors, ranging from age and education to income, the researchers found that women with the low-expression type of MAOA were significantly happier than others. Compared to women with no copies of the low-expression version of the MAOA gene, women with one copy scored higher on the happiness scale and those with two copies increased their score even more.

While a substantial number of men carried a copy of the “happy” version of the MAOA gene, they reported no more happiness than those without it.

So, why the genetic gender gap in feeling good?

The researchers suspect the difference may be explained in part by the hormone testosterone, found in much smaller amounts in women than in men. Chen and his co-authors suggest that testosterone may cancel out the positive effect of MAOA on happiness in men.

The potential benefit of MAOA in boys could wane as testosterone levels rise with puberty, Chen said. “Maybe men are happier before adolescence because their testosterone levels are lower.”

Chen emphasizes that more research is needed to identify which specific genes influence resilience and subjective well-being, especially since studies of twins estimate genetic factors account for 35 to 50 percent of the variance in human happiness.

While happiness is not determined by a single gene, there is likely a set of genes that, along with life experiences, shape our individual happiness levels, Chen said. “I think the time is right for more genetic studies that focus on well-being and happiness.”

“Certainly it could be argued that how well-being is enhanced deserves at least as much attention as how (mental) disorders arise; however, such knowledge remains limited.”

The study by Chen and colleagues was supported by the National Institutes of Health and a USF proposal enhancement grant.

Journal Reference:

  1. Henian Chen, Daniel S. Pine, Monique Ernst, Elena Gorodetsky, Stephanie Kasen, Kathy Gordon, David Goldman, Patricia Cohen. The MAOA gene predicts happiness in women. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 2012; DOI:10.1016/j.pnpbp.2012.07.018

Beliefs Drive Investors More Than Preferences (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 28, 2012) — If experts thought they knew anything about individual investors, it was this: their emotions lead them to sell winning stocks too soon and hold on to losers too long.

But new research casts doubt on this widely held theory that individual investors’ decisions are driven mainly by their feelings toward losses and gains. In an innovative study, researchers found evidence that individual investors’ decisions are primarily motivated by their beliefs about a stock’s future.

“The story is not about whether an investor hates losing or loves gains — it’s not primarily a story about preferences,” said Itzhak Ben-David, co-author of the study and assistant professor of finance at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business.

“It is a story about information and speculation. The investor has a belief about where a stock is headed and that’s what he acts on. Investors act more on their beliefs than their preferences.”

Ben-David conducted the study with David Hirshleifer of the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine. Their results appear in the August 2012 issue of the journal Review of Financial Studies.

The researchers studied stock transactions from more than 77,000 accounts at a large discount broker from 1990 through 1996 and did a variety of analyses that had never been done before. They examined when investors bought individual stocks, when they sold them, and how much they earned or lost with each sale.

The result was a radical rethinking of why individual investors sell winning stocks and hold on to losers.

The findings don’t mean that investors don’t have an aversion to losses and a desire to sell winners, Ben-David said. But the trading data suggests that these feelings aren’t dominating their decisions.

“People have a variety of reasons for trading stocks, which may include tax issues, margin calls, and an aversion to losses. These all may play a role, but what we show that beliefs are dominant for the trading of retail investors.”

The tendency to sell winners too early and to keep losers too long has been called the “disposition effect” by economists.

“The disposition effect has been well-documented. The question is what we make of it. A lot of people look at the data and interpret it as meaning that the typical retail investor is irrational, simply reacting to their feelings about gains and losses,” he said.

“But what we find is that, looking at the data, we can’t really learn about their preferences. We don’t learn about what they like or don’t like. Surely, they don’t like to lose money — but their reasons for selling stocks are more complex than that.”

The simplest test was to see what investors do when a stock is trading just slightly higher or lower than the price they paid — in other words a small winner or a small loser.

If investors really did make stock trades based simply on their pleasure in making money and their aversion to realizing losses, a small winner should lead to more sales than a small loser.

But this study found that investors were not clearly more likely to sell when it was a small winner than when it was a small loser.

Another piece of evidence against the theory that investors’ decisions are driven by their aversion to realizing losses was the fact that, the more a stock lost value, the more likely investors were to sell it.

“If investors had an aversion to realizing losses, larger losses should reduce the probability they would sell, but we found the opposite — larger losses were associated with a higher probability of selling,” Ben-David said.

Interestingly, the stocks that investors sell the least are those that did not have a price change since purchase.

Another clue is the fact that men and frequent traders were more likely than others to sell winning stocks quickly to reap their profits and sell losers quickly to cut their losses.

“Past research has shown that overconfidence in investing is associated with men and frequent traders,” Ben-David said. “They have a belief in their superior knowledge and so you would expect them to buy and sell more quickly than others as they speculate on stock prices. That’s exactly what we found. They are engaged in belief-based trading.”

The researchers also examined when investors were more likely to buy additional shares of a stock that they had previously purchased. They found that the probability of buying additional shares is greater for shares that lost value than it was for shares that gained value.

That shouldn’t happen if investors are really acting on emotions rather than beliefs, Ben-David said.

“If you buy additional shares of a stock that has lost value, that suggests you are acting on your beliefs that the stock is really a winner and other people have just not realized it yet,” he said.

“You wouldn’t buy additional shares of a losing stock if your biggest motivation was to avoid realizing losses.”

However, Ben-David noted that just because investors act on beliefs rather than feelings doesn’t mean they are acting rationally.

“They may be overconfident in their own abilities. It is a different kind of irrationality from being averse to selling losers,” Ben-David said.

This study’s suggestion that investors act more on beliefs than preferences is likely to make waves in the economics profession, he said.

“In economics, these two stories are very different. Beliefs and preferences are very different concepts, and it is important to distinguish them and how they affect investors. Many economists had thought that an irrational aversion to selling losers was crucial for the trading decisions of retail investors.”

Journal Reference:

  1. I. Ben-David, D. Hirshleifer. Are Investors Really Reluctant to Realize Their Losses? Trading Responses to Past Returns and the Disposition Effect. Review of Financial Studies, 2012; 25 (8): 2485 DOI:10.1093/rfs/hhs077

Skeptical Uses of ‘Religion’ in Debate on Climate Change (The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media)

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Michael Svoboda   August 27, 2012

Religion’ and religion-inspired terms — savior, prophet, priests, heretic, dogma, crusade — are regularly used in efforts to influence public attitudes about climate change. But how does this language work, and on whom?

Over the past several months The Yale Forum has published a series of articles describing how major religious groups across America address climate change. Within the broader societal debate on this issue, however, the voices heard in these pieces may be outnumbered by those of a group with a very different take on the connections between religion and the environment: climate skeptics.

Since 2005, in op-eds published in newspapers (The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Post, and The Washington Times), in magazines (Forbes, National Review, The Weekly Standard), and online (Fox News and Townhall and also climate-specific websites like Watts Up with That), conservative commentators have repeatedly described global warming as a religion.

So how does this use of religious language affect the public understanding of climate change? To answer this question, the Forum analyzed more than 250 op-eds, blog posts, and books published between 2005 and the present. The results suggest that this religious language may be most effective in fortifying the opinions of those using it: Calling global warming a “religion” effectively neutralizes appeals to “the scientific consensus.”

Taking the Measure of the Meme

To take your own quick measure of the global-warming-as-religion (hereafter GWAR) meme, try two related searches at Google: first search for “climate change” and “religion,” then for “global warming” and “religion.” The top ten items from the Forum‘s two most recent searches (20 items in all) broke down as follows:

  • 10% were by religious groups calling for action on climate change,
  • 25% were about religious groups calling for action on climate change,
  • 10% were against religious groups opposed to action on climate,
  • 50% described concern for global warming as a religion, and
  • 5% rebutted those who described concern for global warming as a religion.

Based on this sample, one is more likely to encounter an article or op-ed about global warming as a religion than an article or op-ed explaining how or whether a particular religious group addresses climate change.

The dominance of the GWAR meme is even greater when one looks specifically at conservative venues. Over the past year, approximately 100 op-ed pieces that touched on global warming were published in nationally recognized conservative newspapers and/or by nationally syndicated columnists whose work is aggregated by Townhall. Ten of these pieces equated accepting the science on global warming with religious belief; none offered a religious argument for action on climate change.

During the peak years of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006–2008), the ratio was far higher. Roughly 40% of the more than 150 conservative op-eds penned in response to the documentary, to its Academy Award, or to Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize included language (prophet, priests, savior, crusade, faith, dogma, heresy, faith, etc.) that framed concern for climate change as a religious belief. Some drew that analogy explicitly. (See, for example, Richard Lindzen’s March 8, 2007, op-ed piece forThe Wall Street Journal and The Daily Mail (UK) — “Global Warming: The Bogus Religion of Our Age.”)

And since then several climate skeptics — Christopher Horner (2007), Iain Murray (2008), Roy Spencer (2008), Christopher Booker (2009), Ian Wishart (2009), Steve Goreham (2010), Larry Bell (2011), Brian Sussman (2012), and Robert Zubrin (2012) — have included the GWAR meme in their books.

A Brief History of the Global-Warming-as-Religion Meme

The global-warming-as-religion meme is an offshoot of the environmentalism-as-religion meme, which, according to New American Foundation fellow and Arizona State University Law Professor Joel Garreau, can be traced back to religious critiques of Lynn White’s 1967 essay in Science, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” By pinning the ecological blame on the Judaeo-Christian tradition’s instrumental view of nature, these authors argued, White seemed to call for the revival of nature worship.

Elements of these early critiques were reworked in what is perhaps the most well-known instance of the environmentalism-as-religion argument, Michael Crichton’s speech to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in 2003.

The first* example of the more specific global-warming-as-religion claim appears to be the aside in Republican Senator James Inhofe’s January 4, 2005, “update” to his “greatest hoax” speech: “Put simply, man-induced global warming is an article of religious faith.” Using slightly different language, Inhofe repeated this charge a few months later in his “Four Pillars of Climate Alarmism” speech.**

In between these two speeches, in a February 16, 2005, editorial for Capitalism Magazine by American Policy Center President Tom DeWeese, the GWAR meme gained titular status: “The New Religion Is Global Warming.”

But the most fully developed version of the global-warming-as-religion analogy is the nearly 5,000-word essay published on the Web in 2007 by retired British mathematician John Brignell — who cites Crichton’s 2003 speech in his opening paragraph.

The more generic environmentalism-as-religion meme now seems confined to Earth Day, which Emory University economics professor Paul Rubin described in an April 22, 2010, WSJ op-ed piece as environmentalism’s “holy day.” Two recent examples, from this past April, were provided by former business consultant W.A. Beatty and by Dale Hurd, a “news veteran” for the Christian Broadcasting Network.

The GWAR meme appears as opportunities — cool summers; early, late, or heavy snowstorms; or scandals — arise. And its meaning can vary accordingly.

Nature/Climate as Sacred

Some of the first American “environmentalists” — David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir — often used religious language. Nature was where they most vividly experienced the presence of God. But when contemporary environmentalists use quasi-religious language without explicitly avowing a particular faith, their opponents may suspect that nature itself has become the object of their worship. When James Lovelock named his homeostatic model of the planet and its atmosphere after the ancient Greek earth goddess, Gaia, he provided a new ground for this suspicion.

For conservatives, there are strong and weak versions of this charge.

The strong charge is “paganism,” that environmentalists or climate activists/scientists worship nature in ways akin to the practices of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and Roman empires in which the ancient Jews and early Christians lived. This strong charge is typically leveled by evangelicals who publicly profess their own faith. Physicist James Wanliss and his colleagues — whose book and dvd,Resisting the Green Dragon, offer “A Biblical Response to One of the Greatest Deceptions of the Day” — provide perhaps the most vivid example.

The weak version reduces the charge of paganism to misplaced values. Very arch religious language may still be used, but the meaning is now metaphorical. In these more frequent instances of the GWAR meme, conservatives accuse climate activists/scientists of essentializing climate, of being too willing to slow or even disable our economic engine because they believe Earth has an “optimal climate.”

Climate Science as Cult

“Cult” implies that a given set of beliefs or practices is arcane, outside the mainstream, and insular. Someone embedded in a cult will not acknowledge conflicting evidence. So whenever new facts or dramatic events challenge the validity of climate science, at least in the minds of conservative skeptics, “cult of global warming” op-eds appear. Major snowstorms, cold snaps, and years that fail to surpass 1998′s average annual temperature provide these new “facts.”

Odd religious news can also prompt “cult of global warming” op-eds. The third no-show of Harold Camping’s apocalypse provided the prompt, last fall, for op-eds by Michael Barone and Derek Hunter. (The “cult” in the title of Michael Barone’s piece, however, may be the work of the Post’s editor; thesame piece appeared under a different title in The Washington Examiner.)

Climate Science as Corrupt Orthodoxy

But it’s hard to depict a thoroughly institutionalized effort like climate science as a cult. The international undertaking that is science is more plausibly compared with the Roman Catholic Church. And for climate skeptics, the best of the many possible instances of that church is the Roman Catholic Church of the late Renaissance, the church that condemned both Luther and Galileo.

The very Nobel public profiles of Al Gore and the IPCC, from 2006 to 2008, prompted many comparisons with priests and popes, cardinals and curia. Add in carbon offsets and the Reformation riffs practically wrote themselves. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer’s March 16, 2007,column in Time exemplifies this subgenre:

In other words, the rich reduce their carbon output by not one ounce. But drawing on the hundreds of millions of net worth in the Kodak theatre [for the “carbon-neutral” 2007 Academy Awards], they pull out lunch money to buy ecological indulgences. The last time the selling of pardons was prevalent — in a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity — Martin Luther lost his temper and launched the Reformation.

(It should be noted, however, that climate activists and environmental journalists have themselves sometimes written about their ecological “sins.”)

While green hypocrisy was the primary target of Krauthammer’s 2007 column, orthodoxy and dogma are always at least secondary targets in this use of the GWAR meme. And shots were taken at them in a February 9, 2007, National Review column by Rich Lowry; a May 30, 2008, Washington Post column by Charles Krauthammer; a March 9, 2009, Townhall piece by Robert Knight; a January 13, 2010, Townhallcolumn by Walter E. Williams; a November 29, 2011, Wall Street Journal column by Bret Stephens; and, most recently, an April 26, 2012, post by David Solway. This is the most common use of the GWAR meme.

Dissenting Religions and the Scientific Consensus

But one might argue that by depicting climate scientists and activists as members of an aloof and self-serving (and possibly self-deluding) priesthood, conservatives are themselves engaged in religious posturing, for self-righteous dissent is part of the DNA of the western religious tradition.

Ancient Israel was a small country surrounded by much more powerful empires. Some heroes of the Bible — e.g., Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego — worked as trusted bureaucrats within state-ecclesiastical systems based on cosmologies they did not believe in. When ordered to consent to the beliefs of their rulers, they refused.

During the Protestant Reformation religious dissent often became political dissent. Today’s evangelicals are dissenters from mainstream denominations that dissented first from the Church of England and then from King George. Now they dissent from Washington.

But in the U.S., Roman Catholics too can view themselves as a dissenting minority, as, for example, when the Catholic Bishops objected to parts of the new healthcare law.

In fact, Americans are so primed for dissensus that both sides in the climate debate find it plausible to claim the mantle of Galileo.


In the run-up to the December 2009 conference in Copenhagen, cartoonists Michael Ramirez and David Horsey published cartoons that drew exactly opposite conclusions from the history of science, including Galileo’s conflict with the Roman Catholic Church regarding Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the solar system.

Within this charged religious history, a steadfast minority (of Jews, early Christians, Protestants, or Puritans) has been correct more often than the majority, than the broader cultural consensus (of Egyptians/Assyrians/Babylonians/Persians, Greeks/Romans, Roman Catholics, or Anglicans). Thus the GWAR meme not only legitimizes dissent (because everyone is entitled to his or her own religious views), it also provides emotional reinforcement for it (because the “official” religion is almost always “false”). The Protestant vs. Catholic variant of the meme also reinforces climate skeptics’ narratives about greedy and scheming scientists and/or self-serving elites. For those who use it, the GWAR meme effectively inoculates them against “the scientific consensus.”

Managing the Meme

Much has been said and published by religious leaders trying to promote action on climate change. But these messages must compete against the global-warming-as-religion meme reinforced regularly in op-eds sent out by The Wall Street Journal to its two million plus subscribers and, more frequently, in columns posted by Townhall for its two million unique monthly visitors.

Are there counter-measures for this meme?

In his summer 2010 article in The New Atlantis, Joel Garreau, New American Foundation fellow and Lincoln Professor of Law, Culture and Values (Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University), traced the emergence of environmentalism as a secular religion. In that piece, Gerreau speculated that “the two faces of religious environmentalism — the greening of mainstream religion and the rise of carbon Calvinism — may each transform the political and policy debate over climate change.” In response to an e-mailed query from The Yale Forum, after stressing that he did not “conflate faith-based environmentalism with the scientific study of climate,” Garreau explained his “pragmat[ic]” outlook:  ”I just lay out the facts (as startling as they may be to some), observe that faith-based systems are ubiquitous in history, and then ask, in public policy terms, how you deal with this situation.”

Garreau said he is not surprised that “climate change deniers [might] wish to point out the ironies of faith-based environmentalism rising up in parallel with scientific environmentalism.” But he said he does not think that would have much effect. He suggested no countermeasures but did anticipate a possible line of attack: “It would hardly be surprising if there were a few under-examined pieties in their own world view.”

From the title of University of Maryland School of Public Policy professor Robert H. Nelson’s 2010 book,The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America, one might infer that the playing field for climate policy might be leveled by calling attention to the equally religious faith in economics, in economic growth in particular. But what would be gained from a “religious” standoff between economics and environmentalism? In response to an e-mail question, Nelson listed three benefits:

First, … it helps us to understand … the … intensity of the disagreements about climate policy. Second, it offers a note of caution to all participants, given [that past] religious disagreements have too often escalated beyond all reason …. Third, … [s]eeing economics and environmentalism as religions, and discussing them as such, [would bring their] core value assumptions to the surface.

In other words, pushing back with the same religious language might be an effective countermeasure, at least initially. Then, Nelson added,  ”a secular religious ‘ecumenical movement’” could perhaps resolve the tensions between economics and environmentalism.

One clearly should proceed with caution in pursuing any “religious” countermeasures. The cultural and historical associations evoked by religious language do not necessarily favor “consensus,” especially a consensus presented in authoritative terms. In American history, religious groups have splintered far more often than they have united.

Bottom line: Climate communicators should expect and prepare for religious language. But they should weigh the subtle cultural messages religious language carries before deciding whether or how to use or respond to it.

*If readers know of an earlier example, please send the reference and/or the link to the author.
**Brian McCammack’s September 2007 American Quarterly article, “Hot Damned America: Evangelicalism and the Climate Policy Debate,” pointed the way to these two speeches by Senator Inhofe.

Michael Svoboda

Michael Svoboda (PhD, Hermeneutics) is an Asst. Prof. of Writing at The George Washington University. Previously the owner of an academic bookstore, he now tracks and analyzes efforts to communicate climate change, including the stream of research and policy published by NGOs. E-mail: msvoboda@yaleclimatemediaforum.org

Ape ‘genius’ smarter than the average chimp (Discovery News)

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Geniuses exist among non-humans, but no one attribute constitutes intelligence.

By Jennifer Viegas – Mon Aug 27, 2012 06:01 AM ET

Chimp

Natasha, who appears in this photo, outperformed other chimps on tests given by researchers to measure intelligence. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology/Esther Herrmann

Certain apes appear to be much smarter than others, with at least one chimpanzee now called “exceptional” when compared to other chimps.

The standout chimp, an adult female in her 20s named Natasha, scored off the charts in a battery of tests. The findings, published in the latest Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, suggest that geniuses exist among non-humans, but that no one attribute constitutes intelligence.

Instead, a perfect storm of abilities seems to come together to create the Einsteins of the animal kingdom. Natasha’s keepers at the Ngamba Island chimpanzee sanctuary in Uganda knew she was special even before the latest study.

“The caretakers named Natasha as the smartest chimpanzee, precisely the same chimpanzee that our tests had revealed to be exceptional,” study authors Esther Herrmann and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology wrote.

“All three of the most experienced caretakers included Natasha in their lists (of the most intelligent chimps),” they added.

Natasha has made headlines over the months for her attention-grabbing antics. For instance, she repeatedly escaped her former enclosure, surrounded by an electric fence. She did this by tossing branches at the fence until she didn’t see a spark, letting her know that the power was off.

She also learned how to tease humans, beckoning them to throw food her way, only to spray the unsuspecting person with water.

Herrmann and Call decided to study this chimp, along with numerous others, to see if there really are chimp prodigies among non-human great apes. To do this, the researchers created a multi-part mental challenge consisting of eight tasks.

chimp"WATCH VIDEO: See how chimp family groups cope with the death of a close relative. (Caution: Images may be disturbing to some viewers.)

For the first task, the chimps had to find hidden food, testing their spatial knowledge. For the second, the chimps wielded a tool — avoiding a trap — to again obtain a food reward. The remaining tasks demonstrated understanding of things like color, size and shape.

“We identified some individuals who consistently scored well across (the) multiple tasks,” wrote the authors, who again made note of Natasha, who aced nearly every task.

The researchers could not identify “a general intelligence factor.” They instead indicate that ape intelligence might be a bundling of skills related to learning, tool usage, understanding of quantities, and an ability to reach conclusions based on evidence and reasoning.

As the saying goes, necessity may be the mother of invention and, at least in some cases, one reason behind chimp cleverness.

Call, for example, told Discovery News about chimps that make tools for extracting termites out of mounds. The process requires several steps.

“They uproot the stem or use their teeth to clip the stem at the base and then remove the large leaf from the distal end by clipping it with their teeth before transporting the stem to the termite nest, where they complete tool manufacture by modifying the end into a ‘paint brush’ tip by pulling the stem through their teeth, splitting the probe lengthwise by pulling off strands of fiber, or separating the fibers by biting them,” he said.

As for why only some chimps go through such an elaborate process, “a lot depends on the ecological constraints and needs,” he said.

In terms of other animals, Herrmann and Call mention the dogs Rico and Chaser, who knew the meaning of hundreds of words.

“Interestingly,” the scientists point out, “all of these dogs (considered to be very smart) are border collies. And many of their owners reported that they did not train the dogs to play the fetching game; it was the dogs who trained them!”

The jury is still out on what exactly constitutes such cleverness. The researchers propose that more studies be conducted, with “tasks that capture cognitive, motivational and temperament dimensions.”

That’s because, in part, a willingness to learn and a positive attitude seem to make as big of a difference in dogs, chimps and other animals as they do in humans.

NEWS: Zoo Chimp Makes Elaborate Plots to Attack Humans

NEWS: Chimps Are Self-Aware

NEWS: Chimps Have Better Sex Than Humans

Study Reveals Human Drive for Fair Play (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 23, 2012) — People will reject an offer of water, even when they are severely thirsty, if they perceive the offer to be unfair, according to a new study funded by the Wellcome Trust. The findings have important implications for understanding how humans make decisions that must balance fairness and self-interest.

It’s been known for some time that when humans bargain for money they have a tendency to reject unfair offers, preferring to let both parties walk away with nothing rather than accept a low offer in the knowledge that their counterpart is taking home more cash.

In contrast, when bargaining for food, our closes relatives chimpanzees will almost always accept an offer regardless of any subjective idea of ‘fairness’.

Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL wanted to see whether humans would similarly accept unfair offers if they were bargaining for a basic physiological need, such as food, water or sex.

The team recruited 21 healthy participants and made 11 of them thirsty by drip-feeding them a salty solution, whilst the remainder received an isotonic solution that had a much smaller effect on their level of thirst. To obtain an objective measure of each individual’s need for water, the team measured the salt concentration in their blood. The participants’ subjective perception of how thirsty they were was assessed using a simple rating scale.

The participants then separately took part in an ultimatum game. They were given instructions that two of them had been randomly selected to play a game to decide the split of a 500ml bottle of water that could be consumed immediately. One of them would play the part of ‘Proposer’ and decide how the bottle should be split. The other would be a ‘Responder’ who could either accept the split and so drink the water offered to them, or reject the split so that both parties would get nothing. The participants knew that they would have to wait a full hour after the end of the game before they would have access to water.

In reality, all of the participants played the part of the Responder. They were presented with two glasses of water with a highly unequal offer that they were told was from the Proposer: the glass offered to them contained 62.5ml, an eighth of the original bottle of water, and the other contained the remaining seven eighths that the Proposer wanted to keep for themselves. They had fifteen seconds to decide whether to accept or reject the offer.

The team found that, unlike chimpanzees, the human participants tended to reject the highly unequal offer, and here that was the case even if they were severely thirsty. The participants’ choices were not influenced by how thirsty they actually were, as measured objectively from the blood sample. However, they were more likely to accept the offer if they subjectively felt that they were thirsty.

Dr Nick Wright, who led the study, explains: “Whether or not fairness is a uniquely human motivation has been a source of controversy. These findings show that humans, unlike even our closest relatives chimpanzees, reject an unfair offer of a primary reward like food or water — and will do that even when severely thirsty. However, we also show this fairness motivation is traded-off against self-interest, and that this self-interest is not determined by how their objective need for water but instead by their subjective perception of thirst. These findings are interesting for understanding how subjective feelings of fairness and self-interested need impact on everyday decisions, for example in the labour market.”

Journal Reference:

  1. Nicholas D. Wright, Karen Hodgson, Stephen M. Fleming, Mkael Symmonds, Marc Guitart-Masip, Raymond J. Dolan.Human responses to unfairness with primary rewards and their biological limits. Scientific Reports, 2012; 2 DOI: 10.1038/srep00593

Bonobo genius makes stone tools like early humans did (New Scientist)

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13:09 21 August 2012 by Hannah Krakauer

Kanzi the bonobo continues to impress. Not content with learning sign language or making up “words” for things like banana or juice, he now seems capable of making stone tools on a par with the efforts of early humans.

Even a human could manage this <i>(Image: Elizabeth Rubert-Pugh (Great Ape Trust of Iowa/Bonobo Hope Sanctuary))</i>

Even a human could manage this (Image: Elizabeth Rubert-Pugh (Great Ape Trust of Iowa/Bonobo Hope Sanctuary))

Eviatar Nevo of the University of Haifa in Israel and his colleagues sealed food inside a log to mimic marrow locked inside long bones, and watched Kanzi, a 30-year-old male bonobo chimp, try to extract it. While a companion bonobo attempted the problem a handful of times, and succeeded only by smashing the log on the ground, Kanzi took a longer and arguably more sophisticated approach.

Both had been taught to knap flint flakes in the 1990s, holding a stone core in one hand and using another as a hammer. Kanzi used the tools he created to come at the log in a variety of ways: inserting sticks into seams in the log, throwing projectiles at it, and employing stone flints as choppers, drills, and scrapers. In the end, he got food out of 24 logs, while his companion managed just two.

Perhaps most remarkable about the tools Kanzi created is their resemblance to early hominid tools. Both bonobos made and used tools to obtain food – either by extracting it from logs or by digging it out of the ground. But only Kanzi’s met the criteria for both tool groups made by early Homo: wedges and choppers, and scrapers and drills.

Do Kanzi’s skills translate to all bonobos? It’s hard to say. The abilities of animals like Alex the parrot, who could purportedly count to six, and Betty the crow, who crafted a hook out of wire, sometimes prompt claims about the intelligence of an entire species. But since these animals are raised in unusual environments where they frequently interact with humans, their cases may be too singular to extrapolate their talents to their brethren.

The findings will fuel the ongoing debate over whether stone tools mark the beginning of modern human culture, or predate our Homo genus. They appear to suggest the latter – though critics will point out that Kanzi and his companion were taught how to make the tools. Whether the behaviour could arise in nature is unclear.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1212855109

Language and China’s ‘Practical Creativity’ (N.Y.Times)

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AUGUST 22, 2012

By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

Every language presents challenges — English pronunciation can be idiosyncratic and Russian grammar is fairly complex, for example — but non-alphabetic writing systems like Chinese pose special challenges.

There is the well-known issue that Chinese characters don’t systematically map to sounds, making both learning and remembering difficult, a point I examine in my latest column. If you don’t know a character, you can’t even say it.

Nor does Chinese group individual characters into bigger “words,” even when a character is part of a compound, or multi-character, word. That makes meanings ambiguous, a rich source of humor for Chinese people.

Consider this example from Wu Wenchao, a former interpreter for the United Nations based in Hong Kong. On his blog he has a picture of mobile phones’ being held under a hand dryer. Huh?

The joke is that the Chinese word for hand dryer is composed of three characters, “hong shou ji” (I am using pinyin, a system of Romanization used in China, to “write” the characters in the English alphabet.)

Group them as “hongshou ji” and it means “hand dryer.” Group them as “hong shouji” and it means “dry the mobile phone.” (A shouji is a mobile phone.)

Good fodder for serious linguists and amateur language lovers alike. But does a character script also exert deeper effects on the mind?

William C. Hannas is one of the most provocative writers on this today. He believes character writing systems inhibit a type of deep creativity — but that its effects are not irreversible.

He is at pains to point out that his analysis is not race-based, that people raised in a character-based writing system have a different type of creativity, and that they may flourish when they enter a culture that supports deep creativity, like Western science laboratories.

Still, “The rote learning needed to master Chinese writing breeds a conformist attitude and a focus on means instead of ends. Process rules substance. You spend more time fidgeting with the script than thinking about content,” Mr. Hannas wrote to me in an e-mail.

But Mr. Hannas’s argument is indeed controversial — that learning Chinese lessens deep creativity by furthering practical, but not abstract, thinking, as he wrote in “The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity,” published in 2003 and reviewed by The New York Times.

It’s a touchy topic that some academics reject outright and others acknowledge, but are reluctant to discuss, as Emily Eakin wrote in the review.

How does it work?

“Alphabets used in the West foster early skills in analysis and abstract thinking,” wrote Mr. Hannas, emphasizing the views were personal and not those of his employer, the U.S. government.

They do this by making readers do two things: breaking syllables into sound segments and clustering these segments into bigger, abstract, flexible sound units.

Chinese characters don’t do that. “The symbols map to syllables — natural concrete units. No analysis is needed and not much abstraction is involved,” Mr. Hannas wrote.

But radical, “type 2” creativity — deep creativity — depends on being able to match abstract patterns from one domain to another, essentially mapping the skills that alphabets nurture, he continued. “There is nothing comparable in the Sinitic tradition,” he wrote.

Will this inhibit China’s long-term development? Does it mean China won’t “take over the world,” as some are wondering? Not necessarily, Mr. Hannas said.

“You don’t need to be creative to succeed. Success goes to the early adapter and this is where China excels, for two reasons,” he wrote. First, Chinese are good at improving existing models, a different, more practical type of creativity, he wrote, adding that this practicality was noted by the British historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham.

Yet there is a further step to this argument, and this is where Mr. Hannas’s ideas become explosive.

Partly as a result of these cultural constraints, China has built an “absolutely mind-boggling infrastructure” to get hold of cutting-edge foreign technology — by any means necessary, including large-scale, apparently government-backed, computer hacking, he wrote.

For more on that, see a hard-hitting Bloomberg report, “Hackers Linked to China’s Army seen from E.U to D.C.”

Non-Chinese R.&D. gets “outsourced” from its place of origin, “while China reaps the gain,” Mr. Hannas wrote, adding that many people believed this was “normal business practice.”

“In fact, it’s far from normal. The director of a U.S. intelligence agency has described China’s informal technology acquisition as ‘the greatest transfer of wealth in history,’ which I regard as a polite understatement,” he said.

Mr. Hannas has co-authored a book on this, to appear in the spring. It promises to shake things up. Watch this space.

The Role of Genes in Political Behavior (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2012) — Politics and genetics have traditionally been considered non-overlapping fields, but over the past decade it has become clear that genes can influence political behavior, according to a review published online August 27th in Trends in Genetics. This paradigm shift has led to novel insights into why people vary in their political preferences and could have important implications for public policy.

“We’re seeing an awakening in the social sciences, and the wall that divided politics and genetics is really starting to fall apart,” says review author Peter Hatemi of the University of Sydney. “This is a big advance, because the two fields could inform each other to answer some very complex questions about individual differences in political views.”

In the past, social scientists had assumed that political preferences were shaped by social learning and environmental factors, but recent studies suggest that genes also strongly influence political traits. Twin studies show that genes have some influence on why people differ on political issues such as the death penalty, unemployment and abortion. Because this field of research is relatively new, only a handful of genes have been implicated in political ideology and partisanship, voter turnout, and political violence.

Future research, including gene-expression and sequencing studies, may lead to deeper insights into genetic influences on political views and have a greater impact on public policy. “Making the public aware of how their mind works and affects their political behavior is critically important,” Hatemi says. “This has real implications for the reduction of discrimination, foreign policy, public health, attitude change and many other political issues.”

Journal Reference:

  1. Peter K Hatemi and Rose McDermott. The Genetics of Politics: Discovery, Challenges and Progress. Trends in Genetics, August 27, 2012 DOI: 10.1016/j.tig.2012.07.004

The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness

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On this day of July 7, 2012, a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at The University of Cambridge to reassess the neurobiological substrates of conscious experience and related behaviors in human and non-human animals. While comparative research on this topic is naturally hampered by the inability of non-human animals, and often humans, to clearly and readily communicate about their internal states, the following observations can be stated unequivocally:

 The field of Consciousness research is rapidly evolving. Abundant new techniques and strategies for human and non-human animal research have been developed. Consequently, more data is becoming readily available, and this calls for a periodic reevaluation of previously held preconceptions in this field. Studies of non-human animals have shown that homologous brain circuits correlated with conscious experience and perception can be selectively facilitated and disrupted to assess whether they are in fact necessary for those experiences. Moreover, in humans, new non-invasive techniques are readily available to survey the correlates of consciousness.

 The neural substrates of emotions do not appear to be confined to cortical structures. In fact, subcortical neural networks aroused during affective states in humans are also critically important for generating emotional behaviors in animals. Artificial arousal of the same brain regions generates corresponding behavior and feeling states in both humans and non-human animals. Wherever in the brain one evokes instinctual emotional behaviors in non-human animals, many of the ensuing behaviors are consistent with experienced feeling states, including those internal states that are rewarding and punishing. Deep brain stimulation of these systems in humans can also generate similar affective states. Systems associated with affect are concentrated in subcortical regions where neural homologies abound. Young human and nonhuman animals without neocortices retain these brain-mind functions. Furthermore, neural circuits supporting behavioral/electrophysiological states of attentiveness, sleep and decision making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopus).

 Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought. Moreover, certain species of birds have been found to exhibit neural sleep patterns similar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches, neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.

 In humans, the effect of certain hallucinogens appears to be associated with a disruption in cortical feedforward and feedback processing. Pharmacological interventions in non-human animals with compounds known to affect conscious behavior in humans can lead to similar perturbations in behavior in non-human animals. In humans, there is evidence to suggest that awareness is correlated with cortical activity, which does not exclude possible contributions by subcortical or early cortical processing, as in visual awareness. Evidence that human and nonhuman animal emotional feelings arise from homologous subcortical brain networks provide compelling evidence for evolutionarily shared primal affective qualia.

We declare the following: “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

* The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was written by Philip Low and edited by Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip Low and Christof Koch. The Declaration was publicly proclaimed in Cambridge, UK, on July 7, 2012, at the Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals, at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, by Low, Edelman and Koch. The Declaration was signed by the conference participants that very evening, in the presence of Stephen Hawking, in the Balfour Room at the Hotel du Vin in Cambridge, UK. The signing ceremony was memorialized by CBS 60 Minutes.

Manifesto de neurocientistas sobre a consciência animal

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16/07/2012

Comportamento animal

Quase humanos (Veja)

Neurocientistas publicam manifesto afirmando que mamíferos, aves e até polvos têm consciência e esquentam debate sobre direitos dos animais

Marco Túlio Pires

Chimpanzé alimenta um filhote de tigre dourado, em mini zoológico na cidade de Samutprakan, Tailândia

Chimpanzé alimenta um filhote de tigre dourado, em mini zoológico na cidade de Samutprakan, Tailândia: percepção de sua própria existência e do mundo ao seu redor (Rungroj Yongrit/EFE)

Os seres humanos não são os únicos animais que têm consciência. A afirmação não é de ativistas radicais defensores dos direitos dos animais. Pelo contrário. Um grupo de neurocientistas — doutores de instituições de renome como Caltech, MIT e Instituto Max Planck — publicou um manifesto asseverando que o estudo da neurociência evoluiu de modo tal que não é mais possível excluir mamíferos, aves e até polvos do grupo de seres vivos que possuem consciência. O documento divulgado no último sábado (7), em Cambridge, esquenta uma discussão que divide cientistas, filósofos e legisladores há séculos sobre a natureza da consciência e sua implicação na vida dos humanos e de outros animais.

Leia mais: A íntegra, em inglês, do manifesto que afirma a existência da consciência em todos os mamíferos, aves e outras criaturas, como polvos

Apresentado à Nasa nesta quinta-feira, o manifesto não traz novas descobertas da neurociência — é uma compilação das pesquisas da área. Representa, no entanto, um posicionamento inédito sobre a capacidade de outros seres perceberem sua própria existência e o mundo ao seu redor. Em entrevista ao site de VEJA, Philip Low, criador do iBrain, o aparelho que recentemente permitiu a leitura das ondas cerebrais do físico Stephen Hawking, e um dos articuladores do movimento, explica que nos últimos 16 anos a neurociência descobriu que as áreas do cérebro que distinguem seres humanos de outros animais não são as que produzem a consciência. “As estruturas cerebrais responsáveis pelos processos que geram a consciência nos humanos e outros animais são equivalentes”, diz. “Concluímos então que esses animais também possuem consciência.”

O que é consciência?

PARA A FILOSOFIA
Filosoficamente, é o entendimento que uma criatura tem sobre si e seu lugar na natureza. Alguns atributos definem a consciência, como ser senciente, ou seja, sentir o mundo à sua volta e reagir a ele; estar alerta ou acordado ou ter consciência sobre si mesmo (o que, para a filosofia já basta para incluir alguns animais “não-linguísticos” entre os seres com consciência).Fonte: Enciclopédia de Filosofia de Stanford

PARA A CIÊNCIA
A ciência considera como consciência as percepções sobre o mundo e as sensações corporais, junto com os pensamentos, memórias, ações e emoções. Ou seja, tudo o que escapa aos processos cerebrais automáticos e chega à nossa atenção. O conteúdo da consciência geralmente é estudado usando exames de imagens cerebrais para comparar quais estímulos chegam à nossa atenção e quais não. Como resumiu o neurocientista Bernard Baars, em 1987, o cérebro é como um teatro no qual a maioria dos eventos neurais são inconscientes, portanto acontecem “nos bastidores”, enquanto alguns poucos entram no processo consciente, ou seja, chegam ao “palco”.

Estudos recentes, como os da pesquisadora Diana Reiss (uma das cientistas que assinaram o manifesto), da Hunter College, nos Estados Unidos, mostram que golfinhos e elefantes também são capazes de se reconhecer no espelho. Essa capacidade é importante para definir se um ser está consciente. O mesmo vale para chimpanzés e pássaros. Outros tipos de comportamento foram analisados pelos neurocientistas. “Quando seu cachorro está sentindo dor ou feliz em vê-lo, há evidências de que no cérebro deles há estruturas semelhantes às que são ativadas quando exibimos medo e dor e prazer”, diz Low.

Personalidade animal – Dizer que os animais têm consciência pode trazer várias implicações para a sociedade e o modo como os animais são tratados. Steven Wise, advogado e especialista americano em direito dos animais, diz que o manifesto chega em boa hora. “O papel dos advogados e legisladores é transformar conclusões científicas como essa em legislação que ajudará a organizar a sociedade”, diz em entrevista ao site de VEJA. Wise é líder do Projeto dos Direitos de Animais não Humanos. O advogado coordena um grupo de 70 profissionais que organizam informações, casos e jurisprudência para entrar com o primeiro processo em favor de que alguns animais — como grandes primatas, papagaios africanos e golfinhos — tenham seu status equiparado ao dos humanos.

O manifesto de Cambridge dá mais munição ao grupo de Wise para vencer o caso. “Queremos que esses animais recebam direitos fundamentais, que a justiça as enxergue como pessoas, no sentido legal.” Isso, de acordo com o advogado, quer dizer que esses animais teriam direito à integridade física e à liberdade, por exemplo. “Temos que parar de pensar que esses animais existem para servir aos seres humanos”, defende Wise. “Eles têm um valor intrínseco, independente de como os avaliamos.”

Questão moral – O manifesto não decreta o fim dos zoológicos ou das churrascarias, muito menos das pesquisas médicas com animais. Contudo, já foi suficiente para provocar reflexão e mudança de comportamento em cientistas, como o próprio Low. “Estou considerando me tornar vegetariano”, diz. “Temos agora que apelar para nossa engenhosidade, para desenvolver tecnologias que nos permitam criar uma sociedade cada vez menos dependente dos animais.” Low se refere principalmente à pesquisa médica. Para estudar a vida, a ciência ainda precisa tirar muitas. De acordo com o neurocientista, o mundo gasta 20 bilhões por ano para matar 100 milhões de vertebrados. Das moléculas medicinais produzidas por esse amontoado de dinheiro e mortes, apenas 6% chega a ser testada em seres humanos. “É uma péssima contabilidade”, diz Low.

Contudo, a pesquisa com animais ainda é necessária. O endocrinologista americano Michael Conn, autor do livro The Animal Research War, sem edição no Brasil, argumenta que se trata de uma escolha priorizar a espécie humana. “Conceitos como os de consentimento e autonomia só fazem sentido dentro de um código moral que diz respeito aos homens, e não aos animais”, disse em entrevista ao site de VEJA. “Nossa obrigação com os animais é fazer com que eles sejam devidamente cuidados, não sofram nem sintam dor — e não tratá-los como se fossem humanos, o que seria uma ficção”, argumenta. “Se pudéssemos utilizar apenas um computador para fazer pesquisas médicas seria ótimo. Mas a verdade é que não é possível ainda.”

A inteligência dos polvos

O vídeo mostra diversas situações em que o polvo consegue resolver problemas. Desde a captura de presas em diferentes tipos de recipientes até escapar de locais extremamente difíceis. As situações mostram que o animal é capaz de formular soluções para problemas específicos, o que denota, na opinião dos neurocientistas, um estado de consciência inteligente.

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“Não é mais possível dizer que não sabíamos”, diz Philip Low (Veja)

Entrevista

Neurocientista explica por que pesquisadores se uniram para assinar manifesto que admite a existência da consciência em todos os mamíferos, aves e outras criaturas, como o polvo, e como essa descoberta pode impactar a sociedade

Marco Túlio Pires

Epilepsia: especialistas estimam que 2% da população brasileira tenha a doença

Estruturas do cérebro responsáveis pela produção da consciência são análogas em humanos e outros animais, dizem neurocientistas (Thinkstock)

O neurocientista canadense Philip Low ganhou destaque no noticiário científico depois deapresentar um projeto em parceria com o físico Stephen Hawking, de 70 anos. Low quer ajudar Hawking, que está completamente paralisado há 40 anos por causa de uma doença degenerativa, a se comunicar com a mente. Os resultados da pesquisa foram revelados no último sábado (7) em uma conferência em Cambridge. Contudo, o principal objetivo do encontro era outro. Nele, neurocientistas de todo o mundo assinaram um manifesto afirmando que todos os mamíferos, aves e outras criaturas, incluindo polvos, têm consciência. Stephen Hawking estava presente no jantar de assinatura do manifesto como convidado de honra.

Philip LowPhilip Low: “Todos os mamíferos e pássaros têm consciência”. Divulgação.

Low é pesquisador da Universidade Stanford e do MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), ambos nos Estados Unidos. Ele e mais 25 pesquisadores entendem que as estruturas cerebrais que produzem a consciência em humanos também existem nos animais. “As áreas do cérebro que nos distinguem de outros animais não são as que produzem a consciência”, diz Low, que concedeu a seguinte entrevista ao site de VEJA:

Estudos sobre o comportamento animal já afirmam que vários animais possuem certo grau de consciência. O que a neurociência diz a respeito?Descobrimos que as estruturas que nos distinguem de outros animais, como o córtex cerebral, não são responsáveis pela manifestação da consciência. Resumidamente, se o restante do cérebro é responsável pela consciência e essas estruturas são semelhantes entre seres humanos e outros animais, como mamíferos e pássaros, concluímos que esses animais também possuem consciência.

Quais animais têm consciência? Sabemos que todos os mamíferos, todos os pássaros e muitas outras criaturas, como o polvo, possuem as estruturas nervosas que produzem a consciência. Isso quer dizer que esses animais sofrem. É uma verdade inconveniente: sempre foi fácil afirmar que animais não têm consciência. Agora, temos um grupo de neurocientistas respeitados que estudam o fenômeno da consciência, o comportamento dos animais, a rede neural, a anatomia e a genética do cérebro. Não é mais possível dizer que não sabíamos.

É possível medir a similaridade entre a consciência de mamíferos e pássaros e a dos seres humanos? Isso foi deixado em aberto pelo manifesto. Não temos uma métrica, dada a natureza da nossa abordagem. Sabemos que há tipos diferentes de consciência. Podemos dizer, contudo, que a habilidade de sentir dor e prazer em mamíferos e seres humanos é muito semelhante.

Que tipo de comportamento animal dá suporte à ideia de que eles têm consciência?Quando um cachorro está com medo, sentindo dor, ou feliz em ver seu dono, são ativadas em seu cérebro estruturas semelhantes às que são ativadas em humanos quando demonstramos medo, dor e prazer. Um comportamento muito importante é o autorreconhecimento no espelho. Dentre os animais que conseguem fazer isso, além dos seres humanos, estão os golfinhos, chimpanzés, bonobos, cães e uma espécie de pássaro chamada pica-pica.

Quais benefícios poderiam surgir a partir do entendimento da consciência em animais? Há um pouco de ironia nisso. Gastamos muito dinheiro tentando encontrar vida inteligente fora do planeta enquanto estamos cercados de inteligência consciente aqui no planeta. Se considerarmos que um polvo — que tem 500 milhões de neurônios (os humanos tem 100 bilhões) — consegue produzir consciência, estamos muito mais próximos de produzir uma consciência sintética do que pensávamos. É muito mais fácil produzir um modelo com 500 milhões de neurônios do que 100 bilhões. Ou seja, fazer esses modelos sintéticos poderá ser mais fácil agora.

Qual é a ambição do manifesto? Os neurocientistas se tornaram militantes do movimento sobre o direito dos animais? É uma questão delicada. Nosso papel como cientistas não é dizer o que a sociedade deve fazer, mas tornar público o que enxergamos. A sociedade agora terá uma discussão sobre o que está acontecendo e poderá decidir formular novas leis, realizar mais pesquisas para entender a consciência dos animais ou protegê-los de alguma forma. Nosso papel é reportar os dados.

As conclusões do manifesto tiveram algum impacto sobre o seu comportamento? Acho que vou virar vegano. É impossível não se sensibilizar com essa nova percepção sobre os animais, em especial sobre sua experiência do sofrimento. Será difícil, adoro queijo.

O que pode mudar com o impacto dessa descoberta? Os dados são perturbadores, mas muito importantes. No longo prazo, penso que a sociedade dependerá menos dos animais. Será melhor para todos. Deixe-me dar um exemplo. O mundo gasta 20 bilhões de dólares por ano matando 100 milhões de vertebrados em pesquisas médicas. A probabilidade de um remédio advindo desses estudos ser testado em humanos (apenas teste, pode ser que nem funcione) é de 6%. É uma péssima contabilidade. Um primeiro passo é desenvolver abordagens não invasivas. Não acho ser necessário tirar vidas para estudar a vida. Penso que precisamos apelar para nossa própria engenhosidade e desenvolver melhores tecnologias para respeitar a vida dos animais. Temos que colocar a tecnologia em uma posição em que ela serve nossos ideais, em vez de competir com eles.

Politics and Prejudice Explored (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 20, 2012) — Research has associated political conservatism with prejudice toward various stereotyped groups. But research has also shown that people select and interpret evidence consistent with their own pre-existing attitudes and ideologies. In this article, Chambers and colleagues hypothesized that, contrary to what some research might indicate, prejudice is not restricted to a particular political ideology.

Rather, the conflicting values of liberals and conservatives give rise to different kinds of prejudice, with each group favoring other social groups that share their values. In the first study, three diverse groups of participants rated the ideological position and their overall impression of 34 different target groups.

Participants’ impressions fell in line with their ideology. For example, conservatives expressed more prejudice than liberals against groups that were identified as liberal (e.g., African-Americans, homosexuals), but less prejudice against groups identified as conservative (e.g., Christian fundamentalists, business people).

In the second and third studies, participants were presented with 6 divisive political issues and descriptions of racially diverse target persons for each issue. Neither liberals’ nor conservatives’ impressions of the target persons were affected by the race of the target, but both were strongly influenced by the target’s political attitudes.

From these findings the researchers conclude that prejudices commonly linked with ideology are most likely derived from perceived ideological differences and not from other characteristics like racial tolerance or intolerance.

Journal References:

J. B. Luguri, J. L. Napier, J. F. Dovidio. Reconstruing Intolerance: Abstract Thinking Reduces Conservatives’ Prejudice Against Nonnormative Groups. Psychological Science, 2012; 23 (7): 756 DOI:10.1177/0956797611433877

J. B. Luguri, J. L. Napier, J. F. Dovidio. Reconstruing Intolerance: Abstract Thinking Reduces Conservatives’ Prejudice Against Nonnormative Groups. Psychological Science, 2012; 23 (7): 756 DOI:10.1177/0956797611433877

 

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Prejudice Comes from a Basic Human Need and Way of Thinking, New Research Suggests

ScienceDaily (Dec. 21, 2011) — Where does prejudice come from? Not from ideology, say the authors of a new paper. Instead, prejudice stems from a deeper psychological need, associated with a particular way of thinking. People who aren’t comfortable with ambiguity and want to make quick and firm decisions are also prone to making generalizations about others.

In a new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Arne Roets and Alain Van Hiel of Ghent University in Belgium look at what psychological scientists have learned about prejudice since the 1954 publication of an influential book, The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport.

People who are prejudiced feel a much stronger need to make quick and firm judgments and decisions in order to reduce ambiguity. “Of course, everyone has to make decisions, but some people really hate uncertainty and therefore quickly rely on the most obvious information, often the first information they come across, to reduce it” Roets says. That’s also why they favor authorities and social norms which make it easier to make decisions. Then, once they’ve made up their mind, they stick to it. “If you provide information that contradicts their decision, they just ignore it.”

Roets argues that this way of thinking is linked to people’s need to categorize the world, often unconsciously. “When we meet someone, we immediately see that person as being male or female, young or old, black or white, without really being aware of this categorization,” he says. “Social categories are useful to reduce complexity, but the problem is that we also assign some properties to these categories. This can lead to prejudice and stereotyping.”

People who need to make quick judgments will judge a new person based on what they already believe about their category. “The easiest and fastest way to judge is to say, for example, ok, this person is a black man. If you just use your ideas about what black men are generally like, that’s an easy way to have an opinion of that person,” Roets says. “You say, ‘he’s part of this group, so he’s probably like this.'”

It’s virtually impossible to change the basic way that people think. Now for the good news: It’s possible to actually also use this way of thinking to reduce people’s prejudice. If people who need quick answers meet people from other groups and like them personally, they are likely to use this positive experience to form their views of the whole group. “This is very much about salient positive information taking away the aversion, anxiety, and fear of the unknown,” Roets says.

Roets’s conclusions suggest that the fundamental source of prejudice is not ideology, but rather a basic human need and way of thinking. “It really makes us think differently about how people become prejudiced or why people are prejudiced,” Roets says. “To reduce prejudice, we first have to acknowledge that it often satisfies some basic need to have quick answers and stable knowledge people rely on to make sense of the world.”

Journal Reference:

Arne Roets and Alain Van Hiel. Allport’s Prejudiced Personality Today: Need for Closure as the Motivated Cognitive Basis of Prejudice. Current Directions in Psychological Science, (in press)

 

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Ironic Effects of Anti-Prejudice Messages

ScienceDaily (July 7, 2011) — Organizations and programs have been set up all over the globe in the hopes of urging people to end prejudice. According to a research article, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, such programs may actually increase prejudices.

Lisa Legault, Jennifer Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht, from the University of Toronto Scarborough, were interested in exploring how one’s everyday environment influences people’s motivation toward prejudice reduction.

The authors conducted two experiments which looked at the effect of two different types of motivational intervention — a controlled form (telling people what they should do) and a more personal form (explaining why being non-prejudiced is enjoyable and personally valuable).

In experiment one; participants were randomly assigned one of two brochures to read: an autonomy brochure or a controlling brochure. These brochures discussed a new campus initiative to reduce prejudice. A third group was offered no motivational instructions to reduce prejudice. The authors found that, ironically, those who read the controlling brochure later demonstrated more prejudice than those who had not been urged to reduce prejudice. Those who read the brochure designed to support personal motivation showed less prejudice than those in the other two groups.

In experiment two, participants were randomly assigned a questionnaire, designed to stimulate personal or controlling motivation to reduce prejudice. The authors found that those who were exposed to controlling messages regarding prejudice reduction showed significantly more prejudice than those who did not receive any controlling cues.

The authors suggest that when interventions eliminate people’s freedom to value diversity on their own terms, they may actually be creating hostility toward the targets of prejudice.

According to Dr. Legault, “Controlling prejudice reduction practices are tempting because they are quick and easy to implement. They tell people how they should think and behave and stress the negative consequences of failing to think and behave in desirable ways.” Legault continues, “But people need to feel that they are freely choosing to be nonprejudiced, rather than having it forced upon them.”

Legault stresses the need to focus less on the requirement to reduce prejudices and start focusing more on the reasons why diversity and equality are important and beneficial to both majority and minority group members.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided byAssociation for Psychological Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Doctors Often Don’t Disclose All Possible Risks to Patients Before Treatment (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 7, 2012) — Most informed consent disputes involve disagreements about who said what and when, not stand-offs over whether a particular risk ought to have been disclosed. But doctors may “routinely underestimate the importance of a small set of risks that vex patients” according to international experts writing in this week’s PLoS Medicine.

Increasingly, doctors are expected to advise and empower patients to make rational choices by sharing information that may affect treatment decisions, including risks of adverse outcomes. However, authors from Australia and the US led by David Studdert from the University of Melbourne argue that doctors, especially surgeons, are often unsure which clinical risks they should disclose and discuss with patients before treatment.

To understand more about the clinical circumstances in which disputes arise between doctors and patients in this area, the authors analyzed 481 malpractice claims and patient complaints from Australia involving allegations of deficiencies in the process of obtaining informed consent.

The authors found that 45 (9%) of the cases studied were disputed duty cases — that is, they involved head-to-head disagreements over whether a particular risk ought to have been disclosed before treatment. Two-thirds of these disputed duty cases involved surgical procedures, and the majority (38/45) of them related to five specific outcomes that had quality of life implications for patients, including chronic pain and the need for re-operation.

The authors found that the most common justifications doctors gave for not telling patients about particular risks before treatment were that they considered such risks too rare to warrant discussion or the specific risk was covered by a more general risk that was discussed.

However, nine in ten of the disputes studied centered on factual disagreements — arguments over who said what, and when. The authors say: “Documenting consent discussions in the lead-up to surgical procedures is particularly important, as most informed consent claims and complaints involved factual disagreements over the disclosure of operative risks.”

The authors say: “Our findings suggest that doctors may systematically underestimate the premium patients place on understanding certain risks in advance of treatment.”

They conclude: “Improved understanding of these situations helps to spotlight gaps between what patients want to hear and what doctors perceive patients want — or should want — to hear. It may also be useful information for doctors eager to avoid medico-legal disputes.”

Rooting out Rumors, Epidemics, and Crime — With Math (Science Daily)

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ScienceDaily (Aug. 10, 2012) — A team of EPFL scientists has developed an algorithm that can identify the source of an epidemic or information circulating within a network, a method that could also be used to help with criminal investigations.

Investigators are well aware of how difficult it is to trace an unlawful act to its source. The job was arguably easier with old, Mafia-style criminal organizations, as their hierarchical structures more or less resembled predictable family trees.

In the Internet age, however, the networks used by organized criminals have changed. Innumerable nodes and connections escalate the complexity of these networks, making it ever more difficult to root out the guilty party. EPFL researcher Pedro Pinto of the Audiovisual Communications Laboratory and his colleagues have developed an algorithm that could become a valuable ally for investigators, criminal or otherwise, as long as a network is involved. The team’s research was published August 10, 2012, in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Finding the source of a Facebook rumor

“Using our method, we can find the source of all kinds of things circulating in a network just by ‘listening’ to a limited number of members of that network,” explains Pinto. Suppose you come across a rumor about yourself that has spread on Facebook and been sent to 500 people — your friends, or even friends of your friends. How do you find the person who started the rumor? “By looking at the messages received by just 15-20 of your friends, and taking into account the time factor, our algorithm can trace the path of that information back and find the source,” Pinto adds. This method can also be used to identify the origin of a spam message or a computer virus using only a limited number of sensors within the network.

Trace the propagation of an epidemic

Out in the real world, the algorithm can be employed to find the primary source of an infectious disease, such as cholera. “We tested our method with data on an epidemic in South Africa provided by EPFL professor Andrea Rinaldo’s Ecohydrology Laboratory,” says Pinto. “By modeling water networks, river networks, and human transport networks, we were able to find the spot where the first cases of infection appeared by monitoring only a small fraction of the villages.”

The method would also be useful in responding to terrorist attacks, such as the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway, in which poisonous gas released in the city’s subterranean tunnels killed 13 people and injured nearly 1,000 more. “Using this algorithm, it wouldn’t be necessary to equip every station with detectors. A sample would be sufficient to rapidly identify the origin of the attack, and action could be taken before it spreads too far,” says Pinto.

Identifying the brains behind a terrorist attack

Computer simulations of the telephone conversations that could have occurred during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, were used to test Pinto’s system. “By reconstructing the message exchange inside the 9/11 terrorist network extracted from publicly released news, our system spit out the names of three potential suspects — one of whom was found to be the mastermind of the attacks, according to the official enquiry.”

The validity of this method thus has been proven a posteriori. But according to Pinto, it could also be used preventatively — for example, to understand an outbreak before it gets out of control. “By carefully selecting points in the network to test, we could more rapidly detect the spread of an epidemic,” he points out. It could also be a valuable tool for advertisers who use viral marketing strategies by leveraging the Internet and social networks to reach customers. For example, this algorithm would allow them to identify the specific Internet blogs that are the most influential for their target audience and to understand how in these articles spread throughout the online community.