Future - Dogs look like their owners – it’s a scientific fact. Go to any park, and you will see the strange phenomenon of the canine mini-me. Maybe it’s a bearded hipster, accompanied by a little bundle of fur that looks like it went to the same barber, or a pugnacious thug carrying a bulldog. Or perhaps it’s an athletic jogger and her Afghan hound, their glossy locks blowing effortlessly in the wind. Why do people choose the dog that looks most like themselves? Far from being skin-deep, the answer may give you a new appreciation of the intense bonds we humans have forged with our four-legged friends.
Indeed, there are some strange and unexpected parallels with the way we choose our other, two-legged life partners. Michael Roy at the University of California, San Diego was one of the first psychologists to put the idea to the test. Going to three nearby dog parks, he photographed the pooches and the owners separately, and then asked a group of participants to try to match them up. We are more similar to dogs than we are to our friends and partners. Why can’t you tickle yourself? It’s almost impossible to get a laugh by self-tickling, says David Robson, and the reason why tells us surprising things about the brain and consciousness. If you want to probe some of the great mysteries of the human mind, all you need is a duster and your feet.
Sit back, take your shoes and socks off, and gently stroke its feathers against your sole. Now ask a friend, parent or child to do the same for you. If you are like most people, you will be left stony-faced by one, but convulsed in a pleasurable agony by the other. How come? While asleep, people tried to get dream characters to tickle them - that too failed — Even in dreams, the brain stops self-tickling Once the domain of childhood curiosity, the question of why we can’t tickle ourselves is exciting neuroscientists.
To understand their interest, consider this: every time your body moves, it creates potentially confusing sensations that could lead you astray in all kinds of ways. Why do we laugh when tickled? What do dictators like to eat? 4 December 2014Last updated at 19:46 ET You are what you eat - but also how you eat and who you eat with. Food can affect your mood, your bowels and your world-view, write Victoria Clark and Melissa Scott, authors of Dictators' Dinners: A Bad Taste Guide to Entertaining Tyrants. In this age of the foodie, the gourmand and the gourmet, we have taken a fresh look at some of the worst dictators of the 20th Century by subjecting them to culinary scrutiny.
Without seeking to mitigate their crimes by humanising them we wanted to cut them down to human size. The line between man and monster can be very thin. Although forced to conclude that evil-doing and delusions of grandeur cannot be attributed to the consumption of any single food or any one physical constitution, hints of patterns did emerge. As many dictators aged they grew more and more obsessed with the purity of what they ate. Kim Il-sung had grains of rice individually selected Stalin enjoyed picnics at his dacha How to make Satsivi Method. A point of view: That joke isn't funny any more. 22 August 2014Last updated at 11:48 ET Will Self asks why people laugh at jokes which he doesn't find funny, and whether there's such a thing as the wrong type of humour.
Nothing is funny twice - I mean that. In fact, most things that are meant to be funny aren't even funny once, let alone twice. But in that case - I can hear your protests helium-squeaking through the ether - why do people repeat anecdotes, jokes and witticisms with such frequency? I kid you not. And what are those finer feelings? But rest assured, I'm not going to use the rest of our time together to recount such formerly amusing incidents. Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900 BBC Radio 4 - Great Lives, Friedrich Nietzsche You know the one I mean. This is the miserably contrived cachinnation that nowadays follows us wherever we go, and we could be forgiven for taking it at once universally and personally.
The Crazy Gang, 1955 Taking the joke apart "Analysing comedy is like dissecting a frog. "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Warning over electrical brain stimulation. Given the option, would you want to think faster and have sharper attention? Research suggests that electrical brain stimulation kits could have just those effects. But now some companies are selling such devices online, leading to calls to regulate the technology. It may sound too good to be true but scientists say the technology is promising. Transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), which passes small electrical currents directly on to the scalp, stimulates the nerve cells in the brain (neurons). It's non-invasive, extremely mild and the US military even uses TDCS in an attempt to improve the performance of its drone pilots.
The idea is that it makes the neurons more likely to fire and preliminary research suggests electrical simulation can improve attention as well as have a positive impact on people with cognitive impairments and depression. It has also been shown to increase performance in a maths task, an improvement which was still in place six months later. Exploiting hype. Neuroscience: ‘I built a brain decoder' What are you looking at? Scientist Jack Gallant can find out by decoding your thoughts, as Rose Eveleth discovers. Jack Gallant can read your mind. Or at least, he can figure out what you’re seeing if you’re in his machine watching a movie he’s playing for you. Gallant, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, has a brain decoding machine – a device that uses brain scanning to peer into people’s minds and reconstruct what they’re seeing. For Gallant and his lab, this was just another demonstration of their technology. Science or not, the machine strokes the dystopian futurists among people who fear that the government could one day tap into our innermost thoughts.
Right now, in order for Gallant to read your thoughts, you have to slide into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine – a huge, expensive device that measures where the blood is flowing in the brain. Dream reader While Gallant isn’t working on trying to build any more decoding machines, others are. Neuroscience: why do we see faces in everyday objects?
From Virgin Mary in a slice of toast to the appearance of a screaming face in a man’s testicles, David Robson explains why the brain constructs these illusions. It’s not often that you look at your meal to find it staring back at you. But when Diane Duyser picked up her cheese toastie, she was in for a shock. “I went to take a bite out of it, and then I saw this lady looking back at me,” she told the Chicago Tribune. “It scared me at first.” We are primed to see faces in every corner of the visual world. — Kang Lee, University of Toronto As word got around, it soon began to spark more attention, and eventually a casino paid Duyser $28,000 to exhibit the toasted sandwich. For many, the woman’s soft, full features and serene expression recalls famous depictions of the Virgin Mary. “If someone reports seeing Jesus in a piece of toast, you’d think they must be nuts,” says Kang Lee, at the University of Toronto, Canada.
…a bin greeting you with a cheery hello ...some angry pretzels. Who, What, Why: What is mindfulness? 6 May 2014Last updated at 11:16 ET By Magazine Monitor A collection of cultural artefacts The word "mindfulness" seems to be everywhere. Parliament has even started using it. But what is it? To many people, mindfulness just means "the state or quality of being mindful". But the second meaning of the word, taken from Buddhist philosophies, is proliferating rapidly.
This other definition of mindfulness is "with reference to yoga philosophy and Buddhism: the meditative state of being both fully aware of the moment and of being self-conscious of and attentive to this awareness; a state of intense concentration on one's own thought processes; self-awareness". But the dictionary also notes that the term is "in weakened use". Matching the challenges of modern life, mindfulness turns out to be a rather adaptable tool which can be practised anytime and anywhere, says Danny Penman, author of Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world.
Dogs' brain scans reveal vocal responses. 20 February 2014Last updated at 19:52 ET By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC World Service Pet dogs took part in the MRI scanning study Devoted dog owners often claim that their pets understand them. A new study suggests they could be right. By placing dogs in an MRI scanner, researchers from Hungary found that the canine brain reacts to voices in the same way that the human brain does. Emotionally charged sounds, such as crying or laughter, also prompted similar responses, perhaps explaining why dogs are attuned to human emotions. The work is published in the journal Current Biology.
Lead author Attila Andics, from the Comparative Ethology Research Group at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, said: "We think dogs and humans have a very similar mechanism to process emotional information. " Eleven pet dogs took part in the study; training them took some time. "We used positive reinforcement strategies - lots of praise," said Dr Andics. The team used a variety of techniques to train the dogs. Nervous system. Personality types. Men and women's brains are 'wired differently' 3 December 2013Last updated at 08:45 ET Men and women's brains are connected in different ways which may explain why the sexes excel at certain tasks, say researchers. A US team at the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of nearly 1,000 men, women, boys and girls and found striking differences. The "connectome maps" reveal the differences between the male brain (seen in blue) and the female brain (orange) Male brains appeared to be wired front to back, with few connections bridging the two hemispheres.
In females, the pathways criss-crossed between left and right. These differences might explain why men, in general, tend to be better at learning and performing a single task, like cycling or navigating, whereas women are more equipped for multitasking, say the researchers in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The same volunteers were asked to perform a series of cognitive tests, and the results appeared to support this notion. Complex organ. Bully in the next bedroom - are we in denial about sibling aggression? 8 November 2013Last updated at 08:02 ET By William Kremer BBC World Service Siblings routinely pick on one another, but when does bickering become bullying - and what can parents do about it? Sibling relationships can be difficult, and never more so than in childhood.
But society often regards the scrapping and squabbling, the play fighting and not-so-playful fighting as a normal part of growing up. "The public brushes off aggression between siblings as just rivalry," says Corinna Tucker of the University of New Hampshire. Tucker is the lead author of a new study on the issue for the journal Pediatrics. Almost a third of the 3,600 children questioned said they had been the victim of some sort of sibling aggression in the past 12 months. Continue reading the main story 'I'm so scared of my brother' The following quotes are adapted from real calls to the UK children's counselling service Childline. "I'm so scared of my brother. "My sister is so mean to me. A Point of View: Why people give into temptation when no-one's watching. 20 September 2013Last updated at 16:17 GMT Why are apparently good people tempted to commit evil acts, asks novelist AL Kennedy. I spend a lot of time in hotels.
They offer many temptations and although, like most people, I believe I'm more than averagely honest, nevertheless temptation does prove, on occasion, tempting. Well, it would. These days, mini-bars are often left both warm and aggressively empty to circumvent thefts, but since I have no interest in any mini-bar's contents I feel this bespeaks a hurtful lack of trust. And I wouldn't - unlike some acquaintances - steal a towel, no matter how snowy, or unscrew a light fitting and take it home. I did wrong. And I'm not alone in behaving badly when I know I'm unobserved. We inhabit an age when the complaint, "Why do bad things happen to good people? " After World War II showed our species just how many hells on earth it could create, a whole generation of researchers devoted themselves to what I find a much more vital question. Chromatic illusion.
Get a set of headphones–you’ll need them for this audio high. Listen closely to the patterns. Once you’ve listened with both ears for thirty seconds, press STOP. Now remove the headphones from one ear and just listen to the pattern in the other. Do the same for the other side. How It Works Chromatic Illusion incorporates two scales that range over two octaves. This audio high was developed by psychology professor and audio-explorer Diana Deutsch who has been experimenting with sound hallucinations in an attempt to uncover how our brains process audio signals. Chromatic Illusion © Diana Deutsch, 1995.