The Movement to Restore Children’s Play Gains Momentum. The key to being attractive (and looking healthy)? A good night's sleep. If you want to look attractive and healthy, the best thing you can do is get a good night's sleep, finds research in the Christmas issue published on the British Medical Journal website. For the first time, say the authors, there is scientific backing for the concept of beauty sleep. The study, led by John Axelsson from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, investigated the relationship between sleep and perceptions of attractiveness and health. The authors believe this research is important in today's 24 hour society with the number of people suffering from sleep disorders and disturbed sleep on the rise.
Twenty-three participants between the ages of 18 to 31 took part in the study. They were photographed between 2pm and 3pm on two occasions, once after normal sleep and once after being deprived of sleep. Smokers were excluded from the research and no alcohol was allowed for two days prior to the experiment. Social Science Palooza. In this column, I’m going to try to summarize as many of these studies as space allows.
No single study is dispositive, but I hope these summaries can spark some conversations: Female mammals tend to avoid close male relatives during moments of peak fertility in order to avoid inbreeding. For the journal Psychological Science, Debra Lieberman, Elizabeth Pillsworth and Martie Haselton tracked young women’s cellphone calls. They found that these women had fewer and shorter calls with their fathers during peak fertility days, but not with female relatives. Classic research has suggested that the more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them.
Physical contact improves team performance. According to John Gaski and Jeff Sagarin in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics, there is a surprisingly strong relationship between daylight saving time and lower SAT scores. Self-control consumes glucose in the brain. Searching the Brain for the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving. But who wants to troll? Let lightning strike. Let the clues suddenly coalesce in the brain — “field!” — as they do so often for young children solving a riddle. As they must have done, for that matter, in the minds of those early humans who outfoxed nature well before the advent of deduction, abstraction or SAT prep courses. Puzzle-solving is such an ancient, universal practice, scholars say, precisely because it depends on creative insight, on the primitive spark that ignited the first campfires.
And now, modern neuroscientists are beginning to tap its source. In a just completed study, researchers at found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine. This and other recent research suggest that the appeal of puzzles goes far deeper than the -reward rush of finding a solution. And that escape is all the more tantalizing for being incomplete. Heribert Watzke: The brain in your gut. Those with a desk job, please stand up. Some people can't stand working.
Mark Ramirez works standing. He is not a waiter or factory worker -- he is a team leader at AOL. Ramirez could, if he wanted, curl into the cushiest leather chair in the Staples catalog. No, thanks. "I've got my knees bent, I feel totally alive," Ramirez said. In the past few years, standing has become the new sitting for 10 percent of AOL employees at the firm's Dulles campus, part of a standing ovation among accountants, programmers, bureaucrats, telemarketers and other office workers across the nation. Standers have various reasons for taking to their feet: it makes them feel more focused, prevents drowsiness, makes them feel like a general even if they just push paper. In academic papers with titles such as, "Your Chair: Comfortable but Deadly," physicians point to surprising new research showing higher rates of diabetes, obesity, heart disease and even mortality among people who sit for long stretches. Not so fast, other experts say. How to form a habit.
This has nothing to do with nuns' clothing. Habits are those behaviours that have become automatic, triggered by a cue in the environment rather than by conscious will. Health psychologists are interested for obvious reasons - they want to assist people in breaking unhealthy habits, while helping them adopt healthy ones. Remarkably, although there are plenty of habit-formation theories, before now, no-one had actually studied habits systematically as they are formed.
Phillippa Lally and her team recruited 96 undergrads (mean age 27) and asked them to adopt a new health-related behaviour, to be repeated once a day for the next 84 days. The new behaviour had to be linked to a daily cue. Examples chosen by the participants included going for a 15 minute run before dinner; eating a piece of fruit with lunch; and doing 50 sit-ups after morning coffee. Unsurprisingly perhaps, more complex behaviours were found to take longer to become habits. Epigenetics arise! | Gene Expression. Last week I quipped on twitter that epigenetics had started to become the scientific deus ex machina of our age, a phenomenon which offered the potential for boundless explanatory power. In the past I have felt that sexual selection and random genetic drift have fulfilled the same roles as one-size-fits-all-explanations at the service of all. The critiques of adaptationism have taken hold broadly, but in lieu of that old-standby it seems that people naturally go seeking other theoretical gurus instead of admitting ignorance as to the nature of things.
Like sexual selection and genetic drift, perhaps more so, epigenetics has made the leap from the pages of Science, Nature, and Cell, to the more humane domains. I became very conscious of this when by chance I ran into someone with a past affiliation with the literary journal n + 1, and they asked me about epigenetics when they became aware of my interest in genetics. If Mike Lynch and Jerry Coyne have fits over Sean B. MASTER CASS 2010: CANCERING: Listening In On The Body's Proteomic Conversation- W. DANIEL HILLIS. CANCERING: Listening In On The Body's Proteomic Conversation (PART I) W. Daniel Hillis Right now, I am asking a lot of questions about cancer, but I probably should explain how I got to that point, why somebody who's mostly interested in complexity, and computers, and designing machines, and engineering, should be interested in cancer.
I'll tell you a little bit about what I am doing in cancer, but before I tell you about that, I'm going to tell you about proteomics. Before I tell you about proteomics, I want to get you to think about genomics differently because people have heard a lot about genes and genomics in the last few years, and it's probably given them a misleading idea about what's important, how diseases work, and so on. Let me start by talking about genes, and giving you a different way of looking at genes, I want to start by clearing up, well maybe not misunderstandings, but putting a different emphasis on how genes work. An analogy might be restaurants. Sweet Satisfaction. While you may not be able to stop after just one, simply imagining yourself eating a bag of potato chips could keep you from going overboard.
A new study by Carnegie Mellon researchers, published in Science, shows that when you imagine eating a certain food, it reduces your actual consumption of that food. (See ABC News video.) The landmark discovery changes the decades-old assumption that thinking about something desirable increases cravings for it and its consumption. The researchers drew on past studies underscoring the power visualization can play in ‘tricking’ the brain. “These findings suggest that trying to suppress one’s thoughts of desired foods in order to curb cravings for those foods is a fundamentally flawed strategy,” said CMU’s Carey Morewedge. Morewedge is an assistant professor of social and decision sciences and lead author of this study. The group ran a series of five experiments. Next, all participants ate freely from a bowl filled with M&M’S. Thirty Pounds in Thirty Days - Ta-Nehisi Coates - Personal. We got to talking in the Open Thread yesterday about weight loss. I was arguing that part of the problem with weight loss in this country is that there's an industry specifically dedicated to making you think it's easy, that it doesn't require fundamental change, and that it won't take a lot of time and effort to achieve stable results.
Anyway commenter Katryzyna wrote the following: Human bodies are designed to store fat. Your body is built to get fat, if it can, and hold on to that fat, if it can. I'm not up on the science of weight loss, but this sounds about right. I am sure this approach works for some people, but not for me. I did join the gym. My attention was toward something more mundane--inserting less food into the gaping orifice just above my chin. When the way out became clear, it was really depressing. It's interesting seeing people on the street these days. There's a cost for everything. Doctor’s Orders - Eat Well to Be Well. Vital Signs - A Good Massage Brings Biological Changes, Too. All of the subjects were fitted with intravenous catheters so blood samples could be taken immediately before the massage and up to an hour afterward.
To their surprise, the researchers, sponsored by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a division of the , found that a single session of massage caused biological changes. Volunteers who received Swedish massage experienced significant decreases in levels of the stress hormone in blood and saliva, and in , a hormone that can lead to increases in cortisol. They also had increases in the number of lymphocytes, white blood cells that are part of the immune system.
Volunteers who had the light massage experienced greater increases in oxytocin, a hormone associated with contentment, than the Swedish massage group, and bigger decreases in adrenal corticotropin hormone, which stimulates the adrenal glands to release cortisol. School starts later to give teens more zzz's | Philadelphia Inquirer | 09/17/2010. The reason? Researchers have found that - get this - teenagers are not at their best in the early-morning hours.
Joke all you want, but teen drowsiness is a serious phenomenon, linked to such diverse ills as auto accidents and obesity. Sleep researchers say a key factor is a change in brain chemistry that starts with puberty - one that can't be addressed simply by telling the kid to hit the sack earlier. Typical teens need 9 hours of sleep, but their bodies won't let them fall asleep much before 11 p.m. - a cycle regulated by later secretions of the hormone melatonin, said Judith A. Owens, lead author of a recent study in Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine. Do the math: Teenagers need to sleep until 8 a.m., an hour when many schools are already in full swing. Hoey, who is from Macungie, Lehigh County, said he always used to feel tired for the first few periods when the Hill School started at 7:55. "I like to do some studying in the morning," she said. BPS Research Digest. Brainiac - Ideas from academia.
Today Vladimir Putin signed legislation that officially annexed Crimea into Russia. His actions in Ukraine over the last three weeks have prompted a slew of articles that try to guess at what the Russian leader is thinking, including a piece two Sundays ago in Ideas, "Putin's Long Game? Meet the Eurasian Union.” For more perspective on the inner-workings of Putin’s mind, last week I interviewed Zachary Shore, a historian of international conflicts who specializes in analyzing why historical actors act the way they do.
His newest book, “A Sense of the Enemy: The High-Stakes History of Reading Your Rival’s Mind,” offers several concepts that are useful for trying to divine Putin’s motives. IDEAS: In your new book you argue we go wrong when we try to understand current events by looking for historical patterns. In the case of the Russian invasion of Crimea, why do you think it’s wrong to think of Putin’s move as an attempt to re-Sovietize the region? SHORE: Pattern breaks.