Brain Scans Predict Musical Hits. The verdict? For most people, Pepsi labeled as Coke tastes better than Pepsi labeled as Pepsi. Evidently, advertising works, and as this experiment went on to further suggest, you can in some sense ‘see’ a brand at work in the brain as it alters or supplements sensory processing. While fascinating, these kinds of data probably aren’t exciting to someone peddling a second-rate product. What good is seeing the neural correlate of your lousy brand, especially if you’ve already invested a lot in it? Naturally, what marketers would really want to do is run this process in reverse. For now, no. Instead of studying soft drinks, Berns and Moore studied music preferences in adolescents. During that time, the songs did what songs will do. For one area -- the nucleus accumbens - the answer was yes. This study wasn’t designed to test any specific idea about how the nucleus accumbens might do this.
The reasons are unclear, but there are many interesting possibilities. Rude People Can Be Percieved As Powerful. Powerful people often bend the rules. But here’s a twist: If someone breaks rules, are they then perceived as powerful? Scientists had 40 volunteers read various scenarios. One was about a person who, without asking, helped himself to a cup of coffee from another person’s pot. In another, a bookkeeper consciously ignored a financial error. The subjects also read about scrupulous coffee drinkers and bookkeepers.
In another test, being publicly rude also seemed to engender a perceived sense of power. So next time you think someone is important, remember: They may simply be a jerk. —Christie Nicholson. Austism Caused by Rare/Varied Mutations. The underpinnings of autism are turning out to be even more varied than the disease's diverse manifestations. In four new studies and an analysis published June 8 researchers have added some major landmarks in the complex landscape of the disease, uncovering clues as to why the disease is so much more prevalent in male children and how such varied genetic mutations can lead to similar symptoms. Large genetic studies have ruled out the idea that the malfunction of a universal gene or set of genes causes autism.
And the new papers, which assessed the genomes of about 1,000 families that had only one autistic child, revealed that the genetic mutations that are likely responsible for the disorder are exceedingly rare—sometimes almost unique to an individual patient. Even some of the most common point of mutations were found in only about 1 percent of autistic children. Despite the rarity of these genetic code errors, researchers could detect some important patterns in the disparate data. Study on Human Fear & Life Without It.
One of the few exceptions to the old saying “everybody is afraid of something” is a 44-year-old woman known to psychologists as patient SM. She suffers from a rare case of brain damage to an almond-shaped region of her brain called the amygdala that, according to a paper published online December 16 in Current Biology, makes her incapable of experiencing fear. For three months researchers did everything they could to scare SM. “We tried to use stimuli common in Western society,” says Justin Feinstein, a University of Iowa graduate student who worked on the study. They showed her horror movies, walked her through haunted houses and exposed her to all kinds of other situations that the average person would consider frightening.
They found instead that situations that would terrify most people evoked in SM an intense feeling of fascination. These findings suggest that our emotional response to danger involves elements of both fear and fascination. Dangers of Red Meat: Diabetes & More. Sugary soda and other sweet treats are likely not the only foods to blame for the surge in diabetes across the U.S.
New research out of Harvard University supports the theory that regular red meat consumption increases the risk of getting type 2 diabetes. An average of just one 85-gram (three-ounce) serving of unprocessed red meat—such as a medium hamburger or a small pork chop—per day increased by 12 percent the chances a person would get type 2 diabetes over the course of a decade or two. And if the meat was processed—such as a hot dog or two slices of bacon—the risk increased to 32 percent, even though serving sizes were smaller. The new study, published online August 10 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, is not the first to find the link between red meat and diabetes risk. But it is the largest and one of the first to look separately at unprocessed and processed meats. Many researchers are waiting for more evidence. Evolutionary Logic Explains Wicked Step-Parents. Are the husbands of unfaithful women more likely to kill children they might unconsciously know aren’t theirs?
In “Too Hard For Science?” I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don’t think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as devices as big as galaxies, or they might be completely unethical, such as experimenting on children like lab rats. This feature aims to look at the impossible dreams, the seemingly intractable problems in science. However, the question mark at the end of “Too Hard For Science?” Suggests that nothing might be impossible. The scientist: Jaimie Krems, a graduate student of cognitive and evolutionary anthropology in the doctoral track at the University of Oxford in England. The idea: Fairy tales are rife with wicked stepmothers that do their utmost to kill their stepchildren. These monstrous statistics have counterparts elsewhere in the animal kingdom. The solution?