Mindopener

The forward momentum of medical progress is manifest, it could be argued, in the $50 billion spent in 2008 on pharmaceutical research and development in the quest to bring new drugs to market. But little scientific or governmental infrastructure exists to ensure that each new treatment is actually an improvement over existing therapies--and to tease out what therapies are best for which patients. [More]

Why is talking along with gestures so much easier than trying to talk without gesturing? -- Lionel Halvorsen, Cornith, Tex.

The origins of language have long been a mystery, but mounting evidence hints that our unique linguistic abilities could have evolved from gestural communication in our ancestors. Such gesturing may also explain why most people are right-handed.

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center recently ex­am­ined captive chimpanzees and found that most of them predominantly used their right hand when communicating with one another--for example, when greeting another chimp by extending an arm. The animals did not show this hand preference for noncommunicative actions, such as wiping their noses. Such lateralized hand use suggests that chimpanzees have a system in their left brain hemisphere that is coupled to the production of com­municative gestures, says study author William Hopkins. The same cerebral hemisphere is host to most language functions in humans, which hints that an ancestral gestural system could have been the precursor for language, he says.

I don’t know how many e-mails I have received fromchildren who are terrified that 2012 will somehow involve the end of life as we know it, all because of an unfounded fringe religious prophecy that has received mass-market exposure with the release of a recent Hollywood movie. I have tried to reassure those children (and not a few adults) that this date represents nothing more cosmically special than the year of the next presidential election.

Having said that, however, I just realized there might be a genuine connection between 2012 and an end-of-days menace!

Religious belief may seem to be a unique psychological experience, but a growing body of research shows that thinking about religion is no different from thinking about secular things­--at least from the standpoint of the brain. In the first imaging study to compare religious and nonreligious thoughts, evaluating the truth of either type of statement was found to involve the same regions of the brain.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, used functional MRI to evaluate brain activity in 15 devout Christians and 15 nonbelievers as the volunteers assessed the truth or falsity of a series of statements, some of which were religious (“angels exist”) and others nonreligious (“Alexander the Great was a very famous military ruler”). They found that when a subject believed a statement--whether it was religious or not--activity appeared in an area called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is an area associated with emotions, rewards and self-representation.

There’s a story about a truck driver who passed the long, lonely hours in his big rig knitting sweaters. His hands thus otherwise occupied, he steered with his knees. A highway patrol officer noted this behavior and set out after the truck driver. As the cop got close, he commanded via his vehicle’s loudspeaker, “Pull over.” To which the trucker shouted back, “No, it’s a cardigan.”

Though not a bona fide law-enforcement officer myself, I sometimes act in loco centurion while on the road. I do this by sharing safety tips with distracted motorists, such as “Slow down!” or “Pick a lane!” or, my go-to line, “Get off the phone!”

Consider the classic hypothetical scenario: Your house is on fire and you can take only three things with you before the entire structure becomes engulfed in flames. What would you take? Laptops and external hard drives aside, people’s responses to this question differ wildly. This diversity results from people’s flexibility in ascribing unique value to objects ranging from a hand-scrawled note from a loved one to a threadbare t-shirt that others might consider worthless.

Children, like adults, use three visible cues--race, gender and age--to arrange their social world. They prefer to make friends with kids similar to them on these traits. New research shows that verbal accents may be equally important in guiding youngsters’ social decisions--in fact, accents may be even more important than race.

Working at Harvard University, developmental psychologist Katherine D. Kinzler and her colleagues first showed American five-year-olds photographs of different children paired with audio clips of voices and asked which ones they preferred as a friend: a child who spoke English, one who spoke French, or one who spoke English with a French accent. Even though the subjects understood the French-accented English, they were almost four times more likely to choose the native English speaker as a friend.

So, they’re scanning your items at the grocery store, and when the last tomato gets bagged you’re stunned at the cost. How did you spend so much? Maybe those cherries were 12 bucks a pound. Or maybe you should have paid more attention to what you put in the wagon. Then again, maybe not. Because a new study in the Journal of Marketing [see http://tinyurl.com/yl5dbxg ] shows that the harder shoppers try to keep track of what they’re spending, the worse they actually do. [More]

[ Hear movie clip by clicking on audio podcast above. ]

That’s a scene from the 1968 movie The Party with Peter Sellers attempting small talk. And sometimes small talk can lead to interesting connections.

Each new generation of astronomers discovers that the universe is much bigger than their predecessors imagined. The same is also true of brain complexity. Every era’s most advanced technologies, when applied to the study of the brain, keep uncovering more layers of nested complexity, like a set of never ending Russian dolls. We now know that there are up to 1,000 different subtypes of nerve cells and supporting actors--the glia and astrocytes--within the nervous system. Each cell type is defined by its chemical constituents, neuronal morphology, synaptic architecture and input-output processing.

Different cell types are wired up in specific ways. For example, a deep layer 5 pyramidal neuron might snake its gossamer-thin output wire, the axon, to a subcortical target area while also extending a connection to an inhibitory local neuron. Understanding how the brain’s corticothalamic complex creates any one conscious sensation necessitates delineating these underlying circuits for the 100 billion cells in the brain.

Temple Grandin HBO Films [More]

Life: Extraordinary Animals, Extreme Behaviour by Martha Holmes and Michael Gunton. University of California Press, 2010

When science revises its stance, the field itself follows established protocol to adapt, but public opinion can be slow to catch up. Rather than wiping the slate clean, last month's retraction of a key paper proposing a link between childhood vaccines and autism seem only to have widened the societal divide on the issue. And the rising rate of retractions--roughly ninefold between 1990 and 2008--suggest that there could be more cases in which public opinion carries on long after science has reversed course. [More]

Stanislas Dehaene holds the chair of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France, and he is also director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpin, the most advanced neuroimaging research center in France. Dehaene is best known for his research into the cerebral basis of numbers, popularized in his book The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (Oxford University Press, 1999). In his new book, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention (Viking Adult, 2009), he describes his quest to understand an astounding feat that most of us take for granted: translating marks on a page (or a screen) into language. Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook recently talked with Dehaene about how the art of reading reveals the fundamental relationship between our cultural inventions and our evolved brain.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND : How did you become interested in the neuroscience of reading?