(PHOTO:Christine Daniloff)

Having a hard time deciding if someone’s actions are morally right or wrong? Huh. Have a group of MIT neuroscientists used transcranial magnetic stimulation to mess with the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) of your brain lately?

In one experiment, volunteers were exposed to TMS for 25 minutes before taking a test in which they read a series of scenarios and made moral judgments of characters’ actions on a scale of one (absolutely forbidden) to seven (absolutely permissible).

In a second experiment, TMS was applied in 500-milisecond bursts at the moment when the subject was asked to make a moral judgment. For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely. In such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even though it appears he intended to do harm.

In both experiments, the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible.

More detail on these startling revelations here.

(PHOTO:Frédéric Theunissen)

For spotted hyenas, it seems, laughter encodes crucial information. Two zoologists who studied a group of the animals in captivity found that the pitch of a hyena’s “giggle” indicated how old it was, while the frequency of “notes” in its laughter told others in its pack whether it was a dominant or subordinate animal. What we hear as hysterical amusement may actually help hyenas sort out rights to food or summon others to their aid.

You can read the article, published in the open access journal BMC Ecology, here and, more importantly, listen to hyenas giggling here, here, here, and here.

PHOTO: Mario D’Amore

An MIT neuroengineer has discovered a way to genetically modify neurons so that their activity can be temporarily silenced using specific colors of light. The technique, which so far has only been tried on mice, takes advantage of a protein (named Arch) which is expressed by the modified neurons when the animals are exposed to rays of yellow-green light. When the proteins are expressed, they pump protons across the cell membrane, alter the neuron’s voltage, and stop it from firing.

In theory, the discovery (which is strangely beautiful, even in the absence of practical applications) could someday be used to treat disorders, such as epilepsy, that are caused by the overactive firing of neurons in certain parts of the brain. It’s also an extraordinarily finely-tuned tool for safely and selectively turning off brain activity, so researchers can learn what different regions of the brain do.

For more, check out the MIT news release or the group’s website.

(PHOTO:Ben Murray

The accepted wisdom is that exposure to the news and other media helps make people more politically educated—but a new study examining 2,400 respondents over the 2008 presidential campaign suggests that when it comes to an entrenched belief (or paranoia), this may not be the case.

Because the survey asked the same questions of the same people in October, September and November of 2008, Hollander was able to explore how people’s beliefs changed over time. The percentage of respondents who believed that Obama was Muslim stayed roughly the same over the study period, shifting from 20.2 percent in September to 19.7 percent in November.

“With most forms of political knowledge, media should theoretically make you more accurate,” Hollander said. “In this case, media exposure had no effect. Ultimately, the message here is that people believe what they want to believe.”

For more, check out the press release about the study.

A new study of older adults and sex, released in the British Medical Journal, finds that men are more likely than women “to be sexually active, report a good quality sex life, and be interested in sex.” In addition, when it comes to being sexually active, women...don’t live as long.

When calculated from age 30, sexual life expectancy for men is nearly 35 years, while sexual life expectancy for women is closer to 31. Those numbers are fairly close, but there’s a key denominator difference - men, on average, die younger than women, leaving women with a greater percentage of their older years in a sexually inactive state.

But, most interestingly, long-term relationships tend to increase women’s sexual life expectancies.

...the gender gap of sexual activity virtually disappeared in those who were married or living with a partner. And in an endorsement of eating right and getting your exercise, health was strongly associated with sexuality in both midlife and later life (whether good health leads to sexuality or vice versa cannot be parsed from the data).

Thanks to the University of Chicago Medical Center’s blog, which I love, for the hat tip.

A new study of 19,567 Chinese subjects found that daily naps increased the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes from 13.5% (without naps) to 15.1% (with naps). In addition, there was some evidence that longer siestas raised the risk more than shorter snoozes.

According to the authors, napping in China is a social norm, which is practiced by all ages primarily as a habit started in childhood. In Western countries, napping is less common and is often unplanned and prompted by sleepiness likely caused by aging, deteriorating health status or nighttime complaints....The authors noted that the association between napping and diabetes was observed despite the fact that nappers had higher levels of physical activity, which has been shown to reduce the risk of diabetes.

Lead author Neil Thomas, PhD, reader in epidemiology at the University of Birmingham, U.K., said that additional research is needed to determine if napping itself plays a causative role in the development of type 2 diabetes, or if other factors are involved.

You can read the study abstract here.

(PHOTO: Great Ape Trust.)

Although apes are physically capable of pointing with a finger, scientists had always believed they did so with no particular meaning in mind—that their gestures, in other words, were empty. But a new study of bonobos, a species of great ape native to the Democratic Republic of Congo, suggests that if captive apes are reared in a human culture, in which pointing is carried out with specific intent, they can learn to use the action just as people do: to direct attention, indicate choices, and express ideas. Guess they never met my mother—she always told me pointing was rude.

For more, including a video of bonobos pointing at their preferred human companion, go here.

P.S. If you haven’t yet heard the most recent Radiolab episode about primates raised as humans, you really should. Kanzi, a bonobo from the Great Ape Trust, makes an unforgettable appearance in it.

P.P.S. We recently talked about other human-like things apes can do.

(PHOTO: Addrox Karpenkopf.)

Japanese computer scientists are awesome, aren’t they? I mean, really. They’ve gone and made a program that can tell new parents if their baby is crying because it’s in pain, or just because.

The team has employed sound pattern recognition approach that uses a statistical analysis of the frequency of cries and the power function of the audio spectrum to classify different types of crying. They were then able to correlate the different recorded audio spectra with a baby’s emotional state as confirmed by the child’s parents. In their tests recordings of crying babies with a painful genetic disorder, were used to make differentiating between the babies’ pained cries and other types of crying more obvious. They achieved 100% success rate in a validation to classify pained cries and “normal” cries.

No word on whether the program can translate complex sentences, such as “Stop pinching my cheeks or I’ll bite you, lady!”

Via Eureka News.

(PHOTO: Mark Larson.)

Using data collected from Amazon.com book reviews of titles relating to true crime and war and written by members with gendered usernames, researchers at the University of Illinois concluded that women are far more likely to want to read about horrible, violent things (rape, murder, serial killings) that really happened, to ordinary people like themselves. Men, on the other hand, like reading about traumatic injuries and death occurring as a result of gang violence or wars.

Coding usernames for gender, the researchers found that women wrote 70 percent of the reviews of books about true crime, while men wrote 82 percent of the reviews of books on war. The gender of the author appeared to play no role in women’s preference for true crime books.

A second study gave participants summaries of two books...a “true account” of the murder of two women in Hawaii (and) either a true story of two female soldiers who died in a Gulf War army unit, or a true account of two female members of a Los Angeles gang who were killed. Women overwhelmingly chose the true crime books over the books about war or gang violence, even when the main characters of all of the books were female.

The researchers suspected that women prefer true crime stories in part because such stories provide information that the readers feel could help them avoid or escape from a potential attacker. Previous studies have shown that women are much more likely than men to fear becoming crime victims, and there may be an evolutionary benefit to learning from others’ negative experiences, Fraley said. Perhaps the fear of an attack and the desire to avoid becoming a victim drives many women to read true crime stories, he said.

To get at this question, the researchers conducted three more studies in which the summaries of the books included details that might help explain the choices women made. They found that women were much more likely than men to choose a book if it included a “clever trick” the would-be victim used to escape from an attacker, or a psychological profile of the attacker. And women, but not men, were much more interested in books with female victims.

You can read the entire report here.

(PHOTO: Richard Dawkins, as photographed by Mike Cornwell.)

According to a new study by British evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, social, political, and religious viewpoints that are “evolutionarily novel"—meaning relatively new to human history—are more likely to be held by people of higher intelligence. Among the values Kanazawa classifies as being novel are “caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers you never meet or interact with” (liberalism), and failing to “perceive agency and intention...at work behind otherwise natural phenomena” (atheism).

Kanazawa is set to publish his findings in an upcoming issue of Social Psychology Quarterly; at the moment only the abstract of Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent is available, but you can read a detailed press release here. 

(Whatever else you might think of his work, the guy knows how to write a title: Earlier papers of his include 2001’s Why Single Men Might Abhor Foreign Cultures, and 2004’s Why Beautiful People are More Intelligent.)