SLOW Movement

WSJ: Chinese Medicine Goes Under the Microscope

IN THE LAB
April 2, 2012, 6:56 p.m. ET

Chinese Medicine Goes Under the Microscope

By SHIRLEY S. WANG

There's growing acceptance that herbal medicines could be effective for medical conditions, but the scientific evidence to vault such a treatment into an approved drug is often lacking. As Shirley Wang explains on Lunch Break, researchers are making progress on a cancer treatment based on a common herbal combination in Chinese medicine.

Scientists studying a four-herb combination discovered some 1,800 years ago by Chinese herbalists have found that the substance enhances the effectiveness of chemotherapy in patients with colon cancer.

Photo Researchers Inc.

Early studies show a traditional four-herb combination has cancer-treatment benefits. The herbs are Chinese peony (pictured), Chinese jujube, Chinese licorice and baikal skullcap.

The mixture, known in China as huang qin tang, has been shown in early trials to be effective at reducing some side effects of chemotherapy, including diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. The herbs also seem to bolster colon-cancer treatment: Tests on animals with tumors have shown that administering the herbs along with chemotherapy drugs restored intestinal cells faster than when chemo was used alone.

The herb combination, dubbed PHY906 by scientists, is a rare example of a plant-based product used in traditional folk medicine that could potentially jump the hurdle into mainstream American therapy. A scientific team led by Yung-Chi Cheng, an oncology researcher at Yale University, and funded in part by the National Cancer Institute, is planning to begin Phase II clinical trials to study PHY906's effectiveness in people with colon cancer.

Photo Researchers Inc.

Chinese jujube

Many conventional medications are derived from individual chemical agents originally found in plants. In the case of huang qin tang, however, scientists so far have identified 62 active chemicals in the four-herb combination that apparently need to work together to be effective.

"What Dr. Cheng is doing is keeping [the herbal combination] as a complex entity and using that as an agent," says Josephine Briggs, head of the federal National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which is helping fund some of the PHY906 research. "It's polypharmacy," or the equivalent of several drugs being administered at once.

Dr. Cheng began his research on huang qin tang about a dozen years ago when he sought a better way of dealing with the chemotherapy's side effects. A variety of medications are currently used to treat these symptoms, but with varying success. A more effective technique could improve patients' quality of life and possibly allow them to tolerate a larger dose of chemo, which might speed up their course of treatment, he says.

Dr. Cheng, who grew up in Taiwan, turned to Chinese traditional medicine, which often touts holistic treatments and multiple health claims for a single herb. In herbal literature he found mention of huang qin tang, a herbal combination traditionally used in China for gastrointestinal problems, and decided to test whether it could help cancer patients without compromising the effectiveness of the chemotherapy.

San Diego Botanic Garden

Chinese licorice

The research team began by giving mice with colon cancer high doses of irinotecan, a chemotherapy drug. Some of the mice also received varying doses of PHY906, the herbal combination. After four days, the animals that got the herbs seemed to experience fewer side effects. The herbs also appeared to improve the efficacy of the chemo, restoring damaged intestinal cells faster than with chemo alone and allowing the mice to tolerate doses of the drug that otherwise might have been lethal.

They followed with another experiment treating animals in four groups. One group received just the chemotherapy drug, another received just PHY906, a third group got both and the last group got nothing. The herb and drug combination worked the best at reducing side effects. As the researchers expected, PHY906 had no impact on the cancer when used by itself.

Further testing showed that PHY906's effectiveness was diminished if any of the four herbs was eliminated, indicating that there is an apparent synergistic effect between them. This finding "got me serious about [PHY906]," says Dr. Cheng. The work was published in the journal Science and Translational Medicine in 2010. By submitting PHY906 to the scientific rigor of clinical trials, Dr. Cheng aims to win regulatory approval for the compound's use in cancer treatment.

One challenge with using herbal medicines is that the ratio of the chemicals they contain isn't consistent when plants are grown under different conditions. After testing various suppliers, Dr. Cheng ended up creating a biotechnology company sponsored by Yale called PhytoCeutica to carefully monitor growing conditions to ensure plants from different batches were pharmacologically consistent and to continue clinical development of the compound.

University of British Columbia Botanical Garden

Baikal skullcap

Why PHY906 works isn't entirely clear, Dr. Cheng says. The herbal combination appears to have an anti-inflammatory effect on the gastrointestinal tract, according to work the group published in the journal BMC Medical Genomics last year. Dr. Cheng says he believes PHY906 works in at least three different ways in the body to control the side effects of chemotherapy, whereas conventional treatments work in just a single way.

So far, research data seem to support Dr. Cheng's hunch about traditional medicine. "If it's still in use after a thousand years there must be something right," he says.

Write to Shirley S. Wang at [email protected]

Bucking the Mainstream to Focus on Healing Herbs

Yale University

Cancer researcher Dr. Yung-Chi Cheng

When cancer researcher Yung-Chi Cheng set out some 12 years ago to study a traditional Chinese medicine, the initial reaction from colleagues and other experts in the field was "pretty bad," he says.

Colleagues worried that Yale University's Dr. Cheng, a mainstream, respected professor of pharmacology, was taking a professional risk by delving into possible herbal treatments for cancer. It wasn't possible to get separate batches of herbs containing chemical compounds that were consistent, they told him. And there wasn't evidence to support the claim that the herbs had any benefit. "It was rejectionist and narrow-minded," Dr. Cheng says.

Nature's Drugs

Some herbs and plants with possible cancer-treatment benefits.

Boswellia serrata (frankincense) Reduces inflammation

What it is being studied for: To reduce tumor growth and brain swelling in patients with gliomas

Nerium oleander (rose laurel)

Reduces inflammation and modulates the immune system

What it is being studied for: To use with chemotherapy drugs to treat advanced non-small-cell lung cancer

Valeriana officinalis (garden heliotrope)

Has sedating effects

What it is being studied for: To improve sleep in cancer patients undergoing treatment

Hypericum perforatum (St. John's wort)

Has analgesic, sedative and anti-depressant effects

What it is being studied for: To reduce hot flashes in postmenopausal women with breast cancer

Source: National Cancer Institute

Born in Britain and raised in Taiwan, the 67-year-old Dr. Cheng mainly works at developing better cancer and antivirus compounds. He says he decided to move forward with the work on Chinese herbs on a part-time basis because he felt that whether the medical claims were true or not, they needed to be evaluated closely.

Over the years, the field's view of this type of work has changed, says Dr. Cheng. With clinical evidence and data showing that the herbal product can be made to be consistent, he has experienced more acceptance from colleagues in the U.S. and internationally. In 2003, he started a global consortium of researchers and pharmaceutical companies studying traditional Chinese medicine.

Dr. Cheng, who earned his doctorate in biochemical pharmacology from Brown University in Rhode Island, has also found it easier over time to get published and to receive funding for the work with herbs, including as a potential treatment for the side effects induced by cancer chemotherapy.

Anticipating the skepticism he might face in developing a plant-based drug, Dr. Cheng didn't publish his work in a journal until two years ago when he had consistent, clinical evidence and some understanding of the mechanism. "I might as well wait until the whole comprehensive story develops," says Dr. Cheng. "Now I feel it's about time."

—Shirley S. Wang

Corrections & Amplifications 
The common name of the plant Hypericum perforatum is St. John's wort. In an earlier version of this article, a listing of herbs and plants with possible cancer-treatment benefits misspelled the name as St. John's sort.

A version of this article appeared April 3, 2012, on page D4 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Chinese Medicine Goes Under the Microscope.

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker

LIFE & CULTURE
FEBRUARY 11, 2012

Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker

Why does Adele's 'Someone Like You' make everyone cry? Science has found the formula

By MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF

The Wall Street Journal (illustration) Associated Press (photo); Universal Music Publishing (score)

Adele slightly modulates her pitch at the end of some long notes, adding to the tension.

On Sunday night, the British singer-songwriter Adele is expected to sweep the Grammys. Three of her six nominations are for her rollicking hit "Rolling in the Deep." But it's her ballad "Someone Like You" that has risen to near-iconic status recently, due in large part to its uncanny power to elicit tears and chills from listeners. The song is so famously sob-inducing that "Saturday Night Live" recently ran a skit in which a group of co-workers play the tune so they can all have a good cry together.

Adele, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter performed "Someone Like You" from her latest album "21" at WSJ Cafe

What explains the magic of Adele's song? Though personal experience and culture play into individual reactions, researchers have found that certain features of music are consistently associated with producing strong emotions in listeners. Combined with heartfelt lyrics and a powerhouse voice, these structures can send reward signals to our brains that rival any other pleasure.

Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an "appoggiatura."

An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. "This generates tension in the listener," said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. "When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good."

Chills often descend on listeners at these moments of resolution. When several appoggiaturas occur next to each other in a melody, it generates a cycle of tension and release. This provokes an even stronger reaction, and that is when the tears start to flow.

"Someone Like You," which Adele wrote with Dan Wilson, is sprinkled with ornamental notes similar to appoggiaturas. In addition, during the chorus, Adele slightly modulates her pitch at the end of long notes right before the accompaniment goes to a new harmony, creating mini-roller coasters of tension and resolution, said Dr. Guhn.

To learn more about the formula for a tear-jerker, a few years ago Dr. Guhn and his colleague Marcel Zentner found musical excerpts—from Mendelssohn's "Trio for Piano" and Barber's "Adagio for Strings," for example—that reliably produce the chills and then measured the physiological reactions (heart rate, sweating, goose bumps) of listeners.

Chill-provoking passages, they found, shared at least four features. They began softly and then suddenly became loud. They included an abrupt entrance of a new "voice," either a new instrument or harmony. And they often involved an expansion of the frequencies played. In one passage from Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 (K. 488), for instance, the violins jump up one octave to echo the melody. Finally, all the passages contained unexpected deviations in the melody or the harmony. Music is most likely to tingle the spine, in short, when it includes surprises in volume, timbre and harmonic pattern.

"Someone Like You" is a textbook example. "The song begins with a soft, repetitive pattern," said Dr. Guhn, while Adele keeps the notes within a narrow frequency range. The lyrics are wistful but restrained: "I heard that you're settled down, that you found a girl and you're married now." This all sets up a sentimental and melancholy mood.

When the chorus enters, Adele's voice jumps up an octave, and she belts out notes with increasing volume. The harmony shifts, and the lyrics become more dramatic: "Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead."

Adele, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter performed "Rolling In The Deep" from her latest album "21" at WSJ Cafe

When the music suddenly breaks from its expected pattern, our sympathetic nervous system goes on high alert; our hearts race and we start to sweat. Depending on the context, we interpret this state of arousal as positive or negative, happy or sad.

If "Someone Like You" produces such intense sadness in listeners, why is it so popular? Last year, Robert Zatorre and his team of neuroscientists at McGill University reported that emotionally intense music releases dopamine in the pleasure and reward centers of the brain, similar to the effects of food, sex and drugs. This makes us feel good and motivates us to repeat the behavior.

Measuring listeners' responses, Dr. Zatorre's team found that the number of goose bumps observed correlated with the amount of dopamine released, even when the music was extremely sad. The results suggest that the more emotions a song provokes—whether depressing or uplifting—the more we crave the song.

With "Someone Like You," Adele and Mr. Wilson not only crafted a perfect tear-jerker but also stumbled upon a formula for commercial success: Unleash the tears and chills with small surprises, a smoky voice and soulful lyrics, and then sit back and let the dopamine keep us coming back for more.

—Ms. Doucleff is a scientific editor at the journal Cell.

Copyright 2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

NY Times: Sound, the Way the Brain Prefers to Hear It

 

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September 5, 2011

Sound, the Way the Brain Prefers to Hear It

By GUY GUGLIOTTA

LOS ANGELES — There is, perhaps, no more uplifting musical experience than hearing the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” performed in a perfect space. Many critics regard Symphony Hall in Boston — 70 feet wide, 120 feet long and 65 feet high — as just that space.

Some 3,000 miles away, however, a visitor led into the pitch-blackness of Chris Kyriakakis’s audio lab at the University of Southern California to hear a recording of the performance would have no way to know how big the room was.

At first it sounded like elegant music played in the parlor on good equipment. Nothing special. But as engineers added combinations of speakers, the room seemed to expand and the music swelled in richness and depth, until finally it was as if the visitor were sitting with the audience in Boston.

Then the music stopped and the lights came on. It turned out that the Immersive Audio Lab at U.S.C.’s Viterbi School of Engineering is dark, a bit dingy, and only 30 feet wide, 45 feet long and 14 feet high.

Acousticians have been designing concert halls for more than a century, but Dr. Kyriakakis does something different. He shapes the sound of music to conform to the space in which it is played. The goal is what Dr. Kyriakakis calls the “ground truth” — to replicate the original in every respect. “We remove the room,” he said, “so the ground truth can be delivered.”

Dr. Kyriakakis, an electrical engineer at U.S.C. and the founder and chief technical officer of Audyssey Laboratories, a Los Angeles-based audio firm, could not achieve his results without modern sound filters and digital microprocessors.

But the basis of his technique is rooted in the science of psychoacoustics, the study of sound perception by the human auditory system. “It’s about the human ear and the human brain, and understanding how the human ear perceives sound,” Dr. Kyriakakis said.

Psychoacoustics has become an invaluable tool in designing hearing aids and cochlear implants, and in the study of hearing generally. “Psychoacoustics is fundamental,” said Andrew J. Oxenham, a psychologist and hearing expert at the University of Minnesota. “You need to know how the normally functioning auditory system works — how sound relates to human perception.”

The field’s origins date back more than a century, to the first efforts to quantify the psychological properties of sound. What tones could humans hear, and how loudly or softly did they need to be heard?

Pitch could be measured in hertz and loudness in decibels, but other phenomena were not so easily quantified. Human hearing can discern the movement of sound with a surprising degree of accuracy. It can distinguish timbre, the difference between a clarinet and a saxophone. It can remember patterns of speech, to immediately identify a friend in a phone call years after last hearing the voice. And a parent can effortlessly sift the sound of an infant’s cry from the blare of a televised football game.

Finally there were the imponderables, things we do with our hearing simply because we can. “Everyone knows the sound of a bowling ball as it rolls down the alley,” said William M. Hartmann, a Michigan State University physicist and former president of the Acoustical Society of America. “What is it about that sound that we can identify?”

For much of the 20th century, engineers devoted themselves to developing acoustical hardware like amplifiers, speakers and recording systems. After World War II, scientists learned how to use mathematical formulas to “subtract” unwanted noise from sound signals. Then they learned how to make sound signals without any unwanted noise.

Next came stereo. By recording two tracks, engineers could localize sound for the listener. “Simple enough,” said Alan Kraemer, chief technological officer for SRS Labs, an audio company in Santa Ana, Calif. “If something’s louder on one side, you’ll hear it on that side.”

But stereo had no real psychoacoustics. It created an artificial sense of space with a second track, but did so by dealing with only one variable — loudness — and enhanced human perception simply by suggesting that listeners separate their speakers. 

The digital age changed all this, allowing engineers to manipulate sound in ways that had never been tried before. They could create sounds that had never existed, eliminate sounds they did not want and use constant changes in filter combinations to deliver sound to listeners with a fidelity that had never before been possible. 

Digital technology has led to innovations that have been critical in improving sound reproduction, in tailoring hearing aids for individual patients and in treating hearing impairment and developing cochlear implants — tiny electronic devices linking sound directly to the auditory nerve of a deaf person.

“Hearing aids are not the same as glasses,” said Dr. Oxenham, at the University of Minnesota. “It’s never been just about hearing sound; it’s also about understanding sound and separating it from background noise. We can help with microprocessors. Without them it would have been impossible.”

Despite recent advances, however, psychoacoustics has shown engineers that they still have a long way to go. No machine can yet duplicate the ability of the human ear to understand a conversation in a crowded restaurant. People with cochlear implants have “a terrible time” with background noise, Dr. Oxenham said. They also have trouble with pitch perception and distinguishing the sounds of different instruments. “Hearing loops,” which are transmitters that broadcast sound signals directly to a receiver in a hearing aid, are catching on in concert halls, places of worship and even subway booths.

“The technology is really being strained,” said Dr. Hartmann, at Michigan State. Because of psychoacoustics, “we know so much more, and therefore we can do so much more,” but “there is so much more to do.”

One factor that slows the pace of innovation, Dr. Hartmann suggested, is that the human auditory system is “highly nonlinear.” It is difficult to isolate or change a single variable — like loudness — without affecting several others in unanticipated ways. “Things don’t follow an intuitive pattern,” he said.

It was this anomaly, in part, that led Dr. Kyriakakis in the 1990s to venture into psychoacoustics. He, his U.S.C. film school associate Tomlinson Holman, and their students were trying to improve the listening qualities of a room by measuring sound with strategically placed microphones.

“Often our changes were worse than doing nothing at all,” Dr. Kyriakakis recalled. “The mic liked the sound, but the human ear wasn’t liking it at all. We needed to find out what we had to do. We had to learn about psychoacoustics.”

The trick was to establish a baseline for what sounded best, and there was no guidebook. So Dr. Kyriakakis and his students went to Boston Symphony Hall in 1998 to conduct a series of sound tests and to record the “Messiah.”

At that time, acousticians had long known that a shoebox-shaped concert hall like Boston’s offered the best sound, but what was important for Dr. Kyriakakis was to know why the human ear and the human brain that processed the signal felt that way.

Back in Los Angeles, his team began a series of simple experiments. Listeners were invited into the labs to hear the Boston tests and music and to rate the sound, using a scale of 1 to 5. Researchers shifted the sound to different combinations of speakers around the room.

Statistics showed that speakers directly ahead, combined with speakers 55 degrees to either side of the listener, provided the most attractive soundstage. The “wide” speakers mimicked the reflection from the side walls of the concert hall by causing the sound to arrive at the listener’s ears milliseconds after the sound from the front. Sound from other angles did not have as great an effect.

Next, the team asked listeners what combination of speakers gave the best impression of “depth of stage.” Here again, statistics showed a clear preference for speakers in front of listeners and high above them. This sound — also slightly delayed — gave the ear and the human brain a sense of where the different instruments were on a bandstand.

With these results as his template, Dr. Kyriakakis founded Audyssey. His idea was to make dens and living rooms sound like concert halls and movie theaters. Microprocessors made it possible to filter sound to minimize distortion and add the delays that make the music sound nearly perfect to the human ear from anywhere in the room.

Audyssey’s first product, MultEQ, started with a five-speaker configuration, but for a full concert-hall-like effect, it now offers what Dr. Kyriakakis calls an “11.2” system: three speakers in front of the listener; two elevated speakers; two wides; two speakers slightly behind the listener, and two speakers directly in back. Audio-video receivers with Audyssey’s latest MultEQ technology cost $1,000 to $2,000.

For the unsophisticated listener, top-of-the-line sound equipment by itself seems good enough, but it is not like the psychoacoustically adjusted version. A video of the Eagles singing “Hotel California” sounded nice to a visitor until Audyssey’s hardware director, Andrew Turner, pointed out that there was no bass when the volume was low. He flicked a switch and the bass returned, enriching the music with startling effect.

“At the concert itself, where there was a big room with a lot of high-volume sound, you could hear the low tones,” he said. “But here in the studio, your brain is filtering them out as irrelevant at low volume. So you have to restore them.

“It’s pure psychoacoustics.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 7, 2011

A picture in some editions on Tuesday with an article about advances in psychoacoustics was published in error. It showed the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan — not at Symphony Hall in Boston, which is regarded by many critics as an acoustically perfect space.

NY Times: Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas

 

 

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June 6, 2011

Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas

By BENEDICT CAREY

Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache.

Or at least it was. For about a month now, Wynn, 17, has been practicing at home using an unusual online program that prompts him to match graphs to equations, dozens upon dozens of them, and fast, often before he has time to work out the correct answer. An equation appears on the screen, and below it three graphs (or vice versa, a graph with three equations). He clicks on one and the screen flashes to tell him whether he’s right or wrong and jumps to the next problem.

“I’m much better at it,” he said, in a phone interview from his school, New Roads in Santa Monica, Calif. “In the beginning it was difficult, having to work so quickly; but you sort of get used to it, and in the end it’s more intuitive. It becomes more effortless.”

For years school curriculums have emphasized top-down instruction, especially for topics like math and science. Learn the rules first — the theorems, the order of operations, Newton’s laws — then make a run at the problem list at the end of the chapter. Yet recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules: gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem they’re up against. Like the ballplayer who can “read” pitches early, or the chess master who “sees” the best move, they’ve developed a great eye.

Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of this same bottom-up ability, called perceptual learning. The brain is a pattern-recognition machine, after all, and when focused properly, it can quickly deepen a person’s grasp of a principle, new studies suggest. Better yet, perceptual knowledge builds automatically: There’s no reason someone with a good eye for fashion or wordplay cannot develop an intuition for classifying rocks or mammals or algebraic equations, given a little interest or motivation.

“When facing problems in real-life situations, the first question is always, ‘What am I looking at? What kind of problem is this?’ ” said Philip J. Kellman, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Any theory of how we learn presupposes perceptual knowledge — that we know which facts are relevant, that we know what to look for.”

The challenge for education, Dr. Kellman added, “is what do we need to do to make this happen efficiently?”

Scientists have long known that the brain registers subtle patterns subconsciously, well before a person knows he or she is learning. In a landmark 1997 experiment, researchers at the University of Iowa found that people playing a simple gambling game with decks of cards reported “liking” some decks better than others long before they realized that those decks had cards that caused greater losses.. Some participants picked up the differences among decks after just 10 cards.

Experts develop such sensitive perceptual radar the old-fashioned way, of course, through years of study and practice. Yet there is growing evidence that a certain kind of training — visual, fast-paced, often focused on classifying problems rather then solving them — can build intuition quickly. In one recent experiment, for example, researchers found that people were better able to distinguish the painting styles of 12 unfamiliar artists after viewing mixed collections of works from all 12 than after viewing a dozen works from one artist, then moving on to the next painter. The participants’ brains began to pick up on differences before they could fully articulate them.

“Once the brain has a goal in mind, it tunes the perceptual system to search the environment” for relevant clues, said Steven Sloman, a cognitive scientist at Brown University. In time the eyes, ears and nose learn to isolate those signs and dismiss irrelevant information, in turn sharpening thinking.

Good teachers at all levels already have their own techniques to speed up this process — multiplication flash cards, tips to break down word problems, heuristic rhymes — but scientists are working to tune students’ eyes more systematically and to build understanding of very abstract concepts.

Fractions, for one. Most American middle school students, though they understand what fractions represent, don’t do so well when tested on their ability to change one fraction, like 4/3, to another, like 7/3, by adding or subtracting (many high school students bomb these tests, too).

In a 2010 study, researchers at UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania had sixth graders in a Philadelphia public school use a perception-training program to practice just this On the computer module, a fraction appeared as a block. The students used a “slicer” to cut that block into fractions and a “cloner” to copy those slices. They used these pieces to build a new block from the original one — for example, cutting a block that represented the fraction 4/3 into four equal slices, then making three more copies to produce a block that represented 7/3. The program immediately displayed an ‘X’ next to wrong answers and “Correct!” next to correct ones, then moved to the next problem. It automatically adjusted to each student’s ability, advancing slowly for some and quickly for others. The students worked with the modules individually, for 15- to 30-minute intervals during the spring term, until they could perform most of the fraction exercises correctly.

In a test on the skills given afterward, on problems the students hadn’t seen before, the group got 73 percent correct. A comparison group of seventh graders, who’d been taught how to solve such problems as part of regular classes, scored just 25 percent on the test.

“The impressive thing for me was that we went back five months later, after the summer, and the gains had held up,” said Christine Massey, director of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science and a study co-author. When the younger students returned as seventh graders in the fall, they scored just as high as they had the previous spring on tests of fractions that they had not seen. Knowing what a fraction represents is one thing, the authors say, but repeatedly seeing and manipulating all those fractions by slicing and cloning drives the concept home once and for all.

The research team found similar results in high school sophomores who practiced with the software that Wynn Haimer used, working to match algebraic equations with graphs.

“I find that often students will try to solve problems by doing only what they’ve been told to do, and if that doesn’t work they give up,” said Joe Wise, a physics instructor at New Roads School, where the study was done. “Here they’re forced to try what makes sense to them and to keep trying. The brain is very good at sorting out patterns if you give it the chance and the right feedback.”

The modules are less demanding than problem sets, but they’re not video games — they’re homework. “To be honest, I’ve got so much to wrap up this year that I haven’t really used the program much,” said Gabe Boros, one of Mr. Wise’s students. “I did try it a couple of times and improved a little, but often I have to guess or use tricks to eliminate the wrong answers.”

Which is the whole idea: Subtle shortcuts are the very stuff of perceptual intuition. With practice, neurons in the visual cortex and elsewhere specialize to identify these signature patterns, and finding them frees up mental resources for deductive reasoning, to check answers or to move on to harder problems. Such perceptual intuition isn’t cheating — it’s what the big-shot experts do. In the case of graphs and equations, it includes making quick judgments about where lines should intercept the axes and about their slope, even when that is not at all obvious.

On the surface at least, this may sound like the approaches that SAT or LSAT prep courses take, using time-saving strategies and informed guessing. But there is a difference, researchers say. The prep courses teach to the test, but perceptual training tools are aimed at the underlying skills — manipulating fractions, graphing equations. “It’s not how well you do, but how well you learn,” as Mr. Wise put it.

Ideally, perceptual training does more than breathe life into abstract principles, the same way that repairing engines instills a lived experience of internal combustion mechanics. It also primes students to apply the principles in other contexts. This ability to transfer, as it’s known, is fundamental to scientific reasoning and is among the highest goals of teachers at all levels.

Here, too, perceptual learning may help. In a series of experiments, researchers at Indiana University have had students practice on software that models scientific principles, like positive feedback loops. In one, middle school students use a mouse to add “slime mold” to a slide and watch as it spreads faster the more they add. The process fuels itself.

“The kids who have seen this situation will transfer it to other positive feedback loops, like global warming,” said Rob Goldstone, director of the cognitive science program at Indiana University. “The more ice that melts, the more heat that’s absorbed into the earth, the warmer it gets, which melts more ice, and so on.”

“Once they have the concept, I can refer back to it,” said Nancy Martin, a science teacher at Jackson Creek Middle School in Bloomington, Ind., who has worked with Dr. Goldstone. “I can say, ‘Remember how the ants worked, or the slime; does that have anything to do with what we’re discussing today?’ ”

In an education system awash with computerized learning tools and pilot programs of all kinds, the future of such perceptual learning efforts is far from certain. Scientists still don’t know the best way to train perceptual intuition, or which specific principles it’s best suited for. And such tools, if they are incorporated into curriculums in any real way, will be subject to the judgment of teachers.

But researchers are convinced that if millions of children can develop a trained eye for video combat games and doctored Facebook photos, they can surely do the same for graphs and equations.

Perceptual Learning

How does a student learn from gut insinct? Try these samples to find out.

 

Basic Math

Measurements and Graphing: Match the equation to the graph and learn to perceive basic measurement concepts.

 

Positive and Negative Feeback

Extreme Ball: Time a fan to blow and push a ball attached to rubber bands.

Extreme Population: Help your city reach a population of one million citizens.

Stabilize Ball: Time a fan to blow and stabilize a ball attached to rubber bands.

Stabilize Population: Help your city's population stabilize at 500,000 citizens.

WSJ: Do You Get an 'A' in Personality

BONDS
APRIL 5, 2011

Do You Get an 'A' in Personality?

By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

In the never-ending quest to help people co-exist peacefully with their spouses, children, siblings and in-laws, therapists are turning to tools used to assess the psychological stability of pilots, police officers and nuclear-power plant operators: personality tests.

I'm not talking about the pop quizzes in magazines that claim to help you determine the color of your aura or what breed you'd be if you were a dog. I am referring to tests that are scientifically designed and heavily researched, consisting of dozens if not hundreds of questions that identify specific aspects of your personality. Are you a thinker or a feeler? Intuitive or fact-oriented? Organized or spontaneous?

Answering questions like these helped Mardi and Richard Sayer get through a difficult period a few years ago when their adult daughter, Maggie Sayer, moved back into their Middletown, R.I. home.

Testing Your Relationships

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, one of the better-known personality tests, probes subjects with 567 true-or-false statements on a wide range of seemingly random topics, including ...

67. Like poetry
115. Not afraid of blood
148. Feel the best ever
163. Don't fear snakes
189. Like to flirt
193. Avoid stepping on sidewalk cracks
220. No worries about appearance
275. Difficulty talking in front of class in school
302. Easily get impatient
318. Expect to succeed
348. Wish were a child again

Source: Abbreviated items excerpted from the MMPI®-2 Booklet of Abbreviated Items. Copyright © 2005 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the University of Minnesota Press. "MMPI" and "Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory" are registered trademarks owned by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.

Depressed at the time, Maggie would often stay up half the night watching TV, then sleep past noon. Her parents, worried and frustrated, tried to push her to move forward with her life. "We would fight about God knows what," says the younger Ms. Sayer, now 30 and living in Santa Monica, Calif., where she is an assistant at a school for film-industry professionals.

The three decided to see a life coach, who administered a personality test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, to each of them. Mardi Sayer says she discovered that she and her husband are extroverts and "thinkers"; they like to identify goals and move forward directly to achieve them. Their daughter is an introvert, a "feeler" who craves harmony and needs time and freedom to discover what she wants to do.

"It helped us see that she is a different person and will have a different path," says Ms. Sayer, 59, an accounting consultant. "You need to understand yourself in the context of the other people in your life," says her husband, Richard, 63, an attorney.

The tests have had lasting effects on her relationship with her parents, Maggie Sayer says. "My mom and dad weren't being insensitive or uncaring—they just didn't understand how I processed things," she says. "I learned that rather than immediately reacting emotionally to something my parents said, I could step back and formulate my response without having a dramatic meltdown."

Family therapists, marriage counselors and life coaches increasingly recognize that personality assessments can lead clients not only to greater self-insight but also to improved relationships. The tests "can help get to the heart of the problem quickly," says Richard Levak, a Del Mar, Calif., psychologist, who uses them extensively in his practice. "Too often psychologists operate on their intuition and clinical knowledge, but people are not often as they appear."

A test might reveal that someone who appears jovial and self-effacing may actually be insecure and introverted—constantly working to play a role, he says.

Answer Questions, Achieve Self-Knowledge

Here's how to take two of the best-known assessments:

• Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory You can take this test only through a trained administrator. Check with the American Psychological Association, or your local chapter, to find someone certified to administer it and interpret the results.
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Go to MBTIreferralnetwork.org to find someone to administer the test. You also can take it online and receive a one-hour telephone feedback assessment for $150 through the Center for Applications of Psychological Type at www.capt.org. Or take a computer-scored version of the test at MBTIcomplete.com for $59.95.

Hmmm. Dr. Levak offered to give me the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 and interpret my answers. I soon found myself responding to 567 true-or-false statements, on such topics as whether I like to flirt or had trouble speaking in front of the class when I was in school.

Because it was hard to tell exactly what underlying trait each question was assessing, it was impossible to game the test. Besides, individual responses are unimportant; it's the pattern of responses that reveals the personality, says Dr. Levak, who has done personality testing of candidates for television reality shows, such as "The Apprentice."

I wanted to see if the test would reveal something about me that I, or others, didn't already know. When Dr. Levak called with my results, he announced: "You're not hyper like I thought you were." According to the test, he said, I am extroverted, poised and controlled, hate conflict and aim to please, have a good balance between masculine and feminine and can be a bit of a rebel. "I bet as a teenager you hung out with a nice boy with an earring," he said. I shared the assessment with my best friend. "Spot on," she said.

How can knowing this help my relationships? Dr. Levak explained: Because I hate to get mad, I have a tendency to let resentments fester. By the time I allow myself to express anger, I am furious. Then I come across as judgmental rather than hurt. Knowing this, I can work on dealing with my anger before it builds up, he says. And I can be more aware of how others see me.

Lauren Mackler, the Boston life coach who worked with the Sayers, gives clients the Myers-Briggs and the Life Styles Inventory, which assesses habitual behavioral styles. (Life coaches usually help clients understand behaviors and achieve goals, whereas therapists often help clients explore their pasts to understand how their upbringing has influenced their behavior.)

Ms. Mackler uses the tests to help family members see how problems might be driven by personality differences and come up with strategies to adjust.

Consider what happens when an introvert comes home hoping to chill after a rough day at work—only to find his extrovert partner waiting to recap every moment of her day. The introvert gets angry; the extrovert feels hurt. Ms. Mackler tells the extrovert that her spouse needs time alone; she tells the introvert that he needs to make an effort to come out and talk after he has decompressed.

"When people see something on paper, they realize it's not subjective—they have done the test and described the behavior themselves," she says. "It makes it more palatable for them to see and talk about" the issues.

What, exactly, is personality? John D. Mayer, a psychologist and expert on personality testing at the University of New Hampshire, says it is "the system that organizes one's emotions, motives and capacities to think." Personalities are partly innate, partly learned, he says; we can change them a bit, but it isn't easy.

Dr. Mayer says the roots of modern personality tests date back to the early 1900s, when French psychologist Alfred Binet created an intelligence test predicting which children had special needs requiring alternative education. Testing spread to the U.S. during World War I, when the military used a type of personality test to assess if recruits were mentally fit for service.

Early personality tests were designed to assess mental illness. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, developed at the University of Minnesota to help diagnose psychiatric patients, now is used to assess the psychological stability of people with public-safety responsibilities.

The Myers-Briggs was developed in the 1940s by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother, Katherine Cook Briggs, who despite little advanced training in psychology, immersed themselves in the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and designed the questionnaire based on Jung's personality types.

When family members take personality tests, their self-awareness goes up and they quickly figure out their strengths and weaknesses, says John Williams, a life coach in Portland, Ore., who uses a test in his work with teenagers. "People realize they are different from other people," he says. "The personality test becomes a road map."

—Email Elizabeth Bernstein at [email protected] or follow her column at www.Facebook.com/EBernsteinWSJ.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: The Sleepless Elite

HEALTH JOURNAL
APRIL 5, 2011

The Sleepless Elite

Why Some People Can Run on Little Sleep and Get So Much Done

By MELINDA BECK

Melinda Beck explains why for a small number of people getting a full night of sleep is a waste of time and the reasons behind it.

For a small group of people—perhaps just 1% to 3% of the population—sleep is a waste of time.

Natural "short sleepers," as they're officially known, are night owls and early birds simultaneously. They typically turn in well after midnight, then get up just a few hours later and barrel through the day without needing to take naps or load up on caffeine.

They are also energetic, outgoing, optimistic and ambitious, according to the few researchers who have studied them. The pattern sometimes starts in childhood and often runs in families.

While it's unclear if all short sleepers are high achievers, they do have more time in the day to do things, and keep finding more interesting things to do than sleep, often doing several things at once.

Nobody knows how many natural short sleepers are out there. "There aren't nearly as many as there are people who think they're short sleepers," says Daniel J. Buysse, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, a professional group.

Out of every 100 people who believe they only need five or six hours of sleep a night, only about five people really do, Dr. Buysse says. The rest end up chronically sleep deprived, part of the one-third of U.S. adults who get less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night, according to a report last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To date, only a handful of small studies have looked at short sleepers—in part because they're hard to find. They rarely go to sleep clinics and don't think they have a disorder.

A few studies have suggested that some short sleepers may have hypomania, a mild form of mania with racing thoughts and few inhibitions. "These people talk fast. They never stop. They're always on the up side of life," says Dr. Buysse. He was one of the authors of a 2001 study that had 12 confirmed short sleepers and 12 control subjects keep diaries and complete numerous questionnaires about their work, sleep and living habits.One survey dubbed "Attitude for Life" that was actually a test for hypomania. The natural short sleepers scored twice as high as the controls.

There is currently no way people can teach themselves to be short sleepers. Still, scientists hope that by studying short sleepers, they can better understand how the body regulates sleep and why sleep needs vary so much in humans.

Normal Sleeper

Most adults have normal sleep needs, functioning best with 7 to 9 hours of sleep, and about two-thirds of Americans regularly get it. Children fare better with 8 to 12 hours, and elderly people may need only 6 to 7.

Wannabe Short Sleeper

One-third of Americans are sleep-deprived, regularly getting less than 7 hours a night, which puts them at higher risk of diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and other health problems.

Short Sleeper

Short sleepers, about 1% to 3% of the population, function well on less than 6 hours of sleep without being tired during the day. They tend to be unusually energetic and outgoing. Geneticists who spotted a gene variation in short sleepers were able to replicate it in mice—which needed less sleep than usual, too.

"My long-term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health," says human geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California-San Francisco. "Everybody can use more waking hours, even if you just watch movies."

Dr. Fu was part of a research team that discovered a gene variation, hDEC2, in a pair of short sleepers in 2009. They were studying extreme early birds when they noticed that two of their subjects, a mother and daughter, got up naturally about 4 a.m. but also went to bed past midnight.

Genetic analyses spotted one gene variation common to them both. The scientists were able to replicate the gene variation in a strain of mice and found that the mice needed less sleep than usual, too.

News of their finding spurred other people to write the team, saying they were natural short sleepers and volunteering to be studied. The researchers are recruiting more candidates and hope to find more gene variations they have in common.

Potential candidates for the gene study are sent multiple questionnaires and undergo a long structured phone interview. Those who make the initial screening wear monitors to track their sleep patterns at home. Christopher Jones, a University of Utah neurologist and sleep scientist who oversees the recruiting, says there is one question that is more revealing than anything else: When people do have a chance to sleep longer, on weekends or vacation, do they still sleep only five or six hours a night? People who sleep more when they can are not true short sleepers, he says.

That All-Nighter Feels Good—Temporarily

Sleep deprivation makes most people grumpy. It's sometimes used as a form of torture. Oddly enough, it can also bring on temporary euphoria, according to a study in the journal Neuroscience last month.

Researchers had 14 healthy young adults stay up all night and all the next day and then compared their reactions with 13 subjects who had slept normally. In one test, sleepless subjects asked to rate a series of images uniformly saw them as more pleasant or positive. "We saw this strange lopsided shift," says lead author Matthew Walker, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California-Berkeley.

Brain scans also showed that the subjects who had pulled all-nighters had heightened activity in the mesolimbic pathway, a brain circuit driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter that typically regulates feelings of pleasure, addiction and cravings.

The boost of dopamine after an all-nighter may help explain why sleep deprivation can alleviate major depression in about 60% of patients, although the effect is only temporary. "As soon as they get recovery sleep, all that mood elevation is lost," says Dr. Walker.

Could the sleep-deprived brain be somehow compensating for the lack of downtime with a surge of dopamine to keep on going? Scientists don't yet know.

Earlier studies have also shown that sleep deprivation amplifies activity in the amygdala, the primitive emotional center of the brain, and reduces it the prefrontal cortex, where higher, more rational thought occurs. It may be that the brain reverts to a more basic mode of operating when it is sleep deprived, Dr. Walker speculates. Alternatively, he says, "we know that different parts of the brain are more sensitive than others to sleep deprivation. It may be that the prefrontal cortex just goes down first."

Although the feelings of euphoria sound great, Dr. Walker warns that operating more on emotion than reason can be very risky. "You are all gas pedal and no brake," he says. That can be dangerous, indeed, if you are in a job that requires both long hours and difficult decision making

To date, Dr. Jones says he has identified only about 20 true short sleepers, and he says they share some fascinating characteristics. Not only are their circadian rhythms different from most people, so are their moods (very upbeat) and their metabolism (they're thinner than average, even though sleep deprivation usually raises the risk of obesity). They also seem to have a high tolerance for physical pain and psychological setbacks.

"They encounter obstacles, they just pick themselves up and try again," Dr. Jones says.

Some short sleepers say their sleep patterns go back to childhood and some see the same patterns starting in their own kids, such as giving up naps by age 2. As adults, they gravitate to different fields, but whatever they do, they do full bore, Dr. Jones says.

"Typically, at the end of a long, structured phone interview, they will admit that they've been texting and surfing the Internet and doing the crossword puzzle at the same time, all on less than six hours of sleep," says Dr. Jones. "There is some sort of psychological and physiological energy to them that we don't understand."

Drs. Jones and Fu stress that there is no genetic test for short sleeping. Ultimately, they expect to find that many different genes play a role, which may in turn reveal more about the complex systems that regulate sleep in humans.

Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Leonardo da Vinci were too busy to sleep much, according to historical accounts. Winston Churchill and Thomas Edison came close but they were also fond of taking naps, which may disqualify them as true short sleepers.

Nowadays, some short sleepers gravitate to fields like blogging, videogame design and social media, where their sleep habits come in handy. "If I could find a way to do it, I'd never sleep," says Dave Hatter, a software developer in Fort Wright, Ky. He typically sleeps just four to five hours a night, up from two to three hours a few years ago.

"It's crazy, but it works for me," says Eleanor Hoffman, an overnight administrator at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York who would rather spend afternoons playing mahjong with friends than sleep anymore than four hours. Sometimes she calls her cousin, Linda Cohen, in Pittsburgh about 4 a.m., since she knows she'll be wide awake as well—just like they were as kids.

"I come to life about 11 at night," says Mrs. Cohen, who owns a chain of toy stores with her husband and gets up early in the morning with ease. "If I went to bed earlier, I'd feel like half my life was missing."

Are you a short sleeper? For more information on the genetic study, contact Dr. Jones at [email protected]

Write to Melinda Beck at [email protected]

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Economist: Clothes may make the man, but it is the label that really counts

Status displays

I've got you labelled

Clothes may make the man, but it is the label that really counts

Mar 31st 2011 | from the print edition

What more could a boy want?

DESIGNERS of fancy apparel would like their customers to believe that wearing their creations lends an air of wealth, sophistication and high status. And it does—but not, perhaps, for the reason those designers might like to believe, namely their inherent creative genius. A new piece of research confirms what many, not least in the marketing departments of fashion houses, will long have suspected: that it is not the design itself that counts, but the label.

Rob Nelissen and Marijn Meijers of Tilburg University in the Netherlands examined people’s reactions to experimental stooges who were wearing clothes made by Lacoste and Tommy Hilfiger, two well-known brands that sell what they are pleased to refer to as designer clothing. As the two researchers show in a paper about to be published in Evolution and Human Behavior, such clothes do bring the benefits promised: co-operation from others, job recommendations and even the ability to collect more money when soliciting for charity. But they work only when the origin of the clothes in question is obvious.

In the first experiment, volunteers were shown pictures of a man wearing a polo shirt. The photo was digitally altered to include no logo, a designer logo (Lacoste or Hilfiger) or a logo generally regarded as non-luxury, Slazenger. When the designer logo appeared, the man in the picture was rated as of higher status (3.5 for Lacoste and 3.47 for Hilfiger, on a five-point scale, compared with 2.91 for no logo and 2.84 for Slazenger), and wealthier (3.4 and 3.94 versus 2.78 and 2.8, respectively).

To see if this perception had an effect on actual behaviour, the researchers did a number of other experiments. For instance, one of their female assistants asked people in a shopping mall to stop and answer survey questions. One day she wore a sweater with a designer logo; the next, an identical sweater with no logo. Some 52% of people agreed to take the survey when faced with the Tommy Hilfiger label, compared with only 13% who saw no logo.

In another experiment, volunteers watched one of two videos of the same man being interviewed for a job. In one, his shirt had a logo; in the other, it did not. The logo led observers to rate the man as more suitable for the job, and even earned him a 9% higher salary recommendation.

Charitable impulses were affected, too. When two of the team’s women went collecting for charity on four consecutive evenings, switching between designer and non-designer shirts, they found that wearing shirts with logos brought in nearly twice as much—an average per answered door of 34 euro cents (48 American ones) compared with 19 euro cents when logo-less. It seems, then, that labels count. The question is, why?

The answer, Dr Nelissen and Dr Meijers suspect, is the same as why the peacock with the best tail gets all the girls. People react to designer labels as signals of underlying quality. Only the best can afford them. To test that idea, they checked how people responded to a logo they knew had cost the wearer nothing. To do this, they asked their volunteers to play a social-dilemma game, in which both sides can benefit from co-operating, but only at the risk of being taken advantage of.

Each volunteer was given €2 in 10 cent coins and told he (or she) could transfer as much as desired to an unseen partner, and that any amount transferred would be doubled. If both partners transferred all of their money, each would end up with €4. But because there was no guarantee that the unseen partner would give back any money at all, players tended to hedge their bets, and transfer only some money.

When shown a picture of their purported partner wearing a designer shirt, volunteers transferred 36% more than when the same person was shown with no logo (95 cents, as opposed to 70 cents). But when told that the partner was wearing a shirt given by the experimenters, the logo had no effect on transfers. The shirt no longer represented an honest signal.

This study confirms a wider phenomenon. A work of art’s value, for example, can change radically, depending on who is believed to have created it, even though the artwork itself is unchanged. And people will willingly buy counterfeit goods, knowing they are knock-offs, if they bear the right label. What is interesting is that the label is so persuasive. In the case of the peacock, the tail works precisely because it cannot be faked. An unhealthy bird’s feathers will never sparkle. But humans often fail to see beyond the superficial. For humans, then, the status-assessment mechanism is going wrong.

Presumably what is happening is that a mechanism which evolved to assess biology cannot easily cope with artefacts. If the only thing you have to assess is the quality of a tail, evolution will tend to make you quite good at it. Artefacts, though, are so variable that mental shortcuts are likely to be involved. If everyone agrees something has high status, then it does. But that agreement often transfers the status from the thing to the label. Maybe a further million years or so of evolution will eliminate this failing. In the meantime, marketers can open another bottle of champagne.

from the print edition | Science and Technology

Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2011. All rights reserved.

The Telegraph: Robert Bunsen's birthday marked with Google Doodle

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8417723/Robert-Bunsens-birthday-marked-with-Google-Doodle.html

Google

Robert Bunsen's birthday marked with Google Doodle

Robert Bunsen, the German scientist who developed the Bunsen burner, has been honoured on what would have been his 200th birthday with a Google Doodle.

Robert Bunsen's Google Doodle 

8:00AM BST 31 Mar 2011

19 Comments

The distinctive laboratory gas burner used by generations of schoolchildren in science lessons takes centre stage in an animated graphic on Google's home page.

It shows a flame changing colour from blue to purple as a multicoloured chemicals bubble in a series of pots and test tubes while steam flies out of a coffee pot.

Born in Gottingen, Germany, on March 31 1811, Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen was a prominent chemist in his day who discovered the elements caesium and rubidium and developed the Bunsen cell battery.

But he is best remembered for the distinctive gas burner he developed with his laboratory assistant Peter Desaga in 1854 and 1855 to study the colour spectrum of different heated elements.

It was during the construction of new lab facilities at Heidelberg University that he came up with the idea.

NY Times: Radiation, Once Free, Can Follow Tricky Path

 

---

March 21, 2011

Radiation, Once Free, Can Follow Tricky Path

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Ten days after an earthquake and tsunami crippled a nuclear plant in Japan, officials are detecting abnormal levels of radiation in what may seem like a scattershot assortment of foods: milk from Fukushima Prefecture, where the reactors sit; spinach from Ibaraki Prefecture to the south; canola from Gunma Prefecture to the west; and chrysanthemum greens from Chiba to the south. Shipments of the milk and spinach have been banned.

Experts hesitate to predict where the radiation will go. Once radioactive elements that can harm health are released into the outdoors, their travel patterns are as mercurial as the weather and as complicated as the food chains and biochemical pathways along which they move.

When and where radioactive contamination becomes a problem depends on a vast array of factors: the specific element released, which way the wind is blowing, whether rain will bring suspended radioactivity to earth, and what types of crops and animals are in an exposed area.

Research related to the 1986 Chernobyl accident makes clear that for decades, scientists will be able to detect the presence of radioactive particles released by the crippled Japanese reactors thousands of miles away. Scientists and doctors in Japan and abroad will be monitoring the results to see if those measurements reach dangerous levels. So far there is no indication that anyone has been harmed by eating contaminated food.

“It’s natural that people worldwide will be monitoring for this — just in case it is far worse than we now expect,” said F. Ward Whicker, a professor emeritus at Colorado State University who developed a leading model for following radiation through the food chain.

When radiation is released with gas, as it was at the Japanese reactors, the particles are carried by prevailing winds, and some will settle on the earth. Rain will knock more of the suspended particles to the ground. “There is an extremely complex interaction between the type of radionuclide and the weather and the type of vegetation,” Dr. Whicker said. “There can be hot spots far away from an accident, and places in between that are fine.”

The principal elements that have been released from reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant are iodine 131 and cesium 137. Cesium is dangerous because it is long-lived and travels easily through the food chain, continuing to emit particles for centuries once it is released.

More than 15 years after the Chernobyl accident in what is now Ukraine, studies found that cesium 137 was still detectable in wild boar in Croatia and reindeer in Norway, with the levels high enough in some areas to pose a potential danger to people who consume a great deal of the meat.

While iodine 131 is much shorter lived — its radioactive potency is halved every eight days — it is dangerous because it concentrates in the thyroid gland, resulting in high radiation doses to that vulnerable organ. The thyroid is such an iodine magnet that Dr. Whicker recounts that a week after a nuclear weapons test in China, iodine 131 could be detected in the thyroid glands of deer in Colorado, although it could not be detected in the air or in nearby vegetation.

Initially, some plants will collect more radiation than others: those with big leaves like lettuce, spinach and other greens will naturally collect more radiation than apples, oranges or potatoes, he said. Foods like rice and corn whose edible portion is protected by husks or leaves are relatively safe in this early stage.

But over a period of weeks, the radioactivity particles enter the food chain when they are ingested by animals or settle into dirt where they can be absorbed by the roots of growing plants. Soils with high clay content tend to bind radioactive elements and hinder their travel, while sandy soils allow more of the radiation to pass into growing food.

Long-lasting particles of cesium 137 can cycle through an ecosystem for decades, entering plants when they are taken up by root systems and returning to the earth when the plant dies.

For the first time on Monday, Japanese nuclear officials said that some of the water used to douse and cool the damaged reactors had reached the ocean, raising the possibility that seafood might eventually be at risk, too. The officials said they would monitor the situation. Scientists generally measure radioactivity of local mussels and seaweed to assess the level of contamination.

Experts suggest that levels would have to be watched closely because cesium 137 concentrates in fish muscle much as mercury does when it moves up the food chain from plankton to small fish to big fish. “I would definitely be monitoring fish populations in the area, since there may be certain items that should be avoided,” said Nicholas Fisher, a professor of marine sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

In a worst-case scenario, said Paul Falkowski, a professor of marine sciences and geology at Rutgers University, a major ocean current that travels up the coast of Japan, across the Pacific and into the Gulf of Alaska could carry radiation to Alaska fisheries months from now. He said the International Atomic Energy Agency should monitor such movements, although he and other experts considered it highly unlikely that the current would take the radiation to Alaska unless the leak became far worse.

Many fish and the oceans already contain radiation, both naturally occurring and as a result of prior nuclear testing, said Dr. Fisher, who said that added current levels from the damaged reactors were not likely to be significant in terms of human health.

But he and other experts say that vigilance is crucial because problematic levels of radiation can turn up unexpectedly.

After the Chernobyl accident, some relatively distant villages were contaminated with fallout of iodine 131, and local cows ate grass that contained the radiation. Children who drank milk from those cows ended up with high rates of thyroid cancer.

Nuclear Boy

うんち・おならで例える原発解説

A rather light hearted piece amidst the chaos of the nuclear incident...

Pray and hope that it will soon be over.

===

NY Times: Frankenfish Phobia

March 17, 2011, 8:30 pm

Frankenfish Phobia

By TIMOTHY EGAN

At a time when the shell of the earth has cracked and the ocean heaved a mortal wave upon a shore of vulnerable nuclear plants, a small miracle is playing out in the biggest river of the American West. Spring Chinook salmon, the alpinists of the maritime world, are following biological imperative and climbing their way up the Columbia to spawn and die.

They are returning from a life in the distant Pacific, swimming home to a grave in gravel, some going almost 1,000 river miles inland. Chinook are the largest salmon, easily the most tasty, and perhaps the most imperiled.

Given the demand for salmon, it is no surprise that a Frankenfish has emerged — a lab-created hybrid that could soon become the first genetically engineered animal approved by the Food and Drug Administration for human consumption. The company behind these manufactured fish promises that they will not affect ones from an ancient and wild gene pool.

Here we go again. It is human to think we can trick nature, or do it one better. It is human to think a tsunami would never knock out a nuclear plant, a hurricane would never bury a city and a deepwater oil drill would never poison a huge body of water. In the gods of technology we trust.

Until they fail. And then, we feel helpless and small and wonder what they — or we — were thinking.

The fate of wild salmon and a panic over power plants that no longer answer to human commands would not seem to be interlinked. But they are, in the belief that the parts of the world that have been fouled, or found lacking, can be engineered to our standards — without consequence. You see this attitude in the denial caucus of Congress, perhaps now a majority of Republicans in power, who say, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that climate change is a hoax.

AquaBounty TechnologiesThe “AquAdvantage Salmon,” in the background, with a non-transgenic Atlantic salmon of the same age.

The newfangled fish comes from AquaBounty Technologies, a company in New England, where many species of the water world are now extinct. They have patented an “AquAdvantage Salmon,” a sterile Atlantic female with a Chinook gene that can “grow to market size in half the time of conventional salmon,” says the company.

Consumer groups, and a bipartisan cluster of Congress that has not forsaken reason, are fighting fast-track Food and Drug Administration approval. They are also insisting that if the Frankenfish comes to market, the new salmon would have to be labeled transgenic — over the company’s objections.

Wild salmon require so much work: they need clean water, a bountiful ocean and restraint to ensure that they aren’t fished out of existence. Vigilance, and a small amount of sacrifice — what a drag.

The alternative, some feel, is to create something under human control. What AquaBounty would do is to take the Chinook gene and splice it into a farm-raised Atlantic. A third fish, an ocean pout, which looks like an eel on a bad fin day, would provide the genetic code that allows AquAdvantage Salmon to grow so fast. Voila: fast fish from the factory, without the hassle of habitat preservation.

I’m not reflexively afraid of living better through chemistry. Genetically modified corn and soybeans have been around for some time. If we can grow food and fiber with less demand on water and nutrients, that’s often worth pursuing.

But the Frankenfish is a much bigger step, and not just because it opens the door to federal approval of all kinds of freaks from the farm. Splice a breast-heavy chicken with a pellet-loving pig and you’re into some seriously modified “other white meat.”

With wild salmon, many people wonder what all the fuss is about. In the Northwest, salmon is our symbol, even if we’ve so mismanaged their spawning grounds with dams and overfishing. Where once there were perhaps 20 million salmon returning to the Columbia, that number now is barely a million in some years.

Alaska has done much better. They have the world’s largest wild salmon runs because they’ve protected habitats, kept water quality fairly good and regulated fishermen.

These new salmon, AquaBounty says in its pleadings before the government, will not harm the ones handed down by the ages. There is “virtually no possibility of escape and interaction with the wild population,” company officials say.

Why do I not feel reassured? The last quarter century has bred skepticism into me, beginning with a personal experience in 1986. We were in Italy, my wife pregnant with our first child, when the Chernobyl nuclear plant blew. The Soviets lied, and covered up the accident.

But what soon became clear — that a runaway reactor had spewed more than 400 times the amount of radioactivity into the environment than that released by the atomic bomb over Hiroshima — made us tremble. For days, along with the rest of Europe, we watched the pattern of a huge radioactive plume, as officials warned that pregnant women were at particularly high risk.

Luckily, the radioactive cloud never came our way. But given the choice between the hard work of trying to respect the laws of nature, and the engineered solution, I’ll take the seasonal miracle of wild salmon — and try to learn something about humility.

Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company

FT: On the other hand

On the other hand

By Harry Eyres

Published: January 21 2011 22:06 | Last updated: January 21 2011 22:06

I want to speak out on behalf of an oppressed minority. This is not one of those minorities one could call fashionable; its oppression might seem negligible, and perhaps most of it, in the west at least, occurred in the past. But left-handed people, who constitute about one-tenth of the population pretty much across the board, have suffered in the course of history.

The negative connotations attached to left-sidedness and left-handedness are remarkably consistent across cultures and across history. Perhaps the most striking is the Latin adjective sinister, which starts off meaning “left” or “on the left hand”, but quickly (in Latin that is) acquires the secondary meanings “wrong”, “perverse” and then (closer to the meaning of sinister in modern English) “unfavourable”, “adverse”, “ill-omened”.

Sinister has passed into many European languages, keeping the link between left-sidedness and inauspiciousness. The French word gauche means both left and physically awkward. In English, we talk about having two left feet to designate clumsiness. The left side fares no better in Slavic or Finno-Ugrian tongues. But this is not just a European phenomenon: the Chinese word for left, zuo, can also mean “improper”. Conversely, the association of right and the right hand with notions of correctness and justice runs deep and broad through European and non-European cultures.

Tarred with this brush, left-handers have either been treated with suspicion or more violently, and with unknowable consequences, “changed” – that is, forced to use their right hand to write.

Why should this matter? I am not left-handed myself, all too right-handed I fear, but my mother is or was left-handed, until she was “changed”. She suspects that such changing might lead to quite profound cognitive and emotional disturbance. A friend tells me her father was beaten repeatedly until he switched from left to right hand, and developed a lifelong stutter.

The more we learn about handedness and the workings of the brain, the more perverse the attempt to denigrate or change natural left-handers appears to be. Left-handers, or at least people who are not strongly right-handed seem, some studies have shown, to be at a cognitive and creative and even sporting advantage. Anyone watching Rafael Nadal, Gary Sobers or Alastair Cook might have worked that out already.

According to the critic and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, in his fascinating book The Master and his Emissary, citing research by Marian Annett: “There are unexpectedly large numbers of left-handers among artists, athletes and ‘skilled performers of many kinds’.” Annett herself goes on to say that it is “not that there is a predominance of left-handers in talented groups, but rather that there is a shortfall in such groups of people who are strongly right-handed”.

And for McGilchrist, the implications of this apparently random quirk could hardly be more momentous. The Master and his Emissary tells a story of the human condition, and human history, based on the “power struggle” between the two hemispheres of our brains – the increasing, and, he argues, disastrous dominance of the left brain, the main seat of language and representation, over the more immediately perceiving right brain, on which it is in fact dependent.

McGilchrist’s thesis is bold and to some extent, given our limited knowledge of the immense complexities of the brain, speculative. But he is a subtle and clever thinker, and unusually qualified to range with such authority over so many different domains of knowledge.

In case you are scratching your head, or racking your brain, about what all this has to do with left-handedness, it is worth recalling one of things which has been known with certainty about the brain since the early days of neuroscience: that motor and other functions on the left side of the body are controlled by the right side of the brain and vice versa. This means that some, not all, left-handers, together with people who suffer from dyslexia and schizophrenia, might be less “likely to show ‘left-hemisphere encapsulation’”. Just possibly, left-handed people, or some of them, might be less locked in to the increasingly artificial world-view delivered by the left brain and more in touch with the more intuitive right brain and its way of perceiving the world.

If that is so, we should be rejoicing at the recent resurgence of left-handers in politics; you might expect Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein to have been southpaws but not Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and David Cameron. But perhaps the real skill or genius in politics lies not so much in being left-handed as in being to see things from both sides, or as many sides as possible, that is being able to bridge the hemispheric and also the ideological divide.

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The Washington Post: Tears may send a sexual message in addtition to an emotional one, study fnds

Tears may send a sexual message in addition to an emotional one, study finds

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 7, 2011; 12:00 AM

 

It's widely held that a woman's tears will turn a man to mush. And many think that sympathetic response is a sign of sensitivity, a psychological shift away from baser male impulses.

But new research suggests that much of the response may be involuntary and that men are unable to help themselves. The smell of a woman's tears, the study found, is associated with a dip in testosterone, the principal male hormone, and a general decline in sexual arousal.

"We've identified that there is a chemosignal in human tears," said Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science near Tel Aviv. Sobel headed the study, which involved exposing men to tears collected in vials. It was published online Thursday by the journal Science.

Historically, tears have been of more interest to poets than scientists.

"Emotional tears" are considered by many biologists to be uniquely human. They're known to have a different chemical composition than tears shed when the eye is simply irritated. The few studies of tears' psychological effects suggest they have a help-soliciting function.

Whether the quenching of ardor is a big part of their evolutionary function or a side effect of a more complicated care-giving response isn't known. But it now seems clear they contain substances that work unconsciously on others.

For practical reasons, Sobel and his colleagues have studied only women's tears. But they suspect that men's tears, and possibly children's, also contain chemical signals and are eager to find out what messages they may convey.

"This experiment opened gazillions of questions. It opened way more questions than it answered," Sobel said.

The new study places human tears in a family of fluids that includes urine and anogenital gland secretions.

Those fluids contain behavior-altering compounds, known as pheromones. Research in rodents has shown that liquids secreted from glands near the eye have a variety of social effects. In mole rats, they reduce aggressiveness in head-to-head underground confrontations. In mice, they stimulate aggression between males but promote mating behavior between males and females.

"What we have found is that human emotional crying may not be so unique after all," Sobel said. "It is a reflection of something common to many if not all mammals, which is chemosignaling through lacrimal secretions."

The study, which entailed collecting tears and exposing people to them in a laboratory, was greeted positively by the small circle of researchers who study crying.

"It's the first report. I think it's quite interesting," said Robert R. Provine, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, who has studied tears as visual cues.

"The results indeed are fascinating," said Ad Vingerhoets of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who has studied social reactions to crying. However, he said, he suspects that tears' pheromones may have a bigger effect on another hormone, oxytocin, which is associated with social bonding, than on testosterone. He said he hopes further research will head in that direction.

In the study published Thursday, Sobel and his colleagues collected tears from women who cried after watching a sad scene in a movie. The researchers had previously trickled a saline solution - salty water - down the women's cheeks and collected it as a "control" substance. Men were exposed to the two liquids, sniffing them in vials and, for some of the experiments, having a small pad soaked with the liquid taped between the nostrils and upper lip.

The men were unable to distinguish the two liquids; both were odorless. However, the men's physiological states, and to some extent their thoughts, changed depending on whether the liquid was tears or saline.

When presented with emotionally ambiguous pictures of women's faces, 17 of 24 men in the experiment found the faces to be less sexually attractive after sniffing tears than after sniffing saline. After the men sniffed tears while watching a somewhat sad movie not of their choosing, they reported an overall reduction in sexual arousal.

These subjective changes were small; changes in physiological measurements were larger.

The concentration of testosterone in the men's saliva (which reflects the amount circulating in the bloodstream) fell 13 percent after they sniffed tears but stayed the same after sniffing saline. Their physiological state, as measured by skin temperature, heart rate and respiration, also fell after exposure to tears. Functional MRI imaging of their brains similarly showed less activity in areas associated with sexual arousal after smelling tears.

Taken together, the results "jointly suggest that women's emotional tears contain a chemosignal that reduces sexual arousal in men," the researchers concluded. "We have . . . identified an emotionally relevant function for tears."

In an interview, Sobel said that he doesn't think chemical signaling is unique to women's tears. His research used them because they were easier to obtain than men's.

To conduct the study, the research team posted an ad on the Weizmann Institute campus seeking volunteers who could cry easily. About 60 women and one man responded. They were screened to see how easily they cried and to determine the volume of tears they produced.

"We reached this core group of six women criers who could come back to the lab every other day and cry a full" milliliter, Sobel said.

Each woman chose a movie to elicit crying, watching it in private and collecting tears. By far the most successful tear-inducer was the death scene in "The Champ," a 1979 film starring Jon Voight about an over-the-hill boxer making a comeback to provide a better future for his son, whom he is raising on his own.

"That scene is a winner," Sobel said. "Emotion labs all over the world use it to establish sad mood."

Other reliable tear-jerkers were "Life Is Beautiful," "Terms of Endearment," "When a Man Loves a Woman" and an Israeli movie, "Broken Wings."

The researchers now have two male criers and are recruiting more to study the effects of their tears on women and on other men.

NY Times: This Year, Change Your Mind

December 31, 2010

This Year, Change Your Mind

By OLIVER SACKS

NEW Year’s resolutions often have to do with eating more healthfully, going to the gym more, giving up sweets, losing weight — all admirable goals aimed at improving one’s physical health. Most people, though, do not realize that they can strengthen their brains in a similar way.

While some areas of the brain are hard-wired from birth or early childhood, other areas — especially in the cerebral cortex, which is central to higher cognitive powers like language and thought, as well as sensory and motor functions — can be, to a remarkable extent, rewired as we grow older. In fact, the brain has an astonishing ability to rebound from damage — even from something as devastating as the loss of sight or hearing. As a physician who treats patients with neurological conditions, I see this happen all the time.

For example, one patient of mine who had been deafened by scarlet fever at the age of 9, was so adept at lip-reading that it was easy to forget she was deaf. Once, without thinking, I turned away from her as I was speaking. “I can no longer hear you,” she said sharply.

“You mean you can no longer see me,” I said.

“You may call it seeing,” she answered, “but I experience it as hearing.”

Lip-reading, seeing mouth movements, was immediately transformed for this patient into “hearing” the sounds of speech in her mind. Her brain was converting one mode of sensation into another.

In a similar way, blind people often find ways of “seeing.” Some areas of the brain, if not stimulated, will atrophy and die. (“Use it or lose it,” neurologists often say.) But the visual areas of the brain, even in someone born blind, do not entirely disappear; instead, they are redeployed for other senses. We have all heard of blind people with unusually acute hearing, but other senses may be heightened, too.

For example, Geerat Vermeij, a biologist at the University of California-Davis who has been blind since the age of 3, has identified many new species of mollusks based on tiny variations in the contours of their shells. He uses a sort of spatial or tactile giftedness that is beyond what any sighted person is likely to have.

The writer Ved Mehta, also blind since early childhood, navigates in large part by using “facial vision” — the ability to sense objects by the way they reflect sounds, or subtly shift the air currents that reach his face. Ben Underwood, a remarkable boy who lost his sight at 3 and died at 16 in 2009, developed an effective, dolphin-like strategy of emitting regular clicks with his mouth and reading the resulting echoes from nearby objects. He was so skilled at this that he could ride a bike and play sports and even video games.

People like Ben Underwood and Ved Mehta, who had some early visual experience but then lost their sight, seem to instantly convert the information they receive from touch or sound into a visual image — “seeing” the dots, for instance, as they read Braille with a finger. Researchers using functional brain imagery have confirmed that in such situations the blind person activates not only the parts of the cortex devoted to touch, but parts of the visual cortex as well.

One does not have to be blind or deaf to tap into the brain’s mysterious and extraordinary power to learn, adapt and grow. I have seen hundreds of patients with various deficits — strokes, Parkinson’s and even dementia — learn to do things in new ways, whether consciously or unconsciously, to work around those deficits.

That the brain is capable of such radical adaptation raises deep questions. To what extent are we shaped by, and to what degree do we shape, our own brains? And can the brain’s ability to change be harnessed to give us greater cognitive powers? The experiences of many people suggest that it can.

One patient I knew became totally paralyzed overnight from a spinal cord infection. At first she fell into deep despair, because she couldn’t enjoy even little pleasures, like the daily crossword she had loved.

After a few weeks, though, she asked for the newspaper, so that at least she could look at the puzzle, get its configuration, run her eyes along the clues. When she did this, something extraordinary happened. As she looked at the clues, the answers seemed to write themselves in their spaces. Her visual memory strengthened over the next few weeks, until she found that she was able to hold the entire crossword and its clues in her mind after a single, intense inspection — and then solve it mentally. She had had no idea, she later told me, that such powers were available to her.

This growth can even happen within a matter of days. Researchers at Harvard found, for example, that blindfolding sighted adults for as few as five days could produce a shift in the way their brains functioned: their subjects became markedly better at complex tactile tasks like learning Braille.

Neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to create new pathways — is a crucial part of recovery for anyone who loses a sense or a cognitive or motor ability. But it can also be part of everyday life for all of us. While it is often true that learning is easier in childhood, neuroscientists now know that the brain does not stop growing, even in our later years. Every time we practice an old skill or learn a new one, existing neural connections are strengthened and, over time, neurons create more connections to other neurons. Even new nerve cells can be generated.

I have had many reports from ordinary people who take up a new sport or a musical instrument in their 50s or 60s, and not only become quite proficient, but derive great joy from doing so. Eliza Bussey, a journalist in her mid-50s who now studies harp at the Peabody conservatory in Baltimore, could not read a note of music a few years ago. In a letter to me, she wrote about what it was like learning to play Handel’s “Passacaille”: “I have felt, for example, my brain and fingers trying to connect, to form new synapses. ... I know that my brain has dramatically changed.” Ms. Bussey is no doubt right: her brain has changed.

Music is an especially powerful shaping force, for listening to and especially playing it engages many different areas of the brain, all of which must work in tandem: from reading musical notation and coordinating fine muscle movements in the hands, to evaluating and expressing rhythm and pitch, to associating music with memories and emotion.

Whether it is by learning a new language, traveling to a new place, developing a passion for beekeeping or simply thinking about an old problem in a new way, all of us can find ways to stimulate our brains to grow, in the coming year and those to follow. Just as physical activity is essential to maintaining a healthy body, challenging one’s brain, keeping it active, engaged, flexible and playful, is not only fun. It is essential to cognitive fitness.

Oliver Sacks is the author of “The Mind’s Eye.”

Economist: Age and happiness

Age and happiness

Dec 16th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world’s careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.

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These ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008 France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced that the British government would start collecting figures on well-being.

There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America’s General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of question. One concerns people’s assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious? The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.

Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?

Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.

Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists’ regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people’s mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.

Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.

Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people’s lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable uplift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness—though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones—though just how much is a source of argument (see article).

The view from winter

Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both lots point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: “Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old”. They pointed out that Mr Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humour.

Mr Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The “seven ages of man”—the dominant image of the life-course in the 16th and 17th centuries—was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline towards the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. “A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s,” says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. “We ran a conference about it, but nobody came.”

People are least happy in their 40s and early 50s. They reach a nadir at a global average of 46

Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant—about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Mr Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries—Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35—but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46.

The U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls thereafter.

Turn the question upside down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labour Force Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an arc, peaking at 46.

Happier, no matter what

There is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes during the life-course, but of differences between cohorts. A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the second world war and was thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend would not show up consistently in 40 years’ worth of data.

Another possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon. Perhaps the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?

The answer, it turns out, is no: control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.

People, studies show, behave differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and younger people were similarly saddened, but older people less angry and less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that “you can’t please all the people all the time.”

There are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of “the uniquely human ability to recognise our own mortality and monitor our own time horizons”. Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues, they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things that matter now—such as feelings—and less on long-term goals. “When young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters most.” For instance, she says, “young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties.”

Death of ambition, birth of acceptance

There are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete. “Being an old maid”, says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was “like death by drowning—a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling.” Perhaps acceptance of ageing itself is a source of relief. “How pleasant is the day”, observed William James, an American philosopher, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”

Whatever the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional. Happiness doesn’t just make people happy—it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.

Happier people are more productive, too. Mr Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12% better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists’ experiment rather than the psychologists’ or psychiatrists’. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills—a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an ageing workforce.

The ageing of the rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter. The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes—a prospect which should be especially encouraging to Economist readers (average age 47).

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Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010. All rights reserved.

ST: Time for science lessons, take out your phones

Singapore

Home > Singapore > Story

Nov 22, 2010

Time for science lessons, take out your phones

Nan Chiau Primary's innovative use of IT in teaching wins it top honour from Microsoft

By Amelia Tan

Nan Chiau Primary pupils (clockwise from bottom left) Abel Tsen, Janelle Lee, Yuki Chua, Isabel Ow and Ng Tze Ming, all 10, using their cellphones during a science lesson. -- ST PHOTO: NEO XIAOBIN

 

WHEN Nan Chiau Primary teachers start their science lessons, they ask their pupils to take out not their textbooks, but their mobile phones.

Using their handsets' styluses, the pupils use the software uploaded on their phones to read up on the concepts, then go on to do exercises. If in doubt, they surf the Internet for more information.

Teachers test the pupils' understanding by getting them to sketch diagrams of what they have learnt. Their work is uploaded to a server for teachers to review.

The school, in partnership with National Institute of Education (NIE) researchers, has introduced this new way of learning to all Primary 3 classes and two Primary 4 classes. It has bought about 300 mobile phones, so the pupils can each have one to take home.

Although there are other schools that also use mobile phones in classes, they do so on a smaller scale, for example, taking photographs or videos during class trips.

Nan Chiau Primary's innovative use of technology has been recognised: Software giant Microsoft last Thursday named it a 'Mentor School' - the highest honour it gives to schools that develop information technology programmes that can serve as models for schools globally.

Mentor Schools can get access to Microsoft experts who will help them develop new programmes. The schools also get to test out new Microsoft technology, and share their expertise with other schools. There are 25 other Mentor Schools around the world.

Besides Nan Chiau Primary, Singapore has two other Mentor Schools - Ngee Ann Secondary and Crescent Girls' School. The only country with more Mentor Schools is Australia, which has five.

Crescent Girls' has been a Mentor School since 2007, while Ngee Ann Secondary was upgraded from being a Pathfinder School this year.

All Crescent Girls' students have tablet PCs, which allow them to blog, upload videos and chat using instant messaging with their teachers and classmates.

Ngee Ann Secondary has developed 'virtual buddies' on Windows Live Messenger that answer questions on physics and texts from Shakespeare.

Schools can apply to be a Mentor School or Pathfinder School - the second highest level of recognition - by submitting a written entry and video about how they use technology in teaching and learning. A panel of judges comprising Microsoft staff and experts makes the final call.

The awards are part of Microsoft's Partners in Learning - a US$500 million (S$650 million) initiative set up in 2003 to improve education through access to technology and training.

Nan Chiau Primary applied to be a Pathfinder School, but its work impressed Microsoft so much that it upgraded the school.

Microsoft Singapore managing director Jessica Tan said the judges felt the school had 'a robust and well-thought vision and plan' for its IT projects.

Nan Chiau Primary has resident researchers from NIE throughout the year. They work with teachers to design and evaluate IT projects for teaching and learning.

The school is working with the NIE, Singapore Centre for Chinese Language and Microsoft on a new software, MyCloud, to teach Chinese. The software can read out uploaded text and has an e-dictionary to help with difficult words.

Principal Tan Chun Ming said: 'IT equipment costs a lot of money. We cannot embark on a project without proper planning and after a few months say, 'Hey, this is not working out' and stop it. So all our IT initiatives begin with research and our teachers work with the researchers to evaluate if the projects are successful.'

Researchers have tracked the results of a Primary 4 class that has been using mobile phones for lessons for two years.

The pupils who used to get Cs and Bs in science before using the gadgets now get Bs and As. Pupils say they like using mobile phones in class because it is fun.

Janelle Lee, 10, who got an A at the recent year-end exams, said: 'Science lessons used to be boring. Now with the mobile phones, I can watch videos, surf the Internet and draw pictures.'

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WSJ: How Handwriting Trains the Brain

BUSINESS
OCTOBER 5, 2010

How Handwriting Trains the Brain

Forming Letters Is Key to Learning, Memory, Ideas 

By GWENDOLYN BOUNDS

Ask preschooler Zane Pike to write his name or the alphabet, then watch this 4-year-old's stubborn side kick in. He spurns practice at school and tosses aside workbooks at home. But Angie Pike, Zane's mom, persists, believing that handwriting is a building block to learning.

Wendy Bounds discusses the fading art of handwriting, pointing out that new research shows it can benefit children's motor skills and their ability to compose ideas and achieve goals throughout life.

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• Gwendolyn Bounds reports on what your handwriting says about your brain and everything else.

 

She's right. Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.

It's not just children who benefit. Adults studying new symbols, such as Chinese characters, might enhance recognition by writing the characters by hand, researchers say. Some physicians say handwriting could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep their minds sharp as they age.

Studies suggest there's real value in learning and maintaining this ancient skill, even as we increasingly communicate electronically via keyboards big and small. Indeed, technology often gets blamed for handwriting's demise. But in an interesting twist, new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate the practice.

Four-year-old Zane Pike used to toss aside his handwriting books. Now, the Cabot, Ark., preschooler is learning to write his letters using a smartphone application.

Most schools still include conventional handwriting instruction in their primary-grade curriculum, but today that amounts to just over an hour a week, according to Zaner-Bloser Inc., one of the nation's largest handwriting-curriculum publishers. Even at institutions that make it a strong priority, such as the private Brearley School in New York City, "some parents say, 'I can't believe you are wasting a minute on this,'" says Linda Boldt, the school's head of learning skills.

Recent research illustrates how writing by hand engages the brain in learning. During one study at Indiana University published this year, researchers invited children to man a "spaceship," actually an MRI machine using a specialized scan called "functional" MRI that spots neural activity in the brain. The kids were shown letters before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and "adult-like" than in those who had simply looked at letters.

"It seems there is something really important about manually manipulating and drawing out two-dimensional things we see all the time," says Karin Harman James, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University who led the study.

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• The Juggle: In Digital Age, Does Handwriting Still Matter?

 

Adults may benefit similarly when learning a new graphically different language, such as Mandarin, or symbol systems for mathematics, music and chemistry, Dr. James says. For instance, in a 2008 study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, adults were asked to distinguish between new characters and a mirror image of them after producing the characters using pen-and-paper writing and a computer keyboard. The result: For those writing by hand, there was stronger and longer-lasting recognition of the characters' proper orientation, suggesting that the specific movements memorized when learning how to write aided the visual identification of graphic shapes.

Other research highlights the hand's unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas. Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says handwriting differs from typing because it requires executing sequential strokes to form a letter, whereas keyboarding involves selecting a whole letter by touching a key.

She says pictures of the brain have illustrated that sequential finger movements activated massive regions involved in thinking, language and working memory—the system for temporarily storing and managing information.

And one recent study of hers demonstrated that in grades two, four and six, children wrote more words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with a keyboard.

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AJ Mast for the Wall Street Journal

For research at Indiana University, children undergo specialized MRI brain scans that spot neurological activity.

Even in the digital age, people remain enthralled by handwriting for myriad reasons—the intimacy implied by a loved one's script, or what the slant and shape of letters might reveal about personality. During actress Lindsay Lohan's probation violation court appearance this summer, a swarm of handwriting experts proffered analysis of her blocky courtroom scribbling. "Projecting a false image" and "crossing boundaries," concluded two on celebrity news and entertainment site hollywoodlife.com. Beyond identifying personality traits through handwriting, called graphology, some doctors treating neurological disorders say handwriting can be an early diagnostic tool.

"Some patients bring in journals from the years, and you can see dramatic change from when they were 55 and doing fine and now at 70," says P. Murali Doraiswamy, a neuroscientist at Duke University. "As more people lose writing skills and migrate to the computer, retraining people in handwriting skills could be a useful cognitive exercise."

In high schools, where laptops are increasingly used, handwriting still matters. In the essay section of SAT college-entrance exams, scorers unable to read a student's writing can assign that portion an "illegible" score of 0.

 

Even legible handwriting that's messy can have its own ramifications, says Steve Graham, professor of education at Vanderbilt University. He cites several studies indicating that good handwriting can take a generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile, while bad penmanship could tank it to the 16th. "There is a reader effect that is insidious," Dr. Graham says. "People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting."

Handwriting-curriculum creators say they're seeing renewed interest among parents looking to hone older children's skills—or even their own penmanship. Nan Barchowsky, who developed the Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting method to ease transition from print-script to joined cursive letters, says she's sold more than 1,500 copies of "Fix It … Write" in the past year.

Some high-tech allies also are giving the practice an unexpected boost through hand-held gadgets like smartphones and tablets. Dan Feather, a graphic designer and computer consultant in Nashville, Tenn., says he's "never adapted well to the keypads on little devices." Instead, he uses a $3.99 application called "WritePad" on his iPhone. It accepts handwriting input with a finger or stylus, then converts it to text for email, documents or Twitter updates.

And apps are helping Zane Pike—the 4-year-old who refused to practice his letters. The Cabot, Ark., boy won't put down his mom's iPhone, where she's downloaded a $1.99 app called "abc PocketPhonics." The program instructs Zane to draw letters with his finger or a stylus; correct movements earn him cheering pencils.

In children who had practiced writing by hand, the scans showed heightened brain activity in a key area, circled on the image at right, indicating learning took place.

"He thinks it's a game," says Angie Pike.

Similarly, kindergartners at Harford Day School in Bel Air, Md., are taught to write on paper but recently also began tracing letter shapes on the screen of an iPad using a handwriting app.

"Children will be using technology unlike I did, and it's important for teachers to be familiar with it," says Kay Crocker, the school's lead kindergarten teacher. Regardless of the input method, she says, "You still need to be able to write, and someone needs to be able to read it."

Write to Gwendolyn Bounds at [email protected]

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: I'm Very, Very, Very Sorry... Really?

• BONDS
• OCTOBER 18, 2010

I'm Very, Very, Very Sorry ... Really?

We Apologize More to Strangers Than Family, and Why Women Ask for Forgiveness More Than Men

• By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

I'd like to tell the man whose cab I stole in the rain last week that I'm very sorry. But to my mom, whose driving I criticized recently? Not so much.

Elizabeth Bernstein discusses the various ways men, women, strangers and family members apologize.

I'm in good company on this. According to new research from Canadian psychologists, people apologize about four times a week. But, on average, they offer up these apologies much more often to strangers (22% of the time) than to romantic partners (11%) or family members (7%). The only folks we apologize to more? Friends (46%).

Why is it so hard to say "I'm sorry" to someone we love? Ask Phil Peachey. He knew he was in trouble when he woke up one morning to find his wife banging utensils around the kitchen. What was wrong? "Nothing," she said. He asked her again. She gave him the cold shoulder. 

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• Listen: There's a clear "apology gap" between men and women. Elizabeth Bernstein explains why.

Then he came up with the answer: Pinot Grigio—a lot of it—which he'd drunk the night before. Had he really told her he didn't trust her sense of direction and called her "stupid"?

Uh-oh. Mr. Peachey, a 47-year-old real-estate broker in Orlando, Fla., quickly offered his best apology: "Is there anyone who would like a new pair of shoes?"

"Nothing says 'I'm sorry' like Christian Dior," he says.

Odds are your mother taught you that it's important to apologize if you've done something wrong—and to graciously accept an apology when one is offered. The act of making amends is crucial to maintaining harmony in both our personal relationships and the world at large.

Apologies are so important that many hospitals train their staffs to say they are sorry to patients and their families following a medical mistake because they've found it deters malpractice lawsuits. Economists have shown that companies offering a mea culpa to disgruntled customers fare better than ones offering financial compensation.

But apologies can be complicated. They're not always forthcoming, or even sincere. Making matters worse, there's a gender "apology gap": Men and women have different approaches and different expectations when it comes to acts of contrition.

Conventional wisdom says women apologize too much, and men don't apologize often enough. Women are good at nurturing relationships, the thinking goes, while men are too egotistical to say they're sorry or have a different take on social graces. Yet there's no proof that women are better than men at apologizing—they just do it more often, sometimes for inconsequential offenses.

Two small studies at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, published last month by the journal Psychological Science, indicate men are just as willing as women to apologize if they think they've done something wrong. Men just have a different idea of what defines "something wrong."

In the first study, 66 men and women kept daily diaries and recorded each time they committed—or were on the receiving end—of an offense. They also noted whether an apology was issued. The outcome: Women were offended more often, and they offered more apologies for their own behavior. Yet men were just as likely as women to apologize if they believed they'd done something wrong.

Saying 'I'm Sorry'

A 'comprehensive' apology is more likely to win forgiveness, researchers say. There are eight elements:

• Remorse
• Acceptance of responsibility
• Admission of wrongdoing
• Acknowledgment of harm
• Promise to behave better
• Request for forgiveness
• Offer of repair
• Explanation

Source: University of Waterloo

In the second study, 120 subjects imagined committing offenses, from being rude to a friend to inconveniencing someone they live with. The men said they would apologize less frequently. The researchers concluded the men had a higher threshold for what they found offensive. "We don't think that women are too sensitive or that men are insensitive," says Karina Schumann, one of the study's authors. "We just know that women are more sensitive."

Sandra Elmoznino, 27, a New York City teacher, says she apologizes all the time, whether for calling a friend too early in the morning or showing up two minutes late. "I want to be in everyone's good graces," she says. "It's an anxiety thing."

Recently, though, Ms. Elmoznino has begun to feel that the constant apologizing has become a handicap. Her friends tease her about it. Men she has dated find it annoying. Her twin brother told her it makes her look unsure of herself. As a result, she's now making a conscious effort to apologize only when she's really done something wrong. "I don't want to be like the boy who cried wolf," she says.

Funny, the men I spoke with agreed that women are too sensitive, though most of them were reluctant to talk on the record. I promised anonymity, though, and they piped up:

"Apologize? What language is that?"

"Women care too much."

"One of the first requirements of getting into relationships with women is to rehearse saying 'I'm sorry' as many times as possible."

"If a husband speaks in the forest and no one hears him, is he still wrong?"

I pressed on, and asked men to explain exactly why they apologize—when they do:

"To move on."

"To end the drama." (Hmm. This from a man who's apologized recently to me.)

"To be honest, men never—well, almost never—have any idea what we are apologizing for," says Mark Stevens, 63, chief executive of MSCO, a Rye Brook, N.Y., marketing consulting firm.

Mr. Stevens says during his 35-year marriage he has sincerely apologized to his wife, Carol, just five times—but has said he's sorry an additional 3,500 times. He calls these mea culpas "fraudulent apologies." They go something like this: "I don't know why you're unhappy, but I'm sorry."

"Ninety percent of apologies are to keep the peace," he adds. "How can you have a sincere apology if you don't know what you've done?"

He still remembers when, years ago, he and his wife agreed to buy a vacation home in Vermont and consider it their anniversary gift to each other. On the night of the anniversary, though, he found his wife slamming silverware into a drawer. (Sound familiar?) His transgression: He hadn't bought her a gift.

More

• The Juggle: Life Means Sometimes Having to Say 'I'm Sorry'

"Despite the agreement we both made, I apologized because I realized she was hurting and I had overlooked something," Mr Stevens says. ("He has no clue," says Ms. Stevens, 57. "Sometimes I'll just let it go.")

Mr. Peachey, of the Pinot Grigio episode, says he also was trying to do his best. To show remorse, he took his wife to the mall and bought her the shoes—and an iPad. "That was a $1,000 insult," he calculated.

Yet his wife, Rochelle, the 46-year-old director of an Internet dating site, says all she really wanted was the apology: "I told him, had he just put his arms around me and said he was so sorry he screwed up and that he loved me, that would have been enough."

Need help with your own apologies? Here are some tips:

Know what you did wrong. If you're not sure, ask.

Show real remorse. Don't say: "I'm sorry you are hurt," which suggests the person is too sensitive. Say: "I am sorry I hurt you."

Don't be defensive. Don't use the word "but," as in, "I am sorry, but…"

Offer to make changes. It helps to say, sincerely, that you will try not to make the same offense again.

Don't throw in the kitchen sink. If you're the one who wants the apology, stick to the matter at hand. Don't bring up past slights.

Try humor. A little self-deprecation can go a long way.

Don't delay. Just do it. An imperfect apology is better than none at all.

—Write to Elizabeth Bernstein at [email protected] and follow her column at www.Facebook.com/EBernsteinWSJ.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: Building a More Resilient Brain

IN THE LAB

OCTOBER 12, 2010

Building a More Resilient Brain

• By SHIRLEY S. WANG

A lifetime of speaking two or more languages appears to pay off in old age, with recent research showing the symptoms of dementia can be delayed by an average of four years in bilingual people.

Multilingualism doesn't delay the onset of dementia—the brains of people who speak multiple languages still show physical signs of deterioration—but the process of speaking two or more languages appears to enable people to develop skills to better cope with the early symptoms of memory-robbing diseases, including Alzheimer's.

Scientists for years studied children and found that fluently speaking more than one language takes a lot of mental work. Compared with people who speak only one language, bilingual children and young adults have slightly smaller vocabularies and are slower performing certain verbal tasks, such as naming lists of animals or fruits.

But over time, regularly speaking more than one language appears to strengthen skills that boost the brain's so-called cognitive reserve, a capacity to work even when stressed or damaged. This build-up of cognitive reserve appears to help bilingual people as they age.

"Speaking two languages isn't going to do anything to dodge the bullet" of getting Alzheimer's disease or dementia, says Ellen Bialystok, a bilingualism researcher at York University in Toronto. But greater cognitive reserve means the "same as the reserve tank in a car: Once the brain runs out of fuel, it can go a little farther," she says.

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Specifically, the advantages of bilingualism are thought to be related to a brain function known as inhibitory or cognitive control: the ability to stop paying attention to one thing and focus on something else, says Dr. Bialystok. Fluent speakers of more than one language have to use this skill continually to silence one language in their minds while communicating in another.

The idea of building up cognitive reserve has led to the popular advice that doing crossword puzzles or brain teasers, anything to remain mentally active, helps stave off dementia symptoms. A panel convened by the National Institutes of Health in July cautioned, however, that there isn't enough evidence to conclude that such activities prevent Alzheimer's disease or related dementias.

Researchers don't know whether it is beneficial for people to learn more than one language if one doesn't speak them fluently or nearly every day. The age at which the second language needs to be acquired to yield the protective effect is also unknown.

 

 

Tamar Gollan, a researcher on bilingualism at the University of California San Diego and at the university's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, says people can, of course, learn a new language if they want to, regardless of age. "But there's no magic point," Dr. Gollan cautions.

Dr. Bialystok began her decades-long research by studying how children learn a second language.

In 2004, she and her colleague Fergus Craik shifted to conduct three studies looking at the cognitive effects in some 150 monolingual and bilingual people between 30 and 80 years old. They found that in both middle and old age, the bilingual subjects were better able to block out distracting information than the single-language speakers in a series of computerized tests. The advantage was even more pronounced in the older subjects.

Dr. Bialystok says other research also shows better performance from bilingual people on tests requiring cognitive control, such as when they are instructed to determine whether a sentence is grammatically correct, even if the content doesn't make sense. For example, in distinguishing, "apples grow on trees" from "apple trees on grow" and "apples grow on noses," the third sentence requires people to focus on the structure and suppress paying attention to the meaning of the words.

The findings from the 2004 study led Dr. Bialystok to wonder whether these benefits might help older people compensate for age-related losses in learning.

She and her colleagues examined the medical records of 228 memory-clinic patients who had been diagnosed with different kinds of dementia, two-thirds with Alzheimer's disease. The results, published in the journal Neuropsychologia in 2007, suggested that bilingual patients exhibit problematic memory problems later than those who only spoke one language.

Bilingual patients were, on average, four years older than single-language speakers when their families first noticed memory problems, or when the patient first came to the clinic seeking treatment.

Moreover, bilingual patients' memories were no worse than those of single-language speakers by the time they arrived at the clinic, and there was no difference in the length of time between the detection of symptoms and when the patients were first checked in.

In a subsequent study, Dr. Bialystok and her colleagues looked at brain images of monolingual and bilingual Alzheimer's patients at the same age and stage of disease. They found that the brains of the bilingual people appeared to be in worse physical condition. This suggests that bilingualism doesn't delay the disease process itself, but rather helps bilingual individuals better handle memory deficits, Dr. Bialystok says.

Their group has confirmed the finding in a further study that will be published later this year, says Dr. Craik, a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto.

Other research, however, complicates the picture of the potential benefits of multilingualism. A recent review of the medical records of some 600 people at a Montreal memory clinic showed a protective benefit for people who were fluent in more than two languages and for bilingual people who learned French before they learned English.

English-only speakers, however, fared just as well as multilingual people who learned English first. This anomaly might be explained by the English-speakers' particular genetics, nutrition, stress levels and environmental exposure, says Howard Chertkow, a cognitive neurologist at Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and a professor at McGill University, one of the authors on the study.

Researchers in Europe, such as Wouter Duyck, a professor at the University of Ghent in Belgium, are also working on similar studies to replicate the effect in other bilingual populations.

Write to Shirley S. Wang at [email protected]

 

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: Sound advice

Sound advice

By Mike Southon

Published: October 1 2010 17:50 | Last updated: October 1 2010 17:50

Having the right image is vital for success in business. Significant effort and expense is devoted to marketing materials and websites – and we might even check ourselves in the mirror before a meeting. Rather less thought, however, is given to how our businesses sound.

But many customers are auditory, more interested in sounds than pictures. The clues are in the way they speak; they like the sound of what they are being told and say they would like to hear more.
A wise salesperson should continue talking, rather than showing pictures out of a brochure.

Julian Treasure understands the effect of sound in commercial environments. He began his career in advertising and then moved into contract publishing, producing in-house magazines for high-technology customers. At the same time, though, he pursued a parallel career as a musician, playing on two BBC [John] Peel Sessions and even making the final of 1980s talent show New Faces. He then brought his interests together to form the Sound Agency, a consultancy that helps its clients achieve better results by optimising the sound they make in every aspect of their business.

This includes making the sound in their branding and marketing communications congruent with their visuals, as well as designing and installing appropriate soundscapes for shops, offices and corporate reception spaces.

Treasure explains his techniques – and the benefits of having the right sound in the business environment – in his book Sound Business (Management Books). We are constantly suppressing unwanted noise such as traffic, he writes, so our relationship with sound is largely unconscious. Some effects are physiological, such as the sound of an alarm clock, which increases the secretion of the hormone cortisol, normally associated with stress. Other sounds have a positive effect, such the sound of the sea, which has a similar tempo to the breathing patterns during sleep, and is therefore relaxing. Listening to several people speaking at once has a negative effect: Treasure explains that people working in open-plan offices are 66 per cent less effective in their jobs than those working in a peaceful environment. His advice for those who have to work in noisy environments is to use headphones and to play the sound of birdsong.

Most important in a business context are the behavioural effects of sound. Treasure shows that retail environments can drive away up to 28 per cent of business by playing the wrong music. The songs that the managers and staff enjoy may not be the same as those that encourage the customers to linger, browse and buy.

The unconscious relationship we have with sound was illustrated perfectly by the members’ club where Treasure and
I met. I had been there many times without noticing the unfortunate acoustics of the room, which were not helped by regular interruptions from the cappuccino machine. The hand dryer in the men’s bathroom was only a few decibels short of an aircraft taking off, and there was a noticeable change in mood when the venue put on some background music late in the afternoon. The volume of conversation in the room suddenly increased and several people left.

All of us have songs that take us back to special times in our lives. The key is ensuring they are not also the sound of customers heading for the door.

www.thesoundagency.com

[email protected]
Follow Mike on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mike
southon
More columns at www.ft.com/mikesouthon

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.