Video: monkey fairness
Posted: September 15, 2011 Filed under: Animals, Research, Videos Leave a comment »A pair of capuchin monkeys show very compelling signs of cooperation and a sense of fairness, by working together to solve a problem using tools, and then sharing the reward.
They also show signs of understanding fairness: when unequal rewards are given to one monkey and not another, the monkey receiving the lesser treat would rather go hungry than accept anything less than an equal reward.
From the BBC documentary “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle”, narrated by the ever brilliant Sir David Attenborough.
For the full 29 minute documentary, “Capuchins: The Monkey Puzzle,” click here.
Why people who speak Chinese are better at math
Posted: August 22, 2011 Filed under: Education, Research Leave a comment »
By Malcolm Gladwell
“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
An excerpt from Chapter Eight of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Outliers.
Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.
If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.
That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene’s book “The Number Sense,” and as Dehaene explains:
Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is ‘si’ and 7 ‘qi’) Their English equivalents—”four,” “seven”—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.
It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one would think that we would also say one-teen, two-teen, and three-teen. But we don’t. We make up a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty, and sixty, which sound like what they are. But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound what they are but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second: twenty-one, twenty-two. For the teens, though, we do it the other way around. We put the decade second and the unit number first: fourteen, seventeen, eighteen. The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten one. Twelve is ten two. Twenty-four is two ten four, and so on.
That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children, at that age, can only count to fifteen, and don’t reach forty until they’re five: by the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.
The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can perform basic functions—like addition—far more easily. Ask an English seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty two, in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is nine and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens nine.
“The Asian system is transparent,” says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist, who has done much of the research on Asian-Western differences. “I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different. Instead of being a rote learning thing, there’s a pattern I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. There is an expectation that it’s sensible. For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, ‘out of five parts, take three.’ That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It’s differentiating the denominator and the numerator.”
The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among western children starts in the third and fourth grade, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn’t seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.
Asian children, by contrast, don’t face nearly that same sense of bafflement. They can hold more numbers in their head, and do calculations faster, and the way fractions are expressed in their language corresponds exactly to the way a fraction actually is—and maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle.
When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have built-in advantage. . .
I think you’re fat
Posted: August 9, 2011 Filed under: Happiness, Inspiring, Psychology, Research Leave a comment »
By A.J. Jacobs
This story is about something called Radical Honesty. It may change your life. (But honestly, we don’t really care.)
Here’s the truth about why I’m writing this article:
I want to fulfill my contract with my boss. I want to avoid getting fired. I want all the attractive women I knew in high school and college to read it. I want them to be amazed and impressed and feel a vague regret over their decision not to have sex with me, and maybe if I get divorced or become a widower, I can have sex with them someday at a reunion. I want Hollywood to buy my article and turn it into a movie, even though they kind of already made the movie ten years ago with Jim Carrey. I want to get congratulatory e-mails and job offers that I can politely decline. Or accept if they’re really good. Then get a generous counteroffer from my boss.
To be totally honest, I was sorry I mentioned this idea to my boss about three seconds after I opened my mouth. Because I knew the article would be a pain in the ass to pull off. Dammit. I should have let my colleague Tom Chiarella write it. But I didn’t want to seem lazy.
What I mentioned to my boss was this: a movement called Radical Honesty.
The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.
Yes. I know. One of the most idiotic ideas ever, right up there with Vanilla Coke and giving Phil Spector a gun permit. Deceit makes our world go round. Without lies, marriages would crumble, workers would be fired, egos would be shattered, governments would collapse.
And yet…maybe there’s something to it. Especially for me. I have a lying problem. Mine aren’t big lies. They aren’t lies like “I cannot recall that crucial meeting from two months ago, Senator.” Mine are little lies. White lies. Half-truths. The kind we all tell. But I tell dozens of them every day. “Yes, let’s definitely get together soon.” “I’d love to, but I have a touch of the stomach flu.” “No, we can’t buy a toy today — the toy store is closed.” It’s bad. Maybe a couple of weeks of truth-immersion therapy would do me good.
I e-mail Blanton to ask if I can come down to Virginia and get some pointers before embarking on my Radical Honesty experiment. He writes back: “I appreciate you for apparently having a real interest and hope you’re not just doing a cutesy little superficial dipshit job like most journalists.”
I’m already nervous. I better start off with a clean slate. I confess I lied to him in my first e-mail — that I haven’t ordered all his books on Amazon yet. I was just trying to impress upon him that I was serious about his work. He writes back: “Thanks for your honesty in attempting to guess what your manipulative and self-protective motive must have been.”
Blanton lives in a house he built himself, perched on a hill in the town of Stanley, Virginia, population 1,331. We’re sitting on white chairs in a room with enormous windows and a crackling fireplace. He’s swirling a glass of Maker’s Mark bourbon and water and telling me why it’s important to live with no lies.
“You’ll have really bad times, you’ll have really great times, but you’ll contribute to other people because you haven’t been dancing on eggshells your whole fucking life. It’s a better life.”
“Do you think it’s ever okay to lie?” I ask.
“I advocate never lying in personal relationships. But if you have Anne Frank in your attic and a Nazi knocks on the door, lie….I lie to any government official.” (Blanton’s politics are just this side of Noam Chomsky’s.) “I lie to the IRS. I always take more deductions than are justified. I lie in golf. And in poker.”
Blanton adjusts his crotch. I expected him to be a bully. Or maybe a new-age huckster with a bead necklace who sits cross-legged on the floor. He’s neither. He’s a former Texan with a big belly and a big laugh and a big voice. He’s got a bushy head of gray hair and a twang that makes his bye sound like bah. He calls himself “white trash with a Ph.D.” If you mixed DNA from Lyndon Johnson, Ken Kesey, and threw in the nonannoying parts of Dr. Phil, you might get Blanton.
He ran for Congress twice, with the novel promise that he’d be an honest politician. In 2004, he got a surprising 25 percent of the vote in his Virginia district as an independent. In 2006, the Democrats considered endorsing him but got skittish about his weeklong workshops, which involve a day of total nudity. They also weren’t crazy that he’s been married five times (currently to a Swedish flight attendant twenty-six years his junior). He ran again but withdrew when it became clear he was going to be crushed.
My interview with Blanton is unlike any other I’ve had in fifteen years as a journalist. Usually, there’s a fair amount of ass kissing and diplomacy. You approach the controversial stuff on tippy toes (the way Barbara Walters once asked Richard Gere about that terrible, terrible rumor). With Blanton, I can say anything that pops into my mind. In fact, it would be rude not to say it. I’d be insulting his life’s work. It’s my first taste of Radical Honesty, and it’s liberating, exhilarating.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/honesty0707-2
Dopamine squirts, intermittent reinforcement, and mobile apps
Posted: July 28, 2011 Filed under: Health, Psychology, Research, Technology Leave a comment »
Is this you? Your phone vibrates and you pull it out of your pocket to check and see if anything interesting caused the vibration. You have a moment of boredom in a store, in a checkout line, while waiting for your spouse to get dressed – so you pull out the phone and run through a checklist of information to peruse – looking to see if anything exciting has occurred in your digital universe be it Twitter, Facebook, or any of a thousand different things people can check on these days. Finally, after prolonged lack of exposure to your smart phone, your overall sense of boredom is heightened. You get fidgety, you get bored quickly, and you feel disconnected and out of touch. Often times you simply don’t know what to do with yourself w/out a laptop or your mobile phone.
If this is you, don’t be ashamed. You’re just like millions of other people who are being conditioned by their “smart” mobile devices. Every time your phone vibrates to alert you of the possibility of something interesting, exciting, or even mundane (but new) – your brain is getting what psychologists call a “Dopamine squirt”. Over time, your brain links the phone vibration, ring, or the “new SMS” tone to a brief release of dopamine. You feel this tiny little rush of excitement that feels like adrenaline every time your phone vibrates, jingles, rings, or otherwise begs for your attention. Since this is dopamine we’re talking about, you actually suffer mild withdrawal symptoms when you are away from your phone or your phone is idle/quiet for a long period of time. You get fidgety, anxious, bored, etc.
Intermittent Reinforcement is another psychological term that is used to refer to the behavior of people tethered to their smart phones. Even if their phone has been programmed to alert them to the arrival of something new and noteworthy, millions of people will pull out their phones and do a quick scan for “new or interesting stuff”. The next time you’re in an airport, or a Starbucks, or any other crowded place (especially one with business people on their lunch break), sit back and do some people watching. Watch how often people pull out their phone, do a scan, then put their phone back. The scary part comes when you see the same person do this 4, 5, 10 times in a row while waiting in line for their coffee, sandwich, or standing on a street corner waiting for the “walk” signal to light up.
Creative kryptonite and the death of productivity
Posted: July 9, 2011 Filed under: Health, Psychology, Research, Technology Leave a comment »
By Jonathan Fields
Great work, brilliant ideas, extraordinary art requires space.
Time away. Room to process, synthesize, allow connections between seemingly disparate parts to effervesce out of the ether of the mind.
Genius is the offspring of the in-between.
But, increasingly, technology is removing the in-between.
We don’t just walk in contemplation, we walk, talk and type.
We don’t just drive, we drive, talk and every time we stop the car, we check, tap and reply. Red lights, the bain of a life-long quest to get “there,” have now become a sought after opportunity to catch up on any communication that may’ve arrived since the last red-light…5 blocks ago.
But when we fill in all the organic in-betweens with texting, e-mailing, DMing and updating, we unintentionally kill the a critical step in the ideation process—percolation and contemplation—and along with it go creativity, innovation and despite your opposite intention, productivity.
So, why do we do it?
Filling in the in-between, we say, lets us get so much more done. Wrong.
Hyperconnectivity gives us the perception of getting more done, it makes us feel like we’re doing more, because we’re using every free moment of every waking hour.
There is often a huge chasm between being busy and being productive.
Hyperconnectivity requires a massive volume of switchtasking, which destroys true-productivity and efficiency because every time you page through your various modes of connectivity and respond to different prompts, you lose focus. To regain that focus requires a certain amount of time and cognitive effort.
Put another way, there is a ramping cost every time you switch gears, then return.
So when you spiral through every known mode of communication hundreds of times a day, you may be busy as hell, but you damn sure aren’t productive. At least nowhere near the level you could be. You’ve just created the illusion of productivity.
By the way, if you’re wondering if that’s you, here’s an easy test:
Next time someone asks what you did at the end of a day, if you know you were crazy busy but you can’t immediately pin-point a small number of substantially-meaningful accomplishments, critical insights or measurable forward movement…let alone recall any tasks beyond “oh I answered a lot of emails, put out fires and had a bunch of meetings…you’ve very likely fallen into hyperconnected lost-sock land.
All of which begs an even bigger question…
If hyperconnectivity really isn’t about efficiency and productivity, like we claim it is, what is it about?
Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor
Posted: October 14, 2010 Filed under: Early Man, Research, Science Leave a comment »
ScienceDaily — New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.
What is the genetic mutation
“Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Professor Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. “But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a “switch”, which literally “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes”. The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to our hair, eyes and skin. The “switch”, which is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris – effectively “diluting” brown eyes to blue. The switch’s effect on OCA2 is very specific therefore. If the OCA2 gene had been completely destroyed or turned off, human beings would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin colour – a condition known as albinism.
Variation in the colour of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes. “From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” says Professor Eiberg. “They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.” Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production.
Professor Eiberg and his team examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Professor Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being responsible for eye colour.
Nature shuffles our genes
The mutation of brown eyes to blue represents neither a positive nor a negative mutation. It is one of several mutations such as hair colour, baldness, freckles and beauty spots, which neither increases nor reduces a human’s chance of survival. As Professor Eiberg says, “it simply shows that nature is constantly shuffling the human genome, creating a genetic cocktail of human chromosomes and trying out different changes as it does so.”
University of Copenhagen (2008, January 31). Blue-eyed Humans Have A Single, Common Ancestor. ScienceDaily. Retrieved March 26, 2010. Source
are your friends making you fat?
Posted: October 13, 2010 Filed under: Health, Research Leave a comment »>
Can having obese friends increase your risk of packing on pounds? A new study suggests it can, if you’re a man.
The study, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, finds that the obesity epidemic can spread like a virus through social networks. When a person becomes obese, his friends and siblings are likely to gain weight as well.
“We were stunned to find that friends who live hundreds of miles away have just as much impact as friends who are next door,” said James Fowler, one of the study’s authors and an associate professor of political science at the University of California San Diego (UCSD).
He adds that this may be due to the fact that friends may subconsciously share ideas about what constitutes a healthy weight.
The research was based on more than 12,000 people taking part in the three-decade-long Framingham Heart Study.
At each update in that study, doctors monitored participants’ height and weight and also recorded information about their neighbors, friends and spouses.
Using new software, Harvard and UCSD researchers created diagrams that plotted obesity and relationships, mapping the past 30 years.
Obesity and Socializing
While mapping networks of neurons in the brain or HIV prevalence among different communities has been popular in the past, this is the first time that obesity has been put under the lens of social networks.
The researchers found that when a person becomes obese, the chances that a friend will become obese increases by 57 percent. Siblings of obese people have a 40 percent increased risk of obesity, and their spouses’ risk increased by 37 percent.
On average, having an obese friend made a person gain 17 pounds, which put many people over the body mass index (BMI) measure for obesity.
Female friendships did not seem to be impacted by obesity. But the chances that a man might gain weight from having a fat pal doubled for so-called mutual friends — friends who both listed each other as buddies.
“There is an important implication here for a broadening perspective on treatment for obesity,” said Dr. Nicholas Christakis, the study’s lead author. “Attitudes are changing about what constitutes an acceptable body size, more so than a sharing of behaviors.
“We don’t think that this is the only cause of obesity. This is adding one additional factor or explanation.”
Still, the research could have weighty implications in a society in which adult obesity rates have shot up from 15 to 32 percent over the past three decades. Currently, around 66 percent of adults are considered overweight.
Norms Trump Networks for Gals?
One of the questions raised by the study was why women’s weight didn’t seem to depend on having obese friends.
“There is a strong social bias for women towards thinness,” said Dr. Robert Kushner, president of the American Board of Nutrition Physician Specialists.
“Social norms may trump social networks here. Guys don’t have the same social pressure. Men may be more influenced by their friends.”
Other diet experts agree that the inner workings of male friendships may have a lot to do with weight gain.
“Current social stigma against obesity is greater among women, and women jointly discuss weight and support each other in dieting and exercising,” said Jeffery Sobal, a professor of nutritional science at Cornell University. “Men may engage in joint activities that increase weight, such as consuming more calories or spending time in sedentary activities.”
So depending on a man’s network of friends, he’s just as likely to be chomping down wings and guzzling beer while watching the game as he is to be shooting hoops with the boys.
You Are Who You Eat With
If heavy friends can make someone gain weight, can thin friends make someone shed the flab? Not necessarily, say the researchers — but it might be worthwhile to start a diet or lifestyle change in groups.
“The public needs to know that it’s very important to get your friends and family on board when making a lifestyle change,” said Amy Wachholtz, a medical psychiatrist with the Duke Diet and Fitness Center.
“You are more likely to be successful if you have friends and family members to support you,” Wachholtz said. “It’s not just size of social network but also how committed they are to losing weight. Getting a friend who’s also very committed is going to help you.”
Jennifer Nelson, director of clinical dietetics at the Mayo Clinic, agrees. “Social networks definitely have an effect. This is something to be aware of for both the patient and the health care provider,” she said.
“We as health care providers should be mindful of addressing the social group, not just the individual.” By Katharine Stoel Gammon care of ABC News Medical Unit.
further reading: The New York Times magazine article
>For Early Man, It Wasn’t Easier Being Green
Posted: October 7, 2010 Filed under: Early Man, Nature, Research Leave a comment »>
Archaeologists who study early hunter-gatherer societies are discovering that even the simplest cultures altered their environments, whether they meant to or not.
For example, aboriginal people in Australia burned huge areas to change the landscape so they could hunt animals more easily. Perhaps the most famous example is the way mastodons and giant sloth and other ice-age animals were killed off by roving bands of hungry humans.
Torben Rick, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, says the notion of hunter-gatherers living in perfect harmony with their environment is going the way of the dodo. He says he’s discovered that indigenous people even altered America’s coastlines, thousands of years ago.
In a big, sunny laboratory at the Smithsonian, Rick pulls a palm-sized shell out of a plastic bag to show what he means.
“These are red abalones,” he says. “This one is 6,500 years old.” He says people living on the islands of California dumped these shells after eating the abalone and, unknowingly, became “dune-builders.”
“So there might have been a five-foot dune there at one time right above the beach,” Ricks says, “and a group of hunter-gatherers came in, lived on top of that dune, dumped their refuse there and left. And this creates a pavement there that anchors that sand.”
Small dunes eventually became big ones, built up like a layer cake, with trash dividing each layer.
Intentional Changes
Then there were intentional changes that people wrought, like the clam gardens of the Pacific Northwest.
People built rock walls into the ocean shallows.
“What these rock walls do,” says Rick, “is they create behind them an area of sandy substrate that’s really good for clams. You can kind of think of them like a terraced garden.”
Rick has also found layers of sea otter bones thousands of years old in California’s Channel Islands. The layers above just had sea urchin remains. He thinks people killed the otters because they ate too many shellfish. Since otters also prey on sea urchins, the urchin population exploded. All those urchins ate up the kelp forests, creating what Rick calls an “urchin barren.”
Changes Can Lead To Disaster
Rick says intentionally or not, hunter-gatherers altered the environment for a long, long time, long before agriculture emerged. University of Nebraska anthropologist Raymond Hames, who studies how people interact with their environment, says they had no choice.
“The take-home point to some extent is that humans do things to make their life easier,” Hames says. “It was really hard to make a living back then, so you know, you took advantage of the knowledge and skills you had in order to make the environment useful to you.”
Hames says sometimes in early human history, changing the environment led to disaster.
“The problem is that your successes lead to population growth, which then leads to more pressure on the system to produce more resources,” he says. “Your successes can set you up for even greater failures.”
Many archaeologists argue that societies like the Easter Islanders and the Mayans suffered after over-exploiting their forests and land.
Rick notes that human activity is now threatening places like the Everglades and the Chesapeake Bay. Scientists are trying to restore them, but to what condition? He says archaeology can provide snapshots of what these places looked like at different moments in time, and how much people had altered them.
by Christopher Joyce of National Public Radio
>The Addictiveness of Unhealthy Foods
Posted: September 8, 2010 Filed under: Health, Research Leave a comment »>
Scientist have previously proven links between drug addiction and fast-food addiction, but now there is a growing body of research that is finding out how junk food is hard wiring our brains for cravings.
The latest study, published March 28 in “Nature Neuroscience,” likened the affects of high-fat, high-calorie fast food to those of cocaine or heroin, in animals at least.
The researchers showed that the pleasure-center in rats brains were overstimulated from the fast food similar to an addict’s cocaine binge. Eventually, the pleasure centers became so overloaded that rats needed more and more food to feel normal, according to Paul H. Kenny, an associate professor of molecular therapeutics at the Scripps Research Institute.
Throughout the study, Kenny and his co-author studied three groups of lab rats for 40 days. The first group ate healthy food. The second ate a limited amount of junk food. The third group, however, was allowed to gorge on high-fat, high-calorie foods and became obese.
The startling side effect? The brains of the obese rats changed.
“The body adapts remarkably well to change — and that’s the problem,” Kenny said in a press release. “When the animal overstimulates its brain pleasure centers with highly palatable food, the systems adapt by decreasing their activity. However, now the animal requires constant stimulation from palatable food to avoid entering a persistent state of negative reward”.
During the study, the rats lost complete control over the ability to regulate whether they were hungry, often eating despite electric shocks. When the obese rats were put on a healthy diet, they refused to eat, starving themselves for two weeks.
In another study, researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City showed that feeding rats a diet high in saturated fat, calories and sugar — which is the typical make-up for a fast-food menu item — lowered the rats ability to respond to leptin, a hormone that helps regulate eating behavior by controlling how full one feels. As rats grew fatter, the amount of leptin in their bodies increased signaling that they were dangerously close to starvation. They continued to overeat and gain weight.
Those who yo-yo diet face similar problems that those going through withdrawal do, Boston University researchers proved last year. According to Pietro Cottone, an assistant professor in the Laboratory of Addictive Disorders at BU, dieters seek out foods to avoid the negative feelings that they experience if they are deprived of their favorite comfort foods.
“These findings confirm what we and many others have suspected,” Kenny said, “that over-consumption of highly pleasurable food triggers addiction-like neuroadaptive responses in brain reward circuitries, driving the development of compulsive eating. Common mechanisms may therefore underlie obesity and drug addiction.”
Check out our writer’s take on whether food addiction is worse than drug addiction.
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Wow that’s a neat article.. I’m lovin’ it!
>The Discovery of Umami
Posted: June 4, 2010 Filed under: Health, Research Leave a comment »>
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Professor Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University was thinking about the taste of food: “There is a taste which is common to asparagus, tomatoes, cheese and meat but which is not one of the four well-known tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty.”
It was in 1907 that Professor Ikeda started his experiments to identify the source of this distinctive taste. He knew that it was present in the “broth” made from kombu (a type of seaweed) found in traditional Japanese cuisine. Starting with a tremendous quantity of kombu broth, he succeeded in extracting crystals of glutamic acid, an amino acid, and a building block of protein. 100 grams of dried kombu contain about 1 gram of glutamate, the sodium salt of glutamic acid. Professor Ikeda found that glutamate had a distinctive taste, different from sweet, sour, bitter and salty, and he named this taste “umami”.
Professor Ikeda decided to make a seasoning using his newly-isolated and distinctive-tasting ingredient. To be used as seasoning, glutamic acid had to have some of the same physical characteristics which are found, for example, in sugar and salt: it had to be easily soluble in water but neither absorb humidity nor solidify. Professor Ikeda found that monosodium glutamate had good storage properties and a strong umami or savory taste. It turned out to be an ideal seasoning. Because monosodium glutamate has no smell or specific texture of its own, it can be used in many different dishes where it naturally enhances the original flavor of the food.
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Thanks to Michele for the news tip!
