Puzzle behind face blindness solved
The causes of congenital face blindness — a condition in which a person is unable to use facial features to identify other people —can be traced back to an early stage in the perceptual process, scientists say. Each face is unique and forms a crucial part of a person’s identity and interpersonal communication, researchers said. They focussed their efforts on a group of persons who have experienced problems recognising familiar faces from a young age, but show no evidence of other cognitive impairments. “We were able to show that even the earliest face-selective responses, those recorded approximately 170 milliseconds after seeing a face, are altered in people with congenital prosopagnosia; we were also able to show that these changes are linked to their deficit in recognising aces,” said researchers, who used magne oencephalography to measure the magnetic signature of cortical activity.
Men’s brains decline faster: study
An old adage may state, “Men age like a fine wine, while women age like a glass of milk,” but scientists has found that men’s brains age faster than women’s. Researchers drew their conclusions from scanning the brains of men and women, with an average age of 32. The results showed differences between the sexes in their sub cortical brain structures. Men lose more matter than women in the caudate nucleus and the putamen volume, the part of the brain that deals with movement and emotional processing. The researchers said, “Grey matter volume decreases faster in males than in females, emphasising the interplay between ageing and gender on sub cortical structures.”
Watch action films, cheat and lie!
If you are a movie buff, better cut down on action films! Researchers have found that watching violent movies or reading books with violent content can make you more likely to lie or cheat, suggests new research. Exposure to human violence is strongly linked to an increase in cheating for monetary gain, the study said. “Research shows that violent media increases aggressive behaviour towards others, but what we are showing here is that it goes beyond that,” said study co-author Josh Gubler, professor of political science at Brigham Young University in Utah, US. Researchers carried out several experiments with roughly 1,000 participants for the study. In one experiment, participants were paid to review sentences and edit those with mistakes. Half of the participants were given sentences with violent language. Those who reviewed violent sentences were 24 per cent more likely to cheat.