Brain's spot for love found
A region deep inside the brain controls how quickly people make decisions about love, according to new research at the University of Chicago. The finding, made in an examination of a 48-year-old man who suffered a stroke, provides the first causal clinical evidence that an area of the brain called the anterior insula “plays an instrumental role in love,” said neuroscientist Stephanie Cacioppo, lead author of the study. In an earlier paper that analysed research on the topic, Cacioppo and colleagues defined love as “an intentional state for intense longing for union with another” while lust, or sexual desire, is characterised by an intentional state for a short-term, pleasurable goal.
talking to kids really matters
Fifty years of research has revealed the sad truth that the children of lower-income, less-educated parents typically enter school with poorer language skills than their more privileged counterparts. By some measures, five-year-old children of lower socioeconomic status (SES) score two years behind on standardised language development tests by the time they enter school. In recent years, Anne Fernald, a psychology professor at Stanford University, has conducted experiments revealing that the language gap between rich and poor children emerges during infancy. Her work has shown that significant differences in both vocabulary and real-time language processing efficiency were already evident at age 18 months in English-learning infants from higher and lower SES families. By the age of 24 months, there was a six-month gap between SES groups in processing skills critical to language development.
Watch your emotions, not eating
Being overweight appears related to reduced levels of a molecule that reflects brain cell health in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in memory, learning, and emotions, and likely also involved in appetite control, according to a study performed by researchers at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and other institutions. The results of the study were published in Neuroimage: Clinical. Jeremy D Coplan, MD, professor of psychiatry at SUNY Downstate, led a multicenter team that visualised the molecule, N-acetyl-aspartate (NAA), using magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) application. NAA is associated with brain cell health. Overweight study participants exhibited lower levels of NAA in the hippocampus than normal weight subjects.
restless sleep causes pain
Researchers in the UK report that non-restorative sleep is the strongest, independent predictor of widespread pain onset among adults over the age of 50. According to the study, anxiety, memory impairment and poor physical health among older adults may also increase the risk of developing widespread pain. Muscle, bone and nerve (musculoskeletal) pain is more prevalent as people age, with up to 80 per cent of people 65 years of age and older experiencing daily pain. Widespread pain that affects multiple areas of the body — the hallmark feature of fibromyalgia — affects 15 per cent of women and 10 per cent of men over age 50 according to previous studies.
appreciate the beauty of math
People who appreciate the beauty of mathematics activate the same part of their brain when they look at aesthetically pleasing formula as others do when appreciating art or music, suggesting that there is a neurobiological basis to beauty. There are many different sources of beauty — a beautiful face, a picturesque landscape, a great symphony are all examples of beauty derived from sensory experiences. But there are other, highly intellectual sources of beauty. Mathematicians often describe mathematical formulae in emotive terms and the experience of mathematical beauty has often been compared by them to the experience of beauty derived from the greatest art.