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A study of the children of older fathers has found subtle impairments of intelligence and other mental abilities during infancy and childhood. The story has been widely reported, but the findings have not been put in the proper context. This is only the latest in a series of problems identified in the children of older fathers, an area of study that has been widely overlooked. The risks faced by the children of older fathers are similar to those faced by the children of older mothers. But while we all know about the risks of Down syndrome in older mothers, most of us are ignorant of the risks in the children of older fathers. And the risks for older fathers are comparable to those for older mothers. As I noted in The Father Factor , an article on this subject in the current issue of Scientific American Mind, Children born to fathers 40 or older have nearly a six-fold increase in the risk of autism as compared with kids whose fathers were younger than 30. Children of fathers older than 50 have a nine-fold risk of autism. And advanced paternal age, as it’s called, has also been linked to “an increased risk of birth defects, cleft lip and palate, water on the brain, dwarfism, miscarriage and ‘decreased intellectual capacity.’” And to an increased risk of schizophrenia. This risk rises for fathers with each passing year. The child of a 40-year-old father has a 2 percent chance of having schizophrenia-double the risk of a child whose father is younger than 30. And the kicker: A 40-year-old man’s risk of having a child with schizophrenia is the same as a 40-year-old woman’s risk of having a child with Down syndrome. More recent studies have linked fathers’ age to prostate and other cancers in their children. In September 2008, researchers linked older fathers to an increased risk of bipolar disorder in their children. Add to that the new finding , that the kids of older fathers score lower on IQ and other cognitive tests. The study, in the current issue of PLOS Medicine, noted that the cognitive deficits were small, and that the children of older fathers might “catch up” to their peers as they get older. But nobody knows whether these early deficits might have implications for the children’s development across their lifespans, the authors said. So why don’t we hear more about the risks faced by the children of older fathers? Why isn’t it part of the discussion about whether, and how long, to delay child-bearing? “I think there has been a bit of a cultural bias against even looking at this issue,” says Dr. Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center who has done much of the pioneering research on this. “It turns out that the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father,” she told the New York Times. Do the findings offend middle-aged men’s sense of themselves, of their vitality and power? Do they puncture the image of the father as defender of the family? These risks should be understood by every older father who’s considering having children.

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More bad news for the children of older fathers

If you wanted to turn a rat into a fearless critter , unfazed by cats or bigger rats, the best way would be to neutralise a small pair of tiny structures in its brain called the dorsal premammillary nuclei , orPMD. According to new research by Simone Motta at the University of Sao Paolo, these small regions, nestled within a rat’s hypothalamus , control its defensive instincts to both predators and other rats. But not all neurons in the PMD are equal. It turns out that the structures are partitioned so that different bits respond to different threats. The front and side parts (the ventrolateral area) are concerned with threats from dominant and aggressive members of the same species. On the other hand, the rear and middle parts (the dorsomedial area) process the threats of cats and other predators. And both areas are distinct from other networks that deal with the fear of painful experiences, such as electric shocks. This complexity is surprising. Until now, scientists have mostly studied the brain’s fear system by focusing on an area called the amydgala , which plays a role in processing memories of emotional reactions.   And they have generally assumed that fearful responses are driven by the same networks of neurons, regardless of the threat’s nature. There’s good reason to think that. Hesitating in the face of danger is a sure-fire way to lose one’s life, so animals respond in a limited number of instinctive ways when danger threatens. They freeze to avoid detection, flee to outrun the threat, or fight to confront it. These automatic ” freeze, fight or flight ” responses are used regardless of the nature of the threat. Rats, for example, behave in much the same way when they are menaced by cats or electrified floors alike, and actually find it very difficult to do anything else. This limited repertoire of action convinced scientists that animals process different fears in the same way, relying on the same network of neurons to save their hides from any and all threats. Motta’s research shows that this idea is wrong, certainly for rats and probably for other mammals too. The brain’s fear system isn’t a one-size-fits-all toolkit; it has different compartments that respond specifically to different classes of threats. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Different neuron networks control fear of different threats [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

In 1997, Swedish inspectors found several stockpiles of missiles hidden in a local zoo. Apparently, the arsenal had been gathered together for the express purpose of being used against civilians. And who was the mastermind behind this collection? A 19-year-old chimpanzee called Santino. Santino was born in a German zoo in 1978 and transferred to Furuvik Zoo at the age of 5. To this day, he lives in the zoo’s chimpanzee island – a large outdoor enclosure surrounded by a moat. Throughout his residence, he was mostly docile towards the eager visitors, but all of that changed in 1997 when he started chucking disc-shaped stones at them. Now many of us may have secretly wanted to take part in a spot of tourist-stoning, but Santino’s antics became so common that visitors were actually in real danger. The zoo staff had to take action. One morning, they swept the chimpanzee island and (unlike some other weapons inspectors) they actually found Santino’s arsenal – five separate caches of stones dotted along the shoreline facing the public area. Each one contained 3-8 missiles including concrete slabs, and algae-covered stones that had clearly been taken from the moat. Mathias Osvath from Lund University, who describes the behaviour in a new paper, believes that it’s clearly premeditated. Until now, it’s been very difficult to work out if natural chimp behaviour involves true forward-planning or represents a reaction to present circumstances. Is a chimp that gathers twigs for termite-fishing planning for the future, or just responding to a more immediate hunger? There’s no easy answer to that, but Santino’s case is much clearer. One of his caretakers, Ing-Marie Persson has collected plenty of evidence to show that he was deliberately stockpiling weapons of individual destruction for future acts of tourist-stoning. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Chimpanzee collects ammo for "premeditated" tourist-stoning [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

(comic from kxcd ) This post will discuss some findings about the factors that are correlated to clinical response to clozapine (Clozaril® , FazaClo® ).   Clozapine is a drug used to treat psychosis.  It usually is used for persons with schizophrenia; sometimes it is used for persons with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, or psychosis associated with Parkinson disease .   Clozapine was developed in the 1960′s.  It was the first so-called atypical antipsychotic medication.  It is not a first-line drug, because of problems with adverse effects.  However, it remains the single antipsychotic drug that is most likely to produce a favorable response in a patient with psychosis.  That makes it special.  Thus, anything we learn about the way it works is automatically interesting. The (open-access) article, and a later column in the same journal, refer to the finding that higher blood lipid levels seem to correspond to greater clinical response to the medication.  That is, the higher the lipid levels, the greater the positive effect of the drug. Changes in serum lipids, independent of weight, are associated with changes in symptoms during long-term clozapine treatment J Psychiatry Neurosci. 2007 September; 32(5): 331–338. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Clozapine Response and Lipids: An Intriguing Correlation [The Corpus Callosum]

Let me first introduce myself and this blog, which is titled Total Brain Workout. I am a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto, and one of my main areas of cultural research is puzzles. I have also been teaching an undergraduate course on puzzles (their history and cultural meaning) at the University for many years. It is one of the most satisfying courses I have ever taught because, by the end of it, the students not only develop puzzle-solving skills (which they may have thought they didn’t have at the start), but also come out of it with a better perspective about the role of puzzles in human life. This blog is modeled on puzzles that I put together for my recent book, The Total Brain Workout: 450 Puzzles to Sharpen Your Mind, Improve Your Memory & Keep Your Brain Fit, published by Harlequin Books. It will contain one or two puzzles, and (if relevant) the history behind them, to tease your brain and thus keep it fit. As I indicate in the preface to that book, it would seem that such apparently “trivial amusements” foster brain growth, by stimulating logical and creative thinking regions of the brain. Research has come forward to suggest (although not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt) that puzzles sharpen the mind, improve memory, and keep the brain fit throughout life, and especially later life. As a boomer myself, and a puzzle addict since my childhood, I welcome this news. If puzzles are to the brain what physical exercise is to the body, then let’s do puzzles-not just for fun, but more importantly for brain fitness. And even if the research is not exactly what it is claimed to be, so what! Doing puzzles cannot hurt. Puzzles are as old as human history. They are found in all cultures throughout time. One of the first documented puzzle-and still one of the most famous-is the Riddle of the Sphinx. According to myth and legend, when Oedipus approached the city of Thebes he encountered a gigantic sphinx guarding entrance to the city. The menacing beast confronted Oedipus, posing the following riddle to him, and warning him that if he failed to answer it correctly he would die instantly at the Sphinx’s hands: What has four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three at night? The fearless Oedipus answered (paraphrasing his statement somewhat): “Humans, who crawl on all fours as babies, then walk on two legs as grown-ups, and finally need a cane in old age to get around.” Upon hearing the answer, the astonished sphinx killed itself, and Oedipus entered Thebes as a hero for having gotten rid of the terrible monster that had kept the city in captivity for so long. Ironically, by solving the riddle the devastating prophecy, which Oedipus tried to elude-that he would kill his father (which he did unwittingly on the way to Thebes) and marry his mother, the widowed queen of Thebes-came true. Why are we so intrigued by stories such as this one which revolve around puzzles? The answer might lie in the origin of the English word puzzle itself, which comes from the Middle English word poselen “to bewilder, confuse.” And indeed, puzzles generate bewilderment and confusion, because they cannot be solved by applying any formula or method mindlessly. They always require a dose of creative, unconventional thinking, which psychologists call “insight thinking.” This is essentially an intuitive grasp of a pattern or twist concealed by the puzzle. Given their appeal, some puzzles have given origin to commonly-held ideas, such as the one that life is comparable to the three main parts of a day (the Riddle of the Sphinx). Others are the source of everyday expressions. Here is a brainteaser that gave origin to the expression “thinking outside the box.” Many readers undoubtedly know it: Without letting your pencil leave the paper, can you draw four straight lines through the following nine dots? Those who may not have come across this puzzle before might tend to approach it by joining up the dots as if they were located on the perimeter (boundary) of an imaginary square or flattened box. But this reading of the puzzle does not yield a solution, no matter how many times one tries to draw four straight lines without lifting the pencil. A dot is always left over. It is at this point where creative thinking comes into play: “What would happen if I extend one or more of the four lines beyond the box?” That hunch turns out, in fact, to be the relevant insight. One possible solution is as follows: Can you find the others? It should now be obvious why this puzzle gave rise to the expression “thinking outside the box,” which entered the English language around the middle part of the twentieth century when people in business and education started referring to it as a prototypical example of what creative or “lateral” thinking is all about. It continues to be cited by psychologists as an example of how the mind tends to impose unnecessary limitations upon methods of attacking problems. Who invented the puzzle? I have looked into several sources and have been able to trace it as far back as 1914, in the first edition of puzzlist Sam Loyd’s (1841-1911) Cyclopedia of Puzzles. But the principle it embodies is probably older, as Martin Gardner indicates in his 1960 edition of Loyd’s work (titled The Mathematical Puzzles of Sam Loyd). The Nine-Dot puzzle is a 3 × 3 version of what can be called generally a Dot-Joining puzzle. Can you solve the Sixteen-Dot (4 × 4) and Twenty-Five Dot (5 × 5) versions? Again, you just connect the dots without lifting your pencil. How many lines are required in each of these two cases? Do you detect a correlation between number of dots and number of connecting lines? Sixteen-Dot Version Twenty-Five-Dot Version As a final word on Dot-Joining puzzles, I should mention that, as with any puzzle genre, once the general principle involved in solving them is deciphered, the genre starts losing its appeal. However, like any good joke, Dot-Joining puzzles can be played on others over and over to great effect. I await your answers, solutions, discussions, anecdotes, etc. for this particular puzzle, including any general formula for solving any general version (n × n) of the puzzle (if there is one). I also welcome suggestions for future puzzles on this blog. This is going to be fun!  (Scroll down for the answers)                           Answers Each of the following constitutes only one possible solution. Sixteen-Dot Version Six lines are needed for this version of the puzzle. As mentioned other solutions are possible. All involve six lines. Twenty-Five-Dot Version Eight lines are needed for this version of the puzzle. Other solutions are possible. Can we generalize? By making the Nine-Dot puzzle as complex as we desire (increasing the number of dots to 16, 25, 36, 49, etc.), a pattern seems to emerge through inspection. This pattern can be charted as follows: Dots    Lines Required 3 × 3    (3 + 1) = 4 4 × 4    (4 + 2) = 6 5 × 5    (5 + 3) = 8 6 × 6    (6 + 4) = 10 …    … n × n    n + (n – 2) = 2n – 2 I should point out that I have not tested this pattern beyond a 6 × 6 version of the puzzle. As with all inductively-derived formulas, there is no way to be sure that the formula works all the time. It thus can be called, simply, a working formula.  

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The Original "Thinking Outside the Box" Puzzle!

Both objects and behaviour can be described as disgusting. The term could equally apply to someone who cheats other people out of money as it could to the sight of rancid food or the taste of sour milk. That’s not just a linguistic quirk. Some scientists believe that the revulsion we feel towards immoral behaviour isn’t based on our vaunted mental abilities, but on ancient impulses that evolved to put us off toxic or infectious foods. It seems that your facial muscles agree. Hanah Chapman from the University of Toronto has found that both physical and moral disgust cause the levator labii muscles, which run from your eyes to your mouth, to contract. The result: you wrinkle your nose and you purse your lips. Nasty tastes, gross photos and foul play all cause the same physical reaction and the same subjective emotions. When people say that moral transgressions “leave a bad taste in your mouth”, it’s more than just a pretty metaphor. Chapman began by studying disgust in its more primitive forms – reactions to foul tastes. She recruited 27 volunteers and recorded the electrical activity in their levator labii muscles as they drank small vials of various liquids. If the concoctions were unpleasantly salty, sour or bitter, this group of muscles contracted more strongly than if the liquids were sweet or flavourless. These reactions were a good measure of their subjective opinions – the more distasteful they found the drinks, the more strongly their muscles contracted. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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A bad taste in your mouth – moral outrage has origins in physical disgust [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

If you decided to spend $100 on your happiness, would you buy something experiential like a meal out or something material like an item of clothing? Research covered here recently suggested that for long-term happiness experiences tend to beat possessions . But Leonardo Nicolao and colleagues at the University of Texas argue in the Journal of Consumer Research that this research doesn’t tell us the whole picture ( Nicolao et al., 2009 ). Nicolao and colleagues point out that the previous research by Van Boven and Gilovich (2003) only compared experiential and material purchases that went well, not those that went wrong. What if the clothes turn out to be money down the drain or the meal out is a complete bust from beginning to end: what does that do to our happiness? When purchases go wrong The researchers used three experiments to examine this question. In the first two of these participants were randomly assigned to groups in which they recalled material and experiential purchases that had either turned out well, or that had turned out badly. They were then asked how happy (or otherwise) these purchases had made them. The results suggested that, just like Van Boven and Gilovich’s research, experiential purchases (e.g. a meal out) beat material purchases (e.g. clothes) if each turned out well. But, for some people whose scores were low on a measure of materialism, when the purchases turned out badly, it was the material goods that left them slightly happier. In contrast the highly materialistic were left less happy when their material purchases went wrong. In a third experiment participants actually made a small experiential versus a small material purchase and then their happiness over time was measured. It was found that when participants made a material purchase that turned out badly it was easier for them to forget about it than an experiential purchase that went wrong. Across three experiments, then, Nicolao and colleagues found evidence that when our experiential purchases go wrong we are likely to end up slightly less happy than if we had chosen a material purchase. But, as in previous research, when our purchases go well we are likely to end up significantly happier if we choose an experiential rather than a material purchase. Experiences still beat possessions This study provides further support for the idea that experiential purchases like restaurant trips or theatre tickets are likely to beat material purchases like clothes or electronics for our long-term happiness. Nicolao and colleagues show that this is at least partly because it takes us longer to adapt to experiential purchases than material purchases. Experiences also beat possessions because they seem to: Improve with time as we forget about all the boring moments and just recall the highlights. Take on symbolic meanings, whereas those shoes are still just shoes. Be very resistant to unfavourable comparisons: a wonderful moment in a restaurant is personally yours and difficult to compare, but all too soon your shoes are likely to look dated in comparison with the new fashions. On the other hand this study does suggest that if our purchases go badly, there’s probably little to choose between experiences and possessions, with the less materialistic left slightly happier with their material purchases. This may be because unhappy experiences live longer in the mind than purchases that turn out badly. Of course this study only compared material purchases with experiential purchases because, after all, this is the Journal of Consumer Research . But what about comparing material purchases with totally free experiences like a walk in the park, an afternoon spent lolling by the river or chatting with friends? In these cash-strapped times it’s worth remembering that free experiences may well make us happier than possessions, it’s just that with less money we can’t hand the responsibility for our entertainment to others (restaurants, theatres, films etc.) but have to be more creative ourselves. [Image credit: catfunt & luchilu ]

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How to Choose Between Experiential and Material Purchases

source Percy Lavon Julian, Ph.D. (1899-1975) was a scientist who rose from humble beginnings, was trained and educated in an adverse cultural era and became a highly accomplished synthetic chemist and entrepreneur ( Wikipedia ; PubMed ; ACS bio ). From the American Chemical Society biography: He was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 11, 1899, the son of a railway clerk and the grandson of slaves. From the beginning, he did well in school, but there was no public high school for African-Americans in Montgomery. Julian graduated from an all-black normal school inadequately prepared for college. Even so, in the fall of 1916, at the age of 17, he was accepted as a subfreshman at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. This meant that in addition to his regular college courses he took remedial classes at a nearby high school. He also had to work in order to pay his college expenses. Nevertheless, he excelled. Julian was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with a B.A. degree in 1920 as valedictorian of his class. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Faces of Neuropsychopharmacology: Percy L. Julian, Ph.D. [DrugMonkey]

The wiping of unwanted memories is a common staple of science-fiction and if you believe this weekend’s headlines, you might think that the prospect has just become a reality. The Press Association said that a ” drug helps erase fearful memories “, while the ever-hyperbolic Daily Mail talked about a ” pill to erase bad memories “. The comparisons to The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were inevitable, but the actual study, while fascinating and important, isn’t quite the mind-wiper these headlines might have you believe. The drug in question is propranolol, commonly used to treat high blood pressure and prevent migraines in children. But Merel Kindt and colleagues from the University of Amsterdam have found that it can do much more. By giving it to people before they recalled a scary memory about a spider, they could erase the fearful response it triggered. The critical thing about the study is that the entire memory hadn’t been erased in a typical sci-fi way. Kindt had trained the volunteers to be fearful of spidery images by pairing them with electric shocks. Even after they’d been given propranolol, they still expected to receive a shock when they saw a picture of a spider – they just weren’t afraid of the prospect. The drug hadn’t so much erased their memories, as dulled their emotional sting. It’s more like removing all the formatting from a Word document than deleting the entire file. Congatulations to Forbes and Science News who actually got it right. Kindt’s work hinges on the fact that memories of past fears aren’t as fixed as previously thought. When they are brought back to mind, proteins at the synapses – the junctions between two nerve cells – are broken down and have to be created from scratch . This process is called “reconsolidation” and scientists believe that it helps to incorporate new information into existing memories. The upshot is that when we recall old memories, they have to be rebuilt on some level, which creates an opportunity for changing them. A few years ago, two American scientists managed to use propranolol to banish fearful responses in rats. They injected the animals in their amygdalae, a part of their brains involved in processing emotional memories. The drug didn’t stop a fearful memory from forming in the first place, but it did impair the memory when the rats tried to retrieve it. Now, Kindt has shown that the chemical has the same effect in humans. Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…

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Beta-blocker drug erases the emotion of fearful memories [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

Put some random people in a group, give them a task and soon enough a leader will emerge. What is it about that person that makes others grant them the honour of being in charge? New insight comes from a study published in Personality and Social Psychology , which suggests that leaders emerge through a combination of their own outspoken behaviour, and how this outspoken behaviour is perceived by others. In two studies Anderson and Kilduff (2009) from the University of California, Berkeley, looked at how dominant individuals in a group were perceived by others in the group. Perceived competence is important because, everything else being equal, it’s very difficult to become a leader if everyone in the group thinks that person is a dunce, even if they are extremely dominant. But what Anderson and Kilduff’s research showed is that there is a big gap between the actual competence of leaders and the way in which they are perceived by the others. In the second of two studies Anderson and Kilduff had participants attempting a series of maths problems in competition with another group. The groups were videotaped and the behaviour of their members carefully examined. They found that dominant participants tended to offer more suggestions to the group, and that these individuals were perceived by the group, plus those observing the group, as the most competent. Crucially, though, the study showed that not only did a leader’s dominant behaviour of itself encourage others to see that person as competent, but this was true even though their suggestions to the group were no better, or even worse than others. In reality the leaders did not always make the best contribution to the task, but their voices were usually heard first and most often. This study suggests leaders emerge through more subtle processes than the word ‘dominance’ might imply. Rather than brow-beating or bullying others into submission, leaders-in-waiting effectively signal their competence to the group by making greater verbal contributions to discussions. Others then assume that their greater contribution will mean their group will be more likely to succeed. Outside of the laboratory, of course, money and power has more to do with who leads organisations like corporations or nations. In reality groups of people don’t start on egalitarian terms and people don’t always ‘emerge’ from groups of their peers on the basis of who shouts loudest and longest. But this study does tell us something useful about more informal, everyday groups similar to those studied in this research. » See also: 7 Reasons Leaders Fail . [Image credit: Nod Young ]

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Leaders Emerge by Talking First and Most Often