It Must Taste Good, Your Nose Is Red


As we rapidly move deeper into the Holiday Season our thoughts are turned more and more to food. Gourmets or non-gourmets, we all hope for a great gustatory experience or two before the season is over. We will, in many cases, have the opportunity to taste other people’s favorites and in our multi-ethnic culture, the variety can indeed be wide.

Not all those tastes will work out for us as we are wedded strongly to flavors and textures that we grew up with, and can be reluctant to savor new combinations. Hopefully, we’ll all be too polite to wrinkle our nose or make faces if the result of someone’s hours of preparation isn’t to our liking.

It is interesting, though, how we make these extravagant facial expressions of dislike spontaneously from a very early age. But it’s not just our facial muscles that respond. Our autonomic nervous system kicks in and our body responds with local changes in blood flow. A recent paper by Kashima and Hayashi from Kyushi U discusses the changes to facial blood flow that occur in response to the five basic tastes (1).

Change of blood flow means change of color and we communicate with each other through changes in facial color. For example, “he turned pale with fear” or “she turned red with anger.” So it is with tastes. Our bodies are in automatic and, although we can control the muscles, the blood flow will give us away.

Sixteen men and women in their twenties, were proffered solutions of sugar (sweet), salt (salty), citric acid (sour), quinine (bitter), and monosodium glutamate (umami) to savor. The 16 chosen ones were asked to rate their gustatory experience on a pleasant/unpleasant scale.

Sweet and salty showed increased blood flow in the eyelids in line with the degree of pleasantness. On the other hand, the umami response went with changes to the blood flow in the skins of the subject’s noses.

So keep a close eye on your guest’s eyelids and noses as they dig in to your lavish fare. If their eyes and noses glow red, you have pulled off a winner. If they go pale, turn up the heat until their whole face is red and willingly suspend your disbelief.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0028236

Getting A Charge Out Of Stressed Rocks


“Solid as a rock” is an expression which none of us would argue with. We may think that the metaphor shouldn’t be applied to our favorite bank noire as we know that it isn’t really solid let alone “as a rock”. Seemingly, even living in a geologically challenged region like the ring of fire doesn’t lessen our belief in the solidarity of rock. However, beneath our feet things are moving, and once in a while (thankfully a long while) there’ll be an earthquake or a volcanic eruption.

Earthquakes in particular catch us by surprise, but often the animal world pick up much earlier than we do that something is afoot. It can be days or even months ahead of the actual event. The BBC reviewed a recent paper by Grant et al that is published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health with both a possible reason why our animal friends head for the hills and a suggestion that we could plug into their behavior as an indicator of something of earthshaking importance to come (1,2).

Grant was studying Italian toads at mating time in a pond near L’Aquila in 2009. These were just the usual run of the mill Italian toads called Bufo bufo, and were getting on with their business of chasing as many females as possible. There had been plenty of rain and the girls were cooperating until a few days before the earthquake occurred. They abandoned their activity and headed out of the pond. The epicenter of the quake was about 50 miles away.

Prior to an earthquake, huge pressures have built up, putting rock under great stress. Scientists at NASA have also been putting rocks under a lot of stress in recent times and shown how imperfections in the silicate crystal structure can cause peroxy bonds to break so the rocks act like a battery with charge migration occurring through the rock. The charge can migrate at very high speeds through the silicate structure to large distances.

Where there is a groundwater/rock interface, hydrogen peroxide can be produced which is strong oxidizing agent. Getting your eggs oxidized would seem to make the whole mating activity pointless.

 If the rock runs out and there is just air, positive ions are produced. We, and other animals, don’t like positive ions very much. They raise our serotonin levels and that can give us migraines. Remember that negative ions lower our serotonin levels and that relaxes us and reduces our anxiety.

Maybe it was the change in serotonin levels that caused the hibernating snakes in Haicheng to wake up and head out into the freezing countryside to their demise several months prior to the 1975 earthquake. A migraine might have been preferable to getting your tail frozen off, though.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/15945014
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3138006/pdf/ijerph-08-01936.pdf

Digitally Challenged? Check Your Digit Ratio.


There are scads of papers out there on the importance of your digit ratio to all sorts of activities and even proclivities. Wikipedia, for example, lists 88 peer reviewed papers as examples of traits ranging from sporting ability through aggression to tactile perception. Even exam scores have been related to the digit ratio of male students.

What is your digit ratio? You haven’t measured it lately? Then now is the time. Measure the length of your index finger and divide that length by the length of your ring finger and there you have it –­ your own personal 2D:4D ratio. Even the behavior of mice and pheasants has been related to their digit ratios.

Wikipedia quotes an average for men as 0.947 and one for women as 0.965 (1). Apparently your personal 2D:4D ratio is set by your exposure to testosterone while you are developing prior to birth, so you’re stuck with it now. A low ratio, apparently is better if you want to be a good athlete but a high ratio goes with good exam scores.

High-ranking male musicians were like athletes, their digit ratio was on the low side of the mean Sluming and Manning even found that the seats close to the orchestra had more women than men and concluded that “that music is a sexually selected trait in men that indicates fertilizing capacity and perhaps good genes” (2).

After that astounding idea from the turn of the century, I, of course, had to rush off and measure my ratio. Being right handed, I measured my left 2D:4D value first. Horror – 1.006! Next I struggled with the right hand. Ughh – 1.00. Knowing now that I’m unlikely to be a top ranking musician or a successful Sumo wrestler (3,4)

The only bright spot came from the paper of Luxen and Buunk back in ’05 published in the J. Personality and Individual Differences, which suggested that a higher ratio might indicate high verbal intelligence, high agreeableness, although low numerical intelligence.

I can relax now and revel in being that chatty, agreeable guy in the checkout line who can never make the right change. When those mutterings breakout behind me, I can just wave my hand and let the fingers tell all.

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digit_ratio#cite_note-Romano2006-20
  2. http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(99)00026-4/abstract
  3. Evolution and Human Behavior  doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.07.003 
  4. http://www.improbable.com/ N0v. 30, 2011
  5. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886905001388

Stressing Out And Your Love Hormone


The job scene in most countries is bad – unless you are among the 1% of course – and the stress of applying for jobs and waiting to get turned down only gets worse when you get the invitation to the dreaded job interview. On the day, you stress over how you should look – not too formal, yet not too casual – and rehearse replies to likely questions. Of course, you checked out the prospective employers website and try and remember those intelligent questions to ask if there is one of those awkward pauses that cry out to be filled.

Maybe you have the luxury of a sympathetic partner who can calm you down. Their interest and empathy can help that critical flow of oxytocin, which makes the world look better. Oxytocin is a large molecule that is made up of nine amino acids and seeks out your oxytocin receptors (OXTR) to bind tightly to them. Those in your central nervous system modulate your anxiety and stress levels, enhances empathy and quiet you aggression.

Hopefully you won’t have the rs53576 polymorphism in your OXTRs or you're out of luck. Those kind words won’t work too well as the binding of your oxytocin isn’t too good and it runs to waste. Chen et al in this week’s early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy have just published the study to clarify that idea (1).

The experiment was to put 184 young guys through a moderate stress job interview situation and measure the cortisol levels in their saliva to see how stressed they were. Half the group had 10 minutes of their female friends doing their best to calm them with as much support as they could muster – just the situation to release lots of oxytocin and reduce their stress levels.

Results? Those participants that received social support and had regular OXTRs had half the level of cortisol of the guys with no support. 29 of the guys had the rs53576 polymorphism and those who had their support group with them had just as much stress as those without.

Fortunately, the rs53576 polymorphism is recessive, but there are a lot of us out there who won’t benefit from lots of hugs and kind words as we go into a stressful situation. Maybe that’s the time for a good slug of whisky a few minutes before we take on the interview panels. Be careful though, too big a slug of “Dutch courage” could be counter-productive.

  1. PNAS Early Edition  doi/10.1073/pnas.1113079108

Camera – Truth or Lies?


The talented photographers among us have a great feel for lighting and composition in creating a mood, but in these days they will need to be digitally adept if they want to move into the professional scene. Portraits for publication, maybe for advertising or maybe just to head up a feature, are frequently being “retouched to remove blemishes.” Blemishes, like beauty, are in the eye of the beholder.

To Photoshop is now a verb in common use and has raised red flags for some years now in the field of fashion photography. Rightly or wrongly, heavily photoshopped advertising images are touted as the cause of the growth of eating disorders among the young. Mutterings are getting louder about truth in advertising and control of the digital airbrush.

Kee and Farid have rushed to the aid of the industry with a solution in the digital issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (1). Their solution comes in the form of a computer analysis of the before and after pictures to quantify the retouching. It works on a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 means “no change” and 5 is “OMG who’s that?”

They trained their computer on almost 500 images and then verified the effectiveness with a crowd of 390 sourced through the internet. The perception of the crowd  was in fairly good agreement with the computer, so now there is  a numeric ranking of the distortion of reality which is available by a disinterested party (your computer has no personal or financial interest, of course).

Thus the industry can now self-police by labeling their pictures with a Reality Rating in the form of a number. A nice idea, but labeling for content is usually only achieved after a long drawn out battle. I don’t think we should hold our breath.

  1. doi:10.1073/pnas.1110747108