Do Me A Flavor


The craving for strange flavor combinations of food is a well-known stereotype of one of the behaviors of pregnant women and is always good for a smile in a movie. However, flavors from foods are perhaps the most important factor in our ongoing choice of diet. We can work hard to focus on a healthy diet, but sooner or later we start to crave the monosodium glutamate enhanced flavor of some junk food or other.

It’s not even that a particular flavor is automatically universally liked that governs our craving, but just ones that we have learned from an early age. We may think that it was the free toy that got us started, but it probably goes back even further. How far? Back to the perinatal stage in some cases. What our moms were eating before and after we were born is part of our flavor heritage.

When we were weaned, our diet changed dramatically and very often for quite bland foods.  Many of us screamed, threw stuff about and got generally bent out of shape by the whole process.

Do animals have the same problems? Oostindjer et al from Wageningen U have had a look at pigs and fed some sows on a diet flavored with trans-anethol with others on a control diet (1).

Anethol gives a strong anise flavor. It is responsible for the flavor in absinthe and its solubility behavior produces the cloudy appearance when water is added. It also works well as a mosquito repellant which may have been good for the pigs. Note: no absinthe was drunk by the pigs.

Once the piglets were ready to become weaners, they were grouped in pens which had flavored food, just anise smelling air but normal food, or the control food and air. The piglets that had the most fun, playing and getting on with their pen-pals, were those who had the anise flavored air. Having flavor in the food didn’t do that much for them. Just the smell made them happy as Larry. Having just plain old, plain old food and air resulted in a manipulative bunch of squealers.

I guess the message that we can take away is that we need to choose our flavors early but wisely. Living with lots of garlic odor might be a hard choice just to get to happy mealtimes when weaning our kids.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025318

Cognitive Calisthenics


Answering e-mails and organizing meetings, lunches or other exciting events in the social calendar is the first task of the day after crawling out of bed to get a kettle filled and heating. I carry on happy in the knowledge that I’m exercising my amygdala and keeping its grey matter density up to snuff.

After that comes the attention to the social networks: Facebook, Linked-In and Google+, which have a little overlap, but not very much. Again the fleeting fingers on the keyboard do double duty and massage my amygdala as they scan through to see what people have been up to.

Of course, other parts of the brain are involved too. Kanai et al, in Proc. Roy. Soc. B, chose 125 post-grad students of U C London as lab rats for fMRI studies of their brain structure (1). Young post-grads are expected to have very active thumbs servicing large numbers of Facebook friends and so they should be good candidates to see what all this thumb activity was doing to their brains.

They would also have quite large circles of normal friends – ‘normal’ in this context means ones that they would go to parties and get drunk with, like post-grads have been doing for generations. Hence, they could all be expected to have good plump amygdalas. But what else would also be plumped up by their Facebook work instead of their notebook work?

Three other areas were seen to have benefitted from their diligence in increasing their social network size. The areas where their grey matter had been plumped up in proportion to their number of Facebook friends were the EC, the right STS, and the Left MTG (2). Sounds good, but what do these parts do?

The ER is active in organizing memory so when your number of Facebook friends gets into the hundreds, things need to be well ordered. It is also the first part to go if Alzheimer’s strikes. So we can see our fast moving thumbs as a good sign.

 The right STS is associated with our noticing what motion others are carrying out and processing what that means for us. The left MTG is implicated in our processing of word-meaning. As many comments are short and somewhat cryptic when posted on the ‘Walls’ of Facebook, it is not surprising that we are heavily exercising these parts of the brain which are implicated in social perception.

It would appear that our brain plasticity is well up to the challenges set by the excitement of wandering around reading the Walls in Facebook. A ‘ripped brain’ somehow doesn’t sound as desirable as ‘ripped abs’ though, does it?

    1. R. Kanai, B. Bahrami, R. Roylance and G. Rees, Proc. Roy. Soc. B (2011).              Doi: 10.1098.rspb.20-11.1959 
    2. EC – Entorhinal Cortex; right STS – right superior temporal sulcus; left MTG – left middle temporal gyrus.

Teen Choices


Once we get to 30+years old we look at teenagers as being both wilder and more likely to get into trouble than we were at that age. One of the problems is that by this time we have kids and are struggling with all the pitfalls that ‘society’ seems to be putting in their way.

 A genuinely disturbing trend shows up when we look at the rate of pregnancies for girls between 15 1nd 19 years old. The US has the highest rate which is about twice as high as the UK’s, the second highest. The rate is 7-times that of the Netherlands, a country that has a pretty liberal reputation.

This trend caught the eyes of Stranger–Hall and Hall of U of Georgia and so they dug into the meta-data available for the US (1). Most of the States have laws advocating the teaching of abstinence along with sex education in the schools. Some states have more general sex education than others. As a result, some states have comprehensive sex education with information about sexually transmitted diseases included. Some do not and push hard that abstinence is basically what students should know about.

The result shown by this study is that the pregnancy rate increases in proportion to the emphasis on abstinence only with less comprehensive information. It appears that the serpent is alive and well and is tempting the teens to nibble at the fruit of the tree and abstinence is a challenge.

The clear recommendation from this study is that comprehensive sex education with information on STDs is beneficial and that teen pregnancy rates fall  for groups with more information, as do the rates of infection of STDs. Clearly just nibbling at the fruit of the tree isn’t as good as serving up a whole hot apple pie and cream (bearing in mind that we are pretending that it’s an apple tree in the Eden of Innocence when it’s more likely to have been a fig tree).

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0024658

Party Problems


When our hearing is normal we can recognize our name or pick out snatches of conversation in a room where a lot of people are talking at once. If our hearing has to be digitally supplemented, this is more difficult to do.  If a computer is tasked with this “dip listening” task, it is very ineffectual. This has become known as the “cocktail party problem.”

In the current pre-print issue of the Journal of Animal Behavior, Vélèz and Bee of the U of Minnesota have pondered on the problem for grey treefrogs who have the problem of fixing up dates amid the cacophony of their numerous relatives all croaking themselves hoarse.

The problem they address is are the females able to dip listen effectively so they can pick out their soul mate calling amongst the very loud chatter of the general melee of a noisy communal bacchanal.

Well, our treefrog ladies were somewhat handicapped if their soul mates calls were done in short bursts. They seemed to lose the sound in the rise and fall of the noisy background. They did rather better if their suitors were more long winded and called out about their potential prowess in long bursts with the pulse rate of the call coming into line with the background fluctuations.

If things quieted down somewhat, the length of the calls again had to be quite long if the guys were going to get any traction. So it seems that treefrogs aren’t very good at dip listening. There again, maybe the girls just want a clearer statement of intent which doesn’t quite sound like the same old song.

  1. A. Vélèz and M. A. Bee, doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.09.015

Old Word Order


The ability to communicate is clearly a prerequisite for cooperation and humans are a cooperative, social species. The evolution of language puts us at the top of the tree for group actions. The ubiquitous ownership of smartphones is taking that instant communication way beyond earshot.

At some point in our past, our ancestors started to formulate words for objects and actions instead of using grunts and screeches. So an interesting question arises as to what was the word order used in the earliest language? For example, dogs are quick to understand our directions, although following them may be something else entirely. So we attract our dog's attention, hold up a ball, throw it and shout, “fetch,” and Fido rushes off after the ball.

Here our order is that the our dog (the subject, S) is established when we make eye contact. The ball (the object, O) is waved around to establish what we are interested in and we shout “Fetch” our verb, V, as the only spoken part of the sentence. Our word order here is SOV. But we also have been known to gaze into those big eyes and say, “Fido, find the ball” with great enthusiasm. In this case it’s SVO.

Of course none of our dogs are pernickety academics and so have no desire to question our grammar or indeed get into a discussion of language, but the question remains: what was the word order of the earliest spoken language?

Gell-Mann and Ruhlen in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Science have sorted this out for us (1). The short answer is SOV. The study of old languages indicates that this is the common syntax. When changes did occur, they tended to go from SOV to SVO rather than VOS or VSO, the latter two being very rare.

My dog won’t mind as long as I keep throwing the ball. Editors aren’t so compliant.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/10/04/1113716108