Eideard

The human foetus feels no pain before 24 weeks, according to a major review of scientific evidence…

The connections in the foetal brain are not fully formed in that time, nor is the foetus conscious, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

The findings of two reports commissioned by the Department of Health strike a blow to those seeking to reduce the upper time limit for having an abortion, currently at 24 weeks.

The studies suggest that late abortions, permitted for serious abnormalities or risks to a woman’s health, do not result in foetal suffering because of increasing evidence that the chemical environment in the uterus induces “a continuous sleep-like unconsciousness or sedation”…

Even after 24 weeks, “it is difficult to say that the foetus experiences pain because this, like all other experiences, develops post-natally along with memory and other learned behaviours”…

Anti-abortion campaigners said the work did not challenge other arguments for a lower limit.

Other than the fact that anti-abortion arguments are limited almost exclusively to anti-scientific, religious humbug. And take no account of a woman’s right to choose to order her own life.

Some 98 to 99 percent of the population has at one time been “infected” with a song they just can’t seem to shake off. This common phenomenon has rarely been researched, until Andréane McNally-Gagnon, a PhD student at the Université de Montréal Department of Psychology, decided to examine the issue.

In most cases, earworms will disappear after a few minutes. In some cases, earworms can last hours or even days. McNally-Gagnon is also a musician, who is often infected, which is why she wanted to better understand how and why it occurs.

For starters, she asked French-speaking Internet users to rank 100 pop songs according to their ability to be compulsively repeated within one’s mind. The top five were: Singing in the Rain (Gene Kelly), Live Is Life (Opus), Don’t Worry, Be Happy (Bobby McFerrin), I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor) and, in first place, Ça fait rire les oiseaux by Caribbean sensation La Compagnie Créole. (A complete list is published at www.brams.org).

In the laboratory, McNally-Gagnon and her thesis director Sylvie Hébert, professor at the Université de Montréal School of Speech Therapy and Audiology and a member of the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), asked 18 musicians and 18 non-musicians to hum and record their obsessive songs and note their emotional state before and after. The researchers found earworm infections last longer with musicians than with non-musicians.

The phenomenon occurs when subjects are usually in a positive emotional state and keeping busy with non-intellectual activities such as walking, which requires little concentration. “Perhaps the phenomenon occurs to prevent brooding or to change moods,” says Hébert.

The study also revealed that auditive memory in people is stronger among those who can accurately replicate songs. Humming among musicians was only one key off original recordings, while non-musicians were off by two keys.

Next, will be studies using MRI, Transcranial Magnetic Imaging technology. Woo-Hoo.

Dr. Cramer

Bad drivers may in part have their genes to blame. A recent study found that people with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it—and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant.

“These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away,” says Steven Cramer, University of California, Irvine, neurology associate professor and senior author of the study…

“We wanted to study motor behavior, something more complex than finger-tapping,” says Stephanie McHughen, graduate student and lead author of the study. “Driving seemed like a good choice because it has a learning curve and it’s something most people know how to do.”

The driving test was taken by 29 people—22 without the gene variant and seven with it. They were asked to drive 15 laps on a simulator that required them to learn the nuances of a track programmed to have difficult curves and turns. Researchers recorded how well they stayed on the course over time. Four days later, the test was repeated.

Results showed that people with the variant did worse on both tests than the other participants, and they remembered less the second time. “Behavior derives from dozens and dozens of neurophysiologic events, so it’s somewhat surprising this exercise bore fruit,” Cramer says…

A test to determine whether someone has the gene variant is not commercially available.

“I’d be curious to know the genetics of people who get into car crashes,” Cramer says. “I wonder if the accident rate is higher for drivers with the variant.”

Ooh! I know a few people who absolutely would be caught out in a test like this. It explains a lot.

In a research report featured as the cover story of the October 2009 print issue of The FASEB Journal…scientists show that a molecule from the body’s immune system (interleukin-6) when administered through the nose helps the brain retain emotional and procedural memories during REM sleep.

“Sleep to remember, a dream or reality?” said Lisa Marshall, co-author of the study, from the Department of Neuroendocrinology at the University of Lubeck in Germany. “Here, we provide the first evidence that the immunoregulatory signal interleukin-6 plays a beneficial role in sleep-dependent formation of long-term memory in humans…”

“If a nasal spray can improve memory, perhaps we’re on our way to giving some folks a whiff of common sense, such as accepting the realities of evolution,” said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal…

Can we get a few politicians to remember who elected them – not just who paid for the campaign.

Maccone claims glass can unbreak – for example

Imagine if a cold cup of coffee spontaneously heated up as you watched. Or a cracked pane of glass suddenly un-broke. According to physicist Lorenzo Maccone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you see things like this all the time – you just don’t remember.

In a paper published last week in Physical Review Letters, he attempts to provide a solution to what has been called the mystery of “the arrow-of-time”.

Briefly, the problem is that while our laws of physics are all symmetrical or “time-reversal invariant” – they apply equally well if time runs forwards or backwards – most of the everyday phenomena we observe, like the cooling of hot coffee, are not. They never seem to happen in reverse…

So why will your coffee spontaneously cool down, but not heat up?

Maccone’s solution is to suggest that in fact entropy-decreasing events occur all the time – so there is no asymmetry and no associated mystery about the arrow of time.

He argues that quantum mechanics dictates that if anyone does observe an entropy-decreasing event, their memories of the event “will have been erased by necessity“.

Maccone doesn’t mean that your memories will never form in the first place. “What I’m pointing out is that memories are formed and then are subsequently erased,” he tells me.

When you observe any system, according to Maccone, you enter into a “quantum entanglement” with it. That is, you and the system are entangled and cannot properly be described separately.

The entanglement, Maccone says, is between your memory and the system. When you disentangle, “the disentangling operation will erase this entanglement, namely the observer’s memory”. His paper derives this conclusion mathematically.

Smacks of philosophic Idealism to me. Mind over matter. Or mind over matter over mind over matter.

In any case, accounting for physical processes with non-material devices.

The next time you are caught doodling in a meeting, declare that you are simply trying to boost your concentration.

Rather than being frowned upon, doodling should be actively encouraged in meetings because it improves our ability to pay attention, a British psychologist claims.

A study that compared how well people remembered details of a dull monologue found that those who doodled throughout retained more information than those who tried to sit and listen…

“A simple task like doodling may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task,” she said. “In everyday life, doodling may be something we do because it helps to keep us on track with a boring task, rather than being an unnecessary distraction that we should try to resist doing.”

Short-attention-span societies may have varying results, eh?

Reducing what you eat by nearly a third may improve memory, according to German researchers.

They introduced the diet to 50 elderly volunteers, then gave them a memory test three months later. The study…found significant improvements…

There is growing interest in the potential benefits of calorie restricted diets, after research in animals suggested they might be able to improve lifespan and delay the onset of age-related disease. However, it is still not certain whether this would be the case in humans – and the the levels of “caloric restriction” involved are severe.

The precise mechanism which may deliver these benefits is still being investigated, with theories ranging from a reduction in the production of “free radical” chemicals which can cause damage, to a fall in inflammation which can have the same result.

The researchers from the University of Munster carried out the human study after results in rats suggested that memory could be boosted by a diet containing 30% fewer calories than normal…

They also showed other signs of physical improvement, with decreased levels of insulin and fewer signs of inflammation. Care was taken to make sure that the volunteers, despite eating a restricted diet in terms of calories, carried on eating the right amount of vitamins and other nutrients.

A spokesman for the British Dietetic Association said that people, particularly those already at normal or low weight, should be “extremely careful” about attempting such a diet. “It could even be dangerous if the person is already underweight.”

“It could even be dangerous if the person is already underweight.” Har! That’s not a problem for me.