Sleepiness and boredom aren’t always contagious
The following post is from a series about the annual Ig Nobel Prizes in science, which
honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” They were awarded in September in Cambridge, Mass.
Now we come to the Ig Nobel Physiology Prize. Yawns are notoriously contagious in humans and in other social animals, especially primates. In humans, yawning has been thought to do various things, including cooling the brain, increasing arousal when you’re sleepy and, possibly, helping to synchronize group behavior.
Could yawning be a form of unconscious empathy? This would mean that in order to have a contagious yawn, the animals involved would have to be capable of empathy, of fellow feeling. We know that dogs and primates, and humans, probably are, but that means we can’t really test for whether it’s empathy or not. We need a species that is social but probably can’t feel for its compatriots.
That’s where tortoises come in. To test whether yawning requires empathy and thus get at the real purpose that yawning might serve, Anna Wilkinson of the University of Lincoln in England and her colleagues took a group of redfooted tortoises that lived together and trained one of them to yawn when exposed to a red square. Then they had tortoises watch the trained tortoise in action and checked them for yawns. The researchers also checked for yawns when no other tortoise was present and when the trained tortoise had no red square and so wasn’t yawning.
What they got was a big, fat negative. The test tortoises showed no notice of the other animals’ huge yawns. This may mean that contagious yawning is not just the result of a fixed-action pattern triggered when you see someone else yawn. If that were the case, the tortoises would have yawned right along with their compatriots. Contagious social yawning may require something more, a social sense or a sense of empathy resulting from complex social interactions. Of course, it could also mean that tortoises are just a really bad choice for contagious yawning. But the social explanation seems a little more supported.
Source of Information : Scientific American Magazine
Showing posts with label BEHAVIOR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BEHAVIOR. Show all posts
Monday, May 28, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Of Flash Mobs and Four Loko
An out-of-context experience can feel more intense
On an ordinary afternoon at Copenhagen Central Station, a performer sets up a drum in the center of a large hall. A cellist joins him. A woman approaches with her flute. They strike up a melody that seems familiar. A clarinet and bassoon and other instruments start playing. People pull out their cell phones and record video. Within minutes an entire symphony orchestra has assembled in the middle of the station, and suddenly it’s clear that this isn’t just your typical street performance; it’s the Copenhagen Philharmonic, and the tune is Ravel’s Boléro. This musical flash mob is a very different experience from watching an orchestra perform in a music hall, perhaps because of the novelty of the surroundings.
The same sort of disconnect may explain the peculiar potency of Four Loko, a fruit-flavored, caffeinated, alcoholic drink that was invented by three Ohio State University students in 2005. Following a series of reported hospitalizations, in 2010 the Food and Drug Administration declared that it was illegal to add caffeine to alcoholic beverages, and the makers of Four Loko complied. Case closed? That caffeinated alcoholic drinks are dangerous is clear, but is caffeine the culprit? Shepard Siegel, a psychologist at McMaster University in Ontario writing in a recent issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, doesn’t think so.
For one thing, caffeine doesn’t seem to affect the way that alcohol gets absorbed by the body. Moreover, many drugs, including alcohol, are known to be more potent if they are taken in an unusual context. In a 1976 paper in Science, Siegel termed this the “situational specificity of tolerance.” Environmental variables ranging from the room where a drug is administered to flavor cues can influence an individual’s drug-related tolerance. What this comes down to is classical Pavlovian conditioning. The body of a social drinker learns to prepare for the alcohol in response to the environment, before the alcohol is even ingested. Siegel’s argument is that people became especially
drunk after drinking Four Loko because of the unexpected way in which it was presented: it doesn’t actually taste like alcohol. If Siegel is right, the decaf approach that the manufacturer of Four Loko has now taken could be troubling. It has announced a new beverage that comes with “a brand new flavor profile every four months.” This doesn’t fix the problem. Once someone becomes tolerant to the effects of the alcohol in one flavor, his or her tolerance would be eliminated when the next one is released. Intentional or not, Four Loko takes advantage of the situational specificity of tolerance. It has more in common with the Copenhagen Philharmonic flash mob than with your morning cuppa joe.
Source of Information : Scientific American Magazine
On an ordinary afternoon at Copenhagen Central Station, a performer sets up a drum in the center of a large hall. A cellist joins him. A woman approaches with her flute. They strike up a melody that seems familiar. A clarinet and bassoon and other instruments start playing. People pull out their cell phones and record video. Within minutes an entire symphony orchestra has assembled in the middle of the station, and suddenly it’s clear that this isn’t just your typical street performance; it’s the Copenhagen Philharmonic, and the tune is Ravel’s Boléro. This musical flash mob is a very different experience from watching an orchestra perform in a music hall, perhaps because of the novelty of the surroundings.
The same sort of disconnect may explain the peculiar potency of Four Loko, a fruit-flavored, caffeinated, alcoholic drink that was invented by three Ohio State University students in 2005. Following a series of reported hospitalizations, in 2010 the Food and Drug Administration declared that it was illegal to add caffeine to alcoholic beverages, and the makers of Four Loko complied. Case closed? That caffeinated alcoholic drinks are dangerous is clear, but is caffeine the culprit? Shepard Siegel, a psychologist at McMaster University in Ontario writing in a recent issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, doesn’t think so.
For one thing, caffeine doesn’t seem to affect the way that alcohol gets absorbed by the body. Moreover, many drugs, including alcohol, are known to be more potent if they are taken in an unusual context. In a 1976 paper in Science, Siegel termed this the “situational specificity of tolerance.” Environmental variables ranging from the room where a drug is administered to flavor cues can influence an individual’s drug-related tolerance. What this comes down to is classical Pavlovian conditioning. The body of a social drinker learns to prepare for the alcohol in response to the environment, before the alcohol is even ingested. Siegel’s argument is that people became especially
drunk after drinking Four Loko because of the unexpected way in which it was presented: it doesn’t actually taste like alcohol. If Siegel is right, the decaf approach that the manufacturer of Four Loko has now taken could be troubling. It has announced a new beverage that comes with “a brand new flavor profile every four months.” This doesn’t fix the problem. Once someone becomes tolerant to the effects of the alcohol in one flavor, his or her tolerance would be eliminated when the next one is released. Intentional or not, Four Loko takes advantage of the situational specificity of tolerance. It has more in common with the Copenhagen Philharmonic flash mob than with your morning cuppa joe.
Source of Information : Scientific American Magazine
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