New field of ‘optogenetics’ offers new insights into brain function

Wired reports on the new field of optogentics. This research takes light-sensitive plant cells and implants them in animals, allowing light to activate specific neurons in a way not previously possible.

Right ear more responsive to requests than left ear, study finds

Wired reports:

You’re in a loud and sweaty Italian dance club when a woman approaches you. To be heard over the techno, she leans in close and yells into your ear, “Hai una sigaretta?”

If she spoke into your right ear, you would be twice as likely to give her a cigarette than if she asked by your left ear, according to a new study that employed this methodology in the clubs of Pescara, Italy. Of 88 clubbers who were approached on the right, 34 let the researcher bum a smoke, compared with 17 of 88 whom she approached on the left.

“The present work is one of the few studies demonstrating the natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries, showing their effect in everyday human behavior,” write psychologists Daniele Marzoli and Luca Tommasi of the University G. d’Annunzio in Italy in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

It’s the latest in a series of studies that show that sound from both human ears is processed differently within the brain. Researchers have noted that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear. Brain scientists hypothesize that the right ear auditory stream receives precedence in the left hemisphere of the brain, where the bulk of linguistic processing is carried out.

Auditory modality + visual modality = faster perception

Science Daily reports:

The traditional view of individual brain areas involved in perception of different sensory stimuli—i.e., one brain region involved in hearing and another involved in seeing—has been thrown into doubt in recent years.

A new study shows that, in monkeys, the region involved in hearing can directly improve perception in the visual region, without the involvement of other structures to integrate the senses.

Integration of sensory stimuli has traditionally been thought of as hierarchical, involving brain areas that receive signals from distinct areas of the brain layer known as the cortex that recognise different stimuli. But the recent finding of nerve cells projecting from the auditory cortex (associated with the perception of sound) directly into the visual cortex (associated with sight), suggest that perception of one sense might affect that of another without the involvement of higher brain areas.

“Viral” yawning?

The LA Times reports on research from the UK on yawning:

A study published in the journal Biology Letters this week found that human yawns are contagious to dogs, a sign that man’s best friend may be capable of a rudimentary form of empathy.

To scientists, dogs have been a bit of a puzzle. Dogs are adept at reading human intentions and excel over other animals in picking up human hand gestures and other behavioral cues. At the same time, though, they appear to lack a sense of self, considered a prerequisite for understanding the feelings of others.

Unlike chimpanzees and possibly elephants and dolphins, dogs do not recognize themselves in a mirror, a classic test of self-awareness.

The latest study demonstrates that dogs are not completely egocentric in their relationships with humans but possess “some low-level attending to what others feel,” said Duke University anthropologist Brian Hare, who was not involved in the research.

“What’s fascinating about this study is that you would not expect to find contagious yawning where you did not have self-awareness,” he said.

Only humans and chimps are known to contagiously yawn.

Chimps, orangutans capable of planning for future

I don’t really follow animal behavior research very closely but this Live Science report (via MSNBC) raises some interesting issues in the old “what is intelligence?” debate.

Chimps and orangutans plan for the future just like us.

They are capable of exercising self-control to postpone gratification and to imagine future events via “mental time travel,” according to new research from Lunds University Cognitive Science in Sweden.

The skill of future planning was commonly thought to be exclusive to humans, although some studies of apes and crows have challenged this idea, say researchers Mathias and Helena Osvath. Now, for the first time, there is “conclusive evidence of advanced planning capacities in non-human species,” they say.

The results are detailed online this week in the journal Animal Cognition.