Why my dog drinks beer

* 17:00 26 April 2007
* NewScientist.com news service
* Roxanne Khamsi
When dogs learn new tricks, they do not simply copy what they see, but interpret it, suggests a new study, which provides evidence that man's best friend possesses a human-like ability to understand the goals and intentions of others.

In the experiment, a well-trained Border collie bitch demonstrated to untrained dogs how to pull a lever for food using her paw. If she did this while carrying a toy ball between her teeth, the dogs in her audience would instead tug the lever with their mouths when their turn arrived. These animals appeared to be thinking that she used her paw only because her mouth held a ball, say researchers.

Forty other dogs – none of which had seen the food lever before – observed the well-trained collie pull it for a biscuit 10 times. Half of them saw the collie carry out the task with nothing in her mouth. Almost all of these observers used their paws when given a chance to tug the lever for food.

"We were very surprised to see this 'selective imitation' by the dogs," says Range, referring to how the dogs' actions depended on whether the Border collie carried a ball. "They didn't just copy blindly what they saw." She believes it is the first time that this sort of selective imitation has been shown in animals besides humans.

The new dog study involved almost two dozen breeds, including Labradors and various herding dogs, ranging in age from one to 12 years. So Range believes that most dogs rely on selective imitation to learn.Read on...

Thinking out of the box

She notes that some experiments in chimps have shown signs of a related – but not identical – type of sophisticated imitation. In one study, for example, chimps observed a human poke a stick twice into a transparent box of food. The first, an ineffective jab from above, was always followed by a fruitful jab from the side. The chimps skipped the first, unnecessary jab when they had a chance to try for the food reward themselves.

But while Range argues that sophisticated imitation might help animals learn, some experts believe that mindless copying can actually give species – even humans – an advantage when used appropriately.

Basic copycat behaviour can result in speedier mastery of very simple tasks, they say (see Mindless imitation teaches us how to be human).

Journal reference: Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2007.04.026)

Things We Learn From Rat Sex

Scientific American Mind: Good Sex Is Not a Rat Race
Good Sex Is Not a Rat Race
By David Dobbs
For years the story on rat sex has been this: the male seeks above all else to ejaculate quickly, and once he has done it with one female, he is eager to move on to new partners. The female, meanwhile, seeks to extend the sex encounter through "pacing." A new study finds that if pacing is slow enough, the male will prefer that familiar partner to someone new. The wait, it seems, makes the female more attractive.

"It's an awful lot like what we were taught in high school," says Concordia University psychologist James Pfaus, who co-authored the study with Nafissa Ismail, the graduate student who conceived it.
The experiment made innovative use of standard research devices called pacing chambers, which are cages with dividers having either one or four holes big enough to let a female rat through but too small for the larger male. Thus, the female can join or leave the male, allowing her to significantly lengthen her arousal and, studies have shown, her chance of pregnancy. But the mating rituals last longer in the one-hole chambers, because the male, eager to get at the female, often sticks his big head in the hole, blocking her only passage back to his side and delaying her return.

The researchers let 20 couples mate in one-hole chambers and 20 in four-hole chambers. Then they placed each couple, along with a novel female, in a larger, open area. Among males from four-hole chambers, about half preferred their familiar mates. Among males who mated more slowly in the one-hole chambers, 80 percent preferred the familiar partner.

Driving this behavioral dynamic is, as always with rat sex, some neurochemical reward. Boston University biologist Mary Erskine notes that "sexual preferences come from chemical rewards, and we can be sure there are some here." Sexual climax, in fact, unleashes a flood of pleasure-producing hormones and neurotransmitters, such as testosterone and dopamine. Pfaus speculates that the higher level of arousal created by the longer wait generates a stronger release, and a more substantial reward, thereby enforcing the preference.

"Whether it's simply a stronger dose of the usual chemical rewards or some in addition, we don't know," Pfaus says. "But something is making this sort of mating more rewarding to the male or rewarding in a different way."

Rat sex, Rat sex
I've had a lot of that sex.
Get'im in the sack sex
Line 'em up, 'mon back sex.

Cute whiskers and a big pink tail
Show me who's boss
I might make your bail.

Big rats, little rats
Shady, non-committal rats
waiting for acquital rats,
Gimme-just-a-little rats.

Come on over baby
You don't have to stay,
But if you want me in there
Get yo big head out' the way!

What Wives Assume their Husbands Know (But they don't)

Assumptions lead to miscommunication

Some of people's biggest problems with communication come in sharing new information with people they know well, U.S. researchers said.

People often use short, ambiguous messages when talking to colleagues or spouses, unintentionally creating misunderstandings, said University of Chicago Psychology Professor Boaz Keysar.

"People are so used to talking with those with whom they already share a great deal of information, that when they have something really new to share, they often present it in away that assumes the person already knows it," Keysar said. read on...

My new excuse ..er ..reason

February 12, 2007
NAPPING MAY BE GOOD FOR YOUR HEART

Like to kick back for an afternoon siesta? Good news: a new study shows that regular napping may cut your risk of dying from a heart attack or other heart problems.

In the largest study to date on the effects of midday snoozing, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of Athens Medical School in Greece, tracked 23,681 apparently healthy men and women, ages 20 to 86, for more than six years.

Their findings, published in today's Archives of Internal Medicine: those who took afternoon siestas of 30 minutes or more at least three times a week had a 37 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease than those who did not.

Even more impressive: researchers found that working men who took regular or occasional naps had a 64 percent lower risk of death from heart attacks or other heart-related ills than their nonnapping compeers. And working women? "The apparent effect was evident mainly among working men," says lead study author Dimitrios Trichopoulos. "There were not enough coronary deaths among working women (only six) in this group to allow sound inference." (Of course, some might consider that a positive thing.)

Trichopoulos, a cancer prevention and epidemiology professor at HSPH, says researchers decided to look into this issue, because coronary mortality tends to be low in populations in which the prevalence of siestas tends to be high.

"Our working hypothesis has been that napping may have stress-releasing properties," he says.
read on...

Why I'm Stupid

ScienceDaily: Neural Bottleneck Found That Thwarts Multi-Tasking
Neural Bottleneck Found That Thwarts Multi-tasking
Science Daily — Many people think they can safely drive while talking on their cell phones. Vanderbilt neuroscientists Paul E. Dux and René Marois have found that when it comes to handling two things at once, your brain, while fast, isn't that fast.

"Why is it that with our incredibly complex and sophisticated brain, with 100 billion neurons processing information at rates of up to a thousand times a second, we still have such a crippling inability to do two tasks at once?" Marois, associate professor of Psychology, asked. "For example, what is it about our brain that gives us such a hard time at being able to drive and talk on a cell phone simultaneously?"
Researchers have long thought that a central "bottleneck" exists in the brain that prevents us from doing two things at once. Dux and Marois are the first to identify the regions of the brain responsible for this bottleneck, by examining patterns of neural activity over time. Their results were published in the Dec. 21 issue of Neuron.
"In our everyday lives, we seem to complete so many cognitive tasks effortlessly. However, we experience severe limitations when we try to do even two simple tasks at once, such as pressing a button when a visual stimulus appears and saying a word when a sound is presented. This is known as dual-task interference," Dux, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Psychology, said. "We were interested in trying to understand these limitations and in finding where in the brain this bottleneck might be taking place
Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/01/070118161628.htm

Exploring the Mind-Body Orgasm

Exploring the Mind-Body Orgasm

By Randy Dotinga| Wired
02:00 AM Jan, 10, 2007

Armed with MRI scanners and willing volunteers, a hardy band of sex researchers is exploring the long-misunderstood organ that's at the center of human sexuality -- the brain.

Three of the leading lights in sex research have compiled several decades' worth of knowledge into a new book called The Science of Orgasm.

The authors are Rutgers University professor emeritus Beverly Whipple (who helped popularize the "G-spot" in the '70s), Rutgers psychology professor Barry Komisaruk, and Carlos Beyer-Flores, head of the Laboratorio Tlaxcala in Mexico.

In a Q&A with Wired News, Whipple and Komisaruk discussed what we're learning about the eternal mystery of the Big O.
read on

Past and Future: All in Your Head

Time Past, Time Future Intricately Connected In Brain

by Agence France-Presse • Posted January 2, 2007 11:24 AM

CHICAGO (AFP)—Our ability to daydream about our future is closely related to our ability to recall our past, and may even depend on it, according to a study which may explain a little-known quirk of the amnesiac's condition.

The findings come from a small study in which researchers compared the brain activity of volunteers as they alternately reminisced about past personal events such as a birthday, or getting lost, and then conjured up images of similar scenarios in the future.

The brain scans of the 21 students who took part in the experiment revealed "a surprisingly complete overlap" in the brain regions used for both processes, the researchers said.

"Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories," said Karl Szpunar, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.