Teenagers are more selfish than adults because they use a different part of their brain to make decisions compared to adults, new research suggests. Previous work has shown that when children reach puberty, there is an increase in connections between nerves in the brain. This occurs particularly in the area involved in decision-making and awareness of other people’s feelings, called the ‘mentalising network’. Now Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neuroscientist from University College London, UK, has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 19 adolescents (aged 11 to 17) and 11 adults (aged 21 to 37) whilst they were asked questions relating to decision-making. Questions such as: ‘You’re going to the cinema, where do you look for film times?’ Blakemore found that teenagers rely on the rear part of the mentalising network to make their decisions, an area of the brain called the superior temporal sulcus. In contrast, adults use the front part, called the prefrontal cortex. The superior temporal sulcus is involved in processing very basic behavioural actions, whereas the prefrontal cortex is involved in more complex functions such as processing how decisions affect others. So the research implies that ‘teenagers are less able to understand […]
Neanderthals are often thought of as the stray branch in the human family tree, but research now suggests the modern human is likely the odd man out. ‘What people tend to do is draw a line from our ancestors straight to ourselves, and any group that doesn’t seem to fit on that line is divergent, distinct, unusual, strange,’ researcher Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told LiveScience Friday. ‘But in terms of evolution of our family tree, the genus Homo, we’re the outliers and the Neanderthals are more toward the core.’ Humans are not at the inevitable end of a sequence, Trinkaus said. ‘It just happens that we happen to be alive today and Neanderthals are not.’ Trinkaus spent decades examining fossil skeletons and gradually realized that maybe researchers had looked at Neanderthals the wrong way. Over the last two years, he systematically combed through fossils, comparing the shapes of Neanderthal and modern human skulls, jaws, teeth, arms and legs with those of the earliest members of the genus Homo. ‘I wanted to see to what extent Neanderthals are derived, that is, distinct, from the ancestral form. I also wanted to […]
BOSTON — The US higher education system – often considered the best in the world – is starting to lag behind other countries’, according to a report released yesterday. The report, produced by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, an independent research group based in California, highlights the need for the US to improve college participation rates among young adults and support degree completion, the report’s authors said. ‘The rest of the world has a much stronger sense of the relationship between having a college-educated society and being economically competitive,’ said Patrick Callan, president of the centre. ‘This knowledge-based economy is a real thing and [the US] hasn’t gotten the message yet.’ Mr Callan said the US had not made significant progress in the past 15 years on many measures of college participation and student attainment, while other countries had enhanced their systems. Because of this, the US’s educational firepower was more concentrated in its older adult population. For example, the US ranks second – behind Canada – in the percentage of adults aged 35 to 64 who hold at least an associate degree, according to the report, which draws comparisons with countries […]
The Tom and Jerry cartoon image that mice love cheese is a myth, an academic has claimed. Dr David Holmes, from Manchester Metropolitan University, said mice prefer foods with a lot of sugar, chocolate for example. He said: ‘Mice respond to the smell, texture and taste of food. Cheese is something that would not be available to them in their natural environment and so not something they would respond to.’ A mouse’s natural diet is primarily made up of grains and fruit, both high in sugar. The findings were part of a wider study into what foods attract and repel animals. Researchers found a mouse’s diet is primarily made up of grains and fruit. They say a real mouse would turn its nose up at something as strong in smell and rich in taste as cheese.
Past changes to the climate that generated increasingly arid conditions for ancient peoples helped to trigger the rise of the earliest civilisations on three continents, a study has found. The ancient civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, south Asia, China and northern South America all owe some of their initial success to significant changes in rainfall and temperature, a climatologist said yesterday. The conventional view of how early civilisations developed is that they benefited from the steady conditions of a predictable period of climate constancy. However, Nick Brooks, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, believes there is mounting evidence to show that past civilisations grew in response to climate change rather than being the result of climate stability. ‘The earliest civilisations developed as a by-product of adaptation to climate change, and crucially that they were the products not of a benign environment, but of a hostile one,’ Dr Brooks told the British Association. A study of the early Garamantian civilisation that developed 3,000 years ago in what is now the Sahara showed that increasingly dry conditions had led to an acceleration in the technological innovation and monumental architecture that are the hallmarks of […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
