Cheezy poofs only taste good when all is right

In our early years, we are taught about the five senses: hearing, sight, taste, touch and smell. These senses (supposedly) make up our own personal toolbox for perceiving the world around us, and we are initially taught that our senses give us an accurate representation of what we perceive: cookies always smell like cookies, cheezy poofs always taste oh-so-good.

This idea that our brain perceives the world exactly as it is starts to break down when we are exposed to optical illusions: images that differ from what we think is real. One of my favorite ones is on the right: the A square and the B square are actually the same shade of grey, even though we perceive them to be different. As it turns out, neuroscientists are increasingly finding out that most of our senses, not just vision, are far from perfect when it comes to representing the world accurately. How we feel, what we are doing, what we just did, pretty much anything can influence our perception.

In a recent study about perception, researchers investigated the relationship between morality and taste. They started by having participants read a short story. Not everybody got the same story to read: a third of the participants read a story in which something morally bad happens (shoplifting, or a politician accepting a bribe), a third read a story in which something morally good happens (a gift to a homeless family, or a good Samaritan stopping a mugging), and a third read a story in which something boring happens (a student choosing a major, or waiters chit chatting). The participants were then asked to rate the morality of the story, and not surprisingly, they rated the stories exactly as you would expect – the shoplifting and bribe-accepting as being morally bad, and so on.

The researchers then pretended that the study was over, and that they were now starting a new study that had to do with product-testing. The participants were asked to drink a teaspoon of a mysterious drink (in reality, diluted blue Gatorade), and then rate the taste of the drink on a scale from very disgusting to very delicious. Can you see where this is going?

As you might have guessed, the participants that had read a “morally bad” story rated the drink as more disgusting, and the participants that had read a “morally good” story rated it as more delicious (the ones who got the boring story rated it somewhere in the middle). That is to say, the participant’s experience of a moral judgment significantly influenced their perception of taste. Seems like we can’t trust any of our senses!

The researchers discussed the results of this study in the context of how we process morality and so on, but I think it’s even more interesting to think of this as a prime example of just how much our brain puts a personal slant on everything we experience. I also see implications for issues like overeating and emotional eating.

Can you think of a time when food tasted different because of emotional reasons? Share in the comments!

Reference: The bitter truth about morality - virtue, not vice, makes a bland beverage taste nice. (2012) Eskine KJ et al. PLoS One 7(7): e41159.

Sitting ducks die... Maybe.

I think it’s pretty safe for me to assume that you’re sitting down right now. Some of you might be so lucky to have a treadmill desk (on my long list of wants) or you might be reading this on your mobile device while waiting in line at the grocery store, but chances are most of you are sitting. Many people around the world do what I call “sitting for a living”, meaning working at a desk for the larger portion of the day. A recent study reported that Taiwan, Norway, Saudi Arabia and Japan are the “most seated” countries with people sitting over 6 hours per day. It’s a no-brainer that sitting all day is bad for your health – it’s been associated with health issues like Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Conversely, it’s also known that exercise is good for you and helps prevent health issues like – you guessed it – Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Based on these findings, the government has established guidelines suggesting adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise per week to benefit from physical activity.

Long work hours combined with all this evidence about the health benefits of exercise has led to a new label: what I call the “active couch potato”, one who is both sedentary and physically active. These people, like me, work 8- to 10-hour days at a desk, but also exercise – for example, they cycle to work, or jog regularly. So the question becomes: is regular exercise sufficient to offset sitting all day on most days?

A recent study tries to shed light on the relationship between sitting and life expectancy, regardless of exercise. After seeing a number of dubious headlines about this study such as “Sitting less can boost your life expectancy” and “Sitting ourselves to death” (gasp!), I thought I’d take a look at the original research and report back.

The researchers carried out a “meta-analysis”, which essentially means an “analysis of analyses”. They looked through previously published scientific articles on the topics of sitting and life expectancy, pooled the results together, and crunched the numbers to get a “big picture”. To make their results easier to understand, they divided sitting habits in three levels: level 1 means sitting less than a quarter of the time in a normal day, level 2 means sitting about half the time, and level three means sitting three quarters of the time or more. What their results show is that going from level 2 or 3 to level 1 (meaning sitting less) can mean a gain of 2 years in life expectancy.

So what? Do we really conclude that sitting is a silent killer?

Not so fast. We have many reasons to believe that sitting is bad for our health, but this article isn’t necessarily one of them. For one thing, the researchers themselves point out that their results don’t mean that someone who sits less can expect to live longer. Life expectancy is a measure that can only apply to populations, not to individuals, so while the study is relevant in a “big picture” kind of way, it means little for your own personal habits and life expectancy.

The authors also make one big assumption in their model: that sitting more causes a shortened life expectancy. However, the study results don’t tell us whether there is a direct cause-and-effect relationship. I talked about confounders in previous posts, and this is a perfect place to continue this discussion. For my new readers, confounders are variables that the researcher didn’t take into consideration, which could explain his results in a different way. For example, in this instance, the researchers find that sitting more shortens life expectancy. However, the real explanation could be that people who sit more end up eating more spicy Cheetos, and it’s the chemicals in the spicy Cheetos that actually shortens their life expectancy. See what I mean? Of course this is a silly example, but you get the idea (and of course I will never give up spicy Cheetos).

Can you think of possible (silly or not!) confounders in this study? Share in the comments!

You can count on more articles about sitting in the future. Since this one didn’t really answer whether sitting and exercising cancel out, I’ll keep looking.  

Reference: Sedentary behaviour and life expectancy in the USA: a cause-deleted life table analysis. (2012) Katzmaryk PT, Lee I-M. BMJ Open 2:e000828.

Hurray for Higgs

There has been a lot of discussion in the news recently about the discovery of the Higgs boson particle at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.

I'm sure some of you would like to know more about this, and I would have loved to write a good post about the discovery and its implications. Sadly, my knowledge of subatomic particle physics is somewhat limited (and by limited I mean nonexistent).

So instead, I recommend the following video for an introduction to the Higgs boson:

What is the Higgs Boson?

And since this wouldn't be a proper Scientific Chick article without a good measure of hype debunking, here's a more critical take on the news:

Cross-Check Blog

 Enjoy!

Healthy aging: As easy as do-re-mi ♪ ?

We’re all growing old – for all the recent advances in science and all the predictions of science fiction, this is still an inescapable fact. By 2050, there will be roughly 89 million older adults in the US, twice as many as there are now. While old age chases most of us down if we’re lucky, that doesn’t mean we’re entirely powerless in the process.

Previous entries in my blog looked at various ways to promote healthy aging: walking and lifting weights, eating less, learning languages. Some of these lifestyle changes, like exercise, are easy to incorporate later in life, while others, like bilingualism, may depend on the environment you grew up in. Today’s new finding about healthy aging fits in the latter category. It's a bit like a lottery: were you one of the lucky ones who benefited from an anti-aging activity in your youth?

Researchers were interested in how the brain responds to sound. We already know that brain structures that lie at the base of your brain, called subcortical structures (sub > beneath, cortical > the outer layer of your brain) are important for detecting fast-changing sounds like the ones we make when we talk. The precise timing of your brain reacting to sounds degrades as you get older, and scientists believe this is why grandma sometimes doesn’t really follow what you’re saying.

In this study, the researchers measured the precision of this timing by putting electrodes on participants’ heads (the outside only!) and recording the signals their brains generated when they heard the syllable “da”. As expected, the older participants didn’t have as precise a timing as younger ones. More interestingly, however, was that this age-related decline wasn’t nearly as bad in participants who were musicians.

So the take-home message is that lifelong musical experience can help make your brain better equipped to deal with aging. No doubt it also comes with other benefits - my grandma, in her eighties, had forgotten much of her adult years but still delighted fellow residents of her care home with her flawless rendition of the "Sweet bye and bye". Now of course while this is an interesting article, the results don't come as a huge surprise – by now you probably have figured out that the whole “use if or lose it” saying has a lot of truth to it.

Conveniently, I just bought a piano. Now if only I could reap all the benefits just by looking at it…

Reference: Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing (2012) Parbery-Clark A, Anderson S, Hittner E, Kraus N. Neurobiology of Aging 33:1483.e1-1483.e4.

Science does not rest!

Science lovers, I shall neglect you no more!

Scientific Chick is back at it. There have been so many developments while I have been away from this blog - new findings about obesity, Alzheimer's disease, gene therapy, stem cells, cancer, sex, you name it!

I'm pondering new features for this site - for one thing, I promise to get a better picture up there soon! I would like to have a more interactive format, perhaps a forum for debates, seeing as new developments in science, health and technology do not come without controversy...

In the meantime, though, I'll be bringing some new science stories that I think you'll find interesting, and the occasional ridiculous headline, since I love them so much.

Stay tuned! And thanks for sticking around so patiently!

Live from the sky, somewhere over the prairies

It’s been a while, science-loving friends, and I apologize. I could list all the things that have kept me away from this blog in the past month, but then I might scare away anyone who is considering the postdoc life. Instead, I will reward your patience with brain news hot off the press: a report from a neuroethics conference I just attended in Montreal called Brain Matters. As with previous conference reports, I will share my insights in bullet-proof format, as my foggy jet-lagged brain cannot write a coherent paragraph at the moment.

• The conference brought together a large variety of professionals: neuroscientists, lawyers, bioethicists, philosophers, psychiatrists, you name it. As it turns out, psychiatrists know a joke or two.

• We heard quite a bit about how the media handles neuroscience news. The consensus is that in most cases (but not all), the answer is poorly. The blame gets tossed around. Journalists hype research too much, but it’s not their fault, they need to sell papers. Researchers hype research too much, but it’s not their fault, they need to get funding. I voted to shift the blame onto grad students. I also thought we could solve the problem easily by making everybody read Scientific Chick. It didn’t take as well as I had hoped.

• We also heard quite a bit about deep brain stimulation (DBS), a potential treatment for a variety of illnesses and conditions that involves sticking a stimulating electrode in the brain and leaving it there. Right now, this works relatively well for treating advanced cases of Parkinson. The problem is that it comes with side effects and that people undergoing this type of treatment are reporting things like “no longer feeling like themselves”. This brings us to an important question: What does it mean to feel like yourself? One of the most fascinating talks of the conference involved an in-depth discussion of personal identity and how it is or isn’t affected by brain interventions like DBS.

• There was also a discussion of self-experimentation. Should willing neuroscientists be allowed to stick electrodes in their own brains to advance our knowledge of neuroscience? The speaker argued that we allow people to skydive and bungee jump without having them fill endless forms and run their proposal to do something crazy through an ethics board, so self-experimentation should be no different. I mean, do you want the Nobel Prize or not?

• One of the most interesting talks was on placebos. The researcher argued that antidepressants work only marginally better than placebos in most cases (though not all cases), and so we should really ask ourselves whether the small improvement is worth the side effects. I thought of a genius business venture that involves selling sugar pills for every possible condition. Then I remembered that this already exists. It’s called homeopathy.

• Speaking of placebos, everyone always assumes that they only work because you think you’re getting an active drug. Some researchers were skeptical about this, and so they carried out this fascinating study that involved giving placebos to people with irritable bowel syndrome, but also telling them that they’re getting placebos the entire time. Guess what? They felt better anyway.

This blog post is already dragging on too long, but these were just a few of all the very interesting topics and discussions we had over two days. I hope to be back with regular science programming very shortly, so stay tuned for the latest and greatest!

Pretty politics

My Canadian readers are no doubt preparing for the upcoming federal election. Living in a democracy, we have the opportunity to vote for the candidate we think is most competent (even if sometimes it seems like all options are pretty grim). If we choose well, we may be rewarded: there is much evidence that intelligence and competence correlate with effective performance in politics. Unfortunately, research also shows that intelligence can’t be predicted from one’s appearance. Everyone knows that. That’s why we would never choose a competent candidate solely based on what they look like. Or would we?

To evaluate how much looks factor in when choosing a political candidate, Swiss researchers asked over 600 adults to rate which of two faces (in photographs) looked most competent. Little did the participants know, the two faces were actually of two candidates in a past French parliamentary election. As it turns out, over 70% of the participants ended up picking the candidate who had won the election.

To take things a little further, the researchers then carried out a similar experiment in children. They had over 600 children ranging from five to thirteen years old play a computer game that involved a sailing trip from Troy to Ithaca (sounds familiar?). After the game, the children were shown the same two faces used in the adult experiment and were asked to choose who they would prefer to have as captain of the boat. Again, just over 70% of the children chose the election winner.

Interpreting these results can be a bit tricky, but keep in mind that we already know that competent people aren’t necessarily prettier. One thing is clear: the experiments tell us that adult and children use similar types of visual information when judging whether someone is competent or not. The researchers also conclude that voters don’t factor in enough information about the actual performance of candidates when heading to the ballots, relying instead on what candidates look like. While I’m sure they are at least partially right, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to come to this conclusion given the simplicity of the study.

In any case, the results serve as a good reminder to think about our candidates and to take our civic duties seriously. After all, we wouldn’t judge a book by its cover…

Reference: Predicting elections: child’s play! (2009) Antonakis J and Dalgas O. Science 323(27):1183.