Blogs / Discoblog

Between the plastic surgeries and Neverland, some may conclude that Michael Jackson had lost his mind prior to his death. Well, now it’s being taken to literal levels: He’ll likely be buried without his brain.

Apparently, scientists need to remove the pop star’s brain to finish his autopsy. And because it takes about two weeks for a brain to “harden” before it can be examined, if he’s laid to rest before then, his body will have to be buried without it.

Letting a brain “harden” is standard autopsy protocol when the brain is suspected of playing an important part in the death, as it would with a drug overdose. According to Mind Hacks, a neuroscience and psychology blog:

[Hardening] involves removing the brain from the skull and leaving it to soak in a diluted mixture of formaldehyde and water called formalin. This soaking process usually takes four weeks and the brain genuinely does harden. A “fresh” brain is a pinkish colour and has the consistency of jelly, gello or soft tofu meaning it is difficult to examine and the various internal structures are often hard to make out.
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As anyone who’s seen movie Cars knows, the front of an automobile can look suspiciously like a face. Now, scientists in the field of shape analysis, or morphometrics, are exploring how a car’s “face,” or front design, can also give it a personality.

A Volkswagen beetle, for example, has a rounded, childlike face that implies niceness, whereas a Ford Mustang has a mature, angular mug that looks distinctly masculine—and far more aggressive.

What’s more, the ability to see faces in inanimate objects may have served an evolutionary purpose, according to the researchers. The AP reports:

Facial features offering clues about a person’s sex, age, emotions and intentions helped early humans “know whether the guy that just stepped out of the bushes is going to take your head back for a trophy or invite you to lunch,” [shape analysis researcher Dennis] Slice said.

Those identifications are so important that people also tend to see faces even where they don’t exist.

“If you get it wrong and you see a face in a cloud or a stone or a mountain or some burnt toast [ed. note: Or a block of wood] then you might be frightened a little bit, but it’s no real cost to you,” Slice said. “But if you should ever miss a face and that person wants your head, then that’s a serious omission.”

Next, the researchers might examine how other drivers react to cars with faces that project different personalities, or how adjusting the position of the headlights or other “features” can change which types of customers find a particular car appealing.

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Researchers hoping to literally get inside the heads of soldiers will have their chance: 20 retired and active members of the U.S. military have pledged to donate their brains for research on the physical effects of war on the brain.

The program will be looking for evidence of brain damage caused by explosions and other wartime trauma, and the researchers involved have already examined the brains of athletes for similar problems. According to the New York Times:

Just as researchers at the Boston University center and elsewhere have linked some athletes’ later-life emotional problems to their on-field brain trauma, the research on military personnel will try to determine whether some soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder—a psychological diagnosis—actually retain physical brain damage caused by battlefield blasts. Some signs of P.T.S.D., particularly depression, erratic behavior and the inability to concentrate, appear similar to those experienced by concussed athletes.

Such a link could have effects beyond medicine. Disability benefits for veterans can vary depending on whether an injury is considered psychological or physical. And veterans with P.T.S.D. alone do not receive the Purple Heart, the medal given to soldiers wounded or killed in enemy action, because it is not a physical wound.

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From 80Beats:

A noisy Italian disco may not seem like a conducive location for scientific experiments, but for a couple of researchers investigating hearing and language processing it was perfect. The undercover scientists studied clubbers who were trying to talk while the music was pumping, and found that they showed a decided preference for speaking into each other’s right ears. What’s more, when the researchers approached clubbers with a request for a cigarette, they found the unwitting test subjects were much more likely to comply if the petition was made in the right ear.

Previous lab studies have also suggested 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” [Wired.com]. Researchers say this bias holds true for both lefties and righties.

For those of us with no discernible artistic talent, it may seem impossible to produce a recognizable sketch, sculpture, or painting.  For Alan Brown, a 49-year-old father of three, however, all it took was a stroke and 16 hours of brain surgery to give him the artistic prowess to get a degree in fine arts and open his own gallery.

The U.K. Daily Mail reports that Brown was still recovering from his surgery when he realized that his doodles, once limited to stick men, had become strikingly more realistic.  Brain surgery can cause significant changes in behavior and abilities. Luckily for Brown, his change was for the better. He began painting (examples of his work can be seen here) and eventually quit his day job to open a gallery, where he displays and sells his art.

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New Scientist is reporting that a paper by the U.S. National Academies of Science has thrown out the possibility of using genetic testing and analysis to match soldiers with specific duties/specialties, and monitor their brains for signs of stress or weakness. For instance:

If a soldier is struggling, a digital “buddy” might step in and warn them about nearby threats, or advise comrades to zap them with an electromagnet to increase their alertness. If the whole unit is falling apart, biosensors could warn central commanders to send in a replacement team….

Sponsored by the U.S. army and written by a panel of 14 prominent neuroscientists, the report focuses on those areas with “high-payoff potential” – where the science is sufficiently reliable to turn into useful technologies….

Within five years, biomarkers might be used to assess how well a soldier’s brain is functioning, and within 10 years, it should be possible to predict how individuals are likely to respond to environmental stresses like extreme heat and cold, or endurance exercises.

There’s also the matter of matching people to combat specialties based on a combo of psych and genetics tests:

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Short people may be disadvantaged on the basketball court, in the workplace, and when trying to see over large crowds, but they just might be quicker in sensing the world around them—because, well, their signals don’t have to travel as far to get to their brains.

In effect, this means that tall people are living in the past, if only by a tenth of a second. This is all according to neuroscientist David Eagleman, whose essay entitled “Brain Time” suggests that “if the brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive.”

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People may perceive sound differently, depending on how in shape they are. Researchers have previously shown that women respond to oncoming noise sooner than men, supporting the view that stronger people require less time to react to impending danger. In the latest study from Ohio, scientists say that response time is not based on someone’s gender, height, or weight, but instead, relies on how fit a person is.

“This is the first evidence that our motor system and the perception of looming sounds evolved together,” John Neuhoff, an evolutionary psychologist at the College of Wooster and lead researcher on the study, told DISCOVER. Neuhoff tested 50 people, ranging from college students to 43-year-old couch potatoes, for strength and cardiovascular fitness. He categorized his subjects based on their fitness level, measuring their pulse rate for 60 seconds after they marched for three minutes.

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Everyone can make “marijuana” in their heads. We don’t mean this literally.

Recently, researchers found that our brains produce proteins that mimic the effects of marijuana. The active ingredient in hash—tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC for short—is the reason why people feel high when they smoke pot. While the exact mechanism of how the brain takes in cannabis isn’t completely understood, THC is thought to play a significant role. After marijuana is inhaled, THC enters the lungs and the bloodstream, and then attaches to a certain type of cannabinoid receptor in the brain. That’s when the known effects of pot start to kick in: A person’s appetite increases (a.k.a the munchies), pain dissipates, and a heightened mental state sets in.

The psychoactive effect of pot is widely used in the medical community to treat symptoms of pain and inflammation in a slew of chronic illnesses. Now, Mount Sinai researchers have figured out which proteins made naturally in the brain can act like THC, so that someday they can produce marijuana-type drugs that don’t come with the side effects of smoking actual pot.

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Does blood type really matter? If you’re Japanese, the answer, at least right now, is yes. The importance of blood type is so ingrained in Japanese culture that potential employers regularly ask about it during job interviews. There’s also the Nintendo DS game that asks players their blood type to help them rediscover themselves, the Japanese department stores that sell “lucky bags” of women’s accessories that are tailored to blood types, and a new dating show that lets women pick men based on whether they’re an A negative or B positive.

Perhaps the biggest measure of the country’s obsession is in its books: Japan’s largest book distributor has reported that four out of the top ten books sold last year were on the ways a blood type determines a person’s personality.

In the bestselling series, there’s one book for each of the blood types, which are categorized as follows:

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