Sometimes, when trolling through your institution’s journal subscriptions online, you wander into a treasure trove. I happened upon such a treasure trove recently: The Journal of Animal Behavior , which was published for just six years, between 1911 and 1916.

- Scicurious – This is your brain on psilocybin

Let’s be honest: tarsiers look odd. Among the smallest of all primates, most species of tarsier would fit easily in the palm of your hand. They have long, slender, largely hairless tails and elongated fingers with knobby knuckles and mushroom-cap finger pads.

Post from: Blisstree

Post from: Blisstree

Post from: Blisstree

Post from: Blisstree

Post from: Blisstree

1. Meningioma (9.2)
2. Glioblastoma (4.4)
3. Tumors of the sella turcica region (3.6)
4. Acoustic neuroma (1.5)
5. Astrocytomas (1.2)

• 19 and younger (75.3%)
• 20-39 (65.1%)
• 40-64 years (26.6%)
• 65 and older (<5%)

• Family history of brain cancer
• Caucasian race
• Advanced age
• Exposure to ionizing radiation
• Exposure to toxic chemicals

1. female gender
2. living with mother only
3. a baseline diagnosis of conduct disorder rather than oppositional defiant disorder
4. higher levels of conduct disorder symptoms
5. higher baseline levels of internalizing symptoms such as anxiety or depression
6. maternal depressive symptoms after treatment intervention
7. maternal stress rating of parenting

• Both groups of adolescents with conduct disorder demonstrated a reduced responses in brain regions felt to be linked to antisocial behavior
• Early onset conduct disorder adolescents showed reduced amygdala activation for sad versus neutral faces
• Early onset conduct disorder adolescents showed reduced amygdala activation for sad faces relative to the control fixation task

AFTER four years here at ScienceBlogs.com, Neurophilosophy is moving to a new home. As of today, it will be hosted by The Guardian.

During its time here, the blog has grown from strength to strength. It has received over 2.5 million page views, was featured regularly on the New York Times science page, and has been translated into about a dozen languages. It has also enabled me to earn a living as a freelance science writer for the past two years.

Thanks to everyone here at ScienceBlogs and especially to all my readers. I hope you'll continue reading. The URL for the new blog is: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/neurophilosophy and the feed is here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/neurophilosophy/rss; and here's my first post, 'The illlusion of attention.'

Very little research has been done on human echolocation, and nothing is known about the underlying brain mechanisms. In the first study of its kind, Canadian researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the brain activity of two blind echolocation experts. Their findings, published today in the open access journal PLoS ONE, show that echolocation engages regions of the brain that normally process vision.  

THE question of how mammals evolved their exceptionally large brains has intrigued researchers for years, and although many ideas have been put forward, none has provided a clear answer. Now a team of palaeontologists suggests that the mammalian brain evolved in three distinct stages, the first of which was driven by an improvement in the sense of smell. Their evidence, published in tomorrow's issue of Science, comes from two fossilized skulls, each measuring little more than 1cm in length. 

Cristina Marzano of the Sleep Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of Rome and her colleagues recruited 65 students, selected on the basis of their sleeping habits. All of them had a regular sleep 'routine', going to bed at around the same time, and sleeping for an average of seven-and-a-half hours, every night. For the study, the participants slept for two consecutive nights in a sound-proof, temperature-controlled room in the lab. They were left to sleep uninterrupted on the first night, so that they would get accustomed to the new surroundings. 

THE United States military funded research into using networks of 'spy crows' to locate soldiers who are missing in action, and extended the work to see if the birds might be useful in helping them to find Osama bin Laden. The idea may seem far-fetched, but unlike some military research programs (such as the Stargate remote-viewing program) it is actually based on sound science.

I've got some exciting news: Starting today, the Frontal Cortex will be moving over to the Wired website. Needless to say, the move comes with the usual mixture of emotions, as I've greatly enjoyed my four years as part of the Scienceblogs community. It's been an honor to share this space with such a fine collection of scientists and writers. I'm sad to be leaving. (I should note, by the way, that this move was planned long before Pepsi, etc.) However, I'm really thrilled to be joining the blog network of the publication that I contribute to in print. I apologize for the hassle of changing RSS feeds, bookmarks and all the rest, but I really hope we can make this move together. Regardless, thanks so much for reading!

I realized most of my Twitter friends are like me: white dorks. So I picked out my new friend and started to pay attention.

She's a Christian, but isn't afraid of sex. She seems to have some problems trusting men, but she's not afraid of them, either. She's very proud of her fiscal responsibility. She looks lovely in her faux modeling shots, although I am surprised how much her style aligns with what I consider mall fashion when she's a grown woman in her twenties. Her home is Detroit and she's finding the process of buying a new car totally frustrating. She spends an embarrassing amount of time tweeting responses to the Kardashian family.

One of the best things about Twitter is that, once you've populated it with friends genuine or aspirational, it feels like a slow-burn house party you can pop into whenever you like. Yet even though adding random people on Twitter is just a one-click action, most of us prune our follow list very judiciously to prevent tedious or random tweets to pollute our streams. Understandable! But don't discount the joy of discovery that can come by weaving a stranger's life into your own.

I'd argue that the benefits of these twitter strangers extend beyond the fleeting pleasures of electronic eavesdropping. Instead, being exposed to a constant stream of unexpected tweets - even when the tweets seem wrong, or nonsensical, or just plain silly - can actually expand our creative potential.

The explanation returns us to the banal predictability of the human imagination. In study after study, when people free-associate, they turn out to not be very free. For instance, if I ask you to free-associate on the word "blue," chances are your first answer will be "sky". Your next answer will probably be "ocean," followed by "green" and, if you're feeling creative, a noun like "jeans". The reason for this is simple: Our associations are shaped by language, and language is full of cliches.

How do we escape these cliches? Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at UC-Berkeley, has found a simple fix. Her experiment went like this: A lab assistant surreptitiously sat in on a group of subjects being shown a variety of color slides. The subjects were asked to identify each of the colors. Most of the slides were obvious, and the group quickly settled into a tedious routine. However, Nemeth instructed her lab assistant to occasionally shout out the wrong answer, so that a red slide would trigger a response of "yellow," or a blue slide would lead to a reply of "green". After a few minutes, the group was then asked to free-associate on these same colors. The results were impressive: Groups in the "dissent condition" - these were the people exposed to inaccurate descriptions - came up with much more original associations. Instead of saying that "blue" reminded them of "sky," or that "green" made them think of "grass," they were able to expand their loom of associations, so that "blue" might trigger thoughts of "Miles Davis" and "smurfs" and "pie". The obvious answer had stopped being their only answer. More recently, Nemeth has found that a similar strategy can also lead to improved problem solving on a variety of creative tasks, such as free-associating on ways to improve traffic in the Bay Area.

The power of such "dissent" is really about the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer - this is the shock of hearing blue called "green" - we start to reconsider the meaning of the color. We try to understand this strange reply, which leads us to think about the problem from a new perspective. And so our comfortable associations - the easy association of blue and sky - gets left behind. Our imagination has been stretched by an encounter that we didn't expect.

And this is why we should all follow strangers on Twitter. We naturally lead manicured lives, so that our favorite blogs and writers and friends all look and think and sound a lot like us. (While waiting in line for my cappuccino this weekend, I was ready to punch myself in the face, as I realized that everyone in line was wearing the exact same uniform: artfully frayed jeans, quirky printed t-shirts, flannel shirts, messy hair, etc. And we were all staring at the same gadget, and probably reading the same damn website. In other words, our pose of idiosyncratic uniqueness was a big charade. Self-loathing alert!) While this strategy might make life a bit more comfortable - strangers can say such strange things - it also means that our cliches of free-association get reinforced. We start thinking in ever more constricted ways.

And this is why following someone unexpected on Twitter can be a small step towards a more open mind. Because not everybody reacts to the same thing in the same way. Sometimes, it takes a confederate in an experiment to remind us of that. And sometimes, all it takes is a stranger on the internet, exposing us to a new way of thinking about God, Detroit and the Kardashians.

Baboons are nasty, brutish and short. They have a long muzzle and sharp fangs designed to inflict deadly injury. Their bodies are covered in thick, olive-colored fur, except on their buttocks, which are hairless. The species is defined by its social habits: The primates live in troops, or small groupings of several dozen individuals. These troops have a strict hierarchy, and each animal is assigned a specific ranking. While female rank is hereditary--a daughter inherits her mother's status--males compete for dominance. These fights can be bloody, but the stakes are immense: A higher rank means more sex. The losers, in contrast, face a bleak array of options: submission, exile, or death.

In 1978, Robert Sapolsky was a recent college graduate with a biology degree and ajobinKenya.Hehadsetoffforayearof fieldwork by himself among baboons before he returned to the US for grad school and the drudgery of the lab. At the time, Sapol- sky's wilderness experience consisted of short backpacking trips in the Catskill Moun- tains; he had lit a campfire exactly once. Most of what he knew about African wildlife he'd learned from stuffed specimens at the Museum of Natural History. And yet here he was in Nairobi, speaking the wrong kind of Swahili and getting ripped off by everyone he met. Eventually he made his way to the bush, a sprawling savanna filled with zebras and wildebeests and marauding elephants. "I couldn't believe my eyes," Sapolsky remem- bers. "There was an animal behind every tree. I was inside the diorama."

Sapolsky slowly introduced himself to a troop of baboons, letting them adjust to his presence. After a few weeks, he began recog- nizing individual animals, giving them nick- names from the Old Testament. It was a way of rebelling against his childhood Hebrew school teachers, who rejected the blasphemy of Darwinian evolution. "I couldn't wait for the day that I could record in my notebook that Nebuchanezzar and Naomi were off screwing in the bushes," Sapolsky wrote in A Primate's Memoir. "It felt like a pleas- ing revenge."

Before long, Sapolsky's romantic vision of fieldwork collided with the dismal reality of living in the African bush. His feet itched from a fungal infection, his skin was cov- ered in bug bites, the Masai stole his stuff, he had terrible diarrhea, and he was des- perately lonely. Sapolsky's subjects gave him no glimpse of good fellowship. They seemed to devote all of their leisure time--and baboon life is mostly leisure time--to mischief and malevolence. "One of the first things I discovered was that I didn't like baboons very much," he says. "They're quite awful to one another, constantly scheming and backstabbing. They're like chimps but without the self-control."

While Sapolsky was disturbed by the behavior of the baboons--this was nature, red in tooth and claw--he realized that their cruelty presented an opportunity to investi- gate the biological effects of social upheaval. He began to notice, for instance, that the males at the bottom of the hierarchy were thinner and more skittish."They just didn't look very healthy," Sapolsky says. "That's when I began thinking about how damn stressful it must be to have no status. You never know when you're going to get beat up. You never get laid. You have to work a lot harder for food."

And so Sapolsky set out to test the hypothesis that the stress involved in being at the bottom of the baboon hierarchy led to health problems. At the time, stress was mostly ignored as a scientific subject. It was seen as an unpleasant mental state with few long- term consequences. "A couple of studies had linked stress to ulcers, but that was about it," he says. "It struck most doctors as extremely unlikely that your feelings could affect your health. Viruses, sure. Carcinogens, absolutely. But stress? No way." Sapolsky, how- ever, was determined to get some data. He wasn't yet thinking lofty thoughts about human beings or public health. His transformation into one of the leading researchers on the sci- ence of stress would come later. Instead, he was busy learning how to shoot baboons with anesthetic darts and then, while they were plunged into sleep, quickly measure the levels of stress hormones in their blood.

In the decades since, Sapolsky's speculation has become scientific fact. Chronic stress, it turns out, is an extremely dangerous condition. And it's not just baboons: People are just as vulnerable to its effects as those low-ranking male apes. While stress doesn't cause any single disease--ironically, the causal link between stress and ulcers has been largely disproved--it makes most diseases significantly worse. The list of ailments connected to stress is staggeringly diverse and includes everything from the common cold and lower-back pain to Alzheimer's disease, major depressive disorder, and heart attack. Stress hollows out our bones and atrophies our muscles. It triggers adult onset diabetes and is a leading cause of male impotence. In fact, numerous studies of human longevity in developed coun- tries have found that "psychosocial" factors such as stress are the single most important variable in determining the length of a life. It's not that genes and risk factors like smoking don't matter. It's that our levels of stress matter more.

Furthermore, the effects of chronic stress directly counteract improvements in medical care and public health. Antibiotics, for instance, are far less effective when our immune system is suppressed by stress; that fancy heart surgery will work only if the patient can learn to shed stress. As Sapolsky notes, "You can give a guy a drug-coated stent, but if you don't fix the stress problem, it won't really matter. For so many conditions, stress is the major long-term risk factor. Everything else is a short-term fix."

The emergence of stress as a major risk factor is largely a testament to scientific progress: The deadliest diseases of the 21st century are those in which damage accumulates steadily over time. (Sapolsky refers to this as the "luxury of slowly falling apart.") Unfortunately, this is precisely the sort of damage that's exacerbated by emotional stress. While modern medicine has made astonishing progress in treating the fleshy machine of the body, it is only beginning to grapple with those misfortunes of the mind that undo our treatments.

The power of this new view of stress--that our physical health is strongly linked to our emotional state--is that it connects a wide range of scientific observations, from the sociological to the molecular. On one hand, stress can be described as a cultural condition, a byproduct of a society that leaves some people in a permanent state of stress. But that feeling can also be measured in the blood and urine, quantified in terms of glucocorticoids and norepinephrine and adrenal hormones. And now we can see, with scary precision, the devastating cascade unleashed by these chemicals. The end result is that stress is finally being recognized as a critical risk factor, predicting an ever larger percentage of health outcomes.

There's a lot more in the article. Here's one example of how stress destroys the body. Elissa Epel, a former grad student of Sapolsky's and a professor of psychiatry at UCSF, has demonstrated that mothers caring for chronically ill report much higher levels of stress. That's not surprising. What is surprising is that these women also have dramatically shortened telomeres, those caps on the end of chromosomes that keep our DNA from disintegrating. (Women with the highest levels of stress had telomere shortening equal "to at least one decade of additional aging.") When our telomeres run out, our cells stop dividing; we've run out of life. Stress makes us run out of life faster.

And yet, Dye notes that the very neural features that make babies so babyish might also allow them to learn about the world at an accelerated rate. Consider, for instance, the lack of a prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is woefully underdeveloped in infants. (Your PFC isn't fully developed until late adolescence.) One of the main consequences of not having an online PFC is that babies can't focus their attention. Alison Gopnik, a UC-Berkeley psychologist who has written a few wonderful books on baby cognition, suggests the following metaphor: If attention works like a narrow spotlight in adults - a focused beam illuminating particular parts of reality - then in babies it works more like a lantern, casting a diffuse radiance on their surroundings.

The lantern mode of attention can make babies seem very peculiar. For example, when preschoolers are shown a photograph of someone - let's call her Jane - looking at a picture of a family, they make very different assumptions about Jane's state of mind. When the young children are asked questions about what Jane is paying attention to, the kids quickly agree that Jane is thinking about the people in the picture. But they also insist that she's thinking about the picture frame, and the wall behind the picture, and the chair lurking in her peripheral vision. In other words, they believe that Jane is attending to whatever she can see.

While this less focused form of attention makes it more difficult to stay on task - preschoolers are easily distracted - it also comes with certain advantages. In many circumstances, the lantern mode of attention can actually lead to improvements in memory, especially when it comes to recalling information that seemed incidental at the time. This suggests that the so-called deficits of the baby brain are actually advantages, and might be there by design. Here's Dye:

The superiority of children's convention learning has been revealed in a series of ingenious studies by psychologists Carla Hudson-Kam and Elissa Newport, who tested how children and adults react to variable and inconsistent input when learning an artificial language. Strikingly, Hudson-Kam and Newport found that while children tended to ignore "noise" in the input, systematizing any variations they were exposed to, adults did just the opposite, and reproduced the variability they encountered.

So, for example, if subjects heard "elle va à la fac" 60% of the time and "elle va à fac" 40% of the time, adult learners tended to probability match and include "la" about 60% of the time, whereas younger learners tended to maximize and include "la" all of the time. While younger learners found the most consistent patterns in what they heard, and then conventionalized them, the adults simply reproduced what they heard. In William James' terms, the children made sense of the "blooming, buzzing confusion" they were exposed to in the experiment, whereas the adults did not.

Children's inability to filter their learning allows them to impose order on variable, inconsistent input, and this appears to play a crucial part in the establishment of stable linguistic norms. Studies of deaf children have shown that even when parental attempts at sign are error-prone and inconsistent, children still extract the conventions of a standard sign language from them. Indeed, the variable patterns produced by parents who learn sign language offers insight into what might happen if children did not maximize in learning: language, as a system, would become less conventional. What words meant and the patterns in which they were used would become more idiosyncratic and unstable, and all languages would begin to resemble pidgins.

Or consider this experiment, designed by John Hagen, a developmental psychologist at the University of Michigan. A child is given a deck of cards and shown two cards at a time. The child is told to remember the card on the right and to ignore the card on the left. Not surprisingly, older children and adults are much better at remembering the cards they were told to focus on, since they're able to direct their attention. However, young children are often better at remembering the cards on the left, which they were supposed to ignore. The lantern casts its light everywhere.

And it's not just complex learning that benefits from a quiet PFC. A recent brain scanning experiment by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that jazz musicians in the midst of improvisation - they were playing a specially designed keyboard in a brain scanner - showed dramatically reduced activity in a part of the prefrontal cortex. It was only by "deactivating" this brain area - inhibiting their inhibitions, so to speak - that the musicians were able to spontaneously invent new melodies. The scientists compare this unwound state of mind with that of dreaming during REM sleep, meditation, and other creative pursuits, such as the composition of poetry. But it also resembles the thought process of a young child, albeit one with musical talent. Baudelaire was right: "Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."

A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare -- the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct -- but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the "I know I'm right" syndrome, and considers it a "potentially formidable problem" in a democratic system. "It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs," he wrote, "but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so."

In How We Decide, I discuss the mental mechanisms behind these flaws, which are ultimately rooted in cognitive dissonance:

Partisan voters are convinced that they're rational⎯only the other side is irrational⎯but we're actually rationalizers. The Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels analyzed survey data from the 1990's to prove this point. During the first term of Bill Clinton's presidency, the budget deficit declined by more than 90 percent. However, when Republican voters were asked in 1996 what happened to the deficit under Clinton, more than 55 percent said that it had increased. What's interesting about this data is that so-called "high-information" voters⎯these are the Republicans who read the newspaper, watch cable news and can identify their representatives in Congress⎯weren't better informed than "low-information" voters. According to Bartels, the reason knowing more about politics doesn't erase partisan bias is that voters tend to only assimilate those facts that confirm what they already believe. If a piece of information doesn't follow Republican talking points⎯and Clinton's deficit reduction didn't fit the "tax and spend liberal" stereotype⎯then the information is conveniently ignored. "Voters think that they're thinking," Bartels says, "but what they're really doing is inventing facts or ignoring facts so that they can rationalize decisions they've already made." Once we identify with a political party, the world is edited so that it fits with our ideology.

At such moments, rationality actually becomes a liability, since it allows us to justify practically any belief. We use the our fancy brain as an information filter, a way to block-out disagreeable points of view. Consider this experiment, which was done in the late 1960's, by the cognitive psychologists Timothy Brock and Joe Balloun. They played a group of people a tape-recorded message attacking Christianity. Half of the subjects were regular churchgoers while the other half were committed atheists. To make the experiment more interesting, Brock and Balloun added an annoying amount of static⎯a crackle of white noise⎯to the recording. However, they allowed listeners to reduce the static by pressing a button, so that the message suddenly became easier to understand. Their results were utterly predicable and rather depressing: the non-believers always tried to remove the static, while the religious subjects actually preferred the message that was harder to hear. Later experiments by Brock and Balloun demonstrated a similar effect with smokers listening to a speech on the link between smoking and cancer. We silence the cognitive dissonance through self-imposed ignorance.

There is no cure for this ideological irrationality - it's simply the way we're built. Nevertheless, I think a few simple fixes could dramatically improve our political culture. We should begin by minimizing our exposure to political pundits. The problem with pundits is best illustrated by the classic work of Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at UC-Berkeley. (I've written about this before on this blog.) Starting in the early 1980s, Tetlock picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends" and began asking them to make predictions about future events. He had a long list of questions. Would George Bush be re-elected? Would there be a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? In each case, the pundits were asked to rate the probability of several possible outcomes. Tetlock then interrogated the pundits about their thought process, so that he could better understand how they made up their minds. By the end of the study, Tetlock had quantified 82,361 different predictions.

After Tetlock tallied up the data, the predictive failures of the pundits became obvious. Although they were paid for their keen insights into world affairs, they tended to perform worse than random chance. Most of Tetlock's questions had three possible answers; the pundits, on average, selected the right answer less than 33 percent of the time. In other words, a dart-throwing chimp would have beaten the vast majority of professionals.

So those talking heads on television are full of shit. Probably not surprising. What's much more troubling, however, is that they've become our model of political discourse. We now associate political interest with partisan blowhards on cable TV, these pundits and consultants and former politicians who trade facile talking points. Instead of engaging with contrary facts, the discourse has become one big study in cognitive dissonance. And this is why the predictions of pundits are so consistently inaccurate. Unless we engage with those uncomfortable data points, those stats which suggest that George W. Bush wasn't all bad, or that Obama isn't such a leftist radical, then our beliefs will never improve. (It doesn't help, of course, that our news sources are increasingly segregated along ideological lines.) So here's my theorem: The value of a political pundit is directly correlated with his or her willingness to admit past error. And when was the last time you heard Karl Rove admit that he was wrong?

Now, it's time to say goodbye to that. We are permanently closing Cognitive Daily, and this will be our last post.

While we won't be here, we've seen a number of exceptional psychology blogs join us in sharing the science of psychology with the world, and we encourage you to visit them. Rather than single any of these blogs out, we ask that you visit Dave's ongoing project, ResearchBlogging.org. There, by clicking on the "Psychology" and "Neuroscience" channels, you can find nearly 100 blogs that regularly discuss peer-reviewed research in the same fields we've been covering here. You can also follow dedicated psychology and neuroscience RSS feeds, or the @researchblogs twitter feed, to get an even broader view of what's going on in the world of science.

We're grateful to many, many people who have helped make Cognitive Daily great. There are too many to mention by name, but without the many scientists who provided the raw materials, the bloggers who've helped share ideas, and the administrators and techies who've made it all work, this blog simply couldn't exist. And, of course, without our readers and commenters, Cognitive Daily probably wouldn't have been around for more than a few months. You've inspired us, motivated us, corrected us, disputed us, informed us, and responded to more polls and surveys than we ever imagined possible. We hope you'll continue to find Cognitive Daily useful; the archives will remain here for all to see.

What will we do with all that time we've freed up? Greta plans to continue her work as Professor of Psychology at Davidson College, teaching and mentoring students, conducting research, and sharing her love of music, literature, and art. Dave will continue as editor of ResearchBlogging.org and weekly columnist for SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, and he'll maintain his personal blog, Word Munger and his obsessively-updated Twitter account. In addition, Dave's planning a new project, to be unveiled within the next few weeks. Look for more information about it on Twitter and Word Munger. In addition, Dave's now launched a new blog, The Daily Monthly. Check there for a new post every day, a new topic each month.

Thanks again for being a part of Cognitive Daily. It's been an amazing ride.

Aside from the fact that it's a computer-generated MIDI performance, do you hear anything unusual?

If you're a non-musician like me, you might not have noticed anything. It sounds basically like the familiar song, even though the synthesized sax isn't nearly as pleasing as the familiar Nat King Cole version of the song. But most trained musicians can't listen to a song like this without cringing. Why? Because the music has been made "bitonal" by moving the accompanying piano part up two semitones (a semitone is the difference between a "natural" note and a sharp or flat). Here's the original, unaltered piece:

Can you tell the difference? A 2000 study led by R.S. Wolpert found that non-musicians couldn't distinguish between monotonal and bitonal music played side-by-side. Meanwhile musicians found artificially-created bitonal music to be almost unlistenable. For most non-musicians, if they heard anything wrong with the clips, they typically said they were being played too fast, or mentioned some other unrelated concept.

But Mayumi Hamamoto, Mauro Bothelo, and Margaret Munger (AKA Greta) wondered if years of musical training were really necessary for non-musicians to hear bitonal music. Bitonality is actually a bit controversial in the world of music, and it can be a little hard to define. In principle, there's a difference between bitonality and just playing or singing off-key, but in practice, the difference may not even exist. Advocates of bitonality like to point to the works of composers like Milhaud, Bartók, Prokofiev, and Strauss. These composers deliberately wrote in two different musical keys. But how is that different from occasionally or regularly writing dissonant chords? After all, all the same notes can be written using any musical key. To be truly bitonal, advocates say the two separate parts must unfold independently in different keys. This results in a distinctive "crunch" when the music is played. The separate question is, is this noticeable? Wolpert's work shows that it is, at least for trained musicians.

But one question researchers haven't been able to nail down is exactly how synesthesia occurs. Consider the relatively common form of synesthesia, where colors are perceived along with words. One synesthete consistently sees the color green when she hears someone say "neat." Does the synesthetic experience occur when she first detects the word, or only after she understands its meaning?

A team led by Gary Bargary has figured out a new way to test when a synesthetic experience occurs by relying on the McGurk Effect. In the McGurk effect, the word you "hear" someone saying changes depending on what you see. This movie gives a quick demonstration of the phenomenon:

In the first clip, I superimposed the sound of myself saying "neat neat peat peat" over video of myself saying "neat peat neat peat". What most people think they hear is "neat meat peat peat." You can see the actual recording of what I said in the second part of the clip. Because my mouth makes a similar movement when I say "p" and "m", the combination of the audio "neat" with a video "peat" makes viewers think they heard "meat." Listeners use both the audio and video information to decide what I'm saying, and they get it wrong! Did you experience the illusion? Let's make this a poll:

The host, John Hockenberry of The Takeaway, then introduced the lead author of the study in question, David Dunstan, and me, and asked us to explain how watching TV may or may not result in death. Dunstan's team's study, as you might expect, has gotten a lot of media attention. There was a press release, a report on CNN, and many others. It was nearly midnight in Dunstan's home in Australia, and he had been taking interviews all day.

I had been selected as a commentator because of my column a few weeks ago on SEEDMAGAZINE.COM where I discuss the harms and benefits of TV. So, presumably, my "pro-TV" viewpoint would balance Dunstan's "anti-TV" research.

But for the most part, science doesn't lend itself to this sort of position-taking. We can understand the results of a study, and perhaps do a bit of speculating on the implications, but beyond that there really isn't much room for taking sides. So let's take a closer look at the study in question.

Dunstan's team analyzed data from the massive AusDiab study of diabetes and related diseases in Australia. In 1999 and 2000, researchers visited over 28,000 randomly-selected Australian households to gather medical and other data, to be revisited over many years following. For this study, the researchers identified 8,800 adults who met their criteria for participation (basically, they showed no signs of cardiovascular disease, they completed the entire response form and medical tests, and their results fell in a normal range). Then they observed who died over the next six to seven years, a total of 284 individuals.

The question of how a baseball player knows where to run in order to catch a fly ball has baffled psychologists for decades. (You might argue that a football receiver faces a similar task, but generally in football, the distances involved are much shorter, and most football players aren't expected to catch passes at all.)

There are three primary possible explanations for how a baseball fielder catches a fly ball:

• Trajectory Projection (TP): The fielder calculates the trajectory of a ball the moment it is hit and simply runs to the spot where it will fall (of course, taking into account wind speed and barometric pressure).
• Optical acceleration cancellation (OAC): The fielder watches the flight of the ball; constantly adjusting her position in response to what she sees. If it appears to be accelerating upward, she moves back. If it seems to be accelerating downward, she moves forward.
• Linear optical trajectory (LOT): The fielder pays attention to the apparent angle formed by the ball, the point on the ground beneath the ball, and home plate, moving to keep this angle constant until she reaches the ball. In other words, she tries to move so that the ball appears to be moving in a straight line rather than a parabola.

In principle, all three of these systems should work. However, TP is probably impossible; our visual system isn't accurate at determining distances beyond about 30 meters, and outfielders stand up to 100 meters away from home plate. The second system, OAC, might not work because the visual system isn't actually very sensitive to acceleration. And the third system, LOT, is problematic because it doesn't predict a unique path for the fielder to take to the ball. Further, the most likely paths a fielder would take to catch a ball wouldn't be much different under OAC and LOT.

But Philip Fink, Patrick Foo, and William Warren figured out a way to experimentally distinguish between all three models. They had 8 skilled male baseball players and 4 skilled female softball players don VR headsets and attempt to catch virtual balls in a large room. The room was big enough that they could freely move 6 meters in each direction. VR was necessary because the researchers made their virtual balls take paths that aren't possible in real life: