BeingHuman

Nicki Minaj has given me an ear worm infestation. Disgusting? Not quite. An “ear worm” is the catchy name for a song that get stuck in your head easily. Many of us find ourselves plagued by ear worms. But what makes some songs stick?

Researchers at a recent conference on music and the brain have been trying to get to the bottom of the problem. Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, has noted a few common denominators. One, ear worms tend to be melodically and rhythmically simple. Two, the “sticky” part of the song is usually a segment. rather than the whole song. And three, you seem to be able to lose an ear worm by listening to a different song. Some people even have trouble sleeping on account of ear worms!

“What we think is going on is that the neural circuits get stuck in a repeating loop and they play this thing over and over again,” Levitin said.

Why do songs get stuck in our head so easily? It might be evolutionary. Before we had writing, our ancestors used music to remember important information—with everything from hunter-gatherer tribes recording watering holes through song, to the Iliad and the Torah both being sung long before they were written down. Music may simply be in our DNA. Now I need to go get rid of my earworm…

Are you bilingual? It might make you think better. In a recent paper, a team of researchers headed by University of Chicago psychologist Boaz Keysar argue that speaking two languages serves as a remarkable cognitive power-up. Using study subjects from three continents who spoke English, Korean, French, Spanish, and Japanese (with less than perfect fluency in their second language), the researchers tested their rational decision making ability.

Though behavioral economists and other researchers have long shown that we are prone to making irrational economic decisions, the studies on bilingual people showed an interesting wrinkle in the problem. When asked the question in their native language, the subject would often make the irrational decision expected, but when asked in their learned language, they were more likely to make a rational choice. The researchers theorized that, because in the second language words don’t have as much emotional baggage, we lose the connotations that might make us slip up.

Not only does learning another language open up a whole new culture, it might actually help you think better! If the brain restrictions inherent in using a non-native language actually help bring clarity to decision-making, what other ways might we enhance cognition and rational thinking through constraint? The possibilities and implications seems endless.

We’ve made it pretty clear here that emotions happen in the body. As it turns out, we physically keep secrets as well. New research suggests that we think of weighty secrets as a physical burden, whether we realize it or not.

Researchers had volunteers write out a description of either a serious—such as an infidelity—or a frivolous—such as enjoying a cheesy movie—secret. They then asked the volunteers to look at a hill and estimate its steepness. The volunteers who had been prompted to consider a serious secret rated the hill as being steeper than those who considered a trivial secret.

Could keeping big secrets literally weigh you down? Everyone who has ever felt the urge to share a friend’s juicy secret understands how intensely knowing something can make you feel. Being psychologically burdened naturally affects how physically burdened we feel, even if we don’t realize it.

Contemplations of your own mortality often lead interesting places. It was realizing that he only had 10 thousand days left to live that Peter Baumann both to initiate the Being Human project. Peter’s not alone. A recent analysis of the scientific literature concludes that thinking about death helps many of us to promote positive changes in our lives.

Much of the previous research has concluded that thinking about death and the fear it can provoke leads us to behave in more defensive or greedier ways. However, this recent analysis finds that subtle reminders of death can in fact make people more willing to help strangers, more environmentally active, more compassionate, and more careful of their personal health and wellbeing. Recognizing that we won’t live forever seems to make many people want to make the most of their short time on earth.

Though many of us might assume that our big brains came about in a cutthroat struggle for survival, new research implies that cooperation may actually have been the driver behind the development of human intelligence. Researchers used computer models of organisms with simple artificial brains, and had them play games simulating human social interactions. Individuals that were successful at the games were allowed to reproduce within the model and spread their genes. The researchers found that it was cooperation that led to the selection of the biggest brains.

Teamwork requires complex coordination and communication between individuals, so it makes sense that it would lead to selection for bigger brains. Could humanity’s impressive intelligence be rooted in our desire to cooperate with one another for the good of the group? These findings offer evidence that it might indeed have been teamwork that made us human.

Which do you find more soothing: retail therapy or giving to charity? As much as your answer might say about your personality, it also may tell us how you feel about your social environment. New research suggests that feeling ignored by others may encourage conspicuous consumption, while feeling rejected may make us more likely to give our money or time to a good cause. Since different types of social exclusion leave us feeling outside the group for different reasons, the researchers surmise, our responses to that exclusion could also be affected by that different reasoning.

Researchers conducted a series of experiments that left people feeling either ignored or rejected, such as by having participants recall experiences in which they felt excluded, or by simulating social exclusion in online exchanges. Later, the researchers gave participants separate surveys on intended and actual behavior, asking about preferences for brand logos (to measure conspicuous consumption) and willingness to donate time or money to charity (to measure prosocial behavior).

“Being ignored increased preferences for clothing with conspicuous brand logos, but it had no effect on prosocial behavior,” the authors write. “In contrast, being rejected increased prosocial behavior, but had no effect for clothing with conspicuous brand logos.”

The researchers concluded that when the sense of belonging is threatened by rejection, we may unconsciously attempt to compensate with prosocial behavior, like volunteering, in order to reconnect with society. When our sense of importance, or ego, is threatened by being ignored, we then may use display and consumption in order to stand out. Our need to feel valued by the group certainly drives much of our behavior. It only makes sense that it would influence our economic decisions as well.

Imagine a caveman who never worried about anything. Carefree Thrag might have happily eaten handfuls of unfamiliar berries, marched curiously up to a sabre-toothed cat, or, at the least, wouldn’t have troubled himself over how to impress the comely Frakkina. In other words, a caveman who never worried wouldn’t have passed his genes on to us. New research suggests that worry may have coevolved with intelligence in humans, a sign that Thrag’s smarter, more brooding cousins were indeed better candidates for survival.

Researchers compared patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and healthy volunteers on IQ, worry, and the metabolism of the nutrient choline in the brain. Among the volunteers with GAD, there was a strong correlation between IQ and level of worry, both of which were correlated with choline metabolism. Those without GAD showed the opposite correlation.

Worrying may have saved Thrag’s companions, but does it hinder us now? Too much worrying is stressful, and our high-octane, high-stimulation lives probably worry us more chronically than those of our ancestors. Perhaps the most intelligent of us shouldn’t worry so much. After all, we made it this far.

You might think that your senses are fairly good at delivering an unbiased assessment of your surroundings, but that’s not quite the case. In fact, what’s going on in your brain subtly affects how your senses perceive the world around you. A new study confirming this finds that hungry people are able to see words relating to food more clearly than those who aren’t hungry. This effect occurs immediately, during the act of perception and long before the higher thinking parts of the brain could get involved.

French researchers told student participants to arrive at the study lab at noon, after three or four hours of not eating. They then told the participants there was a delay; some were held for just ten minutes, while others had a whole hour in which to get lunch, thus dividing volunteers into the hungry and the sated. After the delay, the participants were asked to identify words flashing on a screen at 1/300th of a second each. After each word, researchers asked the study participants to choose the word they had seen and how bright it was. One-quarter of the words had been related to food. Each word had appeared too briefly for the participant to really read it, yet the hungry people reliably were better at identifying food-related words and had seen them as brighter. Because the word appearance was too brief for higher level processing (i.e. reading) to happen, the researchers concluded that the difference had occurred at the level of perception itself.

“This is something great to me, that humans can really perceive what they need or what they strive for, to know that our brain can really be at the disposal of our motives and needs,” [study director Rémi] Radel says. “There is something inside us that selects information in the world to make life easier.”

Our brains unconsciously allocate resources according to need, so it makes sense that the brain of a hungry person would be extra-perceptive when it comes to food. Try as we might, we will never be completely unbiased beings. Deep below our awareness, brain processes chug along unbeknownst to us. And that’s a good thing, the result of eons of evolution helping to fine-tune our brains and our bodies for survival.