Faking Sick for a Living

Lying to your doctor is encouraged in one situation: when your doctor is a student and you're an actor asked to portray a certain condition. My friend Amy Savage does this for work. In between fake symptom bouts, I asked her to write a guest post sharing what she's learned from being poked for practice.

Have you ever been asked to “please dislocate your left breast,” or if you “have noticed any hairs growing in places you normally wouldn’t have hairs"? Or maybe someone told you to “have a nice day” after your spouse just passed away or you’d received a cancer diagnosis. Not only do I hear things like this from time to time at my job, but I have grown to expect them.

I have been working for several months as a so-called standardized patient. The local medical school runs an excellent program that lets students conduct histories and physical exams in a simulated, standardized setting. This means I (and many others) pad around in rubberized socks and breezy hospital gowns and feign myriad diseases, syndromes, conditions, and (sometimes nasty) habits. It also means I overuse hand sanitizer and have many strangers listen to my heart, palpate my abdomen, and poke me with a broken wooden Q-tip to test my sensation. One time I even let someone stick their gloved hand in my mouth and squeeze my tongue a little.

As a standardized patient, I have to memorize case materials for fictional patients. This means memorizing not just a list of symptoms and how long the “patient” has had them, but also the patient’s occupation, education, diet, marital status, drinking habits, exercise, stress, family history, and past medical history. If I am supposed to experience or not experience pain when they poke me, or have a knee jerk reaction (literally), I’d better be ready with a realistic response. This involves a bit of groaning, some crying (in the case of bad news), and some bona fide reflexes.

Most often the students show concern and empathy. In the rare case, though, that they say something a patient could perceive as judgmental, we “patients” get to act grumpy and less compliant.

I am expected to give specific, memorized lines about my symptoms, but only if the students ask the right questions in the right way. For example, if a student asks if I use tobacco, that is different from asking if I use or have ever used tobacco products. Asking a woman if she has ever been pregnant is different from asking if she has any children. And, of course, those types of oversights in questioning can lead to different diagnoses.

Luckily, I am not just a living cadaver for the medical students to practice on. I also give feedback. We evaluate the students on things such as how they organize their questions; whether they display empathy; how they perform the physical exam; and how they communicate the possible diagnoses to the patient. After the exam we have time for students to ask questions and for the standardized patients to give suggestions—like how to encourage patients to change their habits, or what would be better wording to deliver bad news.

From this experience, I have learned what to expect from an ideal physician, what to ask, and what not to tolerate. For example, your doctor should not ask leading (or possibly judgmental) questions such as, “You don’t smoke, right?” Nor should they run off a list of questions such as, “Do you smoke, drink, or use drugs?” without giving you time to think. They should ask open-ended questions: “Have you noticed any other changes lately?”

I've also learned that it's important to pay attention to symptoms that may seem unrelated to your chief complaint. If you were experiencing extreme fatigue, for example, you might not think that your newly brittle hair had anything to do with your energy levels, but it could be a thyroid problem.

Even though I am trained to train medical students, this only means I know what (or how) they are supposed to ask or not ask. It did not necessarily mean I knew what to ask when I saw my own doctor.

Recently, I went to my own physician for knee pain. The doctor instructed a medical student to ask about my symptoms while she (the doctor) went out of the room, presumably to doctor someone. The medical student reviewed my complaints. What made the pain better? Worse? Did the knee make any sounds? The student said that it sounded like a very common problem; she just couldn’t remember the name exactly. (Whether she really couldn’t remember or was refraining from diagnosing me without a medical license, I will never know.)

The student left to get the doctor, and when they returned the doctor moved my knee cap around a bit and then suggested that I might have premature arthritis (I’m close to thirty) and that I may need cortisone shots and physical therapy. I refused to believe this, but said “Oh, okay,” nodding complacently. The student and the doctor left the room to give me time to get my pants on, and when they returned, the doctor admitted that the medical student had come up with another possibility: runner’s knee. I read the photocopied pamphlet they handed me, and it fit all of my activities and symptoms.

I was grateful that my physician was willing to listen to the medical student, though a bit terrified to think what I would have put myself through if she hadn’t. Though I know better now from my work as a standardized patient what the doctor could and should ask me, I am still at their mercy if they do not ask the right questions and listen carefully to the answers.

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How to Make Your Doctor’s Appointment Better Than Standard: Advice from a Standardized Patient

• Find a physician who will ask you many questions and listen carefully to the answers. Do not assume, if you’ve talked to a medical student or other proxy, that they have conveyed all the information to the physician.

• Your physician should give you more than one possible diagnosis. In other words, they should tell you what they are thinking, unless they are absolutely certain what is wrong. This should be like a conversation between you and your physician. Don’t be afraid to ask, “Are there any other possibilities for what this could be?”

• Pay attention to your own body. Notice when the pain started and what makes it better or worse. Does it happen at a certain time of day or after certain activities? Have you changed your diet recently? Tell your physician about everything you’ve noticed that is not normal for you, even if you don’t think those other symptoms or changes are relevant.

• As I learned with my knee problem, some medical students—because they are not overly confident and are willing to ask, not assume—are better than some doctors.


Image: Craig Breil/University of Michigan MSIS (not a picture of Amy)

The More Your Friends Change, the More Your Social Network Stays the Same

For the most part, people move in and out of our lives at a trickle: a new coworker becomes a friend; a neighbor moves away. But there's at least one cataclysmic monsoon in a young person's social life, and that's high school graduation. So long, hometown chumps! Hello, dorms! When scientists used cell phone records to track the social networks of people graduating from high school and starting the next phase of their lives, they saw a huge turnover in friends and acquaintances. Remarkably, though, the overall structure of each person's network stayed the same.

"We wanted to see what happens to social networks when there is a big disruption," says Jari Saramäki. A professor at Aalto University in Finland, he leads a research group studying complex networks.

In 2007, Saramäki and his coauthors gave cell phones to 24 soon-to-graduate high schoolers in a large city in the United Kingdom. The phones came with an 18-month contract and a guarantee that all their call data during that time would be collected by researchers. After graduating, a quarter of the subjects stayed in their home city and got jobs; the rest went off to universities nearby or in other cities.

At three points during the study, the young people filled out questionnaires about their phone use. They listed all the friends, acquaintances, and family members for whom they had contact information, and rated the closeness of their relationships with each person. The researchers combined this information with the call records to piece together each person's network: who were they calling, how often, and how close were they to the people they called?

Researchers didn't calculate the absolute numbers of people in each subject's social network, Saramäki explains, because a graph of anyone's call frequencies shows a long "tail" of numbers dialed just once or twice. Are these doctor's office receptionists? School administrators? Does a virtual stranger count as a member of someone's network? Instead, Saramäki says, they focused on the top of the graph. Each subject's acquaintances were ranked by the number of phone calls they got, then graphed according to the fraction of total calls this was. Here's an example. "Ego" is the person we're interested in, and A-J are the people he or she called the most:

The graph on the right is this person's "social signature." There were some patterns among subjects. For example, an average of 20 to 25 percent of calls went to each person's top-ranked acquaintance, and nearly half of calls to their top three acquaintances. Nevertheless, each subject's social signature had a distinct shape. 

Over time, the graduating students had huge turnover in their networks. Within all top-20 contacts, 42 percent were people added in the middle section of the study. Yet statistical analysis showed that for the most part, the shapes of these social networks stayed the same.

"I would have expected that when the participants begin their first university year, there is some dramatic, temporary effect on their network shapes," Saramäki says. "What was really surprising is that [network structures] do not change much, even when this turnover is there."

Of course, phone calls don't give a complete picture of a person's social activity—there are also text messages, for one thing. But Saramäki says texts can be "problematic." Not everyone's parents text, for example, and some interactions might be completed in one message while others take a dozen back-and-forth volleys. "We do have data on text messages for this study and are working on it," Saramäki says. "But judging from what we have seen so far, it looks like the text message data tells pretty much the same story."

Even when people overhaul nearly all their friends at once, they seem to just slot the new acquaintances into the old social structure. The researchers point out that people have a limited amount of time to spend on their friends, and the brain may have a finite capacity for keeping track of others. So it's possible that people allot those resources in a consistent way, no matter which friends they currently have. It seems you can't shake your social network—wherever you go, there you (and they) are.

Jari Saramäki, E. A. Leicht, Eduardo López, Sam G. B. Roberts, Felix Reed-Tsochas, & Robin I. M. Dunbar (2013). Persistence of social signatures in human communication. PNAS : 10.1073/pnas.1308540110

Image: Mine. All mine.

This post has been edited from an earlier version.

Higher Altitude Protects Teens from Concussions

The human brain is a vulnerable thing, perched in its peanut shell on top of our walking, stumbling bodies. Humans who enjoy collision-heavy pastimes—say, tackle sports—put their brains in particular danger. And when it comes to concussions, young people are at even more risk than adults. Yet kids who play at at higher altitudes seem to be safer than their peers. The reason, hidden somewhere in the brain's squishy dynamics, might help protect kids and adults who are smashing into each other everywhere.

You don't have to travel to Denver's Mile High stadium for your body to start responding to altitude. "Relatively small changes in altitude can have significant changes upon the physiology of the body," say Gregory Myer and David Smith, both in the sports medicine department at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. (The coauthors responded to my email jointly.)

At just 600 feet above sea level, the authors point out, oxygen in the atmosphere has already dropped from 21 percent to 20 percent. Your body notices this slight change and adjusts. One measure it takes, upon noticing there's less oxygen available than usual, is to send a little more blood to your brain. "This leads to a slight filling up of the brain space," Myer and Smith say. Your brain ends up squeezed just a tad more tightly into your head.

Wherever you are, if you get suddenly knocked on the head, your brain will ricochet around inside your skull's fluids. In actual scientific terms, it "sloshes." The delicate brain squishes and twists, and hosts of neurons fire all at once. You may black out. Afterward, you might have memory loss, confusion, nausea, dizziness, and other symptoms that can last for days or months. The looser, stretchier blood vessels in the brains of people under age 20 may explain why they're at even greater risk.

Concussions might be prevented if the skull could keep the brain from sloshing by holding onto it a little tighter—as it does at higher altitudes. To find out whether this works, Myer, Smith and their colleagues used data from the National High School Sports-Related Injury Surveillance System. Run by the University of Colorado, Denver, this study collects data on injuries from high schools across the country.

The authors looked at nearly 6,000 concussions from about 500 schools. The concussed kids were athletes in all kinds of sports, at schools ranging from sea level to 6,900 feet. When the researchers divided student athletes into those living above and below the median altitude—which was 600 feet—they saw a significant difference in concussions. Across all sports, kids at higher altitudes had a 31 percent lower risk of concussion. Among football players only, the results were essentially the same: a 30 percent lower risk at higher altitude.

It's an intriguing difference. As sports organizations and the public learn more about chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and the long-term risks for athletes with head injuries, the quest to prevent concussions is growing more urgent. High schoolers, though, don't travel to play like professional athletes do. Could some of their lower risk have to do with changes in their bodies that happen over a lifetime of living at a certain altitude? "Visiting altitude will begin creating a tighter fit the minute you arrive," Myer and Smith say. However, adjustment happens over the long term too. "Everyone is likely different in how quickly they respond [to altitude] and how protection occurs for them," the authors say. "This is why we are working to evaluate technologies that can give this same protection whether you are in Denver or Miami." They'll be looking next at adults and professional athletes to try to find answers.

One hint comes from an earlier study David Smith performed on rats. While wearing a collar that slightly squeezed their jugular veins, the rats were hit hard on the head. The collar seemed to make rats less vulnerable to concussion, apparently because more blood was in their heads, squeezing their brains more tightly and preventing sloshing. This all sounds pretty unpleasant for the rats, but Myer and Smith insist that "the technologies we are studying are no more risky than yawning or even the act of lying down."

Animals like woodpeckers and head-ramming sheep manage to protect their brains from damage, the researchers point out. So why can't we? Of course, in our case the head ramming is in the name of fun. But there might be ways to safeguard our brains, like these animals do, from the inside out.


Image: Rocky Mountain High School in Colorado, by Paul L. Dineen (via Wikimedia Commons)

David W. Smith, Gregory D. Myer, Dustin W. Currie, R. Dawn Comstock, Joseph F. Clark, & Julian E. Bailes (2013). Altitude Modulates Concussion Incidence: Implications for Optimizing Brain Compliance to Prevent Brain Injury in Athletes. Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine DOI: 10.1177/2325967113511588

Newly Discovered Flower Makes Fake Pollen to Fool Bees

"I was certain it was something new when I saw it," says Chris Martine of the bush tomato species he discovered in the Australian outback. It's a scrappy, spiny shrub with crinkly purple flowers that thrives on fire. It also uses treachery to survive, disguising its female flowers with fake male parts and even fake pollen.

A botanist and biodiversity scientist at Bucknell University, Martine explains that the new plant "was on the radar of a few local botanists as being an oddball." Martine had been studying related species for a decade, so when his lab analyzed this plant's DNA, he recognized that it was something different. He went to Australia to document the species in person and dubbed it Solanum cowiei after botanist Ian Cowie at the Northern Territory Herbarium, who first introduced him to the plant.

The diverse Solanum genus includes plants ranging from potatoes and tomatoes to eggplant and nightshade. The Australian bush tomatoes that Martine studies grow little fruits that can be edible or quite poisonous, depending on the species.

Martine discovered that compared to its relatives, S. cowiei is especially well adapted to the fires that sometimes sweep through its habitat. The plants live in large groups of clones tied together by underground root systems. In an area that had recently been burned clear, Martine found S. cowiei plants springing up and blooming while other species lagged behind. This means that after a fire, these plants have a competitive edge over all their neighbors in getting to pollinators.

The new species's method of reaching those pollinators is a weird one. S. cowiei grows separate male and female flowers, and like about a dozen of its close relatives, it disguises the female flowers with fake male parts and pollen. Under an electron microscope, the false pollen grains look like brand-new tennis balls. Real pollen grains are closer to old ping-pong balls, with large dents or grooves on their surface—these are the weak spots where a narrow tube may later burst out of the wall of the pollen grain, carrying the plant's sperm to an egg.

Why bother with the ruse? Solanum flowers don't have any attractive fragrance to lure their pollinators, or nectar for insects or birds to drink while they're dusted with pollen. Instead, these plants rely on pollinators that want to eat the pollen itself. Certain foraging bees use pollen to feed their young, Martine says. "So if you want one of these bees to visit your flowers, you have to have to have the visual cue of the anthers," a flower's male parts. "And if you want them to come back to flowers like yours again, you have to give them some reward to take away."

Martine and his collaborators are now studying whether this fake pollen is any better or worse for young bees to eat than the real stuff. "Is there a difference in what they are getting?" he says. "Can they tell?"

The "oddball" bush tomato isn't the only plant Martine finds intriguing. He produces an online video series called "Plants Are Cool, Too!" ("Can an animal make its own food? No! Can an animal feed the whole world? No!" the theme song declares.) Martine started this series after working with kids who were interested in science and realizing that they knew a lot about animals, but not so much about plants. People browsing online are more likely to encounter a cute cat video, after all, than one about cattails. So he started putting together episodes that highlight some of the "coolest" plants, along with the botanists who study them.

The next full episode should be out in January, he says, and it includes an especially cool moment: a new species of mustard plant being discovered. "Our guest expert looked down during shooting and said, 'Hey, wait a minute,'" he says. "I don't know how often new species are discovered while a camera is running, but it can't be very common."

Photo by Kym Brennan.

Christopher T. Martine, David E. Symon, & Elizabeth C. Evans (2013). A new cryptically dioecious species of bush tomato (Solanum) from the Northern Territory, Australia. PhytoKeys DOI: 10.3897/phytokeys.30.6003

Cooler Than Your Environmental Club: An Interview with My Little Sister about the Adirondack Youth Climate Summit

Teenagers who want to cause a disruption don't have to ride a skateboard anymore; these days they can do it on a bike generator. Earlier this November a crowd of students came together in Upstate New York to share ideas about greening their schools and addressing climate change on a small and large scale.  My youngest sister, Leigh, is a senior in high school and was at the conference for her second year. I asked her what they did there, and she told me about energy efficiency, celeriac soup, and how her generation is going to do things differently. (I never did get a straight answer about some Facebook photos, though.)

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Hi Leigh! So who attends the Adirondack Youth Climate Summit?

There were about 150 students representing 27 colleges and high schools around New York, mostly from the Adirondack region. Each school could send 5 to 6 students along with a teacher chaperone. Students at my school had to write an essay explaining why they wanted to go to the summit and what interest they had in climate change. (Most students I talked to were shocked that my school had been so selective because their schools just brought their entire environmental club.)

By the way, I hope email is OK. Would I have more generational cred with you right now if I were conducting this interview via SnapChat or something?

I have to say, I much prefer the transfer of information through text bubbles containing less than 140 characters attached to a picture I can only view for 10 seconds on a 4-inch screen...but I guess this will do.

What kinds of workshops did you go to?

I got to attend three different workshops of my choice on the first day, splitting up with my school group so that we could cover more ground. I attended the three that were geared towards successfully sustaining a school garden and implementing younger students into climate action, because that's what I've been focused on at school the past couple years. The rest of my team attended workshops about composting, green teams, energy efficiency, biofuels, and recycling.

I hear the food was a highlight.

The food was absolutely delicious! All the meals and snacks were provided by local farms and vendors. They had vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free options, and Ben & Jerry's (a major sponsor of the summit) provided ice cream the second day. I caught myself enjoying kale chips and even tried parsnip and celeriac for the first time in a delicious soup that a Culinary Arts professor from Paul Smith's College made. (See recipe below.)

As weird as it sounds, I think the presence of wholesome, fresh, unprocessed food really boosted everyone's brain power for a few days.

And there were speakers too?

Brian Stillwell of Alliance for Climate Education kicked off the summit with a catchy, motivating presentation about climate change and the science behind it, followed by Brother Yusef Burgess of Youth Ed-Venture and the Children & Nature Network, who spoke about using the power of nature to transform and educate youth. Later in the afternoon Dr. Susan Powers, the Associate Director for Sustainability at Clarkson University, presented to us the outcomes of climate change in both our best and worst case scenarios.

Mark and Kristin Kimball, who own Essex Farm in the Adirondacks, hosted the dance party, fed us freshly harvested carrots, and encouraged our generation to be the driving force of the climate movement—and, more importantly, to have fun doing it. They made the point that these days, things like smoking cigarettes or dumping gasoline into a lake are considered "socially unacceptable," but that took time. Now, it is our time to make not caring about the environment be socially unacceptable.

Was it valuable just interacting with the other kids there, from different kinds of schools? Were you learning and getting ideas from each other?

YES. The second day, there was a 2-hour poster session where all the schools displayed posters of their current "green" efforts and plans for the future. I had a chance to talk to so many different schools and share ideas about outdoors clubs, gardening problems, recycling efforts and cafeteria food. I had conversations with a high school that was having trouble even starting an environmental club due to the lack of support from administration, and on the other end of the spectrum, I talked to a school that had livestock and taught all their science classes on a farm.

We also had the amazing opportunity to Skype with Finland, where they were holding a similar youth climate summit modeled after ours in the Adirondacks. Despite the sound lag and language barrier, it was still inspiring to see that kids our age halfway around the globe are facing the same problems we are.

It looks like you guys had a lot of fun at this dance party. In your Facebook photos I observed electric guitar, someone crowdsurfing, a guy in a sailor hat juggling fire, and what appeared to be people using ropes to move a large rock. Are these the elements of a good party for the young environmentalist crowd?

I think these are the elements of any good party, actually. Moving the rock could have been a metaphor for how teamwork can move the world or something, but it was really just for the fun of moving a rock. We were told that our generation will make it through this difficult time in climate change only if we have fun in the process.

What sorts of ideas or projects did you bring back from the summit to use at school?

The second day of the summit, all the teams were given 2 hours to create their school's "Climate Action Plan" and a detailed timeline to present to the rest of the schools at the end of the day. Our team decided to focus on 4 major projects in the coming year: improving the school garden, building a bike generator for the lobby, holding a bi-annual school-wide locker clean-out to donate gently used school supplies and teach proper recycling, and finding places to cut the school's phantom energy usage (a.k.a. the wattage used by electronics when they're turned off but still plugged in).

You may not know this, but back when I was at your school I belonged to an "environmental club" too. This meant that a couple of us would go to all the classrooms after school and pull trash out of the blue bins, because otherwise the maintenance guys refused to recycle. Is it fair to say things have come a long way?

Simply put, yes. We have a recycling bin in every classroom, our cafeteria serves vegetables from a number of local farms, quarterly grades and comments are now only available online, our drinking fountains are now water-bottle filling stations, and we have a garden that brings vegetables to the salad bar. We have solar panels on one building and another LEED-qualified building, with another one in the construction phase.

I think we're also a little cooler than your environmental club, because now we are the "Green Avengers," equipped with a logo and a Facebook page.

Are you optimistic about climate change? Do you come back from an event like this feeling like you're part of a group of people who will actually make a difference, whether it's through school-level projects now, or after college as policy makers? Or are we pretty much screwed?

Both times going to the summit I came back incredibly high in motivation, but I knew if I didn't write down all my ideas and get acting quickly, I would lose my energy. Spending time around so many like-minded people definitely makes me excited to get out there and make change.

It also reminds me we have to be able to work on our own and not rely on the work of others because that's part of the attitude that brought us to this predicament in the first place. As Dr. Powers told us, even in the earth's "best-case scenario," we'll still experience rising global temperatures. It's just up to my generation to slow the acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions and provide the optimistic attitude.

Celeriac and Parsnip Soup
Yields 18-24 servings (reduce if you're not feeding a youth summit)

Ingredients:
5 pounds cubed celeriac root
5 pounds chopped parsnip
6 tablespoons olive oil
15 cups vegetable stock
1 bundle thyme
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

Preparation:
Preheat the over to 400°F. Toss the celeriac and parsnip with the olive oil. Arrange the vegetables in a single layer on a foil-covered baking sheet. Roast them 35-45 minutes, flipping once, until they are tender and golden brown. Combine the caramelized vegetables with the stock and other ingredients in a pot over medium-high heat. After bringing to a boil, let the soup simmer for 15 minutes. Put all the food through a blender or food processor until smooth and serve hot.

Images: The Wild Center (top); Leigh Preston (bottom).

Unempathetic Kids Don't Get Sarcasm

A crucial tool in your social survival kit is the ability to tell when someone means the opposite of what they're saying. For centuries, writers have tried to aid readers' detection of sarcasm with various typographic contortions: backward question marks, upside-down or zigzagged exclamation marks, even left-leaning italics dubbed "ironics."* (None of these have stuck, probably because pointing out when you're being sarcastic totally ruins it.)

For kids, sarcasm is a developmental hurdle to clear. At some point while they're growing up, they learn that positively worded statements—"Wow, great job"—aren't always positive. When psychologists at the University of Calgary began their recent study of kids and sarcasm, they started with a group of 6- and 7-year-olds. They expected that the children would be just beginning to grasp the skill. But when these kids showed "near-zero accuracy" at detecting irony, the researchers had to try again.

Thirty-one 8- and 9-year-olds became the new study group. For the experiment, each kid watched a series of 12 short puppet shows. The shows involved two puppet characters and ended with one of them saying either "That was so good" or "That was so bad"—sometimes literally and sometimes sarcastically. For example, one puppet misses a soccer goal; the other says, "That was SO GOOD." (A separate panel of adults had vouched for the sarcastic tone of the recorded dialogue.)

Kids had to decide after each show whether the final line of dialogue was nice or mean. They indicated their answers by picking up either a small plush duck or shark. (The actual niceness or ironic tendency of these animals was not addressed in the study.)

When the puppets' statements were literal, kids had no difficulty interpreting them as nice or mean. But the sarcastic statements gave them more trouble. Their accuracy as a group was a little under 50 percent; the researchers explain that about half the kids seemed to get it consistently, while the other half were "quite inaccurate" at spotting sarcasm.

Subjects' parents also filled out questionnaires about how empathetic their children were—a good understanding of other people's emotions might go along with an understanding of when people are being shark-ish or duck-ish. Kids with higher empathy scores did better in the sarcasm test. Additionally, explains senior author Penny Pexman, video footage revealed that kids with better empathy were slower when reaching for the wrong toy than their less empathetic peers. In other words, when empathetic kids failed to find the sarcasm, they struggled more with their answers. They may have sensed that there was another layer to the puppet's words: was that missed soccer goal really "so good"?

"We need to offer children extra supports when we use sarcasm," Pexman says. A second- or third-grader might have only a dim understanding of your clever one-liner. A first-grader will likely miss it entirely.

Additionally, "Encouraging children to be more empathetic has great benefits for understanding sarcastic speech," Pexman says. "We know from other research that empathy helps with other aspects of social functioning too." I mean, I GUESS that's a good thing.


*I learned about ironic punctuation in Keith Houston's book Shady Characters. There are a lot of good tidbits in there, from ampersands to octothorpes. The chapter on irony is summarized at Brain Pickings.

Image: by Spamily (via Flickr)

Andrew Nicholson, Juanita M. Whalen, & Penny M. Pexman (2013). Children's processing of emotion in ironic language. Frontiers in Psychology DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00691

Gibbon Moms Help Daughters Practice Their Singing for Future Mates

Before their daughters grow up and leave home, mothers may impart some lessons in the womanly arts—for example, the proper way to whoop and hoot with your mate while sitting in a tree branch. As an adult, a female gibbon sings elaborate duets with her male partner. But before she leaves the family, her mother seems to take responsibility for the daughter's vocal lessons.

Young gibbons spend many years learning to vocalize like adults. By age six or so, "sub-adult" apes can match the vocal prowess of a grownup. Mothers and daughters often sing at the same time, though it's not clear why. Researchers traveled into the rainforests of Sumatra to make audio recordings of gibbon families and try to figure out whether these sing-alongs are significant.

Lead author Hiroki Koda of Kyoto University and his colleagues studied six families of agile gibbons (that's a species name, not just a descriptor). Koda explains that gibbons are monogamous, and male and female young grow up with their parents before departing the group to find their own partners. Each family in the study included a nearly adult daughter, and the researchers captured recordings of these daughters and their mothers singing together.

They found that some daughter gibbons were better than others at singing in sync with their mothers. They were also better at matching their mothers' tunes. But these talented daughters actually duetted with their mothers less often. Koda thinks that's because the ones who "showed more skillful songs" are the most mature, and are nearly ready to leave home. Daughters who still need the practice sing with their mothers more often.

Here, a mother and daughter gibbon match each other's calls as they sing together:

The researchers also found that mothers who sing more often with their daughters—the ones who are still giving lessons—modify their own songs more when they do so. Koda says this may be similar to the "motherese" that humans speak to their babies. Like human moms talking slowly and at a high pitch, gibbon moms alter their vocalizations when duetting with their daughters.

Koda says that in the past, primate calls have been seen as "completely different from human language development." Rather than learning from their parents, young monkeys and apes seem to figure out their calls on their own. But this is the first evidence of mothers helping offspring learn to vocalize in gibbons—or any other nonhuman primate.

By paying more attention to vocal interactions between parents and offspring, Koda thinks scientists might discover other examples of primate parents getting involved in their children's learning. (After that, maybe they'll discover primate parents getting too involved. "Don't you take that tone with me, young lady! I heard what you just hooted!")

Images: Top, singing gibbon by patries71, via Flickr (not, as far as I know, the study species). Bottom, a mother gibbon from the study by Hiroki Koda.

Hiroki Koda, Alban Lemasson, Chisako Oyakawa, Rizaldi, Joko Pamungkas, & Nobuo Masataka (2013). Possible Role of Mother-Daughter Vocal Interactions on the Development of Species-Specific Song in Gibbons PLOS ONE DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071432

How Science Education Changes Your Drawing Style

Take a look at these neurons. Ignore the fact that several of the brain cells look like snowflakes and at least one looks like an avocado. Can you pick out the drawings done by experienced, professional neuroscientists? What about the ones made by undergraduate science students?

Researchers at King's College London gave a simple task to 232 people: "Draw a neuron." (Actually, being British, they said "Please draw a neuron.") Some of the subjects were undergraduates in a neurobiology lecture. A small group were experienced neuroscientists who led their own research labs at the college. And a third, in-between group included graduate students and postdocs.

The researchers saw marked differences in how the three groups drew their brain cells. To confirm what they saw, they also pooled the drawings together and asked a new batch of subjects to sort the drawings into categories. These subjects agreed: the drawings clustered into distinct styles. The results are in the journal Science Education.

Did you pick out the pictures in the top row as examples from undergrads? Student sketches had lots of detail and were often labeled. In fact, they mostly resembled this classic textbook drawing from 1899, which the authors describe as the "archetype" of brain cells.

Sketches made by lab leaders are on the bottom row. These highly experienced scientists were more likely to make abstract or stylized drawings. Instead of imitating a textbook picture, they drew from their own personal understanding of what a neuron is. (Or possibly, for the scientist on the bottom left, what a martini glass is.)

The graduate students and postdocs, whose drawings are in the middle row, seemed to fall somewhere in between. They didn't label their drawings like undergrads did, and they didn't include quite so much detail. Their neurons were more likely to bend, and the nuclei of the cells were often hidden—in other words, the cells looked more like they would under a microscope, rather than on a textbook page. But they weren't quite as simplified and abstracted as the lab leaders'.

Lead author David Hay says that the three drawing styles represent "different cultures." Undergraduate students spit out textbook images; scientists in training draw on their own observations; and more experienced scientists make "highly conceptual" drawings that represent their personal judgment.

This matters because "learning to reproduce the textbook images is NOT learning science," Hay says. Even postdoctoral researchers didn't seem to have internalized the concept as much as the lab leaders had. However, Hay thinks there are ways that experienced scientists can help students gain perspective.

One way might be by physically acting out scientific ideas. After Hay and his coauthors had students try a couple such exercises—for example, walking on different paths through a laboratory to mimic how neurons grow—the students produced drawings that were more creative and less like the textbook.

Hay thinks students need to internalize scientific concepts before they can play around with them and make their own hypotheses. "Scientists do not simply know information," he says; "they put information to work to discover something new." Failing that, they can create formidable Pictionary teams.


HAY, D., WILLIAMS, D., STAHL, D., & WINGATE, R. (2013). Using Drawings of the Brain Cell to Exhibit Expertise in Neuroscience: Exploring the Boundaries of Experimental Culture Science Education, 97 (3), 468-491 DOI: 10.1002/sce.21055

Images: Hay et al.

Kids Learn Better When Teachers Wave Their Hands

Maybe it's no mistake that we talk about "grasping" new ideas. When we find our hands moving wildly as we try to explain something, maybe we shouldn't feel ridiculous. Research in math classrooms has found that kids learned better when a teacher used gestures—and their grip on the new material improved even more after the lesson ended.

Teachers who gesture more or less while they speak can have other differences too, of course: they might use different intonation or vocabulary, or have more or less energy. University of Iowa psychologist Susan Wagner Cook and her coauthors, though, were only interested in the effect of teachers' hand motions. To isolate this factor, they created a series of videos.

In the videos, aimed at elementary schoolers, a teacher taught a single scripted lesson. The subject of the lesson was equivalence, the idea that what's on one side of an "=" must be equal to the other side.

In one set of videos, the teacher used her hand to indicate "one side" and "the other side" of an equation. A second set of videos showed the same teacher reading the same script, but she kept her hands at her sides. The researchers made several recordings and chose the ones in which the teacher's intonation was the most consistent, ensuring that the only difference between the lessons was her hands.

The kids who watched the videos were 184 boys and girls from 22 classrooms in central Michigan schools. Most were in second or third grade, and a few were in fourth. The kids had taken a pretest to make sure they weren't already familiar with this mathematical idea.

Each classroom watched a videotaped lesson, either the one with hand gestures or the one without. Immediately afterward, they took a test with questions such as:

7 + 2 + 4 = 7 + __

Kids who had understood the lesson would answer "6."

A day later, the kids had a second set of test questions spring on them. First they answered the same type of questions that they had the day before. Then they saw a second set of questions designed to make them "transfer" the rules they'd learned to new situations. For second graders, this meant trickier addition problems such as:

6 + 4 + 2 = __ + 3

in which none of the numbers on the right side matched the left. Third and fourth graders had to transfer their new skills to multiplication problems such as:

5 x 2 x 3 = __ x 3

Kids who had seen the lesson with gestures did significantly better than the no-gesture kids on the first test. A day later, they again outperformed the hands-free group—and beat their own test scores from the day before. Their understanding of the lesson seemed to have gotten even better in the 24 intervening hours. (This wasn't true of kids who watched the hands-free lesson.) Finally, the gesture group did better on the test of transferred skills.

A couple factors could explain why students learned better from a gesturing teacher, the authors write. Hand movements might help them pay better attention to the teacher, for example. And seeing a repeated hand motion across different problems might reinforce how those problems are similar.

That doesn't answer the question of why students continued to improve over the next 24 hours. Susan Wagner Cook explains that shortly after we form new memories, those memories are stabilized or "consolidated" in our minds. Consolidation can make new memories even stronger.

"We do know that motor memory is often consolidated during sleep," Cook says. Seeing another person's hands moving may have built motor (movement) memories in kids' minds, as if they were pointing and waving their own hands. "One possibility is that memories encoded with gesture are more likely to be consolidated during sleep," Cook says. "We are trying to figure this out!"

Although being able to point to the two sides of an equation seems like a clear advantage in this particular lesson, Cook says the benefit of gesturing goes beyond arithmetic—or even math. Other studies have shown that hand motions help kids learn in a wide range of subjects.

What's new is the idea that gestures help in the future, not only the present. Cook points out that even though some kids learned the lesson just fine without gestures, they didn't show the same improvement over time that the other kids did. Instead of only clarifying, gestures may help kids grasp their new knowledge more tightly. (Please imagine a fist-closing gesture to drive home this idea.)


Image: sleepinyourhat (via Flickr)

Cook, S., Duffy, R., & Fenn, K. (2013). Consolidation and Transfer of Learning After Observing Hand Gesture Child Development DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12097

Sneaky Kids Teach Parents to be Environmentally Responsible

Don't trust your kids. Like a miniature, juice-fueled army with subliminal messaging tactics, they can get inside your mind and make you do things. You won't realize what's happening until you step out of your low-flow shower one morning, turn the calendar page, and see a smug endangered trout looking back at you.

Though we usually think of education flowing down from parents and teachers to children, some people would prefer it to go upstream too. Environmental educators, for example, may hope when they teach groups of children about recycling or saving energy that they'll go home and impose new habits on their parents.

In the Seychelles, an archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean, preserving the wetlands is a major concern. An NGO called Wildlife Clubs Seychelles runs extracurricular "wildlife clubs" in the schools; these groups organize projects and go on field trips to learn about the environment. Researchers from Imperial College London took advantage of the widespread clubs to find out whether environmental education can travel against the current.

During the year before the study, certain wildlife clubs had taught a unit on wetlands while others studied something else. Lead author Peter Damerell and his colleagues studied 7 wildlife clubs that had done the wetlands unit and 8 that hadn't, with kids in the groups ranging from age 7 to 15.

The researchers distributed a questionnaire for kids to fill out in school. A second set of questionnaires went home to the kids' parents. The forms included questions to test wetland knowledge as well as questions about how people used water in their homes.

When the questionnaires came back, there were 137 complete parent-child pairs in the batch. Kids who had participated in a wetland unit scored better on questions about wetland knowledge (what kinds of species live in local wetlands, what threatens these habitats, and so on). More surprisingly, the authors report in Environmental Research Letters, the kids' knowledge had rubbed off on their parents. Moms and dads of wetland-educated kids outscored parents of kids who hadn't studied wetlands.

The questionnaires also asked parents point-blank whether they'd learned anything about wetlands from their children. Their answers, it turned out, were totally unrelated to their actual scores. Even when kids had taught their parents something, parents didn't necessarily know it.

On questions about people's water use in their homes—whether they made choices that use less water, in light of water shortages in the Seychelles—families whose children had studied wetlands with their wildlife clubs again scored significantly better. (It's also possible, the researchers note, that these families just knew the "right" answers to water-use questions. It would take more research to find out whether they actually used less water.)

Since scores didn't increase with children's ages, Damerell and his coauthors don't think regular classroom time did the trick. The wildlife clubs' field trips and outdoor projects may have been just exciting enough to make a real impression on kids—and to get them talking about their fun swamp adventures with their parents. Er, indoctrinating them.

Damerell, P., Howe, C., & Milner-Gulland, E. (2013). Child-orientated environmental education influences adult knowledge and household behaviour Environmental Research Letters, 8 (1) DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/1/015016

Image: jmb_craftypickle (Flickr)

Aging Makes People Colon-Close-Parenthesis

Getting older is not a recipe for crotchetiness. Although those two cranky Muppets will always be up in their balcony, Americans in general don't become less happy with age. If anything, they get happier.

The trajectory of people's happiness over a lifetime is tricky to study, because in a given year you're capturing not only your subject's age but also the current events. You need to follow a large group of people over many years, and you need them to be all different ages when the study starts.

Angelina Sutin and her colleagues at the National Institute of Aging in Maryland had just such a dataset to work with. Called the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), this project has been running for more than five decades and has gathered data on people born everywhere between 1885 and 1980. These subjects have answered questions about their happiness on many occasions—some as many as 19 times—throughout their lives.

Want to find your own happiness score? Answer the following questions on a scale from 0 to 3, where 0 is "rarely or never" and 3 is "most or all of the time." In the past week of your life, how frequent were these feelings?

     I enjoyed life

     I felt I was just as good as other people

     I felt hopeful about the future

     I was happy

Summing the four numbers will give you your well-being score. If you were in the BLSA, that score would be your data point for today.

When the researchers put all 2,267 subjects together and looked at how their happiness changed with age, they got a decidedly downward slope. A frowny face, if you will.

age = : ( 

It looked like aging made people less happy. But then the researchers tried a different tactic. Instead of lumping all their subjects together, they grouped them by when they were born. That frown turned upside down:

age = : \

Within each birth year, the results now looked like a somewhat more optimistic "meh?" face. Every group's well-being slightly (but significantly) improved with age.

The first set of results had sloped downward because people who were born earlier reached lower endpoints of well-being. In the graph, you can see that someone born in 1905 or 1925 is likely to reach a 9 or a 10 later in life; someone born in the 1960s might make it nearly to 12 (a perfect score).

Sutin thinks this could have to do with the biggest national frowny-face of all: the Great Depression. People who lived through this time, she writes, may have felt lasting psychological effects. Although their well-being still improved as they aged, the cloud of the Depression may have lingered.

(Sutin notes also that younger and older adults, according to previous studies, treat this set of well-being questions and the 0-to-3 scale similarly. This suggests the results aren't just happiness inflation—say, younger people reporting a 12 for the same feelings that older people would rate a 10.)

Aside from increasing economic prosperity in the United States, there are plenty of other reasons people may have felt happier in more recent decades. Sutin cites increased life expectancy, decreased infant mortality, better nutrition, less disease, and more women in the workplace as possible factors. The twentieth century also saw faster travel, the invention of the Internet, and the eradication in America of both the polio virus and gelatin-based entrées. There's a lot to be happy about.

Now that Sutin has found that the average American seems to have an upward trajectory of well-being, she's interested in people's individual paths: what makes one person's happiness increase more or less (or decrease) over time?

In this study, subjects who were white had higher well-being scores on average, as did those with more education. Sutin hopes to pick apart the social, economic, and health factors that affect how happiness changes with age. When everyone can feel as :) as they want, we'll really be living in the future.

Sutin, A., Terracciano, A., Milaneschi, Y., An, Y., Ferrucci, L., & Zonderman, A. (2013). The Effect of Birth Cohort on Well-Being: The Legacy of Economic Hard Times Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797612459658

Image: a 102-year-old woman, by Uppy Chatterjee (Flickr)

11 People Trace Synesthesia to One Set of Alphabet Magnets

Most people with synesthesia can't tell you exactly why they perceive the letter M as purple and not orange, or a high C-sharp as bright yellow and not blue. For one group of synesthetes, though, there appears to be an answer. For their green D's, red G's, and so on, they can thank the toy company Fisher-Price.

Stanford researchers Nathan Witthoft and Jonathan Winawer discovered, through word of mouth and from synesthetes contacting them online, a group of people who share a "startlingly similar" set of letter-color associations. Out of the eleven subjects, ten remembered owning (or still owned) a particular set of alphabet refrigerator magnets that was manufactured in the 1970s and 1980s.

The leftmost column below (labeled "set") shows the actual colors of this toy. The colors that the eleven subjects associate with the alphabet are listed as S1 through S11, in order of how well they match the magnetic letters. (And to the right are the magnets themselves.)

Subject S1 was carrying around mentally a perfect replica of the Fisher-Price letters, as the authors report in Psychological Science. The others had some differences—but were close enough to the toy's colors that, the researchers figure, it can't be a coincidence.

All eleven subjects also had number-color synesthesia. For the numerals 0 through 9, five of these people turned out to have color associations that matched sets of magnetic numbers sold along with some Fisher-Price alphabet sets.

Witthoft and Winawer don't think the magnets themselves made anybody synesthetic. But among this group of people who became synesthetic (and they may have been predisposed; it runs in families), many of the associations they learned came from a childhood toy.

Not that synesthesia should be confused with memory. Someone with synesthesia doesn't recall the color green when he sees the letter K the same way he sees Kansas and recalls that Topeka is the capital. Instead, synesthetes automatically experience that color when they read that letter or number (or experience a taste when they hear a sound, among other rarer combinations). Some even see the color on the page.

The authors say that the case of the Fisher-Price magnets shows synesthetic associations can be learned, rather than plucked from nowhere by the brain. "The idea that the colors would be learned has been around for a long time," Witthoft says, "but it has been difficult to turn up any examples." In this case, a mass-produced toy—combined with the powers of the Internet—helped.

But they don't think most synesthetes learn their associations from objects around them. These people appear to be, the researchers write, "anomalies among the anomalous."

When the colors of these subjects' mental alphabets differed from the Fisher-Price letters, it was often in ways that made them less anomalous—that is, more like the synesthetic population in general. "Color-grapheme synesthetes as a group have some shared tendencies," Witthoft says.

For example, 40 to 50 percent of English-speaking synesthetes associate the letter Y with yellow. Out of three subjects in this study who deviated from the red Y of the magnets, two went to yellow. It's also common to associate the letter X with black, as four subjects did (deviating from Fisher-Price purple).

Besides yellow Y's, studies have also found a lot of red R's, blue B's, and violet V's among synesthetes. These associations seem to come from language. The origin of most connections, though, is still mysterious.

One study, Witthoft says, argues that the brightness of a synesthetic color is related to how common that letter or number is. Other research "suggests that letters with similar shapes end up with similar colors." And in some types of synesthesia, he says, there are hints that the associations come from some basic way the brain is set up. For example, "pitch-color" synesthetes tend to see higher pitches as brighter colors. Non-synesthetes, if asked, make the same connection.

For now, childhood toys seem to be only a small part of the answer. To help dispel more of the mystery, you can take tests for synesthesia at synesthete.org—even if you weren't a Fisher-Price kid.


Witthoft, N., & Winawer, J. (2013). Learning, Memory, and Synesthesia Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797612452573

Images: Manon Paradis (Flickr); Witthoft & Winawer.

Captive Animals Act Smarter

In the Kenyan wilderness, hyenas facing a meat-stuffed puzzle box performed impressively—impressively badly, that is. Researchers expected the animals to be up to the challenge, but few of them ever got the box open. Now, repeating the experiment with captive hyenas, they've discovered that there's no contest: the captive animals are better problem solvers.

Out of 62 wild hyenas in last year's study, less than 15 percent ever managed to slide the latch and swing open the door of the barred metal box. Despite multiple chances, most of the animals were losers in this game.

But lead author Sarah Benson-Amram observed certain behavioral traits shared by the winners. Hyenas that tried more techniques to get the box open (biting, dragging, flipping the darn thing over) had greater odds of success. And hyenas that were less "neophobic"—that is, less wary when approaching a new object in their environment—also did better.

Previous studies with primates and birds had suggested that captive animals are both less neophobic and better at problem solving than wild ones. So Benson-Amram repeated her experiment on a group of hyenas living very far from their homeland, in Berkeley, California.

This group was smaller than the wild hyena group, with only 19 animals tested. But three-quarters of them solved the puzzle, Benson-Amram reports in Animal Behaviour. And every successful captive hyena got the meat on its first try—unlike the wild animals, most of which needed more than one trial before they figured it out.

Although the wild and captive animals belonged to the same species, you would get very different impressions of hyenas' problem-solving smarts if you only looked at one group.

Benson-Amram ruled out a few possible explanations for that difference. Did well-fed animals have more energy for solving the puzzle? In the wild, high-ranking hyenas ate more but didn't do any better with the puzzle box. Were hungrier animals more motivated? Skinny hyenas had no advantage either, and captive hyenas didn't lose interest after eating.

Two explanations, though, held up. One was neophobia. In the wild, animals that were more cautious about approaching the manmade box were less likely to crack it open. Captive animals were overall less neophobic than wild ones. This isn't surprising, since they're used to living around humans and our metal objects.

The second notable difference was that captive hyenas tended to try more behaviors (biting, digging, pulling, and so on) than wild hyenas did. Benson-Amram thinks this has to do with distraction.

"It’s almost akin to giving a puzzle to a civilian in an active war zone versus giving one to a person in the comfort of their living room," she says. The wild hyena is busy watching out for predators, rather than wondering whether pushing and biting at the same time might get this box open. "The person in the war zone would likely give much less mental focus to the puzzle since they have to constantly look over their shoulder," Benson-Amram says.

Or maybe the comfortable home isn't the right analogy for the captive hyenas.

"Imagine giving a puzzle to a person in solitary confinement," Benson-Amram says. "That person may be much more excited about the puzzle and interested in solving it than the person in their living room who has TV, books, their family, and other fun diversions." She adds, "I am not trying to say that zoos are as bad as solitary confinement." But captive hyenas clearly live in a more predictable, less stimulating environment than the Kenyan savannah.

Not all the hyenas learned how to open the box. But scientists learned something that might be critical. When researchers are wondering about the "maximum cognitive abilities" of a species, Benson-Amram says, captive animals may be better subjects. When they want to know what a species is capable of in the wild, though, they should remember that it's a war zone out there.

Benson-Amram, S., Weldele, M., & Holekamp, K. (2012). A comparison of innovative problem-solving abilities between wild and captive spotted hyaenas, Crocuta crocuta Animal Behaviour DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.11.003

Image and video courtesy of MSU.

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 10: Acoustic Scavenger Hunt

On the beach of a tiny Scottish island, a person kicked and jumped through unusual "singing sands" that made a squeaky barking sound in response. More than 3,600 miles away, I was able to eavesdrop on the weird phenomenon because that person had uploaded a recording to the website Sound Around You.

This crowdsourced sound map is a project by researchers at the University of Salford in Manchester. Volunteers around the world have shared ambient noises or noteworthy moments from their environments. The researchers hope to learn about how our soundscapes make us feel, and how they affect our lives.

Exploring the map they've built so far, you can hear street music in Chile, a quiet countryside in Thailand, and chatter on an Italian bus. From Israel, someone has uploaded the wail of an air-raid siren. Once you start cupping your ear toward people and streets on the other side of the world, it's hard to turn away.

The ambient noises of wind and elevated trains in Chicago seem to be pretty well covered already. But if you live someplace with more interesting background noise, you can use a free app called i-SAY to capture (and share) the sounds around you.

Image: Sound Around You