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Group Sleeping: How Social Sleep Affects Rest Patterns - Neuroscience News
Group sleeping can impact when animals sleep, how long they sleep for, and how deeply they sleep. For example, groups of meerkats time their sleep according to “sleep traditions”; olive baboons sleep less when their group size increases; bumblebees suppress sleep in the presence of offspring; and co-sleeping mice can experience synchronized REM sleep.
Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic so Hard to Cure? - The New York Times
Thirty-six percent of the respondents reported feeling chronic loneliness in the previous month, with another 37 percent saying they experienced occasional or sporadic loneliness. As Weissbourd and Batanova had hoped, the answers to subsequent questions helped clarify why. Among the cohort identifying as lonely, 46 percent said they reached out to people more than people reached out to them. Nineteen percent said no one outside their family cared about them at all.
Empathy for the Pain of the Conflicting Group Is Altered Across Generations in the Aftermath of a Genocide - Neuroscience News
“But what was even more critical is that children from both former genocide perpetrators and survivors displayed the same intergroup bias as their parents, even though they did not experience the conflict themselves. This result might explain why some conflicts sometimes last over generations, as the children appear to have the same biases as their parents”, she adds.
Scent of a friend: Similarities in body odor may contribute to social bonding: An electronic nose relying on body odor chemistry may predict whether we are likely to 'click' with a stranger -- ScienceDaily
ilar to their own.
To test her hypothesis, Ravreby recruited pairs of click friends: same-sex nonromantic friends whose friendships had originally formed very rapidly. She hypothesized that because such friendships emerge prior to an in-depth acquaintance, they may be particularly influenced by physiological traits such as body odor. She then collected body odor samples from these click friends and conducted two sets of experiments to compare the samples with those collected from random pairs of individuals. In one set of experiments, she performed the comparison using the eNose, which assessed the chemical signatures of the odors. In the other, she asked volunteers to smell the two groups of body odor samples in order to assess similarities measured by human perception. In both types of experiments, click friends were found to smell significantly more like each other than did the individuals in the random pairs.
Drinking Too Much Is an American Problem - The Atlantic
Over time, groups that drank together would have cohered and flourished, dominating smaller groups—much like the ones that prayed together. Moments of slightly buzzed creativity and subsequent innovation might have given them further advantage still. In the end, the theory goes, the drunk tribes beat the sober ones.
Drinking Too Much Is an American Problem - The Atlantic
Even drinking in bars has become less social in recent years, or at least this was a common perception among about three dozen bartenders I surveyed while reporting this article. “I have a few regulars who play games on their phone,” one in San Francisco said, “and I have a standing order to just refill their beer when it’s empty. No eye contact or talking until they are ready to leave.” Striking up conversations with strangers has become almost taboo, many bartenders observed, especially among younger patrons. So why not just drink at home? Spending money to sit in a bar alone and not talk to anyone was, a bartender in Columbus, Ohio, said, an interesting case of “trying to avoid loneliness without actual togetherness.”
Loneliness alters your brain's social network: Feeling disconnected from others is reflected by how the brain represents relationships -- ScienceDaily
Thinking about someone from each category corresponded to a different activity pattern in the mPFC: one for the self, one for the social network (both friends and acquaintances), and one for celebrities. The closer the relationship, the more the pattern resembled the pattern seen when thinking about the self.
These brain patterns differed for lonelier individuals. Activity related to thinking about the self was more different from activity related to thinking about others, while the activity from thinking about others was more similar across social categories. In other words, lonelier people have a "lonelier" neural representation of their relationships.
Performance improves when the enemy of an enemy is a friend: Study of traders finds balanced professional networks lead to better high-risk decisions -- ScienceDaily
SBT consists of four primary rules for relationships among individuals:
A friend of a friend is a friend
A friend of an enemy is an enemy
An enemy of an enemy is a friend
An enemy of a friend is an enemy
When all of these conditions are met, a network is said to be balanced. Through a two-year study of day traders, the researchers found that: (A) workers gravitate toward a state of balance in their relationships; and (B) performance improves when there is a high level of balance.
Want to quit smoking? Partner up: Couples who attempt to stop smoking together have a sixfold chance of success -- ScienceDaily
At the end of the programme, 64% of patients and 75% of partners were abstinent -- compared to none and 55% at the start, respectively. The odds of quitting smoking at 16 weeks were significantly higher (5.83-fold) in couples who tried to quit together compared to patients who attempted it alone.
"Previous research has shown that ex-smokers can also positively influence their spouse's attempts to quit, but in this study the effect was not statistically significant," said Ms Lampridou. "As for non-smoking partners, there is a strong risk that they will adopt their spouse's habit." Ms Lampridou noted that research is needed to confirm the findings in smokers who are otherwise healthy.
Brains of people with schizophrenia-related disorders aren't all the same: New study supports the use of a data-driven approach to identify novel biomarkers -- ScienceDaily
"We know that, on average, people with schizophrenia have more social impairment than people in the general population," says senior author Dr. Aristotle Voineskos in the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto. "But we needed to take an agnostic approach and let the data tell us what the brain-behavioural profiles of our study participants looked like. It turned out that the relationship between brain function and social behaviour had nothing to do with conventional diagnostic categories in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)."
Most brain research in the mental health field compares a disease group to a non-disease or "healthy" group to search for biomarkers, a biological measure of mental health symptoms. This search for biomarkers has been elusive. This multi-site research study -- which included 179 participants recruited at CAMH in Toronto, Zucker Hillside Hospital in New York and the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore -- calls that paradigm into question because people with the same mental illness may not show the same biological patterns.
The study, which involved participants completing a facial imitation task while undergoing functional MRI brain scans, found three "activation profiles," says first author Dr. Colin Hawco, also of CAMH. These can be described as typical, over-activated and de-activated profiles.
Ant Colonies Retain Memories That Outlast the Lifespans of Individuals | Science | Smithsonian
From day to day, the colony’s behavior changes, and what happens on one day affects the next. I conducted a series of perturbation experiments. I put out toothpicks that the workers had to move away, or blocked the trails so that foragers had to work harder, or created a disturbance that the patrollers tried to repel. Each experiment affected only one group of workers directly, but the activity of other groups of workers changed, because workers of one task decide whether to be active depending on their rate of brief encounters with workers of other tasks. After just a few days repeating the experiment, the colonies continued to behave as they did while they were disturbed, even after the perturbations stopped. Ants had switched tasks and positions in the nest, and so the patterns of encounter took a while to shift back to the undisturbed state. No individual ant remembered anything but, in some sense, the colony did.
Quantum science turns social -- ScienceDaily
Why could players without any formal training in experimental physics manage to find surprisingly good solutions? One hint came from an interview with a top-player, a retired Italian microwave systems engineer. He said, that for him participating in the Alice Challenge reminded him a lot of his previous job as an engineer. He never attained a detailed understanding of microwave systems but instead spent years developing an intuition of how to optimize the performance of his "black-box."
"We humans may develop general optimization skills in our everyday work life that we can efficiently transfer to new settings. If this is true, any research challenge can in fact be turned into a citizen science game," said Jacob Sherson, head of the ScienceAtHome project at Aarhus University.
It still seems incredible that untrained amateurs using an unintuitive game interface outcompete expert experimentalists. One answer may lie in an old Herbert Simon quote: "Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent."
Faster. Slower. How We Walk Depends on Who We Walk With, and Where We Live. - The New York Times
People in Uganda, it turned out, walked much more quickly than those in Seattle when they were by themselves, their pace averaging about 11 percent swifter than lone walkers in the United States.
But they were slower in groups. Both men and women in Mukono strolled at a more leisurely pace when they were with others, especially children. Their pace when accompanied by children was about 16 percent slower than when they were alone, whether they carried the children or walked beside them.
The opposite was true in Seattle. There, people sped up when they walked with other people. Men were particularly hurried when walking with other men, but both men and women increased their pace if they had children in tow. Their average walking speed when they carried or accompanied children was about 20 percent speedier than when they walked alone.
Poor sleep triggers viral loneliness and social rejection: Lack of sleep generates social anxiety that infects those around us -- ScienceDaily
Notably, researchers found that brain scans of sleep-deprived people as they viewed video clips of strangers walking toward them showed powerful social repulsion activity in neural networks that are typically activated when humans feel their personal space is being invaded. Sleep loss also blunted activity in brain regions that normally encourage social engagement.
"The less sleep you get, the less you want to socially interact. In turn, other people perceive you as more socially repulsive, further increasing the grave social-isolation impact of sleep loss," Walker added. "That vicious cycle may be a significant contributing factor to the public health crisis that is loneliness."
National surveys suggest that nearly half of Americans report feeling lonely or left out. Furthermore, loneliness has been found to increase one's risk of mortality by more than 45 percent -- double the mortality risk associated with obesity.
When there's an audience, people's performance improves -- ScienceDaily
When participants knew an audience was watching, a part of the prefrontal cortex associated with social cognition, particularly the thoughts and intentions of others, activated along with another part of the cortex associated with reward. Together these signals triggered activity in the ventral striatum, an area of the brain that motivates action and motor skills.
In essence, the presence of an audience, at least a small one, increased people's incentive to perform well, Chib said, and the brain scans validated this by showing the neural mechanism for how it happens.
While people were watching, participants were an average of 5 percent better at the video game -- and as much as 20 percent better. Only two participants didn't perform better in front of others.
The brain's GPS has a buddy system -- ScienceDaily
It has been known for some time that the hippocampus maintains a mental map of space -- in fact, the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded precisely for this research. 'Place cells' and 'grid cells' in the hippocampus register the location of the brain's owner in its environment, but until now, little was known about how the movements of others are tracked in the brain. Researchers put this to the test by observing the activity of hippocampal neurons in one rat (the 'self') watching another rat (the 'other') go through a simple T-maze. The self's neurons registered what the other was doing and changed their responses based on the self's location and subsequent actions. This study was published on January 11 in Science, which also contains a report of similar location awareness in the brains of bats.
How singing your heart out could make you happier -- ScienceDaily
Prof Shakespeare said: "We found that singing as part of a group contributes to people's recovery from mental health problems.
"The main way that Sing Your Heart Out differs from a choir is that anyone can join in regardless of ability. There's also very little pressure because the participants are not rehearsing towards a performance. It's very inclusive and it's just for fun.
"The format is also different to a therapy group because there's no pressure for anyone to discuss their condition.
"We heard the participants calling the initiative a 'life saver' and that it 'saved their sanity'. Others said they simply wouldn't be here without it, they wouldn't have managed -- so we quickly began to see the massive impact it was having.
"All of the participants we spoke to reported positive effects on their mental health as a direct result of taking part in the singing workshops.
"For some it represented one component of a wider progamme of support. For others it stood out as key to their recovery or maintenance of health.
"But the key thing for everyone was that the Sing Your Heart Out model induced fun and happiness."
