Reading is an advanced form of looking – and of looking at faces, in particular. That’s the fascinating story behind Evolution of Reading and Face Circuits during the First Three Years of Reading Acquisition, a paper published in NeuroImage in 2022 by Xiaoxia Fenge et al in which some interesting distinctions are made. The part of the brain dedicated to facial recognition (the fusiform gyrus) is co-opted when we learn to read. But after that ability has been acquired it can’t be lost, or only...

Some people hear voices in their heads but are not suffering from a psychiatric disorder. The voices are “non clinical”, and the people who experience them “non-clinical voice hearers”. One question that arises is: do NCVHs also hear external speech in a different way; more distinctly, perhaps? According to experiments conducted by Ben Alderson-Day et al (“Distinct Processing of Ambiguous Speech in People with Non-clinical Auditory Verbal Hallucinations”, 2017), the answer is yes, though it’s...

Have you ever tried to finish a tricky but familiar task – unlocking something, let us say – and discovered that, even though the key won’t turn in the lock, and there are other keys to be tried, you’re oddly compelled to carry on jiggling the one that doesn’t fit? If you have, then you have been demonstrating what psychologists call the Einstellung or set effect, which finds that a general tendency exists, in humans, to favour first ideas in problem solving at the expense of alternatives,...

South Sudan gained its independence from the north in 2011. A matter of months later, the retired human-rights researcher Elizabeth Hodgkin went to teach in a village in the mountains of Eastern Equatoria, close to the Ugandan border. Letters from Isohe (2022) memorably evokes the challenges of life in this beautiful but remote community. Food supplies falter, girls are forced into marriage, teachers’ salaries disappear, people die: but the village schools survive. Hodgkin’s dispatches are...

If you’re funny and you know it, you’re probably not funny – and the same goes for theories of humour (like: comedy makes us feel superior, or: it’s about “benign violations” of expectation), which can’t begin to explain the context for humour, or get big laughs out of a tough crowd. Freud was great on “The Joke”, but then again he never played the Glasgow Empire on a Monday night, so what does Freud know? In “Wriggly, Squiffy, Lummox, and Boobs: What Makes Some Words Funny?”, 2019, Chris...

This month, on the Neuromantics, we’re looking at stories about hormones, brains and sexual behaviour that run counter to expectations. Testosterone has a masculinising effect on the body in utero and in development, but it also has an effect on the brain, and in mammal brains it turns out that it’s only having that effect after it has interacted with an enzyme called aromatase – and become an oestrogen (estradiol). That’s the shifting ground explored in Brain Aromatisation: Classical Roles...

How does a profound emotional experience in one generation affect the next? Is it handed down? Both the scientific paper and the short story under scrutiny in this month’s Neuromantics consider the ripple effect of trauma, and its observable consequences not just for survivors, but for those who come after them. Offspring of all the higher primates have an extended period of infancy in which they are dependent on their mothers. If the mother dies, the infants are less likely to survive....

Something happens when we go to the theatre, visit an art gallery, or hear music in the company of others, and it’s good for us, whatever our background, whatever the socio-economic indicators that mould our perceptions and expectations of art. That’s the contention – and, in part, the conclusion – of Daisy Fancourt and Alan Steptoe in their paper on Cultural Engagement and Mental Heath: does socio-economic status explain the association? (1982). But Fancourt and Steptoe leave important...

An all-purpose definition of “metaphor” might be, as the OED suggests, a name or descriptive term given to an object to which it is not properly applicable – something described in terms of something else. Can such a transfer of meaning be more than a figure of speech? Hernan Pablo Casakin thinks so. In Tel Aviv, a group of first-year architectural students were asked to redevelop an old bus station. All stages of planning benefited from ideas and images from other disciplines, but especially...

The good news from neuroscientists in Australia (Jiang, et al, 2020), as published in NeuroImage and reported in Psychology Today (“How Some People Stay Sharp After 95”, May 6, 2020), is that very elderly people (90-100 yr-olds) exhibiting strong connectivity between the right and left frontal parietal lobes tend not to experience cognitive decline. The bad news is that, while it may sound like a great idea for nonagenarians to keep walking and learning new things, scientists find it hard...

We’re on to the hard stuff now: sub-saharan baboons and grooming as a tool for promoting longevity, rogue males, currencies in friendship, feral children, niche succession, the mythical hinterland of the Peak District in weird fiction, and 1980s Variety Club Sunshine Coaches. One of the main findings of “Social Bonds. social status and survival in wild baboons”, a fascinating (and recent) paper by Fernando A. Campos et al, is that male baboons who are “strongly bonded” to older females (ie...

The human brain doesn’t work out of the box: it has to learn tasks; processing has to be developed. By “grey matter” we mean the 80 billion or so brain cells with which we’re born, but it’s the fatty white matter – or myelination – growing along the cells’ axonal projections, connecting different parts of the brain, that make it work faster and better. In this episode of the Neuromantics, we take a look at the surprising effects of that learning process on the neurophysiology of older...

How do birds know where things are? “The keys are where you last saw them”, we often say, meaning that, as mammals, we have to recall both an internalised map of location and the lost keys’ visual identity (their shape and colour) in order to find them again. And for a long time it was thought that birds did something similar, matching object cues to spatial memory. New research is taking us on a different journey. In “Taking An Insect-Inspired Approach to Bird Navigation”, by David J....

The verse produced in Baghdad by the Abbasid dynasty poets Abdullah Al-Mu’tazz (ninth century) and Abu Al-Ala Al-Ma’aari (tenth century) speaks to us across the years in vivid and at-once familiar translations by Abdullah Al-Udhari and George Wightman (Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster, Penguin Classics, 1975). The poets’ subject-matter is the beauty of natural phenomena and human frailty; how language conserves that beauty and frailty; why honouring the earth matters. The poems also...

Laughter is a social lubricant, but to what end? What does it help us do, in a group, that strengthens that group’s social bonds? All is revealed in Episode 10 – the Season 1 finale – of The Neuromantics, your monthly meeting of scientific and literary minds. According to Alan Gray, Brian Parkinson and Robin Dunbar, in their 2015 paper on the Intimacy of Self-Disclosure, laughing in company increases our willingness to trust others with personal information – and it’s the laughter itself...

How real are our conceptions? And if they’re real – if the mental world has substance of some kind – then what about imaginary companions and the voices we hear when we reason with ourselves? Are they disturbances or auditory perceptions? What role can they play in fostering self-reliance, and in child development and learning as a whole? to the ninth instalment of The Neuromantics, your monthly guide through the disputed territory between science and literature. In this episode, we’re...

Pleasure seekers, you have arrived at your destination. In Episode 8 of The Neuromantics, your essential guide to neuroscience, art and literature, we look at the relationship between music and the body’s natural opioid system. What evidence does the pleasurable experience of listening to – and making – music provide for the existence of a neurochemical reward system, and why does that reward system respond so positively to it? What is the importance of habitual fulfilment (“the familiarity...

We’re entering on sensitive ground in Episode 7 of the Neuromantics, our monthly podcast at the intersection of neuroscience and literature. In the 1990s, the “Memory Wars”, waged between different scientists, clinicians and therapists (and their patients), tried to settle a difficult question: is it possible for the memory of a traumatic event to be a) completely repressed (or re-directed), and b) retrieved, usually in a therapeutic environment? What are the medico-legal implications? We...

In Episode 6 of the Neuromantics, we conduct an allegro ma non troppo investigation of pitch, timbre and the high drama of embodied sound – what we feel when we sing, and why we sing at all. The two papers under vocal attack – but think Philly Soul as well as Kirsten Flagstad – are Gerald J. Balzano’s “What Are Musical Pitch and Timbre?” (1974, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40285339?seq=1) and “Notes on Music and Opera” by W. H. Auden, from his wonderful anthology of essays, The Dyer’s Hand...

Episode 5 of our neuroscience and literature podcast looks at emotions and the body with as much objectivity as it can muster. The two texts under discussion drill down into how (and where in the body) we feel things, what it is that we call emotion, and how feelings change or persist over time. Sarah Maguire‘s “The Hearing Cure” (a poem from her 1997 collection The Invisible Mender: https://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/sarah-maguire) uses pain, fear and relief associated with illness in the...

Welcome to The Neuromantics, a monthly look-twice-both-ways at the crossroads of neuroscience and literature. In this fourth episode, Will Eaves and Professor Sophie Scott consider death and the different ways in which humans and primates respond to a loss of agency. Topics whispered and bewailed include ghostly voices in English poetry, the uses of the corpse in primate groupings, smell and decay, the relationship between high sociability and infanticide, Penelope Fitzgerald’s...

Welcome to the third Neuromantics podcast, brought to you by Sophie Scott and Will Eaves. In this month’s edition, we’re looking at visual representation, mental imagery, and the relationship between sensory awareness in humans and the cultivated idea of an “inner world”. Topics covered, uncovered, and discovered, include the gulf between visual and spatial recognition, how visualisation is linked to making things, the proximity of aesthetics to task specialisation, Impressionism, Milton’s...

Welcome, listeners, new and nearly new, to The Neuromantics. Here‘s the second episode of what will be – we promise – a monthly podcast about literature, neuroscientific research and the surprising correspondences between the two in identifying and exploring fundamental traits of human communication. The idea: we give each other homework. I have to read a scientific paper and Sophie has to read some poetry or a story. We then see how they inform each other. There is music by Michael Caines...

In Episode One, we think about processes in science and writing – the general picture of mistake-making – and revisit both Alan Newell‘s 1973 paper, “You Can’t Play Twenty Questions with Nature and Win” (read it here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85a0/96908670cd83cacfdede9e11f2df2dc41c9b.pdf) and U. A. Fanthorpe’s Christmas poem, “The Sheepdog” (2002).