Of the five senses, taste seems to be the one that we take personally. People will identify themselves as having a “sweet tooth” as opposed to being a “salt junky”. Many cultures are defined on the basis of their traditional cuisine–we often are more familiar with a country’s basic dishes than we are with its…
Recent studies of brain development in teenagers may finally give parents the scientific authority to say “No you’re not!” in answer to the common adolescent complaint, “But I’m old enough to make my own decisions!” That authority comes from brain imaging studies that reveal some surprising features of the adolescent brain. Deborah Yurgelun-Todd and colleagues…
Sleep debt has become a common phrase in health news recently, as many different research studies have shown that insufficient amounts of sleep can have lasting negative impacts on health. A new report published in the journal Nature provides some of the first evidence of how the brain changes its activity in response to sleep…
I.Q. tests are traditionally viewed as a quantitative measure of a person’s intelligence. Children who score very well on I.Q. tests are often tracked into programs for the “gifted,” while those who do very poorly are tracked into “remedial” programs. Despite their prevalence, the true meaning and import of I.Q. tests are subjects of some…
A report in the February 23 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) describes a disturbing trend in the rate at which the stimulant Ritalin is prescribed for preschool-aged children. Dr. Julie Mango Zito and her colleagues at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University found that between the years of…
In the heated environment of last year’s U.S. presidential election, the subject of education was a common sound bite, with both candidates describing the terrible state of literacy in our nation—and of course each candidate assured us that he was the person to fix the problem! It is true that literacy is in a state…