Alcohol is a very odd thing for us to imbibe, when you come right down to it. It is, after all, the waste product of another life-form: namely, yeast. There are very few other life forms whose waste products we willingly take into our body. So why do we do it?

The answer, of course, is that this particular waste product produces interesting side-effects when ingested: side-effects that humans discovered very, very early on (beer and wine-making were already well-established in the Middle East by 1500 B.C.).

Although alcohol, like barbiturates, tranquilizers and anesthetics, is a depressant (in that it depresses the central nervous system, not in that it makes you depressed, although, of course, it may), at low doses it actually acts as a mild stimulant, producing exhilaration, loss of restraints and inhibitions and talkativeness—which is what makes it popular at parties.

At higher doses you begin to see things like slurred speech, sensory disturbance, poor balance and impaired judgment, and as the blood-alcohol concentration continues to increase, you eventually reach fun things like unconsciousness, coma, and, ultimately, death. Which are not so popular at parties.

Alcohol is easily absorbed into the bloodstream through the walls of the small intestine. How quickly it is absorbed determines how quickly its effects are felt. (Drinking while eating is less intoxicating than drinking on an empty stomach, because the fat and protein in the foods in the stomach delay alcohol absorption.)

Alcohol is metabolized by the liver, at a rate of about 3/4 to one drink per hour. Drink more rapidly than that, and your blood alcohol concentration rises. Unfairly (but nothing says physiology has to be fair), if a man and a woman drink the same amount, the woman will usually become more intoxicated. Men have more of an enzyme called dehydrogenase that breaks down alcohol, and also tend to have more body water than women, which means the alcohol is more diluted than in women. Also, men tend to be larger.

As I noted earlier, every year new alcohol-related stories emerge just in time for the festive season. It’s almost as if writers expect people to imbibe more at this time of year than others. Go figure.

This year’s most interesting example: a press release about new research indicating that alcohol tastes sweeter when loud music is playing.

At the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., psychologist Lorenzo Stafford asked 80 participants (69 females and 11 males, all regular drinkers, aged between 18 and 28) to rate a selection of drinks on the basis of strength, sweetness and bitterness. While they were doing so, they were subjected to four different levels of distraction, from none all the way up to loud club-style music playing at the same time as someone was reading a news report.

The participants rated drinks significantly sweeter overall when they were listening to music alone: which is interesting, because it indicates it’s not the level of distraction but music specifically that makes alcohol taste sweeter. Since we tend to drink more of things that are sweet than things that are bitter, this could explain why, as previous research has shown, we tend to drink more and faster when loud music is playing.

Ah, you may say, but even if I drink a little too much, I always walk home rather than drive, so I’m all right, right?

Not so fast. Also appearing just in time for the holidays: an article detailing the dangers of walking under the influence. According to the journal Injury Prevention, from 1986 to 2002, 410 pedestrians in the U.S. were killed on New Year’s Day. Of those, 58 percent had high blood-alcohol concentrations. In 2008, says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, 38 percent of fatally injured pedestrians 16 and older had blood-alcohol concentrations at or above 0.08 percent. Never mind people who fall down the stairs or trip at home.

So this New Year’s Eve, remember this sage advice: even though you’re imbibing another life form’s waste product, you don’t have to get wasted.

(The photo: Beer in winter. Big Rock Traditional, for those who really, really need to know.)

But gags like that are funny because they have a grain of truth in them, and increasingly, I’m finding that grain of truth sticking in my own aging gullet.

Of course, when an oyster finds an irritant in its gullet, it turns that oyster into a pearl. My equivalent is turning it into a science column. (Albeit obviously not one focusing on the biology of the oysters, since even if they have gullets, I’m pretty sure that’s not where they make pearls.)

As it turns out, this science column is even more like a pearl than I thought. After all, pearls reduce an oyster’s irritation. And I find myself far less irritated by my lapses of memory now that I’ve learned it may not have all that much to do with age. Rather, it appears the blame lies with doorways.

No, that’s not a non sequitur and even further evidence of the decay of my mental processes. Research just published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology really does indicate all of us, regardless of age, are more likely to forget things when we pass through a doorway.

The research, conducted by Gabriel Radvansky, a psychology professor  at Notre Dame University, refines some of his previous research which already indicated that  moving from room to room can make us forgetful.

In the new study, Radvansky conducted three experiments. In the first, participants used a virtual  environment like you’d find in a computer game. They selected an object from a table in one virtual room–say, a blue wedge–and either walked across the room to another table, set down the object, and picked up a different object, or walked into another room (through a doorway), set down the object, and picked up a different object. Along the way, they were “probed” with the name of an object, asked if it was either the object they were carrying or the one they had put down (they couldn’t see the object they were carrying or the one they had set down). Those who passed through doorways were more likely to have forgotten what they were either carrying or had just set down than those who had merely crossed the room.

In his previous experiments along these lines, the experience was made as immersive as possible, using a 66-inch diagonal screen the participants sat very close to. The new experiment used only 17-inch monitors, to see if what Radvansky calls the “location-updating effect” depends on how immersive the experience is. Apparently, it does not.

In the second experiment, Radvansky for the first time tested the effect in the real world, to see if it was just an artifact of a sensory-impoverished virtual world. To make sure participants couldn’t see what they were carrying or had set down, the objects were concealed in black boxes. Sure enough, walking through a doorway increased forgetfulness.

In the third experiment, once more in the virtual environment, participants passed through several rooms but ended up in the same room they had started in, to see if the ability to remember is linked to the environment in which a decision is made. The experiment showed no improvements in memory upon returning to the original room.

All of this supports the “event horizon model of event cognition and memory” that Radvansky and his colleagues have been developing. The theory holds that our brains segment events into a series of “event models” that are processed one at a time. Passing through a doorway *an “event boundary”) triggers the formation of a new event model: and information in the current event model takes precedence over the previous event model. When the brain needs to retrieve information for two event models at once, as when it is called upon to remember an object it incorporated into a previous event model but cannot now see, that “competitive retrieval” leads to “retrieval interference”–i.e., forgetfulness.

Frankly, I find not only reassuring, but inspiring. So inspiring, I think I’ll write a sequel to Nancy Ford and Gretchen Cryer’s off-Broadway musical I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking it on the Road.

I’ll call it I Finally Got My Act Together But I Forgot Where I Left It.

(Sorry, no photo: I forgot.)

The effects of drinking too much of the stuff have been known for every one of those 10,000 years (although individuals somehow seem to forget them within a remarkably short time frame).

For decades, scientists have been trying to understand the mechanism behind the reduced muscle coordination and sedative effects of alcohol. The assumption has been that alcohol acts on the brain’s neurons, but nobody could figure out exactly how.

A new study indicates that may be because they’ve been looking in the wrong place. Not only that, the study hints that it might be possible to create drugs that could be used to treat chronic alcohol dependence—or even to counter the short-term effects of drinking too much.

The study, out of Australia (a where people have been known to enjoy an occasional drink while throwing another shrimp on the barbie), indicates that these effects may not arise in the brain at all: instead, improbably, they may be caused by the way alcohol acts on the immune system.

The study focuses, as so many studies do, on mice.

Researchers at the University of Adelaide genetically engineered mice that are able to “hold their liquor” by deactivating something called the “Toll-like receptor 4,” or TLR-4.

TLR-4 is a member of a family of receptors that induce inflammation, one of the body’s main lines of defense against infection. TLR-4 was first identified in fruit flies, and is known to be present on immune-defence white blood cells in the bloodstream. It is also present on glial cells in the brain.

“Glial” comes from the Greek word for “glue,” and for a long time glial cells were seen as little more than the glue that held the more important neurons together. But in fact, glial cells make up around 90 percent of the cells in the brain and play many important roles in brain function—including protecting the brain against infection.

It appears that alcohol activates the TLR-4 receptor, causing the glial cells in a part of the brain called the hippocampus to send out an inflammation signal: essentially, alcohol acts on the brain just like an infection would, and sedation and unsteadiness are the results.

The evidence? The mice genetically engineered so that TLR-4 was inactive were resistant to the behavioral effects of alcohol. Not only did they refrain from getting into bar fights with mice twice their size, they were able to stay perched on a rotating log longer and were sedated for a much shorter time than normal drunken mice. (You know, I don’t believe I’ve ever before typed the phrase “normal drunken mice.”)

Next, the researchers treated normal mice with a drug called (+)-naloxone, which blocks TLR-4. Sure enough, the drug also reduced the effects of alcohol, halving the duration of sedation and shortening the recovery time for loss of balance.
So, does that mean you’ll someday be able to take a pill that blocks TLR-4 and then head out for an overindulgent evening without fear of consequences?

Um, no. The study showed that it might be possible to reduce the severity and duration of alcohol’s effects: not eliminate them. Also, there are some effects of alcohol people actually want, and blocking TLR4 might actually block the pleasurable effects, too, so it would be unlikely to be popular with drinkers.

But this drug, or others to be developed that could be taken by mouth (the particular drug used in the study has to be injected, and in any event no one knows yet if it is safe for use by people, as opposed to mice) could play a valuable role in the emergency treatment of people suffering from an alcohol overdose.

Further, it seems likely that individual differences in TLR4 could account for individual differences in the effects of alcohol…which could give a means of determining how susceptible a particular individual is to its effects: perhaps someday your doctor will be able to tell you exactly how much alcohol you can enjoy without unpleasantness ensuing, or if you should avoid it altogether.

All I know is that if this research someday leads to a reduction in drunken karaoke, it will have made the world a better place for us all.

The photo: Wine glasses lined up ready for tasting at the 2010 International Festival of Wine and Food at the Banff Springs Hotel.

Up until recently, I would have said mind-reading was impossible…but, even though I am neither distinguished, elderly, nor a scientist, it’s beginning to appear as if it may not be impossible forever. Why? Because scientists have successfully reconstructed videos of what people have seen, simply by scanning their brain activity.

Sure the resulting video is extremely blurry, but like a singing dog, it’s not so much that it sings well as the fact it sings at all that is extraordinary.

The research, led by neuroscientist Jack Gallant at the University of California, Berkeley, follows up on previous research from 2008, when the same team reported it was able to use data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine, with 90-percent accuracy, which of a library of photographs a person was looking at while their brain activity was measured.

Reconstructing video, however, is much tougher. As Gallant points out, fMRI doesn’t measure brain activity directly; rather, it measures blood flow to active areas of the brain. Blood flow is much, much slower than the back-and-forth among neurons, and video, of course, is changing all the time, resulting in a lot of back-and-forth.

To get around that, Gallant and postdoctoral researcher Shinji Nishimoto designed a computer program that combined a model of thousands of virtual neurons with a model of how the activity of neurons affects blood flow in the brain. The program allowed them to translate the slow flow of blood into the much speedier flow of information among neurons.

Next, three volunteers, all neuroscientists involved in the project, watched hours of video clips while inside an fMRI machine. Gallant’s team built a “dictionary” that could successfully link the recorded brain activity with individual video clips. The computer learned, in other words, that a particular pattern on the screen corresponded to a particular pattern of brain activity.

With their dictionary in place, the researchers gave the computer nearly 18 million seconds of new clips randomly downloaded from YouTube, none of which the volunteers had ever seen. Then the volunteers’ brain activity was run through the model, which was told to pick the clips most likely to trigger each second of activity: in other words, to reconstruct the volunteers’ video experience using building blocks of random moving pictures.

Say the volunteer saw someone sitting on the left side of the screen. The computer would look at the brain activity, then go to its library of clips and find the ones most likely to trigger that particular pattern—most likely, videos of people sitting on the left side of the screen.

The final videos were recreated from an average of the top 100 clips the computer deemed closest based on the brain activity. The averaging was necessary because even 18 million seconds of YouTube video didn’t come close to capturing all the visual variety in the original movie clips. As you would expect, the results are blurry—but still recognizably in the right ballpark, especially in cases where there are people simply sitting and talking to the camera.

Presumably, the larger the library of clips the computer had to draw on, the closer it could come to capturing exactly what the individual had seen…offering the tantalizing possibility of someday accurately playing back another person’s visual experience.

The researchers hope to build models that mimic other brain areas, such as those related to thought and reason. The potential, however far down the road it may be, is for nothing less than machines that can read people’s thoughts, or even play back their dreams (opening up the fascinating possibility of professional dreamers, whose dreams would be so interesting people would pay to see them, or directors who would only have to vividly imagine their stories to see them on the screen, rather than go to all the trouble of actually filming them).

Sound impossible? Well, maybe. But remember Clarke’s Second Law: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

And if it all sounds like magic—which it certainly does—well, then, remember Clarke’s Third Law while you’re at it: “Any sufficiently advanced technology,” he said, “is indistinguishable from magic.”

I’d love to tell you exactly what I said, but I think the paper I wrote the speech on crumbled to dust long ago. Still, I’m pretty sure I expressed optimism about the future and said something about “scaling peaks” and “reaching for the sky” and so forth and so on, yada-yada-yada.

Optimism about the future is par for the course for graduation and commencement speakers…even though experience teaches us that that optimism is often misplaced. Lots of students imagine they’re going to change the world/be fabulously wealthy/be a rock star/etc., etc., etc. Very few of them actually do.

But you know what? That’s okay. Because as Tali Sharot, a research fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London, recently wrote in an article in the New York Times, by and large, optimism is good for you.

Sharot, author of the book The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, points out that being optimistic (or, as he puts it “underestimating the obstacles life has in store”), lowers stress and anxiety, which in turn leads to better health and well-being.

Optimists, he notes, recover faster from illnesses and live longer. And, of course, if you believe there is a possibility you can achieve your dreams, you’re more likely to work toward those dreams…which, in turn, makes it more likely you actually will achieve them. If you believed your efforts were doomed from the beginning (as, sad to say, they often are), you wouldn’t even try…and trying, though it may not get you all the way to your goal, will almost certainly get you at least part of the way to your goal, and maybe that’s good enough.

Optimism seems to be hard-wired into our brains. Surveys have shown that students expect more job offers, higher salaries, longer-lasting marriages, and better long-term health than statistically they have any right to expect…even when they are fully aware of the statistics for unemployment, divorce, cancer or heart disease.

Nor is optimism a function of how well off you are or what part of the world you live in. Studies show that 80 percent of the population, without regard to age, country of residence, ethnic background or gender, has an optimism bias.

That puzzled scientists before the advent of modern brain-imaging techniques. But we now have evidence, Sharot says, that when we learn what the future may hold, our neurons are very good at encoding unexpectedly good information—but fail to incorporate information that is unexpectedly bad.

So if we hear about someone born poor who became fabulously wealthy, we think, “That could happen to me!”, whereas when we are told that the likelihood of someday being unemployed is one in 10 or the odds of suffering cancer are over one in three, we pay it no nevermind (as my southern kinfolk would put it).

Of course, there can be a down side to unrealistic optimism, as well. Underestimating risk leads to dangerous driving, failure to save for retirement, and a reluctance to undergo medical screenings.

Globally, misplaced optimism has even caused economic disaster. The financial crisis of 2008, Sharot suggests, came about because investors, homeowners, bankers and economic regulators all expected slightly better profits then were realistic. Combined, those unrealistic expectations led to a financial bubble that, when it collapsed, caused huge losses.

Sharot quotes Duke University economists Manju Puri and David T. Robinson, who like to say that optimism is like red wine: a glass a day is good for you, but a bottle a day can be hazardous.

And so, graduates, let me leave you with these inspiring words: climb every mountain, but make sure your ropes are secure, check the weather forecast before you begin, and don’t be afraid to go back to the bottom and start all over again.

Or as Sharot puts it, in words that go straight to my young adult-fantasy-writing heart, “aspire to write the next ‘Harry Potter’ series, but have a safety net in place, too.”

(The photo: Me, speechifying as valedictorian of the Class of 1976, Western Christian College.)

…but it’s already fading. By the time you get to the shower, all that remains is a faint sense of how the dream made you feel…and regret that you can’t remember it.

Now Italian researchers think they’ve figured out why we remember some dreams, but not others. But first, a little refresher on dreams and what we know about them.

Dreams, of course, have fascinated people for millennia. Most of us don’t believe they portend the future any more, but you’ll still find plenty of people who think you can interpret your dreams for fun and profit.

The function of dreams still isn’t universally agreed upon. Some scientists think they must have a survival function (why else would we have evolved them?), while others think they’re an unimportant byproduct of the way our brains work.

We do have some solid data. Research has told us three-quarters of our dreams are in colour and two-thirds include sound, but only about one percent include touch, taste or smell.

Men (perhaps surprisingly) most often dream about men; women dream about men and women equally.

Women’s dreams are typically more emotional and have fewer people in them, though they tend to include more social interaction and more clothes: men tend to dream about money, weapons and nudity.

Dreaming takes place during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which lasts from 10 minutes to half an hour, four to six times a night. During REM sleep your previously comatose brain suddenly erupts with activity. Your eyes move rapidly under your closed eyelids, and your heart rate, breathing rate and blood pressure go up. (Fortunately, your body remains effectively paralyzed.)

A study a few years ago showed that during REM sleep the frontal lobes, which integrate information, help us interpret the outside world, and contain working memory, are shut down—while much of the rest of the brain is highly active. That could explain why our dreams are so vivid and gripping, even though they don’t make a lick of sense. With our frontal lobes out of the picture, dreams are being driven by emotion, not logic. And without working memory, the dreaming brain forgets what just happened in the dream—which is why you can step out of your kitchen onto the top of the Empire State Building, while your companions morph from friends to large shaggy dogs.

We dream about 90 minutes every night, but we usually only remember a dream every four or five days.

Now Luigi De Gennaro at the University of Rome and his team have discovered what’s going on in our brains when we remember our dreams.

The researchers monitored 65 students with an electroencephalogram (EEG) while they slept. Thirty had been identified as people who habitually wake up while in REM sleep, and 35 were people who usually wake up in Stage 2 non-REM sleep. About two-thirds of both groups recalled dreams during the study.

The researchers found that those who woke during REM sleep and successfully recalled their dreams were more likely to demonstrate a pattern of theta waves in their frontal and prefrontal cortexes, where advanced thinking occurs. The patterns and the part of the brain involved were the same as those important for awake subjects recalling memories.

Those who woke up in non-REM sleep had patterns of alpha wave activity in the right temporal lobe, the area of the brain involved in recognizing emotional events. Again, this was similar to activity known to be key for memory recall when awake.

The researchers interpret this to mean that even when we’re asleep, our brain is alert for things that are important enough to remember, often things that are emotionally charged.

Proof enough, I say, that dreams have survival value. Because the next time I open the front door of my house to discover a giant squid devouring my television while a poodle in a smoking jacket sits in my armchair and laughs, at least I won’t be taken completely by surprise.

If that doesn’t have survival value, I don’t know what does.

Which is why, I guess, that researchers studying the neurological basis of embarrassment recently chose to trigger embarrassment by making people listen to recordings of themselves singing. Oh, the horror!

Apparently it’s a pretty reliable way to make people feel embarrassed, although I’m not sure how they screen for people like me who actually enjoy listening to recordings of ourselves.

Anyway, the method of engendering embarrassment wasn’t really the point of the study (although it’s certainly why I noticed it). The goal was to identify the neurological basis of embarrassment, and the study has given a strong indication that the seat of embarrassment in the human brain is, in fact, a thumb-sized piece of tissue in the right hemisphere of the front part of the brain.

The study was conducted by a team of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley.

The study was based on the long-documented fact that people suffering from a group of related neurodegenerative conditions called frontotemporal dementia do things without embarrassment that would be embarrassing to most healthy people.

The temporal and frontal lobes of the brain play a significant role in decision-making, behavior and understanding and expression of language and emotion–including embarrassment.

So for this study, the researchers, led by Virginia Sturm, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF, took 79 people, most of whom suffer from neurodegenerative diseases, and asked them to sing “My Girl,” the 1964 Motown hit by The Temptations, with a karaoke accompaniment.

According to Sturm (and rather worrying for me), “In healthy people, watching themselves sing elicits a considerable embarrassment reaction.” Specifically, their heart rate and blood pressure both increase, and their breathing changes.

While they sang, probes measured their vital signs and cameras videotaped their facial expressions. Their songs were recorded, and then they were played back to the singers at normal speed–but without the accompanying music. Sturm and the other researchers assessed how embarrassing they found this, based on facial expressions and things such as sweating and heart rate.

Then, they put all the people through MRIs to make extremely accurate maps of their brains, which were then used to measure the volume of different regions of the brain, to see if they could find a link between the sizes of various regions and the level of embarrassment.

The result: people whose pregenual anterior cingulate cortex had deteriorated significantly were less likely to be embarrassed, and the more it had deteriorated, the less likely they were to be embarrassed by their own singing.

By way of a control, the study participants were given a “startle” test, which measures emotional reactivity: they sat quietly in a room until they were surprised by a gunshot sound.

The subjects did jump and were frightened by the sound, Sturm noted, “so it’s not like they don’t have any emotional reactions at all.” But, she said, “Patients with loss in this brain region seem to lose these more complicated social emotions”…such as embarrassment.

No, this doesn’t mean that just because you don’t get embarrassed watching yourself sing you have a neurodegenerative disorder. It may just mean you’re a ham. (“Le jambon, c’est moi!”)

Whereas changes in thinking and memory are usually easily identified by family members and doctors, changes in emotion and social behavior, being more subtle, can be missed. The researchers hope that a better understanding of the neurological basis of these changes may help loved ones and caregivers cope better with the more severe behavioral changes that can result from neurodegenerative conditions.

As for the rest of us…well, it probably doesn’t really help the easily embarrassed to know that the physiological source of embarrassment is the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex. It’s simplistic to say that if you have a big one you’re more likely to be embarrassed than if you have a small one. (There’s a joke there somewhere that I’m trying really hard to avoid.)

Embarrassment is a very complicated emotion and not one that’s fully understood by any means.

Still, this is another example of how, bit by bit, we’re mapping the regions of the brain responsible for the emotions that we experience as free-floating. We sense ourselves as being somehow separate from the wrinkled gray mass inside our skulls, but really, we’re entirely contained within it.

It’s a bit humbling, but honestly, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.

(The photo: Cocktails for Two Hundred at Souris Valley Theatre. That’s me on the right, with Marianne Woods leaning on the piano and.)

Research has shown that when viewers who have been told to count the number of passes don’t know the person in the gorilla suit is going to appear, more than 40 percent fail to see him, even though he stops halfway across the room to briefly thump his chest.

This failure to see something unusual that’s right in front of our eyes is called “inattention blindness,” and new research has shed some light on who is most susceptible to it, and why.

The key, it appears, is the capacity of a person’s working memory, the memory we use to deal with whatever we’re doing at any given moment. If you’re solving a math problem, or working on a grocery list, you’re using working memory.

The question has been whether people with a high working memory capacity are less likely to see a distraction because they focus more intently on the task at hand, or more likely to see it because they are better able to shift their attention as needed.

New research indicates it’s the latter: those with greater working memory capacity are more likely to see the gorilla than those with less.

The research was conducted by University of Utah psychologist Janelle Seegmiller (the video was the work of psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, who wrote a book called, naturally, The Invisible Gorilla), along with fellow psychology faculty members Jason Watson and David Strayer. Strayer has led several studies on cell phone use and distracted driving.

To begin, 306 psychology students were tested with the gorilla video. About a third were promptly excluded because they already had some knowledge of it. That left 197, ages 18 to 35, whose test results were analyzed.

First, the psychologists measured the participants’ working memory capacity using an “operation span test” in which they were given a set of math problems, each of which was followed by a letter. (For example: “Is 8 divided by 4, then plus 3, equal to 4? A.”)

There were 75 of these equation-letter combinations in all, divided into sets of three to seven. Participants were asked to recall all the letters of each set. For instance, if a set of five equations ended with PGDAE, they’d get a full five points if they remembered the letters in that order. (Although there was a catch: to ensure they weren’t just memorizing the letter order, they also had to solve at least 80 percent of the equations correctly.)

In the next step the participants watched the gorilla video, which features two three-member teams, one wearing red shirts, one wearing black shirts, passing basketballs back and forth. Participants were asked to count bounce passes and aerial passes by the black team. At the end, they were asked how many passes of each kind they counted, and whether they noted anything unusual. To ensure they were actually counting passes, and so were focused on the task in hand, only participants who were 80 percent accurate in their pass count were included in the final analysis.

The overall results were very similar to those noted by Simons and Chabris: 58 percent of participants who were reasonably accurate in counting passes noticed the gorilla, but 42 percent did not. When that was correlated with the working memory capacity test, the researchers found that the gorilla was noticed by 67 percent of those with high working memory capacity, but only 36 percent of those with low working memory capacity.

To put it in other words, those with greater working memory capacity have more “attentional control”: they are better able to focus attention when and where needed, and on more than one thing at a time.

Outside the lab, attentional control is important any time we’re trying to deal with more than one task at once. The most obvious real-world example is driving. Those with a greater working memory capacity are less likely to run a just-turned red light because they’re distracted by conversation, for instance.

It’s an interesting finding, but don’t think just because you have a higher working memory capacity, you can safely drive and talk on your cellphone at the same time. Previous research by this same team has shown that only a very few people (2.5 percent) can do so without impairment.

This probably still isn’t the whole story. At least, the Utah researchers don’t think it is: they plan to continue their research to look at other possible explanations for why some people suffer more from inattention blindness than others, including brain processing speed and differences in personality types.

Personally, I’ve always thought I’m very good at multitasking. I was doing four other things while writing this column, and I’ll bet you no close you matter how look can’t tell, can you?

(The photo: Gorillas in wash tubs at the Calgary Zoo.)

Oh, I know, it doesn’t rank up there with, say, coal miner in physical difficulty or neurosurgeon in mental difficulty, but where it probably has it over both of them is in creative difficulty: the pressure to constantly come up with something new.

Heck, as a science fiction and fantasy writer, I’m expected to create entire worlds, whole solar systems, mythical creatures and believable characters out of nothing more than my own brain cells.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were some way to artificially stimulate creativity?

Turns out, there may be.

In a paper published earlier this month in PLoS One, an online scientific journal, researchers Richard Chi and Allan Snyder from the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney reported on a study they conducted that seemed to show that people receiving electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes of the brain (located, basically, just above the ears) found it easier to figure out how to solve a difficult puzzle than those who didn’t receive that stimulation.

To provide the electrical stimulation, the scientists created what the press release from the journal calls “an electric thinking cap.” (Consisting of two sponge electrodes soaked in salt water fastened to the head by a rubber strap, in order to set up a weak current through the targeted part of the brain, it’s more properly called a tDCS device, for “transcranial direct current stimulation”.)

The puzzle presented to the participants involved correcting a false arithmetic statement presented in Roman numerals constructed from matchsticks. The participants had to figure out how to make the statement correct by moving a single matchstick from one position to another: for example, turning an X into a V.

The results: while only 20 percent of non-thinking-capped participants could figure out a complex version of the problem (after practicing with a series of easier problems) in the six minutes allowed, 60 percent of those receiving stimulation managed it.

Past research has indicated that the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) is associated with solving problems using known, tried-and-true methods, while the right ATL is associated with what is commonly called “thinking outside the box”: coming up with new ways to solve problems.

The researchers placed their electrodes on the subjects’ heads so that the flow of current suppressed activity in the left ATL, while enhancing it in the right.

The brain is always trying to find a balance between “exploration and exploitation,” as neuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine puts it: in other words, between finding new ways of doing things and using methods it has already figured out.

Eagleman points out that there’s a downside to “thinking outside the box” in survival terms: “The only way an animal can get by…is using what it has learned in the past and coming up with new solutions,” he says. “If you were an animal in the wild trying to constantly come up with new solutions to every problem…you’d probably starve to death.

 “What this study shows is that you can tip the balance of this battle in favor of exploring new possibilities.”

One uncertainty is whether the increase in creativity arose because of the enhancement of activity in the right ATL or the suppression of it in the left ATL, or if it was a combination of the two.

However, according to Snyder, the research was inspired by reports of accident victims who, after damaging the left side of their brains, suddenly “burst out into the arts or other types of creative activities,” which would seem to imply suppressing the left ATL alone is enough to enhance creativity.

So, does this mean I and other types who depend on being creative for our livelihoods will be able to buy a thinking cap at Staples any time soon?

Alas, no. But as research continues, who knows? Snyder isn’t discounting it. Although the science is in its infancy, he says the “thinking cap” has potential applications in problem-solving…and, yes, in the arts.

Perhaps, in the future, there will no longer be any need for writers to gaze mournfully into space, take long walks in the rain, or starve in garrets as they seek their muse.

Instead, they’ll slap on their “We ‘R’ A Muse” patented electromagnetic thinking cap (available in a variety of designer colors!), plug it in, and pop out a masterpiece by supper.

Not very romantic, I admit. But it sure would take the pressure off.

The photo: Barefoot in Bemidji.

It’s the lightning, of course, that makes thunderstorms thunder. If I may quote myself from a previous column, lightning “is a massive but short-lived electrical discharge in the atmosphere, usually several kilometres long.

“Lightning arises because of a charge separation in a cloud. A ‘charge separation’ just means that there are more electrons in one place than another. Cloud-to-ground lightning occurs when there are lots of free electrons in the base of the cloud. These electrons are discharged in what is called a stepped leader: ‘stepped’ because it descends from the cloud in discrete steps, each about 50 metres long (which is what gives lightning its jagged appearance), and ‘leader’ because that’s what it is–the precursor for the main bolt.

“Since electrons are negatively charged, this stepped leader has a very strong negative charge. When it gets within 100 metres or less of the positively charged ground, another leader moves up to meet it, often through handy protruding objects like buildings, trees and golfers.

“What we think is the main stroke of lightning is actually the return stroke, which propagates upward from the ground along the path formed by the leader and the stepped leader. Several subsequent strokes usually follow along the same path…because the stepped leader knocked electrons loose from molecules of atmospheric gas along the way, creating a channel of positively charged air, a path of least resistance…All these strokes come and go with the space of a second, traversing the distance between cloud and sky at up to half the speed of light, until the surplus of electrons in the lower part of the cloud is eliminated.”

That’s the lightning we all know and, um, love.

But there’s another kind of lightning whose nature is far more obscure: ball lighting.

Ball lightning, reported by thousands of people, consists of luminous spheres, typically the size of a grapefruit, said to last for a few seconds or even minutes, sometimes hovering, sometimes bouncing along the ground, sometimes doing weird things like burning through screen doors or bouncing on someone’s head.

In 2007, New Scientist noted that a theory by John Abrahamson and James Dinniss of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, suggesting ball lightning could form when lightning strikes soil, vaporizing any silica in it, had been supported by experimental work in Brazil.

Abrahamson and Dinniss suggested that as the silicon vapour cools, it condenses into a floating aerosol, bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface and glowing from the heat of the silicon recombining with oxygen.

To test the idea, a team at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil vaporized wafers of silicon in an arc between two electrons. Sure enough, the arc occasionally spat out luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that lasted for up to eight seconds, moved randomly as their surfaces emitted little jets, emitted smoke trails, and were hot enough to melt plastic.

In the last couple of weeks, though, another explanation has come along: Joseph Peer and Alexander Kendl at the University of Innsbruck in Austria suggest that at least some “ball lightning” is actually a hallucination.

Noting that transcranial magnetic stimulation—stimulating the brain with a rapidly changing magnetic field–can cause subjects to see glowing discs and lines, they pointed out that the rapidly changing magnetic fields associated with repeated lightning strikes are powerful enough to cause a similar phenomenon in humans within 200 metres.

The strike has to be of a particular type in which there are multiple return strokes at the same point over a period of a few seconds, and of course the observer has to be uninjured, sitting inside a house, perhaps, which, sure enough, is where ball lightning is often experienced. Peer and Kendle estimate that roughly one percent of those who experience lightning close at hand without being harmed are likely to experience magnetic fields strong enough to induce hallucinations.

So, is ball lighting floating spheres of silicon gas, or all in the observers’ heads?

Since investigating either requires you to be in close proximity to powerful lightning strikes, I’m content to let the scientists figure it out.

Although if Ben Franklin were alive today, I’m sure he’d be right on it.