Science

Can You Describe an Odour?

It is widely believed that people are bad at naming odors. This has led researchers to suggest smell representations are simply not accessible to the language centers of the brain. But is this really so?
English speakers grapple to describe smells. Even with familiar everyday odors, such as coffee, banana, and chocolate, English speakers only correctly name the smells around 50% of the time. This has led to the conclusion that smells defy words. Psychologist Asifa Majid from Radboud University Nijmegen and linguist Niclas Burenhult from Lund University Sweden present new evidence that this is not true in all languages.

They conducted research with speakers of Jahai, a hunter-gatherer language spoken in the Malay Peninsula. In Jahai there are around a dozen different words to describe different qualities of smell. For example, ltpɨt is used to describe the smell of various flowers and ripe fruit, perfume etc while Cŋɛs is used for the smell of petrol, smoke, bat droppings etc. These terms refer to different odor qualities and are abstract.  English speakers, on the other hand, use mostly source-based descriptions (like a banana) or evaluative descriptions (that's disgusting).
The researchers concluded that the inability to name smells is a product of culture and not biology.

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How Horses Can Teach Humans  Communication Skills, Kindness

A nudge from the nose of a free-roaming zebra, or towering, 2,500-pound Clydesdale draft horse, might send others running.
But Lauren Burke, a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University's social work school, instead extends a curved hand to return the equine "hello."
 Burke spent 18 months learning to communicate with horses (and a zebra) and teaching others how to do the same.  
Before clients are introduced to the horses, Burke begins with a 15-minute lesson in nonverbal horse communications -- the meaning of ear positioning, swishing tails, and handling a nose-to-nose welcome.
No one rides the horses.  Burke teaches clients how to go from greeting the horses, to creating respect and trust to leading a horse through an obstacle course, called the "Field of Possibilities." By doing so, clients achieve skills in working as a team.
The approach is based on the belief that humans and horses share a natural connection. In fact, Burke said, horses are a metaphor for humans who, like a herd, once lived and worked together, with each member contributing to maintaining the tribe. And, like an isolated and lonely human, horses also suffer emotional and physical problems when separated from their herds.

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Testosterone in Male Songbirds May Enhance  Desire to Sing, but Not Song Quality

For the male canary, the ability to sing a pitch-perfect song is critical to wooing female canaries. As the seasons change, so does song quality and frequency. The hormone testosterone plays a role in this changing song behavior.
Researchers at The Johns Hopkins University have found that introducing testosterone in select areas of a male canary's brain can affect its ability to successfully attract and mate with a female through birdsong. They also found that enhancing song activity based on testosterone in one brain area can change the size of a separate brain area that regulates song quality. These findings could shed light on how testosterone acts in the human brain to regulate speech or help explain how anabolic steroids affect human behaviors.
In a paper recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, graduate student Beau Alward and Professor Gregory F. Ball found that when male canaries received testosterone in a specific area in the brain, the frequency of the song increased. However, the quality of songs sung did not change in comparison to the male birds that received testosterone throughout the brain.

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Stress in the Orchestra: Mood Plays a Part

Even professional orchestra musicians suffer from particular stress on the day of the concert and release more cortisol, a steroid hormone. For the first time it has now been possible to demonstrate that, amongst others, the enzyme myeloperoxidase, which is regarded as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, plays a part in the stress reaction in musicians. This effect is however dampened by an emotional factor: this is because a good mood reduces the stress-induced release of myeloperoxidase.

This is the core result of a current joint study carried out by the Institute for Occupational Medicine at the MedUni Vienna.
The stress reactions in 47 musicians and the conductor of the Austrian radio symphony orchestra, the ORF, were examined at the dress rehearsal and on the following day, the day of the premier, at Vienna's Musikverein. Saliva and blood samples were taken for the purpose of producing a cortisol profile and to measure the myeloperoxidase, which plays a major role in inflammatory processes – these were taken before and after each performance, as well as during the concert and rehearsal intervals.