A bit of a slow start for the year in terms of science news so I’ll have to make do with some softer research articles. All three of the articles are about human psychology. First a short one about how chess grandmasters use their brains. Next, one about how men and women respond to stress differently when under the effects of caffeine and finally an odd look at how having a name that with starts with a letter at the end of the alphabet influences human behavior.
The first article is from New Scientist which talks about how Merim Bilalic at the University of Tübingen in Germany used an MRI machine to look at the brains of various chess players while they were looking at images of geometrical shapes or identifying whether certain situations in chess amounted to a check. Half of these were just novices and the other half were all internationally acknowledged grandmasters.
As expected, the grandmasters turned out to be quicker at solving the chess problems but not at identifying geometrical shapes. What was unexpected was that rather than simply working faster, the brains of the grandmasters turned out to be working differently. While the novices only used the left sides of their brains to work on both sets of problems, the grandmasters were able to deploy both sides of their brains to tackle the chess problems. This suggests that it is indeed possible to use intensive practice to train your brain to work in a different manner.
The next article is from the BPS Research Digest and covers a study by Lindsay St. Claire and colleagues at the University of Bristol about how drinking coffee affects the way that men and women react to stress in different ways. Broadly speaking, they found that drinking coffee is bad for men who are negotiating or collaborating while under stress but is good for women under the same circumstances. They determined this by asking same-sex pairs of men and women to work on puzzles, negotiations or memory tasks after giving them a decaffeinated drink that for some pairs had been secretly spiked with a high dose of caffeine.
They found that male pairs who had been given caffeine did much more poorly in solving puzzles and had worse memory while the converse was true for female pairs. The reason for the discrepancy is as yet unknown but the authors suggest that it could be rooted in how males and females react differently to stress. Specifically, it could be that males have a fight or flight response to stress that makes it difficult for them to collaborate while women have an instinct to want to work together more when in danger or while under stress.
Finally, the last article from the Wall Street Journal introduces what is known as the “last name effect“. The researchers claims that as people with last names that start with letters that come late in alphabet become used to getting called last, they train themselves to respond faster to opportunities whenever they occur. Using several experiments, such as emailing people to offer them a chance to get free tickets for sports events and telling them that it was on a first come-first served basis, the team found that participants with last names that begin with the last few letters of the alphabet did indeed tend to respond faster.
They also found that married women who take on the surnames of their husbands still react according to their birth surname, reinforcing the notion that this is behavior learned since childhood. Anyway, I guess some people will roll their eyes at findings like this and wonder why research money is being wasted in this way, but I nevertheless think it is an interesting insight into a familiar aspect of everyday life that we don’t think much about.