In Britain this week a programme of concerts for babies (including the unborn!) is beginning. Can't do any harm and may even do some good, but of course it's born out of the hyperbolic "Mozart effect" (as opposed to the real Mozart effect - see my article). The BBC article on it is honest enough to use phrases like "many experts think that it may", and "a theory which is credited with", but then displays the writer's true colors with the exaggerated "Numerous studies conclude that playing music to babies in the womb and in the early years helps build the neural bridges along which thoughts and information travel".
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of involving young children with music; my own children were Suzuki kids. But the playing of music is a world away from merely being exposed to it. I mean, it's a nice idea, and as I say, it certainly won't do the kids any harm; but let's not oversell the idea, okay? (And the idea of legally requiring all preschools to play classical music - as apparently is the case in Florida - just blows me away.)

If you want to fully appreciate the value of memory, read this story about a man whose hippocampus was destroyed, leaving him living in an eternal present.

An intriguing imaging study has found that genuine acupuncture needles activate brain areas beyond the ones that light up when trick needles are used. Clinical trials into acupuncture have had mixed results and many studies have suggested that the placebo effect accounts for most of the benefits seen. It now appears that, although the placebo effect accounts for much of the effect, there is indeed a real effect going on there.

And while we're on the subject of expectations, here's a cute study - the effects of alcohol on your sex drive can apparently be replicated simply by being exposed to flashes of alcohol-related words on a computer screen. After subconciously experiencing these words, the subjects (male students) rated the attractiveness of young women (from photos!), and - here's the interesting part - how highly they rated them depended on whether they believed alcohol enhanced or depressed their sex drive.

And if you're interested in the complexity of our experience of pain (and it is a complex issue), check out this article on what imaging studies have shown us.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned an article by Steven Johnson on how TV is making us smarter. The same guy's also recently written an article on the Flynn effect, which is worth reading. The Flynn effect refers to the fact that IQ scores have been steadily increasing in industrialized countries for the past few decades (the makers of IQ tests regularly "re-norm" their tests to allow for this).

And there's an interesting article in the latest Science & Consciousness Review about a new theory of why we evolved consciousness. Basically it's to do with the problem of how we distinguish between actual movements in our environment from apparent movements produced by the movement of our sense organs? An earthworm, apparently, solves its limited problem “by giant fibers in the segmented worm’s ventral nerve cord” - a mechanical solution. But earthworms have extremely limited senses. For animals like ourselves with many sense organs, capable of receiving complex information, the problem is much more difficult. This new theory is that subjective consciousness evolved to solve this problem.