New Scientist reports on a rather unusual study from economists: they modeled the behavior of ove 500 participants in the UK game show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" They concluded from the risk averse behavior demonstrated by most of the participants that most people are not natural gamblers. An intriguing question that occurs to me is the extent to which this behavior is culturally influenced -- would you, for example, get the same results with American participants?

And here's another article on the "your gut is a second brain" idea. Did you know, for example, that antidepressants cause gastric upset in up to a quarter of people who take them? Or that early childhood trauma can result in chronic gut problems? Or that you can use biofeedback to train your gut to manage better? And of course none of us need to be told about ulcers!

Further to the supposed IQ gender gap I mentioned a few days ago, the BBC have an article on it; the fun part is the inclusion of various people's comments.

The New Scientist has an article on how placebos work, as revealed by an imaging study. The writer makes a common mistake when she starts off by saying "It seems that placebos have a real physical, not imagined, effect". She may of course simply mean that the placebo turns out to be a real effect and not a statistical phenomenon -- in which case, fair enough. However, I suspect she's reflecting the common confusion between "real" and "imagined". If you imagine something, it may not "really" exist, in the world outside your brain, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a representation in your brain -- in fact, clearly it has. If there is a "real" placebo effect, as there certainly appears to be (i.e., something measurable is happening at a level greater than could be expected by chance), then clearly there must be something physical happening in the brain, otherwise we're in the realm of magic. What this study does is give us some clear to the mechanism -- what's happening in the brain.