'Sex doc' busy writing books in jail

Serving a life term for dabbling in the business of erotica, orthopaedic surgeon Dr L Prakash is busy churning out books on various subjects including a four-volume book on Mahabharata in his prison cell.

Convicted for providing pornographic pictures to websites, the 52-year-old doctor reportedly is busy writing on subjects ranging from science, adventure and his pet subject -- erotica.

Prakash was arrested in December 2001 following a complaint from a youth that he was forced to commit sexual acts with women, which were filmed and later posted on websites hosted by the doctor. He was sentenced in February this year.

G Asokan of Banana Books said that he has already published four books of Prakash -- Glimpses of Vedic Wisdom , Swiss Chocolates , Maybach Maiden , and Tangled Web Beats .

Asokan came to know of Prakash through an advocate S Namonarayanan who was imprisoned in the same jail for three days for unlawful assembly where he read Prakash's books and brought this to the notice of the publishers.

Following this the publishers had a brief meeting with Prakash when he was brought to court last June and clinched the deal.

"We will bring out his six lakh worded Mahabharata in four volumes in October and plan to publish more," he said.

Namonarayanan reportedly told Asokan that the doctor was involved in writing for hours. Recently, the Madras High Court allowed the doctor to have a personal computer.

Man and Wife Argue Over Who's Too Drunk to Drive; Argument Gets Settled the Hard Way

I believe the fact that the husband ran over his wife shows which on was too drunk, or rather, in this case, drunker.

Thursday, in Merritt Island, Florida, Richard Zubowicz, 45, thought his wife Becky, 44, was too drunk to drive. Never mind himself. So they pulled into a grocery store parking lot to argue. He allegedly pushed his wife to the ground, jumped in the SUV and circled the parking lot.

As his wife was still lying down, he ran over her when he returned to the spot of the argument.

Police later found Becky Zubowicz still pinned beneath the SUV. She remains in critical condition.

Richard Zubowicz remains jailed on charges of drunken driving and and domestic violence.

Humans married to pups, to ward off evil

KULUPDANGA: Three boys and two girls were married to puppies in the superstition that it would ward off evil at this remote tribal-dominated village in Jharkhand's Saraikela-Kharswan district on Monday.

Salu Banra, the mother of one of the girls, 15-year-old Puspa, a student of class seven in a government school said, “this is a custom. We set the puppy free after the marriage.”

The upper tooth appearing in either a girl or a boy is considered inauspicious by the Ho tribe which lives in this village. “Marriage to puppies of the opposite gender gets rid of the evil,” said some of the other villagers.

They said that six marriages between puppies and boys and girls had taken place on Sunday.

The pup-human marriage takes place on only two days in a year - the second and third of the month of Maghe. Today was the third of Maghe.

Full grown dogs are not used in the marriages but puppies which are called 'pida panda' (one who drives away evil).

All rituals and customs of a tribal marriage takes place with a priest officiating and guests invited, entertained by songs and dances, the villagers told a PTI correspondent.

Dowry in cash is sought and given. The bride is also given new clothes to wear. Only in case of smearing of sindur (vermillion), it is applied not to the puppies or humans but to a tree known locally as 'renge banam'.

When contacted, SDO Dinesh Prasad said, “this is a tradition. As long as they don't disturb others, we don't interfere.”

An elderly woman belonging to the Ho community, Laxmi Kalundia, said such marriages also demonstrated the fondness for pets and nature.

“Only pet dogs are preferable in such marriages,” she said. The marriage to pups also did not hinder the real marriage in future, she said as husbands and wives accepted this as a part of tribal custom.

The 15-year-old bride said she was happy and hoped to lead a peaceful life free from evil.

Men, please note: 'Smoking, drinking can affect your progeny'

London (PTI): Science has long been clear that smoking or heavy alcohol consumption causes cancer. But, a new study has found that babies could inherit genetic damage from a father who puffs or drinks too much.

A team of international researchers has found that smoking or drinking alcohol can cause chemical changes in the semen in men and the alterations could be potentially inherited by their progenies and their future generations.

The researchers came to the conclusion after they analysed the effects of smoking and heavy drinking -- both toxic in nature -- on a group of rodents. They gave pregnant female mice daily injections of pesticide vinclozolin during the period when the sex of embryos is determined.

Male offspring had abnormalities, including prostate and sperm development problems, and genetic changes that the researchers found were passed on through four generations when the males were mated with healthy females. The researchers have also identified specific genes involved in the production of sperm that were permanently altered by the exposure to the pesticide.

"In addition to the spermatogenic and prostate abnormalities, trans-generational effects on numerous disease states were observed including tumour development and kidney disease," 'The Daily Telegraph' quoted Dr Matthew Anway of the University of Idaho as saying.

Now, charge your mobiles just by walking

Washington, February 8: University of Michigan scientists have found that a new energy-capturing knee brace has the potential to generate enough electricity from walking to operate a portable GPS locator or to charge a cell phone.

Arthur Kuo, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the university, has revealed that the wearable mechanism works much like regenerative braking charges a battery in some hybrid vehicles.

While regenerative brakes collect the kinetic energy that would otherwise be dissipated as heat when a car slows down, the knee brace harvests the energy lost when a human brakes the knee after swinging the leg forward to take a step.

"There is power to be harvested from various places in the body, and you can use that to generate electricity. The knee is probably the best place. During walking, you dissipate energy in various places, when your foot hits the ground, for example. You have to make up for this by performing work with your muscles," said Kuo, who called the device "a cocktail-napkin idea".

"The body is clever. In a lot of places where it could be dissipating energy, it may actually be storing it and getting it back elastically. Your tendons act like springs. In many places, we're not sure whether the energy is really being dissipated or you're just storing it temporarily. We believe that when you're slowing down the knee at the end of swinging the leg, most of that energy normally is just wasted," Kuo added.

During a study, reported in the journal Science, the scientists tested the knee brace on six men walking leisurely on a treadmill at 2.2 miles per hour. They measured the subjects' respiration to determine how hard they were working.

A control group wore the brace with the generator disengaged to measure how the weight of the 3.5-pound brace affected the wearer.

The study report reveals that in the mode in which the brace is only activated while the knee is braking, the subjects required less than one watt of extra metabolic power for each watt of electricity they generated.

By contrast, says the report, a typical hand-crank generator takes an average of 6.4 watts of metabolic power to generate one watt of electricity because of inefficiencies of muscles and generators.

"We've demonstrated proof of concept. The prototype device is bulky and heavy, and it does affect the wearer just to carry. But the energy generation part itself has very little effect on the wearer, whether it is turned on or not. We hope to improve the device so that it is easier to carry, and to retain the energy-harvesting capabilities," Kuo said.

The authors believe that a lighter version of the knee brace would be helpful to hikers or soldiers who do not have easy access to electricity. They also envision its application in implantable devices such as pacemakers or neurotransmitters, which today require a battery and periodic surgery to replace that battery.

"A future energy harvester might be implanted along with such a device and generate its own power from walking," Kuo said.

Georgia Police Officers Shoot Each Other

Two off-duty officers from different police departments wounded each other in a gun fight in the middle of a road in an Atlanta suburb, authorities said.

Both officers suffered non-life-threatening wounds, police said. Their conditions were not immediately known on Saturday.

Officer Jay Daily, a five-year veteran of the Duluth Police Department, exchanged multiple gunshots with Fulton County officer Paul Phillips on Friday afternoon, police said.

Daily was in custody Saturday, charged with aggravated assault, Cpl. Illana Spellman of the Gwinnett County police said.

"It's been confirmed that the Duluth police officer was the aggressor in this case," Spellman said.

Phillips, 37, required surgery at Gwinnett Medical Center. A hospital spokesman said Saturday he could not release information about the two officers. He referred questions to Spellman, who did not immediately have an update on their injuries.

"It's been baffling to us why this situation even occurred," said Duluth Police Chief Randy Belcher. "It's an embarrassment to this agency."

Phillips, who was wearing his uniform and in a marked police car, was driving to his home in Gwinnett County, police said. He was flagged down by someone who had seen Daily involved in a physical altercation with a woman in a sport-utility vehicle.

Daily, who lives in the area, was off duty and in civilian clothing but was wearing a bulletproof vest, police said.

Police did not know what relationship Daily had with the woman or what started the confrontation. The woman, who was not identified, later was hospitalized for minor injuries she suffered before the shooting started, police said.

Belcher described Daily as "an outstanding officer" and said he was suspended while the investigation is under way.

Rat nibbles on face of 10-day-old baby

Dr Suresh Shah, a pediatrician, attends to the baby. He said in such cases there are chances of infection reaching the brain. So he had to take great care of the baby to ensure the infection does not spread



The rodent badly mutilates the infant’s face; eats away nose and parts of the cheek; now, doctors plan to reconstruct the nose

Twenty-three year old Sunita Chavan (name changed) was in for a shock when she saw a rat nibbling at the face of her 10-day-old child on Thursday.

By the time Chavan, who was asleep next to her daughter woke up hearing her scream, the rat had eaten away the nose and parts of her daughter’s cheeks. “I got up and saw a big rat on the face of my child. I raised an alarm. By the time my mother came, the baby was bleeding profusely.” said Chavan.

The child is the first for Chavan, after her marriage a year back. Chavan had come to her parent’s home in a chawl in Matunga, for the delivery. She delivered on January 22 at a private nursing home nearby. As the baby weighed 1.6 kilogrammes at the time of birth, she was kept in the nursing home for three days. According to Chavan, she had finished her afternoon chores when she fell asleep along with the baby. She was in deep sleep when the baby woke up screaming. Chavan and her mother shooed the rat away, and rushed the baby to a hospital in King’s Circle. But doctors there refused to treat the child as the baby’s face was completely covered with blood. “We could not figure out which parts of the face the rat had eaten as the entire face was covered in blood. We kept running from one hospital to another, until she was finally taken care of at Shah Nursing home and Child health centre.” said Sunita’s mother, who did not want to disclose her name.
Doctor Suresh Shah, the pediatrician attending to the baby said, “The child was admitted to the hospital on January 31 at 5.30 pm. I was present in the hospital when she was brought in bleeding profusely. In such cases there are chances of infection reaching the brain, so we had to take great care to ensure the infection does not spread.”

A team of three doctors attended to the baby. Pediatric surgeon Bhalchandra Jaykar and Plastic surgeon Shankar Shriniwas were called in from other hospitals. Dr Shah and they are constantly monitoring the child’s progress. The doctor’s plan to reconstruct the baby’s nose through plastic surgery.

“The child is out of danger, but we had to pay particular attention to the nutrition aspect, as the upper lip is swollen. We also took care of the respiration, since the nose was eaten up.” said Dr Shah.

Kidney Transplant Scam Shocks India

GURGAON, India (Jan. 30) - The last things Mohammed Salim remembered were the knees pinning him to the ground, the guns pointed at his head, and, finally, the injection that sent him into oblivion.

Police in Gurgaon, India, recently busted an illegal transplant racket that allegedly removed kidneys from up to 500 poor laborers and sold their organs to clients. Here, 33-year-old Mohammed Salim recovers at a hospital Wednesday in Gurgaon after his kidney was stolen.

When he awoke, he was in agonizing pain, uncertain where he was or why he was wearing a hospital gown.

"We have taken your kidney," a masked man calmly explained. "If you tell anyone, we'll shoot you."

Salim was one of the last victims in an organ transplant racket that police believe sold up to 500 kidneys to clients who traveled to India from around the world over the past nine years.

Police say that when they raided the operation's main clinic in this upscale New Delhi suburb last week, they broke up a ring spanning five Indian states and involving at least four doctors, several hospitals, two dozen nurses and paramedics and a car outfitted as a laboratory.

Subsequent raids uncovered a kidney transplant waiting list with 48 names and, in one clinic, five foreigners - three Greeks and two Americans of Indian descent - who authorities believe were waiting for transplants.

Only one doctor has been arrested so far and police are searching for the alleged ringleader, Amit Kumar, who has several aliases and has been accused in past organ transplant schemes elsewhere in India. Authorities believe he's fled the country.

"Due to its scale, we believe more members of the Delhi medical fraternity must have been aware of what was going on," Gurgaon Police Commissioner Mohinder Lal told reporters this week.

There long have been reports of poor Indians illegally selling kidneys, but the transplant racket in Gurgaon is one of the most extensive to come to light - and the first with an element of so-called medical tourism.

The low cost of medical care in India has made it a popular destination for foreigners in need of everything from tummy tucks to heart surgery.

The Gurgaon kidney transplant racket, however, was not the types of operation the medical community wanted in the headlines. The case has shocked the country, sparking debate about medical ethics and organ transplant laws.

Some "donors" were forced onto the operating table at gunpoint, while others were tricked with promises of work, Lal said. There were also some who sold kidneys willingly, usually for between $1,125 to $2,250, the Hindustan Times newspaper reported. The sale of human organs is illegal in India.

Salim, 33, a laborer with five children, said he was lured from his home town a few hours outside New Delhi by a bearded stranger offering a construction job that paid 150 rupees ($3.75) a day, as well as food and lodging. He was told the work would last three months.

"I thought I could earn money and save it for my children," he said from a government hospital in Gurgaon, where he is recovering under police protection.

He was first taken to a two-room house "in the jungle" outside New Delhi where two gunmen held him for six days, he said. Then he was taken to a bungalow in Gurgaon, where armed men took a blood sample at gunpoint.

Salim said he tried to escape, but the doors were locked and within moments, the men were on top of him, sticking him with another needle while he slowly lost consciousness.

When he awoke and learned what happened, Salim thought he was soon to die - he didn't know you could live with one kidney. He lay in a haze of pain and confusion for about a day, when the men, apparently tipped off to the coming raid, told him they had to move him.

Minutes later, police burst into the house and rescued Salim and two other men who also had their kidneys taken. He never received any money, he said.

"I don't know how I will survive," said Salim, whose five children were at the hospital. "I am the only earner in the family and the doctors said I can't do heavy work."

Shakeel Ahmed, 28, was in the hospital bed next to Salim, wincing in pain as he told his story. He is unmarried and has no children, but he is responsible for five nieces and nephews, he said.

"I'm sad, I'm angry. I don't know how I will care for them," Ahmed said, pointing to his elderly parents sitting on the foot of his bed. "Why me?"

Man survives billion-volt lightning strike!

A British man trounced death after surviving a billion-volt lightning strike on his head.

Darren Milne was hit by a 14,000mph bolt that tossed him to the ground, shredded his shirt and destroyed his trainers.

Darren's wife Vicky rushed to him, and feared that he was dead after seeing blood oozing from an open wound on his head.

But, as she embraced Darren, shouting his name repeatedly, he opened his eyes and cried: "I can hear you."

And the 41-year-old left doctors shocked after making a full recovery in just a week.

"He is very lucky - he could have been boiled alive," The Sun quoted a doctor, as saying.

The lightning struck Darren when he and Vicky were exploring the weird 100ft Hoodoo rock formations at Bryce Canyon, Utah.

"Suddenly a storm blew in and it started to hailstone so I made a snowball out of the stuff. Then I heard this loud crack. I woke up on the ground in a complete daze," he said.

Vicky added: "I thought Darren was dead. There was a smell of burnt flesh and all his hair was singed. When he said 'I can hear you', I cried with relief."

Unsuccessful Robber Shoots Self in Foot

CHERRYVILLE, N.C. (AP) - Authorities said an unsuccessful robber shot himself in the foot ... by shooting himself in the foot. Police said Kelvin Ethelbert Roberts, 28, botched his plans to rob a Cherryville convenience store by accidentally shooting his right foot.

According to an arrest warrant, Roberts dropped a .45-caliber handgun in front of Gasland USA on Sunday. The gun hit the ground and went off, a bullet striking Roberts in the foot.

Roberts faces several charges that include attempted robbery with a dangerous weapon and possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Police said the handgun had been altered to fire .410 shotgun shells.

Authorities said Roberts was in illegal possession of the gun because of his felony cocaine possession conviction in 2002 in Chautauqua County, New York.

Cherryville is about 40 miles northwest of Charlotte.

Brain Surgery Lets Woman Enjoy Music

Now that surgeons have operated on Stacey Gayle's brain, her favorite musician no longer makes her ill. Four years after being diagnosed with epilepsy, Gayle recently underwent brain surgery at Long Island Jewish Medical Center to cure a rare condition known as musicogenic epilepsy.



Gayle, a 25-year-old customer service employee at a bank in Alberta, Canada, was suffering as many as 10 grand mal seizures a day, despite being treated with medications designed to control them. The condition became so bad she eventually had to quit her job and leave the church choir where she sang.

Eighteen months ago, she began to suspect that music by reggae and hip-hop artist Sean Paul was triggering some of her seizures. She recalled being at a barbecue and collapsing when the Jamaican rapper's music started playing, and then remembered having a previous seizure when she heard his music.

Her suspicions were confirmed on a visit to the Long Island medical center last February, when she played Paul's hit "Temperature" on her iPod for doctors. Soon after, she suffered three seizures.

"Being that the seizures could be triggered by the music, this was a very interesting opportunity to study Stacey's brain," said Dr. Ashesh Mehta, the hospital's director of epilepsy surgery.

During the first surgery, doctors implanted more than 100 electrodes in the right side of her brain to pinpoint the abnormal area of her brain.

The surgeons followed that procedure with a second surgery to remove the electrodes, along with parts of her brain suspected of causing the seizures.

"We used the latest techniques, including image guidance, to pinpoint the areas of abnormality, and the operating microscope to perform the procedure during a four-hour operation," Mehta said.

Within three days, the woman was released from the hospital and has not experienced a seizure since.

"I always live each day like it's my last," she said. "I want to show others that life does not end at epilepsy. I know I have what it takes to succeed."

Epidemic Feared - Gays May Spread Deadly Staph Infection to General Population

Reuters has reported that, "A drug-resistant strain of potentially deadly bacteria has moved beyond the borders of U.S. hospitals and is being transmitted among gay men during sex, researchers said on Monday.

"They said methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is beginning to appear outside hospitals in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles."

"'Once this reaches the general population, it will be truly unstoppable,' said Binh Diep, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who led the study."

According to the study, at this point, homosexual men are 13 times more likely to contract the potentially deadly, drug-resistant strain of staph infection, but the fear is that, because the infection is spread via skin-to-skin contact, homosexual men may soon spread it to the general population.

Matt Barber, Policy Director for Cultural issues with Concerned Women for America (CWA), said, "The medical community has known for years that homosexual conduct, especially among males, creates a breeding ground for often deadly disease. In recent years we have seen a profound resurgence in cases of HIV/AIDS, syphilis, rectal gonorrhea and many other STDs among those who call themselves 'gay.'

"The human body is quite callous in how it handles mistreatment and the perversion of its natural functions. When two men mimic the act of heterosexual intercourse with one another, they create an environment, a biological counterfeit, wherein disease can thrive. Unnatural behaviors beget natural consequences.

"In recent years our culture has adopted a laissez faire attitude toward sexual deviancy. Television shows like Will and Grace glorify the homosexual lifestyle while our children are taught in schools that homosexuality is a perfectly healthy, alternative sexual 'orientation.' 'Stay out of our bedrooms!' we're often commanded by militant 'gay' activists.

"Well, now the dangerous and possibly deadly consequence of what occurs in those bedrooms is spilling over into the general population. It's not only frightening, it's infuriating.

"Citizens, especially parents, need to stand up and say, 'No More! We will no longer sit idly by while politically correct cultural elites endanger our children and larger communities through propagandist promotion of this demonstrably deadly lifestyle.'

"Why does it take a potentially deadly staph epidemic for people to acknowledge reality? Will that even do it? Enough is enough!" concluded Barber.

2,500-year-old 'First Sword under Heaven' discovered in China

A sword, said to be around 2,500 years old, has been discovered by Chinese archaeologists from an ancient tomb in the eastern province of Jiangxi.

The chief of the excavation team, Xu Changqing, has named the sword the "First Sword under Heaven."

"It is reckoned as the oldest ever excavated in the country," China Daily quoted Changqing, as saying.

The well-preserved 50 centimetre-long sword is black, gold and bright red.

"A dragon pattern was carved on both ends of the scabbard, and the middle part of the scabbard was decorated with two rows of a W-shaped design," Changqing said.

Two other heritage pieces dug out along with the sword from the same tomb have been named "First Mat under Heaven" and "First Fan under Heaven."

At least 1,000 relics have been found in the ancient tomb built in the late Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC) since the excavation work was launched in January last year.

Fossil of rodent that weighed as much as a one-tonne truck discovered

US researchers have discovered a fossil of a rodent in South America, which might be the largest rodent known to have existed.

In a boulder on the southern coast of Uruguay, the 53 centimetre-long skull of the new species, Josephoartigasia monesi, was discovered.

The researchers, based on the age of the rock, estimated that the skull is between two and four million years old.

"This is a remarkable finding because of the size of the animal and the fortunate completeness of the skull," Nature quoted evolutionary biologist Ines Horovitz of the University of California, Los Angeles, as saying. The scientists couldn't access other skeletal measures, such as the length of the limb bones that are traditionally used to estimate the size of an animal, because they found only the skull of the rodent.

However, the research team developed an equation relating skull length to body mass using information from 13 of J. monesi 's closest living relatives.

The calculation gave an estimate of 1,008 kilograms. Adding information from 6 other measures of skull size gave an estimate of 1,211 kilograms, with a likely range of 468 to 2,586 kilograms.

The relatively small grinding teeth in the skull suggested that J. monesi was a member of the Dinomyidae family, which contains just one living example, the pakarana. This rodent lives in South America and weighs roughly 15 kilograms.

The resemblance in molars and premolars suggest the bull-sized J. monesi had a relatively weak jaw and lived on roughly the same diet as its modern-day cousin: soft vegetation and fruit.

Man opened graves to steal human parts

A grave-digger allegedly involved in stealing human parts, including skull and bones, to sell them to a drug maker was arrested by police at Ponnani town in the district.

Kunjikilian (63) admitted of having opened up as many as five graves in the dead of the night to collect human parts, police said.

A skull, pieces of bone and other human parts were recovered by police in the search conducted at Kunjikkilian's house close to the graveyard.

When questioned, Kunjikkilian admitted that he used to sell the body parts to a drug making firm in Kochi which used to sell its products as 'wonder cure' for a host of ailments, they said.

Kunjikilian fell into the police net following investigations based on complaints from local people who saw the graves being dug up at Kotathara graveyard in Ponnani. People living in the area had earlier complained of 'mysterious movement' of strangers during the nights.

Dino sex: Mrs. T. rex you've got a lovely daughter

Teen sex, it turns out, is an issue at least as old as the dinosaurs.

Scientists have found inside the fossilized bones of three different types of dinosaurs the remains of a special type of calcium-rich bone tissue that forms just before egg-laying to enable pregnant female to produce eggshells.

All three pregnant dinosaurs -- the meat-eaters Tyrannosaurus rex and Allosaurus and the plant-eater Tenontosaurus -- were adolescents and had not yet achieved their maximum adult size, according to the scientists.

"It's nice to know when dinosaurs started having sex," University of California at Berkeley paleontologist Sarah Werning, one of the researchers, said in a phone interview.

"It's also nice to be able to compare them to living animals in terms of understanding the timing of major events in their life," Werning added.

Only dinosaurs and birds are known to have produced medullary bone, laid done in the marrow cavity shortly before egg laying. Paleontologists consider birds to be the living descendants of dinosaurs.

"It's actually really common to start reproducing before you're done growing. Most animals do that. Reptiles do that. Medium- and large-sized mammals do that. Whether our parents like it or not, humans do that," Werning said.

But birds do not reproduce before adulthood, Werning said.

"They finish growing completely. And they all do it within about a year. And then they wait months or years before starting to have sex," Werning added.

The scientists found the medullary bone while making thin slices inside the bones of various dinosaurs.

Allosaurus, a bipedal carnivore about 39 feet long, lived about 150 million years ago. Tenontosaurus, a common plant eater about 26 feet long, lived about 115 million years ago. T. rex, a ferocious bipedal predator about 43 feet long, lived at the end of the age of dinosaurs, about 65 million years ago.

The three dinosaurs were all denizens of North America.

Based on growth rings in their bones, the scientists judged that the Tenontosaurus was 8 years old and the Allosaurus was 10 -- both qualifying as early adolescents. The T. rex was 18, still not fully grown, they reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Werning said it is likely that starting reproduction in adolescence made a lot of sense. The life span of these types of dinosaurs was about 25 to 30 years, she said, but they did not achieve full adult stature until about age 20, and there was a lot of adult mortality in this dino-eat-dino world.

That would leave just a handful of years to reproduce and ensure species survival. "If you start reproducing earlier, you have more time and more chances to reproduce," Werning added.

Don't just stand there, think - study says we think with our bodies too

New research suggests that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies


WHEN YOU READ something confusing, or work a crossword puzzle, or try to remember where you put your keys, what do you do with your body? Do you sit? Do you stand? Do you pace? Do you do anything with your hands? Do you move your eyes in a particular pattern?

Discuss Do you use movement to think better?

How you answer questions like these, it turns out, may determine how long it will take for you to decipher what you're reading, solve your puzzle, or get your keys back.

The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer, and the body as its all-purpose tool. But a growing body of new research suggests that something more collaborative is going on - that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies. A series of studies, the latest published in November, has shown that children can solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking. Another recent study suggested that stage actors remember their lines better when they are moving. And in one study published last year, subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it.

The term most often used to describe this new model of mind is "embodied cognition," and its champions believe it will open up entire new avenues for understanding - and enhancing - the abilities of the human mind. Some educators see in it a new paradigm for teaching children, one that privileges movement and simulation over reading, writing, and reciting. Specialists in rehabilitative medicine could potentially use the emerging findings to help patients recover lost skills after a stroke or other brain injury. The greatest impact, however, has been in the field of neuroscience itself, where embodied cognition threatens age-old distinctions - not only between brain and body, but between perceiving and thinking, thinking and acting, even between reason and instinct - on which the traditional idea of the mind has been built.

"It's a revolutionary idea," says Shaun Gallagher, the director of the cognitive science program at the University of Central Florida. "In the embodied view, if you're going to explain cognition it's not enough just to look inside the brain. In any particular instance, what's going on inside the brain in large part may depend on what's going on in the body as a whole, and how that body is situated in its environment."

Or, as the motto of the University of Wisconsin's Laboratory of Embodied Cognition puts it, "Ago ergo cogito": "I act, therefore I think."

The emerging field builds on decades of research into human movement and gesture. Much of the earlier work looked at the role of gestures in communication, asking whether gesture grew out of speech or exploring why people gestured when they were talking on the telephone.

But today, neuroscientists, linguists, and philosophers are making much bolder claims. A few argue that human characteristics like empathy, or concepts like time and space, or even the deep structure of language and some of the most profound principles of mathematics, can ultimately be traced to the idiosyncrasies of the human body. If we didn't walk upright, for example, or weren't warm-blooded, they argue, we might understand these concepts totally differently. The experience of having a body, they argue, is intimately tied to our intelligence.
Discuss Do you use movement to think better?
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"If you want to teach a computer to play chess, or if you want to design a search engine, the old model is OK," says Rolf Pfeifer, director of the artificial intelligence lab at the University of Zurich, "but if you're interested in understanding real intelligence, you have to deal with the body."

. . .

Embodied cognition upends several centuries of thinking about thinking. Rene Descartes, living in an age when steam engines were novelty items, envisioned the brain as a pump that moved "animating fluid" through the body - head-shrinkers through the ages have tended to enlist the high-tech of their day to describe the human cognitive system - but the mind, Descartes argued, was something else entirely, an incorporeal entity that interacted with the body through the pineal gland.

While a few thinkers, most notably the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the 1940s, challenged Descartes' mind-body separation, it remained the dominant model up through the 20th century, though its form evolved with the times. After the development of the modern computer in the years after World War II, a new version of the same model was adopted, with the brain as a computer and the mind as the software that ran on it.

In the 1980s, however, a group of scholars began to contest this approach. Fueled in part by broad disappointment with artificial-intelligence research, they argued that human beings don't really process information the way computers do, by manipulating abstract symbols using formal rules. In 1995, a major biological discovery brought even more enthusiasm to the field. Scientists in Italy discovered "mirror neurons" that respond when we see someone else performing an action - or even when we hear an action described - as if we ourselves were performing the action. By simultaneously playing a role in both acting and thinking, mirror neurons suggested that the two might not be so separate after all.

"You were seeing the same system, namely the motor system, playing a role in communication and cognition," says Arthur Glenberg, a professor of psychology and head of the embodied cognition laboratory at Arizona State University.

This realization has driven much of the recent work looking at how moving and thinking inform and interfere with each other. For example, a pair of studies published in 2006 by Sian Beilock, now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, and Lauren Holt, one of her former students, examined how people who were good at certain physical activities thought about those activities.

In one study, Beilock and Holt had college hockey players, along with a non-hockey-player control group, read a sentence, sometimes hockey-related, sometimes not. Then the subjects would be shown a picture and asked if it corresponded with the sentence. Hockey players and non-hockey players alike almost invariably answered correctly, but on the hockey-related sentences the response times of the hockey players were significantly faster than the nonplayers. In a second study, the researchers found similar results with football players. According to Beilock, the difference in response time wasn't a matter of knowledge - after all, all of the subjects in the study got the vast majority of the questions right. What it suggested, Beilock argues, is that the athletes' greater store of appropriate physical experiences served as a sort of mental shortcut.
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"People with different types of motor experiences think in different ways," she argues.

These sorts of results aren't simply limited to thinking about sports, or other highly physical activities. A 2003 study by Michael Spivey, a psychology professor at Cornell, and his student Elizabeth Grant, found that people who were given a tricky spatial relations brainteaser exhibited a distinctive and unconscious pattern of eye movements just before they arrived at the answer. The subjects seemed to unconsciously work through the problem by enacting possible solutions with their gaze.

A study published in August by Alejandro Lleras and Laura Thomas, two psychologists at the University of Illinois, built on those results by inducing the eye movements Spivey had discovered. Lleras and Thomas found that doing so greatly improved the rate at which people solved the problem - even though most never figured out that the eye movements had anything to do with it.

"The subjects actually think that the eye-tracking task is very distracting," Lleras says. "They think we're doing this to keep them from solving the problem."

Other studies have looked at non-spatial problems and at memory. Work led by Susan Goldin-Meadow, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, has found that children given arithmetic problems that normally would be too difficult for them are more likely to get the right answer if they're told to gesture while thinking. And studies by Helga Noice, a psychologist at Elmhurst College, and her husband Tony Noice, an actor and director, found that actors have an easier time remembering lines their characters utter while gesturing, or simply moving.

The body, it appears, can subtly shape people's preferences. A study led by John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, found that subjects (all non-Chinese speakers) shown a series of Chinese ideographs while either pushing down or pulling up on a table in front of them will say they prefer the ideographs they saw when pulling upward over the ones they saw while pushing downward. Work by Beilock and Holt found that expert typists, when shown pairs of two-letter combinations and told to pick their favorite, tend to pick the pairs that are easier to type - without being able to explain why they did so.

What's particularly interesting to neuroscientists is the role that movement seems to play even in abstract thinking. Glenberg has done multiple studies looking at the effect of arm movements on language comprehension. In Glenberg's work, subjects were asked to determine whether a string of words on a computer screen made sense. To answer they had to reach toward themselves or away from themselves to press a button.
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What Glenberg has found is that subjects are quicker to answer correctly if the motion in the sentence matches the motion they must make to respond. If the sentence is, for example, "Andy delivered the pizza to you," the subject is quicker to discern the meaning of the sentence if he has to reach toward himself to respond than if he has to reach away. The results are the same if the sentence doesn't describe physical movement at all, but more metaphorical interactions, such as "Liz told you the story," or "Anne delegates the responsibilities to you."

The implication, Glenberg argues, is that "we are really understanding this language, even when it's more abstract, in terms of bodily action."

Some linguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers go further - arguing that the roots of even the most complex and esoteric aspects of human thought lie in the body. The linguist George Lakoff, of the University of California, Berkeley, along with Rafael Nunez, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, have for several years advanced the argument that much of mathematics, from set theory to trigonometry to the concept of infinity, derives not from immutable properties of the universe but from the evolutionary history of the human brain and body. Our number system, they argue, and our understanding of addition and subtraction emerge from the fact that we are bipedal animals that measure off distances in discrete steps.

"If we had wheels, or moved along the ground on our bellies like snakes," Lakoff argues, "math might be very different."

These ideas have met intense opposition among mathematicians, but also among some cognitive scientists, who believe they reflect an overreaching reading of a promising but still sketchy set of experimental results.

"I think these findings are really fantastic and it's clear that there's a lot of connection between mind and body," says Arthur Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. He remains skeptical, though, that the roots of higher cognition will be found in something as basic as the way we walk or move our eyes or arms.

"Any time there's a fad in science there's a tendency to say, 'It's all because of this,"' Markman says. "But the thing in psychology is that it's not all anything, otherwise we'd be done figuring it out already."

While embodied cognition remains a young field, some specialists believe that it suggests a rethinking of how we approach education. Angeline Lillard, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, says that one possibility is to take another look at the educational approach that Italian educator Maria Montessori laid out nearly 100 years ago, theories that for decades were ignored by mainstream educators. A key to the Montessori method is the idea that children learn best in a dynamic environment full of motion and the manipulation of physical objects. In Montessori schools, children learn the alphabet by tracing sandpaper letters, they learn math using blocks and cubes, they learn grammar by acting out sentences read to them.

To Lillard, the value of embodied cognition in education is self-evident.

"Our brains evolved to help us function in a dynamic environment, to move through it and find food and escape predators," she says. "It didn't evolve to help us sit in a chair in a classroom and listen to someone and regurgitate information."

24-foot snake staying at Columbus Zoo

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Fluffy, a 24-foot python billed as the largest snake in captivity, is staying put to lure visitors into the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium.

The zoo paid $35,000 to the snake's breeder in Oklahoma to keep the reticulated python on permanent display. While on loan last year, the python helped draw 1.53 million visitors, just under the zoo's attendance record of 1.56 million set in 2006, said Pete Fingerhut, the zoo's associate director.

Fluffy is about as long as a moving van and thick as a telephone pole.

Bob Clark, the breeder from Oklahoma City who raised the python from a hatchling, initially resisted the zoo's purchase offer but said he's happy with the outcome.

"I really love that snake; I think it's a special animal," he said. "It's so big and tame and wonderful. But I have to deal with the realities of life like everyone else. I like to have the money, and I know she's got a great place to live there."

The Columbus Zoo doesn't buy animals very often, said Executive Director Jerry Borin. Its animals generally come as exchanges from other zoos or through breeding loans or donations, he said.

Fluffy is on display in a 25-foot enclosure with a pool and a few plants, where he eats two 10-pound rabbits a week. In the wild, pythons native to Asia eat whatever they can catch, starting with mice and lizards when they're small and graduating to pigs and goats. There are a few reports of human victims.

The largest known reticulated python, named for the cross-hatching patterns on their skin, was 32 feet, 9 1/2 inches when killed in 1912 in Indonesia.

Dog digs up dead best friend

Oscar was so distraught after his best friend died that he dug him up and put him in his bed.

Oscar, an 18-month-old Lancashire heeler, missed Arthur, the family cat, so much after he died that the dog dug him up and brought him back into the house, according to the UK Web site TimesOnline.



When Oscar’s owner, Robert Bell of Great Manchester woke up the next morning, he discovered the dog curled up beside Arthur’s body in his basket.

The two pets had been constant companions, and Arthur watched over Oscar, Bell said. When Arthur died, Oscar was there as Bell buried his buddy in the garden.

During the middle of the night, Oscar had managed to get out of the cat door, dig up the cat and drag him inside. The dog then licked the cat clean before falling asleep next to his body.

“It must have taken him nearly all night,” Bell said about Oscar.

Arthur is now reburied in a secure grave, and the Bell’s have found Oscar a new friend … a kitten.

A good reason not to bury man's best friend (or its best friend) in your back yard!