Chimps snack smarter than us

Apparently chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, are much smarter eaters than we are. That doesn’t come as a surprise, seeing as I have yet to hear reports of chimps crying in the corner with an entire bunch of bananas because the alpha male called him fat, or of teenage chimps running off with an entire horde of grapes to be consumed while mindlessly watching the people go by all day and night.

Modern economics, farming practices, and distribution networks have completely changed the way we eat. No longer are we forced to scavenger for food or run our prey down to exhaustion. No longer do we have to worry about certain plants spoiling or the seasons drying up a food source. Today we simply get fruits and vegetables from hydroponics bays or from tropical nations.

But these are still issues to chimps, and whether it’s engrained in their genetics or they’re making conscious decisions, they know what to eat and when to eat it.

Chimps in the African wild constrain their diets to fruit, leaves, plant stalks, roots, insects, and other vertebrate animals. The only difference between us and them in that last category is that they have absolutely no problem pounding prey to a pulp themselves before enjoying their tartare. You might even say that they follow the recently trendy Paleolithic diet – which I’m afraid to tell you makes absolutely zero sense evolutionarily speaking.

Chimps will kill for food, but they haven’t evolved to our levels yet.

But I digress.

Humans aren’t the only animals that have Circadian cycles tuned into the sun and moon. If you look around a forest, you’ll quickly realize that breathing animals aren’t the only group of living organisms, either. Plans blooms with the changing of the day, take up nutrients depending on the sunlight, and even look more appetizing at certain times of the day.

And apparently chimps take notice, which is a good thing seeing as how when a plant looks it’s most delicious, it’s also at its nutritional height.

Researchers from Purdue University recently took careful observations of chimpanzees from Ngogo in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. They were specifically watching for when the inhabitants ate two species of saplings. After watching 41 adult males for nearly a decade and taking leaf samples during feeding periods, the scientists showed that the chimps ate their foliage at just the right times to get the most nutritional benefit from the leaves.

Chimp refuge where the study took place

Pterygota mildbraedii is a very large tree, common throughout the Ngogo chimpanzee habitat. The chimpanzees, however, eat young leaves of the saplings found near the forest floor. This study found that the leaves’ hemicellulose – a more digestible fiber – and nonstructural carbohydrates – simple sugars and starch – increased 15 percent to 100 percent, respectively, from morning to evening. Cellulose and lignin, which make the leaves more difficult to digest, also decreased by day’s end. Celtis africana is a smaller tree than Pterygota, the saplings of which contain many thin branches and small leaves. The sugars in this plant’s leaves were found to double from morning to late afternoon.

As you might assume, the chimps chose to eat these two plants in the evenings rather than in the mornings.

“If these sugars or total non-structural carbohydrates are increasing, then the leaves are returning more calories late in the day,” said Bryce Carlson, an assistant professor of anthropology who studies primate ecology and nutrition in human evolution. “At this time, they may taste sweeter, and the chimpanzees may then learn and adjust their feeding behavior accordingly. We know they use vision, texture, taste and smell to gauge when to eat fruit, so it’s understandable to think they may do the same with leaves.”

Also no word on when Mountain Dew and Doritos reach their full nutritional potential, but I suspect it’s right around 3:00 am between levels 10 and 12.

No word yet on how the chimpanzee’s diet changes when Doritos are introduced in copious, continuous amounts.

The study, “Diurnal Variation in Nutrients and Chimpanzee Foraging Behavior,” was published in the American Journal of Primatology by Carlson, along with Jessica Rothman of Hunter College and John Mitani of the University of Michigan.

Psychiatric Disorders Linked to a Bad Rap1

Here’s another look into my professional life – a story on an interesting discovery relating to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

VTCRI in Roanoke, Virginia

Researchers have discovered the mechanism by which the brain controls a neural pathway critical to forming long-term memories and connected with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The discovery was made by a team of scientists led by Alexei Morozov, an assistant professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.

The mechanism – a protein called Rap1 – controls L-type calcium channels, which participate in the formation of long-term memories. Previous studies have also linked alterations in these ion channels to certain psychiatric disorders. The discovery of the channels’ regulation by Rap1 could help scientists understand the physiological genesis of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

“People with genetic mutations affecting L-type calcium channels have higher rates of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia,” said Morozov. “This suggests that there might be a relationship between the activation of L-type calcium channels and these psychiatric disorders. Understanding how these ion channels are controlled is the first step to determining how their functioning or malfunctioning affects mental health.”

A neuron with tons of synapses.

A single neuron in the brain can have thousands of synapses, each of which can grow, strengthen, weaken, and change structurally in response to learning new information. Electric signals traveling from neuron to neuron jump across these synapses through chemical neurotransmitters. The release of these chemicals is caused by the flow of electrically charged atoms through ion channels in the neurons’ membranes caused by electrochemical gradients. This process, in turn, is controlled by the activation of a particular subset of ion channels known as voltage-gated calcium channels.

Previous studies have shown that blocking these ion channels inhibits the formation of long-term memories. Although it was known that L-type calcium channels are activated in response to learning, how they are controlled was a mystery.

Sort of what we’re talking about here.

In the experiment, Morozov and colleagues knocked out the gene responsible for coding the enzyme Rap1, which he suspected played a role in activating L-type calcium channels. The researchers then used live imaging techniques to monitor the release of neurotransmitters and electron microscopy to visualize L-type channels at synapses. They discovered that, without Rap1, the L-type calcium channels were more active and more abundant at synapses all the time, increasing the release of neurotransmitters. The results showed that Rap1 is responsible for suppressing L-type calcium channels, allowing them to activate only at the proper moments, possibly during long-term memory formation.

“Our next step is to determine whether this new signaling pathway is altered in cases of mental disease,” said Morozov. “If so, it could help us gain a better understanding of the molecular underpinnings of channel-related psychiatric disorders, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Such knowledge would go a long way toward developing new therapeutic methods.”

The study appeared in The Journal of Neuroscience in the article “Rap1 Signaling Prevents L-Type Calcium Channel-Dependent Neurotransmitter Release,” by Jaichandar Subramanian, now a research fellow at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Louis Dye, a staff scientist at the Microscopy and Imaging Core of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; and Morozov, who is also an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences.

Framing Science

How much difference does a choice in framing make? This might not seem like that important of a question, but when you pose it to journalists, politicians, or even scientists, the answer becomes quite valuable.

For example, there’s often a major difference between how Fox News covers a story and how the rest of the world chooses to portray events. Or when Barak Obama talks about the next round of debt ceiling wars, does he choose to talk about how Republicans refuse to cooperate on the most mundane things like paying the nation’s bills or does he instead focus on how irresponsible it is to play chicken with the nation’s credit rating?

Okay, so those two framing tactics are pretty much the same. But you get my drift, right?

The same issue easily finds a home in scientific literature. New discoveries are presented to the public on a daily basis, and it’s to a scientist’s advantage to get the public interested in their work. Popular support can often lead to more grants for the field. Getting the information out there can also lead to collaborations or partnerships with industry.

Of course, there’s the other side of the coin too. If researchers today just found out about nuclear fission for the first time, how would they talk about? Would they focus on the potential for limitless clean energy, or the dangers of producing nuclear fuel and the potential to weaponize the byproducts?

Nothing to see here

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin recently took a look at this question in more depth. The burgeoning field of research they chose to focus on was nanoparticles. Sure, a lot of folks might have heard the word from time to time, but for most people it means just about as much as metallofullerenes.

Yes, that’s a thing.

The scientists brought in volunteers and gave each of them one of three definitions. One highlighted the promise for real-world applications of nanoparticles, the second talked about the risks and benefits of the technology, and the third was composed of a mix of the first two. The newly informed folks were then asked to rate their support of nanoparticles and how likely they would be to seek out more information about them.

Yup. There’s nanoparticles in sunscreen. Run for your lives!

The results showed that the difference in framing tactics made a difference in how people reacted to the technology. If they learned about all the great things that nanoparticles might bring us – destroying cancer, reprogramming DNA, cleaning up the environment, sunscreen, etc. – they were very much in support of furthering research. However, they weren’t so interested in learning more about it.

On the other hand, if they were told about the potential benefits and risks – especially the risks – people had less support for the technology but yet wanted to learn more about it.

People could jump to some conclusions at this point. One is that getting the public both interested in a technology and in support of it is a careful seesaw battle. Telling them too much about the underlying potential pitfalls might lose their support, but telling them too little about it might make them not care.

After all, why should they care about anything that can’t hurt them?

That brings up an interesting point. These results did not hold true for anyone with a college degree in the sciences. Why might that be? Perhaps it’s because those folks were already interested in science and how the world works, and they want to know more about everything in the first place.

So maybe the point here isn’t weighing how you tell the public about your science, it’s about getting them interested in science in general. Perhaps we should be getting people to look around them in awe and wonder and start questioning how the world works. No, forget it, they’re too busy wondering why Sean Lowe chose Catherine Giudici instead of Lindsay Yenter in the 17th season of The Bachelor.

That’s right. There’s been 17 goddamn seasons of The Bachelor.

We’re hopeless.

The study, “What’s in a name? How we define nanotech shapes public reactions,” was published in the Journal of Nanoparticle Research by Ashley Anderson, Jiyoun Kim, Dietram Scheufele, Dominique Brossard, and Michael Xenos.

New Next-Door Extraterrestrial Neighbors

We’re the smartest people alive!

There aren’t many better ways to spend a weeknight than at a bar knocking back a few beers and answering obscure questions. Who doesn’t like to exercise their imagined mental superiority over the masses?

One night a little more than a year ago, a question came up that I absolutely knew the answer to (as did everyone else in the bar). What is the closest star to the planet Earth other than our own sun? Being the space geek and Star Trek nerd that I am, I immediately threw down the answer of Alpha Centauri, put the maximum number of points down that I could, and confidently turned in my answer.

Naturally, I was wrong.

The closest star to our solar system is actually a red dwarf by the name of Proxima Centauri. Oh sure, it’s gravitationally associated with the Alpha Centauri system, which by the way, is actually a binary star system with two separate giant flaming  gas balls circling each other. But you’d never be able to tell them apart – or see Proxima, for that matter – without a pretty decent telescope.

Diagram of the Centauri system

Perhaps that is why Alpha Centauri was discovered in 1839 and Proxima Centauri wasn’t seen until 1915. While Alpha Centauri is the third brightest star seen from our planet (which makes me wonder how it could have been discovered in 1839 when even the Neanderthals could look up and see it), Proxima has a mass about 1/8 the sun and has a very low energy output, making it fairly dim as far as stars are concerned. And seeing as how it’s only about the same distance from Alpha Centauri as Neptune is from our own star, I still feel I got a little bit hosed on that answer. In 50 years, when I’m presented with the same question at a bar trivia night, I’ll be sure to know the correct star.

Or will I?

Technology is advancing all the time, and that includes our ability to survey the night sky. We might think we have a good handle on where all of the objects are that are relatively close to our solar system, but then we have discoveries such as this one that puts all of those assumptions in question.

No, not that brown dwarf

Researchers at Penn State University recently discovered a brand new star that is the third closest known to our solar system. How has it escaped detection this long? Because it’s a brown dwarf. These underachievers are anywhere between 13 and 80 times the size of Jupiter, which is large enough to not be considered a planet but too small to achieve nuclear ignition. That’s right – they’re just giant balls of gas hanging around in space, wishing they could ignite. I’ll let you make up your own joke here.

The discovery was made using the wide-field infrared survey explorer, or WISE for short. The project launched in December of 2009 with the mission of taking images of the entire sky from space. It takes snapshots every 11 seconds and eventually will image every square inch of space at least eight times. And actually, some regions near the poles will be imaged more than 1,000 times.

WISE before it got launched into orbit

The goal of the mission is to cast a wide net to catch all sorts of cosmic treasures that are too dim to notice by other means. This includes cool stars, distant galaxies, asteroids, comets, and a whole lot more. Speaking of asteroids, one of its primary objectives is to figure out just how many asteroids are floating around so that we can calculate the odds of being struck by a meteor.

It’s surprisingly not that low.

As Neil deGrasse Tyson famously said, “If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, we would be the laughing stock of aliens in the galaxy, for having a large brain and a space program, yet we met the same fate as the pea-brained, space program-less dinosaurs that came before us.”

But I digress.

With millions of images, WISE will give us the opportunity to spot hundreds of millions of objects. And it seems to be doing its job just fine at the moment.

Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, was looking through some of the images taken by WISE  when he noticed an object rapidly moving across the sky in images snapped during a 13-month period. The speed at which it was moving indicated that it had to be fairly close to our solar system. He used the images to calculate its trajectory and figure out where the same object should have been during previous sky imaging programs.

Sure enough, when he checked the spots from programs like the Digitized Sky Survey and the Two Micron All-Sky Survey, the object was right where he thought it should be in a whole bunch of pictures taken between 1978 and 1999. Next, he calculated its redshift to determine how far away from Earth it is.

Redshift is created by the Doppler Effect. You hear it all the time when you’re standing by a road. As a car comes towards you, its speed causes the sound waves it produces to be closer and closer together, making the noise sound higher in frequency. Then as it moves away from you, the opposite effect happens, causing the sound waves to become further apart and the noise to sound lower in pitch.

The same thing happens in light emitted from moving objects. If it’s moving towards us, the light appears slightly bluer. If moving away, it becomes slightly redder. By looking at these subtle shifts in color created during different points in Earth’s orbit, researchers can determine how far away an object is.

And this one turned out to be close. Just 6.5 light years away, to be exact.

Intrigued by how near it was, Luhman then turned to the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachon in Chile to obtain its spectrum. This revealed its temperature and the fact that it was a brown dwarf. But it also held another surprise. The star was not one, but two objects, orbiting each other in a binary system.

“It was a lot of detective work,” Luhman said. “There are billions of infrared points of light across the sky, and the mystery is which one — if any of them — could be a star that is very close to our solar system.”

The discovery comes just a few months prior to the recent announcement that NASA’s Kepler space telescope – charged with discovering planets orbiting other stars – has malfunctioned. One of the gyroscopes that keeps the camera pointed in the desired direction has quit doing its job. There is still hope that some work-around can be achieved and that the project can continue, but it doesn’t look all that good.

Let’s hope for the sake of finding cool shit in space that the geniuses in NASA can figure out a way to keep the project trucking along.

Scientists discover how Alzheimer’s drugs sharpen the brain’s performance

Here’s another story for you fresh off the presses from Virginia Tech. More Big Ten news to follow this week, but hey it’s my blog, so I’m featuring all the writing I do. Enjoy!

ROANOKE, Va., May 13, 2013 –One factor even more important than the size of a television screen is the quality of the signal it displays. Having a life-sized projection of Harry Potter dodging a Bludger in a Quidditch match is of little use if the details are lost to pixelation.

The importance of transmitting clear signals, however, is not relegated to the airwaves. The same creed applies to the electrical impulses navigating a human brain. Now, new research has shown that one of the few drugs approved for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease helps patients by clearing up the signals coming in from the outside world.

The discovery published this week in The Journal of Neuroscience was made by a team of researchers led by Rosalyn Moran, an assistant professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. Her study indicates that cholinesterase inhibitors — a class of drugs that stop the breakdown of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine — allow signals to enter the brain with more precision and less background noise.

“Increasing the levels of acetylcholine appears to turn your fuzzy old analog TV signal into a shiny new high-definition one,” said Moran, who also holds an appointment as an assistant professor in the Virginia Tech College of Engineering. “And the drug does this in the sensory cortices. These are the workhorses of the brain, the gatekeepers, not the more sophisticated processing regions – such as the prefrontal cortex – where one may have expected the drugs to have their most prominent effect.”

Alzheimer’s disease affects more than 35 million people worldwide — a number expected to double every 20 years, leading to more than 115 million cases by 2050. Of the five pharmaceuticals approved to treat the disease by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, four are cholinesterase inhibitors. Although it is clear that the drugs increase the amount of acetylcholine in the brain, why this improves Alzheimer’s symptoms has been unknown. If scientists understood the mechanisms and pathways responsible for improvement, they might be able to tailor better drugs to combat the disease, which costs more than $200 billion annually in the United States alone.

In the new study, Moran recruited 13 healthy young adults and gave them doses of galantamine, one of the cholinesterase inhibitors commonly prescribed to Alzheimer’s patients. Two electroencephalographs were taken — one with the drugs and one without — as the participants listened to a series of modulating tones while focusing on a simple concentration task.

The researchers were looking for differences in neural activity between the two drug states in response to surprising changes in the sound patterns that the participants were hearing. The scientists compared the results to computer models built on a Bayesian brain theory, known as the Free Energy Principle, which is a leading theory that describes the basic rules of neuronal communication and explains the creation of complex networks. The theory hypothesizes that neurons seek to reduce uncertainty, which can be modeled and calculated using free energy molecular dynamics. Connecting tens of thousands of neurons behaving in this manner produces the probability machine that we call a brain.

Moran and her colleagues compiled 10 computer simulations based on the different effects that the drugs could have on the brain. The model that best fit the results revealed that the low-level wheels of the brain early on in the neural networking process were the ones benefitting from the drugs and creating clearer, more precise signals.

“When people take these drugs you can imagine the brain bathed in them,” said Moran. “But what we found is that the drugs don’t have broad-stroke impacts on brain activity. Instead, they are working very specifically at the cortex’s entry points, gating the signals coming into the network in the first place.”

The study appeared in the May 8 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience in the article, “Free Energy, Precision and Learning: The Role of Cholinergic Neuromodulation.”

Just a Spoonful of Beer Helps the Pleasure Chemicals Spike

Just a quick follow-up post today to yesterday’s article on how beer makes us creative problem solving geniuses. Another study recently popped up on my radar talking about how just the mere taste of alcohol – and beer in particular – can stimulate the reward zones of our brains in an intriguing way.

By now you’ve probably heard of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which has been oversimplified to the point of being called the “pleasure” drug. In short, when something happens to us that we like, dopamine is released in the brain and causes us to get all warm and fuzzy. Of course this is a grossly inadequate description of a very complicated biochemical interaction, but I’ll let it slide for the moment.

PET scan example

A recent study from Indiana University has discovered that the mere taste of libations is enough to stimulate our reward-pleasure zones of neural activity. The experiment brought in 49 men and stuck them in a PET scanner twice. The first time, a miniscule amount of their beer of choice was sprayed into their mouth; it wasn’t enough to have any alcoholic effects, but was enough to get their taste buds dancing. In the second trial, the same procedure was followed, except that the beer was replaced by Gatorade.

The researchers watched the patients’ brains light up like Christmas trees. Except there was a difference – Gatorade’s effect was like your grandmother’s fake spruce while beer’s was like Clark Griswold’s fire hazard. The implication is that the mere taste of beer is enough to get our neurotransmitters rolling in the reward zone in a way that mere sugar water never can. And it doesn’t even require the pleasant buzz accompanying the great taste.

While it’s an intriguing study, I have to ask, is Gatorade really all that equivalent to your favorite beer? I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly like Gatorade that much, so I wouldn’t expect it to have all that large of an affect on my dopamine release. Meanwhile it’s being compared to one of your favorite beverages of all-time.

Seem a little flawed to you?

As a control, I’d really like to see the experiment repeated with other consumables that people get cravings for. How about a milkshake or a nice piece of cheesecake? Might those sugar and carb bombs have a similar affect to your pleasure neurons as a great tasting beer?

Now this could compete with beer in my dopamine-laden brain.

While I offer criticism, there is one other piece of the puzzle that does speak to actual intriguing results. According to the experiments, those individuals with alcoholism in their families had their dopamine release levels climb higher than those who don’t. That could be an indicator of one mechanism that leads to alcoholism – just a mere sip of the stuff sends some people’s brains to Risa before the good feelings even start flowing.

Still, there obviously needs to be some more work done here.

The study, “Beer flavor provokes striatal dopamine release in male drinkers: Mediation by family history of alcoholism,” was published in Neuropsychopharmacology by Indiana University’s Brandon Oberlin, Mario Dzemidzic, Stella Tran, Christina Soeurt, Daniel Albrecht, Karmen Yoder, and David Kareken.

Alcohol makes you a creative genius

If you’re anything like me, and I think most of the people out there reading this blog probably are, you can’t help but throw out a silent fist pump every time you hear something about how drinking alcohol is good for you. There’s plenty of scientific evidence to back up these common claims.

Via Bluegrass Brewing Company, in case you’re interested.

As one of my favorite t-shirts informs the world, beer is food. There are small percentages of vitamins in beer and significant proportions of trace metals and minerals. And while wine lacks both of these characteristics, the juice of the Gods provides a lot more antioxidants than its mere mortal cousin.

What’s more, studies have shown that alcohol has a negative correlation with rates of coronary heart disease and hypertension. It could be affecting these conditions directly by increasing levels of HDL, the good cholesterol that removes the shitty kind of cholesterol from our tissues, or it could be due to decreased platelet aggregation and coagulation. Or it could have indirect effects by modifying the way we approach the rest of our diet.

Whatever the cause, the connection is a well-studied fact.

No better way to fuel a run.

And whether wine, beer, or distilled spirits, all alcohol provides energy for our body to function on. When consumed as a small percentage of total calories, the energy stored in booze contributes to our energy levels in roughly the same way as fat or carbohydrates, with about 75 percent of its calories available to fuel our daily lives.

In case you’re wondering, three ounces of alcohol equates to 12 pats of butter or one-half cup of sugar. If my math is right, that’s about a sixer of light beer per everything else I just mentioned.

There is, however, a key word in all of these alcohol health benefits – moderate consumption. There’s plenty of research out there too about the perils of alcohol. Drinking in excess is causally related to more than 60 different medical conditions, responsible for 4 percent of global burden of disease, and results in as many deaths and disabilities as tobacco and hypertension.

But health affects aren’t the only reason you should consider drinking in moderation on a regular basis.

Tastes like shit.

Everybody knows that you’re the smartest person in the world while intoxicated by alcohol. Putting together a fast plate of nachos with everything left in your refrigerator? Brilliant! Getting that one person who doesn’t drink on religious or sobriety grounds to make a run to Taco Bell? The best idea of the century! Using beer instead of milk on your Cheerios for a late night snack?

Okay, so there is obviously a limit to how much alcohol one can imbibe while retaining the genius level IQ. Luckily, we now know where that threshold lives.

According to recent research out of the University of Illinois at Chicago, having a blood alcohol content (BAC) of about .075 makes people better at creative problem solving. That’s why Beethoven, Poe, Hemmingway, and advertising agencies everywhere have and continue to keep their buzzes on while doing their creative work.

There’s a few theories as to why this is. Getting drunk makes people worse at memorizing a single sequential list of things, but it doesn’t seem to do anything to their ability to memorize simultaneous lists. It affects the region of our brains responsible for executive function – the ability to pay attention. But of course, this only hinders our analytical processes of problem solving. If you want that “Aha!” moment, you’re better off letting your mind wander.

And what’s better than letting your mind wander than a good buzz?

Proof that drinking helps creative problem solving.

In the recent study, researchers brought in 40 male social drinkers between the ages of 21 and 30 via an ad on Craigslist. (Yet another reason to check the random ads on a regular basis.) They ran all of them through a series of tests designed to measure their capacity of working memory while sober. They split them into equal groups making sure that people on either side scored roughly the same as each other. Next, they made one of the intellectually equivalent groups drink vodka cranberries until their BACs got in the neighborhood of .075. Note that the choice of drink probably would have excluded yours truly from signing up.

They then gave them a common creative problem-solving task to complete called a Remote Association Test, or RAT test for short. The gist is that each trial consists of three separate words, and the participant has to come up with a single fourth word that can be combined with each of the original three to form a phrase. For example, if I were to give you shopping, punching, and douche, one correct answer would be bag (punching bag, shopping bag, douchebag). The ability to form remote associations is important in these games, as is the ability to overcome fixations on early incorrect guesses.

As you might have guessed by now, the guys who had downed some girly drinks performed better on the tests. Not only did they get more of them correct – 58 percent versus 42 percent success rates – they figured them out an average of four seconds faster.

What’s more, the drunks were more likely to attribute their success to a sudden insight instead of a linear process of cognitive reasoning. This lends credit to the theory of alcohol allowing the brain to wander and create unlikely associations between thoughts and ideas.

See you there.

So what are you waiting for? How about a nice imperial stout for lunch?

The paper, “Uncorking the muse: Alcohol intoxication facilitates creative problem solving,” was published in Consciousness and Cognition by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Andrew Jarosz, Gregory Colflesh, and Jennifer Wiley, all of the Department of Psychology.