Smokes Are for Bad Guys

The Hollywood hero races his convertible down the boulevard for a date he can’t miss. It might be with a lover or a terrorist or a CIA offi cer, but it probably won’t involve a cigarette. A new study fi nds that in studio fi lms, the most likely people to be lighting up are lower-class male villains.

Karan Omidvari, a pulmonary physician at St. Michael’s Medical Center in Newark, N.J., and his colleagues watched 447 movies released after 1990 to quantify exactly who smokes on screen—an intentional scripted act. Omidvari found that the seven big companies, such as Paramount and Universal, that make up the Hollywood studio system do have a plan: villains smoked nearly twice as often as heroes; men more than women; and poor characters more than rich ones.

Why this profi le exists is diffi cult to say, however. In movies from the 1950s and 1960s, many glamorous leading men and women smoked. Modern Hollywood fi lms may just be refl ecting U.S. population statistics, which show that lower-income people smoke more. Omidvari does not think Hollywood is shilling for tobacco

companies. He concedes that villainous characters are often popular with teenagers but maintains that it is hard to say if the propensity of such characters to smoke represents a deliberate effort to get teenagers to pick up the habit.

Interestingly, Omidvari found that independently produced R-rated fi lms are more likely to glorify smoking—51 percent of the characters smoked, compared with

31 percent in Hollywood’s R movies. If there is an attempt to infl uence smoking habits, “it is being orchestrated by independent movies,” Omidvari says. He speculates that independent fi lmmakers might have more trouble raising money, and so some may accept product-placement fi nancing. —Kaspar Mossman

www.sc iammind.com 9

Blinking Turns Off the Brain

We blink an average of 15 times a minute. So why don’t we notice our world repeated-ly going dark?

University College London scientists used fMRI brain imaging to fi nd out. They placed light-blocking goggles on volunteers and put a strong fi ber-optic light source against the roof of subjects’ mouths, which illuminated the eye through the skull. This combination created constant visual stimulation in the optic nerve and brain that

blinking did not interrupt. Yet the fMRI scans showed that each blink temporarily shut down certain parts of the visual cortex. Activity was also decreased in parts of the parietal and prefrontal regions involved in consciousness and awareness of change. The act of blinking, it seems, makes the brain blind to the interruption.

Lead scientist Davina Bristow notes that this “transient suppression” mechanism may be at work in other sensory situations. “Basically you can’t tickle yourself for the same reason,” she says. “When you touch yourself, as opposed to someone or something else touching you, the response [in brain activation] is lowered.” —Nicole Garbarini

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■ Properly sensing the pitch of sound helps ani-mals interpret behavior by predators. It also helps humans distin-guish a question from a statement. Recently neu-roscientists at Johns Hopkins University found that in monkeys, special neurons in the auditory cortex control pitch per-ception. If an equivalent region is found in hu-mans, altering it could provide therapy for indi-viduals who have certain hearing and speech problems. No promises for people who can’t carry a tune.

■ Gene therapy could one day help treat Alzheim-er’s disease. Research-ers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, San Diego, were able to reduce memory loss in mice by stopping the translation of genes into a protein involved in forming plaques in the brain. It is not yet clear if the same mechanism could coun-ter the human disease.

■ In Britain it is a common perception that eating cheese before bedtime gives you bad dreams. To counter this notion, the British Cheese Board asked volunteers to eat domestic cheese a half an hour before sleep each night, for a week. The next morning they recorded dreams they had. Few recalled scary encounters. Further-more, the board reported that Lancashire cheese seemed to prompt appa-ritions about work, Red Leicester cheese led to nostalgic visions of childhood, and cheddar caused dreams about celebrities.

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Actor John Travolta lights up in Pulp Fiction.