Many calendrical calculators are autistic—individuals who score low in
IQ tests and have trouble relating to other people and communicating with them.
But Neil O’Connor, Richard Cowan and Katerina Samella of the Institute of
Education in London have recruited enough non-autistic calendrical calculators
to investigate the skill’s link with intelligence.

The researchers linked the accuracy, speed and range of date calculation to
the volunteers’ performance on standard IQ tests. Some of the calculators were
97 per cent accurate on dates tens of thousands of years into the future, giving
correct answers in less than two seconds. But there was a definite link between
this ability and IQ. “Any relationship between general intelligence and degree
of savant skill is a challenge to the proposal that general intelligence is
irrelevant to savant talent,” says Cowan.

The researchers also found that IQ scores were related to the volunteer’s
knowledge of patterns and regularities in the calendar. “For example, 1 April is
on the same day as 1 July,” says Cowan. “There is also the 28-year rule, which
holds across century years which are leap—so 1999 is the same as 2027,
2055 and 2083.”

The results, which will be published in a future issue of the journal
Intelligence, suggest that anybody could teach themselves the skill. They
add to a growing body of evidence indicating that savant skills aren’t the
preserve of autistic patients
(żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 9 October, p 30).

“Autistic individuals only exhibit skills that are exhibited by some
proportion of the general population,” says Howard Gardner, an expert on
cognitive abilities at Harvard University.

*Sunday and Saturday

While it is now accepted that the repeated blows to the head that boxers
suffer can cause poor memory, loss of coordination and slurred speech
(żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 17 May 1997, p 4),
the idea that footballers can suffer similar
damage from heading the ball is more controversial.

To investigate, Danielle Symons and David Abwender of the University of
Florida in Gainesville recruited 32 footballers and compared them to a group of
swimmers. The footballers performed significantly worse on tasks assessing
reaction times and quick or flexible thinking.

This might just have been because the soccer players had a lower cognitive
ability to start with. So the researchers related players’ performance to a
“heading exposure index” based on the length and competitive level of their
careers. They found that players who scored highest on this index tended to
score worst in the cognitive tests. “The dose-response relationship is a lot
more convincing than a lot of the existing research,” says James Nicoll, a
neuropathologist at the University of Glasgow.

Tom Murray, a solicitor in Glasgow, believes this finding could have
important legal implications. Murray represented Billy McPhail, a player with
Glasgow Celtic in the 1950s who earlier this year claimed unsuccessfully at a
benefits tribunal that he had suffered brain damage from repeatedly heading the
ball. “If research like this had been in the public domain at the time of the
case, the decision might not have gone against us,” says Murray.

Providing a conclusive assessment on the dangers posed by heading will
require a long-term study, using footballers and other groups carefully matched
on IQ and educational level, says Symons. However, she warns that over the
course of a career, most footballers will head a ball weighing more than 400
grams and travelling at up to 120 kilometres an hour thousands of times.
“Coaches should be encouraging better techniques,” she says. “Some researchers
believe that children shouldn’t be heading the ball at all.”

Farmers use selective breeding to produce animals that are muscular and lean.
John Owen of the University of Wales in Bangor says these programmes can produce
pigs prone to symptoms that resemble anorexia nervosa in people. The pigs
affected are usually young females. They don’t eat enough to maintain their body
weight, are hyperactive and may not go on heat. The syndrome hasn’t been widely
studied, but Owen reviews research into the condition in the latest
Nutrition (vol 15, p 609).

“This selective breeding has led to the uncovering of recessive genetic
traits which produce extremes,” says Owen. It seems that the pigs have mutations
in a gene for the ryanodine receptor, which regulates the flow of calcium ions
across cell membranes. These mutations are linked to leanness and susceptibility
to stress.

So far, only a small percentage of pigs seem to be affected. But some
researchers suspect the condition is becoming more common. “It may well be that
Owen has picked up on something that is going to be an increasing problem,” says
Donald Broom of the University of Cambridge, a member of the Farm Animal Welfare
Council that advises Britain’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

Experts in human eating disorders are intrigued. Because pigs have similar
body weights and digestive systems to people, they may provide valuable insights
into these diseases. Nicky Bryant of the Eating Disorders Association in Norwich
says that human eating disorders also have a genetic component: epidemiological
studies suggest that some people are predisposed to suffer from them. “However,
there are also other environmental triggers such as low self-esteem and bullying
that might not have an equivalent in the animals,” she says.

Some scientists think the parallels are even closer. Jane Guise, director of
Cambac JMA Research, an independent veterinary science institute based in
Chippenham, Wiltshire, notes that changes in pig housing on British farms,
introduced to improve animal welfare, may have provided an environmental trigger
that has made the problem worse. Since January, farmers have been banned from
tethering pigs in individual stalls. But in group housing, where animals compete
for access to the trough, thin sows are even less likely to get enough to eat.
“It’s time for human and veterinary scientists to start working a lot more
closely,” says Guise.

Researchers could use the skinny pigs as a way of testing new drugs to treat
anorexia. Anorexic pigs have already been treated experimentally by giving a
drug that raises levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. Similar
drugs also seem to help some people with anorexia. “There is no doubt at all
that animal models will prove to be very useful,” says Janet Treasure of the
Institute of Psychiatry in London, who is coordinating a European Union-funded
study of the genes and brain systems involved in anorexia.

Dyslexia, a learning disability characterised by problems reading and
writing, is thought to afflict around 5 per cent of the world’s population.
Children are often diagnosed with the condition only after they have experienced
serious difficulties in school. “By this time, children’s minds are not so
flexible and they find it harder to master new skills,” says Dennis Molfese, a
psychologist at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

Molfese and his colleagues attached electrodes to the scalps of 186 babies
around 36 hours old. While playing recorded speech and non-speech sounds, they
monitored the size and speed of the newborns’ brainwave responses. Then they
gave the children IQ and comprehension tests every two years until the age of 8,
when normal, poor and dyslexic readers were identified.

Comparing the newborn brain wave patterns of the three groups, the
researchers spotted several telltale differences between the dyslexics and the
better readers. Such differences may arise from selective damage to nerves in
the fetal brain, which is thought to cause dyslexia (żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 24
April 1999, p 26). As Molfese will tell a symposium on dyslexia in October at
the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 22 out of the 24
dyslexics could have been identified at birth on the basis of these differences,
and could have received early educational intervention.

However, several babies who grew up to be normal readers would also have been
targeted for intervention. For comparison, Molfese chose 24 children from the
normal reading group who matched the dyslexics in IQ and other skills. At birth,
five of these had brain wave patterns similar to those of the dyslexic
children.

Rod Nicolson, an expert on dyslexic children at the University of Sheffield,
is concerned that such mistakes would cause unnecessary worry for children and
parents. Nevertheless, he believes Molfese is on the right track. He says a
study in which the children are grouped at birth on the basis of their brain
waves, rather than later after reading problems develop, would be a better
measure of the technique’s usefulness. “What is needed now is a prospective
study of the same brain patterns in other samples, to see if they are reliable,”
he says. Such a study is already under way, says Molfese.

Even if the brain wave technique proves reliable, the question of how
potential dyslexics should be treated remains controversial. Molfese says
infants who test positive could wear a special hearing aid that accentuates the
differences between speech sounds. Some research has suggested that dyslexia
arises in part from hearing problems early on.

But Nicolson disagrees. He says interfering with normal hearing could slow
down the rate at which children acquire language. In his view, a less risky
solution would be to check for hearing difficulties and to increase infants’
exposure to speech.

People are more likely to criticise another person to a third party than
directly, so Clifford Nass and his colleagues at Stanford University in Palo
Alto wondered if people would afford computers the same consideration.

They asked volunteers to take a computer-based tutorial followed by a brief
multiple-choice test on the same machine. Afterwards, the participants were
questioned about the performance of their computer, either by the same machine,
an identical one or on paper.

As the researchers report in the current issue of the Journal Of Applied
Social Psychology (vol 29, p 1093), evaluations made on the same computer
were by far the most positive. “Our participants automatically and unconsciously
made an attempt to ingratiate themselves to a computer,” Nass says.

He concludes that computers have a “social presence” that can influence
users. That fact, he says, is often ignored by research psychologists, who
increasingly use computers to ask subjects about sensitive areas such as sexual
behaviour (żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 16 May 1998, p 18).

Bengt Arnetz, an expert on technological stress at Uppsala University in
Sweden, believes that people get angry at their computers because most programs
are not designed to return politeness. “It’s a social interaction,” Arnetz says,
and lessons from psychology could make the interaction less stressful.