Material Submitted August 1

The experience of falling in love has definite biochemical effects in the brain that account for the various symptoms of this emotional crisis. According to an article published in the Journal of Neurophysiology , Dr. Fisher, Dr. Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, studied brain scans of college students who were in the first weeks of falling in love. The students submitted to brain scans while admiring photos of their beloved. The results suggested that the feeling of being in love is more like hunger or thirst than it is like sexual arousal, in terms of brain activity.

New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia and obsession that cuts people off from friends and family and prompts out-of-character behavior - compulsive phone calling, serenades, yelling from rooftops - that could almost be mistaken for psychosis.

Now for the first time, neuroscientists have produced brain scan images of this fevered activity, before it settles into the wine and roses phase of romance or the joint holiday card routines of long-term commitment.

In an analysis of the images appearing today in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

The research helps explain why love produces such disparate emotions, from euphoria to anger to anxiety, and why it seems to become even more intense when it is withdrawn. In a separate, continuing experiment, the researchers are analyzing brain images from people who have been rejected by their lovers.

"When you're in the throes of this romantic love it's overwhelming, you're out of control, you're irrational, you're going to the gym at 6 a.m. every day - why? Because she's there," said Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and the co-author of the analysis. "And when rejected, some people contemplate stalking, homicide, suicide. This drive for romantic love can be stronger than the will to live."

Brain imaging technology cannot read people's minds, experts caution, and a phenomenon as many sided and socially influenced as love transcends simple computer graphics, like those produced by the technique used in the study, called functional M.R.I.

Still, said Dr. Hans Breiter, director of the Motivation and Emotion Neuroscience Collaboration at Massachusetts General Hospital, "I distrust about 95 percent of the M.R.I. literature and I would give this study an 'A'; it really moves the ball in terms of understanding infatuation love."

He added: "The findings fit nicely with a large, growing body of literature describing a generalized reward and aversion system in the brain, and put this intellectual construct of love directly onto the same axis as homeostatic rewards such as food, warmth, craving for drugs."

In the study, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and Dr. Arthur Aron, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, led a team that analyzed about 2,500 brain images from 17 college students who were in the first weeks or months of new love. The students looked at a picture of their beloved while an M.R.I. machine scanned their brains. The researchers then compared the images with others taken while the students looked at picture of an acquaintance.

Functional M.R.I. technology detects increases or decreases of blood flow in the brain, which reflect changes in neural activity.

In the study, a computer-generated map of particularly active areas showed hot spots deep in the brain, below conscious awareness, in areas called the caudate nucleus and the ventral tegmental area, which communicate with each other as part of a circuit.

These areas are dense with cells that produce or receive a brain chemical called dopamine, which circulates actively when people desire or anticipate a reward. In studies of gamblers, cocaine users and even people playing computer games for small amounts of money, these dopamine sites become extremely active as people score or win, neuroscientists say.

Yet falling in love is among the most irrational of human behaviors, not merely a matter of satisfying a simple pleasure, or winning a reward. And the researchers found that one particular spot in the M.R.I. images, in the caudate nucleus, was especially active in people who scored highly on a questionnaire measuring passionate love.

This passion-related region was on the opposite side of the brain from another area that registers physical attractiveness, the researchers found, and appeared to be involved in longing, desire and the unexplainable tug that people feel toward one person, among many attractive alternative partners.

This distinction, between finding someone attractive and desiring him or her, between liking and wanting, "is all happening in an area of the mammalian brain that takes care of most basic functions, like eating, drinking, eye movements, all at an unconscious level, and I don't think anyone expected this part of the brain to be so specialized," Dr. Brown said.

The intoxication of new love mellows with time, of course, and the brain scan findings reflect some evidence of this change, Dr. Fisher said.

In an earlier functional M.R.I. study of romance, published in 2000, researchers at University College London monitored brain activity in young men and women who had been in relationships for about two years. The brain images, also taken while participants looked at photos of their beloved, showed activation in many of the same areas found in the new study - but significantly less so, in the region correlated with passionate love, she said.

In the new study, the researchers also saw individual differences in their group of smitten lovers, based on how long the participants had been in the relationships. Compared with the students who were in the first weeks of a new love, those who had been paired off for a year or more showed significantly more activity in an area of the brain linked to long-term commitment.

Last summer, scientists at Emory University in Atlanta reported that injecting a ratlike animal called a vole with a single gene turned promiscuous males into stay-at-home dads - by activating precisely the same area of the brain where researchers in the new study found increased activity over time.

"This is very suggestive of attachment processes taking place," Dr. Brown said. "You can almost imagine a time where instead of going to Match.com you could have a test to find out whether you're an attachment type or not."

One reason new love is so heart-stopping is the possibility, the ever-present fear, that the feeling may not be entirely requited, that the dream could suddenly end.

In a follow-up experiment, Dr. Fisher, Dr. Aron and Dr. Brown have carried out brain scans on 17 other young men and women who recently were dumped by their lovers. As in the new love study, the researchers compared two sets of images, one taken when the participants were looking at a photo of a friend, the other when looking at a picture of their ex.

Although they are still sorting through the images, the investigators have noticed one preliminary finding: increased activation in an area of the brain related to the region associated with passionate love. "It seems to suggest what the psychological literature, poetry and people have long noticed: that being dumped actually does heighten romantic love, a phenomenon I call frustration-attraction," Dr. Fisher said in an e-mail message.

One volunteer in the study was Suzanna Katz, 22, of New York, who suffered through a breakup with her boyfriend three years ago. Ms. Katz said she became hyperactive to distract herself after the split, but said she also had moments of almost physical withdrawal, as if weaning herself from a drug.

"It had little to do with him, but more with the fact that there was something there, inside myself, a hope, a knowledge that there's someone out there for you, and that you're capable of feeling this way, and suddenly I felt like that was being lost," she said in an interview.

And no wonder. In a series of studies, researchers have found that, among other processes, new love involves psychologically internalizing a lover, absorbing elements of the other person's opinions, hobbies, expressions, character, as well as sharing one's own. "The expansion of the self happens very rapidly, it's one of the most exhilarating experiences there is, and short of threatening our survival it is one thing that most motivates us," said Dr. Aron, of SUNY, a co-author of the study.

To lose all that, all at once, while still in love, plays havoc with the emotional, cognitive and deeper reward-driven areas of the brain. But the heightened activity in these areas inevitably settles down. And the circuits in the brain related to passion remain intact, the researchers say - intact and capable in time of flaring to life with someone new.

Archaeologists have found examples of the knotted strings associated with Incan record keeping that predate the Incas by about five millennia. These “quipus,” cotton strings knotted in a systematic matter and wrapped around thin sticks, had previously appeared among Incan artifacts only, so it was supposed that this system of record keeping was Incan in origin.

The ancient quipus were discovered in the ancient city of Caral, a coastal town about a hundred miles north of Lima. Caral is thought to be the oldest civilization in the Americas. At the same time that the Saqqara pyramid, the oldest in Egypt, was being built, pyramid structures were being built in Caral.By the time of Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Cheops (or Khufu) was under construction, the ones in Caral were being remodeled.

For these knotted records there is no equivalent to the Rosetta Stone, which allowed translation of the ancient Eqyptian hieroglyphics.

Archaeologists in Peru have found a “quipu” on the site of the oldest city in the Americas, indicating that the device, a sophisticated arrangement of knots and strings used to convey detailed information, was in use thousands of years earlier than previously believ! ed.

Previously the oldest known quipus, often associated with the Incas whose vast South American empire was conquered by the Spanish in the 16th century, dated from about A.D. 650.

But Ruth Shady, an archaeologist leading investigations into the Peruvian coastal city of Caral, said quipus were among a treasure trove of articles discovered at the site, which is about 5,000 years old.

“This is the oldest quipu, and it shows us that this society ... also had a system of ‘writing’ (which) would continue down the ages until the Inca empire and would last some 4,500 years,” Shady said.

She was speaking before the opening in Lima Tuesday of an exhibition of the artifacts which shed light on Caral, which she called one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

The quipu, with its well-preserved, brown cotton strings wound around thin sticks, was found with a series of offerings including mysterious fiber balls of different sizes wrapped in ”nets” and pristine reed baskets.

“We are sure it corresponds to the period of Caral because it was found in a public building,” Shady said. “It was an offering placed on a stairway when they decided to bury this and put down a floor to build another structure on top.”

Pyramid-shaped public buildings were being built at Caral, a planned coastal city 115 miles (185 kilometers) north of Lima, at the same time that the Saqqara pyramid, the oldest in Egypt, was going up. They were were already being revamped when Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Cheops (or Khufu) was under construction, Shady said.

“Man only began living in an organized way 5,000 years ago in five points of the globe — Mesopotamia (roughly comprising modern Iraq and part of Syria), Egypt, India, China and Peru,” Shady said. Caral was 3,200 years older than cities of another ancient American civilization, the Maya, she added.

Shady said no equivalent of the “Rosetta Stone” that deciphered the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt had yet been found to fully unlock the language of the quipus, but said their existence pointed to a sophisticated, organized society where such information as production, taxes and debts were recorded.

“They came up with their own system becausem unlike cities in the Old World which had contact with each other and exchanged knowledge and experiences, this (city) in Peru was isolated in the Americas, and advanced alone.”

Caral’s arid location at an altitude of 11,500 feet (3,500 meters) has helped preserve its treasures, such as piles of raw cotton — still uncombed and containing seeds, though turned a dirty brown by the ages — and a ball of cotton thread.

The exhibition includes some of the 25 huge whale bones fashioned into chairs found at the site, as well as a cotton-soled sandal and flutes and pipes made from animal horns, pelican or condor bones or reeds.

The remains of jungle fruits, cactus fiber and shells revealed trade with distant regions and a block of salt the size of a small laptop computer was found in Caral’s main temple, suggesting salt may have had religious as well as commercial value.

Shady said representations on clay figurines had helped show that nobles wore their hair in two long ponytails each side of the face, with a fringe at the front and the hair on the top of the head cropped close to the skull.

In 2001, scientists implanted human brain cells into the brain stem of monkeys. The results were more political than scientific. A debate ensued over the morality of such cell transplants. Now that human embryonic stem cells are becoming popular candidates for transplant, the implications for placing such cells within monkey brains has created even more unrest.

Could a monkey with human stem cells in its own brain begin to develop human attributes? Scientists from various disciplines formed a panel to study the implications of such research. According to a report in a recent issue of the journal Science, these twenty-two panelists could not agree on what might happen, but expressed concern that the usual moral boundary between humans and animals could be dissolved.

The journal quoted Ruth Faden, director of the Phoebe R. Berman Bioethics Institute at Johns Hopkins University, as saying, "There are biblical injunctions and secular reflection over the course of centuries, but nothing is certain or universally accepted, either scientifically or morally. Debate is complicated by uncertainty and uncharted territory in all of our fields of expertise. It quickly became clear how little is known."

The insertion of human stem cells into monkey brains runs a "real risk" of altering the animals' abilities in ways that might make them more like us, scientists said today.

A panel of 22 experts -- including primatologists, stem cell researchers, lawyers and philosophers -- debated the possible consequences of the technique for more than a year.

While the group agrees it is "unlikely that grafting human stem cells into the brains of non-human primates would alter the animals' abilities in morally relevant ways," the members "also felt strongly that the risk of doing so is real and too ethically important to ignore."

In the case of Alzheimer's research, for example, grafting human stem cells into a monkey brain would be designed to reinstate lost memory function, but "we cannot be certain that this will be the only functional result," the report concludes.

There was "considerable controversy" within the group, which disagreed on whether such experiements, some already underway, should proceed.

The conclusions, reported in the July 15 issue of the journal Science, reveal that scienists don't know how their monkeying around might alter the intelligence and emotions of animals.

The scientists admit they don't even know what really separates humans from our closest relatives, morally speaking, or how to measure any cognitive changes they might induce in an ape, monkey or other non-human primate.

"Many of us expected that, once we'd pooled our expertise, we'd be able to say why human cells would not produce significant changes in non-human brains," said the report's lead author Mark Greene, formerly of Johns Hopkins University and now a professor at the University of Delaware. "But the cell biologists and neurologists couldn't specify limits on what implanted human cells might do, and the primatologists explained that gaps in our knowledge of normal non-human primate abilities make it difficult to detect changes.

"And there's no philosophical consensus on the moral significance of changes in abilities if we could detect them," Greene said.

The panel's report cites Kant, Mills and the Bible: "Humans are set apart by God as morally speical and are given stewardship over other forms of life" (Genesis I: 26-28).

Human stem cells are unique cells that can transform into all the parts needed to create a living being. There are different types of stem cells. Brain stem cells in a human fetus, for example, morph into the neurons and all other cells needed to make a mind.

In 2001, researchers first inserted human brain stem cells into fetal monkeys. A controversy ensued over the morality of the procedure, which eventually led to the formation of the 22-member panel.

Other experiments using the technique are underway. The work is largely pointed toward finding cures for Parkinson's disease, Lou Gehrig's disease, and other human afflictions.

The panel concluded that implanting human stem cells into monkey brains "could unintentionally shift the moral ground between humans and other primates."

Similar research has been done with other animals. In one project, scientists plan to inject a mouse with human brain cells. But bioethicists are not as concerned that a mouse could get morals.

"The possibility that human cells might create human-like abilities is much larger in nonhuman primates than in mice," said panel member Hank Greely, a law professor at Stanford University and chair of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics steering committee.

"Our group struggled with many fundamental questions," said Ruth Faden, director of the Phoebe R. Berman Bioethics Institute at Johns Hopkins University. "Are there cognitive or emotional capacities that are unique to humans in ways that make us worthy of higher moral status? What sets one primate, including us, apart from another primate, cognitively speaking?"

The report states that the understanding of emotions and smarts of non-human primates is "patchy" and that "data are tricky to gather and difficult to interpret."

The panel members "agreed to disagree" about whether primates should be used for any invasive biomedical procedures, Faden said.

Researchers do not currently insert brain stem cells into human brains. Some in the group questioned whether inserting human cells into monkeys would provide relevant scientific results.

The panel recognized that the possibility of making monkeys more humanlike is an issue that goes well beyond science.

"There are biblical injunctions and secular reflection over the course of centuries, but nothing is certain or universally accepted, either scientifically or morally," Faden said. "Debate is complicated by uncertainty and uncharted territory in all of our fields of expertise. It quickly became clear how little is known."

"A fundamental issue was whether such experiments might unintentionally alter the animals' normal cognitive capacity in ways that could cause considerable suffering," Faden said.

The group concluded that many procedures in medicine are unnatural but are not necessarily considered unethical. Pig cells have been studied for use in people with Parkinson's disease without moral objection, for example. So they set that argument aside.

The panelists concluded that morally significant changes are least likely if the research is done on adult primates as opposed to those whose brains are still developing. Further, abhorent alterations would be less likely by using primates more distantly related to humans, such as macaque monkeys, rathern than closer relatives like apes and chimpanzees.

The group recommends that ethical groups should oversee such work based on six factors:

1. The number of human cells used compared with the number of cells in the animal's brain.

"And, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, proposed studies should measure and monitor behavioral, emotional and cognitive changes," Faden said. "We need to know whether the human cells have an effect on cognition, but right now, the experts aren't even quite sure what 'normal' is for some of these primates."

Although debate remains, consensus is growing that the evidence now proves that climate change is underway. Writing for Britain’s Independent, Mark Lynas, outlines the several sources of convincing evidence.

Alaska, being close to the North Pole, is feeling it the most, because its temperature is rising almost ten times as fast as in other places on the planet. Houses and trees are toppling as the permafrost melts and opens up deep crevasses into the earth. Into these cracks lakes are disappearing and roadways are dropping.

Coral reefs are dying out in the heated waters, “bleaching” to a bright white as they die, allowing invasive organisms to multiply.

Hurricanes are becoming more frequent, and are forming in areas previously strangers to these devastating storms. The hotter the ocean waters, the stronger the storms.

Glaciers are melting everywhere. In Peru, for example, in the eastern Cordillera Blanca, a range which includes the highest glaciated peaks in the country, entire glaciers have disappeared. Among all Peruvian glaciers, about one third have melted completely during the past thirty years.

Desertification is increasing. Over seven hundred square miles of Inner Mongolia, China, turn to dust every year, increasing the desert at an alarming rate as temperatures rise there at twice the global average. Rivers are disappearing, and dust storms are increasing, almost doubling each decade over the past fifty years.

Rising sea levels, averaging 10 to 20cm, over the the past 100 years, is beginning to take its tolls on low-lying coastal towns and small islands. Debate on how best to evacuate the entire population of the island Tuvalu, off the coast of New Zealand, has been underway for some time. How do you move the culture along with the people? Climate changes bring more change than simply to climate.

No one in Fairbanks denies global warming any more. When your house is collapsing under you, there is little point in refusing to face the cause. The ground is collapsing beneath this Alaskan town. The state is among the most rapidly warming places on the planet, with temperatures rising 10 times faster than the global average. So what was once permanently frozen ground - permafrost - is thawing.

One of the worst-hit parts of town is the aptly-named Madcap Lane, which looks like a badly built Toytown. Houses pitch and lean in all directions. "I don't think anything is level here," says Viki Heiker, one of the dwindling number of residents. Her porch has fallen off, and a large crack snakes across the kitchen. Several houses in Fairbanks have been abandoned.

Other infrastructure is also affected. Roads are hastily patched as sinking ground cracks the asphalt, and the repair bill now totals $35m (£20m) a year for the state. In Alaska's interior, lakes have disappeared, draining into cracks in the thawing ground. Across Alaska, trees are toppling, caused by permafrost melt, and forests are being replaced by marshy wetland. And Alaska is not alone; large-scale permafrost melt is happening across the polar regions, from Canada to Siberia. The cause is indisputable: earth science tells us climate change should be amplified in polar regions, and this is exactly what is happening across the Arctic.

Summer is a tough time for the colourful corals of Australia's Great Barrier Reef. As sea surface temperatures rise under the baking sub-tropical sun, these tiny creatures - whose calcium carbonate skeletons form the famous reefs - begin to suffer a kind of marine heat-stroke. The coral polyps expel their companion algae and turn bone white in an increasingly-frequent event known as "bleaching".

Coral reefs are the most biologically diverse ecosystem in all the seas, holding nine million types of plants and animals, including a quarter of all known ocean fish. Yet bleaching events have devastated large sections of reef across the world. Unless the corals can recover quickly, invasive algae appear, covering the dead reefs in choking grey sheets.

In 1998, an El Niño year, and still the hottest globally on record, huge swaths of reef were killed, particularly in the Indian Ocean, which suffered 90 per cent mortality rates in some areas. The Australian marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg called it "the most serious human impact on an ecosystem ever". He estimates that overall a sixth of tropical corals were destroyed. "If we lost that proportion of the rainforests in a single year, people would be screaming," he says.

Dr Hoegh-Guldberg calculates that within 20 to 30 years, disasters on the scale of 1998 will become annual events, putting the survival of tropical reefs at risk.

Coastal residents in Florida could be forgiven for keeping a nervous eye on the horizon now that this year's hurricane season has started. Records broke last year when four hurricanes in succession pounded Florida, causing $45bn (£25.5bn) worth of damage. And that was just in the Atlantic; in the Pacific, Japan was struck by a record number of typhoons, several also wreaking havoc in Taiwan, China and the Korean peninsula.

And, for the first time on record, the southern Atlantic also spawned a hurricane. Forecasters were left scratching their heads in bewilderment as the familiar swirl of clouds, complete with a well-defined eye, appeared in an ocean basin where none had been spotted before.

Hurricane Catarina struck Brazil with 90mph winds, causing up to a dozen deaths. Hurricane monitoring services may now have to be extended 2,000 miles to the south of the equator to deal with the new threat.

The stormy weather was followed by an equally stormy debate among tropical meteorologists about whether the fingerprint of global warming may be to blame. One, Chris Landsea from the Hurricane Research Division in Miami, even resigned from the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, accusing it of bias.

But even from a debate this politicised, a few facts do stand out. First, hurricanes are essentially heat engines, spawned only over warm ocean waters. The warmer the water, the stronger the hurricane can be. There is clear evidence that tropical Atlantic sea-surface temperatures are rising, and a broad acceptance that at least some of this must be down to human-caused global warming. So - in theory at least - each storm that forms can now be that little bit stronger. The problem comes in distinguishing this statistical signal from the huge swings of natural variability.

A hurricane is a tropical storm with winds that have reached a constant speed of 74 miles an hour or more. Hurricane winds blow in a large spiral around a relative calm centre known as the eye. The eye is generally 20 to 30 miles wide, and the storm may extend outward 400 miles.

As global warming accelerates, hurricane modellers forecast that these storms will become 10 to 20 per cent stronger as years go by, potentially breeding a greater number of monster Category 5 storms out in the Atlantic. And if one of them hits New York or Washington, even the US President will have to start taking global warming seriously.

I have a personal interest in the Andean glaciers of Peru. My father worked in the region as a geologist back in the early 1980s, and since I started writing about global warming I wanted to revisit some of the areas he had photographed more than 20 years before to see for myself how the glaciers might have changed.

At the head of the valley, my father had taken a photograph of a broad, fan-shaped glacier tumbling down from the snows above into a small lake. But when I visited two years ago, the scene was almost unrecognisable; the entire glacier had vanished, leaving just bare rock.

This is a story repeated across Peru, which has lost about a third of its glaciers in the space of just three decades. This is of vital interest to Peruvians, most of whom live in the desert strip fringing the Pacific Ocean in the west of the country, and are dependent on rivers which flow down from the Andean mountains.

These rivers run year-round because melting glaciers act as natural reservoirs, storing snowfall in the wet season and releasing the stored water into rivers all year round.

After these glaciers have disappeared - as they are projected to do within as short a time as the next two decades - then millions of people, including the population of Lima, will be left drastically short of water.

Indeed, Lima's most important icefield, Glacier Sullcon in the Cordillera Central, has already lost half of its mass, and the peaks that feed it are too low to stay frozen if global temperatures continue to rise.

The Lima water authority, Sedapal, has tried to tap new water sources by building reservoirs and drilling a water tunnel right through the Andean continental divide to a natural lake on the Amazon side of the mountains.

But the cash-strapped country cannot afford to simply engineer its way out of the crisis, and each year another large chunk of these vital glaciers simply drains away into the sea.

Early every spring, a large part of Inner Mongolia visits the Chinese capital, Beijing. The first Beijing residents notice is an orange glow in the air, then a choking haze descends. Most of the dust in these increasingly frequent storms originates far to the north, on Inner Mongolia's once rolling grassland plains, which are turning into desert.

Official figures show more than 770 square miles of China turns to desert every year. The causes are complex - over-grazing and bad agricultural management play a large role - but north China's changing climate is undeniably linked to global warming. Long-term records show a declining rainfall and temperatures have risen at twice the global average.

To the west of Inner Mongolia, in Gansu province, river systems have disappeared. The great Yellow River now fails to reach the sea on average for more than half the year. Across the region, villages are being buried by sand, as are irrigation wells, telegraph poles and roads.

There were eight dust storms in the 1960s, 14 in the 1980s and 23 in the 1990s. In the year 2000 alone, seven dust storms roared through Beijing, scouring off even road markings. The strongest storms are killers: one "black wind" in 1993 left 85 people dead.

Created from half of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands when the British colonial authorities handed over power in 1978, Tuvalu is disappearing. Global sea levels have risen by 10 to 20cm in the past 100 years, and on low-lying coral atolls such as Tuvalu the effects are already being felt. "Now is the time to start preparing, so that when people move they move with their traditions, customs and culture," said Toaripi Lauti, Tuvalu's first Prime Minister.

Early each year, during the "high tide" season, springs erupt in people's gardens, and torrents flow along the edges of roads and Tuvalu's airstrip. Lakes appear and people have to wade to their front doors. There's nowhere to run if the tide is combined with strong winds or a cyclone - no part of the atoll is more than a metre above sea level.

Plans for an evacuation of Tuvaluans to New Zealand have been tied up in red tape for years. A brief attempt to launch legal action against Australia and the US for not ratifying Kyoto never got off the ground. The idea of compensation has raised a host of problems. "How do you put a price on a whole nation being relocated?" asks Paani Laupepa, head of the environment ministry. "How do you value a culture that is being wiped out?"

Archaeologists in Britain believe that they have discovered the source of the bluestone rocks used in the Stonehenge monument. Their discovery, published in British Archaeology, began with the discovery of a burial site near Stonehenge. At this site, the remains of a group of men proved to be from Wales at the time of Stonehenge’s construction. It was presumed that these men worked on Stonehenge. Genetic analysis led the researchers to a part of Wales where these men originated. There they found evidence of the rare bluestone used at Stonehenge, two hundred and forty miles away. Further analysis confirmed the connection.

The location of this quarry is at one of the highest points of the 1,008ft high Carn Menyn mountain in Pembrokeshire's Preseli Hills of Wales. There researchers also found stone pillars showing signs of being chisled. Drill holes gave evidence of the method used to shape the stones.

Archaeologists have solved one of the greatest mysteries of Stonehenge - the exact spot from where its huge stones were quarried.

A team has pinpointed the precise place in Wales from where the bluestones were removed in about 2500 BC.

It found the small crag-edged enclosure at one of the highest points of the 1,008ft high Carn Menyn mountain in Pembrokeshire's Preseli Hills.

The enclosure is just over one acre in size but, according to team leader Professor Tim Darvill, it provides a veritable "Aladdin's Cave" of made-to-measure pillars for aspiring circle builders. Within and outside the enclosure are numerous prone pillar stones with clear signs of working. Some are fairly recent and a handful of drill holes attest to the technology used. Other blocks may have been wrenched from the ground or the crags in ancient times.

They were then moved 240 miles to the famous site at Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire.

The discovery comes a year after scientists proved that the remains of a "band of brothers" found near Stonehenge were Welshmen who transported the stones. The skeletons were found by workmen laying a pipe on Boscombe Down and chemical analysis of their teeth revealed they were brought up in South West Wales.

Experts believed the family accompanied the stones on their epic journey from the Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain.

Now Prof Darvill, colleague Geoff Wainwright, a retired English Heritage archaeologist, and six researchers and students from Bournemouth University have confirmed where exactly they uncovered the stones.

They scoured a 3km-square area in the highest points of Carn Menyn where they made the amazing discovery.

Prof Darvill said, "When we came across the enclosure we couldn't believe it. You dream about finding things like this but don't really think they exist. We have done geological and chemical tests which are still ongoing but show the quarry is the exact place.

"Geographically, the bluestones are very distinctive and could have only come from a very certain area. We already knew it was in the Preseli Hills but the geological tests combined with the chemical test results make us sure we have found it.

"Nobody can be sure why the stones were taken from there to Salisbury but I believe it is because they were regarded as holy or to do with a deity of some kind.

"Hopefully in the future we will be able to trace the exact holes where the stones were extracted from. It isn't going to be a massive hole in the ground as we understand a quarry to be these days.

"In 2500 BC things were a lot more primitive so the builders would have looked for rocks which were naturally displaced.

"They then would have put them on a river and taken them to Stonehenge that way.

The "band of brothers" found last year, were a family unit of three adults, one teenager and three children buried in the same grave 4,300 years ago, at the start of the metal age.

The family were found on Boscombe Down and were soon christened the "Boscombe bowmen."

The burials were found near to the site where the famously wealthy "Amesbury archer" was uncovered three years ago.

Prof Darvill's discovery will be published in the July-August edition of British Archaeology.

Time and space seem like obvious realities. Edgar Cayce describes them as devices God gave humanity to provide an opportunity for us to find our way back to oneness with the Creator. Scientists gathering recently at the Massachussets Institute of Technology have come up with a similar view of the illusionary nature of time and space. But what is time, really? What is space, really? Scientists are no closer to knowing the underlying reality than were the philosophers of old. But they do have more compelling reasons to try to make this important discovery. Einstein showed in his theory of relativity that time and space are inter-dependent and relative to a point of observation. Quantum physics showed that when you stick your nose down into the nitty gritty of material, time and space seems to disappear. The theory of the Big Bang and the observed expansion of the universe require a scientific understanding of time and the scientists are becoming impatient with their frustrating ignorance. For one thing, they have a gut instinct that time travel is not possible, yet the current state of their theorizing must allow for it. As one of the scientists involved in the debate, Stephen Hawkings, put it, "Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible."

I'm still hoping to attend, and although the odds are slim, they are apparently not zero despite the efforts and hopes of deterministically minded physicists who would like to eliminate the possibility of your creating a paradox by going back in time and killing your grandfather.

"No law of physics that we know of prohibits time travel," said Dr. J. Richard Gott, a Princeton astrophysicist.

Dr. Gott, author of the 2001 book "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time," is one of a small breed of physicists who spend part of their time (and their research grants) thinking about wormholes in space, warp drives and other cosmic constructions, that "absurdly advanced civilizations" might use to travel through time.

It's not that physicists expect to be able to go back and attend Woodstock, drop by the Bern patent office to take Einstein to lunch, see the dinosaurs or investigate John F. Kennedy's assassination.

In fact, they're pretty sure those are absurd dreams and are all bemused by the fact that they can't say why. They hope such extreme theorizing could reveal new features, gaps or perhaps paradoxes or contradictions in the foundations of Physics As We Know It and point the way to new ideas.

"Traversable wormholes are primarily useful as a 'gedanken experiment' to explore the limitations of general relativity," said Dr. Francisco Lobo of the University of Lisbon.

If general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity and space-time, allows for the ability to go back in time and kill your grandfather, asks Dr. David Z. Albert, a physicist and philosopher at Columbia University, "how can it be a logically consistent theory?"

In his recent book "The Universe in a Nutshell," Dr. Stephen W. Hawking wrote, "Even if it turns out that time travel is impossible, it is important that we understand why it is impossible."

When it comes to the nature of time, physicists are pretty much at as much of a loss as the rest of us who seem hopelessly swept along in its current. The mystery of time is connected with some of the thorniest questions in physics, as well as in philosophy, like why we remember the past but not the future, how causality works, why you can't stir cream out of your coffee or put perfume back in a bottle.

Just as Einstein needed to come up with a new concept of time in order to invent relativity 100 years ago this year, so physicists say that a new insight into time - or beyond it - may be required to crack profound problems like how the universe began, what happens at the center of black hole or how to marry relativity and quantum theory into a unified theory of nature.

Space and time, some quantum gravity theorists say, are most likely a sort of illusion - or less sensationally, an "approximation" - doomed to be replaced by some more fundamental idea. If only they could think of what that idea is.

"By convention there is space, by convention time," Dr. David J. Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and a winner of last year's Nobel Prize, said recently, paraphrasing the Greek philosopher Democritus, "in reality there is. ... ?" his voice trailing off.

The issues raised by time travel are connected to these questions, Dr. Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and author of the book "The Physics of Star Trek," said. "The minute you have time travel you have paradoxes," Dr. Krauss said, explaining that if you can go backward in time you confront fundamental issues like cause and effect or the meaning of your own identity if there can be two of you at once. A refined theory of time would have to explain "how a sensible world could result from something so nonsensical."

"That's why time travel is philosophically important and has captivated the public, who care about these paradoxes," he said.

At stake, said Dr. Albert, the philosopher and author of his own time book, "Time and Chance," is "what kind of view science presents us of the world."

"Physics gets time wrong, and time is the most familiar thing there is," Dr. Albert said.

We all feel time passing in our bones, but ever since Galileo and Newton in the 17th century began using time as a coordinate to help chart the motion of cannonballs, time - for physicists - has simply been an "addendum in the address of an event," Dr. Albert said.

"There is a feeling in philosophy," he said, "that this picture leaves no room for locutions about flow and the passage of time we experience."

Then there is what physicists call "the arrow of time" problem. The fundamental laws of physics don't care what direction time goes, he pointed out. Run a movie of billiard balls colliding or planets swirling around in their orbits in reverse and nothing will look weird, but if you run a movie of a baseball game in reverse people will laugh.

Einstein once termed the distinction between past, present and future "a stubborn illusion," but as Dr. Albert said, "It's hard to imagine something more basic than the distinction between the future and the past."

Space and time, the philosopher Augustine famously argued 1,700 years ago, are creatures of existence and the universe, born with it, not separately standing features of eternity. That is the same answer that Einstein came up with in 1915 when he finished his general theory of relativity.

That theory explains how matter and energy warp the geometry of space and time to produce the effect we call gravity. It also predicted, somewhat to Einstein's dismay, the expansion of the universe, which forms the basis of modern cosmology.

But Einstein's theory is incompatible, mathematically and philosophically, with the quirky rules known as quantum mechanics that describe the microscopic randomness that fills this elegantly curved expanding space-time. According to relativity, nature is continuous, smooth and orderly, in quantum theory the world is jumpy and discontinuous. The sacred laws of physics are correct only on average.

Until the pair are married in a theory of so-called quantum gravity, physics has no way to investigate what happens in the Big Bang, when the entire universe is so small that quantum rules apply.

Looked at closely enough, with an imaginary microscope that could see lengths down to 10-33 centimeters, quantum gravity theorists say, even ordinary space and time dissolve into a boiling mess that Dr. John Wheeler, the Princeton physicist and phrasemaker, called "space-time foam." At that level of reality, which exists underneath all our fingernails, clocks and rulers as we know them cease to exist.

"Everything we know about stops at the Big Bang, the Big Crunch," said Dr. Raphael Bousso, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

What happens to time at this level of reality is anybody's guess. Dr. Lee Smolin, of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, said, "There are several different, very different, ideas about time in quantum gravity."

One view, he explained, is that space and time "emerge" from this foamy substrate when it is viewed at larger scales. Another is that space emerges but that time or some deeper relations of cause and effect are fundamental.

Dr. Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara of the Perimeter Institute described time as, if not an illusion, an approximation, "a bit like the way you can see the river flow in a smooth way even though the individual water molecules follow much more complicated patterns."

She added in an e-mail message: "I have always thought that there has to be some basic fundamental notion of causality, even if it doesn't look at all like the one of the space-time we live in. I can't see how to get causality from something that has none; neither have I ever seen anyone succeed in doing so."

Physicists say they have a sense of how space can emerge, because of recent advances in string theory, the putative theory of everything, which posits that nature is composed of wriggling little strings.

Calculations by Dr. Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and by others have shown how an extra dimension of space can pop mathematically into being almost like magic, the way the illusion of three dimensions can appear in the holograms on bank cards. But string theorists admit they don't know how to do the same thing for time yet.

"Time is really difficult," said Dr. Cumrun Vafa, a Harvard string theorist. "We have not made much progress on the emergence of time. Once we make progress we will make progress on the early universe, on high energy physics and black holes.

Dr. Bousso, an expert on holographic theories of space-time, said that in general relativity time gets no special treatment.

He said he expected both time and space to break down, adding, "We really just don't know what's going to go."

"There is a lot of mysticism about time," Dr. Bousso said. "Time is what a clock measures. What a clock measures is more interesting than you thought."

"If we could go faster than light, we could telegraph into the past," Einstein once said. According to the theory of special relativity - which he proposed in 1905 and which ushered E=mc² into the world and set the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit - such telegraphy is not possible, and there is no way of getting back to the past.

But, somewhat to Einstein's surprise, in general relativity it is possible to beat a light beam across space. That theory, which Einstein finished in 1916, said that gravity resulted from the warping of space-time geometry by matter and energy, the way a bowling ball sags a trampoline. And all this warping and sagging can create shortcuts through space-time.

In 1949, Kurt Gödel, the Austrian logician and mathematician then at the Institute for Advanced Study, showed that in a rotating universe, according to general relativity, there were paths, technically called "closed timelike curves," you could follow to get back to the past. But it has turned out that the universe does not rotate very much, if at all.

Most scientists, including Einstein, resisted the idea of time travel until 1988 when Dr. Kip Thorne, a gravitational theorist at the California Institute of Technology, and two of his graduate students, Dr. Mike Morris and Dr. Ulvi Yurtsever, published a pair of papers concluding that the laws of physics may allow you to use wormholes, which are like tunnels through space connecting distant points, to travel in time.

These holes, technically called Einstein-Rosen bridges, have long been predicted as a solution of Einstein's equations. But physicists dismissed them because calculations predicted that gravity would slam them shut.

Dr. Thorne was inspired by his friend, the late Cornell scientist and author Carl Sagan, who was writing the science fiction novel "Contact," later made into a Jodie Foster movie, and was looking for a way to send his heroine, Eleanor Arroway, across the galaxy. Dr. Thorne and his colleagues imagined that such holes could be kept from collapsing and thus maintained to be used as a galactic subway, at least in principle, by threading them with something called Casimir energy, (after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir) which is a sort of quantum suction produced when two parallel metal plates are placed very close together. According to Einstein's equations, this suction, or negative pressure, would have an antigravitational effect, keeping the walls of the wormhole apart.

If one mouth of a wormhole was then grabbed by a spaceship and taken on a high-speed trip, according to relativity, its clock would run slow compared with the other end of the wormhole. So the wormhole would become a portal between two different times as well as places.

Dr. Thorne later said he had been afraid that the words "time travel" in the second paper's title would create a sensation and tarnish his students' careers, and he had forbidden Caltech to publicize it.

In fact, their paper made time travel safe for serious scientists, and other theorists, including Dr. Frank Tipler of Tulane University and Dr. Hawking, jumped in. In 1991, for example, Dr. Gott of Princeton showed how another shortcut through space-time could be manufactured using pairs cosmic strings - dense tubes of primordial energy not to be confused with the strings of string theory, left over by the Big Bang in some theories of cosmic evolution - rushing past each other and warping space around them.

These speculations have been bolstered (not that time machine architects lack imagination) with the unsettling discovery that the universe may be full of exactly the kind of antigravity stuff needed to grow and prop open a wormhole. Some mysterious "dark energy," astronomers say, is pushing space apart and accelerating the expansion of the universe. The race is on to measure this energy precisely and find out what it is.

Among the weirder and more disturbing explanations for this cosmic riddle is something called phantom energy, which is so virulently antigravitational that it would eventually rip planets, people and even atoms apart, ending everything. As it happens this bizarre stuff would also be perfect for propping open a wormhole, Dr. Lobo of Lisbon recently pointed out. "This certainly is an interesting prospect for an absurdly advanced civilization, as phantom energy probably comprises of 70 percent of the universe," Dr. Lobo wrote in an e-mail message. Dr. Sergey Sushkov of Kazan State Pedagogical University in Russia has made the same suggestion.

In a paper posted on the physics Web site arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0502099, Dr. Lobo suggested that as the universe was stretched and stretched under phantom energy, microscopic holes in the quantum "space-time foam" might grow to macroscopic usable size. "One could also imagine an advanced civilization mining the cosmic fluid for phantom energy necessary to construct and sustain a traversable wormhole," he wrote.

Such a wormhole he even speculated, could be used to escape the "big rip" in which a phantom energy universe will eventually end.

But nobody knows if phantom, or exotic, energy is really allowed in nature and most physicists would be happy if it is not. Its existence would lead to paradoxes, like negative kinetic energy, where something could lose energy by speeding up, violating what is left of common sense in modern physics.

Dr. Krauss said, "From the point of view of realistic theories, phantom energy just doesn't exist."

But such exotic stuff is not required for all time machines, Dr. Gott's cosmic strings for example. In another recent paper, Dr. Amos Ori of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa describes a time machine that he claims can be built by moving around colossal masses to warp the space inside a doughnut of regular empty space into a particular configuration, something an advanced civilization may be able to do in 100 or 200 years.

The space inside the doughnut, he said, will then naturally evolve according to Einstein's laws into a time machine.

Dr. Ori admits that he doesn't know if his machine would be stable. Time machines could blow up as soon as you turned them on, say some physicists, including Dr. Hawking, who has proposed what he calls the "chronology protection" conjecture to keep the past safe for historians. Random microscopic fluctuations in matter and energy and space itself, they argue, would be amplified by going around and around boundaries of the machine or the wormhole, and finally blow it up.

Dr. Gott and his colleague Dr. Li-Xin Li have shown that there are at least some cases where the time machine does not blow up. But until gravity marries quantum theory, they admit, nobody knows how to predict exactly what the fluctuations would be.

"That's why we really need to know about quantum gravity," Dr. Gott said. "That's one reason people are interested in time travel."

But what about killing your grandfather? In a well-ordered universe, that would be a paradox and shouldn't be able to happen, everybody agrees.

That was the challenge that Dr. Joe Polchinski, now at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., issued to Dr. Thorne and his colleagues after their paper was published.

Being a good physicist, Dr. Polchinski phrased the problem in terms of billiard balls. A billiard ball, he suggested, could roll into one end of a time machine, come back out the other end a little earlier and collide with its earlier self, thereby preventing itself from entering the time machine to begin with.

Dr. Thorne and two students, Fernando Echeverria and Gunnar Klinkhammer, concluded after months of mathematical struggle that there was a logically consistent solution to the billiard matricide that Dr. Polchinski had set up. The ball would come back out of the time machine and deliver only a glancing blow to itself, altering its path just enough so that it would still hit the time machine. When it came back out, it would be aimed just so as to deflect itself rather than hitting full on. And so it would go like a movie with a circular plot.

In other words, it's not a paradox if you go back in time and save your grandfather. And, added Dr. Polchinski, "It's not a paradox if you try to shoot your grandfather and miss."

"The conclusion is somewhat satisfying," Dr. Thorne wrote in his book "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy." "It suggests that the laws of physics might accommodate themselves to time machines fairly nicely."

Dr. Polchinski agreed. "I was making the point that the grandfather paradox had nothing to do with free will, and they found a nifty resolution," he said in an e-mail message, adding, nevertheless, that his intuition still tells him time machines would lead to paradoxes.

Dr. Bousso said, "Most of us would consider it quite satisfactory if the laws of quantum gravity forbid time travel."

PRINCETON, NJ -- About three in four Americans profess at least one paranormal belief, according to a recent Gallup survey. The most popular is extrasensory perception (ESP), mentioned by 41%, followed closely by belief in haunted houses (37%). The full list of items includes:

Believe in	%
X
Extrasensory perception, or ESP	41
X
That houses can be haunted	37
X
Ghosts/that spirits of dead people can come back in certain places/situations	32
X
Telepathy/communication between minds without using traditional senses	31
X
Clairvoyance/the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future	26
X
Astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets can affect people's lives	25
X
That people can communicate mentally with someone who has died	21
X
Witches	21
X
Reincarnation, that is, the rebirth of the soul in a new body after death	20
X
Channeling/allowing a 'spirit-being' to temporarily assume control of body	9

A special analysis of the data shows that 73% of Americans believe in at least one of the 10 items listed above, while 27% believe in none of them. A Gallup survey in 2001 provided similar results -- 76% professed belief in at least one of the 10 items.

Number of paranormal items people believe in	Percent	Cumulative percent
X
10	1%	1%
X
9	2	3
X
8	3	6
X
7	3	9
X
6	6	15
X
5	7	22
X
4	10	32
X
3	11	43
X
2	14	57
X
1	16	73
X
None	27	100

The "cumulative percent" column shows that more than one-fifth of all Americans, 22%, believe in five or more items, 32% believe in at least four items, and more than half, 57%, believe in at least two paranormal items. Only 1% believe in all 10 items.

Three other items included in the survey, but which do not necessarily reflect paranormal beliefs, include beliefs in "psychic or spiritual healing or the power of the human mind to heal the body," "that people on earth are sometimes possessed by the devil," and "that extra-terrestrial beings have visited earth at some time in the past."

The healing powers of the mind have been demonstrated empirically, reflected in the power of placebos, among other examples. More than half of Americans, 55%, believe in this connection.

The poll shows that 42% of Americans believe that "people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil." However, it is unclear how many people treat that statement literally, and how many interpret it in metaphorical terms. Thus, for purposes of this analysis, that item was excluded.

Strictly speaking, visits from aliens are not part of paranormal beliefs. Although definitive scientific evidence of such visits is lacking, in principle the existence of extra-terrestrial beings and their ability to visit earth are subject to empirical verification.

All of the other 10 items listed above require the belief that humans have more than the "normal" five senses.

The poll shows no statistically significant differences among people by age, gender, education, race, and region of the country. Christians are a little more likely to hold some paranormal beliefs than non-Christians (75% vs. 66%, respectively), but both groups show a sizeable majority with such beliefs.

Several items show modest declines since 2001 in the percentage of people who profess to believe in them, though the overall percentage of people with at least one paranormal belief has declined only slightly -- from 76% in 2001 to 73% now.

The largest declines since 2001 are found in the number of people who believe in ESP (41% now compared with 50% in 2001), clairvoyance (26% now, 32% in 2001), ghosts (32% vs. 38%), mentally communicating with the dead (21% vs. 28%), and channeling (9% vs. 15%).

Results in the current survey are based on telephone interviews with 1,002 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted June 6-8, 2005. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±3 percentage points. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Parapsychology has long divided the population into goats and sheeps, with the more curious and adventurous species being the ones who believe in the paranormal, while their sheepish cousins do not. A recent Gallup poll indicated that the vast majority of Americans are goats.

Telephone interviews with more than one thousand American adults over the age of eighteen revealed that seventy three per cent of the population believe in at least one paranormal phenomenon. The ten phenomena surveyed and the percentage of Americans who believe in each phenomena is given below:

· Ghosts/that spirits of dead people can come back in certain places/situations: 32%

· Clairvoyance/the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future: 26%

· Astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets can affect people's lives: 25%

· Reincarnation, that is, the rebirth of the soul in a new body after death: 20%

Three in four Americans believe
in the paranormal Gallup survey says

Although the United States constitution calls for a separation of church and state, Americans do not feel the constitution bans the influence of church and politics. According to a survey sponsored by the Associated Press, and reported in various media outlets, Americans, more than any other industrialized country, believe that their religious values should influence the policies of elected politicians.

Americans are not the most church going of countries. The survey found that forty per cent of Americans report going to church regularly, while in Nigeria the figure was eighty nine per cent, in the Philippines it was sixty eight per cent, while in both South Africa and Poland, it was fifty five per cent. Yet these countries had a much lower percentage of citizens who believed that religious attitudes should influence policy makers.

In looking for answers, surveyors found that in America only two per cent of the population reports that they do not believe in God. In France and in South Korea, the proportion of atheists is nineteen per cent.

Other experts point to the history of religious freedom in America, resulting in a much more heterogeneous population than in Western Europe. This diversity has provided many more sources of religious motivation for influencing the public arena than is available to Europeans.

Some snapshots of religious zeal in the US: there are churches in Texas where 20,000 worshippers pray every Sunday; Alabama's most senior judge was dismissed for refusing to remove the Ten Commandments from his court; the re-election of George Bush Â returned with the support of thousands of evangelicals lured to the polls by local laws banning homosexual marriage.

Such images leave little doubt about the importance of religion in a country where more than 40 per cent of the population say they regularly attend church. But a survey has underlined the huge gulf between the US and other industrialised countries on the influence of religion in everyday life.

Despite the separation of church and state being enshrined in the US constitution, more than 40 per cent of US citizens said religious leaders should use their influence to try to sway policy-makers. In France, by contrast, 85 per cent of people said they opposed such "activism" by the clergy.

"These numbers are not surprising," Daniel Conkle, who teaches law and religion at Indiana University, told The Independent. "The US, in separating church and state, has not followed with the notion that it includes a separation of religion and politics.

"In other words, it's believed the institutions of church and state should be separate but there has never been a consensus that religious values should somehow be separated from public life or kept private."

The survey, carried out for the Associated Press by Ipsos, found that, in terms of the importance of religion to its citizens, only Mexico came close to the US. But unlike in the US, Mexicans were strongly opposed to the clergy being involved in politics Â an opposition to church influence rooted in their history.

The survey Â which questioned people in the US, Australia, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, South Korea and Spain Â found that only 2 per cent of people in the US said they did not believe in God. In France and South Korea the number of people who said they were atheists stood at 19 per cent.

The survey has again highlighted the gap between the US and Western Europe, where Pope Benedict XVI has complained that growing secularism has left churches empty. It has also reopened the debate among academics as to the reasons for the difference.

Some specialists, such as Roger Finke, a sociologist at Penn State University, point to the long history of religious freedom in the US and say it has created a greater supply of options for citizens than in other countries. That proliferation, they argue, has inspired wider observance.

"In the United States, you have an abundance of religions trying to motivate Americans to greater involvement. It makes a tremendous difference here," said Mr Finke.

Others argue that rejecting religion is a natural result of modernisation and the US is an exception to the trend. And then there are those who argue Europe is an anomaly and that people in modernised countries inevitably return to religion Â they yearn for tradition.

Gregg Easterbrook, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank, said: "By a lot of measures, the US is the most religious of the industrialised nations."

In terms of church attendance the US is not exceptional. A survey carried out by the University of Michigan found that, while more than 40 per cent of people in the US said they went to church, in Nigeria the number was 89 per cent and in the Philippines it was about 68 per cent. In South Africa and Poland, the figure stood at 55 per cent.

But the US appears to be exceptional among industrialised nations because of the numbers who believe religion should influence policy-makers.

One survey respondent, David Black, from Osborne, Pennsylvania, said: "Our nation was founded on Judaeo-Christian policies and religious leaders have an obligation to speak out on public policy, otherwise they're wimps." Experts said many countries, unlike the US, have experienced religious conflicts that have made people suspicious of giving clergy any say in policy.

"In Germany, they have a Christian Democratic Party, and talk about Christian values but they don't talk about them in the same way that we do," said Brent Nelsen, from Furman University in South Carolina.

Science has established that the brain is a growing thing and that it’s health affects the way it functions. An article in New Scientist outlined ten different approaches to improving the health of that grey matter.

1) Smart drugs. Cognitive Enhancement drugs are already on the market. As an example, the most popular is modafinil. Originally designed to fight narcolepsy (suddenly falling asleep), it helps healthy people maintain alertness for almost four days with no sleep, and function better than those who do sleep!

2) Food. Breakfast is especially important to brain function, as it need special feeding when it wakes up. Good brain food breakfast: beans on toast. Lunch should be eggs and salad, with yogurt as dessert. Have fish for dinner, with strawberries and blueberries for dessert.

3) Listen to music, better yet, take lessons. The “Mozart effect,” the increased ability shown in mathematics after listening to Mozart is even stronger if listening is accompanied by active practice. Music lessons are better than going to concerts.

4) Get a job! If not, then work puzzles. Using your mind to good purposes is helpful to the brain. Research has found that I.Q. is not a fixed entity, but can be increased by brain-teaser workouts.

5) Improve your memory. A good memory is part method. Training in memory enhancement methods, usually having to do with training attention and using organizational techniques, improves brain function.

6) Go to sleep. Your brain hates going without sleep and can be very sensitive about it. A day without sleep makes you perform about as well as someone legally drunk. Sleep is when your brain does a lot of its homework, so get plenty.

7) Go for a walk. Exercise, even quiet or mild exercise boosts the brain’s abilities. Exercise helps older folks especially, and regular walking slows the cognitive decline normally seen in elders. Kids benefit, too, as studies show that those who exercise get better grades. Research has shown, in fact, that exercise promotes the growth of new brain cells.

8) Learn from the nuns. The convent of the School Sisters of Notre Dame on Good Counsel Hill in Mankato, Minnesota, has been participating in a longitudinal study to learn why their seventy-five to one hundred and seven year old members have such healthy brains and long lives. One researcher speculated thusly: “They do not drink or smoke, they live quietly and communally, they are spiritual and calm and they eat healthily and in moderation.” The actual research, however, may point to more specific factors. One early finding has to do with the preponderance of positive emotions these women have during their day’s routine.

9) Paying attention. A mind that wanders has a brain that is slack. Caffeine and other drugs can enhance brain arousal, but being interested and curious about your environment is also helpful. Meditation, which is practice in paying attention, is good.

10) Positive feedback. Brain function biofeedback can help brain function. Just as people can learn to control alpha waves, so can they learn to create other patterns of brain function. Research has shown that using feedback people can alter attentiveness, elevate mood, or eliminate undesirable impulses.

KATE DOUGLAS, ALISON GEORGE, BOB HOLMES, GRAHAM LAWTON, JOHN MCCRONE, ALISON MOTLUK, and H. PHILLIPS –

It doesn't matter how brai! ny you are or how much education you've had - you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn't have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behaviour that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.

Does getting old have to mean worsening memory, slower reactions and fuzzy thinking?

AROUND the age of 40, honest folks may already admit to noticing changes in their mental abilities. This is the beginning of a gradual decline that in all too many of us will culminate in full-blown dementia. If it were possible somehow to reverse it, slow it or mask it, wouldn't you?

A few drugs that might do the job, known as "cognitive enhancement", are already on the market, and a few dozen others are on the way. Perhaps the best-known is modafinil. Licensed to treat narcolepsy, the condition that causes people to suddenly fall asleep, it has notable effects in healthy people too. Modafinil can keep a person awake and alert for 90 hours straight, with none of the jitteriness and bad concentration that amphetamines or even coffee seem to produce.

In fact, with the help of modafinil, sleep-deprived people can perform even better than their well-rested, unmedicated selves. The forfeited rest doesn't even need to be made good. Military research is finding that people can stay awake for 40 hours, sleep the normal 8 hours, and then pull a few more all-nighters with no ill effects. It's an open secret that many, perhaps most, prescriptions for modafinil are written not for people who suffer from narcolepsy, but for those who simply want to stay awake. Similarly, many people are using Ritalin not because they suffer from attention deficit or any other disorder, but because they want superior concentration during exams or heavy-duty negotiations.

The pharmaceutical pipeline is clogged with promising compounds - drugs that act on the nicotinic receptors that smokers have long exploited, drugs that work on the cannabinoid system to block pot-smoking-type effects. Some drugs have also been specially designed to augment memory. Many of these look genuinely plausible: they seem to work, and without any major side effects.

So why aren't we all on cognitive enhancers already? "We need to be careful what we wish for," says Daniele Piomelli at the University of California at Irvine. He is studying the body's cannabinoid system with a view to making memories less emotionally charged in people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Tinkering with memory may have unwanted effects, he warns. "Ultimately we may end up remembering things we don't want to."

Gary Lynch, also at UC Irvine, voices a similar concern. He is the inventor of ampakines, a class of drugs that changes the rules about how a memory is encoded and how strong a memory trace is - the essence of learning (see New Scientist, 14 May, p 6). But maybe the rules have already been optimised by evolution, he suggests. What looks to be an improvement could have hidden downsides.

Still, the opportunity may be too tempting to pass up. The drug acts only in the brain, claims Lynch. It has a short half-life of hours. Ampakines have been shown to restore function to severely sleep-deprived monkeys that would otherwise perform poorly. Preliminary studies in humans are just as exciting. You could make an elderly person perform like a much younger person, he says. And who doesn't wish for that?

You are what you eat, and that includes your brain. So what is the ultimate mastermind diet?

YOUR brain is the greediest organ in your body, with some quite specific dietary requirements. So it is hardly surprising that what you eat can affect how you think. If you believe the dietary supplement industry, you could become the next Einstein just by popping the right combination of pills. Look closer, however, and it isn't that simple. The savvy consumer should take talk of brain-boosting diets with a pinch of low-sodium salt. But if it is possible to eat your way to genius, it must surely be worth a try.

First, go to the top of the class by eating breakfast. The brain is best fuelled by a steady supply of glucose, and many studies have shown that skipping breakfast reduces people's performance at school and at work.

But it isn't simply a matter of getting some calories down. According to research published in 2003, kids breakfasting on fizzy drinks and sugary snacks performed at the level of an average 70-year-old in tests of memory and attention. Beans on toast is a far better combination, as Barbara Stewart from the University of Ulster, UK, discovered. Toast alone boosted children's scores on a variety of cognitive tests, but when the tests got tougher, the breakfast with the high-protein beans worked best. Beans are also a good source of fibre, and other research has shown a link between a high-fibre diet and improved cognition. If you can't stomach beans before midday, wholemeal toast with Marmite makes a great alternative. The yeast extract is packed with B vitamins, whose brain-boosting powers have been demonstrated in many studies.

A smart choice for lunch is omelette and salad. Eggs are rich in choline, which your body uses to produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Researchers at Boston University found that when healthy young adults were given the drug scopolamine, which blocks acetylcholine receptors in the brain, it significantly reduced their ability to remember word pairs. Low levels of acetylcholine are also associated with Alzheimer's disease, and some studies suggest that boosting dietary intake may slow age-related memory loss.

A salad packed full of antioxidants, including beta-carotene and vitamins C and E, should also help keep an ageing brain in tip-top condition by helping to mop up damaging free radicals. Dwight Tapp and colleagues from the University of California at Irvine found that a diet high in antioxidants improved the cognitive skills of 39 ageing beagles - proving that you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Round off lunch with a yogurt dessert, and you should be alert and ready to face the stresses of the afternoon. That's because yogurt contains the amino acid tyrosine, needed for the production of the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin, among others. Studies by the US military indicate that tyrosine becomes depleted when we are under stress and that supplementing your intake can improve alertness and memory.

Don't forget to snaffle a snack mid-afternoon, to maintain your glucose levels. Just make sure you avoid junk food, and especially highly processed goodies such as cakes, pastries and biscuits, which contain trans-fatty acids. These not only pile on the pounds, but are implicated in a slew of serious mental disorders, from dyslexia and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to autism. Hard evidence for this is still thin on the ground, but last year researchers at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, California, reported that rats and mice raised on the rodent equivalent of junk food struggled to find their way around a maze, and took longer to remember solutions to problems they had already solved.

It seems that some of the damage may be mediated through triglyceride, a cholesterol-like substance found at high levels in rodents fed on trans-fats. When the researchers gave these rats a drug to bring triglyceride levels down again, the animals' performance on the memory tasks improved.

Brains are around 60 per cent fat, so if trans-fats clog up the system, what should you eat to keep it well oiled? Evidence is mounting in favour of omega-3 fatty acids, in particular docosahexaenoic acid or DHA. In other words, your granny was right: fish is the best brain food. Not only will it feed and lubricate a developing brain, DHA also seems to help stave off dementia. Studies published last year reveal that older mice from a strain genetically altered to develop Alzheimer's had 70 per cent less of the amyloid plaques associated with the disease when fed on a high-DHA diet.

Finally, you could do worse than finish off your evening meal with strawberries and blueberries. Rats fed on these fruits have shown improved coordination, concentration and short-term memory. And even if they don't work such wonders in people, they still taste fantastic. So what have you got to lose?

Music may tune up your thinking, but you can't just crank up the volume and expect to become a genius

A DECADE ago Frances Rauscher, a psychologist now at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, and her colleagues made waves with the discovery that listening to Mozart improved people's mathematical and spatial reasoning. Even rats ran mazes faster and more accurately after hearing Mozart than after white noise or music by the minimalist composer Philip Glass. Last year, Rauscher reported that, for rats at least, a Mozart piano sonata seems to stimulate activity in three genes involved in nerve-cell signalling in the brain.

This sounds like the most harmonious way to tune up your mental faculties. But before you grab the CDs, hear this note of caution. Not everyone who has looked for the Mozart effect has found it. What's more, even its proponents tend to think that music boosts brain power simply because it makes listeners feel better - relaxed and stimulated at the same time - and that a comparable stimulus might do just as well. In fact, one study found that listening to a story gave a similar performance boost.

There is, however, one way in which music really does make you smarter, though unfortunately it requires a bit more effort than just selecting something mellow on your iPod. Music lessons are the key. Six-year-old children who were given music lessons, as opposed to drama lessons or no extra instruction, got a 2 to 3-point boost in IQ scores compared with the others. Similarly, Rauscher found that after two years of music lessons, pre-school children scored better on spatial reasoning tests than those who took computer lessons.

Maybe music lessons exercise a range of mental skills, with their requirement for delicate and precise finger movements, and listening for pitch and rhythm, all combined with an emotional dimension. Nobody knows for sure. Neither do they know whether adults can get the same mental boost as young children. But, surely, it can't hurt to try.

If training and tricks seem too much like hard work, some technological short cuts can boost brain function

Put your mind to work in the right way and it could repay you with an impressive bonus

UNTIL recently, a person's IQ - a measure of all kinds of mental problem-solving abilities, including spatial skills, memory and verbal reasoning - was thought to be a fixed commodity largely determined by genetics. But recent hints suggest that a very basic brain function called working memory might underlie our general intelligence, opening up the intriguing possibility that if you improve your working memory, you could boost your IQ too.

Working memory is the brain's short-term information storage system. It's a workbench for solving mental problems. For example if you calculate 73 - 6 + 7, your working memory will store the intermediate steps necessary to work out the answer. And the amount of information that the working memory can hold is strongly related to general intelligence.

A team led by Torkel Klingberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, has found signs that the neural systems that underlie working memory may grow in response to training. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, they measured the brain activity of adults before and after a working-memory training programme, which involved tasks such as memorising the positions of a series of dots on a grid. After five weeks of training, their brain activity had increased in the regions associated with this type of memory (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 75).

Perhaps more significantly, when the group studied children who had completed these types of mental workouts, they saw improvement in a range of cognitive abilities not related to the training, and a leap in IQ test scores of 8 per cent (Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol 44, p 177). It's early days yet, but Klingberg thinks working-memory training could be a key to unlocking brain power. "Genetics determines a lot and so does the early gestation period," he says. "On top of that, there is a few per cent - we don't know how much - that can be improved by training."

Mind like a sieve? Don't worry. The difference between mere mortals and memory champs is more method than mental capacity

AN AUDITORIUM is filled with 600 people. As they file out, they each tell you their name. An hour later, you are asked to recall them all. Can you do it? Most of us would balk at the idea. But in truth we're probably all up to the task. It just needs a little technique and dedication.

First, learn a trick from the "mnemonists" who routinely memorise strings of thousands of digits, entire epic poems, or hundreds of unrelated words. When Eleanor Maguire from University College London and her colleagues studied eight front runners in the annual World Memory Championships they did not find any evidence that these people have particularly high IQs or differently configured brains. But, while memorising, these people did show activity in three brain regions that become active during movements and navigation tasks but are not normally active during simple memory tests.

This may be connected to the fact that seven of them used a strategy in which they place items to be remembered along a visualised route (Nature Neuroscience, vol 6, p 90). To remember the sequence of an entire pack of playing cards for example, the champions assign each card an identity, perhaps an object or person, and as they flick through the cards they can make up a story based on a sequence of interactions between these characters and objects at sites along a well-trodden route.

Actors use a related technique: they attach emotional meaning to what they say. We always remember highly emotional moments better than less emotionally loaded ones. Professional actors also seem to link words with movement, remembering action-accompanied lines significantly better than those delivered while static, even months after a show has closed.

Helga Noice, a psychologist from Elmhurst College in Illinois, and Tony Noice, an actor, who together discovered this effect, found that non-thesps can benefit by adopting a similar technique. Students who paired their words with previously learned actions could reproduce 38 per cent of them after just 5 minutes, whereas rote learners only managed 14 per cent. The Noices believe that having two mental representations gives you a better shot at remembering what you are supposed to say.

Strategy is important in everyday life too, says Barry Gordon from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Simple things like always putting your car keys in the same place, writing things down to get them off your mind, or just deciding to pay attention, can make a big difference to how much information you retain. And if names are your downfall, try making some mental associations. Just remember to keep the derogatory ones to yourself.

SKIMPING on sleep does awful things to your brain. Planning, problem-solving, learning, concentration,working memory and alertness all take a hit. IQ scores tumble. "If you have been awake for 21 hours straight, your abilities are equivalent to someone who is legally drunk," says Sean Drummond from the University of California, San Diego. And you don't need to pull an all-nighter to suffer the effects: two or three late nights and early mornings on the trot have the same effect.

Luckily, it's reversible - and more. If you let someone who isn't sleep-deprived have an extra hour or two of shut-eye, they perform much better than normal on tasks requiring sustained attention, such taking an exam. And being able to concentrate harder has knock-on benefits for overall mental performance. "Attention is the base of a mental pyramid," says Drummond. "If you boost that, you can't help boosting everything above it."

These are not the only benefits of a decent night's sleep. Sleep is when your brain processes new memories, practises and hones new skills - and even solves problems. Say you're trying to master a new video game. Instead of grinding away into the small hours, you would be better off playing for a couple of hours, then going to bed. While you are asleep your brain will reactivate the circuits it was using as you learned the game, rehearse them, and then shunt the new memories into long-term storage. When you wake up, hey presto! You will be a better player. The same applies to other skills such as playing the piano, driving a car and, some researchers claim, memorising facts and figures. Even taking a nap after training can help, says Carlyle Smith of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.

There is also some evidence that sleep can help produce moments of problem-solving insight. The famous story about the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev suddenly "getting" the periodic table in a dream after a day spent struggling with the problem is probably true. It seems that sleep somehow allows the brain to juggle new memories to produce flashes of creative insight. So if you want to have a eureka moment, stop racking your brains and get your head down.

IT'S a dream come true for those who hate studying. Simply walking sedately for half an hour three times a week can improve abilities such as learning, concentration and abstract reasoning by 15 per cent. The effects are particularly noticeable in older people. Senior citizens who walk regularly perform better on memory tests than their sedentary peers. What's more, over several years their scores on a variety of cognitive tests show far less decline than those of non-walkers. Every extra mile a week has measurable benefits.

It's not only oldies who benefit, however. Angela Balding from the University of Exeter, UK, has found that schoolchildren who exercise three or four times a week get higher than average exam grades at age 10 or 11. The effect is strongest in boys, and while Balding admits that the link may not be causal, she suggests that aerobic exercise may boost mental powers by getting extra oxygen to your energy-guzzling brain.

There's another reason why your brain loves physical exercise: it promotes the growth of new brain cells. Until recently, received wisdom had it that we are born with a full complement of neurons and produce no new ones during our lifetime. Fred Gage from the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, busted that myth in 2000 when he showed that even adults can grow new brain cells. He also found that exercise is one of the best ways to achieve this.

In mice, at least, the brain-building effects of exercise are strongest in the hippocampus, which is involved with learning and memory. This also happens to be the brain region that is damaged by elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. So if you are feeling frazzled, do your brain a favour and go for a run.

Even more gentle exercise, such as yoga, can do wonders for your brain. Last year, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, reported results from a pilot study in which they considered the mood-altering ability of different yoga poses. Comparing back bends, forward bends and standing poses, they concluded that the best way to get a mental lift is to bend over backwards.

And the effect works both ways. Just as physical exercise can boost the brain, mental exercise can boost the body. In 2001, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Ohio asked volunteers to spend just 15 minutes a day thinking about exercising their biceps. After 12 weeks, their arms were 13 per cent stronger.

If you don't want senility to interfere with your old age, perhaps you should seek some sisterly guidance

THE convent of the School Sisters of Notre Dame on Good Counsel Hill in Mankato, Minnesota, might seem an unusual place for a pioneering brain-science experiment. But a study of its 75 to 107-year-old inhabitants is revealing more about keeping the brain alive and healthy than perhaps any other to date. The "Nun study" is a unique collaboration between 678 Catholic sisters recruited in 1991 and Alzheimer's expert David Snowdon of the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging and the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

The sisters' miraculous longevity - the group boasts seven centenarians and many others well on their way - is surely in no small part attributable to their impeccable lifestyle. They do not drink or smoke, they live quietly and communally, they are spiritual and calm and they eat healthily and in moderation. Nevertheless, small differences between individual nuns could reveal the key to a healthy mind in later life.

Some of the nuns have suffered from Alzheimer's disease, but many have avoided any kind of dementia or senility. They include Sister Matthia, who was mentally fit and active from her birth in 1894 to the day she died peacefully in her sleep, aged 104. She was happy and productive, knitting mittens for the poor every day until the end of her life. A post-mortem of Sister Matthia's brain revealed no signs of excessive ageing. But in some other, remarkable cases, Snowdon has found sisters who showed no outwards signs of senility in life, yet had brains that looked as if they were ravaged by dementia.

How did Sister Matthia and the others cheat time? Snowdon's study, which includes an annual barrage of mental agility tests and detailed medical exams, has found several common denominators. The right amount of vitamin folate is one. Verbal ability early in life is another, as are positive emotions early in life, which were revealed by Snowdon's analysis of the personal autobiographical essays each woman wrote in her 20s as she took her vows. Activities, crosswords, knitting and exercising also helped to prevent senility, showing that the old adage "use it or lose it" is pertinent. And spirituality, or the positive attitude that comes from it, can't be overlooked. But individual differences also matter. To avoid dementia, your general health may be vital: metabolic problems, small strokes and head injuries seem to be common triggers of Alzheimer's dementia.

Obviously, you don't have to become a nun to stay mentally agile. We can all aspire to these kinds of improvements. As one of the sisters put it, "Think no evil, do no evil, hear no evil, and you will never write a best-selling novel."

You can be smart, well-read, creative and knowledgeable, but none of it is any use if your mind isn't on the job

PAYING attention is a complex mental process, an interplay of zooming in on detail and stepping back to survey the big picture. So unfortunately there is no single remedy to enhance your concentration. But there are a few ways to improve it.

The first is to raise your arousal levels. The brain's attentional state is controlled by the neurotransmitters dopamine and noradrenalin. Dopamine encourages a persistent, goal-centred state of mind whereas noradrenalin produces an outward-looking, vigilant state. So not surprisingly, anything that raises dopamine levels can boost your powers of concentration.

One way to do this is with drugs such as amphetamines and the ADHD drug methylphenidate, better known as Ritalin. Caffeine also works. But if you prefer the drug-free approach, the best strategy is to sleep well, eat foods packed with slow-release sugars, and take lots of exercise. It also helps if you are trying to focus on something that you find interesting.

The second step is to cut down on distractions. Workplace studies have found that it takes up to 15 minutes to regain a deep state of concentration after a distraction such as a phone call. Just a few such interruptions and half the day is wasted.

Music can help as long as you listen to something familiar and soothing that serves primarily to drown out background noise. Psychologists also recommend that you avoid working near potential diversions, such as the fridge.

There are mental drills to deal with distractions. College counsellors routinely teach students to recognise when their thoughts are wandering, and catch themselves by saying "Stop! Be here now!" It sounds corny but can develop into a valuable habit. As any Zen meditator will tell you, concentration is as much a skill to be lovingly cultivated as it is a physiochemical state of the brain.

IT SOUNDS a bit New Age, but there is a mysterious method of thought control you can learn that seems to boost brain power. No one quite knows how it works, and it is hard to describe exactly how to do it: it's not relaxation or concentration as such, more a state of mind. It's called neurofeedback. And it is slowly gaining scientific credibility.

Neurofeedback grew out of biofeedback therapy, popular in the 1960s. It works by showing people a real-time measure of some seemingly uncontrollable aspect of their physiology - heart rate, say - and encouraging them to try and change it. Astonishingly, many patients found that they could, though only rarely could they describe how they did it.

More recently, this technique has been applied to the brain - specifically to brain wave activity measured by an electroencephalogram, or EEG. The first attempts were aimed at boosting the size of the alpha wave, which crescendos when we are calm and focused. In one experiment, researchers linked the speed of a car in a computer game to the size of the alpha wave. They then asked subjects to make the car go faster using only their minds. Many managed to do so, and seemed to become more alert and focused as a result.

This early success encouraged others, and neurofeedback soon became a popular alternative therapy for ADHD. There is now good scientific evidence that it works, as well as some success in treating epilepsy, depression, tinnitus, anxiety, stroke and brain injuries.

And to keep up with the times, some experimenters have used brain scanners in place of EEGs. Scanners can allow people to see and control activity of specific parts of the brain. A team at Stanford University in California showed that people could learn to control pain by watching the activity of their pain centres (New Scientist, 1 May 2004, p 9).

But what about outside the clinic? Will neuro feedback ever allow ordinary people to boost their brain function? Possibly. John Gruzelier of Imperial College London has shown that it can improve medical students' memory and make them feel calmer before exams. He has also shown that it can improve musicians' and dancers' technique, and is testing it out on opera singers and surgeons.

Neils Birbaumer from the University of Tübingen in Germany wants to see whether neurofeedback can help psychopathic criminals control their impulsiveness. And there are hints that the method could boost creativity, enhance our orgasms, give shy people more confidence, lift low moods, alter the balance between left and right brain activity, and alter personality traits. All this by the power of thought.

Three in four Americans believe in the paranormal Gallup survey says

Three in four Americans believe
in the paranormal Gallup survey says