The Triangle

Issue date: 5/14/04 Section: Sci-Tech

Platek

Steven Platek is an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences. He received his undergraduate degree in psychology with a minor in music from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. from the University of Albany, State University of New York, where he began conducting his research on the evolutionary psychology and the brain.

The Triangle: Evolutionary cognitive neuroscience -- what does this mean for someone who doesn't know anything about biology or psychology?

Steven Platek: Evolutionary biology is Darwin's theory of natural selection. So we apply that theory to a field that's called cognitive neuroscience, which is basically understanding the relationship between the brain and behavior. [Why] does your brain make you think the way you do, or why when you feel a certain way do certain parts of your brain become recruited for that activity?

So for example, [when] you see an angry or a happy face, a part of your brain called the amygdala will become active. And what we're trying to do is understand why that's becoming active so that we can understand how the brain has evolved to deal with things like looking at angry faces or how you react socially [to someone] who's yelling at you [might be important for your survival], these sorts of things. Essentially, it's applying the question of "why" to how the brain and behavior interact; what did our ancestors have to do to solve certain problems and what their brains [had] to do to solve these problems in order to survive the wilderness and also [most importantly] to reproduce.

T: I understand you've done a lot of research with yawning and it's effect on people. What can you get from that, once you've learned what's behind it in the brain?

SP: In basic science, understanding why yawning is contagious is just plain cool, because everyone kind of notices it. Contagious yawning seems to be a social synchronization, dealing with things like sleep and empathy. How can we apply it? Our research has shown that individuals who are schizophrenic don't show this trait. So it might be a good early indicator developmentally if there's an onset, at about ages 4-7, when little kids will start showing something like contagious yawning. If children start to show unusual or atypical social behavior and also do not manifest this contagious yawning effect, maybe that's a good indicator that we need to get them to the neurologist, because there might be something more basic wrong with their neurochemistry or their brain.

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