Health & Science

The lure of music for depressed teenagers

Teenagers who spend a lot of time listening to music are more likely to be depressed, a new study has found, while those who read are considerably less so. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh closely monitored the activity of 106 teenagers, half of whom had been diagnosed with clinical depression, over the course of eight weeks. Surprisingly, they found that the amount of time the subjects spent on TV, movies, video games, and Facebook had no correlation with their mental health. But music did: Those who listened for five or more hours per day were eight times more likely to be depressed than those who didn’t listen often. And though only a tiny fraction of the volunteers spent much time reading, avid readers were 90 percent less likely to be depressed than those who rarely cracked a book or magazine. The study doesn’t prove that music causes depression, lead author Brian Primack tells NPR.org. But it does suggest that listening to music appeals to teens who “don’t have a lot of energy,” which is a warning sign of depression. To read, on the other hand, “you really have to engage a lot of your brain,” something that is harder for depressed teens to muster the energy to do.

Penguins short on food

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The populations of two penguin species in western Antarctica have dropped by half since the 1980s, a 30-year study has found, because of a shortage of krill, the tiny crustaceans that are their main food source. Lead author Wayne Trivelpiece tells The New York Times that 90 percent of young Adélie and chinstrap penguins don’t make it through their first year because “they are not finding the food they need.” He estimates that krill density in the Southern Ocean has fallen by 80 percent since the mid-1970s. Part of the reason is that populations of fur seals and whales, which also eat krill, are recovering after decades of overhunting; the human catch of krill has also risen steeply in recent years. But global warming plays a crucial role, too, since krill eat algae that grow on ever-shrinking sea ice. “As warming continues,” Trivelpiece says, “the loss of krill will have a profound effect throughout the Antarctic ecosystem.”

Senior moments explained

As we get older, the odds increase that we’ll blank on where we put the car keys or what we’re looking for in the fridge. But such “senior moments” aren’t exactly a memory problem. Rather, they are evidence of a glitch in “how brain networks switch between tasks,” neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley tells LiveScience.com. He and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, compared the brains of seniors in their 60s and 70s to those of volunteers in their 20s by having them play two memory games. The two groups performed almost equally well when asked to look at a picture of a field or a forest, keep it in mind for 15 seconds, and then say whether it matched a second photo. But when researchers interrupted the two landscapes with a picture of a face, the seniors proved much less capable of matching the scenes. Scans of their brains showed that they were slow to stop processing the face and re-engage in landscape analysis—tasks handled by different parts of the brain. Understanding how the glitch works could allow scientists to devise brain-training programs to help older people multitask better—especially now that portable gadgets can distract seniors when they’re driving or crossing the street.

Order fosters tolerance

Could cleaning up clutter make people more open-minded? Researchers from Tilburg University in the Netherlands say it can, Nature.com reports. In a series of innovative experiments, they found that exposure to disorder—from standing on a shabby street to looking at a photo of a messy bookshelf—made people more likely to agree with negative stereotypes about Muslims and homosexuals, and less disposed to donate to charity. They also found that when white subjects were asked to sit down on a trash-strewn train platform, they tended to choose a seat farther away from black people than from white ones; on a clean platform they didn’t discriminate. The authors say their study suggests that stereotyping may be “a way to cope with chaos” by mentally organizing people into neat categories, and that investments in tidying up neighborhoods and parks “may be relatively inexpensive and effective ways to reduce stereotyping and discrimination.”