Give in to cravings? We’re all Pavlov’s dog in response to the siren song of food

Q. What makes some of us all but powerless in the presence of a cruller?

A. “Food cues. These make you eat more,” answers Yale University neuroscientist Hedy Kober in “Discover” magazine. “The sight of food, the smell of it, even just a picture of it — they all make us want it. Just like the classic example of dogs drooling at the ring of a dinnertime bell, it’s out-and-out Pavlovian — a conditioned response to a stimulus.” And just like dogs, we need food but also like it.

The explanation has neurobiological origins: One system regulates our need for food and is controlled mainly in the lower region of the brain, regulating hormones that make us feel hungry or full and responding to energy balance signals. The second, our hedonic reward system, is complex and not well understood, though research shows that it makes us want to eat, even when we’re not hungry. While the two systems aren’t completely separate, “no amount of satisfying that hunger will shut it down.”

Call it “the siren song of food.” As Kober describes it: “I remember afternoon meetings when there was no earthly reason I should be hungry, staring down the damn cruller. The meetings were long. I stood no chance. I am Pavlov’s dog. We’re all Pavlov’s dogs.”

Q. Babies in TV or films are frequently depicted crying. How are they made to do this?

A. Practicing midwife Terri Coates of Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK, and midwifery adviser for the BBC’s “Call the Midwife” TV show has a lot of experience handling babies on film sets, she writes in “New Scientist” magazine. Regulations about babies on a film set are understandably restrictive: They are required only for a few minutes at a time, so they and their parent or chaperone wait in comfort off camera. Though the set is made as baby-friendly as possible—calm, warm and quiet—one necessary disruption involves costume changes. Because most babies don’t like being disturbed to be dressed or undressed, “the change is made as late as feasible, so the baby is kept with the parent until the last possible moment.” Also, the actor handling the baby will have rehearsed the scene and ideally met the baby beforehand.

As for the crying, Coates explains: “Babies quickly pick up adult feelings and emotions, so an anxious actor usually ends up holding a crying child. Babies are not made to cry on cue, so any crying that is caught on camera is serendipitous.”

Q. When lightning gets to really lighting things up, how extreme can things get?

A. You can call the stuff extreme and in rare instances the term fits electrifyingly well, as in one case in Oklahoma some years ago, when a streak was clocked at 5.7 seconds and measured crossing over 300 kilometers of sky, roughly the distance from Washington, D.C., to New York City, says Thomas Sumner in “Science News” magazine. Outdoing this one by plenty was a single lightning flash in southern France in 2012 that “lit up the sky nonstop for 7.74 seconds, enough time for light to make about three round trips from Earth to the moon.”

These two flashes have been recognized by a World Meteorological Organization committee as the world record holders for lightning distance and duration. Though lightning flashes used to be defined as lasting a second or less, scientists can now accurately track much longer flashes, so the committee recommended dropping the time limit. “As scientists get better looks at lightning, these records may be gone in a flash.”