The nose knows why it is you tend to eat more when you’re feeling tired
Q. When people want to know about the total unemployment rate for the U.S., they commonly go by the “official figure,” which at the beginning of 2017 measured 4.8%. But the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics actually uses five other alternatives to quantify “labor underutilization.” Can you name any of them? A. In ascending order, people unemployed 15 weeks or longer as a share of the total civilian labor force as of the beginning of 2017 was 1.9%, says Vaclav Smil in “IEEE Spectrum” magazine. Next were those who lost jobs and completed temporary jobs at 2.3%; then was the official rate of 4.8%. Next were all unemployed workers plus discouraged workers at 5.1%, and at 5.8% were that category plus all people “marginally attached” to the labor forces. Finally, the highest stat at 9.4% was the previous category plus those who worked only part time but would have preferred full-time work.
Importantly, “if you lose your job, you count as unemployed only if you keep looking for a job; otherwise, you never get counted again.” In Smil’s view, “the complex reality of (un)employment can never be caught by aggregate numbers…” And, he concludes, “Numbers may not lie, but which truth do they convey?” Q. Everyone smiles in the same language, right? Aren’t facial expressions one of those universals? A. That’s what Paul Ekman and others argued back in the 1960s; for example, a crunched-up nose signals disgust. Even in the isolated Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea, Ekman’s theory found confirmation. But some researchers today believe that subtle differences in different facial expressions show up in different cultures, says Teal Burrell in “Discover” magazine. The Ekman theory doesn’t hold up, maintains Boston College psychologist James Russell.
When Russell and colleagues asked Spaniards and Papua New Guinea’s Trobrianders to interpret a wide-eyed gasping face, the Trobrianders said the person was likely to attack. The wide-open eyes and wide-open mouth Ekman identified as a fear signal, they saw as a threat. The Spaniards, on the other hand, felt the person making the face was likely to run away scared (“Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”).
Counters Ekman: Recent evidence reveals not only distinct brain circuits for different emotions but also the presence of facial expressions at birth for some emotions like disgust, suggesting they’re innate. “The evidence is quite strong this is a universal signaling system… I need to learn different words or different bodily gestures if I’m traveling to another country, but I don’t need to learn different expressions.” Q. Your nose knows when you’re tired. How so? A. Researchers have found that sleep deprivation seems to increase the brain’s sensitivity to food smells, says Laurel Hamers of “Science News” magazine. In a recent study, adults who’d had only four hours of sleep underwent functional MRI scans while inhaling food odors like those from potato chips and non-food ones like fir trees. The same group was then tested later after eight hours of sleep.
Tellingly, people responding to food smells showed more brain activity in areas involved in olfaction when they were tired than when they were well-rested, reported Surabhi Bhutani of Northwestern University’s medical school in Chicago. That spike wasn’t seen for nonfood odors. Perhaps, Hamers suggests, such heightened brain activity “might make snacks more enticing, helping to explain why people who burn the candle at both ends tend to eat more and gain weight.”