A new brain module for understanding whole words

While it has been known that rapidly comprehending whole words activates an area called the visual word form area (VWFA), the same area is also activated by faces and objects. Gaillard et al have now shown that this area is indispensable for reading whole words, but not faces and objects. In an operation for severe epilespy, they removed a small area near the VWFA. The patient now required 900 milliseconds rather than 600 milliseconds to recognize a three letter word, suggesting a transition from reading the whole word to reading letter by letter.

What is curious is that a task invented only about 6,000 years ago, understanding whole words as entities instead of letter by letter, apparently requires a dedicated brain area. Since this is a very short time for genetic changes that might enable such an area, it seems more likely that this specialzed area forms during language development in each individual as a solution to the problem of rapidly processing written text.

The Paomnnehal Pweor Of The Hmuan Mnid

I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdgnieg.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Amzanighuh?

Inhibiting Negative Emotions - Opps!, A simple story evaporates

Numerous studies from Davidson's laboratory and others have shown that deliberately suppressing negative affect correlates with increased activity in the prefrontal cortex (and vice versa). The idea has been that the more modern thinking and interpreting prefrontal cortex feeds down to inhibit the amygdala, the center of emotional reactivity in our more primitive mammalian brain. Most of this work was done on college students or younger people. Urry et al now find that older subjects, 62-64 years of age, can suppress negative affect without a corresponding increase in prefrontal activation. In a supplement they offer reasons for the discrepancy. It is very hard to walk away with any kind of clean message now, a situation not helped by the fact that this is one of the most poorly written jargon laden papers I have ever tried to wade through. The senior authors should have paid more attention to what they were putting their name on.

Brain's Reward Pathway Involved in Mood Disorders

A recent Science article by Berton et. al. shows that long lasting fearful and withdrawal behaviors that are induced in mice by bullying and intimidation are enabled by a nerve growth factor (BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic factor) acting in the mesolimbic dopamine reward pathway in the brain. When a genetic trick is used to knock out DBNT production in just this area, mice are no longer intimidated by bullies. Elsewhere in the brain BDNF is associated with an opposite effect, antidepressant actions. The authors point out that the brain's reward system has been slighted in research on emotional disorders, even though the inability to experience rewarding feelings is a hallmark of depression and emotional withdrawal.

The Self-Help Scam

In the May 2006 issue of The Scientific American, Michael Shermer (publisher of Skeptic magazine) argues that the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (SHAM), an $8.5 billion-a-year business, is a scam. He notes the recent book by Steve Salerno, "SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (Crown Publishing Group, 2005). There is an eighteen week rule: the most likely customer for a self help book is someone who bought a similar book with the preceeding eighteen months. If the books worked, why would one need further help? A bulletproof shield surrounds SHAM: if your life does not get better, it is your fault, your thoughts were not positive enough. The solution? More of the same self-help. SHAM books market a clever mix of victimization and empowerment. We are all victims of our demonic "inner children" replaying negative tapes. Redemption comes from empowering yourself with the new "life script" offered by the self-help book or by the masters themselves at prices ranging from $500 to $6,000. Unfortunately there is no evidence that any of the SHAM techniques is better than doing something else or even doing nothing (the same problem is faced by virtually all therapies).

Our inability to cope with what empirical data show us to be true about how our minds work...

I get frustrated when I try to reconcile what I know from empirical data to be true about my self (see the "I-Illusion" essay on this website) with the common sense feeling of agency and responsibility that we are share.

Our commonsense conceptions of ourselves have co-evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, along with their physiological, homeostatic, neuroendocrine, and limbic emotional correlates. This whole complex (us, that is) can be upset by facing what it can come to know to be true about the impersonal physical processes that actually run our show, finding it impossible to integrate its 'illusory' self image.

Here is a clip, and then its more extended context from the piece by Metzinger on edge.org..his response to the question "What is your dangerous idea." He frames it much better than I can. First the clip:

"I think that the irritation and deep sense of resentment surrounding public debates on the freedom of the will actually has nothing much to do with the actual options on the table. It has to do with the perfectly sensible intuition that our presently obvious answer will not only be emotionally disturbing, but ultimately impossible to integrate into our conscious self-models."

Then the more extended quotation:

"For middle-sized objects at 37° like the human brain and the human body, determinism is obviously true. The next state of the physical universe is always determined by the previous state. And given a certain brain-state plus an environment you could never have acted otherwise. A surprisingly large majority of experts in the free-will debate today accept this obvious fact...."

"Yes, you are a physically determined system. But this is not a big problem, because, under certain conditions, we may still continue to say that you are "free": all that matters is that your actions are caused by the right kinds of brain processes and that they originate in you. A physically determined system can well be sensitive to reasons and to rational arguments, to moral considerations, to questions of value and ethics, as long as all of this is appropriately wired into its brain. You can be rational, and you can be moral, as long as your brain is physically determined in the right way. You like this basic idea: physical determinism is compatible with being a free agent. You endorse a materialist philosophy of freedom as well. An intellectually honest person open to empirical data, you simply believe that something along these lines must be true.

Now you try to feel that it is true. You try to consciously experience the fact that at any given moment of your life, you could not have acted otherwise. You try to experience the fact that even your thoughts, however rational and moral, are predetermined — by something unconscious, by something you can not see. And in doing so, you start fooling around with the conscious self-model Mother Nature evolved for you with so much care and precision over millions of years: You are scratching at the user-surface of your own brain, tweaking the mouse-pointer, introspectively trying to penetrate into the operating system, attempting to make the invisible visible. You are challenging the integrity of your phenomenal self by trying to integrate your new beliefs, the neuroscientific image of man, with your most intimate, inner way of experiencing yourself. How does it feel?

I think that the irritation and deep sense of resentment surrounding public debates on the freedom of the will actually has nothing much to do with the actual options on the table. It has to do with the perfectly sensible intuition that our presently obvious answer will not only be emotionally disturbing, but ultimately impossible to integrate into our conscious self-models.

Or our societies: The robust conscious experience of free will also is a social institution, because the attribution of accountability, responsibility, etc. are the decisive building blocks for modern, open societies. And the currently obvious answer might be interpreted by many as having clearly anti-democratic implications: Making a complex society work implies controlling the behavior of millions of people; if individual human beings can control their own behavior to a much lesser degree than we have thought in the past, if bottom-up doesn't work, then it becomes tempting to control it top-down, by the state. And this is the second way in which enlightenment could devour its own children. Yes, free will truly is a dangerous question, but for different reasons than most people think. "

Why do I feel an urge to write about how the mind works?

Here are some sentences trying to put together one motivation for doing this website and this mindblog....and for working up a new web essay titled "The Merging of Minds" .. about how our behavior is unconsciously regulated by our social brains and their mirroring systems. If you are reading this (I don't know whether the counter on this web page is monitoring real people or web-bots) I would appreciate any expression of interest or disinterest. (Feedback on this site is very close to zero).

Some sentences of rationale:

Understanding the biological processes that generate our sense of self, our feelings, and our connections to each other reveals engines of our behavior previously hidden from our awareness. Using our awareness to get partial glimpses of those engines in action can loosen their iron grip and let our behaviors be more spontaneous and competent.

I want to cast this material in the form of the lived body understanding it as it plays out in our self observed moment-to-moment behavior, in addition to the more conventional expository writing. This was the point of the self exercises in my "Biology of Mind" book.

Intellectual Ability and Brain Cortex Development in Children

Shaw et. al. have recently published a fascinating study in Nature Magazine that shows that the trajectory of change in the thickness of the cerebral cortex during its development, rather than cortical thickness itself, is most closely related to level of intelligence. Previous studies attempting to correlate thickness or size of frontal cortical regions with intelligence had provided mixed results. Compared to children with average scores, cortex starts out thinner
in children with IQ scores above 120 but later grows thicker. A review of this work by Miller quotes Shaw: "The cortex gets thicker during childhood and reaches a peak and then gets thinner." But the timing of these events was dramatically different in the "superior" group. "the cortex in these children started out thinner, on average, than in the other groups. Then it grew rapidly, starting around age 7, and peaked in thickness around 11 before falling off. Cortical thickness peaked between 7 and 8 years of age in the average-IQ group, and a year or two later in the high-IQ group. By early adulthood, the cortex in all three groups was roughly the same thickness."

Power of Prayer? - apparently not.....

Herbert Benson, author of "The Relaxation Response" and researcher into medical effects of relaxation and prayer has just published, along his coworkers, some long awaited results: "Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer." (American Heart Journal Volume 151, Issue 4 , April 2006, Pages 934-942). There have been several claims that prayer by strangers could ameliorate the condition of patients at another location (by unknown or supernatural forces...). Over ten studies have been carried out over the past six years with mixed results, but none approached the scientific rigor and number of patients involved in Benson's study.

Not only were there no effects of prayer, but the third of the subjects who were informed that they were being prayed for did slightly worse (performance anxiety?)

Seeing as a way of acting.

I want to point out an accessible and fascinating web lecture with dynamic visual examples that outlines how we mentally construct our visual world (as well as the world interpreted through our other senses). The common view is that seeing is making an internal representation in our brains. O'Regan's new view is that seeing is knowing about things to do. This will make sense to you if you scan through O'Regan's very accessible introduction to the basic experiments and ideas: "Experience is not something we feel but something we do: a principled way of explaining sensory phenomenology, with Change Blindness and other empirical consequences."

One quote from the essay:
"In neuroscience today, one of the problems people are grappling with is to try to understand how a physical entity like a brain can give rise to something like the feeling of seeing, which is patently not physical.

Some as yet unknown mysterious, possibly even nonphysical mechanism has to be postulated to instill experience into the brain. But under the new view, the problem disappears, because experience is not in the brain at all.

It's in the doing of the exploration, and in the knowledge of the things that will change as you explore. Instead of the role of the brain being to generate the experience of seeing, the role of the brain simply becomes that of generating the exploratory activity which underlies the seeing, and that of holding the knowledge of current possibilities for action that underlies seeing.

Thus, the problem of finding a mechanism to generate experience in the brain disappears."

O'Regan's website provides links to his other work, and includes some excellent change blindness demonstrations, as well as a link to download his 2001 magnum opus in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

How to spot a baby conservative

A friend sent me this link to an article in the Toronto Star...

KID POLITICS | Whiny children, claims a new study, tend to grow up rigid and traditional. Future liberals, on the other hand ...

"Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right......"

Important models of self and sensing, and their reviewers

You will find on the Psyche website two fascinating symposia. One deals with Thomas Metzinger's magisterial (and very long and dense) book titled "Being No One" in which he develops a model of the phenomenal self. No one has better understood and integrated the basic domains of philosophy, neurobiology, and psychology. The review by Gallagher is particularly interesting.

A second symposium deals with Alva Noe's book "Action in Perception" which argues that perceiving is a way of acting, and that perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. Rather it is something we do. The review by Clark is interesting.

How genes make up your mind

You will find a nice introduction to this topic by Thomas Ramsoy on the Science and Consciousness Review website. He gives the necessary background (showing the brain anatomy and chemistry) for understanding a paper by Harari et al. that correlates a variation in human serotonin transporter genes with fear and anxiety traits and amygdala activation.

What is happening in your brain during a sensory illusion?

This article by Blankenburg et al, "The Cutaneous Rabbit Illusion Affects Human Primary Sensory Cortex Somatotopically" demonstrates that during an illusion regions of the brain that would actually be responding to the real stimulus become active.

"We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study neural correlates of a robust somatosensory illusion that can dissociate tactile perception from physical stimulation. Repeated rapid stimulation at the wrist, then near the elbow, can create the illusion of touches at intervening locations along the arm, as if a rabbit hopped along it. We examined brain activity in humans using fMRI, with improved spatial resolution, during this version of the classic cutaneous rabbit illusion. As compared with control stimulation at the same skin sites (but in a different order that did not induce the illusion), illusory sequences activated contralateral primary somatosensory cortex, at a somatotopic location corresponding to the filled-in illusory perception on the forearm. Moreover, the amplitude of this somatosensory activation was comparable to that for veridical stimulation including the intervening position on the arm. The illusion additionally activated areas of premotor and prefrontal cortex. These results provide direct evidence that illusory somatosensory percepts can affect primary somatosensory cortex in a manner that corresponds somatotopically to the illusory percept."

What We Know May Not Change Us

Here are a few quotations from a very sane and brief essay by Barry Smith, a philosopher at the University of London.

"Human beings, like everything else, are part of the natural world...we need many different kinds of theories at different levels of description to account for everything there is.

Theories at these different levels may not be reduced one to another. What matters is that they be compatible with one another. The astronomy Newton gave us was a triumph over supernaturalism because it united the mechanics of the sub-lunary world with an account of the heavenly bodies. In a similar way, biology allowed us to advance from a time when we saw life in terms of an elan vital. Today, the biggest challenge is to explain our powers of thinking and imagination, our abilities to represent and report our thoughts: the very means by which we engage in scientific theorising. The final triumph of the natural sciences over supernaturalism will be an account of nature of conscious experience. The cognitive and brain sciences have done much to make that project clearer but we are still a long way from a fully satisfying theory.

But even if we succeed in producing a theory of human thought and reason, of perception, of conscious mental life, compatible with other theories of the natural and biological world, will we relinquish our cherished commonsense conceptions of ourselves as human beings, as selves who know ourselves best, who deliberate and decide freely on what to do and how to live? There is much evidence that we won't. As humans we conceive ourselves as centres of experience, self-knowing and free willing agents. We see ourselves and others as acting on our beliefs, desires, hopes and fears, and has having responsibility for much that we do and all that we say. And even as results in neuroscience begin to show how much more automated, routinised and pre-conscious much of our behaviour is, we are remain unable to let go of the self-beliefs that govern our day to day rationalisings and dealings with others.

We are perhaps incapable of treating others as mere machines, even if that turns out to be what we are. The self-conceptions we have are firmly in place and sustained in spite of our best findings, and it may be a fact about human beings that it will always be so. We are curious and interested in neuroscientists findings and we wonder at them and about their applications to ourselves, but as the great naturalistic philosopher David Hume knew, nature is too strong in us, and it will not let us give up our cherished and familiar ways of thinking for long. Hume knew that however curious an idea and vision of ourselves we entertained in our study, or in the lab, when we returned to the world to dine, make merry with our friends our most natural beliefs and habits returned and banished our stranger thoughts and doubts."

Different Brain Systems Regulating Response to Risk and Uncertainty

How much would you pay me for a deck of 100 cards, half blue and half red, if I told you that if you drew a card from the deck without looking and correctly specified its color you would get $100? Most people would off about $45 for such a deck, indicating an aversion to risk. If offered a second deck and not told how many of the cards are blue and how many are white, the offer drops to $42, indicating that much larger an aversion to risk plus ambiguity. The odds of getting the $100 are actually 50-50 in both cases, but in the first people think 'they know the probability."

Hsu et al use functional brain imaging to show that the brain treats the two decks in different ways. Ambiguity in choice (the second deck) correlates positively with activation of the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, regions involving emotional values of options, and negatively with a striatal system. Striatal activation correlates more strongly with risk and and expected reward (the first deck).

By the way, if you want to learn a bit more about the brain, and brain structures mentioned above, try Neuroscience for Kids. Or better, the more advanced Digital Anatomist or Braininfo sites.

Can physics save your soul?

Dennis Overbye writes an excellent piece in the March 14 New York Times science section.

It is as clear a debunking as I have read of the feel good new age movement, dating from the 1960's, to blend modern quantum physics and consciousness. The argument seems to be that since there are deep paradoxes we can't grasp about physics and consciousness, they must share a deep unity. So maybe reality is just a mental construct we can manipulate, etc. etc.

The popular underground movies "What the #$!%* Do We Know" and its successor "What the Bleep, Down the Rabbit Hole" raise a question for Overbye "Do we really have to indulge in bad physics to feel good?" These movies, along with new age books liek "The Tao of Physics" and "The Dancing Wu Li Master" attempt to connect quantum physic to Eastern mysticism... the movie and the books promote "the idea that, at some level, our minds are in control of reality.." The minor factual problem is that "the waves that symbolize quantum possibilities are so fragile they collapse with the slightest encounter with their environment. Conscious observers are not needed." This is the unanimous opinion of working physicists today. One of them, Dr. David Albert, a professor of philosophy and physics at Columbia, points out that Eugene Wigner, the Nobel laureate who ventured the suggestion that consciousness might be a key to understanding how the "fog of quantum possibilities prescribed by mathematical theory can condense into one concrete actuality.... framed the process in strict mathematical and probabilistic terms..The desires and intentions of the observer had nothing to do with it."

"In other words, reality is out of our control..It's a casino universe...

An extended quote from Overbye :

"Not that there is anything wrong with that. There's a great story to be told about atoms and the void: how atoms evolved out of fire and bent space and grew into Homer, Chartres cathedral and "Blonde on Blonde." How those same atoms came to learn that the earth, sun, life, intelligence and the whole universe will eventually die.

I can hardly blame the quantum mystics for avoiding this story, and sticking to the 1960's.

When it comes to physics, people seem to need to kid themselves. There is a presumption, Dr. Albert said, that if you look deeply enough you will find "some reaffirmation of your own centrality to the world, a reaffirmation of your ability to take control of your own destiny." We want to know that God loves us, that we are the pinnacle of evolution.

But one of the most valuable aspects of science, he said, is precisely the way it resists that temptation to find the answer we want. That is the test that quantum mysticism flunks, and on some level we all flunk.

I'd like to believe that like Galileo, I would have the courage to see the world clearly, in all its cruelty and beauty, "without hope or fear," as the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis put it. Take free will. Everything I know about physics and neuroscience tells me it's a myth. But I need that illusion to get out of bed in the morning. Of all the durable and necessary creations of atoms, the evolution of the illusion of the self and of free will are perhaps the most miraculous. That belief is necessary to my survival."

An "Apostle's Creed" for the humanistic scientific materialist?

The classical Christian apostle's creed, over 1600 years old and formulated soon after the writing of the New Testament, is a series of "I believe....." statements. Without thinking too much about it, I've decided to quickly write down a few sentences to suggest the very different creed that I follow. Here they are:

I believe the most fundamental content of our minds to be the sensed physical breathing and moving body, a quiet awareness that underlies our surface waves of emotions and thoughts.

I believe that this awareness can begin to experience a larger process, closer to the machinery that is generating a self, a process that observes rather than being completely defined by the current narrative "I" chatter of who-I-am or what-it-is-I-do.

I believe that this awareness can expand to feel its part in a a drama of evolving life on this planet and an evolving universe - a theater much more universal than conventional cultural or religious myths.

I believe that this awareness can enhance the depth, sanity, and sensed completion of each moment. It provides a sense of wholeness and sufficiency from which actions rise. It makes contact with other humans more sane and whole.

Recent Evolution of Humans

The once-prevailing orthodoxy that human brain evolution stopped well before the rise of agriculture and cities is being rapidly swept away. "The Twists and Turns of History, and of DNA" an article by Nicholas Wade (New York Times , March 12, 2006) notes works showing that "a fresh look at history may be in order. Evolutionary changes in the genome could help explain cultural traits that last over many generations as societies adapted to different local pressures."....."The Yanomamo... and Ashkenazi Jews... may be examples of a society's genetic response to circumstances. Rice farming, practiced by East Asians for centuries, may have spurred evolutionary changes in physical and psychological traits."

Wade notes the recent book by Richard E. Nisbett "The Geography of Thought." It points out "East Asians tend to be more interdependent than the individualists of the West, which he attributed to the social constraints and central control handed down as part of the rice-farming techniques Asians have practiced for thousands of years." He cites work of Jonathan Pritchard, Univ. of Chicago, "In a study of East Asians, Europeans and Africans, Dr. Pritchard and his colleagues found 700 regions of the genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection in recent times. In East Asians, the average date of these selection events is 6,600 years ago."

Evolutionary Spirituality - Evolutionary Christianity

These sites (thegreatstory.org, evolutionarychristianity.org) show efforts to blend scientific evolutionary perspectives with conventional religions. The idea would be that it is less traumatic for believers if they can nudge towards appreciating "The 14 billion year epic of cosmos, life, and humanity told as a sacred story, glorifying all".