A new positive psychology website

You might want to check out the launch of a new self help website happiness.com. It has the support of gurus in the happiness field such as Martin Seligman, and offers its own particular set of happiness exercises and plans. It's hard to find fault with the simple exercises and suggestions offered; and indeed, whenever I take the attention space to spend some time doing common exercises in the field, like feeling or expressing gratitude or kindness, savoring small joys, forgiving, avoiding over thinking and social comparison, etc. it lightens me up considerably. However, one of the features of these sites that kind of gets to me is their Pollyanna aura, with the apparent goal of being 100% happy 100% of the time - of making 'sad' just go away....it seems to me that the spice of life is having robust highs and lows. I enjoy my lighter moments and I also savor my basically curmudgeonly nature.

Observing the brain pathway that lowers anxiety

Kim and Whalen publish an interesting study in the Journal of Neuroscience using diffusion tensor imaging to show that the structural integrity, or strength, of a pathway between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala correlates with lower trait anxiety in individual subjects (the idea being that this pathway allows prefrontal cortex to inhibit amygdala reactivity to anxiety provoking stimuli). The abstract:

Here, we used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and showed that the strength of an axonal pathway identified between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex predicted individual differences in trait anxiety. A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) functional localizer that has been shown to produce reliable amygdala activation was collected in 20 psychiatrically healthy subjects. Voxelwise regression analyses using this fMRI amygdala reactivity as a regressor were performed on fractional anisotropy images derived from DTI. This analysis identified a white matter pathway between the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Individual differences in the structural integrity of this putative amygdala–prefrontal pathway were inversely correlated with trait anxiety levels (i.e., higher pathway strength predicted lower anxiety). More generally, this study illustrates a strategy for combining fMRI and DTI to identify individual differences in structural pathways that predict behavioral outcomes.

A unique area for tool use in human versus monkey brains

Peeters et al. observe an activation in the left inferior parietal lobule when humans observe tool use, absent in monkeys doing the same observation, which they suggest is related to our capacity to understand the causal relationship between tools and the result of their use.

Though other species of primates also use tools, humans appear unique in their capacity to understand the causal relationship between tools and the result of their use. In a comparative fMRI study, we scanned a large cohort of human volunteers and untrained monkeys, as well as two monkeys trained to use tools, while they observed hand actions and actions performed using simple tools. In both species, the observation of an action, regardless of how performed, activated occipitotemporal, intraparietal, and ventral premotor cortex, bilaterally. In humans, the observation of actions done with simple tools yielded an additional, specific activation of a rostral sector of the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL). This latter site was considered human-specific, as it was not observed in monkey IPL for any of the tool videos presented, even after monkeys had become proficient in using a rake or pliers through extensive training. In conclusion, while the observation of a grasping hand activated similar regions in humans and monkeys, an additional specific sector of IPL devoted to tool use has evolved in Homo sapiens, although tool-specific neurons might reside in the monkey grasping regions. These results shed new light on the changes of the hominid brain during evolution.

More on Brain Boosters

Gary Stix has written a review article for the Oct. 2009 issue of the Scientific American titled "Turbocharging the Brain", a topic that has been the subject of several previous mindblog posts. Here are two simple summary figures on effects and risks (click on figure to enlarge):


and on potential new drugs:

Bird brains get even more clever.

New Caledonian crows, already known for clever tool-making in the wild and in the lab, are now shown to be able of using three tools in the correct order to bag a treat. Such sequential tool use has never been observed in any other untrained nonhuman animal. In the wild, the crows (Corvus moneduloides) regularly fashion barbs and hooks from leaves and twigs to extract grubs from holes and crevices. In the new experiments, each of seven crows was given a test tube stuffed with a tasty piece of meat that could be pried out only with a particular stick. To get at the meat, the birds had to do three things in the right order: pick up a short stick, available on the cage floor, and use it to pull a longer stick out of a second test tube; use that stick to extract an even longer stick from a third test tube; and then use this longest stick to get the prize. Four crows were successful. It seems unlikely that they were selecting sticks at random, because they usually swapped sticks for longer ones.

Societal trend of media multitasking is changing our cognitive control

Lin reviews some interesting work of Ophir et al. showing:

...that heavy media multitaskers (HMMs) performed worse on task switching than light media multitaskers (LMMs), likely because of HMMs' reduced ability to filter out interference from irrelevant stimuli and representations in memory. Their findings are surprising in that, intuitively, HMMs should be better at task switching (i.e., multitasking) because they frequently switch between tasks, a habit or expertise (if so) that should have helped them to be better multitaskers (task switchers). However, the findings are also not surprising in that...HMMs tend to be breadth-biased in their behaviors and are inclined to pay attention to a larger scope of information instead of focusing on a particular piece of information. Such a behavior or habit has conditioned them to be less selective when it comes to filtering information and tasks in front of them. In other words, HMMs may have developed a habit of treating all of the information in front of them with equal (or almost equal) amounts of attention instead of focusing their attention steadily on a particular task. As a result, they performed worse than LMMs did when they were asked to focus attention on selective pieces.

Mood elevating endorphine release greater with social than with solitary exercise

The Research Highlights section of the Sept. 17 issue of Nature points to work by Cohen et al.:

Coordinated social activity, such as dancing or team sports, stimulates the brain to release high levels of mood-elevating endorphins that are believed to have a role in social bonding. But how can this be distinguished from the normal release of endorphins during exercise?...Emma Cohen of the University of Oxford, UK, and her colleagues looked at rowers training alone or with teammates on stationary rowing machines. Because measuring endorphins directly would require a spinal tap, the researchers instead used pain tolerance to gauge endorphin release after workouts. They found that rowers had greater increases in pain threshold after operating as a crew than when going solo.

Cohen et al. suggest that enhanced endorphin release from synchronized activity may explain the sense of euphoria experienced in social activities like laughter, music-making, and dancing that are involved in social bonding in humans (and possibly other vertebrates.)

MRI of emotions in a dead fish...

Even though this gem is making the rounds of the blogosphere it is worth pointing to again here. (This reminds me of my grandmother's answer to my "what do the people do here?" question as we were driving through small Texas towns. Her reply: "They take in each other's laundry." )

Bennett et. al. present a hilarious yet serious abstract showing different brain MRI responses as a dead salmon views pictures of people with different emotional expressions. It is a demonstration of the "multiple comparisons problem" - the fact that if you do a lot of different statistical tests, some of them will, just by chance, give interesting results. A multiple comparisons corrections can be applied, but many fMRI publications still report "uncorrected" results.

Will there ever be a "healthy" diet?

Darn.... here I've been religiously avoiding potatoes, pasta, bread, etc in my diet, and now Rosenzweig and his Harvard colleagues find evidence that low carbohydrate diets are linked to atherosclerosis and impaired blood vessel growth. They find that mice placed on a 12-week low-carbohydrate/high-protein diet showed a significant increase in atherosclerosis, a buildup of plaque in the heart’s arteries and a leading cause of heart attack and stroke. The findings also showed that the diet led to an impaired ability to form new blood vessels in tissues deprived of blood flow, as might occur during a heart attack.

Rewards work better than punishment in enhancing cooperation

Rand and colleagues have examined cooperation among 192 participants in a public goods game probing the fundamental tension between the interests of an individual and a group. In more than 50 rounds of interaction, each of four participants in a group would decide how much to contribute toward a common pool that benefited all four equally. Each participant was then able — at a cost to himself or herself — to either reward or punish each of the three other subjects for their contributions to the group, or lack thereof. Here is their abstract:

The public goods game is the classic laboratory paradigm for studying collective action problems. Each participant chooses how much to contribute to a common pool that returns benefits to all participants equally. The ideal outcome occurs if everybody contributes the maximum amount, but the self-interested strategy is not to contribute anything. Most previous studies have found punishment to be more effective than reward for maintaining cooperation in public goods games. The typical design of these studies, however, represses future consequences for today’s actions. In an experimental setting, we compare public goods games followed by punishment, reward, or both in the setting of truly repeated games, in which player identities persist from round to round. We show that reward is as effective as punishment for maintaining public cooperation and leads to higher total earnings. Moreover, when both options are available, reward leads to increased contributions and payoff, whereas punishment has no effect on contributions and leads to lower payoff. We conclude that reward outperforms punishment in repeated public goods games and that human cooperation in such repeated settings is best supported by positive interactions with others.

Friendship networks revealed by cell phone data.

Lazer and colleagues have compared data gathered through self-reporting versus data gathered through cell phone usage to determine whether such information can prove reliable in predicting friendships and job satisfaction. The study followed 94 subjects over the course of nine months.

Data collected from mobile phones have the potential to provide insight into the relational dynamics of individuals. This paper compares observational data from mobile phones with standard self-report survey data. We find that the information from these two data sources is overlapping but distinct. For example, self-reports of physical proximity deviate from mobile phone records depending on the recency and salience of the interactions. We also demonstrate that it is possible to accurately infer 95% of friendships based on the observational data alone, where friend dyads demonstrate distinctive temporal and spatial patterns in their physical proximity and calling patterns. These behavioral patterns, in turn, allow the prediction of individual-level outcomes such as job satisfaction.

Bad health is good business

Everyone should read this Michael Pollan article. Just two classic clips:

...food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform...the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes...As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

This reminds me of the British Empire's 19th century Chinese tea for Indian opium scam that made opium addicts of the chinese.

At risk for pathological gambling.

I had not realized that treating Parkinson's disease or restless legs syndrome with dopamine agonists (mimics or enhancers) has been associated with impulse control disorders and pathological gambling. Abler et al. look at correlative changes in the brain:

We scanned 12 female restless leg syndrome patients without a history of pathological gambling. All patients were scanned twice: once whilst taking their regular medication with low dose dopamine receptor agonists and once after a washout phase interval. They performed an established gambling game task involving expectation and receipt or omission of monetary rewards at different levels of probabilities. Upon expectation of rewards, reliable ventral striatal activation was detected only when patients were on, but not when patients were off medication....Chronic dopamine receptor agonist medication changed the neural signalling of reward expectation predisposing the dopaminergic reward system to mediate an increased appetitive drive.

What if you were born with only one cerebral hemisphere?

Wolf Singer and collaborators have examined a woman whose right cerebral hemisphere did not develop after birth. Normally this hemisphere would receive information about the left visual field. From their abstract:

Despite the complete loss of her right hemisphere (di- and telencephalon) at birth, the patient's remaining hemisphere has not only developed maps of the contralateral (right) visual hemifield but, surprisingly, also maps of the ipsilateral (left) visual hemifield. Retinal ganglion-cells changed their predetermined crossing pattern in the optic chiasm and grew to the ipsilateral LGN. In the visual cortex, islands of ipsilateral visual field representations were located along the representations of the vertical meridian. In V1, smooth and continuous maps from contra- and ipsilateral hemifield overlap each other, whereas in ventral V2 and V3 ipsilateral quarter field representations invaded small distinct cortical patches. This reveals a surprising flexibility of the self-organizing developmental mechanisms responsible for map formation.

We are the ones we've been waiting for?

That messianic phrase from Obama's campaign turns out not to pan out very well, as illustrated particularly by the current health care debate. Anand Giridharadas notes that web participatory democracy has yielded some rather embarrassing results so far:

During the transition, the administration created an online “Citizen’s Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas to the president. “The best-rated ones will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, we’ll print them out and gather them into a binder like the ones the president receives every day from experts and advisors,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, wrote to supporters...They received 44,000 proposals and 1.4 million votes for those proposals. The results were quietly published, but they were embarrassing — not so much to the administration as to us, the ones we’ve been waiting for...In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Legalizing online poker topped the technology ideas, twice as popular as nationwide wi-fi. Revoking the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status garnered three times more votes than raising funding for childhood cancer.

Yet another theory on why we sleep

Among the functions of sleep suggested are memory consolidation and repair of neuronal wear and tear. Jerome Siegel offers a rationale for why the duration of sleep varies so much between animals. From Carey's reivew:

Why should lions get 15 hours a night and giraffes just 5 — when it is the giraffes who will be running for their lives come hunting time? How on earth do migrating birds, in flight for days on end, sleep? Why is it that some people are early birds as young adults and night owls when they’re older?

[Siegel]...argues that sleep evolved to optimize animals’ use of time, keeping them safe and hidden when the hunting, fishing or scavenging was scarce and perhaps risky. In that view, differences in sleep quality, up to and including periods of insomnia, need not be seen as problems but as adaptations to the demands of the environment...Consider the big brown bat, perhaps the longest-sleeping mammal of them all. It snoozes 20 hours a day, and spends the other 4 hunting mosquitoes and moths in the dusk and early evening. Increased waking time would seem to be highly maladaptive for this animal, since it would expend energy and be exposed to predatory birds with better vision and better flight abilities.

In humans, it is well known that sleep quality changes with age, from the long, deep plunges of early childhood to the much lighter, more frequently interrupted five or six hours that many elderly people call a night’s sleep...In Dr. Siegel’s view, it’s a matter of tradeoffs: older people no longer have a child’s need to grow, which requires deep, long sleep and may have more need and more ability to do things for themselves instead.

Why do we swear? For pain relief.

An interesting little nugget from Scientific American Mind.

Social contagion - Is happiness (or obesity) catching?

Clive Thompson does a nice article in this past Sunday's New York Times magazine on social contagion. It covers the Framingham study that I have mentioned in previous posts along with other studies that document how good as well as bad behaviors pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses.

...behaviors may spread partly through the subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior. Scientists have been documenting this phenomenon; for example, experiments have shown that if a person is seated next to someone who’s eating more, he will eat more, too, unwittingly calibrating his sense of what constitutes a normal meal.

While emotional mirroring might be the most alluring idea about why behaviors spread, there are..

..two other possible explanations. One is “homophily,” the tendency of people to gravitate toward others who are like them. People who are gaining weight might well prefer to hang out with others who are also gaining weight, just as people who are happy might seek out others who are happy. The other possible explanation is that the shared environment — and not social contagion — might be causing the people of Framingham to change in groups. If a McDonald’s opens up in a Framingham neighborhood, it could cause a cluster of people living nearby to gain weight or become slightly happier (or sadder, depending on what they think about McDonald’s). The cluster of people would appear as though they are sharing a contagious form of behavior, but it would be an illusion.

How we change our decisions...

Resulaj et al develop a new model that accounts for how and when we change our mind after we make a decision. They do a series of experiments on subjects who were asked to move a handle to one of two positions dependent on a noisy visual stimulus. Analysis of the rare occasions where subjects changed their mind half way through selecting their answer shows that even after making a decision the brain continues to process the information it had gathered — information still in the processing pipeline— to either reverse or reaffirm its initial decision. Their new theory introduces the acts of vacillation and self correction into the decision-making process. The abstract outlines their basis idea:

A decision is a commitment to a proposition or plan of action based on evidence and the expected costs and benefits associated with the outcome. Progress in a variety of fields has led to a quantitative understanding of the mechanisms that evaluate evidence and reach a decision. Several formalisms propose that a representation of noisy evidence is evaluated against a criterion to produce a decision. Without additional evidence, however, these formalisms fail to explain why a decision-maker would change their mind. Here we extend a model, developed to account for both the timing and the accuracy of the initial decision, to explain subsequent changes of mind. Subjects made decisions about a noisy visual stimulus, which they indicated by moving a handle. Although they received no additional information after initiating their movement, their hand trajectories betrayed a change of mind in some trials. We propose that noisy evidence is accumulated over time until it reaches a criterion level, or bound, which determines the initial decision, and that the brain exploits information that is in the processing pipeline when the initial decision is made to subsequently either reverse or reaffirm the initial decision. The model explains both the frequency of changes of mind as well as their dependence on both task difficulty and whether the initial decision was accurate or erroneous. The theoretical and experimental findings advance the understanding of decision-making to the highly flexible and cognitive acts of vacillation and self-correction.

How chaos drives the brain.

I've been meaning to point out this excellent article in The New Scientist describing evidence that self-organised criticality is important brain function. It has links to a number of useful references.