Blocking the emotions of old memories.

Dolan and collaborators do an interesting study showing that beta-adrenergic blockers (which are known to block the initial storage of emotions along with declarative memory of an event) can later also strip away the emotional memories associated with an event during its recall, an effect which persists for at least 24 hours in the absence of the blocker . The abstract:

Memory enhancement for emotional events is dependent on amygdala activation and noradrenergic modulation during learning. A potential role for noradrenaline (NE) during retrieval of emotional memory is less well understood. Here, we report that administration of the β-adrenergic receptor antagonist propranolol at retrieval abolishes a declarative memory enhancement for emotional items. Critically, this effect persists at a subsequent 24 h memory test, in the absence of propranolol. Thus, these findings extend our current understanding of the role of NE in emotional memory to encompass effects at retrieval, and provide face validity to clinical interventions using β-adrenergic antagonists in conjunction with reactivation of unwanted memories in anxiety-related disorders.

Mate preferences predicted by national health.

DeBruine et al have done an interesting study in which 4500 women from 30 different countries in Europe and the Americas went to a Web site (faceresearch.org) and noted their preferences between pairs of 20 different white male faces, some of them digitally manipulated to increase or decrease masculine features. They wanted to test the evolutionary psychology suggestion that women may prefer tough-looking guys because their offspring are more likely to survive. (The downside is that manly men tend not to be the best dads, investing fewer resources in their offspring.) The less healthy a woman's country was, the more likely she was to prefer the masculinized faces. Those at the high end of the macho-preferring scale came from Brazil, also ranked as having the worst health. Those who tended more toward the girly men were from Belgium and Sweden, the healthiest. Here is their abstract:

Recent formulations of sexual selection theory emphasize how mate choice can be affected by environmental factors, such as predation risk and resource quality. Women vary greatly in the extent to which they prefer male masculinity and this variation is hypothesized to reflect differences in how women resolve the trade-off between the costs (e.g. low investment) and benefits (e.g. healthy offspring) associated with choosing a masculine partner. A strong prediction of this trade-off theory is that women's masculinity preferences will be stronger in cultures where poor health is particularly harmful to survival. We investigated the relationship between women's preferences for male facial masculinity and a health index derived from World Health Organization statistics for mortality rates, life expectancies and the impact of communicable disease. Across 30 countries, masculinity preference increased as health decreased. This relationship was independent of cross-cultural differences in wealth or women's mating strategies. These findings show non-arbitrary cross-cultural differences in facial attractiveness judgements and demonstrate the use of trade-off theory for investigating cross-cultural variation in women's mate preferences.

Facilitating choice with a electrical zap to the head

Hecht et al. show that a 2 milliamp direct current from a battery (small and safe, but noticeable to subjects) passed between one saline-soaked surface sponge electrode placed on the head over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (anodal, positive) and another over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (cathodal, negative) causes participants to become quicker in selecting the most frequent alternative in a probabilistic guessing task, suggesting a cognitive facilitation in reasoning and decision-making processes.  Here is their abstract:

In a random sequence of binary events where one alternative occurs more often than the other, humans tend to guess which of the two alternatives will occur next by trying to match the frequencies of previous occurrences. Based on split-brain and unilaterally damaged patients' performances, it has been proposed that the left hemisphere (LH) tends to match the frequencies, while the right hemisphere (RH) tends toward maximizing and always choosing the most frequent alternative. The current study used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to test this hemispheric asymmetry hypothesis by stimulating the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of each hemisphere and simultaneously inhibiting the corresponding region in the homotopic hemisphere, while participants were engaged in a probabilistic guessing task. Results showed no difference in strategy between the three groups (RH anodal/LH cathodal, LH anodal/RH cathodal, no stimulation) as participants predominantly matched the frequencies of the two alternatives. However, when anodal tDCS was applied to the LH and cathodal tDCS applied to the RH, participants became quicker to select the most frequent alternative. This finding is in line with previous evidence on the involvement of the LH in probabilistic learning and reasoning and adds to a number of demonstrations of anodal tDCS leading to some behavioral enhancement or change in bias.

A Mozart adagio

Second movement of the sonata started in Monday's post. David Goldberger playing treble, I'm playing base.

Overcoming status quo bias in our brains

Yet another interesting bit of work involving Ray Dolan and his collaborators.  Here is the abstract and a summary figure:

Humans often accept the status quo when faced with conflicting choice alternatives. However, it is unknown how neural pathways connecting cognition with action modulate this status quo acceptance. Here we developed a visual detection task in which subjects tended to favor the default when making difficult, but not easy, decisions. This bias was suboptimal in that more errors were made when the default was accepted. A selective increase in subthalamic nucleus (STN) activity was found when the status quo was rejected in the face of heightened decision difficulty. Analysis of effective connectivity showed that inferior frontal cortex (rIFC), a region more active for difficult decisions, exerted an enhanced modulatory influence on the STN during switches away from the status quo. These data suggest that the neural circuits required to initiate controlled, nondefault actions are similar to those previously shown to mediate outright response suppression. We conclude that specific prefrontal-basal ganglia dynamics are involved in rejecting the default, a mechanism that may be important in a range of difficult choice scenarios.

Effects of decision difficulty and default rejection on connectivity. (A) Coronal sections are shown. Circled are the regions that were entered into a connectivity analysis. (B) Schematic showing the winning dynamic causal model and the pattern of significant connections. Default rejection (reject) was associated with increased influence of the rIFC on the STN. The authors observed correlation of activity in bilateral inferior frontal cortex (IFC) and bilateral medial frontal cortex (MFC)with increasing reaction time for rejecting default behavior. They saw additional main effects of decision difficulty in both MFC and IFC, in line with specific recruitment of these regions during situations requiring increased cognitive control.

Harris: science can point to 'what ought to be'

This TED talk by Sam Harris is worth watching.  He makes the point that the fact-value distinction is far from clear.

Sociopaths know right from wrong but don't care.

An interesting point from Cima et al. (open access):

Adult psychopaths have deficits in emotional processing and inhibitory control, engage in morally inappropriate behavior, and generally fail to distinguish moral from conventional violations. These observations, together with a dominant tradition in the discipline which sees emotional processes as causally necessary for moral judgment, have led to the conclusion that psychopaths lack an understanding of moral rights and wrongs. We test an alternative explanation: psychopaths have normal understanding of right and wrong, but abnormal regulation of morally appropriate behavior. We presented psychopaths with moral dilemmas, contrasting their judgments with age- and sex-matched (i) healthy subjects and (ii) non-psychopathic, delinquents. Subjects in each group judged cases of personal harms (i.e. requiring physical contact) as less permissible than impersonal harms, even though both types of harms led to utilitarian gains. Importantly, however, psychopaths’ pattern of judgments on different dilemmas was the same as those of the other subjects. These results force a rejection of the strong hypothesis that emotional processes are causally necessary for judgments of moral dilemmas, suggesting instead that psychopaths understand the distinction between right and wrong, but do not care about such knowledge, or the consequences that ensue from their morally inappropriate behavior.

Monday Mozart allegro

Monday, Wednesday, Friday this week I'm posting the three movements of the Mozart Sonata for 4-hands, K. 358. which I played in concert with David Goldberger in Fort Lauderdale on March 7. Today is the Allegro.

Babies are born to dance.

From Zentnera and Eerolab (open access):

Humans have a unique ability to coordinate their motor movements to an external auditory stimulus, as in music-induced foot tapping or dancing. This behavior currently engages the attention of scholars across a number of disciplines. However, very little is known about its earliest manifestations. The aim of the current research was to examine whether preverbal infants engage in rhythmic behavior to music. To this end, we carried out two experiments in which we tested 120 infants (aged 5–24 months). Infants were exposed to various excerpts of musical and rhythmic stimuli, including isochronous drumbeats. Control stimuli consisted of adult- and infant-directed speech. Infants’ rhythmic movements were assessed by multiple methods involving manual coding from video excerpts and innovative 3D motion-capture technology. The results show that (i) infants engage in significantly more rhythmic movement to music and other rhythmically regular sounds than to speech; (ii) infants exhibit tempo flexibility to some extent (e.g., faster auditory tempo is associated with faster movement tempo); and (iii) the degree of rhythmic coordination with music is positively related to displays of positive affect. The findings are suggestive of a predisposition for rhythmic movement in response to music and other metrically regular sounds.

The Schubert Fantasy - part 3

Following Monday's and Wednesday's postings, the final portion of the Schubert Fantasy. I'm playing treble, David Goldberger is playing base.

Wal-Mart Moral Lessons

John Tierney describes cross cultural studies of sharing and fairness (comparing, for example, hunter-gatherers with midwestern Wal-Mart shoppers) that found:

...the strongest predictor of fairness was the community’s level of “market integration,” - measured by the percentage of the diet that was purchased. The people who got all or most of their food by hunting, fishing, foraging or growing it themselves were less inclined to share a prize equally....Markets don’t work very efficiently if everyone acts selfishly and believes everyone else will do the same...You end up with high transaction costs because you have to have all these protections to cover every loophole. But if you develop norms to be fair and trusting with people beyond your social sphere, that provides enormous economic advantages and allows a society to grow.

The work he is summarizing is by Henrich et al. Their abstract:

Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and reciprocity, which underpin much of primate sociality, do not readily extend to large unrelated groups. Theory suggests that the evolution of such societies may have required norms and institutions that sustain fairness in ephemeral exchanges. If that is true, then engagement in larger-scale institutions, such as markets and world religions, should be associated with greater fairness, and larger communities should punish unfairness more. Using three behavioral experiments administered across 15 diverse populations, we show that market integration (measured as the percentage of purchased calories) positively covaries with fairness while community size positively covaries with punishment. Participation in a world religion is associated with fairness, although not across all measures. These results suggest that modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history.

Everybody have fun.

Elizabeth Kolbert writes a very accessible article (PDF here) having the title of this post in the March 22 issue of The New Yorker. The topic is happiness, how to measure it, and why we are so bad at knowing what will actually make us happy (the paradox of "the happy peasant and the miserable millionaire"). It covers the same territory as the Daniel Gilbert book "Stumbling on Happiness" that I abstracted in MindBlog several years ago (enter Gilbert in the search box in the left column to find those posts).

Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks

Fowler and Christakis, in an open access article in PNAS, demonstrate that one cooperative act has a multiplying effect. In an iterative game, when a subject gives money to help someone else, the recipients of that cash then became more likely to give their own money away in the next round. This leads to a cascade of generosity, in which the itch to cooperate spreads first to three people and then to the nine people that those three people interact with, and then to the remaining individuals in subsequent waves of the experiment. (Uncooperative behavior can spread and persist as well.)  Here is one of their figures. 

Figure - A hypothetical cascade. This diagram illustrates the difference between the spread of the interpersonal effects across individuals and the persistence of effects across time. We abstract from the numerous interactions that take place between individuals in these experiments to focus on a specific, illustrative set of pathways. Cooperative behavior spreads three degrees of separation: if Eleni increases her contribution to the public good, it benefits Lucas (one degree), who gives more when paired with Erika (two degrees) in period 2, who gives more when paired with Jay (three degrees) in period 3, who gives more when paired with Brecken in period 4. The effects also persist over time, so that Lucas gives more when paired with Erika (period 2) and also when paired with Lysander (period 3), Bemy (period 4), Sebastian (period 5), and Nicholas (period 6). There is also persistence at two degrees of separation, because Erika givesmore not only when paired with Jay (period 3) but also when paired with Harla (period 4) and James (period 5). All the paths in this illustrative cascade are supported by significant results in the experiments, and it is important to note that if Eleni decreases her initial contribution, her uncooperative behavior can spread and persist as well.

More on mindfulness meditation and emotional muscle

A reader of Monday's post asked if I could post abstracts from the special issue (on Mindfulness meditation) of the journal Emotion mentioned in that post. I thought the abstracts were open access, but apparently they are not. Here I pass on a PDF of the introductory article by Williams that summarizes the contributions (Mindfulness and psychological process. Williams, J. Mark G.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 1-7.)

Below I show the table of contents and a few abstracts from the issue (email me if you have further requests).

Empirical explorations of mindfulness: Conceptual and methodological conundrums. Davidson, Richard J.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 8-11.
[Research on mindfulness is entering a new era and coming into the mainstream. The group of articles in this Special Issue exemplifies research on the impact of mindfulness on, or the relation between mindfulness and, different components of emotion processing and emotion regulation. Affective processes are a key target of contemplative interventions. The long-term consequences of most contemplative traditions include a transformation of trait affect. After all, if change was not enduring and did not impact everyday life, it would be of little utility. This brief commentary highlights several important conceptual and methodological issues that are central to research on mindfulness, particularly as it is applied to transforming emotion. The term “mindfulness” has been used to refer to an extraordinarily wide range of phenomena in this group of articles, ranging from mindfulness as a state, to mindfulness as a trait and finally mindfulness as an independent variable, that is, something this is manipulated in an experiment. It is imperative that we always qualify our use of this term by the methods we use to operationalize the construct. The measurement of mindfulness and the duration of its training, and the development of adequate comparison conditions against which to compare mindfulness training remain as important issues for further study. Moreover additional research attention on the potential targets within the emotion domain of contemplative practices is required. Great progress has been in this research area and we have much to look forward in the future.]

Dispositional mindfulness and depressive symptomatology: Correlations with limbic and self-referential neural activity during rest. Way, Baldwin M.; Creswell, J. David; Eisenberger, Naomi I.; Lieberman, Matthew D.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 12-24.  
[ To better understand the relationship between mindfulness and depression, we studied normal young adults (n = 27) who completed measures of dispositional mindfulness and depressive symptomatology, which were then correlated with (a) rest: resting neural activity during passive viewing of a fixation cross, relative to a simple goal-directed task (shape-matching); and (b) reactivity: neural reactivity during viewing of negative emotional faces, relative to the same shape-matching task. Dispositional mindfulness was negatively correlated with resting activity in self-referential processing areas, whereas depressive symptomatology was positively correlated with resting activity in similar areas. In addition, dispositional mindfulness was negatively correlated with resting activity in the amygdala, bilaterally, whereas depressive symptomatology was positively correlated with activity in the right amygdala. Similarly, when viewing emotional faces, amygdala reactivity was positively correlated with depressive symptomatology and negatively correlated with dispositional mindfulness, an effect that was largely attributable to differences in resting activity. These findings indicate that mindfulness is associated with intrinsic neural activity and that changes in resting amygdala activity could be a potential mechanism by which mindfulness-based depression treatments elicit therapeutic improvement....dispositional mindfulness and depressive symptomatology show opposite relationships with resting activity in the right amygdala, indicating that this may be a potential mechanism linking mindfulness-based treatments with reductions in depressed mood and relapse risk. That resting state activity differences largely explained the differences in emotional reactivity underscores the importance of understanding intrinsic activity within the brain. Perhaps it is fitting that mindfulness, a practice focused on observant contemplation rather than action, is associated with neural activity when an individual is just “being” rather than “doing.”]

Minding one’s emotions: Mindfulness training alters the neural expression of sadness. Farb, Norman A. S.; Anderson, Adam K.; Mayberg, Helen; Bean, Jim; McKeon, Deborah; Segal, Zindel V.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 25-33.
[Recovery from emotional challenge and increased tolerance of negative affect are both hallmarks of mental health. Mindfulness training (MT) has been shown to facilitate these outcomes, yet little is known about its mechanisms of action. The present study employed functional MRI (fMRI) to compare neural reactivity to sadness provocation in participants completing 8 weeks of MT and waitlisted controls. Sadness resulted in widespread recruitment of regions associated with self-referential processes along the cortical midline. Despite equivalent self-reported sadness, MT participants demonstrated a distinct neural response, with greater right-lateralized recruitment, including visceral and somatosensory areas associated with body sensation. The greater somatic recruitment observed in the MT group during evoked sadness was associated with decreased depression scores. Restoring balance between affective and sensory neural networks—supporting conceptual and body based representations of emotion—could be one path through which mindfulness reduces vulnerability to dysphoric reactivity.]

Effects of mindfulness on meta-awareness and specificity of describing prodromal symptoms in suicidal depression. Hargus, Emily; Crane, Catherine; Barnhofer, Thorsten; Williams, J. Mark G.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 34-42.
Cortical thickness and pain sensitivity in zen meditators. Grant, Joshua A.; Courtemanche, Jérôme; Duerden, Emma G.; Duncan, Gary H.; Rainville, Pierre; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 43-53.

Examining the protective effects of mindfulness training on working memory capacity and affective experience. Jha, Amishi P.; Stanley, Elizabeth A.; Kiyonaga, Anastasia; Wong, Ling; Gelfand, Lois; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 54-64.
[...findings suggest that sufficient mindfulness training practice may protect against functional impairments associated with high-stress contexts. ]

Differential effects on pain intensity and unpleasantness of two meditation practices. Perlman, David M.; Salomons, Tim V.; Davidson, Richard J.; Lutz, Antoine; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 65-71.

A preliminary investigation of the effects of experimentally induced mindfulness on emotional responding to film clips. Erisman, Shannon M.; Roemer, Lizabeth; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 72-82.

Effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) on emotion regulation in social anxiety disorder. Goldin, Philippe R.; Gross, James J.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 83-91.

Expressive flexibility. Westphal, Maren; Seivert, Nicholas H.; Bonanno, George A.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 92-100.

The Schubert Fantasy - part 2

Part 2 of the Schubert fantasy, part I was posted Monday. I'm playing the treble, David Goldberger is playing the base.

Our face recognition capability has a strong genetic component

While we have strong evidence for genetic effects on basic sensory processes (such as inherited color vision defects) evidence for genetic control of specific higher cognitive processes - (as distinct, for example, from more multi-domain processes like general intelligence or 'g') - has been harder to obtain. Wilmer et al. (open access) now report twin studies that offer strong evidence that face recognition ability has a strong genetic component, and that experience or environment plays a surprisingly small role. People are not 'all face recognition experts,' and this variation has now been shown to have a largely genetic basis:

Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.70) was more than double the dizygotic twin correlation (0.29), evidence for a high genetic contribution to face recognition ability. Low correlations between face recognition scores and visual and verbal recognition scores indicate that both face recognition ability itself and its genetic basis are largely attributable to face-specific mechanisms. The present results therefore identify an unusual phenomenon: a highly specific cognitive ability that is highly heritable. Our results establish a clear genetic basis for face recognition, opening this intensively studied and socially advantageous cognitive trait to genetic investigation.

Comments on "Statins enchance memory"

Readers who were interested in the recent post on statins should have a look at the comments that have come in. They note studies showing adverse effects of statins on cognition and memory.

Text without context and the death of culture

Michiko Kakutani writes an excellent article in last Sunday's NYTimes. The article is so rich that you really must read the whole thing, but I will pass on a few clips here. The article starts with reference to David Shields new book "Reality Hunger" which consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers.

...fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” ..“Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”

...the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”...It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”

Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.

More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.

Given the constant bombardment of trivia and data that we’re subjected to in today’s mediascape, it’s little wonder that noisy, Manichean arguments tend to get more attention than subtle, policy-heavy ones; that funny, snarky or willfully provocative assertions often gain more traction than earnest, measured ones; and that loud, entertaining or controversial personalities tend to get the most ink and airtime. This is why Sarah Palin’s every move and pronouncement is followed by television news, talk-show hosts and pundits of every political persuasion. This is why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right and Michael Moore on the left are repeatedly quoted by followers and opponents. This is why a gathering of 600 people for last month’s national Tea Party convention in Nashville received a disproportionate amount of coverage from both the mainstream news media and the blogosphere.

For his part Mr. Lanier says that because the Internet is a kind of “pseudoworld” without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, he argues, it can also devolve into a “Lord of the Flies”-like nastiness, with lots of “bullying, voracious irritability and selfishness” — qualities enhanced, he says, by the anonymity, peer pressure and mob rule that thrive online.

As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”

To Mr. Lanier...the prevalence of mash-ups in today’s culture is a sign of “nostalgic malaise.” “Online culture,” he writes, “is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”

He points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”

Brain changes caused by forced right-handedness

Klöppel et al. make the interesting observation that plastic changes occur not only in primary sensory-motor cortex but also deep structures of the brain in adult "converted" left-handers who were forced as children to become dextral writers:

Does a conflict between inborn motor preferences and educational standards during childhood impact the structure of the adult human brain? To examine this issue, we acquired high-resolution T1-weighted magnetic resonance scans of the whole brain in adult "converted" left-handers who had been forced as children to become dextral writers. Analysis of sulcal surfaces revealed that consistent right- and left-handers showed an interhemispheric asymmetry in the surface area of the central sulcus with a greater surface contralateral to the dominant hand. This pattern was reversed in the converted group who showed a larger surface of the central sulcus in their left, nondominant hemisphere, indicating plasticity of the primary sensorimotor cortex caused by forced use of the nondominant hand. Voxel-based morphometry showed a reduction of gray matter volume in the middle part of the left putamen in converted left-handers relative to both consistently handed groups. A similar trend was found in the right putamen. Converted subjects with at least one left-handed first-degree relative showed a correlation between the acquired right-hand advantage for writing and the structural changes in putamen and pericentral cortex. Our results show that a specific environmental challenge during childhood can shape the macroscopic structure of the human basal ganglia. The smaller than normal putaminal volume differs markedly from previously reported enlargement of cortical gray matter associated with skill acquisition. This indicates a differential response of the basal ganglia to early environmental challenges, possibly related to processes of pruning during motor development.

A Schubert fantasy (part I) for Monday morning

This is a recording of a 4-hands Schubert piano piece played in concert in Fort Lauderdale, FL, March 7, 2010, by myself (treble) and David Goldberger (base). Because YouTube has a 10 minutes length limit on videos, I have broken the ~20 minute video into three chunks (parts 1, 2, and 3) which I'm posting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of this week.