How exercise calms anxiety.

In my scans of journals' tables of contents I missed this interesting piece by Schoenfeld et al., which is pointed to by a summary in the New York Times "Well" section. Running is known to stimulate the production of more dendritic spines, the primary sites of excitatory synapses, on excitatory neurons throughout the hippocampal circuitry known to be involved in emotion processing. In spite of producing more excitable nerve tissue, exercise also calms anxiety (in mice and in humans). Schoenfeld suggest that this is because another effect of exercise is to increase the levels of proteins that process the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA in local inhibitory nerve cells. Their results suggest that running improves anxiety regulation by engaging local inhibitory mechanisms in the ventral hippocampus. (By the way, GABA is a popular dietary supplement for supposedly calming social anxiety.) Here is their more technical abstract:

Physical exercise is known to reduce anxiety. The ventral hippocampus has been linked to anxiety regulation but the effects of running on this subregion of the hippocampus have been incompletely explored. Here, we investigated the effects of cold water stress on the hippocampus of sedentary and runner mice and found that while stress increases expression of the protein products of the immediate early genes c-fos and arc in new and mature granule neurons in sedentary mice, it has no such effect in runners. We further showed that running enhances local inhibitory mechanisms in the hippocampus, including increases in stress-induced activation of hippocampal interneurons, expression of vesicular GABA transporter (vGAT), and extracellular GABA release during cold water swim stress. Finally, blocking GABAA receptors in the ventral hippocampus, but not the dorsal hippocampus, with the antagonist bicuculline, reverses the anxiolytic effect of running. Together, these results suggest that running improves anxiety regulation by engaging local inhibitory mechanisms in the ventral hippocampus.

Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later

Here is a fascinating result from Cartmill et al.:

Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguistic context, an aspect of input quality. To examine this aspect, we asked 218 adult participants to guess 50 parents’ words from (muted) videos of their interactions with their 14- to 18-mo-old children. We found systematic differences in how easily individual parents’ words could be identified purely from this socio-visual context. Differences in this kind of input quality correlated with the size of the children’s vocabulary 3 y later, even after controlling for differences in input quantity. Although input quantity differed as a function of socioeconomic status, input quality (as here measured) did not, suggesting that the quality of nonverbal cues to word meaning that parents offer to their children is an individual matter, widely distributed across the population of parents.

A defense of evolutionary psychology.

For those of you who follow the debate over the legitimacy of the evolutionary psychology perspective, I recommend a look at this contribution by Jerry Coyne, which features Steven Pinker responding to a critique originating from a panel at the Convergence 2013 conference (described here). whose main point was summarized by P.Z. Myers as:

Developmental plasticity is all. The fundamental premises of evo psych are false.

The response:

This paragraph disturbed me for two reasons. First, the notion that “the fundamental premises of evo psych are false” seems deeply misguided. After all, those premises boil down to this statement: some behaviors of modern humans reflect their evolutionary history. That is palpably uncontroversial, since many of our behaviors are clearly a product of evolution, including eating, avoiding dangers, and the pursuit of sex.  And since our bodies reflect their evolutionary history, often in nonadaptive ways (e.g., wisdom teeth, bad backs, the coat of hair we produce as a transitory feature in fetuses), why not our brains, which are, after all, just bits of morphology whose structure affects our behaviors?

Second, “developmental plasticity” does not stand as a dichotomous alternative to “evolved features.” Our developmental plasticity is to a large extent the product of evolution: our ability to learn language, our tendency to defer to authorities when we’re children, our learned socialization—those are all features almost certainly instilled into our brains by natural selection as a way to promote behavioral flexibility in that most flexible of mammals.

These points are followed by a list of rejoinders made by Pinker to points in the panel discussion

The obesity paradox - fat people may live longer!

Virginia Hughes writes about accumulating data on obesity and longevity that many researchers wish would just go away, after all the effort that has been put into documenting the health risks that go with obesity. At issue, for example, is a meta-analysis, lead by Katherine Flegal, of 97 studies including 2.88 million people that reported people deemed 'overweight' by international standards to be 6% less likely to die than were those of 'normal' weight over the same time period. There has been furious debate over this result because the epidemiology involved is complex, and eliminating confounding factors is difficult. However,

....many researchers accept Flegal's results and see them as just the latest report illustrating what is known as the obesity paradox. Being overweight increases a person's risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and many other chronic illnesses. But these studies suggest that for some people — particularly those who are middle-aged or older, or already sick — a bit of extra weight is not particularly harmful, and may even be helpful. (Being so overweight as to be classed obese, however, is almost always associated with poor health outcomes.)  Click on graphic to enlarge:

...the most contentious part of the debate is not about the science per se, but how to talk about it. Public-health experts, including Willett, have spent decades emphasizing the risks of carrying excess weight. Studies such as Flegal's are dangerous, Willett says, because they could confuse the public and doctors, and undermine public policies to curb rising obesity rates. “There is going to be some percentage of physicians who will not counsel an overweight patient because of this,” he says. Worse, he says, these findings can be hijacked by powerful special-interest groups, such as the soft-drink and food lobbies, to influence policy-makers.

But many scientists say that they are uncomfortable with the idea of hiding or dismissing data — especially findings that have been replicated in many studies — for the sake of a simpler message. “One study may not necessarily tell you the truth, but a bulk of studies saying the same thing and being consistent, that really is reinforcing,” says Samuel Klein, a physician and obesity expert at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. “We need to follow the data just like the yellow brick road, to the truth.”

The gospel according to me...

I want to pass on a few clips from the stimulating essay by Critchley and Webster in "The Stone" forum of the New York Times:

…many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. The latter does not make the exorbitant moral demands of traditional religions, which impose bad conscience, guilt, sin, sexual inhibition and the rest.

In the gospel of authenticity, well-being has become the primary goal of human life….The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn’t really require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might transcend the serene and contented living of one’s authentic life and baseline well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma.

This is the phenomenon that one might call, with an appreciative nod to Nietzsche, passive nihilism….In a seemingly meaningless, inauthentic world awash in nonstop media reports of war, violence and inequality, we close our eyes and turn ourselves into islands. We may even say a little prayer to an obscure but benign Eastern goddess and feel some weak spiritual energy connecting everything as we listen to some tastefully selected ambient music. Authenticity, needing no reference to anything outside itself, is an evacuation of history. The power of now.

Work is no longer a series of obligations to be fulfilled for the sake of sustenance: it is the expression of one’s authentic self…But here’s the rub: if one believes that there is an intimate connection between one’s authentic self and glittering success at work, then the experience of failure and forced unemployment is accepted as one’s own fault…A naïve belief in authenticity eventually gives way to a deep cynicism. A conviction in personal success that must always hold failure at bay becomes a corrupt stubbornness that insists on success at any cost. Cynicism, in this mode, is not the expression of a critical stance toward authenticity but is rather the runoff of this failure of belief.

Nothing seems more American than this forced choice between cynicism and naïve belief. Or rather, as Herman Melville put it in his 1857 novel “The Confidence Man,” it seems the choice is between being a fool (having to believe what one says) or being a knave (saying things one does not believe). For Melville, who was writing on the cusp of modern capitalism, the search for authenticity is a white whale.

Order your DIY brain stimulation kit to improve your cognition?

Nature Magazine has an interesting editorial on dealing with the fact that transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS) kits (costing ~ $200) are likely to soon get into the hands, and onto the heads, of many more people. A few clips:

The recent surge in interest in tDCS piggybacks on an increasing number of academic studies of its potential to boost cognitive ability, which themselves build on decades-old work using electrical stimulation of the brain to treat ailments such as depression (see Nature 472, 156–159; 2011).

In an opinion piece published earlier this month, Nicholas Fitz and Peter Reiner of the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, argue that scientists and regulators can no longer ignore the amateurish meddling with tDCS (N. Fitz and P. Reiner J. Med. Ethics http://doi.org/mv8; 2013). “The challenge for the field,” they write, “is to develop policy that thoughtfully deals with the issues stemming from people using tDCS devices at home.”

Such home use of experimental laboratory kit puts neuroethicists, and journals such as Nature, in a bind. To draw attention to it could promote and accelerate its use, and so increase the risk of a mishap. To ignore it leaves the risks unexplored. The scale of at-home tDCS use is unclear at present. It might fizzle out. Or, as scientific interest in the power of electrical stimulation of the brain grows, it might appeal to more enthusiasts, just as the fascination and potential of synthetic biology has spawned a parallel DIY community known as biohackers. The scientific interest is certainly there.

Last month, researchers at the University of Oxford, UK, published a study suggesting that random electrical stimulation of the brain could improve mathematical abilities (A. Snowball et al.Curr. Biol. 23, 987–992; 2013). And there is no lack of exposure. Drawn by the ease of access and the killer copy, science journalists are queuing up to try tDCS for themselves and to write about the effects.

Fitz and Reiner are not the first to raise concerns over the DIY tDCS community. Brain researchers flagged the problem last year, as part of a discussion on the broader ethics of using non-invasive brain-stimulation (R. Cohen Kadosh et al. Curr. Biol. 22, R108–R111; 2012). The researchers even raised the prospect of the ultimate in pushy parents: those who would use the technology on their children to try to boost their cognitive function. And back in 2011, scientists working on tDCS told Nature that they were concerned for the safety of those who tried it at home.

It is easier to raise these questions than to answer them. Fitz and Reiner have some sensible suggestions, ranging from greater reporting of the possible long-term risks of tDCS to mimicking the open communication and education strategy with which the life-sciences field has started to engage biohackers. The first step is to acknowledge the issue to get a sense of how widespread the demand for home electrical self-improvement really is. The next few months will tell us more.

Want to see the metadata on yourself (like the NSA already has)??

Intrigued by two recent articles by Lapidos and Chen, I've taken myself to the MIT media program called "Immersion". "... it only works with Gmail and you have to reveal your password...but, unlike Google, or the NSA, the project also offers an instant deletion option: Remove your name, and it erases your metadata.”  I couldn't resist. I forward all of my older email accounts (University of Wisconsin, etc.) to gmail, so it gives a good picture of my email contacts.  Below I show the graphic of my modest contact network, with names deleted.  And, of course, I've now erased the data and withdrawn the access permissions.  While doing this, I was astounded to see the list of widgets (I was completely unaware of) that have access to all my google data.  I started to delete a few, but gave up after awhile.  I assume the NSA has a vastly more complete picture, which is not being deleted!   And - whistling in the dark - I hope that nothing I do could possibly be of interest to security snoops.  

How our brain cortex receives information about the world

This post is for that subset of MindBlog readers interested in details of brain wiring. Constantinople and Bruno have upset a basic dogma taught to budding neuroscientists (like myself, in the 1960s) - that (from the Science editor's summary):

...there is a “canonical microcircuit” in the neo cortex, in which information is transformed as excitation spreads serially along connections from thalamus, to cortical layer 4, then to layers 2/3, to layers 5/6, and finally to other brain regions. Each cortical layer is thought to transform sensory signals to extract behaviorally relevant information. Now, from Constantinople and Bruno...In vivo whole-cell recordings revealed that sensory stimuli activate neurons in deep cortical layers simultaneously to those in layer 4 and that a large number of thalamic neurons converge onto deep pyramidal neurons, possibly allowing sensory information to completely bypass upper layers. Temporary blockade of layer 4 revealed that synaptic input to deep cortical layers derived entirely from the thalamus and not at all from upper cortical layers. This thalamically derived synaptic input reliably drove pyramidal neurons in layer 5 to discharge action potentials in the living animal. These deep layer neurons project to numerous higher-order brain regions and could directly mediate behavior.

Here is a summary graphic from the paper:

(A) In the conventional serial model, sensory information is transformed as excitation spreads from thalamus to L4 to L2/3 to L5/6 along the densest axonal pathways (green). (B) In the bistratified model, thalamus copies sensory information to both an upper stratum (L4 and L2/3) and a lower stratum (L5/6), which differ in coding properties and downstream target

s.

Eye widening in fear - sensory and social benefits

An interesting bit from Lee et al. Their abstract:

Facial expressions may have originated from a primitive sensory regulatory function that was then co-opted and further shaped for the purposes of social utility. In the research reported here, we tested such a hypothesis by investigating the functional origins of fear expressions for both the expresser and the observer. We first found that fear-based eye widening enhanced target discrimination in the available visual periphery of the expresser by 9.4%. We then found that fear-based eye widening enhanced observers’ discrimination of expressers’ gaze direction and facilitated observers’ responses when locating eccentric targets. We present evidence that this benefit was driven by neither the perceived emotion nor attention but, rather, by an enhanced physical signal originating from greater exposure of the iris and sclera. These results highlight the coevolution of sensory and social regulatory functions of emotional expressions by showing that eye widening serves to enhance processing of important environmental events in the visual fields of both expresser and observer.

Inflammation links ageing to the brain.

Gabuzda et al. do a nice review of work by Zhang et al., that suggests that manipulation of hypothalamus regulation, and especially levels of the hormone GnRH (gonadotropin-releasing hormone) might abrogate some effects of ageing.  I want to pass on several clips from their summary:

One of the least-understood aspects of ageing is its coordinated and stereotyped progression in all organ systems. Although researchers have long suspected that the brain orchestrates systemic ageing, compelling evidence of this in mammals has been lacking. Furthermore, we have had no clear understanding of how ageing is affected by inflammation, which is a hallmark of age-related diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, arthritis and Alzheimer's disease. Zhang et al. help to make this connection by documenting the integration of inflammatory responses with systemic control of ageing by the hypothalamus — a part of the brain that controls growth, reproduction and metabolism.

FIGURE - Zhang et al. report that inflammation leads to activation of the signalling molecule NF-κB in the hypothalamus of the brain, and suggest that this contributes to the control of systemic ageing. They show that NF-κB activation in hypothalamic cells called microglia results in production of TNF-α, which, in turn, stimulates NF-κB activity in nearby neurons. This signalling results in epigenetic repression of the gene that encodes gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), leading to reduced GnRH release from the neurons, which is associated with multiple physiological changes related to ageing, including bone loss, skin atrophy, muscle weakness and memory loss. This pathway might also mediate the effects of a variety of environmental and physiological stressors.

'Inflammageing' describes the close relationship between low-grade chronic inflammation and ageing that has been linked to a wide spectrum of age-related disorders in various organs, including the brain6. Healthy ageing and longevity could relate, in part, to reduced levels of inflammation or strong protective mechanisms that guard against adverse effects of chronic inflammation. Conversely, genetic and environmental factors that promote inflammation or disrupt the mechanisms involved in reducing inflammation seem to confer increased susceptibility to 'accelerated ageing' and age-related disorders such as insulin resistance, metabolic disorders and cardiovascular disease7. Accelerated ageing typically involves multiple organ systems, although the effects in some organs might not be seen as clinical symptoms.

In addition to the classical activity of GnRH in regulating the release of sex steroids involved in development and reproduction (oestrogens and progesterone in females and androgens in males), the hormone might also mediate other functions12. Notably, Zhang et al. found that when mice were administered GnRH, it abrogated ageing effects and increased the production of new neurons in the hypothalamus and hippocampus (a part of the brain that regulates memory). By contrast, sex steroids did not have these anti-ageing effects. A decrease in gonadal sex steroids is a well-established marker of ageing, but many other hormonal changes occur as well; and some of these age-regulated hormones (such as dehydroepiandrosterone) also regulate inflammation and other immune responses. Thus, interplay between the hormonal and immune systems occurs at multiple levels.

How might hypothalamic regulation of ageing have evolved? Chronic inflammation arises from many kinds of insult, from acute infection to genomic instability. The concept that the hypothalamus can sense inflammation through immune pathways is a new one; just as the hypothalamus responds to nutrient status, its response to inflammation may enable the organism to rapidly adapt to physiological perturbations. Turning down the hypothalamic release of modulators such as GnRH to prevent reproduction and reduce growth may be evolutionarily advantageous during acute infection, injury or deprivation. Although this would have been adaptive for our shorter-lived ancestors, it may accelerate ageing in older individuals and have become apparent now that we live longer. This idea also raises the intriguing possibility that hypothalamic regulation could be therapeutically manipulated to have broad effects on the ageing process and age-related pathology.

A spiritual home for atheists.

For many of us secular humanists, agnostics, or atheists, life after our alienation from conventional religious congregations that offer prayers to an anthropomorphic god (or gods) ends up feeling a bit rye-crispy. We lose also the sense of belonging and community that was part of the experience of being in a church congregation. Thus I was struck by this article about a former Pentecostal minister who has started in Baton Rouge, LA., to offer atheist services with impassioned sermons, singing and light swaying, exhortations to service, etc., everything but God! Jerry DeWitt, who was raised as a pentecostal and served 25 years as a minister, now offers an emotional counterpoint to more academic atheist exponents like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. While other non-deistic spiritual congregations now exist, especially in many larger urban areas ( usually with some mix or mysticism, new age rituals, or religious-scientific components) I doubt that many of them get quite as close to reproducing the gut-wrenching intensity of DeWitt’s pentecostal service minus God!

Linking brain imaging to our subjective experience - focused attention versus mind-wandering

An interesting study from Garrison et al at Yale:

Recent advances in brain imaging have improved the measure of neural processes related to perceptual, cognitive and affective functions, yet the relation between brain activity and subjective experience remains poorly characterized. In part, it is a challenge to obtain reliable accounts of participant's experience in such studies. Here we addressed this limitation by utilizing experienced meditators who are expert in introspection. We tested a novel method to link objective and subjective data, using real-time fMRI (rt-fMRI) to provide participants with feedback of their own brain activity during an ongoing task. We provided real-time feedback during a focused attention task from the posterior cingulate cortex, a hub of the default mode network shown to be activated during mind-wandering and deactivated during meditation. In a first experiment, both meditators and non-meditators reported significant correspondence between the feedback graph and their subjective experience of focused attention and mind-wandering. When instructed to volitionally decrease the feedback graph, meditators, but not non-meditators, showed significant deactivation of the posterior cingulate cortex. We were able to replicate these results in a separate group of meditators using a novel step-wise rt-fMRI discovery protocol in which participants were not provided with prior knowledge of the expected relationship between their experience and the feedback graph (i.e., focused attention versus mind-wandering). These findings support the feasibility of using rt-fMRI to link objective measures of brain activity with reports of ongoing subjective experience in cognitive neuroscience research, and demonstrate the generalization of expertise in introspective awareness to novel contexts.

Enhanced emotion regulation persists after meditation training.

Desbordes and collaborators have looked at the effects of training in both mindful attention meditation and compassion meditation in two groups of subject with no previous experience meditating enrolled in 8-week training courses in both. 12 participants from each group reacted to images of people in situations with positive, negative, or neutral emotional content during fMRI measurements made during three weeks before or at three weeks after the training sessions. From the review in The Harvard Gazette:

In the mindful attention group, the after-training brain scans showed a decrease in activation in the right amygdala in response to all images, supporting the hypothesis that meditation can improve emotional stability and response to stress. In the compassion meditation group, right amygdala activity also decreased in response to positive or neutral images. But among those who reported practicing compassion meditation most frequently outside of the training sessions, right amygdala activity tended to increase in response to negative images, all of which depicted some form of human suffering. No significant changes were seen in the control group or in the left amygdala of any study participants.

The Harm-Made Mind

Here is a fascinating bit from Daniel Wegner and his collaborators. (I cite Wegner extensively in my "I-Illusion" web-lecture in introductory lectures sections of the left had column of this web page.)

People often think that something must have a mind to be part of a moral interaction. However, the present research suggests that minds do not create morality but that morality creates minds. In four experiments, we found that observing intentional harm to an unconscious entity—a vegetative patient, a robot, or a corpse—leads to augmented attribution of mind to that entity. A fifth experiment reconciled these results with extant research on dehumanization by showing that observing the victimization of conscious entities leads to reduced attribution of mind to those entities. Taken together, these experiments suggest that the effects of victimization vary according to victims’ preexisting mental status and that people often make an intuitive cognitive error when unconscious entities are placed in harm’s way. People assume that if apparent moral harm occurs, then there must be someone there to experience that harm—a harm-made mind. These findings have implications for political policies concerning right-to-life issues.

Are you married? Did you meet on-line or off-line?

Interesting bit from Cacioppo et al.

Marital discord is costly to children, families, and communities. The advent of the Internet, social networking, and on-line dating has affected how people meet future spouses, but little is known about the prevalence or outcomes of these marriages or the demographics of those involved. We addressed these questions in a nationally representative sample of 19,131 respondents who married between 2005 and 2012. Results indicate that more than one-third of marriages in America now begin on-line. In addition, marriages that began on-line, when compared with those that began through traditional off-line venues, were slightly less likely to result in a marital break-up (separation or divorce) and were associated with slightly higher marital satisfaction among those respondents who remained married. Demographic differences were identified between respondents who met their spouse through on-line vs. traditional off-line venues, but the findings for marital break-up and marital satisfaction remained significant after statistically controlling for these differences. These data suggest that the Internet may be altering the dynamics and outcomes of marriage itself.

Brain science backlash, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

A recent NYTimes Op-Ed piece by David Brooks' ("Beyond the Brain") references the recent book "“Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience.” a book that appropriately notes some of the limitations of zealous over interpretation of brain imaging data but also includes some facile straw man arguments. Brooks kind of loses it in his comment:

It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind...there appears to be no dispersed pattern of activation that we can look at and say, “That person is experiencing hatred."

These sentiments are simply wrong, and I thought, rather than rambling on myself, I would point interested readers to two cogent commentaries on the recent anti-brain science surge, one in The New Yorker blog posted by Gary Marcus, the other in The Neurocritic blog.

Paternal stress changes stress axis in offspring

A study from Bale and colleagues shows that stress on preadolescent and adult male mice induces an epigenetic mark in their sperm that reprogramms their offspring's hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, the brain regions that governs responses to stress. Offspring from paternal stress groups displayed significantly blunted levels of the stress hormone corticosterone -- in humans, it's cortisol -- in response to stress. It is curious that both male and female offspring had abnormally low reactivity to stress. Perhaps this reduced physiological stress response may reflect some adaptive evolutionary benefit passed on to offspring to ensure survival in what is expected to be a more stressful environment.

Neuropsychiatric disease frequently presents with an underlying hyporeactivity or hyperreactivity of the HPA stress axis, suggesting an exceptional vulnerability of this circuitry to external perturbations. Parental lifetime exposures to environmental challenges are associated with increased offspring neuropsychiatric disease risk, and likely contribute to stress dysregulation. While maternal influences have been extensively examined, much less is known regarding the specific role of paternal factors. To investigate the potential mechanisms by which paternal stress may contribute to offspring hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis dysregulation, we exposed mice to 6 weeks of chronic stress before breeding. As epidemiological studies support variation in paternal germ cell susceptibility to reprogramming across the lifespan, male stress exposure occurred either throughout puberty or in adulthood. Remarkably, offspring of sires from both paternal stress groups displayed significantly reduced HPA stress axis responsivity. Gene set enrichment analyses in offspring stress regulating brain regions, the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) and the bed nucleus of stria terminalis, revealed global pattern changes in transcription suggestive of epigenetic reprogramming and consistent with altered offspring stress responsivity, including increased expression of glucocorticoid-responsive genes in the PVN. In examining potential epigenetic mechanisms of germ cell transmission, we found robust changes in sperm microRNA (miR) content, where nine specific miRs were significantly increased in both paternal stress groups. Overall, these results demonstrate that paternal experience across the lifespan can induce germ cell epigenetic reprogramming and impact offspring HPA stress axis regulation, and may therefore offer novel insight into factors influencing neuropsychiatric disease risk.

Paper is not dead...

Sorry to spam you, but particularly after yesterday's post about smartphone apps I thought this was hysterical.

More on smartphone brain training apps.

This post is just a quickie pointer to update the series of posts I have done on smart phone or PC apps that give your brain a workout.  It reviews several current products.  I try each new iteration for a bit,  but then fade because I am phobic about "competing" with myself or anyone else and also get concerned that my scores are not improving fast enough.  I didn't grow up in a video game playing world, and they feel too much like hard work - I like things that feel easy with the skills I have,  like learning a new piano score. 

Neuroimaging our self esteem - be happy!

There are more papers coming out on brain correlates of whatever aspect of our behaviors you care to name than anyone could possibly keep up with. I have the ‘my eyes glaze over’ experience in just scanning tables of contents of the relevant journals. Occasionally an item pops out that grabs my attention, such as this one (open access) on imaging brain correlates of self esteem. The drums continue to beat (see this book review) on how important a positive self image and an "Up" attitude are for health and longevity. Maybe someone will develop some kind of magnetic zapper that we can shoot ourselves up with whenever whenever we are feeling like a piece of …... 

Although neuroimaging studies strongly implicate the medial prefrontal cortex (ventral and dorsal), cingulate gyrus (anterior and posterior), precuneus and temporoparietal cortex in mediating self-referential processing (SRP), little is known about the neural bases mediating individual differences in valenced SRP, that is, processes intrinsic to self-esteem. This study investigated the neural correlates of experimentally engendered valenced SRP via the Visual–Verbal Self-Other Referential Processing Task in 20 women with fMRI. Participants viewed pictures of themselves or unknown other women during separate trials while covertly rehearsing ‘I am’ or ‘She is’, followed by reading valenced trait adjectives, thus variably associating the self/other with positivity/negativity. Response within dorsal and ventral medial prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex and left temporoparietal cortex varied with individual differences in both pre-task rated self-descriptiveness of the words, as well as task-induced affective responses. Results are discussed as they relate to a social cognitive and affective neuroscience view of self-esteem.

.... stimulus presentations were blocked in terms of the conditions Reference (Self vs Other, i.e. photographs) and Valence (words), creating four trial types: self-negative (S-N), self-positive (S-P), other-negative (O-N) and other-positive (O-P). Participants were not instructed that they ‘should try to press the buttons as fast as possible’ as is often done in social cognition experiments. In contrast, participants were instructed only to press the buttons ‘so that we can assess afterwards whether you are paying attention to and completing the task’. This passive orientation was intended to focus attention towards introspection and interoception with participants reminded repeatedly of the importance of ‘paying close attention to how you are feeling throughout the different parts of the task’.