Varieties of introspection.

I disagree with David Brooks’ opinions much of the time, but I’m impressed with what a polymath he is. His Op-Ed piece on healthy versus unhealthy introspection is a case in point:

...there seems to be a paradox at the heart of introspection. The self is something that can be seen more accurately from a distance than from close up. The more you can yank yourself away from your own intimacy with yourself, the more reliable your self-awareness is likely to be...When people examine themselves from too close, they often end up ruminating or oversimplifying...have repetitive thoughts, but don’t take action. Depressed ruminators end up making themselves more depressed.

We are better self-perceivers if we can create distance and see the general contours of our emergent system selves — rather than trying to unpack constituent parts. This can be done in several ways.

First, you can distance yourself by time. ...people who write about trauma later on can place a broader perspective on things. Their lives are improved by the exercise.

Second, we can achieve distance from self through language. ..it’s smart, when trying to counsel yourself, to pretend you are somebody else. This can be done a bit even by thinking of yourself in the third person...people who view themselves from a self-distanced perspective are better at adaptive self-reflection than people who view themselves from a self-immersed perspective.

Finally, there is narrative. ..We should see ourselves as literary critics, putting each incident in the perspective of a longer life story. The narrative form is a more supple way of understanding human processes, even unconscious ones, than rationalistic analysis.

Maturity is moving from the close-up to the landscape, focusing less on your own supposed strengths and weaknesses and more on the sea of empathy in which you swim, which is the medium necessary for understanding others, one’s self, and survival.

An opinion due to social conformity lasts only a few days.

Huang et al. do a study on 22 South China Normal University students in which they evaluated the attractiveness of a series of neutral faces with and without knowing other students' opinions of them.

When people are faced with opinions different from their own, they often revise their own opinions to match those held by other people. This is known as the social-conformity effect. Although the immediate impact of social influence on people’s decision making is well established, it is unclear whether this reflects a transient capitulation to public opinion or a more enduring change in privately held views. In an experiment using a facial-attractiveness rating task, we asked participants to rate each face; after providing their rating, they were informed of the rating given by a peer group. They then rerated the same faces after 1, 3, or 7 days or 3 months. Results show that individuals’ initial judgments are altered by the differing opinions of other people for no more than 3 days. Our findings suggest that because the social-conformity effect lasts several days, it reflects a short-term change in privately held views rather than a transient public compliance.

Motivation not improved by multiple motives.

Wrzesniewski et al. do an interesting study of 11,320 West Point cadets over a period of ten years.

Although people often assume that multiple motives for doing something will be more powerful and effective than a single motive, research suggests that different types of motives for the same action sometimes compete. More specifically, research suggests that instrumental motives, which are extrinsic to the activities at hand, can weaken internal motives, which are intrinsic to the activities at hand. We tested whether holding both instrumental and internal motives yields negative outcomes in a field context in which various motives occur naturally and long-term educational and career outcomes are at stake. We assessed the impact of the motives of over 10,000 West Point cadets over the period of a decade on whether they would become commissioned officers, extend their officer service beyond the minimum required period, and be selected for early career promotions. For each outcome, motivation internal to military service itself predicted positive outcomes; a relationship that was negatively affected when instrumental motives were also in evidence. These results suggest that holding multiple motives damages persistence and performance in educational and occupational contexts over long periods of time.

Here is a bit more detail from the start of the results section:

Across two different survey measures administered by the institution at the start of their first year, cadets indicated how much each of a set of reasons offered represented their reasons for attending West Point, which allowed them to endorse any number of reasons at various levels of strength (response scales for the two measures ranged from very important to not important on a 1–3 Likert-type scale; and very positive to very negative on a 1–5 Likert-type scale). Reasons offered in the survey ranged from the prospect of getting a good job (instrumental), to economic necessity (cadets do not pay tuition), to a desire to be an Army officer (internal). Of the various reasons offered, two types were of key interest: reasons indicating an internal desire to become an Army officer and reasons indicating an instrumental desire to gain eventual outcomes associated with attending West Point. The data are archival; thus, none of the items in the surveys completed by cadets perfectly captured the distinction between “internal” and “instrumental” motives. For example, there were no items intended to capture a “pure” internal motive, defined to mean that the activity of becoming a West Point cadet was a meaningful and valuable end in itself (3). However, this motive is “internal” in the sense that the desire to be an Army officer requires that one do the things that Army officers do. In this way, it is akin to “being a soldier” (internal) rather than “getting a good job” (instrumental)....A total of 31 reasons appeared in the surveys and were subjected to exploratory factor analysis...

How much do our genes influence our political beliefs?

One of MindBlog’s subject threads has been noting articles that examine the correlation between our genetic constitution and our political behaviors. Thus I point to a recent article by Thomas Edsall that notes work in this controversial field by Ludeke et al. who:

...write that “authoritarianism, religiousness and conservatism,” which they call the “traditional moral values triad,” are “substantially influenced by genetic factors.” — all three traits are reflections of “a single, underlying tendency,” previously described in one word by Bouchard in a 2006 paper as “traditionalism.” Traditionalists in this sense are defined as “having strict moral standards and child-rearing practices, valuing conventional propriety and reputation, opposing rebelliousness and selfish disregard of others, and valuing religious institutions and practices.”

From this perspective, the Democratic Party — supportive of abortion rights, same-sex marriage and the primacy of self-expressive individualism over obligation to family — is irreconcilably alien to a segment of the electorate. And the same is true from the opposite viewpoint: a Republican Party committed to right-to-life policies, to a belief that marriage must be between a man and a woman, and to family obligation over self-actualization, is profoundly unacceptable to many on the left.

Ludeke et al. studied a sample of identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins who were separated from each other early in life. They assessed their adult social, political, and social attitudes, finding that they represented a single construct that was heritable and similar to a traditionalism measure. Their abstract:

Social attitudes, political attitudes and religiousness are highly inter-correlated. Furthermore, each is substantially influenced by genetic factors. Koenig and Bouchard (2006) hypothesized that these three areas (which they termed the Traditional Moral Values Triad) each derive from an underlying latent trait concerning the tendency to obey traditional authorities. We tested this hypothesis with data from a sample of twins raised in different homes. We assessed social attitudes with Altemeyer’s (1988) Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale, political attitudes with Wilson and Patterson’s (1968) Conservatism scale, and religiousness with Wiggins’ (1966) Religious Fundamentalism scale. The best-fitting model identified the three TMVT domains as different manifestations of a single latent and significantly heritable factor. Further, the genetic and environmental bases for this factor overlapped heavily with those for the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire Traditionalism scale, supporting the conception of traditionalism as the latent factor represented by the three scales in contemporary Western societies.

Anger as the most easily spread emotion.

Teddy Wayne does an essay on how anger is the emotion that spreads the most easily over social media. Some clips:

A 2013 study, from Beihang University in Beijing, of Weibo, a Twitter-like site, found that anger is the emotion that spreads the most easily over social media. Joy came in a distant second. The main difference, said Ryan Martin, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, who studies anger, is that although we tend to share the happiness only of people we are close to, we are willing to join in the rage of strangers. As the study suggests, outrage is lavishly rewarded on social media, whether through supportive comments, retweets or Facebook likes. People prone to Internet outrage are looking for validation, Professor Martin said. “They want to hear that others share it,” he said, “because they feel they’re vindicated and a little less lonely and isolated in their belief.”

...outrage carries a different flavor from pure anger; it suggests an affront to one’s value system as opposed to seething, Hulk-like fury. So whereas a venomous insult from an anonymous commenter simply seeks to tear down another person or institution, an outraged Twitter post from an identified account calls attention to the user’s own probity. By throwing 140-character stones from our Google Glass houses, we preserve our belief (or delusion) that we are morally superior to those who have offended us.

Perhaps the real problem, Professor Martin suggested, isn’t our rage but our rashness, and its relationship to our easily accessible devices. The Internet exacerbates impulse-control problems. You get mad, and you can tell the world about it in moments before you’ve had a chance to calm down and think things through.

Brain noise? Insomnia? Try A.S.M.R.

Fairyington does an interesting piece on a phenomenon called autonomous sensory meridian response (A.S.M.R.), which is felt as a mild calming tingling sensation that travels over the scalp or other part of the body in response to some kinds of subtle repetitive visual, auditory, or smell stimulation (rustling pages, whispering; tapping, scratching, etc.). The article contains numerous links to YouTube sites devoted to this effect. Some clips:

Carl W. Bazil, a sleep disorders specialist at Columbia University, says A.S.M.R. videos may provide novel ways to switch off our brains...“People who have insomnia are in a hyper state of arousal,” he said. “Behavioral treatments — guided imagery, progressive relaxation, hypnosis and meditation — are meant to try to trick your unconscious into doing what you want it to do. A.S.M.R. videos seem to be a variation on finding ways to shut your brain down.”

Bryson Lochte, a post-baccalaureate fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse who looked into A.S.M.R. for his senior thesis as a neuroscience major at Dartmouth College last year, has submitted his paper for publication in a scientific journal. Mr. Lochte said, “We focused on those areas in the brain associated with motivation, emotion and arousal to probe the effect A.S.M.R. has on the ‘reward system’ — the neural structures that trigger a dopamine surge amid pleasing reinforcements, like food or sex.

He compared A.S.M.R. to another idiosyncratic but well-studied sensation called musical frisson, which provokes a thrilling ripple of chills or goose bumps (technically termed piloerection) over one’s body in emotional response to music. Mathias Benedek, a research assistant at the University of Graz in Austria who co-authored two studies on emotion-provoked piloerection, says A.S.M.R. may be a softer, quieter version of the same phenomenon. “Frisson may simply be a stronger, full-blown response,” he said. And like A.S.M.R., the melodies that ignite frisson in one person may not in another.

Robert J. Zatorre, a professor of neuroscience at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital at McGill University who has also studied musical frisson, said that “the upshot of my paper is that pleasurable music elicits dopamine activity in the striatum, which is a key component of the reward system” in the brain. Writing in The New York Times last year, in an article titled “Why Music Makes Our Brain Sing,” he notes, “What may be most interesting here is when this neurotransmitter is released: not only when the music rises to a peak emotional moment, but also several seconds before, during what we might call the anticipation phase.”

Perhaps the everyday experiences that A.S.M.R. videos capture — whispering, crinkling, opening and closing of boxes — evoke similar anticipatory mechanisms, sparking memories of past pleasures that we anticipate and relive each time we watch and listen.

MindBlog gets married.

Deric Bownds and his partner of 25 years, Len Walker, having brunch at Palmer House in Chicago after getting married at the Cook County Courthouse during a visit with friends Mark Weber and Roy Wesley.

Faith and ideology trump reason...

Sigh...sorry to spread such pessimistic material, but I pass on two items on the persistence of faith or ideology over reason. Nyhan describes a number of studies, including one by Kahan, who finds that the divide over belief in evolution between more and less religious people is wider among people who otherwise show familiarity with math and science, which suggests that the problem isn’t a lack of information. And, Paul Krugman issues another installment in his railing about the inflation delusions clung to by conservative economists and politicans.

Brain activity that reflects positive and negative emotion.

Knutson et al. at Stanford note a correlation between self reported positive and negative arousal and fMRI measurement of brain activity in the nucleus accumbens and anterior insula (if you go to Google images and enter these terms you can see the locations of these regions in brain). Their abstract:

Neuroimaging findings are often interpreted in terms of affective experience, but researchers disagree about the advisability or even possibility of such inferences, and few frameworks explicitly link these levels of analysis. Here, we suggest that the spatial and temporal resolution of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data could support inferences about affective states. Specifically, we propose that fMRI nucleus accumbens (NAcc) activity is associated with positive arousal, whereas a combination of anterior insula activity and NAcc activity is associated with negative arousal. This framework implies quantifiable and testable inferences about affect from fMRI data, which may ultimately inform predictions about approach and avoidance behavior.

And a figure from their paper:

Meta-analytic results for activity in nucleus accumbens (NAcc; white circles) and anterior insula (black circles) during incentive anticipation. Activation likelihood estimate maps adapted from Bartra et al.  - who also present a list of regions correlating with affect -  superimposed onto the affective circumplex [from right to left: positive minus negative subjective value (SV), positive subjective value, positive plus negative subjective value, and negative subjective value]

Brain correlates of behaviors in market bubbles.

Interesting...from Smith et al. a visualization of the part of our brains that seem to be saying "go for it" during a market bubble (and making less money) and another region that is saying "Whoa..." (whose activity is more prominent in successful traders who pull out of the market before the crash.)

Groups of humans routinely misassign value to complex future events, especially in settings involving the exchange of resources. If properly structured, experimental markets can act as excellent probes of human group-level valuation mechanisms during pathological overvaluations—price bubbles. The connection between the behavioral and neural underpinnings of such phenomena has been absent, in part due to a lack of enabling technology. We used a multisubject functional MRI paradigm to measure neural activity in human subjects participating in experimental asset markets in which endogenous price bubbles formed and crashed. Although many ideas exist about how and why such bubbles may form and how to identify them, our experiment provided a window on the connection between neural responses and behavioral acts (buying and selling) that created the bubbles. We show that aggregate neural activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) tracks the price bubble and that NAcc activity aggregated within a market predicts future price changes and crashes. Furthermore, the lowest-earning subjects express a stronger tendency to buy as a function of measured NAcc activity. Conversely, we report a signal in the anterior insular cortex in the highest earners that precedes the impending price peak, is associated with a higher propensity to sell in high earners, and that may represent a neural early warning signal in these subjects. Such markets could be a model system to understand neural and behavior mechanisms in other settings where emergent group-level activity exhibits mistaken belief or valuation.

A intriguing take on consciousness as a perceptual construct.

A recent review by Aaron Schurger in Science Magazine pointed me to Michael Graziano's 2013 book "Consciousness and the Social Brain", which I immediately downloaded, read, and abstracted. Very engaging and clear writing (although I am dumbfounded that he makes no reference to Thomas Metzinger's work and 'ego tunnel' model, which has common elements with his own.) In Graziano's theory awareness is information, the brain's simplified, schematic model of the complicated, data-handling process of attention. A brain can use the construct of awareness to model its own attentional state or to model someone else’s attentional state. An extract from Schurger's review:

In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Michael Graziano argues that consciousness is a perceptual construct—the brain attributes it to other people in much the same way that the brain attributes speech to the ventriloquist's puppet. To clarify, imagine being greeted by a very lifelike android version of your best friend with a prerecorded behavioral program that had you genuinely fooled for a few minutes. From your perspective, for those minutes, the android was endowed with consciousness. Thus there need be no truth or falsity to the statement “My friend standing before me is conscious.” Your brain decides that the android–best friend standing in front of you is conscious, and that is what you perceive to be true.

According to Graziano's “attention schema” theory, our own consciousness is also a perceptual construct—a unique one that emerges when the brain applies the same perceptual attribution recursively to itself. We attribute consciousness to others as part of our perceptual model of what they are paying attention to (an inference particularly useful for predicting their behavior). This model describes the process of attention as a mysterious something extra in the brains of beings that are selectively processing information that guides their behavior. When the brain applies the model to itself, “I” become endowed with this extra something as well—although, as with the android, it was never there in the first place.

According to the theory, consciousness is to attention what the body schema is to the body: it is the brain's perceptual description of its own process of attention. The two phenomena are thus locked “in a positive feedback loop,” which explains the tight connection between attention and consciousness. In essence, consciousness is a descriptive story about a real physical phenomenon (attention). The ink in which the story is written (neural activity) is real, and the physical phenomenon that the story is “about” (attention) is real. But, like the talking puppet, the story itself need not be real. We say that we have consciousness, and that it seems irreducible to physical phenomena, because that is how the brain describes the process of attention (in ourselves and in others): as something ineffable.

I'll also give you a clip from my abstracting of the book:

The heart of the theory is that awareness is a schematized, descriptive model of attention. The model is not perfectly accurate, but it is good enough to be useful. It is a rich information set, as rich as a sensory representation. It can be bound to a representation of an object as though it were another sensory attribute like color or motion….the purpose of a model in the brain is to be useful in interacting with the world, not to be accurate.

The body schema and the attention schema may share more than a formal similarity. They may partially overlap. The body schema is an internal model— an organized set of information that represents the shape, structure, and movement of the body, that distinguishes between objects belonging to the body and objects that are foreign.

In the present theory, the attention schema is similar to the body schema. Rather than representing one’s physical body, it models a different aspect of oneself, also a complex dynamical system, the process of attention— the process by which some signals in the brain become enhanced at the expense of others. It is a predictive model of attention, its dynamics, its essential meaning, its potential impact on behavior, what it can and can’t do, what affects it, and how. It is a simulation. The quirky way that attention shifts from place to place, from item to item, its fluctuating intensity, its spatial and temporal dynamics— all of these aspects are incorporated into the model.

Video game puzzle that improves executive function.

Maybe you don't have to pay brainhq.com or luminosity.com a monthly fee for brain exercises to improve your brain's executive functions. An iOS or Android App costing three dollars might do the job. Oei and Patterson make the interesting observation that executive function (making decision in rapidly changing circumstances) can be improved 30% by a video game (Cut the Rope) that requires physics-based puzzle solving but not by an action video game, a fast paced arcade game, or a real-time strategy game. Tests of executive function were administered before and a week after the game training. Their abstract:

Recent research suggests a causal link between action video game playing and enhanced attention and visual-perceptual skills. In contrast, evidence linking action video games and enhanced executive function is equivocal. We investigated whether action and non-action video games enhance executive function. Fifty-five inexperienced video game players played one of four different games: an action video game (Modern Combat), a physics-based puzzle game (Cut the Rope), a real-time strategy game (Starfront Collision), and a fast paced arcade game (Fruit Ninja) for 20 h. Three pre and post training tests of executive function were administered: a random task switching, a flanker, and a response inhibition task (Go/No-go). Only the group that trained on the physics-based puzzle game significantly improved in all three tasks relative to the pre-test. No training-related improvements were seen in other groups. These results suggest that playing a complex puzzle game that demands strategizing, reframing, and planning improves several aspects of executive function.

Life purpose, longevity, and Alzheimers disease.

From Hill and Turiano:

Having a purpose in life has been cited consistently as an indicator of healthy aging for several reasons, including its potential for reducing mortality risk. In the current study, we sought to extend previous findings by examining whether purpose in life promotes longevity across the adult years, using data from the longitudinal Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) sample. Proportional-hazards models demonstrated that purposeful individuals lived longer than their counterparts did during the 14 years after the baseline assessment, even when controlling for other markers of psychological and affective well-being. Moreover, these longevity benefits did not appear to be conditional on the participants’ age, how long they lived during the follow-up period, or whether they had retired from the workforce. In other words, having a purpose in life appears to widely buffer against mortality risk across the adult years.

(MIDUS refers to a longitudinal study of health and well-being that began in 1994–1995. 7,108 participants were recruited from a nationally representative, random-digit-dialing sample of noninstitutionalized adults between the ages of 20 and 75 (mean age = 46.92 years, SD = 12.94)).

An article by Span points to other studies following almost 1,000 people (age 80, on average) for up to seven years, finding that those with high purpose scores were 2.4 times more likely to remain free of Alzheimer’s than those with low scores and also less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment, often a precursor...In a subset of 246 people who died, autopsies found that many of the purposeful subjects also showed the distinctive markers of Alzheimer’s, suggesting that even for people developing the plaques and tangles in their brains, having purpose in life allows them to tolerate them and still maintain their cognition...Another study, of 1,238 people followed for up to five years (average age: 78)found that those with high purpose had roughly half the mortality rate of those with low purpose.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

The standard answer, which I've used to end several of my lectures, is "practice, practice, practice." Macnamara et al. suggest there is a bit more to it than that (like genetics....there's no way my piano sight reading ability, obvious at age 6, was due to practice.):

More than 20 years ago, researchers proposed that individual differences in performance in such domains as music, sports, and games largely reflect individual differences in amount of deliberate practice, which was defined as engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance in a domain. This view is a frequent topic of popular-science writing—but is it supported by empirical evidence? To answer this question, we conducted a meta-analysis covering all major domains in which deliberate practice has been investigated. We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.

Why is melody in the high notes and rhythm in the base?

Hove et al. examine to what extent musical convention might be shaped by evolutionarily-shaped human physiology.

Across cultures, polyphonic music most often conveys melody in higher-pitched sounds and rhythm in lower-pitched sounds. They show that, when two streams of tones are presented simultaneously, the brain better detects timing deviations in the lower-pitched than in the higher-pitched stream and that tapping synchronization to the tones is more influenced by the lower-pitched stream. Furthermore, their modeling reveals that, with simultaneous sounds, superior encoding of timing for lower sounds and of pitch for higher sounds arises early in the auditory pathway in the cochlea of the inner ear. Thus, these musical conventions likely arise from very basic auditory physiology.

The abstract:

The auditory environment typically contains several sound sources that overlap in time, and the auditory system parses the complex sound wave into streams or voices that represent the various sound sources. Music is also often polyphonic. Interestingly, the main melody (spectral/pitch information) is most often carried by the highest-pitched voice, and the rhythm (temporal foundation) is most often laid down by the lowest-pitched voice. Previous work using electroencephalography (EEG) demonstrated that the auditory cortex encodes pitch more robustly in the higher of two simultaneous tones or melodies, and modeling work indicated that this high-voice superiority for pitch originates in the sensory periphery. Here, we investigated the neural basis of carrying rhythmic timing information in lower-pitched voices. We presented simultaneous high-pitched and low-pitched tones in an isochronous stream and occasionally presented either the higher or the lower tone 50 ms earlier than expected, while leaving the other tone at the expected time. EEG recordings revealed that mismatch negativity responses were larger for timing deviants of the lower tones, indicating better timing encoding for lower-pitched compared with higher-pitch tones at the level of auditory cortex. A behavioral motor task revealed that tapping synchronization was more influenced by the lower-pitched stream. Results from a biologically plausible model of the auditory periphery suggest that nonlinear cochlear dynamics contribute to the observed effect. The low-voice superiority effect for encoding timing explains the widespread musical practice of carrying rhythm in bass-ranged instruments and complements previously established high-voice superiority effects for pitch and melody.

Blue is warmer than red?

Red colors are arousing, blue colors calming, so at first the results of Ho et al. seem counter-intuitive. A red object at the same temperature as a blue object feels colder, and they suggest that this is because our prior expectation from the red color that it should be warmer biases our perception to make it seem cooler than it is.

It is commonly believed that reddish color induces warm feelings while bluish color induces cold feelings. We, however, demonstrate an opposite effect when the temperature information is acquired by direct touch. Experiment 1 found that a red object, relative to a blue object, raises the lowest temperature required for an object to feel warm, indicating that a blue object is more likely to be judged as warm than a red object of the same physical temperature. Experiment 2 showed that hand colour also affects temperature judgment, with the direction of the effect opposite to object colours. This study provides the first demonstration that colour can modulate temperature judgments when the temperature information is acquired by direct touch. The effects apparently oppose the common conception of red-hot/blue-cold association. We interpret this phenomenon in terms of “Anti-Bayesian” integration, which suggests that the brain integrates direct temperature input with prior expectations about temperature relationship between object and hand in a way that emphasizes the contrast between the two.

Ecstasy (MDMA) and LSD as therapeutic drugs

Kupferschmidt offers two pieces in Science magazine on using two currently banned classes of drugs for therapeutic purposes: the party drug ecstacy (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA), and hallucinogenic compounds derived from fungus or mushrooms (LSD and psilocybin).

NDMA activates brain receptors for dopamine and noradrenaline and releases serotonin from nerve endings, leading to the characteristic feeling of euphoria that made it popular in clubs and at dance events. One study in which 10 out of 12 PTSD patients no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD after two months of taking MDMA has motivated the launching of phase II clinical studies in Israel, Canada, and the United States.

LSD and psilocybin, which bind to serotonin and other brain receptors, are being tested in studies to treat depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, cluster headaches, and nicotine, alcohol, or cocaine addictions.

Feeling the social touch being observed in others.

Interesting work by Bolognini et al. on our mirroring of the emotions of others :

Touch has an emotional and communicative meaning, and it plays a crucial role in social perception and empathy. The intuitive link between others’ somatosensations and our sense of touch becomes ostensible in mirror-touch synesthesia, a condition in which the view of a touch on another person’s body elicits conscious tactile sensations on the observer’s own body. This peculiar phenomenon may implicate normal social mirror mechanisms. Here, we show that mirror-touch interference effects, synesthesia-like sensations, and even phantom touches can be induced in nonsynesthetes by priming the primary somatosensory cortex (SI) directly or indirectly via the posterior parietal cortex. These results were obtained by means of facilitatory paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (ppTMS) contingent upon the observation of touch. For these vicarious effects, the SI is engaged at 150 ms from the onset of the visual touch. Intriguingly, individual differences in empathic abilities, assessed with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, drive the activity of the SI when nonsynesthetes witness others’ tactile sensations. This evidence implies that, under normal conditions, touch observation activates the SI below the threshold for perceptual awareness; through the visual-dependent tuning of SI activity by ppTMS, what is seen becomes felt, namely, mirror-touch synesthesia. On a broader perspective, the visual responsivity of the SI may allow an automatic and unconscious transference of the sensation that another person is experiencing onto oneself, and, in turn, the empathic sharing of somatosensations.

Brain activity can reveal whom someone is thinking about.

A collaboration between five different research centers shows that in predicting or imagining the behavior of others based on their personality the brain relys on the same network of regions that support other forms of mental simulation, such as remembering the past and planning for the future:

The behaviors of other people are often central to envisioning the future. The ability to accurately predict the thoughts and actions of others is essential for successful social interactions, with far-reaching consequences. Despite its importance, little is known about how the brain represents people in order to predict behavior. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, participants learned the unique personality of 4 protagonists and imagined how each would behave in different scenarios. The protagonists' personalities were composed of 2 traits: Agreeableness and Extraversion. Which protagonist was being imagined was accurately inferred based solely on activity patterns in the medial prefrontal cortex using multivariate pattern classification, providing novel evidence that brain activity can reveal whom someone is thinking about. Lateral temporal and posterior cingulate cortex discriminated between different degrees of agreeableness and extraversion, respectively. Functional connectivity analysis confirmed that regions associated with trait-processing and individual identities were functionally coupled. Activity during the imagination task, and revealed by functional connectivity, was consistent with the default network. Our results suggest that distinct regions code for personality traits, and that the brain combines these traits to represent individuals. The brain then uses this “personality model” to predict the behavior of others in novel situations.

Response of large scale brain networks to acute stress.

I pass on this interesting summary and graphic by Hermans et al.

Exposure to acute stress prompts a reallocation of resources to a salience network, promoting fear and vigilance, at the cost of an executive control network. After stress subsides, resource allocation to these two networks reverses, which normalizes emotional reactivity and enhances higher-order cognitive processes important for long-term survival.

Schematic anatomical overview of salience and executive control networks. The sphere sizes illustrate the relative sizes of the clusters that co-activate with the respective networks. Our model proposes that these two neurocognitive systems are regulated in a time-dependent and reciprocal fashion by stress-related neuromodulators. Adapted from. Abbreviations: AI, anterior insula; am, amygdala; DACC, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex; DLPFC, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; DMPFC, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex; DPPC, dorsal posterior parietal cortex; FEF, frontal eye fields (precentral/superior frontal sulci); hy, hypothalamus; IT, inferotemporal cortex; mb, midbrain; Th, thalamus; TPJ, temporoparietal junction; vs, ventral striatum.