Lack of exercise disrupts body’s rhythms.

Natural daily rhythms in spontaneous movement patterns in both humans and mice show scale invariance, i.e., movement patterns repeat over time scales of minutes to hours. These scale invariant patterns decay with aging in both humans and mice, apparently correlating with progressive dysfunction of circadian pacemaker circuits in the brain's suprachiasmatic nucleus. Scheer and collaborators have now shown that in both aged and young mice exercise is a crucial variable. Loss of scale invariance associated with both inactivity and aging can be restored by exercise, even in old animals.

In healthy humans and other animals, behavioral activity exhibits scale invariance over multiple timescales from minutes to 24 h, whereas in aging or diseased conditions, scale invariance is usually reduced significantly. Accordingly, scale invariance can be a potential marker for health. Given compelling indications that exercise is beneficial for mental and physical health, we tested to what extent a lack of exercise affects scale invariance in young and aged animals. We studied six or more mice in each of four age groups (0.5, 1, 1.5, and 2 y) and observed an age-related deterioration of scale invariance in activity fluctuations. We found that limiting the amount of exercise, by removing the running wheels, leads to loss of scale-invariant properties in all age groups. Remarkably, in both young and old animals a lack of exercise reduced the scale invariance in activity fluctuations to the same level. We next showed that scale invariance can be restored by returning the running wheels. Exercise during the active period also improved scale invariance during the resting period, suggesting that activity during the active phase may also be beneficial for the resting phase. Finally, our data showed that exercise had a stronger influence on scale invariance than the effect of age. The data suggest that exercise is beneficial as revealed by scale-invariant parameters and that, even in young animals, a lack of exercise leads to strong deterioration in these parameters.

It’s not a stream of consciousness, its a rhythm.

In the NYTimes Gray Matter series Gregory Hickok gives an exegesis on the implications of his Psychological Science paper "The Rhythm of Perception." Some edited clips:

IN 1890, the American psychologist William James famously likened our conscious experience to the flow of a stream...recent research has shown that the “stream” of consciousness is, in fact, an illusion. We actually perceive the world in rhythmic pulses (brain waves that correlate with states like calm alertness and deep sleep) rather than as a continuous flow....We are exploring the possibility that brain rhythms are not merely a reflection of mental activity but a cause of it, helping shape perception, movement, memory and even consciousness itself...What this means is that the brain samples the world in rhythmic pulses, perhaps even discrete time chunks, much like the individual frames of a movie. From the brain’s perspective, experience is not continuous but quantized.

It turns out, for example, that our ability to detect a subtle event, like a slight change in a visual scene, oscillates over time, cycling between better and worse perceptual sensitivity several times a second. Research shows that these rhythms correlate with electrical rhythms of the brain.

If that’s hard to picture, here’s an analogy: Imagine trying to see an animal through a thick, swirling fog that varies in density as it drifts. The distinctness of the animal’s form will oscillate with the density of the fog, alternating between periods of relative clarity and opaqueness. According to recent experiments, this is how our perceptual systems sample the world — but rather than fog, it’s brain waves that drive the oscillations...Rhythms in the environment, such as those in music or speech, can draw neural oscillations into their tempo, effectively synchronizing the brain’s rhythms with those of the world around us.

In the study reported in Psychological Science Hickok and colleagues:

...presented listeners with a three-beat-per-second rhythm (a pulsing “whoosh” sound) for only a few seconds and then asked the listeners to try to detect a faint tone immediately afterward. The tone was presented at a range of delays between zero and 1.4 seconds after the rhythm ended. Not only did we find that the ability to detect the tone varied over time by up to 25 percent — that’s a lot — but it did so precisely in sync with the previously heard three-beat-per-second rhythm.

Why would the brain do this? One theory is that it’s the brain’s way of focusing attention. Picture a noisy cafe filled with voices, clanging dishes and background music. As you attend to one particular acoustic stream — say, your lunch mate’s voice — your brain synchronizes its rhythm to the rhythm of the voice and enhances the perceptibility of that stream, while suppressing other streams, which have their own, different rhythms. (More broadly, this kind of synchronization has been proposed as a mechanism for communication between neural networks within the brain.)

All of this points to the need for a new metaphor. We should talk of the “rhythm” of thought, of perception, of consciousness. Conceptualizing our mental experience this way is not only more accurate, but it also situates our mind within the broader context of the daily, monthly and yearly rhythms that dominate our lives.

Humans need not apply.

Check out this chilling video on the increasing obsolescence of humans, which was referenced in a recent meeting of the Chaos and Complexity Seminar group I attend at the University of Wisconsin (when I am in Madison during the warm months). Then note the partial solace offered by Carr's essay "Why Robots Will Always Need Us."

How we fashion meaning and purpose.

This is a brief post about some material I thought I might get to cohere, maybe something along the lines of purpose as an evolved means of generating order, part of the big story of order evolving from chaos in the universe. I was wrong about the coherence, but I think the links are worth mentioning. The “Big History Project” is an effort to generate a modern origin story that transcends previous stories because it is global. From David Christian:

...in modern science we've gotten used to the idea that science doesn't offer meaning in the way that institutional religions did in the past. I'm increasingly thinking that this idea that modernity puts us in a world without meaning….may be completely wrong. We may be living in an intellectual building site, where a new story is being constructed. It's vastly more powerful than the previous stories because it's the first one that is global. It's not anchored in a particular culture or a particular society. This is an origin story that works for humans in Beijing as well as in Buenos Aires...it sums over vastly more information than any early origin story….across so many domains, the amount of information, of good, rigorous ideas, is so rich that we can tease out that story.

The Christian's Big History project reminds me of the Natural Sciences 5 course originated by my mentor George Wald, which I taught in when I was a Harvard senior and then graduate student in 1963-67. These efforts have started with cosmology, the origin of the university, the solar systems and earth, the appearance and evolution of life, and finally the human story. I had a look at Chapter 5 of the online Big History Project (aimed at middle and high school level, 13-17 year olds) and found it reasonably engaging.


The second source I want to mention is a piece by Worthen titled "Wanted: A Theology of Atheism." The title is an oxymoron [Greek Theos (god) + logia (subject of study)], presumably intentional. It discusses efforts, of the sort described in some previous MindBlog posts, to form secular (godless) forums, churches, or assemblies that meet our human need for communal settings that reinforce kindness and moral behavior, that balance the needs of the community against self interest. Worthen quotes Sam Harris's:

...promoting science as a universal moral guide. This proposal is an old one. The 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte and the American intellectuals Walter Lippmann and John Dewey all wrote that moral progress depended on the scientific method.

Morality depends on “the totality of facts that relate to human well-being, and our knowledge of it grows the more we learn about ourselves, in fields ranging from molecular biology to economics,” Harris has stressed the special role of his own field, cognitive science. Every discovery about the brain’s experience of pleasure and suffering has implications for how we should treat other humans. Moral philosophy is really an “undeveloped branch of science” whose laws apply in Peoria just as they do in the Punjab.

Pragmatist philosophers like Philip Kitcher offer a different approach to the question of atheist morality, one based on “the sense that ethical life grows out of our origins, the circumstances under which our ancestors lived, and it’s a work in progress,” he said. In the pragmatist tradition, science is useful, but ethical claims are not objective scientific facts. They are only “true” if they seem to “work” in real life.

Sleep stabilizes, but does not enhance, motor performance training.

From Nettersheim et al., a result challenging the prominent model that sleep enhances the performance of a newly learned skill (which is my experience in learning difficulat new piano passages):

Sleep supports the consolidation of motor sequence memories, yet it remains unclear whether sleep stabilizes or actually enhances motor sequence performance. Here we assessed the time course of motor memory consolidation in humans, taking early boosts in performance into account and varying the time between training and sleep. Two groups of subjects, each participating in a short wake condition and a longer sleep condition, were trained on the sequential finger-tapping task in the evening and were tested (1) after wake intervals of either 30 min or 4 h and (2) after a night of sleep that ensued either 30 min or 4 h after training. The results show an early boost in performance 30 min after training and a subsequent decay across the 4 h wake interval. When sleep followed 30 min after training, post-sleep performance was stabilized at the early boost level. Sleep at 4 h after training restored performance to the early boost level, such that, 12 h after training, performance was comparable regardless of whether sleep occurred 30 min or 4 h after training. These findings indicate that sleep does not enhance but rather stabilizes motor sequence performance without producing additional gains.

Cultural differences, emotional expressivity, and smiles

Rychlowska et al. analyze cultural display rules from 32 countries to reveal that the extent to which a country’s present-day population descends from numerous versus few source countries is associated with norms favoring greater emotional expressivity.

A small number of facial expressions may be universal in that they are produced by the same basic affective states and recognized as such throughout the world. However, other aspects of emotionally expressive behavior vary widely across culture. Just why do they vary? We propose that some cultural differences in expressive behavior are determined by historical heterogeneity, or the extent to which a country’s present-day population descended from migration from numerous vs. few source countries over a period of 500 y. Our reanalysis of data on cultural rules for displaying emotion from 32 countries reveals that historical heterogeneity explains substantial, unique variance in the degree to which individuals believe that emotions should be openly expressed. We also report an original study of the underlying states that people believe are signified by a smile. Cluster analysis applied to data from nine countries, including Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States, reveals that countries group into “cultures of smiling” determined by historical heterogeneity. Factor analysis shows that smiles sort into three social-functional subtypes: pleasure, affiliative, and dominance. The relative importance of these smile subtypes varies as a function of historical heterogeneity. These findings thus highlight the power of social-historical factors to explain cross-cultural variation in emotional expression and smile behavior.

How biased are our brains?

Kristof reviews some recent work on unconscious bias, particularly racial bias.

Scholars suggest that in evolutionary times we became hard-wired to make instantaneous judgments about whether someone is in our “in group” or not — because that could be lifesaving. A child who didn’t prefer his or her own group might have been at risk of being clubbed to death...tests of unconscious biases... suggest that people turn out to have subterranean racial and gender biases that they are unaware of and even disapprove of.

I thought I would point out a recently published book, the subject of a forthcoming multiple review in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which argues that the power of biases on perception is usually overstated, that perceptions of individuals and groups tend to be accurate. The précis of the book can be downloaded here. Book title and abstract:

Lee Jussim - Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (Oxford University Press, 2012)

Abstract: Social Perception and Social Reality reviews the evidence in social psychology and related fields and reaches three conclusions: 1. Although errors, biases, and self-fulfilling prophecies in person perception, are real, reliable, and occasionally quite powerful, on average, they tend to be weak, fragile and fleeting; 2. Perceptions of individuals and groups tend to be at least moderately, and often highly accurate; and 3. Conclusions based on the research on error, bias, and self-fulfilling prophecies routinely greatly overstates their power and pervasiveness, and consistently ignores evidence of accuracy, agreement, and rationality in social perception. The weight of the evidence - including some of the most classic research widely interpreted as testifying to the power of biased and self-fulfilling processes - is that interpersonal expectations related to social reality primarily because they reflect rather than cause social reality. This is the case not only of teacher expectations, but also social stereotypes, both as perceptions of groups, and as the bases of expectations regarding individuals. The time is long overdue to replace cherry-picked and unjustified stories emphasizing error, bias, the power of self-fulfilling prophecies and the inaccuracy of stereotypes with conclusions that more closely correspond to the full range of empirical findings, which includes multiple failed replications of classic expectancy studies, meta-analyses consistently demonstrating small or at best moderate expectancy effects, and high accuracy in social perception.

After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain

I've been reading through an interesting article by Michael Anderson, a précis of a book accepted for publication and available as a PDF through BBS. I pass on the abstract:

Neural reuse is a form of neuroplasticity whereby neural elements originally developed for one purpose are put to multiple uses. A diverse behavioral repertoire is achieved via the creation of multiple, nested, and overlapping neural coalitions, in which each neural element is a member of multiple different coalitions and cooperates with a different set of partners at different times. This has profound implications for how we think about our continuity with other species, for how we understand the similarities and differences between psychological processes, and for how best to pursue a unified science of the mind. After Phrenology surveys the terrain and advocates for a series of reforms in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The book argues that, among other things, we should capture brain function in a multi-dimensional manner, develop a new, action-oriented vocabulary for psychology, and recognize that higher-order cognitive processes are built from complex configurations of already evolved circuitry.

Neural basis of anxiety reduction by placebo.

Meyer et al. directly measure neural consequences of expecting a placebo treatment to be effective in relieving anxiety:

The beneficial effects of placebo treatments on fear and anxiety (placebo anxiolysis) are well known from clinical practice, and there is strong evidence indicating a contribution of treatment expectations to the efficacy of anxiolytic drugs. Although clinically highly relevant, the neural mechanisms underlying placebo anxiolysis are poorly understood. In two studies in humans, we tested whether the administration of an inactive treatment along with verbal suggestions of anxiolysis can attenuate experimentally induced states of phasic fear and/or sustained anxiety. Phasic fear is the response to a well defined threat and includes attentional focusing on the source of threat and concomitant phasic increases of autonomic arousal, whereas in sustained states of anxiety potential and unclear danger requires vigilant scanning of the environment and elevated tonic arousal levels. Our placebo manipulation consistently reduced vigilance measured in terms of undifferentiated reactivity to salient cues (indexed by subjective ratings, skin conductance responses and EEG event-related potentials) and tonic arousal [indexed by cue-unrelated skin conductance levels and enhanced EEG alpha (8–12 Hz) activity], indicating a downregulation of sustained anxiety rather than phasic fear. We also observed a placebo-dependent sustained increase of frontal midline EEG theta (4–7 Hz) power and frontoposterior theta coupling, suggesting the recruitment of frontally based cognitive control functions. Our results thus support the crucial role of treatment expectations in placebo anxiolysis and provide insight into the underlying neural mechanisms.

How alarm amplifies through social networks.

We've all probably played the parlor game with 10 or more people sitting in a circle, with one whispering a word into the ear of the person to their right, continuing to pass the word by whispering to the right until it comes back to the originator, frequently altered from its original form. Moussaïd et al. do a version of this routine in an experiment on how risk perception of hazardous events such as contagious outbreaks, terrorist attacks, and climate change spread through social networks. They find that although the content of a message is gradually lost over repeated social transmissions, subjective perceptions of risk propagate and amplify due to social influence.

Understanding how people form and revise their perception of risk is central to designing efficient risk communication methods, eliciting risk awareness, and avoiding unnecessary anxiety among the public. However, public responses to hazardous events such as climate change, contagious outbreaks, and terrorist threats are complex and difficult-to-anticipate phenomena. Although many psychological factors influencing risk perception have been identified in the past, it remains unclear how perceptions of risk change when propagated from one person to another and what impact the repeated social transmission of perceived risk has at the population scale. Here, we study the social dynamics of risk perception by analyzing how messages detailing the benefits and harms of a controversial antibacterial agent undergo change when passed from one person to the next in 10-subject experimental diffusion chains. Our analyses show that when messages are propagated through the diffusion chains, they tend to become shorter, gradually inaccurate, and increasingly dissimilar between chains. In contrast, the perception of risk is propagated with higher fidelity due to participants manipulating messages to fit their preconceptions, thereby influencing the judgments of subsequent participants. Computer simulations implementing this simple influence mechanism show that small judgment biases tend to become more extreme, even when the injected message contradicts preconceived risk judgments. Our results provide quantitative insights into the social amplification of risk perception, and can help policy makers better anticipate and manage the public response to emerging threats.

Modulating movement intention and the extended present with tDCS.

Douglas et al. do a fascinating bit of work on the 'extended present' in which our brains function, during which our experienced intention to make a movement actually comes ~200 milliseconds after motor cortex signals initiating the movement (the famous Libet experiment showing we are 'late to action'). Conscious intention, or volition, provides the foundation for our attributing agency to ourselves, and for society attributing responsibility to an individual. A distorted sense of volition is a hallmark of many neurological and psychiatric illnesses such as alien hand syndrome, psychogenic movement disorders, and schizophrenia.

Conscious intention is a fundamental aspect of the human experience. Despite long-standing interest in the basis and implications of intention, its underlying neurobiological mechanisms remain poorly understood. Using high-definition transcranial DC stimulation (tDCS), we observed that enhancing spontaneous neuronal excitability in both the angular gyrus and the primary motor cortex caused the reported time of conscious movement intention to be ∼60–70 ms earlier. Slow brain waves recorded ∼2–3 s before movement onset, as well as hundreds of milliseconds after movement onset, independently correlated with the modulation of conscious intention by brain stimulation. These brain activities together accounted for 81% of interindividual variability in the modulation of movement intention by brain stimulation. A computational model using coupled leaky integrator units with biophysically plausible assumptions about the effect of tDCS captured the effects of stimulation on both neural activity and behavior. These results reveal a temporally extended brain process underlying conscious movement intention that spans seconds around movement commencement.

Brain correlates of loving kindness meditation.

Garrison and collaborators extend their work on brain correlates of meditation practice, noting again a central role for the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (for previous posts in this thread, enter "Garrison" in the MindBlog search box in the left column).

Loving kindness is a form of meditation involving directed well-wishing, typically supported by the silent repetition of phrases such as “may all beings be happy,” to foster a feeling of selfless love. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the neural substrate of loving kindness meditation in experienced meditators and novices. We first assessed group differences in blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal during loving kindness meditation. We next used a relatively novel approach, the intrinsic connectivity distribution of functional connectivity, to identify regions that differ in intrinsic connectivity between groups, and then used a data-driven approach to seed-based connectivity analysis to identify which connections differ between groups. Our findings suggest group differences in brain regions involved in self-related processing and mind wandering, emotional processing, inner speech, and memory. Meditators showed overall reduced BOLD signal and intrinsic connectivity during loving kindness as compared to novices, more specifically in the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC/PCu), a finding that is consistent with our prior work and other recent neuroimaging studies of meditation. Furthermore, meditators showed greater functional connectivity during loving kindness between the PCC/PCu and the left inferior frontal gyrus, whereas novices showed greater functional connectivity during loving kindness between the PCC/PCu and other cortical midline regions of the default mode network, the bilateral posterior insula lobe, and the bilateral parahippocampus/hippocampus. These novel findings suggest that loving kindness meditation involves a present-centered, selfless focus for meditators as compared to novices.

Essentialism

I pass on some clips from Richard Dawkins' brief essay, and suggest you also take a look at Lisa Barrett's comments on essentialist views of the mind:

Essentialism—what I’ve called "the tyranny of the discontinuous mind"—stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle, or a right triangle, were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realised in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect approximation to the ideal Platonic circle hanging in some abstract space. That works for geometric shapes like circles, but essentialism has been applied to living things and Ernst Mayr blamed this for humanity’s late discovery of evolution—as late as the nineteenth century. If, like Aristotle, you treat all flesh-and-blood rabbits as imperfect approximations to an ideal Platonic rabbit, it won’t occur to you that rabbits might have evolved from a non-rabbit ancestor, and might evolve into a non-rabbit descendant. If you think, following the dictionary definition of essentialism, that the essence of rabbitness is "prior to" the existence of rabbits (whatever "prior to" might mean, and that’s a nonsense in itself) evolution is not an idea that will spring readily to your mind, and you may resist when somebody else suggests it.

Essentialism rears its ugly head in racial terminology. The majority of "African Americans" are of mixed race. Yet so entrenched is our essentialist mind-set, American official forms require everyone to tick one race/ethnicity box or another: no room for intermediates. A different but also pernicious point is that a person will be called "African American" even if only, say, one of his eight great grandparents was of African descent. As Lionel Tiger put it to me, we have here a reprehensible "contamination metaphor." But I mainly want to call attention to our society’s essentialist determination to dragoon a person into one discrete category or another. We seem ill-equipped to deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of intermediates. We are still infected with the plague of Plato’s essentialism.

Moral controversies such as those over abortion and euthanasia are riddled with the same infection. At what point is a brain-dead accident-victim defined as "dead"? At what moment during development does an embryo become a "person"? Only a mind infected with essentialism would ask such questions. An embryo develops gradually from single-celled zygote to newborn baby, and there’s no one instant when "personhood" should be deemed to have arrived. The world is divided into those who get this truth and those who wail, "But there has to be some moment when the fetus becomes human." No, there really doesn’t, any more than there has to be a day when a middle aged person becomes old. It would be better—though still not ideal—to say the embryo goes through stages of being a quarter human, half human, three quarters human . . . The essentialist mind will recoil from such language and accuse me of all manner of horrors for denying the essence of humanness...Our essentialist urge toward rigid definitions of "human" (in debates over abortion and animal rights) and "alive" (in debates over euthanasia and end-of-life decisions) makes no sense in the light of evolution and other gradualistic phenomena.

We define a poverty "line": you are either "above" or "below" it. But poverty is a continuum. Why not say, in dollar-equivalents, how poor you actually are? The preposterous Electoral College system in US presidential elections is another, and especially grievous, manifestation of essentialist thinking. Florida must go either wholly Republican or wholly Democrat—all 25 Electoral College votes—even though the popular vote is a dead heat. But states should not be seen as essentially red or blue: they are mixtures in various proportions.

You can surely think of many other examples of "the dead hand of Plato"—essentialism. It is scientifically confused and morally pernicious. It needs to be retired.

What to do with brain markers that predict future behaviors?

An interesting review from Gabrieli et al. suggesting how predicting individual futures with neuromarkers might make a pragmatic contribution to human welfare.

Neuroimaging has greatly enhanced the cognitive neuroscience understanding of the human brain and its variation across individuals (neurodiversity) in both health and disease. Such progress has not yet, however, propelled changes in educational or medical practices that improve people’s lives. We review neuroimaging findings in which initial brain measures (neuromarkers) are correlated with or predict future education, learning, and performance in children and adults; criminality; health-related behaviors; and responses to pharmacological or behavioral treatments. Neuromarkers often provide better predictions (neuroprognosis), alone or in combination with other measures, than traditional behavioral measures. With further advances in study designs and analyses, neuromarkers may offer opportunities to personalize educational and clinical practices that lead to better outcomes for people.

Figure - Functional Brain Measure Predicting a Clinical Outcome: Prior to treatment, patients with social anxiety disorder who exhibited greater posterior activation (left) for angry relative to neutral facial expressions had a better clinical response to CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) than patients who exhibited lesser activation (right)

More comment on anti-aging regimes

A recent brief review by Jane Brodie points to work showing a small effect of cognitive training programs engaging memory, reasoning, or speed of processing. After 10 years 60% of those in the training programs, compared with 50 percent of the controls, had maintained or improved their ability to perform activities of daily living. Reasoning and speed, but not memory, training resulted in improved targeted cognitive abilities for 10 years. The article also contains a brief video demonstrating the NeuroRacer program developed by Gazzaley and colleagues. The article points out that very few of the potions and gizmos on the market "...have been proven to have a meaningful, sustainable benefit beyond lining the pockets of their sellers. Before you invest in them, you’d be wise to look for well-designed, placebo-controlled studies that attest to their ability to promote a youthful memory and other cognitive functions."

Grasp posture of our hands biases our visual processing.

Fascinating observations from Laura Thomas:

Observers experience biases in visual processing for objects within easy reach of their hands; these biases may assist them in evaluating items that are candidates for action. I investigated the hypothesis that hand postures that afford different types of actions differentially bias vision. Across three experiments, participants performed global-motion-detection and global-form-perception tasks while their hands were positioned (a) near the display in a posture affording a power grasp, (b) near the display in a posture affording a precision grasp, or (c) in their laps. Although the power-grasp posture facilitated performance on the motion-detection task, the precision-grasp posture instead facilitated performance on the form-perception task. These results suggest that the visual system weights processing on the basis of an observer’s current affordances for specific actions: Fast and forceful power grasps enhance temporal sensitivity, whereas detail-oriented precision grasps enhance spatial sensitivity.

The sound of climate change.

The sound of climate change from the Amazon to the Arctic from Ensia on Vimeo.

Literary (like musical and athletic) expertise shifts brain activity to the caudate nucleus.

Erhard et al. find that creative writing by expert versus amateur writers is associated with more activation in the caudate nucleus, the same area that become more active in expert versus amateur athletes and musicians. The increased recruitment of the basal ganglia network with increasing levels of expertise correlates with behavioral automatization that facilitates complex cognitive tasks.

The aim of the present study was to explore brain activities associated with creativity and expertise in literary writing. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we applied a real-life neuroscientific setting that consisted of different writing phases (brainstorming and creative writing; reading and copying as control conditions) to well-selected expert writers and to an inexperienced control group.

During creative writing, experts showed cerebral activation in a predominantly left-hemispheric fronto-parieto-temporal network. When compared to inexperienced writers, experts showed increased left caudate nucleus and left dorsolateral and superior medial prefrontal cortex activation. In contrast, less experienced participants recruited increasingly bilateral visual areas. During creative writing activation in the right cuneus showed positive association with the creativity index in expert writers.

High experience in creative writing seems to be associated with a network of prefrontal (mPFC and DLPFC) and basal ganglia (caudate) activation. In addition, our findings suggest that high verbal creativity specific to literary writing increases activation in the right cuneus associated with increased resources obtained for reading processes.

Human Purpose

The recent NYTimes David Brooks Op-Ed piece “What is your purpose?” has drawn a lot of feedback and comment. He laments the passing the era of lofty authority figures like Reinhold Niebuhr who argued for a coherent moral ecology. (I remember as a Quincy House Harvard undergraduate in 1962 having breakfast with Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr during their several weeks residence in the house.)

These days we live in a culture that is more diverse, decentralized, interactive and democratized…Public debate is now undermoralized and overpoliticized…Intellectual prestige has drifted away from theologians, poets and philosophers and toward neuroscientists, economists, evolutionary biologists and big data analysts. These scholars have a lot of knowledge to bring, but they’re not in the business of offering wisdom on the ultimate questions.

And there you have it. Per Thomas Wolfe, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Brooks’ "neuroscientists, economists, evolutionary biologists and big data analysts" have let the genie out of the bottle. We are very clear now that “purpose” is a human invention in the service of passing on our genes. I have seen no more clear statement on purpose than that given by E. O. Wilson, which I excerpted in my Dec. 5, 2014 post.

Trust and the Insula

From Belfi et al:

Reciprocal trust is a crucial component of cooperative, mutually beneficial social relationships. Previous research using tasks that require judging and developing interpersonal trust has suggested that the insula may be an important brain region underlying these processes. Here, using a neuropsychological approach, we investigated the role of the insula in reciprocal trust during the Trust Game (TG), an interpersonal economic exchange. Consistent with previous research, we found that neurologically normal adults reciprocate trust in kind, i.e., they increase trust in response to increases from their partners, and decrease trust in response to decreases. In contrast, individuals with damage to the insula displayed abnormal expressions of trust. Specifically, these individuals behaved benevolently (expressing misplaced trust) when playing the role of investor, and malevolently (violating their partner's trust) when playing the role of the trustee. Our findings lend further support to the idea that the insula is important for expressing normal interpersonal trust, perhaps because the insula helps to recognize risk during decision-making and to identify social norm violations.