Thoughts of randomness enhance supernatural beliefs.

Kay et al. do some interesting experiments in which thoughts of randomness are primed in subject by a set of manipulations. They:

...supraliminally primed half the participants with randomness-related words; the other half were primed with words matched in negative valence. To assess the role of arousal, we employed a misattribution paradigm, which involved requiring all participants to swallow a pill ostensibly containing an herbal supplement. Half the participants were told that the pill sometimes induces arousal as a side effect, and half were told that the pill has no side effects. Previous work has shown that the side-effect condition leads participants to attribute the cause of any experienced arousal to this salient source. Hypothesizing that beliefs in supernatural control function, at least in part, to down-regulate the aversive arousal associated with randomness, we expected the randomness primes to increase beliefs in God, but only for those participants not given the opportunity to attribute the cause of their arousal to the ingested pill.

Their observations were that:

...participants primed with randomness-related words exhibited heightened beliefs in spiritual control compared with participants primed with negatively valenced control words. This effect disappeared when participants were given the opportunity to attribute the cause of any arousal they experienced to a pill ingested earlier in the session. 

They take their data to suggest:

...that belief in supernatural sources of control, such as God and karma, may function, in part, to defend against distress associated with randomness, even when the perception of randomness is not related to traumatic events.

Demasculinization of frogs (and men?) by pesticides

Male sperm count has dropped dramatically over the past 50 years (~50% in some areas) and one of the prime suspects is estrogen like compounds, such as the pesticide atrazine, that have been introduced into the environment. Atrazine is one of the most commonly applied agricultural pesticides in the world (and, curiously, male sperm count has dropped more in agricultural than in metropolitan areas). Hays et al now show that at levels of only 2.5 parts per billion it can completely feminize amphibian males.

Strange Maps

Having spent a fair amount of time on the London underground this past summer, I thought this graphic of an imagined world-wide system, shown in the Sunday NYTimes Book Review section,  was intriguing.

An imagined train route from Oslo to Pyongyang, from STRANGE MAPS: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities (Viking Studio, paper, $30).

Men's testosterone increases with female ovulation cues

Observations from Miller and Manor:

Adaptationist models of human mating provide a useful framework for identifying subtle, biologically based mechanisms influencing cross-gender social interaction. In line with this framework, the current studies examined the extent to which olfactory cues to female ovulation—scents of women at the peak of their reproductive fertility—influence endocrinological responses in men. Men in the current studies smelled T-shirts worn by women near ovulation or far from ovulation (Studies 1 and 2) or control T-shirts not worn by anyone (Study 2). Men exposed to the scent of an ovulating woman subsequently displayed higher levels of testosterone than did men exposed to the scent of a nonovulating woman or a control scent. Hence, olfactory cues signaling women’s levels of reproductive fertility were associated with specific endocrinological responses in men—responses that have been linked to sexual behavior and the initiation of romantic courtship.

More on the virtues of red wine...

A further rationale for my sipping red wine during and after dinner -  O'Connor notes work showing that red wine does indeed aid the digestion, particularly of dark meats, because it both stimulates digestion and inhibits the formation of harmful oxidized fats.

Fundamental changes in public discourse.

Three recent New York Times pieces have provided a summary of the disintegration of public discourse since the era of Lyndon Johnson. David Carr notes the demise of a short-lived column in The Washington Post on Washington's social life which is symbolic of the passing of the old paradigm, in which

...people with different points of view would assemble in various salons of Georgetown and set aside their differences over an Old Fashioned before the coq au vin was even served...Now the butter knife has been replaced by a machete. People with opposing political points of view are less likely to eat with the loyal opposition at night than to try to dine on them in a quick hit on MSNBC or Fox News... “The dinner party at Ben and Sally’s or Mrs. Graham’s circa 1975 was The Note or Mike Allen blast e-mail of its day,” said David Von Drehle, editor at large for Time and a former editor of The Post’s Style section..."You would go there to see people, try out ideas, figure out what was the interesting next take on the day’s news and where the hot story was headed. But now, you find all that out just by opening up your laptop in the morning.”

Articles by both John Harwood and Paul Krugman chronicle the almost perfect polarization that now characterizes the political scene. Harwood:

...when President Lyndon B. Johnson won passage of Medicare, most of the Democratic majority in Congress and half of the Republicans backed him...Those Democratic and Republican parties no longer exist. The kinds of Southern Democrats who resisted Johnson’s agenda and Northern Republicans who supported it have switched parties; longstanding differences between liberals and conservatives are now reinforced by party affiliation, not blurred by it...What democrats and republicans share is a dedication to party unity as an overriding imperative — and a relentlessly improving track record of achieving it.

And Krugman focuses on:

...the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally...Democrats believe .. what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment...the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay. [The view of the second ranking senate Republican, in contrast is that:]... unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

...the difference between the two universes isn’t just intellectual, it’s also moral...How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?..bipartisanship is now a foolish dream...Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.

Looking at motor imagery underlying complex skill learning.

During a recent period of rehearsing for the four hands piano recital that I participated in yesterday,* I found myself observing (mentally imaging) the detailed execution of the pieces when I woke during the night or early morning. Such imaging is known to be a central part of learning skilled sequences in athletic and musical performance.  In a bit of fortuitous timing, the most recent issue of PNAS has an article by Miller et al. describing direct observation of this kind of motor imagery:

Imagery of motor movement plays an important role in learning of complex motor skills, from learning to serve in tennis to perfecting a pirouette in ballet. What and where are the neural substrates that underlie motor imagery-based learning? We measured electrocorticographic cortical surface potentials in eight human subjects during overt action and kinesthetic imagery of the same movement, focusing on power in “high frequency” (76–100 Hz) and “low frequency” (8–32 Hz) ranges. We quantitatively establish that the spatial distribution of local neuronal population activity during motor imagery mimics the spatial distribution of activity during actual motor movement. By comparing responses to electrocortical stimulation with imagery-induced cortical surface activity, we demonstrate the role of primary motor areas in movement imagery. The magnitude of imagery-induced cortical activity change was ∼25% of that associated with actual movement. However, when subjects learned to use this imagery to control a computer cursor in a simple feedback task, the imagery-induced activity change was significantly augmented, even exceeding that of overt movement.

*(I have put some rehearsal videos made before the recital here and here, but the final recordings turned out to have technical recording problems and so can't be posted.)

Funny or die

Under the "random curious stuff" category mentioned in MindBlog's title line,  I couldn't resist passing on this satirical gem from funnyordie.com

Funny or Die's Presidential Reunion from Will Ferrell

Measuring consciousness -how an anesthetic puts us to sleep.

Ferrarelli et al. show what is happening when we are zonked out by an anesthetic like the benzodiazepine midazolam. They use an array of EEG electrodes on the head to measure how much the activities of different areas of the cortex are coordinated with each other when a magnetic pulse is applied to stir things up (transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS). When we are awake TMS triggers responses in multiple cortical areas lasting for more than 300 ms, during midazolam-induced loss of consciousness, TMS-evoked activity is shorter and more local, i.e. areas of the cortex stop talking to each other. Here is their abstract:

By employing transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in combination with high-density electroencephalography (EEG), we recently reported that cortical effective connectivity is disrupted during early non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. This is a time when subjects, if awakened, may report little or no conscious content. We hypothesized that a similar breakdown of cortical effective connectivity may underlie loss of consciousness (LOC) induced by pharmacologic agents. Here, we tested this hypothesis by comparing EEG responses to TMS during wakefulness and LOC induced by the benzodiazepine midazolam. Unlike spontaneous sleep states, a subject’s level of vigilance can be monitored repeatedly during pharmacological LOC. We found that, unlike during wakefulness, wherein TMS triggered responses in multiple cortical areas lasting for >300 ms, during midazolam-induced LOC, TMS-evoked activity was local and of shorter duration. Furthermore, a measure of the propagation of evoked cortical currents (significant current scattering, SCS) could reliably discriminate between consciousness and LOC. These results resemble those observed in early NREM sleep and suggest that a breakdown of cortical effective connectivity may be a common feature of conditions characterized by LOC. Moreover, these results suggest that it might be possible to use TMS-EEG to assess consciousness during anesthesia and in pathological conditions, such as coma, vegetative state, and minimally conscious state.

Are kids overmedicated?

Zuger reviews a book by Judith Warner on a topic that I and many others have had a knee jerk reflex type opinion on:  "Yes, of course kids are overmedicated by lazy parents and pill popping psychologists."  Warner began her study with that attitude, intending to prove her point,  and found quite the opposite.   She:

...sallied forth to interview all the pushy parents, irresponsible doctors and overmedicated children she could find — and lo, she could barely find any. After several years of dead ends, missed deadlines and worried soul-searching, she was forced to reconsider her premise and start all over again.

“A couple of simple truths have become clear,” she writes with the passion of a new convert. “That the suffering of children with mental health issues (and their parents) is very real. That almost no parent takes the issue of psychiatric diagnosis lightly or rushes to ‘drug’ his or her child; and that responsible child psychiatrists don’t, either. And that many children’s lives are essentially saved by medication, particularly when it’s combined with evidence-based forms of therapy.”

The power of touch.

I've been meaning to point to an interesting article by Benedict Carey on our voluntary momentary touches that can - whether an exuberant high five, a warm hand on the shoulder, or a creepy touch to the arm — communicate an even wider range of emotion than gestures or expressions, and sometimes do so more quickly and accurately than words. He focuses on work of Dacher Keltner, Hertenstein, and collaborators, the subject of previous posts (PDF here, also, enter Keltner in the search box in the left column). In their experiments volunteers tried to communicate a list of emotions by touching a blindfolded stranger. The participants were able to communicate eight distinct emotions, from gratitude to disgust to love, some with about 70 percent accuracy. Here is their abstract:

The study of emotional communication has focused predominantly on the facial and vocal channels but has ignored the tactile channel. Participants in the current study were allowed to touch an unacquainted partner on the whole body to communicate distinct emotions. Of interest was how accurately the person being touched decoded the intended emotions without seeing the tactile stimulation. The data indicated that anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, and sympathy were decoded at greater than chance levels, as well as happiness and sadness, 2 emotions that have not been shown to be communicated by touch to date. Moreover, fine-grained coding documented specific touch behaviors associated with different emotions.

A forthcoming publication from Kraus, Huang, and Keltner finds that, with a few exceptions, good basketball teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. Another slightly edited clip:

If a high five or an equivalent can in fact enhance performance, on the field or in the office, that may be because it reduces stress. A warm touch seems to set off the release of oxytocin, a hormone that helps create a sensation of trust, and to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol...In the brain, prefrontal areas, which help regulate emotion, can relax, freeing them for another of their primary purposes: problem solving. In effect, the body interprets a supportive touch as “I’ll share the load.”...“We think that humans build relationships precisely for this reason, to distribute problem solving across brains,” said James A. Coan, a a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “We are wired to literally share the processing load, and this is the signal we’re getting when we receive support through touch.”

The same is certainly true of partnerships, and especially the romantic kind, psychologists say. In a recent experiment, researchers led by Christopher Oveis of Harvard conducted five-minute interviews with 69 couples, prompting each pair to discuss difficult periods in their relationship...The investigators scored the frequency and length of touching that each couple, seated side by side, engaged in... "it looks so far like the couples who touch more are reporting more satisfaction in the relationship,” he said.  Again, it’s not clear which came first, the touching or the satisfaction. But in romantic relationships, one has been known to lead to the other. Or at least, so the anecdotal evidence suggests.

Food and Flying

An interesting tidbit from the Random Samples section of the 19 Feb. issue of Science Magazine:

German scientists have figured out why tomato juice tastes better aboard an airplane than on the ground (and coffee tastes worse). Low atmospheric pressure dampens the experience of sweet and salty tastes whereas sour comes through unchanged and bitter is slightly intensified, says flavor chemist Andrea Burdack-Freitag of the Frauenhofer Institute for Building Physics in Holzkirchen.

She and her colleagues asked 30 taste testers to rate their perceptions of different foods and wine while sitting in a partial Airbus A310 in a chamber with adjustable pressure. At ground pressures, tasters perceived tomato juice as musty, but at a low pressure typical in flight they found it fruitier, with cool notes. The complex aromas picked up by the nose that give coffee its flavor were barely perceived at low pressure, unmasking caffeine's bitterness, Burdack-Freitag says. Lufthansa's catering arm, which sponsored the study, wants to use the data to improve its menus.

Damage to our amygdala can eliminate monetary loss aversion

Here is an interesting open access article from Ralph Adolphs and his colleagues:

Losses are a possibility in many risky decisions, and organisms have evolved mechanisms to evaluate and avoid them. Laboratory and field evidence suggests that people often avoid risks with losses even when they might earn a substantially larger gain, a behavioral preference termed “loss aversion.” The cautionary brake on behavior known to rely on the amygdala is a plausible candidate mechanism for loss aversion, yet evidence for this idea has so far not been found. We studied two rare individuals with focal bilateral amygdala lesions using a series of experimental economics tasks. To measure individual sensitivity to financial losses we asked participants to play a variety of monetary gambles with possible gains and losses. Although both participants retained a normal ability to respond to changes in the gambles’ expected value and risk, they showed a dramatic reduction in loss aversion compared to matched controls. The findings suggest that the amygdala plays a key role in generating loss aversion by inhibiting actions with potentially deleterious outcomes.

Oxytocin may improve autism

I have done a large number of posts on behavioral effects of oxytocin, the 'trust hormone', notably in human studies that use an oxytocin inhaler (enter oxytocin in the blog search box in the left column to display them).  Recent studies are now suggesting that when some autistic people (who have difficulty interacting with others) inhale oxytocin, they began looking at people in the eye and recognizing social concepts like fairness in a computer game.

Behavioral Addictions in the proposed DSM-V

I am increasingly amazed at the creeping "pathologicalization" of behaviors that vary a bit from the 'normal'.  Almost any repetitive activity or habit could be construed as a behavioral addition (Tiger Wood's golf and sex?).  I might well be considered an alcoholic sociopathic sex addict by some, given my one a day knockout happy hour drink, my extremely active libido, and my ability to observe the generation of my emotional and social behaviors and halt or detach from them when necessary. I though this article by Constance Holden had some interesting chunks, which I pass on here (see also the related previous post yesterday on the Bonkers institute):

"...proposed revisions for the American Psychiatric Association's (APA's) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) include for the first time "behavioral addictions"—a change some say is long overdue and others say is still premature...

"Sex addiction" has received a lot of press lately, but O'Brien [University of Pennsylvania, chair of the addictions work group for DSM-V] says his work group found "no scientific evidence" that sex qualifies. APA psychiatrist Darrel Regier, co-chair of the DSM task force, says "it's not clear that reward circuitry is operative in the same way as in addictive areas." Nonetheless, a near equivalent may make it into the sexual disorders section of DSM: That work group is proposing a controversial new diagnosis of "hypersexual disorder."

The DSM teams have also tussled with the often-blurry line between addictions and compulsions. "I used to think [addictions] overlapped with OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder]," says O'Brien. But new data from both brain-imaging and treatment studies suggest "more dissimilarities than similarities."

In another major change, O'Brien's group recommends dropping categories of "abuse" and "dependence" and labeling all problems major and minor as substance "use disorders" (or "disordered gambling"). Since the late 1980s, says O'Brien, "numerous large population studies" have shown there's no "breakpoint" where "abuse" becomes something more serious. He also says the term "dependence" only implies physiological dependence, which is not the same as the psychological obsession of addiction.

Some longtime addiction researchers, such as psychiatrist Victor Hesselbrock of the University of Connecticut, Farmington, have qualms about the direction DSM is moving. Hesselbrock believes behavioral addictions are dicey territory and prefers to limit the term "addiction" to substances, which are "pathogens we can identify." He also objects to fusing all drinking problems into "alcohol use disorder." Hesselbrock says he and others think there are proven subcategories of alcoholism that would aid both in treatment and discovering causes. "When you do a one-size-fits-all type of classification system," he says, "that will fit a lot of people but not so well."

Our thalamus goes to sleep before our cerebral cortex

Magnin et al. have recorded thalamic and cortical activities simultaneously in epileptic patients chronically implanted with intracerebral electrodes to address the issue of when these two regions of the brain go to sleep. (The thalamus is the main gateway through which information from our bodies flows to the cortex.) They find, contrary to the common view, that the thalamus deactivates well before the cortex during sleep onset, leaving the cortex to spin its stories without input from the world during a hypnagogic or half-awake state during which illusions or inspirations sometimes occur, giving us the impression that it is taking us longer to get to sleep than is actually the case. Here is their abstract:

Thalamic and cortical activities are assumed to be time-locked throughout all vigilance states. Using simultaneous intracortical and intrathalamic recordings, we demonstrate here that the thalamic deactivation occurring at sleep onset most often precedes that of the cortex by several minutes, whereas reactivation of both structures during awakening is synchronized. Delays between thalamus and cortex deactivations can vary from one subject to another when a similar cortical region is considered. In addition, heterogeneity in activity levels throughout the cortical mantle is larger than previously thought during the descent into sleep. Thus, asynchronous thalamo-cortical deactivation while falling asleep probably explains the production of hypnagogic hallucinations by a still-activated cortex and the common self-overestimation of the time needed to fall asleep.

Depression's Upside

Jonah Lehrer (a really bright guy, author of "How We Decide", "Proust was a Neuroscientist", and the blog "The Frontal Cortex") has made his first New York Times Magazine contribution, an excellent article on depression that focuses on work of Andrews and Thomson who suggest that depression is a evolved behavior that has the function of removing us from normal daily behaviors to focus on and hopefully solve a pressing life issue.  They describe their model as the "analytic-rumination hypothesis." A few clips from the article:

Several studies found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients. Most recently, a paper to be published next month by neuroscientists in China found a spike in “functional connectivity” between the lateral prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain in depressed patients, with more severe depressions leading to more prefrontal activity. One explanation for this finding is that the hyperactive VLPFC underlies rumination, allowing people to stay focused on their problem...the reliance on the VLPFC doesn’t just lead us to fixate on our depressing situation; it also leads to an extremely analytical style of thinking. That’s because rumination is largely rooted in working memory, a kind of mental scratchpad that allows us to “work” with all the information stuck in consciousness. When people rely on working memory — and it doesn’t matter if they’re doing long division or contemplating a relationship gone wrong — they tend to think in a more deliberate fashion, breaking down their complex problems into their simpler parts.

The bad news is that this deliberate thought process is slow, tiresome and prone to distraction; the prefrontal cortex soon grows exhausted and gives out. Andrews and Thomson see depression as a way of bolstering our feeble analytical skills, making it easier to pay continuous attention to a difficult dilemma. The downcast mood and activation of the VLPFC are part of a “coordinated system” that, Andrews and Thomson say, exists “for the specific purpose of effectively analyzing the complex life problem that triggered the depression.” If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.

....the analytic-rumination hypothesis is merely the latest attempt to explain the prevalence of depression. There is, for example, the “plea for help” theory, which suggests that depression is a way of eliciting assistance from loved ones. There’s also the “signal of defeat” hypothesis, which argues that feelings of despair after a loss in social status help prevent unnecessary attacks; we’re too busy sulking to fight back. And then there’s “depressive realism”: several studies have found that people with depression have a more accurate view of reality and are better at predicting future outcomes. While each of these speculations has scientific support, none are sufficient to explain an illness that afflicts so many people. The moral, Nesse says, is that sadness, like happiness, has many functions.

To say that depression can be useful doesn't mean it is always going to be useful. While it might explain patients reacting to an acute stressor, it can’t account for those whose suffering has no discernible cause or whose sadness refuses to lift for years at a time.

In the last section of the article Lehrer notes a number of studies indicating a correlation of depression with better artistic creativity and improved analytical abilities.

Asymptomatic Depression - hidden disease and untapped market

The distinguished Dr. Methodius Bonkers has emailed me to point out his institute's most recent study.  It is a hoot.

A Mozart Presto

Here is another of the rehearsal recordings we make to critique, to be eventually replaced by a final version. It is a run through of the Presto (last movement) of Mozart's Piano Sonata for 4-hands, K. 358. I'm playing base, David Goldberger is playing treble.

Evidence for a geometric brain module suggested by William's syndrome defect

Context from the introduction by Lakusta et al.

When rats, human toddlers, or adults are disoriented in a chamber, they search for targets using geometric properties of the layout, often ignoring quite salient nongeometric cues. This pattern has led scientists to hypothesize that reorientation in animals (including humans) is guided by a cognitive module that engages geometric properties of layouts such as the lengths of surfaces, the angles of their intersections, and geometric sense (i.e., “left-” and “right-ness”), but does not engage nongeometric information such as surface color.

The authors find that geometric reorientation abilities are specifically impaired in Williams Syndrome patients. (Williams syndrome results from a microdeletion in chromosome 7q11.23. People with the syndrome have mild to moderate retardation and highly selective but severe impairment in a range of spatial tasks that normally engage parietal and other dorsal stream functions of the brain.)  Here is their abstract:

The capacity to reorient in one’s environment is a fundamental part of the spatial cognitive systems of both humans and nonhuman species. Abundant literature has shown that human adults and toddlers, rats, chicks, and fish accomplish reorientation through the construction and use of geometric representations of surrounding layouts, including the lengths of surfaces and their intersection. Does the development of this reorientation system rely on specific genes and their action in brain development? We tested reorientation in individuals who have Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic disorder that results in abnormalities of hippocampal and parietal areas of the brain known to be involved in reorientation. We found that in a rectangular chamber devoid of surface feature information, WS individuals do not use the geometry of the chamber to reorient, failing to find a hidden object. The failure among people with WS cannot be explained by more general deficits in visual-spatial working memory, as the same individuals performed at ceiling in a similar task in which they were not disoriented. We also found that performance among people with WS improves in a rectangular chamber with one blue wall, suggesting that some individuals with WS can use the blue wall feature to locate the hidden object. These results show that the geometric system used for reorientation in humans can be selectively damaged by specific genetic and neural abnormalities in humans.

Human pheromones - androstenol activates hypothalamus in women.

There is continuing debate over whether, and to what extent, we humans (like other mammals) might use body odors secreted from our skin in signaling sexual attraction, aggression, submission, etc.  Several progesterone derivatives have been shown to activate regions of the thalamus and hypothalamus, and the activations are differentiated with respect to sex and sexual orientation of the smeller in relation to the respective compounds.   Slavic et al. asked whether compounds actually released by our bodies have pheromone properties, and focused on highly volatile androstenol, which is found (primarily in males), in sweat, urine, plasma and saliva. They found that smelling androstenol (unlike several common odors) causes activation of a portion of the hypothalamus in women that animal data suggests mediates pheromone triggered mating behavior. (The article is open access, and you can see the brain imaging data there.)

Reward centers in men activated by optimal hip-to-waist ratio in women

Observations from Platek and Singh add to the evolutionary psychologists' discussion of determinants of men's sexual preferences. They take male preference for lower hip waist ratio in females (as indicative of reproductive quality) to be culturally universal, but I recall debate on this point, and indeed find that debate covered by cited references (17,18) at the end of the article. Their core observation is that when men view photographs of women after and before plastic surgery to achieve an optimal (~0.7) waist to hip ratio (with redistributed body fat but relatively unaffected body mass index), an increase in activation of brain rewards centers can be observed. They suggest their observations "are the first description of a neural correlate implicating waist to hip ratio as a putative honest biological signal of female reproductive viability and its effects on men's neurological processing."

Is the internet making us smarter or dumber?

During happy hour at my local watering hole, I frequently pull out my iPhone and do a bit of random web cruising. Several nights ago this yielded this piece on effects of internet use on our intelligence, suggesting extensive internet use makes us different, but not dumb. The article cites a Pew Study reporting, contra an influential article by Nicholas Carr, that 76 percent of the respondents said they agree that by 2020, "people’s use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information, they become smarter and make better choices. The article also relays the opinions of a number of other futurists.

Universal nonverbal vocal communication of negative, but not positive, emotions.

Here is a fascinating open access article well worth having a look at:

Emotional signals are crucial for sharing important information, with conspecifics, for example, to warn humans of danger. Humans use a range of different cues to communicate to others how they feel, including facial, vocal, and gestural signals. We examined the recognition of nonverbal emotional vocalizations, such as screams and laughs, across two dramatically different cultural groups. Western participants were compared to individuals from remote, culturally isolated Namibian villages. Vocalizations communicating the so-called “basic emotions” (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) were bidirectionally recognized. In contrast, a set of additional emotions was only recognized within, but not across, cultural boundaries. Our findings indicate that a number of primarily negative emotions have vocalizations that can be recognized across cultures, while most positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals.

Holy surgery and the spiritual brain.

Over the past several years I've done a number of posts on brain correlates of spirituality, in particular work on lesions or temporal lobe seizures that induce mystical or spiritual states (click the religion topic in the left column to find them). Urgesi et al. have now done a clinical study on selective cortical lesions that modulate human self transcendence. They 88 brain cancer patients to fill out a widely used personality questionnaire before and after surgery to remove their tumors. One section of the test measured "self transcendence." It asked respondents, for example, about their tendency to become so absorbed in an activity that they lose track of time and place and whether they feel a strong spiritual connection with other people or with nature. They found that selective damage to left and right inferior posterior parietal regions induced a specific increase of self-transcendence. Other studies have found that some of the same regions become active during prayer and meditation. These posterior parietal brain regions have been implicated in providing awareness of the body's position and location in space.

Figure - Lesion Correlates of Increased and Decreased Self Transcendence. The authors found two clusters of voxels located in the left inferior parietal lobe (L-IPL; A) and in the right angular gyrus (R-AG; B) whose damage was associated with a significant ST increase.

The 'cutaneous rabbit' hops outside of the body!

A well known demonstration of how our brain makes assumptions about what is happening 'out there' on the basis of very limited input is the 'Cutaneous Rabbit' demonstration. If rapid sequential taps are delivered to two points on our skin, we also feel sequential taps at points intermediate between the two, as if a small rabbit were hopping along our skin. The assumption has been that this illusion is link to our somatotopic sensory cortex, which continuously maps the skin surface. Miyazaki et al. show that this illusion can be moved to an external object - a stick held between our left and right index fingers. Here is the abstract from their open access article:

Rapid sequential taps delivered first to one location and then to another on the skin create the somatosensory illusion that the tapping is occurring at intermediate locations between the actual stimulus sites, as if a small rabbit were hopping along the skin from the first site to the second (called the "cutaneous rabbit"). Previous behavioral studies have attributed this illusion to the early unimodal somatosensory body map. A functional magnetic resonance imaging study recently confirmed the association of the illusion with somatotopic activity in the primary somatosensory cortex. Thus, the cutaneous rabbit illusion has been confined to one's own body. In the present paper, however, we show that the cutaneous rabbit can "hop out of the body" onto an external object held by the subject. We delivered rapid sequential taps to the left and right index fingers. When the subjects held a stick such that it was laid across the tips of their index fingers and received the taps via the stick, they reported sensing the illusory taps in the space between the actual stimulus locations (i.e., along the stick). This suggests that the cutaneous rabbit effect involves not only the intrinsic somatotopic representation but also the representation of the extended body schema that results from body–object interactions.

Some friday morning Mozart

Working with retired professional pianist David Goldberger, I'm preparing for a 4-hands recital on Sunday, March 7 in Fort Lauderdale. I decided to make a few rehearsal recordings, to be eventually replaced by a final version. The video below is of a palatable, but we think much less than optimal, run through of the Allegro (first movement) of Mozart's Piano Sonata for 4-hands, K. 358. We will also be doing the Schubert Fantasy for 4-hands.

Effect of socioeconomic status on increase in stress hormones over time.

A sobering account from Chen et al.:

Disparities by socioeconomic status (SES) are seen for numerous mental and physical illnesses, and yet understanding of the pathways to health disparities is limited. We tested whether SES alters longitudinal trajectories of cortisol output and what types of psychosocial factors could account for these links. Fifty healthy children collected saliva samples (four times per day for 2 days) at 6-month intervals for 2 years. At baseline, families were interviewed about SES and psychosocial factors. Lower-SES children displayed greater 2-year increases in daily cortisol output compared with higher-SES children. These effects were partially mediated by children’s perceptions of threat and by family chaos. These findings may help explain, and provide some first steps toward ameliorating, low-SES children’s vulnerability to health problems later in life by identifying the tendency to perceive threat in ambiguous situations and experiences of chaos as factors that link low SES to 2-year hormonal trajectories.

Female teachers can transmit math anxiety to girls

Beilock et al. make some interesting observations:

People’s fear and anxiety about doing math—over and above actual math ability—can be an impediment to their math achievement. We show that when the math-anxious individuals are female elementary school teachers, their math anxiety carries negative consequences for the math achievement of their female students. Early elementary school teachers in the United States are almost exclusively female (more than 90%), and we provide evidence that these female teachers’ anxieties relate to girls’ math achievement via girls’ beliefs about who is good at math. First- and second-grade female teachers completed measures of math anxiety. The math achievement of the students in these teachers’ classrooms was also assessed. There was no relation between a teacher’s math anxiety and her students’ math achievement at the beginning of the school year. By the school year’s end, however, the more anxious teachers were about math, the more likely girls (but not boys) were to endorse the commonly held stereotype that “boys are good at math, and girls are good at reading” and the lower these girls’ math achievement. Indeed, by the end of the school year, girls who endorsed this stereotype had significantly worse math achievement than girls who did not and than boys overall. In early elementary school, where the teachers are almost all female, teachers’ math anxiety carries consequences for girls’ math achievement by influencing girls’ beliefs about who is good at math.

More on conservative versus liberal brains.

Nicholas Kristoff does a nice piece on a topic I have done several previous posts on - fundamental differences in the wiring of conservative versus liberal brains - the central observation being that conservatives feel threat and revulsion much more readily than liberals, with corresponding physiological changes measured, for example, by the startle blink reflex or skin conductance. Kristoff discusses work showing a remarkably strong correlation between state attitudes toward spanking children and voting patterns. Essentially, spanking states go Republican, while those with more timeouts go Democratic.

Spankers tend to see the world in stark, black-and-white terms, perceive the social order as vulnerable or under attack, tend to make strong distinctions between “us” and “them,” and emphasize order and muscular responses to threats. Parents favoring timeouts feel more comfortable with ambiguities, sense less threat, embrace minority groups — and are less prone to disgust when they see a man eating worms.

And, I thought this bit was interesting:

I moaned to the scholars that their research was utterly dispiriting for those of us in the opinion business. After all, it’s extra challenging to try to change people’s minds if they may not even share our hard-wiring. Are people who are “wrong” on the issues beyond redemption, because of their physiological inability to help themselves?..Professors Hetherington and Smith dismissed my whining and were more sanguine. For starters, they note that physiological differences are probably found among the extremes on each side, while political battles are fought in the middle. Indeed, these studies may be useful in determining what arguments to deploy against the other side...“What research like ours may help with is in figuring out how to construct an argument in a way that is going to meaningfully connect with those on the other side,” Dr. Smith said.

Conservatives may be more responsive to health reform, he suggested, if it is framed as a national security argument. For example, American companies complain about the difficulty of competing with foreign companies that don’t have to pay for employee medical coverage. In that sense, our existing health care system leaves us vulnerable...That foreign threat might make conservatives sweat so much that maybe, just maybe, they’d consider revisiting the issue.

Grumpy people may be more evolved

My son pointed me to work by Wobber et al.  which makes me feel much better about my curmudgeonly nature.  They compared the behavior of Chimpanzees, who can be quite grumpy, that that of Bonobos, who maintain childlike playfulness throughout their lives.  They suggest the chimps' ability to put aside their sociability is one of the reasons they are more intelligent and civilized than their genetically similar great ape cousins.  Perhaps being aggressive, intolerant and short-tempered could be a sign of a more advanced nature! Here is their abstract:

Phenotypic changes between species can occur when evolution shapes development. Here, we tested whether differences in the social behavior and cognition of bonobos and chimpanzees derive from shifts in their ontogeny, looking at behaviors pertaining to feeding competition in particular. We found that as chimpanzees (n = 30) reached adulthood, they became increasingly intolerant of sharing food, whereas adult bonobos (n = 24) maintained high, juvenile levels of food-related tolerance. We also investigated the ontogeny of inhibition during tasks that simulated feeding competition. In two different tests, we found that bonobos (n = 30) exhibited developmental delays relative to chimpanzees (n = 29) in the acquisition of social inhibition, with these differences resulting in less skill among adult bonobos. The results suggest that these social and cognitive differences between two closely related species result from evolutionary changes in brain development.

Cat Turf War

My apologies (and this surely falls under the 'random curious stuff' category) but I can't resist passing on this hysterical cat video.

Better to react than to act.

In ScienceNOW Tim Wogan points to recent work by Welchman et al.  showing that when it comes to execution of our movements, reaction beats intention by about 10%.

Have you ever noticed that the first cowboy to draw his gun in a Hollywood Western is invariably the one to get shot? Nobel prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr did, once arranging mock duels to test the validity of this cinematic curiosity.

Welchman's team organized simulated "gunfights" in the laboratory, with pairs of volunteers competing against each other to push three buttons on a computer console in a particular order. The researchers observed that the time interval between when players removed their hands from the first button and when they pressed the final button was on average 9% shorter for the players who reacted to an opponent moving first. However, those who reacted to a first move were more likely to make an error, presssing the buttons in the wrong order. Welchman speculates that this rapid, if somewhat inaccurate, response system may have evolved to help humans deal with danger, when immediate reaction is essential and the risk of an error worth taking.

Dialing the desired emotions in your music...

One evolutionary rationale for the origin of music is that it enhances and amplifies basic emotional states to amplify social bonding and cohesion, creating an emotional resonance that spreads through and binds a group to share joy, anger, sadness, kindness, etc. Thus I was fascinated upon receiving an email from folks who have made a new widget that appears to tap some very ancient roots in a high-tech way - an iPhone App called Moodagent that lets you adjust touchscreen sliders labeled Sensual, Tender, Joy, Aggressive and Tempo to create playlists whose musical items correspond to the emotional mix you have specified. I have several thousand items in my iTunes music library, mostly classical performances I don't even remember putting there, totaling many more gigabytes than the iPhone has, and this App, with the assistance of a small bit of downloaded software, manages to scan my collection, and offer any of its items to a list of 25 pieces selected to fit the emotional mix I have requested. (I have no idea how it does this - something about 'the cloud'). I'm discovering all sort of music I didn't realize I had.  And, having been a person who has resolutely refused to work while listening to music I sit here (like my adult kids always have) doing just that, with a playlist having a high 'tender' setting.  Now let's see what happens if I ramp up the 'sensual setting.'  Here is a demo video:



Added note: A bit of web cruising yields this information on how that small downloaded App (Moodagent Profilter) has managed to let Moodagent draw items from my whole iTunes library.

Moodagent Profiler desktop app, like Apple’s Genius function, goes through your iTunes library and uploads anonymous information about your iTunes tracks to the Moodagent server. The more people who use the app and index their music, the better Moodagent’s database will get.

Lusting while loathing...

An interesting open access article from Litt (something you knew already, but psychologists gotta have something to measure!):

We show how being “jilted”—that is, being thwarted from obtaining a desired outcome—can concurrently increase desire to obtain the outcome, but reduce its actual attractiveness. Thus, people can come to both want something more and like it less. Two experiments illustrate such disjunctions following jilting experiences. In Experiment 1, participants who failed to win a prize were willing to pay more for it than those who won it, but were also more likely to trade it away when they ultimately obtained it. In Experiment 2, failure to obtain an expected reward led to increased choice, but also negatively biased evaluation, of an item that was merely similar to that reward. Such disjunctions were exhibited particularly by individuals low in intensity of felt affect, a finding supporting an emotional basis for relative harmonization of wanting and liking. These results demonstrate how dissociable psychological subsystems for wanting and liking can be driven in opposing directions.

A chemical test for disturbed relationship?

MindBlog has done a number of posts on behavioral effects of oxytocin and vasopressin in humans (enter the terms in the search box in the left column to see them). Taylor et al. now show, in an open access article, that they may be biomarkers of distressed relationships:

Young adults in couple (pair-bond) relationships reported on the positive and negative aspects of their relationships and had blood drawn and assayed for oxytocin and vasopressin. Elevated plasma oxytocin was associated with distress in the pair-bond relationship for women, but not for men. Vasopressin, which is closely related to oxytocin in molecular structure and significantly related to male pair-bond behavior in animal studies, was elevated in men experiencing distress in the pair-bond relationship, but not in women. Controlling for estradiol and testosterone did not alter these findings. We conclude that plasma oxytocin in women and plasma vasopressin in men may be biomarkers of distressed pair-bond relationships.

Abstract thoughts move muscles.

Movements of our muscles influence our thoughts and emotions. People given neutral bland instructions to contract the specific face muscles that make a smile find it harder to generate a feeling of anger when requested to do so, and instruction to move the muscles that make an angry frown make it harder to follow a subsequent instruction to feel friendly or happy. Havas has found that blocking a frown can actually prevent a bad mood.  Natalie Angier summarizes several studies that show the opposite: how thoughts influence our muscle movements in subtle ways.  Miles et al., for example, show that when we thing of events in the future, our bodies move slightly forward, while thinking of past events causes them to move slightly backwards. Their observations are consistent with theories of "embodied cognition," in this case mental time travel may be represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. The metaphorical “arrow of time” may be grounded in a processing architecture that integrates temporal and spatial information in a directional manner (i.e., past = back, future = forward).

Angier also notes other work on embodied cognition that I have mentioned - Students who held a hot cup of coffee in their hand were more likely to evaluate a target person as being warm and friendly than those holding a cold cup of coffee.  She notes work (this post) showing that a warm versus cold stare causes subject to evaluate the temperature of a room as warmer.  Finally she points to work (this post) showing our bodies conflate weight with greater importance or value.  (...almost makes you think that  both Angier and Bownds scan the contents of the journal "Psychological Science.")

The 4th anniversary of Deric's MindBlog

As year five of this blog starts, I find it hard to believe that I have banged out over 2,000 postings, that the blog has ~1,500 RSS feed subscribers, and is seriously engaged by 300-400 people on an average day.

(The figure is a Feedburner report, starting in July 2006.  The green line is the number of RSS subscribers, the blue indicates significant engagement, the amplitude being the weekday (new posts) - weekend (no new posts) difference).

About this time of year I usually cycle through an identity crisis regarding what kind of thinking and writing I want to do, how much energy to put into MindBlog.  Sometimes external forces nudge my efforts.  I recently got a curious invitation to an international Cognitive Neuroscience meeting in Istanbul next May 18-20.  The request was that I both present a piano recital and also give a talk on the mind.  I'm now working on the talk ("Who wants to know? - the nature of our subjective "I"), deciding on the music, and will eventually put the talk on my website, with a podcast version on this blog.  I've done a few previous podcasts (see left column of blog), but haven't really gotten into it.  I don't listen to podcasts, they seem so much less efficient than just reading.  I started to play with Twitter (left column), but aside from a few spurts of activity, I also haven't gotten into it.

Ever since the 1999 publication of my book, The Biology of Mind, I have puttered with the idea of another book. This first book had been a 'crossover' effort, written to be useful both for college course instruction and also for the educated layperson. It was reasonably successful, got some good reviews, and by now has sold ~ 9,000 copies. For the first year or two after its publication both I and the reviewers assumed that there would be a second revised edition.

But as I began to organize an updated version over the next several years, I became tempted by the prospect of doing a pure trade book, not a textbook. I got as far as a fairly complete book outline and design. Then I toyed with the idea of a short paragraph-a-day popular book, a bit of test writing being Mindstuff: bon-bons for the curious user posted on my website in 2002. Then in 2005 I attempted a still short but more continuous text: Mindstuff: a guide for the curious user. (On re-reading, it comes off as ponderous and impenetrable.) None of these efforts got to the level of seriously writing for publication - mainly because I was observing an exponential increase in the number of popular books on the mind, and thought it very likely that my effort would be lost in the noise.

I started Deric's MindBlog in early 2006, after reading a New York Times article on the blog phenomenon, and found myself reaching a larger audience than the previous writing efforts had generated, with much more feedback and interaction. Generating this blog provided a very useful excuse for doing all the reading I was doing anyway, for my own pleasure and stimulation - I could feel less self-indulgent if I was passing some of the material on. 

The problem with the blog gig, which I have mentioned before, is that it is a very episodic, present-centered, non-cumulative activity - a very different mindset from the deeper and more continuous thinking that goes into doing a book. I don't think I have the time, motivation, or energy to do both kinds of activities.

This thinking-out-loud gets me to the point of rambling further about a book title that has been popping into my head for at least the last ten years: "The 100 Millisecond Manager." (a riff on the title the popular book of the early 1980's by Blanchard and Johnson, "The One Minute Manager.") The gist of the argument would be that given in the "Guide" section of the 2005 writing I mentioned above, and actually in Chapter 12 of my book, Figure 12-7.

It might make the strident assertion that the most important thing that matters in regulating our thoughts, feelings, and actions is their first 100-200 msec in the brain, which is when the levers and pulleys are actually doing their thing. It would be a nuts and bolts approach to altering - or at least inhibiting - self limiting behaviors. It would suggest that a central trick is to avoid taking on on the ‘enormity of it all,’ and instead use a variety of techniques to get our awareness down to the normally invisible 100-200 msec time interval in which our actions are being programmed. Here we are talking mechanical, not ideological; this is where all the limbic routines that result from life script, self image, temperament, etc., actually get their start-up. The suggestion is that you can short circuit the whole process if you simply bring awareness to the level of observing the moments during which a behavior switches on, and can sometimes say “I don’t think so.”

"The 100 msec Manager" has gone through the ‘this could be a book’  cycle several times over the past ten years, the actual execution then bogging down as I actually got into description of the underlying science and techniques for expanding awareness. I keep searching for keys to making it feisty, punchy, accessible, and attractive to readers. I note the enormous number of books out there on meditation, relaxation, etc. that are all really addressing the same core processes in different ways. How attractive or effective would be an approach that didn't have the slightest whiff of 'spirituality' or 'purpose' be? (I think that spirituality and purpose are human inventions, culturally evolved psychologies, not shared with other animals, that help humans pass on their genes.)

So.... for the moment all this waffling brings me back to thinking that just doing this blog isn't such a bad deal after all.

Religiosity tied to socioeconomic status.

Gregory Paul makes an interesting comment on an article by Cullota that was the subject of my Nov. 17 post.  I think his point that belief in gods and an afterlife is unlikely to be a "strongly genetically programmed result of major selective evolutionary pressures such as social cohesion" is a good one.   But, I assume he would agree that there is genetic/development programming of things like the facial muscles that are specialized for signaling affiliative gestures that are universal across cultures. Here is his letter:

The Science News Focus story "On the origin of religion" (E. Culotta, 6 November 2009, p. 784) did not incorporate the growing body of psychosociological research that is revealing the crucial role of socioeconomics in the origin and popularity of religion, as well as in creationism (1–6). Some hunter-gatherers have minimal religion (7), and those who do not believe in the gods and an afterlife have spontaneously expanded in prosperous democracies until they are the majority in some nations, such as France, Sweden, and Denmark (1, 3, 4). Because religion is not universal, as implied in the News Focus article, serious religiosity cannot be the strongly genetically programmed result of major selective evolutionary pressures such as social cohesion (8).

In modern nations, nonreligion and the acceptance of evolution become popular when the middle class majority feels sufficiently secure and safe, thanks to low income inequality, universal health care, job and retirement security, and low rates of lethal crime; this has occurred to greater and lesser degrees in most first-world countries, from Japan to Scandinavia (1–6). Religion thrives when the majority seek the aid and protection of supernatural powers because they are impoverished, as in the third- and second-world countries or, in the case of the United States (the most religious and creationist first-world country), because the majority of Americans fear losing their middle-class status as a result of limited government support, high levels of social pathology, and intense economic competition and income disparity (1–6). Prosperous modernity is proving to be the nemesis of religion.

References

* 1. G. Paul, Evol. Psychol. 7, 398 (2009); www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07398441_c.pdf.
* 2. T. Rees, J. Relig. Soc. 11 (2009); moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2009/2009-17.html.
* 3. P. Zuckerman, Soc. Compass 3, 949 (2009). [CrossRef]
* 4. P. Norris, R. Inghelart, Sacred and Secular (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2004).
* 5. A. Gill, E. Lundsgaarde, Rational. Soc. 16, 399 (2004). [CrossRef]
* 6. S. Verweii, P. Ester, R. Naata, J. Sci. Study Relig. 36, 309 (1997). [CrossRef] [Web of Science]
* 7. F. Marlowe, in Ethnicity, Hunter-Gatherers, and the "Other," S. Kent , Ed. (Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington, DC, 2002), pp. 247–281.
* 8. C. N. Wade, The Faith Instinct (Penguin, New York, 2009).

Our brain activity as desire collides with reason.

How do we resist impulsive desires?  Apparently our anteroventral prefrontal cortex tells our nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental  areas (involved in reward and pleasure)  to chill out. From Diekhof and Gruber:

Human decisions are guided by "desire" or "reason," which control actions oriented toward either proximal or long-term goals. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess how the human brain mediates the balance between proximal reward desiring and long-term goals, when actions promoting a superordinate goal preclude exploitation of an immediately available reward option. Consistent with the view that the reward system interacts with prefrontal circuits during action control, we found that behavior favoring the long-term goal, but counteracting immediate reward desiring, relied on a negative functional interaction of anteroventral prefrontal cortex (avPFC) with nucleus accumbens (Nacc) and ventral tegmental area. The degree of functional interaction between avPFC and Nacc further predicted behavioral success during pursuit of the distal goal, when confronted with a proximal reward option, and scaled with interindividual differences in trait impulsivity. These findings reveal how the human brain accomplishes voluntary action control guided by "reason," suggesting that inhibitory avPFC influences Nacc activity during actions requiring a restraint of immediate "desires."

Slime molds and humans - similar transport network design.

Tero et al. show that a slime mold in one day can design a network that is as efficient as one developed by humans over many years: the Tokyo rail system. Here is their abstract, followed by two figures:

Transport networks are ubiquitous in both social and biological systems. Robust network performance involves a complex trade-off involving cost, transport efficiency, and fault tolerance. Biological networks have been honed by many cycles of evolutionary selection pressure and are likely to yield reasonable solutions to such combinatorial optimization problems. Furthermore, they develop without centralized control and may represent a readily scalable solution for growing networks in general. We show that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum forms networks with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost to those of real-world infrastructure networks—in this case, the Tokyo rail system. The core mechanisms needed for adaptive network formation can be captured in a biologically inspired mathematical model that may be useful to guide network construction in other domains.

Fig. 1 Network formation in Physarum polycephalum. (A) At t = 0, a small plasmodium of Physarum was placed at the location of Tokyo in an experimental arena bounded by the Pacific coastline (white border) and supplemented with additional food sources at each of the major cities in the region (white dots). The horizontal width of each panel is 17 cm. (B to F) The plasmodium grew out from the initial food source with a contiguous margin and progressively colonized each of the food sources. Behind the growing margin, the spreading mycelium resolved into a network of tubes interconnecting the food sources.

Fig. 2 Comparison of the Physarum networks with the Tokyo rail network. (A) In the absence of illumination, the Physarum network resulted from even exploration of the available space. (B) Geographical constraints were imposed on the developing Physarum network by means of an illumination mask to restrict growth to more shaded areas corresponding to low-altitude regions. The ocean and inland lakes were also given strong illumination to prevent growth. (C and D) The resulting network (C) was compared with the rail network in the Tokyo area (D). (E and F) The minimum spanning tree (MST) connecting the same set of city nodes (E) and a model network constructed by adding additional links to the MST (F).

Is there an ecological unconscious?

I wanted to pass on the link to this interesting article by Daniel Smith that discusses the psychological maladies that accompany ecological degradation. A few clips:

...Ecopsychology embraces a more revolutionary paradigm: just as Freud believed that neuroses were the consequences of dismissing our deep-rooted sexual and aggressive instincts, ecopsychologists believe that grief, despair and anxiety are the consequences of dismissing equally deep-rooted ecological instincts...a number of psychiatrically inflected coinages have sprung up to represent people’s growing unease over the state of the planet — “nature-deficit disorder,” “ecoanxiety,” “ecoparalysis.”

It was Bateson’s belief that the tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicated a flaw at the core of human consciousness. Writing several years after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” at a time when the budding environmental movement was focused on the practical work of curbing DDT and other chemical pollutants, Bateson argued that the essential environmental crisis of the modern age lay in the realm of ideas. Humankind suffered from an “epistemological fallacy”: we believed, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other. In fact, nature was a recursive, mindlike system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us.

So what to do? How do you go about rebooting human consciousness? Bateson’s prescription for action was vague. We needed to correct our errors of thought by achieving clarity in ourselves and encouraging it in others — reinforcing “whatever is sane in them.” In other words, to be ecological, we needed to feel ecological. It isn’t hard to see why Bateson’s ideas might appeal to ecopsychologists. His emphasis on the interdependence of the mind and nature is the foundation of ecotherapy. It is also at the root of Kahn’s notion that “rewilding” the mind could have significant psychological benefits. But it also isn’t hard to see how the seeming circularity of Bateson’s solution — in order to be more ecological, feel more ecological — continues to bedevil the field and those who share its interests.

Measuring our happiness...

Does money buy happiness? Economists empasize correlations between higher incomes and greater self-reported well-being, while psychologists argue that happiness shows little correlation with absolute material goods and is instead dictated largely by an individual's so-called set-point. Other research invokes a hedonic treadmill, whereby income matters until subsistence requirements are met, at which point comparisons with one's neighbors are what influence one's sense of life satisfaction. Oswald and Wu now establish that the subjective responses from 1 million adults (to questions like "Taking all things together, how happy are you?"), collected within health surveys conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, do indeed correlate with objective measures of quality of life.

Music training induces plasticity in our hippocampus

From Herdener et al. :

Training can change the functional and structural organization of the brain, and animal models demonstrate that the hippocampus formation is particularly susceptible to training-related neuroplasticity. In humans, however, direct evidence for functional plasticity of the adult hippocampus induced by training is still missing. Here, we used musicians' brains as a model to test for plastic capabilities of the adult human hippocampus. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging optimized for the investigation of auditory processing, we examined brain responses induced by temporal novelty in otherwise isochronous sound patterns in musicians and musical laypersons, since the hippocampus has been suggested previously to be crucially involved in various forms of novelty detection. In the first cross-sectional experiment, we identified enhanced neural responses to temporal novelty in the anterior left hippocampus of professional musicians, pointing to expertise-related differences in hippocampal processing. In the second experiment, we evaluated neural responses to acoustic temporal novelty in a longitudinal approach to disentangle training-related changes from predispositional factors. For this purpose, we examined an independent sample of music academy students before and after two semesters of intensive aural skills training. After this training period, hippocampal responses to temporal novelty in sounds were enhanced in musical students, and statistical interaction analysis of brain activity changes over time suggests training rather than predisposition effects. Thus, our results provide direct evidence for functional changes of the adult hippocampus in humans related to musical training.

Exercise keeps your cells young, and a tip on running.

Two random items on exercise.  Work by Lieberman et al. on running has caused quite a stir in the press (and two MindBlog readers have pointed it out to me). I've tried taking off my running shoes for a few days now, and wow.... this is good stuff. (This should not have surprised me of course...I ran around barefoot for years as a kid growing up in Austin, Texas.)  Here's the abstract:

Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and little cushioning relative to modern running shoes. We wondered how runners coped with the impact caused by the foot colliding with the ground before the invention of the modern shoe. Here we show that habitually barefoot endurance runners often land on the fore-foot (fore-foot strike) before bringing down the heel, but they sometimes land with a flat foot (mid-foot strike) or, less often, on the heel (rear-foot strike). In contrast, habitually shod runners mostly rear-foot strike, facilitated by the elevated and cushioned heel of the modern running shoe. Kinematic and kinetic analyses show that even on hard surfaces, barefoot runners who fore-foot strike generate smaller collision forces than shod rear-foot strikers. This difference results primarily from a more plantarflexed foot at landing and more ankle compliance during impact, decreasing the effective mass of the body that collides with the ground. Fore-foot- and mid-foot-strike gaits were probably more common when humans ran barefoot or in minimal shoes, and may protect the feet and lower limbs from some of the impact-related injuries now experienced by a high percentage of runners. 

A second item concerns exercise and longevity. Larocca et al. show that exercise delays the normal shortening of telomeres that occurs on aging. (Telomeres are tiny caps on the end of DNA strands, long strands of DNA that are snipped when cells divide, a process that is believed to protect the rest of the DNA but leaves an increasingly abbreviated telomere. Eventually, if a cell’s telomeres become too short, the cell either dies or enters a kind of suspended state.)

Genetic contributions to financial risk taking

Having just done a post on brain changes on aging that increase financial risk taking I thought it appropriate to follow up with another article I came across from Crişan et al. who link genetic changes in a serotonin transporter to social learning of fear and economic decision making. Their abstract:

Serotonin (5-HT) modulates emotional and cognitive functions such as fear conditioning (FC) and decision making. This study investigated the effects of a functional polymorphism in the regulatory region (5-HTTLPR) of the human 5-HT transporter (5-HTT) gene on observational FC, risk taking and susceptibility to framing in decision making under uncertainty, as well as multidimensional anxiety and autonomic control of the heart in healthy volunteers. The present results indicate that in comparison to the homozygotes for the long (l) version of 5-HTTLPR, the carriers of the short (s) version display enhanced observational FC, reduced financial risk taking and increased susceptibility to framing in economic decision making. We also found that s-carriers have increased trait anxiety due to threat in social evaluation, and ambiguous threat perception. In addition, s-carriers also show reduced autonomic control over the heart, and a pattern of reduced vagal tone and increased sympathetic activity in comparison to l-homozygotes. This is the first genetic study that identifies the association of a functional polymorphism in a key neurotransmitter-related gene with complex social–emotional and cognitive processes. The present set of results suggests an endophenotype of anxiety disorders, characterized by enhanced social learning of fear, impaired decision making and dysfunctional autonomic activity.

Financial risk taking in the elderly - brain correlates

As I look at the current stock market swoon and decide to hang in there, I learn something I'd rather not know about my aging brain.....

Samanez-Larkin et al. first note research that shows that older adults make more errors when making risky decisions (In the domain of finance, healthy older investors have been shown to continue to invest in risky assets even after suffering losses in the stock market large enough to necessitate postponing retirement.) Then, using an investment task, the authors confirm that older adults make more risk-seeking mistakes, and find that these mistakes are mediated by increased temporal variability in the Nucleus Accumbens. Their findings  indicate an age-related subcortical deficit that may promote risky decision-making mistakes. Here is their abstract:

As human life expectancy continues to rise, financial decisions of aging investors may have an increasing impact on the global economy. In this study, we examined age differences in financial decisions across the adult life span by combining functional neuroimaging with a dynamic financial investment task. During the task, older adults made more suboptimal choices than younger adults when choosing risky assets. This age-related effect was mediated by a neural measure of temporal variability in nucleus accumbens activity. These findings reveal a novel neural mechanism by which aging may disrupt rational financial choice.

The populist addiction

I thought this Op-Ed piece by David Brooks was worth passing on.  He notes that populism and elitism are really mirror images of one another, both manichean simplifications of complex multidimensional issues into stark good and evil extremes.

A clever treatment for tinnitus

Okamoto et al. find that they can reduce brain activity related to tinnitus by exposing chronic tinnitus patients to self-chosen, enjoyable music, which has been modified (“notched”) to contain no energy in the frequency range surrounding the individual tinnitus frequency:

Maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization may contribute to the generation and maintenance of tinnitus. Because cortical organization can be modified by behavioral training, we attempted to reduce tinnitus loudness by exposing chronic tinnitus patients to self-chosen, enjoyable music, which was modified (“notched”) to contain no energy in the frequency range surrounding the individual tinnitus frequency. After 12 months of regular listening, the target patient group (n = 8) showed significantly reduced subjective tinnitus loudness and concomitantly exhibited reduced evoked activity in auditory cortex areas corresponding to the tinnitus frequency compared to patients who had received an analogous placebo notched music treatment (n = 8). These findings indicate that tinnitus loudness can be significantly diminished by an enjoyable, low-cost, custom-tailored notched music treatment, potentially via reversing maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization.

Social structure influences language structure.

Lupyan and Dale do a statistical analysis of over 2,000 languages to show that

...languages spoken by large groups have simpler inflectional morphology than languages spoken by smaller groups, as measured on a variety of factors such as case systems and complexity of conjugations. Additionally, languages spoken by large groups are much more likely to use lexical strategies in place of inflectional morphology to encode evidentiality, negation, aspect, and possession.

This suggests that

...just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used.