Doing two things at once splits the brain.

...and we are not very good at managing more than two things at once. Here is the fascinating abstract from Charron and Koechlin:

The anterior prefrontal cortex (APC) confers on humans the ability to simultaneously pursue several goals. How does the brain’s motivational system, including the medial frontal cortex (MFC), drive the pursuit of concurrent goals? Using brain imaging, we observed that the left and right MFC, which jointly drive single-task performance according to expected rewards, divide under dual-task conditions: While the left MFC encodes the rewards driving one task, the right MFC concurrently encodes those driving the other task. The same dichotomy was observed in the lateral frontal cortex, whereas the APC combined the rewards driving both tasks. The two frontal lobes thus divide for representing simultaneously two concurrent goals coordinated by the APC. The human frontal function seems limited to driving the pursuit of two concurrent goals simultaneously.

A figure from the ScienceNow review. When tackling tasks A and B simultaneously, half of the brain handles A (red) while the other handles B (yellow).

Opera singers' brains - and the brain's organization of music knowledge

Numerous studies have shown brain changes that correlate with athletic and musical instrument training. Kleber et al. now extend such work to vocal performance training:

Several studies have shown that motor-skill training over extended time periods results in reorganization of neural networks and changes in brain morphology. Yet, little is known about training-induced adaptive changes in the vocal system, which is largely subserved by intrinsic reflex mechanisms. We investigated highly accomplished opera singers, conservatory level vocal students, and laymen during overt singing of an Italian aria in a neuroimaging experiment. We provide the first evidence that the training of vocal skills is accompanied by increased functional activation of bilateral primary somatosensory cortex representing articulators and larynx. Opera singers showed additional activation in right primary sensorimotor cortex. Further training-related activation comprised the inferior parietal lobe and bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. At the subcortical level, expert singers showed increased activation in the basal ganglia, the thalamus, and the cerebellum. A regression analysis of functional activation with accumulated singing practice confirmed that vocal skills training correlates with increased activity of a cortical network for enhanced kinesthetic motor control and sensorimotor guidance together with increased involvement of implicit motor memory areas at the subcortical and cerebellar level. Our findings may have ramifications for both voice rehabilitation and deliberate practice of other implicit motor skills that require interoception.

In another article on the brain and music, Omar et al. (open access) compare normal subjects with alzheimer's and dementia patients to find evidence that music knowledge is fractionated, with superordinate musical knowledge relatively more robust than knowledge of particular music. They propose that music constitutes a distinct domain of non-verbal knowledge but shares certain cognitive organizational features with other brain knowledge systems. Within the domain of music knowledge, dissociable cognitive mechanisms process knowledge derived from physical sources and the knowledge of abstract musical entities.

PharmVille

An article by Virginia Heffernan in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine points to the interesting Psych-Babble website hosted by psychiatry professor Robert Hsiung at the University of Chicago.

Hsiung’s F.A.Q. includes a section called, “How should I decide what information to trust?” Compiled entirely from board posts, it’s a masterpiece. Above all, it empowers Web users and psychiatric patients alike to be strong readers, to mediate between dictatorial commercial culture and the radical factionalism and individualism of Web communities. One answer came from a poster called Daveman: “The search for truth reminds me of Hegel. It is neither the ‘thesis’ (the claim by the manufacturer that the medication is some sort of wonder drug) nor the ‘antithesis’ (the claim by someone who blames all their problems on the medication) but rather a ‘synthesis’ (a sober analysis of both positive and negative aspects).” Very sanely put.

The article also points to an online cognitive behavioral therapy site, and the Icarus Project, investigating "the space between brilliance and madness."

Enhanced facial threat detection in elite warriors

Ross et al show that Navy SEALS, compared with a male control group, show more focused neural and performance tuning: greater neural processing resources are directed toward threat stimuli (angry faces), while processing resources are conserved when facing a nonthreatening stimul (fearful or happy faces).

Irrespective of the target emotion, elite warfighters relative to comparison subjects showed relatively greater right-sided insula, but attenuated left-sided insula, activation. Navy SEALs showed selectively greater activation to angry target faces relative to fearful or happy target faces bilaterally in the insula. This was not accounted for by contrasting positive versus negative emotions. Finally, these individuals also showed slower response latencies to fearful and happy target faces than did comparison subjects.

MindBlog's spring home

This picture (click to enlarge) of early spring at my 1860 stone schoolhouse residence in Middleton Wisconsin shows why I recently returned from  winter exile in Fort Lauderdale (which doesn't have seasons). 

Two routes to slowing aging...

Fontana et al. offer a nice article in the April 16 issue of Science Magazine, a review of experiments indicating that caloric restriction and reduced activity of nutrient-sensing pathways may slow aging by similar mechanisms. I am passing on the excellent summary of the article's main points provided by the magazine, as well as the final section of the article on the outlook for the future (well worth a look for resveratrol enthusiasts.  A previous mindblog post on resveratrol side effect has drawn multiple comments):

Nutrient-sensing pathways are central to the aging process
Both dietary restriction -- a reduction of food intake without malnutrition -- and manipulation of nutrient-sensing pathways through mutations or drugs can increase life span and reduce age-related disease in several model organisms. These pathways are conserved during evolution.

Single-celled yeast provides a simple model system for studying aging
The life span of yeast can be increased substantially through both dietary restriction and mutation or drugs. Reduced activity in two major nutrient-sensing pathways is involved.

C. elegans worms are a simple multicellular model system for aging
Life-span increases in C. elegans are similar to those in yeast. As in yeast, aging in C. elegans is delayed by the activation of pathways normally turned on by starvation/food restriction.

Flies provide a more complex model system that allows e.g. sex differences to be studied
The damage response pathways in some unicellular eukaryotes, such as yeast, differ from those in mammals. Their telomeres are tailored to respond to these differences. The way in which telomeres solve the end protection problem thus differs widely between eukaryotes.

Studies of rodents may yield leads for human clinical trials
Both dietary restriction and manipulation of nutrient-sensing pathways through mutation or drugs can reduce the occurrence of age-related diseases and extend life span in rodents. However, dietary restriction in rodents can also have negative effects. Differences in metabolism, life span, and susceptibility to diseases must be taken into account when extrapolating these results to humans.

Limited data exist on life-span extension in primates
Naturally occurring mutations in humans or monkeys help to understand the role of nutrient-sensing pathways in aging. Experimental studies are complicated by the long life spans of primates. The protective effects of dietary restriction against cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes in primates must be weighed against potentially negative long term effects.

A key question is how we can extend the life span without unwanted side effects
The identification of a common set of genes in yeast, worms, flies, and mice that can extend the healthy life span will accelerate progress toward human clinical trials testing drugs that activate these conserved anti-aging pathways. Further mammalian studies are needed to understand whether dietary restriction and the pharmacological modulation of anti-aging pathways can extend life span and reduce pathologies.

Outlook
Extreme dietary restriction can lead to several detrimental health effects such as amenorrhea, infertility, sarcopenia, osteoporosis, and immune deficiencies. Thus, it will be important to examine these negative side-effects in dietary-restricted subjects that are not malnourished. Indeed, experimental studies are required to evaluate the optimal calorie intake and macro- and micronutrient composition needed for healthy aging in humans, on the basis of age, sex, genotype, and energy expenditure.

Although adjustment of dietary intake and composition may be realistic and beneficial, the severe dietary restriction that induces major health benefits is not a desirable option for most people. Drugs that target nutrient-sensing pathways to obtain the health benefits of dietary restriction are realistic, but the effects of chronic administration require study. For instance, rapamycin, the TOR (target of rapamycin) inhibitor that extends mouse life span, is an immunosuppressant and may not produce an overall health benefit in humans living in an environment with pathogens. However, genetic deletion of the GH receptor or of the downstream S6 kinase in mice extends life span and induces a broad-spectrum improvement in health. More testing of potential disadvantages is required and many open questions remain, but these seem promising drug targets and are hopefully the first of many.

More detail on money and happiness

Yet another study, this one by Boyce et al. (open access), confirming that money doesn't buy happiness, people gain "utility" from occupying a higher ranked position within an income distribution rather than from either absolute income or their position relative to a reference wage:

Does money buy happiness, or does happiness come indirectly from the higher rank in society that money brings? We tested a rank-income hypothesis, according to which people gain utility from the ranked position of their income within a comparison group. The rank hypothesis contrasts with traditional reference-income hypotheses, which suggest that utility from income depends on comparison to a social reference-group norm. We found that the ranked position of an individual’s income predicts general life satisfaction, whereas absolute income and reference income have no effect. Furthermore, individuals weight upward comparisons more heavily than downward comparisons. According to the rank hypothesis, income and utility are not directly linked: Increasing an individual’s income will increase his or her utility only if ranked position also increases and will necessarily reduce the utility of others who will lose rank.

Like humans - Leaders, Followers and Schmoozers among animals

Natalie Angier does an interesting article describing work showing that the array of personality types noted within human groups, mostly likely largely due to genetic variation, is seen also in many animal populations (stylistic diversity is seen in chimpanzees, monkeys, barnacle geese, farm minks, blue tits and great tits, bighorn sheep, dumpling squid, pumpkinseed sunfish, zebra finches, spotted hyenas, even spiders and water striders, to name a few). A particular robust parallel is noted with variation in the traits of neophobia (fear of novelty) versus the willingness to explore one’s surroundings (The trait distinctive to birds leading a flock is apparently boldness). Field experiments with birds have now answered the critique that observing these distinct traits in different individuals might be due to the captive environment of laboratory behavioral studies. Researchers have identified:

...hotheads and tiptoers, schmoozers and loners, divas, dullards and fearless explorers.. animals, like us, often cling to the same personality for the bulk of their lives...highly sensitive, arty-type humans have a lot in common with squealing pigs and twitchy mice, and that to call a hypersensitive person thin-skinned or touchy might hold a grain of physical truth.

Self control without a self...

The fact that humans are better at self control (delayed gratification) than animals is often attributed to their having a sense of self that animal lack. Simple body chemistry also appears to play a role. Miller et al. point to a regulator of self control that is common to humans and dogs: blood glucose. Here is their abstract:

Self-control constitutes a fundamental aspect of human nature. Yet there is reason to believe that human and nonhuman self-control processes rely on the same biological mechanism—the availability of glucose in the bloodstream. Two experiments tested this hypothesis by examining the effect of available blood glucose on the ability of dogs to exert self-control. Experiment 1 showed that dogs that were required to exert self-control on an initial task persisted for a shorter time on a subsequent unsolvable task than did dogs that were not previously required to exert self-control. Experiment 2 demonstrated that providing dogs with a boost of glucose eliminated the negative effects of prior exertion of self-control on persistence; this finding parallels a similar effect in humans. These findings provide the first evidence that self-control relies on the same limited energy resource among humans and nonhumans. Our results have broad implications for the study of self-control processes in human and nonhuman species.

Lessening moral judgements by a magenetic zap to the brain.

MRI measurements have shown that the the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) - an area just above the right ear - receives more blood than usual when we think or read about the beliefs and intentions of other people, particularly if we use the information to judge people negatively. Young et al. show that this area is actually involved in making negative moral judgements, because when it is inactivated by trans cranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), subjects judge an attempted versus an accidental homicide less severely. The abstract:

When we judge an action as morally right or wrong, we rely on our capacity to infer the actor's mental states (e.g., beliefs, intentions). Here, we test the hypothesis that the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), an area involved in mental state reasoning, is necessary for making moral judgments. In two experiments, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt neural activity in the RTPJ transiently before moral judgment...and during moral judgment... In both experiments, TMS to the RTPJ led participants to rely less on the actor's mental states. A particularly striking effect occurred for attempted harms (e.g., actors who intended but failed to do harm): Relative to TMS to a control site, TMS to the RTPJ caused participants to judge attempted harms as less morally forbidden and more morally permissible. Thus, interfering with activity in the RTPJ disrupts the capacity to use mental states in moral judgment, especially in the case of attempted harms.

We separate identity and emotion of a stimulus in under 100 msec.

Liu and Ioannides record the small rapid magnetic signals caused by brain activity (using magnetoencephalography, or MEG) to study whether face affect recognition depends on where the face stimulus (happy, fearful, neutral) appears in the visual field. Emotional appraisal (amygdalar activity) occurs more rapidly than final cognitive appraisal in the pre-frontal cortex - (We jump away from a moving S-shaped figure in our peripheral vision before we have determined whether it is actually a snake). Here is their abstract:

It is now apparent that the visual system reacts to stimuli very fast, with many brain areas activated within 100 ms. It is, however, unclear how much detail is extracted about stimulus properties in the early stages of visual processing. Here, using magnetoencephalography we show that the visual system separates different facial expressions of emotion well within 100 ms after image onset, and that this separation is processed differently depending on where in the visual field the stimulus is presented. Seven right-handed males participated in a face affect recognition experiment in which they viewed happy, fearful and neutral faces. Blocks of images were shown either at the center or in one of the four quadrants of the visual field. For centrally presented faces, the emotions were separated fast, first in the right superior temporal sulcus (STS; 35–48 ms), followed by the right amygdala (57–64 ms) and medial pre-frontal cortex (83–96 ms). For faces presented in the periphery, the emotions were separated first in the ipsilateral amygdala and contralateral STS. We conclude that amygdala and STS likely play a different role in early visual processing, recruiting distinct neural networks for action: the amygdala alerts sub-cortical centers for appropriate autonomic system response for fight or flight decisions, while the STS facilitates more cognitive appraisal of situations and links appropriate cortical sites together. It is then likely that different problems may arise when either network fails to initiate or function properly.

Brain correlates of anticipation and body dysmorphic disorder

For readers who like this sort of stuff, this post is a grab-bag pointing to three recent studies correlating brain activity with behavior, two on anticipation and one on body dysmorphic disorder:

A group at University College London finds that the temporal probability of expected visual events is encoded not by a single area but by a wide network that importantly includes neuronal populations at the very earliest cortical stages of visual processing. Activity in those areas changes dynamically in a manner that closely accords with temporal expectations. (These early stages have generally been thought to be locked to the visual stimulus in an invariant and automatic way. Now they appear to link with higher parietal and motor-related areas known to be involved in anticipation.)

Kahnt et al. show that reward value of sensory cues can be decoded from distributed fMRI patterns in the orbitofrontal cortex, and that value representations in the orbitofronal cortex are independent of whether reward is anticipated or actually received.

Finally, a study from UCLA in the Archives of General Psychiatry finds that subjects with body dysmorphic disorder (i.e., preoccupied with perceived defects in their appearance) show (compared with control subjects) hyperactivity in the left orbitofrontal cortex and bilateral head of the caudate when viewing their own face versus a familiar face. This suggests abnormalities in visual processing and frontostriatal systems in body dysmorphic disorder. The two most effective theraputic approaches to the disorder are cognitive behavioral therapy and treatment with serotonin-enhancing drugs, either alone or in combination. As Brody notes, what does not work is plastic surgery and other cosmetic treatments. Even if the treatments modify one presumed defect, the person is likely to come up with another, and another, and another, leading to a vicious cycle of costly and often deforming as well as ineffective remedies.

fMRI measurents distinguish specific memories

It was bound to happen at some point - given the rapid refinement of fMRI measurement and analysis over the past few years. Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues at University College London report in Current Biology that different episodic memories can be distinguished as they are recalled. In their experiments fMRI signals from the hippocampus were measured as volunteers observed and were asked to memorize different 7-second movie clips. A computer algorithm was used to match the pattern of activity to each memory. When subjects were subsequently instructed to recall one of the movie clips, the algorithm performed much better than chance at determining which movie was being recalled. Their results show that highly abstracted representations of space are expressed across tens of thousands of coordinated neurons in our hippocampus in a structured manner. They suggest that, contrary to current consensus, neuronal ensembles representing place memories must be large and have an anisotropic structure.

April stirs the dull roots...and MindBlog is on the road.

Today I start my annual migration from Fort Lauderdale (the Winter home) back to Middleton, Wisconsin (the Spring, Summer, and Fall home) - driving with my two Abyssinian cats. A few posts are in the queue to appear, but after that MindBlog postings may be lean or absent for a few days...

Early spring pictures of our Wisconsin home sent by my partner Len show why I return (Florida doesn't have seasons). 

Unconscious control of 'conscious' prefrontal cognitive control.

Unconscious information has been shown to influence motivation, reward value and decision making, emotional processing, object recognition, semantic processing, and action planning/execution. Van Gaal et al. now look for evidence of unconscious cognitive control. From their text and the abstract:

Cognitive control becomes necessary when routine behavior (e.g., driving a car) is interrupted unexpectedly by information (e.g., a 'no-go' stimulus such as a pedestrian crossing the street) that calls for behavioral adaptations (e.g., braking fiercely). Generally speaking, it is thought that one should be conscious of the control-initiating stimulus to implement control and to overcome or to inhibit automatized ongoing behavior ("to regain control"). The recruitment and implementation of such control processes depend strongly on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is, of all brain regions, also the one most often associated with conscious experience. Therefore, it seems likely that consciousness and cognitive control are intimately related and this belief is so strong that many authors naturally refer to the concept of "conscious cognitive control" as if "unconscious cognitive control" is inconceivable.

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate to what extent unconscious "no-go" stimuli are capable of reaching cortical areas involved in inhibitory control, particularly the inferior frontal cortex (IFC) and the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA). Participants performed a go/no-go task that included conscious (weakly masked) no-go trials, unconscious (strongly masked) no-go trials, as well as go trials. Replicating typical neuroimaging findings, response inhibition on conscious no-go stimuli was associated with a (mostly right-lateralized) frontoparietal "inhibition network." Here, we demonstrate, however, that an unconscious no-go stimulus also can activate prefrontal control networks, most prominently the IFC and the pre-SMA. Moreover, if it does so, it brings about a substantial slowdown in the speed of responding, as if participants attempted to inhibit their response but just failed to withhold it completely. Interestingly, overall activation in this "unconscious inhibition network" correlated positively with the amount of slowdown triggered by unconscious no-go stimuli. In addition, neural differences between conscious and unconscious control are revealed. These results expand our understanding of the limits and depths of unconscious information processing in the human brain and demonstrate that prefrontal cognitive control functions are not exclusively influenced by conscious information.

Figure - Neural activation associated with unconsciously triggered no-go inhibition. The contrast between responded, strongly masked no-go trials and responded, strongly masked go trials revealed significant activation in three a priori hypothesized regions of interest (pre-SMA and left/right IFC).

The love that dare not squawk its name.

Various forms of same-sex sexual activity, some of them long term couplings, have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, "from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs." Jon Mooallem does an interesting article on the topic, whose title is used as the title of this post, in this past Sunday's NY Times Magazine. A few clips, which don't do justice to the breadth of the article:

“There is still an overall presumption of heterosexuality,” the biologist Bruce Bagemihl told me. “Individuals, populations or species are considered to be entirely heterosexual until proven otherwise.” While this may sound like a reasonable starting point, Bagemihl calls it a “heterosexist bias” and has shown it to be a significant roadblock to understanding the diversity of what animals actually do. In 1999, Baghemihl published “Biological Exuberance,” a book that pulled together a colossal amount of previous piecemeal research and showed how biologists’ biases had marginalized animal homosexuality for the last 150 years — sometimes innocently enough, sometimes in an eruption of anthropomorphic disgust. Courtship behaviors between two animals of the same sex were persistently described in the literature as “mock” or “pseudo” courtship — or just “practice.” Homosexual sex between ostriches was interpreted by one scientist as “a nuisance” that “goes on and on.” One man, studying Mazarine Blue butterflies in Morocco in 1987, regretted having to report “the lurid details of declining moral standards and of horrific sexual offenses” which are “all too often packed” into national newspapers. And a bighorn-sheep biologist confessed in his memoir, “I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S-ram repeatedly.” To think, he wrote, “of those magnificent beasts as ‘queers’ — Oh, God!”

Different ideas are emerging about how these behaviors could fit within that traditional Darwinian framework, including seeing them as conferring reproductive advantages in roundabout ways...a single explanation of homosexual behavior in animals may not be possible, because thinking of “homosexual behavior in animals” as a single scientific subject might not make much sense...the point of heterosexual sex...no matter what kind of animal is doing it, is primarily reproduction. But that shouldn’t trick us into thinking that homosexual behavior has some equivalent, organizing purpose.

What animals do — what’s perceived to be “natural” — seems to carry a strange moral potency: it’s out there, irrefutably, as either a validation or a denunciation of our own behavior, depending on how you happen to feel about homosexuality and about nature. During the Victorian era, observations of same-sex behavior in swans and insects were held up as evidence against the morality of homosexuality in humans, since at the dawn of industrialism and Darwinism, people were invested in seeing themselves as more civilized than the “lower animals.” Robert Mugabe and the Nazis have employed the same reasoning, as did the 1970s anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant, who, Bruce Bagemihl notes, claimed in an interview that “even barnyard animals don’t do what homosexuals do” and was unmoved when the interviewer pointed out what actually happens in barnyards. On the other hand, an Australian drag queen known as Dr. Gertrude Glossip has used Bagemihl’s book to create a celebratory, interpretive gay animal tour of the Adelaide zoo, marketed to gay and lesbian tourists. The book has also been cited in a 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned a Texas state ban on sodomy and, similarly, in a legislative debate on the floor of the British Parliament.

James Esseks, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told me he has never incorporated facts about animal behavior into a legal argument about the rights of human beings. It’s totally beside the point, he said; people should not be discriminated against regardless of what animals do. (In her book, “Sexual Selections,” Marlene Zuk writes, “People need to be able to make decisions about their lives without worrying about keeping up with the bonobos.”) That being said, Esseks told me, polls show that Americans are more likely to discriminate against gays and lesbians if they think homosexuality is “a choice.” “It shouldn’t be the basis of a moral judgment,” he said. But sometimes it is, and gay animals are compelling evidence that being gay isn’t a choice at all. In fact, Esseks remembers reading a brief mention of animal homosexual behavior during an anthropology class in college in the mid-’80s. “And as a closeted guy, it made a difference to me,” he told me. He remembers thinking: “Oh, hey, this is quote-unquote natural. This is normal. This is part of the normal spectrum of humanity — or life.”

A new wave in literary studies - theories of mind

Patricia Cohen writes an article on a new trend in the musty hallways of university English departments,  trying to unite cognitive psychology and literary criticism.  Here are some slightly edited clips:

Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read? ...The layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. This capacity is termed 'theory of mind' by cognitive psychologists.

Humans can comfortably keep track of three different mental states at a time. For example, the proposition “Peter said that Paul believed that Mary liked chocolate” is not too hard to follow. Add a fourth level, though, and it’s suddenly more difficult. And experiments have shown that at the fifth level understanding drops off by 60 percent. Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf are especially challenging because she asks readers to keep up with six different mental states, or levels of intentionality...Perhaps the human facility with three levels is related to the intrigues of sexual mating. Do I think he is attracted to her or me?

Experiments are actually planned to perform MRI experiments on subjects exposed to a set of texts of graduated complexity, noting brain areas previously associated with theory of mind operations. Cohen's article notes nother perspective:

...fictional accounts help explain how altruism evolved despite our selfish genes. Fictional heroes are [frequently] “altruistic punishers,” people who right wrongs even if they personally have nothing to gain. “To give us an incentive to monitor and ensure cooperation, nature endows us with a pleasing sense of outrage” at cheaters, and delight when they are punished. We enjoy fiction because it is teeming with altruistic punishers: Odysseus, Don Quixote, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot...It’s not just that evolution gives us insight into fiction, but also that fiction gives us insight into evolution.

A Mozart presto

Final movement of the Mozart from Monday and Wednesday.

Blocking the emotions of old memories.

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

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

Mate preferences predicted by national health.

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

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

Facilitating choice with a electrical zap to the head

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

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

A Mozart adagio

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

Overcoming status quo bias in our brains

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

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

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

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

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

Sociopaths know right from wrong but don't care.

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

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

Monday Mozart allegro

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

Babies are born to dance.

From Zentnera and Eerolab (open access):

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

The Schubert Fantasy - part 3

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

Wal-Mart Moral Lessons

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

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

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

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

Everybody have fun.

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

Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks

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

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

More on mindfulness meditation and emotional muscle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Schubert Fantasy - part 2

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

Our face recognition capability has a strong genetic component

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

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

Comments on "Statins enchance memory"

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

Text without context and the death of culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brain changes caused by forced right-handedness

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

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

A Schubert fantasy (part I) for Monday morning

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

Training emotional muscles of the brain - special issue of Emotion

The February issue of the journal Emotion is devoted to studying psychological, physiological, emotional correlates of mindfulness meditation. One interesting study from Grant et al. suggest we can train the 'emotional muscle' of our brain.  They turned up the heat on a metal cube applied to the legs of 17 male and female Zen meditation practitioners between the ages of 22 and 57, and 18 matched controls. On average, the meditators, who had between 2 and 30 years of daily practice, tolerated an extra 2°C before saying they were in moderate pain. The team then took MRI scans of the subjects and measured the thickness of several pain-processing cortical regions. The meditators had greater thickness in the region of the anterior cingulate cortex thought to mediate pain's unpleasantness. Here is their abstract:

Zen meditation has been associated with low sensitivity on both the affective and the sensory dimensions of pain. Given reports of gray matter differences in meditators as well as between chronic pain patients and controls, the present study investigated whether differences in brain morphometry are associated with the low pain sensitivity observed in Zen practitioners. Structural MRI scans were performed and the temperature required to produce moderate pain was assessed in 17 meditators and 18 controls. Meditators had significantly lower pain sensitivity than controls. Assessed across all subjects, lower pain sensitivity was associated with thicker cortex in affective, pain-related brain regions including the anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral parahippocampal gyrus and anterior insula. Comparing groups, meditators were found to have thicker cortex in the dorsal anterior cingulate and bilaterally in secondary somatosensory cortex. More years of meditation experience was associated with thicker gray matter in the anterior cingulate, and hours of experience predicted more gray matter bilaterally in the lower leg area of the primary somatosensory cortex as well as the hand area in the right hemisphere. Results generally suggest that pain sensitivity is related to cortical thickness in pain-related brain regions and that the lower sensitivity observed in meditators may be the product of alterations to brain morphometry from long-term practice.

Statins enhance memory

I started taking low doses of a generic statin (Simvastatin) several years ago not because my cholesterol needed lowering, but because I had read about anti-inflammatory effects of the drug. (And it seems to me increases in inflammatory processes are a central issue in aging). Statins also appear to have beneficial effects on the central nervous system. They improve the outcome of stroke and traumatic brain injury, their use has been associated with a reduced prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and dementia. Man et al (Neuroscience, Volume 166, Issue 2, 17 March 2010, Pages 435-444) have now found that simvastatin, widely used in humans, enhances learning and memory in non-transgenic mice as well as in transgenic mice with AD-like pathology on a mixed genetic background. On looking for mechanisms that might underlie these beneficial effects they find that statins enhance a synaptic process called long term potentiation that is a central component of learning and memory.

A lipstick that signals how turned on you are?

An item plucked at random from 'the stream': A new lipstick has gone on sale that the manufacturer claims shows, by changing color, when women are in the mood for sex (by 'reacting with a woman's body chemistry...duh,do I believe this??....maybe temperature sensitive lipstick?)

The lip product changes from clear to deep crimson as the wearer feels more and more frisky. It works by reacting with a woman's body chemistry. Each $18.50 tube comes with a color chart so men can figure out how aroused their partner is feeling. The Mood Swing Emotionally Activated Lip Gloss was invented in California by Too Faced makeup brand."The colors change depending on your emotional state," a spokesperson from Too Faced told The Sun.Celebrity fans include singer Katy Perry, who is engaged to funnyman Russell Brand."This is the ultimate date ice-breaker," dating expert Lorraine Adams said."But using it every day could get embarrassing. Would you really want the man next to you on the bus to know if you're turned on?"

Stress makes men prefer dissimilar mates.

Lass-Hennemann et al. make the interesting observation that men, who generally prefer mates that resemble themselves, switch to preferring dissimilar mates after they are subjected to a very simple stress procedure (holding their right hand in ice water for three minutes). This conforms with research in animals showing that individuals under stress are willing to mate with a wider variety of partners. Attraction to the images shown was measured by an interesting technique, noting startle eyeblink responses to a burst of white noise. Those in a more upbeat frame of mind (i.e. feeling attraction) flinch less. Scratching around for a possible evolutionary rationale for this behavior, one suggestion is that when conditions seem favorable men have the option of picking physically similar mates, whom they subconsciously deem dependable partners who will nurture their offspring. But in stressful times, during which human survival is less guaranteed, men would be more willing to risk a physically dissimilar partner in order to father as many children as possible.

Here is a figure describing how the stimulus photographs were morphed:

Image editing procedure: the nude woman's detailed face (1) was morphed with the portrait picture of the participant (2). The morphing software produces two output images, a shape-only morph (3a) and a combined shape-colour morph (3b). In a second step, the shape-colour morph is used as a semi-transparent layer on top of the shape-only morph. All artefacts of the morphing procedure are eliminated. The resulting image (4) was photo-mounted on the woman's body in a last step (5). The resulting image was used as a stimulus (the image was not masked in the experiment).

Streaming: new culture or cultural dissolution?

Following the thread of Monday's post on the lost art of the R.S.V.P. , I was struck by this Huffington Post bit on the SXSW  (South by Southwest) conference in Austin this past weekend - "Life is but a stream" - that from my point of view points to a future of everyone swirling in a present-centered miasma...

...Activity Streams, Social Objects and a little glimpse into how the data that is our lifestream will grow. And soon.

...SXSW, of course, isn't about the techies, it's about musicians and filmmakers, right? Not so different, as it turns out. They're all developers. All techies. Not just because of the digitization of the music and film industries, but because these are all people who make something from nothing. Inventors. Artists. Creatives. What less people saw coming, I think, was how creative the tech crowd is. How well they fit in and belong with the musicians and movie-makers.

Where does good music come from? Where does great movie writing come from? Some kind of emotional center. So, it was interesting to hear ZeFrank, a guy most people probably refer to as a "viral video maker" talking so much about emotional content. And the guy delivers on it, too. Much of what he has on his site not only will make you think, it reaches you at that emotional center. And it all relies on social experiments.

...Social Objects, Mediated Artifacts and Life Streams are simply techie ways of saying that a system is being engineered that will better capture how you live. That's all. Right now, computers put things into folders, but that's going to change real fast. How? That's not how this works.

If you've written a song, you can relate to this. It's a play between your feeling and the notes available to you. Back and forth. What's happening right now online is that new notes are being added to the scale. What is the future? Listen to the artists. They're all here at SXSW.

Lesion mapping of our brain's general intelligence system.

Adolphs, Damasio, Tranel, and collaborators have published a fascinating open access study in which they report results of having administered standard general intelligence tests to 241 neurologic patients who were being evaluated in connection with their enrollment in the Iowa Cognitive Neuroscience Patient Registry at the University of Iowa, over the course of approximately 2 decades. They found statistically significant associations between g and damage to a remarkably circumscribed, although distributed, network in frontal and parietal cortex, critically including white matter association tracts and frontopolar cortex. They suggest hat general intelligence draws on connections between regions that integrate verbal, visuospatial, working memory, and executive processes. In particular they found a region in the left frontal pole (white circles in Figure 3) that is unique to g and not captured by other subtests. A clip from their discussion:

The largest overlap between WAIS subtests and g was found for Arithmetic, Similarities, Information, and Digit Span; the former two tests also exhibited the greatest conjunction with g. These subtests assess verbal knowledge about the world, verbal reasoning, and abstraction, as well as working memory capacity, and are associated with the left inferior frontal gyrus, the superior longitudinal/arcuate fascicule, and to some degree with parietal cortex (Fig. 3). This suggests that g draws on the combination of conceptual knowledge and working memory, and that the communication between areas associated with these capacities is of crucial importance. Such an interpretation is consistent with the Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT), which postulates roles for cortical regions in the prefrontal (Brodman Area 6, 9–10, 45–47), parietal (BA 7, 39–40), occipital (BA 18–19), and temporal association cortex (BA 21, 37). Our results emphasize the important role of white matter tracts in binding the proposed regions together into a unified system subserving g, in line with a recent study relating white matter integrity to intellectual performance: the study reported significant correlations between integrity of the superior fronto-occipital fasciculus and full-scale intelligence quotient (IQ) (a measure related, but not identical, to g).

One of the caveats they mention:

.... Spearman's g disregards theories of multiple intelligences and does not incorporate specific emotional abilities. Therefore we may have isolated an anatomical network important for processing external stimuli, which might operate in parallel with others that are more critical for stimulus reward processing and interoception.

The decay of sympathy...

Brooks does a concise piece on how the innate sense of fairness and sympathy that we exhibit towards each other in small groups (as in the U.S. Senate as it used to exist) vanishes when groups are in competition with each other (as in the Senate now).  The story of human evolution is the story of competition between groups of humans that are held together internally by more generous and empathetic behaviors than the groups exhibit towards each other.  Clips:

In the United States, leaders in the House of Representatives have done an effective job in getting their members to think in group, not person-to-person, terms. Members usually vote as party blocs. Individuals have very little power. That’s why representatives are often subtle and smart as individuals, but crude and partisan as a collective. The social psychology of the House is a clan psychology, not an interpersonal psychology.

The Senate, on the other hand, has historically been home to more person-to-person thinking. This is because the Senate is smaller and because of Senate rules. Until recently, the Senate leaders couldn’t just ram things through on party-line votes. Because a simple majority did not rule, and because one senator had the ability to bring the whole body to a halt, senators had an incentive, every day, to develop alliances and relationships with people in the other party.

But power trumps principle. In nearly every arena of political life, group relationships have replaced person-to-person relationships. The tempo of the Senate is now set by partisan lunches every Tuesday, whereas the body almost never meets for conversation as a whole. The Senate is now in the process of using reconciliation — rule by simple majority — to try to pass health care.

We have a political culture in which the word “reconciliation” has come to mean “bitter division.” With increasing effectiveness, the system bleaches out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy.

Belief in free will is a belief in vitalism

Any readers who have checked out my web lectures or podcasts (particularly the "I-Illusion") know how I deal with the topic of free will and determinism.  I would recommend that those of you interested in this topic read this excellent open access essay in PNAS by Anthony Cashmore. (Figure 1 is a nice summary of models for the flow of information between unconscious neural activity and conscious thought.) The abstract and a figure:

It is widely believed, at least in scientific circles, that living systems, including mankind, obey the natural physical laws. However, it is also commonly accepted that man has the capacity to make “free” conscious decisions that do not simply reflect the chemical makeup of the individual at the time of decision—this chemical makeup reflecting both the genetic and environmental history and a degree of stochasticism. Whereas philosophers have discussed for centuries the apparent lack of a causal component for free will, many biologists still seem to be remarkably at ease with this notion of free will; and furthermore, our judicial system is based on such a belief. It is the author’s contention that a belief in free will is nothing other than a continuing belief in vitalism—something biologists proudly believe they discarded well over 100 years ago.

Figure (click to enlarge) - Models for the flow of information between unconscious neural activity and conscious thought. In A, the commonly accepted model is shown whereby WILL influences conscious thought and, in turn, unconscious neural activity, to direct behavior. The difficulty with this model is that there is no causal component directing WILL. In B, a causal component for WILL is introduced; however WILL now simply reflects unconscious neural activity and GES (genes, environment, and stochasticism). That is, WILL loses its “freedom.” In C, WILL is dispensed with, and conscious thought is simply a reflection of unconscious neural activity and GES. Conscious thought is now primarily a means of following—more than a means of influencing—the direction of behavior by unconscious neural activity. This subservient role of conscious thought in directing behavior in model C, is indicated by the dotted arrow 2 (contrasting with the solid line for the corresponding arrow in A and B).

The lost art of the R.S.V.P.

Cooper does a NYTimes op-ed piece that perfectly describes my own experience (and frustration) when I have sent out invitations to a music afternoon at my Madison WI.  home. It is worth passing on here:

HERE’S an etiquette experiment for you: E-mail an invitation for a party, one month out, to 45 friends. Request an R.S.V.P. Provide a follow-up e-mail message, two weeks later, politely reminding them to get back to you....How many will?...My experiment arose from plans for an evening of food, drink and literature, with readings by myself and two other writers, at a restaurant. Not exactly a drop-in-if-you’re-around kind of thing, so I asked friends to R.S.V.P. My initial message brought in a dozen responses, and the follow-up a few more, but days before the event I had a paltry 23. Not 23 who planned to come, but 23 who had bothered to respond. Half my invitees had blown me off. Why? I wasn’t peddling life insurance, after all.

Asking around, I discovered that the phenomenon is widespread. One friend of mine e-mailed invitations to a baby shower, and a third of the recipients failed to respond. Another announced a happy hour at her house and received a dozen yeses — only to find her party besieged by 35 people....What’s preventing us from executing this basic social task? Is it the medium? Do Evites somehow not feel like “real” invitations? Is it our busy lives, so overbooked and overwhelmed we’ve drawn up the castle gates? Don’t invite me out this month, I’m ensconced! Or is it simple rudeness? Try as I might to understand, I kept feeling dissed.

What’s clear is how hard the R.S.V.P. rubs against the grain of contemporary life. In requesting people to anchor a plan in the distant future of a month hence, you are demanding a kind of navigation that Americans increasingly do not practice. We prefer to remain flexy, solidifying our plans incrementally as the date approaches. Let’s talk tomorrow. I’ll call you when I’m on the road. Cellphones in hand, we microadjust our schedules as they unfold around us. We’re like the air traffic controllers of our own lives.

It wasn’t always so. A while ago I made a lunch date with an elderly couple. As the day approached with no subsequent corroboration, I felt a strange excitement. Would all three of us just show up? We did, and I realized that what I felt was a small nostalgic thrill over social arrangements that seemed straight out of Jane Austen.

But back to my party. The day before the big event, I sent a final e-mail message, thanking “the half of you who responded for helping keep the dying art of the R.S.V.P. alive.” This irked missive flushed out a final 10 hangdog respondents. But there remained a gang of 12 — the dirty dozen, the truly hardcore, fanatical nonresponders — who couldn’t even be shamed into R.S.V.P.ing...In the end, perhaps they were merely following the French literally: Respond, if you please. Left over from a time when graciousness couched demands as requests, the R.S.V.P. no longer functions. I therefore propose an update, something still French but a bit more ... frank — the R.V.O.M.:  Répondez Vite — ou Mourir!     (Respond Quickly, or Die!)

Brain regions and the DC metro

A reader's comment on last Wednesday's post points to a graphic (see below, click on it to enlarge) showing an amazingly credible mapping of brain regions onto the Washington, DC metro system.

New nerve cell growth in stress-induced social avoidance.

Lagace et al. look at changes in the dentate gyrus region of the hippocampus to probe why some people are resilient to long-term chronic stress while others develop maladaptive functioning. They examined chronic social defeat stress in a mouse model, finding that synthesis of new nerve cells is increased after social defeat stress selectively in mice that display persistent social avoidance. Irradiation that halts formation of these new nerve cells inhibits appearance of social avoidance, suggesting a functional role for adult-generated dentate gyrus neurons. The data show that the time window after cessation of stress is a critical period for the establishment of persistent cellular and behavioral responses to stress and that a compensatory enhancement in neurogenesis is related to the long-term individual differences in maladaptive responses to stress.

The Blues Broaden, but the Nasty Narrows

A great article title from Gable and Harmon-Jones, and yet another study involving students in an introductory psychology course: observations that highly motivated positive and negative emotions go with narrowing of our attentional focus, but either positive or negative low-motivation feelings broaden attention. Their slightly edited abstract:

Positive and negative affects high in motivational intensity cause a narrowing of attentional focus. In contrast, positive affects low in motivational intensity cause a broadening of attentional focus. The attentional consequences of negative affects low in motivational intensity have not been experimentally investigated. A first experiment (using color photographs, selected from the International Affective Picture System) compared the attentional consequences of negative affect low in motivational intensity (sadness) relative to a neutral affective state. Results indicated that low-motivation negative affect caused attentional broadening. A second experiment found that disgust, a high-motivation negative affect not previously investigated in attentional studies, narrowed attentional focus. These experiments support the conceptual model linking high-motivation affective states to narrowed attention and low-motivation affective states to broadened attention.