A lecture and piano recital in Istanbul

As this post appears I will just be landing in Istanbul to attend "Cognitive VII", an international cognitive neuroscience meeting being held here May 18-20. The organizers asked me to give both a piano recital and a talk at the May 19 session, which features several talks on art, music, and the brain. I've elected to play a number of pieces, most of which I have previously posted on YouTube. The Chopin Prelude Op. 28 no. 17 shown just below I posted this past weekend.

F. Chopin - Nocturne Op. 27 no. 2
F. Chopin - Prelude Op. 28, no. 17
E. Grieg - Lyric Pieces Op. 43, no. 5 Erotic Piece
E. Grieg - Lyric Pieces Op. 47, no. 5 Melancholy
E. Grieg - Lyric Pieces Op. 54, no. 4, Notturno
C. Debussy - Reverie  (version I  and version II)
C. Debussy - Minuette from Suite Bergmanesque
C. Debussy - Valse Romantique

The talk following this performance is titled "Who wants to know - the nature of our subjective I." I have posted a web version of this talk on my website.

I will be on vacation in Istanbul after the meeting, and probably will suspend MindBlog posts for several weeks.

Here is the Chopin prelude:

The chemistry of commitment

Parker-Pope does an interesting article on a topic that has repeatedly appeared in this blog, the role of vasopressin in regulating affiliative behavior. Here she notes studies on correlations between a gene regulating vasopressin activity and commitment and marital stability. Studies on 552 sets of twins found:

...men who carried a variation in the gene were less likely to be married, and those who had wed were more likely to have had serious marital problems and unhappy wives. Among men who carried two copies of the gene variant, about a third had experienced a serious relationship crisis in the past year, double the number seen in the men who did not carry the variant.

Parker-Pope also notes experiments suggesting that women might have developed a kind of early warning system to alert them to relationship threats.

More on the science of morality - baby morals.

Sam Harris deals with the massive (mostly critical) response to the TED lecture which I pointed to in my March 30 post, in which he argues for a natural and scientific basis for morality.  And,  Paul Bloom discusses observations on very young human infants that provide very strong evidence for our having an innate primitive moral capacity that is refined by individual and group interactions starting in the first year after birth .

Nasal attraction

Olsson and Laska find an exception to the generalization that women sense chemicals better than men. Men are better at detecting the lily-of-the-valley flower smell of the compound bourgeonal. This same compound is a powerful chemical attractant for male sperm cells. Because the olfactory receptors on sperm cells are also expressed in the human nose, and selective pressure for keener receptors would act on men but not on women, it makes sense that men are more sensitive to the sperm attractant.

Recent studies have shown that sperm chemotaxis critically involves the human olfactory receptor OR1D2, which is activated by the aromatic aldehyde bourgeonal. Given that both natural and sexual selection may act upon the expression of receptors, we hypothesized that human males are more sensitive than human females for bourgeonal. Using a 3-alternative forced-choice test procedure, olfactory detection thresholds were determined for a total of 500 subjects, 250 males, and 250 females between 18 and 40 years of age. We found that male subjects detected bourgeonal at significantly lower concentrations (mean value: 13 ppb) compared with female subjects (mean value: 26 ppb), whereas no such gender difference in olfactory sensitivity was found with helional, a structural analog of bourgeonal, and with n-pentyl acetate, an aliphatic ester, which were tested in parallel. Males and females did not differ in their frequency of specific anosmia for any of the 3 odorants. The frequency distributions of olfactory detection thresholds were monomodal with all 3 odorants in both genders. Olfactory detection thresholds did not differ significantly between pre- and postovulatory females with any of the 3 odorants. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study ever to find a human male superiority in olfactory sensitivity. Single nucleotide polymorphisms and/or copy number variations in genes coding for olfactory receptors may be the proximate cause for our finding, whereas a gender difference in the behavioral relevance of bourgeonal may be the ultimate cause.

Eipgenetics and cognitive aging

Aging-related cognitive decline begins for most of us when we are in our late 40s.  Deterioration is mosty pronounced the ability to recall facts and experiences (declarative memory) and has been associated with aberrant changes in gene expression in the brain's hippocampus and frontal lobe. Peleg et al. now find support for an emerging hypothesis that changes in the epigenetic modification of chromatin in the adult central nervous system drive cognitive decline. They show that restoring a reaction that places acetyl groups on the histone proteins that regulate gene expression reinstates the expression of learning-induced genes.

As the human life span increases, the number of people suffering from cognitive decline is rising dramatically. The mechanisms underlying age-associated memory impairment are, however, not understood. Here we show that memory disturbances in the aging brain of the mouse are associated with altered hippocampal chromatin plasticity. During learning, aged mice display a specific deregulation of histone H4 lysine 12 (H4K12) acetylation and fail to initiate a hippocampal gene expression program associated with memory consolidation. Restoration of physiological H4K12 acetylation reinstates the expression of learning-induced genes and leads to the recovery of cognitive abilities. Our data suggest that deregulated H4K12 acetylation may represent an early biomarker of an impaired genome-environment interaction in the aging mouse brain.

More on creativity and the brain

This past Saturday's NYTimes had an article featuring work by Rex Jung which was the subject of last Tuesday's post. A bit facile and simplistic, but I thought I would pass on some of the eye-catching graphics supplied by researchers:

Images from brain research conducted by the Mind Research Network. While intelligence and skill are associated with the fast and efficient firing of neurons in the brain, subjects who tested high in creativity had thinner white matter and connecting axons that slow nerve traffic. In these images, the green tracks show the white matter being analyzed. The yellow and red spots show where creativity corresponds with slower nerve traffic. The blue areas show where “openness to experience,” associated with creativity, corresponds with slower nerve traffic. (from Jung).

Left, before an insight, activity drops in the visual cortex; right, in the “aha! moment,” activity in the right temporal lobe spikes. (from Ohn Kounios, Drexel University)

Chimps have tools for sex

Here is a great item from Tierney in this past Tuesday's NYTimes Science section. With the use of about 20 different tools having been documented in different groups of chimpanzees, now a 'come hither' tool for a male trying to get a female to mate has been recorded.

The male will pluck a leaf, or a set of leaves, and sit so the female can see him. He spreads his legs so the female sees the erection, and he tears the leaf bit by bit down the midvein of the leaf (making a rasping noise), dropping the pieces as he detaches them. Sometimes he’ll do half a dozen leaves until she notices.,,,And then?...Presumably she sees the erection and puts two and two together, and if she’s interested, she’ll typically approach and present her back side, and then they’ll mate.

...you might see this chimp as the equivalent of a human (wearing pants, one hopes) trying to attract women by driving around with a car thumping out 120-decibel music... But it would be fairer to compare the clipped leaf with the most popular human sex tool...the vibrator, considered taboo a few decades ago, has become one of the most common household appliances in the United States....

William's syndrome: Disappearance of racism along with social fear.

Meyer-Lindenberg and collaborators report the interesting observation that racial stereotyping, but not gender stereotyping, disappears in children with Williams syndrome (who lack social fear):

Stereotypes — often implicit attributions to an individual based on group membership categories such as race, religion, age, gender, or nationality — are ubiquitous in human interactions. Even three-year old children clearly prefer their own ethnic group and discriminate against individuals of different ethnicities. While stereotypes may enable rapid behavioural decisions with incomplete information, such biases can lead to conflicts and discrimination, especially because stereotypes can be implicit and automatic, making an understanding of the origin of stereotypes an important scientific and socio-political topic. An important process invoked by out-groups is social fear. A unique opportunity to study the contribution of this mechanism to stereotypes is afforded by individuals with the microdeletion disorder Williams syndrome (WS), in which social fear is absent, leading to an unusually friendly, high approachability behaviour, including towards strangers. Here we show that children with WS lack racial stereotyping, though they retain gender stereotyping, compared to matched typically developing children. Our data indicate that mechanisms for the emergence of gender versus racial bias are neurogenetically dissociable. Specifically, because WS is associated with reduced social fear, our data support a role of social fear processing in the emergence of racial, but not gender, stereotyping.

Our brain as a cognitive miser - where decision costs are registered.

McGuire1 and Botvinick show that lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) is where the costs of cognitively demanding decisions are reflected. From their introduction:

...decision-makers balance a motive to maximize gains with a motive to minimize decision costs. The concept of decision costs helps explain such behavioral phenomena as effort-accuracy tradeoffs, reliance on fast and frugal heuristics, failure to consider all available alternatives, effort discounting, the use of stereotypes, and salutary effects of monetary incentives. Amplified decision costs might play a role in clinical depression and chronic fatigue syndrome. This idea is related to the view that decision-making consumes a limited resource, and, more generally, that humans act as cognitive misers.

Their abstract: (Experiment 1 elicited repeated self-reports of experienced decision costs, measured in terms of participants’ rated desire to avoid the task. Experiment 2 sought to confirm the relevance of LPFC to the evaluation of decision costs, with costs measured directly in terms of observed avoidance behavior.)

Human choice behavior takes account of internal decision costs: people show a tendency to avoid making decisions in ways that are computationally demanding and subjectively effortful. Here, we investigate neural processes underlying the registration of decision costs. We report two functional MRI experiments that implicate lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) in this function. In Experiment 1, LPFC activity correlated positively with a self-report measure of costs as this measure varied over blocks of simple decisions. In Experiment 2, LPFC activity also correlated with individual differences in effort-based choice, taking on higher levels in subjects with a strong tendency to avoid cognitively demanding decisions. These relationships persisted even when effects of reaction time and error were partialled out, linking LPFC activity to subjectively experienced costs and not merely to response accuracy or time on task. In contrast to LPFC, dorsomedial frontal cortex—an area widely implicated in performance monitoring—showed no relationship to decision costs independent of overt performance. Previous work has implicated LPFC in executive control. Our results thus imply that costs may be registered based on the degree to which control mechanisms are recruited during decision-making.

Slowing down the brain may enhance creativity.

Geddes points to work by Jung et al. that suggest an inverse correlation in human subjects between brain connectivity, reflected by the amount of the cortical myelin that sheathes nerve tracts (see the illustrations here), and creativity, assayed by a "composite creativity index."  If  less myelin corresponds to slower communication between regions of the brain, this could suggest that slowing down our brains makes them more creative:

That creativity and psychopathology are somehow linked remains a popular but controversial idea in neuroscience research. Brain regions implicated in both psychosis-proneness and creative cognition include frontal projection zones and association fibers. In normal subjects, we have previously demonstrated that a composite measure of divergent thinking (DT) ability exhibited significant inverse relationships in frontal lobe areas with both cortical thickness and metabolite concentration of N-acetyl-aspartate (NAA). These findings support the idea that creativity may reside upon a continuum with psychopathology. Here we examine whether white matter integrity, assessed by Fractional Anisotropy (FA), is related to two measures of creativity (Divergent Thinking and Openness to Experience). Based on previous findings, we hypothesize inverse correlations within fronto-striatal circuits. Seventy-two healthy, young adult (18–29 years) subjects were scanned on a 3 Tesla scanner with Diffusion Tensor Imaging. DT measures were scored by four raters (α = .81) using the Consensual Assessment Technique, from which a composite creativity index (CCI) was derived. We found that the CCI was significantly inversely related to FA within the left inferior frontal white matter (t = 5.36, p = .01), and Openness was inversely related to FA within the right inferior frontal white matter (t = 4.61, p = .04). These findings demonstrate an apparent overlap in specific white matter architecture underlying the normal variance of divergent thinking, openness, and psychotic-spectrum traits, consistent with the idea of a continuum.

Emotions can persist longer than memory of their induction.

Feinstein et al. provide evidence that a feeling of emotion can endure beyond the conscious recollection for the events that initially triggered the emotion:

Can the experience of an emotion persist once the memory for what induced the emotion has been forgotten? We capitalized on a rare opportunity to study this question directly using a select group of patients with severe amnesia following circumscribed bilateral damage to the hippocampus. The amnesic patients underwent a sadness induction procedure (using affectively-laden film clips) to ascertain whether their experience of sadness would persist beyond their memory for the sadness-inducing films. The experiment showed that the patients continued to experience elevated levels of sadness well beyond the point in time at which they had lost factual memory for the film clips. A second experiment using a happiness induction procedure yielded similar results, suggesting that both positive and negative emotional experiences can persist independent of explicit memory for the inducing event. These findings provide direct evidence that a feeling of emotion can endure beyond the conscious recollection for the events that initially triggered the emotion.

Embodyment: a two-minute powerful pose raises your testosterone levels

I pass on this fascinating item from a mindblog reader who has pointed out a number of other interesting articles to me. The article by Carnay, Cuddy, and Yap is titled "Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance."

Hey, I tried it, puffing up my chest and letting my shoulders rest back for two minutes left me feeling way more strong and assertive (now....where can I find a cheap saliva testosterone  home test kit...).

Here is the abstract:

Humans and other animals express power through open, expansive postures, and powerlessness through closed, constrictive postures. But can these postures actually cause power? As predicted, results revealed that posing in high-power (vs. low-power) nonverbal displays caused neuroendocrine and behavioral changes for both male and female participants: High-power posers experienced elevations in testosterone, decreases in cortisol, and increased feelings of power and tolerance for risk; low-power posers exhibited the opposite pattern. In short, posing in powerful displays caused advantaged and adaptive psychological, physiological, and behavioral changes — findings that suggest that embodiment extends beyond mere thinking and feeling, to physiology and subsequent behavioral choices. That a person can, via a simple two-minute pose, embody power and instantly become more powerful has real-world, actionable implications.

Click here for PDF of article to appear in Psychological Science

Evaluating effects of genes and environment on early reading.

Work from Taylor et al. studying mono- and dizygotic twins in kindergarten through 5th grade suggests, not suprisingly, that that better teachers allow children to fulfill their genetic potential:

Children’s reading achievement is influenced by genetics as well as by family and school environments. The importance of teacher quality as a specific school environmental influence on reading achievement is unknown. We studied first- and second-grade students in Florida from schools representing diverse environments. Comparison of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, differentiating genetic similarities of 100% and 50%, provided an estimate of genetic variance in reading achievement. Teacher quality was measured by how much reading gain the non-twin classmates achieved. The magnitude of genetic variance associated with twins’ oral reading fluency increased as the quality of their teacher increased. In circumstances where the teachers are all excellent, the variability in student reading achievement may appear to be largely due to genetics. However, poor teaching impedes the ability of children to reach their potential.

When do human groups form states?

Spencer suggests that human states evolve (without contact with any preexisting states) when the area controlled by a group becomes larger than a day's round trip from the capital:

A major research problem in anthropology is the origin of the state and its bureaucratic form of governance. Of particular importance for evaluating theories of state origins are cases of primary state formation, whereby a first-generation state evolves without contact with any preexisting states. A general model of this process, the territorial-expansion model, is presented and assessed with archaeological data from six areas where primary states emerged in antiquity: Mesoamerica, Peru, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and China. In each case, the evidence shows a close correspondence in time between the first appearance of state institutions and the earliest expansion of the state's political-economic control to regions lying more than a day's round-trip from the capital. Although additional research will add detail and clarity to the empirical record, the results to date are consistent with the territorial-expansion model, which argues that the success of such long-distance expansion not only demanded the bureaucratization of central authority but also helped provide the resources necessary to underwrite this administrative transformation.

Do brain training programs work?

ScienceNow reports an interesting tussle over the effectiveness of brain training programs. BBC producers contacted Adrian Owen at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, U.K., to help design an experiment to test the efficacy of computer brain training exercises and tested them in 11,430 healthy adults who registered on a Web site set up by the BBC. One group trained on a program that emphasized reasoning and problem-solving skills, and another group trained on a program that emphasized different skills, including short-term memory and attention. A third, control group, essentially did busywork, hunting for answers to general knowledge questions on the Internet. All participants were asked to "train" for at least 10 minutes, three times a week for 6 weeks, and all received a battery of cognitive tests before and after this 6-week period....Not surprisingly, people in both training groups got better at the tasks they actually practiced. But that's as far as it went - none of the brain-training tasks transferred to other mental or cognitive abilities beyond what had been specifically practiced.

These conclusion are contested by Klingberg, who has published one of the few studies demonstrating benefits of training can generalize beyond a specific task. He notes subjects were trained only three hours in total.

I'm a bit puzzled over why the work of Jaeggi et al. showing the effects of short term memory training on general intelligence, which I have mentioned previously, was not mentioned.

Old age improves reasoning about social conflicts

Interesting observation from Grossmann et al.:

It is well documented that aging is associated with cognitive declines in many domains. Yet it is a common lay belief that some aspects of thinking improve into old age. Specifically, older people are believed to show better competencies for reasoning about social dilemmas and conflicts. Moreover, the idea of aging-related gains in wisdom is consistent with views of the aging mind in developmental psychology. However, to date research has provided little evidence corroborating this assumption. We addressed this question in two studies, using a representative community sample. We asked participants to read stories about intergroup conflicts and interpersonal conflicts and predict how these conflicts would unfold. We show that relative to young and middle-aged people, older people make more use of higher-order reasoning schemes that emphasize the need for multiple perspectives, allow for compromise, and recognize the limits of knowledge. Our coding scheme was validated by a group of professional counselors and wisdom researchers. Social reasoning improves with age despite a decline in fluid intelligence. The results suggest that it might be advisable to assign older individuals to key social roles involving legal decisions, counseling, and intergroup negotiations. Furthermore, given the abundance of research on negative effects of aging, this study may help to encourage clinicians to emphasize the inherent strengths associated with aging.

Internet enhancing, not diminishing, the public square.

Some interesting points from David Brooks, noting a study by Gentzkow and Shapiro which counters the prevailing assumption that the internet has created a collection of information cocoons which people occupy to confirm their existing prejudices:

...they tracked how people of different political views move around the Web...The study measures the people who visit sites, not the content inside...a person who visited only Fox News would have more overlap with conservatives than 99 percent of Internet news users. A person who only went to The Times’s site would have more liberal overlap than 95 percent of users....the core finding is that most Internet users do not stay within their communities. Most people spend a lot of time on a few giant sites with politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo News.

But even when they leave these integrated sites, they often go into areas where most visitors are not like themselves. People who spend a lot of time on Glenn Beck’s Web site are more likely to visit The New York Times’s Web site than average Internet users. People who spend time on the most liberal sites are more likely to go to foxnews.com than average Internet users. Even white supremacists and neo-Nazis travel far and wide across the Web....Gentzkow and Shapiro found that the Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association — like meeting people at work, at church or through community groups. You’re more likely to overlap with political opponents online than in your own neighborhood.

...Looking at a site says nothing about how you process it or the character of attention you bring to it. It could be people spend a lot of time at their home sites and then go off on forays looking for things to hate. But it probably does mean they are not insecure and they are not sheltered....If this study is correct, the Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square. The study also suggests that if there is increased polarization (and there is), it’s probably not the Internet that’s causing it.

How pain impairs cognition

Ji et al. use an animal model of arthritis pain to show that pain-related cognitive deficits result from amygdala-driven impairment of medial prefrontal cortical (mPFC) function.

Oxytocin enhances social learning as well as empathy.

From Hurlemann et al.:

Oxytocin (OT) is becoming increasingly established as a prosocial neuropeptide in humans with therapeutic potential in treatment of social, cognitive, and mood disorders. However, the potential of OT as a general facilitator of human learning and empathy is unclear. The current double-blind experiments on healthy adult male volunteers investigated first whether treatment with intranasal OT enhanced learning performance on a feedback-guided item–category association task where either social (smiling and angry faces) or nonsocial (green and red lights) reinforcers were used, and second whether it increased either cognitive or emotional empathy measured by the Multifaceted Empathy Test. Further experiments investigated whether OT-sensitive behavioral components required a normal functional amygdala. Results in control groups showed that learning performance was improved when social rather than nonsocial reinforcement was used. Intranasal OT potentiated this social reinforcement advantage and greatly increased emotional, but not cognitive, empathy in response to both positive and negative valence stimuli. Interestingly, after OT treatment, emotional empathy responses in men were raised to levels similar to those found in untreated women. Two patients with selective bilateral damage to the amygdala (monozygotic twins with congenital Urbach–Wiethe disease) were impaired on both OT-sensitive aspects of these learning and empathy tasks, but performed normally on nonsocially reinforced learning and cognitive empathy. Overall these findings provide the first demonstration that OT can facilitate amygdala-dependent, socially reinforced learning and emotional empathy in men.

The brain's default mode, our ego, and Freud

Carhart-Harris and Friston offer an open access article exploring the notion that Freudian constructs may have neurobiological substrates.

Specifically, we propose that Freud’s descriptions of the primary and secondary processes are consistent with self-organized activity in hierarchical cortical systems and that his descriptions of the ego are consistent with the functions of the default-mode and its reciprocal exchanges with subordinate brain systems. This neurobiological account rests on a view of the brain as a hierarchical inference or Helmholtz machine. In this view, large-scale intrinsic networks occupy supraordinate levels of hierarchical brain systems that try to optimize their representation of the sensorium. This optimization has been formulated as minimizing a free-energy; a process that is formally similar to the treatment of energy in Freudian formulations. We substantiate this synthesis by showing that Freud’s descriptions of the primary process are consistent with the phenomenology and neurophysiology of rapid eye movement sleep, the early and acute psychotic state, the aura of temporal lobe epilepsy and hallucinogenic drug states.

The best illusion of the year contest

The top ten candidates for the 2010 best Illusion of the Year context have been chosen. The site show the illusions from previous years' competitions.

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.