Are you holding your breath?

While mulling over how I am feeling or acting during the day,  a recollection of an old MindBlog post occasionally pops into my head....I sometimes go back and look at that post, find it useful, and think it might be worth repeating. I think I will act on this impulse now, and more frequently in the future.  Here is a repeat of the entirety of a post from Jan. 28, 2008:


I notice - if I am maintaining awareness of my breathing - that the breathing frequently stops as I begin a skilled activity such as piano or computer keyboarding. At the same time I can begin to sense an array of unnecessary (and debilitating) pre-tensions in the muscle involved. If I just keep breathing and noticing those tensions, they begin to release. (Continuing to let awareness return to breathing when it drifts is a core technique of mindfulness meditation). Several sources note that attending to breathing can raise one's general level of restfulness relative to excitation, enhancing parasympathetic (restorative) over sympathetic (arousing) nervous system activities. These personal points make me feel like passing on some excerpts from a recent essay which basically agrees with these points: "Breathtaking New Technologies," by Linda Stone, a former Microsoft VP and Co-Founder and Director of Microsoft's Virtual Worlds Group/Social Computing Group. It is a bit simplistic, but does point in a useful direction.

I believe that attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit and that we can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals...but... the way in which many of us interact with our personal technologies makes it impossible to use this extraordinary tool of attention to our advantage...the vast majority of people hold their breath especially when they first begin responding to email. On cell phones, especially when talking and walking, people tend to hyper-ventilate or over-breathe. Either of these breathing patterns disturbs oxygen and carbon dioxide balance...breath holding can contribute significantly to stress-related diseases. The body becomes acidic, the kidneys begin to re-absorb sodium, and as the oxygen and CO2 balance is undermined, our biochemistry is thrown off.

The parasympathetic nervous system governs our sense of hunger and satiety, flow of saliva and digestive enzymes, the relaxation response, and many aspects of healthy organ function. Focusing on diaphragmatic breathing enables us to down regulate the sympathetic nervous system, which then causes the parasympathetic nervous system to become dominant. Shallow breathing, breath holding and hyper-ventilating triggers the sympathetic nervous system, in a "fight or flight" response...Some breathing patterns favor our body's move toward parasympathetic functions and other breathing patterns favor a sympathetic nervous system response. Buteyko (breathing techniques developed by a Russian M.D.), Andy Weil's breathing exercises, diaphragmatic breathing, certain yoga breathing techniques, all have the potential to soothe us, and to help our bodies differentiate when fight or flight is really necessary and when we can rest and digest.

I've changed my mind about how much attention to pay to my breathing patterns and how important it is to remember to breathe when I'm using a computer, PDA or cell phone...I've discovered that the more consistently I tune in to healthy breathing patterns, the clearer it is to me when I'm hungry or not, the more easily I fall asleep and rest peacefully at night, and the more my outlook is consistently positive...I've come to believe that, within the next 5-7 years, breathing exercises will be a significant part of any fitness regime.

Associating a nerve growth factor with positive affect - depression therapy?

Panksepp has made a number of interesting observations on the neurochemistry of affiliative (bonding) and hedonic behavior in animals (role of dopamine, etc). Now attention turns to nerve growth factors. Here is the abstract from a recent collaboration:

Positive emotional states have been shown to confer resilience to depression and anxiety in humans, but the molecular mechanisms underlying these effects have not yet been elucidated. In laboratory rats, positive emotional states can be measured by 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations (hedonic USVs), which are maximally elicited by juvenile rough-and-tumble play behavior. Using a focused microarray platform, insulin-like growth factor I (IGFI) extracellular signaling genes were found to be upregulated by hedonic rough-and-tumble play but not depressogenic social defeat. Administration of IGFI into the lateral ventricle increased rates of hedonic USVs in an IGFI receptor (IGFIR)-dependent manner. Lateral ventricle infusions of an siRNA specific to the IGFIR decreased rates of hedonic 50-kHz USVs. These results show that IGFI plays a functional role in the generation of positive affective states and that IGFI-dependent signaling is a potential therapeutic target for the treatment of depression and anxiety.

Is that my Mobile ringing? Rapid brain processing

Roye et al. show that top-down frontal-parietal attentional mechanisms prime even the earliest stages of our auditory pathways to be especially sensitive to personally significant sounds:

Anecdotal reports and also empirical observations suggest a preferential processing of personally significant sounds. The utterance of one's own name, the ringing of one's own telephone, or the like appear to be especially effective for capturing attention. However, there is a lack of knowledge about the time course and functional neuroanatomy of the voluntary and the involuntary detection of personally significant sounds. To address this issue, we applied an active and a passive listening paradigm, in which male and female human participants were presented with the SMS ringtone of their own mobile and other's ringtones, respectively. Enhanced evoked oscillatory activity in the 35–75 Hz band for one's own ringtone shows that the brain distinguishes complex personally significant and nonsignificant sounds, starting as early as 40 ms after sound onset. While in animals it has been reported that the primary auditory cortex accounts for acoustic experience-based memory matching processes, results from the present study suggest that in humans these processes are not confined to sensory processing areas. In particular, we found a coactivation of left auditory areas and left frontal gyri during passive listening. Active listening evoked additional involvement of sensory processing areas in the right hemisphere. This supports the idea that top-down mechanisms affect stimulus representations even at the level of sensory cortices. Furthermore, active detection of sounds additionally activated the superior parietal lobe supporting the existence of a frontoparietal network of selective attention.

Acupuncture's secret revealed?

I've tried acupuncture therapy for myself, and found it to be somewhere between ineffective and mildly annoying. This experience, plus reading several convincing studies finding identical pain reduction effects when acupuncture was compared with sham or placebo manipulations has made me think it likely that acupuncture is in fact a placebo effect. Now Goldman et al. have found a greater than 20-fold increase in adenosine, a nerve modulator with anti-nociceptive (i.e. anti-pain) properties, in tissue around the point where  acupuncture needles are rotated in a mouse's paw. This reduces pain in the paw caused by an injected inflamatory chemical, and the effect is not observed in mice genetically altered to delete the pain nerve adenosine receptors. An adenosine receptor agonist (enhancer) boosts the effectiveness of the acupuncture treatment.

Now, what one needs to see next is experiments with humans in which adenosine release caused by rotating a needle at the classical acupuncture needle points is measured and compared with the release at randomly placed needles.  Also, it would be interesting to see whether other placebo interventions shown to cause endorphin release also caused adenosine release.

Cognitive changes caused by single exposure to a placebo

Given the mention of placebo responses in today's other post on acupuncture, I thought I would pass on this interesting bit in Neuropsychologia from Morton et al., showing that the cognitive effects of a single placebo intervention can persist for six weeks:

Placebo has been shown to be a powerful analgesic with corresponding reduction in the activation of the pain matrix in the brain. However, the response to placebo treatment is highly variable. It is unclear how anticipatory and pain-evoked potentials are affected by the treatment and how reproducible the response is. Laser stimulation was used to induce moderate pain in healthy volunteers. We induced placebo analgesia by conditioning subjects to expect pain reduction by applying a sham anaesthetic cream on one arm in conjunction with a reduced laser stimulus. Pain ratings were assessed before, during and after treatment. Using electroencephalography (EEG) we measured anticipatory neural responses and pain-evoked potentials to laser heat to determine how expectation of analgesia affected the response to a placebo manipulation. This was a reproducibility study and as such the experimental procedure was repeated after a minimum gap of 2 weeks. Significant reductions in pain-evoked potentials were shown after treatment. The anticipatory responses did not change after treatment for the control and sham-treatment groups in the first session but were significantly lower in the repeat session relative to the first session in the sham-treatment group only. A significant correlation was found between the reduction in state anxiety in the repeat session relative to the first and the reduction in the anticipatory response in the sham-treatment group. Receiving a placebo treatment appears to cause a lasting change in the cognitive processing of pain for at least 6 weeks. This cognitive change may be facilitated by a change in state anxiety.

Our brains on the internet - smarter, dumber, neither?

As part of my re-entry catching up with accumulated articles, I want to point out some contrasting takes on how gadgets, the internet, our modern pace, multi-tasking and attention span, etc. are influencing our brains:
Richtel describes a number of experiments demonstrating how multitasking can diminish the ability to focus on or switch between tasks

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information...and they experience more stress...even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist.

Jonah Lehrer reviews "The Shallows," a new book by Nicholas Carr on the internet and the brain. Carr takes a dire view of what the internet is doing to our brains, but Lehrer counters:

There is little doubt that the Internet is changing our brain. Everything changes our brain. What Carr neglects to mention, however, is that the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind. For instance, a comprehensive 2009 review of studies published on the cognitive effects of video games found that gaming led to significant improvements in performance on various cognitive tasks,...Carr's argument also breaks down when it comes to idle Web surfing. A 2009 study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that performing Google searches led to increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, at least when compared with reading a "book-like text." Interestingly, this brain area underlies the precise talents, like selective attention and deliberate analysis, that Carr says have vanished in the age of the Internet. Google, in other words, isn't making us stupid -- it's exercising the very mental muscles that make us smarter.

Pinker offers a sanguine and sane assessment:

New forms of media have always caused moral panics...such panics often fail basic reality checks...If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting. Yet discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying. Other activities in the life of the mind, like philosophy, history and cultural criticism, are likewise flourishing.

...the effects of experience are highly specific to the experiences themselves. If you train people to do one thing (recognize shapes, solve math puzzles, find hidden words), they get better at doing that thing, but almost nothing else. Music doesn’t make you better at math, conjugating Latin doesn’t make you more logical, brain-training games don’t make you smarter...The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.

...to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.

Believing is seeing.

Langer et al. do experiments showing that vision can be improved by manipulating our mind-set:

.... In Study 1, participants were primed with the mind-set that pilots have excellent vision. Vision improved for participants who experientially became pilots (by flying a realistic flight simulator) compared with control participants (who performed the same task in an ostensibly broken flight simulator). Participants in an eye-exercise condition (primed with the mind-set that improvement occurs with practice) and a motivation condition (primed with the mind-set “try and you will succeed”) demonstrated visual improvement relative to the control group. In Study 2, participants were primed with the mind-set that athletes have better vision than nonathletes. Controlling for arousal, doing jumping jacks resulted in greater visual acuity than skipping (perceived to be a less athletic activity than jumping jacks). Study 3 took advantage of the mind-set primed by the traditional eye chart: Because letters get progressively smaller on successive lines, people expect that they will be able to read the first few lines only. When participants viewed a reversed chart and a shifted chart, they were able to see letters they could not see before. Thus, mind-set manipulation can counteract physiological limits imposed on vision.

MindBlog back in Madison - the anterior insula rests from risk alertness

I'm finally back in my University of Wisconsin office, after a month of mainly being on the road, and I'm very much looking forward to settling in to have more time to read and face the  list of accumulated articles that might be the subjects of blog posts.  No matter how comfortable I think I am feeling while traveling, I still am surprised on the return to familiar settings as I watch the body relax to reveal a stored up tiredness, indicating how much energy was being put into the alertness and vigilance - being poised for the unexpected in foreign settings.

It would appear that my being more alert to risks associated with travel was, according to Mohr et al.,  strenuously exercising my anterior insula:

In our everyday life, we often have to make decisions with risky consequences, such as choosing a restaurant for dinner or choosing a form of retirement saving. To date, however, little is known about how the brain processes risk. Recent conceptualizations of risky decision making highlight that it is generally associated with emotions but do not specify how emotions are implicated in risk processing. Moreover, little is known about risk processing in non-choice situations and how potential losses influence risk processing. Here we used quantitative meta-analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments on risk processing in the brain to investigate (1) how risk processing is influenced by emotions, (2) how it differs between choice and non-choice situations, and (3) how it changes when losses are possible. By showing that, over a range of experiments and paradigms, risk is consistently represented in the anterior insula, a brain region known to process aversive emotions such as anxiety, disappointment, or regret, we provide evidence that risk processing is influenced by emotions. Furthermore, our results show risk-related activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex in choice situations but not in situations in which no choice is involved or a choice has already been made. The anterior insula was predominantly active in the presence of potential losses, indicating that potential losses modulate risk processing.

Observing disease symptoms causes a more vigorous immune response

We know that social status, positive versus negative affect, etc. can influence immune system robustness. Now Schaller et al. show that the mere observation of photographs depicting symptoms of infectious disease can boost the subsequent elevation of proinflammatory cytokines released by white blood cells in response to a bacterial stimulus. The effect was specific to the perception of disease-connoting social cues; it did not occur in response to a different category of stress-inducing interpersonal threat. The abstract and a few clips:

An experiment (N = 28) tested the hypothesis that the mere visual perception of disease-connoting cues promotes a more aggressive immune response. Participants were exposed either to photographs depicting symptoms of infectious disease or to photographs depicting guns. After incubation with a model bacterial stimulus, participants’ white blood cells produced higher levels of the proinflammatory cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6) in the infectious-disease condition, compared with the control (guns) condition. These results provide the first empirical evidence that visual perception of other people’s symptoms may cause the immune system to respond more aggressively to infection.

This linkage may have been adaptive in ancestral ecologies, as individuals characterized by perception-facilitated immune responses would have had reduced likelihood of succumbing to pathogenic infections...People are sensitive to visual stimuli connoting the potential presence of infectious pathogens in others. These stimuli include anomalous morphological and behavioral characteristics (e.g., skin discolorations, sneezing) that suggest infection with disease-causing microorganisms. When perceived, these stimuli trigger psychological responses—such as disgust and the activation of aversive cognitions into working memory—that inhibit interpersonal contact.

You are how you eat - fast food and impatience

Here is a gem from the May issue of Psychological Science, offered by Zhong and DeVoe at the University of Toronto:

Based on recent advancements in the behavioral priming literature, three experiments investigated how incidental exposure to fast food can induce impatient behaviors and choices outside of the eating domain. We found that even an unconscious exposure to fast-food symbols can automatically increase participants’ reading speed when they are under no time pressure and that thinking about fast food increases preferences for time-saving products while there are potentially many other product dimensions to consider. More strikingly, we found that mere exposure to fast-food symbols reduced people’s willingness to save and led them to prefer immediate gain over greater future return, ultimately harming their economic interest. Thus, the way people eat has far-reaching (often unconscious) influences on behaviors and choices unrelated to eating.

"Vital Exhaustion"

Benedict Carey discusses how the term "Nervous Breakdown," popular in 1900 before yielding to number of supposedly more scientific diagnoses, has mutated to what psychiatrists in Europe have been diagnosing as “burnout syndrome,” the signs of which include “vital exhaustion.” A paper published last year defined three types: “frenetic,” “underchallenged,” and “worn out.” "Nervous breakdown" has begun to fade from use, and the same fate may or may not await "burnout syndrome".

Austin pictures

This is my last day in Austin Texas, where, after attending a 50th high school reunion, I have been revisiting scenes of my childhood.  One of the most beautiful is Hamilton's Pool, formed in a box canyon on a creek that runs into the Pedernales River about 23 miles west of Austin.  I have put a few photos from the trip on my Picassa photo page. 

Testosterone decreases trust.

Fascinating observations from Bos et al., who tested the effect of testosterone in regulating womens' rating of the trustworthiness of a series of men’s faces shown in photographs. It is essentially an antidote to oxytocin, which has been shown to increase judgments of trustworthiness. Their abstract:

Trust plays an important role in the formation and maintenance of human social relationships. But trusting others is associated with a cost, given the prevalence of cheaters and deceivers in human society. Recent research has shown that the peptide hormone oxytocin increases trust in humans. However, oxytocin also makes individuals susceptible to betrayal, because under influence of oxytocin, subjects perseverate in giving trust to others they know are untrustworthy. Testosterone, a steroid hormone associated with competition and dominance, is often viewed as an inhibitor of sociality, and may have antagonistic properties with oxytocin. The following experiment tests this possibility in a placebo-controlled, within-subjects design involving the administration of testosterone to 24 female subjects. We show that compared with the placebo, testosterone significantly decreases interpersonal trust, and, as further analyses established, this effect is determined by those who give trust easily. We suggest that testosterone adaptively increases social vigilance in these trusting individuals to better prepare them for competition over status and valued resources. In conclusion, our data provide unique insights into the hormonal regulation of human sociality by showing that testosterone downregulates interpersonal trust in an adaptive manner.

Also, check out this article by Nicholas Wade in the NYTimes discussing this work and comments on its relevance to understanding human evolution.

Neural processing of risk.

Mohr et al. show that, over a range of experiments and paradigms, risk is consistently represented in the anterior insula, a brain region known to process aversive emotions such as anxiety, disappointment, or regret. This provides further evidence that risk processing is influenced by emotions.

In our everyday life, we often have to make decisions with risky consequences, such as choosing a restaurant for dinner or choosing a form of retirement saving. To date, however, little is known about how the brain processes risk. Recent conceptualizations of risky decision making highlight that it is generally associated with emotions but do not specify how emotions are implicated in risk processing. Moreover, little is known about risk processing in non-choice situations and how potential losses influence risk processing. Here we used quantitative meta-analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments on risk processing in the brain to investigate (1) how risk processing is influenced by emotions, (2) how it differs between choice and non-choice situations, and (3) how it changes when losses are possible. By showing that, over a range of experiments and paradigms, risk is consistently represented in the anterior insula, a brain region known to process aversive emotions such as anxiety, disappointment, or regret, we provide evidence that risk processing is influenced by emotions. Furthermore, our results show risk-related activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex in choice situations but not in situations in which no choice is involved or a choice has already been made. The anterior insula was predominantly active in the presence of potential losses, indicating that potential losses modulate risk processing.

More on clever crows and complex cognition.

Taylor et al have done some beautiful experiments clearly demonstrating complex cognition in New Caledonian crows, proving that these birds are capable to thinking through their actions, not simply learning through association a series of behaviors and combining them. You really should watch the video in the review by Telis. From that review:

...Taylor trained seven wild crows to associate a short stick with ineffectiveness; the crows failed to obtain their out-of-reach food with the stick and eventually began to ignore or reject it. Then they were divided into two groups, an innovation group and a training group. The training group learned six activities—such as how to use a short stick to extract a long stick from a toolbox—that together could help them get meat with long and short tools. The innovation group wasn’t taught how to use a short stick to extract a long stick from the toolbox, but did learn other techniques.

When tasked with reaching a snack in a hole using a short stick on a string and a longer stick trapped in a toolbox, all of the crows pulled it off. The three birds in the training group linked the behaviors they had learned into a new behavior. They freed the short stick from the string, used it to dislodge the long stick, and used the long stick to obtain their food. And all four crows in the innovation group figured out the sequence on their own. One crow in the innovation group stared at the setup for less than 2 minutes and then performed the whole trial correctly on her very first attempt.

The Taylor et al. abstract:

Apes, corvids and parrots all show high rates of behavioural innovation in the wild. However, it is unclear whether this innovative behaviour is underpinned by cognition more complex than simple learning mechanisms. To investigate this question we presented New Caledonian crows with a novel three-stage metatool problem. The task involved three distinct stages: (i) obtaining a short stick by pulling up a string, (ii) using the short stick as a metatool to extract a long stick from a toolbox, and finally (iii) using the long stick to extract food from a hole. Crows with previous experience of the behaviours in stages 1–3 linked them into a novel sequence to solve the problem on the first trial. Crows with experience of only using string and tools to access food also successfully solved the problem. This innovative use of established behaviours in novel contexts was not based on resurgence, chaining and conditional reinforcement. Instead, the performance was consistent with the transfer of an abstract, causal rule: ‘out-of-reach objects can be accessed using a tool’. This suggests that high innovation rates in the wild may reflect complex cognitive abilities that supplement basic learning mechanisms.

Older is happier

Many diminutions come with aging,  but decreasing happiness is not apparently among them. Bakalar notes studies by Stone et al. showing, to the contrary, that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older, for reasons that are not clear. Clips from Bakalar's summary:

On the global measure, people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.

In measuring immediate well-being — yesterday’s emotional state — the researchers found that stress declines from age 22 onward, reaching its lowest point at 85. Worry stays fairly steady until 50, then sharply drops off. Anger decreases steadily from 18 on, and sadness rises to a peak at 50, declines to 73, then rises slightly again to 85. Enjoyment and happiness have similar curves: they both decrease gradually until we hit 50, rise steadily for the next 25 years, and then decline very slightly at the end, but they never again reach the low point of our early 50s.

...we can expect to be happier in our early 80s than we were in our 20s...and it’s not being driven predominantly by things that happen in life. It’s something very deep and quite human that seems to be driving this.

Keep Austin Weird

The title of this post is the unofficial motto of Austin Texas, where I am spending this week.  One of the things I enjoy most is its funky coffee houses,  all with high speed wireless internet, and copious outlets to plug in your laptop.

Washing away postdecisional dissonance

An interesting tidbit from Lee and Schwartz:

Hand washing removes more than dirt—it also removes the guilt of past misdeeds, weakens the urge to engage in compensatory behavior, and attenuates the impact of disgust on moral judgment. These findings are usually conceptualized in terms of a purity-morality metaphor that links physical and moral cleanliness; however, they may also reflect that washing more generally removes traces of the past by metaphorically wiping the slate clean. If so, washing one’s hands may lessen the influence of past behaviors that have no moral implications at all. We test this possibility in a choice situation. Freely choosing between two similarly attractive options (e.g., Paris or Rome for vacation) arouses cognitive dissonance, an aversive psychological state resulting from conflicting cognitions. People reduce dissonance by perceiving the chosen alternative as more attractive and the rejected alternative as less attractive after choice, thereby justifying their decision.

The authors tested whether hand washing reduces this classic postdecisional dissonance effect (the need to justify a recent choice) by designing a ranking and choice experiment in which participants, after making a choice, were subsequently asked to evaluate a soap - some with actual hand washing and some without. Their finding:

...indicate that the psychological impact of physical cleansing extends beyond the moral domain. Much as washing can cleanse us from traces of past immoral behavior, it can also cleanse us from traces of past decisions, reducing the need to justify them. This observation is not captured by the purity-morality metaphor and highlights the need for a better understanding of the processes that mediate the psychological impact of physical cleansing. To further constrain the range of plausible candidate explanations, future research may test whether the observed "clean slate" effect is limited to past acts that may threaten one’s self-view (e.g., moral transgressions and potentially poor choices) or also extends to past behaviors with positive implications.

Brunch at Fonda San Miquel in Austin

A picture from yesterday's birthday brunch for my son, now 36 years old, at my favorite Mexican gourmet restaurant in Austin Texas.  Shown from left to right are my partner Len Walker, my son Jon Bownds, Deric (me), daughter-in-law Shana Merlin, and old family friend Martha Leipziger. 

Prozac reverses maturation of some brain cells

Here is some intriguing work from Kobayashi et al. showing that fluoxetine (Prozac) indices a dematuration of hippocampus dentate gyrus cells that reinstates synaptic plasticity that is reduced with development, thereby potentially causing beneficial effects on the adult brain. (These cells are key in learning and memory processes). Their results suggest that the state of neuronal maturation, including aberrant maturation, might be controlled or corrected in adults, a unique approach to treating neuronal dysfunctions associated with neurodevelopmental disorders. Some clips from the abstract:

Serotonergic antidepressant drugs have been commonly used to treat mood and anxiety disorders, and increasing evidence suggests potential use of these drugs beyond current antidepressant therapeutics. Facilitation of adult neurogenesis in the hippocampal dentate gyrus has been suggested to be a candidate mechanism of action of antidepressant drugs, but this mechanism may be only one of the broad effects of antidepressants. Here we show a distinct unique action of the serotonergic antidepressant fluoxetine in transforming the phenotype of mature dentate granule cells. Chronic treatments of adult mice with fluoxetine strongly reduced expression of the mature granule cell marker calbindin. The fluoxetine treatment induced active somatic membrane properties resembling immature granule cells and markedly reduced synaptic facilitation that characterizes the mature dentate-to-CA3 signal transmission. These changes cannot be explained simply by an increase in newly generated immature neurons, but best characterized as “dematuration” of mature granule cells...Our results suggest that serotonergic antidepressants can reverse the established state of neuronal maturation in the adult hippocampus...Such reversal of neuronal maturation could affect proper functioning of the mature hippocampal circuit, but may also cause some beneficial effects by reinstating neuronal functions that are lost during development.

Six Famous Geniuses You Didn't Know Were Perverts

Another random curious piece. 

MindBlog in Austin Texas

Having just returned from Istanbul last Friday, I travel again - this time with my partner Len Walker to Austin Texas to attend the 50th reunion of Austin High School Alumni. I will be vacationing here through next week.   Being in Austin requires adapting the digestive system to gargantuan servings of TexMex dishes. 

Aging brains are less able to recover from the effects of stress

It is well documented that aging reduces the effectiveness of our prefrontal cortex in mediating cognitive processing and decision making, including working memory and flexible use of mental strategies. Bloss, McEwen et al. have now conducted studies that suggest that one reason for this decline may be that aging reduces the ability of prefrontal cortex to recover from stress-induced damage. Their abstract:

Neuronal networks in the prefrontal cortex mediate the highest levels of cognitive processing and decision making, and the capacity to perform these functions is among the cognitive features most vulnerable to aging. Despite much research, the neurobiological basis of age-related compromised prefrontal function remains elusive. Many investigators have hypothesized that exposure to stress may accelerate cognitive aging, though few studies have directly tested this hypothesis and even fewer have investigated a neuronal basis for such effects. It is known that in young animals, stress causes morphological remodeling of prefrontal pyramidal neurons that is reversible. The present studies sought to determine whether age influences the reversibility of stress-induced morphological plasticity in rat prefrontal neurons. We hypothesized that neocortical structural resilience is compromised in normal aging. To directly test this hypothesis we used a well characterized chronic restraint stress paradigm, with an additional group allowed to recover from the stress paradigm, in 3-, 12-, and 20-month-old male rats. In young animals, stress induced reductions of apical dendritic length and branch number, which were reversed with recovery; in contrast, middle-aged and aged rats failed to show reversible morphological remodeling when subjected to the same stress and recovery paradigm. The data presented here provide evidence that aging is accompanied by selective impairments in long-term neocortical morphological plasticity.

Michelangelo as brain anatomist

Check out this Andrew Sullivan post.

Overimitation of adults by kids is a cultural universal.

Most studies showing overimitation of adults by children during learning have been conducted on middle- to upper-class kids of Western-educated parents. Nielsen and Tomaselli studied (from Telis's review)

...a culture with a distinctly different parenting style: the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. Whereas a Western parent might teach a youngster to use a bow and arrow by standing behind her and guiding her motions, a parent from the indigenous African Bushmen culture would allow the child to come along for a hunt and learn by observation and through trial and error. Nielsen hypothesized that a child taught in this hands-off manner would have less reason to overimitate adults and would do so less often.

The Nielsen and Tomaselli abstract:

Children are surrounded by objects that they must learn to use. One of the most efficient ways children do this is by imitation. Recent work has shown that, in contrast to nonhuman primates, human children focus more on reproducing the specific actions used than on achieving actual outcomes when learning by imitating. From 18 months of age, children will routinely copy even arbitrary and unnecessary actions. This puzzling behavior is called overimitation. By documenting similarities exhibited by children from a large, industrialized city and children from remote Bushman communities in southern Africa, we provide here the first indication that overimitation may be a universal human trait. We also show that overimitation is unaffected by the age of the child, differences in the testing environment, or familiarity with the demonstrating adult. Furthermore, we argue that, although seemingly maladaptive, overimitation reflects an evolutionary adaptation that is fundamental to the development and transmission of human culture.

The Telis review has an interesting video of overimitation in a Bushmen child.

Prehistoric makeover

From the 21 May Science Magazine "Random Samples" section:

Care to feel closer to your extinct relatives? The Smithsonian Institution's MEanderthal app for iPhones and Android devices melds your mug shot with features of Homo neanderthalensis, modern humans' closest kin—or, if you prefer, the more distant H. heidelbergensis or H. floresiensis. In the first case, expect to gain a big nose and a puffier face, says Robert Costello, an outreach manager with the Smithsonian. Neandertals needed large sinus cavities to cope with the colder climate in Europe and Asia 28,000 to 200,000 years ago.

The cognitive niche

Steven Pinker offers (full text, open access) one of several fascinating paper in a special PNAS supplement issue: In the light of evolution IV: The human condition. All of the papers are open access. Pinker's title is "The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language." The abstract:

Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design. Wallace's apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition. One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the “cognitive niche.” This embraces the ability to overcome the evolutionary fixed defenses of plants and animals by applications of reasoning, including weapons, traps, coordinated driving of game, and detoxification of plants. Such reasoning exploits intuitive theories about different aspects of the world, such as objects, forces, paths, places, states, substances, and other people's beliefs and desires. The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens, including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hypersociality, complex mating, division into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowledge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution of cooperation). The second hypothesis is that humans possess an ability of metaphorical abstraction, which allows them to coopt faculties that originally evolved for physical problem-solving and social coordination, apply them to abstract subject matter, and combine them productively. These abilities can help explain the emergence of abstract cognition without supernatural or exotic evolutionary forces and are in principle testable by analyses of statistical signs of selection in the human genome.

Contra doomsayers, a bright future beckons?

Matt Ridley has a new book out, "The Rational Optimist", reviewed by John Tierney.  (Ridley is a very bright polymath, I recall he did a much better job than I did some ~15 years ago,  as a fellow contributor of several chapters of a standard introductory biology text book - a hack writing for pay gig).  Ridley argues in his grand theory that it was the invention of the exchange of one object for another,  rather than increasingly big brains or cooperation and reciprocity, that started the explosive growth of civilization. 

Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz,” Dr. Ridley writes. People traded goods, services and, most important, knowledge, creating a collective intelligence: “Ten individuals could know between them ten things, while each understanding one.”

Rulers like to take credit for the advances during their reigns, and scientists like to see their theories as the source of technological progress. But Dr. Ridley argues that they’ve both got it backward: traders’ wealth builds empires, and entrepreneurial tinkerers are more likely to inspire scientists than vice versa. From Stone Age seashells to the steam engine to the personal computer, innovation has mostly been a bottom-up process.
“Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment,” Dr. Ridley writes. “This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time.”

Progress this century could be impeded by politics, wars, plagues or climate change, but Dr. Ridley argues that, as usual, the “apocaholics” are overstating the risks and underestimating innovative responses....with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, Dr. Ridley expects bottom-up innovators to prevail. His prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”

Mindblog as dutiful tourist

I'm heading back to Wisconsin from Istanbul tomorrow, and have just taken time to post the obligatory vacation shots. Being a foodie, I've been especially attentive to treats of the sort shown below, a local cheap restaurant to which my student guide Fatih took us after my piano and lecture gig.

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.