Beyond mirror neurons - the neuroscience of real social encounters

A recent draft manuscript by Schilbach et al (PDF) has a nice summary of what a second-person neuroscience would be like, moving beyond spectator theories of knowledge:

Two neuroanatomically distinct large-scale networks have gained center stage as the neural substrates of social cognition: the so-called “mirror neuron system” and the “mentalizing network” . both of these paradigms are investigating actual, but limited domains of social cognition. Both are, in effect, committed to spectator theories of knowledge. They have focused on the use of isolation paradigms in which participants are required to merely observe others or think about their mental states rather than participate in social interaction with them. Consequently, it has remained unclear whether and how activity in the large-scale neural networks described above is modulated by the degree to which a person does or does not feel actively involved in an ongoing interaction and whether the networks might subserve complementary or mutually exclusive roles in this case

The article outlines work from his and other laboratories on brain imaging done during real time human interactions, noting in particular a ground-breaking study by Saito et al., who have devised a setup in which they not only use hyper-scanning, but also allow participants to interact in real-time by exchanging gaze behavior. Two MRI scanners were equipped with infrared eyetracking systems and video cameras. A live video image of the respective interaction partner’s face could be broadcast into the respective other scanner to generate a mediated face-to-face situation.

Here is the summary from Saito et al.:

Eye contact provides a communicative link between humans, prompting joint attention. As spontaneous brain activity might have an important role in the coordination of neuronal processing within the brain, their inter-subject synchronization might occur during eye contact. To test this, we conducted simultaneous functional MRI in pairs of adults. Eye contact was maintained at baseline while the subjects engaged in real-time gaze exchange in a joint attention task. Averted gaze activated the bilateral occipital pole extending to the right posterior superior temporal sulcus, the dorso-medial prefrontal cortex, and the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. Following a partner’s gaze toward an object activated the left intraparietal sulcus. After all the task-related effects were modeled out, inter-individual correlation analysis of residual time-courses was performed. Paired subjects showed more prominent correlations than non-paired subjects in the right inferior frontal gyrus, suggesting that this region is involved in sharing intention during eye contact that provides the context for joint attention.

Our brains lengthen perceptions of biological motions.

Wang and Jiang show that the inherent temporal properties of life motion signals spontaneously engage more intricate brain processings compared with those of nonbiological motions, and consequentially induce subjective time dilation. They thus suggest that the temporal encoding of biological motions relies upon a specialized brain mechanism intrinsically tuned to life motion signals irrespective of their configurations, and is essentially an automatic process operating without a person's awareness.

Point-light biological motions, conveying various different attributes of biological entities, have particular spatiotemporal properties that enable them to be processed with remarkable efficiency in the human visual system. Here we demonstrate that such signals automatically lengthen their perceived temporal duration independent of global configuration and without observers’ subjective awareness of their biological nature. By using a duration discrimination paradigm, we showed that an upright biological motion sequence was perceived significantly longer than an inverted but otherwise identical sequence of the same duration. Furthermore, this temporal dilation effect could be extended to spatially scrambled biological motion signals, whose global configurations were completely disrupted, regardless of whether observers were aware of the nature of the stimuli. However, such an effect completely disappeared when critical biological characteristics were removed. Taken together, our findings suggest a special mechanism of time perception tuned to life motion signals and shed new light on the temporal encoding of biological motion.

Meditation practice increases brain size and gyrification

Luders and her colleagues (PDF here) have examined 44 people — 22 control subjects and 22 who had practiced various forms of meditation, including Zazen, Samatha and Vipassana, among others. The amount of time they had practiced ranged from five to 46 years, with an average of 24 years. More than half of all the meditators said that deep concentration was an essential part of their practice, and most meditated between 10 and 90 minutes every day. The MRI measurements found significantly larger cerebral measurements in meditators compared with controls: larger volumes of the right hippocampus and increased gray matter in the right orbito-frontal cortex, the right thalamus and the left inferior temporal lobe. Increases in the left and right anterior dorsal insula - which is a hub for internal autonomic, affective, and cognitive integration - were most pronounced. There were no regions where controls had significantly larger volumes or more gray matter than meditators. The enlarged brain areas are linked to emotions, making one wonder whether this reflects the increased 'emotional muscles' of meditators,i.e. their ability to regulate their emotions.

 Cortical Surface Shown is the lateral view of the right cortical surface. The red circle indicates where the maximum effect occurred. Top: Larger gyrification in 50 long-term meditators compared to 50 well-matched controls. Bottom: Positive correlations between gyrification and the number of meditation years within the 50 meditators. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles)

Serotonin and reaction to unfairness.

How should one deal with line cutters? Or, more generally, what would you do if you faced unfair or wrong behavior? Studies have shown that machiavellian individuals accept unfair offers more often in ultimatum games (UG), using realism and opportunism to maximize their self-interest. 5-HT (serotonin) transmission, for which the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) is a major source, is important in brain regions such as the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex that are recruited for this kind of cognitive control. Honest and trustful persons who cannot easily separate themselves from moral precepts tend to adhere to a norm of fairness and thus show lower tolerance of unfairness. Takahashi et al. have now used positron emission tomography to directly measure 5-HT transporters (5-HTT) and 5-HT1A receptors and find that low 5-HTT in the DRN is associated with straightforwardness and trust personality traits and predicts higher rejection rates of unfair offers in the ultimatum game. Here is their abstract:

How does one deal with unfair behaviors? This subject has long been investigated by various disciplines including philosophy, psychology, economics, and biology. However, our reactions to unfairness differ from one individual to another. Experimental economics studies using the ultimatum game (UG), in which players must decide whether to accept or reject fair or unfair offers, have also shown that there are substantial individual differences in reaction to unfairness. However, little is known about psychological as well as neurobiological mechanisms of this observation. We combined a molecular imaging technique, an economics game, and a personality inventory to elucidate the neurobiological mechanism of heterogeneous reactions to unfairness. Contrary to the common belief that aggressive personalities (impulsivity or hostility) are related to the high rejection rate of unfair offers in UG, we found that individuals with apparently peaceful personalities (straightforwardness and trust) rejected more often and were engaged in personally costly forms of retaliation. Furthermore, individuals with a low level of serotonin transporters in the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) are honest and trustful, and thus cannot tolerate unfairness, being candid in expressing their frustrations. In other words, higher central serotonin transmission might allow us to behave adroitly and opportunistically, being good at playing games while pursuing self-interest. We provide unique neurobiological evidence to account for individual differences of reaction to unfairness.

Correlation between rejection rate of unfair offers in UG and 5-HTT binding in DRN. (A) SPM image showing regions of negative correlation between rejection rate of unfair offers and 5-HTT binding in DRN. (B) Plots and regression line of correlation between rejection rate of unfair offers and 5-HTT binding in DRN (R = −0.50, P = 0.026). Dashed lines are 95% confidence interval boundaries.

Elegance of our brain lies in its inelegance.

I want to pass on this nice brief essay by David Eagleman:

For centuries, neuroscience attempted to neatly assign labels to the various parts of the brain: this is the area for language, this one for morality, this for tool use, color detection, face recognition, and so on. This search for an orderly brain map started off as a viable endeavor, but turned out to be misguided.

The deep and beautiful trick of the brain is more interesting: it possesses multiple, overlapping ways of dealing with the world. It is a machine built of conflicting parts. It is a representative democracy that functions by competition among parties who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem.

As a result, we can get mad at ourselves, argue with ourselves, curse at ourselves and contract with ourselves. We can feel conflicted. These sorts of neural battles lie behind marital infidelity, relapses into addiction, cheating on diets, breaking of New Year's resolutions—all situations in which some parts of a person want one thing and other parts another.

These are things which modern machines simply do not do. Your car cannot be conflicted about which way to turn: it has one steering wheel commanded by only one driver, and it follows directions without complaint. Brains, on the other hand, can be of two minds, and often many more. We don't know whether to turn toward the cake or away from it, because there are several sets of hands on the steering wheel of behavior.

Take memory. Under normal circumstances, memories of daily events are consolidated by an area of the brain called the hippocampus. But in frightening situations—such as a car accident or a robbery—another area, the amygdala, also lays down memories along an independent, secondary memory track. Amygdala memories have a different quality to them: they are difficult to erase and they can return in "flash-bulb" fashion—a common description of rape victims and war veterans. In other words, there is more than one way to lay down memory. We're not talking about memories of different events, but different memories of the same event. The unfolding story appears to be that there may be even more than two factions involved, all writing down information and later competing to tell the story. The unity of memory is an illusion.

And consider the different systems involved in decision making: some are fast, automatic and below the surface of conscious awareness; others are slow, cognitive, and conscious. And there's no reason to assume there are only two systems; there may well be a spectrum. Some networks in the brain are implicated in long-term decisions, others in short-term impulses (and there may be a fleet of medium-term biases as well).

Attention, also, has also recently come to be understood as the end result of multiple, competing networks, some for focused, dedicated attention to a specific task, and others for monitoring broadly (vigilance). They are always locked in competition to steer the actions of the organism.

Even basic sensory functions—like the detection of motion—appear now to have been reinvented multiple times by evolution. This provides the perfect substrate for a neural democracy.

On a larger anatomical scale, the two hemispheres of the brain, left and right, can be understood as overlapping systems that compete. We know this from patients whose hemispheres are disconnected: they essentially function with two independent brains. For example, put a pencil in each hand, and they can simultaneously draw incompatible figures such as a circle and a triangle. The two hemispheres function differently in the domains of language, abstract thinking, story construction, inference, memory, gambling strategies, and so on. The two halves constitute a team of rivals: agents with the same goals but slightly different ways of going about it.

To my mind, this elegant solution to the mysteries of the brain should change the goal for aspiring neuroscientists. Instead of spending years advocating for one's favorite solution, the mission should evolve into elucidating the different overlapping solutions: how they compete, how the union is held together, and what happens when things fall apart.
Part of the importance of discovering elegant solutions is capitalizing on them. The neural democracy model may be just the thing to dislodge artificial intelligence. We human programmers still approach a problem by assuming there's a best way to solve it, or that there's a way it should be solved. But evolution does not solve a problem and then check it off the list. Instead, it ceaselessly reinvents programs, each with overlapping and competing approaches. The lesson is to abandon the question "what's the most clever way to solve that problem?" in favor of "are there multiple, overlapping ways to solve that problem?" This will be the starting point in ushering in a fruitful new age of elegantly inelegant computational devices.

Cognitive enhancement is in our futures.

I want to point to three articles on brain enhancement that have accumulated in my queue of potential items for posting:

Benedict Carey discusses work showing that deep brain stimulation delivered through electrodes inserted into the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery sharply improved performance on a virtual driving game that tests spatial memory, the neural mapping ability that allows people to navigate a new city without a GPS:

Ross Andersen does an article in The Atlantic that describes ethical debates that have risen over the use of transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) to improve cognition in human beings.

Recent years have seen some encouraging, if preliminary, lab results involving TDCS, a deep brain stimulation technique that uses electrodes placed outside the head to direct tiny painless currents across the brain. The currents are thought to increase neuroplasticity, making it easier for neurons to fire and form the connections that enable learning. There are signs that the technology could improve language acumen, math ability, and even memory.

Finally in PloS Biology Knafo et al. note that a pharmacological cognitive enhancer that improves spatial learning and memory (in rats) by enhancing synaptic transmission in the hippocampus.

The debate over the evolution of altruism.

Jonah Lehrer does a fascinating article in the March 5 issue of The New Yorker titled "Kind and Kind - a fight about the genetics of altruism". He gives the history of that debate starting by describing the work of William Hamilton and his successors, but centers on the contributions of E.O. Wilson. The last few paragraphs of Lehrer's article, which outline Wilson's current views, are a nice summary that I want to pass on here:

Wilson's current explanation for altruism has returned to a hypothesis first proposed by Darwin.. that human generosity might have evolved as an emergent property not of the individual but of the group…While acts of altruism can be costly for the individual, Darwin argued that they helped sustain the colony, which made individuals within the colony more likely to survive.

The idea is know as group selection, and it's an explanation that most evolutionary biologists now dismiss [inserted note: with the exception of David Sloan Wilson, not mentioned by Lehrer, but whose work is referenced in about 6 mindblog posts.], because the advantages of generosity are much less tangible than the benefits of selfishness. A tribe full of nice guys would be easy prey for a cheater, who would quickly spread his genes through the population. But Wilson believes that it may hold the key to understanding altruism. To make his case, he cites recent studies of "cooperating" microbes, plants, and even female lions. In all these studies, many of which have been conducted in the controlled conditions of the lab, clumps of cooperators thrive and replicate, while selfish groups wither and die. In a 2007 paper that he co-authored, he summarizes his new view in three terse sentences: "selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary."

Wilson's larger point is that, to the extent that altruism exists, is isn't an illusion. Instead, goodness might actually be an adaptive trait, allowing more cooperative groups to outcompete their conniving cousins. In a field defined by the cruel logic of natural selection, group selection appears to be the rare hint of virtue, the one biological force pushing back against the obvious advantages of greed and deceit. "I see human nature as hung in the balance between these two extremes," Wilson says. "If our behavior was driven entirely by group selection, then we'd be robotic cooperators, like ants. But, if individual-level selection was the only thing that mattered, then we'd be entirely selfish. What makes us human is that our history has been shaped by both forces. We're stuck in between."

Why humans made it, and chimps didn’t

Fascinating work on the comparative cognitive and social behavior of humans and chimpanzees continues to pour out, highlighting behaviors that made us human. Yamamoto et al. show that Chimpanzees can understand conspecifics’ goals and demonstrate cognitively advanced targeted helping as long as they are able to visually evaluate their conspecifics’ predicament. However, they will seldom help others without direct request for help. And, Dean et al. compare higher-level problem solving behaviors in Capuchin Monkeys, Chimpanzees, and human infants, finding that a package of sociocognitive processes are found only in humans:

The remarkable ecological and demographic success of humanity is largely attributed to our capacity for cumulative culture, with knowledge and technology accumulating over time, yet the social and cognitive capabilities that have enabled cumulative culture remain unclear. In a comparative study of sequential problem solving, we provided groups of capuchin monkeys, chimpanzees, and children with an experimental puzzlebox that could be solved in three stages to retrieve rewards of increasing desirability. The success of the children, but not of the chimpanzees or capuchins, in reaching higher-level solutions was strongly associated with a package of sociocognitive processes—including teaching through verbal instruction, imitation, and prosociality—that were observed only in the children and covaried with performance.

Recurring patterns in music from Bach to Scott Joplin

More amazing stuff from Daniel Levitan on music...first an except from the introduction to his latest paper in PNAS:

Musical behaviors—singing, dancing, and playing instruments—date back to Neanderthals, and have been a part of every human culture as far back as we know. People experience great enjoyment and pleasure from music, and music theorists have argued that this enjoyment stems in part from the structural features of music, such as the generation and violation of expectations... Mathematics has often been used to characterize, model, and understand music, from Schenkerian analysis to neural topography; and geometric models of tonality. One particular mathematical relation that has received attention in music is the 1/f distribution, which Mandelbrot termed “fractal.” 1/f distributions have been found to be a key feature of a number of natural and sensory phenomena. Analyzing the frequency of several natural disasters, including earthquakes, landslides, floods, and terrestrial meteor impacts,  reveals an inverse log-log linear (fractal) relation between the frequency and the intensity of the events.

Here is the abstract:

Much of our enjoyment of music comes from its balance of predictability and surprise. Musical pitch fluctuations follow a 1/f power law that precisely achieves this balance. Musical rhythms, especially those of Western classical music, are considered highly regular and predictable, and this predictability has been hypothesized to underlie rhythm's contribution to our enjoyment of music. Are musical rhythms indeed entirely predictable and how do they vary with genre and composer? To answer this question, we analyzed the rhythm spectra of 1,788 movements from 558 compositions of Western classical music. We found that an overwhelming majority of rhythms obeyed a 1/f^β power law across 16 subgenres and 40 composers, with β ranging from ∼0.5–1. Notably, classical composers, whose compositions are known to exhibit nearly identical 1/f pitch spectra, demonstrated distinctive 1/f rhythm spectra: Beethoven's rhythms were among the most predictable, and Mozart's among the least. Our finding of the ubiquity of 1/f rhythm spectra in compositions spanning nearly four centuries demonstrates that, as with musical pitch, musical rhythms also exhibit a balance of predictability and surprise that could contribute in a fundamental way to our aesthetic experience of music. Although music compositions are intended to be performed, the fact that the notated rhythms follow a 1/f spectrum indicates that such structure is no mere artifact of performance or perception, but rather, exists within the written composition before the music is performed. Furthermore, composers systematically manipulate (consciously or otherwise) the predictability in 1/f rhythms to give their compositions unique identities. 

The rich behaving badly

No big surprise, I guess, but here is a gem from Piff et al. that shows in a variety of different experimental settings that higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior. The authors agree with Plato and Aristotle, who deemed greed to be at the root of personal immorality.

Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

Some details on the first four studies: Studies 1 and 2 were naturalistic field studies that used observers’ codes of vehicle status (make, age, and appearance,known to be reliable indicators of a person’s social rank and wealth) to index drivers’ social class. Observers stood near the intersection, coded the status of approaching vehicles, and recorded whether the driver cut off other vehicles by crossing the intersection before waiting their turn, a behavior that defies the California Vehicle Code. In study 3 participants who reported their social class using the MacArthur scale of subjective socioeconomic status read eight different scenarios that implicated an actor in unrightfully taking or benefiting from something, and reported the likelihood that they would engage in the behavior described. In study 4 participants were primed to activate higher or lower social-class mindsets. The experimenter then presented participants with a jar of individually wrapped candies, ostensibly for children in a nearby laboratory, but informed them that they could take some if they wanted. This task was adapted from prior research on entitlement, and served as our measure of unethical behavior because taking candy would reduce the amount that would otherwise be given to children. Participants completed unrelated tasks and then reported the number of candies they had taken.

Our brain connectivity predicts perceptual task performance.

An MRI scan may soon be part of the interview process for jobs requiring skill at learning and performing novel tasks...Baldassarre et al. do fMRI measurements showing that certain patterns of resting state functional connectivity within visual cortex, and between visual cortex and higher-order cortical regions - before exposure to a novel perceptual task - represent neural predictors of individual differences in performing that task. Further, the topography of the prior connectivity coincides with the areas subsequently recruited by task performance. Here is their abstract:

People differ in their ability to perform novel perceptual tasks, both during initial exposure and in the rate of improvement with practice. It is also known that regions of the brain recruited by particular tasks change their activity during learning. Here we investigate neural signals predictive of individual variability in performance. We used resting-state functional MRI to assess functional connectivity before training on a novel visual discrimination task. Subsequent task performance was related to functional connectivity measures within portions of visual cortex and between visual cortex and prefrontal association areas. Our results indicate that individual differences in performing novel perceptual tasks can be related to individual differences in spontaneous cortical activity.

Childhood maltreatment reduces brain volume.

Shortly after putting up this post on maternal nurturing correlating with larger hippocampal volumes, I can across the flip side of the story from Teicher et al. Comparing 193 subjects of average age 22 who showed high vs. low scores on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and Adverse Childhood Experience study showed volume reductions in several areas of the hippocampus:

Childhood maltreatment or abuse is a major risk factor for mood, anxiety, substance abuse, psychotic, and personality disorders, and it is associated with reduced adult hippocampal volume, particularly on the left side. Translational studies show that the key consequences of stress exposure on the hippocampus are suppression of neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus (DG) and dendritic remodeling in the cornu ammonis (CA), particularly the CA3 subfield... The sample consisted of 193 unmedicated right-handed subjects (38% male, 21.9 ± 2.1 y of age) selected from the community. Maltreatment was quantified using the Adverse Childhood Experience study and Childhood Trauma Questionnaire scores. The strongest associations between maltreatment and volume were observed in the left CA2-CA3 and CA4-DG subfields, and were not mediated by histories of major depression or posttraumatic stress disorder. Comparing subjects with high vs. low scores on the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and Adverse Childhood Experience study showed an average volume reduction of 6.3% and 6.1% in the left CA2-CA3 and CA4-DG, respectively. Volume reductions in the CA1 and fimbria were 44% and 60% smaller than in the CA2-CA3. Interestingly, maltreatment was associated with 4.2% and 4.3% reductions in the left presubiculum and subiculum, respectively. These findings support the hypothesis that exposure to early stress in humans, as in other animals, affects hippocampal subfield development.

Added note: Relevant to the subject of this post, I just got an email from a children's metal health advocacy group, The Child Mind Institute, that is sponsoring an annual public education campaign called "Speak Up For Kids".

Dim minds and dark attitudes.

This study of Hodson and Busseri on a United Kingdom and U.S. datasets documents the (hardly surprising) correlation between lower cognitive ability and right-wing ideology. They suggest that right-wing ideologies which are socially conservative and authoritarian represent a mechanism through which cognitive ability is linked with prejudice.

Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.

Psychological benefits of religiosity ride on cultural values.

Gebauer et al. at Humboldt-University in Berlin analyze profile data on the eDarling online-dating site from 187,957 individuals in 11 European countries. Their bottom line summary is:

The religiosity-as-social-value hypothesis posits that the psychological benefits of religiosity (benefits to social self-esteem and psychological adjustment) are culturally specific: They should be stronger in countries that tend to value religiosity more. Data from more than 180,000 individuals across 11 countries were consistent with this prediction.

Overall, believers claimed greater social self-esteem and psychological adjustment than nonbelievers did. However, culture qualified this effect. Believers enjoyed psychological benefits in countries that tended to value religiosity, but did not differ from nonbelievers in countries that did not tend to value religiosity. Replication of this pattern with non-self-report data would be desirable. Regardless, the results suggest that religiosity, albeit a potent force, confers benefits by riding on cultural values.

More on the discorrelation of happiness and material welfare

The economist has an interesting piece on a study of 19,000 adults in 24 different countries by the research company Ipsos measuring "degrees of happiness". It reaches several counter-intuitive conclusions:

Large, fast-growing emerging markets do not share rich industrialized countries’ pessimism. The already large “very happy” cohort rose 16 points in Turkey, ten points in Mexico and five points in India...thus the highest levels of self-reported happiness is not in rich countries, as one would expect, but in poor and middle-income ones, notably Indonesia, India and Mexico. In rich countries, happiness scores range from above-average—28% of Australians and Americans say they are very happy—to far below the mean. The figures for Italy and Spain were 13% and 11% (Greece was not in the sample). Most Europeans are gloomier than the world average. So levels of income are, if anything, inversely related to felicity. Perceived happiness depends on a lot more than material welfare.  

Neophily - Exuberance for Novelty predicts well being.

I've been meaning to point to John Tierney's interesting piece in the NYTimes that emphasizes the work of Robert Cloninger, the psychiatrist who developed personality tests for measuring the trait of novelty seeking:

...a trait long associated with trouble.. problems like attention deficit disorder, compulsive spending and gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and criminal behavior...After extensively tracking novelty-seekers, researchers are seeing the upside. In the right combination with other traits, it’s a crucial predictor of well-being. Winifred Gallagher's new book “New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change” ...argues that neophilia has always been the quintessential human survival skill, whether adapting to climate change on the ancestral African savanna or coping with the latest digital toy from Silicon Valley....she classifies people as neophobes, neophiles and, at the most extreme, neophiliacs...

...adventurous neophiliacs are more likely to possess a “migration gene,” a DNA mutation that occurred about 50,000 years ago, as humans were dispersing from Africa around the world, according to Robert Moyzis, a biochemist at the University of California, Irvine. The mutations are more prevalent in the most far-flung populations, like Indian tribes in South America descended from the neophiliacs who crossed the Bering Strait.

...These genetic variations affect the brain’s regulation of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with the processing of rewards and new stimuli (and drugs like cocaine). The variations have been linked to faster reaction times, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and a higher penchant for novelty-seeking and risk-taking.

Cloninger...has.. tracked people using a personality test he developed..looking for traits in people..who reported the best health, most friends, fewest emotional problems and greatest satisfaction with life...they scored high in novelty-seeking as well in persistence and self-transcendence (which he describes as the capacity to get lost in the moment doing what you love to do, to feel a connection to nature and humanity and the universe).

Advice from Gallagher and Cloninger:

..both advise neophiles to be selective in their targets. (Neophilia spurs us to adjust and explore and create technology and art, but at the extreme it can fuel a chronic restlessness and distraction.).. Don’t go wide and shallow into useless trivia...Use your neophilia to go deep into subjects that are important to you.

The map in our head is oriented north.

Interesting observations from Julia Frankenstein et al.:

We examined how a highly familiar environmental space—one’s city of residence—is represented in memory. Twenty-six participants faced a photo-realistic virtual model of their hometown and completed a task in which they pointed to familiar target locations from various orientations. Each participant’s performance was most accurate when he or she was facing north, and errors increased as participants’ deviation from a north-facing orientation increased. Pointing errors and latencies were not related to the distance between participants’ initial locations and the target locations. Our results are inconsistent with accounts of orientation-free memory and with theories assuming that the storage of spatial knowledge depends on local reference frames. Although participants recognized familiar local views in their initial locations, their strategy for pointing relied on a single, north-oriented reference frame that was likely acquired from maps rather than experience from daily exploration. Even though participants had spent significantly more time navigating the city than looking at maps, their pointing behavior seemed to rely on a north-oriented mental map.

Added note: Check out this nice summary by Frankenstein in the NYTimes.

Early maternal support predicts larger brain volumes at school age.

Luby et al. offer a compelling study showing the importance of maternal nuturing in young humans.Maternal support is predictive of hippocampus volume measured at school age. From their introduction:

Animal studies have shown that maternal nurturance...promotes adaptive programming of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis stress response and hippocampal development. Improvements in the capacity for stress modulation have been shown to be related to epigenetic modifications whereby methylation of multiple genes results in changes in gene expression for glucocorticoid and mineralcorticoid receptors. These changes are associated with increases in dendritic branching and neurogenesis and related increases in hippocampal volumes. Consistent with this phenomenon and conversely, the stress of early maternal deprivation has been shown to have negative effects on this cascade. A similar relationship between early nurturance and stress modulation has also been reported in nonhuman primates.

Their abstract:

Early maternal support has been shown to promote specific gene expression, neurogenesis, adaptive stress responses, and larger hippocampal volumes in developing animals. In humans, a relationship between psychosocial factors in early childhood and later amygdala volumes based on prospective data has been demonstrated, providing a key link between early experience and brain development. Although much retrospective data suggests a link between early psychosocial factors and hippocampal volumes in humans, to date there has been no prospective data to inform this potentially important public health issue. In a longitudinal study of depressed and healthy preschool children who underwent neuroimaging at school age, we investigated whether early maternal support predicted later hippocampal volumes. Maternal support observed in early childhood was strongly predictive of hippocampal volume measured at school age. The positive effect of maternal support on hippocampal volumes was greater in nondepressed children. These findings provide prospective evidence in humans of the positive effect of early supportive parenting on healthy hippocampal development, a brain region key to memory and stress modulation.

How to get the rich to share their marbles.

Jonathan Haidt does a nice job of bringing contemporary relevance to Tomasello and colleagues' work comparing and contrasting the social behaviors of young humans and chimpanzees. (As these two previous MindBlog posts show (1,2), this laboratory has been carpet bombing the journals with articles in this vein.)

Pretend you’re a three-year-old, exploring an exciting new room full of toys. You and another child come up to a large machine that has some marbles inside, which you can see. There’s a rope running through the machine and the two ends of the rope hang out of the front, five feet apart. If you or your partner pulls on the rope alone, you just get more rope. But if you both pull at the same time, the rope dislodges some marbles, which you each get to keep. The marbles roll down a chute, and then they divide: one rolls into the cup in front of you, three roll into the cup in front of your partner...In this situation, where both kids have to pull for anyone to get marbles, the children equalize the wealth about 75% of the time, with hardly any conflict. Either the “rich” kid hands over one marble spontaneously or else the “poor” kid asks for one and his request is immediately granted. (Chimpanzees doing tasks similar to this one do not share the spoils, in any of the conditions. They just grab what they can, regardless of who did what.)

A slight variation ..reveals a deep truth. Things start off just as in the first condition: you and your partner see two ropes hanging out of the machine. But as you start tugging it becomes clear that they are two separate ropes. You pull yours, and one marble rolls out into your cup. Your partner pulls the other rope, and is rewarded with three marbles...What happens next?...For the most part, it’s pullers-keepers. Even though you and your partner each did the same work (rope pulling) at more or less the same time, you both know that you didn’t really collaborate to produce the wealth. Only about 30% of the time did the kids work out an equal split. In other words, the “share-the-spoils” button is not pressed by the mere existence of inequality. It is pressed when two or more people collaborated to produce a gain. Once the button is pressed in both brains, both parties willingly and effortlessly share.

Haidt argues that Obama's prescription for curing the economy fails to press the "share-the-spoils", which might happen if he could frame his statements to make Americans perceive the economy as a giant collaborative project, as happened for the generations that went through the great depression and the second world war (share-the-sacrifice). Instead,

Obama promised he would not raise taxes on anyone but the rich. He and other Democrats have also vowed to “protect seniors” from cuts, even though seniors receive the vast majority of entitlement dollars. The president is therefore in the unenviable position of arguing that we’re in big trouble and so a small percentage of people will have to give more, but most people will be protected from sacrifice. This appeal misses the shared-sacrifice button completely. It also fails to push the share-the-spoils button. When people feel that they’re all pulling on different ropes, they don’t feel entitled to a share of other people’s wealth, even when that wealth was acquired by luck.

Cognitive dissonance reduction in conservative and liberal Christians

Ross et al. offer an interesting study showing how the answers of conservative and liberal Christians to the question "What would a contemporary Jesus do?" reduces the cognitive dissonance of their own opinions:

The present study explores the dramatic projection of one's own views onto those of Jesus among conservative and liberal American Christians. In a large-scale survey, the relevant views that each group attributed to a contemporary Jesus differed almost as much as their own views. Despite such dissonance-reducing projection, however, conservatives acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to “fellowship” issues (e.g., taxation to reduce economic inequality and treatment of immigrants) and liberals acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to “morality” issues (e.g., abortion and gay marriage). However, conservatives also claimed that a contemporary Jesus would be even more conservative than themselves on the former issues whereas liberals claimed that Jesus would be even more liberal than themselves on the latter issues. Further reducing potential dissonance, liberal and conservative Christians differed markedly in the types of issues they claimed to be more central to their faith. A concluding discussion considers the relationship between individual motivational processes and more social processes that may underlie the present findings, as well as implications for contemporary social and political conflict.

Desperately seeking simplicity.

The Harvard Business Review blog network has an article by Chris Zook, who is co-head of the Global Strategy Practice at Bain & Company (Now why does that name sound familiar, I wonder!!). I thought it worthwhile to abstract and paraphrase his thoughts - his comments derive from a theme that was omnipresent at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos:

that while events are unfolding in the world at an accelerating pace, increasingly complex institutions are less and less able to deal with them.

The problem seems

...not so much identifying what needed to be done as the lack of a plan for making the changes quickly enough.

In a survey, hundreds of leaders and executives...

...say that they do not face inadequate opportunities. Rather, their biggest barrier by far (about 85% of the time) relates to the internal complexity of their organizations and the management of their energy against that...a multi-year study of the root causes of enduring success...found an increasing premium to simplicity in the world of today — not just simplicity of organization, but more fundamentally to an essential simplicity at the heart of strategy itself...an inherent advantage in dealing with... faster moving markets and increased internal complexity due to ability to keep things simpler and more transparent than their rivals...companies who seemed best at creating enduring competitive advantage seemed to be able to maintain a simplicity at their core (think of companies like IKEA, Nike, or Vanguard for instance — very large in size, but with a clarity of strategy and purpose that jumps out at you).

This has its own parallel in the three attributes of great leaders of the future outlined in a talk by Daniel Goleman (Author of Emotional Intelligence):

1) authenticity and sharp clarity of purpose, 2) empathy and the ability to relate to people at the "front line" levels, and 3) self-awareness and humility to constantly question and adapt.

An App for your anxiety...

Continuing in the thread of yesterdays post about a science App, I should mention the blip of interest (and controversy) over the putative appearance of an array of 'therapists in your iPhone or Android phone." Benedict Carey offers a recent review. My first reaction is one of complete aversion, thinking that therapy is best cast in a social web of narrative, but as Carey notes:

The upside is that well-designed apps could reach millions of people who lack the means or interest to engage in traditional therapy and need more than the pop mysticism, soothing thoughts or confidence boosters now in use.

It is a fact that some cognitive missteps are of a very mechanical nature, reflecting glitches in stimulus-response matching. Here is a nice example of the app approach:

..cognitive bias modification...seeks to break some of the brain’s bad habits...and is straightforward. Consider people with social anxiety, a kind of extreme shyness that can leave people breathless with dread...many who struggle with such anxiety fixate subconsciously on hostile faces in a crowd of people with mostly relaxed expressions, as if they see only the bad apples in a bushel of mostly good ones...Modifying that bias — that is, reducing it — can interrupt the cascade of thoughts and feelings that normally follow, short-circuiting anxiety, lab studies suggest. In one commonly used program, for instance, people see two faces on the screen, one with a neutral expression and one looking hostile. The faces are stacked one atop the other, and a split-second later they disappear, and a single letter flashes on the screen, in either the top half or the bottom....Users push a button to identify the letter, but this is meaningless; the object is to snap the eyes away from the part of the screen that showed the hostile face, conditioning the brain to ignore those bad apples. That’s all there is to it. Repeated practice, the researchers say, may train the eyes to automatically look away, or the frontal areas of the brain to exercise more top-down control.

Some studies claim positive results with these simple games equivalent to normal therapy, other find no effect. There are the usual issues of whether positive outcomes are a placebo effort or undue attention is being paid to positive data, while negative results are rationalized or downplayed. The strongest claims seem to be for anxiety disorders, not depression.

Science of minus 10 Biology iPad App

I've been cruising the annual best science and engineering visualization competition sponsored every year by Science Magazine and the National Science Foundation (see also Wired Magazine account.). I find especially compelling the game "Powers of Ten", which allows players to zoom into a person’s hand, explore the world at different magnifications and learn about the human body:

Our brains as prediction machines - a unified view of mind and action

Anything Andy Clark writes is totally worth reading (I used his charming essay "I am John's brain" when I first began teaching my "Biology of Mind Course" at the University of Wisconsin in the 1990's), and so I pass on this manuscript of an article on which comments are currently being solicited.  It is a fascinating read, lucidly and clearly written. 

"Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science"

Abstract: Brains, it has recently been argued, are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations or predictions. This is achieved using a hierarchical generative model that aims to minimize prediction error within a bidirectional cascade of cortical processing.  Such accounts offer a unifying model of perception and action, illuminate the functional role of attention, and may neatly capture the special contribution of cortical processing to adaptive success. The paper critically examines this 'hierarchical prediction machine' approach, concluding that it offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science of mind and action. Sections 1 and 2 lay out the key elements and implications of the approach. Section 3 explores a variety of pitfalls and challenges, spanning the evidential, the methodological, and the more properly conceptual. The paper ends (sections 4 and 5) by asking how such approaches might impact our more general vision of mind, experience, and agency. 

Our brain's grasp of metaphors grounded in perception?

Theories of grounded cognition suggest that knowledge is represented in modal systems derived from perception (rather than abstract brain codes) and that cognition depends on perceptual simulations. Conceptual metaphor theory is one approach to grounded cognition which suggests that knowledge is structured by metaphorical mappings from sensory experience. Sathian and colleagues do a interesting experiment in which they find that textural metaphors — phrases like "soft-hearted"— turn on a part of the brain (the parietal operculum) that's important to the sense of touch. This doesn't happen with literal counterparts: "he is wet behind the ears" versus "he is naïve," for example, or "it was a hairy situation" versus "it was a precarious situation."

Figure - Touching actives areas shown in yellow and red. Textural metaphors also trigger a reaction (shown in green and, where overlapping, brown) in the parietal operculum.

It would be interesting to see if a subject's appreciation of a tactile metaphor was compromised by transcranial magnetic stimulation that disrupted activity of the parietal operculum.

Negative social interactions and body inflammation.

Many studies have proven that social relationships influence our physical health. People who are more socially integrated live longer, and are less likely to have medical problems such as heart attacks and upper respiratory illness. (Cytokines are small protein molecules - peptides - that regulate our inflammatory immune response. While transient inflammatory response due to tissue insult are adaptive and trigger needed immune responses, chronic increases in proinflammatory cytokines IL-6 and TNF-α are linked hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease, depression, diabetes, and some cancers.) Chiang et al. now show that these cytokines promoting tissue inflammation appear when we are in socially stressful situations:

Research has consistently documented that social relationships influence physical health, a link that may implicate systemic inflammation. We examined whether daily social interactions predict levels of proinflammatory cytokines IL-6 and the soluble receptor for tumor necrosis factor-α (sTNFαRII) and their reactivity to a social stressor. One-hundred twenty-two healthy young adults completed daily diaries for 8 d that assessed positive, negative, and competitive social interactions. Participants then engaged in laboratory stress challenges, and IL-6 and sTNFαRII were collected at baseline and at 25- and 80-min poststressor, from oral mucosal transudate. Negative social interactions predicted elevated sTNFαRII at baseline, and IL-6 and sTNFαRII 25-min poststressor, as well as total output of sTNFαRII. Competitive social interactions predicted elevated baseline levels of IL-6 and sTNFαRII and total output of both cytokines. These findings suggest that daily social interactions that are negative and competitive are associated prospectively with heightened proinflammatory cytokine activity.

How psychedelics affect our brain - unconstrained cognition

Carhart-Harris et al. have done an interesting study showing that psilocybin decreases surrogate markers for neuronal activity [cerebral blood flow and blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals] in key brain regions implicated in psychedelic drug actions. They also report that psilocybin appears to decrease brain “connectivity” as measured by pharmaco-physiological interaction. Their results imply that "the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition."

Psychedelic drugs have a long history of use in healing ceremonies, but despite renewed interest in their therapeutic potential, we continue to know very little about how they work in the brain. Here we used psilocybin, a classic psychedelic found in magic mushrooms, and a task-free functional MRI (fMRI) protocol designed to capture the transition from normal waking consciousness to the psychedelic state. Arterial spin labeling perfusion and blood-oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI were used to map cerebral blood flow and changes in venous oxygenation before and after intravenous infusions of placebo and psilocybin. Fifteen healthy volunteers were scanned with arterial spin labeling and a separate 15 with BOLD. As predicted, profound changes in consciousness were observed after psilocybin, but surprisingly, only decreases in cerebral blood flow and BOLD signal were seen, and these were maximal in hub regions, such as the thalamus and anterior and posterior cingulate cortex (ACC and PCC). Decreased activity in the ACC/medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was a consistent finding and the magnitude of this decrease predicted the intensity of the subjective effects. Based on these results, a seed-based pharmaco-physiological interaction/functional connectivity analysis was performed using a medial prefrontal seed. Psilocybin caused a significant decrease in the positive coupling between the mPFC and PCC. These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition.

Brain deactivations after psilocybin. (Upper) Regions where there was a significant decrease in the BOLD signal after psilocybin versus after placebo. (Lower) Regions where there was a consistent decrease in CBF (cerebral blood flow) and BOLD after psilocybin. We observed no increases in CBF or BOLD signal in any region.

Life is a digital code.

Here is a nicely done precis of a crucial bit of our intellectual history from science written by Matt Ridley, his answer to "What is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation.":

It's hard now to recall just how mysterious life was on the morning of 28 February and just how much that had changed by lunchtime. Look back at all the answers to the question "what is life?" from before that and you get a taste of just how we, as a species, floundered. Life consisted of three-dimensional objects of specificity and complexity (mainly proteins). And it copied itself with accuracy. How? How do you set about making a copy of a three-dimensional object? How to do you grow it and develop it in a predictable way? This is the one scientific question where absolutely nobody came close to guessing the answer. Erwin Schrodinger had a stab, but fell back on quantum mechanics, which was irrelevant. True, he used the phrase "aperiodic crystal" and if you are generous you can see that as a prediction of a linear code, but I think that's stretching generosity.

Indeed, the problem had just got even more baffling thanks to the realization that DNA played a crucial role—and DNA was monotonously simple. All the explanations of life before 28 Feb 1953 are hand-waving waffle and might as well speak of protoplasm and vital sparks for all the insights they gave.

Then came the double helix and the immediate understanding that, as Crick wrote to his son a few weeks later, "some sort of code"—digital, linear two-dimensional, combinatorially infinite and instantly self-replicating—was all the explanation you needed. Here's part of Francis Crick's letter, 17 March 1953:

"My Dear Michael,

Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery...Now we believe that the DNA is a code. That is, the order of the bases (the letters) makes one gene different from another gene (just as one page pf print is different from another). You can see how Nature makes copies of the genes. Because if the two chains unwind into two separate chains, and if each chain makes another chain come together on it, then because A always goes with T, and G with C, we shall get two copies where we had one before. In other words, we think we have found the basic copying mechanismby which life comes from life...You can understand we are excited."

Never has a mystery seemed more baffling in the morning and an explanation more obvious in the afternoon.

Testosterone, digit ratio, and abstract reasoning ability

Brañas-Garza and Aldo Rustichini suggest that perhaps higher testosterone market traders are more successful not only because they are greater risk takers, but also because their abstract reasoning abilities are superior:

Recent literature emphasizes the role that testosterone, as well as markers indicating early exposure to T and its organizing effect on the brain (such as the ratio of second to fourth finger, ), have on performance in financial markets. These results may suggest that the main effect of T, either circulating or in fetal exposure, on economic behavior occurs through the increased willingness to take risks. However, these findings indicate that traders with a low digit ratio are not only more profitable, but more able to survive in the long run, thus the effect might consist of more than just lower risk aversion. In addition, recent literature suggests a positive correlation between abstract reasoning ability and higher willingness to take risks. To test the two hypotheses of testosterone on performance in financial activities (effect on risk attitude versus a complex effect involving risk attitude and reasoning ability), we gather data on the three variables in a sample of 188 ethnically homogeneous college students (Caucasians). We measure a digit ratio, abstract reasoning ability with the Raven Progressive Matrices task, and risk attitude with choice among lotteries. Low digit ratio in men is associated with higher risk taking and higher scores in abstract reasoning ability when a combined measure of risk aversion over different tasks is used. This explains both the higher performance and higher survival rate observed in traders, as well as the observed correlation between abstract reasoning ability and risk taking. We also analyze how much of the total effect of digit ratio on risk attitude is direct, and how much is mediated. Mediation analysis shows that a substantial part of the effect of T on attitude to risk is mediated by abstract reasoning ability.

Us vs. them in context.

As I scan the tables of contexts of journals for items that might be appropriate for MindBlog, I am majorly influenced by a catchy title and relative brevity, the old brain doesn’t have to work as hard. (In this vein, see the recent essay on "Bite Size" Science.) Gilbert Chin of Science Magazine notes that a plain title I passed over points to an interesting piece of work, showing that our attitude towards pluralism and tolerance can depend very much on whether we are in the majority or minority of the relevant social group. From Chin's summary:

Us versus Them is both an enduring view of the world and a malleable one. It is enduring in the sense that groups form naturally even where there are no preexisting differences and malleable in the sense that the group that one identifies with can change over time or between situations. Theoretical and empirical evidence justifies the generalization that members of a majority group tend to favor the assimilation of immigrants into the native culture, whereas immigrants are more likely to vote for pluralistic policies that acknowledge the distinctiveness of minority cultures.

The abstract of the article:

This research examined preferences for national- and campus-level assimilative and pluralistic policies among Black and White students under different contexts, as majority- and minority-group members. We targeted attitudes at two universities, one where 85% of the student body is White, and another where 76% of students are Black. The results revealed that when a group constituted the majority, its members generally preferred assimilationist policies, and when a group constituted the minority, its members generally preferred pluralistic policies. The results support a functional perspective: Both majority and minority groups seek to protect and enhance their collective identities.

Even if the juice is a placebo...

I thought the stuff on the oxytocin spray in the previous post was a hoot, and so dashed off the post on receiving a colleague's email on it yesterday.  Several alert readers have immediately sent in appropriately skeptical comments.  Cursory inspection of the website shows the product to be from a homeopathic outfit, the product description actually gives NO CLUE on how much oxytocin (plus a lot of other claimed stuff) is present.  But hey.... I guess $50 for the product should reinforce a pretty good placebo effect!

Juice up your Valentine's day!

I've done numerous posts on oxytocin effects on us humans (enter oxytocin in the search box in the left column). Generally, it makes us nicer and more affiliative. A recent email from a colleague who diligently sends me results of his wide ranging web scans for enhancers of vitality, longevity, etc. makes me aware that getting a nip of oxytocin for yourself is like falling off a log (if you are also willing to part with ~50-60 dollars for nasal or sublingual versions). He has tried the sub-lingual spray and says it does work "although the subjective results are highly-dependent upon my physiological/mental state and/or the time of day. There are also quite likely different genetic predispositions as reported in Deric's mind blog." I would be curious to try the stuff, but don't want to threaten the curmudgeonly behavior that I normally enjoy.

Don't go to bed angry...

Several studies have shown that sleep enhances emotional memories. Baran et al. show that maybe its better let anger keep you awake at night than to sleep on it. Sleep consolidates the negative emotional memory. Having trouble sleeping after an unsettling experience may be the brain's way of trying to keep the memory or emotion from being stored. The abstract:

Sleep enhances memories, particularly emotional memories. As such, it has been suggested that sleep deprivation may reduce posttraumatic stress disorder. This presumes that emotional memory consolidation is paralleled by a reduction in emotional reactivity, an association that has not yet been examined. In the present experiment, we used an incidental memory task in humans and obtained valence and arousal ratings during two sessions separated either by 12 h of daytime wake or 12 h including overnight sleep. Recognition accuracy was greater following sleep relative to wake for both negative and neutral pictures. While emotional reactivity to negative pictures was greatly reduced over wake, the negative emotional response was relatively preserved over sleep. Moreover, protection of emotional reactivity was associated with greater time in REM sleep. Recognition accuracy, however, was not associated with REM. Thus, we provide the first evidence that sleep enhances emotional memory while preserving emotional reactivity.

Our connectomes 'R Us?

I have received by now several offers from Houghton Mifflin publishers to send a reviewer's copy of Sebastian Seung's "Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are." I haven't acted on it, because a review of the synopsis has convinced me that Seung's own brilliant efforts, and similar works he describes to map every connection in our brain, are not the complete key to understanding ourselves that he implies. I was actually starting to write a list of problems I see with the idea that when you've got the wiring diagram between nerve cells you've got it all, but this succinct critique by Chris Koch permits me to be lazy:

Treating the connectome as the be-all and end-all of brain function has its problems. Seung, for example, rebrands autism and schizophrenia as 'connectopathies' — diseases in which the brain's wiring goes awry. Yet plenty of other things are wrong in brains with these disorders besides their connectivity.

Faults in synaptic transmission and in processes inside neurons and the glial cells that support them have all been implicated in mental illness and brain disease. Neurons are intricate devices with elaborate input structures that show complex, time-dependent and nonlinear processing. They have various characteristic, and often tortuous, morphologies. Connectionism treats all this as irrelevant. Even though we have known the connectome of the nematode worm for 25 years, we are far from reading its mind. We don't yet understand how its nerve cells work.

Massage therapy suppresses expression of inflammatory genes after exercise..

I've been getting regular deep tissue structural massage for years, and continue to be amazed at how good it makes me feel. This report from Tarnopolsky and colleagues explains at least part of the reason why. They profiled the expression of genes involved in both inflammatory pathways and in pathways that regenerate energy generating mitochondria in the leg muscles of eleven young men after very strenuous leg exercise, with one leg being massaged after the exercise. The massaged legs had 30% more PGC-1alpha, a gene that helps muscle cells build mitochondria. They also had three times less NFkB, which turns on genes associated with inflammation. (The study found no evidence to support often-repeated claims that massage removes lactic acid, a byproduct of exertion long blamed for muscle soreness, or waste products from tired muscles.) Here is the detailed abstract:

Massage therapy is commonly used during physical rehabilitation of skeletal muscle to ameliorate pain and promote recovery from injury. Although there is evidence that massage may relieve pain in injured muscle, how massage affects cellular function remains unknown. To assess the effects of massage, we administered either massage therapy or no treatment to separate quadriceps of 11 young male participants after exercise-induced muscle damage. Muscle biopsies were acquired from the quadriceps (vastus lateralis) at baseline, immediately after 10 min of massage treatment, and after a 2.5-hour period of recovery. We found that massage activated the mechanotransduction signaling pathways focal adhesion kinase (FAK) and extracellular signal–regulated kinase 1/2 (ERK1/2), potentiated mitochondrial biogenesis signaling [nuclear peroxisome proliferator–activated receptor γ coactivator 1α (PGC-1α)], and mitigated the rise in nuclear factor κB (NFκB) (p65) nuclear accumulation caused by exercise-induced muscle trauma. Moreover, despite having no effect on muscle metabolites (glycogen, lactate), massage attenuated the production of the inflammatory cytokines tumor necrosis factor–α (TNF-α) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) and reduced heat shock protein 27 (HSP27) phosphorylation, thereby mitigating cellular stress resulting from myofiber injury. In summary, when administered to skeletal muscle that has been acutely damaged through exercise, massage therapy appears to be clinically beneficial by reducing inflammation and promoting mitochondrial biogenesis.

The good life can be a killer.

I've enjoyed the recent piece on our dysfunctional modern community structures by Jane Brodie (who got her journalism degree at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where I teach).

...homes and shopping malls far from city centers…[have created] creating vehicle-dependent environments that foster obesity, poor health, social isolation, excessive stress and depression…Physical activity has been disappearing from the lives of young and old, and many communities are virtual “food deserts,” serviced only by convenience stores that stock nutrient-poor prepared foods and drinks…people in the current generation (born since 1980) will be the first in America to live shorter lives than their parents do.

In a healthy environment…people who are young, elderly, sick or poor can meet their life needs without getting in a car, which means creating places where it is safe and enjoyable to walk, bike, take in nature and socialize…People who walk more weigh less and live longer…People who are fit live longer… People who have friends and remain socially active live longer…In 1974, 66 percent of all children walked or biked to school By 2000, that number had dropped to 13 percent…We’ve engineered physical activity out of children’s lives…two in seven volunteers for the military can’t get in because they’re not in good enough physical condition…Not only are Americans of all ages fatter than ever, but also growing numbers of children are developing diseases once seen only in adults: Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and fatty livers.

On the question of whether our suburbs can be saved, Brodie notes environmental redesigning projects to foster better physical and mental health proceeding in Atlanta, GA., Lakewood, CO., Syracuse, NY, and Elgin, IL. (and, see designinghealthycommunities.org.)

Should I use condoms for sex? The millisecond scan.

This item caught my eye, since I spend the winter months each year living in the center of the gay Wilton Manors ghetto of Fort Lauderdale, FL., where the boys hook up at a fast and furious rate. Many base a decision on whether to use condoms on their 'intuition' of whether a potential partner is HIV positive. Renner et al. find that this guessing is very rapid and based on a few fairly simple facial trait characteristics (that in fact have not been shown to have any relationship to actual HIV status).

Research indicates that many people do not use condoms consistently but instead rely on intuition to identify sexual partners high at risk for HIV infection. The present studies examined neural correlates for first impressions of HIV risk and determined the association of perceived HIV risk with other trait characteristics. Participants were presented with 120 self-portraits retrieved from a popular online photo-sharing community (www.flickr.com). Factor analysis of various explicit ratings of trait characteristics yielded two orthogonal factors: (1) a ‘valence-approach’ factor encompassing perceived attractiveness, healthiness, valence, and approach tendencies, and (2) a ‘safeness’ factor, entailing judgments of HIV risk, trustworthiness, and responsibility. These findings suggest that HIV risk ratings systematically relate to cardinal features of a high-risk HIV stereotype. Furthermore, event-related brain potential recordings revealed neural correlates of first impressions about HIV risk. Target persons perceived as risky elicited a differential brain response in a time window from 220–340 ms and an increased late positive potential in a time window from 350–700 ms compared to those perceived as safe. These data suggest that impressions about HIV risk can be formed in a split second and despite a lack of information about the actual risk profile. Findings of neural correlates of risk impressions and their relationship to key features of the HIV risk stereotype are discussed in the context of the ‘risk as feelings’ theory.

Simplicity itself.

I have to pass on this brief essay by one of my heroes, Thomas Metzinger:

Elegance is more than an aesthetic quality, or some ephemeral sort of uplifting feeling we experience in deeper forms of intuitive understanding. Elegance is formal beauty. And formal beauty as a philosophical principle is one of the most dangerous, subversive ideas humanity has discovered: it is the virtue of theoretical simplicity. Its destructive force is greater than Darwin's algorithm or that of any other single scientific explanation, because it shows us what the depth of an explanation is.

Elegance as theoretical simplicity comes in many different forms. Everybody knows Occam's razor, the ontological principle of parsimony: Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. William of Occam gave us a metaphysical principle for choosing between competing theories: All other things being equal, it is rational to always prefer the theory that makes fewer ontological assumptions about the kinds of entities that really exist (souls, life forces, abstract objects, or an absolute frame of reference like electromagnetic ether). We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances—Isaac Newton formulated this as the First Rule of Reasoning in Philosophy, in his Principia Mathematica. Throw out everything that is explanatorily idle, and then shift the burden of proof to the proponent of a less simple theory. In Albert Einstein's words: The grand aim of all science … is to cover the greatest possible number of empirical facts by logical deductions from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms.

Of course, in today's technical debates new questions have emerged: Why do metaphysics at all? Isn't it simply the number of free, adjustable parameters in competing hypotheses what we should measure? Is it not syntactic simplicity that captures elegance best, say, the number fundamental abstractions and guiding principles a theory makes use of? Or will the true criterion for elegance ultimately be found in statistics, in selecting the best model for a set of data points while optimally balancing parsimony with the "goodness of fit" of a suitable curve? And, of course, for Occam-style ontological simplicity the BIG question always remains: Why should a parsimonious theory more likely be true? Ultimately, isn't all of this rooted in a deeply hidden belief that God must have created a beautiful universe?

I find it fascinating to see how the original insight has kept its force over the centuries. The very idea of simplicity itself, applied as a metatheoretical principle, has demonstrated great power—the subversive power of reason and reductive explanation. The formal beauty of theoretical simplicity is deadly and creative at the same time. It destroys superfluous assumptions whose falsity we just cannot bring ourselves to believe, whereas truly elegant explanations always give birth to an entirely new way of looking at the world. What I would really like to know is this: Can the fundamental insight—the destructive, creative virtue of simplicity—be transposed from the realm of scientific explanation into culture or onto the level of conscious experience? What kind of formal simplicity would make our culture a deeper, more beautiful culture? And what is an elegant mind?

Our Thrifty Brains.

Andy Clark has done a piece that is really worth reading in the Stone, a New York Times forum for contemporary philosophers. (And, check out the video below):

Might the miserly use of neural resources be one of the essential keys to understanding how brains make sense of the world? Some recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience suggests that it is indeed the frugal use of our native neural capacity (the inventive use of restricted “neural bandwidth,” if you will) that explains how brains like ours so elegantly make sense of noisy and ambiguous sensory input. That same story suggests, intriguingly, that perception, understanding and imagination, which we might intuitively consider to be three distinct chunks of our mental machinery, are inextricably tied together as simultaneous results of a single underlying strategy known as “predictive coding.” This strategy saves on bandwidth using (who would have guessed it?) one of the many technical wheezes that enable us to economically store and transmit pictures, sounds and videos using formats such as JPEG and MP3.

...perception may best be seen as what has sometimes been described as a process of “controlled hallucination” ...in which we (or rather, various parts of our brains) try to predict what is out there, using the incoming signal more as a means of tuning and nuancing the predictions rather than as a rich (and bandwidth-costly) encoding of the state of the world.

The basic effect hereabouts is neatly illustrated by a simple but striking demonstration (used by the neuroscientist Richard Gregory back in the 1970’s to make this very point) known as “the hollow face illusion.” This is a well-known illusion in which an ordinary face mask viewed from the back can appear strikingly convex. That is, it looks (from the back) to be shaped like a real face, with the nose sticking outward rather than having a concave nose cavity. Just about any hollow face mask will produce some version of this powerful illusion, and there are many examples on the Web, like this one:

A simple way to attentuate emotional arousal?

I just came across these interesting observations of Herwig et al.. They show that simply using self referential reflection (i.e., using mindfullness) to make an emotional state aware can attenuate amygdala activation and emotional arousal:

The regulation of emotions is an ongoing internal process and often a challenge. Current related neural models concern the intended control of reactions towards external events, mediated by prefrontal cortex regions upon basal emotion processing as in the amygdala. Cognitive strategies to regulate emotions in the context of affective disorders or stress reduction, increasingly applied in clinical practice, are also related to mindfulness techniques. We questioned their effects on neural emotion processing and investigated brain activity during purely internal mental self-referential processes of making current emotions and self-related cognitions aware. Thirty healthy subjects performed a task comprising periods of cognitive self-reflection, of introspection for actual own emotions and feelings, and of a neutral condition, while they were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Brain activations of twenty-seven subjects during emotion-introspection and self-reflection, and also a conjunction of both, were compared with the neutral condition. The conditions of self-reflection and emotion-introspection showed distinguishable activations in medial and ventrolateral prefrontal areas, in parietal regions and in the amygdala. Notably, amygdala activity decreased during emotion-introspection and increased compared to ‘neutral’ during self-reflection. The results indicate that already the self-referential mental state of making the actual emotional state aware is capable of attenuating emotional arousal. This extends current theories of emotion regulation and has implications for the application of mindfulness techniques as a component of psychotherapeutic strategies in affective disorders and also for possible everyday emotion regulation.

You think, therefore I am.

I pass on this contribution from Rose and Markus as their answer to this year's annual question from Edge.org (What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?):

"I think, therefore I am." Cogito ergo sum. Remember this elegant and deep idea from René Descartes' Principles of Philosophy? The fact that a person is contemplating whether she exists, Descartes argued, is proof that she, indeed, actually does exist. With this single statement, Descartes knit together two central ideas of Western philosophy: 1) thinking is powerful, and 2) individuals play a big role in creating their own I's—that is, their psyches, minds, souls, or selves.

Most of us learn "the cogito" at some point during our formal education. Yet far fewer of us study an equally deep and elegant idea from social psychology: Other people's thinking likewise powerfully shapes the I's that we are. Indeed, in many situations, other people's thinking has a bigger impact on our own thoughts, feelings, and actions than do the thoughts we conjure while philosophizing alone.

In other words, much of the time, "You think, therefore I am." For better and for worse.

An everyday instance of how your thinking affects other people's being is the Pygmalion effect. Psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson captured this effect in a classic 1963 study. After giving an IQ test to elementary school students, the researchers told the teachers which students would be "academic spurters" because of their allegedly high IQs. In reality, these students' IQs were no higher than those of the "normal" students. At the end of the school year, the researchers found that the "spurters'" had attained better grades and higher IQs than the "normals." The reason? Teachers had expected more from the spurters, and thus given them more time, attention, and care. And the conclusion? Expect more from students, and get better results.

A less sanguine example of how much our thoughts affect other people's I's is stereotype threat. Stereotypes are clouds of attitudes, beliefs, and expectations that follow around a group of people. A stereotype in the air over African Americans is that they are bad at school. Women labor under the stereotype that they suck at math.

As social psychologist Claude Steele and others have demonstrated in hundreds of studies, when researchers conjure these stereotypes—even subtly, by, say, asking people to write down their race or gender before taking a test—students from the stereotyped groups score lower than the stereotype-free group. But when researchers do not mention other people's negative views, the stereotyped groups meet or even exceed their competition. The researchers show that students under stereotype threat are so anxious about confirming the stereotype that they choke on the test. With repeated failures, they seek their fortunes in other domains. In this tragic way, other people's thoughts deform the I's of promising students.

As the planet gets smaller and hotter, knowing that "You think, therefore I am" could help us more readily understand how we affect our neighbours and how our neighbours affect us. Not acknowledging how much we impact each other, in contrast, could lead us to repeat the same mistakes.

Cellular 'self eating' accounts for some beneficial effects of exercise.

Population studies suggest that exercise protects against diabetes, cancer, and age related diseases such as Alzheimer's. Work by Congcong He et al. has now shown that at least part of this effect is due to the increased "self-eating" (Autophagy) that cells must do to meet the energy demands of exercise. Autophagy recycles used or flawed membranes and internal cell structures by encircling its target material and then dumping it into a compartment that digests it. It has been shown in animal models to reduce diabetes, cancer, and neuro-degenerative diseases. The He et al. work documents that exercise induces autophagy in the skeletal muscles of mice, which in turn lowers glucose and insulin in the bloodstream. Mutant mice that don't induce more autophagy during exercise didn't show this effect. Further, the exercise induced reversal of diabetes induced by overfeeding mice was observed only the mice who showed a exercise induced increased autophagy. Here is the abstract with more details:

Exercise has beneficial effects on human health, including protection against metabolic disorders such as diabetes. However, the cellular mechanisms underlying these effects are incompletely understood. The lysosomal degradation pathway, autophagy, is an intracellular recycling system that functions during basal conditions in organelle and protein quality control. During stress, increased levels of autophagy permit cells to adapt to changing nutritional and energy demands through protein catabolism. Moreover, in animal models, autophagy protects against diseases such as cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, infections, inflammatory diseases, ageing and insulin resistance. Here we show that acute exercise induces autophagy in skeletal and cardiac muscle of fed mice. To investigate the role of exercise-mediated autophagy in vivo, we generated mutant mice that show normal levels of basal autophagy but are deficient in stimulus (exercise- or starvation)-induced autophagy. These mice (termed BCL2 AAA mice) contain knock-in mutations in BCL2 phosphorylation sites (Thr69Ala, Ser70Ala and Ser84Ala) that prevent stimulus-induced disruption of the BCL2–beclin-1 complex and autophagy activation. BCL2 AAA mice show decreased endurance and altered glucose metabolism during acute exercise, as well as impaired chronic exercise-mediated protection against high-fat-diet-induced glucose intolerance. Thus, exercise induces autophagy, BCL2 is a crucial regulator of exercise- (and starvation)-induced autophagy in vivo, and autophagy induction may contribute to the beneficial metabolic effects of exercise.

The psychology of perceived wealth.

Studies have shown that not every dollar contributes equally to perceived wealth, people’s standing relative to those around them often predicts well-being better than net worth does, and increasing income trends are preferred over decreasing ones. Sussman and Shafir (at Princeton, where Kahneman has carried out his behavioral economics studies) show several factors that can influence the perception of wealth:

We studied the perception of wealth as a function of varying levels of assets and debt. We found that with total wealth held constant, people with positive net worth feel and are seen as wealthier when they have lower debt (despite having fewer assets). In contrast, people with equal but negative net worth feel and are considered wealthier when they have greater assets (despite having larger debt). This pattern persists in the perception of both the self and others.

In their concluding discussion,

…people have a robust preference for higher assets in cases of negative net worth and for lower debt in cases of positive net worth…debt appears relatively salient in contexts of positive wealth, whereas assets loom relatively large in contexts of negative wealth, and this differential salience has a corresponding impact on financial judgments and decisions.

…the present findings show how the appeal of a loan may depend on one’s perceived financial state. For a person who is in the red, a loan may provide an appealing infusion of cash, whereas for a person in the black, it might present an aversive incursion into debt. Conversely, people who are in the black may be tempted to diminish their debt, whereas it may prove unappealing for those in the red to lower their debt at the expense of their assets.

Remarkably, the same striving for financial wealth and stability can trigger opposing behaviors: preference for greater assets in some circumstances, and for lower debt in others. Such impulses may not always be aligned with what is best financially. People who are in the red and eager to borrow will sometimes have access only to high-interest loans. And people who are eager to clear their debt will sometimes do so even when their debt (e.g., tax-incentivized mortgages) is financially beneficial. Such psychology may be of great consequence. A remarkable 25% of U.S. households had zero or negative net worth in 2009 (for Black households, the figure was about 40%. Better insight into the determinants of perceived financial wealth and financial decision making could help shape behaviorally informed policy.

Bounded rationality.

I thought I would pass on clips from Mahzarin Banaji's response to the Edge.org annual question "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?":

…my candidate for the most deeply satisfying explanation of recent decades is the idea of bounded rationality…Herbert Simon put one stake in the ground through the study of information processing and AI, showing that both people and organizations follow principles of behavior such as "satisficing" that constrain them to decent but not the best decisions. The second stake was placed by Kahneman and Tversky, who showed the stunning ways in even experts are error-prone—with consequences for not only their own health and happiness but that of their societies broadly.

Together the view of human nature that evolved over the past four decades has systematically changed the explanation for who we are and why we do what we do. We are error-prone in the unique ways in which we are, the explanation goes, not because we have malign intent, but because of the evolutionary basis of our mental architecture, the manner in which we remember and learn information, the way in which we are affected by those around us and so on. The reason we are boundedly rational is because the information space in which we must do our work is large compared to the capacities we have, including severe limits on conscious awareness, the ability to be able to control behavior, and to act in line even with our own intentions.

The idea that bad outcomes result from limited minds that cannot store, compute and adapt to the demands of the environment is a radically different explanation of our capacities and thereby our nature. It's elegance and beauty comes from it placing the emphasis on the ordinary and the invisible rather than on specialness and malign motives. This seems not so dissimilar from another shift in explanation from god to natural section and it is likely to be equally resisted. 

The age of anxiety

Daniel Smith does an interesting piece asking whether it is appropriate to consider our current times an "age of anxiety." Some clips:

...it is undeniable that ours is an age in which an enormous and growing number of people suffer from anxiety. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorders now affect 18 percent of the adult population of the United States, or about 40 million people. By comparison, mood disorders — depression and bipolar illness, primarily — affect 9.5 percent…anti-anxiety drug alprazolam — better known by its brand name, Xanax — was the top psychiatric drug on the list, clocking in at 46.3 million prescriptions in 2010.

Just because our anxiety is heavily diagnosed and medicated, however, doesn’t mean that we are more anxious than our forebears. It might simply mean that we are better treated — that we are, as individuals and a culture, more cognizant of the mind’s tendency to spin out of control.

Earlier eras might have been even more jittery than ours. Fourteenth-century Europe, for example, experienced devastating famines, waves of pillaging mercenaries, peasant revolts, religious turmoil and a plague that wiped out as much as half the population in four years. The evidence suggests that all this resulted in mass convulsions of anxiety, a period of psychic torment in which, as one historian has put it, “the more one knew, the less sense the world made.”

It’s hard to imagine that we have it even close to as bad as that. Yet there is an aspect of anxiety that we clearly have more of than ever before: self-awareness…Anxiety didn’t emerge as a cohesive psychiatric concept until the early 20th century..By 1977, the psychoanalyst Rollo May was noting an explosion in papers, books and studies on the subject.

...we shouldn’t be possessive about our uncertainties, particularly as one of the dominant features of anxiety is its recursiveness. Anxiety begins with a single worry, and the more you concentrate on that worry, the more powerful it gets, and the more you worry. One of the best things you can do is learn to let go: to disempower the worry altogether. If you start to believe that anxiety is a foregone conclusion — if you start to believe the hype about the times we live in — then you risk surrendering the battle before it’s begun.