Enriched environments enhance adult brain plasticity.

I learned much of my neuroscience at tea time in Hubel and Wiesel's laboratory at Harvard Medical School during my post-doc days in the 1960's, as we discussed their discovery of critical periods during the development of ocular dominance columns in the visual cortex, and the apparent immutability of the adult pathways, once formed. Everything now has changed. We know our brains maintain their ability to make new nerve cells and connections throughout life. Greifzu et. al. add a new chapter to the plasticity story in their recent work showing how important enriched environments are in maintaining a younger brain that has not been locked into place by the increased inhibitory interactions characteristic of adult brains. Specifically, they show that ocular dominance columns can remain plastic in adult mice in enriched, but not ordinary cage, environments, and recover from stroke-induced damage or monocular deprivation.

Experimental animals are usually raised in small, so-called standard cages, depriving them of numerous natural stimuli. We show that raising mice in an enriched environment, allowing enhanced physical, social, and cognitive stimulation, preserved a juvenile brain into adulthood. Enrichment also rejuvenated the visual cortex after extended periods of standard cage rearing and protected adult mice from stroke-induced impairments of cortical plasticity. Because the local inhibitory tone in the visual cortex of adult enriched mice was not only significantly reduced compared with nonenriched animals but at juvenile levels, the plasticity-promoting effect of enrichment is most likely mediated by preserving low juvenile levels of inhibition into adulthood and thereby, extending sensitive phases of enhanced neuronal plasticity into an older age.

How inactivity changes the brain

Here is yet another sobering note for couch potatoes. Lack of exercise (in rats) causes undesirable remodeling of the brain. Gretchen Reynolds points to work by Mischel et al. (open source) showing that inactive versus active rats show changes in the region of the rostral ventrolateral medulla that regulates the sympathetic nervous system, increasing connectivity and reactivity, potentially overstimulating the sympathetic nervous system to constrict blood vessels, increase blood pressure, and thus enhance the possibility of cardiovascular disease. Here is the Mischel et al. abstract and a summary figure:

Increased activity of the sympathetic nervous system is thought to play a role in the development and progression of cardiovascular disease. Recent work has shown that physical inactivity versus activity alters neuronal structure in brain regions associated with cardiovascular regulation. Our physiological studies suggest that neurons in the rostral ventrolateral medulla (RVLM) are more responsive to excitation in sedentary versus physically active animals. We hypothesized that enhanced functional responses in the RVLM may be due, in part, to changes in the structure of RVLM neurons that control sympathetic activity. We used retrograde tracing and immunohistochemistry for tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) to identify bulbospinal catecholaminergic (C1) neurons in sedentary and active rats after chronic voluntary wheel-running exercise. We then digitally reconstructed their cell bodies and dendrites at different rostrocaudal levels. The dendritic arbors of spinally projecting TH neurons from sedentary rats were more branched than those of physically active rats (P < 0.05). In sedentary rats, dendritic branching was greater in more rostral versus more caudal bulbospinal C1 neurons, whereas, in physically active rats, dendritic branching was consistent throughout the RVLM. In contrast, cell body size and the number of primary dendrites did not differ between active and inactive animals. We suggest that these structural changes provide an anatomical underpinning for the functional differences observed in our in vivo studies. These inactivity-related structural and functional changes may enhance the overall sensitivity of RVLM neurons to excitatory stimuli and contribute to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease in sedentary individuals.

Physical inactivity versus activity is associated with functional changes in control of blood pressure by neurons in the rostral ventrolateral medulla (RVLM). The present study shows that putative cardiovascular RVLM neurons have more complex dendrites in inactive versus active rats. This anatomical difference may underpin the functional differences previously reported.

The liberal illusion of uniqueness

Bill Clinton is reported to have complained that getting Democrats to agree on a course of action was like herding cats, while the Republicans didn’t seem to have this problem. Stern et al. do a fascinating nugget of work that shows that conservatives and moderates overestimate the degree to which others conservative and moderates are like them, while those on the left end of the spectrum assume they are more unique among party peers than they actually are. (Recall the inability of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 to achieve consensus on vital issues.) The authors used well-validated methodology for examining truly false consensus and truly false uniqueness effects by developing a procedure in which participants were asked to indicate their beliefs and their preferences for a series of items and then estimate the beliefs and preferences of political in-group members. To test for truly false uniqueness and truly false consensus effects, They compared the extent to which participants perceived that political in-group members shared their beliefs and preferences with the extent to which political in-group members actually shared participants’ beliefs and preferences. From their methods section:

We conducted two studies in which participants reported their beliefs and preferences and estimated the beliefs and preferences of political in-group members who were either fellow participants in the study (Study 1) or members of the general American population (Study 2). This procedure allowed us to examine whether similar patterns of effects would emerge even when participants thought about political in-group members in different contexts. In Study 2, we replicated and extended Study 1 by examining whether the desire to feel unique explains in part ideological differences in estimating similarity to political in-group members. Finally, previous research has shown that individuals perceive more similarity between their own beliefs and those of other individuals (i.e., perceive greater consensus) when the beliefs are socially desirable or personally important. To rule out the possibility that these factors explain ideological differences in perceiving similarity to political in-group members, we measured the perceived social desirability of the items to which participants responded in both studies. In addition, in Study 2, we measured the personal importance of the items to rule out the possibility that this factor would explain ideological differences in perceiving similarity.

Here is their brief abstract.

In two studies, we demonstrated that liberals underestimate their similarity to other liberals (i.e., display truly false uniqueness), whereas moderates and conservatives overestimate their similarity to other moderates and conservatives (i.e., display truly false consensus; Studies 1 and 2). We further demonstrated that a fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives in the motivation to feel unique explains this ideological distinction in the accuracy of estimating similarity (Study 2). Implications of the accuracy of consensus estimates for mobilizing liberal and conservative political movements are discussed.

The Kerfuffle over whether men and women's brains are different.

Nothing kicks up a firestorm in the Neuroscience blogosphere like talk of sex differences in brain architecture. Within days of PNAS's early December 2013 publication of what may be a landmark paper on the differing 'connectomes' (nerve fiber tracts connecting different brain areas) of 428 male and 521 female 8-22 year old humans, a storm of criticism of the work was bouncing around the internet, along with accusations of 'neurosexism'. (see, for example, here, here, here, and here.)

The critics make many points - 1. Men have bigger brains on average than women, possibly conflating results; 2. Maybe men and women move their heads differently while in the MRI machine; 3. The structural differences don't necessarily correlate with behavioral differences, and there are varying results on whether the structural results correlate with cognitive function tests. It is unfortunate that the authors of the study were spouting gender stereotypes...but...it seems to me that the objections are mainly nit-picking, the data are rather compelling on fundamental differences in sexual connectivity that arise from genetic/environmental/cultural factors during brain development. (There is no such thing as 'hard wiring'.):

The results establish that male brains are optimized for intrahemispheric and female brains for interhemispheric communication. The developmental trajectories of males and females separate at a young age, demonstrating wide differences during adolescence and adulthood...The brains of men exhibit a far smaller degree of interconnectedness, both within and across the hemispheres, than do those of women.

I decided to wait for the dust to settle a bit, and let the final publication appear, and sure enough in the same issue there is an essay commentary by Larry Cahill that argues essentially that the politically correct view in brain research has been to assume no significant difference between male and female brain, and to assume results obtained (mainly for male brains) apply also to female brains.  Mouse studies in particular have shown that this is not the case.

...we now know that sex influences—small to medium to large—are extremely widespread on brain function. The validity of the assumption that the sex of subjects cannot powerfully alter, negate, and even reverse findings (hence, conclusions) has been crushed under the weight of evidence proving that it can and regularly does and at every level of investigation down to genes, single neurons, and even ion channels...For neuroscientists cognizant of this striking development, the main challenge now is to better understand the dizzying plethora of sex influences being uncovered. Males and females appear to be two complex mosaics, similar in some respects, mildly to highly different in others

Here is Cahill's summary comment:

A comedian discussing men and women once described the male brain as a bunch of boxes that don’t touch one another and the female brain as a complex ball of interconnected wires. Amusing as the bit was, the analogies may be more apt than he could have known. The findings of Ingahalikar et al. do indeed point to a greater degree of modular function in the physical architecture of the male brain and of interconnectedness in physical architecture of the female brain. Given the size of the study, the consistency of the conclusions across various analytic approaches, and the seeming concordance of key findings with well-established literature addressing brain function, one cannot fairly accuse Ingalhalikar et al. of hyperbole when they claim that their findings “reveal fundamental sex differences in the architecture of the human brain.” Theirs is a landmark paper that should accelerate acceptance of the notion that, for those who want to understand how brains function, sex matters.

And here, finally, is the Ingalhalikar et al. abstract:

Sex differences in human behavior show adaptive complementarity: Males have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills. Studies also show sex differences in human brains but do not explain this complementarity. In this work, we modeled the structural connectome using diffusion tensor imaging in a sample of 949 youths (aged 8–22 y, 428 males and 521 females) and discovered unique sex differences in brain connectivity during the course of development. Connection-wise statistical analysis, as well as analysis of regional and global network measures, presented a comprehensive description of network characteristics. In all supratentorial regions, males had greater within-hemispheric connectivity, as well as enhanced modularity and transitivity, whereas between-hemispheric connectivity and cross-module participation predominated in females. However, this effect was reversed in the cerebellar connections. Analysis of these changes developmentally demonstrated differences in trajectory between males and females mainly in adolescence and in adulthood. Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.

Bodily maps of emotions.

Nummenmaa and collaborators, from several universities in Finland, propose that our emotions are represented in our somatosensory system as culturally universal categorical somatotopic maps.

Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In five experiments, participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while viewing each stimulus. Different emotions were consistently associated with statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East Asian samples. Statistical classifiers distinguished emotion-specific activation maps accurately, confirming independence of topographies across emotions. We propose that emotions are represented in the somatosensory system as culturally universal categorical somatotopic maps. Perception of these emotion-triggered bodily changes may play a key role in generating consciously felt emotions.

Figure - Bodily topography of basic (Upper) and nonbasic (Lower) emotions associated with words. The body maps show regions whose activation increased (warm colors) or decreased (cool colors) when feeling each emotion.

The morning morality effect.

Here is an interesting tidbit from Kouchaki1 and Smith:

Are people more moral in the morning than in the afternoon? We propose that the normal, unremarkable experiences associated with everyday living can deplete one’s capacity to resist moral temptations. In a series of four experiments, both undergraduate students and a sample of U.S. adults engaged in less unethical behavior (e.g., less lying and cheating) on tasks performed in the morning than on the same tasks performed in the afternoon. This morning morality effect was mediated by decreases in moral awareness and self-control in the afternoon. Furthermore, the effect of time of day on unethical behavior was found to be stronger for people with a lower propensity to morally disengage. These findings highlight a simple yet pervasive factor (i.e., the time of day) that has important implications for moral behavior.

The milliseconds of a choice - Watching your mind when it matters.

This is actually a post about mindfulness, in reaction to Dan Hurley's article describing how contemporary applications of the ancient tradition of mindfulness meditation are being engaged in many more contexts than the initial emphasis on chilling out in the 1970s, and being employed for very practical purses such as mental resilience in a war zone. It seems like to me that we are approaching a well defined technology of brain control whose brain basis is understood in some detail. I've done numerous posts on behavioral and brain correlates of mindfulness meditation (enter 'meditation' or 'mindfulness' in MindBlog's search box in the left column). For example, only four weeks of a mindfulness meditation regime emphasizing relaxation of different body parts correlates with increases in white matter (nerve tract) efficiency. Improvements in cognitive performance, working memory, etc. have been claimed. A special issue of The journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience discusses issue in the research.

Full time mindfulness might be a bad idea, suppressing the mind wandering that facilitates bursts of creative insight. (During my vision research career, my most original ideas popped up when I was spacing out, once when I was riding a bike along a lakeshore path.) Many physicists and writers report their best ideas happen when they are disengaged. It also appears that mindfulness may inhibit implicit learning in which habits and skill are acquired without conscious awareness.

Obviously knowing whether we are in an attentional or mind wandering (default, narrative) modes is useful (see here, and here), and this is where the title of this posts comes in. To note and distinguish our mind state is most effectively accomplished with a particular style of alertness or awareness that is functioning very soon (less than 200 milliseconds) after a new thought or sensory perception appears to us. This is a moment of fragility that offers a narrow time window of choice over whether our new brain activity will be either enhanced or diminished in favor of a more desired activity. This is precisely what is happening in mindfulness meditation that instructs a central focus of some sort (breathing, body relaxation, or whatever) to which one returns as soon as one notes that any other thoughts or distractions have popped into awareness. The ability to rapidly notice and attend to thoughts and emotions of these short time scales is enhanced by brain training regimes of the sort offered by BrainHq of positscience.com and others. I have found the exercises on this site, originated by Michael Merznich, to be the most useful.  It offers summaries of changes in brain speed, attention, memory, intelligence, navigation, etc. that result from performing the exercises - changes that can persist for years.

A book title that has been popping into my head for at least the last 15 years is "The 200 Millisecond Manager." (a riff on the title the popular book of the early 1980's by Blanchard and Johnson, "The One Minute Manager.") The gist of the argument would be that given in the "The Guide - Noticing What Happens" section of my 2005 "MindStuff: A guide for the curious user' essay, and also in Chapter 12 of my book, Figure 12-7.

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

"The 200 msec Manager" has gone through the ‘this could be a book’ cycle several times, the actual execution  bogging down as I actually got into description of the underlying science and techniques for expanding awareness. Also, I note the enormous number of books out there on meditation, relaxation, etc. that are all really addressing the same core processes in different ways.

Beauty at the ballot box.

From White et al.:

Why does beauty win out at the ballot box? Some researchers have posited that it occurs because people ascribe generally positive characteristics to physically attractive candidates. We propose an alternative explanation—that leadership preferences are related to functional disease-avoidance mechanisms. Because physical attractiveness is a cue to health, people concerned with disease should especially prefer physically attractive leaders. Using real-world voting data and laboratory-based experiments, we found support for this relationship. A first study revealed that congressional districts with elevated disease threats, physically attractive candidates are more likely to be elected. A second study found that experimentally activating disease concerns leads people to especially value physical attractiveness in leaders and a third study showed they prefer more physically attractive political candidates. In a final study, we demonstrated that these findings are related to leadership preferences, specifically, rather than preferences for physically attractive group members more generally. Together, these findings highlight the nuanced and functional nature of leadership preferences.

Signals from inside and outside our bodies in self consciousness

Olaf Blanke (whose work on projecting ourselves outside our bodies I've mentioned previously) and collaborators extend their studies on body perception and self consciousness to show that signals from both the inside and the outside of the body are fundamental in determining our self consciousness:

Prominent theories highlight the importance of bodily perception for self-consciousness, but it is currently not known whether bodily perception is based on interoceptive or exteroceptive signals or on integrated signals from these anatomically distinct systems. In the research reported here, we combined both types of signals by surreptitiously providing participants with visual exteroceptive information about their heartbeat: A real-time video image of a periodically illuminated silhouette outlined participants’ (projected, “virtual”) bodies and flashed in synchrony with their heartbeats. We investigated whether these “cardio-visual” signals could modulate bodily self-consciousness and tactile perception. We report two main findings. First, synchronous cardio-visual signals increased self-identification with and self-location toward the virtual body, and second, they altered the perception of tactile stimuli applied to participants’ backs so that touch was mislocalized toward the virtual body. We argue that the integration of signals from the inside and the outside of the human body is a fundamental neurobiological process underlying self-consciousness.

Experimental setup for the body conditions. Participants (a) stood with their backs facing a video camera placed 200 cm behind them (b). The video showing the participant’s body (his or her “virtual body”) was projected in real time onto a head-mounted display. An electrocardiogram was recorded, and R peaks were detected in real time (c), triggering a flashing silhouette outlining the participant’s virtual body (d). The display made it appear as though the virtual body was standing 200 cm in front of the participant (e). After each block, participants were passively displaced 150 cm backward to the camera and were instructed to walk back to the original position.

A reason for the power of prayer.

Friesea and Wänke find one source of the power of prayer that is not supernatural: it enhances self control by buffering self-control depletion, that is, protecting from breakdowns of will. In a sequential experimental paradigm, subjects were told to watch a humorous video but stifle emotional responses (this causes cognitive depletion) and then performed the stroop task, in which they indicated the ink color of words spelling various color, with the words being either consistent or inconsistent with their actual colors. Studies have shown that this task is harder after cognitive depletion. Both religious and non-religious who were asked to pray about a topic of their choosing for five minutes showed significantly better performance on the stroop task after emotion suppression, compared to participants who were simply asked to think about a topic of their choosing. The authors suggest that people might interpret prayer as a social interaction with a deity, with that social interaction enhancing cognitive resources. Other studies have found that social interaction enhances general cognitive functioning. Here is the Friesea and Wänke abstract:

The strength model of self-control has inspired large amounts of research and contributed to a deeper understanding of the temporal dynamics underlying self-control. Several studies have identified factors that can counteract self-control depletion, but relatively little is known about factors that can prevent depletion effects. Here we tested the hypothesis that a brief period of personal prayer would buffer self-control depletion effects. Participants either briefly prayed or thought freely before engaging (or not engaging) in an emotion suppression task. All participants completed a Stroop task subsequently. Individuals who had thought freely before suppressing emotions showed impaired Stroop performance compared to those who had not suppressed emotions. This effect did not occur in individuals who had prayed at the beginning of the study. These results are consistent with and contribute to a growing body of work attesting to the beneficial effects of praying on self-control.

Left spatial neglect goes with neglecting the “Left Side” of time.

An interesting observation from Saj et al.:

Previous research suggests that people construct mental time lines to represent and reason about time. However, is the ability to represent space truly necessary for representing events along a mental time line? Our results are the first to demonstrate that deficits in spatial representation (as a function of left hemispatial neglect) also result in deficits in representing events along the mental time line. Specifically, we show that patients with left hemispatial neglect have difficulty representing events that are associated with the past and, thus, fall to the left on the mental time line. These results demonstrate that representations of space and time share neural underpinnings and that representations of time have specific spatial properties (e.g., a left and a right side). Furthermore, it appears that intact spatial representations are necessary for at least some types of temporal representation.

How the brains of virtuosic pianists are different...

Because I'm a performing classical pianist (in fact, giving a concert on Feb. 9 in Fort Lauderdale, my snowbird roost from mid-October to mid_April), I always perk up when I come across articles showing how the brains of experienced pianists or other musicians are different from the brains of non-musicians. Candidi et al. make the interesting observation that the refined somatosensory and motor skills of musicians provide the brain with fine anticipatory, simulative error monitoring systems that are absent in non-pianist naive individuals.

Virtuosic musical performance requires fine sensorimotor skills and high predictive control of the fast finger movements that produce the intended sounds, and cannot be corrected once the notes have been played. The anticipatory nature of motor control in experts explains why musical performance is barely affected by auditory feedback. Using single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation, In a first experiment we provide evidence that, in expert pianists, the observation of a mute piano fingering error induces 1) a time-locked facilitation of hand corticospinal representation which occurred 300 and 700 ms but not 100 ms after error onset, and 2) a somatotopic corticospinal facilitation of the very same finger that commits the error. In a second experiment, we show that no corticospinal modulation is found in non-pianist naïve individuals who were experimentally trained to visually detect the observed fingering errors. This is the first evidence showing that the refined somatosensory and motor skills of musicians exceed the domain of individual motor control and may provide the brain with fine anticipatory, simulative error monitoring systems for the evaluation of others’ movements.

The social life of our genes - the devastating effects of social isolation

David Dobbs has done a broad and accessible review of how completely the expression of the genes regulating behavior are controlled by the social milieu, giving examples for bees, birds, fish, primates, and humans. Social conditions can change our gene expression with a rapidity, breadth, and depth previously overlooked. Humans, and other animals, most likely have this evolved capability because an organism that responds quickly to fast-changing social environments will more likely survive them. Dobbs points in particular to work by work by Steve Cole on social regulation of gene expression. Cole analyzed the relationship between social factors and human gene expression by surveying transcriptional profiles in white blood cells (leukocytes) from healthy older adults who differed in the extent to which they felt socially connected to others.

Among the 22,283 genes assayed, 209 showed systematically different levels of expression in people who reported feeling lonely and distant from others consistently over the course of 4 years (see Figure). These effects did not involve a random smattering of all human genes, but focally affected three specific groups of genes. Genes supporting the early “accelerator” phase of the immune response—inflammation—were selectively up-regulated; and two groups of genes involved in the subsequent “steering” of immune responses—genes involved in responses to viral infections (particularly Type I interferons), and genes involved in the production of antibodies by B lymphocytes—were down-regulated. These results provided a molecular framework for understanding why socially isolated individuals show heightened vulnerability to inflammation-driven cardiovascular diseases (i.e., excessive nonspecific immune activity) and impaired responses to viral infections and vaccines (i.e., insufficient immune responses to specific pathogens). A major clue about the psychological pathways mediating these effects came from the observation that differential gene-expression profiles were most strongly linked to a person's subjective sense of isolation rather than to their objective number of social contacts.

Figure: Gene expression in human immune cells in lonely and socially integrated people. Expression of 22,283 human gene transcripts was assayed in 10 million blood leukocytes sampled from each of 14 older adults who showed consistent differences over 4 years in their level of subjective social isolation. Two hundred nine gene transcripts showed at least 30% difference in average expression level between six people experiencing chronic social isolation and eight experiencing consistent social integration. In the heat-plot above, each row represents data from one of the 14 study participants, each column contains expression values for one of the 209 differentially active genes, and the coloring of each cell represents the relative level of that gene's expression in a given participant's leukocyte sample: Red = high expression, Black = intermediate expression, Green = low expression.

Social Darwinism isn't dead - the rich really do think they are different...

An engaging piece by Matthew Hutson in Slate points to work by Kraus and Keltner. Some clips:

...In 2012 the top 0.01 percent of households earned an average of $10.25 million, while the mean household income for the country overall was $51,000. Are top earners 200 times as smart as the rest of the field? Doubtful. Do they have the capacity to work 200 times more hours in the week? Even more doubtful.

..say you’re in that top 0.01 percent—or even the top 50 percent. Would you want to admit happenstance as a benefactor? Wouldn’t you rather believe that you earned your wealth, that you truly deserve it? Wouldn’t you like to think that any resources you inherited are rightfully yours, as the descendant of fundamentally exceptional people? .. you might even adjust your ideas about the power of genes. The lower classes are not merely unfortunate, according to the upper classes; they are genetically inferior.

Kraus and Keltner's work explores "social class essentialism" - the belief that surface differences can be explained by differences in fundamental identities. Studies have shown that

...people hold essentialist beliefs about generally biological categories such as gender, race, and sexuality, as well as about more cultural ones such as nationality, religion, and political orientation. Essentialism leads to stereotyping, prejudice, and a disinclination to mingle with outsiders.

Kraus and Keltner wanted to know if we see social class as an essential category. They found:

...that higher social class was associated with greater social class essentialism. This pattern remained even after controlling for political orientation as well as objective measures of a participant’s income and education level, indicating that it’s one’s sense of being above or below others, not one’s actual resources, that drives the result...the higher people perceived their social class to be, the more strongly they endorsed just-world beliefs (i.e. that the world is a fair place), and that this difference explained their increased social class essentialism: Apparently if you feel that you’re doing well, you want to believe success comes to those who deserve it, and therefore those of lower status must not deserve it.

There is a grain to truth to social class essentialism; the few studies on the subject estimate that income, educational attainment, and occupational status are perhaps at least 10 percent genetic (and maybe much more). ..But that’s a far cry from saying “It is possible to determine one’s social class by examining his or her genes.” Such a statement ignores the role of wealth inheritance, the social connections one shares with one’s parents, or the educational opportunities family money can buy—not to mention strokes of good or bad luck (that are not tied to karma).

Social class essentialism is basically inciting social Darwinism. This distortion of Darwin’s theory of evolution, in one interpretation, is the belief that only the fit survive and thrive—and, further, that this process should be accepted or even accelerated by public policy...It might also entail belief in survival of the fittest as a desired end, given the results linking it to reduced support for restorative interventions... It’s an example of the logical fallacy known as the “appeal to nature”—what is natural is good. (If that were true, technology and medicine would be moral abominations.)

Watching our brain remembering something.

This is kind of neat! Staresinaa et al. observe a part of our brain working at remembering something while we go on about our further activities unrelated to what we want to remember.

How is new information converted into a memory trace? Here, we used functional neuroimaging to assess what happens to representations of new events after we first experience them. We found that a particular part of the medial temporal lobe, a brain region known to be critical for intact memory, spontaneously reactivates these events even when we are engaged in unrelated activities. Indeed, the extent to which such automatic reactivation occurs seems directly related to later memory performance. This finding shows that we can now study the dynamics of memory processes for specific experiences during the “offline” periods that follow the initial learning phase.

Figure- Offline reactivation in the entorhinal cortex (ErC). (Left) Hand-drawn anatomical regions of interest (ROIs) shown for one participant. (Right) Reactivation of encoding representations is greater for later recalled (R) than forgotten (F) trials. Bars represent mean ± SE of the condition difference. *P = 0.013, one-tailed paired t test.

The "being happy" stress-out.

Oliver Burkeman (the author of “The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking”) does an engaging article on how deliberate effort on the part of managers and other to generate fun,

...might have precisely the opposite effect, making people miserable and thus reaffirming one of the oldest observations about happiness: When you try too hard to obtain it, you’re almost guaranteed to fail.

Here are some further clips:

...corporations call upon a burgeoning industry of happiness consultants, who’ll construct a Gross Happiness Index for your workplace, then advise you on ways to boost it…Countless self-help bloggers offer tips for generating cheer among the cubicles…There’s nothing wrong with happiness at work. Enjoyable jobs are surely preferable to boring or unpleasant ones; moreover, studies suggest that happy employees are more productive ones. But it doesn’t follow that the path to this desirable state of affairs is through deliberate efforts.

...there’s evidence that this approach… can have precisely the opposite effect, making people miserable and thus reaffirming one of the oldest observations about happiness: When you try too hard to obtain it, you’re almost guaranteed to fail. the pressure to maintain a cheery facade in such workplaces can be stressful and exhausting in itself, a form of what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called “emotional labor.” In a 2011 study of workers at an Australian call center, where bosses championed the “3 Fs” (focus, fun and fulfillment), researchers found that many experienced the party atmosphere as a burden, not a boon.…

The problem here is an organizational version of the “paradox of hedonism,” best expressed by John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” The attempt to impose happiness is self-sabotaging. Psychologists have shown that positive-thinking affirmations make people with low self-esteem feel worse; that patients with panic disorders can become more anxious when they try to relax; and that an ability to experience negative emotions, rather than struggling to exclude them, is crucial for mental health.

…managers should concentrate on creating the conditions in which a variety of personality types, from the excitable to the naturally downbeat, can flourish. That means giving employees as much autonomy as possible, and ensuring that people are treated evenhandedly. According to a recent Danish study, lack of fairness at work is a strong predictor of depression, and even heavy workloads don’t bring people down, provided their bosses are fair.

Oxytocin enhances brain function in children with autism.

Fascinating observations from Gordon et al, who find that that intranasal administration of oxytocin enhances activity in the brain for socially meaningful stimuli and attenuates its response to nonsocially meaningful stimuli in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as measured via functional MRI. This raises the prospect of treatments that target the core social dysfunction in ASD, and might bring about long-term behavioral improvements.:

Following intranasal administration of oxytocin (OT), we measured, via functional MRI, changes in brain activity during judgments of socially (Eyes) and nonsocially (Vehicles) meaningful pictures in 17 children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD). OT increased activity in the striatum, the middle frontal gyrus, the medial prefrontal cortex, the right orbitofrontal cortex, and the left superior temporal sulcus. In the striatum, nucleus accumbens, left posterior superior temporal sulcus, and left premotor cortex, OT increased activity during social judgments and decreased activity during nonsocial judgments. Changes in salivary OT concentrations from baseline to 30 min postadministration were positively associated with increased activity in the right amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex during social vs. nonsocial judgments. OT may thus selectively have an impact on salience and hedonic evaluations of socially meaningful stimuli in children with ASD, and thereby facilitate social attunement. These findings further the development of a neurophysiological systems-level understanding of mechanisms by which OT may enhance social functioning in children with ASD.

A neural prosthesis can restore sensory-motor function after brain damage.

Guggenmos et al. use a brain–machine–brain interfaces (BMBIs) to reconnect two active brain regions whose connections had severed by damage to the brain area between them:

Closed-loop systems, or brain–machine–brain interfaces (BMBIs), have not been widely developed for brain repair. In this study, we targeted spared motor and somatosensory regions of the rat brain after traumatic brain injury for establishment of a functional bridge using a battery-powered microdevice. The results show that by using discriminated action potentials as a trigger for stimulating a distant cortical location, rapid recovery of fine motor skills is facilitated. This study provides strong evidence that BMBIs can be used to bridge damaged neural pathways functionally and promote recovery after brain injury. Although this study is restricted to a rodent model of TBI, it is likely that the approach will also be applicable to other types of acquired brain injuries.

Figure: Model of neuroprosthetic treatment approach after brain injury. (A) Normal connectivity of M1 (motor cortex), S1 (somatosensory cortex), and PM (premotor cortex). Both M1 (CFA in rat) and PM (RFA in rat) send substantial outputs to the spinal cord via the corticospinal tract. Also, extensive reciprocal connections exist between M1 and PM, as well as between M1 and S1. (B) Effects of focal M1 injury on brain connectivity and the hypothetical effect of a BMBI to restore somatosensory-motor communication. An injury to M1, as might occur in stroke or brain trauma, results in a focal area of necrosis, as well as loss of M1 outputs to the spinal cord. Corticocortical communication between M1 and S1 (and between M1 and PM) is also disrupted, further contributing to functional impairment. Because the uninjured PM also contains corticospinal neurons, it might have the ability to serve in a vicarious role. The dotted line indicates enhanced functional connection between PM and S1 that we propose is established after treatment with a BMBI. (C) Location of target areas in rat cerebral cortex. A topographic map of the somatosensory representation in S1 is superimposed on the cortex.

My aversion to "selfies" and the demographics of social media.

The actor James Franco has done an interesting brief essay on the meaning of "selfies", photos of himself reporting what he is doing relayed via Instagram. (Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, and others,  are other common routes for selfies.)

...the self-portrait is an easy target for charges of self-involvement, but, in a visual culture, the selfie quickly and easily shows, not tells, how you’re feeling, where you are, what you’re doing….I am actually turned off when I look at an account and don’t see any selfies, because I want to know whom I’m dealing with. In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, “Hello, this is me.”…We all have different reasons for posting them, but, in the end, selfies are avatars: Mini-Me’s that we send out to give others a sense of who we are.

I feel a complete aversion to the idea of advertising my daily life by posting pictures of myself as I move through a day.  It seems a violation of my privacy, a threat to periods of solitude and being alone that I value, and I wonder if this is a character trait that is increasingly rare in the millennial generation, which seems to have a fear of being alone.   … and this prompted me to do a cursory survey of the demographics of the users of some of these sites. I am not surprised to find that at age 71 I am on the much older side of a generational gap in behavior. One quickly finds that 90% of the 150 million people who are active on instagram are under the age of 35, urban, with a significant skew towards women. Facebook (which owns instagram) users are clustered in the 25-34 and over 55 age range. A table reported from the Pew research center shows the fraction of internet users who use various social networking sites.

Cognitive Control - what you see depends on how you look.

Turk-Brown argues for a more expansive approach to understanding various kinds of non-invasive brain imaging data. I relay his abstract, and one figure describing how interactions between brain regions vary by cognitive state.

Noninvasive studies of human brain function hold great potential to unlock mysteries of the human mind. The complexity of data generated by such studies, however, has prompted various simplifying assumptions during analysis. Although this has enabled considerable progress, our current understanding is partly contingent upon these assumptions. An emerging approach embraces the complexity, accounting for the fact that neural representations are widely distributed, neural processes involve interactions between regions, interactions vary by cognitive state, and the space of interactions is massive. Because what you see depends on how you look, such unbiased approaches provide the greatest flexibility for discovery.

Fig. 2 Attentional modulation of functional connectivity. (A) The guided activation theory of cognitive control posits that prefrontal cortex (PFC) sends feedback to posterior cortex to switch connectivity between cortex and establish task-relevant pathways. (B) Such pathways exist in the visual cortex of nonhuman primates: V4 shows enhanced coherence with the area of V1 containing receptive fields for the attended target. (C) This mechanism also supports category-based selection in human visual cortex: V4 shows stronger background connectivity with the fusiform face area (FFA) when faces are attended and with the parahippocampal place area (PPA) when scenes are attended.

How our advanced capabilities may have come from separation of our primary brain areas.

Buckner and Krienen put forward the fascinating idea that our advanced human capabilities may be a spandrel (i.e. a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection). They note that the striking increase of hominid brain size over the past three million years (from ~ 400cc in chimps to ~600-800cc in H. habilis to 1,500-1,800 in H. sapiens) has gone with the enlargement not of the size of primary sensory and motor regions of the brain, but instead with the association regions between them, as if the primary regions had become untethered from each other. These association regions might be to form new circuits as they mature later in development in a more plastic and adaptive way than the primary regions. Now, instead of an automatic and tightly coupled linkage between sensory areas and motor areas driving behavior, the association cortices can insert the computations required for making more complex decisions, retrieving memories, and reflecting.

Phylogeny of the cortical mantle.
Schematic depictions of the cortex of placental mammals are shown with the size and positions of several conserved areas. Two organizational features are apparent in the phylogenic tree. Across all species, the relative positions of the areas are preserved, suggesting they arise from an ancient developmental template, or Bauplan, that is conserved. Second, as the brain is enlarged in primates a greater percentage of the cortical mantle falls between the primary and secondary sensory systems. The insets at the top represent hypothetical estimates of the mammalian common ancestor and the primate common ancestor. Dark blue, primary visual area (V1); light blue, secondary visual area (V2); green, middle temporal (MT) visual area; yellow, primary auditory area (A1); red, primary somatosensory area (S1); orange, secondary somatosensory area (S2).

The Tethering Hypothesis:
Bottom: The developing cortical mantle of the estimated mammalian common ancestor is schematically displayed as a thick line with two representative signaling gradients, labeled Signal A (red) and Signal B (blue). These gradients are heuristic presentations of the signal gradients present in the embryonic telencephalon (Figure 6). In the ancestral mammal, the signaling gradients and extrinsic activity from the sensory systems placed strong constraints on most of the developing cortex. Intermediate zones existed, colored in white, but represented a small portion of the cortical mantle. The resulting cortical organization included multiple sensory–motor hierarchies that occupied most of the mantle and formed canonical networks. Top: Following massive evolutionary expansion of the cortical mantle, in the presence of the same core signaling gradients, most of the cortical mantle emerges that is distant from the combined constraints of signaling gradients and extrinsic sensory activity. This emergent zone is illustrated as the large white area in the expanded cortical mantle. Untethered from sensory hierarchies, these distributed in-between zones are hypothesized to wire to one another and emerge as association cortex. The tethering hypothesis, which at this point should be considered a speculation, offers one framework to explain how association networks evolved their prominence and came to possess circuit properties vital to human cognition. The tethering hypothesis awaits further support or falsification.

Your brain has many genomes.

Life used to be simple. We had one set of genes, found in all cells of the body. Skin cells, liver cells, and brain cells were different only because different subsets of those genes were expressed appropriate to each organ. Now, it is turning out that one organ, like the heart, may be governed by one set of genes (genome) while the brain may be run by a mosaic of other genomes generated by somatic mutations, (as opposed to germline mutations that are inherited and found in every body cell.) Psychiatric genetic studies generally have assumed mutations in red blood cells would also appear in the brain, but mutations unique to brain genomes have now been found.

Thomas Insel, who is head of the National Institute of Mental Health, has written a paper on this situation titled “The dark matter of psychiatric genetics.” Here is his abstract:

Although inherited DNA sequences have a well-demonstrated role in psychiatric disease risk, for even the most heritable mental disorders, monozygotic twins are discordant at a significant rate. The genetic variation associated with mental disorders has heretofore been based on the search for rare or common variation in blood cells. This search is based on the premise that every somatic cell shares an identical DNA sequence, so that variation found in lymphocytes should reflect variation present in brain cells. Evidence from the study of cancer cells, stem cells and now neurons demonstrate that this premise is false. Somatic mutation is common in human cells and has been implicated in a range of diseases beyond cancer. The exuberant proliferation of cortical precursors during fetal development provides a likely environment for somatic mutation in neuronal and glial lineages. Studies of rare neurodevelopmental disorders, such as hemimegencephaly, demonstrate somatic mutations in affected cortical cells that cannot be detected in unaffected parts of the brain or in peripheral cells. This perspective argues for the need to investigate somatic variation in the brain as an explanation of the discordance in monozygotic twins, a proximate cause of mental disorders in individuals with inherited risk, and a potential guide to novel treatment targets.

Cognitive benefits of music lessons?

I’ve done numerous posts on effects that early music training has on the brain. Adults with early music training in general show enhanced capabilities in sensory (auditory time resolution) and motor actives related to music generation. There also has been the claim that early music training also enhances cognitive development in other areas. Mehr et al have now done randomized trial studies that show no consistent evidence for nonmusical cognitive benefits of preschool music enrichment. Only one music curriculum was used, and it is possible that a trial with a different kind or intensity of training might yield different results.

Young children regularly engage in musical activities, but the effects of early music education on children's cognitive development are unknown. While some studies have found associations between musical training in childhood and later nonmusical cognitive outcomes, few randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been employed to assess causal effects of music lessons on child cognition and no clear pattern of results has emerged. We conducted two RCTs with preschool children investigating the cognitive effects of a brief series of music classes, as compared to a similar but non-musical form of arts instruction (visual arts classes, Experiment 1) or to a no-treatment control (Experiment 2). Consistent with typical preschool arts enrichment programs, parents attended classes with their children, participating in a variety of developmentally appropriate arts activities. After six weeks of class, we assessed children's skills in four distinct cognitive areas in which older arts-trained students have been reported to excel: spatial-navigational reasoning, visual form analysis, numerical discrimination, and receptive vocabulary. We initially found that children from the music class showed greater spatial-navigational ability than did children from the visual arts class, while children from the visual arts class showed greater visual form analysis ability than children from the music class (Experiment 1). However, a partial replication attempt comparing music training to a no-treatment control failed to confirm these findings (Experiment 2), and the combined results of the two experiments were negative: overall, children provided with music classes performed no better than those with visual arts or no classes on any assessment. Our findings underscore the need for replication in RCTs, and suggest caution in interpreting the positive findings from past studies of cognitive effects of music instruction.

Oxytocin and the strength of romantic bonds in men.

Here is an interesting bit from Scheele et al.:

Significance:

Sexual monogamy is potentially costly for males, and few mammalian species along with humans exhibit it. The hypothalamic peptide oxytocin (OXT) has been implicated in mediating pair bonds in various species, but as yet, we know little about neurobiological factors that might act to promote fidelity, especially in men. Here we provide evidence for a mechanism by which OXT may contribute to romantic bonds in men by enhancing their partner's attractiveness and reward value compared with other women.

Abstract:

The biological mechanisms underlying long-term partner bonds in humans are unclear. The evolutionarily conserved neuropeptide oxytocin (OXT) is associated with the formation of partner bonds in some species via interactions with brain dopamine reward systems. However, whether it plays a similar role in humans has as yet not been established. Here, we report the results of a discovery and a replication study, each involving a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subject, pharmaco-functional MRI experiment with 20 heterosexual pair-bonded male volunteers. In both experiments, intranasal OXT treatment (24 IU) made subjects perceive their female partner's face as more attractive compared with unfamiliar women but had no effect on the attractiveness of other familiar women. This enhanced positive partner bias was paralleled by an increased response to partner stimuli compared with unfamiliar women in brain reward regions including the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens (NAcc). In the left NAcc, OXT even augmented the neural response to the partner compared with a familiar woman, indicating that this finding is partner-bond specific rather than due to familiarity. Taken together, our results suggest that OXT could contribute to romantic bonds in men by enhancing their partner's attractiveness and reward value compared with other women.

In praise of failure

Costica Bradatan offers these thoughts (which I’ve clipped from a longer piece).

The design of a superior kind of human being – healthier, stronger, smarter, more handsome, more enduring – seems to be in the works…the promise of continual human progress and improvement is alluring. But there is a danger there, too — that in this more perfect future, failure will become obsolete.

So, allow me to make a case for the importance of failure. Failure is significant for several reasons. I’d like to discuss three of them.

Failure allows us to see our existence in its naked condition.

…we tend to see the world as a solid, reliable, even indestructible place…To experience failure is to start seeing the cracks in the fabric of being..[it]…turns out to be a blessing in disguise…this lurking, constant threat that should make us aware of the extraordinariness of our being: the miracle that we exist at all…Most of us (the most self-aware or enlightened excepted) suffer chronically from a poor adjustment to existence; we compulsively fancy ourselves much more important than we are and behave as though the world exists only for our sake…Failure could be a medicine against such arrogance and hubris, as it often brings humility.

Our capacity to fail is essential to what we are.

It is crucial that we remain fundamentally imperfect, incomplete, erring creatures; in other words, that there is always a gap left between what we are and what we can be. Whatever human accomplishments there have been in history, they have been possible precisely because of this empty space. …the capacity to fail is something that we should absolutely preserve, no matter what the professional optimists say. Such a thing is worth treasuring, even more so than artistic masterpieces, monuments or other accomplishments. For, in a sense, the capacity to fail is much more important than any individual human achievements: It is that which makes them possible.

We are designed to fail.

No matter how successful our lives turn out to be, how smart, industrious or diligent we are, the same end awaits us all: “biological failure.”…most of us have pretended not to see it… A better model may be Ingmar Bergman’s Antonius Block, from the film “The Seventh Seal.” A knight returning from the Crusades and plunged into crisis of faith, Block is faced with the grand failure in the form of a man. He does not hesitate to engage Death head-on. He doesn’t flee, doesn’t beg for mercy — he just challenges him to a game of chess. Needless to say, he cannot succeed in such a game — no one can — but victory is not the point. You play against the grand, final failure not to win, but to learn how to fail.

Bergman the philosopher [in his classic movie "The Seventh Seal"] teaches us a great lesson... We will all end in failure, but that’s not the most important thing. What really matters is how we fail and what we gain in the process. During the brief time of his game with Death, Antonius Block must have experienced more than he did all his life; without that game he would have lived for nothing. In the end, of course, he loses, but accomplishes something rare. He not only turns failure into an art, but manages to make the art of failing an intimate part of the art of living.

My grandsons - making it in the brave new world - part III

This is the final post in my ramblings on the world my grandsons will face. The first two posts dealt with professional achievement, this final piece touches on the challenge to traditional human friendship and intimacy now presented by the internet, or as Frank Bruni puts it, "The Sweet Caress of Cyberspace." He begins by noting a new movie "Her," in which a man (Joaquin Phoenix)falls in love with the voice (Johansson) generated by the operating system of his smart device that provides not only information, but also motivation, consolation, and intimacy. Bruni:

savored a few themes in particular. One is the Internet’s extreme indulgence of the seemingly innate human impulse to contrive a habitat that’s entirely unthreatening, an ego-stroking ecosystem, a sensibility-controlled comfort zone…You want an endless stream of irony? You can have an endless stream of irony. You want unfettered invective about the politicians you’ve decided to hate? Set your bookmarks and social-media feeds accordingly. You can frolic endlessly in foregone conclusions.

In “Her,” the very nature of Johansson’s operating system is to adapt to and evolve from her interactions with Phoenix. She’s a projection of his needs. She blooms in accordance with his wants (and has an aurally explosive orgasm on cue). He needn’t doubt himself, compromise or color outside the lines…It’s a parable of narcissism in the digital world, which lets you sprint to the foreground of everything, giving you an audience or the illusion of one.

But “Her” also traces the flip side of the coin — that with our amassed knowledge and scientific accomplishments, we may be succeeding in rendering ourselves obsolete. ..Google’s grand designs for robots in manufacturing and shipping… Economists have sounded the alarm about what this could mean for employment and the distribution of wealth. It falls to artists to contemplate what this could mean for psyches and souls, and “Her” imagines a society in which human beings are so thoroughly marginalized that they’re being edited out of courtship and companionship, because they’re superfluous, messy. It’s a love story as horror story. If we no longer need anyone in the passenger seat, do we need anyone at all?

I can't imagine this future dystopian extreme is actually the world my grandchildren will face, but it is good to be aware of such possible dangers ahead so that appropriate defenses can be mounted.

My grandsons making it in the brave new world - part II

The first post in this series dealt with mental capabilities required to be included in the small fraction of future workers who live a comfortable life with plenty of disposable income.  Mental capacities also underlie our kinesthetic (athletic movement) abilities.  Amateur and professional sports (not to mention musical and other artistic kinds of performance) appear now to be undergoing a fundamental transformation that is moving beyond traditional instruction, practice, and repetition to include training the brain to more effective perform the mental computations required to be at the right place at the right time.  I recently received an email pointing me to a brain training regime - of the sort I've described for general cognitive enhancement used to counter aging - that specifically addresses the sports of hockey and basketball (the technology was originally developed to teach Israeli Air Force pilots about aerial combat.)  The demonstration video pasted in below shows the integration of a variety of cognitive enhancement techniques (spatial awareness, anticipation of movements) into an ensemble appropriate for those sports.

Is it going to be the case that my grandsons can not hope to compete in their brave new world unless they have explicitly performed cognitive enhancement training on themselves?  I certainly hope not!

My grandsons - making it in the brave new world - part I

I will be going soon to Austin Texas, to spend the holiday with my son's family, who live in the same house I grew up in. Every grandfather says this, but I have to also say a how incredulous I am at the vastly different a world my two year old grandson and his younger brother will face than the one I grew up in, a period of continuously expanding opportunities from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. The same Univ. of Wisconsin assistant professorship I took as a 27 year old would now go only to someone much older, who would most likely have to settle for a non-tenure position, if even that were available. With the partition of our economy into a service sector whose employees can't support a family and an educated, computer savvy, creative, managing elite, an extraordinary set of skill are now required to 'make it.' David Brooks presents a list of mental types that might thrive in a world in which we we must interface with intelligent machines:

Freestylers - who can play with the computer but know when to overrule it (as you sometimes overrule your GPS in neighborhoods you are familiar with).

Synthesizers - who surf vast amounts of data to crystallize a pattern or story.

Humanizers - who make the human-machine interplay feel more natural.

Conceptual engineers - who come up with creative methods to think about unexpected problems.

Motivators - who can inspire efforts on behalf of machines that are more naturally generated in the service of other humans.

Moralizers - who keep performance metrics from being reduced to productivity statistics that devalue personal moral traits like loyalty and end up destroying morale and social capital.

Greeters - who provide personalized services to the 15 percent of workers who 'make it' (have lots of disposable income).

Economizers - who advise the bottom 85 percent how to preserve rich lives on a small income.

Weavers - who try to deal with the social disintegration, disaffected lifestyles, that are a consequence of the inegalitarian facts of this new world.

Sequence your microbiome!

Some months ago I paid 23andMe about a $100 to analyze a mouth swab of epithelial cell and report back information on my genetic makeup, ancestry, health risks, etc. I was particularly interested in the SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) that correlate with more or less risk for things like heart disease, alzheimer’s, etc. (The FDA has recently shut down their releasing that information to new subscribers because they have decided it is an untested medical diagnostic procedure.)

I want now to mention another neat test you can purchase for ~$100, where you send in a swab of your poop, mouth , and skin and are sent back information on your microbiome, the genes of hundreds of microbial species (microbiota) that share your body with you. Michael Pollan, the guy who has written best selling food books (Omnivore’s Dilemma, etc.) has done an engaging piece on this. Some clips:

To the extent that we are bearers of genetic information, more than 99 percent of it is microbial. And it appears increasingly likely that this “second genome,” as it is sometimes called, exerts an influence on our health as great and possibly even greater than the genes we inherit from our parents. But while your inherited genes are more or less fixed, it may be possible to reshape, even cultivate, your second genome.

Disorders in our internal ecosystem — a loss of diversity, say, or a proliferation of the “wrong” kind of microbes — may predispose us to obesity and a whole range of chronic diseases, as well as some infections. “Fecal transplants,” which involve installing a healthy person’s microbiota into a sick person’s gut, have been shown to effectively treat an antibiotic-resistant intestinal pathogen named C. difficile, which kills 14,000 Americans each year....[there is concern] about the damage that antibiotics, even in tiny doses, are doing to the microbiome — and particularly to our immune system and weight. “Farmers have been performing a great experiment for more than 60 years...by giving subtherapeutic doses of antibiotics to their animals to make them gain weight...the “Westernized microbiome” most of us now carry around is in fact an artifact of civilization”

...a pristine microbiome — of people who have had little or no contact with Westerners — features much greater biodiversity, including a number of species never before sequenced, and ... much higher levels of prevotella than is typically found in the Western gut....these vibrant, diverse and antibiotic-naïve microbiomes may play a role in Amerindians’ markedly lower rates of allergies, asthma, atopic disease and chronic conditions like Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The successful gardener has always known you don’t need to master the science of the soil, which is yet another hotbed of microbial fermentation, in order to nourish and nurture it. You just need to know what it likes to eat — basically, organic matter — and how, in a general way, to align your interests with the interests of the microbes and the plants. The gardener also discovers that, when pathogens or pests appear, chemical interventions “work,” that is, solve the immediate problem, but at a cost to the long-term health of the soil and the whole garden. The drive for absolute control leads to unanticipated forms of disorder.

This, it seems to me, is pretty much where we stand today with respect to our microbiomes — our teeming, quasi-wilderness. We don’t know a lot, but we probably know enough to begin taking better care of it. We have a pretty good idea of what it likes to eat, and what strong chemicals do to it. We know all we need to know, in other words, to begin, with modesty, to tend the unruly garden within.

Psychobiotics - gut bacteria changing our brains?

Walking through the aisles of my local health food store, the Williamson Street Co-op, I’ve often been tempted by the claims of exotic yoghurts and “probiotic” drinks like Kefir, that contain strains of Lactobacillus and a number of other “good” bacteria. It turns out a number of these bugs produce and release into our gut neuroactive compounds such as GABA, an inhibitory neurotransmitter, and serotonin, a mood regulator. Dinan et al. do a review article on what they term psychobiotics (organisms that alleviate psychiatric illness)

Here, we define a psychobiotic as a live organism that, when ingested in adequate amounts, produces a health benefit in patients suffering from psychiatric illness. As a class of probiotic, these bacteria are capable of producing and delivering neuroactive substances such as gamma-aminobutyric acid and serotonin, which act on the brain-gut axis. Preclinical evaluation in rodents suggests that certain psychobiotics possess antidepressant or anxiolytic activity. Effects may be mediated via the vagus nerve, spinal cord, or neuroendocrine systems. So far, psychobiotics have been most extensively studied in a liaison psychiatric setting in patients with irritable bowel syndrome, where positive benefits have been reported for a number of organisms including Bifidobacterium infantis. Evidence is emerging of benefits in alleviating symptoms of depression and in chronic fatigue syndrome. Such benefits may be related to the anti-inflammatory actions of certain psychobiotics and a capacity to reduce hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity. Results from large scale placebo-controlled studies are awaited.

Three psychological regions of the U.S. - economic, health, social, political correlates

Rentfrow and collaborators probe the possibility of dividing regions of the United States, not in terms of traditional social and economic indicators, but in terms of psychological characteristics instead. It seems reasonable that psychological factors would underlie higher level outcomes such as social and economic indicators.

...the present work aimed to determine whether it is possible to construct a map of the United States based entirely on psychological characteristics, in this case personality traits. What would such a map look like? And how would its individual regions vary in terms of key political, economic, social, and health (PESH) metrics known to vary geographically within countries?

The analysis was at a state level, covered data obtained in many studies for millions of people, and the article has mind-numbing detail on statistical analysis of these studies. Just to cut to the chase, I though it would be interesting to show their final summary and graphic.

The maps displayed show the geographical concentrations of the personality clusters across the United States. What is especially striking is that each of the personality clusters formed a distinctive geographical pattern. Cluster 1 (Friendly & Conventional) comprises states predominantly in the north central Great Plains and in the South. States in the Mountain, Pacific Coast, Mid-Atlantic, and New England regions were the least similar to this particular cluster. States predominantly in the West and some along the Eastern Seaboard were prototypical of Cluster 2 (Relaxed & Creative), whereas most of the states in the Midwest, Great Plains, and Gulf Coast were most different from this cluster. Finally, states in New England and the Middle Atlantic were prototypical of Cluster 3 (Temperamental & Uninhibited), whereas states in the Southeast, Great Plains, and Mountain region were not members of this cluster.

Imaging the the updating of true and false memories.

When we recall, or reactivate a memory, we render it susceptible to alterations such as incorporating relevant new information, so that it might be then stored again in an altered form. Schacter and collaborators at Harvard show show more of what is going on in our brains as reactivation-induced updating both enhances and distorts memory. This process has important implications for understanding the unreliability of eyewitness memories. Here is their abstract:

We remember a considerable number of personal experiences because we are frequently reminded of them, a process known as memory reactivation. Although memory reactivation helps to stabilize and update memories, reactivation may also introduce distortions if novel information becomes incorporated with memory. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural mechanisms mediating reactivation-induced updating in memory for events experienced during a museum tour. During scanning, participants were shown target photographs to reactivate memories from the museum tour followed by a novel lure photograph from an alternate tour. Later, participants were presented with target and lure photographs and asked to determine whether the photographs showed a stop they visited during the tour. We used a subsequent memory analysis to examine neural recruitment during reactivation that was associated with later true and false memories. We predicted that the quality of reactivation, as determined by online ratings of subjective recollection, would increase subsequent true memories but also facilitate incorporation of the lure photograph, thereby increasing subsequent false memories. The fMRI results revealed that the quality of reactivation modulated subsequent true and false memories via recruitment of left posterior parahippocampal, bilateral retrosplenial, and bilateral posterior inferior parietal cortices. However, the timing of neural recruitment and the way in which memories were reactivated contributed to differences in whether memory reactivation led to distortions or not. These data reveal the neural mechanisms recruited during memory reactivation that modify how memories will be subsequently retrieved, supporting the flexible and dynamic aspects of memory.

Naked bodies and mind perception.

Numerous studies have found that viewing people’s bodies, as opposed to their faces, makes us judge them as less intelligent, ambitious, likable, and competent. Kurt Gray, Paul Bloom, and collaborators have published a neat study in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that shows further than naked bodies are viewed as having less purposeful agency, but stronger feelings and emotional responses They obtained this result by questioning subjects who were shown pictures of 30 porn stars, with each star represented in an identical pose in two photographs, one naked and the other fully dressed. (Simply revealing more flesh by something as simple as taking off a sweater also could change the way a mind was perceived.)  Here is their abstract:

According to models of objectification, viewing someone as a body induces de-mentalization, stripping away their psychological traits. Here evidence is presented for an alternative account, where a body focus does not diminish the attribution of all mental capacities but, instead, leads perceivers to infer a different kind of mind. Drawing on the distinction in mind perception between agency and experience, it is found that focusing on someone's body reduces perceptions of agency (self-control and action) but increases perceptions of experience (emotion and sensation). These effects were found when comparing targets represented by both revealing versus nonrevealing pictures (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or by simply directing attention toward physical characteristics (Experiment 2). The effect of a body focus on mind perception also influenced moral intuitions, with those represented as a body seen to be less morally responsible (i.e., lesser moral agents) but more sensitive to harm (i.e., greater moral patients; Experiments 5 and 6). These effects suggest that a body focus does not cause objectification per se but, instead, leads to a redistribution of perceived mind.

Below I include one graphic showing pictures and data from experiment 3, in which subjects were shown naked or clothed people and than asked to rate the person's mental capacities by answering 12 questions with the following beginning: “Compared to the average person, how much is this person capable of X?” In the place of “X” were six agency-related words (self-control, acting morally, planning, communication, memory, and thought) and six experience-related words (feeling pain, feeling pleasure, feeling desire, feeling fear, feeling rage, feeling joy).

Pictures and data from Experiment 3. Ratings of agency and experience for clothed and naked portraits. Error bars are ±1 SE. From XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits, by T. Greenfield-Sanders and G. Vidal, 2004, pp. 14, 15, 18–21, 30, 31, 44, 45, 80–85, 92, 93, 102, 103.

Unconscious, not conscious, attitudes predict relationship success.

There has been some recent criticism of 'priming" experiments, in which subliminal presentation, particularly of emotional, stimuli is said to influence the outcome of a decision (see my Nov. 12 post). This is not to be confused with unconscious emotional attitudes, which indeed can be a variance with consciously expressed opinions. McNulty et al. do a nice demonstration of this effect, in showing that 'gut feelings' (implicit attitudes) are a better predictor of success in a marriage than explicit attitudes. They measured explicit and implicit attitudes of newlywed couples toward one another twice a year for 4 years. Over time, the implicit or unaware evaluations of the relationship predicted changes of marital satisfaction, whereas the explicit or conscious evaluations did not.

From their introductory explanation:

The explicit measure was an oft-used semantic differential that asked spouses to report the extent to which they would describe their marriage using 15 pairs of opposing adjectives (e.g., “good” versus “bad,” “satisfied” versus “dissatisfied”). The implicit measure was a version of an associative priming task that required spouses to indicate as quickly as possible the valence of positively and negatively valenced words after being exposed to 300-ms primes of photographs of their partner and various control individuals. An index of spouses’ automatic attitudes was formed by subtracting the time it took them to indicate the valence of the positive words from the time it took them to indicate the valence of the negative words. Both attitude indexes were standardized before analyses. Higher scores on both measures indicate more positive attitudes.

Here is the abstract of the article:

For decades, social psychological theories have posited that the automatic processes captured by implicit measures have implications for social outcomes. Yet few studies have demonstrated any long-term implications of automatic processes, and some scholars have begun to question the relevance and even the validity of these theories. At baseline of our longitudinal study, 135 newlywed couples (270 individuals) completed an explicit measure of their conscious attitudes toward their relationship and an implicit measure of their automatic attitudes toward their partner. They then reported their marital satisfaction every 6 months for the next 4 years. We found no correlation between spouses’ automatic and conscious attitudes, which suggests that spouses were unaware of their automatic attitudes. Further, spouses’ automatic attitudes, not their conscious ones, predicted changes in their marital satisfaction, such that spouses with more positive automatic attitudes were less likely to experience declines in marital satisfaction over time.

Digital Passivity

This piece by Jaron Lanier is well worth reading. A few clips:

I fear that 2013 will be remembered as a tragic and dark year in the digital universe, despite the fact that a lot of wonderful advances took place.

It was the year in which tablets became ubiquitous and advanced gadgets like 3-D printers and wearable interfaces emerged as pop phenomena; all great fun. Our gadgets have widened access to our world. We now regularly communicate with people we would not have been aware of before the networked age. We can find information about almost anything, any time.

But 2013 was also the year in which we became aware of the corner we’ve backed ourselves into. We learned — through the leaks of Edward J. Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, and the work of investigative journalists — how much our gadgets and our digital networks are being used to spy on us by ultra-powerful, remote organizations. We are being dissected more than we dissect...I wish I could separate the two big trends of the year in computing — the cool gadgets and the revelations of digital spying — but I cannot.

...tablets do something unforeseen: They enforce a new power structure. Unlike a personal computer, a tablet runs only programs and applications approved by a central commercial authority. You control the data you enter into a PC, while data entered into a tablet is often managed by someone else...Steve Jobs...declared that personal computers were now ‘‘trucks’’ — tools for working-class guys in T-shirts and visors, but not for upwardly mobile cool people. The implication was that upscale consumers would prefer status and leisure to influence or self-determination.

To be free is to have a private zone in which you can be alone with your thoughts and experiments. That is where you differentiate yourself and grow your personal value. When you carry around a smartphone with a GPS and camera and constantly pipe data to a computer owned by a corporation paid by advertisers to manipulate you, you are less free. Not only are you benefiting the corporation and the advertisers, you are also accepting an assault on your free will, bit by bit.

Childhood poverty changes adult brain emotion regulation pathways.

Kim et al. add sobering detail to the story of how the chronic stress experienced by children in poverty correlates with long term change in the emotion regulation pathways of those children when they become adults. Controlling our emotions depends on the ability of portions of our prefrontal cortex to suppress activation of our amygdala's reactivity. Apparently chronic stress in childhood blocks normal development of this inhibition. Here is the authors' statement of the significance of their work:

Childhood poverty has been linked to emotion dysregulation, which is further associated with negative physical and psychological health in adulthood. The current study provides evidence of prospective associations between childhood poverty and adult neural activity during effortful attempts to regulate negative emotion. Adults with lower family income at age 9 exhibited reduced ventrolateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity and failure to suppress amygdala activation at age 24. Chronic stressor exposure across childhood mediated the relations between family income at age 9 and prefrontal cortex activity. The concurrent adult income, on the other hand, was not associated with neural activity. The information on the developmental timing of poverty effects and neural mechanisms may inform early interventions aimed at reducing health disparities.

Do you use your head or follow your heart?

Fetterman and Robsinon do a piece of work that tries to provide evidence of what we all commonly suppose: that where we physically locate our self (head or heart) predicts aspects of personality such as rationality versus emotionality, interpersonal warmth versus distance, etc. The kind of work derives from the Lakoff and Johnson studies on embodied cognition - how conceptual metaphors guide thought, emotion, and behavior. The experimental subjects were the usual cohort (112 total, 47 female) of college undergraduates seeking psychology laboratory credit, who were asked "Irrespective of what you know about biology, which body part do you more closely associate with your self? (choose one)." A bit more detail is given, but this is apparently how heart and head types were chosen. I'm going to spare you the details of the numbered experiments that are mentioned, and just note the abstract:

The head is thought to be rational and cold, whereas the heart is thought to be emotional and warm. In 8 studies (total N = 725), we pursued the idea that such body metaphors are widely consequential. Study 1 introduced a novel individual difference variable, one asking people to locate the self in the head or the heart. Irrespective of sex differences, head-locators characterized themselves as rational, logical, and interpersonally cold, whereas heart-locators characterized themselves as emotional, feminine, and interpersonally warm (Studies 1–3). Study 4 showed that head-locators were more accurate in answering general knowledge questions and had higher grade point averages, and Study 5 showed that heart-locators were more likely to favor emotional over rational considerations in moral decision making. Study 6 linked self-locations to reactivity phenomena in daily life—for example, heart-locators experienced greater negative emotion on high stressor days. In Study 7, we manipulated attention to the head versus the heart and found that head-pointing facilitated intellectual performance, whereas heart-pointing led to emotional decision making. Study 8 replicated Study 3’s findings with a nearly year-long delay between the self-location and outcome measures. The findings converge on the importance of head–heart metaphors for understanding individual differences in cognition, emotion, and performance.

Homage to idleness.

All of a sudden this past Saturday morning there was a subtle "poof" from somewhere in my now-cyborg body and it just started thinking and writing again, most likely because its preoccupation with pain was decreasing.

I found myself savoring the period of idleness mandated by having both medial knee joints replaced, and so felt a resonance with this opinion piece by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins "Homage to the Idols of Idleness."

Our struggle against the clock is ancient. As far back as the 2nd century B.C., the Roman playwright Plautus lamented, “The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!” as he railed against the city’s central sundial, which served to “cut and hack my days so wretchedly.” Thousands of years later, what would Plautus make of this ringing, dinging world full of productivity apps that hack ever deeper into our days and nights?

Devices that constantly keep us on course, fixed in place and in time — from the GPS to Siri — ruin our ability to get lost, eradicating randomness and its magic in their wake. Perhaps no one knew this better than France’s early-19th century flâneurs, the idle walkers who happily unspooled their days into the unknown, or the flâneurs’ lowbrow American confreres, the tramp poets of the early 20th century, who surrendered to their surroundings with even more conviction than time-bound monks. In the summer of 1912, the poet Vachel Lindsay set off tramping in a corduroy suit, walking and “meditating on the ways of Destiny,” while preaching the “Gospel of Beauty” to everyone he met...

Our worship of time-management denies the courage these aimless wanderers and idlers demonstrated when stepping out of time. They made the crucial tradeoff: reduced output for liberation. When he died, Henry David Thoreau had published only two books, and “Walden,” then out of print, had been only moderately successful. In the Massachusetts woods, he not only sought solitude, but followed an utterly unconventional timetable, hoeing his beans at 5 a.m. and quitting by noon in order to pursue “other affairs,” like befriending squirrels or lounging next to a spring while reading Homer or the Bhagavad Gita. He chose to “live on the stretch” in order to better savor every moment. “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”

The stupefying modern obsession with productivity denies the whimsy and the freedom that living fully demands. We must dare to relax our grip on time for a day, or even for an hour, throwing clocks, watches and iPhones over the housetops, untethering ourselves solely for the thrill of not knowing what happens next.

Still alive....

...but in no mood to think or write. 4 hours of rehab exercises every day.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!