Musical training accelerates cortical thickness maturation.

Hudziak et al. have examined a database of MRI scans of 232 youths ranging from 6 to 18 years of age, obtained over a period of years. Their analysis revealed that music training was associated with an increased rate of cortical thickness maturation.  Clips from their discussion and a figure:

Music training was associated with the rate of cortical thickness maturation in a number of brain areas distributed throughout the right premotor and primary cortices, the left primary and supplementary motor cortices, bilateral parietal cortices, bilateral orbitofrontal cortices, as well as bilateral parahippocampal gyri. Our finding that music training was associated with cortical thickness development in the premotor and primary motor cortices is not surprising, given that both regions contribute to the control and execution of movement.

Music training was also found to influence cortical thickness maturation within aspects of the DLPFC. Myriad imaging and neuropsychological studies have implicated the DLPFC in aspects of executive functioning, including working memory, attentional control, as well as organization and planning for the future. Interestingly, developmental structural neuroimaging studies have shown that participants with quantitatively higher scores on attention problems exhibit delayed cortical thickness maturation in portions of the DLPFC as well as other cortical regions.

Brain areas where local cortical thickness is associated with the “Age × Years of Playing” interaction (N = 232; 334 time points)

Judging and adapting to norm violations engage different brain regions.

Gu et al. find that our insula is critical for learning to adapt when reality deviates from norm expectations, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is important for valuation of fairness during social exchange.

Social norms and their enforcement are fundamental to human societies. The ability to detect deviations from norms and to adapt to norms in a changing environment is therefore important to individuals' normal social functioning. Previous neuroimaging studies have highlighted the involvement of the insular and ventromedial prefrontal (vmPFC) cortices in representing norms. However, the necessity and dissociability of their involvement remain unclear. Using model-based computational modeling and neuropsychological lesion approaches, we examined the contributions of the insula and vmPFC to norm adaptation in seven human patients with focal insula lesions and six patients with focal vmPFC lesions, in comparison with forty neurologically intact controls and six brain-damaged controls. There were three computational signals of interest as participants played a fairness game (ultimatum game): sensitivity to the fairness of offers, sensitivity to deviations from expected norms, and the speed at which people adapt to norms. Significant group differences were assessed using bootstrapping methods. Patients with insula lesions displayed abnormally low adaptation speed to norms, yet detected norm violations with greater sensitivity than controls. Patients with vmPFC lesions did not have such abnormalities, but displayed reduced sensitivity to fairness and were more likely to accept the most unfair offers. These findings provide compelling computational and lesion evidence supporting the necessary, yet dissociable roles of the insula and vmPFC in norm adaptation in humans: the insula is critical for learning to adapt when reality deviates from norm expectations, and that the vmPFC is important for valuation of fairness during social exchange.

Subjective status shapes political preferences.

Brown-Iannuzzi et al. suggest that people's subjective perception of their socioeconomic status (SES) has a large influence on whether they support wealth redistribution as a remedy for increasing economic inequality in America. This is distinct from attitudes based on economic ideologies and economic self-interest. Here is their abstract, followed by their description of their studies:

Economic inequality in America is at historically high levels. Although most Americans indicate that they would prefer greater equality, redistributive policies aimed at reducing inequality are frequently unpopular. Traditional accounts posit that attitudes toward redistribution are driven by economic self-interest or ideological principles. From a social psychological perspective, however, we expected that subjective comparisons with other people may be a more relevant basis for self-interest than is material wealth. We hypothesized that participants would support redistribution more when they felt low than when they felt high in subjective status, even when actual resources and self-interest were held constant. Moreover, we predicted that people would legitimize these shifts in policy attitudes by appealing selectively to ideological principles concerning fairness. In four studies, we found correlational (Study 1) and experimental (Studies 2–4) evidence that subjective status motivates shifts in support for redistributive policies along with the ideological principles that justify them.

In Study 1, we measured subjective and objective SES and predicted that higher subjective SES would be associated with greater opposition to redistributive policies, independently of objective SES. In Study 2, we manipulated subjective SES, hypothesizing that participants induced to feel high status would be less supportive of redistribution and would endorse a more conservative ideology to justify that position than would participants induced to feel low status. In Study 3, we gained greater experimental control by creating an economic game in which players earned money and a portion of the profits of high earners were redistributed to low earners. We manipulated how well participants performed relative to other players, and we predicted that players who performed better would support less redistribution and would justify their preferences on the basis of ideological principles. In Study 4, we sought to replicate this finding and investigated whether the manipulation of subjective status led high-status participants to perceive other participants who disagreed with them as biased by self-interest. Together, these studies investigated whether subjective status may lead to political division.

[The results provide evidence] that perceptions of relative status can cause changes in political preferences. In Study 1, feeling higher in relative status was associated with lower support for redistribution. In Study 2, feeling higher in status caused reduced support for redistribution. In Study 3, we manipulated relative status in the context of an economic game and obtained similar results. Although participants could not profit from their recommendations, they recommended rule changes to reduce redistribution when they believed they had outperformed most other players. These changes were accompanied by shifts in construals of what counts as fair. Study 4 replicated these effects and showed that participants’ status affected their perceptions of bias in another player. High-status participants thought a player who recommended increased redistribution was more biased by self-interest than a player who recommended cutting redistribution. Together, these results suggest that subjective feelings of status can drive opinions toward redistribution, along with ideological views that justify those positions. An implication of the present work is that growing subjective perceptions of class differences may drive increased political polarization.

We can see in the infrared!

The major part of my professional life was spent doing research on how the rod cells in our retinas change light into a nerve signal. (I just got a request from ResearchGate, a site on which scientists list their work, suggesting that I upload another of my old vision articles, in this case one that appeared in Nature - in 1965 - 50 years ago! - titled "Reaction of the Rhodopsin Chromophore with Sodium Borohydride".) Even though for the past 20 years or so I have focused on the topics covered by MindBlog I occasionally see a vision article that takes me back to 'the old days'. A colleague from those days (Krzysztof Palczewski) and collaborators have recently done a nice piece of work demonstrating that we can actually expand our vision beyond the normal "visible" range of 400 (blue) to 720 (red) nanometer (nm) wavelengths into the higher frequency (lower energy) infrared regions emitted by infrared lasers. It turns out that the Rhodopsin Chromophore of my article above, retinal, which normally has its shape changed (isomerized) by absorbing one photon of visible light, can be activated by a two-photon chromophore isomerization, especially at wavelengths above 900 nm. From their significance and abstract statements:

This study resolves a long-standing question about the ability of humans to perceive near infrared radiation (IR) and identifies a mechanism driving human IR vision. A few previous reports and our expanded psychophysical studies here reveal that humans can detect IR at wavelengths longer than 1,000 nm and perceive it as visible light, a finding that has not received a satisfactory physical explanation. We show that IR light activates photoreceptors through a nonlinear optical process.

Vision relies on photoactivation of visual pigments in rod and cone photoreceptor cells of the retina. The human eye structure and the absorption spectra of pigments limit our visual perception of light. Our visual perception is most responsive to stimulating light in the 400- to 720-nm (visible) range. First, we demonstrate by psychophysical experiments that humans can perceive infrared laser emission as visible light. Moreover, we show that mammalian photoreceptors can be directly activated by near infrared light with a sensitivity that paradoxically increases at wavelengths above 900 nm, and display quadratic dependence on laser power, indicating a nonlinear optical process. Biochemical experiments with rhodopsin, cone visual pigments, and a chromophore model compound 11-cis-retinyl-propylamine Schiff base demonstrate the direct isomerization of visual chromophore by a two-photon chromophore isomerization. Indeed, quantum mechanics modeling indicates the feasibility of this mechanism. Together, these findings clearly show that human visual perception of near infrared light occurs by two-photon isomerization of visual pigments.

Steven Pinker's "Sense of Style"

I've just read through Steven Pinker's new book "The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century." It is a lucid exposition, and I wish that I were disciplined enough to heed its exhortations on substance and clarity. I can't resist passing on the following clips from Chapter 2, the second paragraph in particular grabs me.:

Writing is an unnatural act. As Charles Darwin observed, “Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, whereas no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.” The spoken word is older than our species, and the instinct for language allows children to engage in articulate conversation years before they enter a schoolhouse. But the written word is a recent invention that has left no trace in our genome and must be laboriously acquired throughout childhood and beyond.

At the time that we write, the reader exists only in our imaginations. Writing is above all an act of pretense. We have to visualize ourselves in some kind of conversation, or correspondence, or oration, or soliloquy, and put words into the mouth of the little avatar who represents us in this simulated world. The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments , is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate.

Which simulation should a writer immerse himself in when composing a piece for a more generic readership, such as an essay, an article, a review, an editorial, a newsletter, or a blog post? The literary scholars Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner have singled out one model of prose as an aspiration for such writers today. They call it classic style, and explain it in a wonderful little book called Clear and Simple as the Truth.

The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it. That is because the reader is competent and can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view. The writer and the reader are equals, and the process of directing the reader’s gaze takes the form of a conversation.

The signature of consciousness in resting-state brain activity.

I've done a number of posts on attentional or salience versus default mode long-range connectivity networks in our brains (for a review see my lecture.) They correspond roughly to supporting outward task oriented processes versus inward processes such as daydreaming or imagining. Activity in these networks is thought to be a marker of consciousness, but this idea conflicts with observations that long-range functional connectivities persist even after loss of consciousness caused by anesthesia, or in vegetative state patients. This post is to point to recent work by Dehaene and collaborators showing clear difference in the behavior of long-range networks in awake and anesthetized monkeys. Their abstract and statement of significance, followed by a movie showing whole brain connectivity patterns at different time points in the awake monkey.

Significance

What are the origins of resting-state functional connectivity patterns? One dominating view is that they index ongoing cognitive processes. However, this conclusion is in conflict with studies showing that long-range functional connectivity persists after loss of consciousness, possibly reflecting structural connectivity maps. In this work we respond to this question showing that in fact both sources have a clear and separable contribution to resting-state patterns. We show that under anesthesia, the dominating functional configurations have low information capacity and lack negative correlations. Importantly, they are rigid, tied to the anatomical map. Conversely, wakefulness is characterized by the dynamical exploration of a rich, flexible repertoire of functional configurations. These dynamical properties constitute a signature of consciousness.

Abstract

At rest, the brain is traversed by spontaneous functional connectivity patterns. Two hypotheses have been proposed for their origins: they may reflect a continuous stream of ongoing cognitive processes as well as random fluctuations shaped by a fixed anatomical connectivity matrix. Here we show that both sources contribute to the shaping of resting-state networks, yet with distinct contributions during consciousness and anesthesia. We measured dynamical functional connectivity with functional MRI during the resting state in awake and anesthetized monkeys. Under anesthesia, the more frequent functional connectivity patterns inherit the structure of anatomical connectivity, exhibit fewer small-world properties, and lack negative correlations. Conversely, wakefulness is characterized by the sequential exploration of a richer repertoire of functional configurations, often dissimilar to anatomical structure, and comprising positive and negative correlations among brain regions. These results reconcile theories of consciousness with observations of long-range correlation in the anesthetized brain and show that a rich functional dynamics might constitute a signature of consciousness, with potential clinical implications for the detection of awareness in anesthesia and brain-lesioned patients.

Dynamical connectivity matrix - red lines mark positive correlations, and blue lines mark negative correlations.

Body movements shape brain representation of musical rhythms.

Entraining our movement to music is a universal human behavior. The enhancement of social cohesion by group movements in synchrony with the rhythms of chants and songs could have had an adaptive value in human evolution. Chemin et al. have done the interesting experiment of recording EEG evoked potentials caused by study participants listening to an ambiguous rhythm, before and after a body-movement session designed to disambiguate the perception of this rhythm by favoring a specific meter (e.g., two beats per measure vs. three beats per measure). They found that the brain responses to the rhythm after body movement were significantly enhanced at frequencies related to the meter to which the participants had moved. Here is their abstract:

It is increasingly recognized that motor routines dynamically shape the processing of sensory inflow (e.g., when hand movements are used to feel a texture or identify an object). In the present research, we captured the shaping of auditory perception by movement in humans by taking advantage of a specific context: music. Participants listened to a repeated rhythmical sequence before and after moving their bodies to this rhythm in a specific meter. We found that the brain responses to the rhythm (as recorded with electroencephalography) after body movement were significantly enhanced at frequencies related to the meter to which the participants had moved. These results provide evidence that body movement can selectively shape the subsequent internal representation of auditory rhythms.

An Example of Publication Bias - Cognitive Advantage in Bilingualism

MindBlog has done several posts on experiments that reinforce what has become the conventional wisdom regarding bilingualism: that it enhances our executive control faculties. De Bruin et al., noting that they themselves had chosen to report positive results supporting this conclusion, but had not followed through on negative data (the file drawer effect), thought to do a systematic analysis of the publication fate of experiments with positive, mixed, or negative outcomes. They searched for conference abstracts on bilingualism and executive control in 169 conferences (31 different national and international meetings) organized between 1999 and 2012, and identified 128 abstracts (presented at 52 different conferences) that focused on bilingualism and executive control. Their result:

Sixty-eight percent of the studies that clearly found a bilingual advantage were published, compared with 50% of the studies that found mixed results supporting the bilingual-advantage theories, 39% of the studies that found mixed results partly challenging those theories, and 29% of the studies that found no differences between monolinguals and bilinguals or found a bilingual disadvantage. On the whole, 63% of the studies supporting the bilingual advantage were published, compared with only 36% of the studies that challenged it.

From the authors discussion:

This difference in publication percentage based on the outcomes of the study could be the result of a bias during several steps of the publication process: Authors, reviewers, and editors can decide to submit or accept only studies that showed positive results. In the first step of the publication process, the file-drawer problem could play an important role in the observed publication bias. Authors could decide not to publish studies with null or mixed results, or they could choose to submit their results only partially, for example, by leaving out tasks that did not show an effect of bilingualism. The article by Treccani et al. (2009)[Treccani is a co-author of the current paper] is an example of the file-drawer problem, as it excluded the experiments that did not show an effect of bilingualism.

On the next level, reviewers and editors might reject manuscripts reporting null, negative, or mixed results more often than manuscripts reporting positive effects. This rejection is often based on the argument that null effects are difficult to interpret, or the result of poor stimulus design... Mahoney (1977) asked journal reviewers to referee manuscripts reporting positive, negative, mixed, or null results with identical methodological procedures. Although the methodology was the same, reviewers scored the manuscripts reporting positive results as methodologically better than the manuscripts reporting negative or mixed results. For manuscripts with positive results, reviewers usually recommended acceptance with moderate revisions. For manuscripts with negative results, however, their usual recommendation was major revision or rejection. Manuscripts with mixed results were mostly rejected.

Watching brain oscillations drive perception.

Are the electrical oscillations observed in EEG recordings as we perceive images simply correlations, reflecting brain processes driving our visual experience, or are the oscillations themselves causal, driving the visual experience? Helfrich et al. address this basic question in a clever experiment in which they force brain oscillations of the left and right visual hemispheres into synchrony using transcranial alternating current stimulation. This causes human subjects to more often perceive an ambiguous figure in one of its perceptual instantiations, showing that the oscillations are driving the visual experience, not vice versa. Their summary:

Brain activity is profoundly rhythmic and exhibits seemingly random fluctuations across a very broad frequency range (less than 0.1 Hz to greater than 600 Hz). Recently, it has become evident that these brain rhythms are not just a generic sign of the brain-at-work, but actually reflect a highly flexible mechanism for information encoding and transfer. In particular, it has been suggested that oscillatory synchronization between different areas of the cortex underlies the establishment of task-relevant networks. Here, we investigated whether gamma-band synchronization (~40 Hz) is causally involved in the integration between the two brain hemispheres of alternating visual tokens into a coherent motion percept. We utilized transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), a novel non-invasive brain stimulation technique, which allows frequency-specific entrainment of cortical areas. In a combined tACS-electroencephalography study, we selectively up- and down-regulated interhemispheric coherence, resulting in a directed bias in apparent motion perception: Increased interhemispheric connectivity sustained the horizontal motion percept, while decreased connectivity reinforced the vertical percept. Thus, our data suggest that the level of interhemispheric gamma-band coherence directly influenced the instantaneous motion percept. From these results, we conclude that synchronized neuronal activity is essential for conscious perception and cognition.

Perceived control promotes persistence and influences brain response to setbacks

From Bhanji et al:

Highlights

•We report two distinct neural mechanisms for persistence through adversity 

•Perceiving control over setbacks increases persistence 

•Striatum activity relates to persisting after setbacks by correcting mistakes 

•Ventromedial prefrontal activity mediates effects of negative affect on persistence

Summary

How do people cope with setbacks and persist with their goals? We examine how perceiving control over setbacks alters neural processing in ways that increase persistence through adversity. For example, a student might retake a class if initial failure was due to controllable factors (e.g., studying) but give up if failure was uncontrollable (e.g., unfair exam questions). Participants persisted more when they perceived control over setbacks, and when they experienced increased negative affect to setbacks. Consistent with previous observations involving negative outcomes, ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal (VMPFC) activity was decreased in response to setbacks. Critically, these structures represented distinct neural mechanisms for persistence through adversity. Ventral striatum signal change to controllable setbacks correlated with greater persistence, whereas VMPFC signal change to uncontrollable setbacks mediated the relationship between increased negative affect and persistence. Taken together, the findings highlight how people process setbacks and adapt their behavior for future goal pursuit.

From Whalen and Kelly's review :

The vmPFC is necessary for regulating our emotional responses...in the present study, the negative affect change is the catalyst that kicks vmPFC into a higher gear and effects adaptive change (i.e., persistence)...when negative affect accompanies uncontrollable setbacks, as is often the case, the vmPFC activity is necessary to adapt to the emotional reaction and, in so doing, preserve persistence.

The ventral striatum on the other hand is important for signaling prediction errors when behavioral outcomes do not match our expectations...when we believe we have control over situations, the ventral striatum can use value signals to motivate future behavior...this striatal effect is problem focused compared to the prefrontal effect that is more emotion focused.

A fetching point about Paul Whalen's and William Kelley's review is that it starts with the example of two professors currently employed at Dartmouth College.

One applied, and he was hired on his very first try (we’ll call him Bill in this example). Imagine that the other; well, he needed more chances before his eventual hire (we’ll call him P.W. to protect his identity). What dictates whether someone will persist when they encounter a setback? Is it the person who remains calm in the moment, not letting this single event rattle her? Or is it the person who reacts strongly to defeat and heavily reinvests in the project, determined to change things the next time? To borrow from Shakespeare, tell us where is persistence bred, or in the heart, or in the head (The Merchant of Venice, 3.2)? ...Bhanji and Delgado (2014) provide clear evidence of the latter.

Guess who Bill and P.W. actually are!

Another magic anti-aging compound?

Riluzole is a drug used to treat amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also studied for use in mood and anxiety disorders, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. It also can have some nasty side effects (nausea,weakness, decreased lung function).

 
Pereira et al. now show that it has a dramatic effect in preventing cognitive decline in aged rats:

The dementia of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) results primarily from degeneration of neurons that furnish glutamatergic corticocortical connections that subserve cognition. Although neuron death is minimal in the absence of AD, age-related cognitive decline does occur in animals as well as humans, and it decreases quality of life for elderly people. Age-related cognitive decline has been linked to synapse loss and/or alterations of synaptic proteins that impair function in regions such as the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. These synaptic alterations are likely reversible, such that maintenance of synaptic health in the face of aging is a critically important therapeutic goal. Here, we show that riluzole can protect against some of the synaptic alterations in hippocampus that are linked to age-related memory loss in rats. Riluzole increases glutamate uptake through glial transporters and is thought to decrease glutamate spillover to extrasynaptic NMDA receptors while increasing synaptic glutamatergic activity. Treated aged rats were protected against age-related cognitive decline displayed in nontreated aged animals. Memory performance correlated with density of thin spines on apical dendrites in CA1, although not with mushroom spines. Furthermore, riluzole-treated rats had an increase in clustering of thin spines that correlated with memory performance and was specific to the apical, but not the basilar, dendrites of CA1. Clustering of synaptic inputs is thought to allow nonlinear summation of synaptic strength. These findings further elucidate neuroplastic changes in glutamatergic circuits with aging and advance therapeutic development to prevent and treat age-related cognitive decline.

Human children conform to peers' behavior, but apes do not.

Haun and collaborators make the interesting observation that two year old human children will change a learned problem solving strategy on observing peers performing an alternative strategy; apes do not show this behavior.

All primates learn things from conspecifics socially, but it is not clear whether they conform to the behavior of these conspecifics—if conformity is defined as overriding individually acquired behavioral tendencies in order to copy peers’ behavior. In the current study, chimpanzees, orangutans, and 2-year-old human children individually acquired a problem-solving strategy. They then watched several conspecific peers demonstrate an alternative strategy. The children switched to this new, socially demonstrated strategy in roughly half of all instances, whereas the other two great-ape species almost never adjusted their behavior to the majority’s. In a follow-up study, children switched much more when the peer demonstrators were still present than when they were absent, which suggests that their conformity arose at least in part from social motivations. These results demonstrate an important difference between the social learning of humans and great apes, a difference that might help to account for differences in human and nonhuman cultures.

Personality and Ideology

I've done a number of posts (for example, here) pointing to work suggesting that differences in basic partially inherited neurocognitive traits (such as flexibility and openness versus caution and rule following) might underlie liberal versus conservative personalities. Malka et al. have done a cross national test, analyzing responses from more than 70,000 people from 51 countries to ask how a conservative personality style actually relates to cultural and economic attitudes. From their review of the work:

...we found that people with a conservative personality did indeed tend to adopt culturally conservative attitudes on matters like abortion, homosexuality and immigration. On this count, the rigidity of the right model seems to be valid.

But when it came to economic matters related to social welfare policy and economic intervention — the central feature of the left-right divide in much of the world — the results were far different. People with a conservative personality tended to lean slightly to the left...a conservative personality might actually pull people in two directions with respect to their economic attitudes. Prioritizing order and stability will lead to a yearning for the security that left-wing economic policies aim to provide.

This left leaning tendency can be extinguished, however, among people who are highly attentive to politics in countries in which left-right conflict is prominent, by political messaging that binds together right wing cultural and economic views under a broad "conservative" banner. This has nothing to do with psychological predispositions, and suggests that changing the packaging or messaging could change behaviors.

Subliminal Strengthening

Levy et al. make the interesting observation that presenting subliminal positive age stereotypes to older people has a greater effect than similar explicit interventions:

Negative age stereotypes that older individuals assimilate from their culture predict detrimental outcomes, including worse physical function. We examined, for the first time, whether positive age stereotypes, presented subliminally across multiple sessions in the community, would lead to improved outcomes. Each of 100 older individuals (age = 61–99 years, M = 81) was randomly assigned to an implicit-positive-age-stereotype-intervention group, an explicit-positive-age-stereotype-intervention group, a combined implicit- and explicit-positive-age-stereotype-intervention group, or a control group. Interventions occurred at four 1-week intervals. The implicit intervention strengthened positive age stereotypes, which strengthened positive self-perceptions of aging, which, in turn, improved physical function. The improvement in these outcomes continued for 3 weeks after the last intervention session. Further, negative age stereotypes and negative self-perceptions of aging were weakened. For all outcomes, the implicit intervention’s impact was greater than the explicit intervention’s impact. The physical-function effect of the implicit intervention surpassed a previous study’s 6-month-exercise-intervention’s effect with participants of similar ages. The current study’s findings demonstrate the potential of directing implicit processes toward physical-function enhancement over time.

The study they cite as showing less effect of exercise than subliminal priming used the same standard "Short Physical Performance Battery" to assess changes in physical ability caused by the interventions. This test assesses strength, gait, and balance by examining (a) time to rise from a chair and return to the seated position five times, (b) time to walk 8 feet, and (c) ability to stand with feet together in the side-by-side, semi-tandem, and tandem positions for 10 s. Possible scores range from 0 to 12, with a higher score indicating better physical performance. Older individuals who receive lower scores on this measure have increased risk of disability, nursing-home placement, and mortality.

Personality and immune system reactivity.

Vedhara et al. have examined the expression of inflammatory genes in 121 people who also took personality tests that rated the generally identified five major dimensions of human personality (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness). From the author's introduction:

...we hypothesized that pro-inflammatory gene expression would be up-regulated in extraverts and people with high levels of openness to experience (both of whom would be expected to experience elevated risk of injury/infection) and down-regulated in conscientious individuals with comparatively strong behavioural immune responses.

This is in fact what they found. From their discussion:

The present results identified systematic differences in leukocyte gene expression that correlate with individual differences on two major dimensions of human personality: Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Consistent with predictions from behavioural immune response theory, Extraversion was associated with up-regulated expression of pro-inflammatory genes, whereas Conscientiousness was associated with down-regulated expression of pro-inflammatory genes. These effects were independent of major health behavioural factors (BMI, smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity); independent of variations in leukocyte subset prevalence; independent of negative affect; independent of minor physical symptoms and related medications; and independent of demographic characteristics as well as other major dimensions of human personality. In contrast, none of the major personality dimensions was significantly associated with differential expression of the other primary gene module involved in the CTRA profile – antiviral and antibody-related transcripts. In the context of previous data linking Extraversion and Conscientiousness to health and longevity, the present functional genomics findings may provide new insights into the molecular basis for such relationships.

Their results do not support the model of neuroticism and negative affect generating a 'disease-prone personality.' Numerous other studies have correlated the trait of conscientiousness with longevity.

The unforeseen costs of extraordinary experiences.

Daniel Gilbert and his collaborators at Harvard have come up with yet another fascinating nugget on our human behaviors:

People seek extraordinary experiences—from drinking rare wines and taking exotic vacations to jumping from airplanes and shaking hands with celebrities. But are such experiences worth having? We found that participants thoroughly enjoyed having experiences that were superior to those had by their peers, but that having had such experiences spoiled their subsequent social interactions and ultimately left them feeling worse than they would have felt if they had had an ordinary experience instead. Participants were able to predict the benefits of having an extraordinary experience but were unable to predict the costs. These studies suggest that people may pay a surprising price for the experiences they covet most.

A bit from the introduction:

More than 600 people have paid a minimum of $250,000 for a seat on the world’s first commercial spacecraft, soon to be launched by Virgin Galactic. Their journey will last a few hours, but they will talk about it for years to come...Floating weightless for several minutes while gazing down at Earth is an experience that falls somewhere between delightful and dazzling, which is why so many people are willing to pay so much money to have it. The less obvious consequence is that such experiences can make the people who have them strangers to everyone else on earth—and, as a rule, earthlings do not always treat strangers so nicely. At worst, people may be envious and resentful of those who have had an extraordinary experience, and at best, they may find themselves with little to talk about. Indeed, when people interact, they typically discuss the things they have in common and an afternoon in orbit typically is not one of them. Extraordinary experiences are both different from and better than the experiences that most other people have, and being both alien and enviable is an unlikely recipe for popularity.

In one experiment subjects in groups watched a video (17 groups of 4 participants, each watching in their own cubicle - afterwards they were escorted to a room for 5 min of unstructured conversation. One of the participants in each group watched a video that was superior to the video watched by the others. Participants who had watched the superior movie felt more enjoyment just after the film, but felt excluded during a subsequent social interaction, and this left them feeling worse than participants who had had an ordinary experience instead. A second experiment showed that participants correctly predicted that the extraordinary experience would leave them feeling better than the ordinary experience would before the interaction, but failed to realize that it would leave them feeling worse after the interaction. In a final study participants were asked to estimate how the actual participants in Study 1 felt. The result found was that they did not expect the extraordinary experiencer to be excluded from the interaction, and they expected the extraordinary experiencer to feel better—not worse—than the ordinary experiencers.

From the summary:

Pleasures come in two varieties: the social and the nonsocial. A hallmark of the nonsocial pleasures—whether the cool tingle of Dom Pérignon or the hot snarl of a new Maserati—is that people adapt to them quickly, which is why such experiences are typically best when they are novel or rare. The social pleasures have a different appeal. People crave acceptance, belonging, and camaraderie, and the hallmark of these pleasures is that they come more readily to those who fit in than to those who stand out. The two varieties of pleasure give rise to a pair of incompatible desires: to do what other people have not yet done and to be just like everyone else. Satisfying the first of these desires can frustrate the second. When extraordinary experiences separate a person from others, these experiences may ultimately reclaim more joy than they provide.

Invunerablism

Todd May does a brief essay (coining the world “invulnerabilism”) that is yet another interesting take on an issue central to all our lives: Do what degree is it useful to psychologically armor ourselves from the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ - to have a strong psychological immune system, or an emotionally invulnerable self construal? The meditative practices of several traditions offer us a route into our brain’s ‘basement’, a closer approach to and experience of the machinery that generates all the stuff upstairs, our emotionally reactive immersed selves and personas (Buddhism, for example, offering us an end to suffering if we abandon our desires.) May suggests:

..the way to think about these things has less to do with the invulnerability promoted by the official doctrines, and more to do with, one might say, using these doctrines to take the edge off of vulnerability, to allow one to experience life without becoming overwhelmed or depressed or resentful or bitter, except perhaps at the extremity of loss. There is some combination of embedding oneself in the world in a vulnerable way and not being completely undone by that vulnerability that is pointed at, if not directly endorsed, by the official doctrines.

It seems to me that Taoism, Buddhism, Stoicism, etc. work not by making one invulnerable but rather by allowing one to step back from the immediacy of the situation so that the experience of pain or suffering is seen for what it is, precisely as part of a contingent process, a process that could have yielded a very different present but just happened to yield this one.

Another point would be the evolution of our social brain has resulted in a built in bias towards feeling the sort of vulnerability and bonding that sustains and defends social group identity. A group of floating detached Taoists isn't all that useful in intergroup conflicts. Finally, disciplines that result in maintaining emotional distance from others can also let atrophy the evolved neuroendocrine chemistries that can vitalize our physiology and longevity.

Is there a reason for everything? - Teleological reasoning about life events

Banerjee and Bloom  explore the view that the tendency to develop teleological beliefs about life events is a byproduct of certain universal social-cognitive biases, a cognitive byproduct of humans’ natural tendency to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design. Their detailed descriptions of the three studies noted in the abstract below (in the journal "Cognition") are difficult to summarize in this brief post, so I pass on just the highlights and abstract. Motivated readers can request a copy of the article from me.

Highlights

• We examine religious believers’ and non-believers’ belief in purpose in life events. 

• Mentalizing ability predicts the tendency to hold teleological beliefs about events. 

• Adults’ teleological beliefs about life events do not depend upon a belief in God. 

• The perception of purpose in events is rooted in universal social-cognitive biases.

Abstract

People often believe that significant life events happen for a reason. In three studies, we examined evidence for the view that teleological beliefs reflect a general cognitive bias to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that individual differences in mentalizing ability predicted both the tendency to believe in fate (Study 1) and to infer purposeful causes of one’s own life events (Study 2). In addition, people’s perception of purpose in life events was correlated with their teleological beliefs about nature, but this relationship was driven primarily by individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs (Study 3). Across all three studies, we found that while people who believe in God hold stronger teleological beliefs than those who do not, there is nonetheless evidence of teleological beliefs among non-believers, confirming that the perception of purpose in life events does not rely on theistic belief. These findings suggest that the tendency to perceive design and purpose in life events—while moderated by theistic belief—is not solely a consequence of culturally transmitted religious ideas. Rather, this teleological bias has its roots in certain more general social propensities.

Biological explanations for psychopathology decrease clinician empathy.

Lebowitz and Ahn find that clinicians become less, not more, empathetic with patients whose mental disorder is known to have a biological basis:

Mental disorders are increasingly understood in terms of biological mechanisms. We examined how such biological explanations of patients’ symptoms would affect mental health clinicians’ empathy—a crucial component of the relationship between treatment-providers and patients—as well as their clinical judgments and recommendations. In a series of studies, US clinicians read descriptions of potential patients whose symptoms were explained using either biological or psychosocial information. Biological explanations have been thought to make patients appear less accountable for their disorders, which could increase clinicians’ empathy. To the contrary, biological explanations evoked significantly less empathy. These results are consistent with other research and theory that has suggested that biological accounts of psychopathology can exacerbate perceptions of patients as abnormal, distinct from the rest of the population, meriting social exclusion, and even less than fully human. Although the ongoing shift toward biomedical conceptualizations has many benefits, our results reveal unintended negative consequences.

Cerebral coherence between communicators.

Stolk et al. have searched across the whole brain for a cerebral dynamics matching the behavioral dynamics of mutual understanding and note that brain activities in the right temporal lobes of individuals synchronize during communication in a way that reflects conceptualization of a signal's use apart from specific experiences of the signal:

How can we understand each other during communicative interactions? An influential suggestion holds that communicators are primed by each other’s behaviors, with associative mechanisms automatically coordinating the production of communicative signals and the comprehension of their meanings. An alternative suggestion posits that mutual understanding requires shared conceptualizations of a signal’s use, i.e., “conceptual pacts” that are abstracted away from specific experiences. Both accounts predict coherent neural dynamics across communicators, aligned either to the occurrence of a signal or to the dynamics of conceptual pacts. Using coherence spectral-density analysis of cerebral activity simultaneously measured in pairs of communicators, this study shows that establishing mutual understanding of novel signals synchronizes cerebral dynamics across communicators’ right temporal lobes. This interpersonal cerebral coherence occurred only within pairs with a shared communicative history, and at temporal scales independent from signals’ occurrences. These findings favor the notion that meaning emerges from shared conceptualizations of a signal’s use.

Neurobiology and the Humanities

I want to point to this open access article in Neuron by Semir Zeki, a well known visual neuroanatomist who has addressed in particular visual artists - who, in engaging representations of form and color, explore the brain with techniques that are unique to them. Here is an early clip from the relatively brief article, which I think you might enjoy reading, that proceeds to consider the experience, significance, and uses of beauty.:

Paul Cézanne’s preoccupation, and artistic experimentation, with how color modulates form is but a variant of the neurobiological question of how the separate representations of form and color are integrated in the brain to give us a unitary percept of both. The experiments of Picasso and Braque in the early, analytic, phase of cubism—of how a form maintains its identity in spite of wide variations in the context in which it is viewed—resolves itself scientifically into the neurobiological problem of form constancy. The quest of Piet Mondrian for the “constant truths concerning forms” is an artistic version of the question of what the neural building blocks of all forms are (often presumed to be the orientation-selective cells of the visual cortex), while kinetic art, which sought to represent motion artistically, reached conclusions that are consistent with conclusions reached later by neurobiology.

Origins of human altruism.

A number of studies in recent years have shown that 1- and 2-year-olds often provide help to novel individuals, and have generally been interpreted as suggesting that this tendency is innate, and unlikely to result from social interactions. Barragan and Dweck offer observations to the contrary, finding that very simple reciprocal social activities at these ages can elicit high degrees of altruism. The experiments involved reciprocal play (two individuals playing with one set of toys from a bag) or parallel play (two individuals playing separately with identical sets of toys taken from two bags.) Here is their abstract:

A very simple reciprocal activity elicited high degrees of altruism in 1- and 2-y-old children, whereas friendly but nonreciprocal activity yielded little subsequent altruism. In a second study, reciprocity with one adult led 1- and 2-y-olds to provide help to a new person. These results question the current dominant claim that social experiences cannot account for early occurring altruistic behavior. A third study, with preschool-age children, showed that subtle reciprocal cues remain potent elicitors of altruism, whereas a fourth study with preschoolers showed that even a brief reciprocal experience fostered children’s expectation of altruism from others. Collectively, the studies suggest that simple reciprocal interactions are a potent trigger of altruism for young children, and that these interactions lead children to believe that their relationships are characterized by mutual care and commitment.

Exercise and intermittent fasting improve brain plasticity and health

I thought it might be useful to point to this brief review by Praag et al. that references several recent pieces of work presented at a recent Soc. for Neuroscience Meeting symposium. The experiments indicate that exercise and intermittent energy restriction/fasting may optimize brain function and forestall metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases by enhancing neurogenesis, synaptic plasticity and neuronal stress robustness.  (Motivated readers can obtain the article from me.) Here is their central summary figure:

Exercise and IER/fasting exert complex integrated adaptive responses in the brain and peripheral tissues involved in energy metabolism. As described in the text, both exercise and IER enhance neuroplasticity and resistance of the brain to injury and disease. Some of the effects of exercise and IER on peripheral organs are mediated by the brain, including increased parasympathetic regulation of heart rate and increased insulin sensitivity of liver and muscle cells. In turn, peripheral tissues may respond to exercise and IER by producing factors that bolster neuronal bioenergetics and brain function. Examples include the following: mobilization of fatty acids in adipose cells and production of ketone bodies in the liver; production of muscle-derived neuroactive factors, such as irisin; and production of as yet unidentified neuroprotective “preconditioning factors.” Suppression of local inflammation in tissues throughout the body and the nervous system likely contributes to prevention and reversal of many different chronic disease processes.

Several articles on aging brains.

Talking about aging brains is sort of a downer, but it's something I feel like I want to do as I trek onward with open eyes from my current age of 72 years. So, pointers to three recent articles on brain changes in aging:

Douaud et al. characterize a common brain network linking development, aging, and vulnerability to disease. They show that the idea of brain decline mirroring brain development is correct. Analysis of structural brain images reveals that a network of mainly higher-order regions that develop relatively late during adolescence demonstrate accelerated degeneration in old age.

And, from Salami et al.:

Aging is accompanied by disruptive alterations in large-scale brain systems, such as the default mode network (DMN) and the associated hippocampus (HC) subsystem, which support higher cognitive functions. However, the exact form of DMN–HC alterations and concomitant memory deficits is largely unknown. We identified age-related decrements in resting-state functional connectivity of the cortical DMN, whereas elevated connectivity between the bilateral HC was found along with attenuated HC–cortical connectivity. Critically, elevated HC at rest restricts the degree to which HC interacts with other brain regions during memory tasks, and thus results in memory deficits. This study provides empirical evidence of how the relationship between the DMN and HC breaks down in aging and how such alterations underlie deficient mnemonic processing.

Finally, Yotsumoto et al. find white matter in the older brain is more plastic than in the younger brain. Its changes during learning a visual perceptual task are not observed when younger subjects learn the same task.

Exercise changes our muscle DNA

Following yesterday's post on changing gene expression with brain waves, I'll point to another bit of work on gene changing. Chemical changes to DNA, mainly methylation, can alter gene expression in response a number of environmental changes such as stress, diet, and pollutants. Reynolds points to work by Lindholm et al. now showing that exercise activates health enhancing genes by this epigenetic mechanism. They use the simple trick of measuring and comparing methylation of DNA in exercised and unexercised legs of single individuals (twentythree young subjects bicycled using only one leg, leaving the other unexercised, for three months. The pedaling was at a moderate pace for 45 min, four times per week for three months.) Not surprisingly, the exercised leg was more powerful, but in addition more than 5,000 sites on the genome of muscle cells from the exercised leg now featured new methylation patterns.

This work makes me wish I had a home kit for detecting methylation change in the DNA of my thumb muscles, which show dramatic changes in strength and size depending on how often and energetically I practice the piano.

A bit of science fiction...a brain implant that allows mind-controlled gene expression.

The experiments by Folcher et al. are done with optogenetic implants in mouse brains that are wirelessly controlled by human brain waves. This is the proof of concept step, preliminary to trying the implants in humans to control the expression of engineered light sensitive regulators of genes for therapeutic proteins. Here is their cartoon summary of the procedure:

The mind-controlled transgene expression device consisted of (a) an EEG headset that captured brain-wave activities (the encephalogram), identified mental state-specific electrical patterns (biofeedback, concentration, meditation) and processed discrete meditation-meter values (0–100; meditation-meter value plot), which were transmitted via Bluetooth to (b) the Arduino single-board microcontroller with a time-relay device and switching the (c) field generator ON and OFF. This BCI (a–c) controlled (d) the TC (c,d) of the field generator, which inductively coupled with the (d,e) receiver coil (RC) of the (e) wireless-powered optogenetic implant. (e) The NIR light LED illuminated the culture chamber of the wireless-powered optogenetic implant and programmed the designer cells to produce ​SEAP, which diffused through the semi-permeable membrane. The blood ​SEAP (human ​secreted alkaline phosphatase) levels of mice with subcutaneous wireless-powered optogenetic implants containing designer cells that were freely moving on the field generator could be modulated by the human subject’s mindset in a wireless, remote-controlled manner.

Impact of literacy on visual processing

From Pegado et al., a clear demonstration of how learning the act of reading enhances our visual processing:

How does learning to read affect visual processing? We addressed this issue by scanning adults who could not attend school during childhood and either remained illiterate or acquired partial literacy during adulthood (ex-illiterates). By recording event-related brain responses, we obtained a high-temporal resolution description of how illiterate and literate adults differ in terms of early visual responses. The results show that learning to read dramatically enhances the magnitude, precision, and invariance of early visual coding, within 200 ms of stimulus onset, and also enhances later neural activity. Literacy effects were found not only for the expected category of expertise (letter strings), but also extended to other visual stimuli, confirming the benefits of literacy on early visual processing.

Cross-species evidence that adaptive training diminishes distractibility in Aging.

Another fascinating study from Gazzaley's productive research group. A video clip is offered in the abstract. Here are the highlights and summary:

Highlights

•Adaptive distractor training selectively suppresses sensory distractor responses 

•Training enhances spectral and spatial tuning of sensory receptive fields in older rats 

•Top-down frontal theta is selectively restrained for distractors in trained humans 

•Training in older humans generalizes to enhanced aspects of cognitive control

Summary

Aging is associated with deficits in the ability to ignore distractions, which has not yet been remediated by any neurotherapeutic approach. Here, in parallel auditory experiments with older rats and humans, we evaluated a targeted cognitive training approach that adaptively manipulated distractor challenge. Training resulted in enhanced discrimination abilities in the setting of irrelevant information in both species that was driven by selectively diminished distraction-related errors. Neural responses to distractors in auditory cortex were selectively reduced in both species, mimicking the behavioral effects. Sensory receptive fields in trained rats exhibited improved spectral and spatial selectivity. Frontal theta measures of top-down engagement with distractors were selectively restrained in trained humans. Finally, training gains generalized to group and individual level benefits in aspects of working memory and sustained attention. Thus, we demonstrate converging cross-species evidence for training-induced selective plasticity of distractor processing at multiple neural scales, benefitting distractor suppression and cognitive control.

How to bridge the respective bubbles of our ideological tribes?

A number of recent mindblog posts have engaged the issue of the individual versus the collective good (for example, here, here, and here), a creative tension that has been central in human evolution. This has led me to mull a bit about the current apparent drift in the direction of more extreme individualism and rejection of the state’s concern for common interests.

I sometimes feel guilty for not being more evangelistic about promoting a rational scientific ideology that encompasses creationists, conservatives, and libertarians in a more broad evolutionary view, I wonder how it might be possible to induce these groups to admit a broader swath of reality than they currently seem willing to engage.

Concrete personal steps I might take? The expression of my ideas or those of others in writing is relatively easy, that is what this blog is about.

The problem is that MindBlog exists as one instance in the array of similarly minded sites that largely mirror each other’s views. I suspect that it is quite invisible to those following websites that deal with Creationism , conservatism, the libertarian or tea party movements that extoll individualism, etc. Those sites, in turn, are unlikely to be viewed by followers of atheist, agnostic, skeptic, or humanist sites more sympathetic to collective views of the individual in society.

I am a person who is timid about robust personal visceral engagement with those of opposing religious or political views, so I quail at the prospect of showing up at meetings of evangelical or ultra-conservative groups to ask questions like “you say you want the government off our backs...do you accept your social security or medicare payments? If so, do you see any inconsistency in your beliefs and actual practices?” Or, “You indicate you believe the biblical account that earth was created about 6,000 years ago. Do you accept the validity of the physical laws that permit your computer and iPhone to function? If so, how do you account for the fact that these same laws governing the physical properties of atoms prove that life on this planet began 3-4 billion years ago?”

I do hope that the a devout creationist or extreme individualist who occasionally stumbles on to a MindBlog post has his or her mental horizons slightly expanded.

Critique of the Nature paper on dishonest bankers,

I wanted to pass on to MindBlog readers this item analyzing the paper noted in my recent post "Banking - a culture of dishonesty", Statistician Salil Mehta argues that the article is misleading, missing data, and mathematically inaccurate.

Several nuggets on the individual vs. the collective.

Following yesterday's post on the evolution of prosocial religions, I pass on a random set of links to articles also relevant to the individual and the collective.

Terrell notes that the current political schism between Republicans and Democrats has a foundation in different views about the whether an individual's primary purpose is to look out for communal or self interests.

...modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual. Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.

Luhrman does a piece "Wheat people versus rice people" which references the same work mentioned in MindBlog's May 21st post, and notes several other studies on individualistic versus collective cultures.

Rand et al. offer economic game experiments to illustrate how static network structure stabilizes human cooperation

Finally Crockett et al. do an experiment relevant to social cohesion, showing that harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making - most people sacrifice more money to reduce a stranger’s pain than their own pain (the pain being delivered by electric shocks).

The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions

Having been an author in an issue of "Behavioral and Brain Biology" published by Cambridge University Press, I receive notice of forthcoming articles inviting reviewers comments. The articles are then published with the reviewer's comments and authors' responses to the comments.

As a followup to my recent MindBlog post on E.O. Wilson's new book, I am passing on this interesting abstract of such a forthcoming article by Norenzayan et al.  (Motivated readers can email me if they wish to obtain a PDF of this article.)

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions, and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: 1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers in the last twelve millennia, and 2) the spread of prosocial religions during the same period. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted internal harmony, large-scale cooperation, and high fertility, often leading to success in intergroup competition. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as non-adaptive byproducts of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and byproduct approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate.

The new surveillance state and our robotic future.

Isreal et al. examine one of the many uses to which individual credit scores are being put - to determine our cardiovascular risk (useful information for health insurance companies). They also note that credit scores are also used by employers, utility companies, and automobile insurers to index high-risk behavior; and by life insurance companies that incorporate credit scores into actuarial models.) Here is the abstract:

Credit scores are the most widely used instruments to assess whether or not a person is a financial risk. Credit scoring has been so successful that it has expanded beyond lending and into our everyday lives, even to inform how insurers evaluate our health. The pervasive application of credit scoring has outpaced knowledge about why credit scores are such useful indicators of individual behavior. Here we test if the same factors that lead to poor credit scores also lead to poor health. Following the Dunedin (New Zealand) Longitudinal Study cohort of 1,037 study members, we examined the association between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk and the underlying factors that account for this association. We find that credit scores are negatively correlated with cardiovascular disease risk. Variation in household income was not sufficient to account for this association. Rather, individual differences in human capital factors—educational attainment, cognitive ability, and self-control—predicted both credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk and accounted for ∼45% of the correlation between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk. Tracing human capital factors back to their childhood antecedents revealed that the characteristic attitudes, behaviors, and competencies children develop in their first decade of life account for a significant portion (∼22%) of the link between credit scores and cardiovascular disease risk at midlife. We discuss the implications of these findings for policy debates about data privacy, financial literacy, and early childhood interventions.

Also, the well known futuristic author Margaret Atwood offers an essay, well worth giving a read, on our growing efforts to craft a robotic future. One clip:

Why do we dream up such things? Because, deep down, we desire them...If we were technologically capable mice, we’d be perfecting deadly cat harpoons, or bird-exploding rockets, or cheese-on-demand molecular assemblers...To understand Homo sapiens’ primary wish list, go back to mythology. We endowed the gods with the abilities we wished we had ourselves: immortality and eternal youth, flight, resplendent beauty, total power, climate control, ultimate weapons, delicious banquets minus the cooking and washing up — and artificial creatures at our beck and call.

And just one more:

...people are dreaming up robotic prostitutes, complete with sanitary self-flushing features. Will there be a voice feature, and, if so, what will it say?...If the prospect of getting painfully stuck due to a malfunction keeps you from test-driving a full-body prostibot, you may soon be able to avail yourself of a remote kissing device that transmits the sensation of your sweetie’s kiss to your lips via haptic feedback and an apparatus that resembles a Silly Putty egg. (Just close your eyes.) Or you could venture all the way into the emerging world of “teledildonics” — essentially, remote-controlled vibrators. Push the game-controller levers, watch the effect on screen. Germ-free! Wait for Google or Skype to snatch this up.

Why elders smile, and wisdom in social signals.

Two articles relevant to becoming a senior person:
From Rijsbergen et al. (open access), a piece of work that reminds me of the book recently read by my book group here in Fort Lauderdale, the classic John Rechy novel about male hustlers, "City of Night", in which two age classes existed - 'young man' and 'old man.' Their abstract:

In an increasingly aging society, age has become a foundational dimension of social grouping broadly targeted by advertising and governmental policies. However, perception of old age induces mainly strong negative social biases. To characterize their cognitive and perceptual foundations, we modeled the mental representations of faces associated with three age groups (young age, middle age, and old age), in younger and older participants. We then validated the accuracy of each mental representation of age with independent validators. Using statistical image processing, we identified the features of mental representations that predict perceived age. Here, we show that whereas younger people mentally dichotomize aging into two groups, themselves (younger) and others (older), older participants faithfully represent the features of young age, middle age, and old age, with richer representations of all considered ages. Our results demonstrate that, contrary to popular public belief, older minds depict socially relevant information more accurately than their younger counterparts.

Also, David Brooks cites several books on the practical wisdom that comes with aging, and notes on the famous U-curve experiments in which people generally assess their own well being as high in their 20's and decreasing until about age 50 and then rising again until people rate themselve most happy at ages 82 to 85. A sample clip:

...experienced heads have intuitive awareness of the landscape of reality, a feel for what other people are thinking and feeling, an instinct for how events will flow. In “The Wisdom Paradox,” Elkhonon Goldberg details the many ways the brain deteriorates with age: brain cells die, mental operations slow. But a lifetime of intellectual effort can lead to empathy and pattern awareness. “What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work,” Goldberg writes, “I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”

Physics, Emergence, and the Connectome - From the connectome to brain function

A special issue of Neuron on connectomics has a special open source section of articles with different views of the problems we face in relating details of brain structure to brain function. I would in particular recommend, Robert B. Laughlin's rather deep article on Physics, Emergence, and the Connectome, whose final paragraphs I copy in below:

It is not controversial that neurons do playful things. They deploy themselves somewhat haphazardly in glial matter, exhibiting no lateral crystalline order. They arborize with each other in ways that resemble tree branches and roots. They possess on-board memory that responds to incoming signals in an agent-based way and changes the signals they themselves generate.

What Might Be Missing

If we suspend disbelief for a moment and consider the possibility that play might be a design principle rather than a higher emergent phenomenon, a simple idea presents itself as to why making sense of the connectome might be so difficult. The latter includes things like obtaining the entire map of C. elegans and finding that it still doesn’t make any sense, and that it even has no action potentials. It is a small step from systems that play without direction to systems that play with rules, and from there to systems that play games with each other. Were that to happen, it could easily account for something as complicated as the brain, for it is well known from the study of automata that simple systems playing games can create enormously complex structures with very sophisticated functions. It is also known that small changes in the rule base can make enormous changes in the structures that develop. There is also the obvious example of the human economy, a thing that grows out of simple rules of money exchange that transcends anyone’s attempt to understand and manage it. One of the economy’s physical manifestations is a great network of highways with mighty cities at its hubs. It would obviously be a fool’s errand to try understanding the economy by mapping its roads.

There is nothing supernatural or unscientific in the concept of gaming making a brain, or for that matter an entire organism. All that is required is an intermediate stage of organization that is unstable, like the weather. Physical science tells us that unstable development can be perfectly deterministic yet difficult, if not impossible, to follow by experiment, among other reasons because unstable evolution is functionally the same thing as cryptography. Thus the scientific resolution of the whole mystery might simply be that the genome instructs the system to go wild and generate a bag of tools and parts it might need to construct something interesting, and then sends a subsequent instruction to go out and play. Emergent self-organization then finishes the job.

Psilocybin changes brain connectivity.

Petri et al. show that "the brain's functional patterns undergoes a dramatic change post-psilocybin, characterized by the appearance of many transient structures of low stability and of a small number of persistent ones that are not observed in the case of placebo." A simple reading of their results is that the effect of psilocybin is to relax constraints on brain function, ascribing cognition a more flexible quality. This may account for the transient synesthesia reported by many with psilocybin, hearing colors or seeing sounds.

Simplified visualization of the persistence homological scaffolds. a.) placebo baseline b.) with psilocybin

A review of the work by Bone notes:

When ingested, psilocybin metabolizes to psilocin, which resembles the chemical structure of serotonin — a neurotransmitter that regulates mood, appetite, sleep, cognitive functions like memory and learning and feelings of pleasure. Psilocin may simulate serotonin, and stimulate serotonin receptors in the brain...psilocybin therapy could be useful in treating disorders like depression, in which people get stuck in a spiral of negative thoughts. Like electric shock therapy, psilocybin might act like tripping a circuit breaker or rebooting your computer.

The Bone review also give links to studies on psilocybin effects on other psychological syndromes.

We search for meaning at the start of each chronological decade.

Recent soulful introspection by my husband, who moves from age 59 to 60 in late December, motivates me to point to this study by Alter and Hershfield, who perform six cross cultural studies to show the same thing I recall from my own experience when I was 49, 59 and 69: that people renew their search for meaning as they face a new decade. The studies aggregated data available on several major survey data websites relevant to values, search for meaning, extramarital affairs, suicide rates, and marathon sign-ups and performance. The summary from their significance and abstract sections:

...people audit the meaningfulness of their lives as they approach a new decade in chronological age, further suggesting that people across dozens of countries and cultures are prone to making significant decisions as they approach each new decade...Six studies show that adults undertake a search for existential meaning when they approach a new decade in age (e.g., at ages 29, 39, 49, etc.) or imagine entering a new epoch, which leads them to behave in ways that suggest an ongoing or failed search for meaning (e.g., by exercising more vigorously, seeking extramarital affairs, or choosing to end their lives).

Banking - a culture of dishonesty

Kelland points to work by Cohn et al., who have studied bank workers and other professionals in experiments in which they won more money if they cheated. They found that bankers were more dishonest when they were made particularly aware of their professional role. Employees in other sectors - manufacturing, telecoms, pharmaceuticals - did not show more dishonest behavior when their professional identity or banking-related information was emphasized. Honesty was tested by having participants toss a coin 10 times, unobserved, and report the results, knowing whether heads or tails would yield a $20 reward. They were told they could keep their winnings if they were more than or equal to those of a randomly selected subject from a pilot study. The control group reported ~50% winning tosses, and bankers who banking identity had been emphasized to them reported ~58% as wins. The authors conclude that the prevailing business culture in the banking industry weakens and undermines the honesty norm, suggesting a need for measures that re-establish an honest culture.

The ecology of religious beliefs

Botero et al. do a fascinating survey of 583 societies to show that religions with moralizing high gods that promote cooperation between humans are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological duress:

Although ecological forces are known to shape the expression of sociality across a broad range of biological taxa, their role in shaping human behavior is currently disputed. Both comparative and experimental evidence indicate that beliefs in moralizing high gods promote cooperation among humans, a behavioral attribute known to correlate with environmental harshness in nonhuman animals. Here we combine fine-grained bioclimatic data with the latest statistical tools from ecology and the social sciences to evaluate the potential effects of environmental forces, language history, and culture on the global distribution of belief in moralizing high gods (n = 583 societies). After simultaneously accounting for potential nonindependence among societies because of shared ancestry and cultural diffusion, we find that these beliefs are more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological duress. In addition, we find that these beliefs are more likely in politically complex societies that recognize rights to movable property. Overall, our multimodel inference approach predicts the global distribution of beliefs in moralizing high gods with an accuracy of 91%, and estimates the relative importance of different potential mechanisms by which this spatial pattern may have arisen. The emerging picture is neither one of pure cultural transmission nor of simple ecological determinism, but rather a complex mixture of social, cultural, and environmental influences. Our methods and findings provide a blueprint for how the increasing wealth of ecological, linguistic, and historical data can be leveraged to understand the forces that have shaped the behavior of our own species.

E.O. Wilson and "The Meaning of Human Existence"

I've just read through E.O. Wilson's new and admirably brief and terse book (~200 pages) that gives a distillation of his previous writings on our human condition, and in particular the relationship between the sciences and the humanities. I pass on here a few clips from the first section of the book, but start with his statement in the final section where he gives his version of what the meaning of human existence is. (It conforms to my own opinion that experiencing ourselves as part of biological evolution suffices as a complete spiritual path.)

So, what is the meaning of human existence? I suggest that it is the epic of the species, begun in biological evolution and prehistory, passed into recorded history, and urgently now, day by day, faster and faster into the indefinite future, it is also what we will choose to become.

From Section I "The Reason We Exist":

In ordinary usage the word “meaning” implies intention, intention implies design, and design implies a designer. Any entity, any process, or definition of any word itself is put into play as a result of an intended consequence in the mind of the designer. This is the heart of the philosophical worldview of organized religions, and in particular their creation stories. Humanity, it assumes, exists for a purpose. Individuals have a purpose in being on Earth. Both humanity and individuals have meaning.

There is a second, broader way the word “meaning” is used and a very different worldview implied. It is that the accidents of history, not the intentions of a designer, are the source of meaning. There is no advance design, but instead overlapping networks of physical cause and effect. The unfolding of history is obedient only to the general laws of the Universe. Each event is random yet alters the probability of later events. During organic evolution, for example, the origin of one adaptation by natural selection makes the origin of certain other adaptations more likely. This concept of meaning, insofar as it illuminates humanity and the rest of life, is the worldview of science.

We are about to abandon natural selection , the process that created us, in order to direct our own evolution by volitional selection— the process of redesigning our biology and human nature as we wish them to be.

Humanity, I argue, arose entirely on its own through an accumulated series of events during evolution. We are not predestined to reach any goal, nor are we answerable to any power but our own. Only wisdom based on self-understanding, not piety, will save us.

...the grand master is multilevel selection . This formulation recognizes two levels at which natural selection operates: individual selection based on competition and cooperation among members of the same group, and group selection, which arises from competition and cooperation between groups. Group selection can occur through violent conflict or by competition between groups in the finding and harvesting of new resources.

Probably ... during the habiline period, a conflict ensued between individual-level selection, with individuals competing with other individuals in the same group, on the one side, and group-level selection , with competition among groups, on the other. The latter force promoted altruism and cooperation among all the group members. It led to innate group-wide morality and a sense of conscience and honor. The competition between the two forces can be succinctly expressed as follows: Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or, risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue.

So it came to pass that humans are forever conflicted by their prehistory of multilevel selection. They are suspended in unstable and constantly changing positions between the two extreme forces that created us. We are unlikely to yield completely to either force as the ideal solution to our social and political turmoil. To give in completely to the instinctual urgings born from individual selection would be to dissolve society. At the opposite extreme, to surrender to the urgings from group selection would turn us into angelic robots— the outsized equivalents of ants.

Varieties of poverty - money, time, and bandwidth

We usually think of money when the word poverty is employed. But, just like getting caught in a high interest loan cycle, we can get in trouble by borrowing too much time, having a list of deadlines we continually fall behind on, forcing us to focus on the immediate next deadline, just like the next loan payment due. Konnikova points to the consequence of situations like these, bandwidth poverty:

If I’m focused on the immediate deadline, I don’t have the cognitive resources to spend on mundane tasks or later deadlines. If I’m short on money, I can’t stop thinking about today’s expenses — never mind those in the future. In both cases, I end up making decisions that leave me worse off because I lack the ability to focus properly on anything other than what’s staring me in the face right now, at this exact moment... 

She quotes a Princeton psychologist:

Under scarcity, you devote a lot of resources to the thing you’re lacking...When people are juggling time, they are doing something very similar to when they’re juggling finances. It is all scarcity juggling. You borrow from tomorrow, and tomorrow you have less time than you have today, and tomorrow becomes more costly. It’s a very costly loan.

Further clips:

When you get overloaded and you feel this deadline is overwhelming, you can say, I’ll take a vacation, I’ll focus on work-life balance...Poor people can’t say, ‘I’ll take a vacation from being poor.’ It’s the same mental process, but a different feedback loop.The poor are under a deadline that never lifts, pressure that can’t be relieved. If I am poor, I work or I churn until decisions like buying lottery tickets begin to seem like attractive alternatives. I lack the time to calculate the odds and think of alternative uses for my money...the mental bandwidth tax is powerful enough to make the overall problem run deeper. The poor... are so taxed they don’t even realize they have a problem...AND of course how much money you have affects how much time you have. If you keep busyness constant, the rich have it much easier...they can buy nannies and drivers and lawyers and the like. It’s easy to give yourself time if you have money.

If poverty is about time and mental bandwidth as well as money, how does this change how we combat its effects? When we think about programs for the poor, we don’t ever think, hey, let’s give them programs that don’t use a lot of bandwidth...Instead, we fault people for failing to sign up for programs that are ostensibly available, even though we don’t factor in the time and cognitive capacity they need to get past even the first step...Take something like the Fafsa” — the Free Application for Federal Student Aid — Why is pickup for the low-income families less than 30 percent? People are already overwhelmed, and you go and give them an incredibly complicated form...One study found that if you offer help with filling out the Fafsa form, pickup goes up significantly.

My iPad is masturbating!

As I have read the New York Times or Kindle Apps on my iPad over the past few weeks, the tablet has seemed to take on a mind of its own, opening articles or turning pages when I haven't touched it. Going by a techie store I am asked whether the screen has ever been broken and replaced, and indeed, this happened several months ago. It appears that if the job isn't done properly, or the screen is a poor quality one, it can start spontaneous touching or stroking in the absence of a human finger. To turn pages I am now gingerly stroking parts of the screen that don't seem to get its g-spots excited..... (I don't want to buy a new iPad because I am waiting for the larger one to come out, it will be more useful for displaying musical scores.)

The peripheral immune system and stress susceptibility.

Using a social stress model in mice, Hoades et al. find preexisting individual differences in the sensitivity of the peripheral immune system that predict and promote vulnerability to social stress. Finding that the emotional response to stress can be generated or blocked outside the brain suggest a new route for treating stress disorders, perhaps by controlling the peripheral level of the cytokine IL-6.

Significance

Depression and anxiety have been linked to increased inflammation. However, we do not know if inflammatory status predates onset of disease or whether it contributes to depression symptomatology. We report preexisting individual differences in the peripheral immune system that predict and promote stress susceptibility. Replacing a stress-naive animal’s peripheral immune system with that of a stressed animal increases susceptibility to social stress including repeated social defeat stress (RSDS) and witness defeat (a purely emotional form of social stress). Depleting the cytokine IL-6 from the whole body or just from leukocytes promotes resilience, as does sequestering IL-6 outside of the brain. These studies demonstrate that the emotional response to stress can be generated or blocked in the periphery, and offer a potential new form of treatment for stress disorders.

Abstract

Depression and anxiety disorders are associated with increased release of peripheral cytokines; however, their functional relevance remains unknown. Using a social stress model in mice, we find preexisting individual differences in the sensitivity of the peripheral immune system that predict and promote vulnerability to social stress. Cytokine profiles were obtained 20 min after the first social stress exposure. Of the cytokines regulated by stress, IL-6 was most highly up-regulated only in mice that ultimately developed a susceptible behavioral phenotype following a subsequent chronic stress, and levels remained elevated for at least 1 mo. We confirmed a similar elevation of serum IL-6 in two separate cohorts of patients with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder. Before any physical contact in mice, we observed individual differences in IL-6 levels from ex vivo stimulated leukocytes that predict susceptibility versus resilience to a subsequent stressor. To shift the sensitivity of the peripheral immune system to a pro- or antidepressant state, bone marrow (BM) chimeras were generated by transplanting hematopoietic progenitor cells from stress-susceptible mice releasing high IL-6 or from IL-6 knockout (IL-6−/−) mice. Stress-susceptible BM chimeras exhibited increased social avoidance behavior after exposure to either subthreshold repeated social defeat stress (RSDS) or a purely emotional stressor termed witness defeat. IL-6−/− BM chimeric and IL-6−/− mice, as well as those treated with a systemic IL-6 monoclonal antibody, were resilient to social stress. These data establish that preexisting differences in stress-responsive IL-6 release from BM-derived leukocytes functionally contribute to social stress-induced behavioral abnormalities.