Training emotional muscles of the brain - special issue of Emotion

The February issue of the journal Emotion is devoted to studying psychological, physiological, emotional correlates of mindfulness meditation. One interesting study from Grant et al. suggest we can train the 'emotional muscle' of our brain.  They turned up the heat on a metal cube applied to the legs of 17 male and female Zen meditation practitioners between the ages of 22 and 57, and 18 matched controls. On average, the meditators, who had between 2 and 30 years of daily practice, tolerated an extra 2°C before saying they were in moderate pain. The team then took MRI scans of the subjects and measured the thickness of several pain-processing cortical regions. The meditators had greater thickness in the region of the anterior cingulate cortex thought to mediate pain's unpleasantness. Here is their abstract:

Zen meditation has been associated with low sensitivity on both the affective and the sensory dimensions of pain. Given reports of gray matter differences in meditators as well as between chronic pain patients and controls, the present study investigated whether differences in brain morphometry are associated with the low pain sensitivity observed in Zen practitioners. Structural MRI scans were performed and the temperature required to produce moderate pain was assessed in 17 meditators and 18 controls. Meditators had significantly lower pain sensitivity than controls. Assessed across all subjects, lower pain sensitivity was associated with thicker cortex in affective, pain-related brain regions including the anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral parahippocampal gyrus and anterior insula. Comparing groups, meditators were found to have thicker cortex in the dorsal anterior cingulate and bilaterally in secondary somatosensory cortex. More years of meditation experience was associated with thicker gray matter in the anterior cingulate, and hours of experience predicted more gray matter bilaterally in the lower leg area of the primary somatosensory cortex as well as the hand area in the right hemisphere. Results generally suggest that pain sensitivity is related to cortical thickness in pain-related brain regions and that the lower sensitivity observed in meditators may be the product of alterations to brain morphometry from long-term practice.

Statins enhance memory

I started taking low doses of a generic statin (Simvastatin) several years ago not because my cholesterol needed lowering, but because I had read about anti-inflammatory effects of the drug. (And it seems to me increases in inflammatory processes are a central issue in aging). Statins also appear to have beneficial effects on the central nervous system. They improve the outcome of stroke and traumatic brain injury, their use has been associated with a reduced prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and dementia. Man et al (Neuroscience, Volume 166, Issue 2, 17 March 2010, Pages 435-444) have now found that simvastatin, widely used in humans, enhances learning and memory in non-transgenic mice as well as in transgenic mice with AD-like pathology on a mixed genetic background. On looking for mechanisms that might underlie these beneficial effects they find that statins enhance a synaptic process called long term potentiation that is a central component of learning and memory.

A lipstick that signals how turned on you are?

An item plucked at random from 'the stream': A new lipstick has gone on sale that the manufacturer claims shows, by changing color, when women are in the mood for sex (by 'reacting with a woman's body chemistry...duh,do I believe this??....maybe temperature sensitive lipstick?)

The lip product changes from clear to deep crimson as the wearer feels more and more frisky. It works by reacting with a woman's body chemistry. Each $18.50 tube comes with a color chart so men can figure out how aroused their partner is feeling. The Mood Swing Emotionally Activated Lip Gloss was invented in California by Too Faced makeup brand."The colors change depending on your emotional state," a spokesperson from Too Faced told The Sun.Celebrity fans include singer Katy Perry, who is engaged to funnyman Russell Brand."This is the ultimate date ice-breaker," dating expert Lorraine Adams said."But using it every day could get embarrassing. Would you really want the man next to you on the bus to know if you're turned on?"

Stress makes men prefer dissimilar mates.

Lass-Hennemann et al. make the interesting observation that men, who generally prefer mates that resemble themselves, switch to preferring dissimilar mates after they are subjected to a very simple stress procedure (holding their right hand in ice water for three minutes). This conforms with research in animals showing that individuals under stress are willing to mate with a wider variety of partners. Attraction to the images shown was measured by an interesting technique, noting startle eyeblink responses to a burst of white noise. Those in a more upbeat frame of mind (i.e. feeling attraction) flinch less. Scratching around for a possible evolutionary rationale for this behavior, one suggestion is that when conditions seem favorable men have the option of picking physically similar mates, whom they subconsciously deem dependable partners who will nurture their offspring. But in stressful times, during which human survival is less guaranteed, men would be more willing to risk a physically dissimilar partner in order to father as many children as possible.

Here is a figure describing how the stimulus photographs were morphed:

Image editing procedure: the nude woman's detailed face (1) was morphed with the portrait picture of the participant (2). The morphing software produces two output images, a shape-only morph (3a) and a combined shape-colour morph (3b). In a second step, the shape-colour morph is used as a semi-transparent layer on top of the shape-only morph. All artefacts of the morphing procedure are eliminated. The resulting image (4) was photo-mounted on the woman's body in a last step (5). The resulting image was used as a stimulus (the image was not masked in the experiment).

Streaming: new culture or cultural dissolution?

Following the thread of Monday's post on the lost art of the R.S.V.P. , I was struck by this Huffington Post bit on the SXSW  (South by Southwest) conference in Austin this past weekend - "Life is but a stream" - that from my point of view points to a future of everyone swirling in a present-centered miasma...

...Activity Streams, Social Objects and a little glimpse into how the data that is our lifestream will grow. And soon.

...SXSW, of course, isn't about the techies, it's about musicians and filmmakers, right? Not so different, as it turns out. They're all developers. All techies. Not just because of the digitization of the music and film industries, but because these are all people who make something from nothing. Inventors. Artists. Creatives. What less people saw coming, I think, was how creative the tech crowd is. How well they fit in and belong with the musicians and movie-makers.

Where does good music come from? Where does great movie writing come from? Some kind of emotional center. So, it was interesting to hear ZeFrank, a guy most people probably refer to as a "viral video maker" talking so much about emotional content. And the guy delivers on it, too. Much of what he has on his site not only will make you think, it reaches you at that emotional center. And it all relies on social experiments.

...Social Objects, Mediated Artifacts and Life Streams are simply techie ways of saying that a system is being engineered that will better capture how you live. That's all. Right now, computers put things into folders, but that's going to change real fast. How? That's not how this works.

If you've written a song, you can relate to this. It's a play between your feeling and the notes available to you. Back and forth. What's happening right now online is that new notes are being added to the scale. What is the future? Listen to the artists. They're all here at SXSW.

Lesion mapping of our brain's general intelligence system.

Adolphs, Damasio, Tranel, and collaborators have published a fascinating open access study in which they report results of having administered standard general intelligence tests to 241 neurologic patients who were being evaluated in connection with their enrollment in the Iowa Cognitive Neuroscience Patient Registry at the University of Iowa, over the course of approximately 2 decades. They found statistically significant associations between g and damage to a remarkably circumscribed, although distributed, network in frontal and parietal cortex, critically including white matter association tracts and frontopolar cortex. They suggest hat general intelligence draws on connections between regions that integrate verbal, visuospatial, working memory, and executive processes. In particular they found a region in the left frontal pole (white circles in Figure 3) that is unique to g and not captured by other subtests. A clip from their discussion:

The largest overlap between WAIS subtests and g was found for Arithmetic, Similarities, Information, and Digit Span; the former two tests also exhibited the greatest conjunction with g. These subtests assess verbal knowledge about the world, verbal reasoning, and abstraction, as well as working memory capacity, and are associated with the left inferior frontal gyrus, the superior longitudinal/arcuate fascicule, and to some degree with parietal cortex (Fig. 3). This suggests that g draws on the combination of conceptual knowledge and working memory, and that the communication between areas associated with these capacities is of crucial importance. Such an interpretation is consistent with the Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT), which postulates roles for cortical regions in the prefrontal (Brodman Area 6, 9–10, 45–47), parietal (BA 7, 39–40), occipital (BA 18–19), and temporal association cortex (BA 21, 37). Our results emphasize the important role of white matter tracts in binding the proposed regions together into a unified system subserving g, in line with a recent study relating white matter integrity to intellectual performance: the study reported significant correlations between integrity of the superior fronto-occipital fasciculus and full-scale intelligence quotient (IQ) (a measure related, but not identical, to g).

One of the caveats they mention:

.... Spearman's g disregards theories of multiple intelligences and does not incorporate specific emotional abilities. Therefore we may have isolated an anatomical network important for processing external stimuli, which might operate in parallel with others that are more critical for stimulus reward processing and interoception.

The decay of sympathy...

Brooks does a concise piece on how the innate sense of fairness and sympathy that we exhibit towards each other in small groups (as in the U.S. Senate as it used to exist) vanishes when groups are in competition with each other (as in the Senate now).  The story of human evolution is the story of competition between groups of humans that are held together internally by more generous and empathetic behaviors than the groups exhibit towards each other.  Clips:

In the United States, leaders in the House of Representatives have done an effective job in getting their members to think in group, not person-to-person, terms. Members usually vote as party blocs. Individuals have very little power. That’s why representatives are often subtle and smart as individuals, but crude and partisan as a collective. The social psychology of the House is a clan psychology, not an interpersonal psychology.

The Senate, on the other hand, has historically been home to more person-to-person thinking. This is because the Senate is smaller and because of Senate rules. Until recently, the Senate leaders couldn’t just ram things through on party-line votes. Because a simple majority did not rule, and because one senator had the ability to bring the whole body to a halt, senators had an incentive, every day, to develop alliances and relationships with people in the other party.

But power trumps principle. In nearly every arena of political life, group relationships have replaced person-to-person relationships. The tempo of the Senate is now set by partisan lunches every Tuesday, whereas the body almost never meets for conversation as a whole. The Senate is now in the process of using reconciliation — rule by simple majority — to try to pass health care.

We have a political culture in which the word “reconciliation” has come to mean “bitter division.” With increasing effectiveness, the system bleaches out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy.

Belief in free will is a belief in vitalism

Any readers who have checked out my web lectures or podcasts (particularly the "I-Illusion") know how I deal with the topic of free will and determinism.  I would recommend that those of you interested in this topic read this excellent open access essay in PNAS by Anthony Cashmore. (Figure 1 is a nice summary of models for the flow of information between unconscious neural activity and conscious thought.) The abstract and a figure:

It is widely believed, at least in scientific circles, that living systems, including mankind, obey the natural physical laws. However, it is also commonly accepted that man has the capacity to make “free” conscious decisions that do not simply reflect the chemical makeup of the individual at the time of decision—this chemical makeup reflecting both the genetic and environmental history and a degree of stochasticism. Whereas philosophers have discussed for centuries the apparent lack of a causal component for free will, many biologists still seem to be remarkably at ease with this notion of free will; and furthermore, our judicial system is based on such a belief. It is the author’s contention that a belief in free will is nothing other than a continuing belief in vitalism—something biologists proudly believe they discarded well over 100 years ago.

Figure (click to enlarge) - Models for the flow of information between unconscious neural activity and conscious thought. In A, the commonly accepted model is shown whereby WILL influences conscious thought and, in turn, unconscious neural activity, to direct behavior. The difficulty with this model is that there is no causal component directing WILL. In B, a causal component for WILL is introduced; however WILL now simply reflects unconscious neural activity and GES (genes, environment, and stochasticism). That is, WILL loses its “freedom.” In C, WILL is dispensed with, and conscious thought is simply a reflection of unconscious neural activity and GES. Conscious thought is now primarily a means of following—more than a means of influencing—the direction of behavior by unconscious neural activity. This subservient role of conscious thought in directing behavior in model C, is indicated by the dotted arrow 2 (contrasting with the solid line for the corresponding arrow in A and B).

The lost art of the R.S.V.P.

Cooper does a NYTimes op-ed piece that perfectly describes my own experience (and frustration) when I have sent out invitations to a music afternoon at my Madison WI.  home. It is worth passing on here:

HERE’S an etiquette experiment for you: E-mail an invitation for a party, one month out, to 45 friends. Request an R.S.V.P. Provide a follow-up e-mail message, two weeks later, politely reminding them to get back to you....How many will?...My experiment arose from plans for an evening of food, drink and literature, with readings by myself and two other writers, at a restaurant. Not exactly a drop-in-if-you’re-around kind of thing, so I asked friends to R.S.V.P. My initial message brought in a dozen responses, and the follow-up a few more, but days before the event I had a paltry 23. Not 23 who planned to come, but 23 who had bothered to respond. Half my invitees had blown me off. Why? I wasn’t peddling life insurance, after all.

Asking around, I discovered that the phenomenon is widespread. One friend of mine e-mailed invitations to a baby shower, and a third of the recipients failed to respond. Another announced a happy hour at her house and received a dozen yeses — only to find her party besieged by 35 people....What’s preventing us from executing this basic social task? Is it the medium? Do Evites somehow not feel like “real” invitations? Is it our busy lives, so overbooked and overwhelmed we’ve drawn up the castle gates? Don’t invite me out this month, I’m ensconced! Or is it simple rudeness? Try as I might to understand, I kept feeling dissed.

What’s clear is how hard the R.S.V.P. rubs against the grain of contemporary life. In requesting people to anchor a plan in the distant future of a month hence, you are demanding a kind of navigation that Americans increasingly do not practice. We prefer to remain flexy, solidifying our plans incrementally as the date approaches. Let’s talk tomorrow. I’ll call you when I’m on the road. Cellphones in hand, we microadjust our schedules as they unfold around us. We’re like the air traffic controllers of our own lives.

It wasn’t always so. A while ago I made a lunch date with an elderly couple. As the day approached with no subsequent corroboration, I felt a strange excitement. Would all three of us just show up? We did, and I realized that what I felt was a small nostalgic thrill over social arrangements that seemed straight out of Jane Austen.

But back to my party. The day before the big event, I sent a final e-mail message, thanking “the half of you who responded for helping keep the dying art of the R.S.V.P. alive.” This irked missive flushed out a final 10 hangdog respondents. But there remained a gang of 12 — the dirty dozen, the truly hardcore, fanatical nonresponders — who couldn’t even be shamed into R.S.V.P.ing...In the end, perhaps they were merely following the French literally: Respond, if you please. Left over from a time when graciousness couched demands as requests, the R.S.V.P. no longer functions. I therefore propose an update, something still French but a bit more ... frank — the R.V.O.M.:  Répondez Vite — ou Mourir!     (Respond Quickly, or Die!)

Brain regions and the DC metro

A reader's comment on last Wednesday's post points to a graphic (see below, click on it to enlarge) showing an amazingly credible mapping of brain regions onto the Washington, DC metro system.

New nerve cell growth in stress-induced social avoidance.

Lagace et al. look at changes in the dentate gyrus region of the hippocampus to probe why some people are resilient to long-term chronic stress while others develop maladaptive functioning. They examined chronic social defeat stress in a mouse model, finding that synthesis of new nerve cells is increased after social defeat stress selectively in mice that display persistent social avoidance. Irradiation that halts formation of these new nerve cells inhibits appearance of social avoidance, suggesting a functional role for adult-generated dentate gyrus neurons. The data show that the time window after cessation of stress is a critical period for the establishment of persistent cellular and behavioral responses to stress and that a compensatory enhancement in neurogenesis is related to the long-term individual differences in maladaptive responses to stress.

The Blues Broaden, but the Nasty Narrows

A great article title from Gable and Harmon-Jones, and yet another study involving students in an introductory psychology course: observations that highly motivated positive and negative emotions go with narrowing of our attentional focus, but either positive or negative low-motivation feelings broaden attention. Their slightly edited abstract:

Positive and negative affects high in motivational intensity cause a narrowing of attentional focus. In contrast, positive affects low in motivational intensity cause a broadening of attentional focus. The attentional consequences of negative affects low in motivational intensity have not been experimentally investigated. A first experiment (using color photographs, selected from the International Affective Picture System) compared the attentional consequences of negative affect low in motivational intensity (sadness) relative to a neutral affective state. Results indicated that low-motivation negative affect caused attentional broadening. A second experiment found that disgust, a high-motivation negative affect not previously investigated in attentional studies, narrowed attentional focus. These experiments support the conceptual model linking high-motivation affective states to narrowed attention and low-motivation affective states to broadened attention.

Thoughts of randomness enhance supernatural beliefs.

Kay et al. do some interesting experiments in which thoughts of randomness are primed in subject by a set of manipulations. They:

...supraliminally primed half the participants with randomness-related words; the other half were primed with words matched in negative valence. To assess the role of arousal, we employed a misattribution paradigm, which involved requiring all participants to swallow a pill ostensibly containing an herbal supplement. Half the participants were told that the pill sometimes induces arousal as a side effect, and half were told that the pill has no side effects. Previous work has shown that the side-effect condition leads participants to attribute the cause of any experienced arousal to this salient source. Hypothesizing that beliefs in supernatural control function, at least in part, to down-regulate the aversive arousal associated with randomness, we expected the randomness primes to increase beliefs in God, but only for those participants not given the opportunity to attribute the cause of their arousal to the ingested pill.

Their observations were that:

...participants primed with randomness-related words exhibited heightened beliefs in spiritual control compared with participants primed with negatively valenced control words. This effect disappeared when participants were given the opportunity to attribute the cause of any arousal they experienced to a pill ingested earlier in the session. 

They take their data to suggest:

...that belief in supernatural sources of control, such as God and karma, may function, in part, to defend against distress associated with randomness, even when the perception of randomness is not related to traumatic events.

Demasculinization of frogs (and men?) by pesticides

Male sperm count has dropped dramatically over the past 50 years (~50% in some areas) and one of the prime suspects is estrogen like compounds, such as the pesticide atrazine, that have been introduced into the environment. Atrazine is one of the most commonly applied agricultural pesticides in the world (and, curiously, male sperm count has dropped more in agricultural than in metropolitan areas). Hays et al now show that at levels of only 2.5 parts per billion it can completely feminize amphibian males.

Strange Maps

Having spent a fair amount of time on the London underground this past summer, I thought this graphic of an imagined world-wide system, shown in the Sunday NYTimes Book Review section,  was intriguing.

An imagined train route from Oslo to Pyongyang, from STRANGE MAPS: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities (Viking Studio, paper, $30).

Men's testosterone increases with female ovulation cues

Observations from Miller and Manor:

Adaptationist models of human mating provide a useful framework for identifying subtle, biologically based mechanisms influencing cross-gender social interaction. In line with this framework, the current studies examined the extent to which olfactory cues to female ovulation—scents of women at the peak of their reproductive fertility—influence endocrinological responses in men. Men in the current studies smelled T-shirts worn by women near ovulation or far from ovulation (Studies 1 and 2) or control T-shirts not worn by anyone (Study 2). Men exposed to the scent of an ovulating woman subsequently displayed higher levels of testosterone than did men exposed to the scent of a nonovulating woman or a control scent. Hence, olfactory cues signaling women’s levels of reproductive fertility were associated with specific endocrinological responses in men—responses that have been linked to sexual behavior and the initiation of romantic courtship.

More on the virtues of red wine...

A further rationale for my sipping red wine during and after dinner -  O'Connor notes work showing that red wine does indeed aid the digestion, particularly of dark meats, because it both stimulates digestion and inhibits the formation of harmful oxidized fats.

Fundamental changes in public discourse.

Three recent New York Times pieces have provided a summary of the disintegration of public discourse since the era of Lyndon Johnson. David Carr notes the demise of a short-lived column in The Washington Post on Washington's social life which is symbolic of the passing of the old paradigm, in which

...people with different points of view would assemble in various salons of Georgetown and set aside their differences over an Old Fashioned before the coq au vin was even served...Now the butter knife has been replaced by a machete. People with opposing political points of view are less likely to eat with the loyal opposition at night than to try to dine on them in a quick hit on MSNBC or Fox News... “The dinner party at Ben and Sally’s or Mrs. Graham’s circa 1975 was The Note or Mike Allen blast e-mail of its day,” said David Von Drehle, editor at large for Time and a former editor of The Post’s Style section..."You would go there to see people, try out ideas, figure out what was the interesting next take on the day’s news and where the hot story was headed. But now, you find all that out just by opening up your laptop in the morning.”

Articles by both John Harwood and Paul Krugman chronicle the almost perfect polarization that now characterizes the political scene. Harwood:

...when President Lyndon B. Johnson won passage of Medicare, most of the Democratic majority in Congress and half of the Republicans backed him...Those Democratic and Republican parties no longer exist. The kinds of Southern Democrats who resisted Johnson’s agenda and Northern Republicans who supported it have switched parties; longstanding differences between liberals and conservatives are now reinforced by party affiliation, not blurred by it...What democrats and republicans share is a dedication to party unity as an overriding imperative — and a relentlessly improving track record of achieving it.

And Krugman focuses on:

...the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally...Democrats believe .. what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment...the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay. [The view of the second ranking senate Republican, in contrast is that:]... unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

...the difference between the two universes isn’t just intellectual, it’s also moral...How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?..bipartisanship is now a foolish dream...Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.

Looking at motor imagery underlying complex skill learning.

During a recent period of rehearsing for the four hands piano recital that I participated in yesterday,* I found myself observing (mentally imaging) the detailed execution of the pieces when I woke during the night or early morning. Such imaging is known to be a central part of learning skilled sequences in athletic and musical performance.  In a bit of fortuitous timing, the most recent issue of PNAS has an article by Miller et al. describing direct observation of this kind of motor imagery:

Imagery of motor movement plays an important role in learning of complex motor skills, from learning to serve in tennis to perfecting a pirouette in ballet. What and where are the neural substrates that underlie motor imagery-based learning? We measured electrocorticographic cortical surface potentials in eight human subjects during overt action and kinesthetic imagery of the same movement, focusing on power in “high frequency” (76–100 Hz) and “low frequency” (8–32 Hz) ranges. We quantitatively establish that the spatial distribution of local neuronal population activity during motor imagery mimics the spatial distribution of activity during actual motor movement. By comparing responses to electrocortical stimulation with imagery-induced cortical surface activity, we demonstrate the role of primary motor areas in movement imagery. The magnitude of imagery-induced cortical activity change was ∼25% of that associated with actual movement. However, when subjects learned to use this imagery to control a computer cursor in a simple feedback task, the imagery-induced activity change was significantly augmented, even exceeding that of overt movement.

*(I have put some rehearsal videos made before the recital here and here, but the final recordings turned out to have technical recording problems and so can't be posted.)

Funny or die

Under the "random curious stuff" category mentioned in MindBlog's title line,  I couldn't resist passing on this satirical gem from funnyordie.com

Funny or Die's Presidential Reunion from Will Ferrell