This blog post originally appeared on the braiNY website. braiNY seeks to raise the public profile of brain science through the efforts of neuroscientists coordinated by the Greater New York City chapter of the Society for Neuroscience
Worms and jelly beans. It may seem difficult to find a connection between these two long-time favorites of small children and the study of the brain. But as visitors to the braiNY tent at the World Science Festival’s Ultimate Science Street Fair on June 2nd found out, both have the potential to be powerful tools of investigation.
Let’s start with the jelly beans. Fair-goers approaching the braiNY tent were asked to plug their nose, close their eyes, and hold out their hand. After abiding (with varying degrees of hesitation), they were handed a single jelly bean and told to report its flavor. For the now blind and smell-less patrons this was no easy feat. Some declared a flavor with certainty but most stumbled over a guess. While still ruminating on their bean, the taste testers were then told to unplug their noses. Their facial expressions alone relayed the sudden rush of flavor they were experiencing, and it was confirmed with far more accurate flavor guesses. The moral: the experience of flavor is not the domain of the tongue alone; it also relies heavily on odor cues. So, guests left this station with not only free candy but also a newfound appreciation for their noses.
The worm station luckily did not involve any taste-testing. In fact, the type of worms used, Caenorhabditis elegans, are too small to see, let alone taste. Instead, guests peered through microscopes to view how different genetic strains of C. elegans moved in unique ways. The worms, with their simple and well-mapped nervous systems, are a common model organism for the study of topics such as neural development and motor control. Their research significance may have been lost, however, on the toddlers who were just happy to watch them wiggle around under the scope for as long as their parents were willing to hold them up to the eyepiece.
In addition to worms and jelly beans, the braiNY tent also included an opportunity for visitors to witness their own bio-electrical activity in action. With the help of a small device called an EMG SpikerBox, guests could apply electrodes to the surface of their arm, and watch on an iPad as the electrical activity recorded from their muscles changed as they made movements. The stronger the muscle activity, the bigger the electrical response. Experimenting freely with their own movements, subjects quickly discovered which actions most strongly excited the underlying muscles, and which (such as having your friend move your hand for you) did not.
Sometimes, however, the simplest scientific demonstrations are the ones that can have the most impact. Such was the case with braiNY’s brain bank. The bank includes numerous preserved brains, whole and sectioned, from species of birds, fish, rodents, and primates, including humans. The variety of specimens on display allowed guests to compare the brains of these different animals, and to guess which brain belonged to which creature. But for many, the experience of simply seeing, and in some cases touching, a real brain from a real animal was the highlight of the braiNY exhibition. The encounter reinforced just how mysterious and complex an organ the brain is. Leaving the braiNY tent, many visitors thus had an increase not just in their knowledge of the brain, but also in their curiosity about it.
--Grace Lindsay
Grace Lindsay is a second year doctoral candidate in the program of Neurobiology and Behavior at Columbia University. She blogs at neurdiness.wordpress.com and can be reached at gracewlindsay@gmail.com or @neurograce on Twitter.
During Brain Awareness Week this year, Dana Alliance member Richard Restak, M.D., and three New Yorker cartoonists met at the Rubin Museum for a public discussion about humor and the brain. Those of us in the audience left with some key takeaways about how the brain processes humor and the benefits of cartoons: “Cartoons are great brain enhancers,” Restak said, because they make heavy demands on the organ. No stranger to the practical benefits of cartoons, Restak uses them in his neuropsychiatric practice as an evaluative tool to measure patients’ psychological well-being.
In a recent article for The American Scholar, Restak expands upon the Rubin Museum discussion, delving into the question, “Can humor help us better understand the most complex and enigmatic organ in the human body?”
Though quick to dismiss the notion that neuroscience can explain humor—“The brain has no humor ‘center,’” he writes—Restak discusses research on the neurological processes underlying laughter and mirth and three psychological theories about how humor works.
Read the complete article at The American Scholar website.
--Ann L. Whitman
Neuroscientists say adolescence is “a wonderful time.” Beleaguered parents may disagree.
“The adolescent brain isn’t broken or defective,” Dr. Jay Giedd told an audience at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) on Wednesday. “It’s different from the child’s brain, and it’s different from the adult’s brain, but those differences have many upsides.”
In our digital age, for example, adolescents have a great advantage: “They’re old enough to master the technology, and young enough to embrace change,” Dr. Giedd said. Part of the difference is the teen brain’s extreme plasticity: New connections are being formed and others pruned at an astounding rate. This helps teens adapt quickly to any change in the environment (moving to the Arctic; learning a new computer operating system). [Watch video of the brain’s development based on fMRI images.]
Yet, this process also puts them in danger of “over-adapting,” which could potentially lead to serious illness. Psychoses, such as schizophrenia, for example, seem to appear more during adolescence than at other stages of life, said Dr. Giedd, chief of the Unit on Brain Imaging in the Child Psychiatry Branch at the National Institute for Mental Health.
Last spring we wrote about Dr. Giedd’s work on the how the teen brain changes, and he wrote a great explanatory piece for us in Cerebrum describing the double-edged sword that is this plasticity. New to me in this talk was the idea of comparing brain development to language. The basic senses (like sight, hearing), which develop at one of the earliest “sensitive periods” in life, might be considered the “letters” of cognition. Next, association areas come online, tying together the senses as we tie letters into words.
“By age 8 months, the letters are all there,” Dr. Giedd said, and as we grow, “the letters become words; the words become sentences. So the idea is, in schizophrenia, it’s not the words but the sentences” that go awry.
Fellow speaker Elaine Walker of Emory built on that idea. “We’re starting to describe [psychoses] as a brain degenerative process that’s occurring—a kind of ‘brain overshoot’ of the rapid-growth process Dr. Giedd described … It’s like a normal adolescent developmental trajectory that has been amplified over time.”
Her research also suggests that there may be signs as early as the “word” level that a child might be at risk for later psychoses. Examining home movies, researchers saw differences in movement and affect between children who later developed symptoms and their brothers and sisters who did not. “Long before the onset of the first psychotic symptoms, there were subtle abnormalities,” she said.
Showing us one video, she pointed out oddities in posture and in gait, how they held their hands when walking, and specific errors in coordination. She also noted a rather flat affect, describing it as “a lack of emotional connectedness with his environment.” During the ‘sensitive period’ of adolescence, these children showed “a gradual onset of symptoms, and a decline in social and cognitive function,” she said.
The good news is that what we once considered a genetically determined disease may have a strong epigenetic component: The environment may trigger—or dampen—a psychotic illness, Walker said. Instead of a congenital illness, we might think of psychoses as a congenital vulnerability, she suggested.
For example, “young adulthood is characterized by greater biological sensitivity to stress,” which increases levels of cortisol in the body, which “can affect the architecture of the brain, especially at vulnerable developmental stages” like adolescence, she said.
Dr. Walker’s lab is part of a consortium called NAPLS that is tracking a large group of people age 12 to 30 to find better ways to identify those who are at risk of developing a serious disorder and to discover ways to prevent it or stop it. Research is still in early stages, but she described some general findings. For one, at-risk kids are experiencing much more daily stress, and life stress (serious change that may have happened far earlier in life). “Stressful life events in the past seem to set the stage for super-sensitivity to daily stress,” she said.
“We see much higher levels of cortisol in at-risk children, and even higher levels among those soon seen to develop schizophrenia. We see a change in gray matter,” as Dr. Giedd’s research also showed, but in the opposite direction. “Those who convert to a psychotic disorder show much more pronounced decline in gray matter than those who do not.” In addition, individuals at risk who show more gray matter decline also show higher cortisol levels.
This all sounded dire to me, but really these findings “are making us more optimistic,” said Dr. Walker, who is also a member of the Dana Allliance for Brain Initiatives. “We have a lot more leverage for intervening to prevent the onset of psychosis than we ever had before. They do not have an unchangeable risk genotype, and now we’re seeing there are many potential avenues for intervention.”
Taking another angle on intervention, speaker Elizabeth Albro spoke of the challenges of translating cognitive neuroscience into something teachers could use to help students learn. Albro, a commissioner at the Institute of Education Sciences at the US Department of Education, described in-school studies trying to bridge the gap between what scientists have gleaned about learning from the quiet of their labs and what might actually work in the maelstrom that is classroom learning and lifelong learning.
They’ve seen some promising early results using biofeedback to improve attention when doing schoolwork and “interleaving” math problems (combining the new type of problem with types learned earlier) to improve retention.
“We’ve been using them to redesign curricula,” she said, keeping in mind that any one discrete action happens in an environment where many things are happening simultaneously. “The learning brain is working on these things all the time.”
The session was part of the Neuroscience and Society series, a partnership between the Dana Foundation and AAAS. Previous sessions are available via video: Neuroscience and the Law, and The Aging Brain: What’s New in Brain Research, Treatment, and Policy.
--Nicky Penttila
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn more about the teen brain at tomorrow evening’s panel discussion, “What Are They Thinking? Exploring the Adolescent Brain." The speakers are Jay Giedd, chief of the brain imaging unit in the child psychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH); Elaine Walker, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Emory University; and Elizabeth Albro, associate commissioner, National Center for Education Research, U.S. Department of Education. Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of AAAS and a former deputy director and acting director of NIMH, will make opening remarks.
The event is part of the free Neuroscience and Society series, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Dana Foundation. It will be held at the AAAS auditorium in DC.
Visit the AAAS website for more information and to register.
--Ann L. Whitman
Does it matter if art is beautiful? Does interpretation depend on taste and culture? These are some of the questions tackled by panelists at a recent World Science Festival event, “Sunday at the Met: Arts and the Mind.” The topic was the emerging and increasingly interdisciplinary field of neuroaesthetics. Moderated by Cooper Union president and cognitive neuroscientist Jamshed Bharucha, experts in a variety of fields came together for the discussion:
Luke Syson, art curator at the Met, questioned how taste varies according to cultural upbringing and the environment where a work is situated. He pointed out that aesthetic responses to the man-made and natural world differ and that our “conscious awareness [of art] is only the tip of the iceberg.”
Neuroscientist Edward A. Vessel talked about how art produces specific behavioral reactions: sensory, semantic, and emotional. After conducting experiments using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), he identified parts of the prefrontal cortex that exhibited positive or negative responses based on whether the participant liked the artwork or not. He eagerly mentioned that subcortical regions of the brain responded only when participants viewed artworks as deeply moving. In addition, stimulation of the default mode network, a brain system essential for “self-referential thoughts,” was evidence that art is perceived as “personally relevant” and is a powerful means of communication.
Art historian David Freedberg discussed emotional responses to art that depend on a neurosubstrate in the brain, a motor response to texture, composition, or gesture in an artwork that can lead to a strong desire to simulate the movement of the piece, regardless of socio-cultural background or taste. Working with a colleague who used transcranial magnetic stimulation, Freedberg found that observing gestures or movement in art (as seen in this work, for example) produced a significantly higher activation in participants’ brains than viewing those same movements in real life—biological evidence of art’s exceptional ability to move us.
In preparation for the discussion, Matthew Ritchie, a painter, sculptor, and digital artist, created complex diagrams of the panelists’ ideas that can be dragged and rearranged, resembling both neural connections in the brain and many of his sculptures (such as his 2010 piece, “The Morning Line”). He believes that abstract art is less directly relatable and harder to understand than realistic art because it doesn’t contain familiar forms from nature and everyday life; however, abstract art has universal meaning free of any socio-cultural perspective.
To learn more about the World Science Festival and events that took place, click here.
--Amanda Bastone