Discover Mind & Brain

Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Connect

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:05:00 -0800

We often think if ourselves as Robinson Crusoes sitting on separate islands, we’re all interconnected, both bodily and emotionally. This may be an odd thing to say in the West, with its tradition of individual freedom and liberty, but Homo sapiens is remarkably easily swayed in one emotional direction or another by its fellows. This is precisely where empathy and sympathy start—not in the higher regions of imagination, or the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s situation. It began much more simply, with the synchronization of bodies: running when others run, laughing when others laugh, crying when others cry, or yawning when others yawn. Most of us have reached the incredibly advanced stage at which we yawn even at the mere mention of yawning—as you may be doing right now!—but this is only after lots of face-to-face experience. Yawn contagion, too, works across species. Virtually all animals show the peculiar “paroxystic respiratory cycle characterized by a standard cascade of movements over a five- to ten-second period,” which is the way the yawn has been defined. I once attended a lecture on involuntary pandiculation (the medical term for stretching and yawning) with slides of horses, lions, and monkeys—and soon the entire audience was pandiculating. Since it so easily triggers a chain reaction, the yawn reflex opens a window onto mood transmission, an essential part of empathy. This makes it all the more intriguing that chimpanzees yawn when they see others do so. Yawn contagion reflects the power of unconscious synchrony, which is as deeply ingrained in us as in many other animals. Synchrony may be expressed in the copying of small body movements, such as a yawn, but also occurs on a larger scale, involving travel or movement. It is not hard to see its survival value. You’re in a flock of birds and one bird suddenly takes off. You have no time to figure out what’s going on: You take off at the same instant. Other wise, you may be lunch.

Can a Genetic Variation Boost Empathy and Reduce Stress? | 80beats

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:06:07 -0800

One single difference in the human genome may play a role in behaviors such as empathizing and responding to stress. The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on a single gene, called OXTR, which carries the design and production blueprint for cells scattered throughout the heart, uterus, spinal cord and brain that serve as docking stations for a chemical called oxytocin [Los Angeles Times]. Oxytocin is a chemical produced in the brain that makes us feel all warm and fuzzy when we interact with others in a nurturing or bonding way; it has also been shown to help mice stay calm when under stress.

The researchers decided to investigate a region on the OXTR gene associated with decreased social interaction in humans to see if small changes correlated to a person’s sociability and ability to handle stress. They put 192 college students through experiments to measure empathy and stress. One in four of the subjects had a particular variation of that gene region, and those subjects were significantly better at accurately reading the emotions of others by observing their faces than were the remaining three-quarters of subjects [Los Angeles Times]. The people in this subset were also less likely to startle during the stress test, and reported that they were generally chill folks.

Study coauthor Sarina Rodrigues provides the usual caveat that genes alone don’t determine our behavior and cautioned against reading too much into their discovery. Lots of people without the gene variation are able to understand and care about other people’s emotions, Rodrigues said [Telegraph]. So what are we supposed to do with this information? That’s not entirely clear, and the results need to be repeated in a larger group. Still, the work is “one solid step forward” in understanding the role of oxytocin in human social behavior, says neuroeconomist Paul Zak, … who has studied the effects of oxytocin on economic decisions [ScienceNOW Daily News].

One thing we do know is that, starting this weekend, if your employer somehow finds out that you are prone to high stress, at least they can’t fire you for it.

Image: flickr / le venti le cri

Math Monkeys | The Loom

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:28:56 -0800

Math is the subject of my new Discover column on the brain. How do we do it, and when did we (or our primate ancestors) start doing it? The answer, or at least some intriguing new research, is here.

The Brain: Humanity's Other Basic Instinct: Math

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:35:00 -0800

New research suggests that math has evolved its way right into our neurons—and monkeys', too.

Worst Science Article of the Week: io9’s Unspeakable Genetic Error | Discoblog

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:04:18 -0800

In a new study in yesterday’s edition of the journal Nature, researchers analyze the speech-connected gene called FOXP2—both in the variant found in we talkative humans and that found in our close relatives the chimpanzees, who despite great genetic similarity to us are not a linguistic bunch. The team notes that only two amino acids separate the human and chimp versions. So a post over at io9 came out with the headline, “One Gene Tweak Could Make Chimps Talk.”

It has a nice poetic ring to it, and we can understand why a sci-fi blog would theorize that tinkering with this important gene could turn our fair home into Planet of the Apes. But we have to play the fun police on this one: The headline is just so wrong.

FOXP2 certainly is important. The scientists say in the Nature study that “so far, the transcription factor FOXP2 (forkhead box P2) is the only gene implicated in Mendelian forms of human speech and language dysfunction.” They say that scientists don’t know for sure whether this two-amino-acid change in human FOXP2 occurred around the same time we developed language and is connected us beginning to talk, but their study teases the idea: “These data provide experimental support for the functional relevance of changes in FOXP2 that occur on the human lineage, highlighting specific pathways with direct consequences for human brain development and disease in the central nervous system (CNS).”

But the fact that FOXP2 is connected with human language, and that chimps have a slightly different version of the gene, doesn’t mean chips would start reciting Shakespeare if we swapped our version for theirs. For one thing, there are unavoidable physical differences in the voicebox and the size (and non-speech functions) of the brain. And FOXP2 isn’t “The Speech Gene.” Rather, it exerts some control over a series of other genes that all work in concert—at least 116 of them in humans.

The New York Times reports:

Several of the genes under FOXP2’s thumb show signs of having faced recent evolutionary pressure, meaning they were favored by natural selection. This suggests that the whole network of genes has evolved together in making language and speech a human faculty.

So talking chimps aren’t coming just because of one genetic tweak. But maybe I’ll move Planet of the Apes up to the top of my Netflix queue—original version, of course.

Image: flickr / King Chimp

Beware Friends Who Are Bad With Money: It Could Be Contagious | 80beats

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 07:48:15 -0800

Yawning is contagious. So too, it seems, are being fat, being sad, and a host of other things that we social creatures tend to pick up from each other. In a study published this week in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, scientists picked out one more trait that could be contagious among connected people: making bad business decisions.

Researchers had already confirmed that people have a hard time letting go of their own bad investments. For example, someone who buys a lemon of a car or a dilapidated house will, instead of owning up that it was a mistake and cutting their losses, continue to commit to the project and pour more money, effort and emotions into it [Los Angeles Times]. The key finding in this study, however, was that this bad business psychology can spread to others.

On a computer screen, the study participants watched text updates of two supposed volunteers (who were actually played by a computer program) bidding on a prize that supposedly equal $4.45 in real money. When the first “decision-maker” neared the bidding threshold at which they would be losing money on the investment, the real study subject was asked to take over bidding for him or her.

Study subject had all the information to know that it made no business sense to keep going. But the volunteers who felt an identification with the fictitious player (i.e., those told by the researchers that they shared the same month of birth or year in school) made almost 60% more bids and were more likely to lose money than those who didn’t feel a connection [ScienceNOW Daily News]. Thus, the scientists suggest, humans can unconsciously adopt the psychology of friends, business partners, or simply people to whom we feel connected, and become similarly incapable of cutting our losses on a bad investment.

Image: flickr / anglerp1

Who Needs Sunglasses? New Contact Lenses Respond to Light | 80beats

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:22:47 -0800

Contact lenses provide a number of convenience advantages over glasses, but one they come up short in one area—you can’t get contacts that automatically adjust to the sun’s UV light and darken, like the photochromic lenses many bespectacled people enjoy. But that could soon change: Researchers in Singapore led by Jackie Ying have now created a contact lens that responds to UV light.

Transition lenses for glasses are coated with a dye that is transparent when out of the sun, but responds to UV light by changing shape and darkening. Few previous attempts have been made to design transition contact lenses, largely because it’s difficult to apply dye coatings uniformly to the delicate, soft surface of a contact lens. Ying and her colleagues got around this by developing a contact lens that embeds dyes uniformly throughout the material [Technology Review].

The scientists crafted their contacts with a structure that includes nano-sized tunnels to hold the dye. The lens’ porous structure allows the dye to change shape quickly, which team member Edwin Chow says reduces response time. “When your car suddenly goes into a tunnel, the amount of light is very dim, so you need your lenses to transform back immediately,” says Chow. [Technology Review].

First things first: the team tested its lenses on rabbits to make sure they were bio-compatible, and tests continue test to make sure the lenses don’t leak dye. However, there’s no word yet on whether near-sighted rabbits prefer contacts to glasses.

Image: Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology

Brain-Like Chip May Solve Computers' Big Problem: Energy

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:10:00 -0800

Kwabena Boahen is working to create a computer that will fulfill his boyhood vision—a new kind of computer, based not on the regimented order of traditional silicon chips but on the organized chaos of the human brain. Designing this machine will mean rejecting everything that we have learned over the past 50 years about building computers. But it might be exactly what we need to keep the information revolution going for another 50. The human brain runs on only about 20 watts of power, equal to the dim light behind the pickle jar in your refrigerator. By contrast, the computer on your desk consumes a million times as much energy per calculation. If you wanted to build a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain, it would require 10 to 20 megawatts of electricity. “Ten megawatts is a small hydroelectric plant,” Boahen says dismissively. “We should work on miniaturizing hydroelectric plants so we can put them on the backs of robots.” You would encounter similar problems if you tried to build a medical implant to replace just 1 percent of the neurons in the brain, for use in stroke patients. That implant would consume as much electricity as 200 households and dissipate as much heat as the engine in a Porsche Boxster. “Energy efficiency isn’t just a matter of elegance. It fundamentally limits what we can do with computers,” Boahen says. Despite the amazing progress in electronics technology—today’s transistors are 1/100,000 the size that they were a half century ago, and computer chips are 10 million times faster—we still have not made meaningful progress on the energy front. And if we do not, we can forget about truly intelligent humanlike machines and all the other dreams of radically more powerful computers.

The Birds’ Sixth Sense: How They See Magnetic Fields | 80beats

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:32:30 -0700

Some migratory birds that have to navigate across continents have an extremely useful tool at their disposal–an internal compass that points unerringly towards magnetic north. Researchers already knew that some birds possess these biological compasses, but their mechanism has been unclear. “This is basically the sixth sense of biology, but no one knows how it works…. The magnetic sense is by far the least understood sense in the natural world,” [Science News], says study coauthor Henrik Mouritsen.

Now, researchers have determined that light-sensing cells in the eye convey the crucial message to a special visual center of a robin’s brain, called cluster N. Special proteins called cryptochromes in the birds’ eyes may mediate this light-dependent magnetic sensing, Mouritsen says. Light hitting the proteins produces a pair of free radicals, highly reactive molecules with unpaired electrons. These electrons have a property called spin which may be sensitive to Earth’s magnetic field. Signals from the free radicals may then move to nerve cells in cluster N, ultimately telling the birds where north is [Science News].

The research also laid to rest the previous theory that it was actually iron-based receptors in the bird’s beak cells that sensed magnetic fields and sent the message to the bird’s brain. In the study, published in Nature, the researchers tested 36 European robins and found birds with damage to ”cluster N” were unable to orientate themselves using the Earth’s magnetic field. But damage to another nerve channel necessary for a beak-sensing system had no effect [Telegraph].

Image: H. Mouritsen

Phantom Limbs Can Move in Anatomically Impossible Ways | 80beats

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:03:15 -0700

Phantom limb syndrome is an eerie condition, in which amputees have the physically painful sensation that their missing limbs are still present. Now, a small new study has shown that people can twist those ghostly limbs in anatomically impossible ways, while still feeling that the limb is real and present. In essence, each amputee’s brain reshaped his understanding of where his body was. The findings show that the brain can alter how we perceive our bodies all by itself, without input from our senses [Reuters].

Researchers had patients with “vivid phantoms” try to move their wrists in a physically impossible way—a 360 degree spin of the wrist around the long axis of the forearm—and found that 4 of the 7 patients could move their wrists this way. Some patients that were able to move their wrists later reported that their phantom hands were now more difficult to move from side to side because of changes in their phantom arms’ shapes.

To corroborate that the individuals had really learned the new movement (after all, the scientists couldn’t see the phantom limbs) the researchers had them perform a task known as left-right hand judgement before and after their training. The ability to twist the phantom wrist in a new way allowed the participants to react to this task faster than they could before they had learned the impossible move [Science News].

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Acadmey of Sciences, may lead to treatments that help alleviate the pain associated with phantom limb syndrome by helping patients learn to move their phantom limbs into a more comfortable position. The findings also raise the “speculative, but not outrageous” possibility that patients could cope with movement problems due to stroke, back pain, or pain in other regions of the body, by being trained to change the image of that body part, according to the researchers [Reuters].

Image: iStockphoto

This Is (Literally) Your Brain on Drugs: Views From Inside a Drug User’s Brain | Discoblog

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:58:36 -0700

Researchers want to find out if LSD could help medical research, but first they first need to examine the inside of a brain under the influence of the drug to see exactly what’s happening. National Geographic takes an inside look at their Explorer program:

Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this “trippy” drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future. Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease? To find out, Explorer puts LSD under the microscope.

Want to see for yourself? Take a look inside a tripper’s brain:

Video: YouTube / NationalGeographic

Science Explains: Why You Can’t Drink Red Wine With Fish | 80beats

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:35:07 -0700

Snooty wine pairing rules, such as the edict that one must only drink white wine with fish, now have a little data behind them, according to a new study. Researchers found a correlation between the high iron content of red wine and a nasty, fishy aftertaste when the reds are sipped with seafood. In the experiment, tasters ate a bit of scallop, tasted some wine and evaluated the aftertaste on a scale of 1 to 4. The diners found the unpleasant aftertaste was more intense with wines that had a higher iron content, the researchers say [Los Angeles Times]. The researchers were able to block the aftertaste by adding a compound that masks the iron.

The iron content of a wine depends on the composition of the soil in which the grapes were grown, the dust on the berry, contamination during harvesting, transportation, and crushing, and the conditions during fermentation [Telegraph]. The new research, published in Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, suggests that some low-iron red wines are OK to drink with fish. While red wines tend to have more iron than whites, it varies according to the type of grape, country of origin, and vintage.

But the iron is only half the story. The researchers report that they haven’t yet isolated the compound in the scallops that reacts with the wine, but they suspect it’s an unsaturated fatty acid, which could be breaking down rapidly and releasing the decaying fish smell when exposed to iron [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Image: flickr / yashima

I Compute, Therefore I Am | Science Not Fiction

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:06:14 -0700

Science-fiction has long tackled the biggest questions about the human condition: What is reality? What makes us human? What is consciousness?

So to Susan Schneider, [http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~sls/index.html] an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, sci-fi seemed a logical way to illustrate some of the existential conundrums of philosophers over the ages, from Plato to René Descartes to David Chalmers.

“Science fiction fires the imagination and can get across conceptual ideas and thought experiments, or scenarios, that test philosophical theories,” she says. “Consider Isaac Asimov and his stories about robots and what happens if they become conscious. What does that tell us about the notion of a person?”

Also, with science fiction rapidly becoming science fact, many of these questions have practical implications.

In her new book, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2009), [http://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-Philosophy-Travel-Superintelligence/dp/1405149078/ref=ed_oe_p] Schneider mines time travel, artificial intelligence, robot rights, teleportation and genetic modification to discuss the nature of space and time, free will, transhumanism, the self, neuroethics and reality.

Each chapter tackles a different philosophical question via essays by Schneider and academic colleagues with titles like Could I be in a Matrix or a Computer Simulation? and Free Will and Determinism in the World of Minority Report. These discussions draw parallels between such sci-fi stalwarts as Star Trek, Blade Runner and Brave New World, and philosophical classics like Plato’s The Republic and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy.

The book sprang from a 2007 undergraduate Penn course of the same name, which she plans to resume in the 2010-2011 school year. The course grew of out of Schneider’s quest for a compelling way to introduce students to philosophy, plus her own research on the nexus of philosophy and cognitive science.

“Cognitive science regards thinking as computational. I examine how it shapes our understanding of the mind, the self, and consciousness,” says Schneider. “If both computers and humans arrive at answers in a computational manner, then how much of a difference is there between us and them? Not all philosophical questions involve cognitive science. But the area of philosophy I’m most interested in—the nature of our minds and thinking—is in constant dialogue with cognitive science.”

Science fiction has long tackled the biggest questions about the human condition: What is reality? What makes us human? What is consciousness?

So to Susan Schneider, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, sci-fi seemed a logical way to illustrate some of the existential conundrums of philosophers over the ages, from Plato to René Descartes to David Chalmers.

In her new book, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2009), Schneider mines time travel, artificial intelligence, robot rights, teleportation, and genetic modification to discuss the nature of space and time, free will, transhumanism, the self, neuroethics, and reality.

Each chapter tackles a different philosophical question via essays by Schneider and academic colleagues with titles like “Could I be in a Matrix or a Computer Simulation?” and “Free Will and Determinism in the World of Minority Report.” These discussions draw parallels between such sci-fi stalwarts as Star Trek, Blade Runner, and Brave New World, and philosophical classics like Plato’s The Republic and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy.

— Guest-blogger Susan Karlin

Is Playing College Football Enough to Damage a Brain for Life? | 80beats

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:03:24 -0700

Scientists who have been investigating the link between professional football and severe brain damage have a troubling new piece of evidence: The brain of a deceased man who stopped playing football after college also showed the distinctive signs of damage. The man, the former Western Illinois wide receiver Mike Borich, died at 42 of a drug overdose in February after a downward spiral of depression and substance abuse that is generally associated with the type of tissue damage found in his brain [The New York Times].

The findings suggest that the damage isn’t only associated with professional football players who have played at the highest level of competition for years, but might be a fundamental byproduct of the sport itself. The cumulative effect of the many blows to the head that many football players experience may simply be too much for the brain to handle, researchers say.

Several neuroscientists have been investigating football players with a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.). Scientific progress is slow because the condition can only be diagnosed after death, when the brains donated by players can be sliced, stained, and examined for protein deposits and fibrous tangles. So far, researchers have identified C.T.E. in eight NFL players who died between the ages of 36 and 52–many of whom had extreme emotional problems in their last years. It has been found in every player of those ages examined by the two groups doing such research [The New York Times].

Says Ann McKee, one of the researchers: “I’ve looked at more than 1,000 brains, and I’ve never seen this in any individual living a normal life — it’s only through head trauma…. These changes are devastating — they’re extreme and they’re throughout the brain,” McKee said. “They’re in the cortex where we think and make judgments, where we do most of the thought that make us humans” [The New York Times].

Concussion specialist Robert Cantu says C.T.E. isn’t associated only with full-on concussions, the kind that knock football players unconscious and send them out of the game. People with C.T.E., Cantu says, “aren’t necessarily people with a high, recognized concussion history. But they are individuals who collided heads on every play—repetitively doing this, year after year, under levels that were tolerable for them to continue to play” [The New Yorker]. Cantu says that linemen are particularly vulnerable to the condition, since they can get hit in the head 1,000 times in a typical football season.

While McKee says she won’t be able to come to any firm conclusions until she has seen at least 50 football players’ brains with C.T.E., the evidence is mounting. However, neither the NFL nor anyone else has come forward with suggestions on what to do about the problem.

Who Needs Sleep? Drug Corrects Memory Problems in Sleep-Deprived Mice | 80beats

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:01:09 -0700

Researchers have found a pharmaceutical way to clear some of the cognitive fog that results from a sleepless night. In a new study using lab mice, researchers corrected the memory problems in sleep-deprived mice through a drug that suppressed levels of a certain enzyme in a brain region called the hippocampus, which plays an important role in memory and learning.

The study, published in Nature, helps tease out the specific effects of sleep deprivation on the brain. Says lead researcher Christopher Vecsey: “One of the main problems is that sleep deprivation does a lot of things to the brain, and it’s easy to get caught in a mish-mash of different effects” [Nature News].

In the experiment, two groups of mice were either allowed to rest over a five-hour period or were constantly disturbed by handling. The sleep-deprived group demonstrated particular problems when it came to performing a basic retrieval test, which they had learned before [BBC News]. When the researchers examined the brains of the sleep-deprived mice, they found that these mice made more of an enzyme called phosphodiesterase 4 (PDE4). In turn, the surplus of PDE4 caused a shortfall of a compound called cAMP, which is involved in forming new memories in a brain area called the hippocampus [WebMD]. When the researchers gave sleep-deprived mice a drug that stops PDE4 from working, the mice aced their memory tests.

While the study appears to point the way toward drugs that could help out sleep-deprived humans, overworked and overstressed people shouldn’t be clamoring for a prescription, says sleep specialist Neil Stanley, who wasn’t involved in the research. “We are always going to need drugs for people with serious disorders, but we don’t want to end up medicalising lifestyles. We need to go back to basics and think about the way we as a society lead our lives, and the impact this has on our sleep, rather than looking for a cure” [BBC News].

Image: C. Vecsey et al, Nature 2009

Cheesecake Is Like Heroin to Rats on a Junk-Food Diet | 80beats

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:00:45 -0700

The next time a friend says he’s addicted to bacon, you should know he probably isn’t joking. The brains of rats fed only on junk food—like bacon, Ho Hos, cheesecake, and sausage—look similar to the brains of heroin-addicted rats, according to new a study. Pleasure centers in the brains of rats addicted to high-fat, high-calorie diets became less responsive as the binging wore on, making the rats consume more and more food [Science News]. The findings suggest that drug addiction and overeating have similar biological mechanisms, according to the scientists from the Scripps Research Institute. The work is not yet published, but was presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting.

The rats fed on junk food displayed a hallmark of addiction. After just five days on the junk food diet, rats showed “profound reductions” in the sensitivity of their brains’ pleasure centers, suggesting that the animals quickly became habituated to the food. As a result, the rats ate more food to get the same amount of pleasure. Just as heroin addicts require more and more of the drug to feel good, rats needed more and more of the junk food [Science News]. To test the depths of the rats addiction, researchers shocked rats every time they ate junk food. Rats that had not previously binged on Ho Hos quickly stopped eating the high-fat foods. However, the fat rats kept eating junk food even though they knew the shock was coming. Now that’s an addiction.

Image: flickr / asplosh

Lasers Write False, Fearful Memories into the Brains of Flies | 80beats

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:25:03 -0700

It sounds like a scene from an insect version of Total Recall: Using genetically engineered fruit flies and laser beams, researchers have found a way to embed false, fearful memories in the flies.

Researchers first tested normal flies in a chamber where a jets of air on either side brought two different odors into the container. The researchers delivered an electric shock each time a fly strayed into a particular odour stream, which taught the flies to prefer the other one: the flies learned to move in the direction of the shock-related odour 30 per cent less often [New Scientist].

Next, the researchers created a strain of genetically engineered flies with certain neurons that would be activated by a laser blast. Lead researcher Gero Miesenböck explains that with this technique, called optogenetics, researchers can use light to activate particular cell types that have been genetically engineered to express a light-responsive protein. When laser pulses hit the brain, cells expressing the light-sensitive protein activate. “It’s like sending a radio signal to a city but only those houses with a radios set to the right frequency will get the signal,” says Miesenböck [Nature News].

The flies were then put back in the chamber with the two jets of air, and every time they wandered into one of the odor streams, the laser was fired. Many of the flies were unaffected, but a select group quickly learned to avoid the odor stream associated with the laser pulse. Miesenböck says these flies feared that smell as if they had been conditioned to associate an electric shock with it. “Stimulating just these neurons gives the flies a memory of an unpleasant event that never happened,” he says [New Scientist].

In the genetic engineering process, the scientists had tweaked different neurons in different groups of flies. The contingent that did react to the laser all had 12 particular light-sensitive neurons, according to the study published in the journal Cell. Those 12 brain cells may be the root of associative learning, researchers say–at least in flies.

Image: flickr / Image Editor

Electrodes Stuck in the Brain Show How Thought Becomes Speech | 80beats

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:12:46 -0700

A curious experiment has given scientists an unprecedented look into the human brain as it goes about a vital and everyday task: processing and speaking words. The study, published in Science, found that the brain carries out three steps of the task in about half a second, and that all the activity happens sequentially in the same small brain region, known as Broca’s area.

The researchers took advantage of a rare procedure in which epilepsy patients allow doctors to implant dozens of electrodes directly into their brains. While they are awake, the patients answer questions so that doctors can determine which parts of the brain are necessary to maintain language and which parts can be safely removed to treat epileptic seizures [Los Angeles Times]. Three such patients agreed to take part in the language experiment, were given long lists of verbs, and were asked to change some of them to the past or present tense before saying them out loud.

The electrodes picked up regular pulses of activity in the brain region called Broca’s area, which lies beneath the left temple. The area of the brain is named after a 19th century physician named Pierre Paul Broca, who became famous for his study of two patients who couldn’t speak [NPR News]. While neuroscientists have long believed Broca’s area plays an important role in speech, they’ve previously had little luck in determining exactly what goes on inside the brain region, since standard brain scans like fMRIs don’t have enough resolution.

Electrical activity spiked 200 milliseconds, 320 milliseconds and 450 milliseconds after being presented with a new word. The researchers concluded that those peaks corresponded to the times when the brain decided on the appropriate word to use, picked the proper grammatical form, and figured out how to pronounce it [Los Angeles Times]. The findings negate a previous theory that Broca’s area is involved only in speaking, and another region, Wernicke’s area, handles reading and hearing.

Image: Ned Sahin

Solving a Bubbly Puzzle: How We Taste Carbonization | 80beats

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:46:29 -0700

Cracking open a cold can of Coke and taking a bubbling swig will have your taste buds dancing—and now scientists know why. A new study shows that cells in taste buds that respond to sour stimuli also seem to be the ones responsible for tasting the carbonation’s fizz [NPR].The fact that we can taste the carbon dioxide in a fizzing soda has previously puzzled scientists, since the human tongue is usually thought to only sense five flavors—bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and umami (also called savory). However, the new study, published in Science, shows that the sour taste buds have an enzyme that interacts with carbon dioxide, so it’s not the bursting bubbles that you taste, it’s the C0₂ itself.

The researchers discovered this tricky bit of chemistry by studying mice. They gave the animals sips of club soda or a little buzz of carbon dioxide gas and recorded how the tongue signaled the sensation to the brain. Both soda and the gas produced similar sensations. But when they tested mice bred to have no sour taste buds, the brain never got its sensory alert. Further probing uncovered the enzyme responsible [AP]. The mechanism should be the same in humans, according to the scientists.

The discovery of a C0₂-sensing taste bud is not only interesting to soft drink manufacturers, but also to evolutionary biologists. After all, Coca-Cola didn’t usher in a new era of carbonated beverages until the late 1800s, so why would our sour-tasting cells have evolved to taste carbon dioxide? The study’s authors write, “CO₂ detection could have evolved as a mechanism to recognize CO₂-producing sources—for instance, to avoid fermenting foods.” One happy irony of such a hypothesis is that the very same mechanism that allowed our deep ancestors to recognize and avoid fermentation allows modern humans to intentionally create the fermented beverages beer and champagne. Or, our carbonation-detecting skills could be an accident. The sour-cell enzymes might be maintaining the pH balance of the taste buds, and the tang of soda water is just fallout [Wired.com].

Image: flickr / roland

Power + Incompetence = a Bullying Boss | 80beats

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:02:03 -0700

Here’s some gratifying news for any employees out there who are feeling bullied by a tyrannical boss: That aggressive behavior may have little to do with you, and a lot to do with your boss’s feelings of incompetence. A new study in Psychological Science found that when managers are made to feel insecure about their job performance, their aggressiveness skyrockets. “Power holders feel they need to be superior and competent. When they don’t feel they can show that legitimately, they’ll show it by taking people down a notch or two” [New Scientist], says study coauthor Nathanael Fast.

The researchers got 410 volunteers from various workplaces to fill out questionnaires about their position in the workplace hierarchy, how they felt about their job performance, and their aggressive tendencies. They also conducted a series experiments on the volunteers. In one, they manipulated the subjects’ sense of power and self-worth by asking them to write about occasions when they felt either empowered or impotent and then either competent or incompetent. Previous research has suggested that such essays cause a short-term bump or drop in feelings of power and capability [New Scientist]. Next they asked the volunteers to set the level of punishment for (imaginary) university students who got wrong answers on a test. Those people who felt more powerful and more incompetent picked the harshest punishments, the study found.

So what’s to be done with a bullying boss? Coauthor Serena Chen says a little ego stroking may make life easier for everyone. “Make them feel good about themselves in some way,” Chen said, suggesting this might mean complimenting a hobby or nonwork activity provided it is “something plausible that doesn’t sound like you’re sucking up” [San Francisco Chronicle].

Image: iStockphoto

Creepy Cyber-Monkeys Dwell in the Primate “Uncanny Valley” | 80beats

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:47:39 -0700

Humans typically feel uneasy when they see a very realistic human-looking robot or computer avatar, a phenomenon called the “uncanny valley” response. According to a new study performed with monkeys, that reaction might have an evolutionary basis.

Researchers hypothesize that the response stems from almost realistic images that signal HUMAN! to us, but then fail to live up to the initial excitement. The uncanny valley response has been documented in humans since the 1970s, and has been blamed for the unpopularity of some CGI films with realistic characters [like The Polar Express and Final Fantasy], and it is touted as the reason Pixar stuck to characters with cartoonish features [New Scientist].

The response takes its name from a graph (pictured at left) of human emotional response as a function of a depiction’s human-likeness. As human-likeness increases, a positive emotional response also increases, until likeness reaches somewhere around 80 percent, then the emotional response shoots down to revulsion on par with viewing a human corpse.

Uncanny valley response has never been observed in another species. So to investigate the response’s evolutionary basis, researchers checked monkeys for the reaction. To test their preference, researchers showed macaque monkeys real pictures, digital caricatures and realistic reconstructions of other monkey faces. To the latter, the macaques repeatedly averted their eyes [Wired.com], suggesting that monkeys also fall into the uncanny valley.

However the researchers couldn’t determine for certain whether the monkeys were repulsed by the almost real faces, or were simply more attracted or interested in the others. The best way to do that would be to repeat these experiments while looking for possible signs of unease–sweaty skin, dilated pupils or clenched facial muscles, as examples [Not Exactly Rocket Science]. The study was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Images: PNAS / Asif Ghazanfar and Shawn Steckenfinger

Learn to Juggle, Rewire Your Brain | 80beats

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 07:19:41 -0700

Inside the brain of someone who’s learning to juggle, some interesting changes take place. Researchers used MRI scans to study the brains of people before and after a six-week training course in juggling, and say they saw a 5% increase in white matter – the cabling network of the brain [BBC News].

The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, follows up on previous work that found changes in the more famous gray matter of the brain, which consists of the cell bodies of the neurons where processing and computation take place. The white matter, which consists mostly of the axons that stretch away from the cell bodies, can be thought of as the brain’s wiring, and researchers say this is the first time that changes have been observed in the white matter of a healthy adult.

Says lead researcher Heidi Johansen-Berg: “We tend to think of the brain as being static, or even beginning to degenerate, once we reach adulthood…. In fact we find the structure of the brain is ripe for change. We’ve shown that it is possible for the brain to condition its own wiring system to operate more efficiently” [Reuters].

The changes to the jugglers’ brains were found in a rear section called the intraparietal sulcus, which has been shown to contain nerves that react to us reaching and grasping for objects in our peripheral vision. There was a great variation in the ability of the volunteers to juggle but all of them showed changes in white matter [BBC News]. This demonstrates that the brain growth is a result of the time spent training, and isn’t linked to skill level. The researchers also note that juggling isn’t the only activity that could produce such changes–Johansen-Berg says she chose juggling simply because it was a complex task for people to learn.

Image: flickr / brightlightphotographydotcom

I Didn't Sin—It Was My Brain

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 09:40:00 -0700

Brain researchers have found the sources of many of our darkest thoughts, from envy to wrath.

Is Alzheimer's Like a Strange Form of Brain Cancer?

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:50:00 -0700

Biochemist Peter Davies suspects the vast majority of research is on the wrong track: The disease is caused by improper cell division, not plaques or tangles.

Can a Dead Fish Prove that Modern Brain Studies Are Bunk? | Discoblog

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:00:20 -0700

Scientists have a neat little tool they use to read your mind. It’s called fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging for those not in the know) and it seems to be everywhere these days. Scientists are using it for everything from looking at your dreams to studying the brains of jazz musicians to IDing the part of the brain that is activated when we get grossed out.

But not everyone believes fMRI studies are all that useful. In fact, one group recently set out to show how the studies, if not done carefully, can be downright misleading. And to do this, they used dead fish.

Scientists scanned the brains of deceased Atlantic salmon with fMRI to teach their colleagues a lesson in data analysis. The Great Beyond, a Nature blog, has the details:

The salmon was presented with a series of photographs, and then asked to determine what emotion the individual in each picture was experiencing. The team then analyzed tiny areas in the brain (voxels – like pixels but for volume) using basic methods for controlling for error. Surprisingly, report the team, “several active voxels were discovered in a cluster located within the salmon’s brain cavity.”

Of course the salmon were dead, so there shouln’t have been any activity detected. The point was to highlight the false-positive rate inherent in fMRI studies. More from TGB:

They are making a serious point about the dangers of not taking account of false positives. When you image the brain using fMRI, you’re basically asking whether there is activation in each of thousands of voxels. Because there are so many voxels (130,000 in a typical fMRI scan), “the probability of a false positive is almost certain,” writes Bennett [the study's lead author] in the introduction.

The research team says some studies do not do enough to rule out the false positives. Their results were presented at the 2009 Human Brain Mapping Conference in San Francisco.

More on what should be done to correct the problem at Neuroskeptic and Neurolaw.

Image: flickr / denn

Wanna Be Smarter? Read A Book That Doesn’t Make Sense | Discoblog

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:55:21 -0700

Playing brain games aren’t the only way a person can get smarter these days. It turns out reading Kafka can also pump up your brain muscles.

In a recent study, University of British Columbia researchers asked volunteers to read a shortened version of Kafka’s nonsensical story, The Country Doctor. Another group of participants read a version that had been rewritten so the events made more sense. After reading the story, the volunteers took a grammar test that asked them to identify the structure of letter strings in the text—and those who read the first story scored higher.

The scientists think their results show that when a person is exposed to unusual circumstances, he or she is motivated to learn new patterns. Science Daily reports:

According to research by psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” or Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions… .

“The idea is that when you’re exposed to a meaning threat—something that fundamentally does not make sense—your brain is going to respond by looking for some other kind of structure within your environment,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB and co-author of the article. “And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat.”

Granted, even if you run out and rad Kafka, since you’re reading this online, perhaps you should be scared that Google is countering the effects by making us all stupid.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Smart Drugs
DISCOVER: Smart People Are Better Able To Keep A Beat

Image: flickr/ Jim Greenfield

Desire in Slow Motion | The Loom

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:32:52 -0700

This video shows what happens inside a (straight) man’s brain in the first fraction of a second that he looks at a picture of a sexually desirable woman. There’s a lot going on in there–not just the flare-up of some primordial reptile brain. In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at the history of neuroscience’s exploration of desire, from the earliest studies on tumors that triggered orgasms to the latest in neuroimaging. Check it out.

[Video courtesy of Stephanie Ortigue of Syracuse University]

Your Brain on Sex from DISCOVERmagazine.com on Vimeo.

The Brain: Where Does Sex Live in the Brain? From Top to Bottom.

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:30:00 -0700

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Image: iStockphoto

On April 11, 1944, a doctor named T. C. Erickson addressed the Chicago Neurological Society about a patient he called Mrs. C. W. At age 43 she had started to wake up many nights feeling as if she were having sex—or as she put it to Erickson, feeling “hot all over.” As the years passed her hot spells struck more often, even in the daytime, and began to be followed by seizures that left her unable to speak. Erickson examined Mrs. C. W. when she was 54 and diagnosed her with nymphomania. He prescribed a treatment that was shockingly common at the time: He blasted her ovaries with X-rays.

Despite the X-rays, Mrs. C. W.’s seizures became worse, leaving her motionless and feeling as if an egg yolk were running down her throat. Erickson began to suspect that her sexual feelings were emanating not from her ovaries but from her head. Doctors opened up her skull and discovered a slow-growing tumor pressing against her brain. After the tumor was removed and Mrs. C. W. recovered, the seizures faded. “When asked if she still had any ‘passionate spells,’” Erickson recounted, “she said, ‘No, I haven’t had any; they were terrible things.’”

New “Live Happy” iPhone App Claims to Bring iHappiness | Discoblog

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:45:38 -0700

Can your iPhone make you happier? But of course, according to a new application called “Live Happy.” The app is meant to boost contentedness by helping users practice “positive psychology.” It’s a technique that creates spurts of happiness that research suggests may boost overall well-being over time.

The app is based on research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, who has found that, for example, savoring common, yet pleasurable, experiences such as a hot shower can boost happiness. According to U.S. News & World Report:

The $6.99 Live Happy app allows users to track their happiness levels and practice some of her strategies—gratitude, for example, can be practiced by texting, emailing, or calling someone from your contact list. While Lyubomirsky is not profiting financially off the new app, she will be using it to study how her recommendations work in the real world.

So are iPhone users jumping to nab this joy-bringing app? Not all of them. When we offered one iPhone devotee a free trial of the app, he responded: “You know what would make me happy? Not spending so much time staring into an iPhone screen.”

Image: flickr / William Hook

The Brain: The Dark Matter of the Human Brain

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:40:00 -0700

Meet the forgotten 90 percent of your brain: glial cells, which outnumber your neurons ten to one. And no one really knows what they do.

Never Mind The Neurological Elephant In the Corner… | The Loom

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:21:10 -0700

From time to time, I’ve asked around for a good estimate of how many neurons are in the human brain. Ten billion–100 billion–something like that, is the typical answer I get. But there are actually a trillion other cells in the brain. They’re known as glia, which is Latin for glue–which gives you an idea of how little scientists have thought of them. But without glia, our brains would be useless. Scientists don’t yet really understand all the things that glia do for us, but it looks as if they do a lot–perhaps even processing information in their own mysterious way.

In my brain column in the September issue of Discover, I consider the long-neglected neurological elephant in the corner. Check it out.

[Image from Neurophysiology for the Audiologist]

How Much of Your Memory Is True?

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 06:30:00 -0700

Is memory permanent and fixed? Not so much, according to new research. In fact, our brains are constantly re-writing the stories of what happened—and can even erase them.

Comic-Con 2009: Mad Science Panel Video | Science Not Fiction

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 11:41:54 -0700

For those of you who couldn’t make it to San Diego last week, Discovermagazine.com and the National Academy of Sciences’ Science & Entertainment Exchange present our panel discussion on “Mad Science,” featuring Jaime Paglia (co-Executive Producer of Eureka), Kevin Grazier (Battlestar Galactica and Eureka science adviser), Jane Espenson (Dollhouse, Battlestar, Caprica, and lots more), Ricardo Gil da Costa (science adviser for Fringe), and Rob Chiappetta and Glenn Whitman (writers for Fringe).

If you don’t have time to watch the video you can read recaps and quotes from the panel here, here, here, here and here.

Big thanks to Jennifer at SEE, to all of our panelists, and to the Bad Astronomer, who found time to moderate our panel while he wasn’t partying with Hollywood starlets (Phil – we kid because we love).

Rorschach Exposed! Doctor Posts Test Secrets on Wikipedia | Discoblog

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:33:03 -0700

Are you a professional hoping to alienate others in your field? Perhaps you could try the technique used by a Canadian doctor who posted all 10 inkblots used in Rorschach tests to Wikipedia, along with complete descriptions of the most common responses to the images.

Although some psychologists debate the usefulness of the test, which was invented in 1921, it remains the second most-used psychological test today. Many in the field worry that patients who come into the Rorschach test with preconceptions could “game” the test, resulting in a skewed diagnosis.

The New York Times reports:

For [psychologists], the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT. They are pitted against the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia’s users, who share the site’s “free culture” ethos, which opposes the suppression of information that it is legal to publish…

What had been a simmering dispute over the reproduction of a single plate reached new heights in June when [ER doctor] James Heilman…posted images of all 10 plates to the bottom of the article about the test, along with what research had found to be the most popular responses for each.

We’re not quite sure how posting the inkblots online would benefit anyone. But then, we can’t know what was going on in the doctor’s head…maybe we should recruit a couple of psychologists to figure it out.

Image: flickr / Brian Sawyer

Good, Bad, and Government Funding | The Loom

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 09:13:23 -0700

The National Institutes of Health funds research on the biology of morality in the human brain, as well as the evolution of human morality by comparing humans to other primates. Francis Collins, who has been nominated to head NIH, has repeatedly criticized this sort of research–and has used its failure as evidence for the existence of God. In 2008, for example, he said, “I think human altruism can be seen as one of strongest signposts to the existence of a personal God. I can see no fully satisfactory explanation for it coming from biology.”

I’d be curious to know if Collins thinks NIH shouldn’t have funded this research in the past, and if he would cut it in the future. If I were a reporter who went to DC press conferences rather than one that sits at home in his slippers, that’s the question I’d ask–not as a gotcha question, but as a matter on which I cannot figure out an answer based on what he’s said in the past.

Update: Frans de Waal, who does the NIH-funded research on primates I linked to above (and writes lots of interesting trade books on said topic), posted a response I’m pulling up here into the post itself:

Yes, Collins has in the past taken human altruism as proof that God exists, seeing it as a miraculous trait that evolution couldn’t possibly have produced. I disagree, having argued that the building blocks of morality can be found in other animals. I am closer to Darwin than CS Lewis on this. But in response to your blog I must say that I am not sure that Collins will have the power to prevent specific research (such as neuroscience on morality). Furthermore I doubt that he wouldn’t want to know the answers. He is a scientist, after all, and I bet he is open-minded enough to be curious about the outcome of such research even if it doesn’t fully agree with his previous position. Or, am I just being an optimist here?

Thanks for your thoughts, Frans. Of one thing I am sure: the labyrinth of NIH funding is terra incognita for me.

Update #2: Ken Miller, a biologist well known for his books on the relationship between science and religions, has also left a comment:

The worry that Francis Collins would use his position at the NIH to “proselytize” or would not back researchers whom “the religious right dislikes” isn’t grounded in the reality of the man’s life and career. I’m no more worried about Collins using NIH to advance his religious views than I was about Harold Varmus using the same position to advance non-religious views. Varmus was a great Director because he was a first-rate scientist who understood how to administer research, and Collins matches him on both counts.

Yes, Collins has written that he doesn’t think that biological evolution can explain the human moral sense. I disagree with him on that point, even as a fellow Christian. But Collins’ whole career has been marked by openness, fair-mindedness, and above all, a driving intellectual curiosity. The over-reaction of those sounding the warning sirens about him is without foundation in fact. It’s also emotional to the point of irrationality. PZ Myers has called him “a clown,” and written that “The man is a flaming idjit.” This comes from a guy who opposes Collins in the name of scientific reason?

What Do Urban Sounds Do to Your Brain?

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:10:00 -0700

A sonic tour of New York, from the agonizing screech of the Union Square subway station to one of the quietest rooms in the city: Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center

The Legend of Grandmother Cells Continues | The Loom

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:01:34 -0700

In my June brain column for Discover, I wrote about the bizarre idea that there are single neurons in your head that can respond to individual people. The so-called “grandmother cell” started out 40 years ago as a thought experiment riffing on Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint. By the 1970s, most neuroscientists considered it more of a joke than a valid concept, but in the years since it hasn’t quite gone away.

In my column, I described the work of the work of Rodrigo Quian Quiroga of the University of Leicester:

For the past eight years, he and his colleagues have been studying epilepsy patients who have had electrodes implanted in a region of their brains called the medial temporal lobe, as part of a study to identify the source of their seizures. Quian Quiroga showed the subjects 100 pictures. The pictures included photos and drawings of celebrities as well as landmarks and various familiar objects. The patients had to press one button if a picture was of a human face and another if it was not.

In their first such study, Quian Quiroga and his team were able to observe the individual activity of 993 neurons. They found that 132 of them responded to at least one picture. And of those responding neurons, 51 fired in response to only a single person or thing. One neuron responded only to Halle Berry, for example.

Amazingly, the “Halle Berry” neuron responded to any picture of her, including one in which she was dressed as the masked Catwoman. Even the name Halle Berry triggered that neuron, which was silent at the sight of other actresses or their names.

Quian Quiroga does not, however, believe these neurons are grandmother cells, at least as they were initially conceived. He suspect that a very sparse network of neurons–perhaps hundreds out of the billions in our heads–can develop this kind of response to an individual. Quian Quiroga just happen to stick his electrodes near single neurons that belonged to these networks.

Which brings us to Quian Quiroga’s latest paper, published in Current Biology. He analyzed the signals from 750 electrodes implanted in seven patients as they looked at pictures of some celebrities like Oprah Winfrey. Quian Quiroga found neurons that responded strongly to the sight of these individuals–and they also responded strongly to their written names and even the sounds of their names.

Quiroga and his colleagues also ran the same test using themselves rather than the celebrities to probe for neurons. They discovered neurons that responded strongly only to individual researchers, too–and once more, the same neurons responded to the sight and sound of their name. Bear in mind–the patients had only met the scientists a day or two earlier. So these neurons had developed their grandmother-ish response in a very short time.

These results offer some clues to how these sparse networks are arranged. Some of the neurons probably get signals from other regions of the brain that recognize faces. Others tap into auditory networks, and others language centers. Yet, remarkably, the information from these far-flung parts of the brain get funneled into tiny sets of neurons that can then encode concepts of people.

They may not be the Grandmother Cells of legend, but in their own way, they’re very cool.

Reference: Quian Quiroga et al., Explicit Encoding of Multimodal Percepts by Single Neurons in the Human
Brain, Current Biology (2009), doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.06.060

Want No-Cut Brain Surgery? Use Ultrasound Waves | Discoblog

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:45:54 -0700

Neurosurgeons might soon be able to say goodbye to the scalpel: A new technique uses ultrasound waves to remove parts of the brain. High-intensity ultrasound—a different type than what’s used in prenatal screening—heats up parts of the brain, thereby killing sections of tissue that are damaged.

Similar technology is already used to obliterate uterine fibroids, but until now, it’s been difficult to harness the technique for brain surgery, because the skull interferes with the waves. According to Technology Review:

The…device consists of an array of more than 1,000 ultrasound transducers, each of which can be individually focused. “You take a CT scan of the patient’s head and tailor the acoustic beam to focus through the skull,” says Eyal Zadicario, head of InSightec’s neurology program. The device also has a built-in cooling system to prevent the skull from overheating.

The ultrasound beams are focused on a specific point in the brain—the exact location depends on the condition being treated—that absorbs the energy and converts it to heat. This raises the temperature to about 130 degrees Fahrenheit and kills the cells in a region approximately 10 cubic millimeters in volume. The entire system is integrated with a magnetic resonance scanner, which allows neurosurgeons to make sure they target the correct piece of brain tissue.

According to the study, scientists tested the technology on nine people with chronic, debilitating pain that didn’t respond to painkillers. The subjects’ pain dissipated soon after the procedure, and they were up-and-at-’em soon afterward. Ultrasound could also potentially be used to treat other brain disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease.

Image: flickr / Liz Henry

Why Ghost Hunters Is the Best Science Show on TV

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:05:00 -0700

No matter how silly and misguided, Ghost Hunters captures an element of science that Numb3rs, House, and even Mythbusters miss.

Can You Cuss Away Your Pain? Study Says Yes | Discoblog

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 08:22:20 -0700

The next time you stub your toe, bump your head, or otherwise hurt yourself, don’t feel guilty about belting out those four-letter words. A new study found that swearing when you’re injured actually increases your pain tolerance. This is reportedly the first study to provide evidence for the benefits of swearing, and it may explain why the practice has persisted for hundreds of years.

BBC tells us:

A study by Keele University researchers found volunteers who cursed at will could endure pain nearly 50% longer than civil-tongued peers….

He recruited 64 volunteers to take part and each individual was asked to submerge their hand in a tub of freezing water for as long as possible while repeating a swear word of their choice….

On average, the students could tolerate the pain for nearly two minutes when swearing compared with only one minute and 15 seconds when they refrained from using expletives.

Scientists hypothesize that swearing-as-pain-tolerance works by initiating the body’s fight-or-flight response, in which the hypothalamus signals the release of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. The process increases aggression, dampens pain, and allows us to better deal with stresses like pain or fear.

Well, it’s about #^@*ing time someone came up with a good remedy for pain!

Image: flickr / asdf

Brain Surgery Enables Woman to Run 100-Mile Races | Discoblog

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:49:48 -0700

What if there was a surgical procedure that would make it possible for you to run 100-mile races? What if that surgery also erased part of your memory and a portion of your organizational skills?

This is reality for Diane Van Deren, a former professional tennis player who had part of her brain removed in 1997 as a treatment for epilepsy. The lobectomy was a double-edged sword: Her inability to gauge how much time and distance has passed has helped her become one of the greatest ultramarathoners on the globe, but she has no memories of family vacations and little sense of direction.

The New York Times brings us the full story:

She used to run away from epileptic seizures. Since brain surgery, she just runs, uninhibited by the drudgery of time and distance, undeterred by an inability to remember exactly where she is going or how to get back. “It used to be, call for help if Mom’s not back in five hours,” Van Deren said. She laughed. “That rule has been stretched. I’ve got a 24-hour window now. Isn’t that sad?”

Van Deren, 49,… has become one of the world’s great ultra-runners, competing in races of attrition measuring 100 miles or more. She won last year’s Yukon Arctic Ultra 300, a trek against frigid cold, deep snow and loneliness, and was the first woman to complete the 430-mile version this year….

The surgery was not without costs. Van Deren struggles to remember people she recently met and has missed flights simply by getting too involved in a conversation at the gate. “She never remembers where she parked,” Page said. “Never, not once, to this day.”

The lapses are not always amusing. Her husband placed photo collages around the house to help his wife remember vacations and family milestones that slipped past her memory’s reach. Robin Van Deren, the 21-year-old middle child, recently told her mother that she lost a part of her in the surgery. They cried together.

A lack of organizational skills is certainly preferable to living in constant fear of having a seizure while driving. Still, it makes us wonder whether altering the brain can change who we really are. For Van Deren, the answer is not so clear.

Image: flickr / neal_mcquaid

Modern Bedfellows: LSD Inventor Wrote to Steve Jobs, Asked for Support | Discoblog

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:37:32 -0700

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is rumored to have dropped a little acid in his day, and apparently Albert Hofmann, the inventor of LSD, knew it. In fact, Hofmann reportedly wrote a letter to Jobs asking if the he’d be willing to donate some cash to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organization dedicated to investigating the psychological and medical benefits of psychedelic drugs.

A Huffington Post article brings us the original letter and a little background on the relationship between drugs like LSD and successful computer scientists:

Psychedelic drugs… pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. Apple’s Jobs has said that Microsoft’s Bill Gates, would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once.” In a 1994 interview with Playboy, however, Gates coyly didn’t deny having dosed as a young man.

Thinking differently—or learning to Think Different, as a Jobs slogan has it—is a hallmark of the acid experience. “When I’m on LSD and hearing something that’s pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I’ve stopped thinking and started knowing,” Kevin Herbert told Wired magazine at a symposium commemorating Hofmann’s one hundredth birthday. Herbert, an early employee of Cisco Systems who successfully banned drug testing of technologists at the company, reportedly “solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead.”

Far out, dude.

Image: flickr / nyki_m

Neuroscience Finds Wisdom Centers in the Brain

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:05:00 -0700

This quintessential human characteristic depends both on powerful logic and deep emotion.

Left Brain, Right Brain Redux | The Loom

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:13:34 -0700

I wrote about the two sides of our brains in April for Discover. Now some of the scientists whose research I highlighted have an article of their own in Scientific American, focusing on the ancient evolutionary origins of specializations in each hemisphere. So if you still have interhemispheric cravings, check it out!

Radiolab: The Noise and Sloppiness of Life | The Loom

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 06:58:09 -0700

Not too long ago I was interviewed for episode of the radio show Radiolab. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich led me to a windowless cubicle where they then grilled me for a long, long time. From that interrogation, they produce a medley in which I say:

“Sloppy, sloppy, noisy, chaos, jumble, chance, sloppy, sloppy…”

Fortunately, they also saved a little more of our conversation, which was on a topic near and dear to my heart: the noisiness of life. It’s a subject I discuss at some length in my book Microcosm (ahem–paperback coming out on July 14–ahem). To wit: if you think that down at the level of molecules and atoms our bodies are just regular clock-like devices that go tick-tock-tick-tock, you’d be wrong. It’s a sloppy, noisy process, out of which it’s amazing that the regularities and predictabilities of our lives emerge.

The episode that Jad and Robert produced, called “Stochasticity,” (listen here) looks at the many roles chance plays in our life–from the level of cells, where I tend to lurk, to the myth of the hot hand in basketball.

Of course, like any self-absorbed starlet, I must say now that some of my best work was left behind on the cutting-room floor, or at least inside somebody’s hard drive. It was inevitable, given how cool and multi-faceted the mystery of biological noise can be. For example, I talk about noise filters on Radiolab, but I didn’t talk about one of the most important ones, which keeps signals clear in in our brains. If you want to read more, check out this piece I wrote last year for Wired. And I also didn’t get to explain that noise isn’t just something to get rid of, just an unalloyed bad thing. In fact, life has evolved to use noise to its advantage. Even E. coli knows how to play the odds like a skilled gambler, as I explained last year in the New York Times.

And if you want to head straight for the scientific literature behind this story, a great place to start is with the wonderfully-named 2008 review, “Nature, Nurture, or Chance: Stochastic Gene Expression and Its Consequences” (pdf at author’s site)

[Image: jaxpix on Flickr, via Creative Commons Licence]

The Science of Zoning Out | The Loom

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:30:25 -0700

Mind wandering is the subject of my new column for Discover. Far from just useless mental static, mind-wandering actually creates a distinctive pattern of activity in our brains–a pattern that suggests that it may actually be playing a crucial role in our mental life. Check it out.

The Brain: Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:15:00 -0700

Researchers say a wandering mind may be important to setting goals, making discoveries, and living a balanced life.

How to See Inside a Brain in Motion

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:30:00 -0700

A new mobile EEG system now lets researchers probe the brain function while people move around naturally.

Grandma–Ding! | The Loom

Fri, 15 May 2009 09:46:31 -0700

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint. In 1969, the book also became fodder for one of the oddest ideas in neuroscience: the grandmother cell. What if a neuron in your head only responded to the sight of your grandmother? For a long time, many neuroscientists have dismissed it out of hand. And yet the idea will not quite die.

Earlier this year a psychologist published an intriguing review of the grandmother cell, arguing that we should not be so hasty to run its obituary. Other scientists I’ve spoken to don’t think grandmother cells actually exist, but their own ideas about how we recognize individuals are equally fascinating. I’ve put together what I’ve learned about Philip Roth’s unexpected contribution to neuroscience in my latest Brain column for Discover. You can read it here.

The Brain: Can a Single Neuron Tell Halle Berry From Grandma Esther?

Fri, 15 May 2009 08:45:00 -0700

A new theory says the brain stores complex pieces of information in "sparse-coding networks."