In a study in the journal Psychological Science, researchers found that there is increased activity in the brain region linked with fear in the brains of second and third graders with math anxiety. Because of the increased activity in the fear brain region, there was decreased activity in their brain regions linked with problem-solving.

The study included 46 students who had both low and high math anxiety -- meaning, they felt stress and anxiety when doing math problems. The students all had similar IQ levels, working memory, math and reading abilities and levels of general anxiety. The researchers had them fill out a questionnaire to analyze their level of math anxiety.

Then, the students did addition and subtraction math problems while the researchers conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans.

The researchers found that for the kids with math anxiety, the amygdala (which is linked with fear) and a part of the hippocampus (which plays a part in forming memories) had increased activity. Meanwhile, brain regions associated with working memory and number reasoning had decreased activity.

"The same part of the brain that responds to fearful situations, such as seeing a spider or snake, also shows a heightened response in children with high math anxiety," study researcher Vinod Menon, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, said in a statement.

Outside of the brain scans, researchers also found that the kids with math anxiety worked more slowly and less accurately on the math problems, compared with kids without math anxiety."Our study identified the neural correlates of math anxiety for the first time, and our findings have significant implications for its early identification and treatment," the researchers wrote in the study.

According to a Washington Post article last year, math anxiety is not just having a disdain for math -- it's actually feeling anxiety, stress and other negative feelings when you are doing math.

"When engaged in mathematical problem-solving, highly math-anxious individuals suffer from intrusive thoughts and ruminations," Daniel Ansari, principal investigator for the Numerical Cognition Laboratory at the University of Western Ontario, told the Washington Post. "This takes up some of their processing and working memory. It's very much as though individuals with math anxiety use up the brainpower they need for the problem" on stressing out.

The risk for depression is increased in individuals with a tendency towards negative ruminations, but patterns of autobiographic memory also may be predictive of depression.

 

When asked to recall specific events, some individuals have a tendency to recall broader categories of events instead of specific events. This is termed overgeneral memory and, like those who tend to ruminate, these individuals also have a higher risk of developing depression.

These self-referential activities engage a network of brain regions called the default mode network, or DMN. Prior studies using imaging techniques have already shown that the DMN activates abnormally in individuals with depression, but the relationship between DMN activity and depressive ruminations was not clear.

In this new report, Dr. Shuqiao Yao of Central South University in Hunan, China and colleagues evaluated DMN functional connectivity in untreated young adults experiencing their first episode of major depression and healthy volunteers. Each participant underwent a brain scan and completed tests to measure their levels of rumination and overgeneral memory.

As expected, the depressed patients exhibited higher levels of rumination and overgeneral memory than did the control subjects. They also observed increased functional connectivity in the anterior medial cortex regions and decreased functional connectivity in the posterior medial cortex regions in depressed patients compared with control subjects.

Among the depressed subjects, an interesting pattern of dissociation emerged. The increased connectivity in anterior regions was positively associated with rumination, while the decreased connectivity in posterior regions was negatively associated with overgeneral memory.

Dr. Yao commented on the importance of these findings: "In the future, resting-state network activity in the brain will provide useful models for investigating network features of cognitive dysfunction in psychopathology."

"As we dig deeper in brain imaging studies, we are becoming increasingly interested in the activity of brain circuits rather than single brain regions," said Dr. John Krystal, Editor ofBiological Psychiatry. "Although it is a more complicated process, studying brain circuits may provide greater insight into symptoms, such as depressive ruminations. The current study nicely illustrates how altered activity at different sites within a brain network may be related to different features of depression."

Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off—literally with the flip of a switch.

Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget.

“Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget,” said Theodore Berger of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Berger is the lead author of an article that will be published in the Journal of Neural Engineering. His team worked with scientists from Wake Forest University in the study, building on recent advances in our understanding of the brain area known as the hippocampus and its role in learning.

In the experiment, the researchers had rats learn a task, pressing one lever rather than another to receive a reward. Using embedded electrical probes, the experimental research team, led by Sam A. Deadwyler of the Wake Forest Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, recorded changes in the rat’s brain activity between the two major internal divisions of the hippocampus, known as subregions CA3 and CA1. During the learning process, the hippocampus converts short-term memory into long-term memory, the researchers prior work has shown.

“No hippocampus,” says Berger, “no long-term memory, but still short-term memory.” CA3 and CA1 interact to create long-term memory, prior research has shown.

In a dramatic demonstration, the experimenters blocked the normal neural interactions between the two areas using pharmacological agents. The previously trained rats then no longer displayed the long-term learned behavior.

“The rats still showed that they knew ‘when you press left first, then press right next time, and vice-versa,’” Berger said. “And they still knew in general to press levers for water, but they could only remember whether they had pressed left or right for 5-10 seconds.”

Using a model created by the prosthetics research team led by Berger, the teams then went further and developed an artificial hippocampal system that could duplicate the pattern of interaction between CA3-CA1 interactions.

Long-term memory capability returned to the pharmacologically blocked rats when the team activated the electronic device programmed to duplicate the memory-encoding function.

In addition, the researchers went on to show that if a prosthetic device and its associated electrodes were implanted in animals with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device could actually strengthen the memory being generated internally in the brain and enhance the memory capability of normal rats.

“These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes,” says the paper.

Next steps, according to Berger and Deadwyler, will be attempts to duplicate the rat results in primates (monkeys), with the aim of eventually creating prostheses that might help the human victims of Alzheimer’s disease, stroke or injury recover function.

Notes about this artificial hippocampus research article

The paper is entitled “A Cortical Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing Memory.” Besides Deadwyler and Berger, the other authors are, from USC, BME Professor Vasilis Z. Marmarelis and Research Assistant Professor Dong Song, and from Wake Forest, Associate Professor Robert E. Hampson and Post-Doctoral Fellow Anushka Goonawardena.

Berger, who holds the David Packard Chair in Engineering, is the Director of the USC Center for Neural Engineering, Associate Director of the National Science Foundation Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems Engineering Research Center, and a Fellow of the IEEE, the AAAS, and the AIMBE

“A Cortical Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing Memory.” (Berger et al 2011 J. Neural Eng. 8 046017)

Holding information within one’s memory for a short while is a seemingly simple and everyday task. We use our short-term memory when remembering a new telephone number if there is nothing to write at hand, or to find the beautiful dress inside the store that we were just admiring in the shopping window. Yet, despite the apparent simplicity of these actions, short-term memory is a complex cognitive act that entails the participation of multiple brain regions. However, whether and how different brain regions cooperate during memory has remained elusive. A group of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany have now come closer to answering this question. They discovered that oscillations between different brain regions are crucial in visually remembering things over a short period of time.

It has long been known that brain regions in the frontal part of the brain are involved in short-term memory, while processing of visual information occurs primarily at the back of the brain. However, to successfully remember visual information over a short period of time, these distant regions need to coordinate and integrate information.

To better understand how this occurs, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics in the department of Nikos Logothetis recorded electrical activity both in a visual area and in the frontal part of the brain in monkeys. The scientists showed the animals identical or different images within short intervals while recording their brain activity. The animals then had to indicate whether the second image was the same as the first one.

The scientists observed that, in each of the two brain regions, brain activity showed strong oscillations in a certain set of frequencies called the theta-band. Importantly, these oscillations did not occur independently of each other, but synchronized their activity temporarily: “It is as if you have two revolving doors in each of the two areas. During working memory, they get in sync, thereby allowing information to pass through them much more efficiently than if they were out of sync,” explains Stefanie Liebe, the first author of the study, conducted in the team of Gregor Rainer in cooperation with Gregor Hörzer from the Technical University Graz. The more synchronized the activity was, the better could the animals remember the initial image. Thus, the authors were able to establish a direct relationship between what they observed in the brain and the performance of the animal.

The study highlights how synchronized brain oscillations are important for the communication and interaction of different brain regions. Almost all multi-faceted cognitive acts, such as visual recognition, arise from a complex interplay of specialized and distributed neural networks. How relationships between such distributed sites are established and how they contribute to represent and communicate information about external and internal events in order to attain a coherent percept or memory is still poorly understood.

The thesis is based partly on a survey study involving 207 individuals, partly on an intervention study where an experiment group consisting of 21 persons listened to self-chosen music for 30 minutes per day for two weeks while an equally sized control group got to relax without music.

The results of the studies show that positive emotions were experienced both more often and more intensively in connection with music listening. The experiment group did also perceive less stress and had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. The more the participants in the survey study liked the music, the less stress they experienced.

'But it should be pointed out that when studying emotional responses to music it is important to remember that all people do not respond in the exact same way to a piece of music and that one individual can respond differently to the same piece of music at different times, depending on both individual and situational factors. To get the positive effects of music, you have to listen to music that you like,' says the author of the thesis Marie Helsing.

"We are using the technology that is already in your pocket to create a completely new medium for psychotherapeutic intervention," says Ben-Zeev. "You can have therapy with you and accessible to you whenever and wherever you have the need, potentially anywhere in the world."

As guest editor for a special issue of the Schizophrenia Bulletin, Ben-Zeev presents a set of four papers coauthored by a series of international colleagues. The papers are geared toward the increasing numbers of researchers who are leveraging smartphones and cellphones to provide mental health services. The articles are now available online with print publication set for spring 2012.

Ben-Zeev acknowledges that some mental-health practitioners may doubt the ability of the mentally ill to make productive use of this technology. To counter this perception, Ben-Zeev and his associates recently conducted a survey of 1,600 Chicago individuals under treatment for serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder.

"We showed that 70 percent of the people had cellphones and used them for calling, texting, and for accessing the Internet," he remarks. "It's not quite up to the 94 percent of people in the U.S. overall but I think that these results are going to be very surprising to many who expect much less from people with serious mental illness."

The goal of the special issue papers, according to Ben-Zeev, is to stimulate discussion of potential opportunities where mobile technologies can enhance the study of psychotic illnesses and to encourage researchers and clinicians to be creative in employing these technologies.

The first of the four papers is a general review by international experts that includes concrete guidelines and practical suggestions for future studies. Editor Ben-Zeev also alludes to "expert insights and shared collective experiences [that] will undoubtedly be useful to investigators who are unfamiliar with mobile technology study design, hardware and software requirements, and statistical approaches necessary to successfully analyze the rich data that are characteristic of these paradigms."

The remaining three papers in the series are empirical studies that demonstrate the utility of technology in psychiatry, each highlighting the use of three successive generations of technology. The first study report begins with preprogrammed wristwatches that signal people to respond to paper questionnaires. The second had people using personal digital assistants (PDAs) to complete on-screen questionnaires periodically when prompted, and the last employed cellphones that delivered text messages requiring self-monitoring responses.

In addition to the call to action implicit in the special issue papers, Ben-Zeev and his Chicago coworkers are putting "boots on the ground," as he says. He is partnering with community agencies and working with psychiatric rehabilitation centers and people in treatment. As a result, his research is simultaneously providing a clinical service.

"This is not your typical model," states Ben-Zeev. "Usually the research is conducted in an academic medical center, and then there is a transition back to real settings which may take a really long time. We are bypassing that by developing the paradigm here to begin with, getting feedback from both providers and consumers. I think that's the strength of what we are doing."

Workshop programme

You will learn the basic principles of neurofeedback and take away theoretical and practical skills including: (1) basic Neurophysiology & Neuroanatomy of brain connectivity; (2) theoretical models underpinning Neurofeedback interventions in schools; (3) QEEG-guided Neurofeedback; (4) the international 10-20 system and how to place leads on the head to get a good signal; (5) basic features of EEG spectra and bandwidth description; (6) differentiating muscle activity from neural activity; (7) setting up and running sessions; (8) making sense of your data; (9) introduction to protocol design: applying C3-C4 SMR; and peak performance protocols; (10) the role of Quantitative Electroencephalography in protocol design; (11) risk assessment and ethical issues; (12) choosing the right equipment for your practice.

Registration fee: £570

For a registration form visit:
http://www.open.ac.uk/about/teaching-and-learning/esteem/qeeg-workshop/p5.shtml

or contact: a.martins-mourao@open.ac.uk

Sponsored by the British Neuroscience Association, BNA
http://www.bna.org.uk/external-events/view.php?permalink=FPQFBJHCME

* Closest tube station: Camden Town.
For a map visit: http://www3.open.ac.uk/near-you/london/p4.asp