ResearchBlogging.orgEvolutionary psychology tends to receive harsh criticism, and often rightly so. One of the main reasons for this is the severe lack of evidence for many of it’s proposals given that the paucity of fossilised brains fails to bolster many a case. And it isn’t even anyone’s fault. That’s just the way it goes sometimes, that the brain is a jelly-like substance that is subject to decay after death, and there’s no way we can objectively analyse or verify any differences in brains of long ago with brains of today.

This isn’t set to change anytime soon, but the remarkable discovery of a medieval child’s brain was the subject of a Neuroimage paper published recently. This is extremely exciting on many counts: the brain has been so fantastically preserved that it is possible to identify the frontal, temporal and occipital lobes, and even the sulci and gyri, the grooves and furrows channeled into brains.

However it is only the left-hemisphere that survived and not the entire brain, which had also shrunk to about 80% of it’s original weight due to the (natural) mummification process.

Neurowhoa: 700-year-old Brain Found Preserved

It turns out that there is a striking similarity between how the human brain determines what is going on in the outside world and the job of scientists. Good science involves formulating a hypothesis and testing whether this hypothesis is compatible with the scientist’s observations. Researchers in the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt together with the University of Glasgow have shown that this is what the brain does as well. A study shows that it takes less effort for the brain to register predictable as compared to unpredictable images.

Alink and colleagues based this conclusion on the characteristics of responses in the primary visual cortex. It is known that the primary visual cortex is critical for vision and that responses in this brain area create a map of what we are currently looking at. Alink and colleagues, however, for the first time show that images induce smaller responses in this area when they are predictable. The implication of this finding is that the brain does not just sit and wait for visual signals to arrive. Instead, it actively tries to predict these signals and when it is right it is rewarded by being able to respond more efficiently. If it is wrong, massive responses are required to find out why it is wrong and to come up with better predictions.

The brains of psychopaths appear to be wired to keep seeking a reward at any cost, new research from Vanderbilt University finds. The research uncovers the role of the brain’s reward system in psychopathy and opens a new area of study for understanding what drives these individuals.

“This study underscores the importance of neurological research as it relates to behavior,” Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said. “The findings may help us find new ways to intervene before a personality trait becomes antisocial behavior.”

The results were published March 14, 2010, in Nature Neuroscience.

Science Daily: Psychopaths’ Brains Wired to Seek Rewards, No Matter the Consequences

The studies in Kristiina Kompus’s dissertation show that these two different ways of remembering things are initiated by entirely different signal paths in the brain. Efforts to retrieve a specific memory are dealt with by the upper part of the frontal lobe. This area of the brain is activated not only in connection with memory-related efforts but also in all types of mental efforts and intentions, according to the dissertation. This part of the brain is not involved in the beginning of the process of unintentionally remembering something as a response to external stimuli. Instead, such memories are activated by specific signals from other parts of the brain, namely those that deal with perceived stimuli like smells, pictures, and words. Sometimes such memories are thought to be more vivid and emotional; otherwise they would not be activated in this way. But Kristiina Kompus’s dissertation shows that this is not the case — memories do not need to be emotionally charged to be revived spontaneously, unintentionally. Nor do memories that are revived spontaneously activate the brain more than other memories.

Science Daily: Different Signal Paths for Spontaneous and Deliberate Activation of Memories

(Photo credit: Kevin Dooley / CC)

The findings come from a deceptively simple study of people using a computer mouse rigged to malfunction. The resulting disruption in attention wasn’t superficial. It seemingly extended to the very roots of cognition.

“The person and the various parts of their brain and the mouse and the monitor are so tightly intertwined that they’re just one thing,” said Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College. “The tool isn’t separate from you. It’s part of you.”

Chemero’s experiment, published March 9 in Public Library of Science, was designed to test one of Heidegger’s fundamental concepts: that people don’t notice familiar, functional tools, but instead “see through” them to a task at hand, for precisely the same reasons that one doesn’t think of one’s fingers while tying shoelaces. The tools are us.

This idea, called “ready-to-hand,” has influenced artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, but without being directly tested.

Wired Science: Your Computer Really Is a Part of You

(via Cole Tucker)

The world’s first patient-ready and commercially available brain computer interface just arrived at CeBIT 2010. The Intendix from Guger Technologies (g*tec) is a system that uses an EEG cap to measure brain activity in order to let you type with your thoughts. Meant to work with those with locked-in syndrome, or other disabilities, Intendix is simple enough to use after just 10 minutes of training. You simply focus on a grid of letters as they flash. When your desired letter lights up, brain activity spikes and Intendix types it. As users master the system, a few will be able to type as quickly as 1 letter a second. Besides typing, it can also trigger alarms, convert text to speech, print, copy, or email. Retailing for €9000 (~$12,250), Intendix isn’t cheap, but it’s the first thought to type system available that’s geared towards easy to setup personal use in the home. Brain computer interfaces just got more accessible, and that’s a step towards them becoming more common all over the world.

Singularity Hub: Intendix, The Brain Computer Interface Goes Commercial

(via Edge of Tomorrow)

See also:

Chris Arkenberg’s 3 Scenarios for Brain Computer Interface.

I had no idea the link between serotonin and depression was in doubt. Very interesting:

Via Dormivigilia, I came across a fascinating paper about a man who suffered from a severe lack of monoamine neurotransmitters (dopamine, serotonin etc.) as a result of a genetic mutation. [...]

Overall, though, the biggest finding here was a non-finding: this patient wasn’t depressed, despite having much reduced serotonin levels. This is further evidence that serotonin isn’t the “happy chemical” in any simple sense.

On the other hand, the similarities between his symptoms and some of the symptoms of depression suggest that serotonin is doing something in that disorder. This fits with existing evidence from tryptophan depletion studies showing that low serotonin doesn’t cause depression in most people, but does re-activate symptoms in people with a history of the disease. As I said, it’s complicated…

Neuroskeptic: Life Without Serotonin

See also:

Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature

Doctors treat millions of children with Ritalin every year to improve their ability to focus on tasks, but scientists now report that Ritalin also directly enhances the speed of learning.

In animal research, the scientists showed for the first time that Ritalin boosts both of these cognitive abilities by increasing the activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine deep inside the brain. Neurotransmitters are the chemical messengers neurons use to communicate with each other. They release the molecule, which then docks onto receptors of other neurons. The research demonstrated that one type of dopamine receptor aids the ability to focus, and another type improves the learning itself.

The scientists also established that Ritalin produces these effects by enhancing brain plasticity – strengthening communication between neurons where they meet at the synapse. Research in this field has accelerated as scientists have recognized that our brains can continue to form new connections – remain plastic – throughout life.

PhysOrg: Ritalin boosts learning by increasing brain plasticity

(via Chris S.)

The project is in a very early alpha stage. Some of the current goals for the project include:

-Create a workable and easy to build hardware design to allow experimentation similar to that done by Dr. Persinger.

-Develop firmware for any integrated controllers

-Develop software that facilitates controlled application of TMS or rTMS utilizing the hardware

-Software integration with openEEG and Sbagen for a rich experimental environment

Open-rTMS Project

(via William Gibson)

(Photo Credit: h.koppdelaney’s / CC)

See also:

The God Experiments

Above: the apparatus used for this study.

Researchers have successfully reconstructed 3-D hand motions from brain signals recorded in a non-invasive way, according to a study in the March 3 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. This finding uses a technique that may open new doors for portable brain-computer interface systems. Such a non-invasive system could potentially operate a robotic arm or motorized wheelchair — a huge advance for people with disabilities or paralysis. [...]

The reaching apparatus used to study the finger paths from a center button to eight other buttons in random order. While volunteers touched the buttons, researchers recorded their brain signals and hand motions. Afterward, the researchers attempted to decode the signals and reconstruct the 3-D hand movements.

Science Daily: 3-D Hand Movement Reconstructed Using Brain Signals: Future Portable Prosthetic Devices for Movement-Impaired

Kind of. The article, Neural evidence for inequality-averse social preferences, doesn’t mention the C word, but it does claim to have found evidence that people’s brains display more egalitarianism than people themselves admit to. [...]

When people received money for themselves, activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the ventral striatum correlated with the size of their gain.

However, when presented with a payment to the other person, these areas seemed to be rather egalitarian. Activity rose in rich people when their poor colleagues got money. In fact, it was greater in that case than when they got money themselves, which means the “rich” people’s neural activity was more egalitarian than their subjective ratings were. Whereas in “poor” people, the vmPFC and the ventral striatum only responded to getting money, not to seeing the rich getting even richer.

The authors of the study concluded that this is evidence of a neurobiological preference against inequality.

NeuroSkeptic: Is Your Brain A Communist?

I think they probably mean zazen (or am I nitpicking here?)

People can reduce their sensitivity to pain by thickening their brain, according to a new study published in a special issue of the American Psychological Association journal, Emotion. Researchers from the Université de Montréal made their discovery by comparing the grey matter thickness of Zen meditators and non-meditators. They found evidence that practicing the centuries-old discipline of Zen can reinforce a central brain region (anterior cingulate) that regulates pain.

Science Daily: Zen Meditation: Thicker Brains Fend Off Pain

Couples should not worry when the first flush of passion dims – scientists have identified the hormone changes which cause the switch from lust to cuddles.

A team from the University of Pisa in Italy found the bodily chemistry which makes people sexually attractive to new partners lasts, at most, two years.

When couples move into a “stable relationship” phase, other hormones take over, Chemistry World reports.

But one psychologist warned the hormone shift is wrongly seen as negative.

Dr Petra Boynton, of the British Psychological Society, said there was a danger people might feel they should take hormone supplements to make them feel the initial rush of lust once more.

BBC: Sex chemistry ‘lasts two years’

(Thanks Paul!)

See also the work of Helen Fisher.

HAVE you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.

Read More – New Scientist: How chaos drives the brain

(via Wade)

Spirituality was tracked to the the left inferior parietal lobe (left) and the right angular gyrus (right).

Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas.

To investigate the neural basis of spirituality, Cosimo Urgesi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Udine, and his colleagues turned to people with brain tumours to assess the feeling before and after surgery. Three to seven days after the removal of tumours from the posterior part of the brain, in the parietal cortex, patients reported feeling a greater sense of self-transcendence. This was not the case for patients with tumours removed from the frontal regions of the brain. [...]

Probably the most worrisome aspect of the study is the way the authors measured self-transcendence. “It’s important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items,” says cognitive neuroscientist Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In the future, it will be important to understand why lesions in the parietal cortex induce changes on this scale.”

“Self-transcendence is an abstract concept, and different people will attribute different meanings to the word,” says Vandenberghe. Patient self reporting is not always accurate, he says, adding that tapping into spirituality with more rigorous behavioural measures and pinpointing the specific thoughts and feelings that constitute it are the obvious next steps.

Nature: Brain surgery boosts spirituality

(via Cat Vincent)

Chris Arkenberg is a visiting researcher at the Institute for the Future, an organizer of the event AR DevCamp, a musician operating under the name n8ur, and a big picture thinker. I talked to him via instant message about forecasting, how to navigate the future, and more. You can find him on Twitter here and his web site is here.

Klint Finley: You’re a visiting researcher at the Institute for the Future, and you’re working on their Ten Year Forecast. Can you explain what the Ten Year Forecast is, and what your own day to day role in it is?

Chris Arkenberg: The Ten Year Forecast is an annual research arc that looks at global issues impacting the next decade. We develop major forecasts then break each of those out into different scenarios to give organizations models for anticipating the future and adjusting their strategy accordingly. My role is providing research and forecasts for the Global Power and Carbon Economy arcs.

In Carbon, I’ve been profiling global energy dispositions. Eg, “What natural resources does China have under its lands and what is the spread of it’s energy use?” In Global Power, I’ve been analyzing insurgency movements, notably the narcoinsurgency in Mexico, the MEND movement in Nigeria, and the nexus of terrorism, insurgency, and international drug trafficking in Northern Africa.

I noticed you mentioned The Pirate Bay as a global power the other day as well.

Well, Pirate Bay is interesting as an enclave of free information. And they kicked their game up with the recent release of their anonymizing service, effectively acting as an encrypted traffic node. As such, they certainly represent a challenge to traditional systems of control.

Read the rest of this entry »

Researches conducted functional MRI brain scans on 6 skilled jazz musicians while they improvised to learn about the neuroscience of jazz improvisation.

The prefrontal cortex was characterized by a deactivation during improvisation, sensorimotor activity in the sensory cortex area were mostly activated, and a widespread deactivation of the limbic and paralimbic region during improvisation. These deactivation of limbic and paralimbic regions were seen in the amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus and other structures of this region.

The changes in the prefrontal cortex consisted of a deactivation in the lateral parts and activation in the medial parts of the prefrontal cortex. The medial part is thought to play a role in the complex phenomenon of the self, internally motivated self generated content and as such this activation can be explained by the fact that improvisation is also a way of expressing one’s own musical voice or story. The deactivation of the lateral part is explained by the occurrence of free floating attention, permitting spontaneous expressions without interference of self-monitoring.

ShockMD: The Neuroscience of Jazz

(via CC)

For the first time, CNRS(1) and CEA(2) researchers have developed a transistor that can mimic the main functionalities of a synapse(3). This organic transistor, based on pentacene(4) and gold nanoparticles and known as a NOMFET (Nanoparticle Organic Memory Field-Effect Transistor), has opened the way to new generations of neuro-inspired computers, capable of responding in a manner similar to the nervous system.

The study is published in the 22 January 2010 issue of the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

In the development of new information processing strategies, one approach consists in mimicking the way biological systems such as neuron networks operate to produce electronic circuits with new features. In the nervous system, a synapse is the junction between two neurons, enabling the transmission of electric messages from one neuron to another and the adaptation of the message as a function of the nature of the incoming signal (plasticity). For example, if the synapse receives very closely packed pulses of incoming signals, it will transmit a more intense action potential. Conversely, if the pulses are spaced farther apart, the action potential will be weaker.

It is this plasticity that the researchers have succeeding in mimicking with the NOMFET.

Organic Transistor Paves Way for New Generations of Neuro-Inspired Computers

(Thanks Chris S)

Above: Kassiane giving the The American Sign Language sign for “autism.” The sign, which evokes the notion of “closed off,” raises issues in the neurodiversity community.

Kassiane, who prefers I don’t run her last name, is a neurodiversity advocate based in Portland, OR. She was born autistic & epileptic and has spoken at neurodiversity conferences around the world. She spoke to me via instant messenger.

Klint Finley: Could you give us a brief overview of what “neurodiversity” means, or at least what it means to you?

Kassiane: Neurodiversity, the word, simply means the whole variety of different brain wirings people have…from the different kinds of normal to the different kinds of not so normal. Then there’s Neurodiversity, the movement which is the shocking idea that people with non standard wiring are human and deserve to be treated as such without being “fixed” first.

What conditions may be included in the movement?

Autistic/Asperger people tend to make up the base of the movement, because we latch onto things so well, but we’re really inclusive…ADHD, learning disabilities, mental health issues, cognitive conditions like Down Syndrome, epilepsy, migraines, neurotypical allies, Not Diagnosed Just Weird…we’re accepting of pretty much everyone.

Is there a point at which a line is drawn between “neurodiverse” and disabled?

The 2 aren’t mutually exclusive. You can be different and disabled, but being disabled doesn’t keep you from being a human worthy of respect.

Read the rest of this entry »

Emphasis mine:

Neurons have been created directly from skin cells for the first time, in a remarkable study that suggests that our biological makeup is far more versatile than previously thought.

If confirmed, the discovery that one tissue type can be genetically reprogrammed to become another, could revolutionise treatments for conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s, opening up the possibility of turning a patient’s own skin cells into the neurons that they need. [...]

The work has been hailed as a huge conceptual leap forward in fundamental biology. “The possibility that cells could be directly reprogrammed is something that people had thought about, but to see it in black and white is still slightly shocking,” said Professor Jack Price, a neurobiologist at King’s College London. “This suggests that there are no great rules — you can reprogramme anything into anything else.”

Times Online: Neuron breakthrough offers hope on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s

(Via Fred!)

A virtual reality environment which human participants explored while lying in an fMRI brain scanner. An example of the spatially-organised firing pattern of a grid cell is overlaid on the arena floor.

‘Grid cells’ that act like a spatial map in the brain have been identified for the first time in humans, according to new research by UCL scientists which may help to explain how we create internal maps of new environments. [...]

Grid cells represent where an animal is located within its environment, which the researchers liken to having a satnav in the brain. They fire in patterns that show up as geometrically regular, triangular grids when plotted on a map of a navigated surface. They were discovered by a Norwegian lab in 2005 whose research suggested that rats create virtual grids to help them orient themselves in their surroundings, and remember new locations in unfamiliar territory.

Study co-author Dr Caswell Barry said: “It is as if grid cells provide a cognitive map of space. In fact, these cells are very much like the longitude and latitude lines we’re all familiar with on normal maps, but instead of using square grid lines it seems the brain uses triangles.

Science Daily: Human Brain Uses a Grid to Represent Space

Researchers at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research (LICR) at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Moores UCSD Cancer Center have shown one way in which gliomas, a deadly type of brain tumor, can evade drugs aimed at blocking a key cell signaling protein, epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR),that is crucial for tumor growth. In a related finding, they also proved that a particular EGFR mutation is important not only to initiate the tumor, but for its continued growth or “maintenance” as well.

Science Daily: Scientists Show How Brain Tumors Outsmart Drugs

Well, what’s going on in the laboratory – and I have some fantastic graduate students and we work together as a team – and what we have found for example, is that if you place two different brains, two different people at a distance, you put a circular magnetic field around both. There’s a magnetic field going around like a coil, around both brains even at a distance. You make sure both coils are connected to the same computer which means they’re generating the same configuration of two different spaces.

If you flash a light in one person’s eye, even though they’re in a chamber that’s closed up, the person in the other room that’s receiving just the magnetic field now, they’re not aware of the light flashing or not, they will show similar changes in frequency in the room. And we think that’s tremendous because that maybe the first macro demonstration of a quantum connection or so-called quantum entanglement. And if that’s true then there’s another way of potential communication that may have physical application and application, for example, in space travel because there’s no time involved with it. That’s one thing we’re looking at. That’s one of our more exotic hypotheses.

Skeptiko: “God Helmet” Inventor, Dr. Michael Persinger Discovers Telepathy Link in Lab Experiments

(via Electric Children)

I think it’s worth mentioning that other researchers have failed to reproduce Persinger’s “god helmet” results. (See: The God Experiments). Which doesn’t mean his latest results will prove unreproducible, but I think it should lead readers to be very skeptical of his claims.

“In effect, we discovered how the brain’s dictionary is organized,” said Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology and director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. “It isn’t alphabetical or ordered by the sizes of objects or their colors. It’s through the three basic features that the brain uses to define common nouns like apartment, hammer and carrot.”

As the researchers report January 12 in the journal PLoS One, the three codes or factors concern basic human fundamentals:

1. how you physically interact with the object (how you hold it, kick it, twist it, etc.);
2. how it is related to eating (biting, sipping, tasting, swallowing); and
3. how it is related to shelter or enclosure.

The three factors, each coded in three to five different locations in the brain, were found by a computer algorithm that searched for commonalities among brain areas in how participants responded to 60 different nouns describing physical objects. For example, the word apartment evoked high activation in the five areas that code shelter-related words.

Science Daily: Identifying Thoughts Through Brain Codes Leads to Deciphering the Brain’s Dictionary

Neuroscientists at MIT have developed a powerful new class of tools to reversibly shut down brain activity using different colors of light. When targeted to specific neurons, these tools could potentially lead to new treatments for the abnormal brain activity associated with disorders such as chronic pain, epilepsy, brain injury, and Parkinson’s disease. The tools work on the principle that such disorders might be best treated by silencing, rather than stimulating, brain activity. These “super silencers” exert exquisite control over the timing of the shutdown of overactive neural circuits – an effect that’s impossible with existing drugs or other conventional therapies.

“Silencing different sets of neurons with different colors of light allows us to understand how they work together to implement brain functions,” explains Ed Boyden, senior author of the study, to be published in the Jan. 7 issue of Nature. “Using these new tools, we can look at two neural pathways and study how they compute together. These tools will help us understand how to control neural circuits, leading to new understandings and treatments for brain disorders – some of the biggest unmet medical needs in the world.” Boyden is the Benesse Career Development Professor in the MIT Media Lab and an associate member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT.

escience: MIT neuroengineers silence brain cells with multiple colors of light

(via Fadereu)