A 23-year-old mountain climber was hit by a lightning bolt and awoke in hospital to find herself experiencing bizarre hallucinations. […] The air rescue team took her to hospital and she was put in a drug induced coma for three days as she was disoriented and extremely agitated. When she awoke, her world was somewhat different.

[…] On her left side a cowboy riding on a horse came from the distance. As he approached her, he tried to shoot her, making her feel defenceless because she could not move or shout for help.

In another scene, two male doctors, one fair and one dark haired, and a woman, all with strange metal glasses and unnatural brownish-red faces, were tanning in front of a sunbed, then having sexual intercourse and afterwards trying to draw blood from her. […]

Her brain scan showed damage to the occipital lobes, the areas at the back of the brain that are largely taken up with the visual cortex that deal with the early stages of visual perception.

{ Mind Hacks | Continue reading }

photo { Nick Waplington }

{ Alan Gevins and colleagues of San Francisco took electroencephalography (EEG) out of the lab and organized an EEG party - allowing them to record brain electrical activity from 10 people as they chatted and drank vodka martinis. The purpose of the study was to measure the effect of alcohol on brain activity. | Neuroskeptic | full story }

Consciousness is restricted to a subset of animals with relatively complex brains. The more scientists study animal behavior and brain anatomy, however, the more universal consciousness seems to be. A brain as complex as the human brain is definitely not necessary for consciousness. On July 7 this year, a group of neuroscientists convening at Cambridge University signed a document officially declaring that non-human animals, “including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses” are conscious.

Humans are more than just conscious—they are also self-aware. Scientists differ on the difference between consciousness and self-awareness, but here is one common explanation: […] To be conscious is to think; to be self-aware is to realize that you are a thinking being and to think about your thoughts. […]

Numerous neuroimaging studies have suggested that thinking about ourselves, recognizing images of ourselves and reflecting on our thoughts and feelings—that is, different forms self-awareness—all involve the cerebral cortex, the outermost, intricately wrinkled part of the brain. The fact that humans have a particularly large and wrinkly cerebral cortex relative to body size supposedly explains why we seem to be more self-aware than most other animals.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

If you’ve ever wondered why you can remember some things from long ago yet can’t recall what you ate for dinner last night, a new study led by psychologists at the University of Toronto may help.

How much something means to you actually influences how you see it – as well as how vividly you can recall it later – the study shows.

“We’ve discovered that we see things that are emotionally arousing with greater clarity than those that are more mundane,” says Rebecca Todd. […] “Whether they’re positive – for example, a first kiss, the birth of a child, winning an award – or negative, such as traumatic events, breakups, or a painful and humiliating childhood moment that we all carry with us, the effect is the same.”

“What’s more, we found that how vividly we perceive something in the first place predicts how vividly we will remember it later on,” says Todd. “We call this ‘emotionally enhanced vividness’ and it is like the flash of a flashbulb that illuminates an event as it’s captured for memory.”

{ University of Toronto News | Continue reading }

related { Scientists Confirm that Memories of Music Are Stored in Different Part of Brain than Other Memories }

photo { René Magritte, Éclipse Solaire, 1935 }

Botox functions by blocking the neurotransmitter acetylcholine from being released by the axon terminal of a neuron. Typically, acetylcholine binds to receptors on muscle, causing contraction; inhibiting this results in paralysis.

In the 1890s, psychologist William James promoted his facial feedback hypothesis. James believed there was a link between physical facial expressions and emotional states. Indeed, a number of studies in the 1980s and ’90s support this notion.

In the May issue of the Journal of Psychiatric Research, researchers M. Axel Wollmer and colleagues at the University of Basel in Switzerland reported that paralyzing the glabellar frown region—the area between the eyebrows—with Botox significantly improved symptoms in depressed individuals.

{ Gaines, on Brains | Continue reading }

Although real ‘clock measured’ time is passing at a constant rate, experience tells us that our subjective sense of the amount of time that has occurred, or the speed at which time is passing, can vary, leading to distortions in the passage of time. When we feel like less time has occurred than actually has, time feels like it has speeded up. When we feel like more has occurred than actually has, time feels like it has slowed down.

Despite being commonly experienced, the mechanisms behind distortions of the passage of time are underresearched and, as a result, poorly understood. Anecdotal accounts imply that our experience of time is influenced by our emotions and the activities we engage in: ‘time flies when you’re having fun’, but not when an car is hurtling towards you.

It is not only enjoyment and fear that affect how quickly time appears to be passing: other alterations in subjective consciousness have similar effects. The consumption of drugs and alcohol has long been known to warp time experiences. […]

Having experienced distortions in the passage of time whilst under the influence of drugs and alcohol, there is some concern amongst users about whether any effects could be permanent. Heavy drug and alcohol use can result in long-term neurological damage (Harper, 2009) and impaired cognitive function (Fisk & Montgomery, 2009), both of which may alter timing ability even when drug use has ceased. Chronic cocaine and amphetamine use reduces dopamine D2 receptor availability (Volkow et al., 2001), and, because animal studies have demonstrated that dopamine levels influence duration perception, it is possible that chronic users of cocaine or methamphetamine may show impaired timing even after drug use has stopped.

{ The Psychologist | Continue reading }

photo { Janine Gordon }

The ability to be hypnotised seems to be a distinct trait that is distributed among the population, like height or shoe size, in a “bell curve” or normal distribution: a minority of people cannot engage with any suggestions, a minority can engage with almost all, and most people can achieve a few.

The key word here is “engage”, as, contrary to popular belief, hypnosis cannot be used to make people do something against their will, even though the effects seem to happen involuntarily. If this seems paradoxical, a good analogy is watching a movie: you don’t decide to react emotionally to the on-screen story, but you can choose to turn away or disengage at any time. In other words, the effects of the film, just like hypnosis, require your active participation.

{ Observer | Continue reading }

photo { Sam Margevicius }

Hayworth has spent much of the past few years in a windowless room carving brains into very thin slices. He is by all accounts a curious man, known for casually saying things like, “The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body.” He wants that brain to be his brain. He wants his 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion synapses to be encased in a block of transparent, amber-colored resin—before he dies of natural causes.

Why? Ken Hayworth believes that he can live forever. […]

By 2110, Hayworth predicts, mind uploading—the transfer of a biological brain to a silicon-based operating system—will be as common as laser eye surgery is today. […]

To understand why Hayworth wants to plastinate his own brain you have to understand his field—connectomics, a new branch of neuroscience. A connectome is a complete map of a brain’s neural circuitry. Some scientists believe that human connectomes will one day explain consciousness, memory, emotion, even diseases like autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s—the cures for which might be akin to repairing a wiring error.

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

photo { Matthias Heiderich }

Memories merge into memories. Byatt’s grandmother’s vivid remembering becomes the granddaughter’s vivid imagining. Who can tell the difference? In time, we might become so convinced by other people’s descriptions of their memories that we start to claim them as our own. If the experimental conditions are set up correctly, it turns out to be rather simple to give people memories for events they never actually experienced.

A well-known series of experiments by the American cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues at the University of Washington has shown that presenting participants with misleading information after they have experienced an event can change their memory of the event. […]

A recent neuroimaging study has provided some of the first clues to the neural mechanisms involved when our memories are shaped by other people. […] The scan findings showed that persistent memory errors, which went on to become part of the subjects’ own retelling of the story, were associated with greater activation in the hippocampus (the brain region primarily responsible for laying down episodic memories) than transient errors, which seemed to be more about conforming to a public account of the events. The researchers also showed that the amygdala (a part of the brain responsible for emotional memory) was particularly active when the participants thought that the information had come from other people, as compared with computer-generated representations. They suggested that the amygdala, so closely connected to the hippocampus, may play a specific role in the process by which social influences shape our memories. […]

A team of British researchers recently conducted the first scientific study of “nonbelieved memories”: memories which people cease to believe after coming to realise that they are false.

{ Independent | Continue reading }

photo { Tim Geoghegan }

The theory that liars look up to the right has been proved wrong

A paper published in PLOS ONE has apparently disproved the long-standing theory that direction of eye gaze can indicate lying. The theory which forms part of the bed-rock of the controversial offshoot of psychology called ‘Neuro-linguistic programming’ (NLP) has in fact never actually been experimentally researched until now. The study found absolutely no correlation between eye gaze and lying. Considering that this theory has become such a staple of popular psychology, it really is astounding that this was not discovered sooner.

{ Neurobonkers | Continue reading }

photo { Ewen Spencer }

A man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.

Or rather, his brain’s performance is near perfect. The man has a machine strapped to his head, an array of electrodes called an electroencephalogram, or EEG, which is recording his brain activity as each image skips by. It then sends the brain-activity data wirelessly to a large computer. The computer has learned what the man’s brain activity looks like when he sees one of the visual targets, and, based on that information, it quickly reshuffles the images. When the man sorts back through the hundreds of images—most without structures, but some with—almost all the ones with buildings in them pop to the front of the pack. His brain and the computer have done good work.

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

photo { Michel Le Belhomme }

How does the brain decide between actions? Is it through comparisons of abstract representations of outcomes or through a competition in a sensorimotor map defining the actions themselves?

{ Neural Mechanisms for Interacting with a World Full of Action Choices | via Thoughts on Thoughts | Continue reading }

related { New Mind-Reading Device Lets Paralyzed People Type }

photo { Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari }

People can be trained to forget specific details associated with bad memories, according to breakthrough findings that may usher the way for the development of new depression and post-traumatic stress disorder therapies. […]

Researchers found that individuals were still able to accurately recall the cause of the event even after they’ve been trained to forget the consequences and personal meaning associated with the memory.

{ Medical Daily | Continue reading }

We know that love lives in the brain, not in the heart. But where in the brain is it – and is it in the same place as sexual desire? A recent international study is the first to draw an exact map of these intimately linked feelings.

“No one has ever put these two together to see the patterns of activation,” says Jim Pfaus, professor of psychology at Concordia University. “We didn’t know what to expect – the two could have ended up being completely separate. It turns out that love and desire activate specific but related areas in the brain.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

painting { François Boucher, Venus Consoling Love, 1751 }

An experiment that Sigmund Freud could never have imagined 100 years ago may help lend scientific support for one of his key theories, and help connect it with current neuroscience. […] new data supporting a causal link between the psychoanalytic concept known as unconscious conflict, and the conscious symptoms experienced by people with anxiety disorders such as phobias.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Freudian psychoanalysis refers to a specific type of treatment in which the patient verbalizes thoughts, including free associations, fantasies, and dreams, from which the analyst induces the unconscious conflicts causing the patient’s symptoms and character problems, and interprets them for the patient to create insight for resolution of the problems.

The specifics of the analyst’s interventions typically include confronting and clarifying the patient’s pathological defenses, wishes and guilt. Through the analysis of conflicts, including those contributing to resistance and those involving transference onto the analyst of distorted reactions, psychoanalytic treatment can hypothesize how patients unconsciously are their own worst enemies: how unconscious, symbolic reactions that have been stimulated by experience are causing symptoms. Its theories have been criticised on numerous fronts including the view that they constitute pseudo-science, but psychoanalysis still has many practitioners of various schools.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Fan Ho, Approaching Shadow, 1954 }

A paper by Shtulman and Valcarcel argues that even though we know that the earth goes around the sun, we still have hidden away the idea that the sun goes around the earth. Their experiment takes a number of statements about astronomy, evolution, fractions, genetics, germs, matter, mechanics, physiology, thermodynamics, and waves, and asks if they are true. (For example, statements could be ‘the moon goes around the earth’, ‘the sun goes around the earth’.) The speed of answering and the accuracy were compared for statements that have the same validity both scientifically and naïvely, and statements were the validity is different. In all the subject categories the answers were slower and less accurate if there was dissonance between the scientific answer and the naïve one. I assume that neuroscience statements would give the same result, based on the ideas of teleological (design and purpose is found in all things) and animistic (all events are the product of animated intention) bias.

{ thoughts on thoughts | Continue reading }

Scientists have now found the engram, the physical trace of memory in the brain. […]

Decades of scientific dogma asserted that engrams exist only in vast webs of connections, not in a particular place but in distributed neural networks running widely through the brain. Yet a series of pioneering studies have demonstrated that it is possible to lure specific memories into particular neurons, at least in mice. If those neurons are killed or temporarily inactivated, the memories vanish. If the neurons are reactivated, the memories return. These same studies have also begun to explain how and why the brain allocates each memory to a particular group of cells and how it links them together and organizes them—the physical means by which the scent of a madeleine, the legendary confection that sparked Marcel Proust’s memory stream, leads to remembrance of things past. […]

“We have now gotten to the point that we know enough about memory and how memories are formed that we can actually find the engram, and by finding it, we can manipulate it,” says neurobiologist Alcino Silva.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

image { Stefano Colombini }

One of the most mysterious problems in neuroscience is the link between brain chemistry and consciousness. How do changes in our neurochemistry influence our perception of the real world?  […]

Neuroscientists point out that in contrast to the small amount of formal scientific literature in this area, there are large volumes of narrative descriptions of the effects of drugs posted on the web. Their idea is to mine these descriptions using machine learning techniques to identify common features which would allow a quantitative comparison of their effects. […]

The obvious place to start such an endeavour is a website called erowid.org, which is a well known and popular source of user generated information about the effects of all kinds of psychoactive substances. […]

Coyle and co confine their investigations to ten drugs ranging from 3,4‐methylenedioxymethamphetamine, better known as ecstacy, and lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, to less well known drugs such as N,N‐dipropyltryptamine, sometimes called The Light,  and 2,5‐dimethoxy‐4‐ethylphenethylamine which has the street name Europa. […]

The Light and Europa were associated with words such as “stomach,” “nausea,” “vomit,” “headache.”

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { Eylül Aslan }

related { How plants make cocaine }

related { Bath Salts: Your Guide to Dangerous Designer Drugs }

The way that children reason about the world, there’s a lot of good evidence to suggest that there are domains of knowledge: physical, reasoning about the physical world; biological, reasoning about the living world; and reasoning about the psychological world. Those three domains are the physics, the biology and the psychology, and are deemed to cover the majority of what we do when we’re thinking about concepts. […]

This is work I’ve done with Paul Bloom. We initially started looking at sentimental objects, the emergence of this bizarre behavior that you find in children in the West. They form these emotional attachments to blankets and teddy bears and it initially starts off as an associative learning type of situation where they need to self-soothe, because in the West we typically separate children, for sleeping purposes, between one and two years of age. In the Far East they don’t, they keep children well into middle childhood, so they don’t have as much attachment object behavior. It’s common, about three out of four children start off with this sort of attachment to particular objects and then it dissipates and disappears.

What Paul and I are interested in is whether or not it was the physical properties of the object or if there was something about the identity or the authenticity of the object which is important. We embarked on a series of studies where we convinced children we had a duplicating machine, and basically we used conjuring tricks to convince the child that we could duplicate any physical object. We have these boxes which looked very scientific, with wires and lights, and we place an object in one, and activate it, and after a few seconds the other box would appear to start up by itself and you open it up and you see you’ve got two identical objects. The child spontaneously said, “Oh, it’s like a copying machine.” It’s like a photocopier for objects, if you like. Once they’re in the mindset this thing can copy, we then test what you can get away with. They’re quite happy to have their objects, their toys copied, but when it comes to a sentimental object like a blanket or a teddy bear, then they’re much more resistant to accepting the duplicate. […]

Also, we’re getting into the territory of authenticity and identity. There are some fairly old philosophical issues about what confers identity and uniqueness, and these are the principles, quiddity and haecceity. I hadn’t even heard of these issues until I started to research into it, and it turns out these obscure terms come from the philosopher Duns Scotus. Quiddity is the invisible properties, the essence shared by members of a group, so that would be the ‘dogginess’ of all dogs. But the haecceity is the unique property of the individual, so that would be Fido’s haecceity or Fido’s essence, which makes Fido distinct to another dog, for example.

These are not real properties. These are psychological constructs, and I think the reason that people generate these constructs is that when they invest some emotional time or effort into an object, or it has some significance towards them, then they imbue it with this property, which makes it irreplaceable, you can’t duplicate it. […]

The sense of personal identity, this is where we’ve been doing experimental work showing the importance that we place upon episodic memories, autobiographical memories. […] As we all know, memory is notoriously fallible. It’s not cast in stone. It’s not something that is stable. It’s constantly reshaping itself. So the fact that we have a multitude of unconscious processes which are generating this coherence of consciousness, which is the I experience, and the truth that our memories are very selective and ultimately corruptible, we tend to remember things which fit with our general characterization of what our self is. We tend to ignore all the information that is inconsistent. We have all these attribution biases. We have cognitive dissonance. The very thing psychology keeps telling us, that we have all these unconscious mechanisms that reframe information, to fit with a coherent story, then both the “I” and the “me”, to all intents and purposes, are generated narratives.

{ Bruce Hood/Edge | Continue reading }

photo { Todd Fisher }

Research team at Aalto University and Turku PET Centre has revealed how experiencing strong emotions synchronizes brain activity across individuals.

Human emotions are highly contagious. Seeing others’ emotional expressions such as smiles triggers often the corresponding emotional response in the observer. Such synchronization of emotional states across individuals may support social interaction: When all group members share a common emotional state, their brains and bodies process the environment in a similar fashion.

Researchers at Aalto University and Turku PET Centre have now found that feeling strong emotions makes different individuals’ brain activity literally synchronous.

The results revealed that especially feeling strong unpleasant emotions synchronized brain’s emotion processing networks in the frontal and midline regions. On the contrary, experiencing highly arousing events synchronized activity in the networks supporting vision, attention and sense of touch.

{ Aalto University | Continue reading }

photo { Cypress Gardens, Florida, 1954 }