In a recent fMRI study, researchers showed that Cantonese verbs and nouns are processed in (slightly) different parts of the brain than English nouns and verbs in bilinguals. (…)

Chinese nouns and verbs showed a largely overlapping pattern of cortical activity. In contrast, English verbs activated more brain regions compared to English nouns. Specifically, the processing of English verbs evoked stronger activities of left putamen, left fusiform gyrus, cerebellum, right cuneus, right middle occipital areas, and supplementary motor area. The cognition of English nouns did not evoke stronger activities in any cortical regions.

This is truly language affecting thought, no? The point of general interest to linguist is that bilingual speakers seem to process words in their two languages differently. Cantonese words are processed using diffuse brain regions and English words are processed using localized regions (this is a simplified explanation of course).

{ The Lousy Linguist | Continue reading }

painting { Miriam Cabessa, Little Black 2, 2008 | oil on linen }

It is a cliché that the brain is the “largest sex organ,” but the repetition of the phrase doesn’t make it any less true. The mechanics of its role during sex are less obvious and less well understood than that of the body’s other sex organs, but by using brain imaging scans, neuroscientists have begun to get a sense of what parts of the brain light up during sex, especially at the moment of orgasm. (…)

One early study of orgasms suggests that the subjective experience of orgasm is very similar between men and women. Despite having different anatomies, men and women seem to be hard-wired to experience sexual pleasure in the same way. But does this translate to a similarity in the brain? (…)

Much more so than men’s brains, female brains go mysteriously silent during orgasm. In particular, the left lateral orbitofronal cortex and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, areas involved in self-control and social judgment, respectively, are deactivated. Brain activity also fell in the amygdala, suggesting a similar, albeit more drastic, drop in vigilance and emotion as in men. “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings,” Holstege was quoted as saying.

{ Big Think | Continue reading }

painting { Mark Sheinkman, Lourel, 2010 | oil, alkyd and graphite on linen }

Where are you right now? Maybe you are at home, the office or a coffee shop—but such responses provide only a partial answer to the question at hand. Asked another way, what is the location of your “self” as you read this sentence? Like most people, you probably have a strong sense that your conscious self is housed within your physical body, regardless of your surroundings.



But sometimes this spatial self-location goes awry. During a so-called out-of-body experience, for example, one’s self seems to be transported outside the physical body into a surreal perspective—some people even believe they are viewing their bodies from above, as though their true selves were floating. In a related experience, people with a delusion known as somatoparaphrenia disown one of their limbs or confuse another person’s limb for their own. Such warped perceptions help researchers understand the neuroscience of selfhood.



A new paper offers examples of rare bodily illusions that are not confined to a single limb, nor are they complete out-of-body experiences—they are somewhere in between. These illusory body perceptions, described in the September issue of Consciousness and Cognition, could offer novel clues about how the brain maintains a link between the physical and conscious selves, or what the researchers call “bodily self-consciousness.”

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Imp Kerr & Associates, NYC }

Most of us know, but often forget, that handwriting is not natural. We are not born to do it. There is no genetic basis for writing. Writing is not like seeing or talking, which are innate. Writing must be taught.

About 6,000 years ago, the Sumerians created the first schools, called tablet houses, to teach writing. They trained children in Sumerian cuneiform by having them copy the symbols on one half of a soft clay tablet onto the other half, using a stylus. When children did this — and when the Sumerians invented a system of representation, a way to make one thing symbolize another — their brains changed.

Maryanne Wolf explains the neurological developments writing wrought: “The brain became a beehive of activity. A network of processes went to work: The visual and visual association areas responded to visual patterns (or representations); frontal, temporal, and parietal areas provided information about the smallest sounds in words …; and finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meaning, function and connections.”

The Sumerians did not have an alphabet — nor did the Egyptians, who may have gotten to writing earlier. Which alphabet came first is debated; many consider it to be the Greek version, a system based upon Phoenician. Alphabets created even more neural pathways, allowing us to think in new ways (neither better nor worse than non-alphabetic systems, like Chinese, yet different nonetheless).

{ Miller-McCune | Continue reading }

Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world’s leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There’s an intensity in their stare, as if they’re trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue.

Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity.

“The scores range from zero to 40,” Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. “The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile.”

“Brian” is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. (…)

Dugan is smart — his IQ is over 140 — but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he’s developed a sense of remorse.

“And I have empathy, too — but it’s like it just stops,” he says. “I mean, I start to feel, but something just blocks it. I don’t know what it is.”

Kiehl says he’s heard all this before: All psychopaths claim they feel terrible about their crimes for the benefit of the parole board.

“But then you ask them, ‘What do you mean, you feel really bad?’ And Brian will look at you and go, ‘What do you mean, what does it mean?’ They look at you like, ‘Can you give me some help? A hint? Can I call a friend?’ They have no way of really getting at that at all,” Kiehl says.

Kiehl says the reason people like Dugan cannot access their emotions is that their physical brains are different. And he believes he has the brain scans to prove it.

{ NPR | Continue reading }

image { Richard Boulet }

It turns out that, when males and females are scanned by fMRI while told to close their eyes and not think about anything in particular, their brain activations are virtually the same.

Researchers examined the brain activity of 26 females and 23 males who rested in a scanner and daydreamed.

{ Neuroküz | Continue reading }

photos { August Sander }

It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas. (…)

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Do you sleep like a baby? You may have your thalamus to thank, according to research that suggests this brain region helps people sleep through bumps in the night.

To discover why some people can sleep through noise while others awake at the faintest disruption, Jeffrey Ellenbogen and colleagues at Harvard Medical School used electrodes to monitor the brain activity of 12 people while they slept in a pitch-black, soundproof room. They then repeated the experiment, this time playing 14 sounds, such as a toilet flushing and street traffic, at 30-second intervals, increasing the volume until the volunteers’ brainwaves showed signs of arousal.

Sleepers who tolerated louder sounds before waking showed a higher frequency of “sleep spindles” – short bursts of activity of specific wavelength – during non-REM sleep than those who woke more easily.

The spindles arise in the brain’s sensory relay centre in the thalamus.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

• If a vast conspiracy were afoot to create an entire civilization of insomniacs, it would operate pretty much the way our society does now.

• Relentless stress in the high-tech workplace of the 21st century is taking an unprecedented toll on our emotional lives and our capacity to wind down at the end of the day.

• Our widespread fear of and disregard for darkness -both literal and figurative- may be the most overlooked factor in the contemporary epidemic of sleep disorders.

{ A Nation of Insomniacs: The Lost Art of Sleep | Psychotherapy Networker | Continue reading }

photo { Kyoko Hamada }

In the 55 years since Albert Einstein’s death, many scientists have tried to figure out what made him so smart.

But no one tried harder than a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who lost his job and his reputation in a quest to unlock the secrets of Einstein’s genius. Harvey never found the answer. But through an unlikely sequence of events, his search helped transform our understanding of how the brain works.
How that happened is a bizarre story that involves a dead genius, a stolen brain, a rogue scientist and a crazy idea that turned out not to be so crazy.

The genius, Einstein, died April 18, 1955, at Princeton Hospital in Princeton, N.J. Within hours, the quiet town was swarming with reporters and scientific luminaries, and people who simply wanted to be near the great man one last time, says Michael Paterniti, a writer who did a lot of research on the events of that day.

“It was like the death of the prophet,” Paterniti says. “And so it got a little bit crazy.”

Things got especially crazy for Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy on Einstein. During the procedure, he removed the brain to examine it, which is routine.

But instead of placing the brain back in the skull, Harvey put it in a jar of formaldehyde, Paterniti says.

“And out of that complete, sort of melee of the moment, he made off with the brain, and it was under somewhat dubious circumstances,” Paterniti says.

Harvey later said Einstein’s older son Hans Albert had given him permission to take the brain. But the Einstein family denied this.

In any event, Harvey lost his job and was denounced by many colleagues. But he kept the brain. His justification, Paterniti says, was a sense of duty to science. (…)

Along the way, Harvey told Paterniti how he had tried to fulfill his duty to science by periodically sending bits of Einstein’s brain to various neuroscientists. (…) One scientist who’d asked for samples was Marian Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley. She wanted pieces from four areas in Einstein’s brain. (…)

At the time, the 1980s, most scientists still believed all the important work in the brain was done by neurons. And researchers had already learned from other samples of Einstein’s brain that he didn’t have a lot of extra neurons.

But Diamond was fascinated by another type of brain cell, called a glial cell. Glia means glue. And the assumption back then was that glial cells were just glue holding a brain together.

Diamond wanted to see if there were more of the glial cells known as astrocytes and oligodendrocytes in Einstein’s brain. So she counted them and found that there were, especially in the tissue from an area involved in imagery and complex thinking. (…)

Discoveries about the role of glia in the brain have caused a revolution of sorts in the world of neuroscience during the past couple of decades.

“Now we can see scores of ways in which astrocytes could be involved in many cognitive processes,” Fields says. “And now it’s not so crazy to find that there were abnormally high numbers of astrocytes in the parts of Einstein’s brain involved in imagery and mathematical ability and that sort of thing.”

{ NPR | Continue reading }

Discoveries by scientists over the past 10 years have elucidated biological sex differences in brain structure, chemistry and function. “These variations occur throughout the brain, in regions involved in language, memory, emotion, vision, hearing and navigation,” explains Larry Cahill, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine.

While women and men struggle to communicate with each other and ponder why they don’t think and react to things in similar ways, science is proving that the differences in our brains may have more serious implications beyond our everyday social interactions. (…)

To better understand the implications of sex differences in the brain, it is important to examine disease entities in depth. Take Alzheimer’s disease, for example. Significant differences exist between men and women who suffer from the disease. (…)

Schizophrenia is another disease that affects men and women differently. Differences include age of onset, symptoms and the time course of the disease. In addition, structural brain differences are apparent. According to Cahill, “men with schizophrenia show significantly larger ventricles than do healthy men, whereas no such enlargement is seen in women with schizophrenia.”

Researchers do not understand the implications of these differences yet, but the study of sex differences in the brain is advancing quickly.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

There are fundamental sex differences between males and females that go well beyond reproduction. The more people look, the more differ ences are found in both the structure and function of cells throughout the brain. It’s just mind-boggling when you see the complexities. There is recent data suggesting that glial cells from male and female neonates respond differently to estrogen, as if there’s already been some programming that keeps the male glial cells from responding to estrogen the same way as the female cells. We have evidence, as do others, that the hippocampus, a memory-related organ unrelated to reproduction, responds differently to estrogens. The female responds to estrogen by forming new synaptic connections in the hippocampus, while the male does not. But if you block the actions of testosterone in the male at birth, then the male will respond to estrogens to induce these synapses. There are many other examples. The differences include cerebellum, the autonomic nervous system, cerebral cortex, and hypothalamus. The more we look, the more sex differences we discover. (…)

It’s very clear, for example, that psychotropic medications and many other drugs work differently in males and females. Some of it is related to sex differ ences in how the liver clears drugs from the body, but almost any drug that affects the brain is going to work somewhat differently in the male and female, depending on the gender first and secondly on the hormonal status. (…)

When the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) tested Prempro, a combination of Premarin [estrogen made from horse urine] and Provera [a synthetic progestin], all it really did was to show that that’s not a very good combination.

{ Bruce McEwen interview/The Dana Foundation | Continue reading }

Q: You’ve devoted your career to studying hormonal effects on the brain, including sex differences. What surprises you most about how male and female brains differ?

McEwen: There are fundamental sex differences between males and females that go well beyond reproduction. The more people look, the more differ­ences are found in both the structure and function of cells throughout the brain. It’s just mind-boggling when you see the complexities. There is recent data suggesting that glial cells from male and female neonates respond differently to estrogen, as if there’s already been some programming that keeps the male glial cells from responding to estrogen the same way as the female cells. We have evidence, as do others, that the hippocampus, a memory-related organ unrelated to reproduction, responds differently to estrogens. The female responds to estrogen by forming new synaptic connections in the hippocampus, while the male does not. But if you block the actions of testosterone in the male at birth, then the male will respond to estrogens to induce these synapses. There are many other examples. The differences include cerebellum, the autonomic nervous system, cerebral cortex, and hypothalamus. The more we look, the more sex differences we discover.

Q: Has science done enough to take into account sex differences in basic and clinical research?

McEwen: Science has not done enough to take into account sex differences in either basic or clinical research. It’s very clear, for example, that psychotropic medications and many other drugs work differently in males and females. Some of it is related to sex differ­ences in how the liver clears drugs from the body, but almost any drug that affects the brain is going to work somewhat differently in the male and female, depending on the gender first and secondly on the hormonal status. The NIH now has an office of Women’s Health Research and there are a number of private and university-sponsored programs in women’s health research. This has revitalized the study of sex differences, meaning, in large part, the study of whole animals and how they differ behaviorally and physiologically. You can’t just assume that what works in the male is going to work the same way in the female.

{ Sex Differences in the Brain, Inetrview with Bruce McEwen | The DANA Foundation | Continue reading }

unrelated bonus:

During the winter of 2007, a UCLA professor of psychiatry named Gary Small recruited six volunteers—three experienced Web surfers and three novices—for a study on brain activity. He gave each a pair of goggles onto which Web pages could be projected. Then he slid his subjects, one by one, into the cylinder of a whole-brain magnetic resonance imager and told them to start searching the Internet. As they used a handheld keypad to Google various preselected topics—the nutritional benefits of chocolate, vacationing in the Galapagos Islands, buying a new car—the MRI scanned their brains for areas of high activation, indicated by increases in blood flow.

The two groups showed marked differences. Brain activity of the experienced surfers was far more extensive than that of the newbies, particularly in areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with problem-solving and decisionmaking. Small then had his subjects read normal blocks of text projected onto their goggles; in this case, scans revealed no significant difference in areas of brain activation between the two groups. The evidence suggested, then, that the distinctive neural pathways of experienced Web users had developed because of their Internet use.

The most remarkable result of the experiment emerged when Small repeated the tests six days later. In the interim, the novices had agreed to spend an hour a day online, searching the Internet. The new scans revealed that their brain activity had changed dramatically; it now resembled that of the veteran surfers. “Five hours on the Internet and the naive subjects had already rewired their brains,” Small wrote. He later repeated all the tests with 18 more volunteers and got the same results.

When first publicized, the findings were greeted with cheers. By keeping lots of brain cells buzzing, Google seemed to be making people smarter. But as Small was careful to point out, more brain activity is not necessarily better brain activity. The real revelation was how quickly and extensively Internet use reroutes people’s neural pathways. “The current explosion of digital technology not only is changing the way we live and communicate,” Small concluded, “but is rapidly and profoundly altering our brains.”

What kind of brain is the Web giving us? That question will no doubt be the subject of a great deal of research in the years ahead. Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise—and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain. (…)

What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting.

{ Nicholas Carr/Wired | Continue reading }

In an ideal world, I would sit down at my computer, do my work, and that would be that. In this world, I get entangled in surfing and an hour disappears. (…)

For years I would read during breakfast, the coffee stirring my pleasure in the prose. You can’t surf during breakfast. Well, maybe you can. Now I don’t have coffee and I don’t eat breakfast. I get up and check my e-mail, blog comments and Twitter.

{ Roger Ebert/Chicago Sun-Times }

photo { Stephen Shore }

Two Cornell psychologists found we have two separate systems for memories, which helps explain how we can “remember” things that never happened. (…)

here are two distinct types of memory: Verbatim, which allows us to recall what specifically happened at any given moment, and gist, which enables us to put the event in context and give it meaning. (…) They occupy different sections of the brain. (…)

When an event occurs, verbatim memory records an accurate representation. But even as it is doing so, gist memory begins processing the information and determining how it fits into our existing storehouse of knowledge. Verbatim memories generally die away within a day or two, leaving only the gist memory, which records the event as we interpreted it. Under certain circumstances, this can produce “phantom recollection” in which gist memory creates a vivid but illusory image in our mind.

{ Miler-McCune | Continue reading }

“Creativity is a complex concept; it’s not a single thing,” he said, adding that brain researchers needed to break it down into its component parts. Dr. Kounios, who studies the neural basis of insight, defines creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way.

Everyone agrees that no single measure for creativity exists. While I.Q. tests, though controversial, are still considered a reliable test of at least a certain kind of intelligence, there is no equivalent when it comes to creativity — no Creativity Quotient, or C.Q.

Dr. Jung’s lab uses a combination of measures as proxies for creativity. One is the Creativity Achievement Questionnaire, which asks people to report their own aptitude in 10 fields, including the visual arts, music, creative writing, architecture, humor and scientific discovery.

Another is a test for “divergent thinking,” a classic measure developed by the pioneering psychologist J. P. Guilford. Here a person is asked to come up with “new and useful” functions for a familiar object, like a brick, a pencil or a sheet of paper.

Dr. Jung’s team also presents subjects with weird situations. Imagine people could instantly change their sex, or imagine clouds had strings; what would be the implications?

In another assessment, a subject is asked to draw the taste of chocolate or write a caption for a humorous cartoon, as is done in The New Yorker magazine’s weekly contest. “Humor is an important part of creativity,” Dr. Jung said.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

related { How did one ape 45,000 years ago happen to turn into a planet dominator? The answer lies in an epochal collision of creativity. | Why They Triumphed | full story }

photo { Michael Casker }

What do brains and computer chips have in common? Not that much. Sure both use electricity, but in neurons the origin of electrical pulses is chemical while for computer chips it comes from electrical currents. Neurons are highly plastic, rearranging their connections to adapt to new information while computer chips are locked in their arrangement for their entire existence. But one thing they do share is the pattern of connections in their overall structure, specifically both brains and computer chips use the shortest and most efficient pathway they can to avoid the costs associated with taking long detours for the signals to get to their destination. Evolution and chip designers seemed to have reached the same conclusions when bumping up against the same very basic and very important limits, says a recent research paper from a small international team in PLoS. (…)

First, the human brain, the nematode’s nervous system, and the computer chip all had a Russian doll- like architecture, with the same patterns repeating over and over again at different scales. Second, all three showed what is known as Rent’s scaling, a rule used to describe relationships between the number of elements in a given area and the number of links between them.

The first finding confirms the research being done on intelligence and cognition in insects and mammals. (…) The second finding also seems to confirm something we know about evolution, mainly that natural selection tends to trim down waste and excess if it can and over a long period of trial and error, it will eventually arrive at efficient solutions to basic problems.

{ Greg Fish | Continue reading }

video { Jackson Pollock painting, 1950 | more }

When making moral judgements, we rely on our ability to make inferences about the beliefs and intentions of others. With this so-called “theory of mind”, we can meaningfully interpret their behaviour, and decide whether it is right or wrong. The legal system also places great emphasis on one’s intentions: a “guilty act” only produces criminal liability when it is proven to have been performed in combination with a “guilty mind”, and this, too, depends on the ability to make reasoned moral judgements.

MIT researchers now show that this moral compass can be very easily skewed. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report that magnetic pulses which disrupt activity in a specific region of the brain’s right hemisphere can interfere with the ability to make certain types of moral judgements, so that hypothetical situations involving attempted harm are perceived to be less morally forbidden and more permissable.

{ Neurophilosophy/Scienceblogs | Continue reading }

sculpture { Paul McCarthy }

Things that appear on the left are better remembered

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether neurologically intact individuals demonstrate a lateralized bias in remembering mental images of recently presented novel material comprising arbitrary combinations of shape, colour, and location in a temporary memory binding paradigm. The material involved arrays of a small number of simple geometric or animal shapes, so as to make it very unlikely that there would be any difficulties in perception, thereby focusing on memory. Recall was assessed by asking participants to report stimulus features using a forced-choice task in which they selected the colour, shape, and location of each item shown in the study array. In three related experiments, we report evidence of a new phenomenon: a leftward bias when people try to remember visually presented novel information.

{ InformaWorld | Continue reading }

New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia.

High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. Creativity is also linked to a slightly higher risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Certain psychological traits, such as the ability to make unusual pr bizarre associations are also shared by schizophrenics and healthy, highly creative people. And now the correlation between creativity and mental health has scientific backing.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Alison Brady }

Subjective experience poses a major problem for neuroscientists and philosophers alike, and the relationship between them and brain function is particularly puzzling. How can I know that my perception of the colour red is the same as yours, when my experience of the colour occupies a private mental world to which nobody else has access? How is the sensory information from an object transformed into an experience that enters conscious awareness? The neural mechanisms involved are like a black box, whose inner workings are a complete mystery.
 
In synaesthesia, the information entering one sensory system gives rise to sensations in another sensory modality. Letters can evoke colours, for example, and movements can evoke sounds. These extraordinary additional sensations therefore offer a unique opportunity to investigate how the subjective experiences of healthy people are related to brain function. Dutch psychologists now report that different types of synaesthetic experiences are associated with different brain mechanisms, providing a rare glimpse into the workings of the black box.

{ Neurophilosophy/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Werner Amann }

As Mr. Tahiri spoke, an Afghan soldier appeared carrying a large red trash bag. It was, he said, filled with human brains. “What do you want me to do with this,” he asked. “Do you want me to bury it, or do you want to take it?”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }