In the INSERm-CEA Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, Stanislas Dehaene proposed a “neuronal recycling” theory, which suggests that ‘new skills are handled by existing brain-cell circuits with older, but related functions.’[1]To test this hypothesis, Dehaene and his colleagues carried out MRI brain scans while presenting text and images to three groups of people: 10 people who could not read, 22 who learned to read as adults and 31 who learned to read as children. Those who were better readers had more activation in the “visual word form area,” known to enable people to link sounds with written symbols, when they were reading compared to the others. But when shown pictures of faces, the visual word form area of those who could read was much less active than that of the illiterate participants.

The researchers in Dehaene’s group think that perhaps our ability to read competes with our face recognition ability in the visual word form area of our brain. Dehaene says that he will continue to explore this interesting possibility in further research. In the meantime, don’t forget to keep your head up in class; people have much more interesting faces than Powerpoints and who knows who you could by chance notice if your facial recognition abilities improve!

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19720-bad-memory-for-faces-blame-your-reading-skills.html

Recent research, however, indicates that the assignment of sadness to minor and happiness to major may not have been a completely random act.  It has been suggested by researchers at Duke University that emotions might present themselves in both music and speech in similar ways.  This relationship would allow ‘happy’ indicators to be the same, whether they were found in speech or in music.  Thus, it would be easy to identify happiness in either of the two forms using universal cues.  Here they show that excited speech is much like music in a major key while subdued speech corresponds more closely to minor.

If that wasn’t enough evidence to link the depiction of emotion in speech to that in music, another recent study has looked specifically at the ways professional actors say key phrases (such as “come here”) while portraying different emotions.  The authors identified the intervals (distance between the two pitches) that were present when the actor was speaking to convey anger, happiness, sadness, or pleasantness.  One striking finding was that the sad phrases were represented by a minor third—the same interval that plays a key role in distinguishing minor and major keys.  While a major third is happy (think “When the Saints Go Marching In”), a minor third is usually associated with sadness (“Hey Jude”).  The fact that this critical interval indicates sad speech as well as melancholy music could indicate a direct correlation between the two forms of emotional expression.

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100108/full/news.2010.3.html

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=music-and-speech-share-a-code-for-c-2010-06-17

The answer: we can’t.

Just to make things more complicated, neuroscientists here at Harvard and at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have recently created transgenic mice who can smell light.  Now, in addition to wondering what blue light looks like to other people (or other animals), we can try to guess what blueness smells like.

Professor Venkatesh Murthy and his colleagues wanted to study the neural circuitry that allows animals to distinguish between different smells.  Olfaction, however, is extremely complicated as far as sensory systems go: because there are so many odors that can be smelled, a wide variety of receptors are necessary to bind with all the different proteins.  Murthy et al. thus decided to take advantage of the emerging field of optogenetics, in which elements of the visual system (which is comparatively simple and well-understood) are inserted into other sensory systems in order to study their intricacies more closely.  In this case, those complex and variegated olfactory receptors were replaced with channelrhodopsin-2, a light-activated protein which plays a central role in visual processing.

The mice bred with this modification were thus born with the ability to perceive blue light by way of olfaction.  By giving the mice this ability, the researchers were able to more easily isolate specific neural pathways in the olfactory system.  For example, in this study, the timing of an olfactory signal was found to influence the way it was eventually relayed to the brain.  It is difficult to control when a mouse smells a particular scent in a laboratory full of odiferous substances.  But with the transgenic mice, Murthy and his colleagues were able to minutely control the activation of particular olfactory cells based on carefully timed flashes of light.

Mice aren’t the only animals getting sensory makeovers in the name of science.  Earlier this year, a team of German scientists – who were studying olfactory avoidance behavior in fruit fly larvae – created transgenic flies that smelled blue light.  Sure enough, when light receptors were inserted into neurons activated by the mouth-watering scent of rotting fruit, the larvae crawled towards the delicious light; when the light receptors were placed in neurons activated by less pleasant smells, the larvae crawled away from the light.

In the context of neuroscience research, it really makes sense to “make the nose act like a retina,” as Murthy describes his technique.  And it sheds light (or scent?) on the potential of optogenetics to reinvent sensation.  Maybe in the future, it will become possible to literally taste the rainbow.

Image by PaPeR.cLiP

A recent study from the University of Michigan demonstrates that social interactions, especially those that require taking the perspective of another individual, boost executive functioning more than doing brainteasers like crossword puzzles. Executive functioning, defined as your ability to juggle tasks within working memory, inhibit responses, and display mental control, is considered central to intelligence and generally static.  However, short-term social interactions were found to boost executive functioning—when the interaction was in a cooperative setting, not a competitive one.  So make sure your pre-test chat is friendly.

Undergraduates participated in a basic, eight-minute long getting to know you exercise. In the cooperative condition, they were told that after the interaction they would partner up with the other participant in a prisoner’s dilemma game; in the competitive condition, the subjects were told that they would be opponents. In the third condition, they were just told to get to know each other. In these interactions, individuals are tacitly encouraged to build models of each other’s minds (an important social skill, known as theory of mind that seems to be largely unique to humans— perhaps because selection pressures in such social settings rewards the modeling of other minds).  Control groups spent ten minutes doing intellectual puzzle tasks, which have been shown to boost cognitive functioning. After these interactions, no game actually happened; instead, participants took a test of executive functioning. The results? The cooperative and get-to-know groups outperformed the control and competitive groups.

Researchers’ interpretation of this finding: by default, social interactions exercise executive functioning by encouraging perspective taking and thus monitoring of mental states. However, competitive settings trigger withdrawal and self-protection, resulting in less mental monitoring. They followed up the study by having participants play a social game where they monitored the other participant’s statements for lies. This directly involves monitoring the others’ mind; in fact, young children don’t start telling lies until they develop a theory of mind. The result: monitoring lies, even in a competitive setting, causes a boost in executive functioning too. This suggests that the mechanism involved in the cognitive boost may be monitoring the mental states of others, which is simply made less likely in competitive situations.

My two cents: one of the most interesting parts of this finding is that competitive situations take people off their default strategy of monitoring the mental states of others, at a cost to their mental functioning! Seeing as competitive settings have high stakes for fitness, it surprises me that we turn down our game on mental calculations that evolved to help us successfully navigate the social world.

My untested hypothesis: perhaps this is a reason that humans cooperate orders of magnitude more with nonrelatives that any other animals, including our closest relatives. We have evolved to function most optimally in cooperative, not competitive, social settings. In contrast, Chimpanzees are largely non-cooperative, and have been shown to monitor mental states best in competitive settings. They are equally likely to beg for food (cooperative social interaction) from an experimenter wearing a blindfold than not wearing one, demonstrating a lack of ability to track perception (the mental state) of the experimenter. However, when a dominant chimpanzee is watching a subordinate chimpanzee, the subordinate is more likely to eat food that is hidden from the view of the dominant than food the dominant can see—demonstration an understanding of perception in a cooperative setting. Are humans the opposite way? The research described seems to suggest this may be true, as participants derived the largest cognitive benefits from cooperative social interactions.

People are trained to pair music and events through conditioning, the same process Pavlov famously used. Linking images of happiness at the end of adversity with a soaring tune, or hopelessness with a slow melody in the minor third, can intensify emotion. In the same vein, merely hearing the song “Happy Birthday,” can remind us of the events that were concurring with that music. In a study published in October 2010, Meagan Curtis, a researcher at Tufts, found that when she recorded actors saying mundane, innocuous phrases like “let’s go” with a variety of emotional intonations, the actors were relying on the minor third to convey sadness. The minor third is defined as a measurable difference between musical pitches. This alone indicates that music and language are related on a basic, subconscious level. The same pitch – minor third – is used in music that we perceive as “sad.” On the other hand, “happy” music does not use the minor third. Hearing “Happy Birthday” using the minor third may not have the same intended effect.

What Curtis concludes from her study is based on a theory posited by Scott Brown in 2000 (cited in her paper), that there must have been a system comprising acoustic elements common to both music and language, from which music and language evolved. Following this, these elements must have served the purpose of “referential and emotive functions.” Curtis’s conclusion that human “vocal expressions of sadness and anger “approximate” angry or sad music leads into this theory, but begs the question: is this a universal thing? At the moment, it is unclear, but that music in general is often touted as universal. Furthermore, a study conducted in 2009 showed that Native Africans who have never listened to the radio can pick up on whether certain music is sad, angry, or fearful. Thus, it follows that recognizing emotion in music is something everyone is able to do, strengthening Brown’s theory that there may have been a “musilanguage,” as he calls it, from which both music and language descended.

References:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090319132909.htm

http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/music-cognition/pdfs/Curtis&Bharucha2010Emotion.pdf

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=music-and-speech-share-a-code-for-c-2010-06-17

There are no current treatments currently available for individuals with dyscalculia, but just several days ago, a paper published in Current Biology by researchers at the University of Oxford, the University College London Medical School, and the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University College London reported the effective use of transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS), which stimulates or inhibits specific target neurons, to improve the numerical abilities of individuals with dyscalculia. These researchers applied TDCS to neurons in the parietal lobe (the area of the brain lying behind the frontal lobe which is responsible for integrating inputs from the different senses) to 15 adults during a task that involved learning associations between 9 random symbols over 6 days. The left hemisphere has been shown to be important in learning math and more abstract symbolic ideas.

The stimulations done in the study were able to alter the ability of the individuals to learn the associations in the task. Using TDCS, which effectively gives select neurons a specific shock, they were able to make an individual both better and worse at forming these associations. While this doesn’t mean we’ll be applying shocks to our own brains in the hopes of acing our math tests any time soon, it does hold a great deal of potential in learning about new treatments for learning disabilities such as dyscalculia.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11692799

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_direct_current_stimulation

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822%2810%2901234-0

In a conventional computer, logic and memory are located in different parts of the circuit and each element is only connected to a few neighboring elements, resulting in a linear form of operation. Such linear processing allows computers to perform simple tasks, but makes multitasking difficult. Brains obviously can perform many different computations at once, and the goal for the memristor devices is to mimic the interconnected nature of the brain. The researchers devised a paradigm similar to how neurons are connected and connect two circuits through a memristor. With this technology they hope to make a computer brain that is about as smart as a cat (sorry dog lovers). From then they hope to build an even bigger system containing hundreds of artificial neurons connected by memristor synapses.

Many theories have been proposed on the science of falling in love, but most share a common theme that love is comprised of intimacy, compassion, attraction, and attachment. How these feelings develop is often described in three stages. The first is lust or physical attraction driven by sexual hormones in men and women. The second stage is attraction, but not the sexual kind, rather the “crush” kind. Adrenaline is responsible for those sweats and rapid heart beats you experience when someone you are attracted to approaches and dopamine is responsible for that feeling of pleasure and energy you get when thinking about or being with your crush. The third and final stage is attachment. This stage is usually due to oxytocin and vasopressin both hormones which lead to a feeling of attachment and intimacy with your partner.

Finding someone attractive at first sight is a different story. We are for the most part attracted to people who are compatible with us in socioeconomically, intellectually, religiously, and ethnically. However, these factors only seem relevant after two people have gotten to know each other. But what makes you turn your head, and what makes you feel a connection to a person without getting to know them? Scientific studies attribute attraction to evolution. We search for characteristics that have been engrained in us since the first Homo sapiens. A symmetrical face for both men and women is said to be most attractive while for women a youthful hourglass figure is attractive because evolutionary speaking, it means the woman is healthy for child rearing and carrying on a male’s genes. Women are said to be more attracted to men with angular faces and prominent jaws and greater muscle mass signs of greater testosterone levels, therefore more protection. Clear and smooth skin, fuller lips, bright eyes, and lustrous hair are also signs of attraction as evolutionary speaking they signify health.

Helen Fisher, the author of the book Why him? Why her? suggests that attraction is due to hormone levels. According to Fisher, hormones attract other hormones and so a high level of a hormone in one person can attract a high level of hormone in another person. This leads to certain personality types in humans which she has outlined (check out a more detailed explanation of her work here). Other factors such as scent, which actually deals with pheromones that signal brain responses of attraction, and personal history such as whether or not someone reminds you of your first love, is more personal and specific to a person in the laws of attraction. Aside from all these evolutionary qualities people often search for a mate who shares similar characteristics in hopes of building a family.

One thing though that most scientists agree is that attraction and love is a result of fortuitous encounters. A chance meeting can lead to a life together. Sometimes love and relationships follow the saying “in the right place at the right time.”

Surely we have all experienced the frustration of not being able to recall a particular fact when we wish to recall it, only to suddenly remember at a later time when it is not at all necessary. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, then, to have at our fingertips a device like Albus Dumbledore’s pensieve (Harry Potter) – a utility that helps us systematically sort through and organize our memories?

Recent research conducted at the University College London suggests that, in the not-so-distant future, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) could be our pensive. Essentially, these researchers maintain that it is possible to identify the type and location of certain memories while the human brain is functioning normally. If these findings are developed further, they could potentially lead to the creation of a sort of memory map – a diagram of the human brain that would locate the individual positions of memory traces.

Despite the published study, the findings of the UCL research remain controversial for several reasons. Can the human brain really be likened to a filing cabinet? Why is memory-mapping even useful? And could fMRI thereby be the tool that helps our generation finally understand the intricate workings of the human memory and mind?

Recent research suggests that the linkage between culture and biology determines the way that we view problems in the world. Eastern and Western subjects were asked the same questions while being examined through Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) techniques – different regions of their brains were activated even when the subjects ultimately came up with the same response. For example, the Chinese subjects used one area of their brain to compute a basic math problem such as 3+4, while American subjects used a completely different region. Both groups ultimately arrived at the correct answer, of course, but these differences illuminate interesting biological phenomena about the influence that culture has on biology.

Of course, it is possible that these differences are due to a difference in biology all along – perhaps people from Eastern cultures simply have a different “math gene” than the rest of us. But consider the alternative – perhaps our cultural values and upbringing shape our neural development and perception. Further research may bring us closer to the truth.

Psychiatrist Charles O’Brien of the University of Pennsylvania attests that there is adequate brain imaging evidence to make a "pretty strong case that [gambling] activates the reward system in much the same way that a drug does" (935). Researchers in Germany have shown that gamblers show an increase in dopamine, stress hormones, and heart rate compared with non-gamblers. At Yale, brain imaging studies by a research group show that the brains of pathological gamblers resemble those of cocaine addicts – specifically, this shows a decrease in activation in regions that indicated judgment and motivation. This evidence collectively suggests that the
effects of being a "degenerate gambler" have about the same impact internally as being addicted to drugs or alcohol.

Behaviorally, we also see similar effects. Gamblers show impaired social functioning, as their behavior is geared toward feeding their attachment to gambling, much as the concerns of someone addicted to drugs are centered on being able to obtain their next fix. But what about other behavior? For instance, can people be "addicted" to things like sex, the Internet, or a certain genre of books? Here is where the fine distinction between addiction and compulsions comes into play. Like physical substances such as alcohol, behaviors are difficult to control because they could take other forms. If you refuse an alcoholic alcohol, he may turn to smoking instead. If someone is "addicted" to sex, their next recourse will take the form of increasing other pleasure-seeking areas in the brain in the same way that sex once did. It is the behavior of addiction itself that needs to be stopped for the obsession to engage in it to decrease. The compulsions are not addictions, but if the need for the addiction is removed, the compulsion may also decrease. Studies need to be conducted to ascertain the relationship between these factors (compulsion, obsession, and addiction) in behavior.

Blanketing addictive behavior into one DSM diagnosis may encompass a large group of people, but not be geared toward the needs of a specific person or group of people. It’s like a one-size-fits-all glove – it will fit most people’s hands generally well; there will always be outliers, and perhaps their issues are serious enough to warrant attention. But if their particular problems aren’t included in the DSM, how can they be treated fairly? The DSM committees need to recognize foremost that with the advance of technology and a deeper understanding of human behavior must come the acceptance that behavior will keep changing. The only thing to do is meet it – and when necessary, make it easier for people who need help with negative behavior patterns, to get it.

To examine this question, Fisher dyed the sperm from two male mouses different colors (one green and the other red) and mixed them together in a petri dish and observed what happened. She found that sperm would conglomerate based on the mouse that they originated from, meaning that red sperm would more often than not clump with other red sperm and green sperm would clump with other green sperm. It is not known how sperm can differentiate between similar and dissimilar sperm, but it isn't too hard to understand why such behavior occurs. It all goes back to our selfish genes, the desire to pass one's genetic material on to the next generation, an impulse so strong that even sperm will compete for this privilege.

While pundits will talk about vague platforms, poor campaigning and finger-pointing as root causes of voter apathy, science suggests alternative explanations. Investigators James H. Fowler (who collaborates prominently with popular Pfoho housemaster Professor Nicholas Christakis) and Christopher Dawes recently showed in 2008 in two independent studies of fraternal and identical twins that voter turnout may be genetically linked and inheritable.

The reasoning, as in most twin studies, was that if voter apathy were inheritable, then identical twins should have more similar patterns of voting or abstaining than fraternal twins. Examining data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, investigators were able to estimate that genetics dictates some 72 percent of differences in voting turnout. Futhermore, roughly 60 percent of differences in other political activity can be explained by genetic makeup. Other geneticists like Dr. Robert Polmin of Kings College, London, suggest that while the association may be true, the percentages concluded may be too high.

Naturally, each of the scientists concede that the remaining percentages that influence whether a person chooses to vote are gained from environmental cues, suggesting that although politicians may tremble at the idea that voter apathy is genetically engrained, there is still hope for behavioral changes caused by inspiring speeches and attractive ads.

In other words, don’t give up Dems. Just because you did it once doesn’t mean you’re allowed to sit back and expect voters to flock.

When first interviewed by parole officers who were suspicious of her abductor, Jaycee Lee Dugard did not reveal her identity. Instead, she told investigators she was a battered wife from Minnesota who was hiding from her abusive husband, and described Garrido as a "great person" who was "good with her kids." Why would Dugard say these things, even in safe custody of law enforcement?

Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological change that occurs in captives when they are seriously in danger, but are shown acts of kindheartedness by their captors. Captives who exhibit Stockholm Syndrome tend to empathize with and think well and positively of their captors. Such captives fail to identify that their captors' choices are in effect self-serving to only the captors, because the captives are being held against their will. When subjected to prolonged imprisonment, these captives can develop a strong relationship with their captors, in some cases including a mutual sexual interest.

According to the psychoanalytic view of this syndrome, this propensity might be the consequence of employing the strategy evolved by newborn babies to form an emotional connection to the closest authoritative figure in order to increase the likelihood that this adult will facilitate for the survival of the child, if not also prove to be a solid parental figure. In the Dugard case, Garrido seemed to fill that role for her, and therefore, was able to make her trust him for 18 long years.

But perhaps there is a way to cram facts into our head while we sleep, according to a recent study by Rudoy et al of Northwestern University.

The researchers performed a series of tests in which after subjects were taught the locations of certain pictures on the screen, they napped for 90 minutes while sounds related to certain pictures were played. The results showed that all subjects were able to recall the locations of those specific pictures much more efficiently than the pictures not reinforced by sound during sleep.  This would make sense, considering that it is speculated that memory consolidation occurs during sleep and rehearsal is known to be a good way to strengthen specific memories rather it be facts, names, or dates.

Looks like learning a fifth foreign language over J-term with those 1000 phrases on CD playing while you sleep may be an option after all!
And as for next semester, consider recording lectures and sleeping with headphones on – this may very well be the secret to the easy A that you’ve been missing all along!