“We Didn’t Start the Scanner” …
a three-minute history of cognitive neuroscience sung to Billy Joel … with lyrics so you can sing along!
Winner of the ‘ICN Brains on Film’ Competition 2012 at University College London.
Music and film by Jake Fairnie and Anna Remington.
Source: neurons.wordpress.com
Diffusion spectrum MRI image of the human brain showing three dimensional grid structure of white matter tracts. From Wedeen, et al (2012).
This is the first time I’ve seen one of these connectome maps overlaid on a brain image. Context is everything!
Source: neuroimages
Nothing is easier than to familiarize one’s self with the mammalian brain. Get a sheep’s head, a small saw, chisel, scalpel and forceps (all three can best be had from a surgical-instrument maker), and unravel its parts either by the aid of a human dissecting book, such as Holden’s Manual of Anatomy, or by the specific directions ad hoc given in such books as Foster and Langley’s Practical Physiology (Macmillan) or Morrell’s Comparative Anatomy, and Guide to Dissection (Longman & Co.).
Source: ebooks.adelaide.edu.au
Visual phobias: My most terrifying fear
For years now I have experienced an incredibly intense, sudden, gut-wrenching fear over and over again. It almost always happens completely without warning, but always has the same basic cause. I can be blithely scrolling my dashboard on Tumblr, or happily flipping channels on cable, otherwise perfectly relaxed and at ease. Then in the next moment, totally unexpectedly, I am in the tightest, most visceral grip of fear, eyes and jaw slammed tightly shut, pulse racing, breath held, and my stomach clenched in wrenching knots. It usually takes minutes, sometimes hours, for the fear to pass.
What triggers these moments of abject terror? My entire body goes into instant panic mode every time I see images of any man-made object under water.
The last few days have been really intense because of the composite images of the Titanic debris field on the bottom of the Atlantic. They keep popping up unexpectedly on Tumblr and different news programs. A few weeks ago it was seeing the underwater rescue efforts in the capsized Costa Concordia cruise ship. But it isn’t just limited to ocean liners. I feel it every time I encounter any photograph, any television show, any news footage, or any movie that depticts any object under water that shouldn’t be there.
Shipwrecks, antique cannons, sunken oil rigs, submarines, deep water robots, cement spheres for artificial reefs, the Pearl Harbor memorial, underwater sculpture gardens, dock pilings, propellers, sunken buoys, buildings submerged by dam projects, shark cages, cars, and sometimes the hull of a floating boat or ship viewed from under water, or shipwrecks on the beach.
I swim. I enjoy boats. I spent most of my teenage summers sailing. I enjoy underwater nature programs. I’m fine with watching people swimming or diving underwater. Bodies floating in the water don’t trigger it. I don’t specifically have any great fear of water or drowning. This is not the kind of fear that prevents me from functioning in the world. I just have to deal with the unexpected anxiety when certain images trigger the response.
I’ve seen the Poseidon Adventure, and even rooted for Shelley Winters as she made her daring final swim, but none of the scenes from that movie really showed the capsized ship itself. I absolutely cannot watch the opening sequence of Titanic, and I even ruined a perfectly good date once because of it (he thought I was such a wuss!), but I have no particular problem watching the ending as the ship plunges down into the ocean. Yet if the right type of image pops up unexpectedly, I will spend several minutes of a movie or a TV show frozen in fear with my eyes tightly closed, until the audio lets me know it has moved on to another scene.
I can remember being quite little and getting frightened if I was playing with a toy boat in the bathtub or wading pool and it turned upside down in the water. I can also remember some mild distress when sailing and coming close to very large ships. So this has plagued me in one form or another all of my life, and other than spotting the occasional snake or bug, or waking up with the occasional nightmare, I have no other unusual fears.
It was only a few years ago that I ever met anyone else with the same fear, when a co-worker and I were casually discussing the movie Titanic. Since then, a little Googling has shown me a few others with nearly identical triggers, which somehow makes it seem even more strange, not less. I find the neuroscience of fear to be fascinating, with unconscious pathways stimulating instantaneous physical responses even before the conscious mind knows what happened. I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand this, and I doubt it’s an experience I could unlearn without a lot of effort, but the intensity of the subjective experience is always startlingly vivid.
Frederick Bartlett was there first. In 1917, the British psychologist began reading his undergraduates a made up folk tale about a river battle involving Indians from “Egulac.” A few days later, he asked the students to repeat the story. To Bartlett’s surprise, the tale had been utterly transformed in the telling. While the subjects routinely omitted irrelevant details, they almost always inserted a didactic moral. In other words, they misremembered the story until it made sense. Based on his research, Bartlett concluded that the standard view of human memory – it’s a vast repository of stable facts – was completely wrong. “Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces,” he wrote. “It is an imaginative reconstruction.
Source: Wired
We ‘see’ through one eye at a time
A study indicates that humans gather visual information by shifting attention to one eye or the other, while the brain combines the incoming visual information so that the mind thinks it sees with both eyes at once.
“Maybe there are binocular neurons in the brain” — neurons that take in and collate information from both eyes — “that also know which eye that information is coming from and can feed back to that eye,” University of Minnesota researcher Peng Zhang said.
Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”: A Neuroscience Reading
by Maria Popova
Unpacking the lyrics of the iconic happiness anthem to find surprising science-tested insights on well-being.
In 1988, Bobby McFerrin wrote one of the most beloved anthems to happiness of all time. On September 24 that year, “Don’t Worry Be Happy” became the first a cappella song to reach #1 on the Billboard Top 100 Chart. But more than a mere feel-good tune, the iconic song is brimming with neuroscience and psychology insights on happiness that McFerrin — whose fascinating musings on music and the brain you might recall from World Science Festival’s Notes & Neurons — embedded in its lyrics, whether consciously or not.
To celebrate the anniversary of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” I unpack the verses to explore the scientific wisdom they contain in the context of several studies that offer lab-tested validation for McFerrin’s intuitive insight.
In every life we have some trouble
When you worry you make it doubleOur tendency to add more stress to our stress by dwelling on it is known is Buddhism as the second arrow and its eradication is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. But now scientists are confirming that worrying about our worries is rather worrisome. Recent research has found prolonged negative cardiac effects of worry episodes, following a 2006 study that linked worrying to heart disease.
Here, I give you my phone number
When you worry call me
I make you happyMultiple studies have confirmed the positive correlation between social support and well-being, and some have examined the “buffering model,” which holds that social support protects people from the adverse effects of stressful events.
Harvard physician Nicholas Christakis has studied the surprising power of our social networks, finding profound and long-term correlation between the well-being, both physical and mental, of those with whom we choose to surround ourselves and our own.
Cause when you worry
Your face will frown
And that will bring everybody downMirror neurons are one of the most important and fascinating discoveries of modern neuroscience — neurons that fire not only when we perform a behavior, but also when we observe that behavior in others. In other words, neural circuitry that serves as social mimicry allowing the expressed emotions of others to trigger a reflection of these emotions in us. Frowns, it turns out, are indeed contagious.
Put a smile on your face
Pop-culture wisdom calls it “fake it ’till you make it”; psychotherapy calls it “cognitive behavioral therapy“; social psychology call it story editing. Evidence abounds that consciously changing our thoughts and behaviors to emulate the emotions we’d like to feel helps us internalize and embody those emotions in a genuine felt sense. Paul Ekman, who pioneered the study of facial expressions, found that voluntarily producing a smile may help deliberately generate the psychological change that takes place during spontaneous positive affect — something corroborated in the recently explored science of smiles.
Don’t worry, it will soon pass
Whatever it isIn 1983, UCLA psychologist Shelley E. Taylor published a seminal paper [PDF] in the journal American Psychologist proposing a theory of cognitive adaptation for how we adjust to threatening events, based on evidence from a number of clinical and empirical studies indicating that we grossly overestimate the negative impact of the events that befall us, from cancer to divorce to paralysis, and return to our previous levels of happiness shortly after these negative events take place.
As Daniel Gilbert puts it in Stumbling on Happiness, one of our 7 must-read books on the art and science of happiness, “The fact is that negative events do affect us, but they generally don’t affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to.”
(Such a clever article! — Visual Turn)
Whether you are sitting for an important test or sinking a winning golf putt, your brain can get in the way when you need to perform at your very best. Ginger Campbell, MD, of the Brain Science Podcast interviews psychology researcher Sian Beilock about her book, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
This excellent interview regarding research conducted at Beilock’s Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago provides some great insights into how the brains of high performers can interfere with delivering an expert performance when it matters most. Beilock doesn’t stop at explaining the many different reasons why someone might choke on a test, a job interview, a speech, or an athletic game. She offers many practical suggestions for how to overcome the memory overload that can impede top performance.
This is really valuable information for students and their teachers. Beilock says high performers are more likely to choke on a test than students with lesser skills. This seems counter-intuitive until she explains that these higher performers generally have greater working memory to help them perform highly complex cognitive tasks, but this working memory can become flooded by anxiety and worry, significantly limiting the amount of working memory available for the task, resulting in a less than optimal performance.
Beilock describes research that shows that 10 minutes of free writing about these feelings and anxieties can relieve the worries enough to free up that valuable working memory for the cognitive tasks and performance can return to normal.
The interview is filled with interesting research findings and concrete suggestions about mitigating performance problems. Brain Science Podcast host Ginger Cambell does a nice job leading Beilock through many different aspects of her research in a presentation that is easy to follow and full of practical advice. Be sure to take a look at previous episodes of the Brain Science Podcast for some fascinating interviews with many of the world’s leading neuroscience researchers.
Source: brainsciencepodcast.com
Neurons: Animated Cellular and Molecular Concepts
This is a really great illustrated (free!) online textbook of sorts that describes the basic neuron, from its anatomy to ion channels and neurotransmitter activity. The 8 chapters listed are:
- Anatomy of a Neuron
- Axonal Transport
- Ions and Ion Channels
- Resting Membrane Potential
- Action Potential
- Neurotransmitter Release
- Postsynaptic Mechanisms
- Removal of Neurotransmitter
Each section has illustrations and diagrams to help supplement your studies! Whether you want to start your foundation in neuroscience or give it a small refresher, definitely bookmark this resource.
Source: fuckyeahneuroscience
Natural brain state is primed to learn | New Scientist
STUDYING for an exam? Begin by thinking your way into a learning state.
Until now, neuroscientists have focused on identifying parts of the brain that are active during learning. “But no one has looked at the preparedness state,” says John Gabrieli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The idea is to identify before the event whether the brain is prepared to be a learner.”
Gabrieli and his colleagues used functional MRI scanning to monitor the naturally fluctuating brain activity of 20 volunteers and investigate whether the brain enters such a learning state. While in the scanner, each person was presented with 250 images, one at a time, and asked to memorise them. The volunteers were shown the images again 2 hours later - mixed in with 250 new ones - and asked to remember which they had seen before.
Looking through the results, the team was surprised to find that in the moments before individuals were shown images that they later remembered, they had low levels of activity in the parahippocampal place area - a region of the brain that is known to be highly active during learning. “Maybe the fact that this region was less active meant that the deck was cleared - that it was more open for a stimulus to provoke a response,” suggests Gabrieli.
To investigate further, the team attempted to boost subsequent participants’ memory test scores by presenting them with images only when they showed this pattern of brain activity. “There was around a 30 per cent improvement in the memory task,” Gabrieli says.
Original paper here.
This will be a fascinating line of research to follow. What conditions create that state of readiness in the first place? What conditions inhibit it? How could we identify this kind of readiness behaviorially? While it would be premature to draw conclusions about how this applies to classroom practice, it certainly does raise some interesting possibilities about what activities do (or do not) promote this state of readiness.
Source: fuckyeahneuroscience
Neuroscientists at Princeton suggest in a new paper that environment is a factor in increase or decrease in the number of new neurons in the brain. High-threat environments lead to the suppression of neurogenesis in the hippocampus, while high-reward environments favor the growth of new neurons. The authors see this as part of the way that the brain prepares for continued stress or reward, leading to adaptive behaviors: inhibition in the stressful environment, and exploration in the rewarding environments.
High-threat environment = suppression of new neurons = reduced cognitive and learning capacity = reduced exploration = increased chance of survival.
High-reward environment = production of new neurons = increased cognitive and learning capacity = increased exploration = increased chance of finding food and mates.
The fact that stress and reward modulate adult neurogenesis (and results in adaptive behaviors) is interesting enough. I have heard often about the growth of new neurons in the brain, but I never thought about the number of new neurons being variable. Think about what that might indicate about how environments contribute to reduced or increased capacity for learning in adult humans.
Assume for a moment that the same factors play a similar role in humans that they do in other mammals (a leap, I know, but …). It would support the common-sense notion that high-stress, low-reward environments result in a reduced the capacity for learning, while low-stress, high-reward environments increase it — and explains it by pointing to an increase or decrease in the number of new neurons in the hippocampus that are available to support learning.
Glasper, E.R., Schoenfeld, T.J., and Gould, E. (In press). Adult neurogenesis: Optimizing hippocampal function to suit the environment. Behavioural Brain Research. doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2011.05.013
David Eagleman: Incognito, the Secret Lives of the Brain
Currently in the legal system there’s this myth of equality. And the assumption is if you are over 18 and you have an IQ of over 70 then all brains are created equal. And, of course, that’s a very charitable idea but it’s demonstrably false. Brains are extraordinarily different from one another. Brains are essentially like fingerprints; we’ve all got them but they’re somewhat different. And so by imagining that everyone has the exact same capacity for decision-making, for understanding future consequences, for squelching their impulsive behavior and so on, what we’re doing is were imagining that everybody should be treated the same. And, of course, what has happened is that our prison system has become our de facto mental health care system. Estimates are that about 30 percent of the prison population has some sort of mental illness. … The idea here is if you are mentally ill we’re not going to treat you just like everyone else. We’re not going to pretend that incarceration is the perfect one-size-fits-all solution. But instead, we’re going to take you down this different path and, you know, we’ll take you off the street if you’re behaving badly and dangerously, but will see if we can help you.
via Fresh Air, NPR
Lots of other really thought-provoking ideas in this interview.
Your brain, exploded.
This is a remarkable illustration of an exploded view of the interior structures of the human brain. I have seen many side views of the interior of one hemisphere showing these structures packed tightly together deep inside the brain, but this exploded view gave me an entirely new understanding of how these structures are arranged.
These outstanding images are from the lavishly illustrated The Human Brain Book, by Rita Carter, Susan Aldridge, Martyn Page, and Steve Parker, 2009, New York: DK Publishing. Well worth a lengthy browse for the illustrations as well as the detailed information about all aspects of brain function.
Click through for the full-size image.
The grand delusion: What you see is not what you get
Your senses are your windows on the world, and you probably think they do a fair job at capturing an accurate depiction of reality. Don’t kid yourself. Sensory perception - especially vision - is a figment of your imagination. “What you’re experiencing is largely the product of what’s inside your head,” says psychologist Ron Rensink at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “It’s informed by what comes in through your eyes, but it’s not directly reflecting it.”
Given the basic features of your visual system, it couldn’t be any other way. For example, every 5 seconds or so, you blink. Yet unless you’re thinking about it, as you probably are right now, you don’t notice the blackouts because your brain edits them out.
Blinking is just the tip of the iceberg. Even when your eyes are open they’re only taking in a fraction of the visual information that is available.
In the centre of your retina is a dense patch of photoreceptor cells about 1 millimetre across. This is the fovea, the visual system’s sweet spot where perception of detail and colour is at its best. “When you move away from the fovea, visual acuity falls away really quickly, and colour vision disappears,” says Rensink. About 10 degrees to the side of the fovea, visual acuity is only about 20 per cent of the maximum.
What that means is you can only capture a tiny percentage of the visual field in full colour and detail at any one time. Hold your hand at arm’s length and look at your thumbnail. That is roughly the area covered by the fovea. Most of the rest is captured in fuzzy monochrome.
And yet vision doesn’t actually feel like this: it feels like a movie. That, in part, is because your eyes are constantly flitting over the visual scene, fixing on one spot for a fraction of a second then moving on. These jerky eye movements are called saccades and they happen about 3 times a second and last up to 200 milliseconds. With each fixation your visual system grabs a bite of high-resolution detail which it somehow weaves together to create an illusion of completeness.
That’s remarkable given that during saccades themselves, you are effectively blind. Your eyes don’t stop transmitting information as they lurch from one fixation to the next, but for about 100 milliseconds your brain is not processing it.
Look in the mirror and deliberately flick your eyes from left to right and back again. You won’t see your eyes move - not because the movement is too fast (other people’s saccades are visible), but because your brain isn’t processing the information.
Given that you perform approximately 150,000 saccades every day, that means your visual system is “offline” for a total of about 4 hours during each waking day even without blinking (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 12, p 466). Yet you don’t notice anything amiss.
Exactly how your brain weaves such fragmentary information into the smooth technicolour movie that we experience as reality remains a mystery. One leading idea is that it makes a prediction and then uses the foveal “spotlight” to verify it. “We create something internally and then we check, check, check,” says Rensink. “Essentially we experience the brain’s best guess about what is happening now.”
In conjuring up this “now”, the visual system has to do something even more remarkable: predict the future. Information striking the fovea cannot be relayed instantaneously to conscious perception: first it has to travel down the optic nerve and be processed by the brain. This takes several hundred milliseconds, by which time the world has moved on. And so the brain makes a prediction about what the world will look like about 200 milliseconds into the future, and that is what you see. Without this future projection you would be unable to catch a ball, dodge moving objects or walk around without crashing into things.
There’s another huge hole in the visual system that can render you oblivious to things that should be unmissable. The jerky movements that shift your fovea around the visual scene don’t happen at random - they are directed by your brain’s attentional system. Sometimes you consciously decide what to attend to, such as when you read. At other times your attention is grabbed by a movement in your peripheral vision or an unexpected noise.
The problem with attention is that it is a limited resource. For reasons that remain unknown, most people are unable to keep track of more than four or five moving objects at once. That can lead your visual system to be oblivious to things that are staring you in the face.
The most famous demonstration of this “inattention blindness” is the invisible gorilla, a video-based experiment created by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Viewers are asked to pay close attention to a specific aspect of a basketball game, and around half completely fail to see a person in a gorilla suit walk slowly across the screen, beat their chest and walk off again.
via NewScientist
Source: metaconscious
