Focus

Here's a tidbit from John Tierney's NYT Findings column, "Ear Plugs to Lasers - The Science of Concentration":

...
When something bright or novel flashes, it tends to automatically win the competition for the brain’s attention, but that involuntary bottom-up impulse can be voluntarily overridden through a top-down process that Dr. Desimone calls “biased competition.” He and colleagues have found that neurons in the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s planning center — start oscillating in unison and send signals directing the visual cortex to heed something else.
...
“It takes a lot of your prefrontal brain power to force yourself not to process a strong input like a television commercial,” said Dr. Desimone, the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at M.I.T. “If you’re trying to read a book at the same time, you may not have the resources left to focus on the words.”
...

Here are some tips from the author of "Rapt,” a guide to the science of paying attention, Winifred Gallagher.

Ms. Gallagher advocates meditation to increase your focus, but she says there are also simpler ways to put the lessons of attention researchers to use. Once she learned how hard it was for the brain to avoid paying attention to sounds, particularly other people’s voices, she began carrying ear plugs with her. When you’re trapped in a noisy subway car or a taxi with a TV that won’t turn off, she says you have to build your own “stimulus shelter.”

She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

Happyhour Gene Determines Sensitivity to Alcohol

From NewScientist:

A newly identified gene called happyhour makes fruit flies sensitive to booze. Drugs that mimic the effects of the gene may offer a new treatment against alcohol abuse, researchers say. Read more...

Fraction Neurons

From NewScientist (full article):

FRACTIONS may be written as the ratio of two whole numbers, but that's not how our brains process them. Instead it seems we respond to fractions directly, without processing whole numbers along the way. This suggests that kids, who often dread fractions, could be taught them more intuitively.

Previous tests have shown that specifc groups of neurons respond to different whole numbers, with the number one altering the firing patterns of different neurons than the number three. Now Simon Jacob and Andreas Nieder of the University of Tübingen in Germany have shown that we have fraction-specific neurons too.

The pair scanned the brains of adults as they were shown a variety of different fractions - either as numerical ratios or in words. In both cases, specific groups of neurons altered their firing patterns. Crucially, control experiments showed that the volunteers weren't responding first to whole numbers, and then calculating the ratio, but were reacting to the fraction itself (The Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.0651-09.2009).

Fractions tend to be taught as ratios of whole numbers, but Nieder says this may not tap our neural machinery in the most constructive way, making fractions harder to grasp than they need to be.

What We Can Tell From Facial Expression

I mentioned this study on how accurate our perception of a person is simply based on their picture in class today, so I figured I would direct those interested to the post, which can be found here. For more on the topic, check out You Don't Even Know What You Like

More on the Affect of Facial Expressions

This goes quite well with the video I posted about ten minutes ago:

You Don't Even Know What You Like

It's a simple experiment/trick, and it's pretty cool. The guy shows two faces and asks which you like. Upon choosing he puts down the card, hands it to you, and asks why you picked it. The catch is, he is handing you the one you didn't pick - but more often than not you don't even realize, and proceed to explain why you like the picture you didn't choose. What's the explanation for this? Hell if I know.

"Do Parents Matter?"

Sorry Mom and Dad, but I didn't say it. From SciAm.com:

Do Parents Matter?
A researcher argues that peers are much more important than parents, that psychologists underestimate the power of genetics and that we have a lot to learn from Asian classrooms.

In 1998 Judith Rich Harris, an independent researcher and textbook author, published The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do. The book provocatively argued that parents matter much less, at least when it comes to determining the behavior of their children, than is typically assumed. Instead, Harris argued that a child’s peer group is far more important. The Nurture Assumption has recently been reissued in an expanded and revised form. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Harris about her critics, the evolution of her ideas and why teachers can be more important than parents.

If you have any interest in the nature/nurture debate, I suggest that you read the interview...

Are You Genetically Predisposed to Being Mugged?

I have talked a little in the past about the interactions between genes and the environment (see Can Your Genes Tell You Who You Are? or Unnatural Selection), and here is a great post on a similar subject discussing heritability of personality traits that may cause us to seek a particular environment over another.

I think this is extremely interesting. I mean, I was aware that some people have a predisposition to violence, but had never thought about predisposition to being a victim of violence - but now that I have, it really does make some sense (From The Wild Side):

Last Monday, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, killed himself. His mother was one of the world’s most famous suicides, and news stories have mentioned the tendency of suicide and depression to run in families. But this tragic inheritance is just part of a more complex story in which our lives are shaped by genes, environment — and unexpected connections between the two.

Much more than depression is partly inherited. Here’s a weirder fact: the genes you get from your parents partly determine your risk of being mugged. So do genes dictate our fate? Of course not — but they do have a say in who we become.

We tend to think of the environment as something that just happens to us, but in fact animals actively seek out surroundings that are compatible with their genetic predispositions. Teenagers in the chess club choose to be exposed to different influences from their hockey-player counterparts. Such differences don’t even have to be voluntary: tall kids may be picked more often for the basketball team and end up better at the game because they have more opportunities to develop their skills.

Certain people are much more likely than others to be exposed to stressful life experiences, including specific traumas like car accidents, industrial injuries or being a crime victim. Some of this variation is traceable to genetics. Read more...

An aside for those of you in Comm 3600:

In class today we discussed this quote from Michel Foucault:

...(T)he body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.

While professor Joseph was likely trying to invoke discussion regarding the influence of culture/environment on our biology (diet, etc.) - this post illustrates that not only does our environment influence our biology, but that our genetics can influence our environment.

So it goes something like this: the environment (culture, economic class, etc.) into which we are born has influence on our biology, but at a certain age we have the opportunity to decide our environment (at least somewhat) - and the environment we choose is predisposed by our genetics.

Religion is "Natural"

Or at least a natural thought, while evolutionary thinking is unnatural, according to psychological researchers - although that doesn't make it right (from SciAm.com):

Presently I’m attending a small symposium on “Belief and Reason” at Trinity College, Cambridge, being sponsored by the Perrott-Warrick Fund. It’s a rather intimate affair with mostly cognitive scientists discussing the latest research and theory on everything from paranormal beliefs to free will to the placebo effect. One of the standout talks Monday was by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, who gave a presentation titled “Is Religion Natural?” He focused on the puzzling case of creationist beliefs.

As Bloom pointed out, many people believe that one’s acceptance of evolutionary theory boils down to whether that person was indoctrinated as a child by religious parents or educated by science-minded teachers. But it's not that simple. By her own accounts, even Helen Keller, who was born deaf and blind, spontaneously pondered, “Who made the sky, the sea, everything?” prior to being taught how to communicate. As a retrospective anecdote, the example should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they say—but if true, it’s quite something, since her linguistic isolation meant that Keller hadn’t a culturally transmitted concept of God to revert to but nevertheless intuited ‘someone’ had created the world. Read more...

Prozac Cures Promiscuity

I posted a few weeks ago about John Tierney's column from the NY Times, but I just ran across this complimentary blog-post from his blog, TierneyLab, check it out:

Would you rather have a love potion that made you more likely to become attached to someone else, or a love vaccine that stopped you from falling in love with the wrong person?

In my Findings column, I make the case for a love vaccine and discuss an essay about the neurochemistry of love in the new issue of Nature by Larry Young, a neuroscientist who studies prairie voles at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centers at Emory University. He says that pair-bonding in humans (as in voles, one of the few other monogamous mammals) can be enhanced or suppressed by tinkering with brain hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin, and predicts that we’ll be seeing new drugs to do just that.

This doesn’t mean there will soon be magical elixirs causing you to instantly fall in love with anyone. Love isn’t just a response to raging hormones; our rational processes have something to do with it, too. But drugs could make a difference. In fact, some of the antidepressants now in use are suppressing the neurochemical processes that stimulate romance and attachment, according to this article by Helen Fisher and J. Anderson Thomson Jr. (pdf). When I asked Dr. Fisher about a future love vaccine, she laughed and said it could be indeed be useful — and that there are already pharmaceutical tricks for protecting yourself against unwanted infatuation and attachment.

“When you take these seratonin enhancing antidepressants, you can jeopardize your ability to form long-term attachments,” said Dr. Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University. She has discussed the neurochemistry of romance (and her experiments in scanning the brains of lovers) in her 2004 book, “Why We Love.” She told me that love is like an addiction — wonderful when it’s going well, but also potentially dangerous:

It’s possible to fall in love with someone just because you had sex with them, because with orgasm you get a flood of oxytocin and vasopressin that can cause you to feel attached to the person. Casual sex is not always casual. Someone might be happy, with a lovely wife or husband, and then this brain system for romantic love or attachment is triggered by someone totally inappropriate. You acquire all the characteristics of an addict. You come obsessed; you distort reality; you do dangerous things; you crave the person, you have withdrawal symptoms.

How to avoid that fate when, say, you find yourself tempted to have a fling at a convention? “Take enough Prozac beforehand,” Dr. Fisher said, “and your emotions will be so blunted that you won’t even get into bed with anyone.”

Do Prozac users agree? The Lab welcome any reports on ways to fend off romantic madness, and any thoughts on the merits or demerits of a love vaccine. (Or, if you prefer, on a love potion that would promote attachment, like the “commitment pill” envisioned by my colleague Olivia Judson or the “monogamy injection” discussed by my colleague Walter Kirn.)

Despite Economy - Brain Fitness Booming

From FoxBusiness.com:

To commemorate Brain Awareness Week, Posit Science today released a report showing that despite the collapsing economy, consumers are still spending their money on keeping their brains sharp. The report ties growth in the brain fitness industry to growth in the publication of studies in science and medical journals, which now show that certain types of cognitive training yields benefits. Experts caution that consumers should look for brain fitness products shown to work in clinical trials. Read more...

Why do celebrities act crazy? They are.

From Wired Science:

Celebrities' bad behavior is rooted in mental illness, according to "Dr. Drew" Pinsky, who is best known as the host of Celebrity Rehab and Loveline - a nationally syndicated radio show that invites listeners to call in with questions about sex and drugs.

In his latest book, The Mirror Effect (on bookstore shelves Tuesday), he spells out a theory that stars are predisposed to narcissistic personality disorder long before they become famous. Their dysfunctional behavior is rewarded by Hollywood and portrayed as normal by the press. Read more...

"Brain Scanners Know Where You've Been"

Researchers were able to determine where a person was standing in a room by scanning their brain (from Wired Science):

"We could read their spatial memories, so to speak," said study co-author Eleanor Maguire, a University College, London, cognitive neuroscientist. "There must be a structure to how this is coded in the neurons. Otherwise we couldn't have predicted this." Read more...

Memory Switch

We may eventually be able to flip a "memory switch" to activate a region of our brain that could be necessary to remember things (from Wired Science):

...the new study, in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science on Monday, shows a signal that appears to precede the formation of any memory type. It could be an all-purpose memory switch, determining when the brain enters a favorable encoding state, roughly akin to the overwrite tab on an old-fashioned floppy disk. Read more...

No "God Spot"

A recent article discusses findings which dispel the myth that there is a single "God Spot" in the brain. In fact, religious thoughts originate from many different regions of the brain...Check it out (from 60 Second Science).

Do Religious People Have More Self-Control?

From TierneyLab (NYTimes.com):

Dr. McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami, says he learned a lot from the comments here at the Lab:

I was fascinated by the variety of religious activities that many of you have found useful for increasing self-control, including ritual dietary restrictions, meditation, ritual fasting, and rituals of self-examination and repentance. It seems that many readers could also identify with the idea that overdoing it in the religious realm can cause breakdowns in self-control—a sort of “spiritual burn-out.” Finally, many contributors felt that non-religious ideals—one contributor listed equanimity, mindfulness, compassion, for instance—could help to generate the self-control benefits that seem to be associated with religiosity (though some of you were skeptical about this possibility).

Here are answers from Dr. McCullough to three questions repeatedly raised by Lab readers:

1. “Isn’t it possible that religious people are lying about how much self-control they have.” Sure, but this possibility has grown more unlikely as more evidence has come in. We’re doing studies in my lab right now that enable us to measure people’s self-control by way of behavior and physiological functioning, rather than relying solely on what people say about themselves. These results should tell us more about how meaningful the links between religion and self-control really are.

2. “Couldn’t self-control make people more religious, rather than the other way around?” Absolutely. The fact two variables are related doesn’t mean that one causes the other. Some good causal evidence exists, but we’re doing more research that should help us determine whether religion improves self-control, whether low self-control turns people off of religion, or whether some other variable increases people’s self-control and their religiosity.

3.“What about all those pedophile priests and suicide bombers?” Religion spawns a lot of ugliness, it’s true, and some religious people (and religious leaders) are responsible for some truly horrible behavior. However, those facts are a bit of a distraction from the main question we’ve been asking, which, in its simplified form, is this: “If you take two people who are identical in every way except that one is more religious than the other, will the religious person have more self-control?” I’m not claiming that religion is a panacea, but the scientific support for the idea that religiosity is associated with many benefits for health, well-being, and social adjustment is now quite overwhelming. You can review the evidence here (pdf) and decide for yourself.

We want to determine whether these linkages come from religion’s ability to promote self-control. Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn’t. That’s why we do research! A religion/self-control link could also tell us some things about how the propensity for religion evolved to become a universal human characteristic.

The Chemistry of a Kiss

Yesterday I informed you all about the possible anti-depressive properties of semen; today I will enlighten you regarding the chemistry of your saliva, or to put it more poetically, the science of a kiss.

If you think about it, kissing is a gross behavior - essentially spitting in each others mouth. Because of this, and because we are not the only species to engage in such vile behavior, it is reasonable to believe that there is a reason this behavior has been conserved. So, if you've ever liked someone...that is until you kissed them, there may be more to it than technique (or lack thereof). And furthermore, there may be a reason men are generally considered bad kissers.

The reason may have to do with the fact that, similar to sperm, saliva contains hormones, as explained by Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who is a Research Professor and member of the Center for Human Evolution Studies in the Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University and Chief Scientific Advisor to the internet dating site, Chemistry.com:

"There's evidence that saliva has testosterone in it, and there's also evidence that men like sloppier kisses with more open mouth," Fisher said. "That suggests to me that they are unconsciously trying to transfer testosterone to trigger the sex drive in women."
...
And there may be more to this chemical assessment than just kissing, Fisher said. "I think kissing is the tip of the ice berg. I think we'll find that all kinds of other chemical systems are in play that we don't know about."

Fisher says she has found from other scientists' research and from her own analysis of statistics on 40,000 people on the dating Web site Chemistry.com that there are four dimensions of temperaments, or biologically based traits, and each is associated with different chemical systems in the brain: Dopamine is associated with traits like novelty seeking, risk taking, curiosity and creativity; serotonin was linked to calm, caution, cooperation, loyalty, and tradition; testosterone with decisiveness and emotional containment; and estrogen lumped together with oxytocin was linked to nurturing, patience and social skills.

"It now appears that we are drawn to people with particular biological profiles," she said. And the kiss may be how we assess someone's profile."
...
Neuroscientist Wendy Hill thinks it also plays a role in pair bonding. Now doesn't that sound more romantic?

Maybe, but she studied this idea by asking college-aged couples to do the decidedly unromantic act of making out for 15 minutes in a lab room at the campus infirmary. By comparing blood and saliva samples from before and after the kissing sessions, she discovered that cortisol, a hormone involved in stress, went down in both men and women. Interestingly, kissing boosted the mens' level of oxytocin, which has been linked to pair bonding, but the level dropped slightly in women.

Hill suspects that despite the flowers and music she provided, this could be because the college health center is where the students go when they feel sick, not sexy, which may affect women more than men.

I'm not so sure I agree with her assessment of why men like sloppier kisses (and not even sure I agree that we do), but for more, check out the full article at Wired Science. And check out this interview from the Colbert Report with Helen Fisher, talking about the science behind chemistry.com:

Semen: an anti-depressant?

The temptation for lewd commentary is too strong, so just check out this post on Neurotopia.

Are Ocopuses Smart?

Reports of an octopus that flooded a California aquarium on Thursday led Brendan Borrell of SciAm.com to ask the question "are octopuses smart?":

On Thursday morning, workers filing into the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium in California were surprised to find 200 gallons (750 liters) of seawater soaking into their spanking new, ecologically sensitive flooring. It turns out that a curious two-spotted octopus had disassembled a water recycling valve and directed a tube to spew out of the tank for about 10 hours, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"It found something loose and just pulled on it," the aquarium's education manager Tara Treiber told the Times. "They are very smart creatures."

Octopuses, some 300 species of which inhabit tropical waters around the world, can change colors, squirt out poison, and exert a force greater than their own body weight. But calling the eight-armed cousin of your garden snail "smart" seems a bit of a stretch.

But apparently they are:

Scientists have found that octopuses can navigate their way through mazes, solve problems quickly and remember those solutions, at least for the short term.

Octopuses also supposedly "play" - which is considered another sign of intelligence.

Read full article, including an interview with an expert studying the intelligence of octopuses.

Anti-Love Potion: The Secret to Bliss?

Check out this article by John Tierney from the NYT:

In the new issue of Nature, the neuroscientist Larry Young offers a grand unified theory of love. After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding - and, not incidentally, explaining humans’ peculiar erotic fascination with breasts - Dr. Young predicts that it won’t be long before an unscrupulous suitor could sneak a pharmaceutical love potion into your drink.

That’s the bad news. The not-so-bad news is that you may enjoy this potion if you took it knowingly with the right person. But the really good news, as I see it, is that we might reverse-engineer an anti-love potion, a vaccine preventing you from making an infatuated ass of yourself. Although this love vaccine isn’t mentioned in Dr. Young’s essay, when I raised the prospect he agreed it could also be in the offing.

...Read full article