Everyone's Brain Generates Emotions The Same Way
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A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and coding come together in the prefrontal cortex.
Originally published:
Jul 23 2014 - 3:00pm
(Inside Science) -- In an analogy many scientists hate, the human brain is often compared to a small, wet computer, functioning in almost the same way as the electronic kind. Two scientists at Cornell University report the analogy might be closer to the truth than anyone thought.
They have found an emotion code.
In a paper that took four years to write, neuroscientist Adam Anderson, associate professor of human ecology, and his graduate students found that when different people have a pleasant experience, the neurons, or nerve cells, in the part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex, react in all the same way, firing in similar patterns. Additionally, the same pattern shows up in everyone regardless of the type of external sensory stimulus, such as a sight, or sound, or both, that is triggering the pleasant feeling. The concept breaks the pattern of how science deals with emotions.
“The emotion code is distinct from other codes that represent objects,” Anderson said, separate from the process by which we see or taste.
Consider: you and another person are sitting on the deck of a bar on the beach on Maui with a glass of Pinot noir in your hands watching the sunset over the Pacific. Your eyes pick up the photons from the scene; your tongue picks up the taste of the wine. The sensory part of your nervous system processes the image and the taste.
You are aware of what you are doing. But how do you feel about it?
The brain categorizes what it sees, Anderson said. The sunset registers on the brain as a sunset, with colors and motion; the wine registers as fruity, perhaps a bit astringent.
“We used to think about patterns; we would monitor at a specific part of the brain and the activity of the neurons. The more active the neurons were, we would say this was the pleasure center and monitor with some degree of accuracy," said Anderson.
“It was the Swiss-army-knife analogy of the brain, with various tools for various purposes. That in my opinion has largely failed.”
To get their data for their study, the Cornell researchers showed 128 visual scenes to 16 subjects and then monitored their brains using fMRI technology to measure the orbitofrontal cortex, where emotions are processed. The same subjects drank solutions of various tastes, including sweet, sour, salty, and bitter.
What they said they found was that the brain has “information states,” he said, just as computers do. It is not as though you have pictures of your mother in just one area of a hard drive on your computer, he said. In fact, parts of those pictures are all over the hard drive and the computer’s job is to organize them into an overall picture.
That, Anderson found, is what is going on in the brain with emotions.
In the same brain area, such as parts of the prefrontal cortex just above the eyes, there is actually something of a vote going on and that pattern of voting determines aspects of emotion, something like retrieving those pictures. It determines whether you like something or not.
Psychologists call what is happening a valence, a word borrowed from chemistry, to describe the amount of pleasure and displeasure. To measure valence, they use the word coding, right out of computer science.
Back at Maui, if both people like the wine, the same pattern of neural activity is flashing across both brains. If they both like sunsets, the same pattern appears again in the same way. It is not sense-dependent: The pattern exists whether they are savoring the wine or are enthralled by the sunset; the code also remains the same no matter where the stimuli are coming from, taste or vision.
If one person doesn’t like the wine or is indifferent to sunsets, the neurons do not fire in that pattern. The code is different, he said.
“You can significantly predict how someone is feeling by reading the code,” he said. “The code represents our subjective feelings.” The emotion code represents how we are feeling not what we are seeing or tasting.
For a long time, psychologists looked at explanations anchored by senses, said Andrew Connolly, a research scientist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. They assumed, like the British empiricist philosophers John Locke and David Hume, that the only coding in the brain--in thought--derived directly from and depended on the senses.
The Anderson study breaks from that.
What Anderson and his team did was to use big-data analysis to find that coding that was independent of the specific senses, Connolly said, and found a pattern, not an average. It didn’t matter whether we taste something or see it, the emotion code is the same.
The paper was published in Nature Neuroscience.
http://www.insidescience.org/content/everyones-brain-generates-emotions-same-way/1836
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Out of Mind, Out of Sight
Suppressing unwanted memories reduces their unconscious influence on behaviour.
New research shows that, contrary to what was previously assumed, suppressing unwanted memories reduces their influence on behaviour, and sheds light on how this process happens in the brain.
The study, part-funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and published online in PNAS, challenges the idea that suppressed memories remain fully preserved in the brain’s unconscious, allowing them to be inadvertently expressed in someone’s behaviour. The results of the study suggest instead that the act of suppressing intrusive memories helps to disrupt traces of the memories in the parts of the brain responsible for sensory processing.
The team at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the University of Cambridge’s Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (BCNI) have examined how suppression affects a memory’s unconscious influences in an experiment that focused on suppression of visual memories, as intrusive unwanted memories are often visual in nature.
After a trauma, most people report intrusive memories or images, and people will often try to push these intrusions from their mind, as a way to cope. Importantly, the frequency of intrusive memories decreases over time for most people. It is critical to understand how the healthy brain reduces these intrusions and prevents unwanted images from entering consciousness, so that researchers can better understand how these mechanisms may go awry in conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Participants were asked to learn a set of word-picture pairs so that, when presented with the word as a reminder, an image of the object would spring to mind. After learning these pairs, brain activity was recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants either thought of the object image when given its reminder word, or instead tried to stop the memory of the picture from entering their mind.
The researchers studied whether suppressing visual memories had altered people’s ability to see the content of those memories when they re-encountered it again in their visual worlds. Without asking participants to consciously remember, they simply asked people to identify very briefly displayed objects that were made difficult to see by visual distortion. In general, under these conditions, people are better at identifying objects they have seen recently, even if they do not remember seeing the object before—an unconscious influence of memory. Strikingly, they found that suppressing visual memories made it harder for people to later see the suppressed object compared to other recently seen objects.
Brain imaging showed that people’s difficulty seeing the suppressed object arose because suppressing the memory from conscious awareness in the earlier memory suppression phase had inhibited activity in visual areas of the brain, disrupting visual memories that usually help people to see better. In essence, suppressing something from the mind’s eye had made it harder to see in the world, because visual memories and seeing rely on the same brain areas: out of mind, out of sight.
Over the last decade, research has shown that suppressing unwanted memories reduces people’s ability to consciously remember the experiences. The researchers’ studies on memory suppression have been inspired, in part, by trying to understand how people adapt memory after psychological trauma. Although this may work as a coping mechanism to help people adapt to the trauma, there is the possibility that if the memory traces were able to exert an influence on unconscious behaviour, they could potentially exacerbate mental health problems. The idea that suppression leaves unconscious memories that undermine mental health has been influential for over a century, beginning with Sigmund Freud.
These findings challenge the assumption that, even when supressed, a memory remains fully intact, which can then be expressed unconsciously. Moreover, this discovery pinpoints the neurobiological mechanisms underlying how this suppression process happens, and could inform further research on uncontrolled ‘intrusive memories’, a classic characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Dr Michael Anderson, at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit said: “While there has been a lot of research looking at how suppression affects conscious memory, few studies have examined the influence this process might have on unconscious expressions of memory in behaviour and thought. Surprisingly, the effects of suppression are not limited to conscious memory. Indeed, it is now clear, that the influence of suppression extends beyond areas of the brain associated with conscious memory, affecting perceptual traces that can influence us unconsciously. This may contribute to making unwanted visual memories less intrusive over time, and perhaps less vivid and detailed.”
Dr Pierre Gagnepain, lead author at INSERM in France said: “Our memories can be slippery and hard to pin down. Out of hand and uncontrolled, their remembrance can haunt us and cause psychological troubles, as we see in PTSD. We were interested whether the brain can genuinely suppress memories in healthy participants, even at the most unconscious level, and how it might achieve this. The answer is that it can, though not all people were equally good at this. The better understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying this process arising from this study may help to better explain differences in how well people adapt to intrusive memories after a trauma”
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UGA researchers identify
decision-making center of brain
posted by news on march 11, 2014 -
3:32pm
Athens, Ga. – Although
choosing to do something because the perceived benefit outweighs the financial
cost is something people do daily, little is known about what happens in the
brain when a person makes these kinds of decisions. Studying how these cost-benefit
decisions are made when choosing to consume alcohol, University of Georgia
associate professor of psychology James MacKillop identified distinct profiles
of brain activity that are present when making these decisions.
UGA researchers identify
decision-making center of brain
posted by news on march 11, 2014 -
3:32pm
Athens, Ga. – Although
choosing to do something because the perceived benefit outweighs the financial
cost is something people do daily, little is known about what happens in the
brain when a person makes these kinds of decisions. Studying how these cost-benefit
decisions are made when choosing to consume alcohol, University of Georgia
associate professor of psychology James MacKillop identified distinct profiles
of brain activity that are present when making these decisions.
"We were interested in
understanding how the brain makes decisions about drinking alcohol.
Particularly, we wanted to clarify how the brain weighs the pros and cons of
drinking," said MacKillop, who directs the Experimental and Clinical
Psychopharmacology Laboratory in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
The study combined
functional magnetic resonance imaging and a bar laboratory alcohol procedure to
see how the cost of alcohol affected people's preferences. The study group
included 24 men, age 21-31, who were heavy drinkers. Participants were given a
$15 bar tab and then were asked to make decisions in the fMRI scanner about how
many drinks they would choose at varying prices, from very low to very high.
Their choices translated into real drinks, at most eight that they received in
the bar immediately after the scan. Any money not spent on drinks was theirs to
keep.
The study applied a
neuroeconomic approach, which integrates concepts and methods from psychology,
economics and cognitive neuroscience to understand how the brain makes
decisions. In this study, participants' cost-benefit decisions were categorized
into those in which drinking was perceived to have all benefit and no cost, to
have both benefits and costs, and to have all costs and no benefits. In doing
so, MacKillop could dissect the neural mechanisms responsible for different
types of cost-benefit decision-making.
"We tried to span
several levels of analysis, to think about clinical questions, like why do
people choose to drink or not drink alcohol, and then unpack those choices into
the underlying units of the brain that are involved," he said.
When participants decided
to drink in general, activation was seen in several areas of the cerebral
cortex, such as the prefrontal and parietal cortices. However, when the decision
to drink was affected by the cost of alcohol, activation involved
frontostriatal regions, which are important for the interplay between
deliberation and reward value, suggesting suppression resulting from greater
cognitive load. This is the first study of its kind to examine cost-benefit
decision-making for alcohol and was the first to apply a framework from
economics, called demand curve analysis, to understanding cost-benefit decision
making.
"The brain activity
was most differentially active during the suppressed consumption choices,
suggesting that participants were experiencing the most conflict,"
MacKillop said. "We had speculated during the design of the study that the
choices not to drink at all might require the most cognitive effort, but that
didn't seem to be the case. Once people decided that the cost of drinking was
too high, they didn't appear to experience a great deal of conflict in terms of
the associated brain activity."
These conflicted decisions
appeared to be represented by activity in the anterior insula, which has been
linked in previous addiction studies to the motivational circuitry of the
brain. Not only encoding how much people crave or value drugs, this portion of
the brain is believed to be responsible for processing interceptive
experiences, a person's visceral physiological responses.
"It was interesting
that the insula was sensitive to escalating alcohol costs especially when the
costs of drinking outweighed the benefits," MacKillop said. "That
means this could be the region of the brain at the intersection of how our
rational and irrational systems work with one another. In general, we saw the
choices associated with differential brain activity were those choices in the
middle, where people were making choices that reflect the ambivalence between
cost and benefits. Where we saw that tension, we saw the most brain
activity."
While MacKillop
acknowledges the impact this research could have on neuromarketing–or
understanding how the brain makes decisions about what to buy–he is more
interested in how this research can help people with alcohol addictions.
"These findings reveal
the distinct neural signatures associated with different kinds of consumption
preferences. Now that we have established a way of studying these choices, we
can apply this approach to better understanding substance use disorders and
improving treatment," he said, adding that comparing fMRI scans from
alcoholics with those of people with normal drinking habits could potentially
tease out brain patterns that show what is different between healthy and
unhealthy drinkers. "In the past, we have found that behavioral indices of
alcohol value predict poor treatment prognosis, but this would permit us to
understand the neural basis for negative outcomes."
Source: University of Georgia
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Phantom Melodies Yield Real Clues to Brain’s Workings
In 2011, a 66-year-old retired math teacher walked into a London neurological clinic hoping to get some answers. A few years earlier, she explained to the doctors, she had heard someone playing a piano outside her house. But then she realized there was no piano.
Sylvia was experiencing a mysterious condition known as musical hallucinations. These are not pop songs that get stuck in your head. A musical hallucination can convince people there is a marching band in the next room, or a full church choir. Nor are musical hallucinations the symptoms of psychosis. People with musical hallucinations usually are psychologically normal — except for the songs they are sure someone is playing.
The doctors invited Sylvia to volunteer for a study to better understand the condition. She agreed, and the research turned out to be an important step forward in understanding musical hallucinations. The scientists were able to compare her brain activity when she was experiencing hallucinations that were both quiet and loud — something that had never been done before. By comparing the two states, they found important clues to how the brain generates these illusions.
If a broader study supports the initial findings, it could do more than help scientists understand how the brain falls prey to these phantom tunes. It may also shed light on how our minds make sense of the world.
“I think this is a sweet paper and an important one,” said Oliver Sacks, a neurologist whose books include “Hallucinations” and “Musicophilia.” “It’s a new way of looking at things.”
Dr. Sacks added that the conclusions of the study could only be preliminary, because it was based on a single person. But the same method may work on other people with musical hallucinations. “I think it’s a very good protocol,” Dr. Sacks said.
The study was based on a simple idea. Sometimes people with musical hallucinations say that hearing real music can quiet the imaginary tunes. Researchers had already found that they could use a similar method to masktinnitus, in which people have a nagging ringing in the ears.
“The idea came to us, why not try masking music hallucination?” saidSukhbinder Kumar, a staff scientist at Newcastle University and one of the study’s co-authors.
It turned out that Sylvia found that music by Bach sometimes eased her hallucinations. When Dr. Kumar and his colleagues measured the effect in their lab, they found a consistent pattern: once the Bach stopped, Sylvia had several seconds of total relief from the hallucinations. Then the hallucinatory piano gradually returned, reaching full strength about a minute and a half after the Bach ended.
Dr. Kumar and his colleagues wondered what they would see if they measured her brain activity as her hallucinations rebounded. Brain scans in the past have only yielded murky clues about musical hallucinations, for a variety of reasons.
One problem has to do with how the studies have been designed. Scientists compare a group of people with normal hearing with another group of people who experience musical hallucinations to see if there are any significant differences in their brain activity. All the variations in each group may blur the evidence for how the hallucinations arise. Sylvia, by contrast, offered Dr. Kumar and his colleagues an opportunity to essentially switch hallucinations on and off in a single brain.
For their experiment, Sylvia put on earphones and sat with her head in a scanner that detects the magnetic field produced by the brain. On the day of the study, she was hearing selections from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore.”
Every few minutes the scientists would switch to Bach for 30 seconds, to tamp down the hallucination. When the real music stopped, Sylvia pressed numbers on a keyboard to rate the strength of her hallucinations while the scanner recorded her brain activity.
Dr. Kumar and his colleagues later pored over the data. They compared Sylvia’s brain activity when the hallucinations were strongest with when they were at their weakest. They found that a few regions consistently produced stronger brain waves when the hallucinations were louder.
It turned out that they are regions that we all use when we listen to music. One region becomes active when we perceive pitch, for example. Another region becomes active when we recall a piece of music.
Dr. Kumar argues that these results support a theory developed by Karl Friston of the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging. (Dr. Friston is a co-author of the new study.) Dr. Friston has proposed that our brains are prediction-generating machines.
Our brains, Dr. Friston argues, generate predictions about what is going to happen next, using past experiences as a guide. When we hear a sound, for example — particularly music — our brains guess at what it is and predict what it will sound like in the next instant. If the prediction is wrong — if we mistook a teakettle for an opera singer — our brains quickly recognize that we are hearing something else and make a new prediction to minimize the error.
Scientists have long known that people with musical hallucinations often have at least some hearing loss. Sylvia, for example, needed hearing aids after getting a viral infection two decades ago.
Dr. Kumar’s theory could explain why some people with hearing loss develop musical hallucinations. With fewer auditory signals entering the brain, their error detection becomes weaker. If the music-processing brain regions make faulty predictions, those predictions only grow stronger until they feel like reality. “There is nothing from the senses to constrain them,” Dr. Kumar said.
Dr. Kumar and his colleagues are now using their experimental method on more people with musical hallucinations.
If the theory holds up in further research, it could explain why real music provides temporary relief for musical hallucinations: the incoming sounds reveal the brain’s prediction errors. And it may also explain why people are prone to hallucinate music, and not other familiar sounds.
“Music is more predictable,” said Dr. Kumar. “That makes it more likely as a phenomenon for hallucinations.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/science/phantom-melodies-yield-real-clues-to-brains-workings.html?_r=1
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Feeling Is Believing
Many people can “see” their hands in complete darkness, absent any visual stimulus, due to kinesthetic feedback from their own movements.
| February 1, 2014
Nearly 10 years ago, Vanderbilt University cognitive neuroscientist Randolph Blake and his postdoc Duje Tadin needed to give their study participants the experience of complete darkness. They were testing their new transcranial magnetic stimulator (TMS) and developing protocols for a series of experiments involving the generation of phosphenes—light experienced by subjects when there is none. So the researchers ordered high-end blindfolds, designed to block all light from reaching the eyes.
When the blindfolds arrived, Blake tried one out. “I can’t remember what prompted me to do it, but on a lark, I put them on myself first and waved my hand in front of my eyes,” he recalls, “and had this faint sense that I could see my hand moving.”
Tadin then tried it and had the same experience. The two replicated the mini experiment in the TMS lab, a small, dark room on the sixth floor. And again, both researchers could just barely see their hands through the blindfolds. “You could see this faint shadow, this faint impression of something moving back and forth in rhythm with your motions,” Blake says. But, when Blake waved his hand in front of Tadin’s blindfolded face, Tadin saw nothing. “That got us excited,” Blake says.
The duo traipsed around the building eagerly blindfolding their colleagues and asking them to report what they saw. “About half reported seeing something,” Blake says.
To test what was happening, however, the researchers knew they needed to come up with a better way to characterize what people were actually seeing. “What we discovered was an inherently subjective experience,” says Tadin. “There’s no easy way to ascertain that I’m telling the truth.” Unable to think of a reasonable way to measure the phenomenon, they set the project aside.
A few years later, running his own lab at the University of Rochester, Tadin told the story to graduate student Kevin Dieter, who encouraged Tadin to give the project another shot. They devised a conservative experimental setup in which they attempted to control the subjects’ expectations: they told study participants that one blindfold had little, imperceptible holes that might allow them to see through, while another blindfold would successfully keep out all light. (Both blindfolds were, in fact, totally lightproof.) A subject’s experience with the first blindfold could then guide his expectations for a second trial using the other blindfold. Specifically, if he had seen something with the first blindfold, he would certainly not expect to see anything with the second one. But even under these conditions, nearly 50 percent of subjects reported having at least a “visual sensation of motion” while wearing the second blindfold.
The results hold “implications for how our different sensory systems work together,” Tadin says. Dealing only with subjective reports, however, still made him uneasy. So he turned to an eye-tracking device—used without the blindfolds but in complete darkness—to detect the movement of subjects’ eyes as they viewed the hand they reported seeing. People cannot move their eyes smoothly unless they have a visual target to lock on to, Tadin explains. If they just thought they saw their hand, jerky eye movements should reveal the truth.
To Tadin’s amazement, the eye movements suggested that the visual perception was indeed real: people who reported seeing their hands moving in the dark exhibited eye movements that were twice as smooth as those of subjects who reported seeing nothing (Psychological Science, doi:10.1177/0956797613497968, 2013).
“There are examples where stimulating one sense changes what you experience in another sense,” says experimental psychologist Charles Spence, director of the Crossmodal Research Laboratory at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the research. “This is a stronger example of that—doing something in one sense conjures up something out of nowhere in another sense.”
Interestingly, people with synesthesia—who often see letters of the alphabet, numbers, or days of the week in specific colors, or associate particular sounds with visual stimuli—tended to score higher on Tadin’s blindfold experiment in terms of how much they saw. “They were literally off the chart,” he says. One synesthete produced such smooth eye movements that Tadin at first thought the data were erroneous: “Her smooth eye movements were almost perfect.” Research has suggested that synesthetes exhibit higher levels of cross-brain connectivity, which may play a role in the generation of the visual perception as a result of the kinesthetic input.
Regardless of the underlying neural mechanism, Tadin suspects that there are likely other examples of how the senses blend together—in synesthetes and in people with normal sensory experiences. In 2005, for example, when Norimichi Kitagawa at NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Japan and his colleagues recorded the sounds generated inside the ear of a dummy head by brushing the outside of the ear with a paintbrush, then played those sounds to participants who received no ear strokes, many reported feeling a tickling sensation (Japanese Journal of Psychonomic Science, 24:121-22, 2005). “This phenomenon [of ‘seeing’ one’s own movements] may be just the tip of the iceberg,” Tadin says.
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MATHEMATICAL BEAUTY ACTIVATES SAME BRAIN REGION AS GREAT ART OR MUSIC
MATHEMATICAL BEAUTY ACTIVATES SAME BRAIN REGION AS GREAT ART OR MUSIC
People who appreciate the beauty of mathematics activate the same part of their brain when they look at aesthetically pleasing formula as others do when appreciating art or music, suggesting that there is a neurobiological basis to beauty.
There are many different sources of beauty – a beautiful face, a picturesque landscape, a great symphony are all examples of beauty derived from sensory experiences. But there are other, highly intellectual sources of beauty. Mathematicians often describe mathematical formulae in emotive terms and the experience of mathematical beauty has often been compared by them to the experience of beauty derived from the greatest art.
In a new paper published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image the brain activity of 15 mathematicians when they viewed mathematical formulae that they had previously rated as beautiful, neutral or ugly.
The results showed that the experience of mathematical beauty correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain – namely the medial orbito-frontal cortex – as the experience of beauty derived from art or music.
Professor Semir Zeki, lead author of the paper from the Wellcome Laboratory of Neurobiology at UCL, said: “To many of us mathematical formulae appear dry and inaccessible but to a mathematician an equation can embody the quintescence of beauty. The beauty of a formula may result from simplicity, symmetry, elegance or the expression of an immutable truth. For Plato, the abstract quality of mathematics expressed the ultimate pinnacle of beauty.”
“This makes it interesting to learn whether the experience of beauty derived from such as highly intellectual and abstract source as mathematics correlates with activity in the same part of the emotional brain as that derived from more sensory, perceptually based, sources.”
In the study, each subject was given 60 mathematical formulae to review at leisure and rate on a scale of -5 (ugly) to +5 (beautiful) according to how beautiful they experienced them to be. Two weeks later they were asked to re-rate them while in an fMRI scanner.
The formulae most consistently rated as beautiful (both before and during the scans) were Leonhard Euler’s identity, the Pythagorean identity and the Cauchy-Riemann equations. Leonhard Euler’s identity links five fundamental mathematical constants with three basic arithmetic operations each occurring once and the beauty of this equation has been likened to that of the soliloquy in Hamlet.
Mathematicians judged Srinivasa Ramanujan’s infinite series and Riemann’s functional equation as the ugliest.
Professor Zeki added: “We have found that, as with the experience of visual or musical beauty, the activity in the brain is strongly related to how intense people declare their experience of beauty to be – even in this example where the source of beauty is extremely abstract. This answers a critical question in the study of aesthetics, one which has been debated since classical times, namely whether aesthetic experiences can be quantified.”
Notes about this neuroimaging and neuroscience research
Contact: David Weston – UCL
Source: UCL press release
Image Source: The image is adapted from the UCL press release.
Original Research: Full open access research for “The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates” by Semir Zeki, John Paul Romaya, Dionigi M. T. Benincasa and Michael F. Atiyah in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Published online February 13 2014 doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00068
Source: UCL press release
Image Source: The image is adapted from the UCL press release.
Original Research: Full open access research for “The experience of mathematical beauty and its neural correlates” by Semir Zeki, John Paul Romaya, Dionigi M. T. Benincasa and Michael F. Atiyah in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Published online February 13 2014 doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00068
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sciencewr.com
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Neuroscience Uncovers Emotions of 'Man's Best Friend'
First Posted: Oct 08, 2013 01:04 PM EDT
Puppy (Photo : Facebook/I Love Dogs )
A recent study shows that there's a reason why dog's get the nickname 'man's best friend.'
Scientists have found, in fact, that dogs show emotion similar to humans. When a team of neuroscientists studied the reactions of happy and sad dogs via brain scans, they found that dogs even cry like humans and get excited just like children.
First Posted: Oct 08, 2013 01:04 PM EDT
Puppy (Photo : Facebook/I Love Dogs )
A recent study shows that there's a reason why dog's get the nickname 'man's best friend.'
Scientists have found, in fact, that dogs show emotion similar to humans. When a team of neuroscientists studied the reactions of happy and sad dogs via brain scans, they found that dogs even cry like humans and get excited just like children.
Animals in general are also much smarter than we give them credit for. For instance, the study notes that when shelters kill dogs that are unable to be adopted within a certain amount of time, this tremendously disturbs the masses of other dogs living in the community, and they look to the act as murder.
According to lead study author Gregory Berns of Emory University, he and team members used M.R.I. (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners to study a group of dogs and their brain activity when presented with different human smells. All of the pets let themselves voluntarily be scanned for short periods of time without any anesthetics. Berns explained that anesthesia prevents scientists from studying the nuances of dogs' brain functions as it blocks the perceptions of emotion.
"From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons," Berns said, via the New York Times. "We had a consent form, which was modeled after a child's consent form but signed by the dog's owner. We emphasized that participation was voluntary, and that the dog had the right to quit the study. We used only positive training methods. No sedation. No restraints. If the dogs didn't want to be in the M.R.I. scanner, they could leave. Same as any human volunteer."
Bern's studied his own dog's activity, Camille, who he trained to sit calmly in the M.R.I. machine for a period of 30 minutes. The results showed similar emotions to humans in a key region of the brain known as the caudate nucleus. This area plays an important role in learning and memories, such as anticipation of rewards and joy in humans.
For instance, when Camille smelled familiar humans, her caudate nucleus lit up. Smells played a major role in how dogs processed the world around them and the feelings they had.
More information regarding the study can be found via "How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain."
Animals in general are also much smarter than we give them credit for. For instance, the study notes that when shelters kill dogs that are unable to be adopted within a certain amount of time, this tremendously disturbs the masses of other dogs living in the community, and they look to the act as murder.
According to lead study author Gregory Berns of Emory University, he and team members used M.R.I. (magnetic resonance imaging) scanners to study a group of dogs and their brain activity when presented with different human smells. All of the pets let themselves voluntarily be scanned for short periods of time without any anesthetics. Berns explained that anesthesia prevents scientists from studying the nuances of dogs' brain functions as it blocks the perceptions of emotion.
"From the beginning, we treated the dogs as persons," Berns said, via the New York Times. "We had a consent form, which was modeled after a child's consent form but signed by the dog's owner. We emphasized that participation was voluntary, and that the dog had the right to quit the study. We used only positive training methods. No sedation. No restraints. If the dogs didn't want to be in the M.R.I. scanner, they could leave. Same as any human volunteer."
Bern's studied his own dog's activity, Camille, who he trained to sit calmly in the M.R.I. machine for a period of 30 minutes. The results showed similar emotions to humans in a key region of the brain known as the caudate nucleus. This area plays an important role in learning and memories, such as anticipation of rewards and joy in humans.
For instance, when Camille smelled familiar humans, her caudate nucleus lit up. Smells played a major role in how dogs processed the world around them and the feelings they had.
More information regarding the study can be found via "How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain."
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Research Attributes High Rates of Smoking Among Mentally Ill to Addiction Vulnerability
As smoking rates in the general population have fallen below 25 percent, smoking among the mentally ill has remained pervasive, encompassing an estimated half of all cigarettes sold. Despite the well-known health dangers of tobacco consumption, smoking among the mentally ill has long been widely viewed as “self-medication,” reducing the incentive among health care professionals to encourage such patients to quit.
According to the researchers, the data points to neurodevelopmental mechanisms which increase the risk of addiction. It is suggested that better understanding of these mechanisms could lead to new treatment and prevention strategies, which could be extremely beneficial to mentally ill smokers. The image shows a person snapping a cigarette in half. Credited to Qfamily, Flickr.
“This is really a devastating problem for people with mental illness because of the broad health consequences of nicotine addiction,” said R. Andrew Chambers, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry at the IU School of Medicine. “Nicotine addiction is the number one cause of premature illness and death in the United States, and most of that morbidity and mortality is concentrated in people with mental illness.”
In a report published recently in the journalAddiction Biology, the research team lead by Dr. Chambers reported the results of experiments using an established animal model of schizophrenia in which rats display a neuropsychiatric syndrome that closely resembles the disease.
Both the schizophrenia-model rats and normal rats were given access to intravenous self-administration of nicotine.
“The mentally ill rats acquired nicotine use faster and consumed more nicotine,” Dr. Chambers said. “Then when we cut them off from access to nicotine, they worked much harder to restore access to nicotine than did the normal ‘control’ rats.”
In additional testing, the researchers found that administration of nicotine provided equal, but minimal, cognitive benefits to both groups of rats when performing a memory test. When the nicotine was withdrawn, however, both groups of rats were more cognitively impaired, so that any cognitive benefits to nicotine administration were “paid for” by cognitive impairments later.
“These results strongly suggest that what has changed in mental illness to cause smoking at such high rates results in a co-morbid addiction to which the mentally ill are highly biologically vulnerable. The evidence suggests that the vulnerability is an involuntary biological result of the way the brain is designed and how it develops after birth, rather than it being about a rational choice to use nicotine as a medicine,” Dr. Chambers said.
The data, he said, point to neuro-developmental mechanisms that increase the risk of addiction. Better understanding of those mechanisms could lead to better prevention and treatment strategies, especially among mentally ill smokers, Dr. Chambers said.
Notes about this mental health and smoking research
Additional authors of the research paper were Sarah A. Berg, Alena M. Sentir, Benjamin S. Cooley and Eric A. Engleman of the Laboratory for Translational Neuroscience of Dual Diagnosis and Development, Institute of Psychiatric Research and Training Program in Addiction Psychiatry.
This study was funded by a National Science Foundation GK-12 Doctoral Training Program grant and National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse grants (1RC2 AA019366 and R01 AA020396). Support for enabling open access to the journal article was provided by the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (NIH grant TR000006).
Contact: Eric Schoch – Indiana University
Source: Indiana University press release
Image Source: The quitting smoking image is credited to Qfamily, at Flickr. The image is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Video Source: The video “High smoking rates among the mentally ill reflect addiction, not self medication” is available at the IUSM Communications YouTube page.
Original Research: Full open access research (PDF) for “Nicotine is more addictive, not more cognitively therapeutic in a neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia produced by neonatal ventral hippocampal lesions” by Sarah A. Berg, Alena M. Sentir, Benjamin S. Cooley, Eric A. Engleman and R. Andrew Chambers inAddiction Biology. Published online August 6 2013 doi:10.1111/adb.12082
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According to the researchers, the data points to neurodevelopmental mechanisms which increase the risk of addiction. It is suggested that better understanding of these mechanisms could lead to new treatment and prevention strategies, which could be extremely beneficial to mentally ill smokers. The image shows a person snapping a cigarette in half. Credited to Qfamily, Flickr.
Source: Indiana University press release
Image Source: The quitting smoking image is credited to Qfamily, at Flickr. The image is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic
Video Source: The video “High smoking rates among the mentally ill reflect addiction, not self medication” is available at the IUSM Communications YouTube page.
Original Research: Full open access research (PDF) for “Nicotine is more addictive, not more cognitively therapeutic in a neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia produced by neonatal ventral hippocampal lesions” by Sarah A. Berg, Alena M. Sentir, Benjamin S. Cooley, Eric A. Engleman and R. Andrew Chambers inAddiction Biology. Published online August 6 2013 doi:10.1111/adb.12082
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medical news today
Debt and mental health problems
Main Category: Mental Health
Also Included In: Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 30 Sep 2013 - 1:00 PDT
Current ratings for:
Debt and mental health problems
Debt and mental health problems
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New research, led by the University of Southampton, has shown that people in debt are three times more likely to have amental health problem than those not in debt.
There is currently around £156 billion in unsecured debt such as credit cards in the UK, of which the average family owes more than £11,000. Levels of debt have increased in recent years due to the economic recession and are predicted to increase further.
Researchers from the University of Southampton, along with a researcher from Kingston University, carried out a systematic review on all previous research which looked at the relationship between health problems and unsecured debt. They conducted a 'meta-analysis', the first time this has been done on the issue, to statistically combine the results of previous studies involving nearly 34,000 participants.
The results, published online in Clinical Psychology Review, showed that those in debt were more than three times more likely to have a mental health problem as those who were not in debt.
Less than nine per cent of participants with no mental health problems were in debt, compared to more than a quarter of participants being in debt and with a mental health problem.
The team found that those in debt were also more likely to suffer from depression, drug dependence and psychosis and the results also suggest that those who die by suicide are more likely to be in debt.
Dr Thomas Richardson, Clinical Psychologist from the University of Southampton who led the research, comments: "This research shows a strong relationship between debt and mental health; however it is hard to say which causes which at this stage. It might be that debt leads to worse mental health due to the stress it causes. It may also be that those with mental health problems are more prone to debt because of other factors, such as erratic employment. Equally it might be that the relationship works both ways. For example people who are depressed may struggle to cope financially and get into debt, which then sends them deeper into depression.
"Debt advisors should consider asking about mental health when speaking to members of the public. Similarly mental health professionals should ensure they ask about whether their patients are in debt. Further research is now needed to show exactly how debt leads to poor mental health, so that interventions can be designed to try and prevent those in financial trouble developing mental health problems and vice versa."
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Human Head Transplants Are 'No Longer Science Fiction'
The Huffington Post UK | Posted: 03/07/2013 15:23 BST | Updated: 03/07/2013 15:24 BST
Doctors may be able to cure current diseases such as cancer by performing human head transplants, an Italian neuroscientist has claimed.
Dr Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, believes not only that this procedure will be possible in the future but that it can be performed with the technology currently on offer.
"This is no longer science fiction. This could be done today — now," he said, according to The Telegraph. "If this operation is done it will provide a few people with a substantial amount of extra life. The only reason I have not gone further is funding."
According to the Newsy video report above, Dr Canavero has offered a step-by-step guide to performing the human head transplant - including inducing hypothermia on both donor and recipient, and reconnecting to the new body within the hour.
Dr Canavero's has based his claims on a head transplant procedure carried out on rhesus monkeys in 1970 by Dr Robert White, but the animals did not stay alive for long as the doctors were unable to reconnect their spinal cords.
“The greatest technical hurdle to such endeavour is of course the reconnection of the donor's and recipient's spinal cords," Dr Canavero acknowledges in the study, according to The Telegraph. "It is my contention that the technology only now exists for such linkage. It is argued that several up to now hopeless medical conditions might benefit from such procedure.”
Still, his claims have been widely criticised. Not least by Dr Jerry Silver who worked with Dr White on the 1970 transplant.
"I remember that the head would wake up, the facial expressions looked like terrible pain and confusion and anxiety in the animal. The head will stay alive, but not very long," Dr Silver told CBSNews.com. "It was just awful. I don't think it should ever be done again."
He added that the procedure is "light years" away from where it needs to be.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Technology.org
sciencie and technology articules
http://www.technology.org/2013/09/27/gentle-exercise-enough-keep-brain-fit-healthy/ Gentle exercise is enough to keep your brain fit and healthy
Posted on September 27, 2013
Once upon a time we thought the brain was incapable of changing – if it was broken, it couldn’t be fixed. But that idea has been challenged in the last few decades with research suggesting that the brain is quite changeable or plastic.
In fact, we are discovering that the human brain has remarkable capacity for change. It can make new connections between nerve cells, enabling us to learn and remember complex information. And it can undergo a massive reorganisation when damaged.
Young children who have half of their brain removed, due to severe epilepsy, manage to move and walk again. People with a slow-growing brain tumour may not show any symptoms for years, as nerve cells around the mass adapt and compensate for the lesion.
And for those with brain injury, the inherent capacity for change within the brain, which is known as neuroplasticity, is the dominant mechanism for recovering function.
Researchers around the world are investing huge resources to discover how we can harness and improve neuroplasticity in the adult brain. Many hope non-invasive brain stimulation may hold the key to promoting neuroplasticity, either by increasing the activity in the damaged areas of the brain or somehow correcting imbalances that exist between its different regions.
Non-invasive brain stimulation uses either electrical or magnetic currents to painlessly stimulate the brain, probing the connections between nerve cells to understand more about how these connections can be altered.
Preliminary studies of these techniques show promise, but to date, larger trials show that the effects of this type of therapy are not as efficacious as intensive rehabilitation, such as physiotherapy.
In a recent study, my colleagues and I took a different approach by looking at an intervention that acts across the whole brain, rather than at specific circuits. Our approach wasn’t high tech and didn’t have unwanted side effects – it was aerobic exercise.
Using non-invasive magnetic brain stimulation (transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS) to investigate the effect of exercise on the motor areas of the brain, we tested whether low- or moderate-intensity exercise would promote neuroplasticity in the brains of healthy young adults.
We found that 30 minutes of low-intensity cycling on a stationary bike, compared to 15 minutes of moderate-intensity cycling or sitting (our control), encouraged short-term rewiring and neuroplasticity in the brain.
Interestingly, this effect was seen in the region of the brain that controls hand muscles, even though cycling only involved the legs. We observed the change after a single 30-minute session of aerobic exercise.
While it hasn’t been demonstrated with aerobic exercise before, such an immediate effect of exercise on the brain is not unique. We know running improves learning, and a number of other studies have shown that aerobic exercise is good for a variety of cognitive tasks, such as cognitive flexibility and executive function.
The exact mechanism for exercise encouraging neuroplasticity is unknown, but it’s likely to involve several key chemicals in the blood and in the brain.
In our study, we measured levels of two of these chemicals in the bloodstream, and found that the stress hormone cortisol increased with the moderate-intensity, but not with low-intensity, exercise.
Cortisol actually inhibits plasticity, suggesting that exercise at lower intensities may be better at promoting neuroplasticity.
The second chemical measured was brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is widely touted as having akey role in neuroplasticity. But we found BDNF did not increase in the blood stream, and we can’t yet determine whether exercise increased levels of it in the brain, as has been shown in animal studies.
So, what does all this mean for you?
Well, it shows that, for most of us, gentle aerobic exercise is good for our brain – keeping it sharp, alert and ready for action. We know that people who are regularly physically active have greater potential for neuroplasticity.
But for people with brain injury, gentle exercise may make the difference between walking again or being dependent on a wheelchair for the rest of your life.
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