Month: August 2009

Mercy machines

ABC Radio National’s excellent All in the Mind has just broadcast a two part programme on robots, morality and the edges of human well-being from the bedroom to the battlefield.

The first programme focuses mainly on domestic robots while the second tackles military AI systems, which, as we discussed recently, are so common as to be almost standard in many combat situations.

One of the most interesting points is raised during a discussion with AI researcher Noel Sharkey on the use of robots as ‘digital companions’ for children

While most media panics focus on the effect of technology on cognitive functions (memory, attention, reasoning and so on), history and even current research have shown us that technology has a minimal effect on the development of our cognition.

Nevertheless, we know that emotional development is considerably more sensitive to childhood experience and differences tend to have clearer longer-term effects into adulthood.

This is pertinent because, apparently, child minding robots are already in development:

Natasha Mitchell: And you have to ask what sort of attachment, or what sort of a relationship might a child form with their robotic supervisor over a long period of time?

Noel Sharkey: Yes, this is the worry. If you leave them with them for a very short time it’s very motivating for them, inspire them and get them into engineering or science, they’ll ask questions about it. But if you start leaving them with them for longer and longer periods and there are signs of this already, actually, you’ll find the child will have to form an attachment with them. We’re talking now about very young children, say pre-speech, little toddlers to about four years old, three years old.

There is currently no research in this area, but it’s not an angle I’d heard of before and raises the important but largely ignored point about our emotional reactions to technology.

Link to Part 1 of AITM on machine morality.
Link to Part 2 on military machine morality.

Internet addiction storm breaks in China

For several years ‘internet addiction’ has been promoted by the Chinese government as a serious mental illness affecting large numbers of young people, but in recent months it has started to pull back, seemingly due to the growth of a widespread, poorly regulated and abusive system of internet addiction ‘treatment’ centres.

Firstly, let me say that most of my sources on this issue are from China Daily, a state-run news service, but whether this reflects the reality or not, it is clear that the Chinese authorities are becoming worried about how the problem is being dealt with.

For example, the Chinese authorities recently shut down an unlicensed internet ‘boot camp’ style clinic and arrested 13 employees after a 15-year-old boy was beaten to death by camp counsellors for apparently running too slowly.

This follows news that the Chinese Ministry of Health has recently banned electroshock therapy for ‘internet addiction’. The same state media source reported that in Linyi Psychiatric Hospital alone, 3,000 young people had been ‘treated’ in this way. Both Chinese and Western media report that electroshock was also used as a punishment (note that some reports portray it as mild electrical current while others specifically describe it as electroconvulsive therapy).

The clinics seems to be a mixture of private clinics, of which 400 or so are estimated to exist, and government run clinics of an indeterminate number.

The approach of one of the most prestigious state-run clinics is described in this article:

Co-founded by the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China and Beijing Military Region General Hospital in 2004, Tao’s clinic in the suburbs of Beijing has treated nearly 5,000 Internet-addicted youths and says 75 percent have been cured.

At the clinic, young addicts receive “comprehensive therapy” including medication, psychological counseling and low-intensity military training. They also take interactive courses with their parents to learn communication skills.

Tao also uses psychotropic drugs to treat patients suffering from mental illnesses such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and depression.

This clinic seems to be the only one to have admitted Western journalists and it has been featured in TV and radio news reports, which, at times, make for quite disturbing viewing.

The recent admission of abuses in ‘internet addiction’ treatment centres is a significant change in tack as previous reports have typically discussed the internet in rather alarming terms, variously claiming that it has caused schizophrenia, led to drug addiction, resulted in job loss and the like. State media claims that about 10% of young net users are addicts.

Reading all the stories on ‘internet addiction’ in China, both from Chinese and Western media, I was struck by how it consistently reflected the idea that the popularity of the ‘treatment’ is being driven by parents’ anxieties about their children not conforming to the social pressures of family and academic achievement.

This is remarkably similar to what seems to drive the concept in the Western world and while our stereotype can often be that ‘internet addiction’ is simply a tool of Chinese state repression of free speech, it is worth bearing in mind that it may be closer to home than we like to believe.

Link to TV news report on ‘internet addiction’ in China.
Link to China Daily on shut down of illegal clinics.

Interrogation Inc.

The New York Times has a profile of the two psychologists who developed the US ‘war on terror’ interrogations that were widely condemned as torture.

The piece makes an interesting update to the 2007 Vanity Fair article that first fingered Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, and has compiled additional information about the pair from interviews with ex-colleagues.

For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”

The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring.

The piece notes that a decision in imminent on whether a criminal enquiry will be launched into the use of harsh interrogation techniques. If so, all psychologists involved in the programme, not just Jessen and Mitchell, are likely to be the focus of some uncomfortable scrutiny.

Given the somewhat odd behaviour and heal dragging by the American Psychological Association during the saga that eventually led them to an outright ban on participation, one wonders whether any high level contact between the US military and the APA will come to light.

Link to NYT piece ‘Interrogation Inc.’ (via BoingBoing).
Link to Vanity Fair piece on psychologists and interrogation.

An anthropologist as the President’s mother

The New York Times has an interesting piece about the work of anthropologist Ann Dunham Soetoro, most famous for being the mother of President Barack Obama.

The article is by Yale anthropologist Michael Dove who knew and worked with Obama’s mother before she died in 1995.

Dr. Soetoro‚Äôs most sustained academic effort was her 1,043-page dissertation, ‚ÄúPeasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving Against All Odds,‚Äù completed in 1992 and based on 14 years of research. This was a classic, in-depth, on-the-ground anthropological study of a 1,200-year-old industry. Her principal field site was a cluster of hamlets, containing several hundred households, on an arid limestone plateau on Java‚Äôs south coast. There, village metalworkers produced dozens of different iron blades and tools for use in farming, carpentry and daily life…

There is a final lesson from her work that is worth remembering: No nation — even if it is our bitterest enemy — is incomprehensible. Anthropology shows that people who seem very different from us behave according to systems of logic, and that these systems can be grasped if we approach them with the sort of patience and respect that Dr. Soetoro practiced in her work.

Link to NYT piece ‘Dreams From His Mother’.

Happiness is not universal

Photo by Flickr user kalandrakas. Click for sourceThe latest edition of the journal Emotion has a fascinating study comparing common concepts of happiness and unhappiness between Americans and Japanese people. While we tend to think that ‘happiness’ is a universal concept, it turns out that we think of it in quite culturally specific ways.

Happiness and unhappiness in east and west: Themes and variations.

Emotion. 2009 Aug;9(4):441-56.

Uchida Y, Kitayama S.

Cultural folk models of happiness and unhappiness are likely to have important bearings on social cognition and social behavior. At present, however, little is known about the nature of these models. Here, the authors systematically analyzed American and Japanese participants’ spontaneously produced descriptions of the two emotions and observed, as predicted, that whereas Americans associated positive hedonic experience of happiness with personal achievement, Japanese associated it with social harmony.

Furthermore, Japanese were more likely than Americans to mention both social disruption and transcendental reappraisal as features of happiness. As also predicted, unlike happiness, descriptions of unhappiness included various culture-specific coping actions: Whereas Americans focused on externalizing behavior (e.g., anger and aggression), Japanese highlighted transcendental reappraisal and self-improvement. Implications for research on culture and emotion are discussed.

Link to PubMed entry for the study.

Redheads more sensitive to pain

Photo by Flickr user .sanden. Click for sourceThe New York Times Well blog covers the growing amount of research on how the same genes that give rise to red hair also make red heads more sensitive to pain.

This has knock-on effects for doctors and dentists in that greater levels of pain killers are needed for red haired patients:

Researchers believe redheads are more sensitive to pain because of a mutation in a gene that affects hair color. In people with brown, black and blond hair, the gene, for the melanocortin-1 receptor, produces melanin. But a mutation in the MC1R gene results in the production of a substance called pheomelanin that results in red hair and fair skin.

The MC1R gene belongs to a family of receptors that include pain receptors in the brain, and as a result, a mutation in the gene appears to influence the body’s sensitivity to pain. A 2004 study showed that redheads require, on average, about 20 percent more general anesthesia than people with dark hair or blond coloring. And in 2005, researchers found that redheads are more resistant to the effects of local anesthesia, such as the numbing drugs used by dentists.

Link to NYT Well Blog on ‘The Pain of Being a Redhead’.

Yawning radiators

There are two intriguing cases studies in the latest edition of the journal Sleep and Breathing of people with persistent yawning.

Normally, recurrent yawning might be put down to tiredness, but in these cases, both women slept well. They could, however, reduce their yawning by cooling themselves – suggesting that yawning and heat regulation may be linked.

Both of their symptoms are very similar. Each complains of unpredictable and uncontrolled yawning attacks lasting from 5 to 45 min. During these excessive yawning episodes, they experience deep, recurrent, overwhelming yawns that cause their eyes to water and nose to run. Occurring one to 15 times a day, these attacks are very aversive and debilitating, and both patients report feeling ill and exhausted following an attack. The most common diagnosis is a sleep disorder, although neither patient reports sleep problems.

These cases include features consistent with a diagnosis of thermoregulatory dysfunction. Both patients report that nasal breathing and/or applying cool cloths to the forehead can provide temporary relief and/or postpone the onset of an attack…

Taking a cold shower or swimming in cold water after the onset of an attack produces complete remission of symptoms for the South African woman. Both patients report feeling cold during or after an attack and experience goose bumps and shivering which may be a consequence of overcompensation by cooling mechanisms activated during thermoregulatory dysfunction.

Although it is still not well understood why we yawn, this gels with some growing evidence that heat regulation may be at least part of the story.

In one intriguing study [pdf], nasal breathing and forehead cooling reduced ‘contagious yawning’ where yawns are more likely to be triggered when we see other people doing the same.

Link to PubMed entry for yawning case studies.

Revisting the ‘Hawthorne effect’

The Hawthorne Effect is famous for showing that people will change their behaviour when observed, or that any change increases productivity, or perhaps that experimenters always influence their participants. It has become one of those legends of psychology that turns out to be not quite what we believe.

It’s the subject of the second edition of BBC Radio 4’s excellent Mind Changers series which discovers that the original studies, their interpretations and the effect itself have become somewhat mythical.

The studies were conducted on employees of the Hawthorne works in Chicago, a factory that built relays switches for the telephone industry.

The research, conducted between the 1920s and 30s, was not always as systematic as it could have been and was mostly close observations of five women, giving rise to fascinating experimenters’ reports, some of which are read out on the programme.

Unlike studies today, the researchers carefully noted their opinion of the personality of the workers, their conversations, what was happening in their lives and how this affected their productivity.

The actual findings that give rise to the ‘Hawthorne effect’ are in doubt and are still debated (there was some fascinating news on the Advances in the History of Psychology blog about this just recently) but the study was hugely influential in that it was the first to connect the personal to the commercial.

Workers were no longer just cogs in the industrial machine who were lost from sight as soon as they left the factory, but people whose work was intimately connected to their home and social lives.

This is now the basis of modern management techniques and the Hawthorne studies, regardless of the debates over the evidence, were the inspiration.

Anyway, another brilliant documentary from the Mind Changers series put together by the ever-excellent Claudia Hammond.

Link to Mind Changers on the Hawthorne Effect.

Bang goes the bus top and still no tickle

Last night, I walked past a bus stop adorned with a poster advertising the new BBC science programme Bang Goes the Theory asking “Is it possible to tickle yourself?” and giving a number to text for an explanation.

Fantastic, I thought. Neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s work on the role of action prediction in the sensory attenuation of self-produced actions summarised in 160 characters.

But here’s the response I got sent to my phone:

Your brain tells your body not to react when you tickle yourself hard, but skin with no hair is sensitive to a light touch. More at http://bbc.co.uk/bang

Admittedly, I was a little worse for wear last night, but even in the cold hard light of day, this doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The second bit (“skin with no hair is sensitive to a light touch”) just seems irrelevant to the question, the webpage has nothing more and the actual explanation is kinda screwy.

Your brain is not telling your body not to react because, except for reflex actions (which are handled by reflex arcs and can be managed entirely by the spinal cord), sensory reactions are handled by the brain.

So if you’re taking this line, a more accurate description is that your brain is telling your brain not to react but this still explains virtually nothing about why you can’t tickle yourself.

However, a scientific paper [pdf] entitled ‘Why can’t you tickle yourself?’ addresses exactly this question.

The science of this is quite well known (in fact, it was featured in the original Mind Hacks book as Hack #65) but in summary it seems that the brain simulates of the outcomes of actions based on your intentions to move because the actual sensory information from the body takes so long to arrive that we’d be dangerously slow if we relied only on this.

This slower information is used for periodic updates to keep everything grounded in reality, but it looks like most of our action is run off the simulation.

We can also use the simulation to distinguish between movements we cause ourselves and movements caused by other things, on the basis that if we are causing the movement, the prediction is going to be much more accurate.

If the prediction is accurate, the brain reduces the intensity of the sensations arising from the movement – for good safety reasons, perhaps – we want to be more aware of contact from other things than touches from ourselves.

So Aunty BBC, here’s one you can use for free:

Your brain predicts the effects of movement and reduces sensations if it guesses right. We guess our own actions better, so it tickles less. http://is.gd/2978A

The next one will cost you the 10p I spent texting Bang Goes the Theory for an inaccurate explanation.

pdf of scientific paper ‘Why can’t you tickle yourself?’
Link to Hack #65 in Mind Hacks.

2009-08-07 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

I’ve just discovered the wonders of the Mental Nurse blog, which has a fantastically insightful piece on the dark cultural effects of nurse training.

Harpers Magazine has six questions for Oliver Sacks on music and the brain.

There’s a simple but genius demonstration of the innate structure of music by Bobby McFerrin at the World Science Festival.

Dr Petra examines media pressures and the celebrity psychologist in ‘A tale of two psychologists’.

The risk of dementia is vastly increased in middle aged people who who smoke, have high blood pressure or diabetes, according to research reported by BBC News.

Neuron Culture investigates suicides in US army veterans and why veteran’s mental health care falls short.

New Scientist has an article on ‘ten mysteries of you’ of which several are mind and brain mysteries.

Can we emulate the architecture of the brain on a microchip? asks H+ Magazine in a roundup of ‘silicon intelligence’ projects.

The Telegraph reports comments by the lost-the-plot head of the UK’s Catholic Church who says that Facebook leads young people to commit suicide. Actually, I didn’t think there was an app for that yet.

Kids with imaginary friends have superior narrative skills, according to research expertly covered by the BPS Research Digest.

New Scientist reports on research finding that while watching a film, we subconsciously control the timing of blinks to make sure we don’t miss anything important.

There’s an excellent analysis of a recent media flap over ‘bug spray damages nerves’ headlines over at Neuroskeptic.

The Economist has an article on the USA’s sometimes bizarre sex offender laws and their ineffectiveness at tackling sex offences.

Public opinion about psychiatric medications have been improving since the 1990s even in ‘situations where there might not be a proven benefits’, according to a study covered by Somatosphere.

BBC News reports on research finding that we tend to get happier was we live into old age.

A evidence-based approach to teaching psychotherapy styles in covered in an excellent piece by Dr Shock.

The Science Show from ABC Radio National had a segment on ‘Darwin on empathy‘.

The consistently excellent history of neuroscience blog The Neuro Times has an interesting snippet about a case of a quack neurologist in 1875 Dublin.

How long is a severed head conscious for?

In 1905 a French doctor wanted to see how long consciousness remained in a severed head and so did a rather morbid experiment at the execution of a beheaded prisoner. The remarkable report is linked from the Wikipedia page on the guillotine.

The observations were apparently made by a Dr Beaurieux who watched the execution of a prisoner named Henri Languille and immediately tried to get the attention of the severed head to see how it would react.

Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds. This phenomenon has been remarked by all those finding themselves in the same conditions as myself for observing what happens after the severing of the neck…

I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. […] It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions – I insist advisedly on this peculiarity – but with an even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as happens in everyday life, with people awakened or torn from their thoughts.

Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again[…].

It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement – and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.

Apparently, this was also discussed in a brief article in a 1939 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association but I can’t read it because my institution’s subscription seems to be broken (off with their heads!).

The famous French chemist Antoine Lavoisier is often said to have arranged an experiment before his execution where he would try and blink as many times as possible before his head finally died, but the story is apparently a myth.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mind Hacks reader jata for a link to the complete 1939 JAMA piece on decaptitation and consciousness which is available here.

Link to full copy of the report.
Link to Wikipedia page on the guillotine.

Sleep freeze

The August edition of The Psychologist has a fascinating article on the awareness during sleep paralysis, a state where we wake but can’t move and sometimes experience intense hallucinations.

This form of awake sleep paralysis is remarkably common and has been explained throughout the world with a diverse and colourful range of cultural explanations.

In Newfoundland it’s called the ‘old hag’, in Hong Kong ‘ghost oppression’, in Japan ‘kanashibari’ – the result of magic from a Buddhist spirit and famously, in Europe of the middle ages, the effect of the succubus demon. A recent study looked at the phenomenon among Mexican teens and found it was explained as ‘a dead body climbed on top of me’.

The article also tackles science of this curious state and one of the most interesting bits is where it discusses the evidence for sleep paralysis being the intrusion of the rapid eye-movement (REM) stage of sleep into wakefulness.

It turns out that there are some people who experience REM almost immediately after falling asleep and they are much more likely to experience awareness during sleep paralysis:

This research strongly suggests that sleep paralysis is related to REM sleep, and in particular REM sleep that occurs at sleep onset. Shiftwork, jetlag, irregular sleep habits, overtiredness and sleep deprivation are all considered to be predisposing factors to sleep paralysis (American Sleep Disorders Association, 1997); this may be because such events disrupt the sleep–wake cycle, which can then cause SOREMPs [sleep-onset REM periods].

Of course, episodes of sleep paralysis occurring as people emerge from sleep cannot be explained in terms of SOREMPs, but it seems reasonable to argue that such episodes may well involve a similar state of consciousness, mixing aspects of both normal wakeful consciousness and REM consciousness. Needless to say, for practical reasons such episodes are inherently more difficult to study in psychophysiological terms as there is currently no known way to induce their occurrence.

Link to The Psychologist article ‘Terror in the night’.

Full disclosure: I’m an occasional columnist and unpaid associate editor of The Psychologist. I have experienced sleep paralysis once and interpreted it as sleep paralysis.

Through gritted teeth

Photo by Flickr user blmurch. Click for sourceThere’s an excellent article in the Boston Globe about ‘grit’ – the ability to stick with a task and persevere over a long period even when the going gets tough.

The article riffs on the work of psychologist Angela Duckworth who became interested in what attributes outside of intelligence contribute to success.

‚ÄúI‚Äôd bet that there isn‚Äôt a single highly successful person who hasn‚Äôt depended on grit,‚Äù says Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who helped pioneer the study of grit. ‚ÄúNobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that‚Äôs what grit allows you to do.‚Äù…

After developing a survey to measure this narrowly defined trait – you can take the survey at www.gritstudy.com – Duckworth set out to test the relevance of grit. The initial evidence suggests that measurements of grit can often be just as predictive of success, if not more, than measurements of intelligence. For instance, in a 2007 study of 175 finalists in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Duckworth found that her simple grit survey was better at predicting whether or not a child would make the final round than an IQ score.

As the article notes, this concept of grit is not just perseverance, it’s also about keeping relevant long-term goals in mind.

When psychologists have researched ‘goal-directed action’ in the past, they’ve almost always been thinking about the here and now. Reaching, immediate problem solving and short-term achievement.

This is slowly starting to change and some cognitive scientists are now attempting to understand the psychology and neuroscience of what we might call ‘life goals’.

There’s an interesting neuroimaging study in the latest issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that looked which brain areas are active when we’re thinking about future events that are not personally relevant, compared to those that the individual holds as a personal goal.

The study extends previous work that indicates that our ability to imagine the future uses similar brain networks as our ability to remember the past, to the point where patients with dense amnesia have drastic impairments in picturing future events.

In the case of personal goals, it seems a similar network is involved, with the addition of the ventromedial and posterior cingulate areas, both frontal lobe regions previously linked to coding the emotional weight or value of an experience.

I’ve long suspected that 90% of real-world intelligence is motivation and a similar message seems to be emerging from the research.

Link to Boston Globe article ‘The truth about grit’.

The whole body nervous system scan is here

The New England Journal of Medicine has a brilliant research paper describing the first MRI scan capable of imaging the whole nervous system, plus a little something extra.

The technology is based on diffusion MRI, a technique which takes advantage of how water molecules move to separate out nerves from the rest of the body.

Water molecules bounce around inside all of the body tissues. Nerve fibres are long and thin, and so water molecules trapped inside are restricted in their movement – like jumping beans in a pipe.

Diffusion MRI works out which water molecules diffuse only along a fixed route (the nerves) and which are moving more freely (the rest of the body).

Of course, there could be some false positives in there, so the scan looks specifically for this diffusion effect only in tissue of the right density for nerve fibres.

Normal MRI scans are essentially density maps and to do this the scanner aligns the proton spins of the body’s hydrogen atoms using huge magnets. It then fires off a electromagnetic pulse which knocks the spins out of alignment. As the spins return to alignment (called the ‘relaxation time’) a radio signal is given off which differs depending on the type of tissue. This can be read, mapped and turned into a scan.

As an analogy, imagine if you had compasses with lots of different liquids inside. They’d all point north, but you could knock them out of alignment by giving them a shake. Slowly the needles would return to north, but the liquid inside would affect how quickly they moved. Just by measuring the speed of return you could work out the density of the liquid. Treacle would take longer than oil, oil longer than water.

So if you restrict the scan only to pick out tissue with the same density as nerve fibres, that also only has water molecules moving along a single route, you’ve got a very high-tech nerve mapper.

The researchers tweaked this process for the whole body and produced the first scan of the entire nervous system which they called ‘Whole-Body Magnetic Resonance Neurography’.

You may notice from the scans that as well as imaging the young man’s nervous system, it also gives a remarkably good likeness of his cock.

As it turns out, the prostate, testes, and penis also hit the sweet spot of restricting water molecule diffusion while giving off a similar radio signal to nerves.

Action potential? Oh give over.

Link to ‘Whole-Body Magnetic Resonance Neurography’ (via @PsychTimes)

In the trenches

The Boston Globe has a short but interesting article on cerebral folding – the science of why the brain is wrinkled up like a damp walnut.

The wrinkled surface of the brain folds into ‘ridges’ known as gyri and the ‘trenches’ known as sulci. This rippled landscape forms perhaps the most recognisable aspect of the human brain but we still don’t really know why we need this rather odd arrangement.

The standard answer “to fit more brain surface in the skull” really tells us nothing on its own as it’s not clear why the same material in the outer brain layers couldn’t be distributed differently.

Some answers are starting to emerge, however, not least from studies which look at differences in brain folding during the pre-birth growth phase and between people with different neurological conditions.

The article is full of fascinating findings from this research, not least of which is that the brain is smooth until quite late in pregnancy and only starts to fold in the last few months of development.

Premature babies seem to have this process partially disturbed for reasons that aren’t yet clear:

For example, because so much of the folding takes place during the latter weeks of fetal development, premature infants arrive with much of their cortical development yet to be completed. And the folding patterns of preemies relegated to the neonatal intensive care unit don’t match those of their counterparts who spend their full nine months in the womb. New research from Van Essen’s lab shows that even when preemies reach their originally forecasted due dates, their brains are not as large or as folded as those of full-term newborns.

“That means there’s something different in how those brains are organized and in the connections that have formed,’’ Grant said. Perhaps some extra environmental influence in the hospital is disrupting folding or preemies are missing out on some vital influence that their counterparts get in the uterus, though researchers haven’t yet narrowed down what these influences may be.

The article is brief but is packed full of eye-opening discoveries on brain folding. It’s one of those areas were we know so little but what we do know is quite compelling.

Link to Globe article ‘Unfolding the mysteries of the brain’.