Category: Inside the Brain

Narcolepsy is a disorder where the affected person can just drop off to sleep during the day. It’s known to be a problem with the brain’s arousal system and an interesting article in Discover magazine discusses recent findings that suggest a immune system impairment may be at the root of the problem.

As well as falling asleep unexpectedly, people with narcolepsy can experience other sleep experiences that would usually be a relatively common part of sleep (such as confusing dreams with reality, waking or drifting off hallucinations, sleep walking-like activity and paralysis) but because they are so often dropping in and out of consciousness, they occur more frequently or more intensely than in others.

Because of these strange and unpredictable phenomena, sufferers often appear to be drunk or delusional rather than just extremely sleepy. Why the disease has such a wide range of effects isn’t completely understood, but in recent years a potential cause—the loss of hormone-producing neurons, possibly through an autoimmune response—has been identified. That knowledge in turn promises to pave the way for more precise treatments and stronger relief from narcolepsy’s debilitating symptoms.

Studies looking at the genetics of the disorder have found that about 90% of cases can be linked to a gene which is involved in the regulation of the immune system.

It is thought that this may lead to the erroneous destruction of the hormone hypocretin, which is known to be involved in the sleep-wake cycle.

Link to article ‘What Breaks Down the Asleep/Awake Divide?’

I’ve just discovered a fantastic short article on the curious neurological syndromes that appear in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It was published a couple of years ago in a clinical neuroscience journal and is freely available online as a pdf file.

In fact, one condition, ‘Alice in Wonderland Syndrome’ is named after the book, and is otherwise known as micro or macrosomatognosia – a type of body image distortion where you feel you are very large or very small.

It was first reported by psychiatrist John Todd in a 1955 article that noted its connection with epilepsy and migraine.

There are a variety of other possible syndromes that appear in the story, however.

Dr Andrew Larner, author of the recent article, notes that stammering, mirror phenomena, and prosopagnosia all make an appearance.

In contrast, the strange behaviour of the ‘Mad Hatter’ was unlikely to have been inspired by the effects of mercury poisoning, supposedly a common result of working in the hat industry at the time, as he displays none of the typical features of this type of neurological impairment.

Instead, he’s likely have simply to have been based on an Oxford furniture dealer who was known for his eccentric behaviour.

pdf of article The Neurology of Alice.

Believer Magazine covers the battle over whether neuroscience has supported or undermined Freud’s theories on dreaming, who suggested that dreams are symbolic expressions of our unconscious mind.

The debate is particularly interesting because it is largely centred around two larger-than-life personalities.

Allan Hobson is a retired Harvard psychiatry professor who did a great deal of neurophysiological work on dreaming and is vehemently anti-Freud, suggesting that dreams are just the higher cognitive centres creating a narrative out of essentially random brain stem activation.

Mark Solms is a psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist who also researches the neuroscience of sleep, and has argued that dreaming heavily involves higher brain centres and involves a different mechanism from sleep itself, suggesting that there may be involvement of symbolic processing from higher cognitive centres.

The two had a famous debate, which has been made available as an oddly ‘Fight Night’ packaged DVD, where they trade blows over the nature of dreaming and the brain. Their dispute has been continued in both popular and scientific publications.

Hobson originally congratulated Solms on his research, but when he discovered that Solms was on the board of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and was working on an English translation of the complete works of Freud, he stopped writing him friendly letters. He has since altered his own theory to allow for more activity in the forebrain, not just the brain stem as he had originally proposed, but still insists that dreams have no inherent meaning: they‚Äôre the equivalent of Rorschach blots, and analysts or dreamers can make of them what they choose. He’s addressed the controversy in a series of journal publications with titles like “Freud Returns‚ÄîLike a Bad Dream.” Or “In Bed with Mark Solms? What a Nightmare!”

In a somewhat unusual turn of event, Hobson suffered a brain stem stroke in 2001, which seems to have stopped him dreaming, which, he argues, bolsters his claim that dreaming is essentially random activation of the cortex by the brain stem.

However, it’s also notable that the stroke has stopped him sleeping, so the issue remains unresolved.

The Believer Magazine does a great job of capturing the debate, as well as the personalities involved.

Link to Believer Magazine article ‘Hobson’s Choice’.

The New Scientist Invention blog has a short piece on a recent patent application for a radiator which could be installed over a sensitive area of the brain that would allow it to be cooled and prevent epileptic seizures in susceptible people.

It’s not actually such a wacky idea and previous research has suggested something similar.

A 2003 paper by Steven Rothman and Xiao-Feng Yang suggested that an electrical cooling system could be implanted to detect seizure activity and temporarily cool the area to prevent a full-blown seizure.

Link to NewSci piece on the ‘brain radiator’ (via /.).

There’s an interesting and in-depth article in The New Yorker on using brain scans to communicate with people who may be trapped in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) – a coma-like condition that can occur after severe brain injury.

The article focuses on the work of Dr Adrian Owen and colleagues who published a key paper [pdf] in Science last year which reported changes in voluntary brain activation in response to verbal request in a patient who was seemingly unconscious when assessed externally.

The research suggests that some of these patients may be misdiagnosed as being unconscious, when, in fact, they are aware of their surroundings but trapped in their immobile bodies.

Needless to say the research has both stirred some primal fears and garnered a great deal of scientific interest.

Recent research by Owen and other neuroscientists may eventually help make diagnoses more accurate, but it is not yet clear how the new brain-scan data will affect the medical understanding of consciousness. As Owen put it, “The thought of coma, vegetative state, and other disorders of consciousness troubles us all, because it awakens the old terror of being buried alive. Can any of these patients think, feel, or understand those around them? And, if so, what does this tell us about the nature of consciousness itself?”

The article goes on to consider what implications this study has for our understanding of consciousness and discusses some other fascinating studies which suggest how disordered brains can give leads into this crucial question.

One important application of this understanding is to work out ways to ‘awaken’ patients in similar states, which includes using implanted brain electrodes to stimulate under-active arousal-related brain areas.

I found the article via Frontal Cortex, which also has some interesting speculation on the possible links between these states and ‘blindsight’.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Silent Mind’.
Link to information on persistent vegetative state.

The Spanish Journal of Psychology has an interesting English language article [pdf] on the neuropsychology of private thoughts – still one of the most mysterious and poorly understood aspects of our mental life.

Neuropsychology is especially good at looking at how differences in brain function relate to objectively observable behaviour. Private thoughts are quite hard to study in this way, because they are essentially subjective.

Sometimes, of course, we make our private thoughts ‘public’ by talking to ourselves, and, it seems, this is something we learn to do during childhood.

Infants seem unable to ‘think to themselves’ and instead ‘talk to themselves‘ when solving problems, usually vocalising the most tricky or novel aspects of the situation. As we grow, we develop the ability to internalise this speech, and can eventually have a purely internal monologue.

Understanding inner speech is also important because it becomes distorted in psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia.

People with psychosis can experience effects like ‘thought insertion’, where they experience external thoughts being inserted into their stream of consciousness, or ‘thought withdrawal’, where thoughts seem to be removed from the mind.

This suggests that there must be something that the brain uses to identify thoughts as self-generated, and that this perhaps breaks down in psychosis, so we can have the uncanny experience of having thoughts that don’t seem to be our own.

Why we would need this is an interesting question, as surely all thoughts would be our own.

However, the Spanish Journal of Psychology article notes that inner speech often activates areas of the brain also used for ‘outloud speech’, suggesting that it may be a sort of internal action.

Being able to distinguish bodily movements caused by something external (someone moving your arm) and movements caused by our own will is very important, and, perhaps, this is the sort of mechanism that becomes disturbed for what were originally movements, but have become internalised as we ‘think to ourselves’.

pdf of ‘A Neurocognitive Approach to the Study of Private Speech’.
Link to SciAm article on private speech in children.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience has a fascinating article on drugs that remain dormant in the brain and only respond when damage occurs.

They’ve been christened pathologically activated therapeutic (PAT) drugs and rely on the fact that brain damage triggers specific chemical changes and drugs can be designed to take advantage of these processes.

For example, memantine is a type of drug that antagonises (blocks) the NMDA receptor which is activated by the neurotransmitter glutamate.

Important, because this receptor is known to be activated to excess in conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Several drugs block this receptor, including ketamine and PCP (‘Angel dust’), but they block the receptor as soon as they arrive.

Memantine is different – it doesn’t do its job unless the receptor has already been activated or ‘opened’ at least once already – making it a ‘non-competative antagonist’ – in other words, it doesn’t compete with the neurotransmitter, it waits until it’s been and gone.

It’s as if you wanted to prevent postmen from delivery their parcels by bricking up each door, but the householders will only open their door to the postmen.

So you hang around, wait for the postman to call, and then get in the doorway and block it. You’re not fighting the postmen while they deliver the letter, you’re avoiding conflict and taking advantage of what they already do.

This gives memantine a very important property. It blocks more receptors the more glutamate is about, or to return to our analogy, it can block more doors when there are more postmen about.

This means the drug ‘lies in wait’. As more NMDA receptors are activated owing to Alzheimer’s disease, the more it steps in to calm the situation down and prevent constant activation which is what is thought to cause the most damage.

The article outlines several other neurochemical processes that allow drugs to seemingly ‘lie in wait’ and only react to damage, rather than affecting the brain regardless of what else is happening.

It’s an interesting, clever and potentially very important twist on drug design that takes advantage of our growing knowledge of how the brain works in both illness and health.

Link to abstract of scientific paper.

Salon have just announced the start of a regular series of neuroscience articles with the first tackling whether brain scans might enable us to communicate with people who are conscious but trapped in their paralysed bodies.

The article considers a recent scientific paper [pdf] on the use of brain imaging to detect awareness in people who might otherwise be thought to be in a coma-like state, but actually are largely unable to communicate with the outside world because they’re paralysed.

We’ve covered two studies during the last few years that have reported consciousness in what were thought to be unconscious patients owing to the fact that their brain activity seemed to reflect complex mental processes or could be altered at will, following verbal requests from the researchers.

There are two main implications of this work, the first is that we could better diagnose patients as being paralysed rather than in comas, and the second is the hope that we could design systems to read the brain activity in a reliable enough way to allow affected people to communicate with the ‘outside world’.

With all of the brain scan hype we get subjected to, the article considers an important but rarely discussed point – although revolutionary, fMRI isn’t a very accurate measure of brain activity and we can’t directly infer subjective mental states from brain scan data.

This means its utility as a tool for detecting consciousness, let alone ‘mind reading’, is severely limited.

Interestingly, the article is written by a neurologist called Robert Burton, who shares a name with the author of the 17th century book The Anatomy of Melancholy which remains one of the best books ever written on the troubled mind.

It seems this article is the first in a new series called Mind Reader – “a new Salon feature exploring the galaxy of the brain.”

Link to Salon article ‘The light’s on, but is anybody home?’.
pdf of review article on fMRI detectection of awareness in coma-like states.

Musicogenic epilepsy is a neurological disorder where epileptic seizures are uncontrollably triggered by music. Gloria Estefan’s Dr Beat is a catchy 80s pop song where she calls for medical assistance because music is irresistibly moving her body, moving her soul and affecting her brain.

Coincidence? I think not.

Doctor, I’ve got this feelin’ deep inside of me, deep inside of me
I just cant control my feet, when I hear the beat
when I hear the beat
Hey doctor, could you give me somethin’ to ease the pain
cause if you dont help me soon gonna lose my brain
gonna go insane

Despite Ms Estefan’s requests, painkillers are unlikely to help with the acute effects of seizure.

First-line treatment is usually a rapid acting benzodiazepine and long-term stabilisation with a common anticonvulsant such as sodium valproate.

While her concerns about her mental health are understandable (people with epilepsy are at a slightly higher risk of developing mental illness), the majority of people with the condition lead full and active lives, so her fear of insanity is largely unfounded.

There are many cases of musicogenic epilepsy in the medical literature but, unfortunately, only a few few are freely available online. One is particularly interesting though and is available as a pdf file.

It’s a 1957 article published in Psychosomatic Medicine that reports three fascinating cases, including a girl who had her seizures triggered by swing music that induced, among other things, hallucinations of a smartly dressed couple.

For those of you wanting something a bit more up-to-date though, YouTube has the a Dr Beat Mylo remix Dr Who video mashup. Same symptoms, new medical staff.

pdf of ‘Musicogenic Epilepsy: Report of Three Cases’.
Link to Dr Beat lyrics.
Link to original Dr. Beat video.
Link to Dr Beat remix Dr Who tribute mashup.

The Financial Times has a slightly bizarre article on the application of neuroscience to architecture that suggests that we’re genetically predisposed to feel relaxed around flowers, the hearth and food, and that homes need to be designed to release certain neurotransmitters.

The piece is about the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) which aims to use neuroscience in building design and encourage brain research into the effects of buildings.

I’m all for the wider application of neuroscience, and I’m sure there are some relevant findings that could be applied, but the article is full of so many erroneous brain clich√©s that I just despair.

Zeisel is also a director of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), an organisation launched in 2003 to encourage scientists to get out of the lab and partner with architects and designers. “It’s the future of the field,” he says. “People might ask what neuroscience has to do with designing an ’emotional’ house but our emotions are managed by our brain,” Zeisel says. “When our brains are happy a certain endorphin gets released, so we need to design homes in order to release that neuro-transmitter.”

Endorphins are the brain’s natural opioids and are released in a wide variety of situations. They are indeed released when we feel pleasure, but are also released when we feel stress or pain.

So designing homes to maximise the release of endorphins will just as likely lead to uncomfortable, stressful hell-holes.

Take our desire for eye contact with others as an example. “A couple of million kitchens are planned each year and probably only about 5 per cent obey the most basic principles for human communication,” [kitchen designer!] Grey says. In most, the person preparing the food at the sink, stove or counter has to face away from his or her family or guests, decreasing sociability in what should be a social zone. “As a result the brain continues to produce adrenalin and cortisol, the hormones associated with fear and anxiety,” he says. “Whereas if they are facing [into the room] then oxytocin, the bonding hormone, and serotonin, associated with relaxation and enjoyment, are released.”

So, it not only makes the common but false link between specific mental states and general neurotransmitters, makes unproven claims between specific activies and the release of these neurotransmitters, but also makes the unsupported claim that facing away from people in the kitchen causes fear and anxiety, while facing towards them causes relaxation and enjoyment.

Zeisel suggests that responses to some features of the home might even be innate. “We are born with genetically developed instincts that make us feel relaxed around flowers, the hearth, food and water,” he says. “It’s simply an emotional need and using those things in the environment will make us feel more comfortable.” On the flip side, places that seem too sterile or too confusing are perceived as dangerous, which can trigger the hypothalamus to release stress hormones.

There’s no evidence that we are genetically predisposed to feel relaxed around “flowers, the hearth, food and water”. Perceiving things are dangerous does indeed lead to the release of stress-related hormones, but there’s no evidence that ‘confusing’ or ‘sterile’ buildings do this.

Of course, buildings that are ‘too sterile’ or ‘too confusing’ might do, but therein lies a circular argument, because you’ve already defined them as having a negative influence.

Professor Joan Meyers-Levy of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management is another academic interested in how our surroundings affect our physical and mental states. Her research shows that when people are in a room with high ceilings, it activates sections of the right brain associated with freedom and abstract thinking. In low-ceilinged rooms, more constrained thinking is brought to the fore. “There’s a preference in terms of real estate for high ceilings and it‚Äôs [not only] the sense of power and wealth that conveys but also [the fact that] vertical space could have a beneficial mental influence,” she says.

To be completely fair to Meyers-Levey, her study [pdf] was a perfectly reasonable investigation into the effect of ceiling height on priming – an effect where an initial stimulus quickens your ability to react to related things.

However, the brain is not even mentioned in the paper, let alone measured in any way. The bit about high-ceilings activating the ‘right brain’ has just been added, seemingly from nowhere, by the journalist.

Two papers were recently published in Cell about the application of neuroscience to architecture, but importantly, they speculate, but don’t actually reference any studies that have looked at the influence of building design on the brain. The article then goes on to repeat several of the speculations as fact.

I think the article may be a candidate for the Dr Alfred Crockus Award for the Misuse of Neuroscience.

As an aside, Crockus fans may be interested to hear that he’s been tracked down to the hitherto unknown but undoubtedly endorphin stimulating ‘Boston Medical University Hospital’.

UPDATE: Christian just reminded me that he wrote an article for The Psychologist late last year that looked at how psychology is being increasingly used in architecture. It also discusses specific scientific research on psychology and building design. It’s an excellent antidote to the Crockus from the FT.

Link to ropey FT article.
Link to Psychologist article ‘Is there a psychologist in the building?’.

YouTube hosts a classic video of one of the famous ‘split-brain’ patients who had his corpus callosum surgically cut to treat otherwise untreatable epilepsy, effectively separating the two hemispheres of the brain.

This procedure is intended to stop seizures spreading across the brain and its effects were first studied in depth by Roger Sperry, who won a Nobel prize for his work demonstrating that the patients experienced, in certain situations, a sort of split consciousness.

Split-brain patients have been incredibly important in cognitive neuroscience, because the procedure prevents information travelling from one side of the cortex to the other.

The left-most and right-most areas of your vision go directly to the opposite hemisphere, and the same goes for touch information from your hands. Information from the left hand goes to your right hemisphere and vice versa.

In people who have an intact corpus callosum, the information is then communicated to the other hemisphere as well, so the whole brain has access. In split-brain patients, only one hemisphere has access.

Sperry worked with neuropsychologist Michael Gazzaniga who used this effect to demonstrate how each hemisphere could be specialised for different functions.

In the video, Gazzaniga runs Joe, a split-brain patient, through one of these experiments and demonstrates various interesting effects.

For example, it shows how Joe can read words that appear to the right because they get transmitted to the left hemisphere which is specialised for language.

However, Joe can’t read words that appear to the left, because they get transmitted to the language-limited right hemisphere, but he can draw what the word describes with the appropriate hand, because the right hemisphere is specialised for spatial functions.

He can then look at his own picture, making the information available to the left hemisphere, and only then can he name it.

There have been many variations on these experiments that have demonstrated a number of curious effects about brain specialisation and consciousness, some of which are described in a Scientific American article by Gazzaniga.

One of the most interesting things is that the patients don’t feel that their conscious mind is any different, but their split consciousness can be demonstrated experimentally, as shown in the video.

Link to split-brain video.
Link to copy of SciAm article ‘The Split Brain Revisited’.

A paper in the British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery reports on a remarkable case of a man who tried to commit suicide with a crossbow and shot an arrow through his neck into his brain. Thankfully he survived with seemingly little long-term impairment.

The arrow missed all major blood vessels and did not seem to seriously damage any crucial brain areas, although the gentleman lost some sight due to severing part of the optic nerve.

The case report reads:

A 25-year-old man, presented to the accident and emergency department, after having fired an 18-inch arrow with a metal point from a crossbow just beneath his chin in an attempt to kill himself.

He was known to be addicted to cocaine, was depressed, and had been feeling low for several months. He had tried to explain his state of mind to his girlfriend, and a month later he attempted suicide.

The entry point of the arrow was apparent through the anterior part of the neck, and close to the midline. There was no active bleeding. The arrow crossed the mouth and had passed behind the soft palate, which resulted in mechanical trismus and therefore a potentially difficult intubation.

Nasotracheal fibreoptic intubation [camera through the nose] was eventually completed. With the patient anaesthetised, plain radiographs and computed tomograms (CT) were taken urgently; these showed that the arrow had passed up through the brain, and the tip was protruding through a comminuted fracture of the skull vault.

In view of the location, and to assess soft tissue damage further, a magnetic resonance cerebral angiogram was taken, which showed the anatomy clearly, in particular no vascular injury.

The patient was therefore transferred to the nearest neurosurgical centre for definitive treatment. Under general anaesthesia and together with the maxillofacial surgeons, the arrow was withdrawn gently along the precise path of its insertion. This was followed by profuse bleeding from behind the soft palate and base of skull, which had been anticipated and was controlled by a post-nasal pack. No further intervention proved necessary.

His recovery was uneventful, but he lost the sight in his right eye as a result of damage to the right optic nerve. No other neurological deficit was documented. The patient was given psychiatric care for several months for further management of his depression, which had been the cause of his attempted suicide.

Link to PubMed entry for case report.

A funny article in the medical journal Headache discusses Harry Potter’s difficulties with what seems to be a recurrent migraine. This isn’t the first time that Harry has turned up in the medical literature. In fact, he’s made almost 20 appearances so far.

However, this is the first to consider his neurological problems in detail:

Harry Potter and the curse of headache.

Sheftell F, Steiner TJ, Thomas H.

Headache. 2007, Volume 47, Issue 6, p911-6.

Headache disorders are common in children and adolescents. Even young male Wizards are disabled by them. In this article we review Harry Potter’s headaches as described in the biographical series by JK Rowling. Moreover, we attempt to classify them. Regrettably we are not privy to the Wizard system of classifying headache disorders and are therefore limited to the Muggle method, the International Classification of Headache Disorders, 2nd edition (ICHD-II; pdf). Harry’s headaches are recurrent. Although conforming to a basic stereotype, and constant in location, throughout the 6 years of his adolescence so far described they have shown a tendency to progression. Later descriptions include a range of accompanying symptoms. Despite some quite unusual features, they meet all but one of the ICHD-II criteria for migraine, so allowing the diagnosis of 1.6 Probable migraine.

The young wizard also appeared in a recent fMRI study [pdf] that investigated which brain areas would be most active when children and adults thought about themselves compared to others.

In the study, participants were brain scanned while being shown short descriptions and were asked to indicate whether they best described themselves or someone else.

One difficulty is that the ‘someone else’ needs to be well known to both children and adults, so Harry Potter was chosen.

In the final study, when participants judged that the phrase described themself, rather than Harry, the medial (midline) part of the frontal lobes were relatively more active.

Interestingly, this area was significantly more active in children than adults, possibly suggesting that this task requires more effort for children and becomes easier as we age.

Link to PubMed entry for Harry Potter headache article.
Link to abstract of self vs other study.
pdf of self vs other study.

An article in this week’s Science News discusses whether the brain stem may play a more central role in consciousness than it’s usually given credit for.

It focuses on children with hydranencephaly, a where the cortex fails to develop in children and instead, the space is filled with cerebral spinal fluid.

Typically, affected children survive only a few months after birth, but those that do survive seem to remarkably more conscious than you would guess based on theories that suggest the cortex is where all the action happens to support consciousness.

Swedish neuroscientist Bjorn Merker wrote an article [pdf] in February’s Behavioural and Brain Sciences journal arguing that these cases suggest we need to rethink our ideas about how the brain supports conscious thought, and perhaps, even consciousness itself.

Merker argues that the brain stem supports an elementary form of conscious thought in kids with hydranencephaly. It also contains auditory structures capable of preserving hearing in someone without a cortex. In contrast, optic nerve damage in hydranencephaly frequently impairs vision, regardless of what the brain stem does.

Self-awareness and other “higher” forms of thought may require cortical contributions. But Merker posits that “primary consciousness,” which he regards as an ability to integrate sensations from the environment with one’s immediate goals and feelings in order to guide behavior, springs from the brain stem.

If he’s right, virtually all vertebrates‚Äîwhich share a similar brain stem design‚Äîbelong to the “primary consciousness” club. Moreover, medical definitions of brain death as a lack of cortical activity would face a serious challenge. At the very least, physicians could no longer assume that individuals with hydranencephaly don’t need pain medication or anesthesia during invasive medical procedures.

Link to Science News article ‘Consciousness in the Raw’.
pdf of BBS article ‘Consciousness without a cerebral cortex’.

It’s often said that politicians need their head examined, but contrary to recent reports, you’re likely to find out more about whether they wear a hair piece than whether their brains ‘dictate’ their politics.

The fact that there is a brain difference between people with left-wing and right-wing views is hardly news. Because every view we have is supported by the brain, by definition they’ll be a difference somewhere – just as there’s a brain difference between people who prefer London to Paris, strawberry to vanilla, or Britney to Christina.

What is interesting about this new study, is that the researchers have found a difference in the ability to inhibit habitual responses in a ‘detect a letter’ task which was linked to brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex or ACC – a deep mid-line area in the frontal lobes.

Activity in this area correlates with ‘conflict monitoring’ – the ability to detect a conflict between completing mental demands.

It forms part of the brain’s cognitive control and self-regulation system and when it is triggered, the ACC calls in reinforcements to focus attention – in the form of the upper surface areas of the frontal lobes.

Some cases of people with damage to the ACC seem to have perfectly fine conflict monitoring, so it’s not certain that it’s a clear link, but the evidence increasingly points that way.

So the study found that conservatives showed less ACC activation and were more likely to respond when they weren’t supposed to – in other words, were more habitual in their responding.

Cue media pantwetting about brain types ‘dictating’ politics, conservatives being ‘rigid’ and liberals being more ‘flexible’.

Most of this is over-interpretation and, needless to say, the study only reports an association, so it’s just as likely that preferring conservative politics leads to more habitual responding.

Cognitive Daily have a great analysis of the study and I really recommend it if you want to avoid the hype and actually see what’s genuinely interesting about it.

It’s one of their wonderfully clear explanations and has a demo you can try yourself. Importantly, their pants stay dry throughout.

Link to abstract of scientific study.
Link to fantastic Cognitive Daily analysis.

Neurophilosophy has found a series of simply beautiful images created by using the electrical activity of the brain to seed fractal patterns.

They’re generated by BrainPaint, a custom system for neurofeedback – a technique in which a person connected to an EEG machine sees the output of their brain visualised in real-time.

This allows people to see the result of modifying mental states that might otherwise be difficult to monitor internally.

For example, the system might be tuned to show a specific pattern when a peak alpha frequency is reached – reported to correlate positively with cognitive performance.

The user can then practice making this pattern appear more often, as the system allows them to see when they’re being successful, where previously it might not apparent.

BrainPaint is a neurofeedback system created by researcher Bill Scott who seemed to have come up with the idea of making the feedback appear as beautiful images.

Neurofeedback is being used quite widely outside the mainstream and currently crosses the threshold between a fringe practice and a scientifically validated therapy.

Certainly, there are now a growing number of scientific studies which have demonstrated its modest but reliable effectiveness in some disorders.

However, its not difficult to find neurofeedback therapists on the fringes of the mainstream who claim amazing effects that aren’t supported by the research.

If you want to know more about the science of neurofeedback, Scientific American published an article about it last year.

Link to BrainPaint gallery (via Neurophilosophy).
Link to SciAm article ‘Train the Brain’.