I’ve stumbled across a wonderful collection of mind and brain artwork, collected by the author of the Italian website PsicoCaf√©.
Unfortunately, my Italian isn’t what it should be but the site’s blog is updated daily, has a podcast and video section, and, not surprisingly, looks beautiful.
If your language doesn’t hold out, however, the image gallery is well worth a browse as it’s quite a stunning collection.
A new Scientific American Mind has arrived and two of the feature articles are available online – one of which is on the neuroscience of violence.
The article makes a fantastic complement to the Science News article on psychopaths we featured previously.
It touches on psychopathy, but is more focused on the wider issues of non-psychopathic violence that could be triggered in anyone in the population.
Some people in the population engage in more violent acts than others and much research has focused on what are the social and biological risk factors that distinguish high from low-violence individuals.
The frontal lobes seems important as neural circuits here seem to be involved in preventing impulsive acts.
People who experience an abusive or impoverished childhood are also known to be at higher risk for violence, and it is possible that these experiences shape the function of the relevant circuits in the brain as it develops.
Genetics also plays a part, and recent findings that a version of a gene known as MAOA is linked to violence suggests that we may partly inherit a ‘violence threshold’. Brain Ethics has a fantastic article on this research if you want to know more.
The article also talks about the Dunedin project, an important and long-running study on development and psychopathology that has provided a huge amount of data in this, and many other areas.
The December edition of SciAmMind also has articles on the military applications of neuroscience, which we featured previously on Mind Hacks, and a number of articles only available to subscribers or in the print edition.
These include articles on migraine, hearing voices, cooperation, crying, brain-scan lie detecting and whether the teen brain is too rational.
UPDATE: I’ve just noticed that there’s a great article on Cognitive Daily examining a recent study on the interaction between guns, aggression and testosterone.
Link to SciAmMind article ‘The Violent Brain’.
Cutting-edge cognitive science blog Developing Intelligence has a fantastic article on pupil dilation and its likely link to mental processing and arousal.
The eyes are fascinating for neuroscientists as they show the only part of the central nervous system visible from outside the body – namely, the retina.
Areas of the frontal lobes, called the frontal eye fields are specifically involved in eye movements (often called ‘saccades’) and eye movements are known to reflect a range of cognitive abilities.
Hence, eye movements are studied as a way of trying to understand what might be going on in the brain, particularly in people experiencing mental illness.
According to the new research, however, pupil dilation may also be an important measure of brain function.
One study has shown that it could be directly related to the amount of information held in memory:
In the most compelling finding from this literature, pupil diameter has been observed to increase with each successive item maintained in memory, up until each subject’s working memory capacity – and then to contract incrementally as each item is reported back to the experimenter.
As always, there’s a wonderfully thorough analysis over at Developing Intelligence so head over there if you want some more startling details of this developing field.
Link to article ‘Eyes, Window to the Soul – and to Dopamine Levels?’
A recent brain imaging study has suggested that criminal psychopaths do not show the normal neurological reaction to seeing fear in other people’s faces.
Contrary to the media depiction, a diagnosis of clinical psychopathy does not necessarily describe someone who enjoys sadistic violence, but instead describes an aggressive or antisocial person who also seems to have shallow emotions, manipulates others, and has a lack of guilt and empathy for victims.
These traits are usually measured by the use of a diagnostic checklist called the PCL-R.
One of the theories of psychopathy suggests that we learn to avoid treating others badly because their negative emotional reaction is also unpleasant for us.
Psychopaths, so the theory goes, lack the ability to perceive distress in others, and so have less reason to avoid treating others badly if it serves their needs.
A group of researchers, led by Dr Quinton Deeley, tested this theory by brain-scanning 15 psychopaths and 9 healthy controls while they viewed happy, sad and neutral faces.
The participants were asked to indicate whether the faces were male or female as a way of focusing participants on the faces and testing whether they could identify faces adequately, but the real comparison was for their reaction to different emotional expressions.
The researchers found that people with psychopathy show reduced activation in brain areas linked to vision and face perception in response to fearful faces, and surprisingly, also to happy faces.
They also showed less activation to fearful faces compared to neutral faces, which was the reverse of the pattern found in control participants.
These results suggest that psychopathy may involve a problem with identifying others’ emotional reaction that is particularly apparent for fearful faces.
However, a previous study with psychopaths reported that they do not show the same fearful response to mild pain when compared to controls, suggesting that the effect may not be specific to faces but a more general problem with fear-based learning.
Whether the problem with identifying fear in other people’s faces is a part of this, or an additional problem, remains to be seen.
It is known that both genetics and early life experiences, such as coming from a broken home, experiencing physical punishment and anti-social parenting, can contribute to psychopathy.
What remains to be answered is how much of the differences in brain function are due to inherited traits, and how much are the result of the brain developing in response to early experiences.
UPDATE: Dr Quinton Deeley discusses emotion recognition and psychopaths in the December Royal College of Psychiatrists podcast. The interview starts 27 mins 35 secs in.
Link to abstract of scientific study.
Link to write-up from BBC News.
Scientific American has an article on military research programmes that are attempting to optimise the brain for the next generation ‘warfighter’ – the US army’s jargon for the modern solider.
The article is by Dr Jonathan Moreno and is largely made up of excerpts from his new book Mind Wars (ISBN 1932594167) which we featured previously on Mind Hacks.
The SciAm article covers some of the technologies that might reduce the need for sleep, improve mental performance, and get rid of those pesky emotional reactions that crop up when faced with imminent slaughter.
If DNA testing for a fear gene is both scientifically and ethically dicey, what about setting out to create people who lack that characteristic? Would breeding humans without stathmin or other genes associated with fear reactions engender more courageous fighters? Would parents sign on for such meddling if they harbored ambitions for a child capable of a glorious military career or just didn’t want to give birth to a “sissy”? One problem, however, is that fear or its functional equivalent is one of those ancient properties exhibited by just about every animal. It surely has tremendous survival value. Removing it would be deeply counterevolutionary and would almost certainly generate numerous unintended and undesirable consequences for the individual, let alone thrust humans headlong into a fierce debate about whether enhancing ourselves has gone too far.
Proponents of such artificial enhancements argue that the changes may not be artificial at all. Is there even a valid distinction, they ask, between artificial and “natural” enhancements such as exercise and discipline? Aren’t we just trying to gain whatever advantages we can, as we have always tried to do, or are these techniques cheating nature? Can we manage the consequences, or are the risks for the individual and for humanity too great?
Link to SciAm article ‘Juicing the Brain’.
The Neurophilosopher has found an amazing video of a neurosurgical procedure to remove one hemisphere of the brain in a child – a treatment for otherwise untreatable epilepsy.
The procedure is known as a hemispherectomy and remarkably, not only can children survive this operation, but in some cases, can graduate high school and university when they are older.
This is a testament to the brain’s ability to grow and adapt during childhood – something often called ‘plasticity’ in the scientific literature.
There’s some more information and links about this remarkable operation in a previous post on Mind Hacks.
The surgical case in the video is from Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center and involves a 6 year-old girl who suffered brain damage before she was born.
In her case, a problem with the middle cerebral artery meant that part of the brain didn’t get a proper blood supply. This caused one hemisphere to develop abnormally (see the brain scan on the right).
Damaged or malformed brain tissue can lead to epilepsy in both children and adults, and this is exactly what happened in this case.
If seizures can’t be controlled by anti-epileptic medication one option is to surgically remove or isolate the source of the seizures in the brain.
Frequent seizures can lead to problems with day-to-day living, cognitive impairment, further brain damage and increase the chances of sudden unexpected death, which is a rare but tragic.
Therefore, surgery is often a life-saving procedure at best, or at the least, can make the patient a great deal safer.
Notably, before the surgery, the girl in the video wears a helmet. These are often given to children who have frequent seizures to prevent head injury when they fall.
The video explains some of the background to the case, and the surgeons narrate and explain the procedure as they go.
Fascinating stuff.
Link to Neurophilosopher’s page with video.
The Times covers research published in the journal Paediatrics indicating that head size at one year old predicts intelligence in later childhood.
A research team led by Dr Catherine Gale measured the head circumference of 633 children at birth, and regularly afterwards.
The kept in contact with the families and assessed the children at 4 and 8 years for mental performance.
The team found that intelligence was positively related both to head size at birth, and to head growth during childhood.
Interestingly, the same team did a study looking back at older people’s medical records and compared their head size at birth and in adulthood, to their IQ measured in their 60s and 70s.
They found no relationship between birth head size and current IQ, but did find a relationship between adult head size and IQ.
This may suggest that their are complex life-long factors affecting brain development that affect intelligence differently as we age.
Link to article in The Times.
This is one I missed a couple of months ago: Wired had an article on a novel technique that might help rouse people from coma – applying electrical currents to spinal nerves to stimulate the brain.
The surgeon mentioned in the story, Edwin Cooper, has published a number of studies on the technique, which involves applying an electrical current to the right median nerve which connects directly to the spine.
A Japanese team is attempting to do something similar, but uses electrodes implanted directly in the spine itself to stimulate the dorsal column.
The idea behind the treatment is that the electrical current travels up the spinal nerves and boosts the reticular activating system, a part of the brain stem known to be involved in arousal and motivation.
This in turn should boost the activity of higher brain centres, including the thalamus and then the cortex.
More recently, Japanese researchers have attempted to use electrodes implanted directly in the brain to increase arousal, with some success in early trials.
As an aside, Edwin Cooper is a member of the Lifeboat Foundation, a futurist organisation that aims to develop technology to save the planet from cataclysmic events such as global pandemics or holocaust.
This includes “self-sustaining space colonies in case the other defensive strategies fail”.
Needless to say, Ray Kurzweil is involved.
Link to Wired article ‘Back From the Dead’.
Discover magazine has an excellent article on the neuroscience of religious or spiritual experience, an area sometimes known as neurotheology.
Although researchers vary in their own spiritual beliefs, it is possible to be an atheist and still study spiritual experience.
Just as a complete understanding of the visual system wouldn’t disprove the existence of any particular object you see (after all, it could be a true perception, or it could be an illusion), studying the experience of God, doesn’t really tell us anything about whether God exists or not.
One of the most established researchers in this area is Dr Michael Persinger who has stimulated the temporal lobes with weak but shifting magnetic fields (using a modified helmet, pictured) and claims to have induced the experience of a ‘sensed presence’ in na√Øve volunteers.
Persinger notes that minor temporal lobe disturbances are common throughout the population, and are more common in people with high numbers of paranormal beliefs.
Supposedly, a form is the helmet is available for sale over the internet, although as the tag-line of the website is “Neurotheology, Magnetic Brain Stimulation, Deja Vu, Death, God, Sex, Love, and more” it sounds more like a track-listing from a Hawkwind album than a serious piece of research equipment.
The article covers most of the major neurotheology research groups, and gives an overview of their main aims.
Link to article ‘The God Experiments’.
Neurofuture’s Sandra Kiume, who seems to have a knack for discovering striking neuroart projects, has picked up on some pieces by Laura Splan, who has produced detailed neuroanatomy images drawn with her own blood.
Thought Patterns is a series of images inspired by neuroanatomical structures. Each drawing was created using blood taken from my fingertips as the primary medium. The series explores the relationship between the images being depicted and the source of the medium with which they are drawn. I was drawn to these images as a formal exploration of the elements of our body that tell us we sense pain or pleasure.
Wow. There’s more at the links below.
The Plastinated Brain is a website with some amazing pictures of a dissected brain preserved with a process called plastination.
The website is from the Institute for Anatomy at the University of Vienna and intends to help people understand human brain anatomy.
Plastination preserves the body in a state where a remarkable amount of detail can be seen.
You can navigate through the brain slice by slice, or see particular parts taken out and examined in detail.
Each part is also labelled, so if you’re keen to polish up your neuroanatomy, there’s plenty of material to help you on your way.
Link to The Plastinated Brain.
BBC Radio 4 science programme Frontiers just started a new series, and the first programme was an in-depth investigation of the science and tricky moral and clinical problems thrown up by patients in a persistent vegetative state or PVS.
The programme talks to the researchers behind the recent study that used brain scanning to infer that a patient thought to be in PVS was actually conscious.
Doctors on the programme discuss the difficulty in diagnosing the condition, and whether functional brain scans should be used as part of the standard diagnostic checks.
Also involved in the discussion is Martin Coleman from Cambridge University’s Impaired Consciousness Group who are researching whether brain-computer interfaces could help people incapacitated by brain-injury.
Link to Frontiers webpage on Vegetative State edition.
realaudio of programme audio.
Today’s Nature has a special supplement on chemical sensing, including a freely accessible article on smell and the flavour system that is full of surprising facts about one of the most neglected senses.
For me, one of the most surprising aspects of the article, was discovery that there are two distinct brain networks for smell.
One is the orthonasal system which deals with odours ‘sniffed in’ to the nose, and the other is the retronasal smell system (image on the right, click for larger version of both) which is involved in sensing odours when we breath out.
The retronasal system is particularly linked to the flavour system, because it is most commonly activated when we eat food.
The traditional view in the literature on eating behaviour in human culture is that the flavour of prepared foods is humanity’s greatest universal shared behaviour, experienced by individuals of all ages in the course of daily life. Flavour is also among the most complex and powerful of all human sensations. It engages almost all of the sensory modalities. It also engages the complex facial, swallowing and respiratory motor systems. Flavour is therefore an active sensation ‚Äî we use ‘active taste’ to palpate our food with our tongue as we use ‘active touch’ to palpate an object we are examining with our fingers. Some of these systems are indicated in the diagram [above]. Above these sensory and motor systems are the cognitive systems for memory, emotion, abstract thinking and language. The importance of retronasal smell images is illustrated by the massive extent to which they interact with these brain systems compared with orthonasal smell images
The article also discusses the how smells are transformed into spatial odour patterns in the brain depending on which sensors the odour activates, and notes that smell-related genes are the largest group in the genome.
All in all, it’s a really eye-opening article if, like me, you’re not familiar with the surprising and complex nature of our sense of smell.
Link to article ‘Smell images and the flavour system in the human brain’.
The International Herald Tribune has a fascinating article on the work of neuroscientist Prof Sandra Witelson.
Witelson is notable for collating the world’s largest ‘brain bank’ of non-diseased human brains.
She is particularly interested in examining how brain structure relates to mental function, and particularly in sex differences between men and women.
Her research has turned up some intriguing differences between the structures of male and female brains, usually not obviously visible on brain scans, as they are at the cellular level and only in specific areas.
Witelson also got the chance to study a particularly exceptional brain:
It was Witelson’s 1999 study of Albert Einstein’s brain that made headlines by revealing some remarkable features overlooked by other neuroscientists: the parietal lobe, the region responsible for visual thinking and spatial reasoning, was 15 percent larger than average, and it was structured as one distinct compartment, instead of the usual two compartments separated by the Sylvian fissure.
Witelson is continuing her analysis of Einstein’s brain, but with a histological study, probing features of the cellular geography in the parietal lobe, like the packing density of his neurons.
These specimens of Einstein’s brain came to Witelson via Dr. Thomas Harvey, the pathologist at the Princeton hospital where Einstein died in 1955. Shortly thereafter Harvey stole away with the great man’s gray matter (and lost his job as a result).
Now 94, Harvey has received requests for Einstein’s brain from many neuroscientists and turned most of them down. But hearing of Witelson’s extensive brain bank, he sent her a handwritten note by fax in 1995 asking simply, “Do you want to study the brain of Albert Einstein?”
She sent a fax back: “Yes.”
Link to ‘A neuroscientist’s life’s work: Analyzing brains to study structure and cognition’.
Haynes, the maker of the well-known manuals on car mechanics, have released a Haynes Brain Manual (ISBN 1844253716) that gives tips and advice on keeping your mind and brain running smoothly.
Covering everything from exercise and nutrition for optimal brain function, to dealing with stress, to getting help with mental or neurological health problems, the manual seems to be fun and informative guide to possible solutions and resources available.
It not only gives personal advice but also includes a guide to dealing with professional services and tracking down the right sort of help when you need it.
It’s mainly targeted at men, and probably fills a gap in the market which is often missed by most blokes’ magazines.
The website has a selection of pages from the book available as PDF files if you want to have a look inside.
Link to Haynes Brain Manual page.
America’s National Library of Medicine have put scans of beautiful old medical texts online including Jospeh Vimont’s wonderfully illustrated 1832 anatomy book entitled Trait√© de phr√©nologie humaine et compar√©e that compares the skull and brain of humans and animals.
Despite the French title, it’s annotated in both English and French and contains some fantastic illustrations of both normal and abnormal neuroanatomy.
Apparently, it was an attempt to investigate the links between brain structure and the ‘science’ of phrenology which claimed that bumps on the head indicated personality because they suggested how the brain was developing underneath.
Although phrenology has been discounted as rubbish, it is credited with sparking some of the first ideas on whether specific brain areas could be involved in specific mental abilities, an idea that is now central to modern cognitive neuroscience.
People who take this idea too far, by suggesting that there is a ‘brain centre’ for some particular complex behaviour are often accused of being ‘modern day phrenologists’ (usually with an accompanying look of disdain or a loud tut).
Unfortunately, the media loves stories that go something like “‘Dream centre’ of the brain found” (a real headline) which encourages reporters to distort the usually ambiguous findings of research studies, and scientists to over-simplify their conclusions.
In contrast, Vimont’s book is a form of innocent and sincere phrenology and, perhaps, should be enjoyed as such.
Link to Traité de phrénologie humaine et comparée (via BB).
Mind Hacks 