Category: Inside the Brain

I’ve just found an article from defunct Canadian digital art and culture magazine HorizonZero that traces the history of electronic music generated from human EEG recordings.

In the late 1960s, Richard Teitelbaum was a member of the innovative Rome-based live electronic music group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV). In performances of Spacecraft (1967) he used various biological signals including brain (EEG) and cardiac (EKG) signals as control sources for electronic synthesizers. Over the next few years, Teitelbaum continued to use EEG and other biological signals in his compositions and experiments as triggers for nascent Moog electronic synthesizers.

Link to ‘A Young Person’s Guide to Brainwave Music’.

Science and Consciousness Review have an interview with neuroscientist Sara Lazar, who conducted the first fMRI study of meditation in 2000, and recently hit the news for reporting that meditation may increase the thickness of the grey matter in the cortex.

The interview explores Sara’s motivation for studying meditation, and discusses the science and implications of her work.

When we first posted about the meditation study, one of the criticisms was that the study simply compared meditators to non-meditators without following them up to actually see if the cortex did change over time.

It could be argued that people with more grey matter are simply more likely to meditate, rather than the act of meditation having any direct effect on grey matter.

Like the London cab driver study (which reported that cab drivers have larger hippocampi) Lazar’s meditation study reported a correlation between number of years spent meditating and the amount of grey matter, making it much less likely that the effect was incidental.

Lazar discusses such results in detail and, particularly, focuses on the brain areas found to show the most change, and relates them to the possible effects meditation may be having on the brain’s function.

Link to interview with Dr. Sara W. Lazar.

ABC Radio’s All in the Mind discusses the curious condition of prosopagnosia, sometimes called ‘face-blindness’, where affected individuals can’t recognise faces despite having intact vision and being able to recognise objects.

The programme discusses how face recognition can be affected after brain injury, and talks to both a person with the condition, and neuropsychologists trying to better understand how it occurs.

On a related note, last year we interviewed Thomas Grüter, a prosopagnosia researcher and someone who has an inherited version of the disorder.

mp3 or realaudio of programme.
Link to transcript.

This week’s Science News has a cover article on the neural basis of the sense of self, which they’ve kindly published online in full.

The article also discusses how the concept of self can breakdown after brain injury or during mental illness. For example, some people diagnosed with schizophrenia have the experience that they are being controlled by outside forces.

In addition to the article, there was a recent edition WNYC’s Radio Lab that covered similar ground, as noted in a previous post on Mind Hacks.

Link to article ‘Self-Serve Brains’ from Science News.

Seed Magazine have an online article looking at the role of mirror neurons in appreciating spectator sport, particularly in light of the ongoing Winter Olympics.

The article itself is quite speculative, taking some of the conclusions with regard to possible emotional identification with the competitors a little further than the evidence can strongly support, but deftly uses the example of sports as an interesting introduction to the function of the ‘mirror system’.

Link to article ‘Built to be fans’.

The cover article in this week’s New Scientist is about the new generation of wakefulness-promoting and cognitive enhancement drugs being marketed and developed by pharmaceutical companies.

Available drugs, such as modafinil, and those still in development, such as CX717, are being widely discussed as having the potential to alter society as sleep becomes a less necessary comidity.

Although marketed as a treatment for narcolepsy, modafinil is being frequently used by people wanting more work or play time without the cognitive impairement associated with tiredness. This has become so prevalent that it featured in a major article in the Washington Post as far back as 2002.

The New Scientist article is also enthusiastic in its coverage of the new compounds:

If that sounds unlikely, think about what is already here. Modafinil has made it possible to have 48 hours of continuous wakefulness with few, if any, ill effects. New classes of sleeping pills are on the horizon that promise to deliver sleep that is deeper and more refreshing than the real thing. Further down the line are even more radical interventions – wakefulness promoters that can safely abolish sleep for several days at a stretch, and sleeping pills that deliver what feels like 8 hours of sleep in half the time. Nor is it all about drugs: one research team even talks about developing a wearable electrical device that can wake your brain up at the flick of a switch.

Although perhaps we can be a bit suspicious of the claim that they have “few, if any, ill effects”, as the history of new drugs shows that major effects are often not discovered until several years after the marketing claims them to be virtually side-effect free (e.g. benzodiazepines, SSRIs).

Unfortunately, the New Scientist article is not available online to non-subscribers, so you’ll have to visit your local library or newsagent to get a copy, but there’s plenty of information on modafinil and CX717 on the net.

Link to table of contents for current New Scientist.
Link to Washington Post article ‘The Great Awakening’.

As well as semiotics and cognitive psychology there is another tool for understanding advertising – neuroscience! Enter neuromarketing [1]. Neuromarketing promises to tell you how your brain responds to branding, or which adverts during the superbowl are most effective (Vaughan did a great job on this one, here, and here), or how alert people are during normal television adverts (“there may well need to be more ads created.” concludes the executive who commissioned the study!)

Neuromarketing leaves people saying things like

But the brain doesn’t lie, and the ad industry is just waking up to the potential of neuroscience. The brain’s seven defined regions – each affecting a different aspect of brain function – literally light up the screen if stimulated. Each one contributes to different cognitive activities; reasoning, analysis, long or short-term memory, high or low involvement processing, emotion, meaning etc.
(Tess Alps, in the Guardian)

The appeal of neuromarketing is the illusion of being able to access some more fundamental explanatory basis for our actions. People may lie to market researchers, or may even deceive themselves, but – we hope – ‘the brain doesn’t lie’. As psychologist and marketing guru Gerald Zaltman said existing methods don’t go nearly far enough in helping [advertisers] move to a closer understanding of their customers [2]

Sadly for marketing science, a straight description of what the brain is doing is of limited use – the marketing implications crucially depend on how you interpret that activity. And the interpretation depends on your theories and assumptions about the mind. If your assumptions are dubious (see the superbowl study) or just wrong (see the Tess Alps quote above) then you’re not going to get anything more than a pseudo-scientific smokescreen.

Perhaps the real appeal of neuromarketing to advertisers is betrayed by this quote from Jonathan Harries, the creative director at advertising agency FCB:

It is very hard for our clients to buy gut feel because every time they approach [a campaign], their jobs are on the line. Neuroscience promises to measure the gut feel, and that is exciting for us. It makes it easier for us to sell what we believe is right [2]

Ref:

[1] Enjoy the marketing of neuromarketing first hand at neurosense.co.uk/

[2] Inside the Consumer Mind : What neuroscience can tell us about marketing, Wendy Melillo, Adweek; Jan 16, 2006; 47, 3

A new edition of Scientific American Mind has been released and includes two web-published articles: one on recent research on grandmother cells (or ‘Halle Berry neurons’ as they’re becoming known) and another on the use of neurofeedback as a therapy and cognitive enhancer.

‘Halle Berry neurons’ are brain cells that supposedly activate in response to a single face, and are so named because a photo of Ms Berry was used in a recent experiment experiment that seemed to support this “one neuron – one face idea”, that was previously derided as being unrealistic.

The jury is still out on whether they exist or not, but the article considers evidence for and against the hypothesis.

Neurofeedback is a technique where brain activity is measured and shown to the subject, who can then attempt to control it by altering their mental state.

The brain activity can be measured from areas that could be linked to problems a person has (such as poor attention or concentration) and so the technique can be supposedly used to ‘train the brain’ to work more efficiently.

The article considers the evidence that it can be effective, although it is still not a mainstream treatment, partly because there are no widely agreed standards for how it should be administered.

Link to artice ‘One Person, One Neuron?’.
Link to article ‘Train Your Brain’.

The ‘complete results‘ from the Super Bowl brain scans are online, and it does indeed seem as if the exercise has been mostly hype.

Cardinal sins:

1) Not giving the comparison conditions and experimental design. This makes the reported results essentially meaningless.

2) Interpreting brain activity in certain areas to mean a certain response from viewers, even when they actually report something else.

female subjects may give verbally very low ‘grades’ to ads using actresses in sexy roles, but their mirror neuron areas seem to fire up quite a bit, suggesting some form of identification and empathy.

Mirror neurons tend to fire when anyone else’s actions are viewed, there is no evidence that approval or liking of the person doing the actions has any bearing on the response.

3) Assuming activation in the ‘mirror system’ equals empathy.

4) Assuming activation of the amygdala is a measure of fear.

There is a big jump in amygdala activity when the dinosaur crushes the caveman… The scene looks funny and has been described as funny by lots of people, but your amygdala still perceives it as threatening

The amygdala can be active when someone experiences happiness or joy. Equally, it could have been active because people found the scene funny.

5) Finishing on an advert for the neuromarketing company involved.

Link to ‘Complete results’.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on same.

To cut a long story short – don’t believe the hype. At least as it’s described in a story doing the rounds.

According to the report, neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni and his team brain-scanned people while they watched the Super Bowl adverts to see which “won”.

This is part of an emerging science called neuromarketing, which uses the techniques of cognitive neuroscience to try and evaluate and design better product promotions.

Iacoboni claims that “a good indicator of a successful ad is activity in brain areas concerned with reward and empathy” (which seems controversial at best, but we’ll move on).

The tricky bit comes when you try and measure brain activity from participants who are watching adverts.

The images generated from fMRI brain scanning are not pure ‘maps’ of brain activity. All of the brain is active all of the time, so to infer which areas are most involved, neuroscientists compare brain activity between different conditions.

These conditions are designed very carefully in scientific experiments, and in the most common form of comparison (‘subtraction’) they are identical, apart from the one thing that the researchers want to investigate.

It is, therefore, impossible to interpret the results of a brain scanning study without knowing how the experiment was designed and exactly what was being compared with what.

As this hasn’t been made clear, the results could be due to any number of things not related to how good the advert was.

From a previous study done on political ads by the same marketing company, it looks as if they just average the activation of a certain brain area over the course of the ad. They then base their conclusions of the effect of the ads on the assumed functions of these brain areas.

The difficulty is that the functions of these areas are still controversial. For example, with the Super Bowl ads, Iacobini claims that activation in the ‘mirror system’ is a measure of empathy. This is still highly contentious and is presumably based on conclusions from an earlier study of his.

Because of this uncertainty, it is difficult to know that any difference is not due to one advert having more movement in it than the other. Or perhaps more people. Or happier people. Or even something unrelated like a faster tempo in the music… despite the advert being otherwise rubbish.

The previous study on political ads (that made the front page of The New York Times no less) was completed while America was winding up for the 2004 presidential elections, and the current one was completed during the 24 hours after the Super Bowl.

Sounds like the ‘neuromarketing’ company involved in these stories is doing some pretty effective marketing of their own. Apparently more details will be forthcoming. I look forward to reading more (but remain skeptical!).

Link to ‘Who really won the Super Bowl? The Story of an Instant-Science Experiment’.

“Just like the digital codes of replicating life held within DNA, the brain’s fundamental secret will be laid open one day. But even when it has, the wonder will remain, that mere wet stuff can make this bright inward cinema of thought, of sight and sound and touch bound into a vivid illusion of an instantaneous present, with a self, another brightly wrought illusion, hovering like a ghost at its centre”.(p.254)

Henry Perowne is the neurosurgeon at the centre of Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday from which this quote is taken (ISBN 978-0-099-46968-1).

Link to previous post on the neural code.

A database of MRI scans of normally developing children has been launched that could revolutionalise the understanding of childhood brain function, injury and disease. It includes brain scans of 500 children from 7 days to 18 years-old and aims to be representative of the population at large.

The understanding of child brain function is still a grey area, despite the fact that the young brain can show remarkable properties.

For example, a 2001 book by Antonio Battro (sample chapter: pdf) describes a three year old boy named ‘Nico’ who had the whole of his right hemisphere removed to control life-threatening epilepsy.

Nevertheless, he has developed with very little impairment and has turned out to be a bright and engaging child, despite the fact that a similar operation in adults would be profoundly disabling.

One difficulty with many current studies of brain development in children is there is no precise reference for what constitutes ‘normal’ development.

The database will provide a wealth of data for clinicians and researchers to make accurate comparisons, rather than relying on detecting the presence of abnormalities by eye, or by comparison with small or ad-hoc control groups.

The journal NeuroImage just published a early-release copy of the article describing the development and potential uses of the data. The project has been realised by a huge list of individuals, listed as the ‘Brain Development Cooperative Group’, and by neuroscientist Alan Evans.

Link to NeuroImage abstract ‘The NIH MRI study of normal brain development’.
Link to summary from NIH.

Wired magazine examines the recent interest in the neural basis of meditation and the political storm caused by the Dalai Lama’s speech at the last Society for Neuroscience conference, in a recently published online article.

The Tibetan Buddhist leader’s presentation was the subject of much protest and counter-protest even before it began, which guaranteed that it would be one of the hottest tickets at SfN 2005.

One accusation levelled at some of the scientists involved in this research is that they are being unduly influenced by the religious aspects of Buddhism and are losing their scientific objectivity.

The Wired article looks at both the research on meditation and the Dalai Lama’s enthusiam for science and considers whether the science is indeed being affected.

Link to ‘Buddha on the Brain’.

Open-access science journal PLoS Biology has published an article by biologist Peter Lawrence where he suggests that the under-representation of women in science is not because they are biologically unsuited to scientific thinking (as some have controversially suggested), but because employers undervalue those attributes more likely, but not exclusively, to be present in female researchers.

Here I will argue, as others have many times before, that men and women are born different. Yet even we scientists deny this, allowing us to identify the “best” candidates for jobs and promotions by subjecting men and women to the same tests. But since these tests favour predominantly male characteristics, such as self-confidence and aggression, we choose more men and we discourage women. Science would be better served if we gave more opportunity and power to the gentle, the reflective, and the creative individuals of both sexes.

Link to ‘Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science’.

Interdisciplines is an organisation that aims to link the humanities with the cognitive sciences and their latest online conference focuses on art and cognition.

New and original papers are regularly published on their website and are opened for commentary. The latest in the Art and Cognition workshop and is by philosopher John Hyman who examines the ongoing work on art and neuroscience.

This is a topic which has become increasingly popular in the last decade owing to a number of high profile scientists pondering the issue (with mixed success, it has to be said).

Hyman’s paper is notable as it criticises the current trend of suggesting that adequate theories of aesthetics must, in essence, be neurologically based.

Link to ‘ Art and Neuroscience’ by John Hyman.
Link to Interdisciplines Art and Cognition Workshop.

More radio goodness abounds as WNYC’s Radio Lab discusses how the self is represented in the brain and how it can be radically and idiosyncratically altered after brain injury.

The programme is beautifully produced and was really a pleasure to listen to. The first ten minutes even has an audio representation of a firing neuron, skittering through the background.

It includes contributions from the a number of scientists including V.S. Ramachandran, Paul Broks, Julian Keenan and Robert Sapolsky.

The ‘self’ has been a nebulous concept for thousands of years and neuroscience is discovering that it is more curious than was ever imagined.

A free excerpt from the book The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry also covers some of the recent developments in this emerging field of research.

Link to Radio Lab ‘Who am I?’ with audio archive.
Link to info and excerpt from The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry.