Creative people enjoy idle time more than others

Creative people are more likely to make the most of their downtime during a typical day by exploring their mind, a new study by University of Arizona researchers suggests.

The study, published in the Creativity Research Journal, finds that creative people are more likely to fruitfully use idle time by letting one idea lead to another. Study participants who were more creative felt less bored when they sat alone in a room, researchers found. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when the world experienced unusually extended periods of unstructured time, creative people were less bored and more engaged with their thoughts.

"I am particularly interested in creativity because we wanted to know what's going on in the mind of creative individuals, especially in situations where nothing constrains their thoughts," said lead study author Quentin Raffaeli, a graduate student in the UArizona Department of Psychology.

In psychology and neuroscience, most studies on human thoughts either prompt participants to think in a certain way or ask them to report on thoughts they experienced, but less is known about how thoughts naturally arise and unfold over time in unprompted contexts, said Jessica Andrews-Hanna, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and senior author of the paper.

"This is where our study comes in," Andrews-Hanna said.

History is filled with anecdotes of famous scientists, artists and philosophers who enjoyed being alone with their thoughts, and those people often generated some of their best ideas during idle time, Andrews-Hanna said.

"In today's busy and digitally connected society, time to be alone with one's thoughts without distraction may be becoming a rare commodity," she added.

The researchers divided the study into two parts. For the first experiment, the researchers asked each participant to sit alone in a room for 10 minutes without any access to digital devices. In the absence of any particular prompt, the participants were asked to voice their thoughts aloud in real time. The recorded files from 81 participants were then transcribed and analyzed.

The researchers assessed the participants' creativity through a "divergent thinking test," a lab-based verbal test that measures a person's ability to think outside of the box. Participants who performed well in the divergent thinking test had thoughts that flowed freely and were associated with one another, often indicated by phrases such as "this reminds me of" or "speaking of which."

"While many participants had a tendency to jump between seemingly unrelated thoughts, creative individuals showed signs of thinking more associatively," Raffaeli said.

The first experiment also found that creative people were more engaged in their thoughts when they were left alone without distractions, such as cell phone and internet.

"Creative people rated themselves as being less bored, even over those 10 minutes. They also spoke more words overall, which indicated that their thoughts were more likely to move freely," Andrews-Hanna said.

To complement their initial findings, the researchers extended their study in the context of a much larger span of time -- the COVID-19 pandemic -when many people were alone with their thoughts more often.

For the second experiment, over 2,600 adults answered questions through a smartphone app called Mind Window, developed by Andrews-Hanna and her graduate student Eric Andrews. Participants who self-identified as being creative reported being less bored during the pandemic.

"As we become more overworked, overscheduled and addicted to our digital devices, I think we need to do a better job in our homes, our workplaces and our schools to cultivate time to simply relax with our thoughts," Andrews-Hanna said.

The researchers are continuing this line of work using their Mind Window app. They encourage people to download and use the app to help scientists understand how people across the world think in their everyday lives.

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Illusions are in the eye, not the mind

Numerous visual illusions are caused by limits in the way our eyes and visual neurones work -- rather than more complex psychological processes, new research shows.

Researchers examined illusions in which an object's surroundings affect the way we see its colour or pattern.

Scientists and philosophers have long debated whether these illusions are caused by neural processing in the eye and low-level visual centres in the brain, or involve higher-level mental processes such as context and prior knowledge.

In the new study Dr Jolyon Troscianko, from the University of Exeter, co-developed a model that suggests simple limits to neural responses -- not deeper psychological processes -- explain these illusions.

"Our eyes send messages to the brain by making neurones fire faster or slower," said Dr Troscianko, from the Centre for Ecology and Conservation on Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"However, there's a limit to how quickly they can fire, and previous research hasn't considered how the limit might affect the ways we see colour."

The model combines this "limited bandwidth" with information on how humans perceive patterns at different scales, together with an assumption that our vision performs best when we are looking at natural scenes.

The model was developed by researchers from the Universities of Exeter and Sussex to predict how animals see colour, but it was also found to correctly predict many visual illusions seen by humans.

"This throws into the air a lot of long-held assumptions about how visual illusions work," Dr Troscianko said.

He said the findings also shed light on the popularity of high-definition televisions.

"Modern high dynamic range televisions create bright white regions that are over 10,000 times brighter than their darkest black, approaching the contrast levels of natural scenes," Dr Troscianko added.

"How our eyes and brains can handle this contrast is a puzzle because tests show that the highest contrasts we humans can see at a single spatial scale is around 200:1.

"Even more confusingly, the neurones connecting our eyes to our brains can only handle contrasts of about 10:1.

"Our model shows how neurones with such limited contrast bandwidth can combine their signals to allow us to see these enormous contrasts, but the information is 'compressed' -- resulting in visual illusions.

"The model shows how our neurones are precisely evolved to use of every bit of capacity.

"For example, some neurones are sensitive to very tiny differences in grey levels at medium-sized scales, but are easily overwhelmed by high contrasts.

"Meanwhile, neurones coding for contrasts at larger or smaller scales are much less sensitive, but can work over a much wider range of contrasts, giving deep black-and-white differences.

"Ultimately this shows how a system with a severely limited neural bandwidth and sensitivity can perceive contrasts larger than 10,000:1."

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Lonely people's divergent thought processes may contribute to feeling 'alone in a crowded room'

Common wisdom suggests that a core difference between solitude and loneliness is choice. Whereas a person who appreciates solitude might choose to enjoy a quiet night in or a solo trip abroad, a lonely person may feel disconnected from other people even in a crowded room. New research published in Psychological Science supports this notion, suggesting that lonely people may think differently regardless of the size of their social networks.

"We found that lonely individuals are exceptionally dissimilar to their peers in the way that they process the world around them … even when taking into account the number of friends that they have," said lead author Elisa C. Baek (University of Southern California) in an interview. Her study showed that lonely individuals' neural responses differ from those of other people, suggesting that "seeing the world differently than those around you may be a risk factor for loneliness, even if you regularly socialize with them."

Baek and colleagues Ryan Hyon, Karina López, Meng Du, Mason A. Porter, and Carolyn Parkinson (University of California, Los Angeles [UCLA]) came to this conclusion by comparing the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of 63 first-year university students.

During each 90-minute scan, participants viewed 14 engaging video clips in the same order. After the scan, they self-reported their feelings of social connection using the UCLA Loneliness Scale. Earlier in the academic year, each participant had also completed a social network survey in which they were asked to list the names of each person with whom they studied, ate meals, or otherwise hung out during their first several months as students.

In order to analyze these data, Baek and colleagues divided participants into two groups: a "lonely" group with participants who scored higher than the median on the loneliness scale and a nonlonely group with participants who scored under the median.

When the researchers compared these participants' scans, they found that the brain activity of lonely participants was very dissimilar to that of both nonlonely participants and other lonely participants. By comparison, the brain activity of nonlonely participants was similar to that of other nonlonely participants. This was especially true in the default-mode network, in which shared brain activity appears to be associated with interpreting narratives and friendships in a similar manner, and in the reward-processing areas of the brain, the researchers wrote. These findings remained significant even when the researchers controlled for demographic characteristics and the size of participants' social networks.

"Lonely people process the world idiosyncratically, which may contribute to the reduced sense of being understood that often accompanies loneliness," the researchers explained.

Additional research is needed in order to determine the underlying cause of these results, however, Baek said.

"One possibility is that lonely individuals do not find value in the same aspects of situations or scenes as their peers," Baek and colleagues wrote. "This may result in a reinforcing feedback loop in which lonely individuals perceive themselves to be different from their peers, which may in turn lead to further challenges in achieving social connection."

Another possibility is that loneliness itself could lead people to process information differently, the researchers added.

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New model for predicting belief change

A new kind of predictive network model could help determine which people will change their minds about contentious scientific issues when presented with evidence-based information.

A study in Science Advances presents a framework to accurately predict if a person will change their opinion about a certain topic. The approach estimates the amount of dissonance, or mental discomfort, a person has from holding conflicting beliefs about a topic.

Santa Fe Institute Postdoctoral Fellows Jonas Dalege and Tamara van der Does built on previous efforts to model belief change by integrating both moral and social beliefs into a statistical physics framework of 20 interacting beliefs.

They then used this cognitive network model to predict how the beliefs of a group of nearly 1,000 people, who were at least somewhat skeptical about the efficacy of genetically modified foods and childhood vaccines, would change as the result of an educational intervention.

Study participants were shown a message about the scientific consensus on genetic modification and vaccines. Those who began the study with a lot of dissonance in their interwoven network of beliefs were more likely to change their beliefs after viewing the messaging, but not necessarily in accordance with the message. On the other hand, people with little dissonance showed little change following the intervention.

"For example, if you believe that scientists are inherently trustworthy, but your family and friends tell you that vaccines are unsafe, this is going to create some dissonance in your mind," van der Does says. "We found that if you were already kind of anti-GM foods or vaccines to begin with, you would just move more towards that direction when presented with new information even if that wasn't the intention of the intervention."

While still in an early stage, the research could ultimately have important implications for communicating scientific, evidence-based information to the public.

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Being in nature: Good for mind, body and nutrition

In late 2020, Canadian doctors made headlines for "prescribing nature," or recommended time outdoors based on research that suggests people who spent two or more hours in nature per week improved their health and wellbeing. Knowing this, transdisciplinary researchers from Drexel University investigated how nature relatedness -- simply feeling connected with the natural world -- benefits dietary diversity and fruit and vegetable intake, in a study recently published the American Journal of Health Promotion.

"Nature relatedness has been associated with better cognitive, psychological and physical health and greater levels of environmental stewardship. Our findings extend this list of benefits to include dietary intake," said Brandy-Joe Milliron, PhD, an associate professor in Drexel's College of Nursing and Health Professions and lead author of the publication. "We found people with higher nature relatedness were more likely to report healthful dietary intake, including greater dietary variety and higher fruit and vegetable consumption."

The research team surveyed over 300 adults in Philadelphia to measure their self-reported connection to nature, including their experience with and perspective of nature, and the foods and beverages they had consumed the previous day to assess their dietary diversity and estimate their daily fruit and vegetable consumption. Survey participants mirrored demographic characteristics (gender, income, education and race) of Philadelphia, as of the 2010 census. The data were collected between May and August 2017. The results of the survey showed that participants with a stronger connection to nature reported a more varied diet and ate more fruits and vegetables.

"This work can impact health promotion practices in two ways," said Milliron. "First, nature-based health promotion interventions may increase nature relatedness across the lifespan and potentially improve dietary intake. And second, augmenting dietary interventions with nature-based activities may lead to greater improvements in dietary quality."

The research team added that these findings highlight the potential for leveraging nature-based experiences or interventions such as incorporating green spaces or urban greening into city planning, integrating nature- and park-prescription programs into healthcare practices (similar to the Canadian model) and promoting nature-based experiences in the classroom settings, among many others.

But, the researchers noted, while improving dietary intake through nature-based interventions may be valuable, it is also complex.

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Reading the mind of a worm

It sounds like a party trick: scientists can now look at the brain activity of a tiny worm and tell you which chemical the animal smelled a few seconds before. But the findings of a new study, led by Salk Associate Professor Sreekanth Chalasani, are more than just a novelty; they help the scientists better understand how the brain functions and integrates information.

"We found some unexpected things when we started looking at the effect of these sensory stimuli on individual cells and connections within the worms' brains," says Chalasani, member of the Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory and senior author of the new work, published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology on November 9, 2021.

Chalasani is interested in how, at a cellular level, the brain processes information from the outside world. Researchers can't simultaneously track the activity of each of the 86 billion brain cells in a living human -- but they can do this in the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans, which has only 302 neurons. Chalasani explains that in a simple animal like C. elegans, researchers can monitor individual neurons as the animal is carrying out actions. That level of resolution is not currently possible in humans or even mice.

Chalasani's team set out to study how C. elegans neurons react to smelling each of five different chemicals: benzaldehyde, diacetyl, isoamyl alcohol, 2-nonanone, and sodium chloride. Previous studies have shown that C. elegans can differentiate these chemicals, which, to humans, smell roughly like almond, buttered popcorn, banana, cheese, and salt. And while researchers know the identities of the small handful of sensory neurons that directly sense these stimuli, Chalasani's group was more interested in how the rest of the brain reacts.

The researchers engineered C. elegans so that each of their 302 neurons contained a fluorescent sensor that would light up when the neuron was active. Then, they watched under a microscope as they exposed 48 different worms to repeated bursts of the five chemicals. On average, 50 or 60 neurons activated in response to each chemical.

By looking at basic properties of the datasets -- such as how many cells were active at each time point -- Chalasani and his colleagues couldn't immediately differentiate between the different chemicals. So, they turned to a mathematical approach called graph theory, which analyzes the collective interactions between pairs of cells: When one cell is activated, how does the activity of other cells change in response?

This approach revealed that whenever C. elegans was exposed to sodium chloride (salt), there was first a burst of activity in one set of neurons -- likely the sensory neurons -- but then about 30 second later, triplets of other neurons began to strongly coordinate their activities. These same distinct triplets weren't seen after the other stimuli, letting the researchers accurately identify -- based only on the brain patterns -- when a worm had been exposed to salt.

"C. elegans seems to have attached a high value to sensing salt, using a completely different circuit configuration in the brain to respond," says Chalasani. "This might be because salt often represents bacteria, which is food for the worm."

The researchers next used a machine-learning algorithm to pinpoint other, more subtle, differences in how the brain responded to each of the five chemicals. The algorithm was able to learn to differentiate the neural response to salt and benzaldehyde but often confused the other three chemicals.

"Whatever analysis we've done, it's a start but we're still only getting a partial answer as to how the brain discriminates these things," says Chalasani.

Still, he points out that the way the team approached the study -- looking at the brain's network-wide response to a stimulus, and applying graph theory, rather than just focusing on a small set of sensory neurons and whether they're activated -- paves the way toward more complex and holistic studies of how brains react to stimuli.

The researchers' ultimate goal, of course, isn't to read the minds of microscopic worms, but to gain a deeper understanding of how humans encode information in the brain and what happens when this goes awry in sensory processing disorders and related conditions like anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorders (ADHD), autism spectrum disorders and others.

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Scientists look beyond the individual brain to study the collective mind

In a new paper, scientists suggest that efforts to understand human cognition should expand beyond the study of individual brains. They call on neuroscientists to incorporate evidence from social science disciplines to better understand how people think.

"Accumulating evidence indicates that memory, reasoning, decision-making and other higher-level functions take place across people," the researchers wrote in a review in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. "Cognition extends into the physical world and the brains of others."

The co-authors -- neuroscientist Aron Barbey, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Richard Patterson, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Emory University; and Steven Sloman, a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University -- wanted to address the limitations of studying brains in isolation, out of the context in which they operate and stripped of the resources they rely on for optimal function.

"In cognitive neuroscience, the standard approach is essentially to assume that knowledge is represented in the individual brain and transferred between individuals," Barbey said. "But there are, we think, important cases where those assumptions begin to break down."

Take, for instance, the fact that people often "outsource" the task of understanding or coming to conclusions about complex subject matter, using other people's expertise to guide their own decision-making.

"Most people will agree that smoking contributes to the incidence of lung cancer -- without necessarily understanding precisely how that occurs," Barbey said. "And when doctors diagnose and treat disease, they don't transfer all of their knowledge to their patients. Instead, patients rely on doctors to help them decide the best course of action.

"Without relying on experts in our community, our beliefs would become untethered from the social conventions and scientific evidence that are necessary to support them," he said. "It would become unclear, for example, whether 'smoking causes lung cancer,' bringing into question the truth of our beliefs, the motivation for our actions."

To understand the role that knowledge serves in human intelligence, the researchers wrote that it is necessary to look beyond the individual and to study the community.

"Cognition is, to a large extent, a group activity, not an individual one," Sloman said. "People depend on others for their reasoning, judgment and decision-making. Cognitive neuroscience is not able to shed light on this aspect of cognitive processing."

The limitations of individual knowledge and human dependence on others for understanding are the themes of "The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone," a book Sloman wrote with Phil Fernbach, a cognitive scientist and professor of marketing at the University of Colorado.

"The challenge for cognitive neuroscience becomes how to capture knowledge that does not reside in the individual brain but is outsourced to the community," Barbey said.

Neuroscientific methods such as functional MRI were designed to track activity in one brain at a time and have limited capacity for capturing the dynamics that occur when individuals interact in large communities, he said.

Some neuroscientists are trying to overcome this limitation. In a recent study, researchers placed two people face-to-face in a scanner and tracked their brain activity and eye movements while they interacted. Other teams use a technique called "hyperscanning," which allows the simultaneous recording of brain activity in people who are physically distant from each another but interacting online.

Such efforts have found evidence suggesting that the same brain regions are activated in people who are effectively communicating with one another or cooperating on a task, Barbey said. These studies are also showing how brains operate differently from one another, depending on the type of interaction and the context.

Several fields of research are ahead of neuroscience in understanding and embracing the collective, collaborative nature of knowledge, Patterson said. For example, "social epistemology" recognizes that knowledge is a social phenomenon that depends on community norms, a shared language and a reliable method for testing the trustworthiness of potential sources.

"Philosophers studying natural language also illustrate how knowledge relies on the community," Patterson said. "For example, according to 'externalism,' the meaning of words depends on how they are used and represented within a social context. Thus, the meaning of the word and its correct use depends on collective knowledge that extends beyond the individual."

To address these shortfalls, neuroscientists can look to other social science fields, Barbey said.

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Mind’s quality control center found in long-ignored brain area

Model of the brain

The cerebellum can't get no respect. Located inconveniently on the underside of the brain and initially thought to be limited to controlling movement, the cerebellum has long been treated like an afterthought by researchers studying higher brain functions.

But researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis say overlooking the cerebellum is a mistake. Their findings, published Oct. 25 in Neuron, suggest that the cerebellum has a hand in every aspect of higher brain functions -- not just movement, but attention, thinking, planning and decision-making.

"The biggest surprise to me was the discovery that 80 percent of the cerebellum is devoted to the smart stuff," said senior author Nico Dosenbach, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of neurology, of occupational therapy and of pediatrics. "Everyone thought the cerebellum was about movement. If your cerebellum is damaged, you can't move smoothly -- your hand jerks around when you try to reach for something. Our research strongly suggests that just as the cerebellum serves as a quality check on movement, it also checks your thoughts as well -- smoothing them out, correcting them, perfecting things."

Dosenbach is a founding member of the Midnight Scan Club, a group of Washington University neuroscientists who have taken turns in an MRI scanner late at night, scanning their own brains for hours to generate a massive amount of high-quality data for their research. A previous analysis of Midnight Scan Club data showed that a kind of brain scan called functional connectivity MRI can reliably detect fundamental differences in how individual brains are wired.

Postdoctoral researcher and first author Scott Marek, PhD, decided to apply a similar analysis to the cerebellum. In the better-known cerebral cortex -- the crumpled outer layer of the brain -- wiring maps have been drawn that connect distant areas into networks that govern vision, attention, language and movement. But nobody knew how the cerebellum is organized in individuals, partly because a quirk of MRI technology means that data obtained from the underside of the brain tend to be low quality. In the Midnight Scan Club dataset, however, Marek had access to more than 10 hours of scans on each of 10 people, enough to take a serious look at the cerebellum.

Using the cortex's networks as a template, Marek could identify the networks in the cerebellum. Notably, the sensory networks are missing -- vision, hearing and touch -- and only 20 percent of the cerebellum is devoted to movement, roughly the same amount as in the cerebral cortex. The remaining 80 percent is occupied by networks involved in higher-order cognition: the attention network; the default network, which has to do with daydreaming, recalling memories and just idly thinking; and two networks that oversee executive functions such as decision-making and planning.

"The executive function networks are way overrepresented in the cerebellum," Marek said. "Our whole understanding of the cerebellum needs to shift away from it being involved in motor control to it being more involved in general control of higher-level cognition."

The researchers measured the timing of brain activity and found that the cerebellum was consistently the last step in neurologic circuits. Signals were received through sensory systems and processed in intermediate networks in the cerebral cortex before being sent to the cerebellum. There, the researchers surmise, the signals undergo final quality checks before the output is sent back to the cerebral cortex for implementation.

"If you think of an assembly line, the cerebellum is the person at the end who inspects the car and says, 'This one is good; we'll sell it,' or 'This one has a dent; we have to go back and repair it,'" Dosenbach said. "It's where all your thoughts and actions get refined and quality controlled."

People with damage to their cerebellum are known to become uncoordinated, with an unsteady gait, slurred speech and difficulty with fine motor tasks such as eating. The cerebellum also is quite sensitive to alcohol, which is one of the reasons why people who have had too many drinks stumble around. But the new data may help explain why someone who is inebriated also shows poor judgment. Just as a person staggers drunkenly because his or her compromised cerebellum is unable to perform the customary quality checks on motor function, alcohol-fueled bad decisions might also reflect a breakdown of quality control over executive functions.

Marek also performed individualized network analyses on the 10 people in the data set. He found that while brain functions are arranged in roughly the same pattern in everyone's cerebellum, there is enough individual variation to distinguish brain scans performed on any two participants. The researchers are now investigating whether such individual differences in cerebellar networks correlate with intelligence, behavior, personality traits such as adaptability, or psychiatric conditions.

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Recording a thought's fleeting trip through the brain

Brain activity.

University of California, Berkeley neuroscientists have tracked the progress of a thought through the brain, showing clearly how the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain coordinates activity to help us act in response to a perception.

Recording the electrical activity of neurons directly from the surface of the brain, the scientists found that for a simple task, such as repeating a word presented visually or aurally, the visual and auditory cortexes reacted first to perceive the word. The prefrontal cortex then kicked in to interpret the meaning, followed by activation of the motor cortex in preparation for a response. During the half-second between stimulus and response, the prefrontal cortex remained active to coordinate all the other brain areas.

For a particularly hard task, like determining the antonym of a word, the brain required several seconds to respond, during which the prefrontal cortex recruited other areas of the brain, including presumably memory networks not actually visible. Only then did the prefrontal cortex hand off to the motor cortex to generate a spoken response. The quicker the brain's handoff, the faster people responded.

Interestingly, the researchers found that the brain began to prepare the motor areas to respond very early, during initial stimulus presentation, suggesting that we get ready to respond even before we know what the response will be.

"This might explain why people sometimes say things before they think," said Avgusta Shestyuk, a senior researcher in UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and lead author of a paper reporting the results in the current issue of Nature Human Behavior.

The findings, including the key role played by the prefrontal cortex in coordinating all the activated regions of the brain, are in line with what neuroscientists have pieced together over the past decades from studies in monkeys and humans.

"These very selective studies have found that the frontal cortex is the orchestrator, linking things together for a final output," said co-author Robert Knight, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience and a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at UCSF. "Here we have eight different experiments, some where the patients have to talk and others where they have to push a button, where some are visual and others auditory, and all found a universal signature of activity centered in the prefrontal lobe that links perception and action. It's the glue of cognition."

While other neuroscientists have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephelography (EEG) to record activity in the thinking brain, the UC Berkeley scientists employed a much more precise technique, electrocorticograhy (ECoG), which records from several hundred electrodes placed on the brain surface and detects activity in the thin outer region, the cortex, where thinking occurs. ECoG provides better time resolution than fMRI and better spatial resolution than EEG, but requires access to epilepsy patients undergoing highly invasive surgery involving opening the skull to pinpoint the location of seizures.

Clues from epilepsy patients

The current study employed 16 epilepsy patients who agreed to participate in experiments while undergoing epilepsy surgery at UC San Francisco and California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, Stanford University in Palo Alto and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

"This is the first step in looking at how people think and how people come up with different decisions; how people basically behave," said Shestyuk, who recorded from the first patient 10 years ago. "We are trying to look at that little window of time between when things happen in the environment and us behaving in response to it."

Once the electrodes were placed on the brains of each patient, Shestyuk and her colleagues conducted a series of eight tasks that included visual and auditory stimuli. The tasks ranged from simple, such as repeating a word or identifying the gender of a face or a voice, to complex, such as determining a facial emotion, uttering the antonym of a word or assessing whether an adjective describes the patient's personality.

During these tasks, the brain showed four different types of neural activity. Initially, sensory areas of the auditory and visual cortex activate to process audible or visual cues. Subsequently, areas primarily in the sensory and prefrontal cortices activate to extract the meaning of the stimulus. The prefrontal cortex is continuously active throughout these processes, coordinating input from different areas of the brain. Finally, the prefrontal cortex stands down as the motor cortex activates to generate a spoken response or an action, such as pushing a button.

"This persistent activity, primarily seen in the prefrontal cortex, is a multitasking activity," Shestyuk said. "fMRI studies often find that when a task gets progressively harder, we see more activity in the brain, and the prefrontal cortex in particular. Here, we are able to see that this is not because the neurons are working really, really hard and firing all the time, but rather, more areas of the cortex are getting recruited."

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Mirror neuron activity predicts people's decision-making in moral dilemmas

Researchers found that the brain's inferior frontal cortex (circled) is more active in people who are more averse to harming others when facing moral dilemmas.

It is wartime. You and your fellow refugees are hiding from enemy soldiers, when a baby begins to cry. You cover her mouth to block the sound. If you remove your hand, her crying will draw the attention of the soldiers, who will kill everyone. If you smother the child, you'll save yourself and the others.

If you were in that situation, which was dramatized in the final episode of the '70s and '80s TV series "M.A.S.H.," what would you do?

The results of a new UCLA study suggest that scientists could make a good guess based on how the brain responds when people watch someone else experience pain. The study found that those responses predict whether people will be inclined to avoid causing harm to others when facing moral dilemmas.

"The findings give us a glimpse into what is the nature of morality," said Dr. Marco Iacoboni, director of the Neuromodulation Lab at UCLA's Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center and the study's senior author. "This is a foundational question to understand ourselves, and to understand how the brain shapes our own nature."

In the study, which was published in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, Iacoboni and colleagues analyzed mirror neurons, brain cells that respond equally when someone performs an action or simply watches someone else perform the same action. Mirror neurons play a vital role in how people learn through mimicry and feel empathy for others.

When you wince while seeing someone experience pain -- a phenomenon called "neural resonance" -- mirror neurons are responsible.

Iacoboni wondered if neural resonance might play a role in how people navigate complicated problems that require both conscious deliberation and consideration of another's feelings.

To find out, researchers showed 19 volunteers two videos: one of a hypodermic needle piercing a hand, and another of a hand being gently touched by a cotton swab. During both, the scientists used a functional MRI machine to measure activity in the volunteers' brains.

Researchers later asked the participants how they would behave in a variety of moral dilemmas, including the scenario involving the crying baby during wartime, the prospect of torturing another person to prevent a bomb from killing several other people and whether to harm research animals in order to cure AIDS.

Participants also responded to scenarios in which causing harm would make the world worse -- inflicting harm on another person in order to avoid two weeks of hard labor, for example -- to gauge their willingness to cause harm for moral reasons and for less-noble motives.

Iacoboni and his colleagues hypothesized that people who had greater neural resonance than the other participants while watching the hand-piercing video would also be less likely to choose to silence the baby in the hypothetical dilemma, and that proved to be true. Indeed, people with stronger activity in the inferior frontal cortex, a part of the brain essential for empathy and imitation, were less willing to cause direct harm, such as silencing the baby.

But the researchers found no correlation between people's brain activity and their willingness to hypothetically harm one person in the interest of the greater good -- such as silencing the baby to save more lives. Those decisions are thought to stem from more cognitive, deliberative processes.

The study confirms that genuine concern for others' pain plays a causal role in moral dilemma judgments, Iacoboni said. In other words, a person's refusal to silence the baby is due to concern for the baby, not just the person's own discomfort in taking that action.

Iacoboni's next project will explore whether a person's decision-making in moral dilemmas can be influenced by decreasing or enhancing activity in the areas of the brain that were targeted in the current study.

"It would be fascinating to see if we can use brain stimulation to change complex moral decisions through impacting the amount of concern people experience for others' pain," Iacoboni said. "It could provide a new method for increasing concern for others' well-being."

The research could point to a way to help people with mental disorders such as schizophrenia that make interpersonal communication difficult, Iacoboni said.

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Try exercise to improve memory and thinking, new guideline urges

For patients with mild cognitive impairment, don't be surprised if your health care provider prescribes exercise rather than medication. A new guideline for medical practitioners says they should recommend twice-weekly exercise to people with mild cognitive impairment to improve memory and thinking.

The recommendation is part of an updated guideline for mild cognitive impairment published in the Dec. 27 online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

"Regular physical exercise has long been shown to have heart health benefits, and now we can say exercise also may help improve memory for people with mild cognitive impairment," says Ronald Petersen, M.D., Ph.D., lead author, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Mayo Clinic, and the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging. "What's good for your heart can be good for your brain." Dr. Petersen is the Cora Kanow Professor of Alzheimer's Disease Research.

Mild cognitive impairment is an intermediate stage between the expected cognitive decline of normal aging and the more serious decline of dementia. Symptoms can involve problems with memory, language, thinking and judgment that are greater than normal age-related changes.

Generally, these changes aren't severe enough to significantly interfere with day-to-day life and usual activities. However, mild cognitive impairment may increase the risk of later progressing to dementia caused by Alzheimer's disease or other neurological conditions. But some people with mild cognitive impairment never get worse, and a few eventually get better.

The academy's guideline authors developed the updated recommendations on mild cognitive impairment after reviewing all available studies. Six-month studies showed twice-weekly workouts may help people with mild cognitive impairment as part of an overall approach to managing their symptoms.

Dr. Petersen encourages people to do aerobic exercise: Walk briskly, jog, whatever you like to do, for 150 minutes a week -- 30 minutes, five times or 50 minutes, three times. The level of exertion should be enough to work up a bit of a sweat but doesn't need to be so rigorous that you can't hold a conversation. "Exercising might slow down the rate at which you would progress from mild cognitive impairment to dementia," he says.

Another guideline update says clinicians may recommend cognitive training for people with mild cognitive impairment. Cognitive training uses repetitive memory and reasoning exercises that may be computer-assisted or done in person individually or in small groups. There is weak evidence that cognitive training may improve measures of cognitive function, the guideline notes.

The guideline did not recommend dietary changes or medications. There are no drugs for mild cognitive impairment approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

More than 6 percent of people in their 60s have mild cognitive impairment across the globe, and the condition becomes more common with age, according to the American Academy of Neurology. More than 37 percent of people 85 and older have it.

With such prevalence, finding lifestyle factors that may slow down the rate of cognitive impairment can make a big difference to individuals and society, Dr. Petersen notes.

"We need not look at aging as a passive process; we can do something about the course of our aging," he says. "So if I'm destined to become cognitively impaired at age 72, I can exercise and push that back to 75 or 78. That's a big deal."

Read more at Science Daily

Getting the right treatment: Predicting treatment response in depression

New evidence from mice suggests why an antidepressant treatment can alleviate depression in one person but not another. The study, publishing December 28 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, was led by Marianne Müller and an international team at the University Medical Center Mainz and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. The researchers developed a mouse model that allowed them to identify blood signatures associated with response to antidepressant treatment and could show the importance of the stress-related glucocorticoid receptor in recovery from depression.

Major depression is the leading cause of disability according to the World Health Organization, affecting an estimated 350 million people worldwide, but only one-third of patients bene?t from the ?rst antidepressant prescribed. Although the currently available treatments are safe, there is significant variability in the outcome of antidepressant treatment. So far there are no clinical assessments that can predict with a high degree of certainty whether a particular patient will respond to a particular antidepressant. Finding the most effective antidepressant medication for each patient depends on trial and error, underlining the urgent need to establish conceptually novel strategies for the identification of biomarkers associated with a positive response.

To tackle this challenge, scientists established a novel experimental approach in animals focusing on extreme phenotypes in response to antidepressant treatment. This model simulated the clinical situation, by identifying good and poor responders to antidepressant treatment. The researchers hypothesized that conditions in the mouse model would facilitate the identification of valid peripheral biomarkers for antidepressant treatment response and could potentially apply to humans.

"We were able to identify a cluster of antidepressant response-associated genes in the mouse model that we then validated in a cohort of depressed patients from our collaborators from Emory University, Atlanta," explains Tania Carrillo-Roa from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. This suggests that molecular signatures associated with antidepressant response in the mouse could in fact predict the outcome of antidepressant treatment in the patient cohort. Additional analyses indicated that the glucocorticoid receptor, which is one of the most important players in fine-tuning the stress hormone system, shapes the response to antidepressant treatment.

Ultimately, identification of biomarkers predictive of individual responses to treatment would dramatically improve the quality of care/ treatment for depressed patients by taking the trial and error out of prescribing antidepressants. In the future, this cross-species approach might serve as a template for the discovery of improved and tailored treatment for patients who suffer from depression.

From Science Daily

Adolescent brain makes learning easier

The brains of adolescents react more responsively to receiving rewards. This can lead to risky behaviour, but, according to Leiden University research, it also has a positive function: it makes learning easier. This work has been published in Nature Communications.

Alcohol abuse, reckless behaviour and poor choice in friends: all these are inextricably linked to puberty and adolescence. In the late teens, young people test their limits, and in many cases, push beyond their limits. This is due in part to increased activity in the corpus striatum, a small area deeply hidden away inside the brain. According to previous research, that part of the brain in young people is more responsive to receiving rewards.

Sensitive

Leiden University scientists are now able to show that this increased activity in the corpus striatum does not have only negative consequences. 'The adolescent brain is very sensitive to feedback,' says Sabine Peters, assistant professor of developmental and educational psychology and lead author of the article. 'That makes adolescence the ideal time to acquire and retain new information.'

Peters used a large data set for her research with MRI scans. Over a period of five years, no fewer than 736 brain scans were made of a total of 300 subjects between the ages of 8 and 29. According to Peters, the data set is about ten times larger than that of most comparable studies. In the MRI scanner, participants had to solve a memory game. During that game, the researchers gave feedback on the participants' performance.

Instructional feedback

'It showed that adolescents responded keenly to educational feedback', says Peters. 'If the adolescent received useful feedback, then you saw the corpus striatum being activated. This was not the case with less pertinent feedback, for example, if the test person already knew the answer. The stronger your brain recognises that difference, the better the performance in the learning task. Brain activation could even predict learning performance two years into the future.'

It has been known for some time that adolescent brains become more 'successful' when they receive the same reward as small children or adults. For example, it has already been proven that the use of drugs and/or alcohol in the teenage years is linked to powerful activation in the brain's reward system. Peters: 'It explains why adolescents and young adults go on a voyage of discovery, with all the positive and negative consequences that entails. You see the same behaviour in many animal species, including rats and mice.'

From Science Daily

Talking to ourselves and voices in our heads

We spend a lot of time listening to our own inner speech. But to what extent does the brain distinguish between inner speech and the sounds we produce when we speak out loud?

As far our brain is concerned, talking to ourselves in our heads may be fundamentally the same as speaking our thoughts out loud, new research shows. The findings may have important implications for understanding why people with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia hear voices.

UNSW Sydney scientist and study first author Associate Professor Thomas Whitford says it has long been thought that these auditory-verbal hallucinations arise from abnormalities in inner speech -- our silent internal dialogue.

"This study provides the tools for investigating this once untestable assumption," says Associate Professor Whitford, of the UNSW School of Psychology.

Previous research suggests that when we prepare to speak out loud, our brain creates a copy of the instructions that are sent to our lips, mouth and vocal cords. This copy is known as an efference-copy.

It is sent to the region of the brain that processes sound to predict what sound it is about to hear. This allows the brain to discriminate between the predictable sounds that we have produced ourselves, and the less predictable sounds that are produced by other people.

"The efference-copy dampens the brain's response to self-generated vocalisations, giving less mental resources to these sounds, because they are so predictable," says Associate Professor Whitford.

"This is why we can't tickle ourselves. When I rub the sole of my foot, my brain predicts the sensation I will feel and doesn't respond strongly to it. But if someone else rubs my sole unexpectedly, the exact same sensation will be unpredicted. The brain's response will be much larger and creates a ticklish feeling."

The study, published in the journal eLife, set out to determine whether inner speech -- an internal mental process -- elicits a similar efference-copy as the one associated with the production of spoken words.

The research team developed an objective method for measuring the purely mental action of inner speech. Specifically, their study in 42 healthy participants assessed the degree to which imagined sounds interfered with the brain activity elicited by actual sounds, using electroencephalography (EEG).

The researchers found that, just as for vocalized speech, simply imagining making a sound reduced the brain activity that occurred when people simultaneously heard that sound. People's thoughts were enough to change the way their brain perceived sounds. In effect, when people imagined sounds, those sounds seemed quieter.

"By providing a way to directly and precisely measure the effect of inner speech on the brain, this research opens the door to understanding how inner speech might be different in people with psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia," says Associate Professor Whitford.

Read more at Science Daily

Comparison of Primate Brains Reveals Why Humans Are Unique

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin

Since humans and chimpanzees split from their common ancestor around 6 million years ago, the Homo sapiens brain and that of our closest primate relative evolved on their own separate paths.

Besides the obvious size difference — the human brain is about three times larger than the chimp brain — little has been known about how the human brain and the rest of the nervous system changed in our lineage over evolutionary time.

A new evaluation of brain tissue samples from various primates identified key elements that make the human brain unique, including cortical circuits underlying production of the neurotransmitter dopamine. The findings are published in the journal Science.

"Based on our data, which is comprised of gene expression across 16 brain regions, we found that the most distinct region, i.e. the region where we observe more human-specific differences in gene expression, is the striatum, a region involved in motor coordination, reward, and decision-making," lead author André M. Sousa of the Yale School of Medicine and the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience told Seeker.

The study looked at transcriptional profiles of 247 tissue samples from six humans, five chimps, and five macaques. While they were not surprised by the differences between human and chimp brains, the researchers were astounded by a feature that links humans to monkeys.

Sousa, senior author Nenad Sestan, and their team found a rare population of interneurons that produce dopamine and is enriched in the human striatum, but did not make a similar finding in chimp, bonobo, or gorilla brains.

"Surprisingly, this population of cells is also present in macaques and several other primate species that are not among the non-human African great apes," Sestan told Seeker. "The implication is that these cells were somehow lost in the lineage leading to the African great apes and recovered specifically in the human lineage."

Barbary macaque

The finding shows that the human brain is more similar to that of a macaque than a chimp brain.

How the other great apes lost the cells remains unknown, but the researchers theorize genetic disruptions affecting the cells' migration to different parts of the brain, differentiation, or survival could have led to the loss.

Sestan explained that, like a city, the brain is a highly organized arrangement of discrete units linked by transportation and communication systems. In the brain, cells are among the units, migratory pathways are the highways or roads, and various electrical or chemical signals, including dopamine, are the communication systems.

Similar to a city’s real estate industry, the three most important things are location, location, location.

"Very few neurons born in the developing brain reside in the same location in the adult," Sestan said. "Instead, they are born, migrate to a new location, establish functionality, and then, eventually die.  As you might expect, a lot can go wrong. A cell might not be born or might die prematurely, it might migrate to the wrong location, or it might assume or acquire a different functionality."

These events could then help to explain why the brain differences exist between humans and chimps, with which we share up to 98 percent of the same DNA. "In principle,” Sestan said, “small changes in the wiring of the brain can lead to profound and specific functional changes."

Human brain interneurons express the enzymes tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and DOPA (3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine) decarboxylase (DDC). The two proteins are involved in dopamine biosynthesis.

While the ancestors of chimps and gorillas lost the ability to express these enzymes in the neocortex, a human ancestor likely recovered it. The scientists do not know which human ancestor recovered this ability, or when.

Since dopamine in the midbrain plays many roles in the central nervous system tied to cognition and behavior, humans would seem to have won the evolutionary brain jackpot. The definition of intelligence is subjective, but our working memory, reflective exploratory behavior, and other cognitive skills appear to be uniquely enhanced versus these abilities in other animals.

"After all, to the best of our knowledge, we are the only living species that is trying to understand how our brain works and what makes our brain different from other species' brains," Sousa said.

On the other hand, there appear to be drawbacks associated with the structure and organization of the human brain.

"In general, the additional brain size and connectivity of the human brain compared to the chimpanzee or macaque, along with the protracted period of time during which human neurodevelopment occurs, means that there are many more problems than can arise and a greater period of time during which those problems can occur," Sestan explained.

Prior research, for example, determined that dopamine-producing neurons throughout the brain are damaged in Parkinson's disease. In fact, Parkinson's patients often receive L-DOPA, an amino acid produced by TH. DDC may then produce dopamine using L-DOPA as a substrate.

Read more at Seeker

Theory: Flexibility is at the heart of human intelligence

The more readily the brain forms and reforms its connectivity in response to changing needs, the better it works, according to Aron Barbey, author of the paper.

Centuries of study have yielded many theories about how the brain gives rise to human intelligence. Some neuroscientists think intelligence springs from a single region or neural network. Others argue that metabolism or the efficiency with which brain cells make use of essential resources are key.

A new theory, published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, makes the case that the brain's dynamic properties -- how it is wired but also how that wiring shifts in response to changing intellectual demands -- are the best predictors of intelligence in the human brain.

"When we say that someone is smart, we understand intuitively what that means," said University of Illinois psychology professor Aron Barbey, the author of the new paper. "Usually, we're referring to how good they are at making decisions and solving particular types of problems. But recently in neuroscience, there's been a focus on understanding in biological terms how general intelligence arises." That requires studying the structural and functional characteristics of the brain.

Scientists have long understood that the brain is modular, with different regions supporting specific abilities, Barbey said.

"For example, brain regions within the occipital lobe at the back of the brain are known to processes visual information," he said. But interpreting what one sees requires the integration of information from other brain modules.

"To identify an object, we also must classify it. That doesn't depend only on vision. It also requires conceptual knowledge and other aspects of information processing, which are supported by other brain regions," he said. "And as the number of modules increases, the type of information represented in the brain becomes increasingly abstract and general."

Scientists have struggled to understand how the brain organizes itself and have tried to identify a structure or region that performs that function.

"The prefrontal cortex, a structure at the front of the brain, for example, has expanded dramatically over the course of human evolution," Barbey said. Because this brain region is known to support several higher-order functions such as planning and organizing one's behavior, scientists have suggested that the prefrontal cortex drives general intelligence.

"But really, the entire brain -- its global architecture and the interactions among lower- and higher-level mechanisms -- is required for general intelligence," Barbey said.

Brain modules provide the basic building blocks from which larger, "intrinsic connectivity networks" are constructed, Barbey said. Each network includes multiple brain structures that are activated together when a person engages a particular cognitive skill.

"For example, the frontoparietal network is activated when attention is focused on external cues, the salience network is engaged when attention is directed to relevant events, and the default mode network is recruited when attention is focused internally," he said.

Neural networks are made up of two types of connections that are believed to support two types of information processing, Barbey said.

"There are the pathways that encode prior knowledge and experience, which we call 'crystallized intelligence.' And there are adaptive reasoning and problem-solving skills that are quite flexible, called 'fluid intelligence,'" he said.

Crystallized intelligence involves robust connections, the result of months or years of neural traffic on well-worn pathways. Fluid intelligence involves weaker, more transient pathways and connections that are formed when the brain tackles unique or unusual problems.

"Rather than forming permanent connections, we are constantly updating our prior knowledge, and this involves forming new connections," Barbey said. The more readily the brain forms and reforms its connectivity in response to changing needs, the better it works, he said.

Although researchers have known that flexibility is an important characteristic of human brain function, only recently has the idea emerged that flexibility provides the basis for human intelligence, he said.

Read more at Science Daily

Alcohol Consumption Appears to Improve Foreign Language Skills

Do you ever feel like your high school Spanish comes back to you more easily after a few drinks? A new study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology shows there might be some validity to that feeling. Researchers at Maastricht University in Holland found that people who recently learned Dutch, spoke the language better after they consumed a small amount of alcohol.

“On the one hand, we know that alcohol consumption has negative effects on executive functioning and cognitive functioning which is necessary for language production,” Fritz Renner, lead author and a post-doctoral student in emotional disorders at the University of Cambridge, told Seeker. “[But] there is a popular belief among foreign language learners that alcohol improves their foreign language. There are two seemingly opposing positions that makes it interesting to test.”

Study participants included 50 native German speakers who are students at Maastricht where they recently learned to speak, read, and write in Dutch.

For the trials, each participant drank a beverage that was either alcoholic or non-alcoholic without knowing which one they were consuming. The amount of alcohol consumed by a subject was adjusted to the person’s height and body weight, but was equivalent to a 154-pound-man drinking a little less than one pint of beer.

Afterwards, two native Dutch speakers, who did not know if the subject had consumed an alcoholic drink, observed the students speaking Dutch. Each subject also rated their own language skills.

Nearly every participant who consumed alcohol before speaking Dutch was given a higher rating than those who did not. The native speakers rated them particularly high on their pronunciation.

“The [speakers] received higher ratings on an overall rating scale,” Renner said. “But when looking at specific ratings, pronunciation was higher in the alcohol group.”

The alcohol did not affect self-ratings. People rated themselves on their language skills the same with or without alcohol.

It’s a long-held assumption that we can speak a foreign language better after a few drinks, the study authors noted, and this research partially supports that idea. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the dosage of alcohol was very low. Drinking more may not have the same benefits. Researchers have studied the effects of alcohol on speech for years, with most studies showing that intoxication causes a speaker to slur their words and make errors even in their native language.

Read more at Seeker

The Nocebo Effect Shows Pain Isn’t All in Your Brain

Everybody’s heard of the placebo effect — the phenomenon in which people report positive health impacts of drugs that are, in fact, nothing more than sugar pills. But there’s also an opposite reaction called the nocebo effect, when patients report negative side effects — dizziness, headaches, nausea — from drugs that aren’t really drugs.

Both the placebo and nocebo effect are known to wreak havoc on drug trials. In fact, it’s become nearly impossible to win approval for new pain meds because the placebo effect is so strong, making the real medication seem weak in comparison. And research shows that when you list a bunch of potential negative side effects to participants in a drug trial, participants will report back those very symptoms whether they get the real drug or a placebo.

Until recently, the placebo and nocebo effects were thought to be entirely psychological, our brain tricking itself into believing that we feel good or bad. But advances in real-time functional MRI technology have revealed a two-way signaling pathway between pain receptors along the spine and higher-order processing areas in the brain. It turns out that the brain feels pain because the body says, “Ouch!”

A team of German researchers developed a new fMRI protocol that allowed them to measure real-time nervous system activity in both the spinal cord and the brain. The idea was to trigger a nocebo response and pinpoint exactly where it was coming from — the body, the brain, or both.

In a paper published in the journal Science, lead investigator Alexandra Tinnermann of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Hamburg, Germany, described her team’s experiment involving two types of anti-rash creams. Nearly 50 participants were divided into two groups. One was treated with a supposedly cheap rash cream from a generic-labeled box. The other was treated with what they were told was an expensive, brand-name cream. In truth, both creams were identical and neither contained any active ingredients.

Both groups were told that their anti-rash cream — both cheap and expensive — had one potential side effect, that it might increase their sensitivity to pain. To determine the strength of the side effect, participants were told, the researchers were going to treat half their arm with a control cream and the other half with a target drug, either the expensive or cheap version of the cream. Heat pads were then applied to each half of the arm to compare pain levels.

In reality, though, all the creams were identical. 

When asked to rate their pain, both groups exhibited a nocebo response, citing increased pain sensitivity in the region treated with the target cream as opposed to the control. But interestingly, the people who received the “expensive” treatment exhibited a much stronger nocebo response, rating their pain as twice as bad compared to the “cheap” group.

In their paper, Tinnermann and her colleagues equate the participants’ nocebo response to earlier findings from placebo studies, theorizing that “participants infer that expensive medication contains a more potent and effective agent and, consequently, produces more side effects.”

But the more interesting question is where the nocebo effect originates. Clearly there’s some higher-order brain activity required to look at a package and determine if a cream is “cheap” or “expensive.” But does that mean that the pain is all in the patient’s head?

Luana Colloca, a professor, researcher, and physician in the department of anesthesiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, has been studying the nocebo effect for a decade and wrote an accompanying commentary in the same issue of Science. Colloca has run trials where participants were told that pain medication was stopped, when it fact it was continued, and people immediately reported higher levels of pain. She’s also seen the opposite, where pain meds were covertly turned off and participants reported no increased pain.

Despite the clear psychological component of the placebo and nocebo effect, Colloca says studies like the anti-rash experiment point to something more complicated at play. First off, we know that pain requires more than the brain.

“The reason we can say this stimulus is painful, it’s hurting me, is because there’s a signal from our arm reaching the spinal cord, and then from the spinal cord to the brain,” Colloca told Seeker.

And that’s exactly what the fMRI scans found in the rash-cream experiment. When participants thought they were being treated with an expensive cream, the nerve endings in the peripheral nervous system (as opposed to the central nervous system) sent more pain signals to the spinal cord, which were then transmitted to the brain.

“This is revolutionary,” said Colloca. “For the first time, we switch from a concept and phenomenon that we believed was merely psychological to something more — a neurobiological phenomenon. You believe that you’re going to experience more pain and your spinal cord lets in more information from the periphery signaling an increase of pain.”

Read more at Seeker

Minimal Consciousness Restored in Man Who Was in a Vegetative State for 15 Years

Persistent vegetative states lasting longer than 12 months has long been considered irreversible. But a 35-year-old man severely injured in a car accident was partially revived by vagus nerve stimulation after lying in a vegetative state for 15 years.

The technique has been in use for many years for treating people with epilepsy or depression. But this is the first time that doctors attempted to treat a vegetative patient with the technique.

The vagus nerve connects the human brain stem to the heart, lungs, and digestive tract. It's the longest nerve in the body's autonomous nervous system, which mostly regulates unconscious functions like heart rate, digestion, and breathing.

Angela Sirigu, who led the research at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences – Marc Jeannerod in Lyon, France, said the technique could trigger a radical change in neurological treatments worldwide.

“Brain plasticity and brain repair are still possible even when hope seems to have vanished,” Sirigu said in a statement accompanying publication of research describing the procedure.

The research team began the experiment by looking for a particularly difficult case, to reduce the possibility that any improvements weren't simply a matter of chance and good timing. The patient chosen for the experiment had shown no signs of improvement in 15 years.

Doctors then implanted a vagus nerve simulator in the man's chest designed to send small pulses of electricity up the vagus nerve and into the brain.

After a month of constant stimulation, the patient's movements and brain activity improved significantly. He responded to simple commands, such as following an object with his eyes and turning his head upon request.

Computer monitoring of the patient’s brain activity confirmed major changes took place. Imaging scans showed increased metabolic activity in areas of the brain associated with movement, awareness, and sensation. A series of electroencephalogram tests suggested that the patient had improved from a “vegetative state” to a “minimally conscious state.”

By stimulating the vagus nerve, “it is possible to improve a patient's presence in the world,” Sirigu said.

The research was published in the journal Current Biology.

An estimated 25,000 people in the US lie in a vegetative state at any given time.

While the new study marks a positive development, researchers caution that the study is, by design, extremely limited in scope.

“We need to be a little cautious about this, because it's just one patient,” said neurologist Hae Won Shin, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine who was not involved in the research. “I'm really glad to hear that the patient responded positively to vagus nerve stimulation treatment after 15 years in a vegetative state, but it's only one case.”

The researchers are currently planning a larger collaborative study to confirm the therapeutic potential of VNS for patients in a vegetative state. The initial study was supported by France's National Center for Scientific Research, the French National Research Agency, and by a grant from the University of Lyon

Hae, who specializes in epileptic disorders, said vagus nerve stimulation has a track record of proven efficacy in treating certain disorders — but there's a caveat: No one is quite sure how it works.

Read more at Seeker

In witnessing the brain's 'aha!' moment, scientists shed light on biology of consciousness

Michael Shadlen, MD, PhD (above) and his team have made new progress in our understanding of the biology of conscious thought.

Columbia scientists have identified the brain's 'aha!' moment -- that flash in time when you suddenly become aware of information, such as knowing the answer to a difficult question. Today's findings in humans, combined with previous research, provide compelling evidence that this moment -- this feeling of having decided -- pierces consciousness when information being collected by the brain reaches a critical level. The results of this study further suggest that this piercing of consciousness shares the same underlying brain mechanisms known to be involved in making far simpler decisions. Importantly, this study offers new hope that the biological foundations of consciousness may well be within our grasp.

This research was reported in Current Biology.

"The vast majority of thoughts circling in our brains happen below the radar of conscious awareness, meaning that even though our brain is processing them, we are not aware," said Michael Shadlen, MD, PhD, a Principal Investigator at Columbia's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and the paper's senior author. "How some of that information bubbles to the level of consciousness, however, remains an unsolved mystery. But now, we've found a way to observe that moment in real time, and then apply those findings to our understanding of consciousness itself."

For Dr. Shadlen, the most complex thoughts that the human brain can experience -- such as love, grief, guilt or morality -- can be ultimately be boiled down to a series of decisions, made by the brain, to engage with the outside world. He has spent his career working to understand how signals sent by the brain's billions of cells result in such decisions. In so doing, he hopes to unravel the mechanisms that underlie the brain's most complex abilities.

In 2008, Dr. Shadlen and colleagues found that when asked to make a challenging decision, the brain does not use all the available information before deciding. This is not because the brain is unable to do so, but rather because at a certain point, the brain thinks it has all the information it needs. There is a mechanism in the brain that says "enough is enough."

"For us, this then begged a question," recalled Dr. Shadlen, who is also a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University Medical Center and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "Could the moment when the brain believes it has accumulated enough evidence be tied to the person's awareness of having decided -- that important 'aha!' moment?"

To find out, the researchers asked five human participants to watch dots on a computer screen that moved like grains of sand blowing in the wind. The participants were then asked whether the dots seemed to be blowing to the right or to the left.

Placed in the center of the screen was a clock. Once the dots' motion ended and after a brief delay, participants chose which direction the dots had traveled. Using a controversial technique known as mental chronometry, the participants were asked to move the clock handle backwards to the time they felt they had become aware that they knew the answer. The participants repeated this action over many trials and levels of difficulty.

"The moment in time indicated by the participants -- this mental chronometry -- was entirely subjective; it relied solely on their own estimation of how long it took them to make that decision," said Dr. Shadlen. "And because it was purely subjective, in principle it ought to be unverifiable."

But by incorporating this new data with decades of previous research on the brain mechanisms of decision making, the team devised a clever way to verify whether the time reported by the participants was an accurate reflection of having actually decided.

"If the time reported to us by the participants was valid, we reasoned that it might be possible to predict the accuracy of the decision," Dr. Shadlen explained. "We incorporated a kind of mathematical trick, based on earlier studies, which showed that the speed and accuracy of decisions was tied together by the same brain function."

Previous research by Dr. Shadlen and others had uncovered how the process of making a decision plays out at the level of individual cells in the brain. By combining this knowledge with the mathematical trick, the team could scientifically validate that the participants' subjective reporting -- their feeling of having decided -- was indeed an accurate reflection of the brain's decision-making process.

"Essentially, the act of becoming consciously aware of a decision conforms to the same process that the brain goes through to complete a decision, even a simple one -- such as whether to turn left or right," said Dr. Shadlen.

While preliminary, this study raises the possibility that a deep understanding the human brain's most complex thoughts and feelings, once solely under the purview of philosophy, may soon be understood in terms of biology as well.

Read more at Science Daily