Mark Wieczorek

Some people believe that dreams are the brain re-organizing memories during sleep.

“It’s quite surprising,” said Brown’s Mayank Mehta, an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience, who led the research. “We’ve known for a century that the hippocampus and the neocortex are anatomically connected. But this is the first time we’ve seen the effect of this connectivity in the brains of live animals. The dialogue is quite unexpected and complex, suggesting that this ’simple’ brain circuit is much more sophisticated than we imagined.”

Read: Neuroscientist Records Surprising Brain ‘Dialogue’ During Sleep

Subliminal messages - for years science has wondered whether or not we could pick up on messages below the level of consciousness, and whether or not those messages could influence our behavior. While I believe the answer to both of those questions is an affirmative ‘yes,’ science hasn’t done much to demonstrate that this is possible. But we’re making progress.

Using fMRI, the study looked at whether an image you aren’t aware of — but one that reaches the retina — has an impact on brain activity in the primary visual cortex, part of the occipital lobe. Subjects’ brains did respond to the object even when they were not conscious of having seen it.

Dr Bahador Bahrami, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the UCL Department of Psychology, said: “What’s interesting here is that your brain does log things that you aren’t even aware of and can’t ever become aware of. We show that there is a brain response in the primary visual cortex to subliminal images that attract our attention — without us having the impression of having seen anything. These findings point to the sort of impact that subliminal advertising may have on the brain. What our study doesn’t address is whether this would then influence you to go out and buy a product. I believe that it’s likely that subliminal advertising may affect our decisions — but that is just speculation at this point.”

Read: ScienceDaily: Subliminal Advertising Leaves Its Mark On The Brain (via son of parnas)

Psychopaths tend to make better stock traders than regular people.

The scientists found emotions led some of the group to avoid risks even when the potential benefits far outweighed the losses, a phenomenon known as myopic loss aversion.

One of the researchers, Antione Bechara, an Associate Professor of Neurology at the University of Iowa, said the best stock market investors might plausibly be called “functional psychopaths.”

Read: Psychopaths to rule fin markets? (via Mindpixel Blog)

Brains don’t really regenerate. After sustaining brain damage, such as a stroke, the brain can compensate & work around the damaged areas building new pathways the way water blocked water will find alternate paths. There have been a few recent studies that show that under a few conditions, brains can generate new nerve cells, and it seems this is one of them.

The researchers said the addition of new nerve cells in the olfactory bulb in humans helped the system respond to different stimuli throughout a person’s life.

By utilizing these existing stem cells, scientists hope to be able to regrow brain tissue & help those with severe brain damage. This is almost as useful as using fat stem cells to augment breasts.

read: Brain creates ‘new’ nerve cells
read: New Cells from Old Brains

Even though EEGs (electroencephalogram) aren’t that much use to medical science, I’ve always wanted one. They’re smaller & easier to use than fMRI machines. EEGs work by reading the electrical activity on your scalp which, believe it or not, registers some brainwave activity. EEGs are where we get the terms “alpha waves” and “delta waves” which correspond to different levels of consciousness (I mean sleep, not some foofy new-age thing). By the time you reach delta waves, most of the brain you can read from an EEG is firing in sync so you get these nice big slow waves. This contrasts with the frenetic & chaotic pattern associated with waking life.

The OpenEEG Project gives anyone the means to make a DIY home EEG machine with just a few simple household items… well, okay not just a few simple household items, but it’s still cheaper than an MRI and it should look at least half as professional as Jim Carrey with a colander on his head.

read: Welcome to the OpenEEG project

Suicide is a weird, taboo subject, which may be why studies on suicide are so rare. A few researchers took this opportunity to put several women who have documented attempts at suicide and compare them with healthy women & non-suicidal depressive patients.

Suicidal patients had smaller right and left orbitofrontal cortex gray matter volumes compared with healthy comparison subjects. Suicidal patients had larger right amygdala volumes than non-suicidal patients. Abnormalities in the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala in suicidal patients may impair decision-making and predispose these patients to act more impulsively and to attempt suicide

While I hesitate to interpret that for fear that my knowledge of neuroscience is too shaky and I might get it wrong, what strikes me is that there is a difference. A physiology we can point to and say “this influences behavior.”

Molecular Psychiatry - Abstract of article: Fronto-limbic brain structures in suicidal and non-suicidal female patients with major depressive disorder

One of the earliest experiments on the brain involved hooking rats up to an electrode that directly stimulated the “reward” center of the brain. When given the choice to press a lever that would give them food, or a lever that gave them a direct reward, they chose the reward every time and eventually died of starvation.

Some Parkinsons Disease patients also have an electrode hooked up to their brain. The tiny electrical shock in just the right place helps calm the tremors associated with Parkinson’s. Well, at least one patient has a choice of areas to stimulate, and can select a more “calm” are or a more “revved-up” area depending on the mood she wants to have that day.

Science is just that much closer to creating a box so addictive that we’d do anything to get our hands on it, or implanting electrodes in our brain that can alter personalities. The implications are both fascinating and terrifying.

How To Change a Personality.

In my neuropsych class I learned that if you’re in an accident & the brain’s ability to control the body is damaged, you’ll actually be amazingly calm. Sure you’ll be freaking out, but since the brain can’t send a signal to the body that tells it to increase your heart rate, to pespire, to breath faster, etc., you don’t feel nervous. This has been confirmed by people who’ve either recovered, or whose condition only affected them from the neck down & who’ve found other ways to communicate, such as blinking.

While a lot of scientists are looking inside the brain for the root of emotion, others look to the body.

This is brought home by two things I’ve recently read. One is a recap of an important experiment in which subjects are divided into two groups - both receive a stimulant (adrenaline), but one half is put in a friendly environment with people who are playful, and the other half is told that the drug they just took will make them nervous. Both groups have a heightened experience, but they have vastly different ones.
They all had the same physiological activity, but the interpretations were vastly different. The group that was surrounded by positive influnces had a great, positive experience. The group that was told they may experience some nervousness, did. The source of the emotions was the physical response to the adrenaline, but the interpretation of it was due entirely to circumstance.

This is part of why I like to be on time for job interviews - if I’m late, I may have to run to catch the train, and I know I can’t distinguish a faster heartbeat from genuine nervousness in those situations.

So you get caught in a feedback loop of sorts - the brain tells the body to prepare for “fight or flight” and when the body does it, the brain interprets what it feels as nervousness and the cycle continues. The same can be true for excitement and happiness, though such extreme happiness is, sadly, rare in our culture. Given this, it’s easy to see why anxiety is such a difficult problem, and why sedatives and muscle relaxants are so popular.

The other article I read is of a woman who has brain damage & shows no signs of responsiveness, but when they put her in an MRI machine, all the right areas light up when she’s presented with stimulus (such a people talking, or being asked to imagine acting in certain ways, such as playing tennis). Some scientists think this is original thought, others believe it’s just a reaction to the stimulus, like aeomeba moving towards or away from light.

It’s hard to imagine a life where you cannot contact the outside world, not even to communicate whether or not you’re conscious or alive, though given what we know about emotions such as fear & anxiety, it’s possible she isn’t as scared as we would imagine.

The next time you experience an extreme emotion, take a moment to think about it - where is this emotion located? Is it a thought or is it something in the body? What differentiates this emotion from other emotions?

Read: Buried alive in your own skull.

Read: Europhoria Induced by Experimental Trickery

By using MRI machines and sophisticated pattern recognition software, scientists were able to predict with 70% accuracy whether someone intended to add or subtract two numbers. While we’re still several decades away from being able to figure out complex information, such as where you put your car keys, or whether or not you committed a crime, this simple demonstration shows immense possibilities for the future of brain scanning technology.

Source: Not-So-Secret Intentions In The Brain (medicalnewstoday.com)
See Also: Tapping Brains for Future Crimes (wired.com)

How do you know if it’s love, or if you’re just crazy? If you asked a neurological psychologist, they might not be able to answer that question. By studying brain scans of people while they’re in love & looking at either neutral images, or images of those they love (or were recently spurned by), scientists are discovering that there’s very little to distinguish love from mental illness.

“It’s not a good combination,” notes Dr. Fisher. “You’re feeling intense romantic love, you’re willing to take big risks, you’re in physical pain, obsessively thinking about a person and you’re struggling to control your rage. You’re not operating with your full range of cognitive abilities. It’s possible that part of the rational mind shuts down.”

The article also offers hints on how to rekindle the fire - do something new.

In one study, couples were assigned a weekly activity they both found new and exciting — such as sailing or taking an art class. Another group did pleasant but familiar activities, such as dinner with friends. Based on answers to relationship tests, the couples doing new things showed far more improvement in the quality of their marriage after 10 weeks than couples who did the same things every week.

source: Is It Love or Mental Illness? They’re Closer Than You Think (wsj.com)