Dana Foundation Blog

Inception and the Neuroscience of Dreaming

First things first: no spoilers here. I don’t think I could provide any even if I wanted to—Inception was that complex a movie. I saw it last night, and its intricate plot revolving around dreams got me thinking about them. I rarely remember my dreams, and when I do, they contain only a few possible “plots.” The images and themes represented in Inception were far more interesting and intricate than what I remember of my dreams, leaving me once again jealous of Leonardo DiCaprio (or at least Cobb, the character he plays).

Dreaming has long fascinated psychologists and neuroscientists, as well as many of the rest of us. Why exactly do we dream? Does dreaming serve any purpose? Dr. Guy McKhann wrote about dreaming in the April Brain in the News, and offered three reasons: memory consolidation, pruning, and creating.

One recent study represents dreaming as a combination of all three. In the study, volunteers studied a maze before attempting to navigate through it. After a few attempts, half of the participants napped. All were given the maze test again later in the day, and those who napped performed better than those who had stayed awake. And nappers who dreamed about the maze performed 10 times better than the other nappers.

I can’t say I’ve ever had useful dreams. While in school I never dreamed about course material I had just reviewed, as some of the participants in the study did. Sleeping without dreaming is still very valuable, but Cobb and others seem to be luckier at making better use of their resting times.

--Andrew Kahn

New Cerebrum article: Enhancing Brains: What Are We Afraid Of?

A new Cerebrum article by Stanford Law Professor Henry T. Greely was published on the Dana Web site this week. In it, Professor Greely builds on a 2008 commentary he co-authored in Nature concluding that “safe and effective cognitive enhancers will benefit both the individual and society.”

In the new article, he argues that only some concerns about the use of cognitive enhancements are justified; it's proper to give attention to address these issues. But rather than banning cognitive enhancements, as some have suggested, we should determine rules for their use.

What do you think? Should widespread use of cognitive enhancements be allowed? In what settings?

--Johanna Goldberg

In an octopus’ garden

In light of the amazing World Cup forecasting abilities of Paul the Octopus, I know exactly what you’re thinking: How do octopus brains work, anyway?

OK, maybe you’re not thinking that. But as a cephalopod fan (they use tools! They’re giving people ideas for horror flicks!), I know I’m interested.

There have been quite a few studies on the octopus’ neural capacity—a basic PubMed search brings up 267 hits for “octopus and brain.”

So what do we know? Here’s an incomplete list:

1. Octopus brains have half a billion neurons, found in distinct and complex lobes. They have the largest brains of all invertebrates.
2. There are great similarities between octopus and mammalian brains in the areas of memory and learning in terms of the structure and wiring of the brain networks involved. 
3. Octopuses (octopi?)* have navigational abilities. Not only do they have a sense of their position in space, but they maintain a working memory of places where they recently searched for food. 
4. Octopuses plan for the future. They have been seen collecting and storing coconut halves, to be used later as “portable armor.” 
5. Octopuses play. In laboratory settings, some have directed streams of water repeatedly at items introduced to their tanks. In one case, two octopuses appeared to be playing catch by shooting an object back and forth for a couple of minutes. 
6. They have an uncanny ability to open jars:

No word yet on how widespread psychic abilities are in octopuses.

*Octopodes, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But who actually says that?

--Johanna Goldberg

Perfectionism as a health risk

While we’re often told, “nobody’s perfect,” that doesn’t stop people from trying. Lofty goals can lead to great achievements and high-self-esteem, but they can also lead to negative affects such as mental and physical health problems.

Many studies suggest that perfectionists are at higher risk of suffering from stress, eating disorders, and depression. As Jeff Szymanski, executive director of the Obsessive Compulsive Foundation, says in a Boston Globe article, "Perfectionism is a phobia of mistake-making. It is the feeling that 'If I make a mistake, it will be catastrophic.'"

In an article for LiveScience, Rachael Rettner discusses the results of a study of 100 first-time mothers in Canada, suggesting that women can suffer from “socially prescribed perfectionism,” feeling pressure from others to be perfect. The study found the strongest link between perfectionism and postpartum depression in women who cope by acting as if they had no problems.

In a separate article, Rettner notes that some people compound the problem by trying to maintain the appearance of perfection. Many perfectionists will not seek support and may even distance themselves from friends and family in an attempt to avoid offers of help.

While there is no definitive origin of perfectionism, experts have pointed to aspects of parenting and genetics. According to Alice Domar, executive director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health in Boston, it is more commonly found in women.

To find out if you have perfectionist tendencies, York University psychology professor and perfectionist expert Gordon Flett has devised a list of ten signs:

*Top Ten Signs Your a Perfectionist

1. You can’t stop thinking about a mistake you made.
2. You are intensely competitive and can’t stand doing worse than others.
3. You either want to do something "just right" or not at all.
4. You demand perfection from other people.
5. You won’t ask for help if asking can be perceived as a flaw or weakness.
6. You will persist at a task long after other people have quit.
7. You are a fault-finder who must correct other people when they are wrong.
8. You are highly aware of other people’s demands and expectations.
9. You are very self-conscious about making mistakes in front of other people.
10. *You noticed the error in the title of this list.

--Ann L. Whitman

Fans in the booth

Next time you go to the polls, you may want to give some extra thought to why you plan to vote for a particular candidate. That goes double for those of you whose favorite football team won a big game the day before.

Wait, what?

A Stanford University study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that incumbents gain two percentage points when the election is held shortly after a home-team victory. The results of college football games should obviously have nothing to do with political elections, but it’s possible that voters are in a better mood following a win, and therefore more likely to vote for the candidate who’s already in office. The thinking could be: “Things are going well, might as well stick with this person.”

It’s a stretch, I know, but the researchers also found that college basketball games affected presidential approval ratings.

The benefit of knowing that an unrelated event such as a football game can impact important decisions like government elections is that hopefully something can be done about it. Peoples’ moods can’t be controlled, but as the researchers note, “making people more aware of the reasons for their current state of mind reduces the effect that irrelevant events have on their opinions.”

Awareness sounds like a wise goal: It doesn’t make much sense to remove the incumbent just because your team has a bad defense.

--Andrew Kahn

Using words as both diagnosis and cure

Just as movement needs to be relearned in some cases of stroke, other people need to find a way to recover speech and language.

Researchers from New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center have developed a metric to predict stroke recovery of language based on extent of early impairment. The researchers, led by Ronald Lazar, Ph.D., tested patients’ language function one to three days after the stroke, and again three months later. Using their test scores immediately following stroke, the researchers could roughly predict how the patient would score after 90 days. Most patients with mild to moderate aphasia, or language impairment, who received language therapy were about 70 percent improved when they were tested for the second time.

In the second, not-yet-published study, Swathi Kiran, Ph.D., of Boston University, assessed language recovery of bilingual stroke patients. She determined that when patients practiced the language in which they were less fluent, their improvement was greater in both languages than when they practiced the language with which they were more familiar. If patients go digging for information, connections in the brain are strengthened.

The Dana Guide to Brain Health article “Trouble with Speech and Language” offers more information on language and brain function. You can also read a more general essay on “Speech, Language, and Reading.”

--Johanna Goldberg

Brains are built to change

In Matt Ritchel’s New York Times recent article, “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price,” a dire picture is painted: We are hooked on technology (e-mail, text messages, phone calls, social media), and our technophilia is changing our brains.

But what Ritchel does not make clear is that everything changes the brain, and that these changes are not necessarily a bad thing. For an excellent explanation of how this works, check out a Mind Hacks blog entry from earlier this week, "Neuroplasticity is a Dirty Word.”

This is not to say that the heavy technology use covered in the article is a good thing—it sounds like the dynamics of the family featured in the article are paying a more serious price than the brains in question. And, as has been covered before, the brain was not built for serious multitasking.

But I know I will think critically the next time someone says that something is problematic or of particular interest because it changes the brain.

--Johanna Goldberg

Music and the mind

“I don’t like a lot of music very much.” I was surprised to hear such a statement from a speaker during a discussion called “Making Music in the Dome,” but cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky did also say he appreciated most forms of “classical” music.

The discussion, part of the World Science Festival, took place last Thursday at the Hayden Planetarium Space Theater in the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It featured music, video, and a discussion between two forward-thinking minds: Minsky and Tod Machover.

Minsky, 82, co-founded the artificial intelligence lab at MIT and continues to write books and present new theories. Machover, also at MIT, is an innovative composer who fuses music with new technologies. He gave hope to millions of untalented musicians when he helped create the game “Guitar Hero.”

Machover and Minsky discussed the future of music and technology, including the idea of musical medicine—creating music that could produce desired effects on a single person, as opposed to creating music for large groups of people.

They have collaborated on the “Brain Opera,” an interactive project on display in Vienna, and showed still images and video from it on the planetarium’s ceiling. Machover talked about how we may one day be able to “download our brains,” a concept he explores in his upcoming opera, “Death and the Powers.” We saw clips from this blend of music, technology, and the mind (musical robots!) on the high ceiling, as well. “Mind immortality” is certainly an interesting, though mind-bending, concept.

For someone who dislikes most forms of music, Minsky sure does spend a lot of time thinking about and helping to create it.

    --Andrew Kahn

Vision, in depth

    One thing I learned from Eye Candy: Science, Sight, and Art, a World Science Festival event, other than that legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer (or God, as moderator Lawrence Weschler called him in his introduction) is all kinds of amazing, is that impaired stereo vision can be beneficial if you want to be a famous artist.

Stereo vision—or stereopsis—allows humans to perceive depth. Simply put, our brains translate the information taken in from each eye to form a single, three-dimensional image. But when eyes don’t track together—when someone is cross-eyed (eyes facing in) or wall-eyed (eyes facing out)—the perception of depth is impacted.

Margaret Livingstone, Dana Alliance member and professor of neurobiology at Harvard, has studied photos of a large number of successful artists. By looking at eye tracking and light reflection in the artists’ eyes, she determined that stereoblindness is more common in artists than in the population at large. Even Rembrandt appears to have been stereoblind.

This is not to say that people with strabismus, or eye misalignment, should go without treatment in the hopes of becoming an artist—untreated strabismus can have serious consequences. But it does mean that an artist’s ability to flatten a vividly three-dimensional world may have a great deal to do with how the artist’s eyes and brain perceive depth.

But what about the non-artists among us? Christopher Tyler—who, among many other accomplishments, wrote the algorithm behind the Magic Eye images—presented three random-dot stereograms, which the audience looked at through 3D glasses. Shapes popped out at some audience members right way, while others (like me) took more time to see them, or didn’t see them at all (I saw two of the three).

The reasons for these discrepancies were not discussed at length. It could be that some people’s eyes converge more quickly, allowing a shape to pop out and the illusion of depth to be created. Some people might be stereoblind to some degree. But it is clear that the way we process visual information varies greatly from one person to the next.

But on the most basic level, how we translate what we see to paper has remained surprisingly static. As cognitive Harvard psychologist Patrick Cavanaugh explained, line drawings on the walls of ancient caves depict animals in the same ways that modern line drawings do.

And yet line drawings don’t exist in the world. From a young age, Jules Feiffer knew that the world was made up of shapes, tones, colors, and dimensions. But drawings making use of only these elements didn’t look how the world looks. Our brains know how to interpret and add meaning to lines—they are something that the visual system evolved to understand. “Our connection to the [art] itself is what excites us,” said Feiffer. Interpreting lines, especially lines drawn well, requires “the beauty of imagination.”

    --Johanna Goldberg

What are your favorite books about the brain?

--update, July 12: The survey is closed. Members of our Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives are reviewing the suggestions and adding some of their own. Stay tuned --

We are gathering a list of the best neuroscience books for general readers, to publish later this year in our Cerebrum e-magazine. Our current list was published in 1999, so it's time for an update.

Please help us out by taking our quick survey. You can name just one book, or as many at ten. Just name, author, and reason why -- we won't collect your name or e-mail; we just want your opinion.

Thanks!    Take the survey

Hockey IntelliGym wins brain fitness award

    USA Hockey is used to receiving gold medals for winning games. Yesterday the organization grabbed the award for an off-ice achievement: First place in the first annual Brain Fitness Innovation Awards.

    Presented by SharpBrains, the 10 finalists demonstrated a commitment to brain fitness through their “results-oriented, scalable initiatives.” A panel of 16 judges made up of researchers and corporate executives judged the Hockey IntelliGym program the best, calling IntelliGym a “personalized program that gives very specialized feedback to players and allows them to improve their skills.” The judges were also impressed that the Under-18 and Under-17 USA Hockey National Teams reported they have seen improved play since using the IntelliGym.

    Co-developed by USA Hockey (ice hockey’s national governing body) and Applied Cognitive Engineering (ACE), the Hockey IntelliGym may look like a videogame but serves as a cognitive training device. Danny Dankner, CEO of ACE, wrote in an e-mail that the IntelliGym helps players with perception, short-term memory focus, and decision-making, brain skills necessary for on-ice success.

    “The system also develops skills like anticipation, attention control, working memory (particularly in the context of covered areas), planning, and pattern recognition,” he wrote. “The tasks embedded in the training system stimulate a similar skill-set, only in a more intense workload (and thus this technology is dubbed ‘Cognitive Simulation’). The player is presented with a video-game-like scenario, where spaceships serve as the contextual representation of the objects in the real environment.”    

    Dankner also noted that ACE chose to develop products for athletes (they also make the Basketball IntelliGym) because athletes want to outperform competitors, and by using the product they’ll be able to see tangible results.

      “When you talk to hockey experts, a lot of people believed you either have (hockey sense) or you don’t,” said Ken Martel during a conference call yesterday. Martel is the director of the American Development Model, a USA Hockey initiative focusing on age-appropriate training and long-term athlete development. “The really fascinating thing for us is we firmly believed we could teach this. We were looking for ways to make our players smarter on the rink—allow them to make better decision. We were extremely excited with the results (of the IntelliGym).”

    With the help of ACE, USA Hockey is helping to disprove the myth that “game IQ” is an innate characteristic that can’t be enhanced. As Dankner wrote, “Just like lifting weights or working out your aerobic fitness, cognitive performance can also be dramatically improved if only addressed by the right ‘fitness room.’”

    The Hockey IntelliGym will be available to the public in October.

    --Andrew Kahn

New fathers can—and do—suffer from postpartum depression

    Can fathers have prenatal or postpartum depression?

    According to a meta-analysis by James Paulson and Sharnail D. Bazemore at Eastern Virginia Medical School, yes they can—and 10.4 percent of fathers do.

    Paulson, who published his analysis in this week’s issue of JAMA, also presented the findings at a media briefing in New York on Tuesday.

    His meta-analysis included 43 studies, with 28,004 fathers represented. Overall, the rate of depression in these men was two times higher than the rate of depression found in men generally.

    Paulson said that the analysis showed a “moderate positive association” between maternal and paternal depression and severity of depression, but the “cause and effect has not been determined.” Because of this association, Paulson recommends that if one parent is depressed, the other be screened (which he acknowledges is easier said than done).

    Prior research has shown that a child suffers adverse outcomes when a parent (in most studies, a mother) is depressed. There can be attachment and bonding issues, along with psychosocial adjustment problems and psychiatric risks. There are also family dynamic problems, which can result in marital conflicts and compromised parenting.

    Paulson is now recruiting subjects—mothers and fathers from the third trimester of pregnancy to six months postpartum—for research into family systems. Looking into relational factors and aspects of co-parenting, he will try to determine “how parents together might affect child outcomes.”

    --Johanna Goldberg

NIMH director: Time to rethink mental illness

• Mental disorders are the No. 1 cause of disability for people ages 15-45 in the developed world.

• There are 33,000 suicides every year in the US—twice as many suicides as homicides.

• The life expectancy of people with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia, 56, is 25 years earlier than the population at large.

• There are three times as many people with serious mental illness in jails and prisons than in hospitals.

    These statistics define where we are in the field, said Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health and a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives. But the field will be transformed in coming decades, he argues, as what we learn from genetics, brain science, and behavior come together to change how we diagnose, treat, and think about mental illness.

    Insel wrote a commentary on the topic in this week’s issue of JAMA; yesterday he elaborated on his ideas during a media briefing discussing the special issue, which focuses on mental illness.

    For example, advances in genetics have led to the discovery of structural variations in the genome. In mental illnesses like schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, OCD, and ADHD, researchers have found hundreds of common variations—deletions or duplications in the genetic code—that have “completely changed the way we think about genetics in psychiatric disease,” he said.

    These variations—all associated with neurodevelopmental genes—“could not be associated with a single illness even in the same family,” said Insel; the same variation could indicate schizophrenia for one person, and autism for another. But they could point to a more general risk for mental illness.

    Discoveries about brain circuitry also may change how we may view disorders. Much mental illness is associated with the developing brain—the age of onset peaks in the teen years, when the brain’s grey matter is undergoing a “pruning effect” and becoming more efficient. Some disorders might be described as “poor pruning.”

    For example, it may be that people likely to develop schizophrenia lose too many synapses during this period, Insel suggested. He hopes that by 2020, we can detect schizophrenia before psychosis begins. “We are going to shift the curve and get earlier in diagnosis and treatment,” intervening when people have risk factors but before they have symptoms.

    This may lead to a change in the way diseases are defined. “We have been locked into presentation,” said Insel, citing the way the DSM characterizes diseases by symptoms, not underlying causes. “Most of medicine has moved beyond that. We want to add all the things we can’t see,” like genetics and imaging.

    In a decade, predicts Insel, “We will have entirely different names and ways of thinking about disorders.”

    --Johanna Goldberg

Are we fostering a generation of anxious learners?

    What is up with kids today?

    I recently attended back-to-back conferences on learning and the brain, the first on “Attention and Engagement in Learning” in Baltimore (see my story for more), the second the three-day Learning & the Brain conference in Washington, DC, also focused on the topic of attention and motivation in education (look for the story, by writer Aalok Mehta, later this week).

    At each conference, I heard from both the speakers and from teachers about an apparent tsunami of stress among students.

    "In the last 10 years of my 40 years of practice, I have been so bowled over by the amount of anxiety I'm seeing in children," said Martha Bridge Denckla, a clinician and researcher at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, during the Baltimore conference. "We're bathing our schoolchildren in an anxious environment," she said. She argued for stopping the push to teach everyone algebra in eighth grade, and suggested we not teach handwriting until a child actually has the motor skills to do handwriting. She suggested that inattention (the topic of the conference) might be secondary or a response to this "anomalous emotional environment."

    Her remarks and those of others at the Learning & the Brain drew a lot of response from attendees. The teacher in my break-out group during the Baltimore session said kids, without prompting, tell her how they worry all year long about the mandatory end-of-year state exams.

    “Anxiety is a tremendous stimulator of ADHD,” Denckla continued during her lecture at the conference in DC. Children may show symptoms of the disorder, such as failing to sit still or focus on a task, when their true trouble is that their minds are diverted by excess worry, often caused by adults asking them to perform activities they are not cognitively ready for, she suggested. “We’re making pseudo-diagnoses of everyone because we’re asking too much of them at an early age.”

    The next day, William Stixrud, a clinical neuropsychologist who also sees children in his practice, seconded Denckla’s observations. “Kids seem to be increasingly less ready than years ago, and yet we’re asking them to do so much more. From the developmental point of view, this is absurd.”

    “Virtually everything is easier to learn at a later age” during childhood, he said. For example, for most children, learning to read at seven years old is easier and makes better readers than learning at five. “You pay a price if you rush,” including the chance that a child’s frustrations at not meeting expectations lead to acting out.

    “The level of stress in kids, Stixrud said, “is a similar crisis to global warming.” He recommends movement and meditation to offset daily anxiety and chronic sleep loss (he said children today sleep an hour less each night than children in the 1970s did). “If we take care of the nervous system, if we take care of development, we get better results.”

    Along with Stixrud and Denckla, other speakers, including Judy Willis, a neurologist turned middle-school teacher, reinforced the idea that children need to feel safe before they can be completely ready to learn. “Safety first, then stimulate their curiosity,” she advised during a teacher-skills lecture.

    I don’t remember feeling stressed-out very often during my early grades, at least about school, and I am the sort who does worry about things. I took standardized tests in third, seventh, and eighth grades, and didn’t fret about them for a moment; I don’t remember my teachers worrying about them.

    The idea that young children today do fret about such things, and that we may be pushing them beyond what their bodies can perform worries me. Nobody wants a generation of stressed-out adults with cramped-hand handwriting and trouble paying attention. And if, as Stixrud suggests, we don’t get good results from all this pushing, shouldn’t we stop?

    --Nicky Penttila

Not All Wins Are Equal

    “A win is a win.” It’s an old cliché tossed around by athletes and coaches who are stressing that victory—even if it was expected, or looked ugly, or was downright lucky—is still a victory, and that’s all that matters.

    This is not the case for sports fans, however, at least according to researchers at Ohio State University. In a study that was published last December, the researchers monitored the emotions of fans watching a sporting event. They determined that if fans, at some point in the game, think their team might lose, they enjoy the victory more than if the contest was never in doubt.

    Put more scientifically, “You need the negative emotions of thinking your team might lose to get you in an excited, nervous state,” said co-author Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick. “If your team wins, all that negative tension is suddenly converted to positive energy, which will put you in a euphoric state.”

    With the NHL and NBA playoffs in action, and baseball one month into its season, this behavior can be witnessed in homes, sports bars, and stadiums across the country. Being a fan of the New York Mets and the University of Michigan basketball and football teams, part of me feels that I should take a win any way I can get it. (After all, my favorite teams haven’t been all that successful the past few years.) But I can’t deny that I take more enjoyment from a thrilling victory than I do from a blowout win.

    To use another well-known sports saying: “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” To fans, that’s certainly not true.

    --Andrew Kahn

The disadvantage of the unbiased

    Imagine you’re grocery shopping, alone, and a stranger makes her way down your aisle. You don’t pay much attention, focusing instead on whether to buy Fruit Loops or Frosted Flakes. Before you can decide, though, the young girl says hello and tries to hug you. For those individuals with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder, this behavior would not be considered uncommon.

    You probably don’t think you look threatening to harmless strangers, and you most likely have no intention of taking advantage of those you perceive as vulnerable. But the same can’t be said for everyone, which is why Williams syndrome can be a blessing and a curse.

    A new study claims to be the first “to report the absence of racial stereotypes in any human population.” Those that the researchers found to be without prejudices were the 20 children tested who have Williams syndrome.

    People with the syndrome were already known to have heart and vascular problems, major difficulties with abstract thought, and a vague concept of space. They were also known for being garrulous, but the complete lack of racial stereotypes was a new finding.

    “The unique hypersociable profile of individuals with Williams syndrome often leads them to consider that everybody in the world is their friend,” said the study’s co-author Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg in a press release. The direct conclusion from this study is something that should be treasured—that it’s possible to accept all races as equal and not hold any racial stereotypes.

    However, the foundation for why those with Williams syndrome can operate like this is what’s troubling. Not having a fear of anyone—regardless of their demeanor or speech—can have potentially devastating consequences. The deletion of about two dozen genes that leads to this “hypersociable” personality can also cause people with Williams syndrome to ignore warning signs of danger, which, sadly, increases their risk of being victimized by sexual predators or other criminals.

    It goes without saying that life without racial stereotypes is something we should all strive towards. Unfortunately for those with Williams syndrome, this innate outlook seems to come at the expense of any sort of social fear.

    --Andrew Kahn

Expanding your palate

    An article in the Dining section of Tuesday’s New York Times explains in scientific terms why so many people hate cilantro, some going so far as to liken the taste to soap or death. Jay Gottfried of Northwestern University explains to reporter Harold McGee that when a food activates our sense of taste, our memories also are activated; we look to past experiences to “create a perception of flavor, including an evaluation of its desirability.”

    Smell and taste are linked to emotion and memory for evolutionary reasons, helping us to avoid eating poisonous items. So if a food is determined to be undesirable, “the brain highlights the mismatch and the potential threat to our safety” and we spit it out. As we continue to be exposed to a particular food, like cilantro, new experiences are created and our views of the food can change.

    I’m hesitant to say this, but the article implies that my mom was right. Growing up, my sister and I were forced to try “no-thank-you portions” of foods we found gross. Maybe this continued exposure is the reason I will now eat squash and zucchini without complaint (I never had a problem with cilantro).

    Still, as a Dana article from 2008 explains, some foods remain repugnant. If you have a particularly unpleasant gustatory experience, a “taste aversion” mechanism can kick in and cause you to avoid a food for years. Too bad I don’t have such an aversion to cupcakes and ice cream.

    --Johanna Goldberg

Recognizing the brain of an introvert

    After reading the LiveScience article, “Study Sheds Light on What Makes People Shy,” my first reaction was, “Someone studied me!”

    American and Chinese researchers looked at individual differences in sensory-processing sensitivity (SPS) in 16 people. SPS is a measure of an individual’s response to environmental stimuli (such as standing among a group of strangers or drinking caffeine); high sensitivity is considered a leading factor in shyness. In this study, researchers first determined the volunteers’ level of sensitivity, and then put them into an fMRI scanner, showing them visual images that differed in subtle ways from one another.

    The researchers report that highly sensitive people are detail-oriented, especially when processing visual information. When individuals with high SPS assessed the images, fMRI scans showed greater activity in brain areas corresponding to high-order visual processing than when the other test subjects performed the task. Rather than just being an outward behavior, the study implies, introversion may affect the way the brain processes information.

    Similarly, in the new Dana Press book The Temperamental Thread, Jerome Kagan cites the excitability of the amygdala, a part of the brain influential in our fear response, as a factor in sensitivity (or, as he calls it, high reactivity). Neurons in the excited amygdala relay information to the prefrontal cortex, the decision-making center of the brain, leading to fight-or-flight reactions. Kagan concludes that because people “differ in the excitability of their amygdala,” their “reactions to unexpected or unfamiliar events” differs as well.

    According to the LiveScience article, highly sensitive people “take longer to make decisions, are more conscientious, need more time to themselves in order to reflect, and are more easily bored with small talk.” But these traits may have an evolutionary advantage; they “[come] in handy when danger is present, opportunities are similar and hard to choose between, or a clever approach is needed.”

    The phrase “sensory-processing sensitivity” is cited in only seven PubMed articles, the first from 1997 by two co-authors of the new study. Clearly, there are other elements of introversion that have received more scrutiny, and some are described in Kagan’s book. But as an introvert in an extrovert’s world, this is a tangible study I can point to and say, “I’m indecisive [self-reflective, detail-oriented, etc.] because of my brain! No, really!”

    --Johanna Goldberg

Brain science at the airport

Guest blogger Eric H. Chudler, Ph.D., research associate professor and director of education outreach at the University of Washington's department of bioengineering, is the creator of Neuroscience for Kids, a Web site for all students and teachers who would like to learn about the brain and nervous system. Dr. Chudler is very active during Brain Awareness Week, including arranging classroom visits and organizing open house brain fairs at the university.

Several weeks ago I traveled to California to give some presentations to teachers interested in neuroscience and education. In addition to giving the keynote lecture, I provided some workshops that provided the teachers with ideas for hands-on neuroscience activities they could use in their classrooms. 

 When I travel by air, I usually take carry-on luggage only. This requires that I pack lightly and bring only the essentials. The trip to California required careful planning because in addition to clothing, I had to bring materials and supplies for the workshops. Because my trip was fairly brief, most of my carry-on bag contained these supplies. 

As I packed my bag with cards, brain and neuron models, visual illusions, and spinning tops (Benham disks), I started to worry. I knew that airport security was getting very strict about screening passengers and some of the materials in my bag were very unusual. I hoped that I would not have any problems when it came time for me to board my flight. 

Waiting in the security line for my flight, I tried to remember everything I had packed just in case I was asked questions. As my bag traveled on the conveyer belt into the X-ray machine, I thought everything would be fine. I watched my bag disappear into the machine and walked through the metal detector. Suddenly, the X-ray machine stopped, lights started flashing and an alarm sounded. 

"Excuse me, sir. Is this your bag?," asked a TSA agent. I replied that it was my bag. The agent asked me to step to the side and asked if there was anything dangerous in my luggage. I said that there was nothing dangerous in the bag. The agent then asked if she could open the bag and look inside. "Of course, please do," I replied. 

I was then placed in the "rectangle of shame," the glass box in the airport security area where they search people who set off the metal detectors. As I waited in the rectangle of shame, the TSA agent slowly opened my bag. The first item she removed was my life-size plastic brain model. She held the brain model high in the air and called to me, "What's this?" I called back, "It's a brain." That drew some interesting stares from other passengers around me. 

The TSA agent suggested that we go through the bag together so I exited the rectangle of shame and went over to the counter with my bag. I explained who I was and where I was going. The TSA agent was still interested in what I was carrying. She even brought the brain model over to her fellow agents to show them. "Look," she said, "Have you ever seen one of these?" 

The next item out of my bag with my giant rope neuron model. This really caught the attention of the agent. "What are you planning to do with this 30 foot rope?", she asked. She was still a bit suspicious of me. I explained that the rope was part of a nerve cell model. The rope represents the axon of a nerve cell. The axon takes messages away from the neuron's cell body. I started to give a little mini-lecture about how nerve cells use electrical and chemical signals to communicate with each other. Two other TSA agents came over to listen. 

The TSA agent then removed a small green box from my bag. "Is it safe to open?," she asked. "Yes," I replied. When the agent opened the box, she had a puzzled look on her face. "What is this?," she asked. I explained that she was looking at the brains of several small animals encased in plastic. I pointed to the smooth cerebral cortex on most of the small brains and compared it to the folded cortex on the plastic human brain model. My airport neuroscience class continued, "Why do you think the human brain has all of these folds on the cortex?", I asked. One agent answered correctly, "To get more brain inside your skull!" 

As our discussion continued, I got a bit anxious because I wanted to get to my gate and did not want to miss my plane to California. Finally, after digging through more items in my bag, the TSA agent said, "I think we found the problem." She pulled out a set of neuron models that I had made from wire. Apparently the wires caught the attention of the TSA agent watching the X-ray machine. I explained that the different wires represented dendrites, the cell body, axon and terminal of a nerve cell. 

My explanations seemed to satisfy everyone. As I re-packed my bag and headed off to my gate, the TSA agent called after me, "You have to come back again and teach us some more!" I am sure I will be back at the airport, but to avoid any delays in the future, I'll leave my wire neuron models at home.

--Eric H. Chudler, Ph.D.

Are neuroscientists risking scientific integrity for funding?

    Are neuroscientists who finance their research through military grants and the sales of brain-fitness software selling their souls? In a guest blog for Scientific American, John Horgan discusses his concerns over these latest funding trends in the neuroscience field.

    Horgan notes that just a few years ago, neuroscientists were reluctant to discuss their involvement in neuroweapons research, yet last year the National Academy of Sciences published a report highlighting the many opportunities for neuroscience to be used in army applications. “Will the militarization of neuroscience really make the world safer, or just trigger a new arms race?” Horgan asks.

    Disturbing on another level is the growing prevalence of brain-fitness software aimed at baby-boomers and touting benefits in learning and memory. According to Horgan, the “neurobics” industry earned $265 million in 2008, despite the fact that the benefits derived from the software have not been proven to be more powerful than simply playing cards with friends or taking a walk.

    Horgan concludes with the question, “should [neuroscientists] adhere to higher ethical standards than defense contractors and infomercial pitchmen?”

    --Ann L. Whitman