Dana Foundation Blog

When senses combine

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which people’s senses seem to be crossed. Some people with the condition can feel tastes or see sounds; others taste voices (think of the opposite of anesthesia, literally “no senses”). Neurologist Richard Cytowic has studied such people for more than three decades, starting with a man in the rare latter category.

“Some people are born with two or more senses hooked together,” Cytowic told an audience of around 120 people at the Library of Congress on Oct. 30. For example, for the first synesthete he studied, some flavors “were more than a mouthful.”

Synesthesia experts estimate that one in 23 people has some form of this involuntary sense-mixing. Some scientists working with infants theorize that all babies are born synesthetic but lose the trait at around three months, when their sense networks start to firm up.

In 1979, when he was a young researcher, Cytowic said, no one had heard of synesthesia, and if they had they thought it wasn’t real. But he was hooked—“it interested me to explain a subjective experience that seems impossible to prove.”

He and others eventually did prove it, through well-designed experiments and a mass of data from people who started calling and writing to describe their experiences. Now “a new generation in 15 countries” studies the trait, from its individualistic expression in behavior to its possible molecular and genetic components.

“Five groups around the world are working on analyzing for the synesthesia gene,” he said. Researchers currently think the trait is genetic (“hyperconnectivity between disparate brain systems”) but requires early exposure to over-learned groupings. For example, many synesthetes see colors or shapes related to such sequences as days of the week, calendars and other common number forms, including music. (Are you synesthetic? Take a computer-based test at http://www.synesthete.org/.)

Cytowic played two short films to help illustrate the ability. The first paired Chopin’s Valse Brillante with a moving pattern of dashes of color changing in time with the music. The second, a short film by Terri Timely seen below, cleverly captures the idea of living with many forms of synesthesia, Cytowic said. One difference, though, is that instead of the discrete objects such as cats seen in the video, synesthetes are more likely to see general shapes or colors.

Crossing sense pathways can run in families and seems to be more common in artistically creative people, Cytowic said. Examples include writers Douglas Coupland and Vladimir Nabokov (and his family); artists David Hockney and Wassily Kandinsky; musicians Olivier Messiaen, Itzak Perlman and Billy Joel; and performer Marilyn Monroe. Stevie Wonder also has a form of sound-color synesthesia. “Synesthesia is very common in blind people because you don’t need your eyes to see—you see with your brain,” Cytowic said.

Their experiences are not always positive, though. One audience member described herself as a mild sound-taste synesthete and her son a stronger one. One year at school, she said, her son found that his new teacher’s voice “brought a bad taste to his mouth” to such an extent that she had to arrange to move him to a new classroom, “and it was ridiculously difficult. Nobody believed it” when he kept saying “her voice makes me sick.”

Sometimes it’s a synesthete’s friends and family who need to close their eyes. Cytowic told of a taste-color synesthete who had to wait until his wife was out of town to eat a favorite, “very blue,” dish: baked chicken Alaska drenched in orange juice and topped with ice cream.

“Synesthetes have taught us that cross-talk is the rule, not the exception,” Cytowik said. “Minds that work differently are not that different at all, and we can learn from them.”

With David Eagleman, Cytowik co-authored Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, which was recently reviewed in Cerebrum. His lecture is part of the “Music and the Brain” series, presented by the Library of Congress and the Dana Foundation. The next event, on music and trance states, is tonight; a lecture on dangerous music takes place Friday, Nov. 6.

—Nicky Penttila

Feast, but visions of famine, at NIH

While the recent deluge of stimulus money to fund science research is very welcome, the chief of the National Institutes of Health said on Monday, the devil is in the details—will the support continue?

“Science is not a 100-yard dash—it’s a marathon,” said Francis Collins during an address at Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in Chicago. Collins is the first sitting NIH chief director to speak at the annual meeting; his talk attracted several thousand of the more than 30,000 neuroscientists and others who have converged on McCormick Place this week.

There could not be a more important time to reinforce the importance of science than now, as the president and Congress begin the difficult debate over the next fiscal budget, Collins argued. Most experiments started now won’t be completed in the two years covered by the stimulus grants, he pointed out. They “are down payments on results in the future,” and “to take away the fuel midstream would not lead to good outcomes” for the research or the researchers, he said. “Science doesn’t resonate very well with feast-or-famine circumstances."

In the past year, the agency received around 20,000 applications for stimulus challenge grant funding; it had expected several thousand. “We weren’t able to fund but a percentage,” Collins said, “but were inspired by the outpouring of creativity.”

Continued funding in 2011 and after will be its own challenge given the economic downturn, however, and the agency could again find itself in the all-then-nothing cycle it suffered this past decade. Funding doubled between 1998 and 2003 and then was flat for the next five years, letting inflation carve “a deep loss” in money available for grants, he said.

After just receiving $10 billion in stimulus funding for the 2008-2009 budget, funding more 12,000 research projects, “I do think there’s some risk” that the cycle will repeat, Collins said. He urged scientists and science advocates to “make the case that science research really is important to the nation’s health, its economy and to the rest of the world’s health.”

With its current funding, Collins said, NIH is supporting its bedrock, basic science research, but he also is looking to take advantage of five “areas of opportunity”:

• Applying “high-throughput technology,” such as imaging, genomics, computational methods and nanotechnology, to answer basic questions. Instead of small projects teasing out one or another component of a biological system, “we want investigators to be able to ask questions with ‘all’ in them,” Collins said, for instance, "what are all the variations in the genome linked to a certain disease?" Researchers didn’t have the tools earlier to ask these wide-ranging questions; now that they do, he said, NIH should encourage them to take advantage.
  
  
• Encouraging research translating bench research to potential therapies for people. Translating a basic-research discovery into a clinical application is a long and complicated process that used to be mainly funded by private pharmaceutical firms. Collins said NIH will target money for more investigators to tackle the climb toward clinical applications, including the “so-called valley of death,” or first-stage trials in humans, a traditionally difficult stage to get funded.
  
  
• Contributing to the science of health care reform. The institute will continue to offer policymakers and the public health information that is based on evidence, including research that compares the effectiveness of current therapies. “NIH has been doing these studies for a long time,” Collins said, including reports on treatments for diabetes and schizophrenia.
  
  
• Encouraging a greater focus on global health. “We’re taking the mandate to use soft power instead of hard power and applying it to scientific research,” he said. For example, he cited a cooperative project by the University of Virginia and Brazil researching the effects of childhood nutrition and cognitive development.
  
  
• Reinvigorating and empowering the biomedical research community. By stimulating innovation and supporting young investigators, Collins said, the U.S. can retain the bright young and mid-career scientists who might not otherwise stay in the field. “We know there is great interest and pent-up capability,” he said. Yet with funds threatening to dry up in two years, those people may start wondering if they made the right career choice and be tempted to abandon research.
  

Collins also separately met with groups of postdoctoral students, with reporters and with the board of the neuroscience society. “We are listening,” he said, urging people to e-mail NIH-LISTENS@nih.gov with questions, critiques and suggestions. “We are at a very exciting time scientifically,” he said, and “neuroscience is one of the areas of greatest excitement in science.

“Clearly, our community, after five years of flat budgets, came back to life with this opportunity provided by the recovery act, and put forth some bold and brilliant new ideas.”

-Nicky Penttila

Travel a while in Eric Kandel’s shoes

For a peek into the life and past of famed neuroscientist Eric Kandel, check out the new documentary "In Search of Memory" (which also happens to be the name of his well-regarded memoir). Here in Chicago, it’s playing through the week of Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting, at the Facets Cinémathèque in Lincoln Park.

If you click over to Facets’ page or the main film page (which is partly in German), you can see the first two minutes of the film. It starts as it goes on; director and producer Petra Seeger shows Kandel primarily via his interactions, with family, with her and other interviewers, with colleagues in and outside the lab, with complete strangers and with politicians in Vienna, the city his family had to escape after the Nazis came to power.

Because there is no straight narration and people sometimes aren’t introduced by name, the story can feel fragmented. This impressionistic method works in its own way, though, switching quickly from a family trip to Vienna to research work on why some memories are stronger to a lecture Kandel gives at a synagogue on why he turned from studying human brains to marine mollusks. In its non-linear way, the film travels a pretty straight history of his life.

Kandel has worked to tease out exactly how we remember, including discovering that we have short-term and long-term memories and that they differ in significant ways, findings that led to a Nobel prize. Seeger emphasizes parallels in his life, from his describing leaving Vienna in panic to his return in glory more than 60 years later. Re-enactments of the strong memories he had in Vienna add additional visual parallels, and his interactions with family and lab colleagues now are contrasted with his interactions in his undergraduate days at Harvard.

She also gives Kandel space to describe himself, trademark laugh, a few tears and all. His Jewish faith is a strong current in his life, including “Never forget,” the motto reminding us to remember the Holocaust. “I’ve been investigating the biological basis of that motto,” how memory works in the brain, all his life, he says.

I enjoyed the glimpses of work in the lab--seeing sea creatures in the tank and then under the microscope, translating descriptions on a posterboard, seeing a neuron alight with nerve growth factor. But though the science sections are a good refresher course, they move so fast (and in fragments) that people new to the field will get only the biggest brushstrokes. Even so, we do get a fascinating glimpse into the world of memory and scientific life, given by one of its most successful—and most down-to-earth—practitioners. Do try to see it if you’re in Chicago this week (through Oct. 22), or keep an eye out for it to come near you.

-Nicky Penttila

Posner receives presidential regard

Next Tuesday, cognitive neuroscientist Michael Posner will be one of nine researchers this year to be awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest honor given by the U.S. government to scientists, educators and inventors. He wrote about his recent research in this month’s Cerebrum story, “ How Arts Training Improves Attention and Cognition.”

He also took part in the Dana Foundation’s Arts & Cognition Consortium, which in March 2008 reported evidence of close links between training in the arts and improvement in certain cognitive areas, such as memory, self control and attention. He is a strong advocate for spreading the word about what we are have discovered about the brain and learning to the public and to policy-makers, including coming here to the Dana Center in Washington, D.C., in 2008 to talk about the consortium studies [see videocast].

I last saw him this May in Baltimore during the Learning, Arts, and the Brain summit, sharing his research and participating in the small-group brainstorming sessions with educators, arts advocates and state and regional government leaders. The teachers and advocates at my table were quite taken with him, especially his easy style and clear delivery that made the top-flight research understandable, helping them to see clearly what we’ve learned about learning and the brain and what we do not yet know.

My table-mates also commented on the discipline of research in general and on how careful he and the other scientists were to claim only and exactly what they could verify, unlike the intuitive and anecdotal reporting education researchers often rely on. Transferring a more rigorous research approach may be one of the first goals of people developing the nascent field of neuroeducation, which combines neuroscience, psychology and education to build improved teaching methods and curricula.

—Nicky Penttila

Conferencing toward virtue

If you are in New York City on Friday, Sept. 11, consider spending the day being mindful of morality. The United Nations will play host to a free all-day conference, open to those who pre-register and sponsored by the Nour Foundation, Georgetown University, and Blackfriars Hall at Oxford University, called “Toward a Common Morality.”

It’s the last of a three-part traveling forum that started in May at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., with “The Paradox of Neurotechnology,” which discussed how people are using new neurotechnologies for treatment and enhancement and whether that might alter what it means to be a human being. In July at Oxford University, “Brain, Mind, and the Nature of Being” explored how neuroscience theories might adapt to encompass the development of a “holistic concept of a human person.”

In New York, the topic will be human subjective experience, including what neuroscience and psychology can tell us about how experience affects our reasoning and morality. One of the presenters is Donald Pfaff, whose Dana Press book The Neuroscience of Fair Play is recommended reading for the conference. Other speakers include Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania and Andrew Newberg, author of the new book How God Changes Your Brain: Breakthrough Findings from a Leading Neuroscientist.

According to conference organizers, one goal of the events is use science to promote a sense of unity and cooperation, a member of the organizing committee says. I’m intrigued by the proposed discussion of morality and ethics as part of “core human ecology,” so you may see me there.

-Nicky Penttila

Music of the brain

Thanks to researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and elsewhere, we now can hear the music of our minds at work. A feature story in the Hartford Courant on Monday describes the work of Dan Lloyd, who has developed software that assigns pitches to various regions of the brain, as seen in action via functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) scans.

Lloyd has posted this slide-show video on YouTube (9:05) of one of his experiments. After slides explaining the experiment and how to read the brain scans that follow, the video then begins “playing” scans as electronic notes, with variations in chromatic scale and timing. This reminds me of the ambient music of Brian Eno or Philip Glass (Lloyd’s favorite composer, the Courant’s William Weir reports). The scans are of Lloyd and Trinity students, but “this bebop is inside you, too, every waking moment (and in your dreams, too),” as Lloyd writes in the slide show.

Another video (5:45) shows how brain music might someday be a useful diagnostic tool. Here Lloyd and colleagues set to electronic music the scans of healthy volunteers and of people with schizophrenia. It was hard for me to hear the difference (guess those aural discrimination classes from college have worn off), but the slides show apparent statistical differences among the scans, especially concerning rhythm.

“Hearing” a scan did feel different to me than looking at one. I seemed to have a better sense of the speed at which pixels/pitches were changing. And because the notes were tuned to my Western-music sensibilities, the sounds made me feel sort of warm and fuzzy toward our own very busy brains.

—Nicky Penttila

Wednesday on PBS: “The Music Instinct”

Musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, who followed his popular-science book This Is Your Brain on Music (2006) with The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature last year, is co-host of an interesting-looking two-hour documentary that explores the science behind music. The program will air on many PBS stations starting at 9 p.m. Wednesday.

Musicians abound in the show, “The Music Instinct: Science and Song,” including Yo-Yo Ma, as well as co-host Bobby McFerrin doing an improvisation with his son, Taylor. Scientists interviewed include Oliver Sacks on whether we’re wired for music and Stephen Mithen on whether Neanderthals, who had no actual language, may have communicated through music. Other topics include music as therapy, how we hear a note’s duration and the importance of early musical training.

The section of PBS’s Web site for the show also has many short video clips, background reading and surveys, as well as extensive lesson plans for teachers on improvisation, rhythm and vibration.

—Nicky Penttila

Neuroeducation in the news

Two newspapers published stories covering the news from the Learning, Arts, and the Brain Summit, held May 6 at the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore.

In “Art is smart, Roland Park teachers say,” Baltimore Messenger writer Larry Perl spoke with teachers who attended the summit, a chance for educators to hear from neuroscientists about the latest brain research on learning and for the scientists to hear where educators think more research should be done. While Roland Park Elementary School in Baltimore is "a school that oozes arts integration," it is an anomaly, said participant Amanda Barnes, the enrichment teacher at the school. "I'd love to see a position like mine in all Baltimore City schools," she said.

In “Arts appear to play role in brain development,” Baltimore Sun writer Liz Bowie focuses on the progress of research on learning and the brain, including that of Ellen Winner, Gottfried Schlaug and Elizabeth Spelke of Harvard, who spoke during the summit, and Charles Limb, a Johns Hopkins doctor and a jazz musician who was in the audience and invited to speak on his own research. Bowie quotes Harvard professor Jerome Kagan as saying that research into the effects of practicing the arts on the brain is "as deserving of a clinical trial as a drug for cancer that has not yet been shown to be effective."

—Nicky Penttila

Wanted: a neuroeducation teaching model

“A child’s opportunity to benefit from the arts should not be restricted by the ZIP code where they live,” said Nancy Grasmick, Maryland state superintendent of schools, during the Learning, Arts, and the Brain conference May 6 in Baltimore. But because few educators understand the benefit of arts learning, the arts are among the subjects and methods of teaching that are perennially in danger of cutting when funds grow tight, most often in less-wealthy school districts.

Grasmick sat in the audience during the day of presentations on how children’s brains change as they practice an art, and then participated in the small-group discussions on how educators could apply this knowledge. At the end of the day, she used her time at the podium to challenge the more than 300 attendees to act on what they had learned.

Currently, she said, “neuroscience is not guiding the decisions we’re making in education.” Teachers, principals, and administrators know little about the science, “even though every day I say they’re brain clinicians” because they foster children’s brain development.

Why isn’t neuroscience part of the conversation? “Because we don’t have a critical model” of how the arts foster cognitive development and how to apply the science to the classroom, she said. She challenged the teachers in the audience, and especially those who teach teachers, including conference sponsor Johns Hopkins University, to create such a teaching model.

“Today’s information is huge,” she said of the new research presented. State educators should use it and work together to build courses allowing teachers-in-training to absorb the science behind learning, she said. “We can use that model for arts educators to understand the cognitive benefits, as well as the emotional and affective ones.” These new teachers and school administrators would help form a secure foundation for arts education in public schools, one that would not shift with the winds of schools funding.

“Unless we have people who are prepared and knowledgeable in these areas, we will be in jeopardy every time a dollar is cut in the budget” or a given arts advocate leaves a certain school, she said.

—Nicky Penttila

Nancy Grasmick, Maryland state superintendent of schools, makes a point during the small-group discussions on how to use the results of brain research to improve learning her during the Learning, Arts, and the Brain Summit, at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore on May 6, 2009. (photo by Nicky Penttila)

Neuroeducation: What to do next?

While many neuroscientists hope that eventually what they have learned about learning will trickle down to how teachers teach, at the recent Learning, Arts, and the Brain summit at Johns Hopkins University, researcher Brian Wandell reminded us that communication goes both ways.

Brian Wandell

“Is there anything I can do that is useful to you?” he asked the audience of more than 300 teaching artists, educators and arts advocates early in the conference, held May 6 in Baltimore.

At the conference, Wandell spoke of his research on how music training may affect phonological awareness (the sound-system aspect of words) as measured by the strength of linkages that make up the white matter of the brain. “It’s been hard to get data on the white matter,” he said, because it is so fragile, but technologies in the past decade such as diffusion tensor imaging, which measures how much water is in a given tissue, have made such studies possible.

He and others have found that the properties of certain fibers are correlated with specific cognitive abilities. For example, “certain fibers passing through the corpus callosum are correlated with phonological decoding,” he said. The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain. These fibers “are essential for learning the skills of phonological awareness,” one of the skills that lead to reading fluency, Wandell said. He and his colleagues reported their early findings in 2008 as part of the Dana Foundations’s Arts & Cognition consortium.

They have discovered a correlation between music training and scores on phonological tests. The training “explains 16 percent of the variance in children’s scores,” he said [see also “White Matter Pathways in Reading,” PDF]. “We also have discovered a modest correlation between visual arts and math,” in ongoing, not-yet-published research led by Jessica Tsang and Mihal Ben-Shachar in Wandell’s lab [listing of their publications]. Wandell and colleagues now are taking images of children’s brains before and after a certain period of arts instruction to see if this direct intervention can cause the effects they have seen in the earlier studies.

The research on math skills came about after Tsang spoke with a public school teacher who wondered if teaching general counting and estimating worked better than teaching exact counting at a certain grade level. Wandell encouraged the audience in Baltimore to ask their own questions; maybe a neuroscientist at the table with them would take up their gantlet. “We’re looking for teachers to ask questions for us to research,” he said.

In the small-group discussions later that afternoon, including the table where I sat, some people took him up on his suggestion. The conference host and co-sponsor, the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, assigned seating to ensure that scientists, educators and policy makers mingled, developing potential education plans as well as sharpening questions the scientists could take back to the labs. Our questions: How does arts training affect mood? Do different artistic disciplines promote different “styles” of focus and attention?

In a few years or so, perhaps we’ll see some answers.

—Nicky Penttila

Educators discuss how to use brain research to improve learning during the Learning, Arts, and the Brain Summit, at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore on Wednesday, May 6, 2009. (photo by Nicky Penttila)

Music as a bit player?

A few in the audience for Steven Brown’s lecture “From Mode to Emotion in Musical Communication” here in Washington, D.C., last night weren’t quite ready to receive the conclusions he pitched. Instead of reinforcing our idea that music induces great emotion in the listener, he said, well, maybe we only think it does.

“Briefly stated, music is a prostitute,” Brown, director of the NeuroArts Lab at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, told his six dozen listeners at the Library of Congress. “Just about everything about music is extra-musical.” For example, music supports prayer and contemplation, dance and movement, story-telling, social bonding, remembering a culture’s memories, and reinforcing morality or ideas such as patriotism.

In Western societies, “we’re so accustomed to thinking about music for music’s sake,” Brown said, but that take on the art is “very rare in terms of musical history and musical culture. Most music has a connection with other things in society. It can reinforce other messages.”

But, one member of the audience asked, why does a passage in Beethoven move me to tears? And, said another, why do I hear a certain thunderous piece of music in my head when I’m angry? These are individual reactions, and true, Brown said. But they aren’t consistent or predictable across cultures or even among similar groups.

“People assume sad music will induce sadness, and it can—but it’s weak,” Brown said. The major induced effect is an aesthetic, thinking sort of response, along the lines of liking or disliking, not a deep emotion. He cited research where people listened to music then described what they thought about the music and what their mood was. Though people identified music as happy, sad, thunderous, and so on, their own moods did not change that much. “You say, ‘it sounds very sad,’ but you don’t feel sad,” he said.

“The best thing I can say about music is it works by representing the general sense of positivity/goodness or negativity/badness,” mostly by changes in contrast via scale sets, such as major and minor scale in Western music, ragas in classical Indian music and dastgahs in Persian music, said Brown, who has co-edited two books of essays, The Origins of Music and Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music.

For me, music in the concert hall or piped into my ears can direct my thinking; a certain soulful Bonnie Raitt song can take me back to the time I first heard it when I was really blue. But my reactions aren’t consistent: last week, hearing that song through my ear-buds “made” me feel bluer, but yesterday when I heard it in the coffee shop my mood didn’t change and instead I thought of the haunting harmonies. Still, I’m only halfway sold on the idea of music as merely a handmaiden; must be my Western-style “musico-centricity” showing.

The lecture was part of the “Music and the Brain” series, which is sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Dana Foundation. The next event is March 13; podcasts and some Webcasts of earlier events are also available.

—Nicky Penttila

Leaping from bench to business

Some advances in neuroscience, especially those related to neurotechnologies, offer big business opportunities, panelists said during the second day of the Neuroethics Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

“Neurotechnology addresses one of the largest untapped markets,” said Zach Lynch of NeuroInsights and the Neurotech Industry Organization, which in May led the effort to introduce the National Neurotechnology Initiative Act in the U.S. Congress.

Nearly one in three people, or about 2 billion worldwide, will develop a mental condition such as addiction, anxiety, depression, chronic pain or dementia during their lives, he said.

In 2007, global neurotech industry revenue rose 8.3 percent to $130.5 billion; it had risen 10 percent the previous year. Venture capitalists are bullish, too, with investment of $1.77 billion last year, representing 20 percent of all investment in life-sciences businesses, according to a survey by NeuroInsights.

More than 100,000 people worldwide already have the neurodevices called cochlear implants, which allow for better hearing, said Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania. Techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, an outside-the-head magnetic technique approved to treat some forms of depression, might “be coming to a brain spa near you any day,” she said.

“We are seeing neuroscience and its applications becoming ‘disruptive technologies,” Farah said, which are not incremental improvements but “fundamental game-changers” in their fields.

Lynch agreed: “The implications of brain improvement” through neuropharmaceuticals, neurodevices and neurodiagnostics will be as far-reaching as the spread of electricity or computing, he said.

These fields have the potential for great good, but also for great ills, Farah said. Should researchers who are also businesspeople declare potential conflicts of interest in their reporting? How can consumers be sure an unregulated neuro-product is safe and effective? How do we ensure fairness if some people can afford brain-improving drugs and others can’t—or do we wish to ensure such fairness? How do we ensure privacy?

And who decides if a worker must take a brain-improving drug—his or her employer? “Mental health is the ultimate competitive resource,” Lynch said, and neurotechnology could improve memory retention and decrease the incidence of anxiety and stress. “Even if only a small group of people takes them, it will reshape the economy,” he said, noting that likely early adopters would be people in the financial industries, such as market traders.

—Nicky Penttila

Truth telling on lie detection

How should we take companies’ claims that their functional magnetic resonance imagers (fMRI) can tell if we are telling lies? With a mighty grain of salt, said panelists during the second day of the Neuroethics Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

The idea of using fMRIs as a lie detector already has permeated society, said Daniel Langleben of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the most-frequently cited fMRI researchers in this area.

“Over the past 6 years, the press assumed fMRI was better than lie detection,” he said. “But no one really knows.” One reason is few controlled or real-world tests of the technology have been done; another is that people can confound lie-detection, whether a person is saying something they think is a lie, and mind reading.

In carefully controlled tests, with white male college students without known medical conditions and not on drugs, Langleben said, “we could sometimes detect deception,” but not always.

“There is no perfect lie detector,” said Steve Laken of Cephos Corp., which offers fMRI scanning to the public. Like standard lie detectors, fMRI “could be a forensic tool, not a definitive tool but a forensic tool,” he said. Cephos’s method has “78-97 percent accuracy,” according to the company’s research.

But the vast majority of his clients do not wish to prove lies but to show that they are telling the truth, he said. “Prosecuting attorneys and DAs aren’t interested; defenders are.” The company has a long list of explanations included on the informed-consent forms it requires clients to sign before administering tests, including the caveat that the client might not like the outcome. Cephos ensures that the people doing the scanning don’t know the details of the case and neither do the off-site researchers reading the images.

If the images light up the right way, “we say they believe what they’re saying is true,” Laken said, not that it is factually true.

But telling the truth may not look like telling lies in the brain, said Hank Greely of Stanford, who co-published a review of then-current fMRI detection studies in the American Journal of Law and Medicine in 2007. And there are even fewer tests of truth-telling.

Imaging for lie detection is just the first of a variety of neuroscience-based tests that will have legal implications, Greely said. Others include tests that might, in the future, detect levels of pain (for personal injury litigation) and whether we recognize people or crime sites. And interest is high: “The law is really interested in someone’s mental state,” he said.

Greely disagrees that fMRI for lie detection would be just another piece of forensic technology. “It is science saying this person is a liar, this person is telling the truth,” he said. Some studies show that simply showing a person information accompanied by an unrelated picture of a brain scan leads the person to think the information is true. “It is reckless, and so unethical, to proceed [with this technology] with so little knowledge if it is good—or good enough.”

What should we do? “It would be nice to have some regulation,” Laken said, but people disagree on what level to recommend and what agency should do it. In the short term, we could regulate the use of fMRI devices under standard medical regulations, just as we do other medical devices, suggested Langleben.

—Nicky Penttila

Illness as social change

The first discussion at the inaugural annual meeting of the Neuroethics Society today, on the neuroethics of pediatric bipolar disorder, felt a little like déjà vu to me.

Fifteen to 20 years ago, nearly no child was labeled bipolar, said panelist Benedetto Vitiello of the National Institute of Mental Health; since then the number of diagnoses has jumped. “It’s really staggering … to go from practically nothing to nearly an epidemic,” said panelist Steven Hyman of Harvard. But the rise is not because children never acted out or had social problems until a decade ago; rather, we labeled it something else—or it wasn’t considered a problem.

“Because we are so focused on the pathological, we can miss the wide range of normal,” said panelist Josephine Johnston of the Hastings Center, who co-authored a briefing book on mental health in children and adolescents on the Center’s Web site. And diagnosing a child wrongly with bipolar disorder can stigmatize her as well as lead well-meaning parents to dose her with strong drugs that not only won’t fix the problem but could cause worse behavior—and serious physical complications.

This theme has come up twice during this past month here, at a forum held at the Dana Center on understanding childhood brain disorders and in “The meaning of psychological abnormality,” the current article in Cerebrum. To make her point, Johnston even read a quote from Cerebrum: “The contemporary American economy requires every child to complete high school with adequate language and mathematical skills, and preferably go on to receive a college degree, in order to obtain a job with some financial security. These were not requirements in the 18th century; Benjamin Franklin did not have the advantage of a high school education.”

Social constructions such as high achievement in education, which often means having the self-control to sit still for hours on end, are real in our lives, she said. “In seeking to change the child, we might also need to change the child’s context.”

Jerome Kagan (who also wrote the Cerebrum piece) spells out the argument against calling the jump in childhood disorder diagnoses an epidemic in the Webcast of the Dana Center forum, about 10 minutes into the piece.

—Nicky Penttila

Basic science can pay off

Last year when I interviewed Mark Bear, a researcher and teacher at MIT, on his work on the neurobiology of fragile X, he was giddy with the possibility that the basic research he and others were doing might quickly translate to drugs that could reduce the genetic damage.

“I would have never dared to dream that our work on basic mechanisms of LTD might suggest a treatment—possibly a cure—for the most common inherited form of human mental retardation and autism,” he said then. LTD stands for long-term synaptic depression, which is a weakening of a neuronal synapse, and the signals it sends out, that can last for hours or days.

Bear is featured today in an audio piece on NPR.org describing his work and the human drug trials now under way, with a focus on one family who formed a foundation to fund such research.

—Nicky Penttila

Easy listening

One of my favorite monthly podcasts is Nature NeuroPod, done by Kerri Smith for Nature.com. (The Dana Foundation sponsors the podcasts, wisely leaving the hard work to the experts.) The only drawback for me had been the length of the podcast: Finding 30 straight minutes to pay close attention to scientists talking can be a challenge. But with its latest offering, the podsters have solved my problem—and added even more goodies.

In addition to the full feed in its many audio-format permutations, the site now also offers each story segment separately and says how long each is. I can spare six minutes now to learn about selfish genes and another six after the morning meeting to hear about mice that eat well but don’t gain weight. And if I want to hear more than the 10 minutes on magic and neuroscience in the podcast, there’s a link to an even longer version of its main interview. Even better, for those like me who like visual reinforcement, below each segment are links to the research and essays mentioned in the piece.

From this online listener, thanks.

—Nicky Penttila

Many voices, one message

I felt a flurry of warm fuzzies at the sight of all the Dana Press and Dana Alliances books and publications at the booth for the European Dana Alliance for the Brain last week during the FENS Forum meeting in Geneva. Part of our mission is to spread the word on advances in brain science, and here already was our new 2008 Progress Report in German, French, Spanish and Italian, with the Flemish version coming soon.

Thanks to our colleagues in the Dana Alliances’ offices in New York and London, and especially Beatrice Roth in Switzerland, most of our brochures and pamphlets are available in multiple languages and downloadable. You can find many of them on the EDAB site; just click the flags in the top-right corner for the language you seek.

The EDAB booth, just off the escalators to the second floor at the Palexpo convention center, was one of the first things the 5,000-some neuroscience junkies saw as they entered the main section of the forum. We couldn’t have asked for better product placement.

—Nicky Penttila

Working to rewire broken spines

Though he works now in research and basic science, former clinician James Fawcett can’t stop thinking about his patients. His current work, exploring an enzyme that helps the nervous system return to a more-plastic state, could help people with spinal cord injuries regain more mobility.

Fawcett and colleagues at the Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair have found that the enzyme chondroitinase digests the structures in the brain that are responsible for turning off the ability of the nervous system to grow new connections. That “opens up a window of opportunity during which rehabilitation can be dramatically more successful,” he said during a lecture at the Federation of European Neuroscience in Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday.

Other researchers, including Martin Schwab at the University of Zurich, also are working toward restarting this form of plasticity. But this is only part of the problem of recovering from spinal-cord injuries, they said. It’s one thing to regrow neuronal connections, and another to train those new connections to link up correctly.

That training, it appears, is what good physical rehabilitation therapy does; when paired with chondroitinase in animal studies, improvement in fine-motor movements is strikingly improved. When chondroitinase is used alone, there is no improvement at all.

While this success is still only in the lab and no one can predict how long it will take to translate into human care or how much it could help restore function, it is encouraging to patients, Schwab says. “Most patients know the field is in early stages, and they are grateful for solid scientific progress. Fifteen years ago, the field was called absolutely hopeless; now it is the focus of much attention.”

“Everyone knows someone who has a central nervous system injury,” says Fawcett. “These are conditions that don’t kill someone but that don’t get better. Even quite little bits of help can be quite meaningful.”

—Nicky Penttila

Switching fear off—and on again

The common term “extinction” may be the wrong word for what happens when we overcome our learned fears, says Andreas Lüthi of the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland. He suggests “active suppression” instead, based on research he and colleagues published in Nature online on July 11.

Studying mice, they discovered that one group of neurons in the amygdala is involved in suppressing established fear responses—and another, distinct group can refresh or restore these responses. Like flipping a switch, by selectively activating one or the other group, the researchers could suppress or trigger fearful behavior in the mouse.

“The new learning [repression] is on top of the old learning [trained fear response], and it uses very similar molecular mechanisms,” Lüthi said during a press conference at the Forum of European Neuroscience meeting in Geneva on Monday. So a mouse that has “unlearned” its fear response to a tone, for example, has not extinguished it completely—and it might be triggered in a new situation.

“It’s really a breakthrough discovery to understand how to get rid of fear, but also what may cause its relapse,” said Casten Wotjak of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. Fear is one of our most basic responses and has been relatively stable in evolutionary terms. So what happens in people’s fear pathways likely parallels what happens in mice’s fear pathways, Wotjak says.

Their research suggests why treatments such as exposure therapy, used to help people overcome phobias, may not always work. People might overcome their fear to a specific type of height, for example, or overcome it while in their doctor’s presence, but another, similar setting could trigger their fear switch back on. In this case, “extinction” would be preferred.

—Nicky Penttila

Artful neuroscience

Here at FENS 2008, the Forum of European Neuroscience meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, this week, we’ve been treated to the music of the alpenhorn and one of the jazz groups playing this week at Montreux. But the sonic highlight was two “experiments” conducted in one of the giant meeting rooms.

In the first, mezzo-soprano Solenn’ Lavanant and pianist and professor of opera Gary Magby were the (scientific) instruments, neuroscientist Pierre Magistretti, psychiatrist François Ansermet and professor of opera Ioanna Bentoiu were the researchers, and the audience of more than 900 registered neuroscience junkies were the subjects. Lavanant performed each of three arias twice, trying to express different emotions each time. After each pair, Magistretti invited us listeners to describe what we heard.

We had a lot to say—and we proved his point: Artists transmit emotion through their performances, yet what I feel may not be what the listener sitting next to me feels. The vibrations of sound are filtered through our minds. One listener heard the first performance, an aria from The Barber of Seville, as melancholy, meaning sad; another said that for her the sound was sweet. To test whether we could guess the singer’s intentions without watching her face and movements, many of us closed our eyes through the second pair. Still good, and beautiful.

In the second experiment, composers Orazio Sciortino and Richard Rentsch treated us to two classically-inspired improvisations to show “the use of synchrony in the process of creativity,” said Magistretti. Or, as Rentsch put it, “notes are words, and when we put them together we speak with each other.”

The audience and the experimenters were so taken with the performances that they coaxed the players to carry on far longer than the allotted time. I can’t say I was too sorry when Magistretti said, “we had a neurobiological part [to the symposium], but we’ll keep it short” to let the players play.

The experiment will continue online: In a week or so, we’ll have the Webcast posted. The symposium, Music and the Brain: Perception to Emotion, was sponsored by the European Dana Alliance for the Brain.

—Nicky Penttila