neuroscience

 

Did you see the eclipse yesterday? In case of poor geographic location or general Sunday laziness, here’s a time-lapse video showing the celestial event in its full glory.

Created by amateur astrophotographer Cory Poole, a math and science teacher, the video gives a great overview of the entire eclipse from start to finish. Poole watched the event from Redding, California, which was directly in the path of the moon’s shadow, allowing him to capture the full extent of the “ring of fire.”

During this annular eclipse, the moon was slightly too far from the Earth to completely block out the sun, leaving a bright red ring that would make any Xbox player shiver.

This time-lapse video was made by stitching together 700 individual frames, taken through a solar telescope with a special filter that can see the sun’s chromosphere, an outer solar layer from which flares and prominences emerge. Normally, a different layer on the sun, the photosphere, outshines the chromosphere, making it invisible. But during an eclipse the photosphere is blocked, allowing the deep red of the chromosphere to come out.

Be sure to check out Poole’s website for more photos of the event.

Video: Cory Poole

 

Panic disorder commonly presents acutely with a first severe panic attack.  Many patients can distinctly remember their first attack even years after the onset of the disorder. Agoraphobia may complicate panic disorder.  The word agoraphobia stems from the Greek word "agora" meaning gathering place.  The Greek agora was the common area for public assembly. People with agoraphobia commonly fear situations where they may be in a crowd of people.  They often fear that in such situations a panic attack may occur and they will be unable to escape.  In the modern world, common settings for agoraphobia are crowded buses, airplanes or motor vehicles. Not all individuals with panic disorder develop agoraphobia.  It is unclear why this pattern exists.  Agoraphobia does tend to occur with more severe and chronic panic disorder.  Individuals with relative few and mild panic attacks are less likely to develop agoraphobia. A recent clinical research study from Japan suggests that the place where the first panic attack occurs may play a role in the risk of developing panic disorder.  Hara and colleagues studied a large group (n=830) of individuals with panic disorder and classified them into 5 groups based on the site of their first panic attack.  These five sites were:

• home
• school or office
• driving a car
• public transportation
• outside of home

Hara N, Nishimura Y, Yokoyama C, Inoue K, Nishida A, Tanii H, Okada M, Kaiya H, & Okazaki Y (2012). The development of agoraphobia is associated with the symptoms and location of a patient's first panic attack. BioPsychoSocial medicine, 6 (1) PMID: 22494552

News reached me today of the formation of a web-forum for Neurohistory. Discipline formation follows rather typical patterns. I would therefore predict that soon there will be a new journal, a society, and thereafter courses will appear in many universities.

This is the long overdue follow-up to last year’s email, to let you know that the Neurohistory forum is up and running at this site: http://www.neurohistory.ucla.edu/neurohistory-web-forum. Our thanks to Lynn Hunt and her group at UCLA for providing the host and tech support. A link to opt-in to a subscription to a mailing list also should have arrived in your inbox. If it hasn't arrived, or got lost or re-directed to your spam folder, please let us the list admin know at neurohistory.net@gmail.com. The contents of the forum are still somewhat skeletal; among other things, we haven’t yet tried to put together anything like a complete bibliography (check under Resources), in part because we need to put more thought into the categories. Under the most expansive understanding of the field, the bibliography could range from psychohistory and some areas of evolutionary psychology to cognitive archaeology and the history of addiction, and from books and articles that constitute solid contributions to the field of neurohistory to important works that make promising allusions. The list of relevant papers in neuroscience alone could go on for pages. Is more necessarily better? We would welcome thoughts about this, as well as any suggestions you might have about content and form. One thing we would certainly like to develop is a page for syllabi or for threads describing how you have worked neurohistorical perspectives into your courses. Please do take a moment to explore the site and send along suggestions or ideas. It would be helpful to constitute a steering committee; if you would like to volunteer, write to Dan Smail at smail@fas.harvard.edu.

I rather regret that students studying history will now be even less likely to read Braudel, Collingwood, Carr, Ginzburg, Hobsbawm, Oakeshott, or Thompson. I can, of course, see how our collective fixation on "ends" and "technology" makes neurohistory the logical replacement of history in the epoch of postmodernity. Yet it is still depressing to think of undergraduates majoring in history reading maintenance manuals of MRI machines and examining EEG prints to detect our paleolithic, hard-wired  and inevitably determined patterns of behavior - all in the name of scholarly respectability. It is still sadder to think about the undergraduates majoring in neuroscience who will eventually take a neurohistory course in lieu of a course focused upon Chinese, Japanese, African or European history, and thus have even fewer opportunities to read, for example, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, or De Tocqueville. A final thought: the most challenging course I ever took as an undergraduate was Physical Biochemistry. Trust me: enzyme kinetics, quantum problems are tough going. There is one reason only that I passed that course. I was taking "History of Modern Physics" at the same time, and I was reading the primary sources to the science I was endeavoring to learn by textbook, lecture, and pen and problem. Without the history, I would have been sunk.

One day, one of my kids was staring at a simple circuit diagram. It showed a battery connected to a resistor and a light bulb. He was doing a homework problem. The particular question that had him stumped asked what would happen to the current in the circuit if the resistor was replaced with another that had more resistance. He hadn’t been in class that day and had never studied electricity, and so he stared at the diagram for a few minutes without comprehension.

My son had reached what psychologists call an impasse, which is really just a fancy way of saying that he was stuck. One of keys to good problem solving is to deal successfully with impasses. My son was not being successful. He sat sullenly at the table and his eyes started to glaze over. As luck would have it, I did know the answer to this question, because I had gotten a ham radio license as a kid and so I had to study some electrical theory. But, as a parent, I don’t like to give my kids the answers, so I put on my best Socrates impression and went to work with him.

I asked him to describe the problem to me, but all he was able to do was to read it back to me almost word-for-word. I asked him what else he knew about electricity. He described to me how the electrons in a circuit flow from the negative part of the battery through the circuit to the positive part. I asked him what resistors did, and he said that they made it harder for the electrons to move through the circuit.

So, then I asked him if he knew anything else that flowed. He thought for a moment and then said that water flows. I told him to think about water flowing through a hose. I asked him to think about what it would be like for a water hose to have a resistor on it. He thought of bending the hose as he and his brothers sometimes do when I’m trying to water the plants or wash the car. He quickly realized that making the resistor bigger was like putting more of a bend in the hose, and so the flow of water would go down as the resistance went up. The frustration evaporated, and he went back to work. He solved the rest of the problems on the page by thinking about water hoses rather than electrical circuits.

In his own way, my son was doing the same thing that James Dyson did. He was using his existing knowledge to help him solve a new problem. Like Dyson, he was using knowledge that came from a different realm of expertise.

This example highlights two of the key elements of the general formula for smart thinking. It is crucial to have high quality knowledge and to find that knowledge when you need it. My son reached an impasse, because he could not find any knowledge that he had that was related to the problem. By suggesting ways to re-describe the problem, I helped him to think of water flowing through a hose. Because he understood the way that water flow is affected by putting a kink in the hose, he was able to learn something new about the effects of resistance on an electrical current.

In this case, he was not able to access the knowledge he needed on his own. He had to have someone else’s help to enable him to move forward with the problem. In general, an impasse feels so frustrating, because you don’t know what to do next. That feeling of being stuck makes you anxious. Getting anxious and stressed when trying to solve a problem is not usually a recipe for successful thinking.

Problem solving can be stressful in part because you have a lot of mental habits that you have generated through years of practice thinking. Unfortunately, not all of those mental habits are conducive to smart thinking.

The thinking habits you have are not part of some fixed mental toolkit that you were born with. Those habits were created by going to school for years and then they were reinforced by all of the thinking you have done since then. Smarter thinking requires developing new habits to complement the ones that have already brought you success. It also requires changing habits that are getting in the way of smart thinking. When you reach an impasse, you need to have habits that allow you to do for yourself what I helped my son to do. You have to develop habits to create high quality knowledge and habits to help you find it when you need it.

If we distill the examples of Dyson, Fairhurst, Edison, chess experts, and even my son, we get the formula for Smart Thinking:

Smart Thinking requires developing Smart Habits to acquire High Quality Knowledge, and to Apply Your Knowledge to achieve your goals.

- This is an Excerpt from Smart Thinking (Perigee Books ©2012 Arthur B. Markman used with permission). Art Markman, PhD is a professor of Psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. He has written over 125 scientific papers. He blogs regularly for Psychology Today, Huffington Post, and Harvard Business Review, and teaches executive education classes  via his consulting company Maximizing Mind, LLC.

Another step has been taken in the research to develop practical brain-machine interfaces (BMI). The basic concept, as I have discussed previously, is to read electrical activity from the brain, then use a computer to interpret that electrical activity and use it to control something, which can be a cursor on a computer screen, a robotic arm, or any other electrical device.

In order for this technology to be useful it has to be possible for the person whose mental activity is being monitored to learn how to control the cursor or robot with their thoughts. Previous research shows that brain plasticity allows for such BMI prosthetics to feel natural – in other words, it is possible to learn how to control external devices through a BMI just as if they were a part of the body.

There are two basic ways to read electrical activity, through implanted sensors or through scalp sensors. The implanted sensors are much better because they are in direct contact with the brain, but then there needs to be some way for the sensor to communicate outside the brain. This is done currently with wires. This, of course, is an invasive procedure and can have complications. The scalp sensory are much safer and easier to apply, but the resolution is much lower as the electrical activity of the brain is attenuated by the skull and scalp – so it’s like looking through a thick pain of foggy glass. For this reason is seems that the future of BMI will be implantable sensors.

A new paper published in Nature reports on two patients who are paralyzed due to brain injury who have had sensors implanted in their brain. One patient, who is a paralyzed in all four limbs due to stroke, had a 96 channel sensor implanted in her motor cortex five years ago. This demonstrates the long term viability and safety of such implants. Further, she has had quadraparesis for 15 year. This means there was ten years between her injury and the implanting of the sensors. This is not a small point – it means that the motor cortex remains viable years after it has been disconnected from the muscles it controls. It is important to note that the subjects did not have injury to their motor cortex itself, but to structures farther downstream – either the brainstem or spinal cord.

One subject, shown in the video, was able to control a robotic arm with enough control to reach out and pick up a cup, bring in to her mouth, and then drink through a straw. The level of control is quite impressive, although still much slower and more clumsy than normal limb movement. The articles notes that she learned to do this without explicit training.

I have been fascinated with this line of research for years and as each new study comes out the future of BMI looks brighter and brighter. Every critical step in the process has been demonstrated: sensors can function for years in the brain, they can read brain activity, relevant brain areas remain active even years after injury, the brain’s plasticity can adapt to the sensors which can even feel “natural”, and subjects implanted with such devices can learn to control them well enough to perform specific functional tasks, like eating, drinking, or communicating via a computer. I can’t think of any significant component to the BMI system that has not already been demonstrated in humans.  The BMI paradigm works.

Researchers will still do basic research on BMI to gain more knowledge and familiarity with the details of how such systems can work, but essentially at this point the technology just needs to mature. One obvious improvement will be larger sensors that are able to read a larger portion of brain activity with more sensors. Computer hardware to interpret these signals does not seem to be a limiting factor in any way, but of course continued computer advances can only help. Software development also seems to be advanced enough to read and interpret the signals, but this too will likely continue to incrementally advance. Once you can control a computer, the whole world of information and communication is available. And robotics itself continues to incrementally advance, but is already at the point that useful robotic arms are available.

In addition to controlling a computer screen and controlling a robotic arm, a third possible application of BMI technology is to control the person’s own limbs. This has already been accomplished also – another team used a BMI on monkeys whose spinal cords were temporarily paralyzed. The monkeys were able to control their own arm and hand through a BMI that read their motor cortex activity and then bypassed the spinal cord to directly stimulated the muscles of the arm. The monkeys were able to perform tasks like picking up  a ball. Similar research has yet to be done in humans, but it should work just as well.

It may seem like this would be the ultimate goal of BMI technology – to restore control of one’s own body by bypassing an injury – there is a significant limitation to this approach. Muscles that have lost their nerve supply also lose their function. With an upper motor neuron lesion (brain or spinal cord above the nerves cell to the relevant muscles) muscles will become spastic with involuntary contractions. For lower motor neuron lesions (spinal cord region that supplies the muscles or the peripheral nerves that connect to the muscles) the muscle will become severely atrophied. Supplying electrical stimulation to the muscles does not reverse or prevent these effects, especially the atrophy. Muscles need specific trophic factors from the nerve endings to stay alive and healthy, electrical stimulation is not enough. There would be no point, therefore, in control either a spastic or extremely atrophied limb.

These are non-trivial issues that have been researched for years, without a good solution. Controlling a robotic limb, therefore, seems like a more viable option, at least for the foreseeable future. The robot limbs, however, could be designed like an exoskeleton to wear over a subject’s own limbs. This could theoretically enable them to walk, and also could keep their limbs active (a form of physical therapy) to help prevent contractures of the joints.

We are already at the point where BMI technology can be useful to a paralyzed individual. For those who are essentially “locked in” the ability to communicate or manipulate their environment at all is extremely useful. I would like to see this technology go beyond the research phase and be developed for use in  such patients. Meanwhile it will be interesting to see this technology continue to develop.

Interesting work from Krizman et al.:

Bilingualism profoundly affects the brain, yielding functional and structural changes in cortical regions dedicated to language processing and executive function [Crinion J, et al. (2006) Science 312:1537–1540; Kim KHS, et al. (1997) Nature 388:171–174]. Comparatively, musical training, another type of sensory enrichment, translates to expertise in cognitive processing and refined biological processing of sound in both cortical and subcortical structures. Therefore, we asked whether bilingualism can also promote experience-dependent plasticity in subcortical auditory processing. We found that adolescent bilinguals, listening to the speech syllable [da], encoded the stimulus more robustly than age-matched monolinguals. Specifically, bilinguals showed enhanced encoding of the fundamental frequency, a feature known to underlie pitch perception and grouping of auditory objects. This enhancement was associated with executive function advantages. Thus, through experience-related tuning of attention, the bilingual auditory system becomes highly efficient in automatically processing sound. This study provides biological evidence for system-wide neural plasticity in auditory experts that facilitates a tight coupling of sensory and cognitive functions.

Humans are poor at assessing probability, but psychologist Dylan Evans has found an elite group with genius scores on a scale he calls risk quotient

It has been known for years that eating too many foods containing "bad" fats, such as saturated fats or trans fats, isn't healthy for your heart. However, according to new research from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), one "bad" fat - saturated fat - was found to be associated with worse overall cognitive function and memory in women over time...

Dartmouth faculty and students played prominent roles in a recent study on the cognitive effects of head impacts among student athletes. Tested at the beginning and end of one season, 22 percent of those students who participated in contact sports scored significantly lower in memory and learning skills than expected, as opposed to only 4 percent of non-contact sport athletes...

In an advance that may someday provide health benefits for soldiers and athletes, a team of researchers has discovered a mechanism that could be the cause of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) in blast-exposed soldiers.

An annular solar eclipse will be visible May 20 from eastern Asia, the Pacific Ocean, and much of the North American West Coast.

A total solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, casting a shadow that blocks out the sun’s light. But in an annular eclipse, the moon is too far from the Earth and the sun’s light isn’t completely blocked. Instead, a thin ring of glowing fire will be visible around the black circle that is the moon’s shadow.

Above, you can watch a live feed of the event starting at 2:30 p.m. PDT courtesy of the Slooh Space Camera. Slooh will have telescope feeds from Japan, California, Arizona, and New Mexico and their show will include an array of special guests including solar researcher Lucie Green of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, and Bob Berman, contributing editor and monthly columnist for Astronomy Magazine.

If you’re looking to get a tip-top view, check out Panasonic’s live feed below, which will be taken from the summit of Japan’s Mt. Fuji. Engineers and mountain guides will be on hand to guide you through the event, starting at 3 p.m. PDT.

Live streaming by Ustream

Finally, you can catch amateur astronomer Scotty Degenhardt’s live broadcast from spooky Area 51 in Nevada. Will there be some unexplained phenomenon occurring at the same time as the eclipse? Watch to find out.

Live streaming by Ustream

If you are planning to see the skyward event yourself, it will begin shortly after 3 pm PDT over southern China, quickly sweeping across Japan. Just before 5 p.m. PDT the eclipse will reach its point of greatest occultation over the central Pacific. By 6:30 PDT it will be visible from Northern California and Nevada, eventually reaching as far as Texas. You can check the eclipse time for your local city if you’re in the U.S. with this table (.pdf) or with this one (.pdf) if you’re in Mexico, Canada, or Asia.

Those not directly in the path of the eclipse will still see some strange effects by stepping outside. Shadows cast from trees and bushes will contain thousands of tiny odd crescents, as the spaces between leaves become pinhole cameras.

This eclipse is the first of several spectacular heavenly phenomena this year. A partial lunar eclipse will occur in two weeks on June 4 and, a day later, the rare transit of Venus will take place. On Nov. 13, the Earth will experience a total solar eclipse. Unfortunately, that one will only be visible over a small patch of land in northern Australia. Finally, a penumbral lunar eclipse will take place on Nov. 28.

 

 

To learn its signature melody, the male songbird uses a trial-and-error process to mimic the song of its father, singing the tune over and over again, hundreds of times a day, making subtle changes in the pitch of the notes. For the male Bengalese finch, this rigorous training process begins around the age of 40 days and is completed about day 90, just as he becomes sexually mature and ready to use his song to woo females.

The CEO of Mar­bles: The Brain Store will provide an overview of What Brain Games Consumers Buy (in Marbles’ stores) and Why, at the upcoming 2012 SharpBrains Virtual Summit (June 7-14th, 2012).

Lind­say started Mar­bles: The Brain Store in 2008 with the sim­ple idea of find­ing the best brain games out there and putting them all in one place. Not just prod­ucts for aging baby boomers con­cerned about mem­ory loss and vic­tims of brain dis­or­ders, but also any­one who wanted to improve focus and atten­tion, enhance cre­ativ­ity, become bet­ter multi-taskers. Mar­bles opened three more Chicagoland stores in 2009 and four more stores in 2010. Pre­vi­ously, Lind­say was a Vice Pres­i­dent at Sand­box Indus­tries, a Chicago-based ven­ture cap­i­tal fund and incubator.

–> To learn more about her work, you can check out:

–> To Learn More about the 2012 Summit and to Register: click on 2012 SharpBrains Virtual Summit: Optimizing Health through Neuroplasticity, Innovation and Data (June 7-14th).

Why are neuroscientists interested in the skills of magicians? Because magicians have long known traits and states of the brain that brain scientists are just now learning. Why am I so interested in what magicians do to so masterfully simulate magic? Because they know the value of paying attention to attention, a critical skill in the my approach to conflict...

Preliminary results from an ongoing, large-scale study shows that oxytocin -- a naturally occurring substance produced in the brain and throughout the body -- increased brain function in regions that are known to process social information in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

Researchers have developed an MRI-based method to detect and monitor pH changes in living brains. The new technique provides the best evidence so far that pH changes do occur with normal function in the intact human brain. The team hopes to use the method to investigate the role of pH changes in psychiatric disease, including anxiety and depression.

If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs.

If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009.

Shortly after amphetamine-a-like stimulant drugs, largely based on variations on pipradrol and the cathinones appeared, and now ketamine-like drugs such as methoxetamine have become widespread.

Since 1997, 150 new psychoactive substances were reported. Almost a third of those appeared in 2010.

Last year, the US government banned several of these drugs although the effect has been minimal as the legal high laboratories have over-run the trenches of the drug warriors.

A new study just published in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology tracked the chemical composition of legal highs as the bans were introduced.

A key question was whether the legal high firms would just try and use the same banned chemicals and sell them under a different name.

The research team found that since the ban only 4.9% of the products contained any trace of the recently banned drugs. The remaining 95.1% of products contained drugs not covered by the law.

The chemicals in legal highs have fundamentally changed since the 2011 ban and the labs have outrun the authorities in less than a year.

Another new study has looked at legal highs derived from pipradrol – a drug developed in 1940s for treating obesity, depression, ADHD and narcolepsy.

It was made illegal in made countries during the 70s due to its potential for abuse because it gives an amphetamine-like high.

The study found that legal high labs have just been running through variations of the banned drug using simple modifications of the original molecule to make new unregulated versions.

The following paragraph is from this study and even if you’re not a chemist, you can get an impression of how the drug is been tweaked in the most minor ways to create new legal versions.

Modifications include: addition of halogen, alkyl or alkoxy groups on one or both of the phenyl rings or addition of alkyl, alkenyl, haloalkyl and hydroxyalkyl groups on the nitrogen atom. Other modifications that have been reported include the substitution of a piperidine ring with an azepane ring (7-membered ring), a morpholine ring or a pyridine ring or the fusion of a piperidine ring with a benzene ring. These molecules, producing amphetamine-like effects, increase the choice of new stimulants to be used as legal highs in the coming years.

New, unknown and poorly understand psychoactive chemicals are appearing faster than they can be regulated.

The market is being driven by a demand for drugs that have the same effects as existing legal highs but won’t get you thrown in prison.

The drug war isn’t only being lost, it’s being made obsolete.

By now, most of us know that the brain often reshapes memories, if not making them up entirely. Life story writers are often writing fiction. Tellers of tall tales may believe they are telling the truth. Witnesses in court can be sincere but very wrong. For a good overview of several elements of the fragility and mistiness of memory, listen...

Dr. Posner will provide an update on latest research and applications to develop brain networks and self-control, at the upcoming 2012 SharpBrains Virtual Summit (June 7-14th, 2012).

Michael Pos­ner is Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus at the Uni­ver­sity of Ore­gon and Adjunct Pro­fes­sor at the Weill Med­ical Col­lege in New York (Sack­ler Insti­tute). He is cur­rently engaged in a project with Mary K. Roth­bart to under­stand the devel­op­ment of brain net­works under­ly­ing atten­tion and self-control. This work explores the inter­ac­tion of genes and expe­ri­ence in nor­mal and atyp­i­cal development.

–> To learn more about his work, you can check out:

–> To Learn More about the 2012 Summit and to Register: click on 2012 SharpBrains Virtual Summit: Optimizing Health through Neuroplasticity, Innovation and Data (June 7-14th).

A fantastic short film about what you might see when your mind is uploaded to an online storage cloud in 2052. It’s subtitled “the Singularity, ruined by lawyers”.

The piece is by futurist Tom Scott who obviously sees the consciousness uploading business far more pessimistically than me.

Personally, I’m going to get uploaded to a linux server. It’s be completely free but won’t support all my mental states.

Yes, I’ll be doing software jokes in the afterlife. No, you won’t have to humour me.  

Link to fantastic video ‘Welcome to Life’.