What is it like to be a baby? For centuries, this question would have seemed absurd: behind that adorable facade was a mostly empty head. A baby, after all, is missing most of the capabilities that define the human mind, such as language and the ability to reason. (…)

Now, however, scientists have begun to dramatically revise their concept of a baby’s mind. By using new research techniques and tools, they’ve revealed that the baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation - they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are.

This hyperawareness comes with several benefits. For starters, it allows young children to figure out the world at an incredibly fast pace. Although babies are born utterly helpless, within a few years they’ve mastered everything from language - a toddler learns 10 new words every day - to complex motor skills such as walking. According to this new view of the baby brain, many of the mental traits that used to seem like developmental shortcomings, such as infants’ inability to focus their attention, are actually crucial assets in the learning process.

In fact, in some situations it might actually be better for adults to regress into a newborn state of mind. While maturity has its perks, it can also inhibit creativity and lead people to fixate on the wrong facts. When we need to sort through a lot of seemingly irrelevant information or create something completely new, thinking like a baby is our best option. (…)

One of the most surprising implications of this new research concerns baby consciousness, or what babies actually experience as they interact with the outside world. While scientists and doctors have traditionally assumed that babies are much less conscious than adults - this is why, until the 1970s, many infants underwent surgery without anesthesia - that view is being overturned. Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even the most mundane activities seem new and exciting.

{ Boston Globe | Continue reading }

photo { Mark Ryden }

The body has a built-in time-keeping system, known as a circadian rhythm, that helps us keep track of when it’s time to eat, sleep, wake up and perform other body functions. This system is partly governed by the cycle of day and night.

Changing time zones or working the late shift can throw off the body’s sense of timing because it changes the timing of our exposure to light.

{ LiveScience | Continue reading }

Scientists claim they are a step closer to curing jet lag after a new study reveals how the phenomenon confuses the body’s internal clocks.

Jet lag is caused as the brain struggles to adjust to a new time zone. Now researchers have found that the condition disrupts the body’s two main sleep patterns in different ways.

While neuron cells in the brain which govern deep sleep can reset themselves in a matter of days, the body’s rapid eye movement (REM) period of sleep can take up to one week to adjust. The study was undertaken in rats exposed to different amounts of light designed to simulate the effects of flying from Paris to New York.

{ The Telegraph | Continue reading }

…I.Q. has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Professor Nisbett says.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

An elaborate electronic helmet that allows the wearer to control a robot by thought alone has been unveiled by researchers in Japan.

Scientists at the Honda Research Institute demonstrated the invention today by using it to move the arms and legs of an Asimo humanoid robot.

To control the robot, the person wearing the helmet only had to think about making the movement. Its inventors hope that one day the mind-control technology will allow people to do things like turn air conditioning on or off and open their car boot without putting their shopping down.

The helmet is the first “brain-machine interface” to combine two different techniques for picking up activity in the brain. Sensors in the helmet detect electrical signals through the scalp in the same way as a standard EEG (electroencephalogram). The scientists combined this with another technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, which can be used to monitor changes in blood flow in the brain.

{ SOTT | Continue reading }

Personality types are linked with structural differences in the brain — which could explain why one child grows up to be impulsive and outgoing while another becomes diligent and introspective.

Anatomical differences between the brains of 85 people have been measured and linked with the four main categories of personality types as defined by psychiatrists.

The researchers said that the brain differences are structural and can be measured as variations in the size of specific regions of the brain that appear to be linked with each of the four personality types. (…)

If the findings are confirmed, they suggest that children are not only born with a given personality type, but they develop anatomically different brains as a result of being that sort of person.

It raises the prospect of being able to test a young child’s future personality by viewing the anatomy of their brain with a hospital scanner.

The four personality types were classified as “novelty seeking” - characterised by impulsive actions; “harm avoidance” - marked by pessimism and shyness; “reward dependence” - with an addictive personality; and “persistence” - who are people who tend to be industrious, hard-working and perfectionist.

{ The New Zealand Herald | Continue reading }

Go to the emergency room with chest pains, and physicians can determine fairly routinely–with blood tests and an electrocardiogram–whether or not you’ve had a heart attack. A bump to the head is another matter. Currently, no blood tests are approved as a way to diagnose brain injury in the United States. In the case of mild head injuries or more serious ones that take time to develop, it’s difficult to tell early on how severely a patient has been hurt and whether she will suffer long-term consequences.

The high-profile case of actress Natasha Richardson, who died last month after a seemingly minor fall on the ski slopes, demonstrates this uncertainty in a dramatic fashion. According to news reports, she was walking and talking after the fall and refused medical attention, but later developed a headache and was rushed to the hospital. Richardson died two days later of an epidural hematoma, an injury in which blood builds up between the brain’s outer membrane and the skull. (…)

Because it’s difficult to determine who needs the scan, many patients get it unnecessarily, and others who do need it may be sent home.

Scientists hope that a blood test to detect proteins and other molecules released into the blood after brain injury could help.

{ Technology Review/MIT | Continue reading }

Suppose scientists could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain. Could make you forget a chronic fear, a traumatic loss, even a bad habit.

For all that scientists have studied it, the brain remains the most complex and mysterious human organ — and, now, the focus of billions of dollars’ worth of research to penetrate its secrets.

This is the first article in a series that will look in depth at some of the insights these projects are producing.

Researchers in Brooklyn have recently accomplished comparable feats, with a single dose of an experimental drug delivered to areas of the brain critical for holding specific types of memory, like emotional associations, spatial knowledge or motor skills.

The drug blocks the activity of a substance that the brain apparently needs to retain much of its learned information. And if enhanced, the substance could help ward off dementias and other memory problems.

So far, the research has been done only on animals. But scientists say this memory system is likely to work almost identically in people.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

We don’t need to annihilate bad memories to get over them. A normal brain is able to take in new information that overrides or “unlearns” traumatic experiences. Researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have found the neurotransmitter that turns this ability on and off.

{ Seed Magazine | Continue reading }

A popular account for how we empathise with other people’s physical pain involves the idea that we perform a mental simulation of their suffering, using the pain pathways of our own brain. Support for this comes from research showing that when I see you in pain, the pain areas of my own brain are pricked into activity.

Now an intriguing study by Nicolas Danziger and colleagues has tested this simulation account with the help of patients with congenital insensitivity to pain - that is, they’ve grown up with abnormal pain fibres, thus rendering them unable to feel physical pain. The findings may require us to rethink the way we characterise some brain areas associated with pain processing.

Thirteen patients with the inability to feel pain, plus 13 healthy controls, had their brains scanned while they viewed videos of body parts being injured and people’s painful facial expressions.

Even though the patients had never felt pain themselves, the sight of other people’s pain triggered activity in the insular and anterior mid-cingulate cortex of their brains - areas which have previously been associated with pain processing, and which were also activated in the brains of the controls.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

The single most famous case study in the history of neuropsychology is that of an anonymous memory-impaired man usually referred to only by the initials H. M. This patient has one of the most severe cases of amnesia ever observed; he has been followed for over 40 years by more than 100 researchers, and is the subject of dozens of research papers and book chapters. (…)

H. M. (sometimes referred to as Henry M.) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1926. His amnesia was the result of neurosurgery performed on him in an effort to alleviate the symptoms of his epilepsy. The origins of H. M.’s epilepsy are unclear. His condition is sometimes attributed to a bicycle accident he had the age of 9. (…) By the early 1950s, he was having up to 10 seizures and blackouts a week. The seizures became incapacitating and, as a result, H. M. was unable to continue work as a motor winder.

H. M.’s condition was intractable - he proved to be completely unresponsive to the various anti-convulsant drugs he was prescribed, even when given the maximum dosage. (…) In 1953, at the age of 27, he was referred to William Beecher Scoville, the founder and director of the Department of Neurosurgery at Hartford Hospital. At the time, Scoville was experimenting with surgery as a means of treating psychosis. He localized H. M.’s seizures to the temporal lobe and, on September 1st of that year, performed on him an experimental surgical procedure called a bilateral medial temporal lobe resection. This involved the removal of large portions of the temporal lobe from both hemispheres of the brain.

The surgery was successful in alleviating the symptoms of H. M.’s epilepsy - afterwards, he had about two seizures a year. But it had been performed as a last resort, and it had devastating consequences: H. M. had been left with profound anterograde amnesia and partial retrograde amnesia.

To this day, he has no memory of anything that has happened since he underwent surgery, and cannot acquire new factual knowledge about the world around him. He is unable to retain any kind of new information for more than several minutes. He would be seen re-reading the same magazine over and over again, without ever remembering that he had read it before. And he cannot remember much of what happened in the decade prior to his surgery.

{ ScienceBlogs/Neurophilosophy | Continue reading }

artwork { Agnes Martin, Tremolo, 1962 | Ink on paper }

The human brain simply may not be wired up to deal with lots of different levels of value. A series of psychological experiments, many dating back to the 1950s, shows that we cannot distinguish between more than about five degrees of, well, almost anything: sweetness in a solution; saltiness; the pitch of a note; brightness; the intensity of an electric shock; the length of a line; or the pungency of a smell. The details vary, but the level of consistency is surprising.

Practice does not help. Neither, surprisingly, does varying the gaps in the scale: it’s no easier to distinguish five sounds between “very loud” and “very quiet” than between “fairly loud” and “fairly quiet”. Some people have perfect pitch and can transcend these limits when it comes to musical tones, but there seem to be few other exceptions. No wonder so many reviews use a scale of one to five stars.

Nick Chater, a psychologist at University College London, argues that the human brain doesn’t have an internal scale for these stimuli, nor for “utility” or “value”. Instead the brain makes comparisons: that light was brighter than the previous light. We can just about wrap our minds around the idea of “much brighter” by comparing a recent gap in brightness with some previous gap in brightness.

{ Financial Times | Continue reading }

artwork { James Rosenquist, Zone, 1960-61 }

Neuroscientists at New York University and Harvard University have identified the neural systems involved in forming first impressions of others. The findings show how we encode social information and then evaluate it in making these initial judgments.

Making sense of others in a social interaction is not easy—each new person we meet may be a source of ambiguous and complex information. However, when encountering someone for the first time, we are often quick to judge whether we like that person or not. In fact, previous research has shown that people make relatively accurate and persistent evaluations based on rapid observations of even less than half a minute.

Participants’ brain activity was observed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). (…) The neuroimaging results showed significant activity in two regions of the brain during the encoding of impression-relevant information. The first, the amygdala, is a small structure in the medial temporal lobe that previously has been linked to emotional learning about inanimate objects, as well as social evaluations based on trust or race group. The second, the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), has been linked to economic decision-making and assigning subjective value to rewards.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

It used to be believed that people had a level of general intelligence with which they were born that was unaffected by environment and stayed the same, more or less, throughout life. But now it’s known that environmental influences are large enough to have considerable effects on intelligence, perhaps even during your own lifetime. (…)

Flynn first noted that standardized intelligence quotient (I.Q.) scores were rising by three points per decade in many countries, and even faster in some countries like the Netherlands and Israel. (…) These I.Q. increases over a single generation suggest that the environmental conditions for developing brains have become more favorable in some way.

What might be changing? One strong candidate is working memory, defined as the ability to hold information in mind while manipulating it to achieve a cognitive goal. Examples include remembering a clause while figuring out how it relates the rest of a sentence, or keeping track of the solutions you’ve already tried while solving a puzzle. Flynn has pointed out that modern times have increasingly rewarded complex and abstract reasoning. Differences in working memory capacity account for 50 to 70 percent of individual differences in fluid intelligence (abstract reasoning ability) in various meta-analyses, suggesting that it is one of the major building blocks of I.Q. This idea is intriguing because working memory can be improved by training.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }