Your View of Time Creates Your World

This 10-minute video can teach you more about why younger people's mind-set is so different than older people's than any other instructional presentation I've ever seen. Period.

The whole Past/Present/Future schematic explains much more than I'd ever imagined ~ affecting geographical locations, generational age, and educational potential. The discussion about video games and their impact on educational systems is just one astounding example.

This is one video I'll watch over and over to make sure I understand its finer points, which are very powerful and meaningful. My sincere thanks to psychologist Philip Zimbardo for sharing his thoughts and findings!

Our Brain and Its Forgotten Gift

I encourage you to spend 12 minutes viewing this little video by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist as he discusses the bicameral brain. He presents a good update on the roles and effects of the brain's two hemispheres, clarifying some misconceptions left over from the 1960s.

He ends the video with one of my favorite Einstein quotes: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant but has forgotten the gift."

Depersonalization Getting More Common

Depersonalization disorder may not be as rare as we think, affecting perhaps one percent of the population, according to recent research. It’s normally associated with an “unreal, spaced-out feeling you might get while severely jet-lagged or hung-over,” according to New Scientist magazine.

The sense of self has much to do with our awareness of our physicality and how we interact with the outside world. The brain integrates all the information coming in from the external world and from internal sensations and forms a default setting of "this is me here and now", says Nick Medford, who studies depersonalization at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK. "If that setting changes somehow, then you feel 'not right', in a way that might be very hard to put into words."

There are probably several ways that change can occur, but Medford's work is looking at the emotional detachment characteristic of depersonalization. In people who have the disorder, areas of the brain that are key to emotion are much less active than normal, he says.

Click here for thearticle.

Lucid Dreaming Providing More Insights

Flying is a frequent occurrence in lucid dreams.

People who can deliberately control their dreams during sleep ~ known as “lucid dreamers” ~ might offer insight into the self-reflection capabilities of the mind.

According to LiveScience.com:

It is difficult to get a full picture of what goes on in the brain when we make the transition from sleep to wakefulness. In fact, the specific areas of the brain underlying our restored self-perception and consciousness when we wake up have eluded scientists, according to a statement by the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. 

But a team of researchers was able to get a picture of that isolated activity in lucid dreamers.  

"In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming,” study researcher Martin Dresler, of Max Planck, said in a statement. "It's only in a lucid dream that the dreamer gets a meta-insight into his or her state."

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, the team compared the activity of the brain during one of these lucid-dreaming periods with the activity just beforehand in a normal dream. The results showed that a specific cortical network is activated when lucid consciousness is attained.

Click here for the article.

Meditators' Brains Process Info Faster

New research at UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro-Imaging indicates that people who meditate have larger amounts of gyrification ~ the “folding” of the cortex ~ than non-meditators, and this enables their brains to process information faster.

"Rather than just comparing meditators and non-meditators, we wanted to see if there is a link between the amount of meditation practice and the extent of brain alteration," Eileen Luders, an assistant professor at the UCLA lab, told ScienceDaily. "That is, correlating the number of years of meditation with the degree of folding."

According to ScienceDaily.com:

The meditators had practiced their craft on average for 20 years using a variety of meditation types -- Samatha, Vipassana, Zen and more. The researchers applied a well-established and automated whole-brain approach to measure cortical gyrification at thousands of points across the surface of the brain.  

They found pronounced group differences (heightened levels of gyrification in active meditation practitioners) across a wide swatch of the cortex, including the left precentral gyrus, the left and right anterior dorsal insula, the right fusiform gyrus and the right cuneus. 

Perhaps most interesting, though, was the positive correlation between the number of meditation years and the amount of insular gyrification.

Luders cautions that while genetic and other environmental factors could have contributed to the effects the researchers observed, "The positive correlation between gyrification and the number of practice years supports the idea that meditation enhances regional gyrification."

Click here for the complete article.

Dreams Activate Brain As In "Real Life"

Scientists, for the first time, have analyzed the activity of the human brain during dreaming. Using lucid dreamers ~ people who are aware of their dreaming state and are able to alter a dream's content ~ they determined that brain activity during a dream matches the activity of the brain during a state of wakefulness.

According to ScienceDaily.com:

Methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have enabled scientists to visualize and identify the precise spatial location of brain activity during sleep. However, up to now, researchers have not been able to analyze specific brain activity associated with dream content, as measured brain activity can only be traced back to a specific dream if the precise temporal coincidence of the dream content and measurement is known. 

Whether a person is dreaming is something that could only be reported by the individual himself.

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, the Charité hospital in Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig asked lucid dreamers to become aware of their dream actions while sleeping and then repeat certain actions while awake.

Click here for the complete article.

Your Brain Often Battles Itself

New studies show that our brains often battle with themselves ~ as in the case of keeping a secret ~ and create stress in the process. According to NPR.org:

Your brain doesn't like to keep secrets. Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, have shown that writing down secrets in a journal or telling a doctor your secrets actually decreases the level of stress hormones in your body. 

Keeping a secret, meanwhile, does the opposite. Your brain also doesn't like stress hormones. So when you have a secret to tell, the part of your brain that wants to tell the secret is constantly fighting with the part of your brain that wants to keep the information hidden, says neuroscientist David Eagleman.  

"You have competing populations in the brain — one part that wants to tell something and one part that doesn't," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And the issue is that we're always cussing at ourselves or getting angry at ourselves or cajoling ourselves. What we're seeing here is that there are different parts of the brain that are battling it out. And the way that that battle tips, determines your behavior."

Eagleman's new book, Incognito, examines the unconscious part of our brains and the complex neural networks that constantly fight one another and influence our behavior.

Click here for the complete article and interview.

Red Wariness is Evolutionary

New research indicates that evolution has played a key role in why people have strong associations with the color red ~ stop, danger, hot, and dominance, to name just a few. Tests into the meaning and impact of colors involved the male rhesus macaques, a species of monkey found in Puerto Rico.

“The similarity of our results with those in humans suggests that avoiding red or acting submissively in its presence may stem from an inherited psychological predisposition,” says Dartmouth College neuroscientist Jerald D. Kralik.

According to Medical News Today:

Two human experimenters, one male and one female, entered the monkeys' colony and found isolated males to test. Both people knelt down, placed a Styrofoam tray in front of them, drew an apple slice from their backpacks, held the slice at chest level for the monkey to see, then placed the apple on the trays. Both stood up simultaneously and took two steps back. 

The monkey typically went directly to the slice he wanted, ran off, and ate it.

The humans wore T-shirts and caps, whose colors ~ red, green, and blue ~ were changed in each of four conditions: red on female, green on male; then vice-versa; red versus blue; blue versus green.

The results were striking. The monkeys paid no mind to the sex of the experimenter. Green or blue made little difference to them either. But in the significant majority of cases, they steered clear of the red-clad humans and stole the food from the other tray.

"We ~ primates and then humans ~ are very visual," Kralik explains. "We are also very social." In both realms, color has important effects, from telling us which food is edible to helping us gauge the emotions of others by the relative redness of their skin. Put the two together, he says, "and we start to see that color may have a deeper and wider-ranging influence on us than we have previously thought."

Click here for the complete article.

Do We See the "Apocalypse" as Renewal?

People’s fascination with “end times” likely is rooted in the emotional and cognitive processes of our brains. Such thinking helps us make sense of the world, according to Michael Shermer, author of The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Conspiracies and Politics.

Writing in New Scientist, he says:

Emotionally, the end of the world is actually a renewal, a transition to a new beginning and a better life to come. In religious narratives, God smites sinners and resurrects the virtuous.

 For secularists, the sins of humanity are atoned through a change in our political, economic or ideological system. Environmental prognostications of calamity are usually followed with reproaches and recommendations for how we can save the planet. 

… Cognitively, there are several processes at work, starting with the fact that our brains are pattern-seeking belief engines.

… Apocalypse thinking is a form of pattern-seeking based on our cognitive percepts of time passing. We connect A to B to C to D causally because they are connected chronologically, and even though occasionally they form false patterns, in the natural world they are connected often enough that in our brains time and causality are inseparable.

Shermer believes apocalyptic visions help people make sense of “an often seemingly senseless world.”

Click here for the complete article.

Drawing: Albrecht Durer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

More on Fear and the Amygdala

Several recent commentaries map brain structure against political views, all with similar findings based on recent research: Conservatives have larger amygdalas and more fear, while liberals have a larger anterior cingulate cortex and greater tolerance.

It remains unclear, however, whether the structural differences cause the divergence in political views or are the effect of them.

According to new article on a recent study from the University of London, other research has shown greater brain activity in those areas, according to which political views a person holds, but the University of London’s is the first study to show a physical difference in size in the same regions.

"We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala," the study said.

"Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual's political orientation," said Ryota Kanai of the University College London, where the research took place. "Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure."

People with a large amygdala are "more sensitive to disgust" and tend to "respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions," the study said. "Thus, it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views."

Click here for the complete article.

Ode to the Brain

"Ode to the Brain" is the ninth episode in the Symphony of Science music video series. Here’s creator John Boswell’s explanation of this video:

Through the powerful words of scientists Carl Sagan, Robert Winston, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Jill Bolte Taylor, Bill Nye, and Oliver sacks, it covers different aspects the brain including its evolution, neuron networks, folding, and more. The material sampled for this video comes from Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Jill Bolte Taylor's TED Talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran's TED Talk, Bill Nye's Brain episode, BBC's "The Human Body", Oliver sacks' TED Talk, Discovery Channel's "Human Body: Pushing the Limits" and more.

Political Conservatives and the Larger Amygdala

New research linking conservative political views with an enlarged part of the brain called the amygdala ~ responsible for reflexive impulses such as fear ~ still lacks sufficient data to say which came first: Does a fear-provoking enlarged amygdala encourage political conservatism, or does conservative thinking actually change the brain to create a larger amygdala?

Conservatives also display a smaller anterior cingulated, which is the part of the brain responsible for courage and optimism.

"We were very surprised to find that there was an area of the brain that we could predict political attitude,” according to Professor Geraint Rees of the University College of London, who lead the study. "It is very surprising because it does suggest there is something about political attitude that is encoded in our brain structure through our experience or that there is something in our brain structure that determines or results in political attitude."

The new research ~ to be published this year ~ supports an earlier study showing that some people were born with a "Liberal Gene" that makes people more likely to seek out less conventional political views. That gene, a neurotransmitter in the brain called DRD4, could even be stimulated by the novelty value of radical opinions, according to the London Telegraph.

Click here for the London Telegraph article.

Music's Popularity Resides in Dopamine

Music causes the brain to release the chemical dopamine, creating a pleasurable rush and even helping listeners to anticipate a particularly thrilling moment. Previous research suggested a role for dopamine~ a substance brain cells release to communicate with each other ~ but new data shows it affects the brain directly.

Scientists for years have known dopamine creates pleasurable sensations when people eat, have sex, or take drugs. According to the Associated Press:

The tie to dopamine helps explain why music is so widely popular across cultures, Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal write in an article posted online Sunday by the journal Nature Neuroscience. 

The study used only instrumental music, showing that voices aren't necessary to produce the dopamine response, Salimpoor said. It will take further work to study how voices might contribute to the pleasure effect, she said.

The researchers described brain-scanning experiments with eight volunteers who were chosen because they reliably felt chills from particular moments in some favorite pieces of music. That characteristic let the experimenters study how the brain handles both anticipation and arrival of a musical rush.

Results suggested that people who enjoy music but don't feel chills are also experiencing dopamine's effects, Zatorre said.

PET scans showed the participants' brains pumped out more dopamine in a region called the striatum when listening to favorite pieces of music than when hearing other pieces.

Click here for the article.

Is the Future Leaking into the Present? Maybe So.

Alice and the White Queen.

Ordinary people may be altered by experiences they haven't had yet, indicating the future can leak into the present. At least that’s the conclusion of a respected psychology professor, Daryl Bem of Cornell.

According to NPR:

Already critics are jumping up and down, saying this can't be, time is not porous, the experiments are flawed. But because this is the Professor Daryl Bem (he's in your high school textbook for his work on self perception) and because the journal publishing his article is top-of-the-line rigorous, all over the world psychologists are trying to duplicate what Dr. Bem has done. If serious scientists can repeat his results, this story is going to be big. 

The NPR article describes two experiments Bem conducted at Cornell that seem to prove his hypothesis. The article concludes:

So who knows? Maybe psychologists, like quantum physicists, will have to deal with the deep strangeness of our universe. Maybe time doesn't behave properly. Maybe it makes little leaps, suddenly appears uninvited when porn is in the air. Or maybe not.

It's not like we've never thought about this before. In his paper Bem recalls that in Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen casually mentions to Alice that in her realm, "memory works both ways."

Not only does the Queen remember past events, she can also remember "things that happened the week after next."

Alice, always puzzled, says, "I'm sure mine only works one way... I can't remember things before they happen." The Queen seems a little sorry for Alice. "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," she says.

In a year or so, Bem suggests, we may have to agree with the Queen.

Click here for the article. 

Research Discovers Pathways for Neurotransmitters

Depiction of a neurotransmitter.

New research showing that the neurotransmitter serotonin uses a special pathway to regulate biological functions could greatly affect future therapies for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia.

The Scripps Research Institute study published in the October 6, 2010 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience contends serotonin has significant influence over control of perception, cognition, sleep, appetite, pain, and mood.

"Our study shows that while both serotonin and hallucinogens act at the serotonin 2A receptor, serotonin utilizes a very specific pathway and its actions are independent of those produced by hallucinogens," says Laura Bohn, an associate professor on the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute. "Future drug discovery efforts to identify lead compounds for treatment of depression may consider focusing upon those that only engage that pathway. This work may also lend insight into the mechanisms that underlie the hallucinations that occur in schizophrenia."

This may be particularly important for the treatment of depression because traditional therapies ~ focusing on elevating serotonin levels ~ can sometimes produce serious side effects such as hallucinations, and is especially serious when antidepressants are mixed with monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

Click here for the complete PhysOrg.com article.

Impulsive Behavior Tied to Excess Dopamine

Bright areas of this brain cross-section show elevated levels of dopamine.

Researchers at Vanderbilt University say high levels of the brain chemical dopamine contribute to impulsive behaviors, creating problems in acts from shopping to substance abuse.

“Think of it as very similar to how a thermostat works,” researcher Joshua Buckholz told NPR. Sensors in the lower-middle part of the brain ~ called autoreceptors ~  tell the midbrain to start pumping dopamine or stop, but new research shows the autorecptors of highly impulsive people aren’t functioning properly.

Other researchers believe there's more to impulsiveness than the dopamine thermostat, according to NPR. “This is not a very huge effect,” says Ahmad Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. He thinks other brain chemicals with their own thermostats also play a role.

“I think that there is a circuitry of self-control that's fundamental to many, many aspects of living,” agrees Edythe London, a psychiatrist at UCLA. She says understanding the dopamine thermostat and other factors may lead to successful treatments for addiction and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Click here for the NPR article.

The Astonishing "Living Camera" Draws Rome

The implications of this 5-minute video are enormous. Here, through the experiment involving Stephen Wiltshire ~ known as "the living camera" ~ we can only be amazed at the potential of the human brain.

Brain Now Found to Better Distinguish Fear

New research into the brain’s capacity for storing fear holds promise for treating post-traumatic stress syndrome, among other fears that lurk in our minds and can haunt our lives.

The new study results appear in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience. According to PhysOrg.com:

The research focused on the brain's amygdala, which has previously been shown to store fear memories. However, prior studies have indicated that the amygdala does not discriminate among the different threats it holds and processes. In other words, whether you are afraid of dogs because you were once bitten by a dog or you are afraid of pizza because you once nearly choked to death eating it, all the amygdala remembers is that both of these experiences were scary. By contrast, other brain areas, such as cortex, ensures that all other aspects of these fearful events in your life are remembered.

New evidence, however, points to the amygdala being able to make distinctions among the fear memories it holds and retrieves.

Click here for the PhysOrg.com article.

Nonsense Can Lead to Finding Unseen Patterns

Illustration for Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky."

Nonsense and anomalies can befuddle us, but out of our confusion can come some of our most creative thinking. New research is showing that, faced with nonsensical situations, our minds seek patterns we would otherwise might have missed.

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling (being perplexed) that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” Travis Proulx of the University of California tells the New York Times. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”

According to the Times:

Researchers have long known that people cling to their personal biases more tightly when feeling threatened. After thinking about their own inevitable death, they become more patriotic, more religious and less tolerant of outsiders, studies find. When insulted, they profess more loyalty to friends — and when told they’ve done poorly on a trivia test, they even identify more strongly with their school’s winning teams.

In a series of new papers, Dr. Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, argue that these findings are variations on the same process: maintaining meaning, or coherence. The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.

Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activity is recorded, the greater the motivation to seek and correct errors in the real world, the research suggests.

Click here for the New York Times article.

Daydreaming Promotes Problem-Solving

New research indicates that when the brain wanders ~ as in daydreaming ~ it is working even harder to solve problems.

Scientists scanning the brains of people inside MRI machines found that a "default network" deep inside a human brain becomes more active during daydreaming. The scans also revealed intense activity in the executive network, the outlying region of the brain associated with complex problem-solving, said neuroscientist Kalina Christoff.

According to Cosmos Magazine:

"People assume that when the mind wanders away it just gets turned off ~ but we show the opposite, that when it wanders, it turns on," said Christoff, head of a neuroscience laboratory at the University of British Columbia.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest daydreaming might be a better way to solve problems than intense focusing.

"People who let themselves daydream might not think in the same focused way as when performing a goal-oriented task, but they bring in more mental and brain resources," said Christoff.

She argued that now people might change their attitudes towards daydreamers. "Within ourselves, we have absorbed that attitude that mind wandering is a bad thing. We're harsh on ourselves, if we catch ourselves mind wandering," she said. "A more playful attitude might allow you to call in more resources."

Some research indicates people typically spend a third of their waking time daydreaming. "It's a big part of our lives, but it's been largely ignored by science," Christoff said.

Click here for the complete Cosmos Magazine article.

Painting is "The Daydream" by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1880.