The Thinking Meat Project

The power of language

One night in the summer of 1987, I was awake late at night at a mountaintop solar observatory. The town of Sunspot, New Mexico, had maybe somewhere between seventy-five and a hundred inhabitants, all of them asleep as far as I could tell, but I was restless that night, emotionally unsettled by my grandmother’s recent death. Sunspot boasted a small informal lending library, in the form of a single room full of books in one of the houses. It was a small collection but the terms of service were fantastic: You walked over any time you wanted to and borrowed what you liked. Bibliotropism drew me there that night, and I stumbled across a book by Loren Eiseley called The Firmament of Time, which is a beautifully written meditation on the human race’s progress in understanding the place it occupies in the universe. As I read, Eiseley seemed to be speaking directly to me, offering an inspiring view of human life and the meaning to be found in the scientific endeavor. My mind was dazzled and calmed by his words, and eventually I relaxed enough to be able to sleep that night.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how really amazing communication is: that facts, ideas, opinions, and emotions can be conveyed from one human brain to another. (On my pessimistic days, I wonder how well any brain communicates anything to another brain beyond things like, “Ham and cheese, easy on the mayo.”) Eiseley had been dead for 17 years when I read that book, but that didn’t matter. I could still incorporate the products of his mental activities into my own brain. How cool is that?

A recent study has examined how the spoken word affects the brains of listeners using a recorded story. The speaker’s brain patterns were recorded by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as she told the story, and then the brain patterns of listeners were examined as they heard the story played back to them. Various control conditions were also examined (listening to a story in a language the listener didn’t understand, or listening to a different story told by the same speaker). When the listeners understood the story, patterns of activity over wide areas of their brains were similar to those of the original story-teller; this didn’t happen in the control conditions. A closer match in neural activity was linked to a better understanding of the story. This guest blog post at Scientific American has more details.

The comments bring out a couple of interesting points. For example, while it’s tempting to think of the speaker as controlling the listener’s brain, the interaction between listener and story-teller was probably at least as much about collaboration as it was about control. In some instances where the listener was really on top of the story, activity in the listener’s prefrontal cortex preceded similar activity in the speaker’s brain, indicating anticipation of what was going to come next. The listener was actively participating in entering the story. (And on a related note, we’ve all experienced the limits of language in trying to convey ideas or information to an unreceptive brain.) When I read the article, my first thought was to wonder whether the same thing holds for writing; this question, and a similar question about music, also came up in the comments. (Answer: We don’t know yet, but the method used in this study should be applicable to those questions as well.)

Anyway, the whole thing gives you something interesting to think about the next time you talk to someone. And I have to wonder what’s happening in your brain right now as you read these words, and how much it might resemble what’s going on in mine as I write them.

The paper is available for free online (for now, anyway):
Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication,
Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online before print, July 26, 2010, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1008662107

          

Gray world

Although we sometimes refer to sadness as “the blues,” depression can often feel more like a state of unrelieved gray. Some recent research has found that in the retinas of depressed people, the response to black/white contrasts was notably lower than in healthy people. This backs up an earlier study which found that depressed people had a harder time detecting differences between black and white (I’m assuming they were talking about fairly subtle differences). The effect of viewing a more monotone world seems obvious (what a downer), but it’s not clear to me how to interpret it. This seems like evidence of a glitch in the sensory equipment that’s associated with depression. On the other hand, some researchers think that depression might be (or might have been) an adaptive withdrawal from the world; in that case, the change in vision might be part of the mechanism that causes that withdrawal. At any rate, the effect was big enough that they could tell most of the depressed people from the healthy ones.

You can read more about the work in this article from Science Daily. The full citation is:

Seeing Gray When Feeling Blue? Depression Can Be Measured in the Eye of the Diseased, by Emanuel Bubl, Elena Kern, Dieter Ebert, Michael Bach, Ludger Tebartz van Elst. Biological Psychiatry 68(2): 205-208 (15 July 2010).

          

Biochemical personality change?

SSRIs (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) have been one of the most high-profile antidepressants in the past 15 or 20 years. The role of various neurotransmitters, including serotonin, in depression is still far from clear, which makes it hard to say exactly how SSRIs work (and why they sometimes don’t). A story from late last year adds another interesting complication: It appears that SSRIs might be capable of causing personality change, distinct from the effect they have on depression.

A study examined 240 depressed adults, some of whom received an SSRI (paroxetine); the others were given either a placebo or cognitive therapy. Their depressive symptoms and their personality traits were compared before, during, and after one year of treatment. All of the people in the study experienced relief from their depression. In addition to these changes, the people who took paroxetine also showed significant changes in two of the Big FIve personality traits: neuroticism and extraversion (a decrease in the former and an increase in the latter). Both of these traits have been linked with depression risk, extraversion more tentatively than neuroticism. (A high score for neuroticism appears to be a risk factor linked with genetic vulnerability to depression, and low levels of extraversion might also be a risk factor.)

This is a very interesting finding. The whole question of personality change seems complicated to me; my best take on it at the moment is that we probably do have some inborn tendencies and preferences that are hard to change, but that we can change how we express those traits. I’m not sure what to think about the idea of personality change through pharmaceuticals (assuming this finding is supported by future work). It’s also kind of interesting to think about the link between personality and emotion, in addition to that between personality and behavior. I also wonder what happens when the people in the study stop taking the SSRI.

The link in the first paragraph goes to a Science Daily article about the research. Here’s the reference for the paper itself:

Tony Z. Tang, Robert J. DeRubeis, Steven D. Hollon, Jay Amsterdam, Richard Shelton, Benjamin Schalet. Personality Change During Depression Treatment: A Placebo-Controlled Trial. Arch Gen Psychiatry, 2009; 66 (12): 1322-1330

          

Primate brain size

Some things that change in time seem to be following a particular trajectory. Hard drives get smaller. Cell phones gain functionality. Internet advertising gets more annoying. Primate brains get bigger. Well, wait a minute. Human technologies may be progressing along a particular path, but the evolution of the primate brain is not quite the same. Evolution adapts organisms to their circumstances over time, and evidently in some primate lineages, this results in smaller rather than larger brains. A recent study, spurred by the discovery of fossilized remains of diminutive (and small-brained) Homo floresiensis, examined brain size and body size over time in a variety of primate species. Although brains have certainly gotten bigger in some lineages, most notably us, in other branches of the primate family tree, brains have gotten smaller. This article from Scientific American has more.

P.S. Oops, I somehow accidentally deleted the sentence about how this study supports the idea that the small brain size of Homo floresiensis is a result of standard evolutionary procedure rather than evidence of deformity.

          

The milk of human kindness

It’s easy to feel that the milk of human kindness has curdled, or perhaps was sour to begin with. Some religious and social practices seem to assume the worst of people: our selfish, antisocial desires must be kept firmly in check by fear of god or of human authorities. However, compassion and generosity are arguably at least as much a part of who we are as self-interest and greed. This article from Greater Good magazine examines some of the evidence for inborn physiological and psychological mechanisms of kindness and caring.

One part that really struck me was the discussion of the autonomic nervous system, which controls our physiological responses to situations, preparing us to react appropriately to situations. The reaction to a threat is the famous fight-or-flight response, which has a distinctive profile (if you’ve read anything about stress, you know about the ways that breathing and blood flow change to make us more ready to run, or fight, for our lives). There is also a distinctive physiological pattern related to a compassionate response to a situation. When I read this, I wondered if the practice of compassion meditation is in part a deliberate attempt to harness that physiological response.

The Greater Good article also talked about a positive feedback loop between compassionate thoughts and behavior and increased production of oxytocin, a hormone and neurotransmitter that has been linked with feelings of trust, closeness, and empathy. In other words, as you cultivate a compassionate outlook, you may be setting up your neurochemistry for further feelings and behaviors of love and connection. The article also mentions some research that indicates that the brain might be particularly plastic—flexible and open to change—with regard to positive emotions, indicating that we can foster such emotions (especially by the way we raise our children).

In short, this is not only fascinating but comforting. Self-centered, aggressive, or uncharitable behavior might be part of our repertoire, but it’s good to remember that we also have the potential for greater kindness, love, and respect. It’s up to each of us to cultivate it.

          

Busy meat

Between keeping up with the workload and preparing for the holidays, this week has been absolutely nuts, so once again I’m afraid I’m going to simply toss a few links your way. Keep that meat thinking!

• First, if you are looking for worthy secular charities for holiday giving, check out the TechSkeptic’s list of atheist charities.
• New Scientist has published an article suggesting that higher level processing plays a role in synesthesia and also offers an accompanying slide show.
• Sizing up our conspecifics is one of the most important things we do, but sometimes it seems complicated. (Ask anyone who has recently ventured into an online dating site or been involved in a hiring decision.) Cognitive Daily discusses a recent paper about whether small snippets of observations of a person can add up to an accurate perception of personality or intelligence.
• And while we’re on the subject of evaluating the personalities of others, here’s a press release from EurekAlert about the degree to which people can judge the personalities of strangers based solely on photographs. The press release is quite short, but it links to the paper itself, which is briefly available for free online.
• Last spring I attended a fascinating talk at IU about the complex mix of factors that determine human skin color. This nifty web page explains succinctly why northern Europeans are white.

          

The famous brain of H.M.

If you’ve read anything about the study of memory, you are probably familiar with the story of Henry Molaison, a man who lost the capacity to form new memories after brain surgery to control seizures in 1953. Known for years only by his initials, Molaison offered some fascinating insights to scientists while he was alive. Last year he died at the age of 82, leaving his brain to science. Researchers have sliced this famous brain into extremely thin sections and are going to map it digitally in great detail for further study. You can read more about it in this article from the New York Times. The Brain Observatory web site at the University of California at San Diego has more information.

          

Thinking Meat roundup

A number of good stories have slipped by me while I was busy with Thanksgiving and work. Without further ado, here are links to some of the cooler Thinking Meat news lately.

Scientific American offers an article about Ardipithecus that examines this intriguing creature’s place in our family tree.

Wired.com has a profile of Viktor Deak, a paleoartist who has created 3D models of our long-gone ancestor species, most recently for the PBS series “Becoming Human.”

The New York Times recently published an article about the cooperative spirit inherent in humankind. It examines the behavior of very small children, who demonstrate spontaneous (perhaps innate) helpfulness, and compares the behavior of chimps and humans. Cooperation and a sense of “shared intentionality” are essential to holding human groups together.

You probably saw the stories about a supercomputer that can simulate a brain as complex as that of a cat. (This is the latest progress report from IBM’s ambitious project for simulating the human brain.) Here’s Jonah Lehrer’s take on that story, considerably less breathless and more critical than some of the hype. (Hat tip to Adam for passing this one along.)

          

Antidepressant shortcomings

Antidepressant medications available today help a great many people; however, they don’t work for everyone. Because it can take a while for an antidepressant to kick in, and there’s so much variability regarding which one will work for which person, finding the right one requires some trial and error and can be a long process. (Although this recent study describes a biomarker that can predict, after a week on an antidepressant, whether a person will respond; testing for the biomarker is non-invasive and relatively quick. Sounds like good news to me.)

A recent study has examined why antidepressant use is not straightforward; the authors have come up with several reasons having to do with current misunderstanding of the nature of depression. First, the assumption that stress and depression are causally linked appears to be invalid. An examination of rat genetics showed very little overlap between the genes involved in depression and those involved in reacting to stress. Second, current antidepressants appear to treat stress, not depression. Furthermore, they aim at increasing levels of certain neurotransmitters, on the assumption that it’s problems with these levels that cause depression. Instead, it looks like the problem lies further upstream, in the way neurons form and work. Neurotransmitter-based medications may be treating a consequence of the neuronal problems, rather than treating the root cause.

The work on which this study rests involves rats, but their brains and neurochemistry are believed to be similar enough to ours that the information may be applicable to humans. I hope these new findings will eventually improve the treatment options for depression.

This article from EurekAlert has more information. The research was presented at Neuroscience 2009 last week.

          

Religion in the brain

A couple of recent articles have examined how religious beliefs and feelings are related to the activity and anatomy of the brain. Together they provide an interesting look at the neuropsychology of religion.

Belief in religious statements and everyday facts

Sam Harris, who has written several books on atheism and is currently working on a doctorate in neuroscience, is one of the authors of a paper that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain activity in Christians and nonbelievers when they evaluated the truth of religious and nonreligious statements. Standard caveats about fMRI and small sample sizes (30 subjects, 15 each believers and non-believers) apply, but still, the results are intriguing.

In a nutshell: the brain areas associated with believing or disbelieving a statement are essentially the same whether the statement is about religion or not. It’s hard to know how this translates into felt experience—whether accepting the truth of the Virgin Birth yields the same feeling of certainty as accepting that the Golden Gate Bridge opened to traffic in 1937— but evidently the brain is doing pretty much the same thing, regardless of the content of the belief. Religious belief, in other words, is not some special brain process different from belief in more empirically verifiable things. However, there are some differences in the brain areas involved in accepting or rejecting religious statements and ordinary facts: the former appears to involve areas of the brain crucial to emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while the latter has more to do with networks involved in memory retrieval.

This article from Newsweek offers an interesting summary and interpretation of the work. The paper itself was published in PLoS, so you can easily access the whole thing yourself: The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief, by Sam Harris, Jonas T. Kaplan, Ashley Curiel, Susan Y. Bookheimer, Marco Iacoboni, and Mark S. Cohen. PLoS ONE, October 1, 2009. There’s a lot of interesting background in the article.

Differences in neuroanatomy between believers and nonbelievers

The second study looked at the neuroanatomy of religiosity, a cluster of traits associated with religious beliefs, feelings, and behavior. In this study, structural magnetic resonance imaging was used to determine the volume of various brain areas in 40 adults who showed different degrees of religiosity based on their responses to a survey.

Analysis of the resulting data revealed four components of religiosity: a feeling of closeness to God, religious behavior, fear of God, and a group of traits linked to pragmatism and skepticism about God’s existence. Each component was associated with increased volume of a particular brain area (the first two traits were both associated with the same area). Religious upbringing did not affect the volume of any of the areas identified.

In a nutshell: the areas of the brain associated with religious behavior and both intimacy with and fear of God have been linked in previous studies with social cognition, including the ability to understand the emotions of others, the ability to regulate one’s own emotions, particularly in response to negative stimuli, and the use of symbolic language.

The study raises a whole bunch of interesting questions, like the chicken-and-egg question of whether people’s brains change in response to their religious feelings and practices or whether an existing brain difference predisposes people to religious feelings and practices (I would guess it might be some of both).

This article from Wired discusses the results (hat tip to Chuck for passing this along), and this article from Ars Technica also covers this research. And again, thanks to PLoS, you can read the whole paper yourself: Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity, by Dimitrios Kapogiannis, Aron K. Barbey, Michael Su, Frank Krueger, and Jordan Grafman. PLoS ONE, September 28, 2009. Again, lots of cool background and some interesting conjecture in the article.

          

Brainsong

If you could translate your brain waves into music, what would it sound like? Would the sounds indicate anything meaningful to you? Some recent work published in PLoS One explores the characteristics of brain songs based on EEGs, and suggests that these songs do, in some circumstances, provide audible clues to brain activity.

Researchers in China translated data from EEGs into sequences of musical notes played on the piano. (Very roughly speaking, the amplitude of the brain waves was translated to pitch, the period to duration of the notes, and the average power to the intensity of the sound.) They processed EEGs taken during REM sleep (a sleep phase characterized by rapid eye movements and loss of muscle tone during which most vivid dreams occur) and during slow-wave or deep sleep. They found that volunteers who didn’t know which was which consistently attributed appropriate moods to the resulting musical sequences. The article (linked below) includes sound clips so you can listen for yourself.

I don’t grasp all the details of the conversion process, but thought it was fascinating to be able to listen to brain waves translated into piano music of a sort. The suggestion that such translated brain waves might someday be the basis of neurofeedback therapy was intriguing. (It seems like it would be wonderful to hear what my brain was doing and also hear how that activity changed according to my efforts. Could hearing brain waves really make it any easier to change your brain’s music from one song to another?) This bit of speculation toward the end is also quite interesting:

“We focus in particular on scale-free phenomena, which exist widely in nature and include those of neural activity, EEG, and human behavior. Therefore, the scale-free or equivalent power-law phenomenon may be an essential mechanism of the brain. In addition, this study also addresses an old question: why do people like music? A possible answer is that the brain and music both follow the same dynamic principle, the power-law, which may provide the most efficient method for humans to interact with the environment.

Scale-free music of the brain, Dan Wu, Chao-Yi Li, and De-Zhong Yao. PLoS ONE 4(6): e5915. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005915 (Published June 15, 2009)

          

Let your mind wander

The very idea of a mind wandering suggests that the wandering mind is off course, aimless, or somehow gone astray. However, it might be more accurate to suppose that the mind is looking the other way while loosening the reins to allow more productive interaction between areas typically seen as having opposing actions. Recent research has shown that when the brain shifts its attention from a routine task and wanders, or daydreams, the so-called executive network, which is important for complex higher-level processing and problem solving, is activated. Earlier research had shown activity in the default network during daydreaming; the default mode seems to be what our brain slips into when it’s not attending to anything in particular.

The recent study suggests that when the mind wanders, these two networks, hitherto seen as opposed, are able to work together, perhaps allowing the solution of knotty problems. The study used fMRI to examine the brains of people who were carrying out a rote task; their level of attention was evaluated based on their performance on the task, their own reports of how attentive they were, and their brain activity. This press release on EurekAlert has more details.

This might explain some of the mysterious workings by which the mind can come up with an answer by going at a problem sideways, while ostensibly working on something else. For example, every Sunday morning I listen to the Sunday puzzle with Will Shortz on NPR. Shortz leaves listeners with a puzzle to solve during the week; the solution often comes to me later in the day when I’m in the shower or folding laundry. And one reason that I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, long walks, and cross-stitch is that these seemingly mindless activities can give me a break from considering some troublesome situation and, at least sometimes, allow me to come up with an answer or an approach to try. (Try as I might, though, I still can’t justify having a bad Freecell habit.)

The paper will be in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Experience sampling during fMRI reveals default network and executive system contributions to mind wandering, by Kalina Christoff, Alan M. Gordon, Jonathan Smallwood, Rachelle Smith, and Jonathan W. Schooler. Published online before print May 11, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0900234106.

          

Anxiety, depression, and new brain cells

Anxiety disorders and depression often strike together, and the latter has been associated with decreased survival rates for newly born neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain important in regulating the emotions. New research has investigated a chemical called fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2), which is crucial to brain development and brain repair after an injury, in terms of its relationship with anxiety. Using rats that have been bred for either high or low anxiety, researchers (led by Javier Perez at the University of Michigan) confirmed the earlier finding that FGF2 levels are lower in the rats bred for high anxiety. The study also identified two things that made these rats behave less anxiously and increased their FGF2 levels: treatment with FGF2 alone, and also giving them new toys (with no FGF2 treatment). Furthermore, both of these treatments enhanced the survival of new neurons in the hippocampus.

Assuming these results are applicable to humans, they offer two potential new treatments for anxiety, and perhaps depression: FGF2 therapy, and environmental enrichment. While it’s not clear what the human equivalent of new toys might be, it seems like we already know that finding new activities that can spark a renewed interest in life is a good thing to try. (This also, to my mind, suggests a link between boredom and depression, although like most such links, there’s a certain chicken-and-egg aspect to it.) This is purely speculation, and I’m sure any application in humans is a long way off, but I’m wondering if FGF2 therapy might turn out to be a useful first step, to get seriously depressed or anxious people to the point where they can even take an interest in something new.

This article from EurekAlert summarizes the work, which will be published in the May 13, 2009, issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

          

Baby minds and unconscious minds

I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity lately, in particular about how it works and what it feels like to create something. A couple of recent news articles, while not directly about creativity, do seem to shed some light.

This article from the Boston Globe discusses some of the capabilities of the infant mind and how they differ from those of the adult mind. The skills our brains are born with are useful in gaining mastery over the world; as we grow and use this initial tool kit, the result is a greater capacity for focused consciousness and time-saving familiarity with the world we live in. As in so many things, though, it’s not all gain. Some of those early-life attributes, such as greater flexibility and the capacity for noticing many more details of a situation or scene, would be kind of handy to regain from time to time. The article gives some interesting tidbits about how the brain develops from its early state into something more sophisticated but in some ways narrower and less rich.

Creativity comes into the story, it seems to me, because part of what it means to be creative is to be able to see things freshly, not only appreciating the familiar as if it were new but being able to present stories, colors, shapes, or sounds in new ways, as if seeing them from a new angle. I wonder if creativity is enhanced in any way by spending time with very young people and borrowing their sense of wonder and their capacity for absorbing situations (not knowing what they should pay attention to, the idea is that they try to pay attention to it all). One thing I’ve run across several times in advice about how to keep your brain fit and healthy as you age is to try new things: learn a new language or a new physical skill, read up on some subject or place that’s foreign to you. Maybe what’s going on there is that by immersing yourself in a world that you don’t know, you have to re-acquire some of that ability to notice everything and put it all together. It certainly seems like that might also be a boon to those who want to create; I’ve always had the feeling that doing new things, even if they weren’t related to the writing I wanted to do, was helpful somehow.

This article from The Economist, on the other hand, covers some new research into unconscious thought. A new study has used EEGs to examine brain activity while people were solving a particular type of problem; it turns out that brain activity can be used to predict, by up to 8 seconds, whether someone is going to get the answer to a puzzle. In other words, brain unconscious activity (specifically, an increase in high-frequency gamma waves in the right frontal cortex) reliably signals a forthcoming conscious moment of insight.

It’s always been fascinating to read about the many ways our subconscious minds seem to go on about their business without letting our conscious minds in on what’s going on until necessary. It’s like there’s some committee in the back room discussing the options unbeknownst to me (although “me” is a slippery pronoun in this context) until suddenly my conscious mind is announcing some decision to myself and to the world, just as confidently as if it had thought of it by itself. I’m sure this behind-the-scenes activity makes my cognitive processing much more efficient, but sometimes I’d really like to know what’s going on in there. The whole thing is even more peculiar when you’re coming up with ideas for some creative project or another, and you suddenly see a way to put together the pieces you’ve been mentally pushing around but you’re not sure where the insight came from, or you think you know what road you’re going to take in your writing that day but wind up finding yourself far from home with not much of an idea how you got there. Funny old things, brains.

          

What makes us wise

Wisdom is one of those difficult concepts: you know it when you see it, but it might be hard to describe succinctly. Perhaps that’s because it’s not a single entity, but a combination of traits. That’s the approach taken by a couple of researchers at the University of California at San Diego, who have mined existing research looking for studies on six characteristics that are common in definitions of wisdom. Looking mostly at neuroimaging studies, they identified brain areas associated with certain facets of wisdom, and also found that some brain regions seem to be involved in several of its components. The thing that really caught my interest is that, based on this very preliminary work on the neurobiology of wisdom, it seems that balance is important: wisdom may be best described as a balancing act between various faculties (e.g., rationality and emotion). That concept of the brain achieving wisdom by integrating multiple capabilities into a balanced whole makes a lot of sense to me.

This article from Science Daily describes the work, and Scientific American Mind has a blog post.

The full citation for the work is: Thomas W. Meeks; Dilip V. Jeste. Neurobiology of Wisdom: A Literature Overview. Archives of General Psychiatry, 2009; 66 (4): 355 DOI: 10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2009.8

          

Real people, fictional people

Characters in novels, movies, and other fictions can seem quite real (we root for one and boo another, for example, and cry sometimes when one of them dies). Yet for all that, we can easily distinguish them from real people, people that we know personally. But how do you know that your mother is real, for example, but Scarlett O’Hara is not?

An ingenious recent fMRI study compared brain activity in cases where people contemplated scenarios involving fictional characters, famous people that they didn’t know personally, and friends or family members. Participants had to determine the plausibility of actions like dreaming about a fictional character (possible), talking with a fictional character (impossible) or having dinner with a real person (possible).

Two brain areas appeared to be involved in the activity of distinguishing flesh-and-blood people from the purely mental constructs that are fictional characters: the anterior medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex. These are parts of the brain’s default network, which kicks in when we’re not doing anything in particular and our minds go wandering over an internal landscape; both areas are believed to be important in self-referential thought and the recall of autobiographical memories. These brain areas were most active in the tasks involving friends and family, moderately active in tasks involving famous people who were not personally known, and least active in tasks involving a fictional character. The idea is that perhaps you know your mother is real because your brain codes her as being more personally relevant to you than a fictional character is.

The paper is available on PLoS ONE: Reality = Relevance? Insights from Spontaneous Modulations of the Brain’s Default Network when Telling Apart Reality from Fiction, Anne Abraham and D. Yves von Craman. It’s got lots of interesting background, and some fascinating material on the possible relevance of this work and ways it could be extended. I’d love to know, for example, how particularly well-known and loved fictional characters fall on the spectrum of brain activity, and also what an writer’s brain looks like when it’s contemplating characters it has created. Meanwhile, it’s time for me to immerse myself in a fictional world and a hot bath.

          

Localizing spiritual experiences in the brain

Spirituality is complicated, an experience with many facets. The current model of spiritual experience in the brain involves multiple brain areas, reflecting that complexity, and has recently received a bit more experimental support. Earlier research has suggested that the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain may play complementary roles in certain kinds of religious or spiritual experience. Researchers have examined the relationship between damage to the right parietal lobe and scores on the Index of Core Spiritual Experiences (INSPIRIT), an assessment of a person’s spirituality. Their findings agree fairly well with a model in which feelings of transcendence are linked with increased temporal lobe activity and decreased activity in the right parietal lobe.

This press release from the University of Missouri focuses only on the right parietal lobe without really saying what it does or talking about the interaction of multiple brain regions that shapes spiritual experience. The paper itself (citation below) offers some interesting discussion of the role played by the various brain areas in general and how they contribute to spiritual experiences in particular. The right parietal lobe is associated with visual and spatial sensory perception, and with the ability to place oneself in space relative to the surrounding environment. While other researchers had suggested, based on earlier work, that transcendence is somehow linked with changing perceptions of space, the authors of the current study think it may have more to do with decreased right-hemisphere functioning overall and a decreased sense of the self. Perhaps as the sense of self diminishes, a feeling of greater connectedness can grow in its place. Some meditation techniques are apparently useful in nurturing this feeling of wider connections with others and with the universe.

The paper also discusses the role of the temporal lobes, which appear to be linked with the strength of the reaction to religious figures and symbols. This is just speculation on my part, but I’m wondering if people whose parietal activity is reduced, permanently or temporarily and for whatever reason, without a particularly strong increase in temporal lobe activity, might be more likely to experience a spirituality more or less separate from the traditional religious imagery (deities, angels, etc.). This would actually explain a lot of things about my own experiences, and I’d be interested in hearing what others think.

Support for a neuropsychological model of spirituality in persons with traumatic brain injury, by Brick Johnstone and Bret A. Glass. Zygon, Volume 43 Issue 4, December 2008, pp. 861-874.

          

Smart planet

Scientific American Mind has published an article on non-human intelligence. It discusses the brains and behavior of a variety of birds, cephalopod molluscs, bony fishes, and even reptiles, debunking the myth of linear brain evolution leading progressively to unique human cognitive abilities and showcasing some surprising findings. I’ve read a bit on this topic so I knew about some of this research, but I had no idea that octopuses can learn from watching another octopus be trained at a task. I also didn’t know reptiles can master some simple learning tasks if they’re offered the right reward (we warm-blooded mammals are suckers for food, but reptiles are more motivated by other things—the chance to get near a sun lamp, for example).

          

Thinking Meat roundup

While I’ve been busy editing and writing and getting the yard ready for next spring, a number of good Thinking-Meat type stories have appeared in the media. So without further ado, here’s a selection of links to articles for your weekend reading pleasure.

Slate examines the moral and social dimensions of the evolutionary psychology behind why people get huffy, with the obligatory tie-in to the presidential campaign.

In an opinion piece in the New York Times, a neuroscientist and a science writer note some of the ways our brains mislead us, describing several studies that illustrate how the line between misinformation and truth becomes blurred in the brain (again with a campaign tie-in).

Scientific American has published this article by Carl Zimmer about the search for links between genes and intelligence. (Note: Lest you think you’re going crazy, I’ll reassure you now by telling you that yes, the even-numbered pages do seem to be duplicates of their respective preceding odd-numbered pages. I don’t know why, but it’s free current content from Scientific American, so I won’t complain.)

Zimmer is evidently a busy man; here’s another article from him in Discover Magazine about the emotional importance of human facial expressions.

This next article, from the Telegraph, is about a month old, but somehow it slipped past my radar at the time. It describes experiments in which crows outperformed great apes in transferring a learned skill from one situation to another.

And finally, something a bit more speculative but certainly intriguing, another article from the Telegraph discusses some new research into whether television and movies affect whether we dream in color. There’s some evidence that people who grew up with black-and-white media may be more inclined to dream in black and white than those who grew up with color TV and movies.

          

Sports and language

It appears that when your mind is hard at work processing language, it may be using areas of the brain that are not usually associated with language. A recent study looked at people’s comprehension of sentences about hockey and sentences about everyday actions, in conjunction with an examination of brain activity while they were listening to the sentences. Hockey players and hockey fans understood the hockey sentences better, compared to those who had never watched a game. OK, no surprise there. The interesting part is that the brains of the players and fans (but not those of the rookies) showed activity in areas that typically are involved in planning physical actions, even though they were just listening to the sentences while lying in an fMRI scanner, and were not planning to do anything. Until now, these parts of the brain hadn’t been linked to language processing, but it looks like the brain makes use of them anyway to strengthen its ability to understand language. (Remember this the next time some non-fan asks you why you’re watching whatever kind of game it is you like to watch.) This article from PhysOrg has more details, and the paper itself is available from PNAS via open access.
(Sian L. Beilock, Ian M. Lyons, Andrew Mattarella-Micke, Howard C. Nusbaum, and Steven L. Small.
Sports experience changes the neural processing of action language.
PNAS published ahead of print September 2, 2008)