Waking the Brain: Advances in Neuroscience
Recent advances in neuroscience show that the damaged brain has a remarkable ability to respond. Patients who were otherwise diagnosed as “vegetative” are responding to tests and in some cases — even learning how to walk again.
Me about a gaggle of gays.
How Abuse Changes a Child’s Brain
Image: D. Sharon Pruitt/Flickr
The brains of children raised in violent families resemble the brains of soldiers exposed to combat, psychologists say.
They’re primed to perceive threat and anticipate pain, adaptations that may be helpful in abusive environments but produce long-term problems with stress and anxiety.
“For them to detect early cues that might signal danger is adaptive. It allows them to react, to try and avoid the danger,” said psychologist Eamon McCrory of University College London. However, “a very similar neural signature characterizes quite a few anxiety disorders.”
In a study published Dec. 5 in Current Biology, McCrory’s team used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to measure blood flows in the brains of 43 children exposed to violence at home as they looked at pictures of sad or angry faces.
Previous studies have shown that abuse affects kids’ brains; as they grow up, abused children become adults with high levels of aggression, anxiety, depression and other behavioral problems. But according to McCrory, the new study is the first to use fMRI to study the form of those changes.
“Understanding the neural mechanisms might give us clues as to how someone’s future might be shaped by their experience,” McCrory said.
His team compared fMRIs from abused children to those of 23 non-abused but demographically similar children from a control group. In the abused children, angry faces provoked distinct activation patterns in their anterior insula and right amygdala, parts of the brain involved in processing threat and pain. Similar patterns have been measured in soldiers who’ve seen combat.
Another recent study found that depression in people who were abused as children is especially difficult to treat. McCrory hopes future work will give a more complete picture of abuse’s neurological effects — and, perhaps, the effects of interventions that help children heal.
“Can children change in response to an act of intervention? To a better home environment? We’re quite optimistic that’s the case, that this is reversible. But that’s something we need to test,” McCrory said.
Never-Before-Seen Stage of Planet Birth Revealed
Astronomers studying a newborn star have caught a detailed glimpse of planets forming around it, revealing a never-before seen stage of planetary evolution.
Large gas giant planets appear to be clearing a gap in the disk of material surrounding the star, and using gravity to channel material across the gap to the interior, helping the star to grow. Theoretical simulations have predicted such bridges between outer and inner portions of disks surrounding stars, but none have been directly observed until now.
Myths about right vs. left sides of the brain continue and can get in our way
Published on January 7, 2013 by Robert Klitzman, M.D. in Am I My Genes?
When I trained as a psychiatrist, one of my wisest professors kept in his office on an old wooden filing cabinet a 19th century ceramic phrenology head. Thick black lines divided the shiny white life-sized ceramic skull into over 20 sections, each labeled with a psychological trait – intelligence, creativity, individuality, secretiveness, combativeness, benevolence, veneration, wonder and hope.Phrenology, which flourished in the 1820s and 1830s, claimed that bumps on one’s head corresponded to these various traits, and could be measured by assessing the size of each bump. [See attached phrenology picture.] By the middle of the 19th Century, scientists had debunked the theory.
My professor displayed this sculpture to remind us of our hubris in trying to understand the vast complexities of the human mind – how much we once thought we understood about the brain, and how little we actually grasped
Yet debates about whether different parts of the brain are primarily responsible for various mental traits – and if so, which traits and which parts — have continued.
A few mental functions have been localized – most famously Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas involved in understanding and using language. But recent functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) research suggests that for most other complex mental tasks, the brain is far more integrative – working as a whole, involving numerous parts and networks.
Still, myths have continued – including those concerning differences between the right and left side of the brain.
Over ten million people have watched Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk, My Stroke of Insight, and more view it each day. Yet it raises several of these issues anew.
Her story is powerful and moving. She suffered a terrible stroke, and eventually recovered. Yet she concludes that the right side of the brain puts us in touch with ”the life force power of the universe”, and that to find peace and Nirvana, we should choose to move away from our left hemisphere, with its focus on the single individual, and listen to the “deep inner peace” of the right hemisphere.
As I describe in my book, When Doctors Become Patients, professionals in health care and research, when becoming patients themselves, often have important lessons to teach the rest of us, as they can see their experiences with unique “double lenses” — as both patients, and scientists or clinicians. Her vivid description of the deficits caused by her stroke should make us all understand more fully the challenges that millions of Americans face following strokes or other neurological symptoms.
I agree with her that we need to engage with each other more fully, and seek happiness and peace. I do not question her experiences of what she endured.
But her explanations of the differences between the right and left sides of the brain are inaccurate, and promote several myths.
In the 1960s, Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry studied patients in whom surgeons had cut certain connections between the two parts of the brain to try to reduce epileptic seizures. This research suggested that in these patients, each hemisphere might then come to specialize in different tasks.
Soon, the right brain became romanticized as the seat of creativity and freedom, as opposed to the “logical”, “analytical” and constraining left side. Individuals and whole societies have been described as being more or less right or left brained. New Age, self-help gurus have claimed to help people develop the right sides of their brains.
Yet recent fMRI research, illustrating the far vaster networking complexities of the brain as a whole, remind us how little we know.
For normal brains, in which surgeons have not cut those crucial connections, the two sides work closely together.
Still, the notion that parts of the brain are responsible for certain traits continues to have a certain allure. In part, we have entered an age of neuromythology, and neuroessentialism – in which we look for “brain explanations” of complex mental phenomena. In the past, many people invoked various theories from astrology to Freud to explain, and often try to solve psychological problems.
Now, notions of right brain and left brain seemingly make sense of certain human conflicts and difficulties, providing ready explanations for traits that we like or don’t like in ourselves or others. Our brains or large parts of our brains – not we ourselves – are somehow responsible.
Yet simplifying the brain in this way into simple binaries – with one half implicitly better than the other — ignores critical intricacies, challenges and unknowns, and does ourselves, and our brains a disservice.
Perhaps Nature’s most complex and sophisticated creation, the human brain is filled with mysteries that should inspire us all, and can lead to better understandings and treatments for a wide range of mental problems.
I wish we could all reach Nirvana simply by turning off one side of our brain; but the reality is far more complex. We cannot shut off half our brain – nor should we try to. Rather, it is important to understand the inherent tensions, uncertainties and puzzles of human existence, and of relationships between ourselves and others. Humans evolved with competing desires – not just togetherness and love, but jealousy, ambition, and protection of kin over strangers, etc.
We should pursue the ends she advocates of greater peace and togetherness, but be careful not to oversimplify the brain and ignore science. We will best meet her worthy goals if we recognize, accept and learn how to confront the competing daily pressures that make these ideals difficult.
As we enter the 21st century, the history of 19th century phrenology has much to teach us about how much we think we know about the brain, and how careful we need to be.
Single gene might explain dramatic differences among people with schizophrenia
Some of the dramatic differences seen among patients with schizophrenia may be explained by a single gene that regulates a group of other schizophrenia risk genes. These findings appear in a new imaging-genetics study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).
The study revealed that people with schizophrenia who had a particular version of the microRNA-137 gene (or MIR137), tended to develop the illness at a younger age and had distinct brain features – both associated with poorer outcomes – compared to patients who did not have this version. This work, led by Drs. Aristotle Voineskos and James Kennedy, appears in the latest issue of Molecular Psychiatry.
Treating schizophrenia is particularly challenging as the illness can vary from patient to patient. Some individuals stay hospitalized for years, while others respond well to treatment.
“What’s exciting about this study is that we could have a legitimate answer as to why some of these differences occur,” explained Dr. Voineskos, a clinician-scientist in CAMH’s Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute. “In the future, we might have the capability of using this gene to tell us about prognosis and how a person might respond to treatment.”
“Drs. Voineskos and Kennedy’s findings are very important as they provide new insights into the genetic bases of this condition that affects thousands of Canadians and their families,” said Dr. Anthony Phillips, Scientific Director at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Institute of Neurosciences, Mental Health and Addiction.
Also, until now, sex has been the strongest predictor of the age at which schizophrenia develops in individuals. Typically, women tend to develop the illness a few years later than men, and experience a milder form of the disease.
“We showed that this gene has a bigger effect on age-at-onset than one’s gender has,” said Dr. Voineskos, who heads the Kimel Family Translational Imaging-Genetics Research Laboratory at CAMH. “This may be a paradigm shift for the field.”
The researchers studied MIR137 — a gene involved in turning on and off other schizophrenia-related genes — in 510 individuals living with schizophrenia. The scientists found that patients with a specific version of the gene tended to develop the illness at a younger age, around 20.8 years of age, compared to 23.4 years of age among those without this version.
“Although three years of difference in age-at-onset may not seem large, those years are important in the final development of brain circuits in the young adult,” said Dr. Kennedy, Director of CAMH’s Neuroscience Research Department. “This can have major impact on disease outcome.”
In a separate part of the study involving 213 people, the researchers used MRI and diffusion tensor-magnetic resonance brain imaging (DT-MRI). They found that individuals who had the particular gene version tended to have unique brain features. These features included a smaller hippocampus, which is a brain structure involved in memory, and larger lateral ventricles, which are fluid-filled structures associated with disease outcome. As well, these patients tended to have more impairment in white matter tracts, which are structures connecting brain regions, and serving as the information highways of the brain.
Developing tests that screen for versions of this gene could be helpful in treating patients earlier and more effectively.
“We’re hoping that in the near future we can use this combination of genetics and brain imaging to predict how severe a version of illness someone might have,” said Dr. Voineskos. “This would allow us to plan earlier for specific treatments and clinical service delivery and pursue more personalized treatment options right from the start.”
(Image: Akelei van Dam)
Japan’s Robot Suit Gets Global Safety Certificate
A robot suit that can help the elderly or disabled get around was given its global safety certificate in Japan on Wednesday, paving the way for its worldwide rollout.
The Hybrid Assistive Limb, or HAL, is a power-assisted pair of legs developed by Japanese robot maker Cyberdyne, which has also developed similar robot arms.
A quality assurance body issued the certificate based on a draft version of an international safety standard for personal robots that is expected to be approved later this year, the ministry for the economy, trade and industry said.
The metal-and-plastic exoskeleton has become the first nursing-care robot certified under the draft standard, a ministry official said.
Battery-powered HAL, which detects muscle impulses to anticipate and support the user’s body movements, is designed to help the elderly with mobility or help hospital or nursing carers to lift patients.
Cyberdyne, based in Tsukuba, northeast of Tokyo, has so far leased some 330 suits to 150 hospitals, welfare and other facilities in Japan since 2010, at 178,000 yen ($1,950) per suit per year.
“It is very significant that Japan has obtained this certification before others in the world,” said Yoshiyuki Sankai, the head of Cyberdyne.
The company is unrelated to the firm of the same name responsible for the cyborg assassin played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1984 film “The Terminator”.
“This is a first step forward for Japan, the great robot nation, to send our message to the world about robots of the future,” said Sankai, who is also a professor at Tsukuba University.
A different version of HAL — coincidentally the name of the evil supercomputer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” — has been developed for workers who need to wear heavy radiation protection as part of the clean-up at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
Industrial robots have long been used in Japan, and robo-suits are gradually making inroads into hospitals and retirement homes.
But critics say the government has been slow in creating a safety framework for such robots in a country whose rapidly-ageing population is expected to enjoy ever longer lives.
The future is here
Trick yourself into an out-of-body experience
Your mind isn’t as firmly anchored in your body as you think. Time for some sleight of hand
CLOSE your eyes and ask yourself: where am I? Not geographically, but existentially. Most of the time, we would say that we are inside our bodies. After all, we peer out at the world from a unique, first-person perspective within our heads – and we take it for granted.
We wouldn’t be so sanguine if we knew that this feeling of inhabiting a body is something the brain is constantly constructing. But the fact that we live inside our bodies doesn’t mean that our sense of self is confined to its borders – as these next examples show.
Sleight of (rubber) hand
By staging experiments that manipulate the senses, we can explore how the brain draws – and redraws – the contours of where our selves reside.
One of the simplest ways to see this in action is via an experiment that’s now part of neuroscience folklore: the rubber hand illusion. The set up is simple: a person’s hand is hidden from their view by a screen while a rubber hand is placed on the table in front of them. By stroking their hand while they see the rubber hand being stroked, you can make them feel that the fake hand is theirs (see diagram).
Why does this happen? The brain integrates various senses to create aspects of our bodily self. In the rubber hand illusion, the brain is processing touch, vision and proprioception – the internal sense of the relative location of our body parts. Given the conflicting information, the brain resolves it by taking ownership of the rubber hand.
The implication is that the boundaries of the self sketched out by the brain can easily expand to include a foreign object. And the self’s peculiar meanderings outside the body don’t end there.
Trading places
Ever wish you had someone else’s body? The brain can make it happen. To show how, Henrik Ehrsson at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues transported people out of their own bodies and into a life-size mannequin.
The mannequin had cameras for eyes, and whatever it was “seeing” was fed into a head-mounted display worn by a volunteer. In this case, the mannequin’s gaze was pointed down at its abdomen. When the researchers stroked the abdomens of both the volunteer and the mannequin at the same time, many identified with the mannequin’s body as if it was their own.
In 2011, the team repeated the experiment, but this time while monitoring the brain activity of volunteers lying in an fMRI scanner. They found that activity in certain areas of the frontal and parietal lobes correlated with the changing sense of body ownership.
So what’s happening? Studies of macaque monkeys show us that these brain regions contain neurons that integrate vision, touch and proprioception. Ehrsson thinks that in the human brain such neurons fire only when there are synchronous touches and visual sensations in the immediate space around the body, suggesting that they play a role in constructing our sense of body ownership. Mess with the information the brain receives, and you can mess with this feeling of body ownership.
Yet while Ehrsson’s study manipulated body ownership, the person “inside” the mannequin still had a first-person perspective – their self was still located within a body, even if it wasn’t their own. Could it be possible to wander somewhere where there is no body at all?
Into thin air
Your self even can be tricked into hovering in mid-air outside the body. In 2011, Olaf Blanke at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne and colleagues asked volunteers to lie on their backs and via a headset watch a video of a person of similar appearance being stroked on the back. Meanwhile, a robotic arm installed within the bed stroked the volunteer’s back in the same way.
The experience that people described was significantly more immersive than simply watching a movie of someone else’s body. Volunteers felt they were floating above their own body, and a few experienced a particularly strange effect. Despite the fact that they were all lying facing upwards, some felt they were floating face down so they could watch their own back (see “Leaving the body”). “I was looking at my own body from above,” said one participant. “The perception of being apart from my own body was a bit weak but still there.”
“That was for us really exciting, because it gets really close to the classical out-of-body experience of looking down at your own body,” says team member Bigna Lenggenhager, now at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Further support came by repeating the experiment inside an MRI scanner, which showed a brain region called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) behaving differently when people said they were drifting outside their bodies. This ties in neatly with previous studies of brain lesions in people who reported out-of-body experiences, which also implicated the TPJ.
The TPJ shares a common trait with other brain regions that researchers believe are associated with body illusions: it helps to integrate visual, tactile and proprioceptive senses with the signals from the inner ear that give us our sense of balance and spatial orientation. This provides more evidence that the brain’s ability to integrate various sensory stimuli plays a key role in locating the self in the body.
According to philosopher Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, understanding how the brain performs this trick is the first step to understanding how the brain puts together our autobiographical self – the sense we have of ourselves as entities that exist from a remembered past to an imagined future. “These experiments are very telling, because they manipulate low-level dimensions of the self: self-location and self-identification,” he says. The feeling of owning and being in a body is perhaps the most basic facet of self-consciousness, and so could be the foundation on which more complex aspects of the self are built. The body, it seems, begets the self.
"If calculations of the newly discovered Higgs boson particle are correct, one day, tens of billions of years from now, the universe will disappear at the speed of light, replaced by a strange, alternative dimension, one theoretical physicist calls “boring."
