Biological Psychology Links

by Jessica Griggs IT'S a big skull. No, wait, it's two people under an arch. Hold on, it's a skull again. Two very different images can be perceived in the trick picture Blossom and Decay (see right). Now we are one step closer to working out how the brain spontaneously flips between such views, with the discovery of what may be the relevant brain region. The precise neural mechanism that provokes the brain to switch its view of a scene is unknown, but it is thought to play a major role in perception by acting as a sort of reality check, says Ryota Kanai of University College London. "We need a trigger to prompt possible different interpretations so that we don't get stuck with a potentially incorrect interpretation of the world." To find out which part of the brain might be involved, Kanai and colleagues asked 52 volunteers to watch a video of a revolving sphere and press a button when the rotation of the sphere appeared to change direction. Crucially, the sphere was not changing direction; it could simply be perceived to be rotating in either direction. How long each rotation-direction was perceived for was recorded and an average "switch rate" assigned to each of the volunteers. The team then used structural magnetic resonance imaging to search for active brain regions during this task. This pointed to the superior parietal lobes (SPL), two areas towards the back of the head known to control attention and process three-dimensional images. People whose cortex was thicker and better connected in this region had faster switch rates. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

by David Robson Can you tell a snake from a pretzel? Some can't – and their experiences are revealing how the brain builds up a coherent picture of the world AFTER her minor stroke, BP started to feel as if her eyes were playing tricks on her. TV shows became confusing: in one film, she was surprised to see a character reel as if punched by an invisible man. Sometimes BP would miss seeing things that were right before her eyes, causing her to bump into furniture or people. BP's stroke had damaged a key part of her visual system, giving rise to a rare disorder called simultanagnosia. This meant that she often saw just one object at a time. When looking at her place setting on the dinner table, for example, BP might see just a spoon, with everything else a blur (Brain, vol 114, p 1523). BP's problems are just one example of a group of disorders known collectively as visual agnosias, usually caused by some kind of brain damage. Another form results in people having trouble recognising and naming objects, as experienced by the agnosic immortalised in the title of Oliver Sacks's 1985 best-seller The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Agnosias have become particularly interesting to neuroscientists in the past decade or so, as advances in brain scanning techniques have allowed them to close in on what's going on in the brain. This gives researchers a unique opportunity to work out how the brain normally makes sense of the world. "Humans are naturally so good at this, it's difficult to see our inner workings," says Marlene Behrmann, a psychologist who studies vision at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Cases like BP's are even shedding light on how our unconscious informs our conscious mind. "Agnosias allow us to adopt a reverse-engineering approach and infer how [the brain] would normally work," says Behrmann. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

By MATT RICHTEL Before the hiking and rafting trip, Art Kramer was concerned about a big grant. “Time is slowing down,” he says on Day 3. For the first time in three days in the wilderness, Mr. Braver is not wearing his watch. “I forgot,” he says. It is a small thing, the kind of change many vacationers notice in themselves as they unwind and lose track of time. But for Mr. Braver and his companions, these moments lead to a question: What is happening to our brains? Mr. Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was one of five neuroscientists on an unusual journey. They spent a week in late May in this remote area of southern Utah, rafting the San Juan River, camping on the soft banks and hiking the tributary canyons. It was a primitive trip with a sophisticated goal: to understand how heavy use of digital devices and other technology changes how we think and behave, and how a retreat into nature might reverse those effects. Cellphones do not work here, e-mail is inaccessible and laptops have been left behind. It is a trip into the heart of silence — increasingly rare now that people can get online even in far-flung vacation spots. As they head down the tight curves the San Juan has carved from ancient sandstone, the travelers will, not surprisingly, unwind, sleep better and lose the nagging feeling to check for a phone in the pocket. But the significance of such changes is a matter of debate for them. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

By Katherine Harmon Binge-shoppers and serial daters might perpetually be living at the whim of their latest impulse, and now research is getting to the biological basis of their seemingly random behavior. "Individuals vary widely in their capacity to deliberate on the potential consequences of their choices before they act," note the authors of a new study on the impulsive tendency. "Highly impulsive people frequently make rash, destructive decisions." Impulsivity has long been linked to the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is involved in learning and reward. And a new model helps to illuminate the connection between the two. The work is described in a study published online July 29 in Science. A team of researchers led by Joshua Buckholtz, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at Vanderbilt University, proposed that people who were more impulsive might have less active dopamine receptors in their midbrain but their brains would be more likely to fire off large quantities of the neurotransmitter when stimulated. To verify their hypothesis, the researchers used PET scans to watch the brains of 32 healthy and psychiatrically normal test subjects ages 18 to 35 (who had no history of substance abuse) while they were taking a classic test to measure impulsivity. Before the first testing round, subjects had taken a placebo pill, but before the second, they were given an oral dose of amphetamine, which can stimulate the brain's reward pathways, mobilizing dopamine. © 2010 Scientific American

By TARA PARKER-POPE Does your husband or wife constantly forget chores and lose track of the calendar? Do you sometimes feel that instead of living with a spouse, you’re raising another child? Your marriage may be suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. An A.D.H.D. marriage? It may sound like a punch line, but the idea that attention problems can take a toll on adult relationships is getting more attention from mental health experts. In a marriage, the common symptoms of the disorder — distraction, disorganization, forgetfulness — can easily be misinterpreted as laziness, selfishness and a lack of love and concern. Experts suggest that at least 4 percent of adults suffer from the disorder; that as many as half of all children with A.D.H.D. do not fully outgrow it and continue to struggle with symptoms as adults; and that many adults with the disorder never got the diagnosis as children. Adults with attention disorders often learn coping skills to help them stay organized and focused at work, but experts say many of them struggle at home, where their tendency to become distracted is a constant source of conflict. Some research suggests that these adults are twice as likely to be divorced; another study found high levels of distress in 60 percent of marriages where one spouse has the disorder. “Typically people don’t realize the A.D.H.D. is impacting their marriage because there’s been no talk about this at all,” said Melissa Orlov, author of the new book “The A.D.H.D. Effect on Marriage,” to be published in September. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

By JOHN TIERNEY At long last, the doodling daydreamer is getting some respect. In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions. But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems. Consider, for instance, these three words: eye, gown, basket. Can you think of another word that relates to all three? If not, don’t worry for now. By the time we get back to discussing the scientific significance of this puzzle, the answer might occur to you through the “incubation effect” as your mind wanders from the text of this article — and, yes, your mind is probably going to wander, no matter how brilliant the rest of this column is. Mind wandering, as psychologists define it, is a subcategory of daydreaming, which is the broad term for all stray thoughts and fantasies, including those moments you deliberately set aside to imagine yourself winning the lottery or accepting the Nobel. But when you’re trying to accomplish one thing and lapse into “task-unrelated thoughts,” that’s mind wandering. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Even if you haven't taken the invisible gorilla test, you've probably heard of it. It consists of a short video of two teams of students moving around while they pass basketballs. The idea is to count the number of passes made by one team while ignoring those made by the other. Roughly half of those who take the test fail to notice a person dressed as a gorilla who strolls into the middle of the players and beats its chest at the camera. The viewers are concentrating so hard on counting the passes that they're blind to the unexpected, even though it is staring them in the face. This book is by the psychologists who devised that experiment (see Gorilla psychologists: Weird stuff in plain sight). Their aim is to show how easy it is to miss things that are right in front of us when we're not looking out for them, and how illusions and distorted beliefs lead us astray every day. They cover what they consider to be six of the most common intuitive errors: Some of these biases have been widely written about, but it is worth reading them again here for the clarity with which Chris Chabris and Dan Simons explain them and their talent for making them relevant to everyday situations. They demonstrate, for example, how over-confidence in one's abilities can be hilarious in a talent show contestant or an incompetent criminal caught on camera, but worrying when it dissuades other members of a group from sharing their own - less confidently held but nonetheless important - opinions. And such over-confidence can be positively dangerous in a witness whose apparently credible evidence is given undue weight by jurors or police. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

By TARA PARKER-POPE Did you see the unicycling clown? Inattentional blindness while walking and talking on a cell phone (Applied Cognitive Psychology) Researchers at Western Washington University decided to study whether pedestrians engrossed in a phone conversation would notice obvious events around them. “I was trying to think about what kind of distraction we could put out there, and I talked to this student who had a unicycle,” said Ira E. Hyman Jr., a professor of psychology. “He said, ‘What’s more, I own a clown suit.’ You don’t have a student who unicycles in a clown suit every day, so you have to take advantage of these things.” The student, Dustin Randall, donned the suit — purple and yellow, with polka-dot sleeves, red shoes and a red nose — then hopped on the unicycle and pedaled around a square. After pedestrians crossed the square, researchers asked them, “Did you see anything unusual?” Among pedestrians who were listening to music or walking alone, 1 in 3 replied that they had just seen a clown on a unicycle, according to a report on the study, in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology. Nearly 60 percent of those who were walking with a friend mentioned the clown. But among people who had been talking on a cellphone, the figure was 8 percent. When the pedestrians were asked, “Did you see the unicycling clown?” the rates rose — to as high as 71 percent for people walking with a friend. But among those who had been talking on a cellphone, just 25 percent said they had. TARA PARKER-POPE Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Health (12 of 43) » A version of this article appeared in print on October 27, 2009, on page D6 of the New York edition. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Aficionados may not only treat their automobiles as if they are people, but it now appears that they recognize their cars with the special part of the brain that is also used to identify faces. And, when they try to identify cars and faces at the same time, they are likely to experience a kind of perceptual traffic jam. Those are some of the implications of research conducted at Vanderbilt University and the University of Colorado at Boulder. Researchers there compared how the brains of auto experts and novices process pictures of cars and faces. They found that viewing cars elicits signals from the brains of car experts that are just like the signals evoked by viewing faces in other brains. Moreover, the experts' skill interfered with their ability to identify faces when they were forced to process cars and faces simultaneously. The findings, reported online on March 10 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, directly challenge the widely held view that a small, specialized area in the brain is specially hardwired to recognize faces. When confronted with a novel object, people use different parts of the brain to identify it by breaking it down into pieces. By contrast, the special facial recognition area appears to recognize faces holistically, all at one time, and does so more quickly than the piecemeal approach.

By STEVE LOHR Confident multitaskers of the world, could I have your attention? Think you can juggle phone calls, e-mail, instant messages and computer work to get more done in a time-starved world? Read on, preferably shutting out the cacophony of digital devices for a while. Several research reports, both recently published and not yet published, provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. The findings, according to neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors, suggest that many people would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car. These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea. In short, the answer appears to lie in managing the technology, instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

By CAROL W. BERMAN, M.D. My patient, a 37-year-old homemaker, gazed at the man in the red plaid shirt as he sat on the couch in her living room. “Who are you?” she asked. There was something familiar about him. He wore her husband’s boots, but the shirt made him look like a truck driver. “Yeah, and who are you?” the man replied with a laugh. “Come here and give me a kiss.” She gave the man a peck on the cheek, but she felt guilty, fearing that her husband would arrive at any moment and admonish her. Not only did the man want a kiss — he also wanted sex! Discouraging him, she sat down to talk. The man spoke just like her husband and knew personal facts about her. It occurred to her that her husband had been mysteriously replaced by this fellow. How it happened she had no idea; she knew only that it had. My patient had a history of schizoaffective disorder, similar to schizophrenia, but with more emotional range. And when she told me of this incident at her weekly visit the next day, I worried that her psychosis was recurring. “Have you been taking your medicine?” I asked. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

By BENEDICT CAREY Even the most fabulous, high-flying lives hit pockets of dead air, periods when the sails go slack. Movie stars get marooned in D.M.V. lines. Prime ministers sit with frozen smiles through interminable state events. Living-large rappers endure empty August afternoons, pacing the mansion, checking the refrigerator, staring idly out the window, baseball droning on the radio. Scientists know plenty about boredom, too, though more as a result of poring through thickets of meaningless data than from studying the mental state itself. Much of the research on the topic has focused on the bad company it tends to keep, from depression and overeating to smoking and drug use. Yet boredom is more than a mere flagging of interest or a precursor to mischief. Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter. In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive. In a recent paper in The Cambridge Journal of Education, Teresa Belton and Esther Priyadharshini of East Anglia University in England reviewed decades of research and theory on boredom, and concluded that it’s time that boredom “be recognized as a legitimate human emotion that can be central to learning and creativity.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

NEW YORK - Brain scans of older people in a noisy lab machine give biological backing to the idea that distraction hampers memory with aging, researchers reported Wednesday. The finding bolsters a theory about one reason why memory weakens with age: older people have more trouble remembering some things because they’re more easily distracted when they try to learn them. The memory exercise reported in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience dealt with recognizing faces, but the findings apply to the more general task of trying to remember something a person sees or hears, said lead author Dale Stevens. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here Stevens, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, did the work while at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto. Older people who have to learn something should do all they can to focus on that task and eliminate potential distractions, he advised. The study compared 10 healthy people in their 60s and 70s to a dozen younger volunteers, ages 22 to 36. Their brains were scanned while they looked at photographs of people they did not know. As each photograph was displayed for one second, the volunteers were asked if they’d seen it before in the study. © 2008 The Associated Press

Got a tough problem to solve? Try daydreaming. Contrary to the notion that daydreaming is a sign of laziness, letting the mind wander can actually let the parts of the brain associated with problem-solving become active, a new study finds. Kalina Christoff of the University of British Columbia in Canada and her colleagues placed study participants inside an fMRI scanner, where they performed the simple routine task of pushing a button when numbers appear on a screen. The researchers tracked subjects' attentiveness moment-to-moment through brain scans, subjective reports from subjects and by tracking their performance on the task. Story continues below ↓advertisement | your ad here Until now, scientists had thought that the brain's "default network," which is linked to easy, routine mental activity, was the only part of the brain that remains active when the mind wanders. But in the study subjects, the brain's "executive network" — associated with high-level, complex problem-solving — also lit up. The less subjects were aware that their mind was wandering, the more both networks were activated. "This study shows our brains are very active when we daydream — much more active than when we focus on routine tasks," Christoff said. The findings, detailed in the May 11 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that daydreaming is an important cognitive state where we may unconsciously turn our attention from immediate tasks to sort through important problems in our lives. © 2009 LiveScience.com.

Brain goes on the blink JESSA NETTING Every time we blink, the world goes away for a fifth of a second. We don't notice, say Timothy Gawne and Julie Martin of University of Alabama at Birmingham, because at the same time part of the brain shuts down momentarily. The brain ignores each blink by suppressing a the nerve signal that tells us to ‘pay attention, the picture has just changed'. Apparently the old, pre-blink visual image then just stays in place to fill the perception gap until our eyes open once more, Gawne and Martin report in the Journal of Neurophysiology1. 1.Gawne, T. & Martin, J. Activity of primate V1 cortical neurons during blinks. Journal of Neurophysiology 84, 2691–2694 (2000). 2.Martinez-Conde, S., MacKnick, S., Hubel, D.H. Microsaccadic eye movements and firing of single cells in the striate cortex of macaque monkeys. Nature Neuroscience 3, 251–258. (2000). © Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2000 - NATURE NEWS SERVICE Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2000 Reg. No. 785998 England.

By BENEDICT CAREY A 38-year-old man who spent more than five years in a mute, barely conscious state as a result of a severe head injury is now communicating regularly with family members and recovering his ability to move after having his brain stimulated with pulses of electric current, neuroscientists are reporting. “I still cry every time I see him, but now it’s tears of joy,” said the man’s mother, in a conference call with reporters on Wednesday; her name was withheld, to protect the patient’s privacy. “He can speak, he can watch movies without falling asleep, he can say ‘Mom’ and ‘Pop,’ and ‘I love you, Mommy.’ ” He eats without the assistance of a feeding tube. He has regained some movement in his arms. When he speaks, usually with only a word or two, he is engaged in the conversation. He recently recited the first 16 words of the Pledge of Allegiance. The new report, which appears in the journal Nature, provides the first rigorous evidence that any procedure can initiate and sustain recovery in such a severely disabled person, years after the injury occurred. An estimated 100,000 to 300,000 Americans subsist in states of partial consciousness, and most are written off as beyond help. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

By NATALIE ANGIER The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time. As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent. “When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.” The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own. “How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

By MATT RICHTEL SAN FRANCISCO — When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it. Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up. “I stood up from my desk and said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.” The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. While he managed to salvage the $1.3 million deal after apologizing to his suitor, Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family. His wife, Brenda, complains, “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.” This is your brain on computers. Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Findings presented at annual Society for Neuroscience meeting
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 6, 2000 – Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have uncovered the mechanism by which the brain prepares itself to solve a problem. Their research was presented today at the 30th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The Pitt researchers, led by Cameron Carter, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry, conducted a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies showing that the part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) becomes active when a person is preparing for a task. The more it activates, the better that person performs a given task. Yet, absent anticipation that a task needs to be performed, the DLPFC does not activate at all. According to Dr. Carter, the data suggest that DLPFC activation is associated with representing and maintaining the attentional demands of a task. (c) 2000 UPMC Health System

A brain in doubt leaves it out JOHN WHITFIELD We are the prisoners of our brains. We see only what they decide to let us see. Researchers now illustrate this with an illusion in which the brain erases some aspects of the visual field. Yoram Bonneh, of the Smith–Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, and colleagues have been showing people a swirling pattern of blue dots superimposed on some stationary yellow dots1. 1.Bonneh, Y. S., Cooperman, A. & Sagi, D. Motion-induced blindness in normal observers. Nature 411, 798–801 (2001). © Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2001 - NATURE NEWS SERVICE. Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2001 Reg. No. 785998 England.

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