Irish Blog Awards

Being a relative newcomer to the blogging world, it is gratifying to see Inside the Brain listed in a great line up of  finalists for the Irish Blog Awards in the Science / Education category. 

The award is sponsored by Microsoft Ireland’s Developer and Platform Group and the awards will take place in Belfast later this month.

Although traditional scientific training typically doesn’t prepare scientists to be effective communicators outside of academia, there is a growing movement towards engagement between scientists and the public. It is something that I have always been interested in, and now new media forms, such as blogging, have made communicating scientific discoveries to the public so much more effective.

The 2005 Descartes science communication prize winner, Bill Bryson believes that “so much science is inherently interesting, and more effort is needed to get that across…you need to teach ‘normal’ people the wonder of science – you should be getting that even if you’re never going to be a scientist.”

He advises scientists hoping to communicate their work to the wider world not to ” lose your sense of wonder and don’t forget the wow factor. It’s the same in all walks of life, but for scientists, who might not be the best communicators, to forget these can be particularly tragic.”

That sense of wonder in science is still very much alive in me and I hope with this blog to be able to convey a little of that wow factor to readers for many years to come. Reading through the list of finalists in this awards category I can see that this is as true for them as it is for me.

Best of luck to everyone who has made it through to the final round of the Irish Blog Awards!

Sign your name across your brain

THE LATEST OECD survey reveals that almost one-quarter of Irish 15-year-olds are below the level of literacy needed to participate effectively in society. How can this be after unprecedented investment in Irish schools in the past decade?*

Research in neuroeducation – the brain science of learning – suggests that something is lost in switching from book to computer screen, and from pen to keyboard. Neuroeducation may help to explain the reported decline in literary – particularly writing – skills observed in students over the past decade.

When it comes to learning – the pen is mightier than the keyboard

Do you remember that diary you so assiduously kept or that pen pal you wrote to? Little did you know then, but the mere act of picking up a pen and writing makes you smarter.  The answer may be that reading and writing involves a number of the senses. When writing by hand, our brain receives feedback from our motor actions, together with the sensation of manipulating the pencil to form words on paper. This nerve activity is significantly different from those we receive when touching and typing on a keyboard. This explains why a written signature carries so much weight in the legal and business world – because it reflects the wiring unique to that brain.

The knack to learning is – learning by doing

The trick to all learning is to create an enriched physical learning environment by employing as many of the five senses as possible – seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling – in your learning.  Thus, when writing by hand, the movements involved leave behind a kind of motor memory in the sensorimotor part of the brain, which helps us recognize letters. This implies a nerve connection between reading and writing, and suggests that the sensorimotor system plays a role in the process of visual recognition during reading. This nerve connection is weak or absent in keyboard typing.

Work it out – with pen and paper

In addition, writing involves more ‘doing’ than that observed for keyboard typing and the ‘doing’ actually reinforces the learning process by helping us focus on the task at hand and strengthening the nerve connections. Furthermore, brain scans of avid writers show an activation of Brocas area – a language centre within the brain – while little or no activation of this area is observed in those who had learned by typing on keyboards.

Awaken the living roots in your head – with your pen

The poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney – a master craftsman of the written word – was not far off the mark in his poem ‘Digging’. The poem takes the form of a promise from the poet to his father and grandfather, whose lives were, spent literally digging the soil. In this short poem Heaney acknowledges that he is not a farmer, and will not follow their vocation. But at the start of his career, he vows to translate their virtues into another kind of work:

 The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

 

 *Irish students drop in rankings for literacy and maths, Irish Times, Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Treatment expectation will boost or reduce drug efficacy

If you read my post yesterday on the neuroscience of success, you will have read of the unbeatable combination of optimism tempered with reality. Having written that post, it was fascinating today to read a paper in the current edition of Science Translational Medicine, which shows that a patient’s belief that a drug will not work can indeed become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Researchers from Oxford University identified the regions of the brain which are affected in an experiment where they applied heat to the legs of 22 patients, who were asked to report the level of pain on a scale of one to 100. The patients were also attached to an intravenous drip so drugs could be administered secretly.

The initial average pain rating was 66. Patients were then given a potent painkiller, remifentanil, without their knowledge and the pain score went down to 55.

They were then told they were being given a painkiller and the score went down to 39.

Then, without changing the dose, the patients were then told the painkiller had been withdrawn and to expect pain, and the score went up to 64.

So even though the patients were being given remifentanil, they were reporting the same level of pain as when they were getting no drugs at all.

Brain scans during the experiment also showed which regions of the brain were affected. The expectation of positive treatment was associated with activity in the cingulo-frontal and subcortical brain areas while the negative expectation led to increased activity in the hippocampus and the medial frontal cortex.

The limbic system comprises several cortical and subcortical brain areas that are interconnected. This system essentially controls emotions, and the autonomic and endocrine responses associated with emotions. The hippocampus also belongs to the limbic system and plays an important role in long-term memory. Activity in the medial frontal cortex predicts learning from errors.

This latest research could have important consequences for patient care and for testing new drugs. Negative expectations about a drug can reduce its efficacy quite significantly, as indeed positive expectation can boost its efficacy. So it seems, that once more, a positive attitude holds the key to another area of success!

The neuroscience of success

Reading the newspaper obituaries of John Paul Getty III, who died recently, I was forcibly struck by the thought that here was the living embodiment of the fact that money is no guarantee of happiness.

Such was the dysfunction in the family of this grandson of  J. Paul Getty (founder of the Getty oil empire and known to be  the richest man in the world), that when as a 16-year-old he was kidnapped for a $17m ransom neither his miserly father nor grandfather were willing to pay. The result of their miserliness was the kidnappers slicing off Getty junior’s ear and sending it to a Roman newspaper.

After five months in captivity the boy was released when $2.8m was agreed – the exact sum eligible for a tax write-off by his grandfather. The teenager was set free and found shivering at a petrol station near Naples on December 15th 1973 ( the date of his grandfather’s 81st birthday) but when his grandson phoned to thank him,  the old man refused to accept his call. Thereafter the boy descendent into a self-destructive spiral of drugs and alcohol. After a stroke in 1981 caused by a drug overdose, he spent the last 30 years of his life in a wheelchair, paralysed and partly blind, eventually dying last month at the age of 54.

What is resilience?

What makes someone pick themselves us when their life’s work comes to nothing or keeps another going after rejection by a lover? The ability of some people to bounce back after defeat is not some triumph of the human will or some inborn trait of human greatness. Rather, such people have developed a way of thinking that does not see defeat as permanent or affecting their core values. The really amazing finding is that this ability is not inbred – where we either have it or we don’t. In fact, optimism is a set of skills that can be learned.

A toolkit for success  

Foremost in your skills toolbox you will need a positive explanatory style. Pessimistic people think that misfortune is their own fault and that the cause of their misery is permanent – due to ugliness, stupidity or lack of talent on their part – and are therefore not bothered to change it. Although few of us are 100% pessimistic we will at some stage in the past have given in to pessimism in reaction to some past events. Some psychology textbooks even consider this to be ‘normal’. 

Pessimism is bad news!

However, we now know that adopting a different way of explaining setbacks to yourself – by using an explanatory style – will protect you from letting disappointment develop into depression. Even an average level of pessimism can bog you down and lower your levels of success in every area of your life, health, relationships and work.

If you think life is hard – try selling life insurance

Much of the research leading to these findings took place by a psychologist studying agents selling life insurance – regarded as the most difficult of all sales jobs. Management in the company was concerned that so many of its agents were quitting despite millions of dollars spent in training.

Success is about attitude not experience

Research suggests that rather than selecting on the basis of their CVs applicants should be hired for testing well on optimism and explanatory style. The results showed that agents performed twice as good as the others. They clearly had better ways to deal with the nine out of ten rejections that made the others give up.

Optimism and success – which comes first?

The conventional view is that success creates optimism but evidence now shows the reverse to be true. Time and time again optimism tends to deliver success. At the exact same point when a pessimist will wilt – an optimist will persevere and break through that barrier.

It’s good to ‘have a word with yourself’

Not getting through this barrier can sometimes be interpreted as laziness or lack of talent but what psychologists have found is that those people who stop trying or give up easily never dispute their own interpretation of failure or disparagement.  In contrast, those who regularly overcome their obstacles argue against their own limiting thoughts and do as Jim Royle in the BBC’s comedy show, The Royle Family would advise ’have a word with yourself’‘– and thereby quickly find positive reasons for the rejection.

When pessimism pays

Is there any situation where pessimism is appropriate? The answer is yes. Pessimists have an ability to see a situation accurately and are eminently suitable for such professions as financial control, accounting and safety engineering for example. In fact all firms could do with one or two pessimists.

The trick is to get the balance right

In fact, Bill Gates praised those Microsoft employees who would tell him what’s gone wrong and would do so quickly. Nevertheless, let us not forget that Gates was a ‘world class’ dreamer who imagined at a very young age that every single house in America would be using his windows software.

Go for that unbeatable combination – reality and possibility

This story illustrates the secret of success in both work and life – the ability to perceive reality accurately and yet visualise a compelling future. The problem is that many people are good at one and not the other.

So the message is simple –if you want to become an optimist – by all means keep the ability to perceive reality accurately but work on becoming a better dreamer – the combination is unbeatable.

Try it and see for yourself!

Weekly Round-Up

 

fightclub

Does a part of our brain host its own fight club?

In this week’s round-up of the latest discoveries and research in the field of neuroscience – the science of falling in love, the brain’s own fight club and how blogging may hold the secret of making boys write properly.

Continuing with the Valentine’s theme this week, Judy Foreman examines the scientific basis of falling in love.

In the Feb. 10 online issue of Current Biology, a Johns Hopkins team led by neuroscientists Ed Connor and Kechen Zhang describes what appears to be the next step in understanding how the brain compresses visual information down to the essentials.

In Itching for a Fight Science News carries the story that a small part of our brain hosts its very own fight club.

And finally, a report in The Independent newspaper on how blogging may have solved one of the most pressing problems that has perplexed the education world for years: how to get boys to write properly.

How cupid’s arrows find their mark inside your brain

Your brain in love

Men and women can now thank a dozen brain regions for their romantic fervor. Researchers have revealed the fonts of desire by comparing functional MRI studies of people who indicated they were experiencing passionate love, maternal love or unconditional love. Together, the regions release neuro­transmitters and other chemicals in the brain and blood that prompt greater euphoric sensations such as attraction and pleasure. Conversely, psychiatrists might someday help individuals who become dan­gerously depressed after a heartbreak by adjusting those chemicals.

Passion also heightens several cognitive functions, as the brain regions and chemicals surge. “It’s all about how that network interacts,” says Stephanie Ortigue, an assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University, who led the study. The cognitive functions, in turn, “are triggers that fully activate the love network.”

Tell that to your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day!

Graphics by James W. Lewis, West Virginia University (brain), and Jen Christiansen.

Source: Scientific American

The neuroscience of emotions

Google Tech Talks
September 16, 2008

ABSTRACT

The ability to recognize and work with different emotions is fundamental to psychological flexibility and well-being. Neuroscience has contributed to the understanding of the neural bases of emotion, emotion regulation, and emotional intelligence, and has begun to elucidate the brain mechanisms involved in emotion processing. Of great interest is the degree to which these mechanisms demonstrate neuroplasticity in both anatomical and functional levels of the brain.

Speaker: Dr. Phillippe Goldin

Chinks in the brain circuitry reveal our worry spots

Some people are more prone to anxiety than others

Open any newspaper, switch on any talk show on the radio this weekend, and you will be spoilt for choice with anxiety-inducing stories.

Living in this time of global recession, rising mortgage rates, political instability, it almost appears as if the media encourages us to be anxious on a daily basis. 

Easy as it is to respond with anxiety to these stories, it is in fact the least productive response to have in life. It is like a mental pain we inflict on ourselves, clouding our judgment and reasoning, zapping us of the energy we need to move forward with our lives and make sound decisions. Anxious thoughts activate stress hormones that trigger the brain’s  fight or flight response. But this arousal is temporary, and when it abates, is followed by exhaustion, apathy and even depression.

Not everyone is affected to the same degree by this tendency to react to life’s events with anxiety. We all know people who fret at the slightest thing, while others have the ability to remain calm and composed in the face of crisis. At its most chronic this tendency can lead to panic-attacks, social phobias, obsessive-compulsive behavior and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have discovered a neural explanation for why some individuals are indeed more anxiety-prone than others. Their findings, published in Neuron, reveal that chinks in our brain circuitry could be the answer, and may pave the way for more targeted treatment of chronic fear and anxiety disorders.

In the brain imaging study, the researchers discovered two distinct neural pathways that play a role in whether we develop and overcome fears. The first involves an overactive amygdala, which is home to the brain’s primal fight-or-flight reflex and plays a role in developing specific phobias.

The second involves activity in the ventral prefrontal cortex, a neural region that helps us to overcome our fears and worries. Some participants were able to mobilize their ventral prefrontal cortex to reduce their fear responses even while negative events were still occurring, the study found.

“This finding is important because it suggests some people may be able to use this ventral frontal part of the brain to regulate their fear responses – even in situations where stressful or dangerous events are ongoing”, said UC Berkeley psychologist Sonia Bishop, lead author of the paper.

“If we can train those individuals who are not naturally good at this to be able to do this, we may be able to help chronically anxious individuals as well as those who live in situations where they are exposed to dangerous or stressful situations over a long time frame,” Bishop added.

Bishop and her team used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to examine the brains of 23 healthy adults. As their brains were scanned, participants viewed various scenarios in which a virtual figure was seen in a computerized room. In one room, the figure would place his hands over his ears before a loud scream was sounded. But in another room, the gesture did not predict when the scream would occur. This placed volunteers in a sustained state of anticipation.

Participants who showed overactivity in the amygdala developed much stronger fear responses to gestures that predicted screams. A second entirely separate risk factor turned out to be failure to activate the ventral prefrontal cortex. Researchers found that participants who were able to activate this region were much more capable of decreasing their fear responses, even before the screams stopped.

The discovery that there is not one, but two routes in the brain circuitry that lead to heightened fear or anxiety is a key finding, the researchers said, and it offers hope for new targeted treatment approaches.

“Some individuals with anxiety disorders are helped more by cognitive therapies, while others are helped more by drug treatments,” Bishop said. “If we know which of these neural vulnerabilities a patient has, we may be able to predict what treatment is most likely to be of help.”

Source: University of California, Berkeley

Weekly Round Up

In a new study, participants who received electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes were three times as likely to reach the fresh insight necessary to solve a difficult, unfamiliar problem than those in the control group. (Credit: iStockphoto/Andrey Volodin)

In this week’s round-up of the latest discoveries in the field of neuroscience – electric thinking caps, shrinking brains, brain controlled bionic arms, expanding memories..and much more.

Are we on the verge of being able to stimulate the brain to see the world anew with an electric thinking cap? Research by Richard Chi and Allan Snyder from the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney suggests that this could be the case.

Human brains have shrunk over the past 30,000 years, but it is not a sign of decreasing intelligence, according to scientists who suggest that evolution is making the key motor leaner and more efficient in an increasing population.

The LA Times reports that the FDA are about to test a brain-controlled prosthetic arm. The arm system, developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, uses a microchip implanted in the brain to record and decode signals to neurons that control muscles linked to the prosthesis.

Interesting abstract in the New Scientist which shows that just as gardeners prune unwanted growths from flowers, the brain has its own molecular secateurs for trimming back unwanted connections.

Researchers have identified a protein that appears vital for forming the right kind of connections in the rapidly growing brain of newborn babies.

New research by scientists at Royal Holloway, University of London provides evidence that the cerebellum, a part of the brain used to store memories for skilled movements, could also store memories important for mental skills

Research conducted with deaf people in Nicaragua shows that language may play an important role in learning the meanings of numbers.

In the Neuroscience of Resilience, Lisa Brookes Kift is asking the question what does the brain and neuroscience have to do with building up our  resilience?

Finally, if you do just one thing this weekend, make it a walk. A report in the New York Times this week reveals that taking a walk may expand the hippocampus – a part of the brain important to the formation of memories. In healthy adults, the hippocampus begins to atrophy around 55 or 60. So get your walking shoes on this weekend!

Pioneering brain surgery to treat Tourette’s

 

Brain structures implicated in Tourette syndrome

 The BBC UK health website carries a story this week of a Devon man with Tourette’s syndrome who is to undergo a pioneering form of brain surgery.

Mike Sullivan, 32, who was diagnosed with the condition at the age of 12, has elected to undergo deep brain stimulation to help reduce his involuntary tics.

Tourette syndrome is an inherited neuropsychiatric disorder which begins in childhood. It is characterised by multiple physical (motor) tics and at least one vocal (phonic) tic

Mr Sullivan has tried a number of different medications. None has relieved his symptoms but many have given him serious and unpleasant side effects.

For deep brain stimulation a local anaesthetic is used and electrodes are put into the brain through the skull.

These are linked to a pacemaker-type battery in the patient’s chest then electrical impulses are sent to the brain to block the damaging signals.

A common perception of Tourette’s is that it is a bizarre condition, most often marked by the involuntary exclamation of obscene words, but actually this symptom is present in only a small minority of people with Tourette’s.[1]  Between 1 and 10 children per 1,000 have Tourette’s;[2] as many as 10 per 1,000 people may have tic disorders,[3] with the more common tics of eye blinking, coughing, throat clearing, sniffing, and facial movements.  The severity of the tics decreases for most children as they pass through adolescence, and extreme Tourette’s in adulthood is a rarity.

The exact cause of Tourette’s is unknown, but it is well established that both genetic and environmental factors are involved.[4]   Gender appears to have a role in the expression of the genetic vulnerability: males are more likely than females to express tics.[5]

Tourette syndrome is a spectrum disorder—its severity ranges over a spectrum from mild to severe. The majority of cases are mild and require no treatment.

However Mr Sullivan said he has to work hard to suppress the almost continual tics while working with the public at Exeter Register Office. He describes this experience as exhausting and mentally draining. He says he is aware of the risks involved in undergoing brain surgery, but if it led to any improvement in his condition it would be worth it.

“Whilst I’m scared and it’s not something I’d choose to do, it’s more than worth the risk,” he said. “If it improves me even by 5% or 10%, it will make such a massive difference to my quality of life.”

Doctors at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London are trialling the use of deep brain stimulation to treat not only Tourette’s Syndrome, but Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which many Tourette’s patients including Mr Sullivan also suffer from.

Only a few procedures have so far been carried out worldwide, but Mr Sullivan has been recommended for treatment by Dr Tim Harrower, a consultant neurologist at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital.

Tourette Support Ireland hopes to develop a countrywide network to support adults with the condition at its annual general meeting at 11am on Saturday, February 19th, in the Ashling Hotel, Dublin. Dr Tara Murphy, clinical psychologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital, will offer advice on behaviour therapies for the condition, and there will be a music workshop for young people. Tel: 087-2982356 or e-mail support@tsireland.ie. Advance registration on tsireland.ie.

Notes

[1] Schapiro NA. “Dude, you don’t have Tourette’s:” Tourette’s syndrome, beyond the tics. Pediatr Nurs. 2002 May–Jun;28

[2] Lombroso PJ, Scahill L. “Tourette syndrome and obsessive–compulsive disorder”. Brain Dev. 2008 Apr;30(4):231–7. doi:10.1016/j.braindev.2007.09.001 PMID 17937978

.[3] Tourette Syndrome Fact Sheet. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke/National Institutes of Health (NINDS/NIH), February 14, 2007. Retrieved on May 14, 2007

[4]Walkup JT, Mink JW, Hollenback PJ, (eds). Advances in Neurology, Vol. 99, Tourette Syndrome. Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, Philadelphia, PA, 2006, p. xv. ISBN 0-7817-9970-8

[5] Black, KJ. Tourette Syndrome and Other Tic Disorders.eMedicine (March 30, 2007). Retrieved on August 10, 2009.