The Brain: Wired To Connect?

Recently, Scientific American covered an interesting interview with scientist Matthew Lieberman, who discussed ideas on the neuroscience of human connections, and the implications behind how we live our lives. As human beings truly are such social creatures, Lieberman took the initiative to explore the social needs we have to connect with one another, analyzing this in regards to brain function. So whether out at social events, hanging out with friends, or (surprisingly) even when we’re alone – our brain is wired to be set on social interaction. In his interview, Lieberman reflects with his insight on these topics.

Our need to connect socially is “powerful.” But just how powerful is it?

Lieberman asserts that our need to connect is as fundamental as the need for food and water. Cultures around the world all have different beliefs about how important community and social interdependence are to our lives. Here in America, and in the West, we tend to believe that we are relatively independent and self-focused, immune to the sway and opinion of others around us. We like to think that we are driven to pursue our personal goals – but according to Lieberman’s studies, we may be less socially independent than we’d like to believe.

What is the connection between physical pain and social pain?

When we experience social pain – a rejection, harsh words – the feeling is as real as physical pain in our minds. Around the world, we use physical pain language to describe emotional or social pains we feel (“he broke my heart,” “she hurt my feelings”). This may be less of a metaphor than at first glance. With respect to human nature and evolution, this finding is pretty interesting… The things that cause us to feel physical pain are things that our brain recognizes as threats to our survival. The existence of social pain indicates that somewhere along the line, evolution treated social connection as a necessity rather than a comfort. Social connection also motivates us in behavior, influencing our decisions to revolve around praise from others and alleviating social threats. Social pain and pleasure are wired into our operating system, even though we never actually consider these as factors motivating “who we are.”

Human mind reading – what is it, and why is it important?

Not in reference to ESP psychic mind reading, this is a skill we use each and every day in social interactions. It’s kind of strange to think about, but humans have a tendency towards trying to understand the thoughts and feelings in the minds of people we interact with. Lieberman asserts that although we are far from perfect at deciphering the inner thoughts of others, the fact that we can even do this at all gives us an “unparalleled ability to connect and cooperate with others.” So in actuality, at times we are using other’s goals to motivate our own behaviors. Strangely enough, thinking about other people’s thoughts doesn’t feel any different from most kinds of analytical thinking we do. Yet Lieberman’s studies of fMRI research show that there are actually two distinct brain networks that support social and non-social thinking. As one of these networks increases its activity, the other one stops its functioning, like a “neural seesaw.” Here is the most fascinating part: whenever we finish doing some kind of non-social thinking, the brain network for social thinking comes on again almost immediately. Why would our brains be wired this way? Research has recently suggested that perhaps this reflex prepares us to enter the next moment of our lives focused on the thoughts behind the actions we see from others. Evolution has placed social functioning highest in our brains, making a major statement about the social nature of humans.

Shedding light on the age-old question: where does the “self” come from, and what does the “self” even mean?

Social psychologists have speculated for a long time that the “self” is a much more social phenomenon than it feels like from the inside, and neuroscience is bringing in new data to directly shed light on this. The region of the brain called the medial pre-frontal cortex, which sits right between your eyes, has been shown repeatedly to become activated when people reflect on themselves. Because we tend to think of the “self” as the thing that separates us from others, it is surprising that the same medial pre-frontal cortex is activated when we allow the beliefs of others to influence our own. The more active your pre-frontal cortex is when someone is trying to persuade you of something, the more likely you are to listen. Rather than being a closed-off area that separates us from others, the “self” is actually a socially-influenced idea, where the ideas of others are subconsciously considered in order that we may have the same kind of beliefs and values as those of the people around us. So the “self” we think of is truly much more an incorporation of the people around us, although we don’t consciously realize it.

So, according to Lieberman’s neuro-scientific research regarding the social nature of the brain, you actually may care what others think just a bit more than you realized… after all, we may be wired to care.

Scientific American, Mind Matters.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-we-are-wired-to-connect&page=2

Music, Memory, and Awareness of Self

Here at Penn, the 2013-2014 Academic Year has been dubbed “The Year of Sound,” gathering the Quaker Nation to celebrate all things musical, harmonious, noteworthy, and rhythmically driven. We’re all dancing (and learning) to the same tune! And as someone interested in neuroscience – which if you’re reading this, I’m sure you probably are as well or you're on the wrong page – Penn could not have picked a more exciting topic to delve into for all things brainy. Sound and the brain often go hand in hand, as scientists and researchers study effects of music on the brain, the way we process sound, clinical music therapy, and sound and memory, among other endless possibilities. I came across an interesting article regarding music in Alzheimer’s therapy, and immediately was drawn to the idea of music and the brain linking to this year’s theme, Year of Sound. So whether this gets you excited about music, memory, or self-awareness, keep both your ears and your brain open to this noteworthy breakthrough in Alzheimer’s research.

As most people probably know, Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by rapid and progressive decline of cognitive function. So far, there has been very little effective treatment for AD, so many have turned to interest in treating Alzheimer’s with behavioral therapy rather than drugs. A broad array of treatments have been investigated to battle this disease, including cognitive training, sensory stimulation, music therapy, and motor stimulation – of which music therapy seems to gather the most interest and results. For some reason, several different studies have shown that in Alzheimer’s patients with moderate to severe AD, their music memory has often been preserved despite of severe impairment in other areas. Several studies have shown that music therapy in Alzheimer’s patients can often alleviate some symptoms and reduce dementia troubles, overall improving healthy cognition, memory, language, and depression or anxiety. However, several researchers in Spain recently set out to examine the effects of music on a slightly different aspect of patients that is lost -- self-consciousness.

Self-consciousness is a characteristic thought to be unique to humans and some apes, separating higher thinking from that of other mammals. Basically, self-consciousness is an awareness of self, an ability to separate ourselves from perception and realize that we are perceiving. Descartes’ aphorism “I think, therefore I am” is the object of self-awareness, an understanding that we can realize we are thinking, and deduce from that our own existence. SC is multi-faceted, including consciousness of the body, its characteristics (i.e. if we are blond, brown, big or small), perception (senses of sight, smell, taste), one’s own autobiography, judgment, and moral decisions. Self-consciousness is a cognitive trait that allows us to be aware of the people we are, what we think, and act by moral reflection. So, in extreme cases, a loss of SC involves the subject no longer being conscious of existing. (Crazy to think we can be alive, yet not know we exist…)

Because music therapy has been shown to improve many symptoms of Alzheimer’s, Gil et al set out to discover if familiar music exposure could improve self-consciousness in cases of Alzheimer’s. 40 patients were recruited from the Memory Clinic in Salamanca, Spain to participate in the study, divided into a control group and an experimental group. 11 familiar songs were chosen for the experimental group and 5 unfamiliar songs were chosen for the control group. To assess levels of self-consciousness, patients were given an SC questionnaire that asked questions regarding personal identity, affective state, body representation, future memory, self-analysis, and moral judgments. They were then exposed to three months of intervention period in which they listened to music as part of daily therapy, and then followed up with the same SC questionnaire. After analyzing the results of the questionnaire, comparisons between the experimental and control groups showed that there were significant differences between the pre and post states of self-consciousness. The experimental group improved significantly in personal identity, affective state, moral judgment, and body representation, whereas in the control group there was impairment in almost all aspects over the three months. The three months of familiar music exposure integrated into daily life appeared to strengthen self-awareness and cognitive mental perception, while the control group continued to decline in state of consciousness.

So what does this mean? Maybe familiar music can be considered an overall enhancer for both self-awareness and mental state of being. Why did unfamiliar music therapy do nothing for patients? It is thought that unfamiliar music may require more processing of short-term memory, which is greatly affected in Alzheimer’s patients, whereas familiar music may trigger involuntary memories by favoring events formerly associated with the music. So it can be proposed that prolonged exposure to familiar music could allow AD patients who have lost other social and cognitive skills to participate in life and gain a sense of their own existence.

Being self-aware is not something we normally think about. How often do we actually take the time to consciously think about our own perception and existence? It’s not exactly something we value, yet in Alzheimer’s patients an ability to recognize ourselves is sadly lost. Who knew that our favorite songs could be the link to bringing us back into existence?

Familiar Music as an Enhancer of Self-Consciousness in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3784147/

Opting-out: The Real Reason Behind the Lack of Organ Donors

If you were asked to predict whether or not someone was a registered organ donor, what factors would you consider first? Perhaps religion? Cultural influences? Their family’s values? What if someone told you that these factors were all irrelevant, and that the main deciding factor was really whether or not someone had to check a box? For such a significant decision, this explanation is not very satisfying, but it may very well be true.

In a 2003 study, Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein studied rates of organ donation in European countries. The rate in Austria was close to 100% and in Sweden it was almost 86%, but in Germany and Denmark the rates were 12% and 4% respectively.  Despite the cultural and physical proximity, there were huge gaps between the rates. The main difference between these countries was that the ones with high percentages of organ donors had an “opt-out” system, whereas the countries with low percentages had “opt-in” systems. Essentially, people did not become organ donors in the “opt-in” countries because of the extra effort required to check a box. As Daniel Kahneman succinctly stated in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “The best single predictor of whether or not people will donate their organs is the designation of the default option that will be adopted without having to check a box.”

Kahneman defines this phenomenon as the “framing effect.” He views it as a threat to the economically rational view of human decision-making since people can clearly be manipulated into making (or not making) important decisions based on how a situation is presented.

The United States has an opt-in system with about 45% people registered as organ donors. While 45% is a better figure than some of the other opt-in countries, it is still not enough to prevent the number of deaths that occur due to a lack of organ donations. The logical next step is for Congress to pass a bill changing America’s opt-in system to an opt-out system. Unfortunately, passing a bill through Congress requires even more effort than checking a box.

Escaping Our Own Minds: The Cure May (Really) Shock You

            Affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide, depression remains the most widespread mental illness across the globe. Chances are, you know at least one person affected by depression’s debilitating effects – as 1 in 10 Americans are affected by its symptoms, and that number is even growing. Personally, depression really fascinates me because it affects such a widespread number of people, yet so little is known about how to effectively treat it. Maybe because it is caused by such a complex combination of social, biological, and psychological factors, treatments aren't always effective in helping eliminate symptoms. But recently, new experiments are providing insight into a specific type of treatment that, surprisingly, has shown such positive effects – electric shock therapy. As harsh and intimidating as this sounds, it’s actually showing to be effective in even the most severe of patients. Now we want to know, most importantly – why.

            The man behind electric shock treatment is Dr. Ian Reid, a psychiatrist at the Royal Cornhill Hospital located in Aberdeen, Scotland. He’s been treating severely depressed patients for 25 years, and witnesses that the disease is an extremely horrible illness. Typically patients who come to Reid’s hospital having major depression first receive a combined treatment of psychotherapy and antidepressants. Usually, less than half respond to their first medication, and 10-20% respond to no medication at all. In these cases, Reid turns to his third and final option, in which he is an expert – officially called electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, commonly known as shock therapy.

            Dr. Reid is an expert on ECT, and has received an incredible amount of criticism and hateful comments for his use of it on patients. People are shocked (no pun intended) by its use as a medical practice to treat depression, mostly because of the stigma of cruelty and torture associated with the practice. Although the movies typically depict shock therapy as a gruesome process, the actual therapy is not this way – patients are given anesthesia and muscle relaxants, and most importantly, they see results. It seems a little bizarre and twisted, but the numbers line up: in Scotland out of a population of about 5 million, 400 people receive ECT treatment each year for depression and around 75% of them are relieved of symptoms. For some reason, shock therapy outperforms the traditional psychotherapy and antidepressant treatment, but just why is a mystery. It sounds a bit convoluted that making someone have a seizure and giving them an electric shock will somehow make something as intensely complex as depression better.

            Electroconvulsive therapy was first used in 1938 to treat schizophrenic patients in Italy, where it then spread to uses for other diseases in other countries. Although it was clearly effective, it could be a frightening process as patients blacked out after seizures, sometimes breaking bones too. In the 1960’s, doctors added anesthesia and muscle relaxants to the treatment in order to prevent this from happening, but memory loss was still a prevalent problem. In the 1980’s, the treatment was further developed to now become a series of short compulsive shocks instead.

            Reid has now made it his mission to find out how ECT works on patients. According to previous studies, it was known that depression reduces the size of certain brain regions, including the hippocampus and gray matter (both involved in expression of emotion). So in 2009, he set out with colleagues to use fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to scan the brains of patients pre-ECT treatment, followed them through the therapy process, then followed up with post-treatment scans. The scans showed that after ECT, the hippocampus was often increased in size, but the gray matter was not.

            Reid and his colleagues also investigated another more significant change: how ECT transforms the brain’s communication with itself. Every region of the brain specializes in specific mental tasks, and each of these regions communicates with the regions around it – like a network of parts working closely in tandem. In some brain disorders like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, it has been found that these diseases alter the connectivity of certain networks and inhibit regions from communicating with one another. So, in an attempt to discover if this was the case in depression, Reid teamed up with Dr. Christian Schwarzbauer to test this on ECT treatment.

Reid and Schwarzbauer set out to analyze brain scans in depressive ECT patients for changes in connectivity. Typically when neuroscientists want to measure connectivity in the brain, they select a few large regions to measure blood flow between – Schwarzbauer however divided the brain into 25,000 separate chunks and measured connectivity between all of them, looking for important changes before and after ECT. Talk about dedication. This fine-tuned approach revealed a significant discovery: ECT weakened the same connective network in all 9 patients.

This region, surrounding a single hub located above the left eye, is in a brain region called the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. As Reid and Schwarzbauer investigated this area in search of a cause, they found previous research indicating that in case studies of depressed people, this network of the brain was “hyperconnected.” So, they speculate that perhaps in depressed individuals, the hyperconnected network excessively bounces thoughts back and forth around the brain, causing an internal information overload. So as shock therapy weakens the connections in this region, it’s possible that ECT allows depressed people to “get out of their own heads” so to speak.

The hypothesis is now currently being tested on patients, and if Reid and Schwarzbauer are correct, hopefully a big breakthrough will lead to a better understanding of depression as a mental illness. Although the study doesn’t clarify the question of how a jolt of electricity to the brain gets rid of hyperconnections, researchers are hopeful that future research will soon make it clear. Hopefully, in time, this could lead to a better long-term treatment that would give the same effect.

For the 1 in 10 Americans, the hundreds of millions around the world, and for family members and loved ones affected by this debilitating illness – this is incredibly good news. As shocking as it may be, a jolt of electricity to the mind may actually be the key to happiness? Scientists aren’t out of their minds – but it will definitely get you out of yours. 

-Madeline Kleypas

Discover Magazine. "The Brain: An Electric Cure for the Mind." http://discovermagazine.com/2012/nov/04-electric-cure-for-the-mind#.UlQwZhb3C8o

Dude-Dame Dimorphism: Are Men's Brains Just Bigger?

Over the past thirty years, a hot topic emerging in popular neuroscience has been the study and anatomical comparison of the male and female brain. From teachers to researchers, writers and bloggers, everyone's interested in it - what anatomical differences in the male and female brain cause the differences between male and female behavior? The answer lies in the brain. Maybe because it simply prods our interest and fuels curiosity, this topic has fascinated people for years. A particular area of interest between gender and the brain is the structure called the corpus callosum, the white matter bridge connecting the brain's left and right hemispheres.

One proposed male-female discrepancy in neuro anatomy is the size of this component, as an early study in 1982 showed that females, overall, had a larger and more bulbous callosal structure. At the time, this newfound discovery sparked tons of popular interest and speculation over its role in male-female behavioral differences. People began to hypothesize and propose that this meant females had more “interconnected” brains, and were better at things requiring multi-tasking or complex functioning:

“The corpus callosum is 30 percent more highly developed in the female brain… allowing information to flow more easily from one side of the brain to the other, which allows a woman to focus on more than one thing at a time.”

Cool, right? As interesting as this sounds, very recently it’s all been proven to be completely untrue - they didn’t get it quite right. In all actuality, a recent study shows that rather than women having a larger corpus callosum, men may just overall have larger brains. The breakthrough in this study has shown that the corpus callosum is relatively smaller in larger brains, appearing larger in smaller-sized brains. Although the original observation in 1982 may have shown the female’s callosum to be larger, it truly just appeared that way because the brain was a smaller size. So, sorry ladies – the actual anatomical difference in gender, and perhaps the only one, is that males have larger brains overall.

The Study:

Eileen Luders, et al.

Luders confirmed this theory with a clever technique. In order to truly investigate the differences between the male and female corpus callosum, the ideal study was planned to extract measurements of the corpus callosum in male and female brains of the same size. To our knowledge today, no other study has compared callosal size in male and females with equal brain mass – so these results are brand new for further exploration. The lack of info on this topic is probably due to the difficulty in finding males and females with similar brain sizes, as cranial capacity differs greatly between sexes. Fortunately, recent databases encompassing thousands of brain images have been established, allowing a unique opportunity to select from a vast pool of subjects. Using the International Consortium for Brain Mapping (ICBM) database, Luders and colleagues selected 24 male brains and 24 female brains from the database, perfectly matched for size. They also complemented this sample with another subset of 24 extra-large male brains and 24 extra-small female brains to account for wide degree of variation in brain size. Total intracranial volume was calculated using imaging technology, and then a special process called “surface-based mesh-modelling” was used to overlay brain images and measure equidistant spatial points in the corpus callosum, male versus female. What Luders found was interesting and completely controversial to prior popular belief. When comparing the brain images divided by sex and accounting for size, Luders’ data pointed to the opposite - that the corpus callosum was actually always thicker in men than in women. However, this gender difference was clearly driven by brain size, thus the following conclusion was formed: simply put, males have larger brains, leading to comparatively thicker corpus callosum than females.

Altogether, findings suggest that individual differences in brain size account for the apparent sex differences in the corpus callosum. Studies like Luders’ will continue to provide important clues about cerebral differences between men and women, especially if appropriate strategies are used to account for variations in brain size. Nevertheless, it is also possible that future studies will use this line of thought to expand on adolescent brain size between boys and girls, examining brain-imaging technology for gender differences in how they develop.

Given the freshness and excitement of these popular findings, and their possible relevance for understanding sex differences in cognition, emotion, and behavior, the sexual dimorphism of the human corpus callosum has been and will be a continued object of exploration. So, as fueled by our neuro-curiosity, the battle of the sexes (the brain battle, that is...) continues on.

-Madeline Kleypas

Eileen Luders, Arthur W. Toga, & Paul M. Thompson (2013). Why Size Matters: Differences in Brain Volume Account for Apparent Sex Differences in Callosal Anatomy Neuroimage DOI:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.09.040