Decisions, Decisions...

Well, the school year has officially started...and that means an inevitable inundation of decisions to make. Whether it be the bad decisions of NSO, or the stressful decisions of OCR, what classes to take, what activities to get involved in, or even the smaller decisions about where to sit in lecture...we make thousands of decisions every day.

Here at Penn especially, students tend to be scrupulous with even the most minute of details, listing out every possible pro and con before finally committing to a decision -- the curse of being perfectionists. Sure the Econ books will tell you that we are all "rational" agents, trying to maximize our utilities. However, what happens when there is simply too much to take in, in order to be truly "rational", especially within a realistic time frame?

Recent research suggests that our subconscious actually come out on top when making complex decisions. Sure, if you have a few options, each with a few qualities to analyze, it does not require too much cognitive effort to make an accurate comparison so to make the best decision. In fact, with simple decisions, our conscious reasoning will pretty much always beat out our unconscious (emotional, visceral) response. However, with very complex decisions, studies have actually shown that our gut instinct, while not perfect, is actually more accurate in achieving maximal utility than conscious deliberation.

If how decisions are made seems like an area of interest for you, I highly recommend a book, titled How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer. The book gets into how the subconscious should not be merely dismissed as the source of insignificant hunches and feelings. The emotional brain is constantly taking in thousands of pieces of information simultaneously, often unbeknownst to us, and so we tend to know more than we are consciously aware of. When there is a burst of positive emotion while considering an option, it may very well be in our best interest to listen to it. The book is a great read, and ultimately sparked my own interest in the interdisciplinary field of Neuroeconomics. In fact, I am conducting independent research this semester in Dr. Joseph Kable's lab, which focuses on the underlying biological/ psychological mechanisms of how we make decisions, so if you would like to get involved, there is an opportunity to right here at Penn!

Ultimately, research has hinted that we make better decisions when we at least consider what our intuitions are telling us. From an evolutionary perspective, our cognitive conscious has evolved for a reason, and so it is important to use that capability as much as we can. However, when there is too much information to process, we may just have to fall back and depend on our affective inklings. Sure it's primitive (our emotional areas of the brain were evolutionarily developed long before our higher-level cognitive ones), but isn't it comforting knowing that we at least have some sort of a backup system to refer to? So the next time you're staring at a test question, desperate for an answer... consider the cliche and "go with your gut". Chances are you're probably right.

For some more info, click here

Jack & Diane & Your Brain

Valentine's Day is tomorrow, y'all. For those of you with significant others, spending exorbitant amounts of money on a mediocre steak and boxed red wine may be in your near future. The rest of us [myself included], however, have slaps in the face from every Hallmark-worthy couple and vomit-inducing bouquet of roses to endure.

Perhaps I'm a little cynical, but can you blame me? Love, a concept so abstract, so complicated, so devoid of scientific foundations, is hard to understand, let alone appreciate as a single college student majoring in neuroscience.

But wait! There's hope.

Acevedo, Aron, Fisher et al. recently published an article in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience titled 'Neural Correlates of Long-term Intense Romantic Love' that investigates where and how love is expressed in the brain.

[Note: the image above is a painting by Greg Dunn titled "Hippocampus" and can be found on his website, here.]

They studied married subjects using fMRI experiments to determine where the brain is activated while the subjects were thinking about their spouses. To control for confounding variables, subjects were also exposed to a long-term acquaintance, a close friend and a stranger while undergoing the fMRI procedures.

The authors observed that areas of the dopamine reward and basal ganglia systems were activated during the subjects' exposure to their spouses. Additionally, the hypothalamus and posterior hippocampus were found to be associated with sexual frequency. Lastly, the study discovered that the caudate, the septum/fornix, the posterior cingulate and the posterior hippocampus were correlated with obsession [creepy].

Alright, so you probably don't have a spare fMRI laying around your house to analyze your girlfriend or boyfriend while he/she watches you. However, these findings add to the growing resources citing that love does, in fact, have a biological basis.

So in the end, I guess love is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna' get [unless you apply and receive funding from the NIH, perform extensive neuroimaging experiments, analyze the data and most likely lose your significant other in the process]. Happy Valentine's Day!

Hahaha....Aha!

I am the first to admit that when I am confronted with a problem that has not yet been solved, I become obsessed. Anything from riddles, to sudoku, to rubik’s cubes, to crossword puzzles, and even homework problems (well…sometimes) have the ability to grab my attention to such an extent that I can’t let go until I am successful. So what provides the incentive to partake in these tedious conundrums? While dopamine may play a role in the feelings of reward upon the completion of such puzzles, research suggests that the mere idea of trying to solve a puzzle shifts the brain into a different state- one that is playful, creative, and open- providing a pleasant escape, calling on not only intellect, but also creativity to find a solution. The longer a puzzle goes unsolved, the more taunting it becomes, until finally there is a spark. This “sudden insight” may be due to the recognition of subtle environmental cues by the brain, while it is in such a creative state, that are not otherwise picked up. “Creative problem solving requires both analysis and out of the box insight, which may be devoted to two entirely different states,” says Adam Anderson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto. A recent study from Northwestern University has found that humor may help us to better achieve this creative condition, flickering on that proverbial light bulb, and helping us pull together pieces of a previously unconnected puzzle. “What we think is happening is that the positive mood of humor lowers the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections to solve puzzles,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study. With a positive mood, sudden insight tends to be the modus operandi as opposed to trial and error, suggesting that the state one is in prior to solving a puzzle really does have an effect on one’s efficiency in doing so. The anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain involved with selective attention, shows the most activity during problem solving. Surprisingly, the brain seems to widen its attentional capacity in evoking that “Aha!” moment, becoming more prone to distraction, but simultaneously more aware of the usually overlooked background cues hinting at a particular solution. Findings imply that a positive mood helps to set one in this broader state of attention, so that one is physically taking in more information, henceforth more clues to solving the problem.

So before your next exam, watch some funny clips or a comedy skit online to put yourself in a positive mood. It may not only relieve anxiety, but also help you to become a more creative thinker when getting through the exam.

Try it out for yourself right now! There are some interactive features linked in the margin of the article to test your problem solving ability. Click here.

Sing Me A Memory

You can often recognize it on the very first beat. The melody starts to consume you, as you feel a rush from head to toe…and all of the sudden you begin to sing, uncontrollably, whether in the shower, the car, or sometimes even in public! There is no better feeling when you catch a familiar tune that was a classic "back in the day", or even a song that used to be your favorite, especially if it has been a while since you’ve heard it. I’m the first to admit that I would sometimes take the long way to drive home if a song came on the car radio that I wanted to listen to in its entirety, and I’ve never been embarrassed by my shower voice.

I’ve always found it fascinating how songs have the ability to change our moods, and so I was intrigued when I heard that songs have been found to possess memory-evoking capabilities. Throughout our lives, many songs tend to be affiliated with a period of particularly strong emotion, from couples recollecting a song playing when they first met, to a student remembering a song from his senior year in high school. It is no surprise that music is strongly tied to memory, since memories are more easily recalled during periods of intense emotional experience. "What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our heads," said Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of California, Davis.

Jamata recognized that the medial pre-frontal cortex actually tracks chord and key changes in music, an area of the brain that is also activated in response to self-reflection and autobiographical recall. So, when an autobiographically related song was played to subjects in Jamata’s study, it is no surprise that this brain region was activated.

Even more interesting is the potential for music in areas such as Alzheimer’s research. These are individuals who suffer significant amounts of memory loss, but are still able to recognize songs from their pasts. "What's striking is that the prefrontal cortex is among the last [brain regions] to atrophy," Janata noted. Even if these patients cannot recall the memory that the song was affiliated with, the emotion associated with that experience is still evoked, evidenced by Alzheimer’s patients often singing along and reporting feelings of happiness when listening songs familiar to them. This just goes to show that when all else has left our minds, music will still be with us. Perhaps one day, this may lead to a method of retrieval of those memories we once thought permanently inaccessible, or lost forever, by the degenerative disease.

Also refer to the book by world-famous neurologist Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia

Nama-say whaaa?

Down dog, chaturanga, up dog, vinyasa. Oh, excuse me, I was just practicing a little Ashtanga (and increasing my thalamic GABA levels).

If this sounds to you like a pickup line from some foreign film noir, you're not alone. Au contraire, mon ami (French for "on the contrary, my friend"), all of the above (excluding GABA, which is a neurotransmitter associated with increased positive affect and decreased anxiety) are actually postures routinely practiced in the age old exercise of yoga.

The physical benefits of yoga are prolific and well-known--increased flexibility, improved circulation and decreased muscle tension to name a few--however, its neuronal benefits have, up until now, been relatively unexplored.

A study published in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine last week documented a significant increase in mood and decrease in anxiety when comparing two experimental groups of people: one that practiced an hour of yoga three times a week and another that did one hour of metabolically comparable walking exercises three times a week (this was all done over a twelve week period). Marked improvements, confirmed by self-reports and quantitative measurements of GABA levels in the brain immediately after each session, were observed in the yoga-practicing group.

Though exercise is inherently associated with an increase in positive affect and decrease in anxiety, comparing two events that involve equal increases in metabolic activity controls for any confounding factors. Thus, more credibility can be attributed to the notion that practicing yoga is the cause of these improvements.

Take a deep breath; you don't have to practice two hours of hot yoga a day to reap its brainy benefits (not to mention the amount of laundry you'd accrue doing that). Just keep in mind that it's never too late to try out a class at your local gym, buy a DVD or even use videos online to learn (Hulu has some great ones).

Click here to read more. Namaste!