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To Be Another

I was hopping around the Internet, when a certain headline jumped out at me: “What’s it like to see through the eyes of Another?” This was either going to be about some bizarre alien conspiracy or some very enticing science experiment. What I found was a project called “The Machine to be Another”, which was conducted by a Barcelona design collective. A team of artists, programmers, and engineers sought to experiment with empathy, perspective, and reality.

Typically in labs that explore empathy, subjects use computer avatars and answer questions while sitting in front of a screen. Video games are a common tool of simulation to study racial or gender bias. In the Be Another lab, however, there is a new method to create integrative approaches to expand our concept of reality.

Using two large goggle and earpieces mounted on the two subjects’ heads, the user’s brain is essentially tricked into seeing a 3-D, lifelike video of the other person’s perspective. The goggles record the view from one user and then feed those images and sounds to the headset of the partner. When the two subject sync their movements—by touching objects, looking around the room, and feeling their respective bodes—the subject gets the complete sensation of being in the other’s body.

The goggles were designed based off of the Oculus VR, which is a virtual reality headset originally designed for immersive video gaming. The headset uses tracking technology that allows for 360 degree viewing. Every movement that the goggles pick up gets tracked in real time, which allows for optimal viewing. The Oculus rift captures unique and parallel images for both eyes, which is similar to the way our eyes view the world. The headset mimics reality as closely as possible.

Here’s the scene: a man and woman stand opposite each other. They are both naked save for a headset that is connected to a monitor for third-party viewing. The woman will look at her hands and see hairy knuckles and a bulge in her pants. The man is quick to explore his newfound breasts. As long as the pair stays roughly in sync, the Machine To Be Another can cheat the brain and convince people that they have switched bodies.

This sounds like some sort of sci-fi version of 13 going on 30, but the Be Another Lab is focused on studying issue of race, gender, and physical disability. The most startling aspect of the experiment of the lab is how quickly the brain changes its understanding of reality. After years and years of living in the same body, in fewer than ten seconds your can brain forget your old physique and accept a completely new reality. That’s pretty cool. A relatively low budget art science experiment can make brains forget sex, physical build, and the sound of your own voice.

The brain displays astounding plasticity in its ability to pick up new languages, patterns, and ideas, but this seems to strike another level of impressive. The brain is so able to blur the boundaries between self and other. What has been such a foundational human belief—that we are ourselves and everyone else is someone else—is being put to trial by this type of experimentation. Indeed we are developing new tools to study human sympathy that can affect human sympathy.

Perhaps with gizmos like this becoming less experimental and more practical, we will be forced to accept the existence of other people on an entirely new level. We will be able to interact with someone else’s existence, either a stranger or a brother. The ultimate scope of this experiment is far from over. Technologies like this will continue to proliferate, and as they grow, our minds will need to expand with them.

By: David Ney 

Insights from the Perspective of an Undergraduate Researcher

I recently completed my first semester of independent research. As a Biological Basis of Behavior major at Penn, I have the opportunity to work in a lab for 10-12 hours per week and earn credit. I currently work in Dr. Anjan Chatterjee’s lab, the details of which I will elaborate on in a separate post. I started working in the lab last July and plan on continuing the project during this upcoming semester.

Now that the semester is over, I have unsurprisingly been reflecting upon the things I learned. I’ve realized that I had many misconceptions about what “research” entails. I’m still not quite sure where my previous views of research originated from…maybe high school biology and chemistry labs or inaccurate stock photos in textbooks. Regardless, I hope to dispel some of these ideas which I know, after speaking to other undergrads, are not unique to myself.

Here are some of the things that surprised me the most.

1) Research takes a really, really, really long time.

When I started in July, I was expecting to have completed an entire project and sent out a paper to be published by the end of the semester. Long story short, I was wrong. Getting enough subjects was one of the initial hurdles. The practical challenges of finding people who met the criteria just hadn’t occurred to me. I learned the hard way that not everyone wants to come to the lab to participate in our study, even if they already signed up to do so. I was also overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data we collected. Each subject yielded a 30,000 line spread sheet with over 12 columns of numbers. With over 55 subjects, it took (and is still taking) awhile to format everything so that it can be analyzed using a statistical program. I’ve read many studies in the past, but I now have a better understanding of the sheer amount of time and effort that went into each article. A succinct 5-page paper could easily take thousands of hours to produce. Researchers are probably some of the most patient people out there.

2) Labs are not all sterile places filled with test tubes and pipets.

Look what comes up when I type in “research lab” on Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=research+lab&safe=active&espv=210&es_sm=91&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=4jTIUumNBsbNsQSAqIDgDQ&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1223&bih=651. This makes me feel slightly better about the fact that this was exactly how I envisioned a “lab.” Microscopes. Rubber gloves. Colorful chemicals. Lab coats. I could not have been further from the truth. I guess I never really considered cognitive neuroscience labs when I was younger. My research professor’s office overlooks a beautiful pond and has walls covered in modern art. There is no “lab” per se. The researchers who work for Dr. Chatterjee have their own offices and cubicles scattered throughout the 3^rd floor of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. There are some patient testing rooms, but all of our eye tracking trials were run in a regular office at a desk. If I were to walk into the building and remove all the neuroscience posters on the walls, it would look more like a scene from corporate America than a prestigious scientific institution, aside from the fact that no one wears a suit.

3) Labs are actually social places.

This one goes along with my previous misconception. In that sterile place, I imagined people in lab coats and goggles pipetting things into test tubes for hours without any human contact. While there are a lot of opportunities for individual work, there is almost just as much collaboration. I did not do anything without first consulting with my two co-workers and discussing what the best course of action would be. In weekly lab meetings, everyone updates the group on their progress and any problems they faced during the previous week. We even had lab dinners which, while not centered around the research, definitely allowed me to get to know people better which helps the overall chemistry of the group in the long run. I know that it’s cheesy and that we’ve all been hearing this from a young age, but cooperation really does yield to better results.

Working in a lab was not what I expected it to be, but I had a great experience overall and look forward to continuing my research in the future. While the excessively long excel spreadsheets continue to haunt me, I genuinely believe all this work will be worth it if I am able to provide some new insights to the scientific community. On top of that, I’ve met some extremely interesting people to look up to as I continue my undergraduate studies. I’m excited to see what challenges and successes next semester will bring.

Neuro-Food for Thought: Free Will and the Unconscious Mind

Happy winter break, Quakers! Hope you’ve enjoyed lots of food, family, and a long break from the countless finals hours spent cramming in Van Pelt. Relaxing over the break, I’ve finally had the chance to pick up a few books I’ve been meaning to read in my free time. On my reading list were two extremely interesting neuro-related books that I suggest everyone pick up when they get the chance! Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer are both two extremely well written books dealing with the popular topic of the true power of the human unconscious. Lately, there has been a vast amount of books, articles, and studies emerging focused on this rapidly growing topic, and I’ve definitely fallen subject to the craze myself. The volume of research in this topic is rapidly expanding as neuroscientists everywhere attempt to uncover the inner workings of the mind – the levels of the unconscious brain that work to form our decisions before we are even aware of them. As humans, we’d like to think that we are in control of our own decisions, consciously determining our own behavior and actions the way that we choose to. But what if this isn’t nearly as true as we think it is? Current research is aiming to expose the activity that occurs deep in the recesses of the brain long before we realize we’ve even made a decision at all. According to scientists, an actual decision occurs deep inside our brain before we realize it, and the consciousness of a decision is merely a biochemical afterthought, a result that has no effect on our choice to perform an action at all. So if we aren’t actually aware of our decisions, does free will exist? This is the core of the heated debate going on today between neuroscientists and philosophers alike.

John-Dylan Haynes, a researcher at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, performed an experiment in 2007 that forever changed his outlook on life. Haynes put subjects into a brain scanner in which a screen flashed a succession of random letters, and told them to press a button with either their right or left index finger whenever they felt the urge to. An fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) test was used to show brain activity in real time as the subjects used either their left or right fingers to hit the button. The results were so surprising that Haynes’ first thought was to question the reality of his data. Haynes and his team found that the conscious decision to push the button could be seen in brain activity about a second before the actual act, but the team also discovered that a pattern of unconscious brain activity seemed to predict the action by as many as seven seconds. This led Haynes and colleagues to challenge the idea that decisions are under our conscious control. According to their logic, they argue that free will is in fact an illusion. “We feel we choose, but we don’t,” says neuroscientist Patrick Haggard from University College London. For example, you may have thought this morning that you decided whether to have coffee or tea, but the decision might have been made long before you were even aware of it.
Just as well, Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book, Blink, an experiment performed by researchers at the University of Iowa in which individuals are placed in a simple gambling game. In front of them are placed four decks of cards, two blue and two red. Each card in any of the decks will cause them to either lose money or win money, and their task is to turn over cards in such a way that will maximize their winnings. What the subjects don't know is that the red cards are a minefield, and can cause them to win large sums of money, but likewise lose much more money than the blue decks. It's designed so that the only way to win is by taking cards from the blue decks. The question is, how long did it take for them to figure it out? The scientists found that after they've overturned about 50 cards, most people start to develop a hunch that they should avoid the red decks, and after about 80 have figured it out and can explain exactly why. But interestingly enough, the scientists also did something else: they hooked up each gambler to a machine which measured the activity of the sweat glands in the palms below the skin's surface. These glands respond to stress and temperature in situations when we get nervous. Interestingly enough, scientists found that gamblers began to generate stress responses in their hands to the red cards and avoid them by the tenth card -- forty before they were consciously aware of any kind of hunch. In other words, the subjects figured out the game before they realized they figured out the game, and behaved accordingly.

            Philosophers, however, aren’t convinced that findings like these can abolish the idea of free will quite so easily. Many question the results and interpretations, arguing that researchers haven’t quite grasped the ideas they are trying to disprove. A group of research projects bridging theology, philosophy, and natural sciences are currently being funded to (hopefully) fully identify the biological processes underlying conscious intention and better understand the brain activity that precedes it. If unconscious brain activity is found to predict decisions with perfect accuracy, the research will truly rattle the notion of free will.

            However, neuroscience experiments usually have a controllable input and output, a “push this button” or “watch this screen” that can easily be measured but are relatively basic actions. Many critics also question whether such simple actions can be comparable to complex behaviors – pressing a button is far removed from making a cup of coffee, running for president, or committing a crime. Just as well, many philosophers also believe that there doesn’t have to be such delineation and divide between mind and body. Sure, every process must have a neural basis, and many philosophers believe this research just proves physical basis that the brain has to first work through a decision before it is made. In particular, scientists tend to see preparatory brain activity as proceeding step-by-step to a decision, whereas neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga suggests that researchers view the processes as working in parallel. He views the process instead as a complex network with interactions happening continually. "I think if we do a new generation of studies with better design, we'll get better evidence about what goes on in the brain when people make decisions," says philosopher Al Mele. However, philosophers are willing to admit that one day in the future, neuroscience could definitely disturb the concept of free will. With further research, imagine a world where researchers could always accurately predict what someone would decide from their brain activity before the person was even aware of their decision. It’s a little bit unsettling. 

So, whether you buy into the research or not, it's simply some neuro-food for thought! Next time you choose coffee over tea, maybe your unconscious mind already knew you would.

Where Does "Identity" Come From?

 (You, Your Brain, and the Nature vs. Nurture Debate)

Imagine your life is a tape, and we rewind it. All your accomplishments, awards, and graduations are erased. Your experiences move in reverse, and you grow smaller and smaller, as you were as a child. Your adult teeth turn back into baby teeth, and eventually retract completely, while all of your traits and quirks start to fade away. Pretty soon language goes away too, and you’re no longer you, but potential you. The tape continues rewinding, halving colonies of your cells until finally we arrive at the amazing singular miracle: the one cell that will evolve to become you.

Now, the question is this: what happens when we press “play” again? The common battle between nature versus nurture arises – the question that psychologists and scientists everywhere are prodding, probing, and researching to figure out. Are your talents, traits, and personal characteristics deeply embedded in your genes? Is what makes you you implanted in the DNA of our cells? Or could things completely change who we are with a few simple nudges? To put it simply – how much of your fate do you believe depends on your genes, your surroundings, or merely just by chance?

Since we can’t rewind time, Julia Freund and her colleagues found another way to better answer this question in a simple but remarkable recent study. To test the nature-versus-nurture phenomenon, Freund and her investigators placed genetically identical mice in a common environment, and tested to see whether systematic behavioral differences still could emerge. By answering “yes,” it would mean that there are sources of behavioral variability (intrinsic individuality, if you will) that could be unaccounted for by a combination of common genes and a common environment.

For the experiment, 40 genetically identical mice were placed in an “enriched” environment, where Freund monitored their behavior for a period of three months (which, for mice, is about 10-15% of their entire lifespan). The enriched environment was about 36 square feet, engineered to include multi-tiered platforms, nesting boxes, and interconnected tubes in order to promote exploratory behaviors in the mice that would not exist in a normal confined cage. What makes this study different from one of human twins is that by using mice, the subjects’ movements could be recorded with extraordinary detail over a major period of their lifespan. A radiofrequency ID transponder was placed on every mouse, measuring their every movement, chase, and sedentary period.

In order to measure the differences in behavior between the mice, the investigators used a gage called “roaming entropy.” Roaming entropy captures how often you get out, and with how much variety – so basically if you are someone who just darts back and forth (say from your dorm room to Van Pelt…) your roaming entropy is low. But if you’re the type of person who could pretty much be anywhere at any given time, you have a high roaming entropy. At the beginning of the study, the mice all had fairly similar roaming entropies… however, as the weeks progressed, the population diverged significantly, with some mice being much more exploratory and active than others. If you take the tendency to explore as a characteristic trait, then this is obviously one that elaborates and changes over time in a way that isn’t strictly determined by genes or the environment.

However, the most interesting part of the study arose when Fruend and her team examined the changes in brain activity that went along with the changes in exploratory behavior. Before the experiment was over, the mice were injected with a compound that selectively incorporates itself into dividing cells. This basically means that the compound can show researchers which neurons are formed in adulthood, and which neurons the mice were born with. While most of our neurons are formed during early development, there are a good number of well-studied brain areas that continuously produce new neurons throughout our adult lives.

Surprisingly, the mice that were the most exploratory throughout the study (who exhibited the most outgoing behavior) were also those who experienced the greatest production of adult-born neurons. While we can’t say this particularly proves anything, the results are still pretty intriguing. Even after your genes are set in stone from birth, and the majority of your environmental surroundings are laid firm throughout your early development, your brain maintains the raw potential to grow its own new neurons. The investigators of this study propose that these neurons are involved in tailoring and tuning our behaviors, implying that the way we live our lives may make us who we are.

So, how does this happen? We don’t actually know. No disrespect intended to these researchers, but any experiment addressing such a controversial, profound, and metaphysically-tangled problem as the nature-vs.-nurture debate is going to generate more questions than answers. It could be that epigenetic changes, where experience modifies gene expression, gives rise to completely different life paths. It can also be questioned just how substantial the differences in roaming entropy could actually be, and whether it was actually statistically significant. Regardless of the specifics and questions left to be answered, this experiment is a reminder that our lives are truly a work in progress. Whether it is our genes, our environments, or generation of adult born neurons, the nature versus nurture debate is yet to be solved. But it seems that if we are living out our lives as a sort of tape, then it’s a tape in which the tracks can be tweaked as they’re read, as our genes can be modified as we live. As your brain is shaped by your life and vice versa, there is so much room for chance and noise – room for you to become you.

The Prophetic Brain: Foretelling Your Future

The act of fortune telling is an ancient practice. Chinese diviners burnt turtle shells and studied the resulting cracks to make a host of predictions, including future crop conditions and weather forecasts, and ancient Greeks read animal entrails in their divinatory practices. While the modern scientific community regards fortune telling as mere hogwash, brain science is starting to use genetic information, environmental conditions, and brain structure to predict an individual’s future actions. Neuroscientists could become the oracles of our era.

One such scientist is Penn professor and neurocriminologist Adrian Raine. In his controversial research, Dr. Raine proposes that the structure of the brain may provide insight into an individual’s propensity to commit a violent crime. In fact, he argues that future criminal offending can be predicted in children as young as three years. In one experiment, Dr. Raine studied 1,800 three-year-old children from the tropical island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. In his longitudinal study, he followed subjects for 20 years, noting any criminal convictions. He then compared the criminals with the noncriminals and discovered that the former demonstrated a lack of fear as children.*

Although the findings of Dr. Raine's research are intriguing, the environmental and biological affects on brain and behavior ought to be examined. Child abuse, cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption during pregnancy, and poor nutrition give scientists great predictive power regarding individuals' outcomes. For example, children of moms who smoked tobacco while pregnant were 2-3 times more likely to be violent criminals by age 20, and pregnant women who consumed just 1 drink per week birthed children who were 30% more aggressive than their peers. Poor nutrition during prenatal and postnatal development also leads to greater antisocial behaviors in children.

Additionally, genetics, brain structure and function, and testosterone levels have a tremendous influence on behavior. Using EEG to study the electrical activity of prisoners' brains, Dr. Raine noted that violent criminal offenders demonstrated poor-functioning prefrontal cortexes, the part of the brain associated with the regulation of behavior and emotions. The amygdala, which is responsible for emotions, is also implicated in antisocial tendencies.  For example, sociopaths have been shown to have an amygdala 18% smaller than individuals without sociopathy.

While it is extremely enticing to regard the brain as quasi-prophetic, it is necessary to consider the ethical dilemmas and misguided conclusions that can be drawn from related research. The following questions are helpful in understanding the consequences of such work: Could neuroscience research be used to fuel a eugenics movement? Is it possible to reduce antisocial tendencies in adulthood by enriching the brain in childhood? Are brain structure and function reliable predictive measures? Does brain structure lead to violent behavior, or does a violent lifestyle lead to changes in the brain? Dr. Raine explores some of these concerns and more in Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane.

*The amygdala is critical in fear conditioning.

Welcome to the Mind-Meld

The way that current research is progressing, our brains may be closer than we ever thought… Ever wanted to know what someone else was thinking? We may have found the answer to connecting human minds – not only figuratively, but literally. Very literally.

Picture this: a scientific experiment, involving two rats. The first rat pressed a lever, as it was trained to, anticipating the reward it would receive for completing the task. An implant in this rat’s brain then converted its neural activity into an electrical signal and beamed the impulse to the second rat. The second rat then jumped forward to press the lever in its own cage… but this rat had never been trained to ever press a lever. The movement impulse it had to press the lever came not from its own mind, but directly from the brain of the first rat, who was in fact thousands of miles away.

What was created in 2012 by lead researcher Miguel Nicolelis was “a new central nervous system made of two brains.” After successfully connecting the brains of two rats, other labs were quick to pick up on the research and one-up Nicolelis’s experiment. A team of researchers at Harvard University engineered a brain-to-brain interface between a human and a rat in the summer of 2013 that enabled the human to control the rat’s tail movements by merely willing them to happen. Pretty crazy…

Then in August 2013 came the final leap that everyone had been waiting for. Scientists Andrea Stocco and Rajesh Rao from the University of Washington successfully created science’s first human-to-human brain-to-brain interface. One person was strapped into a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) helmet, while the other was strapped into a non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG) helmet – the two researchers became successfully mind-melded in the name of all things science.

The Experiment:

Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco, one strapped into each type of helmet, were placed across campus from one another while watching the same video game. Rao was wearing an EEG helmet, a non-invasive device that detects the neuronal firing activity of millions of different neurons underneath the skull. He was also in charge of the controls of the video game, but instead of actually using his hand to hit the spacebar and fire on the video game, he simply imagined moving his hand. Each time he made the conscious thought to fire, an instantaneously fast computer converted the brain signals emitted by Rao’s EEG helmet into a digital signal which was then beamed to a TMS helmet on Stocco’s head. A transcranial magnetic stimulation helmet (also non-invasive) electrically stimulates neurons in particular areas of the brain by creating a small electric current. The helmet attached to Stocco’s head converted Rao’s signals into bursts of magnetic stimulation that were delivered to the exact region of Stocco’s motor cortex that controlled his right hand. The signal would cause Stocco’s hand to involuntarily twitch, sometimes even scoring a hit in the game.

Rao stated that the experience felt very different for both of them. “For me, it was only ater the action had occurred that I had the chance to reflect upon what had happened – that it was Stocco’s hand, stimulated by my brain signal, that had caused the action. That realization was both exciting and a bit eerie.” For Stocco, all that was really felt was an involuntary muscle twitch that caused his hand to move and hit the keyboard. There was no conscious “need” to flex the muscle, he said, because the entire sequence from stimulation to movement happened within a few milliseconds. Moreover, Rao noted about Stucco, “I don’t think he can resist the movement once he’s received the stimulation, since it operates at the subconscious level.” Definitely pretty eerie…

Test Hurdles:

Even with the level of connectivity that was reached at the sub-conscious level, the process revealed that it wasn’t flawless or error-free – and this exposed some interesting discoveries about how our brains process information.

The EEG device used by Rao (which sent the outgoing brain signals) uses technology dating all the way back to 1875. Although today’s advancements in technology are obviously far greater than those of 150 years ago, they still operate on the same basic principle. Electrodes are placed across a person’s scalp that pick up frequencies oscillating within that person’s brain. Because of this, EEG signals can’t pinpoint activity to a specific 3-dimensional point in the brain, but they are handy for tracking large-scale brain impulses. TMS technology is much more recent – and much more controversial as well. It works by disrupting activity deep within the brain by using electrical signals, and some researchers have even reported seizures being triggered as a side effect of TMS. However, most researchers today agree that the risk is small, and many have succeeded in using this technology to trigger movement, increase memory, and treat depression. Rao and Stocco also both agreed to use these procedures because they were non-invasive, making this technology the clear choice. “Andrea and I got really excited about the idea, and we started brainstorming,” he said.

Leading up to the experiment, Rao had to go through quite a bit of brain training in order to successfully execute the experiment. “EEG signals are quite hard to use for controlling devices,” he explained, “because the signal is a weak, noisy, filtered version of the underlying brain activity.” Any extra movement of the eyes, face, or body—or even stray thoughts—could interfere with the signals and give false readings. Rao had to learn, through trial and error, how to control his EEG output more accurately by remaining focused. Finally, in the last session, Rao and Stocco achieved nearly 100% accuracy in the test.

What Now?

Now that scientists have created a full-blown mind-meld, what next? One of the important things to note is that the experiment was built on technology that’s rapidly becoming part of the consumer marketplace, as TMS and EEG devices are becoming more readily available. And, even though this test only transmitted movements from one mind to another, it is the hope of scientists that in the future, we could (theoretically) learn to transfer perceptions, concepts, emotions, and even thoughts. Then we would actually be talking about a REAL mind-meld, allowing people to communicate directly through their brains. As long as humans have been around, the need to communicate thoughts clearly and understanding the minds of others has been an overwhelming desire – the fact that we are this close by putting on little plastic helmets to watch what’s happening inside our brains is both exciting and a little bit scary. Where do you stand? Technologies like this might seem to have the potential to turn us all into robots – or edge us towards a future of communication, understanding, and human contact more intimate and direct than we’ve ever experienced. Where do we draw the line between human connection and complete invasiveness? The thin line is becoming a little bit eerie. Still, the effects of the mind-meld are yet to be discovered…

via Discover Magazine, The Crux