Showing posts with label The Brain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Brain. Show all posts
Saturday, October 19, 2024
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Cognitive Dissonance
General Experimental Psychology Cognitive Dissonance Lab
The theory of cognitive dissonance
Cognitive Dissonance Theory, developed by Leon Festinger (1957), is concerned with the relationships among cognitions. A cognition, for the purpose of this theory, may be thought of as a ³piece of knowledge.² The knowledge may be about an attitude, an emotion, a behavior, a value, and so on. For example, the knowledge that you like the color red is a cognition; the knowledge that you caught a touchdown pass is a cognition; the knowledge that the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation is a cognition. People hold a multitude of cognitions simultaneously, and these cognitions form irrelevant, consonant or dissonant relationships with one another.
Cognitive Irrelevance probably describes the bulk of the relationships among a person¹s cognitions. Irrelevance simply means that the two cognitions have nothing to do with each other. Two cognitions are consonant if one cognition follows from, or fits with, the other. People like consonance among their cognitions. We do not know whether this stems from the nature of the human organism or whether it is learned during the process of socialization, but people appear to prefer cognitions that fit together to those that do not. It is this simple observation that gives the theory of cognitive dissonance its interesting form.
Two cognitions are said to be dissonant if one cognition follows from the opposite of another. What happens to people when they discover dissonant cognitions? The answer to this question forms the basic postulate of Festinger¹s theory. A person who has dissonant or discrepant cognitions is said to be in a state of psychological dissonance, which is experienced as unpleasant psychological tension. This tension state has drivelike properties that are much like those of hunger and thirst. When a person has been deprived of food for several hours, he/she experiences unpleasant tension and is driven to reduce the unpleasant tension state that results. Reducing the psychological sate of dissonance is not as simple as eating or drinking however.
To understand the alternatives open to an individual in a state of dissonance, we must first understand the factors that affect the magnitude of dissonance arousal. First, in its simplest form, dissonance increases as the degree of discrepancy among cognitions increases. Second, dissonance increases as the number of discrepant cognitions increases. Third, dissonance is inversely proportional to the number of consonant cognitions held by an individual. Fourth, the relative weights given to the consonant and dissonant cognitions may be adjusted by their importance in the mind of the individual.
If dissonance is experienced as an unpleasant drive state,the individual is motivated to reduce it. Now that the factors that affect the magnitude of this unpleasantness have been identified, it should be possible to predict what we can do to reduce it:
Changing Cognitions
If two cognitions ar discrepant, we can simply change one to make it consistent with the other. Or we can change each cognition in the direction of the other.
Adding Cognitions
If two cognitions cause a certain magnitude of dissonance, that magnitude can be reduced by adding one or more consonant cognitions.
Altering importance
Since the discrepant and consonant cognitions must be weighed by importance, it may be advantageous to alter the importance of the various cognitions.
The material above is the background reading for the Cognitive Dissonance Lab. These are excerpts from Frederick M. Rudolph¹s page on Social Psychology. For a more detailed discussion on cognitive dissonance and related theories, visit http://www.mindspring.com/~frudolph/lectuires/SOC/soc1.htm
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Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Military Plans To Test Brain Implants To Fight Mental Disorders
by JON HAMILTON
May 27, 2014 2:07 AM ET
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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is launching a $26 million program to help military personnel with psychiatric disorders using electronic devices implanted in the brain.
The goal of the five-year program is to develop new ways of treating problems including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are common among service members who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan.
"We've seen far too many times where military personnel have neuropsychiatric disorders and there's very few options," says Justin Sanchez, a program manager at DARPA.
DARPA is known for taking on big technological challenges, from missile defense to creating a business plan for interstellar travel. In 2013, the agency announced it would play a big role in President Obama's initiative to explore the human brain.
The new program will fund development of high-tech implanted devices able to both monitor and electrically stimulate specific brain circuits. The effort will be led by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco and Massachusetts General Hospital.
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Simple brain stimulation devices are already used to help patients with problems including Parkinson's disease. But DARPA wants something much more sophisticated, Sanchez says.
"While those devices have been shown to be effective, they are very much built on concepts from the cardiac pacemaker industry," he says. "And we know that the brain is very different than the heart."
Working With Epilepsy, Parkinson's Patients
The UCSF team will begin its work by studying volunteers who already have probes in their brains as part of treatment for epilepsy or Parkinson's disease.
That will allow researchers to "record directly from the brain at a level of resolution that's never (been) done before," says Eddie Chang, a neurosurgeon at UCSF.
By monitoring the electrical activity of brain cells, the researchers will be able to study how brain circuits behave in real time, Chang says. And because many of the volunteers also have depression, anxiety and other problems, it should be possible to figure out how these conditions have changed specific circuits in the brain, Chang says.
"If we are able to understand how the circuit has gone awry, that may give us some very critical clues as to how we may be able to reverse that," he says.
Once the scientists have those clues, they hope to design tiny electronic implants that can stimulate the cells in faulty brain circuits. "We know that once you start putting stimulation into the brain, the brain will change in response," Chang says.
That sort of change, known as plasticity, is what allows the brain to learn and adapt throughout our lives. And a device that can deliver the right kind of stimulation to the right brain cells should be able to "heal" malfunctioning brain circuits, Chang says.
At first, the DARPA program will focus on patients with depression, anxiety, and symptoms of PTSD. Later, the plan calls for treating conditions including chronic pain and even traumatic brain injury.
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Saturday, June 22, 2013
What Does Human Brain Mapping Actually Tell Us?
Alice G. Walton, Contributor
PHARMA & HEALTHCARE
6/21/2013 @ 2:04PM
BigBrain, Courtesy of Amunts et al 2013
Google “brain” right now and you’ll find a mountain of news stories on a development known as the BigBrain project, which came out just yesterday: Researchers in Europe and Canada have just mapped the human brain with a precision that’s so strikingly detailed, that it’s unprecedented in humans – and it’s in 3D. The team has devised a way to cut the brain into 20 micrometer-thick sections – far slimmer than the chunky 1 mm sections that have been available with magnetic resonance – dye them, scan them, and reconstruct the slices into a 3D “atlas” of the human brain. But while the research is impressive by any count, and it will certainly gives us some clues into brain cell function and anatomy, there’s a limit to what it can tell us.
To accomplish the mission, the team used the donated brain of a 65-year old woman. It was preserved in formalin and then set in paraffin before slicing. The sections were mounted on glass slides and stained. Then came the scanning prep.
“After this we had over 7400 histological sections,” says author Katrin Amunts. “And a large number of wooden boxes in the lab to hold them!” She and her team used a flatbed scanner to scan the slices – a process, says Amunts, that took about 1,000 hours alone. Part of the process was the removal of all the artifacts of slicing – folds, ruptures, and other miscellaneous blips.
The 3D image of the brain was formed by reconstructing the slices, making what is essentially a cell-by-cell computer image or “atlas” of the brain. The data take up a mind-boggling terabyte of space.
So what information does brain mapping actually offer? It will certainly give us a better idea of where one region ends and the next begins, for a closer understanding of behavior-brain correspondence. It will also allow researchers to start making simulations, perhaps making it possible to “see” what happens in various disease states, say, in an Alzheimer’s- or Parkinson’s afflicted brain over time. “Researchers can take these images,” says Amunts, “and measure surfaces, thicknesses of cortical layers. It provides precise anatomical measures, and lets us make comparisons to in vivo imaging.”
She adds that this brain essentially becomes a new gold standard in the field. “We have a new reference brain,” says Amunts. “It can help us address questions and data coming from neuroscience about things like receptor distribution, microanatomy. Before this, the data were so scattered, we haven’t been able to compare it very effectively.” Plus, the resolution from MRI scans is much poorer – a clumsy 1-mm thickness, which is “not good enough to address questions about microstructure,” adds Amunts.
In terms of the person-to-person brain differences that are inevitable, Amunts says, “This is true. And we’ve actually started second brain, to account for some of these. We’re aware of intersubject variability. But the first brain has all the areas that you need.” She says her team probably won’t do more than a few brains in total, given the massive time commitment each requires.
And BigBrain will almost certainly have some major clinical implications, giving doctors a hand in neurosurgery and in placing electrodes during procedures like deep brain stimulation (DBS).
What the project doesn’t do is tell us a whole lot about anything else – those “deeper” questions that we’re all dying understand. In this way, the headlines touting BigBrain’s ability to work such magic as to “unlock the secrets of the mind” and that kind of thing may not to so accurate.
In fact, in a well-timed New York Times editorial this week, David Brooks makes the important point that the brain is not, after all, the mind, and as much as we’d like to think we’re getting closer to grasping human consciousness and thought with imaging studies, we’re just not. The “neurocentrism,” he says, that we’re so attached to is actually not serving us so well at all. In his words, “An important task these days is to harvest the exciting gains made by science and data while understanding the limits of science and data. The next time somebody tells you what a brain scan says, be a little skeptical. The brain is not the mind.”
When asked about the limits of the 3D brain atlas, Amunts says that though it doesn’t answer all questions, ultimately, basic neuroscience is critical for what it can offer us. “I’m a physician by training. I want to know why the region in the language area is involved in language. You have to understand brain first.” Her past work has mapped out the architecture of the brain, and, she says, the specificity can be dazzling. “And now we can look at everything in the same brain. If you only do small bit, you don’t have the full truth. But now we can analyze the whole brain.”
So this is on many levels a big accomplishment for Europe’s Human Brain Project, which has the not unlike our own BRAIN initiative. But there are limits to what it can tell us, and it only gives a peek at what’s actually going on in our heads. There’s much more work to be done, and a staggering number of questions that still need answers.
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Monday, January 28, 2013
Memory Loss in Elderly Caused by Poor Sleep
Posted by David Arnold on Jan 28th, 2013
Researc
hers from the University of California at Berkley found a link between memory loss and the deterioration of the brain and poor sleep, among elderly adults.
Researchers said they found that during sleep, that is deep and restorative, slow brain waves normally take place in younger people and play a key role in the transference of memories between the brain’s hippocampus, the area that stores memories for the short term and the prefrontal cortex the area that provides storage of memories over the long term.
However, in the elderly, memories at times become stuck in the hippocampus due to poor deep sleep and therefore less slow waves are created. That causes some of the short term memories to be written over by new ones, said researchers. The new discovery has created an opportunity to give a boost to sleep quality among elderly people in an attempt to improve their overall memory.
The findings also give reason to some of the forgetfulness that is common amongst the elderly including having a difficult time remembering names.
Adults that are considered healthy tend to spend about a quarter of their night of sleep in a deep non-rapid eye movement phase known as REM. That form of sleep is the best at generating slow waves in the frontal lobe of the brain. In elderly people that have a deterioration of that region of the brain have been linked to not having sufficient deep sleep, said the findings in the recent study.
More similar types of studies must be performed by researchers, to help enhance the sleep of the elderly and find a way to increase their overnight memory.
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Wednesday, November 14, 2012
DARPA Sponsors Surveillance Technology to Predict Future Behavior
Saturday, 10 November 2012 17:30
Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
The dizzying speed of the growth of the surveillance state and the increasing sophistication of the tools used to build it are paid for in large measure by funds doled out by the Army’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
At The New American we have chronicled the various projects sponsored by the über-secret research and development arm of the military. One of the newest technologies being pursued by DARPA will not only widen the field of vision of government’s never-blinking eye, but it purports to predict the behavior of those being watched.
Forbes reports that DARPA has contracted with scientists at Carnegie Mellon University to develop “an artificial intelligence system that can watch and predict what a person will ‘likely’ do in the future using specially programmed software designed to analyze various real-time video surveillance feeds. The system can automatically identify and notify officials if it recognized that an action is not permitted, detecting what is described as anomalous behaviors.”
Deployment of the devices is anticipated at “airports and bus stations,” but there is little doubt that should these predictive monitors prove successful, they will be installed right there next to the red light cameras already mounted at nearly every intersection in America.
Forbes also reports that “Carnegie Mellon is one of 15 research teams and commercial integrators that is participating in a five-year program, started in 2010, to develop smart video software.”
Several aspects of this "Minority Report" come-to-life sound substantially similar to another contest of sorts being concurrently sponsored by DARPA at a secret campus near George Mason University in Virginia.
In a statement announcing the progress of the research, DARPA spokesmen Mark Geertsen said the goal of the project was “to invent new approaches to the identification of people, places, things and activities from still or moving defense and open-source imagery.”
In the statement, DARPA described several concepts being worked on by six teams of researchers chosen to live and labor in the “DARPA Innovation House,” outside George Mason University.
While the descriptions of the projects provided by DARPA spokesman Mike Geertsen were brief, greater detail of the technologies were discovered by The New American.
The first of the projects reportedly being cooked up in the DARPA test kitchens is called PetaVision. The DARPA statement describes PetaVision as one of the “Multi-Modal Approaches to Real-Time Video Analysis. Biologically-inspired, hierarchical neural networks to detect objects of interest in streaming video by combining texture/color, shape and motion/depth cues.”
While that summary is admittedly vague, a website maintained by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) provides a bit more information not only on the technology, but why the federal government might find it useful in its quest to place every American under constant surveillance and to identify potential “domestic terrorists.”
We seek to understand and implement the computational principles that enable high-level sensory processing and other forms of cognition in the human brain. To achieve these goals, we are creating synthetic cognition systems that emulate the functional architecture of the primate visual cortex. By using petascale computational resources, combined with our growing knowledge of the structure and function of biological neural systems, we can match, for the first time, the size and functional complexity necessary to reproduce the information processing capabilities of cortical circuits. The arrival of next generation supercomputers may allow us to close the performance gap between state of the art computer vision approaches by bringing these systems to the scale of the human brain.
Admittedly, the potential uses for PetaVision are obscured behind the scientific jargon used in its description. However, empowering the federal government with any technology that can simulate the human brain’s ability to see and process information for the purpose of “detect[ing] objects of interest” in streaming video is terrifying.
As the reports on TrapWire have demonstrated, it is very likely that the video feed from many of the traffic cameras, stoplight cameras, and similar devices may be monitored by agents of the federal government. If the ability of those agents to locate and follow a target increases, the ability of that target to evade detection logically decreases proportionally.
That is to say, once a person has been identified by the federal government as a potential threat, that person will be unable to seek refuge anywhere as emerging technology such as PetaVision will put every spot on the planet within the field of vision of the all-seeing, never-blinking eye of government.
Another tool being hammered out on the DARPA anvils is called Videovor. While no specific information on a technology with that name was found, a website offering scholarly journals covering the topic of visualization of video information was discovered.
On that website an abstract of an article written by scholars at the University of Wales, Swansea (U.K.) makes immediately apparent the attraction such work has for the domestic spying agencies of the federal government:
Video data, generated by the entertainment industry, security and traffic cameras, video conferencing systems, video emails, and so on, is perhaps most time-consuming to process by human beings. In this paper, we present a novel methodology for "summarizing" video sequences using volume visualization techniques. We outline a system pipeline for capturing videos, extracting features, volume rendering video and feature data, and creating video visualization. We discuss a collection of image comparison metrics, including the linear dependence detector, for constructing "relative" and "absolute" difference volumes that represent the magnitude of variation between video frames. We describe the use of a few volume visualization techniques, including volume scene graphs and spatial transfer functions, for creating video visualization. In particular, we present a stream-based technique for processing and directly rendering video data in real time. With the aid of several examples, we demonstrate the effectiveness of using video visualization to convey meaningful information contained in video sequences.
Among the noteworthy revelations in this abstract is the fact that this technology will be used to render “video data in real time” and that the source of that video feed is to be provided by “security and traffic cameras, video conferencing systems, video emails, and so on.”
It is foreseeable that such immensely powerful video summarizing technologies could be very valuable to the National Security Agency (NSA) employees who will soon be monitoring, recording, and storing the electronic communications of every American using the supercomputers housed at the NSA’s sprawling complex under construction near Salt Lake City, Utah.
Reading the description of the next item on DARPA’s list makes it easy to see why the spy apparatus of the federal government would spend millions supporting the work of scientists who can provide powerful new weapons in the war on privacy. The next weapon: geospatial oriented structure extraction.
As hinted at by the DARPA status report, geospatial oriented structure extraction is designed to deliver “automatic construction of a 3D wireframe of an object using as few images as possible from a variety of angles.”
Again, not much to go on, but a search of the Internet provides a little more color. And the source of the additional information may be another piece of evidence of the dangerous liaison growing between the federal government and local law enforcement.
Nlets is a non-profit organization owned and operated by the states that maintains the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications Systems. This system is an electronic messaging service that facilitates the exchange of information among state and local law enforcement.
An Nlets website under the heading “International Justice and Public Safety” describes a project called “Geospatial Service Oriented Architecture for Public Safety (GeoSOAPS). GeoSOAPS, the website says is co-sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Again, this is the sort of collaboration the Constitution could do without.
In a frightening admission against interest, the website proudly boasts that “Nlets and its member community offer the ideal proving ground for this nationally focused project.”
And just who are the members of the Nlets community? According to its website, every state police force in the United States, the Secret Service, the FBI, the DHS, the Federal Aviation Administration, TSA, the State Department, and Interpol, among others. That is a coalition of such immense power, reach, and resources that no one can escape it, neither in the real world nor the virtual world of cyberspace.
From predictive surveillance to Petavision, once these tools for warrantless domestic surveillance — in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment — are delivered to DARPA, the vast network of federal spies and local and federal law enforcement will be able to instantly share the data collected from video feeds captured by traffic and stop light cameras located in thousands of street corners in nearly every town in every country around the world and arrest an individual for acts those machines predict the target might make based solely on the software’s predictions.
Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
The dizzying speed of the growth of the surveillance state and the increasing sophistication of the tools used to build it are paid for in large measure by funds doled out by the Army’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
At The New American we have chronicled the various projects sponsored by the über-secret research and development arm of the military. One of the newest technologies being pursued by DARPA will not only widen the field of vision of government’s never-blinking eye, but it purports to predict the behavior of those being watched.
Forbes reports that DARPA has contracted with scientists at Carnegie Mellon University to develop “an artificial intelligence system that can watch and predict what a person will ‘likely’ do in the future using specially programmed software designed to analyze various real-time video surveillance feeds. The system can automatically identify and notify officials if it recognized that an action is not permitted, detecting what is described as anomalous behaviors.”
Deployment of the devices is anticipated at “airports and bus stations,” but there is little doubt that should these predictive monitors prove successful, they will be installed right there next to the red light cameras already mounted at nearly every intersection in America.
Forbes also reports that “Carnegie Mellon is one of 15 research teams and commercial integrators that is participating in a five-year program, started in 2010, to develop smart video software.”
Several aspects of this "Minority Report" come-to-life sound substantially similar to another contest of sorts being concurrently sponsored by DARPA at a secret campus near George Mason University in Virginia.
In a statement announcing the progress of the research, DARPA spokesmen Mark Geertsen said the goal of the project was “to invent new approaches to the identification of people, places, things and activities from still or moving defense and open-source imagery.”
In the statement, DARPA described several concepts being worked on by six teams of researchers chosen to live and labor in the “DARPA Innovation House,” outside George Mason University.
While the descriptions of the projects provided by DARPA spokesman Mike Geertsen were brief, greater detail of the technologies were discovered by The New American.
The first of the projects reportedly being cooked up in the DARPA test kitchens is called PetaVision. The DARPA statement describes PetaVision as one of the “Multi-Modal Approaches to Real-Time Video Analysis. Biologically-inspired, hierarchical neural networks to detect objects of interest in streaming video by combining texture/color, shape and motion/depth cues.”
While that summary is admittedly vague, a website maintained by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) provides a bit more information not only on the technology, but why the federal government might find it useful in its quest to place every American under constant surveillance and to identify potential “domestic terrorists.”
We seek to understand and implement the computational principles that enable high-level sensory processing and other forms of cognition in the human brain. To achieve these goals, we are creating synthetic cognition systems that emulate the functional architecture of the primate visual cortex. By using petascale computational resources, combined with our growing knowledge of the structure and function of biological neural systems, we can match, for the first time, the size and functional complexity necessary to reproduce the information processing capabilities of cortical circuits. The arrival of next generation supercomputers may allow us to close the performance gap between state of the art computer vision approaches by bringing these systems to the scale of the human brain.
Admittedly, the potential uses for PetaVision are obscured behind the scientific jargon used in its description. However, empowering the federal government with any technology that can simulate the human brain’s ability to see and process information for the purpose of “detect[ing] objects of interest” in streaming video is terrifying.
As the reports on TrapWire have demonstrated, it is very likely that the video feed from many of the traffic cameras, stoplight cameras, and similar devices may be monitored by agents of the federal government. If the ability of those agents to locate and follow a target increases, the ability of that target to evade detection logically decreases proportionally.
That is to say, once a person has been identified by the federal government as a potential threat, that person will be unable to seek refuge anywhere as emerging technology such as PetaVision will put every spot on the planet within the field of vision of the all-seeing, never-blinking eye of government.
Another tool being hammered out on the DARPA anvils is called Videovor. While no specific information on a technology with that name was found, a website offering scholarly journals covering the topic of visualization of video information was discovered.
On that website an abstract of an article written by scholars at the University of Wales, Swansea (U.K.) makes immediately apparent the attraction such work has for the domestic spying agencies of the federal government:
Video data, generated by the entertainment industry, security and traffic cameras, video conferencing systems, video emails, and so on, is perhaps most time-consuming to process by human beings. In this paper, we present a novel methodology for "summarizing" video sequences using volume visualization techniques. We outline a system pipeline for capturing videos, extracting features, volume rendering video and feature data, and creating video visualization. We discuss a collection of image comparison metrics, including the linear dependence detector, for constructing "relative" and "absolute" difference volumes that represent the magnitude of variation between video frames. We describe the use of a few volume visualization techniques, including volume scene graphs and spatial transfer functions, for creating video visualization. In particular, we present a stream-based technique for processing and directly rendering video data in real time. With the aid of several examples, we demonstrate the effectiveness of using video visualization to convey meaningful information contained in video sequences.
Among the noteworthy revelations in this abstract is the fact that this technology will be used to render “video data in real time” and that the source of that video feed is to be provided by “security and traffic cameras, video conferencing systems, video emails, and so on.”
It is foreseeable that such immensely powerful video summarizing technologies could be very valuable to the National Security Agency (NSA) employees who will soon be monitoring, recording, and storing the electronic communications of every American using the supercomputers housed at the NSA’s sprawling complex under construction near Salt Lake City, Utah.
Reading the description of the next item on DARPA’s list makes it easy to see why the spy apparatus of the federal government would spend millions supporting the work of scientists who can provide powerful new weapons in the war on privacy. The next weapon: geospatial oriented structure extraction.
As hinted at by the DARPA status report, geospatial oriented structure extraction is designed to deliver “automatic construction of a 3D wireframe of an object using as few images as possible from a variety of angles.”
Again, not much to go on, but a search of the Internet provides a little more color. And the source of the additional information may be another piece of evidence of the dangerous liaison growing between the federal government and local law enforcement.
Nlets is a non-profit organization owned and operated by the states that maintains the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications Systems. This system is an electronic messaging service that facilitates the exchange of information among state and local law enforcement.
An Nlets website under the heading “International Justice and Public Safety” describes a project called “Geospatial Service Oriented Architecture for Public Safety (GeoSOAPS). GeoSOAPS, the website says is co-sponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security. Again, this is the sort of collaboration the Constitution could do without.
In a frightening admission against interest, the website proudly boasts that “Nlets and its member community offer the ideal proving ground for this nationally focused project.”
And just who are the members of the Nlets community? According to its website, every state police force in the United States, the Secret Service, the FBI, the DHS, the Federal Aviation Administration, TSA, the State Department, and Interpol, among others. That is a coalition of such immense power, reach, and resources that no one can escape it, neither in the real world nor the virtual world of cyberspace.
From predictive surveillance to Petavision, once these tools for warrantless domestic surveillance — in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment — are delivered to DARPA, the vast network of federal spies and local and federal law enforcement will be able to instantly share the data collected from video feeds captured by traffic and stop light cameras located in thousands of street corners in nearly every town in every country around the world and arrest an individual for acts those machines predict the target might make based solely on the software’s predictions.
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Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Top Ten Myths About the Brain
When it comes to this complex, mysterious, fascinating organ, what do—and don’t—we know?
By Laura Helmuth
Smithsonian.com, May 20, 2011
Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Top-Ten-Myths-About-the-Brain.html#ixzz1O031KNEe
By Laura Helmuth
Smithsonian.com, May 20, 2011
Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Top-Ten-Myths-About-the-Brain.html#ixzz1O031KNEe
Repeated in pop culture for a century, the notion that humans only use 10 percent of our brains is false. Scans have shown that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks.
1. We use only 10 percent of our brains.
This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during fetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception, movement or emotion.
True, we have some brain reserves. Autopsy studies show that many people have physical signs of Alzheimer’s disease (such as amyloid plaques among neurons) in their brains even though they were not impaired. Apparently we can lose some brain tissue and still function pretty well. And people score higher on IQ tests if they’re highly motivated, suggesting that we don’t always exercise our minds at 100 percent capacity.
2. “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed and persistent.
We all have memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a snapshot, usually of some shocking, dramatic event—the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks of September 11, 2001. People remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they saw or heard. But several clever experiments have tested people’s memory immediately after a tragedy and again several months or years later. The test subjects tend to be confident that their memories are accurate and say the flashbulb memories are more vivid than other memories. Vivid they may be, but the memories decay over time just as other memories do. People forget important details and add incorrect ones, with no awareness that they’re recreating a muddled scene in their minds rather than calling up a perfect, photographic reproduction.
3. It’s all downhill after 40 (or 50 or 60 or 70).
It’s true, some cognitive skills do decline as you get older. Children are better at learning new languages than adults—and never play a game of concentration against a 10-year-old unless you’re prepared to be humiliated. Young adults are faster than older adults to judge whether two objects are the same or different; they can more easily memorize a list of random words, and they are faster to count backward by sevens.
But plenty of mental skills improve with age. Vocabulary, for instance—older people know more words and understand subtle linguistic distinctions. Given a biographical sketch of a stranger, they’re better judges of character. They score higher on tests of social wisdom, such as how to settle a conflict. And people get better and better over time at regulating their own emotions and finding meaning in their lives.
4. We have five senses.
Sure, sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch are the big ones. But we have many other ways of sensing the world and our place in it. Proprioception is a sense of how our bodies are positioned. Nociception is a sense of pain. We also have a sense of balance—the inner ear is to this sense as the eye is to vision—as well as a sense of body temperature, acceleration and the passage of time.
Compared with other species, though, humans are missing out. Bats and dolphins use sonar to find prey; some birds and insects see ultraviolet light; snakes detect the heat of warmblooded prey; rats, cats, seals and other whiskered creatures use their “vibrissae” to judge spatial relations or detect movements; sharks sense electrical fields in the water; birds, turtles and even bacteria orient to the earth’s magnetic field lines.
By the way, have you seen the taste map of the tongue, the diagram showing that different regions are sensitive to salty, sweet, sour or bitter flavors? Also a myth.
5. Brains are like computers.
We speak of the brain’s processing speed, its storage capacity, its parallel circuits, inputs and outputs. The metaphor fails at pretty much every level: the brain doesn’t have a set memory capacity that is waiting to be filled up; it doesn’t perform computations in the way a computer does; and even basic visual perception isn’t a passive receiving of inputs because we actively interpret, anticipate and pay attention to different elements of the visual world.
There’s a long history of likening the brain to whatever technology is the most advanced, impressive and vaguely mysterious. Descartes compared the brain to a hydraulic machine. Freud likened emotions to pressure building up in a steam engine. The brain later resembled a telephone switchboard and then an electrical circuit before evolving into a computer; lately it’s turning into a Web browser or the Internet. These metaphors linger in clichés: emotions put the brain “under pressure” and some behaviors are thought to be “hard-wired.” Speaking of which...
6. The brain is hard-wired.
This is one of the most enduring legacies of the old “brains are electrical circuits” metaphor. There’s some truth to it, as with many metaphors: the brain is organized in a standard way, with certain bits specialized to take on certain tasks, and those bits are connected along predictable neural pathways (sort of like wires) and communicate in part by releasing ions (pulses of electricity).
But one of the biggest discoveries in neuroscience in the past few decades is that the brain is remarkably plastic. In blind people, parts of the brain that normally process sight are instead devoted to hearing. Someone practicing a new skill, like learning to play the violin, “rewires” parts of the brain that are responsible for fine motor control. People with brain injuries can recruit other parts of the brain to compensate for the lost tissue.
7. A conk on the head can cause amnesia.
Next to babies switched at birth, this is a favorite trope of soap operas: Someone is in a tragic accident and wakes up in the hospital unable to recognize loved ones or remember his or her own name or history. (The only cure for this form of amnesia, of course, is another conk on the head.)
In the real world, there are two main forms of amnesia: anterograde (the inability to form new memories) and retrograde (the inability to recall past events). Science’s most famous amnesia patient, H.M., was unable to remember anything that happened after a 1953 surgery that removed most of his hippocampus. He remembered earlier events, however, and was able to learn new skills and vocabulary, showing that encoding “episodic” memories of new experiences relies on different brain regions than other types of learning and memory do. Retrograde amnesia can be caused by Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury (ask an NFL player), thiamine deficiency or other insults. But a brain injury doesn’t selectively impair autobiographical memory—much less bring it back.
8. We know what will make us happy.
In some cases we haven’t a clue. We routinely overestimate how happy something will make us, whether it’s a birthday, free pizza, a new car, a victory for our favorite sports team or political candidate, winning the lottery or raising children. Money does make people happier, but only to a point—poor people are less happy than the middle class, but the middle class are just as happy as the rich. We overestimate the pleasures of solitude and leisure and underestimate how much happiness we get from social relationships.
On the flip side, the things we dread don’t make us as unhappy as expected. Monday mornings aren’t as unpleasant as people predict. Seemingly unendurable tragedies—paralysis, the death of a loved one—cause grief and despair, but the unhappiness doesn’t last as long as people think it will. People are remarkably resilient.
9. We see the world as it is.
We are not passive recipients of external information that enters our brain through our sensory organs. Instead, we actively search for patterns (like a Dalmatian dog that suddenly appears in a field of black and white dots), turn ambiguous scenes into ones that fit our expectations (it’s a vase; it’s a face) and completely miss details we aren’t expecting. In one famous psychology experiment, about half of all viewers told to count the number of times a group of people pass a basketball do not notice that a guy in a gorilla suit is hulking around among the ball-throwers.
We have a limited ability to pay attention (which is why talking on a cellphone while driving can be as dangerous as drunk driving), and plenty of biases about what we expect or want to see. Our perception of the world isn’t just “bottom-up”—built of objective observations layered together in a logical way. It’s “top-down,” driven by expectations and interpretations.
10. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most biased, least reproducible, worst designed and most overinterpreted research in the history of science purports to provide biological explanations for differences between men and women. Eminent neuroscientists once claimed that head size, spinal ganglia or brain stem structures were responsible for women’s inability to think creatively, vote logically or practice medicine. Today the theories are a bit more sophisticated: men supposedly have more specialized brain hemispheres, women more elaborate emotion circuits. Though there are some differences (minor and uncorrelated with any particular ability) between male and female brains, the main problem with looking for correlations with behavior is that sex differences in cognition are massively exaggerated.
Women are thought to outperform men on tests of empathy. They do—unless test subjects are told that men are particularly good at the test, in which case men perform as well as or better than women. The same pattern holds in reverse for tests of spatial reasoning. Whenever stereotypes are brought to mind, even by something as simple as asking test subjects to check a box next to their gender, sex differences are exaggerated. Women college students told that a test is something women usually do poorly on, do poorly. Women college students told that a test is something college students usually do well on, do well. Across countries—and across time—the more prevalent the belief is that men are better than women in math, the greater the difference in girls’ and boys’ math scores. And that’s not because girls in Iceland have more specialized brain hemispheres than do girls in Italy.
Certain sex differences are enormously important to us when we’re looking for a mate, but when it comes to most of what our brains do most of the time—perceive the world, direct attention, learn new skills, encode memories, communicate (no, women don’t speak more than men do), judge other people’s emotions (no, men aren’t inept at this)—men and women have almost entirely overlapping and fully Earth-bound abilities.
1. We use only 10 percent of our brains.
This one sounds so compelling—a precise number, repeated in pop culture for a century, implying that we have huge reserves of untapped mental powers. But the supposedly unused 90 percent of the brain is not some vestigial appendix. Brains are expensive—it takes a lot of energy to build brains during fetal and childhood development and maintain them in adults. Evolutionarily, it would make no sense to carry around surplus brain tissue. Experiments using PET or fMRI scans show that much of the brain is engaged even during simple tasks, and injury to even a small bit of brain can have profound consequences for language, sensory perception, movement or emotion.
True, we have some brain reserves. Autopsy studies show that many people have physical signs of Alzheimer’s disease (such as amyloid plaques among neurons) in their brains even though they were not impaired. Apparently we can lose some brain tissue and still function pretty well. And people score higher on IQ tests if they’re highly motivated, suggesting that we don’t always exercise our minds at 100 percent capacity.
2. “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed and persistent.
We all have memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a snapshot, usually of some shocking, dramatic event—the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks of September 11, 2001. People remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they saw or heard. But several clever experiments have tested people’s memory immediately after a tragedy and again several months or years later. The test subjects tend to be confident that their memories are accurate and say the flashbulb memories are more vivid than other memories. Vivid they may be, but the memories decay over time just as other memories do. People forget important details and add incorrect ones, with no awareness that they’re recreating a muddled scene in their minds rather than calling up a perfect, photographic reproduction.
3. It’s all downhill after 40 (or 50 or 60 or 70).
It’s true, some cognitive skills do decline as you get older. Children are better at learning new languages than adults—and never play a game of concentration against a 10-year-old unless you’re prepared to be humiliated. Young adults are faster than older adults to judge whether two objects are the same or different; they can more easily memorize a list of random words, and they are faster to count backward by sevens.
But plenty of mental skills improve with age. Vocabulary, for instance—older people know more words and understand subtle linguistic distinctions. Given a biographical sketch of a stranger, they’re better judges of character. They score higher on tests of social wisdom, such as how to settle a conflict. And people get better and better over time at regulating their own emotions and finding meaning in their lives.
4. We have five senses.
Sure, sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch are the big ones. But we have many other ways of sensing the world and our place in it. Proprioception is a sense of how our bodies are positioned. Nociception is a sense of pain. We also have a sense of balance—the inner ear is to this sense as the eye is to vision—as well as a sense of body temperature, acceleration and the passage of time.
Compared with other species, though, humans are missing out. Bats and dolphins use sonar to find prey; some birds and insects see ultraviolet light; snakes detect the heat of warmblooded prey; rats, cats, seals and other whiskered creatures use their “vibrissae” to judge spatial relations or detect movements; sharks sense electrical fields in the water; birds, turtles and even bacteria orient to the earth’s magnetic field lines.
By the way, have you seen the taste map of the tongue, the diagram showing that different regions are sensitive to salty, sweet, sour or bitter flavors? Also a myth.
5. Brains are like computers.
We speak of the brain’s processing speed, its storage capacity, its parallel circuits, inputs and outputs. The metaphor fails at pretty much every level: the brain doesn’t have a set memory capacity that is waiting to be filled up; it doesn’t perform computations in the way a computer does; and even basic visual perception isn’t a passive receiving of inputs because we actively interpret, anticipate and pay attention to different elements of the visual world.
There’s a long history of likening the brain to whatever technology is the most advanced, impressive and vaguely mysterious. Descartes compared the brain to a hydraulic machine. Freud likened emotions to pressure building up in a steam engine. The brain later resembled a telephone switchboard and then an electrical circuit before evolving into a computer; lately it’s turning into a Web browser or the Internet. These metaphors linger in clichés: emotions put the brain “under pressure” and some behaviors are thought to be “hard-wired.” Speaking of which...
6. The brain is hard-wired.
This is one of the most enduring legacies of the old “brains are electrical circuits” metaphor. There’s some truth to it, as with many metaphors: the brain is organized in a standard way, with certain bits specialized to take on certain tasks, and those bits are connected along predictable neural pathways (sort of like wires) and communicate in part by releasing ions (pulses of electricity).
But one of the biggest discoveries in neuroscience in the past few decades is that the brain is remarkably plastic. In blind people, parts of the brain that normally process sight are instead devoted to hearing. Someone practicing a new skill, like learning to play the violin, “rewires” parts of the brain that are responsible for fine motor control. People with brain injuries can recruit other parts of the brain to compensate for the lost tissue.
7. A conk on the head can cause amnesia.
Next to babies switched at birth, this is a favorite trope of soap operas: Someone is in a tragic accident and wakes up in the hospital unable to recognize loved ones or remember his or her own name or history. (The only cure for this form of amnesia, of course, is another conk on the head.)
In the real world, there are two main forms of amnesia: anterograde (the inability to form new memories) and retrograde (the inability to recall past events). Science’s most famous amnesia patient, H.M., was unable to remember anything that happened after a 1953 surgery that removed most of his hippocampus. He remembered earlier events, however, and was able to learn new skills and vocabulary, showing that encoding “episodic” memories of new experiences relies on different brain regions than other types of learning and memory do. Retrograde amnesia can be caused by Alzheimer’s disease, traumatic brain injury (ask an NFL player), thiamine deficiency or other insults. But a brain injury doesn’t selectively impair autobiographical memory—much less bring it back.
8. We know what will make us happy.
In some cases we haven’t a clue. We routinely overestimate how happy something will make us, whether it’s a birthday, free pizza, a new car, a victory for our favorite sports team or political candidate, winning the lottery or raising children. Money does make people happier, but only to a point—poor people are less happy than the middle class, but the middle class are just as happy as the rich. We overestimate the pleasures of solitude and leisure and underestimate how much happiness we get from social relationships.
On the flip side, the things we dread don’t make us as unhappy as expected. Monday mornings aren’t as unpleasant as people predict. Seemingly unendurable tragedies—paralysis, the death of a loved one—cause grief and despair, but the unhappiness doesn’t last as long as people think it will. People are remarkably resilient.
9. We see the world as it is.
We are not passive recipients of external information that enters our brain through our sensory organs. Instead, we actively search for patterns (like a Dalmatian dog that suddenly appears in a field of black and white dots), turn ambiguous scenes into ones that fit our expectations (it’s a vase; it’s a face) and completely miss details we aren’t expecting. In one famous psychology experiment, about half of all viewers told to count the number of times a group of people pass a basketball do not notice that a guy in a gorilla suit is hulking around among the ball-throwers.
We have a limited ability to pay attention (which is why talking on a cellphone while driving can be as dangerous as drunk driving), and plenty of biases about what we expect or want to see. Our perception of the world isn’t just “bottom-up”—built of objective observations layered together in a logical way. It’s “top-down,” driven by expectations and interpretations.
10. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most biased, least reproducible, worst designed and most overinterpreted research in the history of science purports to provide biological explanations for differences between men and women. Eminent neuroscientists once claimed that head size, spinal ganglia or brain stem structures were responsible for women’s inability to think creatively, vote logically or practice medicine. Today the theories are a bit more sophisticated: men supposedly have more specialized brain hemispheres, women more elaborate emotion circuits. Though there are some differences (minor and uncorrelated with any particular ability) between male and female brains, the main problem with looking for correlations with behavior is that sex differences in cognition are massively exaggerated.
Women are thought to outperform men on tests of empathy. They do—unless test subjects are told that men are particularly good at the test, in which case men perform as well as or better than women. The same pattern holds in reverse for tests of spatial reasoning. Whenever stereotypes are brought to mind, even by something as simple as asking test subjects to check a box next to their gender, sex differences are exaggerated. Women college students told that a test is something women usually do poorly on, do poorly. Women college students told that a test is something college students usually do well on, do well. Across countries—and across time—the more prevalent the belief is that men are better than women in math, the greater the difference in girls’ and boys’ math scores. And that’s not because girls in Iceland have more specialized brain hemispheres than do girls in Italy.
Certain sex differences are enormously important to us when we’re looking for a mate, but when it comes to most of what our brains do most of the time—perceive the world, direct attention, learn new skills, encode memories, communicate (no, women don’t speak more than men do), judge other people’s emotions (no, men aren’t inept at this)—men and women have almost entirely overlapping and fully Earth-bound abilities.
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