Deric Bownds' MindBlog

Neural correlates of pain reduction through meditation

Salomons and Kucyi present a nice review of experiments examining meditation and pain reduction (PDF here).

...A cognitive mechanism that is thought to be unique to mindfulness is the combination of increased attention and reduced negative evaluation...the key to reported analgesic effects of meditation training might be the co-occurring reduction in emotional and evaluative responses. Thus it is noteworthy that [several experiments] found activation patterns in regions associated with downregulation of negative affective responses, and functional decoupling of dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex and cingulate...attributed to dissociation between attention to pain and evaluation of pain. Zeidan and colleagues noted an inverse correlation between OFC activation and unpleasantness ratings, which was attributed to altered processing of reward and hedonic experiences. The degree of concordance between these studies suggests that meditative practices may indeed reduce pain through a unique neural mechanism, one corresponding to increased attention and reduced evaluative/emotional responses.

How the vagus nerve links our brains to our immune system

A large number of studies show that our psychological state can influence our immune system. Social isolation and stress weaken our immune system, and social affiliation and calm can strengthen it (the latter are associated with increased activity of the vagus nerve, which runs from the brainstem to many parts of the body). Now a multinational collaboration headed by Kevin Tracey has shown that stimulating the vagus nerve halts the pumping out of inflammatory signals by the immune system, with the neurotransmitter molecular responsible being acetyl choline - but, the Vagus nerve is not releasing it directly. Instead the splenic branch of the Vagus nerve is releasing noradrenaline in the spleen whose white blood cells (CD4 lymphocytes) are then secreting the acetyl choline which switches off production of inflammatory chemical by nearby cells. Here is the abstract:

Neural circuits regulate cytokine production to prevent potentially damaging inflammation. A prototypical vagus nerve circuit, the inflammatory reflex, inhibits tumor necrosis factor–α production in spleen by a mechanism requiring acetylcholine signaling through the alpha 7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor expressed on cytokine-producing macrophages. Nerve fibers in spleen lack the enzymatic machinery necessary for acetylcholine production; therefore, how does this neural circuit terminate in cholinergic signaling? We identified an acetylcholine-producing, memory phenotype T cell population in mice that is integral to the inflammatory reflex. These acetylcholine-producing T cells were required for the inhibition of cytokine production by vagus nerve stimulation. Thus, action potentials originating in the vagus nerve regulate T cells, which in turn produce the neurotransmitter acetylcholine required to control innate immune responses.

Synaptic switch to social status in medial prefrontal cortex.

Wang et al. have determined the social hierarchy within groups of mice by using multiple behavioral tests and find that the social hierarchical status of an individual correlates with the synaptic strength in medial prefrontal cortical neurons. Furthermore, the hierarchical status of mice can be changed from dominant to subordinate, or vice versa, by manipulating the strength of synapses in the medial prefrontal cortex.

Our biological immune system activates our behavioral immune system.

Viewing disease cues (skin lesions, someone sneezing) leads people to display a heightened biological immune response (for example, stimulated production of cytokine interleukin-6). Miller and Maner now provide evidence for the converse: Activation of the biological immune system promotes activation of the behavioral immune system. Their abstract:

Adolescent brain changes while viewing media violence

Strenziok et al. (open access) note a habituation and desensitization of adolescent emotional network brain responses to TV violence, which raises the obvious concern that diminishing the linking of the consequences of aggression with an emotional response might promote aggressive attitudes and behavior.

Women's memory enhanced by lower male voice pitch.

Women are attracted to low male voices, and a prevailing idea is that this is relevant to mate selection. Kevin Allen and colleagues now show that they are also more likely to remember what those low voices say to them. (It makes sense that memory should be sensitive towards content of adaptive value and thus help us to act in ways that enhance our reproductive fitness):

From a functionalist perspective, human memory should be attuned to information of adaptive value for one’s survival and reproductive fitness.

Psychopathy correlates with reduced prefrontal connectivity.

Psychopathy, defined as callous and impulsive antisocial behavior, is present in approximately a quarter of adult prison inmates. For many years, it has been known that changes accompanying ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) damage (lack of empathy, irresponsibility, and poor decision making) bear striking resemblance to psychopathic personality traits. Motzkin et al have now used two complementary neuroimaging methods to quantify the structural and functional connectivity of vmPFC in 27 psychopathic and non-psychopathic prison inmates.

Very brief meditation training produces brain changes associated with positive emotions.

It is known that the ratio of left frontal to right frontal lobe activation is relatively higher in individuals with higher positive affect - this effect can be monitored by e.e.g. electrodes placed on the head. (In light of Gilbert's recent observation that "A wandering mind is an unhappy mind," I wonder if resting frontal asymmetry correlates with mind wandering....) Davidson and colleagues have shown that a fairly rigorous 8-week meditation training program can cause a significant increase the left-sided anterior activation associated with positive affect. Now Moyer et al. at the Univ. of Wisconsin, Stout, claim that a much briefer intervention can be effective.

Differences in reality monitoring correlate with prefrontal cortex variations

Narcissistic Leaders and Group Performance

Nevica et al. point to yet another case where reality is at odds with perceptions:

Although narcissistic individuals are generally perceived as arrogant and overly dominant, they are particularly skilled at radiating an image of a prototypically effective leader. As a result, they tend to emerge as leaders in group settings. Despite people’s positive perceptions of narcissists as leaders, it was previously unknown if and how leaders’ narcissism is related to the performance of the people they lead. In this study, we used a hidden-profile paradigm to investigate this question and found evidence for discordance between the positive image of narcissists as leaders and the reality of group performance. We hypothesized and found that although narcissistic leaders are perceived as effective because of their displays of authority, a leader’s narcissism actually inhibits information exchange between group members and thereby negatively affects group performance. Our findings thus indicate that perceptions and reality can be at odds and have important practical and theoretical implications.

A nap enhances relational memory

Lau et al. make the following interesting observations:

It is increasingly evident that sleep strengthens memory. However, it is not clear whether sleep promotes relational memory, resultant of the integration of disparate memory traces into memory networks linked by commonalities. The present study investigates the effect of a daytime nap, immediately after learning or after a delay, on a relational memory task that requires abstraction of general concept from separately learned items. Specifically, participants learned English meanings of Chinese characters with overlapping semantic components called radicals. They were later tested on new characters sharing the same radicals and on explicitly stating the general concepts represented by the radicals. Regardless of whether the nap occurred immediately after learning or after a delay, the nap participants performed better on both tasks. The results suggest that sleep – even as brief as a nap – facilitates the reorganization of discrete memory traces into flexible relational memory networks.

Be Happy! ... regulate your own amygdala

Not really....the conditions used in the experiments by Zotev et al.et al. - having a handy fMRI machine nearby - are not exactly accessible to most of us. Because it is known that activation of the left amygdala is associated with happy emotions, they tried a biofeedback trick:

We investigated the feasibility of training healthy humans to self-regulate the hemodynamic activity of the amygdala, which plays major roles in emotional processing. Participants in the experimental group were provided with ongoing information about the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) activity in the left amygdala (LA) and were instructed to raise the BOLD rtfMRI signal by contemplating positive autobiographical memories. A control group was assigned the same task but was instead provided with sham feedback from the left horizontal segment of the intraparietal sulcus (HIPS) region. In the LA, we found a significant BOLD signal increase due to rtfMRI neurofeedback training in the experimental group versus the control group...The whole brain data analysis revealed significant differences for Happy Memories versus Rest condition between the experimental and control groups...The findings demonstrate that healthy subjects can learn to regulate their amygdala activation using rtfMRI neurofeedback, suggesting possible applications of rtfMRI neurofeedback training in the treatment of patients with neuropsychiatric disorders.

Are we really conscious?

I've done a post on Graziano's 'attention schema' theory of conscious,

How psychedelics affect our brain - unconstrained cognition

Carhart-Harris et al. have done an interesting study showing that psilocybin decreases surrogate markers for neuronal activity [cerebral blood flow and blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals] in key brain regions implicated in psychedelic drug actions. They also report that psilocybin appears to decrease brain “connectivity” as measured by pharmaco-physiological interaction. Their results imply that "the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition."

The evolution of cognition

It is now commonly recognized that high-level cognitive function is not limited to primate lineages and like many other traits, is shaped by selection imposed by ecological and environmental demands.

Positive thinking can sabotage desired outcomes.

The point is a simple one - imagining success in attaining a goal can make one strive less diligently towards it.

Cognitive dissonance reduction in conservative and liberal Christians

Ross et al. offer an interesting study showing how the answers of conservative and liberal Christians to the question "What would a contemporary Jesus do?" reduces the cognitive dissonance of their own opinions:

A mechanism underlying intractable political conflicts.

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href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2006/06/brain-during-normal-awareness-absence.html">The brain during normal awareness, absence Seizures, and the vegetative state</a><br/></li><br/><li><br/><a rel="nofollow" href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2008/01/coevolution-of-choosiness-and.html">Coevolution of choosiness and cooperation</a><br/></li><br/><li><br/><a rel="nofollow" href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2008/05/models-of-cognitive-control-in.html">Models of cognitive control in prefrontal cortex.</a><br/></li><br/><li><br/><a rel="nofollow" href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2009/10/illusion-of-sex.html">The illusion of sex</a><br/></li><br/><li><br/><a rel="nofollow" href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2006/10/your-brain-can-put-your-body-wherever.html">Your brain can put your body wherever it likes....</a><br/></li><br/><li><br/><a rel="nofollow" href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2007/10/rich-and-poor.html">Rich and Poor</a><br/></li><br/><li><br/><a rel="nofollow" href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2010/07/sex-promotes-generation-of-new-brain.html">Sex promotes generation of new brain cells.</a><br/></li><br/><li><br/><a rel="nofollow" href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2011/07/importance-of-our-brains-resting-state.html">The importance of our brains’ resting state activity.</a><br/></li><br/><li><br/><a rel="nofollow" href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2010/10/serotonin-regulates-our-moral.html">Serotonin regulates our moral judgements</a><br/></li><br/></ul><br/><div class="clear"></div><br/><span class="widget-item-control"><br/><span class="item-control blog-admin"><br/><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=22093933&amp;widgetType=PopularPosts&amp;widgetId=PopularPosts1&amp;action=editWidget&amp;sectionId=newsidebar" class="quickedit" target="configPopularPosts1" title="Edit"><br/><img src="http://img1.blogblog.com/img/icon18_wrench_allbkg.png" height="18" width="18" alt=""><br/></a><br/></span><br/></span><br/><div class="clear"></div><br/></div><br/></div></div><br/></div><br/><div id="main-wrapper"><br/><div class="main section" id="main"><div class="widget Blog" id="Blog1"><br/><div class="blog-posts hfeed"><br/>&lt;!-- google_ad_section_start --><br/><h2 class="date-header">Thursday, October 13, 2011</h2><br/><div class="post"><br/><a rel="nofollow" name="5428601906224329031"></a><br/><h3 class="post-title"><br/><a rel="nofollow" href="http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2011/10/merging-emotional-information-from.html">Merging emotional information from voice and faces in the brain.</a><br/></h3><br/><div class="post-header-line-1"></div><br/><div class="post-body"><br/><p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/38/13635.abstract">Klasen et al.<img class="snap_preview_icon" src="http://i.ixnp.com/images/v6.74/t.gif" style="margin-top: 0px !important; margin-right: 0px !important; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px !important; max-height: 2000px; max-width: 2000px; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-family: 'trebuchet ms', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; float: none; left: auto; top: auto; line-height: normal; background-color: transparent; background-image: url(http://i.ixnp.com/images/v6.74/theme/silver/palette.gif); width: 14px; height: 12px; padding-top: 1px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; position: static; vertical-align: top; display: inline; visibility: visible; background-position: -1128px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; " id="snap_com_shot_link_icon"></a> find the ventral posterior cingulate to be a central structure for supramodal representation of complex emotional information. The left amygdala reflects input of happy stimuli from multiple sensory inputs:</p></div></div></div></div></div></div>

Here is an bit of work Zhang et al. on consolidation of motor memory that more clearly confirms what I know from my own experience of trying to learn a new piano piece. If I watch a video of myself playing a passage where I have difficulty with the notes, I remember the notes better than if I actually play them several times - the actual movement appears to get in the way of forming a motor memory of it. (The same effects can happen with mentally visualizing the movements, a trick known to many athletes and performers).

They show that simply using self referential reflection (i.e., using mindfullness) to make an emotional state aware can attenuate amygdala activation and emotional arousal:

The regulation of emotions is an ongoing internal process and often a challenge. Current related neural models concern the intended control of reactions towards external events, mediated by prefrontal cortex regions upon basal emotion processing as in the amygdala.

the presence of probiotic bacteria in the gut can result in lower stress in the brain (via a pathway involving the vagus nerve and the brain neurotransmitter GABA). Perhaps that’s one reason for the longevity observed in many yogurt-eating populations. Their

...findings highlight the important role of bacteria in the bidirectional communication of the gut–brain axis and suggest that certain organisms may prove to be useful therapeutic adjuncts in stress-related disorders such as anxiety and depression.

Underwood's article, "Starting young", which describes the followup on a Scottish national intelligence test performed on every 11 year old in the country in 1932 and 1947. The finding was that an individual's level of intelligence at age 11 is the most powerful predictor of late-life cognitive ability — not diet, social engagement, or any other virtuous activity. Scores at age 11 predicted about 50% of the variance in the IQs at age 77

Many studies have proven that social relationships influence our physical health. People who are more socially integrated live longer, and are less likely to have medical problems such as heart attacks and upper respiratory illness. (Cytokines are small protein molecules - peptides - that regulate our inflammatory immune response. While transient inflammatory response due to tissue insult are adaptive and trigger needed immune responses, chronic increases in proinflammatory cytokines IL-6 and TNF-α are linked hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease, depression, diabetes, and some cancers.) Chiang et al.

now show that these cytokines promoting tissue inflammation appear when we are in socially stressful situations:

in "our" bodies most of the cells are not our own, they are microbial symbionts.

a cognitive bias that drives conflict between American Democrats and Republicans

Control of thought and behavior is fundamental to human intelligence. Evidence suggests a frontoparietal brain network implements such cognitive control across diverse contexts. We identify a mechanism—global connectivity—by which components of this network might coordinate control of other networks. A lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) region's activity was found to predict performance in a high control demand working memory task and also to exhibit high global connectivity. Critically, global connectivity in this LPFC region, involving connections both within and outside the frontoparietal network, showed a highly selective relationship with individual differences in fluid intelligence. These findings suggest LPFC is a global hub with a brainwide influence that facilitates the ability to implement control processes central to human intelligence.

The fact that musicians perceive some sound features more accurately than nonmusicians do is not so surprising.

professionally trained musicians more effectively use divergent thinking (the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems, or thinking 'outside of the box').

Daniel Kahneman's new book "Thinking, Fast and Slow.", which describes his work on evolved blind spots in our rational processes which appear to be virtually impossible to fix, even though we understand that they are there.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don't carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on mental short cuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. The short cuts aren't a faster way of doing the math; they're a way of skipping the math altogether...The biases and blind-spots identified by Messrs. Kahneman and Tversky aren't symptoms of stupidity. They're an essential part of our humanity, the inescapable byproducts of a brain that evolution engineered over millions of years.

"ingroup love" refers to compassion and empathy toward one's own group, and "outgroup hate" refers to dislike and animosity toward the opposing group.

Supramodal representation of emotion and its neural substrates have recently attracted attention as a marker of social cognition. However, the question whether perceptual integration of facial and vocal emotions takes place in primary sensory areas, multimodal cortices, or in affective structures remains unanswered yet. Using novel computer-generated stimuli, we combined emotional faces and voices in congruent and incongruent ways and assessed functional brain data (fMRI) during an emotional classification task. Both congruent and incongruent audiovisual stimuli evoked larger responses in thalamus and superior temporal regions compared with unimodal conditions. Congruent emotions were characterized by activation in amygdala, insula, ventral posterior cingulate (vPCC), temporo-occipital, and auditory cortices; incongruent emotions activated a frontoparietal network and bilateral caudate nucleus, indicating a greater processing load in working memory and emotion-encoding areas. The vPCC alone exhibited differential reactions to congruency and incongruency for all emotion categories and can thus be considered a central structure for supramodal representation of complex emotional information. Moreover, the left amygdala reflected supramodal representation of happy stimuli. These findings document that emotional information does not merge at the perceptual audiovisual integration level in unimodal or multimodal areas, but in vPCC and amygdala.

One cognitive ability that exhibits considerable variability in the healthy population is reality monitoring; the cognitive processes used to introspectively judge whether a memory came from an internal or external source (e.g., whether an event was imagined or actually occurred). Neuroimaging research has implicated the medial anterior prefrontal cortex (PFC) in reality monitoring, and here we sought to determine whether morphological variability in a specific anteromedial PFC brain structure, the paracingulate sulcus (PCS), might underlie performance.

The present study explores the dramatic projection of one's own views onto those of Jesus among conservative and liberal American Christians. In a large-scale survey, the relevant views that each group attributed to a contemporary Jesus differed almost as much as their own views. Despite such dissonance-reducing projection, however, conservatives acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to “fellowship” issues (e.g., taxation to reduce economic inequality and treatment of immigrants) and liberals acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to “morality” issues (e.g., abortion and gay marriage). However, conservatives also claimed that a contemporary Jesus would be even more conservative than themselves on the former issues whereas liberals claimed that Jesus would be even more liberal than themselves on the latter issues.

However, what seems less evident to us is whether or not this intensive musical practice can affect nonmusical abilities. Several recent studies seem to confirm this possibility….In this study, we took the challenge of focusing on a rather high cognitive function: word segmentation, namely, the ability to extract words from continuous speech

The bacteria that colonize humans and our built environments have the potential to influence our health.

Activation of the behavioral immune system has been shown to promote activation of the biological immune system. The current research tested the hypothesis that activation of the biological immune system (as a result of recent illness) promotes activation of the behavioral immune system. Participants who had recently been ill, and had therefore recently experienced activation of their biological immune system, in one study displayed heightened attention to disfigured individuals, and in a second study showed avoidance — cognitive and behavioral processes reflecting activation of the behavioral immune system. These findings shed light on the interactive nature of biological and psychological mechanisms designed to help people overcome the threat of disease.

Practicing a motor task can induce neuroplastic changes in the human primary motor cortex (M1) that are subsequently consolidated, leading to a stable memory trace.

...the argument here is that there is no subjective impression [in the way we commonly suppose]; there is only information in a data-processing device. When we look at a red apple, the brain computes information about color. It also computes information about the self and about a (physically incoherent) property of subjective experience. The brain’s cognitive machinery accesses that interlinked information and derives several conclusions: There is a self, a me; there is a red thing nearby; there is such a thing as subjective experience; and I have an experience of that red thing. Cognition is captive to those internal models. Such a brain would inescapably conclude it has subjective experience.

We investigated skin conductance responses, brain activation and functional brain connectivity to media violence in healthy adolescents. In an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, subjects repeatedly viewed normed videos that displayed different degrees of aggressive behavior. We found a downward linear adaptation in skin conductance responses with increasing aggression and desensitization towards more aggressive videos.

Linking psychopathy to a specific brain abnormality could have significant clinical, legal, and scientific implications. Theories on the neurobiological basis of the disorder typically propose dysfunction in a circuit involving ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC).

Psychedelic drugs have a long history of use in healing ceremonies, but despite renewed interest in their therapeutic potential, we continue to know very little about how they work in the brain. Here we used psilocybin, a classic psychedelic found in magic mushrooms, and a task-free functional MRI (fMRI) protocol designed to capture the transition from normal waking consciousness to the psychedelic state. Arterial spin labeling perfusion and blood-oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI were used to map cerebral blood flow and changes in venous oxygenation before and after intravenous infusions of placebo and psilocybin. Fifteen healthy volunteers were scanned with arterial spin labeling and a separate 15 with BOLD. As predicted, profound changes in consciousness were observed after psilocybin, but surprisingly, only decreases in cerebral blood flow and BOLD signal were seen, and these were maximal in hub regions, such as the thalamus and anterior and posterior cingulate cortex (ACC and PCC). Decreased activity in the ACC/medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was a consistent finding and the magnitude of this decrease predicted the intensity of the subjective effects. Based on these results, a seed-based pharmaco-physiological interaction/functional connectivity analysis was performed using a medial prefrontal seed. Psilocybin caused a significant decrease in the positive coupling between the mPFC and PCC. These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition.

the gender gap in spatial abilities, measured by time to solve a puzzle, disappears when we move from a patrilineal society to an adjoining matrilineal society.

musician's elevated use of both brain hemispheres may be related to having to use two hands independently, as well as follow multiple voices on musical scores. Folley, one of the authors, noted "“Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres...Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere.”

Here we test whether movement observation, known to evoke similar neural responses in M1 as movement execution, can benefit the early consolidation of new motor memories. We show that observing the same type of movement as that previously practiced (congruent movement stimuli) substantially improves performance on a retention test 30 min after training compared with observing either an incongruent movement type or control stimuli not showing biological motion.

memory in women is sensitive to male voice pitch, a sexually dimorphic cue important for mate choice because it not only serves as an indicator of genetic quality, but may also signal behavioural traits undesirable in a long-term partner.

Fifty-three healthy volunteers were selected on the basis of MRI scans and classified into four groups according to presence or absence of the PCS in their left or right hemisphere. The group with absence of the PCS in both hemispheres showed significantly reduced reality monitoring performance and ability to introspect metacognitively about their performance when compared with other participants. Consistent with the prediction that sulcal absence might mean greater volume in the surrounding frontal gyri, voxel-based morphometry revealed a significant negative correlation between anterior PFC gray matter and reality monitoring performance. The findings provide evidence that individual differences in introspective abilities like reality monitoring may be associated with specific structural variability in the PFC.

Clinical evidence suggests a potentially causal interaction between sleep and affective brain function; nearly all mood disorders display co-occurring sleep abnormalities, commonly involving rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. Building on this clinical evidence, recent neurobiological frameworks have hypothesized a benefit of REM sleep in palliatively decreasing next-day brain reactivity to recent waking emotional experiences. Specifically, the marked suppression of central adrenergic neurotransmitters during REM (commonly implicated in arousal and stress), coupled with activation in amygdala-hippocampal networks that encode salient events, is proposed to (re)process and depotentiate previous affective experiences, decreasing their emotional intensity. In contrast, the failure of such adrenergic reduction during REM sleep has been described in anxiety disorders, indexed by persistent high-frequency electroencephalographic (EEG) activity (greater than 30 Hz); a candidate factor contributing to hyperarousal and exaggerated amygdala reactivity. Despite these neurobiological frameworks, and their predictions, the proposed benefit of REM sleep physiology in depotentiating neural and behavioral responsivity to prior emotional events remains unknown. Here, we demonstrate that REM sleep physiology is associated with an overnight dissipation of amygdala activity in response to previous emotional experiences, altering functional connectivity and reducing next-day subjective emotionality.

Recording from layer V pyramidal neurons of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) showed higher strength of excitatory synaptic inputs in mice with higher ranking, as compared with their subordinate cage mates. Furthermore, molecular manipulations that resulted in an increase and decrease in the synaptic efficacy in dorsal mPFC neurons caused an upward and downward movement in the social rank, respectively. These results provide direct evidence for mPFC’s involvement in social hierarchy and suggest that social rank is plastic and can be tuned by altering synaptic strength in mPFC pyramidal cells.

women in a weight reduction program who imaged successful completion of the program lost fewer pounds than those who imagined themselves less positively, and that students instructed to imagine a great week ahead report feeling less energized and accomplish less than students instructed to write down any thoughts about the coming week.

Our results further revealed adaptation in a fronto-parietal network including the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC), right precuneus and bilateral inferior parietal lobules, again showing downward linear adaptations and desensitization towards more aggressive videos.

women’s visual object memory is significantly enhanced when an object’s name is spoken during encoding in a masculinised (i.e., lower-pitch) versus feminised (i.e., higher-pitch) male voice, but that no analogous effect occurs when women listen to other women’s voices.

A standard protocol was used to measure positive and negative affect before and after  15 min of attempted focused-attention meditation according to provided instructions (“relax with your eyes closed, and focus on the flow of your breath at the tip of your nose; if a random thought arises, acknowledge the thought and then simply let it go by gently bringing your attention back to the flow of your breath”).

Consider the overconfidence bias, which drives many of our mistakes in decision-making. The best demonstration of the bias comes from the world of investing. Although many fund managers charge high fees to oversee stock portfolios, they routinely fail a basic test of skill: persistent achievement.

The near-death experience is a complex set of phenomena and a single account will not capture all its components. One recent theory is that the basic arousal systems beginning in the midbrain may account for many of the components of the near-death experience. Of interest is the locus coeruleus, a midbrain region involved in the release of noradrenaline. Noradrenaline is known to be involved in arousal related to fear, stress, and hypercarbia, and is highly connected to regions that mediate emotion and memory, including the amygdala and hippocampus. Indeed, stimulation of the noradrenaline system has been shown to enhance and consolidate memory, and plays a critical role in the sleep-wake cycle, including REM sleep.

The conditions of self-reflection and emotion-introspection showed distinguishable activations in medial and ventrolateral prefrontal areas, in parietal regions and in the amygdala. Notably, amygdala activity decreased during emotion-introspection and increased compared to ‘neutral’ during self-reflection. The results indicate that already the self-referential mental state of making the actual emotional state aware is capable of attenuating emotional arousal. This extends current theories of emotion regulation and has implications for the application of mindfulness techniques as a component of psychotherapeutic strategies in affective disorders and also for possible everyday emotion regulation.

Further reducing potential dissonance, liberal and conservative Christians differed markedly in the types of issues they claimed to be more central to their faith. A concluding discussion considers the relationship between individual motivational processes and more social processes that may underlie the present findings, as well as implications for contemporary social and political conflict.

vitamin D may improve the likelihood of healthy cognitive aging.

I concede that this approach is counterintuitive. One reason is that it seems to leave a gap in the logic: Why would the brain waste energy computing information about subjective awareness and attributing that property to itself, if the brain doesn’t in fact have this property?

psychopathy is associated with reduced structural integrity in the right uncinate fasciculus, the primary white matter connection between vmPFC and anterior temporal lobe. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that psychopathy is associated with reduced functional connectivity between vmPFC and amygdala as well as between vmPFC and medial parietal cortex. Together, these data converge to implicate diminished vmPFC connectivity as a characteristic neurobiological feature of psychopathy.

Granger causality mapping analyses revealed attenuation in the left lOFC, indicating that activation during viewing aggressive media is driven by input from parietal regions that decreased over time, for more aggressive videos.

Musical training is known to modify auditory perception and related cortical organization. Here, we show that these modifications may extend to higher cognitive functions and generalize to processing of speech. Previous studies have shown that adults and newborns can segment a continuous stream of linguistic and nonlinguistic stimuli based only on probabilities of occurrence between adjacent syllables or tones.

Anna North points to the beneficial effects of exposure to soil organisms. Some soil bacteria have the same antidepressant effect on mice as serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac.

As Mr. Kahneman notes, the year-to-year correlation between the performance of the vast majority of funds is barely above zero, which suggests that most successful managers are banking on luck, not talent...This shouldn't be too surprising. The stock market is a case study in randomness, a system so complex that it's impossible to predict.

the most effective strategy, combining positive thinking with realism by mentally contrasting them.

lowering and raising male voice pitch enhanced and impaired women’s memory, respectively, relative to a baseline (i.e., unmanipulated) voice condition. The modulatory effect of sexual dimorphism cues in the male voice may reveal a mate-choice adaptation within women’s memory, sculpted by evolution in response to the dilemma posed by the double-edged qualities of male masculinity.

Vitamin D is an important calcium-regulating hormone with diverse functions in numerous tissues, including the brain. Increasing evidence suggests that vitamin D may play a role in maintaining cognitive function and that vitamin D deficiency may accelerate age-related cognitive decline.

We conclude that aggressive media activates an emotion–attention network that has the capability to blunt emotional responses through reduced attention with repeated viewing of aggressive media contents, which may restrict the linking of the consequences of aggression with an emotional response, and therefore potentially promotes aggressive attitudes and behavior.

This is where my own work comes in. In my lab at Princeton, my colleagues and I have been developing the “attention schema” theory of consciousness, which may explain why that computation is useful and would evolve in any complex brain. Here’s the gist of it:  Take again the case of color and wavelength. Wavelength is a real, physical phenomenon; color is the brain’s approximate, slightly incorrect model of it. In the attention schema theory, attention is the physical phenomenon and awareness is the brain’s approximate, slightly incorrect model of it. In neuroscience, attention is a process of enhancing some signals at the expense of others. It’s a way of focusing resources. Attention: a real, mechanistic phenomenon that can be programmed into a computer chip. Awareness: a cartoonish reconstruction of attention that is as physically inaccurate as the brain’s internal model of color.

We have found that peripheral immune activation with antigens derived from the nonpathogenic, saprophytic bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae, activated a specific subset of serotonergic neurons in the interfascicular part of the dorsal raphe nucleus (DRI) of mice...The effects of immune activation were associated with increases in serotonin metabolism within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, consistent with an effect of immune activation on mesolimbocortical serotonergic systems.

Empirical studies of creativity have focused on the importance of divergent thinking, which supports generating novel solutions to loosely defined problems. The present study examined creativity and frontal cortical activity in an externally-validated group of creative individuals (trained musicians) and demographically matched control participants, using behavioral tasks and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Experiment 1 examined convergent and divergent thinking with respect to intelligence and personality. Experiment 2 investigated frontal oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin concentration changes during divergent thinking with NIRS. Results of Experiment 1 indicated enhanced creativity in musicians who also showed increased verbal ability and schizotypal personality but their enhanced divergent thinking remained robust after co-varying out these two factors. In Experiment 2, NIRS showed greater bilateral frontal activity in musicians during divergent thinking compared with nonmusicians. Overall, these results suggest that creative individuals are characterized by enhanced divergent thinking, which is supported by increased frontal cortical activity.

Nevertheless, professional investors routinely believe that they can see what others can't. The end result is that they make far too many trades, with costly consequences.
 
 We like to see ourselves as a Promethean species, uniquely endowed with the gift of reason. But Mr. Kahneman's simple experiments reveal a very different mind, stuffed full of habits that, in most situations, lead us astray. Though overconfidence may encourage us to take necessary risks—Mr. Kahneman calls it the "engine of capitalism"—it's generally a dangerous (and expensive) illusion.

Along with basic midbrain systems, such as the periaqueductal gray, a region involved in opioid analgesia and basic fear responses, and the ventral tegmental area, which is a core dopamine reward area, the noradrenaline system may be part of a basic set of systems that directly or indirectly evoke positive emotions, hallucinations and other features of the near-death experience.
 
     Taken together, the scientific evidence suggests that all aspects of the near-death experience have a neurophysiological or psychological basis:

Event-Related Potentials data showed that musicians learned better than did nonmusicians both musical and linguistic structures of the sung language.

Testosterone modulates brain talk in social emotional behavior.

People with higher testosterone levels show more approach-related behavior during short social exchanges, and recent work has shown that this hormone influences activity of the amygdala (central to emotional behavior) and the ventral lateral (VLPFC) and orbital frontal (OFC) prefrontal areas of our cortex. I'm passing on this link to an open access article by Volman et al. that details experiments showing that testosterone modulates the effective connectivity between amygdala and VLPFC in approach-avoidance behavior. Their results indicate that endogenous testosterone influences local prefrontal activity and interregional connectivity supporting the control of social emotional behavior.

stimulation of mesolimbocortical serotonergic systems by peripheral immune activation alters stress-related emotional behavior.

the “water tank hypothesis”: The better put-together your brain is early on, thanks to good genes and, to some extent, a favorable early life environment, the more cognitive reserves you have to lose to neurodegeneration. In other words, Martin says, “the more you start out with in the tank, the longer it takes to draw down.”

What's even more upsetting is that these habits are virtually impossible to fix. As Mr. Kahneman himself admits, "My intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues."...Even when we know why we stumble, we still find a way to fall.

the vivid pleasure frequently experienced in near-death experiences may be the result of fear-elicited opioid release

In this theory, awareness is not an illusion. It’s a caricature. Something — attention — really does exist, and awareness is a distorted accounting of it.  One reason that the brain needs an approximate model of attention is that to be able to control something efficiently, a system needs at least a rough model of the thing to be controlled. Another reason is that to predict the behavior of other creatures, the brain needs to model their brain states, including their attention. This theory pulls together evidence from social neuroscience, attention research, control theory and elsewhere.

while the life review and REM components of the near-death experience could be attributed to the action of the locus coeruleus- noradrenaline system.

studies demonstrate a causal relationship between vitamin D status and cognitive function, and they suggest that vitamin D-mediated changes in hippocampal gene expression may improve the likelihood of successful brain aging.

Out-of-body experiences and feelings of disconnection with the physical body could arise because of a breakdown in multisensory processes, and the bright lights and tunneling could be the result of a peripheral to fovea breakdown of the visual system through oxygen deprivation.

Brain deactivations after psilocybin. (Upper) Regions where there was a significant decrease in the BOLD signal after psilocybin versus after placebo. (Lower) Regions where there was a consistent decrease in CBF (cerebral blood flow) and BOLD after psilocybin. We observed no increases in CBF or BOLD signal in any region.

Almost all other theories of consciousness are rooted in our intuitions about awareness. Like the intuition that white light is pure [when it is in fact a spectrum of all colors], our intuitions about awareness come from information computed deep in the brain. But the brain computes models that are caricatures of real things. And as with color, so with consciousness: It’s best to be skeptical of intuition.

With training, focused-attention meditation shifts frontal EEG asymmetry toward a pattern associated with positive, approach-oriented emotions. Further, this shift does not require hundreds or even dozens of hours of practice. Individual MT participants in this study averaged only 5 to 16 min of active training (i.e., instruction, independent practice) per day across 5 weeks, but still exhibited a strong change in EEG asymmetry compared with the WL group. Our results suggest that the benefits of meditation may be more accessible than was previously believed.

activity in right rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (rlPFC) satisfies three constraints for a role in metacognitive aspects of decision-making. Right rlPFC showed greater activity during self-report compared to a matched control condition, activity in this region correlated with reported confidence, and the strength of the relationship between activity and confidence predicted metacognitive ability across individuals. In addition, functional connectivity between right rlPFC and both contralateral PFC and visual cortex increased during metacognitive reports. We discuss these findings in a theoretical framework where rlPFC re-represents object-level decision uncertainty to facilitate metacognitive report.

Individual difference and connectivity analyses. The top panel illustrates the significant correlation between confidence-related activity in right rlPFC and metacognitive accuracy across subjects. The bottom panel depicts results of an exploratory psychophysiological interaction analysis (displayed at p < 0.001, uncorrected), revealing whole-brain corrected (p < 0.05) increases in connectivity between right rlPFC and visual cortex (lingual gyrus) and between right rlPFC and left dlPFC in Report compared to Follow trials.

Individuals are willing to sacrifice their own resources to promote equality in groups. These costly choices promote equality and are associated with behavior that supports cooperation in humans

some parts of the brain are more active during egalitarian outcomes, and these activations are correlated with egalitarian behavior inside the scanner. However, a more crucial result is that the activations are also correlated with behavior outside the scanner, including self-reported preferences for egalitarian outcomes and game behavior that reveals how willing subjects are to use their own resources to obtain egalitarian outcomes within their groups. Taken together, the evidence suggests that the anterior insular cortex plays a critical role in egalitarian behavior in humans.

This conclusion is consistent with a broader view of the insular cortex as a neural substrate that processes the relationship of the individual with respect to his or her environment. The predominately left-lateralized activation may point toward the possibility of a positive valence or energy-preserving mode related processing during egalitarian behavior (i.e., individuals may see the group as a greater good that is worth preserving). The fact that the insula is directly involved in physiological, food, and pain-related processing supports the general notion that prosocial behavior, which is important for survival of both the individual and the group/species, is implemented on a fundamental physiological level similar to breathing, heartbeat, hunger, and pain.

Adam Smith contended that moral sentiments like egalitarianism derived from a “fellow-feeling” that would increase with our level of sympathy for others, predicting not merely aversion to inequity, but also our propensity to engage in egalitarian behaviors. The evidence here supports such an interpretation. Although individuals may experience internal rewards when punishing antisocial behavior and may have preferences for social equality, our results suggest that it is the brain mechanisms involved in experiencing the emotional and social states of self and others that appear to be driving egalitarian behaviors.

Our results have important implications for theories of the evolution of prosocial behavior that suggest culturally transmitted “leveling mechanisms”—for example, food sharing and monogamy—stifle within-group competition and create circumstances in which intergroup antagonism generates selective pressure for altruistic behaviors. A concern for equality may have originally evolved because it fostered the conditions necessary for early human groups to maintain a high level of cooperation. Future research should focus on the interconnectivity of regions of the brain involved in egalitarianism and altruism to better understand how these two behaviors may have coevolved.