Eideard

This is going to sound sort of obvious, but here we go: A study from University College London published this week in Current Biology has discovered that there are actually differences in the brains of liberals and conservatives. Specifically, liberals’ brains tend to be bigger in the area that deals with processing complex ideas and situations, while conservatives’ brains are bigger in the area that processes fear.

According to the report: “We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala.”

People with larger amygdalae respond to perceived threats with more aggression and “are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions.” The anterior cingulate cortex, however, “monitors uncertainty and conflict.” “Thus,” says the report, “it is conceivable that individuals with a larger ACC have a higher capacity to tolerate uncertainty and conflicts, allowing them to accept more liberal views.”

The question remains about sorting the cause-and-effect relationship between ideology and brain structure. Could be that liberal open-mindedness helps the brain grow in complexity – and conservatives habit of cowering behind ideology bloats their right amygdala.

Thanks, Mary Lupin

A stalk of the newfound fungus grows out of a “zombie” ant’s head

Originally thought to be a single species, called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the fungus is actually four distinct species—all of which can “mind control” ants—scientists announced Wednesday.

The fungus species can infect an ant, take over its brain, and then kill the insect once it moves to a location ideal for the fungi to grow and spread their spores.

All four known fungi species live in Brazil’s Atlantic rain forest, which is rapidly changing due to climate change and deforestation, said study leader David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State University.

Hughes and colleagues made the discovery after noticing a wide diversity of fungal growths emerging from ant victims, according to the March 2 study in the journal PLoS ONE.

“It is tempting to speculate that each species of fungus has its own ant species that it is best adapted to attack,” Hughes said.

“This potentially means thousands of zombie fungi in tropical forests across the globe await discovery,” he said. “We need to ramp up sampling—especially given the perilous state of the environment.”

Now, if the stalks extending from the skulls of zombie ants could be used to communicate, produce a hive mentality like some kind of ant-Borg, we could produce a film scary enough, profitable enough, to fund studies for quite a while.

Thanks to wok3

Professionals use the caudate nucleus in the center of the brain

Tracking blood flow in the brain to detect spikes of activity, researchers found that master players of shogi — a Japanese game similar to chess — use two regions of the brain to make critical moves.

Unlike amateur players, who use the precuneus area of the parietal lobe, professionals use the caudate nucleus in the center of the brain, said Keiji Tanaka at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute’s Cognitive Brain Mapping Laboratory.

“Professionals are trained extensively for a long time, over 10 years, hours every day. This extensive training (may have) shifted the activity from the cerebral cortex to the caudate nucleus,” the study’s lead author Tanaka said.

“Amateurs use the precuneus only a third of the time (that professionals do),” Tanaka said.

The findings were published in the journal Science.

Experts believe the caudate nucleus is responsible for switching bodily movements.

“The caudate nucleus is very well developed in rats and mice, while the cerebral cortex is very developed in primates … by becoming expert, shogi masters start to use all parts of the brain,” Tanaka said.
———————————————————————————–

I sent Eid a few subjective comments in response to his showing me this study. I do that hoping to irritate the hell out of him, but it doesn’t always work. In fact, he asked me to post the story along with a few subjective comments. Cripes. Read the rest of this entry »

A new meta-analysis study conducted by Syracuse University Professor Stephanie Ortigue is getting attention around the world. The groundbreaking study, “The Neuroimaging of Love,” reveals falling in love can elicit not only the same euphoric feeling as using cocaine, but also affects intellectual areas of the brain. Researchers also found falling in love only takes about a fifth of a second…

Results from Ortigue’s team revealed when a person falls in love, 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image.

The findings beg the question, “Does the heart fall in love, or the brain?”

“That’s a tricky question always,” says Ortigue. “I would say the brain, but the heart is also related because the complex concept of love is formed by both bottom-up and top-down processes from the brain to the heart and vice versa. For instance, activation in some parts of the brain can generate stimulations to the heart, butterflies in the stomach. Some symptoms we sometimes feel as a manifestation of the heart may sometimes be coming from the brain.”

Other researchers also found blood levels of nerve growth factor, or NGF, also increased. Those levels were significantly higher in couples who had just fallen in love. This molecule involved plays an important role in the social chemistry of humans, or the phenomenon ‘love at first sight.’ “These results confirm love has a scientific basis,” says Ortigue…

RTFA. Fascinating research. Why try to keep romanticism divorced from science?

In fact, the sense of adventure, quest for knowledge, newer and greater understanding of life and living seems to me to be one of the romantic undertakings there could be. Dullards are the ones afraid of real science.

Walking at least six miles a week may be one thing people can do to keep their brains from shrinking and fight off dementia, say U.S. researchers.

A study of nearly 300 people in Pittsburgh who kept track of how much they walked each week showed that those who walked at least six miles had less age-related brain shrinkage than people who walked less.

“Brain size shrinks in late adulthood, which can cause memory problems. Our results should encourage well-designed trials of physical exercise in older adults as a promising approach for preventing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease,” said Kirk Erickson of the University of Pittsburgh, whose study appears in the journal Neurology…

Erickson and colleagues tested to see if people who walk a lot might be better positioned to fight off the disease.

They studied 299 volunteers who were free of dementia and who kept track of how much they walked.

Nine years later, scientists took brain scans to measure their brain volume. After four more years, they tested to see if anyone in the study had cognitive impairment or dementia.

They found that people who walked roughly six to nine miles a week halved their risk of developing memory problems.

“Our results are in line with data that aerobic activity induces a host of cellular cascades that could conceivably increase gray matter volume,” the team wrote.

They said more studies need to be done on the effects of exercise on dementia, but in the absence of any effective treatments for Alzheimer’s, walking may be one thing people can do that may help down the road.

Phew. I made it into the parameters.

Three tobacco giants are suing the city over graphic anti-smoking posters that stores selling cigarettes have to post near the cash register.

R.J. Reynolds, Philip Morris and Lorillard claim the color images of cancer-ravaged lungs, a decayed tooth and a stroke-damaged brain are “unappetizing” and violate the First Amendment.

“The signs…do not describe the risks of smoking in purely factual terms,” claims the lawsuit filed Thursday in Manhattan Federal Court.

The stores are being forced to “undertake graphic advocacy on behalf of the city” – which is barred by the First Amendment, the court papers allege.

The suit was joined by two grocery stores and two retail groups.

Poisonally, I think it’s a wonderful idea. I never would have made to these creaky geek old years if I hadn’t quit smoking when I was twenty-two. Two-and-a-half packs a day, back then.

Information can be the bane of our lives. While the right kind of information at a given moment is extremely empowering, there is little doubt that we are drowning in the stuff.

Douglas Merrill knows this all too well. He is the former chief information officer of Google, the company that wants to take all that information and make it universally accessible. He was with the company for five years, from when it was a mere fledgling with a few hundred staff to when it hit the 19,000 mark…

Even though we have the web, and we have Google to “organise the world’s information” for us, our tendency to become overwhelmed is not our fault. No, says Mr Merrill, chalk that one up to Mother Nature:

“We are just not very good at remembering things, by and large. Our short-term memory can only hold between five and nine things at a time. And our brain weighs three pounds (1.4kg) and is just larger than the average chicken.

“Yet it is pretty fantastic. It can identify gender, how old someone is just by looking at a photograph of someone’s nose and even recognise a song after hearing just a few notes.”

Mr Merrill points out in his book Getting Organized in the Google Era that “your brain was developed eons ago primarily to prevent you from being eaten by carnivorous beasts – not to memorise lists or store facts.”

Interesting read – even though I diverge from the sentence above. After all, we were hunter-gatherers not just hunters [or hunted]. Someone had to remember where to look for apples and mushrooms.

RTFA. Nice piece of journalism and I guess I will get Merrill’s book.

Sleep has long been known to improve performance on memory tests. Now, a new study suggests that an afternoon power nap may boost your ability to process and store information tenfold — but only if you dream while you’re asleep.

“When you dream, your brain is trying to look at connections that you might not think of or notice when [you're] awake,” says the lead author of the study, Robert Stickgold, the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts. “In the dream…the brain tries to figure out what’s important and what it should keep or dump because it’s of no value…”

“The sleeping brain seems to be processing information on one level, but on a higher level it helps evolve your memory network if the information is relevant or helpful in your life experience,” adds Breus, who is also the author of “Beauty Sleep.”

The study’s findings, which appear in the journal Current Biology, underscore just how important sleep is to our memory and mental function.

RTFA. Methods seem straightforward enough. I look forward to reading the details when available to cheapskate members of the public – like me.

As someone whose sleep apnea is thoroughly moderated by CPAP sleep, I don’t dream except for a few brief moments while rousing in the morning. I hope I’m not screwing up this ancient brain.

Cooking is something we all take for granted but a new theory suggests that if we had not learned to cook food, not only would we still look like chimps but, like them, we would also be compelled to spend most of the day chewing.

Without cooking, an average person would have to eat around five kilos of raw food to get enough calories to survive. The daily mountain of fruit and vegetables would mean a six-hour chewing marathon.

It is already accepted that the introduction of meat into our ancestors’ diet caused their brains to grow and their intelligence to increase. Meat – a more concentrated form of energy – not only meant bigger brains for our ancestors, but also an end to the need to devote nearly all their time to foraging to maintain energy levels. As a consequence, more time was available for social structure to develop.

Read the rest of this entry »

New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter.

Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings…”Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” said Matthew Walker…the lead investigator of these studies.

Since 2007, Walker and other sleep researchers have established that fact-based memories are temporarily stored in the hippocampus before being sent to the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which may have more storage space…

In the latest study, Walker and his team have broken new ground in discovering that this memory- refreshing process occurs when nappers are engaged in a specific stage of sleep. Electroencephalogram tests, which measure electrical activity in the brain, indicated that this refreshing of memory capacity is related to Stage 2 non-REM sleep, which takes place between deep sleep (non-REM) and the dream state known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM). Previously, the purpose of this stage was unclear, but the new results offer evidence as to why humans spend at least half their sleeping hours in Stage 2, non-REM, Walker said.

“I can’t imagine Mother Nature would have us spend 50 percent of the night going from one sleep stage to another for no reason,” Walker said. “Sleep is sophisticated. It acts locally to give us what we need.”

Zzzzzzzz…