Category Archives: Neuroscience

The meaning of art

I’m continuing my reading of David Byrne’s “How Music Works” and find myself in an interesting section discussing amateur art. He runs down a lot of theories past and present about what makes art “good” (always a lively debate.) At one point Byrne quotes the views of English author John Carey who said, “Meanings are not inherent in objects. They are supplied by those who interpret them.” Carey’s fundamental point is that high art was considered high because the elite class says so, not that these forms or art have some built in magic.

And I generally agree with that; I would have strongly agreed with that a few years ago (though I reject the sort of punk rock/populist counter argument that “street level” art is great merely because it’s not high art.) But are objects totally without meanings? I’m not sure I buy that. I’m reminded of neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran who argues that the brain seems to associate reactions to certain types of objects. For example, a big spiky sculpture made of steel can’t help but seem fearsome. A painting of pillows can’t help but seem safe. If you want to call those reactions “meanings” (and when you think about it, the exact meaning of the word meaning is rather ethereal) then objects do have meanings in so much as these reactions seem built into the brain. We could revive the whole tabula rasa debate and question whether you’re born with a fear of spiky objects or rather it’s something that gets built in early on, but it probably doesn’t matter much.

The transparent brain

Scientist have created transparent brains, the NY Times reports. (There’s some cool animations at the link.)

Scientists at Stanford University reported on Wednesday that they have made a whole mouse brain, and part of a human brain, transparent, so that networks of neurons that receive and send information can be highlighted in stunning color and viewed in all their three-dimensional complexity without slicing up the organ.

One might ask, “why should I give a shit?” Personally, I suspect this new era of deep brain visualization and research is going to reveal that personality and activity of the mind is closely tied to brain structure. As a result, people choices are essentially limited to their brain components. As an example, un-empathic people may not be simply assholes, but people missing some degree of the empathy “toolset*” in their brain. This opens up a whole well of debate about free will, choice etc. – a debate that may end up affecting our legal system.

* I’m using this term to represent the neural area or network that might be integral to a certain function like empathy.

I do think various drugs an therapies can affect people’s mental “toolsets” (postively or negatively) but I doubt we can radically alter a person’s mental function. Unless we get into some sci-fi transplanting of brain tissue. Perhaps the rich empathy section of some namby-pamby liberal’s brain could be transplanted into that of a hardened psychopath making him a lover of puppies.

Oxytocin: Can we be forced to feel?

Lately I’ve been reading a book titled “The Science of Evil,” written by neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen (the cousin of Sacha Baron-Cohen, the actor who plays “Borat.”) The book is a look at what’s known about the brains of people who lack empathy – psychopaths, narcissists, autistics etc.

At one point in the book, Baron-Cohen mentions the recent development of an oxytocin nasal spray. Oxytocin, my erudite readers might recall, is a hormone produced by the human body and is associated with calm, loving feelings. We get a dose of oxytocin after sex or close contact; mothers get a dose during birth and while breast feeding their children (presumably this increases the mother/child bond.) It’s been termed “the cuddle drug” and there is now a nasal spray version. This article looks at the idea of troubled couples using it too smooth out their relationships.

Baron-Cohen discusses the possibility of the spray being used by people with low empathy – people who might commit some kind of hurtful crime. In essence, he’s proposing that low empathy individuals be encouraged to feel. I have to wonder whether we will see this scenario: a violent offender, perhaps a psychopath, is ordered by the court to use the oxytocin spray. Will civil rights groups then argue that, by forcing this person to feel, the law is mandating that the person change something essential about themselves, to become someone they are not? Do we have a right to maintain our essential character?

Of course how essential can our character be if it can be altered via the ingestion of a chemical? Must we confront a more disturbing possibility, that we have no essential character at all and our “selves” are merely the fluctuating interactions of the various hormones and neurotransmitters that travel throughout our body and brain?

Merry Christmas!

Tracking politics in the brain

I find this overview of a study observing that the brains of Democrats and Republicans function differently somewhat confusing. It states:

Comparing the Democrat and Republican participants turned up differences in two brain regions: the right amygdala and the left posterior insula. Republicans showed more activity than Democrats in the right amygdala when making a risky decision. This brain region is important for processing fear, risk and reward.

Meanwhile, Democrats showed more activity in the left posterior insula, a portion of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly visceral emotional cues from the body. The particular region of the insula that showed the heightened activity has also been linked with “theory of mind,” or the ability to understand what others might be thinking.

So Republicans process fear better while Democrats process emotions better. Except, isn’t fear an emotion? What is this really telling me?

Frankly, both Republicans and Democrats seemed pretty fear based to me; they just obsess over different fears. They should learn to chillax.

I wonder how long before people start alleging that candidates are stealing elections by broadcasting beams into people’s heads that inhibit or free up the appropriate brain region? 3… 2… 1…

Who’s there?

Lately I’ve been musing on the following ideas related to consciousness and free will. Our conventional view of “will” going back thousands of years is that we are, on some level, mental or even spiritual beings and from this mental or spiritual “stuff” thought originates. So this mental spirit thinks “I need some coffee,” and somehow that thought is transmitted to our brain which orders our arm muscles to pick up the coffee cup. Now, in modern times, we’ve dismissed the spirit component explicitly (well, some of us) but we still think that’s a pretty good approximation of how things work (or maybe more correctly, we don’t really examine the process at all, perhaps in fear of what we’ll find out.)

Modern science does indicate that there is a pretty direct correlation between thoughts and brain activity. By this I mean, you think a thought and brain cells send electrical signals to other brain cells and ultimately other parts of the body. But those nerve firings are physical processes bound by the laws of the physical universe, meaning things can’t just suddenly move or send electrical signals by themselves. So we have a couple options to explain this. One is we are all mental, non-material beings and we are firing our nerves off with a kind of telekinesis. I’m dubious about that one. The other is we have no free will and we (and who/what the “we” is there is hard to define) are merely observing the pre-determined firing of nerves bubbling up as thoughts. That’s probably my preferred explanation. The third option is there’s something about the true quantum physics nature of reality which allows for randomness and chance (though generally only at a sub-atomic level) that explains all this.

So this kind of ties in with Eckhardt Tolle and many others’ point about ego. If option two above is correct, I’m not really doing things, I’m merely observing my brain/self running through the programmed motions of doing something. So I really should have no pride in achievement for example, since it’s not really me doing things.

You would think this would be disturbing but I don’t really find it so. Partly because it does map to certain experiences I’ve had. What are things I’ve accomplished, that I feel proud of? Well, various songs I’ve composed, articles I’ve written. But the truth is, during those processes of creation I often don’t feel that I’m doing the writing/composing – it’s more like the universe is handing me ideas and I’m annotating them.

I’m reminded of a book I’ve mentioned in the past, “The User Illusion.” In there is story about the scientist James Clerk Maxwell, a guy who came up with a lot of groundbreaking ideas on thermodynamics and related topics. He was on his deathbed and said, “What is done by what is called myself is, I feel, done by something greater than myself in me.”
E.g. it wasn’t “him” doing the things.

But then who/what is doing the things? And who/what is observing them?

Zombies versus Twinkies

A neuroscience blogger, David Deriso, (who lives in San Diego by the way, as this is the heart of neuroscience investigation) has an post on why explaining science to the public in an understandable way is important. Because, as he states, the uninformed public tends freak out about zombies.

Although difficulty gives science a charming mystique, it is also a fatal flaw. The masses fear what they do not understand, and consequently, and largely due to the poor communication ability of scientists, a lot of great ideas are misconstrued as threats to society.

Scientists, and especially those who write about science, need to be acutely aware of this double-edged sword. Although the mystery of genetics could lead to cures beyond the imagination of modern medicine, how many zombie films start out with a science experiment gone wrong?

Equally plausible to causing zombie-syndrome is an intergalactic cosmic twinkie that explodes on impact, spreading its nefarious alien marshmallow filling into the atmosphere, instantly causing the uprising of a blood-sucking army of undead zombies. But the public doesn’t think of stale cosmic twinkies as a potential cause of zombie-syndrome; instead, they think of stem-cells, gene therapy, and pharmaceuticals. Why? Because they understand the limits of twinkies, but they have no idea what limits are on science.

I think he underestimates the dangers of cosmic twinkies (also, I take issue with his use of the term “blood-sucking” to describe zombies when “brain-eating” would be more true to life), but otherwise an amusing and meaningful piece.

The corridors of the brain

Discover magazine states what might seem rather obvious: Brain Connections Contribute to Our Unique Personalities.

Each human brain has a unique connectome—the network of neural pathways that tie all of its parts together. Like a fingerprint, every person’s connectome is unique. To find out where these individual connectomes differed the most, researchers used an MRI scanning technique to take cross-sectional pictures of 23 people’s brains at rest.

The real variety arose in the parts of the brain associated with personality, like the frontoparietal lobe. This multipurpose area in the brain curates sensory data into complex thoughts, feelings or actions and allows us to interpret the things we sense (i.e., we recognize a red, round object as an apple). Because there are many ways to get from sensation to reaction, and many different ways to react to what we sense, each individual’s brain blazes its own paths.

I was actually just musing on something related to this. We understand that brains are made up of neurons which are essentially the wires of the brain. These neurons can be connected to many other neurons, so you could have a neuron with 100 neurons sending it signals while it is also sending signals to 100 different neurons. Obviously you can get some pretty complex circuitry going on there.

But neurons also group together in clumps, so you can have a network of neurons that may all be deeply interconnect to each other but not so much to “outside” networks. I’m wondering of that correlates to certain personality types. Are people with more complex interconnections of neurons/networks more prone to deeper, nuanced thinking? And are people with rich clumps of neurons that don’t speak much to other clumps more prone to absolutist, clear cut thinking? I think we’ve all had discussions with people – sometimes very intelligent people – who seem just incapable of getting a point we are making. Like they just hit a brick wall. I’m wondering of those people just lack the neural networks to understand what is being said.

I should say, I’m not sure one type of thinking is necessarily better. I tend have this deeper, nuanced way of thinking but as a result I tend to chase ideas down ever narrower corridors of thought, never arriving solid conclusions.

Ah, who am I kidding? My way of thinking is the best!

The secret is in the nipples!

For years men have been clumsily probing women’s bodies in search of their erogenous zones. It turns out we’ve been missing the obvious culprit: the brain!

“Waitaminute, Wil,” you say. “You mean to get women in the mood we should be sawing off the top of their skull and stimulating their brain directly?”

Yes… I mean, what? No! I just mean that by examining how the strip of brain dedicated to physical sensation — the sensory cortex — responds to erotic touch, we find points of interest. For instance…

Komisaruk also checked what happened when women’s nipples were stimulated, and was surprised to find that in addition to the chest area of the cortex lighting up, the genital area was also activated. “When I tell my male neuroscientist colleagues about this, they say: ‘Wow, that’s an exception to the classical homunculus,'” he says. “But when I tell the women they say: ‘Well, yeah?'” It may help explain why a lot of women claim that nipple stimulation is erotic, he adds.

On a related note, you might recall my post about a man who found his sensory cortex representation for his amputated foot connected to his representation of his penis.

The dangers of teleportation

I’ve just started reading “The Emperor’s New Mind – Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics” by Roger Penrose. I don’t know a whole lot about the book — Penrose is a physicist, I think. (He also might be dead. The book was written in 1989.) — but my general sense is that it is an argument that there’s something about human consciousness that cannot be explained in purely materialistic terms. For example, you could not re-create a conscious human brain simply by using some magical device to wire up neurons you happen to have lying around so that they perfectly replicate an existing brain. I believe he’s going to argue that somehow the magical and confounding properties of quantum physics come in to play and are essential to create this mystical thing we call consciousness.

However, in the section of the book I’m reading, he’s contemplating the classic idea of Star Trek teleportation. The basic premise is that a person is scanned and the location of and relationship between all the subatomic particles (electrons, protons etc.) in his or her body are mapped out. This information is then sent to some other planet, where it is used to assemble a version of the person there. A purely materialistic view — the kind I believe Penrose is ultimately criticizing — would say that the consciousness of the person being reassembled on another planet should “arrive” undisturbed.

But there’s a kind of side issue here. By that process, you’re not so much teleporting someone as you are cloning them. After all, you’re scanning the person in the original location, but you’re not destroying them. This process would seem to lead to a potentially endless amount of duplicates of oneself. Penrose contemplates the procedure. (Page 28.)

Try to imagine your response to being told the following: “Oh dear, so the drug we gave you before placing you in the teleporter has worn off prematurely has it? That is a little unfortunate, but no matter. Anyway, you will be pleased to hear that the other you —er, I mean the actual you, that is — has now arrived safely on Venus, so we can, er, dispose of you here — er, I mean the redundant copy here. It will, of course, be quite painless.”

That Penrose… he’s a real card.

Measuring distance

I’ve got a friend who is a phenomenal realistic artist. He’s able to render pencil and painted images that look very similar to reality.

He’s also a good musician, particularly a pianist. And for the most part, largely self taught. He seems to be one of the people of has a natural proclivity for the piano; what some would call talent.

Now, a while back, I was reading “The Tell-Tale Brain” by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran. He noted that there was a part of the brain devoted to our understanding of spatial dimensions e.g. how far apart things are from each other and from us. He also noted that for some reason this part of the brain is strong in young autistics, and consequently, they are often artistically gifted. In essence, they can look at an image (in reality, or in their head, I suppose) and translate the spatial relationships related to what they see to what they draw on paper.

So, it seems likely this artist friend of mine has such a gift in regards to visual imagery. But would this apply to his piano talent as well? In essence, if you hear a melody in your head and then re-create it, you are essentially measuring the distance between each of the the notes in the melody. Unlike visual imagery, you’re not measuring spatial distance, you’re measuring something more ambiguous — steps on a musical scale, or the frequency of sound vibrations. But, in the big picture, it’s the same process: measuring something abstract and then re-creating it. So I’m wondering if there’s a part of the brain dedicated to this? Not just measuring specific “somethings” like spatial distance or sound vibrations, but just measuring the difference between similar elements (sound, space, smells etc.) in general.