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About Me
I am a graduate of Elmhurst College with a B.A in Psychology. I am currently attending Loyola University to complete an MSW graduate degree. Interested in cognitive-behavioral therapy, social cognition, emotion regulation, dreams, fMRI imaging techniques, psychology myths/pseudoscience, personality disorders, and ADHD.
The Importance of Mind-Wandering
What’s happening inside the brain when the mind wanders? A lot. In 2009, a team led by Kalina Christoff of UBC and Jonathan Schooler of UCSB used “experience sampling” inside an fMRI machine to capture the brain in the midst of a daydream. (This condition is easy to induce: After subjects were given an extremely tedious task, they started to mind-wander within seconds.) Although it’s been known for nearly a decade that mind wandering is a metabolically intense process — your cortex consumes lots of energy when thinking to itself — this study further helped to clarify the sequence of mental events:
Activation in medial prefrontal default network regions was observed both in association with subjective self-reports of mind wandering and an independent behavioral measure (performance errors on the concurrent task). In addition to default network activation, mind wandering was associated with executive network recruitment, a finding predicted by behavioral theories of off-task thought and its relation to executive resources. Finally, neural recruitment in both default and executive network regions was strongest when subjects were unaware of their own mind wandering, suggesting that mind wandering is most pronounced when it lacks meta-awareness. The observed parallel recruitment of executive and default network regions—two brain systems that so far have been assumed to work in opposition—suggests that mind wandering may evoke a unique mental state that may allow otherwise opposing networks to work in cooperation.
Deep brain stimulation studies show how brain buys time for tough choices
Take your time. Hold your horses. Sleep on it. When people must decide between arguably equal choices, they need time to deliberate. In the case of people undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) for Parkinson’s disease, that process sometimes doesn’t kick in, leading to impulsive behavior. New research into why that happens has led scientists to a detailed explanation of how the brain devotes time to reflect on tough choices.Source: fuckyeahneuroscienceMichael Frank, professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown University, studied the impulsive behavior of Parkinson’s patients when he was at the University of Arizona several years ago. His goal was to model the brain’s decision-making mechanics. He had begun working with Parkinson’s patients because DBS, a treatment that suppresses their tremor symptoms, delivers pulses of electrical current to the subthalamic nucleus (STN), a part of the brain that Frank hypothesized had an important role in decisions. Could the STN be what slams the brakes on impulses, giving the medial prefrontal cortex(mPFC) time to think?
Why Sugar Makes Us Sleepy (And Protein Wakes Us Up)
According to a new paper in Neuron led by scientists at the University of Cambridge, consuming foods high in protein can increase the activity of orexin neurons. This, in turn, leads to increased wakefullness and bodily activity, helping us burn off the calories we just consumed. Furthermore, eating protein in conjunction with glucose – adding almonds to Frosted Flakes, in other words – can inhibit the inhibitory effects of sugar on orexin. The sweetness no longer makes us tired.
The researchers demonstrated this effect in a number of ways. They began in situ, showing that clumps of orexin cells in a petri dish got excited when immersed in a solution of amino acids. (Neighboring cells in the hypothalamus revealed no such effect.) Then, they moved on to in vivo experiments, studying the impact of an egg white slurry of live animals. This protein meal not only increased orexin activity in the brain, but also led to a dramatic surge in locomotor activity, as the animals began scurrying around their cage. The effect persisted for several hours.
BBC News: OCD, bipolar, schizophrenic and the misuse of mental health terms
Terms like “bipolar”, “autistic” and “schizophrenic” are often used in jest to describe character traits. But how harmful is it to bandy the names of such conditions about?Thanks to eller-hur for the heads up!
(via fuckyeahneuroscience)
Source: mindovermatterzineThis would be one sad neuro blog if I didn’t mention researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, “using fMRI and computational models, were able to decipher and reconstruct movies from our minds” by associating brain activity of subjects with the video being viewed, piecing it together and replaying it.
Watch that video. Amazing. And blurry. Here’s what it means:
While watching the first set of trailers, the fMRI measured blood flow through the visual cortex and this information was directed to a computer, which portrayed the brain as tiny three-dimensional cubes called “voxels,” or volumetric pixels. For each voxel, there was a model that detailed how motion and shapes in the movie are translated into brain activity. The computer program learned to relate visual patterns in the trailers with corresponding brain activity. Via“…the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.” ViaA highly technical and creative experiment showing an interpretation of what our brain “sees” so that one day we may be able to see what is going on in the minds of non verbal patients, e.g. coma, stroke or severe autism.
(via fuckyeahneuroscience)
Should Scientists Develop Morality-Enhancing Drugs?
Synthetic Oxytocin to Enhance Empathy
One of the substances that Sandberg intends to study is produced by the body itself — oxytocin, a nine amino acid peptide that is synthesized in our neurons a s well as in the ovaries and testes. Oxytocin plays an important role in human reproduction, including enhancing the contraction of uterine smooth muscle during birth and afterward stimulating the release of mothers’ milk to nourish infants. But in recent years, researchers have also discovered that it seems to have emotional and behavioral effects as well, by helping to turn on the parental urge to bond with, nurture and protect the young. In studies, researchers have also discovered that subjects who take doses of oxytocin experience heightened feelings of empathy toward others and are more willing to trust them. In one study published in the online scientific journal PLoSOne in 2010, subjects who received a dose of oxytocin were 80 percent more generous than a control group in splitting a sum of money with another person. In another study, subjects given oxytocin made 48 percent higher donations to the Red Cross than counterparts who hadn’t received a dose.
FULL ARTICLE
EXCERPT: The basal ganglia is a core part of the brain, deep inside your skull, that helps control movement. Unless something upsets the chain of command. In this short, Jad and Robert meet a young researcher who was studying what happens when the basal ganglia gets short-circuited in mice…until one fateful day, when things got really, really weird.
LISTEN TO RADIOLAB EPISODE
How Should We Make Hard Decisions?
EXCERPT: A new paper, published this month in Emotion by scientists at DePaul University, provided the best test yet of the possible advantages of using our emotions to make complex decisions. The scientists began with a straightforward replication of the Dijksterhuis car paradigm. Instead of distracting subjects, however, they randomly divided students into a “feeling-focus” group and a “detail-focus” group. The group focused on their feelings were told to reflect on how the various car alternatives made them feel – did they like a large trunk? – while those focused on details were told to remember the various automotive attributes. The assumption is that focusing on feelings leads people to rely on the output of their unconscious, while focusing on details leads to a more deliberate mode of thought. Once again, the “detail-focused” group excelled at making simple decisions. Thinking in a rational manner made them nearly 20 percent more effective at identifying the best car alternative when there were only sixteen total pieces of information. However, those focused on feelings proved far better at finding the best car in the complex condition. While deliberate thinkers barely beat random chance, those listening to their feelings identified the ideal option nearly 70 percent of the time.
Similar results were found when the volunteers were quizzed about subjective choice quality, as those relying on their emotions tended to be much more satisfied with their car selection. In a final pair of experiments, the researchers demonstrated that the advantages of emotional decision-making could be undone by a subsequent bout of deliberation, which suggests that we shouldn’t doubt a particularly strong instinct, at least when the considering lots of information.
FULL ARTICLE
18 Ways Attention Can Go Wrong
EXCERPT: Imagine if every time you walked into a room with a neatly turned down bed, you automatically took off your clothes and got into it — even though it wasn’t bedtime, wasn’t your bed, and wasn’t even your home. This might sound fanciful but it’s a documented behaviour of patients with attentional problems caused by brain damage (Lhermitte, 1983).
Many everyday occurrences can also be explained by attentional errors, like when we miss obvious changes in the environment, fail at sports or simply forget to put the milk back in the fridge. More seriously psychologists have found that attentional processes can play a role in psychological problems like anxiety, panic, insomnia, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
An “As Soon As Possible” Effect in Human Intertemporal Decision Making
Source: fuckyeahneuroscienceMany decisions involve a trade-off between the quality of an outcome and the time at which that outcome is received. In psychology and behavioral economics, the most widely studied models hypothesize that the values of future gains decline as a roughly hyperbolic function of delay from the present. Recently, it has been proposed that this hyperbolic-like decline in value arises from the interaction of two separate neural systems: one specialized to value immediate rewards and the other specialized to value delayed rewards. Here we report behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging results that are inconsistent with both the standard behavioral models of discounting and the hypothesis that separate neural systems value immediate and delayed rewards.
Click the link above to read the full article.
