Cheaper safer MRI's

As I'm sure many of you know, MRI research is really really expensive, somewhere between $300-800 an hour (and if you're a patient or corporation that goes up to about $2000/hr). In a new publication in PNAS, a group from NYU (and other places) have reported on research that one day might make MRI's safer and cheaper.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machines' knack for peering at soft tissue deep within the body has made them one of the most popular imaging tools. But MRI isn't perfect. It works by beaming radiofrequency pulses into a patient and tracking how this radiation affects the magnetic behavior of tissues. But those pulses must be carefully controlled to prevent them from overheating tissue and injuring patients. Now, a new study could pave the way to a new form of radiofrequency-free MRI scans that would offer several advantages.
...
"This is fantastic, novel work," says Alexander Pines, a nuclear magnetic resonance expert at the University of California, Berkeley. Pines and Jerschow note that the new technique isn't ready for human imaging yet, because for now it works best on small samples. But Jerschow says it probably could be improved by using more sensitive magnetic detectors already on the market. As an added benefit, he says, better detectors would also likely make the technique work with smaller magnets than the large expensive superconducting magnets used in conventional MRI machines--an improvement that could make future MRI's both cheaper and safer.

Hot women and ugly men

I always wonder whats going on when I see a beautiful woman with an ugly loaf of a man - I always assumed it had to do with success/money - but perhaps not according to this WSJ article by Sharon Begley (well at least in birds):

At first glance, the "sexy son hypothesis" makes perfect sense. According to this pillar of evolutionary biology, a female who chooses a high-quality male will have sons who inherit dad's allure. They, too, will therefore have their pick of females, allowing mom to hit the jackpot: grandmotherhood.

But when scientists followed male flycatchers whose dads were real catches (as judged by a forehead patch that is this bird's equivalent of perfect abs), they found no such thing.

The sons "did not inherit their father's ... mating status," the Swedish researchers wrote in the February issue of American Naturalist. As a result, mom got fewer grandkids than did females who settled for less-attractive males. The studs were so busy mating they had no time to raise offspring, causing their health and fecundity to suffer. Homelier birds were better dads, raising sons who had more mating success.

Facial expressions that indicate lies.

This research based on Ekman's facial expressions supposedly can detect lies.

When trying to lie your way through any situation, keep a tight rein on your zygo maticus major and your orbicularis oculi. They'll give you away faster than a snitch.

So says social psychologist Mark Frank, whose revolutionary research on human facial expressions in situations of high stakes deception debunks myths that have permeated police and security training for decades. His work has come to be recognized by security officials in the U.S. and abroad as very useful tool in the identification and interrogation of terrorism suspects.

"I want to make it clear that one micro-expression or collection of them is not proof of anything," Frank says. "They have meaning only in the context of other behavioral cues, and even then are not an indictment of an individual, just very good clues."

...

J.J. Newberry, formerly of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, calls Frank and his methods "uncanny."

They are so effective that although he does not advertise his work nor actively solicit contracts in the field, Frank been asked to assist judges; health and police agencies, including the Los Angeles Police Department, the U.S. Federal Judiciary, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Department of Homeland Security, and other legal, medical and law enforcement communities from Singapore to Scotland Yard.

Since 9/11, a variety of federal government agencies have provided funding for Frank, although he declines to discuss the precise nature of his current research until it is complete and published.

Upside down faces and houses.

Well, after waiting a couple years this article finally came out this month in Neuropsychologia:

Cortical correlates of face and scene inversion: A comparison.
Epstein RA, Higgins JS, Parker W, Aguirre GK, Cooperman S.

Face recognition is more strongly impaired by stimulus inversion than nonface object recognition. This phenomenon, known as the face inversion effect (FIE), suggests that the visual system contains specialized processing mechanisms that are more engaged by upright faces than by inverted faces or nonface objects. Neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies indicate that environmental scenes may also recruit specialized-purpose processing machinery but a comparable inversion effect for scenes has not been established. Here we demonstrate that both face and scene inversion lead to behavioral penalties during performance of a continuous visual matching task; however, the scene inversion effect was less robust and declined in magnitude over the course of the experiment. Scene inversion led to greater neural response in the functionally defined lateral occipital (LO) object area for inverted versus upright scenes and reduced response in the parahippocampal place area (PPA), while face inversion lead to greater response in LO and the right middle fusiform (MF) object area for inverted versus upright faces but no change in the fusiform face area (FFA). A whole-brain analysis revealed several regions that responded more strongly to either upright versus inverted faces or upright versus inverted scenes, some of which may be involved in post-recognition processing. These results demonstrate that both face and scene inversion cause a shift from specialized processing streams towards generic object-processing mechanisms; however, this shift only leads to a reliable behavioral penalty in the case of face inversion.

If you're interested in a reprint go here.

Visual stimulation, gene expression, brain growth

I haven't looked at this yet, but it looks potentially interesting. Too bad there aren't really any details about .. well... much of anything.

Brain shape development studied
BOSTON, May 5 (UPI) -- A Harvard study says visual stimulation turns up genes that shape the brain. Citing the pioneering work of Nobel Prize-winning Harvard researchers David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, the new study found that visual stimulus turns up the expression of some genes and turns down the expression of others, somewhat like a conductor cuing the members of an orchestra. The study also found that during different stages of life in rodents, distinct sets of genes spring into action in response to visual input. The findings are reported in the May issue of Nature Neuroscience. "What we found opens science up to a more global look at genes, from studying one gene at a time to looking at families of genes acting together," said lead author Marta Majdan, a research fellow in neurobiology. The findings suggest that genetic therapies for neurodegenerative diseases will require more extensive knowledge of molecular pathways and gene interactions to be successful.

Do you want more tests? Y/N

The BBC hosts quite a few psychology surveys, including the net-infamous Sex ID test.

* Get a brain sex profile and find out if you think like a man or a woman.
* See if you can gaze into someone's eyes and know what they're thinking.
* Find out why scientists are interested in the length of your fingers.
* See how your results relate to theories about brain sex.

After you find out your "sex" be sure to learn Which Sesame Street Persona Are You?

Tests galore!

I found a treasure trove of self-tests over at Psychology today. They're a bit, "self-help section at the book store" like, but should be interesting anyway.

They have the "Do I Need Therapy?" Test, the "Sleep Hygiene" Test (whatever that means - I drool a bit, is that unhygenic?), the "Driving Personality" test, and a couple dozen more.

Top science myths

I kinda like these things, entertaining for a minute or so...
It takes seven years to digest gum is one.
Animals can predict natural disastors is another.

And I don't know what this picture has to do with anything.

Tattooing as self-injury

Christian at BPS Research Digest Blog reports on a case of tattooing used for the purpose of self-injury. It usually involves cutting and other less decorative acts but in this case manifests in art.

Diagnosed with major depressive disorder, Mr. B explained to the clinicians that he had dealt with his emotional pain in the past through acquiring tattoos. "Physical pain helps to take my mind of it" he said. He had considered cutting himself but "people would see the cuts and it would be pretty embarrassing". The greater his emotional pain at a given time, the more sensitive the body area he selected for tattooing.

Anderson and Sansone interpreted this behaviour as a form of mood regulation, distracting Mr. B from his intolerably depressive feelings.

Ritual body modification is often decorative but not undertaken in quite this way. Usually. I wonder how many more BME enthusiasts are using it as a coping mechanism? Could this be a variant of goth self-injury? Transforming pain into beauty.

That would be a neuroaesthetics study I'd love to see.

However:

Physiologically, the pain of the tattoos might have resulted in the release of naturally occurring opioids in the brain and had a therapeutic effect that way.

That's precisely what proponents of whipping therapy extol. There's more to it than that; consider context and not just pain, which is why self-injury is distinct from masochism in the first place and blurring the line is tricky. Is it still self-injury when someone else inflicts it? Perhaps a new name.

Mind control devices

So I was watching Mythbusters the other night and they were testing a number of "mind contol" devices - they used EEG, etc. They even decided that a couple methods were "plausible."
I decided what I could find out there on the internet...

The first place I looked was EBay - they really do sell everything (I once almost got an antique proctologists uhh.."probe" - it was going to be a gift .. i promise), but anyway - this picture popped up. Only $799.99!

Control people's minds with this amazingly simple technology. The Mind Control Machine converts your voice into something called Silent Sound. It is basically a special format the brain can understand without your conscience awareness of any message. In technical terms, it frequency modulates your voice data at 16 kHz in a special format that affects our unconscous mind. It sounds a bit like some kind of secret military communications. The human brain however is able to interpret these messages perfectly. This mind control technology has been around for many years and in fact there are many U.S. patents on it. It definitely works and it has been used for many years by our government and by large corporations. The government used this technology during Desert Storm to influence the Iraqi's to surrender. They set up huge radio transmitting towers near the battle zone and transmitted powerful Silent Sound messages to the Iraqi's to surrender. Others will do anything you program them to. Get that raise you always wanted. Solid-State circuit works great on women too.

Of course I hit up google next and found a acouple more links..
The first is a pretty extensive set of self assembly kits as well as pre assembled devices (the one above is only $390, the ebay guy is a crook! In more than one way). I really like the wish maker (the other picture posted), although I'm not really sure how it works.

There is also a site of software mindcontrol. They have:

Tele Hypnosis Pro (1.0, 2.0 , De Luxe, De luxe 04 and De luxe 20 versions) The advanced version of Tele Hypnosis. Improves results, efficiency, speed and especially useful for self hypnosis purposes and magick. Tele Hypnosis Pro is simply the best software of Tifareth and a must-have in your Personal computer. There are 5 versions of Tele Hypnosis Pro: 1.0, 2.0, De Luxe, De Luxe Multisession 04 and De Luxe Multisession 20.

and even a "Chaos Magick Spell Caster A very useful tool for all the practitioners of chaos magick and all magick in general."

To make everyone feel better after that assault on common sense, here's a site debunking mind control.

Mirrors and pain

There's an interesting post over at Eide Neurolearning blog - particuarly because of the whole mirror neuron craze.

Objectives. Conflict between motor–sensory central nervous processing has been suggested as one cause of pain in those conditions where a demonstrable or local nociceptive aetiology cannot be convincingly established (e.g. complex regional pain syndrome type 1, repetitive strain injury, phantom limb pain and focal hand dystonia). The purpose of this study was to discover whether pain could be induced in pain-free healthy volunteers when this conflict was generated transiently in a laboratory setting.

There also seems to be some evidence that this can work in the other direction, i.e. relieving pain for people. But you should really check it out over at the Eide Blog.


-Update-

Some more related news about pain and its anticipation has popped up today:

Dread prompts pain in the brain Imaging shows that anticipation can be as horrible as the event itself.

The paralysing dread one feels before an injection or tooth extraction fires up some of the same brain regions involved in feeling pain itself, say researchers who subjected plucky volunteers to electric shocks. Their discovery supports the idea that distraction could ease a nasty wait.

Read the full story here.

Neurogenesis, what's it good for?

There have been some issues actually linking neurogenesis in the hippocampus to behavior - this study mentioned in science news (and published in Nature Neuroscience) explores this issue in depth. By the way... that's Zap the neuron according to google image. I wonder what he's gonna do with that wand?

Give a mouse more room and a few toys, and good things happen. New neurons sprout in the hippocampus, while spatial memory improves and anxiety eases. As tempting as it might be to tie the new neurons to the behavioral changes, a new study finds no link between them. The results contradict a popular assumption among scientists that new neurons in the hippocampus contribute to the cognitive boost that comes with a more stimulating environment...

Hen's team zapped mice with a focused dose of radiation to halt neurogenesis in a portion of the animals' hippocampuses. They then placed half the animals in regular cages and half in enhanced environments for 6 weeks before testing their anxiety and spatial memory. To the researchers' surprise, the animals with better accommodations had improved spatial memory skills and were less anxious than mice in smaller confines, despite not having any new neurons in their hippocampuses. "We thought we would see a dependence on neurogenesis in some of the behaviors we saw in the enriched environment, but that's not what we found," says Hen

The Happiness Test

Well... I think it's about time for another test (although it's really really short):

Psychologists say it is possible to measure your happiness. This test designed by psychologist Professor Ed Diener from the University of Illinois, takes just a minute to complete. To find out how happy you are just look at the five statements below and decide whether you agree or disagree using a 1-7 scale. Please be open and honest in your responding - remember your answers are totally private. Once you have answered all five questions press submit and we will calculate your score. You will then be able to read Professor Diener's analysis.

There's an interesting article, also at BBC News, about the search for happiness - it's definitely written from a neurobiological perspective. It looks at a number of pieces of animal research - most notably the experiments where rats continually stimulated their "pleasure" center instead of eating.

New Omni Brain Logo

What do you guys think of the new biscuit themed Omni Brain logo?
Ok.. just kidding, I found a site via BoingBoing that creates images with a biscuit font.

People who take virginity pledges lie about sex.

yeah obviously!

Adolescents who sign a "virginity pledge" and then go on to have premarital sex are likely to disavow having signed such a pledge, according to an analysis of survey data by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researcher Janet Rosenbaum published in the advance online edition of the American Journal of Public Health's June 2006 issue. Conversely, adolescents who have had premarital sex and then decide to make a virginity pledge are likely to misreport their earlier sexual history. This misreporting of sexual experience will make it difficult to accurately assess virginity pledges' effects on early sexual intercourse, according to the author. Moreover, the fact that the majority of adolescents recanted their vows within a year may suggest that the virginity pledge programs have a high drop-out rate and that adolescents do not make a strong affiliation with the pledge, said the author.

There is a great article from Salon.com, back when a large study came out about the whole virginity pledge thing (2001). It is definitely worth a read - it deflates the positive findings (less teen sex, etc) and puts them into context.

In other words, a virginity pledge, like glitter powder and Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirts, is based on the painfully self-conscious surrender of self and not, as Hester wants to believe, on the early adoption of family values.

This comic couldn't be any more appropriate!

Pong with thought

Via Positive Technology Journal: watch a short YouTube video of people controlling a Pong game cursor with thought. Looks like EEG neurofeedback; looks like they need help designing a pretty hat for consumers. Like these ones. No further info provided and the site it apparently came from is in German.

Mixing Memory: Craving a Cigarette Warps Your Sense of Time

Via Mixing Memory: Craving a Cigarette Warps Your Sense of Time.

A great review of studies of the perception of time related to cravings. Turns out when you have a craving, time does seem to go slower.
Like this.
But a more important tendency emerged from this analysis - people overestimate the intensity of cravings over time, thinking they'll get worse when they don't. As Chris points out, this info can certainly help in treating addiction.

As the authors note, smoking relapses are closely related to cravings, and if people believe that their cravings will increase over time, and furthermore, actually perceive time as going by more slowly, they will have a harder time resisting those cravings. What's important, then, is to educate people about the actual behavior and effects of cravings, showing them that cravings don't actually get worse over time (though notably, they don't appear to get any better, either). As someone who had to go through the process of quitting smoking, I can definitely appreciate the value of that knowledge. One of the more difficult aspects of quitting is an intense craving that overwhelms your ability to think about much of anything besides cigarettes, and the fear that not only are you going to suffer more, but that if you don't do something about this craving right now, it's going to get worse, and you're not going to get anything accomplished. Of course, this information alone isn't going to get people to quit smoking, but it may help them when they try.

We also learn:

And from the experiment I described at the beginning of this post, we also know that offering them raffle tickets for cash won't help, and that really big cigarettes will look extra attractive.

Become an NCSE Steve!

I know a Steve or two who may like to join (after graduation).

Are you tired of being ignored by your colleagues at professional meetings?

Do your students yawn every time you begin a lecture?

Do neighbors not invite you to cocktail parties anymore because you always talk about dermestid beetles [or imaging genetics or neuropsychopharmacology or evolutionary psychology, anything related to evolution]?

Well, my friend, you have the power to put a stop to that today simply by becoming an NCSE Steve. Why settle for being just another Jonathan, Michael, or William when you can be what you've always dreamed of being ... an NCSE Steve.

* Are you named Steve, Stephen, Steven, Esteban, Etienne, or Stephanie?
* Do you have a Ph.D. in biology, geology, paleontology, or a related scientific field?
* Do you want the kind of success in life you always thought was reserved for the "other Steves"?

Before I became an NCSE Steve, opportunities just never seemed to come my way. But now my department chair holds the door open for me, and brings me coffee!
--Stephanie

I must have had the worst love life in the whole field of leech systematics, but now that I'm an NCSE Steve my social life has really taken off!
--Steve

Steve-o-Meter rising!

Problems with peer review

There is a great article in today's NYTimes about the problems with peer review and why its partly to blame for all the scientific misconduct occuring. Check it out.

Bees, it seems, may be better decision makers than most corporations

...or our government for that matter.

Here is what they found: When bees outgrow their hives, a few hundred scouts selected by the queen search for the perfect, new location for a swarm—a south-facing knothole that is smaller than 4.7 square inches, perched several yards above the ground and leads to a hollow in the tree that is at least 5 gallons in volume. Scouts return to the waiting swarm and perform a waggle dance, vibrating their abdomens laterally while walking in figure eights, to report on what they found. The longer the waggle dance, the better the site. This prompts other scouts to visit the recommended site.
Scouts compete to attract uncommitted scouts to visit their sites. As time passes, coalitions form that prefer one site over another. Instead of hashing it out endlessly, the group usually makes a decision with no more than 16 hours of dancing debate. As soon as 15 or more bees are at any one site, the scouts signal to the waiting bees in the swarm to warm up their flight muscles. Soon, the swarm lifts off toward its new home.

This is pretty darn cool. It seems that complex decision making isn't all that complex... well in a manner of speaking. Sorry for the dancing bee... I couldn't help myself.

Classic hollywood brain posters

So while I was looking around for some pictures relating art to the brain I ran accross some pretty cool replicas of brain horror movie posters. You can find them here under science fiction.

Neuro Aesthetics -Watch-

There was a recent conference at Columbia about art and neuroscience, and ... they took some videos and then put them on the web. According to the Science and Politics blog they didn't have any speakers who were artists, just neuroscientists - too bad. In anycase.. some of the heavy hitters of neuroscience gave talks on emotion/vision and their connection to art. Looks like its well worth checking out.

Ohh heck I'll save you the time of going to the website to see who talked:

Opening Remarks
David Freedberg
Director, the Italian Academy, and Professor of Art History,Columbia University

Eric R. Kandel
Nobel Laureate and University Professor, Columbia University

Emotion and Consciousness Antonio Damasio
David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience and Director of
The Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern
California

Raymond Dolan
Professor of Neuropsychiatry and Head of Department,
Institute of Neurology, University College, London

Vittorio Gallese
Associate Professor of Human Physiology,
Università degli studi di Parma Real Video (21:19)

Joseph LeDoux
Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science, New York University

Vision and Aesthetics Margaret Livingstone
Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School

V.S. Ramachandran
Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, and Professor,
University of California, San Diego; Adjunct Professor of Biology, the Salk Institute

Semir Zeki
Professor of Neurobiology, University College, London

The human camera

-Via boingboing-

Stephen Wiltshire has been called the "Human Camera." In this short excerpt from the film Beautiful Minds: A Voyage into the Brain, Wiltshire takes a helicopter journey over Rome and then draws a panoramic view of what he saw, entirely from memory. Incredibly, however, Wiltshire does not have a photographic memory (according to this article, no one does). While his drawings possess uncanny accuracy - he gets the number of arches in the Colliseum exactly right - they are not like a Xerox. As Oliver Sacks writes in his book An Anthropologist On Mars, "His pictures in no sense resembled copies or photographs, something mechanical and impersonal - there were always additions, subtractions, revisions, and of course, Stephen's unmistakable style. Stephen's drawings were individual constructions, but could they been seen, in a deeper sense, as creations?"

Cell phone waves - mind control ... again

I meant to post this a few days ago... Any chance someone wants to read the actual article and tell us all what it actually says?

The results, published in April's edition of the journal Neuropsychologia, showed a small but discernable change in brain function among those who were exposed to the electromagnetic fields that mobile phones generate. "The study showed evidence of slower response times for participants undertaking simple reactions and more complex reactions, such as choosing a response when there is more than one alternative," lead researcher Con Stough said.
"The study also found that radiation from mobile phones seems to improve working memory, used for example when remembering a phone number long enough to dial it." He said further work was needed using magnetic resonance imaging to clarify the way mobile phones alter on the way the brain works.

Ohh by the way... they're remaking revenge of the nerds...haahaha

Con someone with a cup of coffee

It looks like you should take your sales meetings at a Starbucks. It also really looks like I'm on a coffee binge lately.

The Australian researchers say a caffeine hit improves our ability to process information and increases the extent to which we listen to and take on board a persuasive message. They tested this by quizzing people about their attitudes to voluntary euthanasia and abortion before and after either the equivalent of about two cups of coffee or a placebo. They were also given a persuasive argument to read after having the caffeine. The experiments showed that "caffeine increases persuasion through instigating systematic processing of the message". But caffeine also puts people in a better mood, which makes them more likely to agree with a message, the researchers say.

The Singin' Scientist

"There is a moment in the middle of my presentation when the audience realizes, 'Oh my god, she wants my brain.'"

Jill Bolte Taylor, also known as the "Singin' Scientist," is a neuroanatomist specializing in post-mortem research. She's a spokesperson for the Harvard Brain Bank and encourages people to donate their brains.

"I travel with my guitar and sing the brain-bank jingle."

It's not available on MP3 just yet, sadly, but hopefully someone will record it.

Learn more at 1-800-Brain Bank. Also, sponsor Dr. Bolte Taylor in the upcoming NAMI Walks. Pledge your money AND your brain!

The evolution of laughter

Hmm... I really don't know what to think of this. Seems like a whole lot of hand waving - but any article to traces the evolution of laughter to farting and tripping (and cites Monty Python) seems like it might be worth a look.

THE old ones really are the best. Evolutionary biologists have traced the origins of laughter back 4m years to pre-humans slipping and stumbling in their first faltering attempts to walk on two legs. According to the theory, when they saw a member of their group lose his footing they would laugh as a sign to each other that something was amiss, but nothing too serious.
...
According to the study, the next basic elements of human behaviour that sparked laughter were flatulence and mild sexual mischief. Language appeared only 2m years after the first laugh, enabling people to combine laughter and words into numerous refinements, from amusement at a joke to sneering at a rival.

Glowing brains

Any technique that makes the brain glow is cool by me, especially if it helps save lives.

A new technique that causes brain tumours to fluoresce results in more complete removal of the tumour and in improved progression-free survival, report German researchers in the May issue of The Lancet Oncology...
The brain tumours, known as malignant gliomas, have a poor prognosis despite the range of treatments currently available, and investigators have suggested that the poor results during surgery could be because it is difficult to see where the tumour stops and healthy tissue starts, making complete removal difficult. "Traditional techniques used for improving resections have not fulfilled expectations (frameless stereotaxy) or are still too expensive and cumbersome (intraoperative MRI) to have been put to broad scale use", notes Dr Stummer.