Brain Mapping and Task Distribution


Sitting and thinking doesn’t mean that you are taking it easy. Your brain is using up about a quarter of the energy output of your metabolism and that energy consumption is pretty well steady whether we are daydreaming about our vacation or trying to solve some huge problem on our income tax form.

The large numbers of fMRI studies show which parts of the brain are getting particularly excited by different activities and we have got used to this sort of brain mapping. However, a paper in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Gonzalez–Castillo et al, argues that we are being a little short sighted here (1).

Their argument is that signal-to-noise levels have misled us to localize the interactions too much and that although we may have highly activated regions for particular tasks, very much more of the brain is involved across both hemispheres giving a much more inclusive picture than hitherto envisaged.

This doesn’t mean that previous visualization studies are incorrect, just that they are incomplete as their sensitivities were limited and we should think of more widely organized activity.

With the energy consumption being fairly constant as our little grey cells are all very busy whether we seem to have a thought in our head or not, it is clear that just thinking hard about going to the gym and eating a more healthy diet isn’t going to up our metabolic demand and we will just have to get exercising on the treadmills after all.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/14/1121049109


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Right-handed Speech


Being right-handed is much more common than being left-handed and the way we are wired means that the left hemisphere of the brain is involved with control of the right hand. The left side of the brain is associated with communication such as speech.

We learn to speak when we’re small, but before that we point and grunt. And the way we fond parents respond, mere gestures are a very effective way of communicating. Meunier et al wondered if the use of gestures preceded speech in an evolutionary path and if that was facilitated by the predominance of right-handedness in our species (1).

The result of that thought was a study of other primates to see if they also were right-handed in terms of gestures but not necessarily in terms of getting hold of the object that they were indicating.  They chose a group of 12 baboons to test this with and at the same time tried a similar test with 10 infants at 14, 17, and 20 months old.

The tendency of baboons and babies was to point at what they wanted with the right hand, but when they were able to pick it up, they chose the hand nearest to the prize.

The conclusion was that the split function of the brain – lateralization – with the left hemisphere being our speech section, in combination with the tendency to be right-handed, led in evolutionary terms to us evolving past gestures through to making the interminable stump speeches full of meaningless promises favored by our politicians.

I should also note that our speech centers are also capable of producing glorious musical performances and perhaps that ameliorates the other nonsense.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0033959


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Group Personalities


We all have different temperaments and personalities even if we can be fitted into a small number of types. In addition, other animals also have their own personal behavioral traits as we well know as we rush to serve our cat’s or dog’s every whim.

An interesting question is do groups of animals have recognizable group personalities especially when we consider a highly organized social species such as ants? Scharf et al set out to sort this out by boxing up 50 colonies of Temnothorax nylanderi, a species of ant that forms small colonies of about two dozen workers with one queen and live in small holes under the bark of rotting trees (1).

A series of tests were carried out on the colonies such as putting in a dead ant from another nest and watching the aggression level, opening the entrance and measuring their efforts to close it up, putting in some rotting ant corpses to watch the removal, and giving them the option to relocate as this is often a choice in the wild.

For colonies that were producing lots of new ants, they were more industrious to close up enlarged entrances so they are prepared to stand their ground and not abandon their nest when under threat. The colonies that weren’t as aggressive towards the dead non-nestmates that were introduced and were not as quick to get rid of the rotting corpses were also more ready to relocate and abandon their nest site for another rather than defend it.

The conclusion of the study is that social insect groups have a range of different personalities, which, in part, is governed by how much they have to lose if they cave in to a threat. Makes ants sound very much like the rest of us.
  
  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0033314


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Smart Tattoos


Our smartphones are destined to get ever smarter with our ability to use them for gathering and sending information and images, as well as playing multiplayer games. One of the problems that they still have is the annoying way that they tell you, and the whole world, that someone wants to tell you something of no interest to anyone else, but which keeps all around you spellbound as the half conversation is taking place.

Even if you’re texted, your phone will beep and startle everyone. Of course you can put it on vibrate, but often the vibrations aren’t silent and if your phone is on a desktop, the buzz is really annoying.

What’s the answer? Nokia have it apparently with US patent 20120062371 in the use of magnetic inks as reported in Unwiredview.com (1). The idea is that when we sign our smartphone contract we get a tattoo done tastefully with magnetic inks and that will vibrate to let us know that a friend has a juicy piece of gossip that we just have to hear.

With caller id, our tattoos will let us know who is calling as well. The patent also suggests the option of a patch but that seems to be rather a wimpy solution for techies.

With general Bluetooth connections, our tattoos could also do double duty as an access device for our desktops, laptops and tablets. Of course colored inks could be used to make our tattoos more appealing. Not all those girls with a dragon tattoo would have the same connection. Although the dragons might look the same, the magnetization pattern would be applied after the tattoo is completed.

Should this work, I can see the potential for smart tattoos replacing id cards. Sounds more fun than rf chips.

  1. http://www.unwiredview.com/2012/03/15/nokia-is-looking-into-haptic-tattoos-to-help-you-feel-whos-calling/


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Video Games For Health


As computers and video games have become ubiquitous it sometimes seems that the developed world is divided into two groups, namely gamers and non-gamers. Belonging to the second category leaves me outside a cyber world full of avatars blasting strange creatures into oblivion.

Apparently not all video games should be classified as similar. Cole et al in this week’s PLoS one are looking at the effects of a “serious video game” which is interactive and called Re-Mission (1).

Re-Mission is available free to young people with cancer and the game story line is that your avatar is a pretty nanobot that roams through your body blasting unwelcome cancer cells. It is available in single or multi-player formats. Your avatar can have antibiotic rockets, radiation guns or a chemoblaster.

It has reportedly had a positive effect on the health of teens with chronic illness and Cole et al wanted to see what part of the brain gets lit up as you hit a cancer cell with a chemoblaster. To do this, they took two groups of undergraduates; one-group chemoblasted lymphoma cells in the lymph nodes while smaller groups just watched and listened to the mayhem.

Both groups had their heads stuffed into the big magnet for fMRI scans while all this excitement was going on. Afterwards, they were quizzed on their attitudes to chemotherapy.

Results? Well everybody’s attitude towards chemotherapy improved after exposure to Re-Mission, whether in active play mode or in voyeur mode. The fMRI scans showed that the dopamine pathways were active and the undergrads reward pathways were working nicely, but more so in those with control of the chemoblasters.

So it appears that serious gaming is therapeutic and something that we should all be taking up. At least those who haven’t to date should perhaps dabble their toe in the water.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0033909


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The Right Genes For Better Time On Task Performance


As individual genetic analysis becomes faster and cheaper our disposition to particular conditions is becoming easier to determine. Of course, the first questions focus on our health, but the information possibilities are much wider than that.

Dopamine is an important chemical that works on our cognition, learning, reward, and attention responses in our frontal cortex. There are a number of genes that play a part in its production on spikes of brain activity and background level. Lim et al have attempted to tie down the effect of the polymorphism of these genes on the ability of people to concentrate on a boring but demanding task for a significant period of time (1).

The experiment used 332 people who had to press a button to stop a digital counter counting milliseconds as fast as they could whenever it appeared in view, which it did every few seconds. They had to do this for twenty minutes and their reaction times were monitored.

In addition, their genes were untangled from saliva samples. Some of the genes are thought make dopamine available on the call from activity and others control the background level over time. Of course these two aren’t entirely independent as a lot of demand will lead to a general increase over time.

The results indicate that it is the genes that regulate the background level that tend to give longer Time On Task (TOT) performance than those that control the releases on spells of activity.

Perhaps in future job interviews we will have to bring in our DNA stats as well as our SAT scores to see if we are suited to mind numbing tasks on a production line.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0033767


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A Speaker's Voice – A Personality Giveaway?


There are lots of studies showing that the frequency of our voice is important in how others perceive us and how this trends towards assuming stereotypes, but how much of our personalities are really revealed by the frequency of a speaker’s voice? Is it cursory or does it give a deep insight?

Hu et al in last weeks PLoS one uses frequency analysis to try to correlate personality traits to the voice frequency of replies to yes or no questions, which were answered truthfully or falsely (1).

The aim of the project was based on the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire that is intended to identify the Big Five traits. This is known as the P-E-N system where E is a measure of ones extravertedness, N is ones tendency to neurotic behavior, and the P is our psychoticism or socialization.

Someone with a low E and N rating would be calm and thoughtful; high N and low E – moody and pessimistic; high E and low N – easy going and chatty; high E and N – excitable and touchy.

The experiments with 22 young men and 24 young women undergrads involved them answering the personality questionnaire by chatting to the computer. They could only say yes or no in Chinese, (that is shi or bushi in an anglicized script.) They also had questions on a Social Desirability feature and this gave them the biggest opportunity to lie.

 Their voice frequency patterns were analyzed. On balance there was more lying than truth telling going on. It was possible to correlate a truthful yes frequency range with neuroticism and psychoticism and a truthful no negatively correlated with extraversion. Neuroticism negatively correlated with frequency in all responses.

Clearly when we listen to our used car salesmen, our bankers or our politicians we need to do more that just listen to what they are promising, we will need to ask questions and analyze the frequency spectra of their replies. We need some enterprising young person to build a smartphone app for this.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0033906


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