Game On!


Problem solving is the fun thing for psychologists to put their subjects through, whether human or animal. Fun for the subjects may be another matter. With animal subjects, the problem is usually centered around food that is tantalizingly unavailable. The trick is for the animal to work out how to get it.

We’ve seen lots of studies with apes, monkeys and even crows and parrots. Recently, there was a study in cooperation with elephants who had to work out how to work together to get something to eat. To me, that seemed to indicate quite insightful problem solving. Foerder et al of City U working at the Smithsonian National Zoo, had doubts about the ability of elephants to have a “light-bulb moment” though (1).

Three Asian elephants were tested by hanging some delicious fruit a foot or so too high for them to reach. They were all tested individually so there was no opportunity for any cooperative cheating. The contestants were a 61-year old female, a 33-year old female and a mere youngster of a male at 7-years old.

The pen had odd toys such as a tractor tire, a large ball and a plastic cube for kicking around, but also craftily placed in the pen was an aluminum stand that was used for their medicals when they had to stand on it.

The old girls didn’t play. They came, they saw fruit and then shrugged their elephantine shoulders and said, in elephant, “Whatever!” They were then eliminated from further rounds.

 Young Kandula (or should it be Kan-du-lad) was up for it and rolled his cube under the fruit so he could stand on it and get his treat.

Of course no psychologist well-trained in the art of teasing would leave it at that. The next thing they did was to hide his cube, so he used the tire. When that wasn’t available, he used his ball albeit requiring more skill to balance. There being no limit to man’s ingenuity, the fruit was hung higher and our poor young friend had to resort to stacking stuff.

The researchers concluded that elephants can be insightful problem solvers. Personally, I would like to know what the old girls thought about the whole thing. They seemed to recognize a game for suckers immediately and refused to play, while young Kandula was laying his neuronal capacity bare for the pleasure and delight of the audience. So maybe the wise old girls were showing more insight than the researcher gave them credit for.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023251

Too Late!


Our experiences in the first few years of our lives have enduring effects on the way we behave later. At that early age we have little or no control on what is going on. Of course, now that we’re grown up, we don’t recall much of those early days and would probably assume that it is our later experiences that mostly shape our behavior. But this may not be so.

 A study by Feng et al from the Kunming Institute of Zoology report this week on a study of rhesus monkeys in which some youngsters who were separated from their mothers at birth, who were hand reared for the first month and then were reared with another youngster (1). The maternal separation was due to problems such as inexperienced moms not handling their babies properly, bad weather that is hazardous for young baby monkeys etc. and not for the purpose of studying the effects of the separation.

These peer-reared monkeys behave differently from those normally reared by their moms even three years later. They spent a lot of their time sitting around on their own and were generally less rhesus monkey-like.

When the monkeys were caught for check-ups, the control group, that is monkeys reared by their moms in the normal manner, responded with the release of cortisol. Cortisol, you’ll recall, helps us to get out there and fight for our survival. The guys who had been raised without their moms, had a much slower, and hence lower, cortisol release, so in a bad situation, they would be more likely to lose.

This effect of early life bad times is also seen in people. Published this week is a meta-data study of problems of depression in later life of children who had been maltreated and the depression treatments had poor outcomes. This work was carried out by Nanni et al from London’s King’s College (2).

Seriously scary to see how long term, permanent even, some of these effects can be on brain functionality.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/12/1010943108.full.pdf+html
  2. http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/appi.ajp.2011.11020335

Synaptic Tactics


Our old friend the Macaque, so often used for cognitive studies, has come through yet again. IBM has just announced the manufacture of a pair of “neurosynaptic computing chips”, their SyNAPSE system is to be funded by DARPA (that is the US tax payer of course) to the tune of $21M (1).

What’s DARPA got to do with Macaques I hear you ask, well, nothing, but IBM have been probing Macaques neural networks for some time. I rush to say that’s not equating their customers with Macaques, but due to the recognition that to take computing to a new level, building in the plasticity of the brain can make cognitive computing possible.

Last year, Modha and Singh of IBM have published their work on tracing a unique network of the Macaque brain using the public domain database CoCoMac (2).  This enabled them to sort out the structure of the network. They demonstrated that the brain network was not uniform like a 3D fishing net, but has increasing complexity as it went to specific functional regions, more like a group of trees growing from common roots. This means that the complex networks feed information down to simpler sub-nets.

Why is this important? Because it like a funnel concentrating the information while processing it down to the nub of the matter. This is a good model for a cognitive system to work efficiently.

Brains are nicely plastic in that the network is modified by the information it is handling, that is it is making new connections. Ultimately this also provides a route for repair of the network. Making new connections on a chip is currently not possible on the fly, but the SyNAPSE system can apparently modulate the signal so it can effectively switch connections on and off. Well almost, it’s more like turning down the signal so it lost in the background and turning the one you want up so you’re not trying to process everything with everything, as I understand it. IBM could put it much better but they aren’t saying too much at present.

This is potentially a huge step forward towards cognitive computing. The next step beyond this is for our computers to start being intuitive. I hope they don’t start showing too much initiative though.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14574747
  2. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/30/13485.full

Retiring Mice


Flipping through the bio papers in the scientific literature, I seem to come across a very large number associated with aging – or its reversal and longevity. Of course we would all like to be long lived with the minimal amount of aging related lack of spryness. Many of the studies are associated in one way or another with our diet, and diet and exercise is what we are told to pay attention to when we visit the doctor if we can bring ourselves to do that.

Today’s post is about a helping retired mice grow older. The paper is by Matsumoto et al in the Public Library of Science (1). The retirees were all females who had spent the previous ten months raising litters. Male retirees couldn’t be considered for the study as they tend to be very, very, grumpy and fight all the time.

So, these old girls were allowed to enjoy their retirement for another eleven months with half of them fed on a probiotic diet. The good bacteria were from milk although the mice didn’t have access to live Greek yogurt, or any yogurt come to that. The good bacteria in the diet result in there being higher levels of polyamines in the colon.

The simplest polyamine is putrescine, so as you can imagine, these don’t smell too good, but they are important in body functions such as cell growth and the synthesis of our DNA and RNA. But they are also anti-inflammatory and this was at the root of the reason for the study. Is longevity increased if chronic low-grade inflammation is suppressed?

Those on the probiotic diet were longer lived and also ended up with better colons. So it’s just like your Mom told you about an apple a day, but now it’s take care of your colon and it’ll take care of you. I will be eating more live Greek yogurt and using lots more Soy sauce in my cooking and am looking forward to a long retirement (eventually).

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023652

Keep Limping Along


We all wish to stay healthy, but once in a while we catch something nasty. Severe bacterial infections can be very nasty and, with the increasing problem of antibiotic resistance build; we have to be careful as to permanent damage to our system, especially as we get older.

Now if we take a deep breath and leave humans and turn to lab rats we can study the longer-term damage of a severe bacterial infection without any likelihood of subsequent lawsuits. The current information is that healthy, but elderly rats, after they catch something nasty in the bacterial line and then get cured, show rather severe memory impairment. Younger rats don’t. The brain inflammation in the older critters that severe bacterial infections can cause is also severe and lasts a long time.

The long-term effects are that the ability to make new connections (plasticity) is much reduced and that a type of nerve growth factor (brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF) has had its production severely curtailed. Now BDNF works in those crucial areas for memory and learning new and important stuff like finding your way through a maze, namely the hippocampus and the cortex. The hippocampus generates some neural stem cells so that we can continue to replace some neurons.

All is not lost for our furry friends. Barrientos et al from the U of Colorado have just published a solution, which will undoubtedly work for us too (1). They have found that regular exercise after the bout of nasty bacteria, increases the BDNF in the hippocampus and lo and behold those elderly rats that took daily voluntary exercise got back to their amazing maze solving, whilst their sedentary friends did not.

Of course, being elderly, the rats were skipping about rather gently and couldn’t manage more that half a mile a week. But that was sufficient. Even better though was the result that regularly exercising elderly rats didn’t have the severe neuro-inflammatory effect from a bacterial infection. So once again, we have the strong message to get out there and exercise. It may be good for the heart, but it’s even better for the brain!

  1. R.M. Barrientos, M.G.Frank, N.Y.Crysdale, T.R.Chapman, J.TAhrendsen, H.E.W.Dasy, S.Gampeau, L.R.Watkins, S.L Patterson & S.F.Maier, J. Neuro. Sci., 31, 11578, (2011)