fmri
edyong | July 14, 2009In a world where the temptation to lie, deceive and cheat is both strong and profitable, what compels some people to choose the straight and narrow path? According to a new brain-scanning study, honest moral decisions depend more on the absence of temptation in the first place than on people wilfully resisting these lures.
Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton and Harvard University came to this conclusion by using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brain activity of people who were given a chance to lie. The volunteers were trying to predict the outcomes…
razib | July 13, 2009Update: See Ed Yong.
Randall Parker points me to a new paper from Joshua Greene which describes the neurological responses of individuals when do, or don't, lie, when lying might be in their self-interest. From EurekaAlert:
The research was designed to test two theories about the nature of honesty - the "Will" theory, in which honesty results from the active resistance of temptation, and the "Grace" theory in which honesty is a product of lack of temptation. The results of this study suggest that the "Grace" theory is true, because the honest participants did not show any additional neural…
neurophilosophy | June 26, 2009
THE term 'hypnosis' was coined by the Scottish physician James Braid in his 1853 book Neurypnology. Braid defined hypnosis as "a peculiar condition of the nervous system, induced by a fixed and abstracted attention of the mental and visual eye". He argued that it was a form of "nervous sleep", and tried to distinguish his theory from that of the mesmerists, who believed that the effects of hypnosis were mediated by a vital force, or animal magnetism.
Because of mesmerism, and its association with stage entertainment and charlatanry, hypnosis was regarded with skepticism for much of its…
cwilcox | June 3, 2009You often hear that happy people see the world differently. They look through 'rose colored glasses' or 'on the bright side.' There are a lot of phrases that connect mood and sight. Those less optimistic, as well, claim to 'see things as they are.' It's no surprise, then, that new research, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, has found that mood really does change how we see the world.
Though the pessimists "realists" might claim to be the ones who are most in touch with actuality, its the optimists that actually see more of the world around them. That's because, as researchers from…
neurophilosophy | May 18, 2009The ability to interpret other peoples' emotions is vital for social interactions. We recognize emotions in others by observing their body language and facial expressions. The voice also betrays one's emotional state: words spoken in anger have a different rhythm, stress and intonation than those uttered with a sense of joy or relief. But how the emotional content of a voice is encoded in the brain was unclear.
Now though, Swiss researchers report that they have decoded the neural activity in the voice-sensitive regions of the brain, and demonstrate that this activity can be analyzed to…
ddobbs | April 23, 2009Reading the Mindreading Studies - Science Progress seeks a handle on fMRI hype, hope, and horizons
The evolving Swine Flu story [Effect Measure] The skinny on a scary run of deadly swine flu, from people who've been doing this a while.
Green Issues Fade Is green losing its lustre?
Eli Lilly Tops List of Drug-Company Pay to Vermont Docs Altogether, 78 drug companies spent just shy of $3 million dollars in payments to health professionals in Vermont last year. This is a state of about 600,000 people, and only a few thousand doctors. Payments to psychiatrists, for instance, totaled $479,306.19…
edyong | April 23, 2009Having your arm in a cast can be a real pain but immobilising your hand in plaster has consequences beyond itchiness, cramps and a growing collection of signatures. Silke Lissek from Bergmannsheil University found that just a few weeks in a cast can desensitise the trapped hand's sense of touch, and lower neural activity in the part of the brain that receives signals from it. The uninjured hand, however, rises to the occasion and picks up the sensory slack by becoming more sensitive than before.
Lissek recruited 31 right-handed people, each of whom had one fractured arm encased in a cast,…
purepedantry | April 14, 2009I don't think I am alone in saying that I often feel a little envy and schadenfreude towards my peers. Science is a particularly competitive business with few remunerative rewards, so a lot of my self-worth is tied to comparisons with my peer's successes and failures. I won't deny being envious when someone gets a Science paper. And while seeing the abject failure of my peers isn't high on my list of priorities, I won't deny the small satisfaction that I get when someone who breezed through their PhD gets taken down a peg.
These aren't happy-joy-joy emotions. They don't make me swell with…
purepedantry | April 9, 2009The title of this pre-publication paper is, "Evidence on the emergence of the brain's default network from 2-week-old to 2-year-old healthy pediatric subjects." The authors put kids in functional MRIs to measure resting state activity and detect the emergence of the default network.
While I am certain that it is very interesting research, I have a more technical question: minus sedation, how in Heaven's name did they get the kids to sit still long enough to collect the data? An fMRI is hardly a crib decorated with puppies and ducklings. You feel like you are about to be shot out of a…
neurophilosophy | March 12, 2009Spatial navigation is a complex mental task which is strongly dependent upon memory. As we make our way around a new environment, we look for easily recognisable landmarks and try to remember how their locations are related in space, so that when we return to it we can negotiate our path.
We know that spatial representations are encoded in the medial temporal lobe, and numerous studies implicate the hippocampus in particular as being crucial for the formation of spatial memories. Information about the environment is believed to be encoded by large populations of neurons distributed…
ddobbs | March 10, 2009"How We Decide" author Jonah Lehrer, fresh from a book tour of the UK, offers what he calls a "spluttering answer" (it's really quite lucid) to a question he says he's getting a lot these days: What decision-making errors were involved in our current financial meltdown??
The short version of his answer -- well worth reading in its entirety -- is that we (and big investment outfits particularlyl) succumbed to an abhorrence of uncertainty.
We hate not knowing, and this often leads us to neglect relevant information that might undermine the certainty of our conclusions. I think some of the…
neurophilosophy | March 9, 2009More than 100 years ago, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, proposed a mechanism called repression, whereby desires and impulses are actively pushed into the unconscious mind. For Freud, repression was a defence mechanism - the repressed memories are often traumatic in nature, but, although hidden, they continue to exert an effect on behaviour.
Many of Freud's theories have long since been discredited, but they remain influential to this day. Repression in particular has proven to be extremely controversial. It has attracted much attention in the context of the many legal cases…
purepedantry | March 5, 2009Caught this bad description of an otherwise very interesting study at Science Daily:
Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have, for the first time, shown what brain activity looks like when someone anticipates an action or sensory input which soon follows.
In the February 25 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, they say this neural clairvoyance involves strong activity in areas of the brain responsible for preparing the body to move.
The findings were made by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a group of student volunteers who brought with them favorite…
thusspakezuska | February 24, 2009As a graduate student, I observed the nascent field of functional magnetic resonance imaging and thought to myself with some amusement "modern phrenology! Now with big, fancy, expensive equipment!" Count me among those who have never been terribly impressed with fMRI, and certainly not with its applications in what is known as social neuroscience.
Now we have this:
Late last year, Ed Vul, a graduate student at MIT working with neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher and UCSD psychologist Hal Pashler, prereleased "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience" on his website. The journal Perspectives…
razib | February 23, 2009Seed Magazine has a nice review of the brewing controversy over shoddy statistical methods in the field of fMRI. To some extent science is politics, this is a sexy and appealing field. A friend of mine who is a psychologist mentioned that though he doesn't think much of fMRI the head of his lab group wanted to make sure that there was always some neural imaging in their papers to increase the likelihood of acceptance. A few vivid images is worth a lot of turgid prose; even if some of the criticisms of fMRI are overblown I suspect that it was necessary that the field be brought down a few…
neurophilosophy | February 19, 2009Working memory refers to the process by which small amounts of information relevant to the task at hand are retained for short periods of time. For example, before cellular phones became so ubiquitous, calling someone usually involved first finding the number and then remembering it for a just few seconds by repeating it to oneself several times. Once the digits had been dialled, they are immediately forgotten.
Very little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying working memory, but very recently some advances have been made. Last month, a group from the University of Texas Medical…
neurophilosophy | February 2, 2009During the first half of the twentieth century, the American psychologist Karl Lashley conducted a series of experiments in an attempt to identify the part of the brain in which memories are stored. In his now famous investigations, Lashley trained rats to find their way through a maze, then tried to erase the memory trace - what he called the "engram" - by making lesions in different parts of the neocortex.
Lashley failed to find the engram - no matter where he made a lesion, his experimental animals were still able to find their way through the maze. As a result, he concluded that memories…
edyong | January 21, 2009The blood that flows into our heads is obviously important for it provides nutrients and oxygen to that most energetically demanding of organs - the brain. But for neuroscientists, blood flow in the brain has a special significance; many have used it to measure brain activity using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.
This scanning technology has become a common feature of modern neuroscience studies, where it's used to follow firing neurons and to identify parts of the brain that are active during common mental tasks. Its use rests on the assumption that the…
amillikan | December 20, 2008Today on ScienceBlogs.com, you will notice a new feature on the site. Instead of The Buzz, we have an embedded video from Bloggingheads.tv. This feature will appear every Saturday and can be viewed subsequently here on Page 3.14, the editorial blog of ScienceBlogs.com. This week, John Horgan from the Stevens Center for Science Writings and George Johnson, author of Fire in the Mind and The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments discuss recent attempts of scientists to use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology to display graphic images on a computer screen directly from the visual cortex…
neurophilosophy | December 12, 2008Recent advances in functional neuroimaging have enabled researchers to predict perceptual experiences with a high degree of accuracy. For example, it is possible to determine whether a subject is looking at a face or some other category of visual stimulus, such as a house. This is possible because we know that specific regions of the brain respond selectively to one type of stimulus but not another.
These studies have however been limited to small numbers of visual stimuli in specified categories, because they are based on prior knowledge of the neural activity associated with the conscious…