LONDON (Reuters) - Unhappy clowns from around the world say a study that reported that children didn't like them has wiped the big smile from their faces, and have been falling over their large shoes to put their case.
A poll by researchers looking at what decor to put in hospital children's wards found that youngsters do not like clowns on the walls and even older ones think they are scary.
"We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable"...
"There are those who are afraid of clowns, this is unavoidable, the same way that there are those afraid of dogs and spiders," she [Heather Myers, aka PipSqueakTheClown] said.
"It is the responsibility of the clown to know his environment, and take the necessary steps when confronted with a phobia."
Coulrophobia is what you call fear of clowns and it’s real. Noted sufferers include Johnny Depp, my husband and Bart Simpson who said, “Can’t sleep, clown will eat me.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — Apparently, raising the price really does make the wine taste better. At least that seems to be the result of a taste test. The part of the brain that reacts to a pleasant experience responded more strongly to pricey wines than cheap ones — even when tasters were given the same vintage in disguise.
Antonio Rangel and colleagues at California Institute of Technology thought the perception that higher price means higher quality could influence people, so they decided to test the idea.
They asked 20 people to sample wine while undergoing functional MRIs of their brain activity. The subjects were told they were tasting five different Cabernet Sauvignons sold at different prices.
However, there were actually only three wines sampled, two being offered twice, marked with different prices.
A $90 wine1 was provided marked with its real price and again marked $10, while another was presented at its real price of $5 and also marked $45.
The testers' brains showed more pleasure at the higher price than the lower one, even for the same wine, Rangel reports...
In their tricky fMRI experiment, the authors weren't really interested in delineating the neocortical (or subcortical) circuitry underlying marketing actions. Instead, their interest was in one particular cortical region within the frontal lobes, hypothesizing that
higher taste expectations would lead to higher activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC), an area of the brain that is widely thought to encode for actual experienced pleasantness.
Lo and behold, that is what they found! Panel A shows the time course of mOFC activation, with greater BOLD signal change when consuming the cheap $5 wine disguised as a $45/bottle wine. Panel D shows with greater BOLD signal change when consuming the expensive $90/bottle wine marketed as such, and much less activity when it masquerades as the $10 wine.
Fig. 2 of Plassmann et al. (2008). Activation maps are shown at a threshold of P less than 0.001 uncorrected and with an extend threshold of five voxels.
So they've demonstrated that "pleasantness" (i.e., mOFC activity) is influenced by price. Similar activations in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, visual cortex, middle temporal gyrus, and cingulate gyrus for wine 1 and in the amygdala, lateral OFC, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior and middle temporal gyrus, and posterior cingulate cortex for wine 2 were under rug swept.
What else have we learned?
...when tasters didn't know any price comparisons, they [20 Cal Tech students] rated the $5 wine as better than any of the others sampled.
"We were shocked," Rangel said in a telephone interview. [NOTE: why were you shocked? Did you think your subjects would be wine connoisseurs?] "I think it was because the flavor was stronger and our subjects were not very experienced."
He added that wine professionals would probably be able to differentiate the better wine — "one would hope."
Plassmann H, O'Doherty J, Shiv B, Rangel A. (2008). Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. Published online before print January 14, 2008. Despite the importance and pervasiveness of marketing, almost nothing is known about the neural mechanisms through which it affects decisions made by individuals. We propose that marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness. We tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI while they tasted wines that, contrary to reality, they believed to be different and sold at different prices. Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks. The paper provides evidence for the ability of marketing actions to modulate neural correlates of experienced pleasantness and for the mechanisms through which the effect operates.
Speaking of ethics, from the Bureau of Irresponsible Press Releases comes this headline:
Reversal Of Alzheimer's Symptoms Within Minutes In Human Study ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — An extraordinary new scientific study, which for the first time documents marked improvement in Alzheimer’s disease within minutes of administration of a therapeutic molecule, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroinflammation.
Have any of the credulous commentators raving about this finding actually read the journal article in question? It's Open Access, so it's freely available to all when you click on a link in the Science Daily piece. Even a cursory perusal will indicate that the manuscript could not have been reviewed by anyone who follows the scientific method.
... The study focuses on one of these cytokines, tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF), a critical component of the brain’s immune system. Normally, TNF finely regulates the transmission of neural impulses in the brain. The authors hypothesized that elevated levels of TNF in Alzheimer’s disease interfere with this regulation. To reduce elevated TNF, the authors gave patients an injection of an anti-TNF therapeutic called etanercept[aka Enbrel, used to treat rheumatoid arthritis]. ...
The new study documents a dramatic and unprecedented therapeutic effect in an Alzheimer’s patient: improvement within minutes following delivery of perispinal etanercept, which is etanercept given by injection in the spine. Etanercept (trade name Enbrel) binds and inactivates excess TNF. Etanercept is FDA approved to treat a number of immune-mediated disorders and is used off label in the study.
Although suppressing inflammation with an anti-TNF agent may indeed be a promising treatment (e.g., Ryu & McLarnon, 2007), I think one must test its efficacy against a placebo. And what mechanism of action would mediate cognitive improvement within minutes, in a disease with complex pathology that takes years and years to develop?
The actual article (Tobinick & Gross, 2008) reads like physician's notes, not a research study or clinical trial. Here's the extent of their "immediate effect" (with absolutely no placebo condition, of course):
Ten minutes after dosing the patient was reexamined. He was noticeably calmer, less frustrated, and more attentive. He was able to correctly identify the state as California, and he identified the year as 2006. His responses to questioning seemed less effortful and more rapid, with less latency. He left for author HG's office for further testing.
See also Etanercept Improves Alzheimer's Disease In Minutes for a critical discussion of this single-case study -- including the lack of a formal research protocol, the lack of any patient selection criteria (the gentleman in question may not be a typical dementia patient), the fact that the authors patented an off-label treatment [how can they do that? was it for the perispinal route of adminstration?], and links to a video interview with family members, for starters.
Unfortunately, these particular adventures in Romania did not involve visiting Peleş Castle.
Dr. Janet D. Stemwedel, a philosophy professor at San Jose State and author of the blog Adventures in Ethics and Science, has a great two-part piece on the ethics of a developmental psychology research study conducted with abandoned Romanian children (Nelson et al., 2007) and published recently in Science. The abstract of the paper begins in a way that set off alarm bells (at least in my head):
In a randomized controlled trial, we compared abandoned children reared in institutions to abandoned children placed in institutions but then moved to foster care. Young children living in institutions were randomly assigned to continued institutional care or to placement in foster care, and their cognitive development was tracked through 54 months of age.
Tens of thousands of children grew up in Romania's institutions (BBC News)
Being neither a developmental psychologist nor an ethics expert1, I thought it best to consult a professional in at least one of those topics. The posts below are essential reading for those interested in human subjects research issues, such as informed consent, standard of care, and "clinical equipoise."
...My aim in these two posts will be to lay out the recognized ethical guidelines for research with human subjects as they apply to the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), and to identify the worries we might raise about this kind of research -- and, by extension, with the prevailing standards.
In an earlier post, I looked at a research study by Nelson et al. [1] on how the cognitive development of young abandoned children in Romania was affected by being raised in institutional versus foster care conditions. Specifically, I examined the explanation the researchers gave to argue that their work was not only scientifically sound but also ethical.
In this post, I examine the accompanying policy forum article, Millum and Emmanuel, "The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children" [2]. Millum and Emanuel are in the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. As such, it's not unreasonable to assume that they are not coming to their understanding of this research -- and to the question of whether it rises to the appropriate ethical level -- from the point of view that good science should trump all other interests.
Footnote
1 Not that The Neurocritic is unethical or anything...
References
[1] Charles A. Nelson, III, Charles H. Zeanah, Nathan A. Fox, Peter J. Marshall, Anna T. Smyke, and Donald Guthrie, "Cognitive Recovery in Socially Deprived Young Children: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project," Science 21 December 2007: Vol. 318. no. 5858, pp. 1937 - 1940.
[2] Joseph Millum and Ezekiel J. Emanuel, "The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children," Science 21 December 2007: Vol. 318. no. 5858, pp. 1874 - 1875.
If you live in New York, there's an ongoing cultural festival with numerous events that combine art, music, psychology, and neuroscience:
BRAINWAVEasks how art, music, and meditation affect the brain and offers countless answers in more than a hundred public events, ranging from an exhibition of contemporary art and a cinema series to cutting-edge concerts, performances, talks, and panels.
The group exhibition BrainWave: Common Senses responds to current neurological discourse by visualizing and investigating the brain’s capacity for perception, memory, emotion and logic—the forces that drive creativity. It brings together work by artists involved with research in cognition, artists that respond critically to the new technologies in neuroscience, and projects in which artists and scientists have collaborated to advance understanding of the mysteries of the brain.
What is the explanation for our love of music, rhythm and dance? In this evening of erudition and performance, Columbia University neuroscientists Dave Sulzer (a.k.a. composer Dave Soldier) and John Krakauer will discuss the brain activity that makes us groove to the beat of music. Krakauer co-directs the Motor Performance Laboratory and Soldier investigates synaptic connections that underlie memory, learning and behavior. Featuring the premiere of Soldier’s "Quartet for percussion and brain waves," a live performance/experiment with drummers and electroencephalographs.
Optical Illusions and the Brain School of Visual Arts Tuesday, January 29, 6:30pm
Research scientist Susana Martinez-Conde discusses optical illusions and what they tell us about the brain. Her talk is informed by her research at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona and "The Magic of Consciousness," a symposium of leading neuroscientists and magicians at the Imperial Palace in Las Vegas. Presented by the BFA Fine Arts Department, SVA.
Plus these two events on the same day:
Secret Life of the Brain Part IV: The Adult Brain RMA Wednesday, January 30, 1 p.m.
The brain is the seat of both intellect and emotion, and this episode chronicles the critical balance between these processes and explores what happens when the balance is lost. Scientists draw insight from the stories of a stroke victim and a sufferer of post-traumatic stress disorder, and break new ground in the struggle to understand and treat depression. Discussion moderator: Michael Shea, PhD.
Lou Reed: Hudson River Wind Meditations RMA Wednesday, January 30, 7 p.m.
Lou Reed introduces his latest meditation compositions and discusses them with mind science scholar Rob Hogendoorn.
THOUGHTS are successfully being read for the first time by scientists using nothing but a modified MRI scanner and a special computer program.
Very briefly, subjects viewed pictures of 10 different objects: 5 tools (drill, hammer, screwdriver, pliers, saw) and 5 dwellings (apartment, castle, house, hut, and igloo). Previous work had shown that these two object categories activate some unique brain regions (e.g., ventral premotor cortex and parahippocampal gyrus, respectively). Machine learning methods were used to classify the patterns of activity obtained while subjects viewed each of these pictures, with a goal of identifying individuals objects (not just the categories) by the distinctive neural activity associated with each.
But is it humans who are doing the mind-reading, or is it...is it...THE COMPUTERS!! Ahh, they're taking over!
By Allison M. Heinrichs TRIBUNE-REVIEW Friday, January 4, 2008
Computers are reading minds at Carnegie Mellon University.
In a small two-year study, computer scientists and cognitive neuroscientists teamed up to teach computers to recognize patterns in brain activity and identify objects that people are looking at.
Scientists call it the first step toward identifying where people's thoughts originate, while ethicists see it as a sign of the need for new public policy.
Colossus - The Forbin Project takes place in the 50s during the height of the cold war. Dr. Charles Forbin, a genius scientist who has lost trust in humanity’s ability to logically address emotional issues, has developed a very special computer to perform the Strategic Air Command and Control functions for the military. This computer, code named Colossus, is developed based on incredible advances in Artificial Intelligence, and has a logical process for determining when to launch the ICBMs. With much fanfare, the President of the US “turns on” Colossus to take over responsibility for the US nuclear armament. [from Cyberpunk Review]
"I want a complete mapping of brain states and thoughts," Dr. Just said. "We're taking tiny baby steps, but anything we can think about is represented in the brain."
In coming years, researchers will be able to develop a fairly complex mapping of brain states and thoughts, he said.
"It's a little science fiction-y, and I don't think we'll do it in one year, but five to 10 is plausible," he said.
Unfortunately, shortly after being turned on, Colossus learns the presence of another AI command and control system. It turns out that the Soviet Union, independently has developed their own system call the Guardian. Both computers “insist” that they be linked to ensure no attacks will take place...
concerned with the design and development of algorithms and techniques that allow computers to "learn". ... Inductive machine learning methods extract rules and patterns out of massive data sets. The major focus of machine learning research is to extract information from data automatically, by computational and statistical methods. Hence, machine learning is closely related not only to data mining and statistics, but also theoretical computer science.
Things begin to go downhill when Professor Forbin realizes that the rate of learning for the machines is increasing at an exponential rate – he recommends detaching the connection between the two computers. When they attempt to do this, both computers threaten an immediate launch of nuclear weapons. Quickly, the government’s realize their situation – the machines are now in power. Worse, they proceed to take complete control of human society.
In the PLoS One article, Shinkareva et al. (2008) describe this approach to analyzing functional imaging data as involving
identification of a multivariate pattern of voxels and their characteristic activation levels that collectively identify the neural response to a stimulus. These machine learning methods have the potential to be particularly useful in uncovering how semantic information about objects is represented in the cerebral cortex because they can determine the topographic distribution of the activation and distinguish the content of the information in various parts of the cortex. In the study reported below, the neural patterns associated with individual objects as well as with object categories were identified using a machine learning algorithm applied to activation distributed throughout the cortex. This study also investigated the degree to which objects and categories are similarly represented neurally across different people.
And wouldn't you know it, people [Carnegie Mellon students] are people.
Carnegie Mellon University has taken an important step in mapping thought patterns in the human brain, and the research has produced an amazing insight: Human brains are similarly organized.
Based on how one person thinks about a hammer, a computer can identify when another person also is thinking about a hammer. It also can differentiate between items in the same category of tools, be it a hammer or screwdriver.
Results revealed the typical-ish distributed activity patterns underlying object representations, and high classification rank accuracies for object exemplars:
Reliable (p less than 0.001) accuracies for the classification of object exemplars within participants were reached for eleven out of twelve participants, and reliable (p less than 0.001) accuracies for the classification of object exemplars when training on the union of data from eleven participants were reached for eight out of twelve participants.
From Table 1 (Shinkareva et al., 2008). Anatomical regions (out of 71) that singly produced reliable average classification accuracies across the twelve participants for category identification.
L Precentral gyrus L Superior frontal gyrus L Inferior frontal gyrus, triangular part L Insula, rolandic operculum L/R Calcarine fissure L/R Cuneus, superior occipital, middle occipital gyri L/R Inferior occipital, lingual gyri L/R Fusiform gyrus L Postcentral gyrus L/R Superior parietal gyrus, precuneus, paracentral lobule L/R Inferior parietal, supramarginal, angular gyri L/R Intraparietal sulcus L/R Posterior superior temporal, posterior middle temporal gyri L/R Posterior inferior temporal gyrus L/R Cerebellum
"This part of the study establishes, as never before, that there is a commonality in how different people's brains represent the same object," said Mitchell, head of the Machine Learning Department in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science and a pioneer in applying machine learning methods to the study of brain activity. "There has always been a philosophical conundrum as to whether one person's perception of the color blue is the same as another person's. Now we see that there is a great deal of commonality across different people's brain activity corresponding to familiar tools and dwellings."
"This first step using computer algorithms to identify thoughts of individual objects from brain activity can open new scientific paths, and eventually roads and highways," added Svetlana Shinkareva, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina who is the study's lead author. "We hope to progress to identifying the thoughts associated not just with pictures, but also with words, and eventually sentences."
In contrast to this last statement are the results from a new paper (Sanai et al., 2008) showing that language representation in the brain is highly variable across individuals:
Background: Language sites in the cortex of the brain vary among patients. Language mapping while the patient is awake is an intraoperative technique designed to minimize language deficits associated with brain-tumor resection. ... Results: ...Cortical maps generated with intraoperative language data ...showed surprising variability in language localization within the dominant [left] hemisphere.
During surgery to remove gliomas, the patients in the mapping study performed three different speech/language tasks (including object naming) while various regions of cortex were stimulated to test for language deficits. Guess the neurosurgeons couldn't read their minds...
Previous studies have succeeded in identifying the cognitive state corresponding to the perception of a set of depicted categories, such as tools, by analyzing the accompanying pattern of brain activity, measured with fMRI. The current research focused on identifying the cognitive state associated with a 4s viewing of an individual line drawing (1 of 10 familiar objects, 5 tools and 5 dwellings, such as a hammer or a castle). Here we demonstrate the ability to reliably (1) identify which of the 10 drawings a participant was viewing, based on that participant's characteristic whole-brain neural activation patterns, excluding visual areas; (2) identify the category of the object with even higher accuracy, based on that participant's activation; and (3) identify, for the first time, both individual objects and the category of the object the participant was viewing, based only on other participants' activation patterns. The voxels important for category identification were located similarly across participants, and distributed throughout the cortex, focused in ventral temporal perceptual areas but also including more frontal association areas (and somewhat left-lateralized). These findings indicate the presence of stable, distributed, communal, and identifiable neural states corresponding to object concepts.
Since we're on the topic of ESP and other psi phenomena, you'll be glad to learn that the first World Telekinesis Competition will be held in Spring 2008 in Victoria, British Columbia.
Telekinesis (also known as psychokinesis) is "the process of moving or otherwise affecting physical objects by the mind only, without making any physical contact," famously employed by Shannen Dougherty's character in Charmed, the eponymous high school student in Carrie, and as one manifestation of The Force. Like many people, The Neurocritic used to dream of having telekinetic powers as a kid, and was always disappointed when I awoke and couldn't really move things around by sheer force of will.
To dream that you are telekinetic, represents a higher level of awareness and consciousness. You are not utilizing your full potential and need to start putting your stored energy levels and mental abilities to use. In other words, your dream may imply that you need to put your thoughts into action. For some, dreams of telekinetic powers may indicate your latent paranormal abilities.
What is going on here, you say? Has The Neurocritic become a Jungian? No, not really. The telekinesis competition/ performance art piece is sponsored by Noxious Sector,
an ongoing collaborative endeavor by Canadian artists Ted Hiebert, Doug Jarvis and Jackson 2Bears, dedicated to the exploration of alternative cognitive function, the paranormal and the absurd. Conceived as a formalized forum for informal inquiry, Noxious Sector projects take the form of performances, curatorial initiatives and artistic collaborations.
Magnetically Inclined is a performance and documentary project exploring the relationship between brainwaves and high-powered earth magnets. Currently in developmental stages, this project will include various magnetic interventions into such brain wave activities as dreaming, meditating and concentration exercises.
