Hey girls and guys,
as I have become really attached to this whole blog idea I decided to invest a bit and make it a bit more professional. From now on you will find your neuroscience fix here:
Go check it out, it’s really pretty!
Watching your own dream on YouTube and reading your spouse’s mind: bad sci-fi idea or the thing to get ready for?
Who did not envy Professor X, the Vulcans or higher elves (I am so sorry, couldn’t think of less nerdier examples!) at least once in their lives? I sure did. Every time a question about superpowers comes up in “Would you rather?..” I always pick mind-reading without even hearing the second option. But how realistic is that? Will we be able to communicate without speaking any time soon? Create romantic moments by finishing each other sentences all the time? Win a Pulitzer Prize by knowing the true answers to all your interview questions? Just brainstroming here.
Just a picture of Patrick Stewart adding 100 points of awesomeness to this post.
But really, what is neuroscience’s opinion on this? It has indeed something to offer, even if not quite in the form we might expect (no Pulitzer for you yet). A scientist named Jack Gallant developed something called brain decoder which earlier was used to identify which of 120 pictures a participant is looking at and now can go as far as figuring out what movie you are watching. It goes like that: first a special program called “classifier” is shown a bazillion of patterns of brain activity and the corresponding images/videos which caused it; this way it learns to to associate different patterns with a specific picture or concept. At the end it knows that this pattern of activity is most likely to be caused by a cat or, say, by fighting babies. Later participants are put in an MRI scanner and shown short videos; after that the program is applied to the brain scans to decipher what the person was seeing in the given moment. Put it simple way, brain activity was turned into pictures. Dynamic brain activity could be decoded. Now before pointing out limitations let’s have a look at the follow-up research inspired by this technique.
Images reconstructed from brain activity.
One team is trying to make a dream-reader, which is obviously way trickier — how do we know what was seen (dreamt) when a specific brain activity was evoked? They solved it by putting the participants in this state when you are drifting away in the dreamland but not yet quite asleep, recorded their brain activity, woke them up and asked them what they saw. It lead to a 60% success rate, yet bear in mind that everyone’s signals are different and it is much harder to develop a universal dream recorder. Seems that we are still one step away from watching each other’s weird dreams on YouTube.
John-Dylan Haynes (who is my professor, woop woop!) took participants on a virtual reality tour through different houses and scanned their brains when they were taken on the second tour. With the brain decoder he was able to accurately say whether the participant has “visited” this house before — speaking technically, visual recognition could be detected.
Imagine all the implications! (Yes, we will discuss limitations later below.. Let a girl be excited for a moment.) We could identify whether a suspect has visited a crime scene before! Can develop a decoder which takes internal speech and translates it to external speech! Watch our dreams on YouTube!
OF COURSE, this whole thing is just in baby shoes so far. In order to train the program to recognize words or pictures in your brain activity you have to lay still in a scanner for hours and hours and hours while thinking about all possible things ten times over. Also the are other factor that might influence it — say thinking of cats makes you happy (and that is how the computer learns it). The next day your cat dies, however, so now thinking of cats will also be associated with patterns of negative emotions. Would it have an influence on accuracy? Probably, we don’t really know. Also so far it works on a very individual level, so, as noted previously, developing a universal mind-reader is not gonna happen in the next couple of years. At the current stage of development, quoting John-Dylan Haynes, “The best way to find out what someone is going to do is to ask them.”
P.S. Also people scared of brain monitoring or what not, it has to be noticed that in order to read your private thoughts an immense amount of compliance from your part is necessary — I highly doubt it that you will not notice being stored in a scanner for 4 hours thinking of specific things over and over again to train the decoding program. So chillax and be excited for our brave new world.
I only use 10% of my left brain or The most common myths about brain debunked.
In every lab I worked in, the mentioning of Luc Besson’s 2014 sci-fi movie “Lucy” caused a wide range of reactions, most of them between an exhausted sigh and a badly concealed bulging of the forehead veins. And not everyone has even even watched it! So, what’s the reason for such a strong dislike? While the movie itself might be entertaining and all, it further perpetuates the myth saying that we only use 10% of our brain capacity (after increasing her usage up to 90%, Scarlett Johansson’s heroine gains abilities such as telepathy, telekinesis and uhm …defying gravity?). Seeing misconceptions about your field of work being promoted is just such a downer. So I wanted to debunk some hard-to-kill myths about the most fascinating thing in the Universe (okay, I know, will tone down fangirling, sorry).
1) We only use 10% of our brain capacity.
TL;DR: NO no no no NO no. No.
It is amazing that this one is so hard to kill. I suggest media stories about people starting to speak a completely new language after stroke is partly what makes people believe we have all the knowledge in the world hidden somewhere deep in our brain. If it just comes out! Then we will be math geniuses! And polyglots! Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like this. In a waking state, most of the brain is active almost all the time. First of all, there is always an activity in your brain regions concerned with such basal functions as breathing, heart rate, posture and balance (which are collectively known as brainstem). Second of all, even such a simple task as pouring a cup of tea includes activation in planning areas, motor areas, areas responsible for comparing the planned action with the outcome, memory regions (what did I wanna do just now? where is the coffee mug?). Third of all, even without a task at hand, when you’re resting or daydreaming, a network called default-mode network which is thought to be responsible for introspection, sense of self, planning, mind-wandering and plenty of other stuff, is continuously active.
We surely use far more than 10% of our brains but it’s clear that we understand about 10% of it. (Btw, speaking a foreign language is a Foreign Language Syndrome and is just as puzzling as it is little researched. But it most likely has to do with damage or restructuring in language areas of the brain, not all languages of the world being buried in your head. Unfortunately.)
This is the default mode network — parts of your brain continuously active at rest and thought to be responsible for the “self”. 10 percent, huh?
2) There are left- and right-brained people.
TL;DR: Some brain functions (like language) are preferentially processed in a specific hemisphere, yet complex cognitive tasks require activity of the whole brain.
Creative people just have a more active left brain and mathematicians are born with a more wired right brain, right? Right? Unfortunately, it is not just as simple as that (this we will hear a lot in this section). Shakespeare’s left brain wasn’t more developed and Feynman’s right hemisphere wouldn’t excessively lighten up in a MRI scanner. There are no findings supporting the idea that different thinking styles depend on a specific hemisphere and no evidence for a correlation between creativity and the activity of the right brain. On the contrary, research has shown that people are using their entire brain equally: Both sides of the brains did not differ in terms of connectivity or activity independent on their creativity or logical skills.
There are, indeed, findings and theories which can be remotely connected to this myth (note the “remotely” though!). For example, there is a thing called lateralization which means that some functions are usually associated with either left or right hemisphere: You have probably already heard something about language being in the left brain. Yet hold your horses, left/right dichotomy supporters, it’s not that simple — it appears now that some language aspects, such as intonation, are actually processed in the right hemisphere. Moreover, some hypotheses say that information is processed differently in both hemispheres: Left one being more specialised for details and the right seeing things in a more holistic way (like closely examining this fruit you found versus scanning for the predators in the entire environment around you). However, let’s repeat it again: Not that simple. Complex cognitive functions require communication across both hemispheres.
So next time someone proudly says they’re creative because of her outstanding right hemisphere development, frown, shake your head and send them to Google.
3) Listening to Mozart will make you smarter.
TL;DR: Listening to Mozart can help you to rotate imaginary objects (but only as you keep the music on).
“Mozart for babies! Awake your child’s creativity! Make it smarter! Give us your money! Buy our stuff!”: a quick scroll through Amazon provides you with all kinds of CDs to make your baby (and you) smarter. There is this prevailing notion that listening to classical music (especially Mozart, therefore the name “Mozart effect”) makes you smarter, and more creative. People’s belief in this stretches so far that some Italian mozzarella farmer was playing Mozart to his buffalos to make them produce better milk. I mean, if it was so easy then tying Trump to a chair and forcing him to listen to Mozart would solve a lot of problems. So what’s really up with this myth?
Whatever little effects were observed as effects of listening to Mozart, it was grossly exaggerated and generalised. The only effect (which couldn’t even be completely reproduced!) was a short-term improvement of the spatial reasoning (meaning understanding and remembering the relations among objects in your environment) which lasted only for the duration of the experiment. So nothing really helpful preparing your baby for the hard life out there (even though it is a curious finding). General intelligence of the participants was not affected whatsoever. Moreover, some studies have shown a similar effect after people listening to Schubert, Blur (Britpop effect! Now we’re talking!) or even a Stephen King novel being read aloud. The important thing seemed to be the enjoyment and engagement, rather than the exact combination of notes people heard. So unless you want to appear like very classy and snobby parents by letting your kids only listen to Mozart, don’t count on his sonatas to make them more intelligent. Give them a good book instead.
4) Memories are stored in the brain like stuff is stored in the cupboard drawers.
TL;DR: Memories are dynamic, can be changed by all kinds of different influences and not always reliable.
Some think, memories are similar to objects in your drawer. You put them in, they stay there, unchanged but for a layer of dust, you put them out and use them, as good as new. Doesn’t work like that — memories can be manipulated and you are not necessarily aware of this. Take eyewitness testimony. Elizabeth Loftus, an expert in the field of false memories, has shown that the wording of the questions asked about an accident or crime people witnessed actually changed their memories without them noticing. Imagine you and your friend see a car accident and later a policeman asks you whether you saw any broken glass when the cars smashed into each other, whereas your friends is asked whether she saw any broken glass when the cars contacted each other. Guess what? You are more likely to remember seeing broken glass than your friend is (even if it wasn’t actualy there), just because the question suggested that is must have been present. In another experiment participants were shown photoshopped pictures with childhood versions of them and their parents on a hot air balloon and were asked to describe that day (which never happened). Half of the participants could actually describe how excited or scared they felt up there or what kind of ice-cream they had. Moral of the story: Memory is fragile and can be corrupted. So… What about this birthday party you had when you were seven? You sure it happened? You actually sure? Just checking.
An example of the falsified picture used to implant a false memory.
P.S. So far I gathered some suggestions as to what to write about next and the list includes neuroimaging for dummies, taking some well-known papers and explaining them in laymen’s terms (like the grid cell Nobel Prize winner), predictive coding and artificial networks. Do you have any other ideas or suggestions of what you’d be interested in? Let me know!
Science of being high: Your brain on acid.
Your ego disappears, you feel united with the Universe, you see things which are not there and your time perception is distorted: Even if you’ve never taken drugs these effects sound familiar to you; this is what your friends told you after they took acid at some festival or after their recent trip to Amsterdam.
Prehistoric art suggests that psychedelic drugs have a pretty long relationship with humans, their usage in spiritual and healing rituals going as far back as about 5000 years (our ancestors knew what’s up). However, due to political mostly than scientific reasons, psychedelic research was prohibited not long after blooming in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Currently, what can be called a reneissance in the research of psychedelic substances is taking place as more and more scientists turn their attention towards the neural correlates of the fascinating altered states of consciousness associated with psilocybin (the main component of magic mushrooms), ayahuaska and LSD.
So what do these substances do exactly to our brain and how do they do it? Let’s go step by step.
1) TL;DR: Hyperconnectivity.
On psychedelics our brain becomes hyperconnected. Regions which are only weakly or not at all communicating in the normal state of consciousness now show significantly increased connections with each other. Imagine it like this: Different areas in our brain can be understood as various districts of a city. Normally there are guards on the roads not letting certain cars pass to certain districts. Yet after the administration of psylocibin the guards are abolished and the traffic between all the city regions increases immensely — people from each district use the opportunity to visit every place they were prohibited to go before. This way the brain reaches a state of a higher entropy — entropy being the measure of the randomness of a system in this case. It means that there is an increased number of patterns of activity that are possible; a much larger range of potential brain states you could enter. Take psychedelics, they said, it will lead to a mind expansion, they said.
Consider the following example: Normally, activity in the visual areas of the brain is primarily driven by the visual input. However, on acid the connection between the visual networks and the networks responsible for introspection and day-dreaming is significantly strenghtened. This could cause inaccurate visual percepts and an increased influence of imagination on the visual processing. This might be the explanation for the hallucinations you see with your eyes open and closed. This is a very simplified but a very pretty illustration of what I just said from a study investigating it with very complex mathematical methods I don’t really understand (‘a’ being the sober state and ‘b’ being the psychedelic state).
2) TL;DR: Break-down within networks
There are networks in our brain which are thought to maintain our sense of self, to filter our sensory experiences and to ground them in reality. As you might have guessed, on acid they fail to keep up their integrity and become disintegrated. Psychedelics inhibit brain’s filtering mechanism and allow the senses to run free: The mechanisms working on keeping the world predictable and stable fail and that the previously inhibited background noise gains importance. If sober this crack on your wall merely slightly resembled a spider then on acid — when nothing restricts your perception with knowledge or expectations — you might see a huge black widow step-dancing (sorry I couldn’t think of a more positive example). Also as normally very active regions keeping your ego stable become disconnected you might experience an ego-dissolution, sense of the unity with the Universe and sign up for a hippie camp.
3) TL;DR: Soon, a doctor will prescribe you LSD. Maybe.
It is a safe bet that an average person would not say “cure for mental diseases”, “ or “psychiatry” if asked for the first associations with drugs. However, current research suggests that psychedelics might be very well used in treating various mental disorders: There are studies showing positive effects of psychedelics on addiction, cancer-related anxiety and depression. Moreover, they silence the area which is hyperactive in depression and anxiety and this way prevent people from ruminating and getting caught in bad thoughts about themselves. This means they are very likely to soon be competing with the traditional antidepressants. “Can I get some acid, doc?” might soon not be as unrealistic as you think!
In the end I would like to quote Robin Carhart-Harris, one of the leading researchers on the topic and my current scientific crush right now, because what he says is BEAUTIFUL and FASCINATING:
“One hypothesis is that what you’re actually seeing is the functional organization of the visual cortex itself. The visual cortex is organized in a sort of fractal way [it repeats the same patterns in different sizes]. It’s the same way that fractals are everywhere in nature. Like tree branches, the brain recapitulates [itself],” says Carhart-Harris. “You’re not seeing the cells themselves, but the way they’re organized — as if the brain is revealing itself to itself”.
Shooting lasers into brain: sci-fi or reality?
Of all the stuff I came to do as a neuroscience undegrad there is one thing I particularly like to brag about. I shone lasers into mice brains, sliced them (brain, not mice) and created pretty fluorescent pictures out of them. Isn’t this the coolest opener at a party?
The way to have this kind of fun is called optogenetics and it is one of the hottest techniques in neuroscience right now. Pioneered by Karl Deisseroth of the Stanford University, this method is spreading like a wildfire through the neuroscience world and that for a good reason. As the name already suggests, genetical and optical technology are at play there. Gene technology is used to make specific cells light-sensitive, that is, to make them activate (or to shut down) when light falls on them and optical methods (=light) are used to subsequently manipulate these cells. This is done by the following steps:
1) taking a gene encoding a light-sensitive protein from a fluorescent pond algae,
2) spicing it up with what is called a specific promoter which acts like a password and ensures that the gene only gets expressed in the specific cells of interest,
3) inserting this biochemical cocktail into a carriage virus (viruses have evolved to carry genetic information in them and then replicating it in the host cell),
4) injecting it into the rodent’s brain and implanting a light delivery mechanism — optical fibre— in it’s skull,
5) waiting for a couple of weeks to let the gene express and then finally shining a light onto the manipulated cells in order to turn them on or off.
This is how it loos like in the end:
Can you already guess what it means for the research? It means PLENTY (I will try not to fangirl too hard). We can overcome the caveats of previous methods such as electrophysiology (spatial precision not optimal, meaning you can accidentally coactivate cells you don’t intend to bother) or pharmacological manipulations (drugs’ effects are too slow compared to the real-life neurotransmission). We can achieve unprecedented specificity — we can manipulate specific ion channels or cells secreting a specific neurotransmitter, we can go very deep in the brain and reversibly activate a particular subset of neurons, we can perform manipulations at the real working speed of the brain, we can establish causal relationships between phenomena which were previously solely correlated, for God’s sake!
TL;DR: It is now possible to basically switch a behaviour associated with a specific neuronal circuits on and off again on a milliseconds time-range in living and freely moving animals. I hope you are as excited as me by this point. If not, hold on, it will get even better (spoiler: some videos are coming).
So far it sounded pretty theoretical, so let’s look at some spectacular examples.
1) Amygdala is an almond-shaped structure deep in your brain playing role in things like emotional processing, fear conditioning and aggressive behaviour. Researchers managed to dissect its neuronal circuitry, identifiying two non-overlapping subpopulations of its medial part and showed how they are responsible for different social (e.g. aggression) and asocial (e.g. repetitive self-grooming) behaviours. Moreover, the subpopulations act in an antagonistic manner meaning that when one is active, another one is suppressed. Let’s see how it worked. When researchers artificially activated inhibitory neuronal subpopulation in the medial amygdala this happened (I couldn’t insert the videos over legal issues so click on the link, scroll ALL THE WAY DOWN to “Supplementary information” and click on the Video 1. Believe me, it’s worth the effort):
The mouse went from Dora the explorer to a blood-thirsty viking!
Whereas when the second, excitatory, cell subpopulation was activated this happened (now do the same but with Video 3):
The mouse just forgot about protecting it’s territory and went totally hippie and relaxed.
2). Another fascinating example which made rounds in the media is creating a false memory in a mouse. While an MIT scientist Steve Ramirez was listening to Taylor Swift and wishing he could forget about his ex he started to wondering whether it is possible to manipulate memories. The result of these wonderings was astonishing: he and his colleagues made a mouse believe that something terrible happened in an environment where actually nothing bad happened. It went like this: they tagged the cells which encoded the memory for a specific context (a harmless box A) with the light-sensitive proteins and then optically activated this memory in another box simultaneously with a delivery of a foot-shock. This way mouse was made to associate a traumatic experience with a memory of a context not connected to this experience. Indeed, when placed back to the box where nothing happened, the mouse froze in fear, seemingly waiting for the electrical shock to come.
You can find more here (I am not very good with embedding videos on WordPress yet…):
Of course, there are much more studies using optogenetics ranging from changing the valence of memories connected to specific contextes (hello, PTSD treatment!) to reversing acquired blindness. And, of course, it is not the long awaited flawless technique send to us from above. It has its flaws and challenges and we are still far from implementing it in humans. But hey, who would have thought ten years ago that something like that would be possible?
Brains and stuff 