What Neuroscience Really Teaches Us, and What It Doesn’t Everyone who has ever looked at a pretty fMRI scan or read a popular science article linking some sexy human behavior to a blob on a pretty brain scan (so, “nearly everyone”) needs to read this blog entry at The New Yorker: …a lot of those reports are based on a false premise: that neural tissue that lights up most in the brain is the only tissue involved in some cognitive function. The brain, though, rarely works that way. Most of the interesting things that the brain does involve many different pieces of tissue working together. Saying that emotion is in the amygdala, or that decision-making is the prefrontal cortex, is at best a shorthand, and a misleading one at that. Different emotions, for example, rely on different combinations of neural substrates. The act of comprehending a sentence likely involves Broca’s area (the language-related spot on the left side of the brain that they may have told you about in college), but it also draws on the parts of the brain in the temporal lobe that analyze acoustic signals, and part of sensorimotor cortex and the basal ganglia become active as well. (In congenitally blind people, some of the visual cortex also plays a role.) It’s not one spot, it’s many, some of which may be less active but still vital, and what really matters is how vast networks of neural tissue work together. Don’t lose faith. Techniques like fMRI have unlocked some amazing science about the workings of the brain, but they are still pretty low-resolution, and can only take snapshots. What about the actions of individual neurons that fMRI can’t see? What if some processes are explained better using dynamic observations instead of snapshots, like video instead of photos? Considering that dead salmon can show brain activity on fMRI, we need to be pretty careful when saying that “Blob X” is linked to “Condition Y”. It doesn’t say that everything you’ve heard is false, just that… …simple explanations of complex brain functions that often make for good headlines rarely turn out to be true. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t explanations to be had, it just means that evolution didn’t evolve our brains to be easily understood. Considering it’s the most advanced biological computer ever created, that shouldn’t surprise anyone, right? (via The New Yorker)
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What Neuroscience Really Teaches Us, and What It Doesn’t

Everyone who has ever looked at a pretty fMRI scan or read a popular science article linking some sexy human behavior to a blob on a pretty brain scan (so, “nearly everyone”) needs to read this blog entry at The New Yorker:

…a lot of those reports are based on a false premise: that neural tissue that lights up most in the brain is the only tissue involved in some cognitive function. The brain, though, rarely works that way. Most of the interesting things that the brain does involve many different pieces of tissue working together. Saying that emotion is in the amygdala, or that decision-making is the prefrontal cortex, is at best a shorthand, and a misleading one at that. Different emotions, for example, rely on different combinations of neural substrates. The act of comprehending a sentence likely involves Broca’s area (the language-related spot on the left side of the brain that they may have told you about in college), but it also draws on the parts of the brain in the temporal lobe that analyze acoustic signals, and part of sensorimotor cortex and the basal ganglia become active as well. (In congenitally blind people, some of the visual cortex also plays a role.) It’s not one spot, it’s many, some of which may be less active but still vital, and what really matters is how vast networks of neural tissue work together.

Don’t lose faith. Techniques like fMRI have unlocked some amazing science about the workings of the brain, but they are still pretty low-resolution, and can only take snapshots. What about the actions of individual neurons that fMRI can’t see? What if some processes are explained better using dynamic observations instead of snapshots, like video instead of photos?

Considering that dead salmon can show brain activity on fMRI, we need to be pretty careful when saying that “Blob X” is linked to “Condition Y”. It doesn’t say that everything you’ve heard is false, just that…

…simple explanations of complex brain functions that often make for good headlines rarely turn out to be true. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t explanations to be had, it just means that evolution didn’t evolve our brains to be easily understood.

Considering it’s the most advanced biological computer ever created, that shouldn’t surprise anyone, right?

(via The New Yorker)

Source: newyorker.com

Weaving Neuroscience and Art Together What’s that? Wooden brains aren’t enough for you? Ok, since you can’t get enough, here’s some amazing knitted brain art. These are real fMRI scans and anatomical studies translated into yarn and woven into rugs! There’s actually a whole mini-museum for this stuff, appropriately titled “The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Brain Art”. Best “weaving” of science and art since these math-inspired creations of New Mexico artist Donna Loraine Contractor. Even more: Here’s some yarn playing tricks on your brain, via “Illusion Knitting”.
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Weaving Neuroscience and Art Together What’s that? Wooden brains aren’t enough for you? Ok, since you can’t get enough, here’s some amazing knitted brain art. These are real fMRI scans and anatomical studies translated into yarn and woven into rugs! There’s actually a whole mini-museum for this stuff, appropriately titled “The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Brain Art”. Best “weaving” of science and art since these math-inspired creations of New Mexico artist Donna Loraine Contractor. Even more: Here’s some yarn playing tricks on your brain, via “Illusion Knitting”.
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Weaving Neuroscience and Art Together

What’s that? Wooden brains aren’t enough for you? Ok, since you can’t get enough, here’s some amazing knitted brain art. These are real fMRI scans and anatomical studies translated into yarn and woven into rugs!

There’s actually a whole mini-museum for this stuff, appropriately titled “The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Brain Art”. Best “weaving” of science and art since these math-inspired creations of New Mexico artist Donna Loraine Contractor.

Even more: Here’s some yarn playing tricks on your brain, via “Illusion Knitting”.

Man in coma uses his thoughts to tell doctors, ‘I’m not in pain’ Building from a 2010 finding that comatose, “locked in” patients could respond to doctors and “communicate” by scanning their brain activity using fMRI, a “locked in” Canadian man has let his doctors know he is not in pain. Scott Routley has been in a coma for 12 years, but thanks to scans of certain brain activity when he is asked questions, doctors are confident there is a living, aware mind at work in the patient before them. fMRI is difficult to draw a bunch of precise conclusions from, but they were able to tell that he was hearing them, responding to questions, and not in distress. It’s sad to imagine what that must feel like, to be aware, but trapped in an unresponsive body. Bot it’s so wonderful to think how this may affect quality of life for comatose patients in the future. Science is pretty wonderful. (via io9)
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Man in coma uses his thoughts to tell doctors, ‘I’m not in pain’

Building from a 2010 finding that comatose, “locked in” patients could respond to doctors and “communicate” by scanning their brain activity using fMRI, a “locked in” Canadian man has let his doctors know he is not in pain.

Scott Routley has been in a coma for 12 years, but thanks to scans of certain brain activity when he is asked questions, doctors are confident there is a living, aware mind at work in the patient before them. fMRI is difficult to draw a bunch of precise conclusions from, but they were able to tell that he was hearing them, responding to questions, and not in distress.

It’s sad to imagine what that must feel like, to be aware, but trapped in an unresponsive body. Bot it’s so wonderful to think how this may affect quality of life for comatose patients in the future.

Science is pretty wonderful.

(via io9)

Source: io9.com

Adrian Owen: The mind reader

What is the definition of “consciousness”?

Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions.

Incredibly, he provided answers.

A challenging look at the definition of consciousness in those confined to a vegetative state. fMRI studies, for all their shortcomings, have recently challenged long-held notions about brain activity in otherwise unresponsive patients, but what does that mean about their “consciousness”? At what threshold does brain activity become “life”?

There’s lots of controversy about how valid Owen’s studies are, but the story of Patient 23 will certainly make you think twice. A wonderful read.

Does Brain Scanning Show Just the Tip of the Iceberg?

Brain scans + fMRI: What are we seeing and what are we missing?

Two new studies suggest that fMRI studies, the brain activity  scans that give us those “thermal blob” images we are so used to, might be the equivalent of cracking an egg with a sledgehammer. You’ll see an effect, but it’s kind of a brute force blunt object, considering the detail of the job. At the same time, when observations are made outside of “normal” experimental time frames, unexpected and interesting results can show up.

From Neuroskeptic:

As an analogy, suppose that all you knew about your neighbours was from the noises that you heard through the wall. The shouts and screams would be loud enough to reach your eyes; the normal conversations and whispers wouldn’t. If you concluded that all your neighbours did was shout, not talk, you’d get a misleading picture of their relationship.

That’s the bad news. On the other hand, fMRI is clearly more powerful than most neuroscientists have realized, and this holds out hope for cracking some of the trickiest questions facing the field in the future, with larger studies and more sensitive techniques

Can Brain Scans Detect Pedophiles? They don’t know what brain activity they were monitoring exactly, but it seemed to work. Put on your tinfoil hats of a mind-reading justice system … Using fMRI, the researchers recorded their brains’ responses and found that by comparing an individual’s brain to the average of the pedophiles and the average of the controls, they could assign them to the correct group more than 90% of the time. (via 80beats)
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Can Brain Scans Detect Pedophiles?

They don’t know what brain activity they were monitoring exactly, but it seemed to work. Put on your tinfoil hats of a mind-reading justice system …

Using fMRI, the researchers recorded their brains’ responses and found that by comparing an individual’s brain to the average of the pedophiles and the average of the controls, they could assign them to the correct group more than 90% of the time.

(via 80beats)

Source: blogs.discovermagazine.com

 Scientists ‘See’ YouTube Videos in the Mind What if what you saw with your eyes could be interpreted in a brain-scanner? Well, that just happened. Check it out: Gallant’s coauthors acted as study subjects, watching YouTube videos inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine for several hours at a time. The team then used the brain imaging data to develop a computer model that matched features of the videos — like colors, shapes and movements — with patterns of brain activity. “Once we had this model built, we could read brain activity for that subject and run it backwards through the model to try to uncover what the viewer saw,” said Gallant. Subtle changes in blood flow to visual areas of the brain, measured by functional MRI, predicted what was on the screen at the time — whether it was Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau or an airplane. The reconstructed videos are blurry because they layer all the YouTube clips that matched the subject’s brain activity pattern. The result is a haunting, almost dream-like version of the video as seen by the mind’s eye. (via  ABC News)
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 Scientists ‘See’ YouTube Videos in the Mind

What if what you saw with your eyes could be interpreted in a brain-scanner? Well, that just happened. Check it out:

Gallant’s coauthors acted as study subjects, watching YouTube videos inside a magnetic resonance imaging machine for several hours at a time. The team then used the brain imaging data to develop a computer model that matched features of the videos — like colors, shapes and movements — with patterns of brain activity.

“Once we had this model built, we could read brain activity for that subject and run it backwards through the model to try to uncover what the viewer saw,” said Gallant.

Subtle changes in blood flow to visual areas of the brain, measured by functional MRI, predicted what was on the screen at the time — whether it was Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau or an airplane. The reconstructed videos are blurry because they layer all the YouTube clips that matched the subject’s brain activity pattern. The result is a haunting, almost dream-like version of the video as seen by the mind’s eye.

(via  ABC News)

Source: abcnews.go.com

What do you get when you put a terrorist inside of a brain scanner? In a perfect future-world you’d be able to plug someone into a machine and know what they liked and didn’t like, if they were lying or being truthful, all at the push of a button.   In our own era, neuroimaging like this has found its way into market research, criminal defense, and now apparently anti-terrorism intelligence. A series of very controversial claims gave hope that fMRI could help us distinguish truth from lies during interrogations by viewing how the brain processes untrue statements. The U.S. military has likely already widely used this, perhaps even on big-shots like KSM. The problem is that fMRI isn’t much more effective than a polygraph (and polygraphs aren’t very useful at all). But despite the concerns of many in the field and piles of scientific evidence against its use, fMRI is reportedly being used as a high-level interrogation tool, perhaps even as a precursor to other equally ineffective “devices” like waterboarding and stress situations. Just because it makes pretty pictures of the brain doesn’t mean that we should be basing national security decisions on it, am I right? (via The Last Word On Nothing)
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What do you get when you put a terrorist inside of a brain scanner?

In a perfect future-world you’d be able to plug someone into a machine and know what they liked and didn’t like, if they were lying or being truthful, all at the push of a button.  

In our own era, neuroimaging like this has found its way into market research, criminal defense, and now apparently anti-terrorism intelligence. A series of very controversial claims gave hope that fMRI could help us distinguish truth from lies during interrogations by viewing how the brain processes untrue statements. The U.S. military has likely already widely used this, perhaps even on big-shots like KSM.

The problem is that fMRI isn’t much more effective than a polygraph (and polygraphs aren’t very useful at all). But despite the concerns of many in the field and piles of scientific evidence against its use, fMRI is reportedly being used as a high-level interrogation tool, perhaps even as a precursor to other equally ineffective “devices” like waterboarding and stress situations.

Just because it makes pretty pictures of the brain doesn’t mean that we should be basing national security decisions on it, am I right?

(via The Last Word On Nothing)

Source: lastwordonnothing.com