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The Brain
Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD
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Brainy Bees
May 1, 2001
It's amazing how un-special we humans are. First it was thought that only we had consciousness. Then they found that chickens had it. Ah well! They said, only humans can have a wide range of emotions. Then they found that any animal with a brain can feel emotion. Well, we're the only ones with speech! Don't tell that to dolphins who have recently been found to have quite complex speech patterns, and regional accents to boot! We're the only ones who use tools? Wrong! Otters, crows and chimpanzees are among the many species making use of tools. The final bastion of human specialness was thought to be the capacity for abstract thought. Alas, even here we are shown to be merely one of many. Parrots have been shown to be quite good mathematicians and now even humble insects are beeing (pardon the pun!) classed as abstract thinkers.
According to a report in the current issue of the journal Nature, the humble honeybee can form "sameness" and "difference," a conceptualizing ability that may help them in their daily foraging activities.
To probe the honeybee's mental prowess, Martin Giurfa of the Free University of Berlin in Germany and his colleagues first trained the insects to associate certain stimuli with a reward: sugar. For example, in one experiment bees saw the color blue at the entrance to a so-called Y-maze. The entrance led to a decision chamber, where the bees could choose between two paths: one carried a blue target, the other carried yellow. The bees received a reward only if they chose blue, the same color as that seen at the entrance. The team then tested whether the bees could apply what they had learned to a new situation. Blue and yellow patches were replaced with black and white patterns of vertical and horizontal bars. The bees passed with flying colors, heading straight for the pattern that matched what they saw at the entrance. Moreover, other experiments revealed that the insects could even transfer their knowledge across the senses: !
bees that learned about sameness through olfactory training were able to apply that concept to situations involving visual stimuli.
These results, the authors conclude, demonstrate that "higher cognitive functions are not a privilege of the vertebrates." Moreover, because the honeybee nervous system is relatively simple, they write, "there is a realistic chance of uncovering the neural mechanisms that underlie this capacity."
The growing proof that human beings are an intrinsic part of nature rather than at the apex of some pyramid goes against many religious doctrines. How many times have you heard Christian minister speak of mankind as "the epitome of God's creation?" Or heard Buddhists speak of a hierarchy of reincarnation, with mankind at the top? Can we really feel one with Creation, or All There Is, when we have to keep up this absurd burden of supremacy? And what moral changes would society have to make in its treatment of animals if it conceded that they do have feelings and perhaps (gasp!) even souls? AF
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Are Women More Emotional than Men? Well, Maybe
April 14, 2001
Psychologists have argued for decades as to whether women were more emotional than men. The jury is still out. However new research from the University of Florida shows that men and women show emotion in different areas of their faces.
Researchers turned to computer technology to quantify gender differences in one component of emotional expression -- how it is revealed by the face. They discovered that although men and women are equally expressive, men display most of their joy, disgust or other sentiments in the lower left quadrant of their face. Women, on the other hand, show their emotions across their entire countenance. How is this significant? A leading hypothesis is that the findings reflect differences in how brains are wired, said Dawn Bowers, an associate professor in the College of Health Professions' clinical and health psychology department. "There's been an argument that the brains of men are more compartmentalized than the brains of women," said Bowers. "Previous research has shown, for example, that for men, language functions are very concentrated in the left hemisphere of their brains, whereas in women they are more equally di!
stributed across the brain.
"It's possible that is also at work in facial expressions -- that the emotional priming systems for men may be located in the right hemisphere but are more dispersed for women." (The right side of the brain usually controls the left side of the body, and vice versa.) Sparked by thoughts, the brain, nerves and muscles work together to produce revealing expressions of joy, anger or sadness. Understanding this complex interaction could provide new insight into human relationships, as well as into illnesses in which facial movements can be affected. These include the flat facade of Parkinson's disease or a facial droop sometimes caused by stroke.
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Addicted To Love
February 14, 2001
Members of SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) have said for a long time that their members were addicted to love the way others were addicted to alcohol and hard drugs.
Mounting evidence is showing that they are right.
Nora Volkow, the associate director for life sciences at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, has analyzed the behaviors of drug addicts and people in love and found striking parallels. "When a person is passionately in love, it is extremely exciting and provocative, and if the loved one is not there, distressing," says Volkow. "When I see my drug addicted patients, it just clicks with me how similar the addiction is."
Using live brain imaging in rats and people, Volkow has shown that drug users have fewer =eceptors for the 'happy hormone,' dopamine, than most. She believes that may mean that taking the drug, or being in love, raises an addict's dopamine levels to the "perfect zone."
The fact that drug addiction and passionate love may trigger the same responses, signals to Volkow that drug addiction is especially dangerous since it taps into a natural sensation. "Dopamine signals for important, salient things," she says. "This means drug addiction is about much more than seeking pleasure."
She points out that recent studies show the same regions of the brain, including the frontal cortex, are activated when a drug addict is high and when someone in love is looking at a picture of a loved one.
Researchers at University College in London recently recorded changes in the brains of people who described themselves as "truly and madly" in love. The researchers, Andreas Bartels and Semir Zeki, used a functional magnetic resonance imager to scan the brains of 17 love-happy volunteers. The team also used lie detectors to screen against any possible exaggerators. When the team showed volunteers photos of their lovers, the results were dramatic. Four small areas of the brain lit up instantly, the same areas that have been shown to respond to euphoria-inducing drugs.
Reported on ABC News
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Obesity Linked to Addiction
February 3, 2001
That overeating is an addiction will not come as news to members of the 12-step program Overeaters Anonymous. What is news is that this has now been confirmed by research carried out at America's Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory.
All forms of addiction have one thing in common. There are fewer receptors for the neurochemical dopamine in addicts' brains. This has now been found to be true in the brains of extremely obese people as well. What is still not known is whether this chemical imbalance is triggered by overeating or whether overeating is a response to the imbalance.
Dopamine is the chemical that produces feelings of satisfaction and pleasure. Addictive pursuits stimulate the limbic system of the brain to produce more of it.
But overeating is also linked to such things as a desire for love (food and love are linked synoptically at the time of birth) or as a result of sexual abuse or other childhood trauma. In many cases obese people are merely compensating for sadness and depression.
But just as depression is a growing worldwide problem, so is obesity.
We have always contended that the two are indissolubly linked. BM
Read more on BBC News
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Eyes Down for a Sharp Mind
February 26, 2001
Want to keep mentally alert well into old age? A British researcher may have found the answer -- bingo!
Bingo needs visual skills and a sharp memory since players have to be able to check numbers off quickly and need rapid hand-eye coordination. It is a game beloved of nearly 3 million sharp-witted pensioners in the UK alone. Some elderly genii play two cards at once and others bring their knitting to prevent themselves from becoming bored.
But the skills needed to play bingo are exactly those which were thought to decline as people aged. It would seem that there is a positive anti-aging benefit to the game. Ms Winstone is now conducting research to find out exactly how many games of bingo are required to keep you mentally alert and is actively seeking volunteers to help her.
"If we can find out an amount of practice that people can do to maintain these abilities, it could have serious implications for how these facts can be used," she says. "I know its often played in nursing homes and residential homes. If we can pin down how much it needs to be played, it would help a lot."
The news of her findings was welcomed by a spokesman from Rank Gambling Division who run many bingo halls in Britain.
Right now: Eyes down for a full brain!
One of the reasons we play games which need quick responses in the Uplift Program is that they not only keep us alert and our brains in shape, but also alleviate the symptoms of depression. Since depression is a growing problem with the elderly I suspect that bingo helps in this area as well. Also since depression is a slowing down of mental activity it maybe that much of the perceived 'age-related' loss of mental faculties may simply be signs of a depressive illness. BM
Read more on BBC News
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Fatty Diet Leads to Flabby Thinking
February 28, 2001
For some time researchers have noted the steady decline in the IQ levels of American children -- something discussed in the controversial book "The Bell Curve" by Herrnstein and Murray (1994).
Various theories have been put forward to account for the phenomenon. Now a new study by Gordon Winocur and Carol Greenwood of the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto, Canada, has thrown new light on the problem.
Part of the cause of the mental decline may lie in the amount of fat that children take in from fast foods such as hamburgers, fries and so forth.
Studies on young rats demonstrated the dramatic effects that a high-fat diet can have. In the experiments one group of rats was fed a normal rat diet and another was fed a diet in which the ratlings received 40% of their calories from fat. By the time they reached rat adolescence they were given mental learning tests. The fatty rats failed miserably. Says Winocur: "High-fat diets impair performance on virtually all our measures. It's remarkable how impaired these animals are."
Winocur believes that the excess fat stops the brain taking up all the glucose energy it needs to develop properly, and that the developing brain may be more susceptible than the adult brain. High fat diets in childhood are also blamed -- alongside a couch-potato lifestyle -- for producing an epidemic of childhood obesity in the Western world.
Read more on BBC News
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Emotion Regulation and Memory
February 10, 2001
An article by Jane Richards and James Gross of Stanford University's Psychology Department in the current edition of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology shows the benefits of not keeping your cool. There are many ways of keeping your cool or repressing your emotions, the authors state. The question is: does regulating your emotions do you any cognitive harm?
We think of emotion suppression as being particularly adult, but frontal brain structures that allow for emotion regulation are evident in infants as young as 9 months, and by age 6 children have developed a sophisticated arsenal of emotion regulatory strategies. One theory says that by adulthood, managing how one looks and feels would have become an automatic response that one draws upon in everyday life and would be so ingrained that it would have no impact on cognitive activities such as memory.
A quite different possibility is that any sort of self-regulation depletes mental resources. The authors relate a study in which participants were shown an emotionally disturbing film. They were told to "try to deny any emotions you may feel.... When I look over the videotape of your facial expressions, I don't want to be able to tell which videotape you are watching." Results revealed that regulation participants (relative to a no-regulation control group) persevered for a shorter period of time on a subsequent handgrip task. In a similar study testing the effects of this emotion-regulation manipulation on a subsequent anagram task, regulation participants were found to solve fewer problems than no-regulation participants.
Apparently cognition -- attention, memory and concentration etc -- is a finite resource. You only have so much of it. Suppressing emotions for whatever reason reduces your cognitive ability because the suppression uses up much of this resource.
Now where did I put that @!?**$%@! pen?
Read the Stanford University article online on the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
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Chimps Don't Get Alzheimer's
February 1, 2001
New research may support the theory that Alzheimer's may have more to do with our lifestyle than with the chemistry of our brains. For example it has long been known that Roman Catholic nuns are very unlikely to get Alzheimer's and that there is a close connection between lack of college education and the disease. It would seem that the more mentally active you stay and more of a supportive community you have around you the less likely you are to suffer from this form of dementia.
Received wisdom has been that insoluble lumps, or plaques, of protein in the brain trigger Alzheimer's disease. However a study of other great apes (gorillas, chimps, bonobos) shows that while they do develop plaques they never get the brain damage associated with dementia. Patrick Hof of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York carried out the study.
The chimp results are surprising because the animals carry genes that are associated with Alzheimer's in humans. All chimps carry two copies of Apoe4, a variant of a gene that helps repair brains cells. Most humans with two copies of Apoe4 get Alzheimer's by the time they are 80 years old. Chimps also have a variant of a gene called Presenilin1, which is associated with early-onset Alzheimer's in humans.
Read about the Mt Sinai study in the New Scientist article published Jan 27th
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When Women Can Read Maps
January 20, 2001
For years women have been the butt of male jokes about their inability to read maps. Indeed we worked with a couple in America recently who said that one of their main problems was that the woman habitually got lost driving or couldn't be relied upon to read a map.
Now, however, researchers at the Ruhr-Universtitat in Bochum, Germany, have discovered that a woman's spatial ability, and hence her ability to read maps, actually increases during her period. (These findings were reported on the BBC News Online on Jan 14).
During most of her monthly cycle higher levels of the female hormone oestrogen are present and these were linked to lower scores on such things as direction finding and map reading. But when levels of the male hormone testosterone were higher, as during their period, women did better.
The interesting evolutionary question is why was it necessary for women to be better spatially orientated during their periods? Any ideas?
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Stress shrinks the Brain
December 12, 2000
We have said for a long time that traumatic childhood stress probably has a profound effect on the physical make up of the brain. Now research reported recently confirms our long-held hypothesis. According to Dr Douglas Bremner, of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, the undue releasing of stress hormines into the brain during times of perceived or actual threat can shrink the area of the brain called the hippocampus. Chronic stress, Bremner said, can also harm mental concentration and reduce a person's learning ability. Stress hormones can "make you think faster and do better," according to Bremner, "but if you release too much you can't think at all." OUR own experience with clients shows that one of the prime causes of learning difficulties in childhood -- including ADHD and ADD -- is childhood trauma.
Read more about Dr Douglas Bremner's study as reported by CNN Online on December 12, 2000.
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About the Author
Dr Bob Murray is a widely published psychologist and expert on emotional health and optimal relationships. Together with his wife and long-term collaborator Alicia Fortinberry, he is founder of the highly successful Uplift Program, and author of Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
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