By mapping the human brain, we will inevitably have a greater comprehensive understanding of how it functions. In this TED talk, Allan Jones explains how his team of researchers is mapping the brain by investigating which genes are turned on in each region and how these regions link up. According to Allan Jones: “Understanding how our genes are used in our brains will help scientists and the medical community better understand and discover new treatments for the full spectrum of brain diseases and disorders.”

The Allen Institute

Sometimes it can be tough to explain the research work that I am involved in right now: I can’t just say “I study the interaction between the hippocampus and the pre-frontal cortex” because inevitably, I get blank stares. So instead, I say “Neuroscience–brain stuff!” But I find this unfortunate: I want to be able to explain my research interests to people – even though they might be unfamiliar with neuroscience – without having to go into a 15-minute neuroanatomy lesson. But this is no fault of theirs: they have just never been exposed to the anatomy of the brain.

In grade school and high school most people are exposed to the body in anatomy classes and text-book diagrams. This tends not be true for the brain – the first time I was exposed to its anatomy was in my first neuroscience course, at a university. However, I think it is a necessary foundation for children to understand their own brains, even at a simplistic level. This is why I was excited to find that Erica Warp and Jessica Voytek have created an inspirational and fascinating children’s storybook called Ned the Neuron. It’s great to know that there are indeed ways that children can learn accurate information about the brain. And although this is a children’s book, I would recommend it to adults, too! This is certainly a step in the right direction toward bringing knowledge of neuroscience to the general public. I’ve already bought my copy!

Sources:
Ned the Neuron – Erika Warp and Jessica Voytek
A Dynamic Neuron & His Dynamic Poster At Society for Neuroscience 2012 – CENtral Science

As feminism becomes mainstream, much of scientific research is following suit, from a book being written about female sexuality to mapping out the female orgasm in the brain.

For many feminists, this effort to better understand female sexuality can be a means of empowerment, and it is not surprising that neuroscience research has branched into this area. Many people, rightfully so, believe that to understand our body and mind we must also understand the mechanisms of behavior in the brain. Yet due to its complexity, much of neuroscience research gets misinterpreted, reduced, or even generalized when written about for the public sphere.

Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography, attempts to explain female sexuality by pulling from both subjective accounts and neuroscience to support her arguments. But what exactly does neuroscience research have to contribute to our knowledge of female sexuality? Although Wolf’s attempt at writing such a boldly stated book is admirable, it fell short, especially in terms of the science. Wolf misinterprets the roles of dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin in the brain and how they could plausibly influence a female’s romantic relationships.

As Maia Szalavits so eloquently wrote:

“The kind of oversimplification seen in Wolf’s book and, sadly, in many other popular accounts of neuroscience, threatens to perpetuate a psychological myth. Rather than illuminating the complex interplay between mind and body, it portrays human beings — especially women — as automatons, enslaved by brain chemicals we cannot control.”

So what does neuroscience have to say about female sexuality? At last year’s Society for Neuroscience Conference in Washington D.C., a 3D movie was presented of the brain during a female orgasm. Barry Komisaruk, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to map brain activity in several women. The women were required to masturbate to an orgasm in the fMRI machine. (fMRI results are brain images reflecting activation in specific areas, and these areas are said to be lit up.)

Many areas lit up during the scanning, first, the sensory areas mapped to the genitals in the cortex. Next, the insula cortex, which is an area that is also activated when individuals experience pain. Since an orgasm is pleasurable and not painful, the researchers postulate that this is an activation of inhibitory neurons, because during an orgasm sensitivity to pain is decreased. Then activation migrates to the amygdala: many believe this area is part of the fear circuit, but others believe that it is actually activated in response to all salient information: the latter better explains its activation here. Next, the hippocampus is activated, the area especially devoted to the consolidation of memories. The pre-frontal cortex is also lit up, which could make sense because the individuals were actively pleasuring themselves, a decision requiring the executive function of the PFC. The next two areas of activation are where Wolf misinterpreted the role of the neurochemicals involved: the hypothalamus is activated, excreting oxytocin, and the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, which is largely known as the pleasure center in the brain and once the orgasm is finished the activation subsides.

It is quite fascinating that there is now such openness in science that allows for the study of previously taboo subject matter: the female orgasm. But the findings from neuroscience research should not be reduced to explain matters of the behavior so flippantly. More caution should be taken when writing about the brain especially regarding fMRI studies, because activation in the brain through imaging studies is not quite equatable to behavior. For instance, although the area in the nucleus accumbens is activated during pleasure due to the release of dopamine, it does not mean that dopamine’s release from the nucleus accumbens is solely responsible for female sexual pleasure. As seen from the video, many brain areas are involved in a complex manner during a female orgasm.

Read more:
Naomi Wolf’s Vagina Aside, What Neuroscience Really Says About Female Desire – Time
Naomi Wolf defends Vagina – Slate
The first 3D movie of the female orgasm in the brain – Time

Creative artists not only experience the world differently they also view the world differently. Picasso and Kandinsky, two of the well known creative geniuses of our time, both had disorders that forced them to perceive their world differently: could these disorders be one of the underlying factors that facilitated their genius?

Strabismus & Picasso
Stereopsis, the ability to have depth perception, is important for artists in order for them to paint the three-dimensional world realistically but new studies have shown that possibly many great artists did not have depth perception. Pablo Picasso, one of the many artists who had strabismus – abnormal alignment of the eyes – was able to create amazing pieces of art despite his inability to perceive depth. For him, this disorder made it easier for him to reproduce his two-dimensional representation of his subject matter. Margaret S. Livingstone and Bevil R. Conway state that “someone who cannot perceive depth from stereopsis may be more aware of—and therefore better able to capture—the other, monocular, cues to depth and distance, such as perspective, shading, and occlusion.” This can be seen in the painting on the left, Picasso’s The Old Guitarist where his shading skill and lack of depth perception is apparent. Picasso, is largely known for his cubist pieces, it is evident that going the route to cubism was ideal for his skill set due to his disorder.

Synesthesia & Kandinsky
Synesthesia is a neurological disorder where activation of one sensory areas instantly activates another sensory area. Wassily Kandinsky, for example, saw colors when he listened to music–when his auditory cortex was stimulated, his visual cortex was instantly stimulated. This cross wiring can make day to day activities hard–raindrops on an umbrella send flashes of color across ones visual field. But for artists, especially for Kandinsky, this disorder opened a wave of creativity. The piece reproduced below was made by Kandinsky while listening to a classical piece. It has been said that Kandinsky created a schema to represent the myriad tones and chords–yellow represented middle C on a trumpet, combinations of colors represented piano vibrational frequencies. The movement exhibited by his brushstrokes and the vivid color palette he uses make his pieces unbelievably beautiful. If it was not for his disorder this piece and all his other pieces would be drastically different.

Harvard Medicine: Neurobiology of the Arts

Wassily Kandinsky

Pablo Picasso

Artist Yaron Steinburg’s installation piece for any brain-lover is a masterpiece. This piece is not only stunningly beautiful but also thought provoking. At first glance, it may look merely like brain model made out of cardboard boxes. After taking a deeper look inside, however, a myriad of complex ideas can be observed. The complexity of the piece is deceptively hidden within the brain itself, wherein a booming city lies. The city looks like a seemingly unorganized mess, much like the many interacting regions of the human brain itself. The true brilliance of the piece though lies in looking past this cluttered city, and viewing the piece (and its message about the nature of the brain) for what it really is: an organized mess of infinite complexity and beauty.

Yaron Steinburg’s Portfolio

How you feel influences what you see, it is not just what you see that influences how you feel; a top down approach to understanding the visual system.

Affective Circumplex: Affect can vary in terms of valence (positive/negative) and arousal (high/low).

A great analogy for understanding how affect (the experience of an emotion) influences perception is to think of affect as a spotlight, or a source of “attention” that sheds light on the external world. This is known as a top-down process because the cortical and sub cortical levels of the brain directly influence what one externally experiences. This is opposed to a bottom-up process wherein external stimuli influences processing in the brain (an example of this process would be hearing something hit the floor behind you and immediately shifting your attention to that object). The brain uses both of these processes interchangeably, but it has only been recently that a top-down understanding of the visual system (a system that has classically been believed to be primarily regulated by external stimuli and how such stimuli influence attention) has been accepted. Many studies by Lisa Feldman Barrett and the Interdisciplinary Affective Sciences lab at Northeastern University seem to have proved strong evidence against the popular claim that the bottom-up system is the sole means by which perception can be influenced.

Affect has a greater influence on our perception than many would think. If placed in an unpleasant mood state, many people are usually more inclined to attend to smiling, scowling, and neutral faces. If placed in a pleasant mood state, however, people tend to be more inclined to attend to smiling faces. Indeed, during a binocular rivalry test in which a specific face (smiling, scowling or neutral) was presented to one of a test subject’s eyes, and a house to the other, mood induction was shown to determine which face would be viewed. The two percepts in this test compete for visual dominance, and it was apparent that the mood of the test subject directly influenced if the he/she would be more likely to attend to the faces and report whether they viewed a scowling, smiling, or neutral face. This test, and many others, seem to show that our affective state can directly influence what we deem as important to attend to in day to day life. Moreover, Could the gossip of other people, and what they tell us to believe as having “negative” or “positive” connotations truly influence our own sense of perception?

It is surprising to think that something as run of the mill as gossip could influence what we see. But, gossip is a social behavior that provides information (negative or positive) about another person, and thus it makes sense that such information could seep in and influence our perception. As Lisa Feldman Barret states in the video above, a neutral face that was gossiped about negatively was seen more often than a positive face that was gossiped about, a neutral face presented but not gossiped about or a novel face. While it is known that faces are usually more salient to us as a whole since we have evolved to be more attuned to faces, gossiped faces have been shown to be even more salient to us than faces alone. This study seems to show the kind of top down processing that can occur and influence our latent perception of certain things, as previously stored information derived from gossip influences what we tend to attend to, and how we perceive it!

Science: Visual Impact of Gossip – Sciencexpress

The Visual Impact of Gossip (supporting online material) – Science

See it with feeling: affective predictions during object perception – Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

What you feel influences what you see: The role of affective feelings in resolving binocular rivalry – Journal of Experimental Psychology

Research has been conducted that proves that our thoughts can control the rate of firing of neurons in our brain. This research reveals the crucial advancement of brain-operated machines in the field. John P. Donoghue at Brown University has conducted research that uses neural interface systems (NISs) to aid paraplegics. NISs allows people to control artificial limbs; individuals simply need to think about commanding their artificial limbs and signals are sent down from their brain to control the movement of these limbs! This great feat is not the only applicable result of current research done by brain-machine interfaces. Dr. Frank Guenther of Boston University uses implanted electrodes in a part of the brain that controls speech to tentatively give a voice back to those who have been struck mute by brain injuries. The signals produced from these electrodes are sent wirelessly to a machine that is able to synthesize and interpret these signals into speech. This is specifically useful for patients suffering from locked in syndrome, wherein an individual with a perfectly normal brain is unable to communicate due to specific brain damage, and thus allowing these individuals to communicate with the world! These discoveries are not only incredibly useful, but they also reveal the astonishing feats that the field of computational neuroscience is accomplishing in the world today.

On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons

Guenther, Boston University

Donoghue, Brown University