Are there REALLY parts of the brain dedicated to categories of thoughts like some reports say?

The field of neuroscience has undoubtedly expanded over the past two decades, and the explosion of all this cutting-edge discovery has inevitably lead to its proliferation in our culture. However, the spread of interest to the general population has begun to instigate the problematic phenomenon of what some scientists deem “neurobabble”. It refers to the overly simplified and misinterpreted information that many contemporary writers use to appeal to the public. Neurobabble in recent pop-science books and articles often engenders false conclusions and denies proper understanding about how the brain really works.

Society’s absorption of this ‘neurobabble’ has somewhat elevated the brain into a cultish status, mythologizing its functions and romanticizing the promise of research applications. Anyone could walk into a bookstore now and come across a magazine article exhibiting vibrantly colored images of brain scans coupled with a beguiling title such as “The Part of The Brain Responsible for Being in Love!” It’s the kind of phrase that fools people into thinking a psychological event can be equivalently replaced by a biological one. And it attracts many of us because it appears to offer explanatory answers to the questions we really care about. But to believe that something as ambiguous and abstract as love can be simply defined as a localized function is not only flawed reasoning, but utterly unsupported by the neuroscientific evidence of the brain as an extremely interconnected and dynamic network.

The media is particularly fond of fMRI studies because the visual aspect seems to make the claims of neurobabble more persuasive. One fallacy people unfamiliar with neuroscience are apt to assume is that the particular part of the brain that “lights up” in the MRI  scanner is accountable for the behavior, emotion, etc. of the person inside. But the machines aren’t directly measuring any real-time, chemical or electrical neural activity; rather, they measure changes in oxygen content in blood. The more neurons fire, the more O2 is used. So activity in the area is being measured, but there’s always ‘background noise’.

Imagine a scenario in which two different men volunteer for an experiment in which they both view pictures of their wives in an fMRI, and those conducting the study look at the areas thought to be involved in ‘empathy’ or ‘love’ based on previous research. Firstly, all brains are unique. There is a lot of variation in background brain activity, including how susceptible neural patterns can be to experimental conditions. Inside an enormous, loud, hollow machine certainly isn’t a natural environment. So can we really conclude that one man loves his wife more than the other because of the results?

Because of the rich technical and conceptual sophistication involved in the questions we really want answered, it’s tempting even for specialists to make overstatements and say things that make no sense. David Eagleman (a neuroscientist at the Baylor college of Medicine) had said in his book “Incognitio: The Secret Lives of The Brain” that neuroimaging scans may someday be used to identify those with the potential to commit crime. He goes as far to say that (quite Orwellian-ly) “some people will need to be taken off the streets on the basis of their fMRIs”.

Pop culture loves twisting neuroscience!

A pod cast by Rationally Speaking & NYC Skeptics used a metaphor to depict the manner of how the brain works and shed light on the neurobabble issue:

Suppose you were running a desktop computer and you were observing which components of the hardware were active when a procedure (we’ll call it Graphics Displays) was carried out. You notice one part of the computer is active when graphics are displayed, but when that active part is taken out, they cannot be displayed. So you assume THAT component causes the display. But… it could be that the graphics are run by another component, but the process of graphics display is so energy intensive that it produces an amount of heat that activates the computer’s cooling device, always active during graphics. So that initial component could actually be for regulating the machine’s temperature, and some automatic safeguards recognized its absence, preventing graphics displays.

The moral of the metaphor is that correlation never implies causation. As a neuroscience student myself, I’ll urge you to be wary of bad claims. Ask yourself questions when you come across them.  Here’s a reliable method: Assume the brain is the most complex object in the entire universe. If a claim about it sounds too simple to be true, then it probably is!

Neurobabble obscures deeper significance of brain science – UCLA Today
The End of Evil?
Neuroscientists suggest there is no such thing. Are they right? – Slate
Neurobabble – Rationally Speaking

Ever wonder why people still “talk with their hands” when they’re on the telephone? We often use hand gestures while speaking even at times when the listener cannot see them. Gestures are processed in the same areas of the brain as speech (think sign language): the left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca’s) and the posterior middle temporal gyrus (Wenicke’s area). Hand movements help us to communicate more efficiently and emphasize certain points of the message we are trying to convey to our conversational partners. They’re an indication of our thought process throughout the discussion. Evolutionary insight proposes that the language brain regions, which originally supported the pairing of body language and meaning, have been adapted in humans for spoken language; however, we still don’t know precisely the reason why people gesture, and more interestingly, why some people use gestures more often than others.

A team of German researchers recently conducted a study suggesting a strong relationship between gesturing, fluid intelligence, and brain development. The scientists at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin selected fifty-one 11th graders gifted in math and science for their experiment and separated them into groups of high and average fluid intelligence, which is responsible for learning and recognizing patterns. They asked both groups to solve analogy tasks that involved pairing sets of geometric configurations correctly. The students with higher fluid intelligence obviously performed better on the task than the students with average fluid intelligence, but they also produced more representational hand and arm gestures while describing how they solved the problems.

All of the students verbally explained the same method to solve the problems, but the students’ intelligence could be distinguished by simply observing their hand movements. The researchers considered that specifically the motion of hands rotating around an imaginary axis (a strategy that was never mentioned in the students’ accounts of the problems) was a reflection of mentally rotating the shapes and using spatial reasoning. Participants with higher fluid intelligence therefore engaged in more active mental representation during problem solving.

Furthermore, fMRI scans of the students’ brains showed that individuals with higher fluid intelligence and who had demonstrated more hand gestures showed greater cortical thickness in Broca’s areas and other areas in the left hemisphere such as the superior frontal cortex.

Both gesture and speech appear to be founded on the same underlying system of simulated action in mental imagery. We haven’t concluded whether gestures facilitate the development of fluid intelligence or whether the gestures themselves are its product. However, since young children are shown to gesture when learning new concepts and expressing new ideas, the activity may facilitate in cognitive development by simulating thought.

Show Your Hands – Are You Really Clever? Reasoning, Gesture Production and Intelligence – Linguistics: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Language Sciences

Using the human nervous system as a representational medium, are there parts of the universe that are innately unknowable to us- are there realities that we can experience but not objectively measure? Is spirituality real, or a man-made delusion to justify ambiguous emotions and guide behavior? Is consciousness an emergent property or does it extend beyond?

These are timeless ontological questions that have been posed by both philosophers and the common man for centuries. But only recently has the new field of neurotheology, the study of correlations between neural phenomena and subjective experiences of spirituality, emerged on the scene to advance our understanding of what the brain undergoes during religious practices. Whereas before we could only rely on logic and speculation in an attempt to tackle some of these controversial issues, today neuroscientists are beginning to uncover substantial information regarding the relationship between brain activity and “the feeling of God”.

Scientists have long been intrigued by claims of mystical encounters. Though these assertions may seem to be all too uncommon and even downright outlandish in an increasingly “secular” nation, still a survey by the Pew Form on Religion and Public Life demonstrated that nearly half of American adults today have had what they consider a “religious” or “mystical experience” of some kind. In order to investigate the biological basis of these obscure episodes, scientists first explored the effects of psychedelic drugs, which have a long history of traditional use in religion. Since users of psychedelics often report of the drug’s ability to elicit a sense of the spiritual, as well as promote mental healing, researchers sought empirical support for the notion that psychedelic drugs could facilitate “religious experiences”.

In fact, the first major study of psychedelics and spirituality took place on Good Friday, 1962 in the basement of Marsh Chapel right here at Boston University. In The Marsh Chapel Experiment, Harvard researchers administered LSD to ten divinity students to discover whether the sacred environment combined with the drug would educe a spiritual experience. Nine out of the ten reported a “profound sense of spiritual awe” and afterward similar research was conducted at other prominent universities until the LSD experiments were prohibited by the US government in the 70’s.

Current research suggests that the serotonin system is the key player in such mystical experiences. The neurotransmitter serotonin (5-HT)  has complex behavioral effects, specifically in the role it plays in regulation of mood and arousal.  Several hallucinogenic drugs produce their effects by interacting with serotonergic transmission, and LSD is a direct agonist for postsynaptic 5HT2a receptors in the forebrain. Some studies now are replicating the ones from the 1960s in which patients with end-stage cancer are given LSD to see if they’re convinced that life exists beyond death. The research raises the question: is God a delusion created by brain chemistry, or is brain chemistry a necessary conduit for people to reach God?

Andrew Newberg, Director of Research at the Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, and author of  “Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science & The Biology of Belief” offers his own insight: “It comes down to belief systems,” When a religious person looks at our brain scans, they say, ‘Ah, that’s where God has an interaction with me.’ An atheist looks at the data and says, ‘There it is. It’s nothing more than what’s in your brain.’ Even if I do a brain scan of somebody who tells me that they’ve seen God, that scan only tells me what their brain was doing when they had that experience, and it doesn’t tell me whether or not they actually did see God.”

Professor Orrin Devinsky, director of The Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at NYU Langone Medical, informs that sufferers of epilepsy often claim to have seen or heard religious figures- and that epileptic activity takes place in the temporal lobe, a key center of emotions and memory. Neurologists now propose that they’ve found  this to be the anatomical center where we perceive our ‘spirituality’. However, Devinsky also reveals himself to not be a complete reductionist as he gives this analogy in an interview on the issue of neurotheology: “If two people were together involved in an intimate conservation and realized that they loved each other, and experienced that emotion we refer to as love, there would be a change in their brain states, probably in the temporal lobe – however, does that negate the presence of true love between them? Of course not. When you get into spirituality, as a scientist, it becomes extremely difficult to say anything other than ‘it’s possible’.”

Institute For the Biocultural Study of Religion

NPR: This Is Your Brain On Religion

Andrew Newberg & Neurotheology

Synesthesia is a neurological condition which joins sensory perceptions. The most common variety links numbers and letters (and often words like the days of the week) with colors. However people with synethesia can experience a slew of unique sensations ranging from tasting shapes to seeing sounds.

In neurologist Richard Cytowic’s book, ‘The Man Who Tasted Shapes’, a synesthetic dinner host describes his experiences: “When I taste something with an intense flavor, the feeling sweeps down my arms into my fingertips. I feel its weight, texture, [temperature], everything. I feel it like I’m actually grasping something.” For him, the taste and aroma of a meal elicit a strong tactile sensation.

Before extensive studies had been conducted on this condition, accounts of synathetic experiences were viewed as out-of-the-ordinary imaginative metaphors and not taken seriously. But in recent years Cytowic has heavily researched synesthesia and has determined its diagnostic criteria, the most significant being that these mixed perceptions are involuntary and automatic.

Tests such as the one below have shown to prove the case.  When the image to the left is presented to an individual without the condition, he/she considers it slightly difficult to distinguish the 5’s from the 2’s. Synesthetes (in particular those with a number-color association) can almost seamlessly make the distinction between the numbers due to the specific colors which they may have come to innately pair with them (as the image on the right shows, the synesthete associates 5 with green and 2 with red).

There have been multiple theories for synesthesia. A popular one suggested that it was caused by neural “cross-wiring” between interpretive areas. For example, a color processing region in the brain’s visual cortex called V4 lies adjacent to an area responsible for identifying letters and numbers, and a mixed perception of color and letters/numbers could be attributed to cross activation between these areas.

However,  Cytowic and his collegue David Eagleman propose a better hypothesis: that the neurological condition is really caused by a slight difference in the balance of excitation and inhibition. When chemical inhibitors, which repress other types of processing during a specific sense experience, are blocked, it is possible to sense blue from a red object without any contradiction. This theory was put forward because we know that non-synesthetes can aquire synethesic “symptoms” under the influence of psychoactive drugs like LSD.  So, we’re all capable of producing unnatural sensory combinations, but a lucky few of us can do it everyday.

The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard E. Cytowic

Dr. Richard E. Cytowic’s Website

Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Synesthesia

In the 2009 film Avatar, scientists exploring the planet Pandora used alien hybrid bodies called “avatars” that functioned through a mental connection established with their genetically-matched human counterparts.

While this kind of technology seems as science fictionally fantastic as only the movies can portray it, recent work in the neuro-scientific community may lead the world to think otherwise.  Neu­rol­o­gist Olaf Blanke, with the Brain Mind In­stitute at Ecole Poly­technique Fédérale de Lau­sanne in Switzer­land, led a Virtual-Reality (VR) experiment utilizing computerized “virtual humans” to gain a deeper understanding of the neurobiological basis for the knowledge of one’s location in space.  Interestingly, his team seems to have discovered that the sensation of possessing a body arises as part of our own conscious experience.

Blanke and his team had vol­unteers wear VR stereoscopic visors, or view projections on a large screen, while the researchers challenged them about fundamental aspects of self perception.  The scientists physically touched the subjects ei­ther in sync or out of sync with their dig­ital human “avatars” as they wandered through 3D environments, and even ‘immersed’ them into an avatar of the opposite sex.  They also changed the subject’s perspective from the first to the third-person point of view.  While such methods may seem a bit odd and even unorthodox, the response of the subjects to such testing was both highly positive and truly fascinating.  Indeed, as Blanke commented regarding his own observations: “They start think­ing that the avatar is their own body;  we cre­ated a partial out-of-body experience.  We were able to disas­sociate touch and vi­sion and make people think that their body was two me­tres in front of them”.

Throughout the experiement, subjects were fitted with  electrode-containing skullcaps to record the electrical activity produced by their brains.  The data collected by the electrodes and brain imaging scans (via fMRI) during the study demonstrated a height­ened response in the temporo-pa­ri­etal and frontal regions of the vol­unteer’s brains, areas classically considered responsible for integrating touch and vision.  These findings suggest that the subjects’ brains were successfully being tricked as they experienced their own “bodies” in virtual space.

Progression in the knowledge of self-awareness and virtual reality could lead to major advances in the fields of robotics, neuro-rehabilitation and even severe-pain treatment.  Imagine being able to temporarily “leave” the body as it heals after a serious injury!  Though we may never get to explore Pandora, the implications of such out of body “avatar” experiences could be enormous.

Scientists project humans into avatars – Financial Times

Scientists explore the meaning of self-consciousness – Irish Times

The real avatar – EurekAlert