Scientists from Duke University and Brazil claim wires connecting one rodent to another can allow communication spanning continents via the internet. Professor Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, led a team of researchers who demonstrated that it is possible to transmit instructions from one animal to another by brain-to-brain communication, a process akin to telepathy.

Brain-to-brain communication could be the start of  organic-based computing based on networks of interconnected brains. Pairs of laboratory rats were able to communicate with each other using microscopic electrodes implanted into their brains. This occurred as part of an experiment where the two rats had to work together in order to receive a reward (see video at source).

The researchers had this to say: “as far as we can tell, these findings demonstrate for the first time that a direct channel for behavioral information exchange can be established between two animal’s brains without the use of the animal’s regular forms of communication.” One rat in each pair, assigned to be the encoder, detected the signals of where to find a food reward and had to communicate these instructions to a second decoder rat. Once the second rat followed the first rat’s instructions, both rats would receive a reward. These communications were able to be sent over the internet, with rats at one lab in Brazil communicating with rats at the other lab in North Carolina.

Professor Nicolelis inserted micro-electrode implants into the rats’ brains to record the neuron activity associated with decision-making. Putting these signals through a computer encoder transmitted them to the second rat via wires connected to another set of micro-electrode implants. The second rat learned how to decode the signals quickly for its own use.  Each rat was trained to find water in its cage based on the type of signals they were given. However, only the encoder rat was actually exposed to the signals, which it had to pass on  correctly to the decoder rat. The decoder rats managed to find the reward in about 70% of trials.

What is most interesting, however, was the scientists found that when two rats were paired up they quickly established a rapport based on  some sort of sensory feedback. If the second rat failed at its task, the first rat would modify what it was transmitting to help the second rat. Both rats worked together since they were sufficiently motivated by the reward.

Future work could encode entire thoughts, hopefully connecting more brains to each other, boosted by the effect of sensory feedback rapport.  Professor Christopher James of the University of Warwick, who conducts similar research, said that the technique is still very crude since it relies only on monitoring one part of the rat’s brain for its nerve activity. “Leap into the future by, say, 50 years: if you could stimulate many multiple sites, and if we knew what patterns to use and when, then we may well be able to conjure up complex ‘thoughts’,”  Professor James said. “Abstract thoughts are harder to read and represent; but not impossible technologically.  We can already do that … we just need to understand the brain better.” Professor Nicolelis hopes brain-to-brain communication will expand the capabilities of  intelligence one day, saying “we cannot even predict what kinds of emergent properties would appear when animals begin interacting as part of a brain-net. In theory, you could imagine that a combination of brains could provide solutions that individual brains cannot achieve by themselves.”

Mind-reading rodents: Scientists show ‘telepathic’ rats can communicate using brain-to-brain connections – The Independent

Do you remember telling a lie at 2, 3, or 4? Well, feel guilty no more! Lying is actually a reliable sign of higher cognitive functioning. It was previously accepted that children were able to start lying at 3.5 years and no earlier. However, a recent study by psychologist Angela Evans found that 25% of two-year olds, 50% of three-year olds, and 80% of four-year olds were capable of lies.

How did she manage this? Evans had a group of 41 two-year-olds and 24 three-year-olds presented with a “really tempting situation.”  The child is told to guess a toy based solely on the noise it makes. The experimenter then tells the child not to peek under the box covering the next toy, leaves, and records the child’s actions on a hidden camera. When the experimenter returns, she asks the child whether they cheated and looked at the toy. To explain why these children are lying, Evans concludes that they feel guilty for defying orders from an adult and are trying to pretend that they never did it to clear their conscience.

Study finds this two-year-old may be capable of lying to you about who really took the cookies from the cookie jar.

Children were also tested for certain cognitive abilities and found that these skills are related to their ability to tell lies. This correlation supports the theory that child liars actually have higher executive functions than those that do not lie. Interestingly enough, Evans found that at the age of three, children were able to distinguish between a lie and a truth and even labeled a lie as something bad.

So if you ever find that a child has lied to you, don’t be offended, they’re just exercising their new cognitive skills!

Check out a great interview with Brock University psychologist Angela Evans here.

Sources:

Emergence of Lying in Very young Children-PsycNET

Toddlers start Lying as Early as Age 2 -CBC News Podcast & Article

Here’s a great TED Talk to get everyone thinking today.

Tyler DeWitt is a PhD candidate at MIT and an advocate of the idea that science education in high schools needs to take a turn for the less serious if we want kids to really get excited about it. Instead of the highly technical jargon of textbooks, he is in favor of turning science lessons into storytelling. “Science has become that horrible storyteller…who gives us all the details nobody cares about,” DeWitt says, and his goal is to change that. DeWitt also has a growing library of YouTube videos aiming at exposing students to topics in biology, chemistry, physics, and math in a fun, engaging, and (perhaps most importantly) relatable way.

Pretty music with pretty pictures: all of our brains love that (nothing new to neuroscience there)! Have a fantastic holiday season everyone!

Neuroscience researchers in China have created a method of transforming brainwaves into music by combining EEG and fMRI scans into sounds that are recognizable to human beings. The EEG adjusts the pitch and duration of a note, while the fMRI controls the intensity of the music.  According to Jing Lu and his associated colleagues from the University of Electronic Science and Technology in China,  this brain music, “embodies the workings of the brain as art, providing a platform for scientists and artists to work together to better understand the links between music and the human brain.”

Applying EEG and fMRI data to make better music represents the limitless opportunities of the brain, potentially leading to improvements useful for research, clinical diagnosis or biofeedback therapy. In fact, researchers at the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate have already looked at a form of neuro-training called ‘Brain Music’, which uses music created from an individual’s brain waves to help the individual move from an anxious state to a relaxed state.

A sample of brain music of a patient at resting state is here:

Beats By Brain

Sources:

Remixed Brain Waves Reveal Soundtrack of the Human Brain – Science News

Brainwaves Translated Into Music for Cerebral Soundtrack – Wired

Listen to the sounds of the human mind: Remixed brain scans reveal our inner music – Daily Mail

…Says the slime mold before the zombie ate its brain centuries ago, forcing the whole species to adapt into its present state: brainless yet smart.

Slime molds avoid bright light. In A, there was none, so molds grew to food (yellow puncta) freely while in B and C there were differing shades of light to influence its growth, which is surprisingly comparable to the real Tokyo rail network in D. E and F show minimum spanning trees (see third source below).

Okay, the zombie part isn’t entirely accurate, BUT, these slime molds (the gelatinous amoebae also known as the protist, Physarum polycephalum) do seem to have no problem functioning without a brain. They can navigate complex mazes for food, choose healthy over less nutritious food, and determine the shortest route between points of interest – a feat that takes humans years when designing complex transportation systems. How could this be?

Scientists have been studying this protist for over thirty years, taking it to the lab from its natural environment, where it has searched for food in leaf litter and along tree limbs to envelop and digest for at least 600 million years (essentially, dumpster diving before it was cool). Following studies in the early 2000s by Toshiyuki Nakagaki at Hokkaido University in Japan, Chris Reid at the University of Sydney observed that slime molds avoid spots they have traveled on, which was thought to demonstrate an externalized spatial memory that encourages exploration. Additionally, when placing the molds in a dish with dry acetate blocking access to food, Reid observed that molds navigated around the obstacle to the food. However, when he added extracellular slime prior to placing the molds in the dish, he noted that the molds had significantly less success finding the food, demonstrating they were “confused” and could no longer map areas traveled.

Time lapse of slime mold starting at "Tokyo" in an experimental arena and creating a network between major cities in white marked by pieces of food (third source below).

Other studies how shown how slime molds can choose optimal travel routes and foods. As a pretty good “shape-shifter,” flattening, thinning, and accumulating as needed, slime molds have been seen to leave areas that are dead-ends in mazes in favor of areas that lead to food. Slime molds similarly left or thinned out in areas that were less optimal, leaving behind interconnected routes that resembled rail-lines and main roads in places like Tokyo. Although the protists may not get paid for their unexpected proficiency in navigation, they may be used in the planning of future transportation routes or to create computer models simulating their decision-making processes, suggests some researchers.

Slime molds not only navigate surprisingly well, they have also been suggested to have internal clocks. Tetsu Saigusa, also at Hokkaido University, found that these internal clocks may allow slime molds to anticipate events by monitoring the rhythmic pulsing of their cytoplasm (also responsible for flowing from one region to another though periodic constrictions and relaxations). When subjected to unfavorable conditions periodically, slime molds slowed their cytoplasmic pulsing. For some slime molds, this slowing trend continued even when exposed to consistently favorable conditions. Eventually, even those molds ceased the slowing of their pulsing, enjoying the good life of humidity and high temperatures.

And apparently, a good life means good food too. Slime molds have been shown to choose the best balance between carbohydrates and proteins when placed near one protein-rich food and one carbohydrate-rich food through adjusting their size. In one study, Dr. Beekman at the University of Sydney placed 3% and 5% oat flakes under bright lights, which slime molds try to avoid (despite liking heat and humidity). The slime molds traveled from dark to light areas for the oat flakes but without a preference of percentage. However, when 1% oat flakes were placed in the dark, they went to the 1% oat flake, suggesting that, like humans, slime molds choose based on relative, not absolute, values, deciding based on priorities.

Certainly, slime molds seem to be prioritizing and optimizing their behaviors. Scientists have been trying to sequence the DNA of the many species of slime molds to explore how they have evolved, and to elucidate what allows the organism to retain memories and optimize decisions.

The question then remains, are these protists an “intelligent” species? As a human and a neuroscience major, I have been taught the importance of centralized nervous systems to intelligence. Then this slime mold comes along, leaving behind externalized memory traces and optimizing its decisions lacking anything even close to a brain. Where’s its hippocampus? Does it not have a dentate gyrus? Where are the granule cells? Neuroscientists, biologists, scientists, psychologists, and so on must then wonder, what makes an organism intelligent? What are the anatomical and functional criteria? One thing is certain,  these slimy protists are challenging our understanding of intelligence, one disgusting, oat flake-coated petri dish at a time.

Sources:

Physarum Music – YouTube

How Brainless Slime Molds Redefine Intelligence [Video] – Scientific American

Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design – Science

Can Answers to Evolution Be Found in Slime? – The New York Times

Behold – our recent ancestor, the gorilla, and ourselves, the human:

There are many characteristics that separate us from our monkey fathers. Most notably, factors that mark the evolution are the use of fire, use of tools, and a bigger brain. A recent study suggests that it is actually the onset of the use of fire that explains the ability to begin to grow a larger brain. According to a timeline of human history, the earliest Homo Sapiens appeared shortly after beginning to use fire to cook food:

What is it about cooking that allowed us to grow bigger brains? As the brain grows bigger, more energy is required to sustain the increased number of neurons. Gorillas could spend up to ten hours a day obtaining the food necessary to sustain both their brain and large body mass. Why is it that humans can spend significantly less than 10 hours per day to consume our required energy intake, but gorillas must be constantly eating? The tradeoff is in how we prepare our food. Gorillas live off of a raw food diet, whereas humans cook food. Cooking can be thought of as “pre-digesting.” Because we’ve already broken down much of the food by cooking, the calorie absorption process becomes more efficient than if the food had been raw, and requires that we put in a significant amount of energy to just digest. On just a raw-food diet of the gorilla, evolution could not have been possible, because the gorilla could never consume enough energy via raw food in a day to support a larger brain. The use of fire to prepare food paved the way for the evolution of organisms that could support significantly larger brains.

I’m no expert on nutrition, but as a general public service announcement after seeing this study, I would caution going on a raw food diet for a long period of time. Sure, as a vegetarian my canine teeth aren’t being put to use like they’re supposed to be. But I can still consume enough energy to be healthy by cooking my veggies. For those of you who want to try a raw food diet… well, I’m seeing some pretty solid evidence that the whole reason we’re here is because of cooking. And you can’t really argue with evolution.

For more information on the topic, see the transcript of a recent Live Chat hosted by Science.

Sources:

Raw Food Not Enough to Feed Big Brains – Science

Metabolic constraint imposes tradeoff between body size and number of brain neurons in human evolution – PNAS

Food for Thought – Science

Sometimes, writing is tough. The passion isn’t there, and every word is a struggle. We’ve all had those moments when forced to do something artistic or creative, whether it be writing or drawing or playing an instrument (or anything really). We’re just not into it, we don’t feel the pulse of the art pounding in our blood. Yet at other times, it’s like our blood rushes in a massive torrential pour, as if it had been held back by a massive dam for a thousand years. Whether its a subject that makes you jump for joy, a song you can head-bang to, or some other Picasso, some things just burst forth in a sudden and fervent explosion of productivity and creativity.

A Tongue Twister: Are Artists' Artistry Artful?

I think we’ve all had those moments when the pieces all click together, and a piece of work flows from us as easily as a hot knife through butter. During those moments, we feel alive, throbbing with a vibrant energy as our whole being is focused onto a single task. It’s an exhilarating feeling, yet at the same time, when you finally come down out of this strange natural high, it feels as though there was something slightly wrong about that, as if those who are capable of reaching that level often must have something wrong with them.

This is a popular idea. Edgar Allen Poe alluded to this creative madness in his work, ‘The Tell Tale Heart.’

“The disease had sharpened my senses –not destroyed –not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?”

Art and creativity have always had their associations with mental issues and powerful personalities. There have always been the stereotypical caricatures of artists:

1) The outcast, socially ill-fitting writer.

2) The out-of-control musician.

3) The quirky and always slightly off painter.

4) The obsessed photographer, whether of the strange shut-in type or the perpetually traveling variety.

Need I go on?

However, these associations have not been without reason. Many famous individuals have been associated with mental disorder. Examples include Vincent Van Gogh and Ludwig Von Beethoven. Others, such as Poe or Richard Wagner, were known to be either troubled or highly passionate, flamboyant individuals.

And recently, a pretty intense population study spearheaded by some pretty cool Swedish guys has actually corroborated some of these general associations. The field has long been investigated and various findings thrown around left and right; unfortunately most of those have been marred by awful experimental design. This Swedish study is an exception. Using a forty year population study encompassing more than a million people, the results are finally in, and some people may be a little disappointed: generally, some associations are there, but they certainly aren’t that strong.

Overall, creative professions were not associated with an increased risk of psychiatric disorders (except for a mild increase in bipolar disorder), despite there being a link between a familial history of disorders and profession. In other words, families of those people who did creative things were more likely to suffer from psychiatric conditions, on average. Although creative professions as a whole had no correlation with disorder, writers were another story entirely. Apparently, writers generally get the short end of the stick when it comes to mental health, as they were more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In addition, they were at a noticeably higher risk for suicide.

Yet despite these findings, a part of me recoils at the idea of “creative” people being more likely to suffer from things like bipolar disorder. What is creativity anyways? Creativity is being able to associate items and express thoughts in novel ways, to make connections where others have yet to be made. Creativity is thinking in a slightly different way, reaching a new conclusion or finding a new way to reach that conclusion.

Albert Einstein was creative. So was John Nash.

In fact, I see high achievement as having a closer link to conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder than the typical association with the arts. However, true creativity has nothing to do with doing anything artistic. It is about making new connections and visualizations of things, and being able to express those in a way for other people to understand and interpret.

Creativity is visualizing riding a bicycle along a beam of light, and imagining what that beam of light would look like. It is revolutionizing game theory. It’s a powerful novel about a dystopian future that touches on some of the most powerful issues in the world today. Creativity is all of these things, and more. More than just the arts, more than the sciences.
Creativity is about uniqueness and newness. Everyone has the capacity for those.

Sources:

Creativity and Mental Illness – Canadian Journal of Psychiatry

Swedish Population Study – Science Direct

Mental Illness vs. The Arts – BBC News

Art and Personality – New York Times

History in the making, for realsies

And yet, there will still be some undecided voters who will make their choice on the way to the voting booth. I’m willing to bet that some of these people, especially those who will cast those critical swing-state votes, will enter their preferred candidate’s name with seemingly no sense of the democratic responsibility and power their vote yields, as evidenced by this political cartoon.

Undecided voters, rejoice! I am here to help you explore the depths of all the questions weighing down your weary mind:

• Were the ancient inventors of democracy wrong?
• Are Barack Obama and Mitt Romney all that different?
• Is my liberal or conservative philosphy determined by genes?
• How does the Electoral College work?
• What is human nature anyway?
• What are the moral and epistemological implications of indecision?
• Does my vote truly matter?

Well maybe not all your questions...

But the most befuddling question in every conversation before, during, and after the Election is this: how and why do people vote?

To answer this question, we might need some ideas from an unexpected source. Let’s investigate some recent research in neuroscience to figure out how people vote.

The act of decision-making is central to the voting process. Whether you make a snap, “gut-reaction” judgment between the Republican and Democratic candidates or take the time to consider their policies rationally, many of the same brain regions are active in decision-making. One of these regions is the amygdala, principal in the functions of memory and emotion. Whether we realize it or not, part of our relation to the candidates in this year’s election is dependent on emotion; while most of us have not met either candidate, we have developed a bias for the political party they represent. According to research published in Political Psychology, we may grow to identify with a certain party based on our parents’ moral leanings, social environment, and socioeconomic class, all the same way we develop our own personal identities. In painful contrast to what we once believed as teenagers, we still inherit much of our parents’ moral and political beliefs.

Moreover, negative emotion seems to play a larger part in our decision-making and motivation than does “positive” emotion. In a 1991 study (Quarterly Journal of Economics), people were more motivated by avoiding pain than by seeking pleasure. Do we unconsciously pretend to like the more popular candidate to avoid potential embarrassment in our social circle?

Thus, are the reasons we vote for one political party versus another based solely on our upbringing and emotional responses?

This view does little to provide optimism for the freethinking, voting populace we believe ourselves to be. Indeed, according to a 2012 Science study, our decisions are quite frequently based on automatic associations instead of the conscious consideration we believe them to be. In a paradigm implicating undecided decision-makers (read: undecided voters), subjects were given photos of two women and asked which they preferred and to state the reasons why. Sounds simple enough, but the twist was that the pictures were sometimes switched, and the subjects were actually given the picture of the woman they did not like initially. Subjects still provided an answer for the photograph, even if it wasn’t the one they chose! Once made to give a choice between the two women (read: candidates), the initially undecided voters found a way to unconsciously derive a reason for their choice.

The typical undecided voter

So, we may have an answer to the almost-Sartrean question poised in the title: how should a person vote? The answer is completely up to you. In a matter of hours, you will (hopefully) cast your vote for the next President of the United States. Maybe you chose your candidate according to what your friends or parents told you about their beliefs. Maybe you made your decision based on fear of losing, even if it is by proxy of your political party.

My advice is this: as we have seen in the studies cited in this article, your unconscious, emotional side plays a large factor in your decision-making ability. If you are still undecided, please sit down and think about what is at stake in this election. Take the time to think for yourself, and you will know how a person should vote.

References:

Automatic Mental Associations Predict Future Choices of Undecided Decision-Makers - Science

Loss Aversion in Riskless Choice: A Reference-Dependent Model – The Quarterly Journal of Economics

Dominance, Politics, and Physiology: Voters’ Testosterone Changes on the Night of the 2008 United States Presidential Election -PLoS ONE

Rational Constraint in Mass Belief Systems: The Role of Developmental Moral Stages in the Structure of Political Beliefs - International Society of Political Psychology

We live in an era where the rapid advances in technology are constantly changing how we perceive and interact with the world around us. The question on everyone’s mind is always “what’s next?” The answer: brain-machine interfaces. For the average consumer, brain-computer interfaces are becoming increasingly available on the mass market and their current uses offer a wide range of fascinating opportunities.

A company that’s been in the news a lot lately is NeuroVigil. Their product known as the iBrain has been used to help world-renowned astrophysicist Steven Hawking communicate with a computer simply by thinking. Hawking, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, developed his own solution to allow him to speak by twitching his cheek to select words from a computer. In its current state, the iBrain is still slower than Hawking’s solution, but NeuroVigil’s founder MD Philip Low hopes that it will eventually be possible to read thoughts aloud. NeuroVigil also made the news by signing a contract with Roche, a major Swiss pharmaceutical company, to use the iBrain in clinical studies for evaluating drugs for neurological diseases.

Philip Low with the iBrain

So how does the iBrain actually work? The iBrain uses one sensor to measure brain signals by means of specialized algorithms. Surprisingly easy to use, NeuroVigil claims that its software makes up for using only one channel. A competing device, the EPOC, made by Emotiv uses a multitude of sensors. The EPOC is a neuro-headset that looks like headphones with sensors extending in all directions. These sensors pick up electrical signals that our brains produce while we are awake or asleep; essentially an EEG recorder. These measurements are not accurate enough to pick up what individual neurons in our brain are doing, but they can provide a rough idea of overall brain activity. Users of the headset learn to think specific thoughts for which the EPOC learns the related brain signals corresponding to a certain command, such as moving the mouse to the left. Emotive has an online store with dozens of applications for the headset and there is also a Mind Workstation for research purposes.

Emotiv's headset

The key strategy of another company, Zeo, is sleep research. Zeo offers a wireless headband to monitor sleep patterns that connect to smartphones using a Bluetooth link. Looking to enter the research scene with their innovative technology at a bargain price, Zeo hopes that it can satisfy the huge demand for a sleep aid product. In a similar manner, NeuroVigil wants to use a smartphone processor to map people’s mind while they sleep using the unique brain ‘signatures’ to diagnose neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s, depression and autism, which again increases the number of potential users. An increasing number of people want to do their own health monitoring and new, inexpensive, wireless sensors and data processing by smartphone apps can help in this goal. Cheap brain-computer interfaces are the next step in this health-monitoring trend and will hopefully lead to newer and much cooler extensions of our mind.

Zeo headset and its app

Sources:

Emotiv

NeuroVigil

Zeo Sleep Manager