Tagneuroscience

Dementia Caregivers More Likely to Also Get the Disease

older couple

Elderly people who care for a spouse who has dementia are at increased risk of developing dementia themselves, a study finds. The stress of attending to a mentally incapacitated spouse may somehow contribute to the added risk, scientists report in the May Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

sciencenewsPrevious studies have shown that chronic stress leads to increased levels of the hormone cortisol in the body, which can suppress immunity, says study co-author Peter Rabins, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore who teamed with researchers at Utah State University in Logan to do this study. “It’s long been thought that this might have adverse outcomes psychologically and physiologically.”

Taking care of a spouse with dementia takes a toll in other ways as well, Rabins says. “Caregivers often complain that they lose their friends,” he says, because they don’t have time to socialize. But the biological mechanisms that might link these challenges to heightened dementia risk remain unclear.

Wired Science: Dementia Caregivers More Likely to Also Get the Disease

Prior research on social life and aging:

Socializing Appears to Delay Memory Problems

Socializing Can Help Elderly Women Stay Sharp

The Effect of Social Engagement on Incident Dementia

To Increase Longevity, Friends Are More Important Than Family

True believers brains shut down while listening to their leaders

Healing

This could explain a lot:

WHEN we fall under the spell of a charismatic figure, areas of the brain responsible for scepticism and vigilance become less active. That’s the finding of a study which looked at people’s response to prayers spoken by someone purportedly possessing divine healing powers. […]

It’s not clear whether the results extend beyond religious leaders, but Schjødt speculates that brain regions may be deactivated in a similar way in response to doctors, parents and politicians.

New Scientists: Brain shuts off in response to healer’s prayer

World premiere of brain orchestra

brain orchestra

Two of the performers were given a task to watch a screen in front of them, with flashing rows and columns of letters, and told to look for a particular letter.

When expectation is fulfilled, 300 thousandths of a second later, a signal known as the P300 appears in the EEG.

A similar strategy has been employed by Mick Grierson at Goldsmiths, University of London to generate individual notes.

In the Multimodal Brain Orchestra, the P300 signal is registered – with a dot demarcating it on the EEG trace projected to the audience, so that they can see the effect of the performer’s thought – in turn launching a sound or recorded instrument. […]

Adjacent to the EEG-capped players, the “emotional conductor” sits comfortably, wearing a pair of virtual reality glasses.

She is being shown images from a series created by artist Behdad Rezazadeh while her heart rate and skin conductance are being measured. Her heart rate is plotted along with the EEG traces.

As her mood changes, so does the visual experience – Rezazadeh’s images are blurred and changed in line with the changing biological measures of the conductor.

BBC: World premiere of brain orchestra

(Thanks Wade)

See also Ikipr’s EEG workshop at Esozone: the Other Tomorrow.

A new theory of the function of dreams

Allan Hobson

(Above: Allan Hobson)

In [Allan Hobson]’s most recent review paper in Nature reviews Neuroscience , he compares the dream state to that of proto consciousness. As per him, proto consciousness is made up of raw emotions and perceptions while secondary consciousness is made up of awareness about perceptions and emotions and meta cognitive processes. He now endows dreams/REM state with some functional significance. He believes that dreams provide and opportunity for inbuilt genetic scripts and schema to be played out and fine tuned against external real-world scenarios. In this view dreams would still be significant as they provide a window to out internal scripts that are present from birth. He doesn’t put this across in so many words and this is my interpretation, but that is what I could sort of intuit.

The Mouse Trap: Dreaming as delirium, protoconsciousness or epiphenomenon?

Are We Zeroing In on the Hard Problem of Explaining Consciousness?

Global workspace theory

What’s the difference between easy and hard problems of consciousness?

Philosophers David Chalmers at the Australian National University in Canberra, points out that “consciousness” is an ambiguous term since it can refer to a variety of phenomena. “Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others,” says Chalmers. “At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods.”

With that out of the way:

Consciousness is the “hard problem” in mind science: explaining how the astonishing private world of consciousness emerges from neuronal activity. Recent research using EEG (brain-wave sensing) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) measurements by Steven Laureys of the University of Liege offers evidence for the “global workspace theory,” and may also offer clues to the “hard problem” of how patterns of electrical activity give rise to our complex internal lives. […]

One way to think about Dr. Baars’ global workspace is to use a “theater” metaphor – but not the notion of a dualistic “Cartesian theater” (which assumes someone is viewing the theater) which is criticized by philosopher Daniel Dennett and others. In the theater of consciousness, a spotlight of selective attention shines a bright spot on stage. The bright spot reveals the contents of consciousness, actors moving in and out, making speeches or interacting with each other. Behind the scenes, also in the dark, are the director (executive processes), stagehands, script writers, scene designers and so forth. They shape the visible activities in the bright spot, but are themselves invisible. Baars’ theater is not located in a single place in the mind but distributed throughout it, nor is there a viewer distinct from what is being viewed.

h+: Are We Zeroing In on the Hard Problem of Explaining Consciousness?

(via Edge of Tomorrow)

Also check out the Wiki for UC Irving’s consciousness course.

New Paper Pinpoints a Seat of Self-Control in the Brain

Prefrontal cortex

The ability to delay gratification allows humans to accomplish such goals as saving for retirement, going to the gym regularly and choosing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In a paper published March 28 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, a team of researchers for the first time causally shows that this ability is rooted in a part of the frontal lobe of the brain: the prefrontal cortex.

Science Daily: New Paper Pinpoints a Seat of Self-Control in the Brain

Certain morality-related brain functions can be disrupted by magnetic coils

phil mri image

Talk about messing with your mind. A new study by neuroscientist Liane Young and colleagues at Harvard University does exactly that: the researchers used magnetic signals applied to subjects’ craniums to alter their judgements of moral culpability. The magnetic stimulus made people less likely to condemn others for attempting but failing to inflict harm, they report in PNAS.

Most people make moral judgements of others’ actions based not just on their consequences but also on some view of what the intentions were. That makes us prepared to attribute diminished responsibility to children or people with severe mental illness who commit serious offences: it’s not just a matter of what they did, but how much they understood what they were doing.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the attribution of beliefs to other people seems to involve a part of the brain called the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ). So Young and colleagues figured that, if they disrupted how well the RTPJ functions, this might alter moral judgements of someone’s action that rely on assumptions about their intention.

The Great Beyond: Magnets mess minds, morality

Paranormal Seizure Activity

two surreal figures with aztec skull heads by uair01

A new case study in Cortex by neurologist Dr. Fabienne Picard (2010) reports on a patient who experienced unusual phenomena during epileptic seizures. She had the convincing sense that several familiar people (family members) were standing before her. This experience of a “sensed presence” is a classic trope in movies with supernatural themes (e.g., Carnival of Souls [available at Internet Archive], The Haunting [trailer for the 1963 version], Poltergeist, Dark Water), but it’s generally attributed to ghosts and not to seizure activity.

From the report:

A 62-year-old right-handed woman of normal psychiatric history presented a simple focal epileptic seizure including a complex sensation characterized by feeling the presence of several members of her family in the immediate environment, associated with paresthesia of the right hemibody (excluding the face). The feeling of presences and the paresthesia (numbness) appeared concomitantly and lasted in total several minutes. The episode occurred while she was sitting alone on the sofa of her living room and immediately felt the presence of four persons in her frontal space. She did not see or hear these persons (no visual or auditory hallucinations), but felt vividly their presence in her peripersonal [within reach] and near extrapersonal space [just outside of reach]. She “recognized” them as close family members. Closest was her grand-daughter who was sitting on the floor immediately in front of her, without any left or right lateralization in relation to her body, whereas the three other persons, her daughter and two other grand-children, were experienced to be localized at a distance of several meters. … This highly vivid and convincing feeling of presences was described by the patient as deeply pleasant, although she guessed that it was not possible that they were really there, as she was alone just before. … She was treated with pregabalin (300 mg/day) and there was no recurrence of simple or complex partial seizures and no further feeling of presences.

NeuroCritic: Paranormal Seizure Activity

See also:

Sleep Paralysis

The God Experiments

(Photo credit: uair01 / CC)

Brain Waves and Meditation

Brainwaves and meditation

During meditation, theta waves were most abundant in the frontal and middle parts of the brain.

“These types of waves likely originate from a relaxed attention that monitors our inner experiences. Here lies a significant difference between meditation and relaxing without any specific technique,” emphasizes Lagopoulos.

“Previous studies have shown that theta waves indicate deep relaxation and occur more frequently in highly experienced meditation practitioners. The source is probably frontal parts of the brain, which are associated with monitoring of other mental processes.”

“When we measure mental calm, these regions signal to lower parts of the brain, inducing the physical relaxation response that occurs during meditation.”

Science Daily: Brain Waves and Meditation

(via Chris23)

A drug that could give you perfect visual memory

RGS-14

Imagine if you could look at something once and remember it forever. You would never have to ask for directions again. Now a group of scientists has isolated a protein that mega-boosts your ability to remember what you see.

A group of Spanish researchers reported today in Science that they may have stumbled upon a substance that could become the ultimate memory-enhancer. The group was studying a poorly-understood region of the visual cortex. They found that if they boosted production of a protein called RGS-14 (pictured) in that area of the visual cortex in mice, it dramatically affected the animals’ ability to remember objects they had seen.

io9: A drug that could give you perfect visual memory

(via Edge of Tomorrow)

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