Using magnets to read minds

By Jamee Bateau

the powerful magnet of your charms by jamelah

Mind-readers exist! No, I’m no referring to street-corner psychics with crystal balls and elaborate antique shops, but to today’s scientists and how they can now get a glimpse at what people are thinking. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), scientists can now tell which items are being thought of in a person’s visual short-term memory (VSTM) based only on patterns of activity in the brain.

Visual short-term memory is a memory system that stores visual information for a few seconds so that it can assist long-term cognitive tasks. Some usually think of VSTM as the visual storage component of the broader working memory system / short-term memory system. Compared with iconic memory, VSTM representations are longer-lasting, more durable, and more conceptual. Items in VSTM can survive eye movements, eye blinks, and other visual disturbances, and they may play an important role in preserving links across these disturbances. Unfortunately, VSTM has a highly limited storage capacity and mainly produces rapid schematic representations. On the other hand, Long-Term Memory (LTM) has a nearly infinite storage capacity and produces richly detailed representations over a reasonably long time period.

VSTM studies are generally categorized into four classes of tasks. In one class of tasks, subjects are asked to create a mental image. In a second class, scientists use a recall procedure.  A third class of VSTM tasks uses a sequential comparison procedure. Finally, a fourth class of VSTM tasks, used most often in monkeys, requires the observer to withhold a response after seeing a target. But today, scientists are taking VSTM studies to the next level, not by testing how much or how long information can be held in VSTM, but by reading the patterns of blood flow in the brain to determine what the person is thinking of.

There have been two recent studies, one led by neuroscientist Frank Tong of Vanderbilt University and the other by psychologists from the University of Oregon and the University of California, San Diego.

Sleepless

By Haley Tanenbaum

Sleepless by pittaya

Everyone can remember a frustrating night of sleeplessness.  You are lying in bed for hours, unable to fall asleep.  Perhaps you were preoccupied with worries from the day before, over energized, or simply just not able to doze off.  Whatever the reason, sleepless nights are unbearable, and for years scientists have been working to develop medicines that can help people fall asleep and stay asleep.  There are countless sleeping medications on the market today.  The question is: are these sleeping pills helpful or harmful?
Here’s a little bit of background—sleep consists of alternating periods of what scientists refer to as REM sleep and of non-REM sleep.  REM sleep is classified by rapid eye movement, which is absent in non-REM sleep.  Non-REM sleep consists of stages 1 through 4, which feature increasingly slow and steady brain waves.   REM sleep occurs in the 5th and final stage of sleep.   Most commonly, when people fall asleep they have a long period of non-REM sleep and then a short period of REM sleep .
Why is sleep so important?  First of all, sleep gives the brain time to heal.  While a person is sleeping, the brain repairs and restores brain tissue as well as neurons (Myers, 2007).  Sleep also helps our memories.  In a study by Kimberly Fenn and others in 2003, it was shown that people who were trained to remember tasks recalled them better after a good night’s sleep than after hours of being awake.
Sleeping pills are a fast and easy way for the typical sleep-deprived student or workaholic to catch up on their z’s.  Though these pills may help you maintain your energy on a day-to-day basis, in the long run, they are harmful.  A six-year study conducted by Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego  used more than a million adults between the ages of 30 to 102.  Kripke found that those who took sleeping pills every night had a greater risk of death than those who only took them occasionally.  In addition, the risk of death for people who took sleeping pills occasionally was 10 to 15 percent higher than people who never used sleeping pills at all.
So, the next time you find yourself tossing and turning in the dead of night, don’t reach for the pill bottle. Instead of popping an Ambien, try some warm milk or the good old counting sheep trick…
References

Myers, David G. (2007). Psychology (eighth edition in modules). New York:
Worth Publishers.

WebMD (2005-2006). Sleep 101. Retrieved October 8, 2008, from
http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/guide/sleep-101.

Nature International Weekly Journal of Science. Consolidation During Sleep of
Perpetual Learning of Spoken Language.  Retrieved October 8, 2008, from
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6958/full/nature01951.html.

Live Science.  Sleep Deprivation: The Great American Myth. Retrieved October
8,2008, from
http://www.livescience.com/health/060323_sleep_deprivation.html

OK, so you haven’t been sleeping much. How bad could that be?

By Leksi Kolanko

Dr. Insomnia's, #2 by Thomas Hawk

We all suffer an occasional restless night of sleep here and there, whether it is the result of stressful events occurring in our lives, jetlag, pain due to a physical injury, or simply the overuse of caffeine.  For some people, however, insomnia, a sleep disorder in which an individual has recurring problems in falling or staying asleep, can become chronic.  Multiple studies have been conducted showing a strong relationship between insomnia, depression, and anxiety.  For instance, a longitudinal study conducted by Dag Neckelmann of Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, surveyed 25,130 adults.  The results of the general health surveys showed that the group of participants with chronic insomnia had increased depression and anxiety, as compared to the group without chronic insomnia.  Another study, carried out by Daniel Taylor, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Texas in Denton, and his colleagues, sampled 722 adults of age 20 to 89.  This cross-sectional and retrospective study reported that people with insomnia were 10 times more likely to have clinically significant depression and 17 times more likely to have clinically significant anxiety.

The wonders of dreaming

By Nick Johnson

Sleeping EEG Monitor by cobalt123

Why do we dream? Is it necessary to dream? Dreaming occurs during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, during which the brain does not recognize any sensory input. One experiment concerning dreams studied REM sleep and how subjects reacted when they were awoken during REM sleep. (Dement, 1960). To establish a baseline percentage of REM sleep per total sleep time, the subjects were observed for a few nights. When they were woken up during non-REM sleep they showed no increase in dream time on the nights after the night when they were woken up continually. However, when the subjects were woken up frequently during REM sleep, they entered REM sleep more often on the recovery nights than on the baseline nights, indicating that the brain needed to make up for lost REM sleep time. Furthermore, subjects that had been woken up repeatedly during REM sleep showed changes in behavior that included anxiety and difficulty concentrating.

A similar experiment involved waking rats up during REM sleep. The observers placed a rat in a bucket full of water on an upside-down flower pot. When the rat wanted to sleep, it had to climb onto the flower pot, but when it entered REM sleep, muscular paralysis made the rat fall into the water and wake up. After several of these dreamless nights the rats were put into survival situations to test their reactions. Though rats have innate responses to threatening situations, the dream-deprived rats could not complete the tasks. According to the article, the rats, when placed in an open area, would not dash for cover, as an alert rat would, but instead would roam aimlessly. Furthermore, after each rat failed the basic survival tests, they were given amphetamines to determine if it was merely sleep-deprivation that was causing their behavior or if it was dream-deprivation that was the culprit. If sleep-deprivation was the cause then the amphetamines would have counteracted the rats’ tiredness but the experimenters found that the rats did not perform better on the survival tests, indicating that dream-deprivation caused their failure on the tests. Just as with the human subjects, the rats could not concentrate on the proper tasks and could not react correctly when they were deprived of REM sleep and therefore deprived of dreaming.  Consistent with the results of this study, some  scientists theorize that dreams served as a sort of theater to prepare one for situations one might encounter when awake.

Another hypothesis (Siegel, 2003) is that REM sleep may be necessary to prevent an overabundance of certain neurotransmitters. The release of monoamines, including the mood-related neurotransmitters norepinephrine and serotonin, stops during REM sleep.  An overabundance might lead to desensitization and a lack of ability to regulate mood. Furthermore, during REM sleep there is a lot of brain activity that may help in allowing the brain to develop properly.  The platypus, which is blind at birth and receives little sensory input, has a lot of REM sleep, whereas the dolphin which is active from birth has very little. The platypus’ greater amount of REM sleep could possibly allow its brain to develop more since it did not have the chance to develop much at birth. The evidence from the results from both the experiments and observations shows the brain needs a certain amount of REM sleep per night to allow the brain to develop and to allow the organism to act properly in its waking hours.

References:
Dement, W. (1960, June 10). The Effect of Dream Deprivation. Science, 131, 1705-1707. Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1705755?origin=JSTOR-pdf

Dixit, J. (2007, Nov. – Dec.). Dreams: Night School. Psychology Today. Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20071029-000003&print=1

Siegel, J. (2003, November). Why We Sleep. Scientific American, 289. Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://moodlepilot.vassar.edu/file.php/51/articles/html_files/Siegel%202003.html

Why do we dream? – The REM state. (n.d.). Retrieved April 28, 2009, from http://www.why-we-dream.com/remstate.htm

Attached to love

By Cecilia Solis

Hands by .michael.newman.

If you were to ask a girl to describe the perfect man, her answer would most likely be something along the lines of- caring, loving, comforting, supporting, sensitive, and good to his mother.  These are often the top qualities sought out it in man but do we really know where they come from?  Are they adaptive traits that give humans a selective advantage in finding sexual partners? Or does something else help to determine them?

Harry Harlow was one of the first psychologists to suggest the idea that contact comfort has always served the animal kingdom as a motivating agent for affectionate responses. The value and influence of a secure base was further explored by John Bowlby who developed the theory of attachment (Meyers, 2007). The theory of attachment tries to understand the intense distress experienced by infants who are separated from their parents. From an ethological perspective Bowlby concluded that crying and searching were adaptive responses to a separation from the attachment figure associated with protection and care- giving. His colleague Mary Ainsworth was influential in expanding the basic understanding of attachment behaviors through her study of infant-parent separations. Her research showed that there are three different categories of infant-parent attachments: secure, anxious resistant, and anxious avoidant. Not all infant-pair bonds, however, can be classified into these categories. Presently these categories have been modified and expanded by different researchers to describe attachment in terms of romantic partners. Ainsworth demonstrated that these differences were connected to the quality of the parent-infant interactions during the first year of life. But just how much of an effect does the quality of early life attachments affect an individual?

Bowlby for example believed that attachment characterizes human experience from “the cradle to the grave”. His theory that adult relationships could be attachment relationships was not empirically tested until later. Research on adult attachment was conducted by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver in 1987. Their study explores the association between differences in adult attachment and the way people think about their romantic and filial relationships.

Hazan and Shaver (1987) tested the attachment-theory approach to romantic love through diverse questionnaire studies. The first questionnaire known as the “love quiz” sought to measure the three-attachment styles by translating Ainsworth’s descriptions of infants into terms of adult romantic partners. The quiz asked individuals about their most important relationship, whether it was current or past, about their childhood relationships with their parents and about how they generally felt in relationships. One portion of the questionnaire asked individuals to classify themselves as avoidant, anxious/ambivalent, or secure in their most important romantic relationship by having to choose from fairly simple descriptions of the three attachment styles. The resulting figures from the study were comparable to proportions reported in other studies of infant-mother attachment (62% secure, 23% avoidant, 15% anxious/ ambivalent) displaying a relative pervasiveness of attachment patterns in adulthood similar to those in childhood.

Hazan and Shaver found that adults who were secure in their romantic relationships were likely to report having had affectionate, caring, and accepting relationships with their parents. Other research on adult attachment has shown that secure adults tend to be more satisfied in their relationships than insecure adults. They are also more likely to seek support from their partners and to provide the same support in situations of distress.  It is possible however for a person’s early attachment pattern to change or to show inconsistencies over time. Hazan and Shaver concluded that romantic relationships, like infant-parent relationships are closely-related forms of attachments. R. Chrish Fraley also found a fair degree of overlap in individual’s self-report measures of their current attachment style both with a parent and with a current romantic partner. He found correlations ranging from .20 to .50 (small to moderate) between the two kinds of  attachments. So, although on a different behavioral dimension, our experiences in childhood can influence our attachment styles as adults (Fraley & Shaver, 2000). It might not be such a bad idea thus, to ask potential partners about what kind of relationship they have with their parents.

References:
Fraley, C. (2004). A brief Overview of Attachment Theory and Research. Retrieved february 27, 2009 from  http://www.psych.uiuc.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm.

Carey, B. (June 29, 2004). Addicted to Mother’s Love: It’s Biology, Stupid. The New York Times. Retrieved February 27, 2009 from http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F06E5D91438F93AA15755C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2.

Hazan, C., Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 52(3), pp. 511-52. Retrieved March 27, 2009 from psycINFO (CSA) database.

Myers, D. (2007). Psychology: Eight Edition in modules. New York: Worth Publishers.

Reaching the child with autism, through music

By Emma Schaeffer

Music Therapy With The Developmentally Handicapped (Folkways)

Conversation and music-making have a number of things in common—the rhythm of the words, the rise and fall of tone, the changing of pitch, the back and forth turn-taking.  Despite this, most of us would not choose to communicate with each other through singing and playing instruments rather than speaking.  Spoken conversation is what is most natural to us.  But for those suffering from autistic spectrum disorder, ordinary communication, or even verbal communication, may not be an option.

People suffering from autism are essentially characterized as being “shut-in” from the rest of the world.  They have difficulties with social communication and interaction, restrictions of imagination and social repertoire, and behavioral problems.  Lower functioning autistics may be speech impaired, or incapable of verbal communication.  Higher functioning autistics may have normal development aside from social issues, and even show advanced skill in an area such as mathematics or art.  However, in either of these cases, communication with others poses an issue. This is where music therapy may prove useful (Graham, 2001).

Music therapy is designed to be very personalized, in order to promote one-on-one interaction and demonstrate a functioning two-person relationship.  It tends to focus on spontaneous improvisation—the idea is not to enhance musical ability; any musical talent that is acquired is merely a side effect (Bell, 2008).  The basic intent is to create an environment in which the client feels comfortable making their own contributions, mixing those contributions with those of the therapist (taking turns), and exploring.  This environment provides the client with a place in which they can connect and communicate on a more advanced level than they usually would, and works to improves their communication issues in everyday life.  Music is effective as a communication device on multiple levels.  Not only does it imitate social interactions, its patterned nature also appeals to the autistic mind, which tends to form patterns and gravitate towards patterns and structure in the external world.  For this reason, even patients with sound sensitivities may benefit from and enjoy music therapy (Gold, Wigram, & Elefant, 2006).

Taking your color temperature

By Michelle Fisher

Boutet's 7-color and 12-color color circles from 1708 courtesy of Wikipedia

We have all heard the question, “What’s your favorite color?” at some point in time, usually on an online personality test. While there are those of us who believe this to have some sort of basis, there are others who are more skeptical. What makes us associate black with evil, white with purity, and blue with peace? Why do we like some colors better than others? (http://www.infoplease.com/spot/colors.html) Is any of this color nonsense relevant? A recent study suggests that it is. The study found that colors can have an effect on perception of individuals in a purchasing environment; essentially, cool colors yield more positive purchasing results (Yildirim, Akalin-Baskaya, & Hidayetoglu, 2007). It would seem perceptions of colors can impact your mood.

Wexner (1954) conducted a study to determine what colors we associate with adjectives that possessed the same meaning as the mood-tone. Participants in the experiment were asked to choose the color that best fit each word group (which consisted of the mood-tone and adjectives). As most people might expect, black was associated with power, yellow with cheerfulness, and so on. What is interesting is that the intensity of the color affected which colors were associated with which words.  In other words, how dark (or light) the color was determined if it was appropriate to associate it with a word, such as dignified.

In a separate study, it was found that color also has an effect on the way that we react to and perceive various scenes, particularly when the structure of a scene is obscured in some way (Castelhano & Henderson, 2007). How is this related to Wexner’s experiment? This indicates that atmosphere of a room and the mood we get when in a room is altered by the color, very much in agreement with the study done by Yildirim, et al. (2007), where the structural elements in the area weren’t changed.

The deadliest drug

By Danielle Nedivi

China by babasteve

It’s a question that we have all wondered about at some point. No matter if we are active users, casual dabblers, or outside observers- the mystery confounds in all contexts: why do people smoke cigarettes? Today, virtually everyone in the United States knows that smoking is bad. School programs, public service ads, flyers, doctors- even the cigarette boxes themselves- have drilled that into our brains incessantly enough. Yellow teeth, wrinkles, short breath, not to mention heart disease, lung disease, cancer- the list is seemingly endless. And yet, despite all of the well-known detrimental consequences, smoking is still very much a prevalent activity throughout the US, with the young generations just as much as the old.

According to the American Cancer Society, more than 3,500 people younger than 18 try their first cigarette every single day, and 1,100 others become regular daily smokers. About one-third of these kids will later die from a smoking-related disease. Considering that we all know about this deadly effect, why try that fateful first cigarette in the first place? The answers vary from person to person, but overall they tend to cover the same ground. Some studies have shown social influences from peers to be a major cause. Powell (2005) showed that moving a high-school student from a school where no children smoked to a school where one quarter of the youths smoked would increase the probability that he or she smoked by about 14.5%. Overall, based on 2007 data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 20% of high school students smoke. Many prefer not to feel left out or appear antisocial by not taking risks or trying new things, and they are willing to compromise their health to achieve that crucial sense of belonging. The health-deteriorating factor of cigarettes is too elusive and vaguely far off to feel critical- if anything, their immediate effects are mostly positive.

Smoking provides many enticements on top of its well-advertised drawbacks.  Cigarettes stimulate receptor sites for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and provide a short term boost in dopamine levels.  The results can be a  temporary yet immediate calm and solace to a smoker . They can also render potentially awkward moments such as breaks from conversation natural (Dichter, 1947). They provide a smoky, mature voice and a feeling of sophistication and nonchalance. That society has brought many to believe that smoking is “cool” does not help matters. In media from films to books to songs, from GQ photo spreads to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the smoker is usually presented as an alluring rebel worth striving to imitate. “Chain smoking” and “clove cigarettes” have become unpredictably glorified terms. At least at the moment, the image of the slightly neurotic, jaded, risk-taking smoker is trendy, and people will go far to emulate it. Even in college, where we believe students are not only more intelligent and mature but also less impressionable, cigarettes still appear all over the place and incite a mystique the influence of which is difficult to shake off, even for those who had successfully avoided the offender thus far (Reed, 2006) .

The fundamental thing

by 105 Student

25/365 Days - Violin by athena.

When an object is struck, the energy from the strike transfers to the molecules of the object, causing them to vibrate.  These vibrations produce sinusoidal waves that carry to our ears and are then interpreted as sound in our brain (Taylor, 1992). But when the object vibrates, it is actually doing so at multiple frequencies at once, producing many waves our brain perceives as one sound.  So contrary to the single note we hear, the sound is actually composed of waves vibrating at many frequencies simultaneously, producing multiple pitches.  Of these pitches, the lowest one (the slowest frequency produced) we refer to as the “fundamental frequency”: the pitches above this frequency are called “overtones.”  Mathematically, these overtones are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency (at least when the sound is harmonic, meaning it contains a distinctive pitch/tone).  For example, if a string vibrates 110 times a second (110Hz), the overtones would be 2×110 (220Hz), 3×110(330Hz), and so forth until the overtones became too high for us to hear.  Again, though, our brain perceives all of these frequencies as one pitch, the fundamental frequency(Levitin, 2007).

In fact, our brains are so adapted to this phenomenon that, even without the presence of the fundamental frequency (such as when a note is artificially simulated with all pitches except the fundamental), we would still perceive the sound as the original note, the fundamental pitch.  For example, if a scientist wanted to create a note with the fundamental frequency of 210Hz, the scientist could actually create this sound by simulating 210’s overtones (420Hz, 630Hz, 840Hz, …) to create a hybrid note that, while lacking the fundamental, still sounds just like the fundamental pitch, 210Hz. This phenomenon where our brain fills in the missing sound is called restoration of the missing fundamental (Levitin, 2007).
In an experiment by Petr Janata (1997), electrodes were placed in the inferior colliculus (part of the auditory system) of a barn owl. A version of Strauss’s “The Blue Danube Waltz” simulated with all but the notes’ fundamental frequency was then played for the owl.  The electrodes output (what the owl’s brain was essentially perceiving), was played back via a small amplifier.  What was heard was “The Blue Danube Waltz,” fundamental frequency and all, indicating that the brain, with or without the actual pitch, will hear the fundamental frequency.  The neurons in our inferior colliculus actually fire at the same rate as the missing frequency.  

Thinking about animal minds (and vice versa?)

By Danielle Sloan

Cheeky Hybrid Capuchin Monkey (Cebus) by Phillip Ritz

What makes human cognition unique from that of other animals? This question is far from new and has an extensive history here at Vassar, where Margaret Floy Washburn spent her career searching for possible answers. In her 1908 book, The Animal Mind, she expressed her belief that gaining knowledge on animal cognition is highly similar to doing so on our own, both being derived by the inference of observed behavior. She believed that our actions vary from the actions of animals by degree and not by kind.

Recently, Marc Hauser, professor of psychology, biological anthropology, and organismic and evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has theorized that there may indeed be specific differences in mental capacity between humans and non-humans (Hauser, 2005). Hauser has conducted research in various fields of cognitive science including animal behavior and communication, the evolution of language, domain-specific systems of knowledge, and morality. He says this so-called “humaniqueness” is a set of evolved mechanisms that differentiate human and animal thought. These mechanisms consist of key differences which make humans capable of creating imaginative solutions to new problems. The four unique elements of human thought are the ability to combine and recombine various types of information and knowledge to gain new understanding; to apply the same solution to one problem to a different situation; to create and understand symbolic representations of computation and sensory data; and to separate modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual data.

According to Hauser, these key abilities have created new paths of evolution that other animals have not utilized, creating the foundation upon which cultural evolution has been constructed. He believes that animals have “laser beam” intelligence, in which there are specific solutions for specific problems. In reference to tool-use, a specific tool has a specific function. In comparison, humans have “floodlight” intelligence, which allows us to apply a certain solution to multiple problems. Other animals are capable of this kind of intelligence, but in highly limited ways when compared with humans. Hauser says the cognitive gap between humans and other “smart species” such as chimps, elephants, and dolphins is “greater than that between those animals and worms”.