Tag Archives: human brain

Rumor Brain Game

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How much do you trust your senses?

How much do you trust your senses?

Remember the game you played as a kid where someone came up with a story and whispered it to his/her neighbor; then the person receiving the story would in turn whisper the story to the next person; and so on and on around a circle or group of people until it came to the last person. In every case, the story told by the first person was materially different from that told by the last person to hear it. That’s because each person would introduce an error (in some cases many errors) into the story. The more complex the initial story, the wilder the outcome story.

According to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization at the University of Gottingen and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Gottingen, this chaotic messaging system is exactly how the cerebral cortex of our brains communicates. Further, they discovered that the information each neuron receives is lost rather quickly after receiving it. And, there appears to be no error correction system. In effect, the cortex is dealing only with occasional quick snapshots rather than a continuous input of sensory data and those snapshots are distorted by the cortex’s chaotic communication system. This could explain sensory illusions…

Approximately one bit of information disappears per active neuron per second. “This extraordinarily high deletion rate came as a huge surprise to us”, says Wolf. It appears that information is lost in the brain as quickly as it can be “delivered” from the senses. (Out Of Mind In A Matter Of Seconds, Medical News Today, 25 Jan 2011 – 3:00 PST)

My interpretation of the data is that we are mostly NOT sensing our world. We are taking short snapshots of it – the rest we make up!

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Change Literally in the Blink of an Eye

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You can make those life changes you want to make in the blink of an eye.

You can make those life changes you want to make in the blink of an eye.

New research out of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, shows that brain neurons can change in as little as two minutes even in adults. For years scientists have known about the plasticity of the brain – that it can change neuronal connections and even grow new brain cells. But until recently, no one had studied the speed at which these changes can occur.

It is unlikely that a brain cell would grow to maturity and make all those dendrite connections in just two minutes. Some other mechanism must be at work.
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Panic Attacks and CO2

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CO2 is heavier than normal air and so will tend to sit at the bottom of your lungs unless you exhale it.

CO2 is heavier than normal air and so will tend to sit at the bottom of your lungs unless you exhale it.

John Wemmie and Michael Welsh of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, reported in the November 25, 2009 issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, that they have discovered a chemical sensor for carbon dioxide deep in the brain’s emotional center – the amygdala. This part of the brain, when it senses an acidic condition (ph) created by higher levels of CO2 in the body, triggers fight-or-flight behaviors we label panic attacks.

I’ve discussed before in this blog the impact of chemistry, particularly CO2 levels in the body on mood and behavior. This is not a new concept – it’s been known for at least a century (the Chinese knew it millenia ago) that chemical imbalances in the body affect behavior.

If you’re experiencing panic attacks fairly often, it could be that your amygdala is hypersensitive to CO2 levels. You may need to breathe differently to expel excess CO2 and increase the oxygen levels in your body.

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Genetics and Emotions

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People who complain that they are more sensitive to sadness or frustration than others and report feeling "hurt" may be telling the truth.

People who complain that they are more sensitive to sadness or frustration than others and report feeling “hurt” may be telling the truth.

There are approximately three billion base pairs (connections) in a strand of DNA. That represents a virtually infinite number of possible combinations. The variation between each of us, although nearly infinitesimally small, is so significant that no two of us in the world population of nearly 7 billion humans is exactly identical. Even identical twins are different from each other.

It is that small variation in each of us that is the result of and contributes to the evolution of the specie. In a study by UCLA researchers, publishing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Markus Heilig, Faculty Member for F1000 Biology, and Chief of the Laboratory of Clinical and Translational Studies at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Bethesda, MD, report that they have identified a genetic factor that causes some people to actually experience stronger physical sensations associated with emotions (in the study case, the emotion was rejection).

There is apparently a wide variation or spectrum associated with the feeling (physical sensations) of emotions. Therefore, some people who complain that they are more sensitive to sadness or frustration, for example, than others and report feeling emotionally “hurt” may be telling the literal truth.

Can these genetic factors be moderated through training or experience? What do you think? Are we “hard wired” – or can we significantly affect our emotional states in spite of genetic predisposition or genetic variations?

An abstract of the original paper, Variation in the micro-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) is associated with dispositional and neural sensitivity to social rejection is online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/19706472?dopt=Abstract&holding=f1000,f1000m,isrctn.

Fear – It’s in the Eyes!

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“There are reasons to believe that the brain has evolved mechanisms to detect things in the environment that signal threat. One of those signals is a look of fear,” David Zald, associate professor of psychology and a co-author of the new study, said. “We believe that the brain can detect certain cues even before we are aware of them, so that we can direct our attention to potentially threatening situations in our environment.”

amygdala2.jpgResearchers set out to determine if we become aware of fearful, neutral or happy expressions at the same speed, or if one of these expressions reaches our awareness faster than the others.

The team found that subjects became aware of faces that had fearful expressions before neutral or happy faces. They believe a brain area called the amygdala, part of the emotions-processing limbic system, shortcuts the normal brain pathway for processing visual images.

“The amygdala receives information before it goes to the cortex, which is where most visual information goes first. We think the amygdala has some crude ability to process stimuli and that it can cue some other visual areas to what they need to focus on,” Zald said.

Zald and his colleagues believe the eyes of the fearful face play a key role.

“Fearful eyes are a particular shape, where you get more of the whites of the eye showing,” he said.”That may be the sort of simple feature that the amygdala can pick up on, because it’s only getting a fairly crude representation. That fearful eye may be something that’s relatively hardwired in there.”

“We are interested in now exploring what this means for behavior,” Yang said. “Since these expressions are being processed without our awareness, do they affect our behavior and our decision making? If so, how?”

The research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health. Blake and Zald are Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development investigators. Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology, and Eunice Yang, doctoral student, were co-authors of the study, which appeared in the November 2007 issue of Emotion.