Category: Brain imaging

Craving money, chocolate and… justice

Image by Lou Beach of The New York Times.A while back, I got really hacked off about a piece of really pathetic science reporting about some brain-related research in the post, Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis. And now, as if sent from heaven (or the Benevolent Goddess That Pokes Holes in Bad Evolutionary Psychology), this news release from UCLA, Brain reacts to fairness as it does to money and chocolate, study shows, by Stuart Wolpert. All caveats in place — including that I haven’t seen the reviewed piece that backs this up — we have some nifty data with which I can continue to pile scorn on those who think images of women’s cleavage dancing before them is what made the ‘financial titans’ leverage the US economy into subprime disaster.

The human brain responds to being treated fairly the same way it responds to winning money and eating chocolate, UCLA scientists report. Being treated fairly turns on the brain’s reward circuitry.

“We may be hard-wired to treat fairness as a reward,” said study co-author Matthew D. Lieberman, UCLA associate professor of psychology and a founder of social cognitive neuroscience.

That’s right — if you recall the sex-money-chocolate ‘hub’ in the brain that we discussed (well, snickered at) in the ‘Bad Brain Science’ post, now it also looks like this part of the brain is also involved in being treated fairly. So now it’s the ‘sex-money-chocolate-justice hub’ (they’re sure beer and pizza isn’t in there, too?).
Continue reading “Craving money, chocolate and… justice”

Differences in dyslexia

A fascinating article came out in the Science section of The New York Times: Patterns: Dyslexia as Different as Day and Night, by Eric Nagourney. The article is based on an original research piece by Wai Ting Siok, Zhendong Niu, Zhen Jin, Charles A. Perfetti, and Li Hai Tan, who examined the abnormalities in brain activity associated with dyslexia in Chinese speakers (in comparison to better documented examples of the disorder in English speakers).

The basic result is simple, but intriguing, especially in light of some of the other research we’ve discussed on how brain areas linked to language differ, Two languages, one brain and theory of mind:

The report, which appeared last week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that changes in the brain that may contribute to dyslexia are different for English speakers and Chinese speakers.
The difference may be explained by the fact that English is an alphabetic language, the researchers said. A reader sees a letter and associates it with a sound. Chinese characters, on the other hand, correspond to syllables and require much more memorization.

In English-speaking individuals, dyslexia shows up in neuroimaging studies as weak activity in left occipitotemporal and temporoparietal regions of the brain. The researchers find out, however, that readers of Chinese with dyslexia have a different anomaly in their brain, perhaps due to the difference between alphabetic and ideographic languages. Children with (from the abstract) ‘impaired reading in logographic Chinese exhibited reduced gray matter volume in a left middle frontal gyrus region,’ an area that had already been found to be active in reading and writing Chinese characters. ‘By contrast, Chinese dyslexics did not show functional or structural (i.e., volumetric gray matter) differences from normal subjects in the more posterior brain systems that have been shown to be abnormal in alphabetic-language dyslexics’: the abstract details.

Continue reading “Differences in dyslexia”

Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis

I’m too busy to be blogging right now; I’m putting in an application for academic promotion, and like much else in academe, that means reams of paper must be offered up to the cruel, fickle gods of bureaucracy. But this example of the reporting on brain imaging research, drawn to my attention by Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon’s, Using 15 college age boys and some reactionary reporting, we are able to blame the coming depression on boobage, couldn’t pass by without comment. Thank YOU Amanda for getting me worked up enough that I won’t need a morning cup of coffee to get through several hours working on my promotion application, if I can just get back to that. (Thanks also to Echidne of the Snakes.)

The article which inspired this train of commentary is ‘Sex and financial risk linked in brain,’ by Seth Borenstein, who probably needs some sort of award for this piece. I’ll let you decide:

A new brain-scan study may help explain what’s going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles — sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported. The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken.

“You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same brain area,” said Camelia Kuhnen, a Northwestern University finance professor who conducted the study with a Stanford University psychologist.

Continue reading “Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis”

Utilitarianism and the Brain

Guy Kahane has a discussion of Utilitarianism and the Brain over at Ethics Etc.  In particular, he is discussing Joshua Green’s fMRI studies of moral judgments that have claimed to distinguish between utilitarian and non-utilitarian thinking (and the latter claimed as more rational, the former more emotional and hence not quite as good).  Kahane in particular pays attention to the methods used to generate the evidence and claims, and finds it wanting—the experimental scenarios themselves don’t clearly distinguish between the two types.

The debate has taken place in Nature, and here is a link to the actual text of the Nature critique by Guy Kahane and Nicholas Schackel as well as the response by Michael Koenig and colleagues.

Hat Tip: Natural Rationality

Two languages, one brain and theory of mind

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchAt first, when I read this journal article in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, I thought, ‘Stop the presses; this one’s a barn burner.’ Since then, I’ve backed off my enthusiasm a bit, but I still think it’s fascinating. Chiyoko Kobayashi, Gary H. Glover, and Elise Tem have a really intriguing piece on brain-imaging studies done on bilingual Japanese-English speakers, when the subjects worked on false belief questions that tested their ability to solve ‘theory of mind’ problems. The piece, entitled ‘Switching language switches mind: linguistic effects on developmental neural bases of “Theory of Mind”‘ (abstract available here), comes to a number of conclusions, some of them needing to be confirmed by other research, but they’re worth mulling over at Neuroanthropology.

I discussed “false belief” (FB) tests and how they indicate developmental changes in children’s ability to perceive the thoughts of others in my post, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right… sort of? Kobayashi and colleagues asked bilingual subjects to solve FB problems in either Japanese or English, and they compared both younger and older subjects, who had learned their second language later in life than the younger subjects.

Different theorists disagree about how important language is to the development of ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) ability, affecting how children solve (or fail to solve) FB problems. For this reason, different experiments have sought to distinguish whether language ability supports the development of ToM or vice versa, but, as Kobayashi and colleagues summarize, ‘the evidence is mixed on this issue’ (62). Children improve on FB tests when given language training and yet pre-verbal children seem to be able to solve some ToM problems that are not based on language. I feel that the authors’ conclusion is warranted, that the evidence seems ‘to support a conjecture that some aspects of language affect ToM throughout development and adults may process ToM more verbally than children’ (63).

Continue reading “Two languages, one brain and theory of mind”

Brain TV and Online 3D Images

University of California at San Diego has a webcast series, Grey Matters: From Molecules to Mind, with lectures by leading neuroscience researchers.  Topics include decision making, brain development, addiction and more.
Hat Tip: Neurophilosophy

The Visible Body is an on-line 3D guide to anatomy.  You can focus in on particular structures, including the brain, and rotate them at your convenience.  Great guide and it’s free if you sign up on the Argosy website. 
Hat Tip: Neurophilosophy

Brain Place is an online resource focused on SPECT imaging: single photon emission computed tomography.  You get 3D images that you can rotate—sort of 3D x-rays.  Good for tracking global changes, for example, with substance abuse due to changes in blood flow or glucose utilization.  Some striking images of “holes” in the brain due to tumors or drug abuse. 
Hat Tip: My Students