Mindframe

  Science news is full of what certainly sound like promising new studies featuring lab mice or lab rats as the test subjects. New treatments are assessed, and psychological truths are mined. Reading about this research, it’s easy to feel like we are witnessing the first steps of something big, something impactful. However, you are not a mouse (we assume). If you have ever read a conclusion from a mouse behavior study and wondered at the exact practical implications to your life, it turns out you had a pretty good point. For instance, more than 80% of medical treatments tested on animals—usually mice—fail when tested on people. Mice are cheap, easy to genetically modify, and we share 99% of our genes, but that one percent holds some crucial differences, especially when it comes to neuroscience research. For example, mice lack a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved with human learning, memory, and cognition. It’s hard to model, let’s say, a mental illne...

As Halloween approaches, let’s pause for a moment to consider a common piece of creepy iconography in Western culture: the bat. Associated as they are with darkness, caves, leathery skin stretched over bony wing bones—and yes, in the case of the vampire bat, blood-sucking—it’s no wonder they’ve become a symbol of all things spooky. Yet, there’s more to these humble non-rodents than thrills and chills. Scientists hope their brains might hold the key to a human mystery: just how do we track the relative position of people around us? Luckily, "A bat's hippocampus is very similar to a human's,” Professor Nachum Ulanovsky of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel told Phys.org . “The hippocampus is very important for things like spatial and social memory." And while bats are not the smartest member of the animal kingdom—they don’t have the tool use of elephants or the trickery of corvids—they are highly social creatures, as well as famously good navigators. ...

It’s an old stereotype that women can pick up on social nuances that men can’t. Ask a neuroscientist whether women are more adept at interpreting feelings from looking at people’s faces, and you’ll get a resounding yes. Or possibly, a resounding no. It turns out that it really depends which neuroscientist you ask. To pick one example , in 2009, Olivier Collignon and his team from the Université de Montréal Centre de recherche en neuropsychologie et cognition (CERNEC) hired actors to portray the fear or disgust in front of 23 men and 23 women, all between the ages of 18 and 43. Participants then had to categorize each performance by emotion. This study found that women completed the assignment more accurately. Women also responded faster when judging the faces of other women. However, that sample size of 46 might raise a few eyebrows when it comes to stating any solid, sweeping conclusions about the sexes. On the other hand, a 1986 metanalysis by Peter Shapiro and Steve...

  Previously, we’ve talked about how enlarged pupils can signify attention or arousal. If someone’s pupils dilate when you talk to them, conventional wisdom went, that means they’re very interested in what you have to say. It’s been speculated that this is why restaurants go in for mood lighting: the low light helps create the illusion that your dining companion is riveted, and thus increases the odds you’ll stay long enough to linger over that slice of cheesecake or extra glass of wine. However, it’s not so simple as looking into your date’s eyeball and reading their mind. In a 2017 study , researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf found that enlarged pupils can also be a sign of indecision. Here’s how they support this conclusion: in a recent study, 27 subjects sat in a dark room in front of a computer screen, which displayed a series of problems. In each sequence, the participant had to make a judgement about dots ...

      No two human brains are exactly alike. Or at least, that’s what neuroscientists have generally assumed. After all, consider the highly specific combination of genetic intermixing that makes up your DNA. Consider neuroplasticity—how easily the brain can wire itself based on past experiences. Learning how to navigate a complicated city, mastering the violin, even keeping your arm in a cast for two weeks all leave an indelible mark on your gray matter. Now consider the tremendous variation in experiences, even among siblings of approximately the same age, growing up in the same family.   However, short of scanning every single brain out there, how can we reasonably conclude that brains truly follow the snowflake model of uniqueness?   Five researchers at the University of Zurich recently took up the task: Seyed Abolfazl Valizadeh, Franziskus Liem, Susan Mérillat, Jürgen Hänggi, and Lutz Jäncke. They chronicled their results in the desc...

  Parrots: at times, they seem almost suspiciously smart. It’s not just about the talking and the mimicry; the Harvard Gazette reports that an adult parrot can routinely outperform a human four-year-old in a variety of cognition tests, including judging the relative volume of liquids. (Pour equal amounts of juice into a tall thin cup and a short stout one and your average preschooler will opt for the taller cup, while your average parrot won’t be fooled.)   How can a creature with a brain so noticeably different than our own seem to think so clearly? And why is parrot or crow intelligence (or, for that matter, octopus intelligence) so unsettling, compared to say, chimpanzee intelligence? What is it about a smart bird that seems a little spooky?   Science has yet to address the latter questions, but as to that first point, it appears that a breakthrough has been made. University of Alberta neuroscientists Cristián Gutiérrez-Ibáñez, Andrew N. Iwaniuk and D...

What makes the human brain so, well, human? It’s not purely a matter of size—from studying the cranial cavities of Neanderthals, we know that our bygone genetic cousins sported more gray matter than us. But seemingly that wasn’t enough to put them in the same ecological niche, or even just to keep them from extinction. After close examination and a lot of theorizing, researchers at Oxford have suggested that the main brain difference between them and us was more a matter of function, that Neanderthal brains prioritized muscle control and eyesight while ours focused more on developing the social skills necessary to form a tight-knit group. In other words, maybe the human brain’s main asset is the ability to foster teamwork.  It’s a nice thought, even if it is unprovable: other scientists have proposed many other theories for the disappearance of the Neanderthal, including interspecies breeding that simply blended them into humans, or even a matter of simple geography. And ...

What do Babe Ruth, Marie Curie, David Bowie, Barack Obama, and Oprah have in common, other than fame? No, that’s not the start of a riddle; there’s a simple, non-trick answer. They’re all left-handed . Today, left-handed people make up roughly ten percent of the population. Modern science has yet to explain what causes left-handedness in humans, although we have weeded out some of our earlier theories, such as “ being a witch .” Still, the idea that lefties are in some way untrustworthy has persisted across cultures and centuries (famously, the Latin word for “left” comes from the word “sinister”).   As late as the 1960’s, American public schools forced left-handed children to write with their right hand. What gives? Perhaps it’s a classic case of a majority failing to understand a minority, and coming to fear them instead. Interestingly, even today, neuroscience experiments commonly exclude left-handed subjects, in the hopes of eliminating variables. In a 2014 article in ...

In a fair and just world, losing a limb would be the end of feeling any discomfort in that particular region. For one thing, surely at that point, you’ve got enough on your plate. For another, it sounds like something that should go without saying. Once the nerve endings in that arm or leg are no longer connected to your body—and crucially, to your brain—it’s not as though you can clock accurate information about what that appendage is going through. (Nor would you want to.) However, most post-surgery amputation patients report an unpleasant sensation sort of floating where their limb used to be. Sometimes this manifests as a burning pain, while sometimes it itches, or prickles like the departed body part has fallen asleep (an ironic expression, in this case.)  Sometimes, this only lasts a few seconds. Sometimes, it lasts days at a time. The Amputee Coalition explains that these attacks tend to decrease in length and frequency over the first six months, but warns, “many con...

How much of our social behavior is hard-wired and how much is learned? It’s a huge question. The nature vs nurture debate has raged for centuries, and while most people today would argue that our actions are shaped by at least a little of both, it’s difficult to analyze social interactions scientifically. There are a thousand nuances at play in any conversation, impossible to replicate in a lab environment. If you’re looking for clean data, it’s a lot easier to study an animal with simpler social dynamics, like mice. And as it happens, exciting things are happening in the field of neurochemical rodent behavioral analysis .  “We’re starting to get a sense of what happens between the part of the brain that takes in sensory information and the part that produces behavior,” explains David Anderson of the California Institute of Technology. Comparing a mouse’s neuron firing patterns to its real-time actions can provide some important clues to the machinery of what we call “inst...