Mindframe

"It's the healthiest thing I can think of to drink," says Dr. Christopher Ochner, nutrition research scientist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. What trendy advance in food technology is Ochner talking about? Plain green tea, which has been regularly consumed in China for over a thousand years. Google “green tea health benefits” and you’ll find a lengthy list of dubious New Age-y claims, suggesting that regular consumption might help with everything from cancer to belly fat. However, research demonstrates that green tea improves blood flow and lowers cholesterol, in the process lowering blood pressure and decreasing risk of congestive heart failure. It does also seem to stabilize blood sugar for people with diabetes. Oh, and there’s the brain benefits. Multiple recent studies have suggested that consuming a compound found in green tea—EGCG, or epigallocatechin-3-gallate—reduces the formation of amyloid beta proteins, which occurs w...

It turns out your teachers were being a little hasty when they said there are only five senses. For instance, there’s proprioception, which is essentially the brain’s ability to take stock of where your limbs are in relation to the rest of your body, without seeing or touching anything. Even floating in a pool with your eyes shut, you don’t have to check to know where your arms and legs are. This, of course, gets a bit complicated when you lose an arm or leg. In 80% of patients, the result, at least for a little while, is a condition called phantom limb syndrome: a burning or tingling perceived in the area of the former extremity, which scientists theorize may be the nerve endings attempting to make sense of the sudden disconnect. Previously, we wrote about an experimental phantom limb treatment involving a VR headset . However, now a new solution may be on the horizon , created by EPFL, the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa and the A. Gemelli University Polycli...

Some amount of fear is healthy. As a 2015 episode of NPR’s Invisibilia illustrates, that rare person born with no fear suffers some unique setbacks. Still, given the millions of people around the world with anxiety disorders and/or post-traumatic stress disorders, it’s easy to see the ways that experiencing too much fear, or experiencing it at the wrong times, can adversely affect day to day life. That’s where the Cardiac Control for Fear in Brain (CCFB) studies come in. Led by Professor Sarah Garfinkel of the University of Sussex, in Brighton, UK, the goals are lofty. “Imagine what might be possible if you can turn fear on and off,” begins their fact sheet on the website for the European Research Council. The concept behind CCFB is rooted in research demonstrating that the brain is better at appropriately processing “fear stimuli” just after the heart has made a beat. This can be harnessed in, for example, exposure therapy, which works best when the fear response is...

For parents of young children hoping to boost their offspring’s language skills, the solution might be simpler than you think: talk to them. And then, crucially, let them respond to you. Rinse and repeat—and repeat, and repeat, as much as you can. In a recent article from the Journal of Neuroscience , researchers studied 40 healthy young children (27 male, 13 female) between the ages of 4 and 6 across a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Of course, 40 kids is not a large enough sample size to draw any definitive conclusions, but the study does offer an interesting place to start. The scientists found that early language exposure is a pretty good predictor of white matter connectivity between two key language-related parts of the brain, known as Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area . Broca’s area handles the movements necessary to produce speech, while Wernicke’s area aids in understanding speech, and selecting accurate words to verbalize thoughts. However, not just ...

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...

What happens to the brain during meditation? When researcher Wendy Hasenkamp was at Emory University, she and her team ran experiments on focused meditation aided by the fMRI[1]. In the end, the researchers came to recognize a distinct pattern among their subjects, a four-phase process involving four distinct brain areas. When subjects entered the fMRI scanner, they were told to focus on the sensation of their own breathing. The subject’s insula (related to a person's focus, or lack thereof) would default towards mind wandering. When that happened and the subject became aware of the fact that they were no longer concentrating on their breathing, they were instructed to press a button. When the subjects tried to refocus on their breathing, their salience network would take over. This is the part of the brain that registers sudden attention shifts, alerting you to nearby distractions. Your salience network might be more aptly named your distraction network, and for many of u...

In February’s blog post, How your Brain is Like an Ant Colony , we discussed how neural networks follow the concept of emergence: when it comes to connections between neurons, much of the order arises by neurons organizing themselves, without top-down direction. Arne Dietrich, the author of How Creativity Happens in the Brain , writes that some of those networks are hardwired and some are flexible and built in the moment. What determines the strength and intensity of a neural network include “a person’s unique past experience, opinions, preferences, and expertise." He explains that, in the same way "lightning follows the path of least resistance," the strongest connections send the fastest signals, taking over brain regions in a phenomenon called "spreading activation." The lack of an overall leader makes ant colonies fascinating. But if our own thoughts (activated neural networks) are all just a matter of signal strength, what is the self? How does sel...

Even if you from time to time think about your neurons, those little chemical-electrical switches that dictate your mental and physical activity, you probably don't give much thought to your transposons. And yet transposons don't just play a crucial role in neural application; in a very real sense, they define who you are. A transposon is a fragment of DNA that inserts itself into another cell. Research suggests that about half our DNA sequence is made up of these fragments, these interlopers. In the cells of, say, your lungs, heart, or kidneys, transposons have no real effect. They don't behave like viruses, which sneak into cells and multiply like crazy. They're more like very mellow hitchhikers: once they've found their way in, they're usually content to fall asleep and enjoy the ride. The exception is the brain. Once transposons get inside neurons, they can alter the very nature of the cell. It's like a troupe of improv actors that show up unexp...