It's all in the mind, or is it all in the brain?

This is a NY Times review of a book about differences in the brains of males and females called Delusions of Gender, by Cordelia Fine, an English cognitive neuroscientist.

Her summary: “Nonexistent sex differences in language lateralization, mediated by nonexistent sex differences in corpus callosum structure, are widely believed to explain nonexistent sex differences in language skills.”

I'm confused. I'm happy to believe that there are no differences in the brains of men and women not directly related to attracting men vs attracting women, because it fits my liberal prejudices so well. 

And it's easy to believe that a previous generation of scientists believed something that grew out of their own prejudices and that has become an urban myth.

She apparently dismantles some studies showing sex differences, but I thought there were lots and lots of studies that showed different behaviors among men and women. Okay, these could be learned, even by the time they're toddlers, and most studies are done on college students. But how about the studies showing men navigate using vectors and women using landmarks? Is the use of landmarks something we teach girls at the same time we tell them they are not good at math? 

And the study of the frontal lobe of the hypothalamus, which I'm pretty sure I think I remember is bigger in boys and men than in girls and women, both in number of cells and size of cells, and somewhere in between for gay men, which mediates sex drive in rats. Did that study turn out to be flawed?

I'm sitting here looking at the clock, thinking I have to get ready to go to work, and my mind is whirling with vague recollections of studies I've read about showing differences, both physiological and behavioral.

She seems to be saying that's all either wrong or cultural (sort of a cultural epigenetics, where what happens to you changes your brain). I guess I have to read the book.

Thinking you can do it, or not, affects your brain activity

The extent to which you believe you will succeed or fail at a task affects the resources the brain brings to bear on the problem. If you think you can do it, the brain shows greater activity than if you don't think you can do it.

And when people who thought  themselves either good or bad were faced with different scenarios, people who thought they were good at something had highest brain activity when they had a chance at a big gain, and people who thought they were bad at it had highest brain activity when they stood a chance of a big loss. (Big, in this case, was $5 compared to $1 for college student test subjects.

If it were possible to make oneself believe that one is good at something, one might well become better at it. I guess that's the point of Stuart Smalley's affirmations. If you think you can, you'll try harder, and maybe you'll succeed.

I wonder if affirmations work. That is, I wonder if telling yourself you're good enough at something does change the brain activity when you get to the actual task? People (okay, college students) weren't good at knowing how good they really were, which fits other research. If you really do think you're bad at it, can you lie to yourself and convince yourself that you are good at it? Maybe if you're real gullible, since you know what a liar you are.

The people doing the research are "working toward the development of implanted neural prosthetic devices that would serve as an interface between severely paralyzed individuals' brain signals and artificial limbs -- allowing their planned actions to control the limbs' movements," which is the coolest thing I've heard in months.

Another benefit of bilingualism

Besides being able to ask where the bathroom is in more places. Last November I mentioned a study showing that knowing two languages gives you "an advantage in mastering other complex thought processes, including "learning in general, complex thinking and creativity, mental flexibility, interpersonal and communication skills, and even a possible delay in the onset of age-related mental diminishment later in life."

A new study "has shown that bilinguals use the left inferior frontal lobe, the Broca's area, to respond to stimuli where executive functions are performed (such as ordering forms by colour or shape), whereas monolinguals use the right part to respond to the same stimuli."

This does't add to the first hypothesis, but it provides a physical substrate for the observed differences in cognition. In general, it supports the muscle metaphor, the more you use it, the stronger it gets.

In particular, it supports routine teaching of languages in schools, as early as possible. If it is true that speaking two languages improves "learning in general, complex thinking and creativity, mental flexibility, interpersonal and communication skills, and even a possible delay in the onset of age-related mental diminishment later in life," then it is almost child abuse not to teach kids a second language. As a public policy issue, we certainly should be teaching foreign languages in elementary school. Why would we not want smarter kids?

I can see why it would be politically difficult. Not only would it cost money to hire teachers, but it would have to contend with the xenophobia of the nativists.

It may be self-serving, because I worked in several different foreign countries for about 6 or 7 years, but it seems to me that I see a difference between people who have lived in a foreign country and those who have not. It seems to me they understand better that there is more than one right way to be. As Kipling wrote, "There are 9 and 60 ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them is right."

[back patting] I've worked for from several months to a couple of years in Mexico, Cameroon, Egypt, Dubai, India, and the People's Republic of Congo (the small one, not the one that used to be Zaire). I learned passable Spanish in Mexico, French in West Africa, Arabic in the Middle East, and then took two semesters of Japanese at the local community college, when #1 son took it there to satisfy a high-school language requirement. I had to drive him there and back, so I might as well sit in. [/back patting]

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, it seems to me that the strong advantages of learning second and third languages are good enough reason to require it in elementary schools. But it won't happen, because of money and nativism. The only way it could possibly happen would be for Obama (who has lived in a foreign country) to make it part of No Child Left Behind. Teach languages, or you don't get any federal money. Fat chance.

The brain and behavior, part 1 million

Regular readers know I spend a lot of time talking about how the brain influences behavior. Yesterday's Science Daily had three articles related to that issues.

Where courage is located
They took a bunch of people who were or were not afraid of snakes and had them move a neutral object or a harmless snake toward them or away from them, and they found the part of the brain that lights up when someone who is afraid of a snake overcomes that fear and pulls it toward them. If you care about details, it was the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. In addition, "a series of temporal lobe structures" decreased activity.

Brain structure and personality
This study looked at the Big Five personality traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness/intellect) and the size of different parts of the brain. "(C)onscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior." Extraverts have  a bigger medial orbitofrontal cortex, which is involved in rewards. Neuroticism and agreeableness each had its big area, though the article didn't say where. Only openness/intellect was not associated with a big area.

One problem with this is that they didn't look at all areas of the brain for each personality trait. After a personality test, they predicted which areas would be bigger than normal and then tested those areas. There may be other areas involved, on the principle that everything is more complicated than you think it is.

It's also not clear which way the causal relation goes. It may be that having a big lateral prefrontal cortex makes you conscientious, or it may be the other way around. I expect we'll find out. In the meantime, it's another strong correlation between brain and behavior.

What you feel affects what you think

• People reading a resume on a heavy clipboard think the person is weightier and better than people reading the same resume on a light clipboard. 
• People negotiating while sitting in harder chairs are less flexible and drive harder bargains. 
• People judged a case-study employee as being more rigid and strict if they had just touched a hard wooden block than if they had just touched a soft blanket.
• People who had been putting together a puzzle with rough pieces described a social interaction as harsher than those who had been handling a puzzle with smooth pieces.

Yup, the brain is god-awful complicated, but a lot of what we think is determined by it. Makes you wonder about free will, doesn't it? More on that some time.

Infant brain scan for schizophrenia

In a rush this morning, so I don't have time to find the links, but I've talked several times about being able in the future to scan newborns' brains and find signs of mental illness, so that early intervention means the first day. Well it's here. They found characteristic signs of schizophrenia in the brains of babies a few weeks old.

So the problems I talked about are here now.

• How do you treat a kid you know to be at high risk of some mental illness. One presumes medication will be involved, but do you treat the kid differently? For schizophrenia, probably not. For autism, maybe. Maybe knowing at birth that a kid has, say, 90% chance of becoming autistic, do you arrange the kid's room or experiences in a way not to trigger it? I don't know. How about a kid with the gene for uncontrollable aggression? Do you treat them the same way you treat another kid who smacks a playmate? I don't know, but we should be thinking about it.
• Not every kid with these characteristic brain signs will develop schizophrenia, or probably whatever is being tested for. If there is a 90% chance of some bad thing, do you risk screwing up the 10% who don't have it by treating them as though they do? I don't know.

Another way gay men's brains are like women's

Here's another case where gay men's brains are wired more like heterosexual women than heterosexual men.

The study ... found that when memorizing and discriminating between faces, homosexual men show patterns of bilaterality – the usage of both sides of the brain – similar to heterosexual women. Heterosexual men tend to favour the right hemisphere for such tasks.

"Our results suggest that both gay men and heterosexual women code faces bilaterally. That allows for faster retrieval of stored information," says study lead author Jennifer Steeves, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health. 

Can anybody see this and believe homosexuality is a lifestyle choice? Nobody you'd have any respect for.

For babies, number is related to size

It seems every time a researcher looks at how early babies can grasp some concept, it turns out to be earlier than we had thought. This time,

"We've shown that 9-month-olds are sensitive to 'more than' or 'less than' relations across the number, size and duration of objects. And what's really remarkable is they only need experience with one of these quantitative concepts in order to guess what the other quantities should look like."  

They showed babies computer screens with objects on the screen that were either big and striped or smaller and polka-dotted. They they showed them a screen where the difference was not size but number. If the more numerous objects were polka-dotted, they stared at the screen longer. The researcher says she thinks this means they expected the pattern on the more numerous to be the same as on the larger on the previous screen.

The article also says "adults associate smaller numbers with the left side of space and larger numbers with the right." I wonder if that's true of readers of languages that go right to left or top to bottom.

Also, "when adults are asked to quickly select the higher of two numbers, the task becomes much harder if the higher number is represented as physically smaller than the lower number." That's like the tests requiring people to read the name of a color if it is printed in a different color, such as RED or BLUE.

Why adolescents are crazy: part 2

I've written before about how adolescent brains differ from younger and older brains and how that affects behavior. Another group of researchers has found another difference.

Our results raise the hypothesis that these risky behaviors, such as experimenting with drugs or having unsafe sex, are actually driven by over activity in the mesolimbic dopamine system, a system which appears to be the final pathway to all addictions, in the adolescent brain.

The study had people from 8 to 30 classify images into two categories and paid them when they got it right.

Researchers measured so-called positive prediction error signals in the participants' brains  (or the difference between an expected outcome of an action and the actual outcome) as the participants discovered the results of their answers and the size of their rewards.

 "Learning seems to rely on prediction error because if the world is exactly as you expected it to be, there is nothing new to learn, " Poldrack said. Previous research has shown that the dopamine system in the brain is directly responsive to prediction errors. 

In other words, teenagers had the highest spikes in prediction error signals, so they probably had the biggest  spike in dopamine.

I don't doubt that all these researchers have identified biological correlates to teenage weirdness. On principle I doubt that any has found the sole cause. Everything is more complicated than you think it is.

Another gene for autism

They found another gene variant in autists and mentally impaired patients. In some, it was also found  in a parent, and in others, it was a new mutation. It has to do with how synapses operate. Another step in understanding and then, one day, ameliorating the problems.

Since the allele is associated with retardation and autism (but not necessarily at the same time, since some autists with it are normal intelligence), it brings to mind what I wrote about yesterday, that sometimes it makes sense to categorize mental health problems by their biological symptoms rather than their psychological ones. The subjects in this study could be categorized as autistic and/or retarded, or they could be categorized as having a synapse problem (or something like that). It could also be that the symptoms are related to the part of the brain the allele is expressed in.

A new way to think about mental disorders

A commentary in JAMA, discussed in Science Daily, suggests a different way of thinking about mental illness. Since we know that

• the symptoms of schizophrenia, bipolar, autism, and, for all I know, everything up to a fondness for romance novels are the behavioral manifestations of biological things going on in brains, and
• much of that is controlled by genes, which alleles are present and which are expressed, and
• the genes and neuroscience do not map straight across to symptoms,

therefore, it makes sense to describe mental illnesses in terms of the biological substrate rather than the behavior.

This all makes sense to me. When you deal with a person with a mental disorder face to face, you see the symptoms, but if you're in the lab trying to figure out how to fix or ameliorate the problem, you're better off thinking in terms of problems with myelination, expression of certain genes, or uptake rate of some neurotransmitter. The rest of us can still think in terms of schizophrenia, bipolar, etc, but we may need to get used to a different set of scientific categories.

Thou shalt have dominion over all the animals, but not until you turn 5

Last week, I noted a report saying that urban kids had "a human-centered pattern of reasoning," but rural kids did not. Today we learn that these urban kids (actually different urban kids) learn this perspective between the ages of 3 and 5. "... 3-year-olds showed no hint of anthropocentrism."

The EurekAlert article about is strange in one way. It says, "This outcome, considered in conjunction with recent cross-cultural evidence including Native American children, suggests a new model of development: Human-centered reasoning is not an obligatory starting point for development, as researchers and educators had previously assumed." 

But the "recent cross cultural evidence including Native American children" also included White rural kids, who tested the same as the Native Americans, so the cultures the study found differences between were urban and rural, not White and Native American.

Musing on music

My partner (MP) and I have different core music values. By that I mean we are moved deep in the lizard brain by different types of music. For me, it's 12-bar blues. For MP, it's salsa. Now MP likes blues okay, and I like salsa okay, but 12-bar blues makes my feet tap and head sway, while salsa makes MP's hips and shoulders move. I most like the parts of rock and roll, R&B, soul music, swing, gospel, and country music that are most like 12-bar blues.

Now why should that be? I don't have anything in my background that would move me toward the blues, nor does MP have any background in salsa, but for each of us, that music seems to resonate with us more than any other, though it's not particularly from our heritage, and for that matter, our heritages are fairly similar, amounting to different parts of Europe. Maybe it's something in the prenatal wiring of the auditory cortex and depends on whether our moms were getting more micro-nutrients from ribs, potatoes, and collard greens or tacos with beans and rice.

I don't have an answer, or even a plausible conjecture. It's just something I've been wondering about.

Sometimes a phone call is as good as being there

Some researchers stressed some adolescent girls by making them give an impromptu speech and solve a series of math problems in front of a panel of strangers. Their cortisol levels soared. Then some were comforted by hugs from mom, some by a phone call from mom, and some watched an emotionally neutral movie.

The interesting result was that the phone call increased oxytocin and reduced cortisol as much as the hug from mom.

Indian British kids less crazy than White British kids

Some researchers have looked at the mental health of Indian-British kids compared with White British kids and those of other ethnoses and found that Indians have fewer mental health problems.

In this study, researchers used data from the 1999 and 2004 British Child and Adolescent Mental Health Surveys, which took a nationwide sample of 5-16 year olds living in England. The proportion of Indian children with any mental health disorder was 3.7%, the lowest of any major ethnic group and substantially lower than the 10.0% proportion in White children. This Indian mental health advantage was driven by Indian children having fewer behavioural problems (e.g. aggressive or antisocial behaviour) and fewer hyperactivity problems. This pattern was reported by parents, teachers and children alike, suggesting that it reflects a real difference and is not the result of chance or biased reporting.

Part of the Indian mental health advantage was explained by the fact that Indian children were more likely to live in two parent familes and had higher academic abilities. Most of the advantage, however, was not explained by the major known risk factors. In addition, Indian children did not show the strong socio-economic gradient in behavioural and hyperactivity problems which was observed in Whites.

So why is this? The authors looked at the usual suspects and threw up their hands. There are other conceivable suspects. Maybe people from that region are genetically different in the parts of the brain that cause mental disorders. I doubt it. We don't know if Indians in India are the same, and I think we would have noticed if a couple of billion people had 1/3 as much mental illness as Europeans. Maybe not.

Another modestly plausible suspect is epigenetics. Maybe getting curry through mother's milk affects early myelination, or maybe the way Indian moms handle their infants affects their seratonin/dopamine balance. 

I'd put my first (also exceedingly modest) bet on culture, possibly acting through epigenetics. If I had to guess (and it's part of the Blogger's Oath that I will guess with a strength of opinion inverse to my actual knowledge of the subject), I'd guess that something in White British culture that makes kids crazy is ameliorated by the way Indian moms treat their little kids. And it probably has something to do with brain development. Is that general enough? 

Cultural epigenetics; where you live affects how you think

In reasoning about nature, kids who live where they see it think differently about animals than kids who don't. This study looked at urban kids in Chicago and rural European and American Indian kids in Wisconsin.

For decades, the consensus was that as young children begin reasoning about the biological world, they adopt an "anthropocentric" stance, favoring humans over non-human animals when it comes to learning about properties of animals. ... The results were striking -- while young urban children revealed a human-centered pattern of reasoning, the rural European-American and Native American children did not.

The authors also talk about the different notions of "alive" in Indian and European cultures, but the difference in thinking they point to is rural vs. urban.

I wish I knew more about the actual study. I suppose I could find it.  I wonder if they just showed kids Tom and Jerry cartoons and then asked them if cats really dress like hep cats and chase mice with cleavers.

But it sounds to me like scaffolding. You bring what you have, and that affects how you receive what you encounter. It also sounds like a cultural version of Lamarckian evolution, where early experience changes the mind's phenotype. (You realize that I intend this as a metaphor, don't you?) That makes it a sort of cultural epigenetics. Stuff that happens to you because of where you live affects the way you think.

I was in junior high when I first discovered evolution by natural selection. I immediately understood it, and I immediately knew it was true. In high school civics class, I remember a discussion of Herbert Spencer. I wonder if they still study Spencer in 12th grade. Spencer's big idea was cultural Darwinism, by which he meant that fit people become rich, and unfit people become poor; that's how you tell fit from unfit.

I remember my mind wandering. I was applying natural selection to cultural phenomena, specifically fads. They come into existence more or less randomly, and the ones that fit our culture last, while the others die off. (The similarity of this idea to Dawkins' memes has not escaped me.) And this issue sounds a lot like my version of cultural Darwinism.

Brain master switch

Researchers have identified the protein that tells synapses to release neurotransmitters. A protein called synaptotagmin1 (Syt1). When calcium reaches 10 parts per million, Syt1 tells the synapse to fire. This is the sort of report that means nothing to me in its details but much more in generalities.

I don't really care about the name of the protein that does this or that, or for that matter the names or affiliations of the researchers. But finding the one protein that causes every synapse to fire seems like a basic enough discovery that all kinds of things should flow from it, though I couldn't name any. It's the sort of thing that gets mentioned in Nobel announcements years later. Apparently Syt1 had been a suspect as part of a structure to release neurotransmitters, but now they're sure it's the sole trigger.

The minds of babes

The New York Times Magazine has an interesting article on the morals of babies. If you show 1-year-olds a puppet show with one puppet acting nice and one acting mean, and then ask the baby to take a treat away from a bowl in front of one or the other, they take it from the mean puppet, and sometimes they smack it in the head, as well. We already knew babies were selectively eager to help. If you have read the Scientist in the Crib or the Philosophical Baby, by Alison Gopnik, nothing here will surprise you, but it is a nice summary of what is known. Babies have an inborn ability to make inferences and moral judgments.

When it's working well, a baby's mind is a wonderous thing, but there are so many ways adults (and genes, which adults are also responsible for, physically if not morally) can screw it up.

We're all copycats

I wish I could remember the name or source of the TV show I saw about chimps and people. A researcher built a contraption that released a grape, or maybe an M&M, after a series of steps. He taught the procedure to kids and to chimps. Each learned easily. Then he removed the sides of the contraption, so they could see inside and tell that only one of the steps was necessary. Kids kept following the old ritual, but chimps went straight for the food.

A similar study was just done with Australian preschoolers and Kalahari Bushmen, and the kids all followed the steps they were taught, even when they were clearly irrelevant. The researchers' conclusion was that copycat behavior is universal. I suspect it's mirror neurons firing.

This video has been going around. It's a baby watching Beyonce and imitating the dancers. More mirror neurons.

Multiple brain areas for different parts of language

Rule 2 is everything is more complicated than you think it is.* In a really cool study, it turns out

there is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species. Instead, humans rely on several regions of the brain, each designed to accomplish different primitive tasks, in order to make sense of a sentence. Depending on the type of grammar used in forming a given sentence, the brain will activate a certain set of regions to process it, like a carpenter digging through a toolbox to pick a group of tools to accomplish the various basic components that comprise a complex task. ...

To determine whether different brain regions were used to decipher sentences with different types of grammar, the scientists turned to American Sign Language for a rare quality it has.

Some languages (English, for example) rely on the order of words in a sentence to convey the relationships between the sentence elements. When an English speaker hears the sentence "Sally greets Bob," it's clear from the word order that Sally is the subject doing the greeting and Bob is the object being greeted, not vice versa.

Other languages (Spanish, for example) rely on inflections, such as suffixes tacked on to the ends of words, to convey subject-object relationships, and the word order can be interchangeable.

American Sign Language has the helpful characteristic that subject-object relationships can be expressed in either of the two ways – using word order or inflection. Either a signer can sign the word "Sally" followed by the words "greets" and "Bob" (a construction in which word order dictates meaning), or the signer can use physical inflections such as moving hands through space or signing on one side of the body to convey the relationship between elements. For the study, the team formed 24 sentences and expressed each of those sentences using both methods.

Videos of the sentences being signed were then played for the subjects of the experiment, native signers who were lying on their backs in MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines with coils around their heads to monitor which areas of the brain were activated when processing the different types of sentences.

The study found that there are, in fact, distinct regions of the brain that are used to process the two types of sentences: those in which word order determined the relationships between the sentence elements, and those in which inflection was providing the information. 

Sorry for the long quote, but they said it so well.

I have a probably unfounded attraction to a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which makes me hope somebody takes this study and looks at whether the parts of the brain that are activated when speaking one language rather than another have any influences on thought or behavior.

*Rule 1 is people vary. Rule 3 is everything takes longer than you think it will.

Where psychopathy happens

A recent study comparing the ability of psychopaths, people with frontal lobe brain damage, and normals to understand the emotions of others found that "The pattern of impairments in the psychopathic participants showed a remarkable resemblance to those in the participants with frontal lobe damage, suggesting that an underlying cause of the behavioural disturbances observed in psychopathy may be dysfunction in the frontal lobes."

The authors consider this ability to be part of the theory of mind, which puts this in a different light than I had considered it before. The article about the study says "it has been suggested recently that (theory of mind) is made up of different aspects: a cognitive part, which requires inferences about knowledge and beliefs, and another part which requires the understanding of emotions."

It makes sense that these two theories of mind exist; I'm not sure if it makes sense to lump them as parts of a whole. Psychopaths are often successful manipulators, which means they have a good theory of mind regarding what other people know. I would have thought that they understood that their victims were afraid but didn't care.  In fact, I thought that was partly the point. And some serial killers have been able to manipulate the emotions of their victims. How could they do that without understanding them? I need to think about this more.

That's the thing about blogging. I get up early in the morning and look at a series of sites for interesting stuff and then need to understand it and write about it right then. If I wait, it will be lost, and I'll be on to something else. Unfortunately, my first impressions of a news item or study have a fairly high probability of being wrong. I guess ya gets what ya gets for the price ya pays.