# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Imagine being attacked by one of your own hands, which repeatedly tries to slap and punch you. Or you go into a shop and when you try to turn right, one of your legs decides it wants to go left, leaving you walking round in circles.

Last summer I met 55-year-old Karen Byrne in New Jersey, who suffers from Alien Hand Syndrome.

Her left hand, and occasionally her left leg, behaves as if it were under the control of an alien intelligence.

Karen's condition is fascinating, not just because it is so strange but because it tells us something surprising about how our own brains work.

It started after Karen had surgery at 27 to control her epilepsy, which had dominated her life since she was 10.

Surgery to cure epilepsy usually involves identifying and then cutting out a small section of the brain, where the abnormal electrical signals originate.

When this does not work, or when the damaged area cannot be identified, patients may be offered something more radical. In Karen's case her surgeon cut her corpus callosum, a band of nervous fibres which keeps the two halves of the brain in constant contact.

It would take things out of my handbag and I wouldn't realise so I would walk away; I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on
Karen Byrne

Cutting the corpus callosum cured Karen's epilepsy, but left her with a completely different problem. Karen told me that initially everything seemed to be fine. Then her doctors noticed some extremely odd behaviour.

"Dr O'Connor said 'Karen what are you doing? Your hand's undressing you'. Until he said that I had no idea that my left hand was opening up the buttons of my shirt.

"So I start rebuttoning with the right hand and, as soon as I stopped, the left hand started unbuttoning them. So he put an emergency call through to one of the other doctors and said, 'Mike you've got to get here right away, we've got a problem'."

Out of control

Karen had emerged from the operation with a left hand that was out of control.

"I'd light a cigarette, balance it on an ashtray, and then my left hand would reach forward and stub it out. It would take things out of my handbag and I wouldn't realise so I would walk away. I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on."

Karen's problem was caused by a power struggle going on inside her head. A normal brain consists of two hemispheres which communicate with each other via the corpus callosum.

The left hemisphere, which controls the right arm and leg, tends to be where language skills reside. The right hemisphere, which controls the left arm and leg, is largely responsible for spatial awareness and recognising patterns.

Usually the more analytical left hemisphere dominates, having the final say in the actions we perform.

The discovery of hemispherical dominance has its roots in the 1940s, when surgeons first decided to treat epilepsy by cutting the corpus callosum. After they had recovered, the patients appeared normal. But in psychology circles they became legends.

That is because these patients would, in time, reveal something that to me is truly astonishing - the two halves of our brains each contain a kind of separate consciousness. Each hemisphere is capable of its own independent will.

Brain experiments

The man who did many of the experiments that first proved this was neurobiologist, Roger Sperry.

In a particularly striking experiment, which he filmed, we can watch one of the split brain patients trying to solve a puzzle. The puzzle required rearranging blocks so they matched the pattern on a picture.

First the man tried solving it with his left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere), and that hand was pretty good at it.

Then Sperry asked the patient to use his right hand (controlled by the left hemisphere). And this hand clearly did not have a clue what to do. So the left hand tried to help, but the right hand did not want help, so they ended up fighting like two young children.

Experiments like this led Sperry to conclude that "each hemisphere is a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting".

In 1981 Sperry received a Nobel prize for his work. But in a cruel twist of fate, by then he was suffering from a fatal degenerative brain disease himself.

Most people who have had their corpus collosum cut appear normal afterwards. You could cross them in the street and you would not know anything had happened.

Karen was unlucky. After the operation, the right side of her brain refused to be dominated by the left.

She has suffered from Alien Hand Syndrome for 18 years, but fortunately for Karen her doctors have now found a medication that seems to have brought the right side of her brain back under some form of control.

Even so I felt it was tactful, when I said goodbye, to give both hands a firm "thank you" shake.

Karen's story features in The Brain: A Secret History - Broken Brains BBC Four, Thu 20 Jan 2100GMT, repeated Tue 25 Jan 2300GMT or online via iPlayer (UK only) at the above link.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Imagine being attacked by one of your own hands, which repeatedly tries to slap and punch you. Or you go into a shop and when you try to turn right, one of your legs decides it wants to go left, leaving you walking round in circles.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In the first months after her surgery, shopping for groceries was infuriating. Standing in the supermarket aisle, Vicki would look at an item on the shelf and know that she wanted to place it in her trolley - but she couldn't. "I'd reach with my right for the thing I wanted, but the left would come in and they'd kind of fight," she says. "Almost like repelling magnets." Picking out food for the week was a two-, sometimes three-hour ordeal. Getting dressed posed a similar challenge: Vicki couldn't reconcile what she wanted to put on with what her hands were doing. Sometimes she ended up wearing three outfits at once. "I'd have to dump all the clothes on the bed, catch my breath and start again."

In one crucial way, however, Vicki was better than her pre-surgery self. She was no longer racked by epileptic seizures that were so severe they had made her life close to unbearable. She once collapsed onto the bar of an old-fashioned oven, burning and scarring her back. "I really just couldn't function," she says. When, in 1978, her neurologist told her about a radical but dangerous surgery that might help, she barely hesitated. If the worst were to happen, she knew that her parents would take care of her young daughter. "But of course I worried," she says. "When you get your brain split, it doesn't grow back together."

In June 1979, in a procedure that lasted nearly 10 hours, doctors created a firebreak to contain Vicki's seizures by slicing through her corpus callosum, the bundle of neuronal fibres connecting the two sides of her brain. This drastic procedure, called a corpus callosotomy, disconnects the two sides of the neocortex, the home of language, conscious thought and movement control. Vicki's supermarket predicament was the consequence of a brain that behaved in some ways as if it were two separate minds.

After about a year, Vicki's difficulties abated. "I could get things together," she says. For the most part she was herself: slicing vegetables, tying her shoe laces, playing cards, even waterskiing.

But what Vicki could never have known was that her surgery would turn her into an accidental superstar of neuroscience. She is one of fewer than a dozen 'split-brain' patients, whose brains and behaviours have been subject to countless hours of experiments, hundreds of scientific papers, and references in just about every psychology textbook of the past generation. And now their numbers are dwindling.

Through studies of this group, neuroscientists now know that the healthy brain can look like two markedly different machines, cabled together and exchanging a torrent of data. But when the primary cable is severed, information - a word, an object, a picture - presented to one hemisphere goes unnoticed in the other. Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the godfather of modern split-brain science, says that even after working with these patients for five decades, he still finds it thrilling to observe the disconnection effects first-hand. "You see a split-brain patient just doing a standard thing - you show him an image and he can't say what it is. But he can pull that same object out of a grab-bag," Gazzaniga says. "Your heart just races!"

Work with the patients has teased out differences between the two hemispheres, revealing, for instance, that the left side usually leads the way for speech and language computation, and the right specializes in visual-spatial processing and facial recognition. "The split work really showed that the two hemispheres are both very competent at most things, but provide us with two different snapshots of the world," says Richard Ivry, director of the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. The idea of dichotomous consciousness captivated the public, and was greatly exaggerated in the notion of the 'creative right brain'. But further testing with split-brain patients gave a more-nuanced picture. The brain isn't like a computer, with specific sections of hardware charged with specific tasks. It's more like a network of computers connected by very big, busy broadband cables. The connectivity between active brain regions is turning out to be just as important, if not more so, than the operation of the distinct parts. "With split-brain patients, you can see the impact of disconnecting a huge portion of that network, but without damage to any particular modules," says Michael Miller, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

David Roberts, head of neurosurgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, sees an important lesson in split-brain research. He operated on some of the cohort members, and has worked closely with Gazzaniga. "In medical school, and science in general, there is so much emphasis on large numbers, labs, diagnostics and statistical significance," Roberts says - all crucial when, say, evaluating a new drug. But the split-brain cohort brought home to him how much can be gleaned from a single case. "I came to learn that one individual, studied well, and thoughtfully, might enable you to draw conclusions that apply to the entire human species," he says.

Today, the split-brain patients are getting on in years; a few have died, one has had a stroke and age in general has made them all less fit for what can be taxing research sessions of sitting, staring and concentrating. The surgery, already quite rare, has been replaced by drug treatments and less drastic surgical procedures. Meanwhile, imaging technologies have become the preferred way to look at brain function, as scientists can simply watch which areas of the brain are active during a task.

But to Miller, Ivry, Gazzaniga and others, split-brain patients remain an invaluable resource. Imaging tools can confirm, for example, that the left hemisphere is more active than the right when processing language. But this is dramatically embodied in a split-brain patient, who may not be able to read aloud a word such as 'pan' when it's presented to the right hemisphere, but can point to the appropriate drawing. "That gives you a sense of the right hemisphere's ability to read, even if it can't access the motor system to produce speech," Ivry says. "Imaging is very good for telling you where something happens," he adds, "whereas patient work can tell you how something happens."

A cable, cut

Severing the corpus callosum was first used as a treatment for severe epilepsy in the 1940s, on a group of 26 people in Rochester, New York. The aim was to limit the electrical storm of the seizure to one side of the brain. At first, it didn't seem to work. But in 1962, one patient showed significant improvement. Although the procedure never became a favoured treatment strategy - it's invasive, risky, and drugs can ease symptoms in many people - in the decades since it nevertheless became a technique of last resort for treating intractable epilepsy.

To Roger Sperry, then a neurobiologist and neuropsychologist at the California Institute of Technology, and Gazzaniga, a graduate student in Sperry's lab, split-brain patients presented a unique opportunity to explore the lateralized nature of the human brain. At the time, opinion on the matter was itself divided. Researchers who studied the first split-brain patients in the 1940s had concluded that the separation didn't noticeably affect thought or behaviour. (Gazzaniga and others suspect that these early sections were incomplete, which might also explain why they didn't help the seizures.) Conversely, studies conducted by Sperry and colleagues in the 1950s revealed greatly altered brain function in animals that had undergone callosal sections. Sperry and Gazzaniga became obsessed with this inconsistency, and saw in the split-brain patients a way to find answers.

The duo's first patient was a man known as W. J., a former Second World War paratrooper who had started having seizures after a German soldier clocked him in the head with the butt of a rifle. In 1962, after W.J.'s operation, Gazzaniga ran an experiment in which he asked W.J. to press a button whenever he saw an image. Researchers would then flash images of letters, light bursts and other stimuli to his left or right field of view. Because the left field of view is processed by the right hemisphere and vice versa, flashing images quickly to one side or the other delivers the information solely to the intended hemisphere (see 'Of two minds').

For stimuli delivered to the left hemisphere, W.J. showed no hang-ups; he simply pressed the button and told the scientists what he saw. With the right hemisphere, W.J. said he saw nothing, yet his left hand kept pressing the button every time an image appeared. "The left and right didn't know what the other was doing," says Gazzaniga. It was a paradigm-blasting discovery showing that the brain is more divided than anyone had predicted.

Suddenly, the race was on to delve into the world of lateralized function. But finding more patients to study proved difficult. Gazzaniga estimates that at least 100 patients, and possibly many more, received a corpus callosotomy. But individuals considered for the operation tend to have other significant developmental or cognitive problems; only a few have super-clean cuts and are neurologically healthy enough to be useful to researchers. For a while, Sperry, Gazzaniga and their colleagues didn't know if there was ever going to be anyone else like W.J..

But after contacting neurosurgeons, partnering with epilepsy centres and assessing many potential patients, they were able to identify a few suitable people in California, then a cluster from the eastern part of the United States, including Vicki. Through the 1970s and the early 1980s, split-brain research expanded, and neuroscientists became particularly interested in the capabilities of the right hemisphere - the one conventionally believed to be incapable of processing language and producing speech.

Gazzaniga can tick through the names of his "endlessly patient patients" with the ease of a proud grandparent doing a roll call of grandchildren - W.J., A.A., R.Y., L.B., N.G.. For medical confidentiality, they are known in the literature by initials only. (Vicki agreed to be identified in this article, provided that her last name and hometown were not published.)

On stage last May, delivering a keynote address at the Society of Neurological Surgeons' annual meeting in Portland, Oregon, Gazzaniga showed a few grainy film clips from a 1976 experiment with patient P.S., who was only 13 or 14 at the time. The scientists wanted to see his response if only his right hemisphere saw written words.

In Gazzaniga's video, the boy is asked: who is your favourite girlfriend, with the word girlfriend flashed only to the right hemisphere. As predicted, the boy can't respond verbally. He shrugs and shakes his head, indicating that he doesn't see any word, as had been the case with W.J.. But then he giggles. It's one of those tell-tale teen giggles - a soundtrack to a blush. His right hemisphere has seen the message, but the verbal left-hemisphere remains unaware. Then, using his left hand, the boy slowly selects three Scrabble tiles from the assortment in front of him. He lines them up to spell L-I-Z: the name, we can safely assume, of the cute girl in his class. "That told us that he was capable of language comprehension in the right hemisphere," Gazzaniga later told me. "He was one of the first confirmation cases that you could get bilateral language - he could answer queries using language from either side."

The implications of these early observations were "huge", says Miller. They showed that "the right hemisphere is experiencing its own aspect of the world that it can no longer express, except through gestures and control of the left hand". A few years later, the researchers found that Vicki also had a right-hemisphere capacity for speech. Full callosotomy, it turned out, resulted in some universal disconnections, but also affected individuals very differently.

In 1981, Sperry was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the split-brain discoveries. ("He deserved it," Gazzaniga says.) Sperry died in 1994, but by that point, Gazzaniga was leading the charge. By the turn of the century, he and other split-brain investigators had turned their attention to another mystery: despite the dramatic effects of callosotomy, W.J. and later patients never reported feeling anything less than whole. As Gazzaniga wrote many times: the hemispheres didn't miss each other.

M. GAZZANIGA

Gazzaniga developed what he calls the interpreter theory to explain why people - including split-brain patients - have a unified sense of self and mental life. It grew out of tasks in which he asked a split-brain person to explain in words, which uses the left hemisphere, an action that had been directed to and carried out only by the right one. "The left hemisphere made up a post hoc answer that fit the situation." In one of Gazzaniga's favourite examples, he flashed the word 'smile' to a patient's right hemisphere and the word 'face' to the left hemisphere, and asked the patient to draw what he'd seen. "His right hand drew a smiling face," Gazzaniga recalled. "'Why did you do that?' I asked. He said, 'What do you want, a sad face? Who wants a sad face around?'." The left-brain interpreter, Gazzaniga says, is what everyone uses to seek explanations for events, triage the barrage of incoming information and construct narratives that help to make sense of the world.

The split-brain studies constitute "an incredible body of work", said Robert Breeze, a neurosurgeon at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, after listening to Gazzaniga's lecture last year. But Breeze, like many other neuroscientists, sees split-brain research as outdated. "Now we have technologies that enable us to see these things" - tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that show the whereabouts of brain function in great detail.

Miller, however, disagrees. "These kinds of patients can tell us things that fMRI can never tell us," he says.

Subject of interest

Seated at a small, oval dining-room table, Vicki faces a laptop propped up on a stand, and a console with a few large red and green buttons. David Turk, a psychologist at the University of Aberdeen, UK, has flown in for the week to run a series of experiments.

Vicki's grey-white hair is pulled back in a ponytail. She wears simple white sneakers and, despite the autumn chill, shorts. She doesn't want to get too warm: when that happens she can get drowsy and lose focus, which can wreck a whole day of research.

During a break, Vicki fetches an old photo album. In one picture, taken soon after her surgery, she is sitting up in the hospital bed. Her hair is starting to grow back as black stubble and she and her daughter have wide smiles. Another page of the album has a slightly faded printout of a 1981 paper from The Journal of Neuroscience glued into it: the first published report involving data gleaned from Vicki, in which researchers describe how she, like P.S., had some capacity for language in her right hemisphere.

"I have a hard time saying it's all over."

When pressed to share the most difficult aspect of her life in science, the perpetually upbeat Vicki says that it would have to be an apparatus called the dual Purkinje eye tracker. This medieval-looking device requires the wearer to bite down on a bar to help keep the head still so that researchers can present an image to just the left or right field of view. It is quite possible that Vicki has spent more of her waking hours biting down on one of those bars than anyone else on the planet.

Soon, it is time to get back to work. Turk uses some two-sided tape to affix a pair of three-dimensional glasses onto the front of Vicki's thin, gold-rimmed bifocals. The experiment he is running aims to separate the role of the corpus callosum in visual processing from that of deeper, 'subcortical' connections unaffected by the callosotomy. Focusing on the centre of the screen, Vicki is told to watch as the picture slowly switches between a house and different faces - and to press the button every time she sees the image change. Adjusting her seat, she looks down the bridge of her nose at the screen and tells Turk that she's ready to begin.

Deep connections

Other researchers are studying the role of subcortical communication in the coordinated movements of the hands. Split-brain patients have little difficulty with 'bimanual' tasks, and Vicki and at least one other patient are able to drive a car. In 2000, a team led by Liz Franz at the University of Otago in New Zealand asked split-brain patients to carry out both familiar and new bimanual tasks. A patient who was an experienced fisherman, they found, could pantomime tying a fishing line, but not the unfamiliar task of threading a needle. Franz concluded that well-practised bimanual skills are coordinated at the subcortical level, so split-brain people are able to smoothly choreograph both hands.

Miller and Gazzaniga have also started to study the right hemisphere's role in moral reasoning. It is the kind of higher-level function for which the left hemisphere was assumed to be king. But in the past few years, imaging studies have shown that the right hemisphere is heavily involved in the processing of others' emotions, intentions and beliefs - what many scientists have come to understand as the 'theory of mind'. To Miller, the field of enquiry perfectly illustrates the value of split-brain studies because answers can't be found by way of imaging tools alone.

In work that began in 2009, the researchers presented two split-brain patients with a series of stories, each of which involved either accidental or intentional harm. The aim was to find out whether the patients felt that someone who intends to poison his boss but fails because he mistakes sugar for rat poison, is on equal moral ground with someone who accidentally kills his boss by mistaking rat poison for sugar. (Most people conclude that the former is more morally reprehensible.) The researchers read the stories aloud, which meant that the input was directed to the left hemisphere, and asked for verbal responses, so that the left hemisphere, guided by the interpreter mechanism, would also create and deliver the response. So could the split-brain patients make a conventional moral judgement using just that side of the brain?

No. The patients reasoned that both scenarios were morally equal. The results suggest that both sides of the cortex are necessary for this type of reasoning task.

But this finding presents an additional puzzle, because relatives and friends of split-brain patients do not notice unusual reasoning or theory-of-mind deficits. Miller's team speculates that, in everyday life, other reasoning mechanisms may compensate for disconnection effects that are exposed in the lab. It's an idea that he plans to test in the future.

As the opportunities for split-brain research dwindle, Gazzaniga is busy trying to digitize the archive of recordings of tests with cohort members, some of which date back more than 50 years. "Each scene is so easy to remember for me, and so moving," he says. "We were observing so many astonishing things, and others should have the same opportunity through these videos." Perhaps, he says, other researchers will even uncover something new.

Other split-brain patients may become available - there is a small cluster in Italy, for instance. But with competition from imaging research and many of the biggest discoveries about the split brain behind him, Gazzaniga admits that the glory days of this field of science are probably gone. "It is winding down in terms of patients commonly tested." Still, he adds: "I have a hard time saying it's all over."

And maybe it's not - as long as there are scientists pushing to tackle new questions about lateralized brain function, connectivity and communication, and as long as Vicki and her fellow cohort members are still around and still willing participants in science. Her involvement over the years, Vicki says, was never really about her. "It was always about getting information from me that might help others."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the first months after her surgery, shopping for groceries was infuriating. Standing in the supermarket aisle, Vicki would look at an item on the shelf and know that she wanted to place it in her trolley - but she couldn't.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Russell Foster, The Life Scientific - BBC Radio 4

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jim Al-Khalili talks to zoologist Russell Foster about circadian rhythms and jet lag.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Read Montague: What we're learning from 5,000 brains

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mice, bugs and hamsters are no longer the only way to study the brain. Functional MRI (fMRI) allows scientists to map brain activity in living, breathing, decision-making human beings. Read Montague gives an overview of how this technology is helping us understand the complicated ways in which we interact with each other.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The science of stage fright (and how to overcome it)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Heart racing, palms sweating, labored breathing? No, you're not having a heart attack -- it's stage fright! If speaking in public makes you feel like you're fighting for your life, you're not alone. But the better you understand your body's reaction, the more likely you are to overcome it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gero Miesenboeck: Re-engineering the brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the quest to map the brain, many scientists have attempted the incredibly daunting task of recording the activity of each neuron. Gero Miesenboeck works backward -- manipulating specific neurons to figure out exactly what they do, through a series of stunning experiments that reengineer the way fruit flies percieve light.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Melvyn Bragg explores the basis for the idea of Evolutionary Psychology and the context for its development as a discipline. What can it tell us about how we behave, and can it be trusted?

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Evolutionary Psychology. Richard Dawkins redefined human nature in 1976, when he wrote in The Selfish Gene: "They swarm in huge colonies, safe inside giant lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rational of our existence...they go by the name of genes and we are their survival machines". Potent ideas like this have given birth to a new discipline, 'Evolutionary Psychology': It claims that all of human behaviour can be understood in terms of a single compulsion - we must sexually reproduce so that our genes will live on. How has this idea developed, what can it tell us of how we behave, and can it be trusted? With Janet Radcliffe Richards, Reader in Bioethics, University College, London; Nicholas Humphrey, Professor of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York; Professor Steven Rose, Professor of Physic, Open University.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Evolutionary Psychology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Melvyn Bragg explores the basis for the idea of Evolutionary Psychology and the context for its development as a discipline. What can it tell us about how we behave, and can it be trusted? Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Evolutionary Psychology.

# data[].attributes.body
What women really want: The effect of women's cycle on preferences for male behavior - Neuroscience News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Summary: Study tests the good genes ovulation shift hypothesis, which states women's preferences for certain male behaviors differ throughout their ovulation cycle. Researchers found no evidence that a woman's preference changes across the ovulation cycle. However, women tend to perceive men as slightly more attractive when fertile than during other cycle phases.
Source: University of Gottingen
In the past, there has been much excitement over research that purported to show a link between changes in a woman's cycle and how attracted she was to men behaving in different ways. However, research at the University of Göttingen using the largest sample size to date questions these results. The new research showed that shifts in women's cycles did not affect their preferences for men's behaviour. The researchers found, however, that when fertile, women found all men slightly more attractive and, irrespective of their hormone cycle, flirtier men were evaluated as being more attractive for sexual relationships but less attractive for long-term relationships. The results were published in Psychological Science.
According to the good genes ovulatory shift hypothesis (known as GGOSH), women's preferences for certain behaviours, presumed to indicate men's genetic fitness, should differ according to their fertility. To test this, the researchers studied 157 female participants who met strict criteria - including being 18 to 35 years old, heterosexual and having a natural, regular cycle. The participants watched videos showing a man getting to know a woman who was out of shot. In four separate testing sessions, the female participants rated the men both on sexual attractiveness for a short-term relationship without commitment, and on attractiveness for a long-term relationship. The participants were asked to focus on the way the men behaved. The researchers used saliva samples to analyse current hormone levels and highly sensitive urine ovulation tests for validating the ovulation date, and in particular the fertile period.

They found there was no evidence that a woman's mate preference changes across the ovulatory cycle. Rather, women seem to perceive or evaluate every man as slightly more attractive when fertile compared to other cycle phases. They also found that men who act in a more competitive manner and show more courtship behaviour (for instance flirting) were evaluated as being more attractive for short-term sexual relations but less attractive for long-term relationships, independent of cycle phase or hormone levels.

First author Dr Julia Stern from the University of Göttingen's Institute of Psychology said, "There is a lot of research on women's mate preferences, so at first we were surprised that we didn't see the same effects. However, our new results are in line with other recent studies using more rigorous methods than previous studies." Stern added, "The finding that ratings of attractiveness increase in the fertile phase, independent of men's behaviour, is new and indicates that women's mating motivation is likely to be higher in the fertile phase."

Apart from using well a large sample that met strict criteria, the researchers followed rigorous methods, for instance by preregistering their study before data collection and employing "open science" practices such as making their data and analyses publicly available.

About this neuroscience research article

Source:
University of Gottingen
Media Contacts:
Julia Stern - University of Gottingen
Image Source:
The image is credited to University of Gottingen.

Original Research: Closed access
"Probing ovulatory cycle shifts in women's preferences for men's behaviors". Julia Stern, Tanja M. Gerlach, Lars Penke.
Psychological Science doi: 10.1177/0956797619882022.
Abstract Probing ovulatory cycle shifts in women's preferences for men's behaviors
The existence of ovulatory-cycle shifts in women's mate preferences has been a point of controversy. There is evidence that naturally cycling women in their fertile phase, compared with their luteal phase, evaluate specific behavioral cues in men as more attractive for sexual relationships. However, recent research has cast doubt on these findings. We addressed this debate in a large, preregistered, within-participants study using salivary-hormone measures and luteinizing-hormone tests. One hundred fifty-seven female participants rated the sexual and long-term attractiveness of 70 men in dyadic intersexual interactions in natural videos. Multilevel comparisons across two ovulatory cycles indicated that women's mate preferences for men's behaviors did not shift across the cycle for either competitive or courtship behavior. Within-women hormone levels and relationship status did not affect these results. Hormonal mechanisms and implications for estrus theories are discussed.

Feel Free To Share This Neuroscience News.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What women really want: The effect of women's cycle on preferences for male behavior - Neuroscience News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Study tests the good genes ovulation shift hypothesis, which states women's preferences for certain male behaviors differ throughout their ovulation cycle. Researchers found no evidence that a woman's preference changes across the ovulation cycle. However, women tend to perceive men as slightly more attractive when fertile than during other cycle phases.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
PAIN! Physiology - The Ascending Pathway, Descending Pain Pathway and the Substantia Gelatinosa

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sandrine Thuret: You can grow new brain cells. Here's how

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Can we, as adults, grow new neurons? Neuroscientist Sandrine Thuret says that we can, and she offers research and practical advice on how we can help our brains better perform neurogenesis-improving mood, increasing memory formation and preventing the decline associated with aging along the way.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Since the early 20th century, surgery to remove half a person's brain has been performed on dozens of people to reduce extreme epileptic seizures. Yet how can anyone exist - much less thrive - with half their brain gone? It seems impossible. Improbable, at the very least. But such patients do exist.

"The people with hemispherectomies that we studied were remarkably high functioning. They have intact language skills; when I put them in the scanner we made small talk, just like the hundreds of other individuals I have scanned," said Dorit Kliemann, a cognitive neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, and first author of a new study. "You can almost forget their condition when you meet them for the first time."

The new study, published in Cell Reports, peers into the patients' brains to see how they are functioning so well after surgery. The team found that specific brain networks reorganize themselves, a hallmark of plasticity, where the brain adapts and modifies its own connections from a previous norm.

Six adults with childhood hemispherectomy were scanned with an fMRI machine while the team tracked brain activity. They found that various regions of the brain for vision, sensorimotor information, and social cues strengthened previous connections, communicating more frequently and with higher activity than the controls. It's as if certain parts of the brain took up some of the slack from the missing regions and took on more roles.

It is generally believed that hemispherectomy is best done when the patient is young to maximize the strength of plasticity in childhood. Although this is still true, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests there isn't necessarily a solid cutoff line. The age in which the study participants had the surgery ranged from 3 months old to 11 years old.

Half-brain hemisphere removal is a last resort in patients with extreme seizures and only performed when medication and other treatment options have not worked. The patients' condition before surgery is often progressive and can inflict damage on the rest of their brain if not stopped.

"As remarkable as it is that there are individuals who can live with half a brain, sometimes a very small brain lesion like a stroke or a traumatic brain injury like a bicycle accident or a tumor can have devastating effects," said Kliemann.

"We're trying to understand the principles of brain reorganization that can lead to compensation. Maybe down the line, that work can inform targeted intervention strategies and different outcome scenarios to help more people with brain injuries."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How The Human Brain Rewires Itself After Half A Hemisphere Is Surgically Removed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Since the early 20th century, surgery to remove half a person's brain has been performed on dozens of people to reduce extreme epileptic seizures. Yet how can anyone exist - much less thrive - with half their brain gone? It seems impossible. Improbable, at the very least. But such patients do exist.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Broken Brains; Dr Michael Mosley concludes his series exploring the brutal history of experimental psychology by looking at how experiments on abnormal brains have revealed the workings of the normal brain. He meets remarkable individuals like Karen, who suffered from a rare condition - alien hand syndrome - which meant that one of her hands constantly attacked her.

# data[].attributes.headline
Understanding written but not spoken words 

# data[].attributes.subject
Understanding written but not spoken words 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An MRI brain scan from a patient in the study. Credit: Northwestern University
Patients in a new Northwestern Medicine study were able to comprehend words that were written but not said aloud. They could write the names of things they saw but not verbalize them.

Even though these patients could hear and speak perfectly fine, a disease had crept into a portion of their brain that kept them from processing auditory words while still allowing them to process visual ones. Patients in the study had primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a rare type of dementia that destroys language and currently has no treatment.

The study, published March 21 in the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, allowed the scientists to identify a previously little-studied area in the left brain that seems specialized to process auditory words.

If a patient in the study saw the word "hippopotamus" written on a piece of paper, they could identify a hippopotamus in flashcards. But when that patient heard someone say "hippopotamus," they could not point to the picture of the animal.

"They had trouble naming it aloud but did not have trouble with visual cues," said senior author Sandra Weintraub, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "We always think of these degenerative diseases as causing widespread impairment, but in early stages, we're learning that neurodegenerative disease can be selective with which areas of the brain it attacks."

For most patients with PPA, communicating can be difficult because it disrupts both the auditory and visual processes in the brain.

"It's typically very frustrating for patients with PPA and their families," said Weintraub, also a member of Northwestern's Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease. "The person looks fine, they're not limping and yet they're a different person. It means having to re-adjust to this person and learning new ways to communicate."

Remarkably, all four patients in this study could still communicate with others through writing and reading because of a specific type of brain pathology, TDP-43 Type A.

"It doesn't happen that often that you just get an impairment in one area," Weintraub said, explaining that the brain is compartmentalized so that different networks share the job of seemingly easy tasks, such as reading a word and being able to say it aloud. "The fact that only the auditory words were impaired in these patients and their visual words were untouched leads us to believe we've identified a new area of the brain where raw sound information is transformed into auditory word images."

The findings are preliminary because of the small sample size but the scientists hope they will prompt more testing of this type of impairment in future PPA patients, and help design therapies for PPA patients that focus on written communication over oral communication.

While 30 percent of PPA cases are caused by molecular changes in the brain due to Alzheimer's Disease, the most common cause of this dementia, especially in people under 60 years old, is frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). The patients in this study had FTLD-TDP Type A, which is very rare. The fact that this rare neurodegenerative disease is associated with a unique clinical disorder of language is a novel finding.

The study followed patients longitudinally and examined their brains postmortem. Weintraub stressed the importance of people participating in longitudinal brain studies while they're alive and donating their brain to science after they die so the science community can continue learning more about how to keep brains healthy.

"We know so much about the heart, liver, kidneys, eyes and other organs but we know so little about the brain in comparison," Weintraub said.

This article has been republished from materials provided by Northwestern University. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Reference: Mesulam, M.-M., Nelson, M. J., Hyun, J., Rader, B., Hurley, R. S., Rademakers, R., ... Weintraub, S. (2019). Preferential Disruption of Auditory Word Representations in Primary Progressive Aphasia With the Neuropathology of FTLD-TDP Type A. Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, 32(1), 46. https://doi.org/10.1097/WNN.0000000000000180

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brain Region Explains Why Aphasia Patients Can Understand Written, But Not Spoken Words

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Patients in a new Northwestern Medicine study were able to comprehend words that were written but not said aloud. They could write the names of things they saw but not verbalize them. This provides an insight into the brain degeneration that defines the rare dementia termed primary progressive aphasia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dr Michael Mosley concludes his documentary series with Broken Brains, exploring the brutal history of experimental psychology by looking at how experiments on abnormal brains have revealed the workings of the normal brain. He meets remarkable individuals like Karen, who suffered from a rare condition - alien hand syndrome - which meant that one of her hands constantly attacked her.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
UC Berkeley researchers have discovered that the brain neurotransmitter dopamine has a yin-yang personality, mediating both pleasure and pain. Credit: Christine Liu.
For decades, psychologists have viewed the neurotransmitter dopamine as a double-edged sword: released in the brain as a reward to train us to seek out pleasurable experiences, but also a "drug" the constant pursuit of which leads to addiction.

According to a new study from UC Berkeley, that's only one face of dopamine. The flip side is that dopamine is also released in response to unpleasurable experiences, such as touching a hot tea kettle, presumably training the brain to avoid them in the future.

The yin-yang nature of dopamine could have implications for treatment of addiction and other mental disorders. In illnesses such as schizophrenia, for example, dopamine levels in different areas of the brain become abnormal, possibly because of an imbalance between the reward and avoidance circuits in the brain. Addiction, too, may result from an imbalance in reactions to pleasure and pain.

"In addiction, people only look for the next reward, and they will take a lot of risk to get the next shot of drugs of abuse," said Stephan Lammel, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of molecular and cell biology and the senior author of a paper describing the results in the journal Neuron. "We currently do not know the neurobiological underpinnings of certain high-risk behaviors of individuals with addiction, such as sharing drug paraphernalia despite the proven risk of mortality and morbidity associated with it. An understanding of how drugs change neural circuits involved in aversion may have important implications for the persistent nature of drug-seeking behavior in the face of negative consequences."

Although some neuroscientists have long speculated about dopamine's potential role in the signaling of aversive events, its dual personality remained hidden until recently because the neurons in the brain that release dopamine in response to rewards are embedded in a different subcircuit than the neurons that release dopamine in response to aversive stimuli.

Johannes de Jong, the first author of the study, was able to simultaneously record from both dopamine subcircuits by implanting fiber optic cannulas in two brain regions - separated by just a few millimeters - using a new technology called fiber photometry.

"Our work delineates for the first time the precise brain circuitry in which learning about rewarding and aversive outcomes occurs," Lammel said. "Having separate neuronal correlates for appetitive and aversive behavior in our brain may explain why we are striving for ever-greater rewards while simultaneously minimizing threats and dangers. Such balanced behavior of approach-and-avoidance learning is surely helpful for surviving competition in a constantly changing environment."

The newly discovered role for dopamine aligns with an increasing recognition that the neurotransmitter has quite different roles in different areas of the brain, exemplified by its function in voluntary movement, which is affected in Parkinson's disease. The results also explain earlier conflicting experiments, some of which showed that dopamine increases in response to aversive stimuli, while others did not.

"We have moved away from considering dopamine neurons as just a homogeneous cell population in the brain that mediates reward and pleasure to a more defined, nuanced picture of the role of dopamine, depending on where it is released in the brain," Lammel said.

Reward prediction errors

Most of what is known about dopamine has been inferred from studies in rodents and monkeys, where researchers recorded from cells in a specific region of the brain that only contains reward-responsive dopamine neurons. It is possible, Lammel said, that through sampling biases, dopamine neurons that respond to aversive stimulation had been missed.

According to the reigning "reward prediction error hypothesis," these dopamine neurons are activated and produce dopamine when an action is more rewarding than we expect, but they remain at baseline activity when the reward matches our expectations and show depressed activity when we receive less reward than predicted.

Dopamine changes neural circuits and trains the brain - for better or worse - to pursue the pleasurable and avoid the unpleasurable.

"Based on the reward prediction error hypothesis, the established tendency has been to emphasize dopamine involvement in reward, pleasure, addiction and reward-related learning, with less consideration of the involvement of dopamine in aversive processes," Lammel said.

To dissect the different dopamine subcircuits, de Jong and Lammel collaborated with the laboratory of Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University, who developed the fiber photometry technology a few years ago.

Fiber photometry involves threading thin, flexible fiber optic wires into the brain and recording fluorescent signals given off by neurons and their axons that release dopamine. The fluorescent markers are inserted into the neurons via a virus that targets only these cells.

In previous experiments in monkeys, Lammel said, scientists had recorded from dopamine cells without knowing where in the brain the cells' axons reached, which could be areas millimeters from the cell body. Working with mice, de Jong recorded simultaneously from dopamine axons in the lateral and medial regions of an area called the nucleus accumbens, considered an integral part of the brain's reward circuits. He thus captured the activity of cells whose axons reach into these regions from the dopamine areas in the midbrain, specifically the ventral tegmental area.

To their surprise, axons in the medial area released dopamine in response to an aversive stimulus - a mild electrical shock to the foot - while those in the lateral area released dopamine only after positive stimuli.

"We have two different subtypes of dopamine cells: one population mediates attraction and one mediates aversion, and they are anatomically separated," Lammel said.

He hopes that these findings can be confirmed in monkeys and humans, and lead to new approaches to understanding and treating addiction and other brain maladies.

This article has been republished from materials provided by UC Berekeley. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Reference: Jong, J. W. de, Afjei, S. A., Dorocic, I. P., Peck, J. R., Liu, C., Kim, C. K., ... Lammel, S. (2018). A Neural Circuit Mechanism for Encoding Aversive Stimuli in the Mesolimbic Dopamine System. Neuron, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2018.11.005

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For decades, psychologists have viewed the neurotransmitter dopamine as a double-edged sword: released in the brain as a reward to train us to seek out pleasurable experiences, but also a "drug" the constant pursuit of which leads to addiction. According to a new study from UC Berkeley, that's only one face of dopamine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The brain may be one of the most complex objects known to humankind, but science has suggested the digestive system is of equal importance, especially when it comes to our emotional health. Your gut is teeming with trillions of bacteria, making up what's known as the microbiome. Collectively weighing up to two kilograms (heavier than the average brain), the microbiome plays a vital role in your health, breaking down food, supporting immunity and, perhaps surprisingly, affecting mood. Nutritionist Rebecca Pilkington believes keeping the microbiome balanced is the key to optimal physical and mental health. "If your gut is out of whack," she says, "this can lead to inflammation, believed to be one of the biggest causes of depression."

It all comes down to the gut-brain axis. "Your gut and brain are connected by the vagus nerve - one of the biggest nerves in the body that's essentially an information superhighway," Pilkington says. This two-way line of communication can trigger your gut to mirror your current state of mind - or vice versa - explaining why you may feel nauseous before a presentation or why stressful situations wreak havoc with your stomach.

The vagus nerve also plays a key role when it comes to stress and mood. In 1921, Otto Loewi, a German physiologist, discovered that electronically stimulating the vagus nerve caused a reduction in heart rate. Since then, researchers have confirmed the vagus nerve doesn't respond well to emotional stress. The more anxious and stressed we are, the higher the likelihood of inflammation and low mood, potential triggers for depression.

Moreover, 95 percent of serotonin, the body's happy hormone, is created in the gut, as well as mood-boosting dopamine, which is why the gut is increasingly referred to as the 'second brain'. If gut bacteria falls out of sync, this can fuel the gut-brain feedback loop, negatively affecting mood. Hormonal changes triggered by the body's stress response can also take their toll on the gut. Many sufferers of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) claim anxiety and stress are their main triggers.

Nutritional therapist and gut expert Eve Kalinik believes that when we are anxious, we shift into a 'fight or flight' mode which can affect the digestive system, causing it to 'hold' or 'release', i.e. causing either constipation or diarrhoea. This may be the explanation behind stress-related tummy troubles.

Kelly Brogan MD, a New York-based holistic women's health psychiatrist and author of A Mind of Your Own, also believes gut inflammation is the root cause of depression. "Not one valid study has proven that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain," she says. Her belief is that the most effective way to treat mental health disorders is through the gut. It may sound controversial, but recent studies have suggested depression could be treated using anti-inflammatory drugs.

The symbiotic relationship between the gut and mental health means the happier your bacteria are, the happier you'll feel. One of the simplest ways to keep the digestive and nervous systems in harmony is to reduce stress levels, says Natalie Lamb, a nutritional therapist at Bio-Kult. "Deep breathing can help keep your vagus nerve strong and healthy," she says. "Practice this regularly and also consider yoga and meditation. Also be mindful of staying active but be wary of overdoing it, which can raise cortisol levels and drain energy, negatively affecting the gut-brain connection."

To help restore balance to the microbiome - which can be affected by antibiotics and processed foods - Lamb advises a Mediterranean-style diet. Aim to consume plenty of good-quality protein, which is high in amino acids - the building blocks for brain neurotransmitters such as serotonin - and oily fish as well as antioxidant-rich seasonal fruits and green vegetables, which are rich in magnesium, a mineral that plays a central role in the nervous system.

And when it comes to probiotics - deemed the holy grail of gut health - Pilkington says they are worth considering if you suffer from brain fog or even anxiety and depression. "Eating probiotic-rich foods, such as kimchi and sauerkraut, or taking a high-quality supplement, can help."

While there's still much to uncover about the mystery of the gut, experts are adamant that the balance of the microbiome is hugely important in both digestive and brain health. "What is happening in the gut has a huge impact on mental health," says Pilkington. Perhaps when it comes to mental health, you really are what you eat after all.
Wednesday 10 October is World Mental Health Day. To highlight this, Culture Trip is looking at how different societies are shining a light on this important issue in innovative and alternative ways. The content of this article is provided for general information only and is not an attempt to practise medicine or give specific medical advice, including, without limitation, advice concerning the topic of mental health. The information contained in this article is for the sole purpose of being informative and is not to be considered complete, and does not cover all issues related to mental health. Moreover, this information should not replace consultation with your doctor or other qualified mental health providers and/or specialists. If you believe you or another individual is suffering a mental health crisis or other medical emergency, please seek medical attention immediately. If you are experiencing mental health issues, in the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting mind.org.uk. Please note there are no affiliations of any kind between the aforementioned organisations and Culture Trip.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Your Gut Bacteria May Be Controlling Your Brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The brain may be one of the most complex objects known to humankind, but science has suggested the digestive system is of equal importance, especially when it comes to our emotional health. Your gut is teeming with trillions of bacteria, making up what's known as the microbiome.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hannah Jenkins speaks English in the morning and German in the afternoon. It's not a routine she chose to adopt - but something her brain requires her to do. It all started with a cycling accident.

Her partner Andrew Wilde was halfway up a mountain in the US state of Montana when he received a baffling text from Hannah.

He understood only two words - "dog" and "hospital" - but knew instinctively something was wrong.

The text was in German, a language Hannah had grown up with, but Andrew didn't really understand. They only ever communicated in English.

Hannah had stayed at home in the UK, running the dog-training business she'd set up in Wokingham, Berkshire, while Andrew had gone to the US to train for an international shooting competition.

He called Hannah's mobile number, but got no response. With growing unease, he started to phone hospitals around Berkshire but couldn't get any information. He knew he needed to get home.

He made his way to the airport, unsure of what would be waiting for him when he returned.

What he didn't expect to find, was a different Hannah to the one he'd kissed goodbye days earlier.

Hannah had been cycling through a park near their home the day before she sent the text to Andrew.

She'd rounded a familiar corner and collided with another cyclist.

She remembers little, but paramedics have since filled her in - the other cyclist saw her lying motionless and bleeding on the ground and called emergency services.

He waited for help to arrive, told them he'd been cycling no faster than 32km/h (20mph), then left, without giving any more information.

An air ambulance was called for Hannah, who had been identified from items in her wallet.

It was touch and go whether she would survive.
Listen to the podcast: The bike crash which made me forget English
A full transcript is available here. For more Disability News, follow BBC Ouch on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to the weekly podcast.

Hannah eventually came to on a busy ward in the Royal Berkshire Hospital with no idea where she was, what had happened or why, in her mind, no-one spoke English.

"I couldn't understand anything," she says. "I felt as though I'd woken up in a foreign country and I couldn't understand why people weren't speaking to me in a way that I could understand."

Doctors tended to her in this unfamiliar language. Finally she recognised what she thought was "name" and "date of birth" - and recited that to anyone who approached. It seemed like the right thing to do.

The doctors were puzzled as Hannah's documents all pointed to the fact she lived and worked in the UK. They knew she was called Hannah Jenkins, and yet she didn't understand or respond to English.

They contacted her next of kin, her sister Margaret, who asked to speak to Hannah.

As Hannah sat in her hospital bed she chatted away on the phone, relieved that she was finally able to communicate with someone.

This bemused doctors, because previously she had only uttered the odd, indecipherable word.

Hannah had so many questions for Margaret, one of them being why the doctors weren't speaking to her in English.

"They are, Hannah," her sister replied.

The crash, it seemed, had knocked Hannah's knowledge of English clear out of her mind.

But she was left with the German that she had learnt as a child - the language that she defaulted to when speaking to her sister.

"The doctors didn't know I could speak German," Hannah explains. "It wasn't until they spoke to my sister that they realised."

The sisters were brought up in the UK speaking German and English, by polyglot parents. Their Austrian mother spoke four languages and their father, a language teacher from Wales, spoke seven.

"German was my first oral language," says Hannah. "It was a rule we had in my house - that when we speak to my family it's always in German, just to keep the language fresh in our heads.

"I couldn't get my head around the fact that in the hospital they were speaking English. My brain had lost my ability to understand that."

Hannah was experiencing something called secondary language loss, according to consultant neurosurgeon Colin Shieff, who is also trustee of brain injury charity Headway.

"Our brains are very sensitive and anything that has the ability to disturb the computer in any way can potentially impact upon the words coming out," he says.

"There is no algorithm that would follow that a specific injury will invariably result in the loss of German nouns or English grammar, but we do lose those bits."
Why did Hannah lose her speech?

Many parts of the brain are involved in speech and language, in particular the frontal and temporal lobes

An injury in these areas will affect speech in some way - from remembering vocabulary, to the construction of fluent speech, and for some people, communication will be permanently affected

Occasionally, someone who was fluent in two languages before an injury may lose one language entirely, but retain the other

Information from the brain injury charity, Headway
He says the skills learned in childhood are those most likely to be retained - the ability to say "yes" or "no" or even to repeat a nursery rhyme. He says "something that's been ingrained for ever" - is more likely to remain intact and those skills learned later, are the first to go.

The physical impact of the crash was minimal - a bruised leg and a sore shoulder - so Hannah was discharged within days.

But via her sister, who acted as her translator, she learnt that her brain injury was significant and would take years, rather than months, to improve.

She went home and waited for Andrew.

"I was listening to the radio a lot," she says. "I don't know how much I understood, but when my partner came that's when I learned how badly the language was affected."

The couple had been together for eight years, but now Hannah couldn't understand Andrew - and his school German only got him so far.

They devised hand signals and their own version of sign language. As time went on, Hannah's written English improved quicker than the speaking.

"When the communication really broke, we did resort to writing stuff down and texting or emailing each other, even though we were in the same room," she says.

"My relationship with Andrew has been affected because you can't not talk to each other just because you're tired or under pressure.

"Having that patience for the situation is always a little bit of a struggle. But I certainly couldn't have done it without him."

Andrew took an 18-month sabbatical from his job to support Hannah. Slowly she regained much of her English language, but it's something that even now, three years on, has not returned completely.

It has now become her second language.

"I'm fine in the mornings, but by the afternoon the fatigue really kicks in and I switch in my mind to thinking in German.

"I'll write little notes to myself in German, and I just sort of almost power down that part of my brain that deals with communication, so that in the evening when my partner's back I can communicate again."

The couple also had to come to terms with the fact that Hannah's personality would be likely to change as a result of the crash. She was told she "might not be the same person post-accident".

"I think that's the hardest part to get your head around," she says. "It's almost like you have to go through a bereavement process to say goodbye to the old you, before you can get to know the new you.

"But there is that level of resentment there to start with. I was fighting that quite a lot and saying, 'No, I'm still me, don't be silly, this is who I always am'."

Hannah has recognised a few "subtle changes" in her personality - she's not as patient as she once was - something that led her to close her business.

"I forgot so much of the theory behind it, my reactions are a lot slower and I don't have the subtlety of language that you need when you have to tell people that this isn't the right dog for them."

She has taken up photography and art, something she studied at university, and has thrown herself into a new sport to improve her focus - shooting.

"Shooting has been described as skilled meditation, and I think that is very true because you have to focus completely on what you're doing. If your brain goes off and ruminates or meanders then your shots do the same.

"To start with I could only do it for about 20 minutes, and now I'm up to about an hour-and-a-half."
Illustrations by Katie Horwich
The crash on an October afternoon in 2015 altered Hannah's life, language and personality, but it is something to which she has learned to adapt.

"Mentally I have to see that this is me now," she says. "I'm happy in my own skin again. So there's no reason why I can't just run with life as I am now."

For more Disability News, follow BBC Ouch on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to the weekly podcast.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hannah Jenkins speaks English in the morning and German in the afternoon. It's not a routine she chose to adopt - but something her brain requires her to do. It all started with a cycling accident. Her partner Andrew Wilde was halfway up a mountain in the US state of Montana when he received a baffling text from Hannah.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is a video tutorial for A2 students studying A Level Psychology (AQA spec A). The tutorial outlines the features of human circadian, infradian and ultradian rhythms.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is a video tutorial for A2 students studying A Level Psychology (AQA spec A). The tutorial outlines the role of exogenous zeitgebers in the control of circadian rhythms.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What happens during a sleep study? | Summa Health

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
(Read caption)

Do your circadian rhythms indicate that you perform better in the evening than in the morning? Or is the reverse true?

London School of Economics researcher Satoshi Kanazawa says that night owls - folks who stay up late - have higher IQs than larks, people who start their day early. He also suggests that this is a relatively new phenomenon in human history. Nocturnal activity was a dangerous thing prior to the advent of fire. He says today's night owls are defying ancestral-genetic tendencies, and can chose to override their circadian clocks, according to his article in Psychology Today. Kanazawa's theories are also explained in his 2012 book: The Intelligence Paradox: Why the Intelligent Choice Isn't Always the Smart One

But Kanazawa's research is not conclusive. In fact, a 2008 study by Kendry Clay, of the University of North Texas, showed undergrad students who study late at night had lower GPAs than morning types. And a study at the University of Bologna indicated that 'larks' may be more conscientious people.

Would you qualify as a lark or a owl? Take the self-assessment quiz.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Are you a morning lark or night owl? Take the quiz

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Do your circadian rhythms indicate that you perform better in the evening than in the morning? Or is the reverse true? London School of Economics researcher Satoshi Kanazawa says that night owls - folks who stay up late - have higher IQs than larks, people who start their day early.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Whether you prefer being up at dawn or burning the midnight oil depends on your genes, experts have found.

Some of us leap out of bed each morning, raring to start the day. Others need at least one alarm clock - preferably one with a snooze button - to ensure they get to work on time.

And some of us happily stay up chatting until the wee small hours, while others prefer to be tucked up listening to 'Book at Bedtime' with the lights turned out.

We really are divided into larks and owls. And this is set by our genes, says neurogeneticist Dr Louis Ptacek of University of California.

He says: "Whether we like it or not our parents are telling us when to go to bed - based on the genes that they gave us."

Scientists have come to realise the importance of understanding a person's chronotype, the time of the day when they function the best.

If you have a fast clock you like to do things early, and if you have a slow clock you like to do things late
Professor Derk-Jan Dijk, , University of Surrey's Sleep Research Centre.

Knowing how much of a lark or an owl we are should help us live more healthily in the modern 24/7 world.

Rick Neubig, a professor of pharmacology in Michigan, is an extreme lark.

"People I communicated with in Europe will always notice that they get emails from me very early in the morning.

"The other thing I like a lot which fits in with the early mornings is that I'm a fairly serious bird watcher. It's much easier for me than other people to get up and see the birds at dawn."

And it runs in his family.

"My mother would always drag us out of bed at 4 in the morning to go on vacation, and my daughter works out early in the morning."

'Strong genetic trait'

Dr Louis Ptacek is studying the families of larks like Rick's that have Familial Advanced Sleep Phase syndrome. He got into this area of research when his colleague Dr Chris Jones met a 69 year old who was worried about waking up very early and whose concern had been ignored by other medics.

Drs Ptacek and Jones looked at her family.

"We recognised this was a strong genetic trait. We found the mutated gene resided near the end of chromosome 2", says Louis Ptacek.

They knew that if similar genes were mutated in fruit flies and mice the circadian clocks speed up. The mutated gene made a different protein that affects the rhythm of the clock.

The famous lateness of teenagers is a real thing
Prof Til Roennenberg, Ludwig-Maximilians University

They also study families of extreme owls, with Familial Delayed Sleep Phase syndrome. And they think this was due to a different mutation in the same genes.

Mutations in other genes have been found in other families with advanced or delayed sleep patterns.

We all have internal circadian clocks - the master clock is made up of thousands of nerve cells in the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a wing - shaped structure located in the hypothalamus, at the base of the brain.

The hypothalamus controls all kinds of bodily functions, from releasing hormones to regulating temperature and water intake.

This internal clock is reset every day by light. You might expect that since the earth's day lasts 24 hours, everyone's clocks would run to a similar schedule.

But they don't. That's why there are larks and owls.

"If you have a fast clock you like to do things early, and if you have a slow clock you like to do things late," says Prof Derk-Jan Dijk, Head of the University of Surrey's Sleep Research Centre.

'A sleep map of the world'

Our clocks are not fixed throughout life. Anyone who has small children will know they're prone to waking early, as do the elderly.

But whatever the speed of your clock we have to fit in with the way that society is set up with its 9-5 working times.

This can be particularly hard for teenagers, who generally find it hard to get up in the morning.

Prof Till Roenneberg of Ludwig-Maximilians University has looked at the sleeping patterns of this age group with the help of his Munich Chronotype Questionnaire.

"We can show that the famous lateness of teenagers is a real thing. They get later through childhood and puberty and reach a point of lateness at 19 and a half for women and 21 for men. It was so clear it was astonishing.

"Our database has over 200,000 participants. We are hoping for a sleep map of the world."

Mary Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University in the US, is campaigning for schools to start later.

"School grades don't get always higher but for me one of the most important aspects of sleep loss is the issue of depression and sadness and lack of motivation of kids.

"The moods improve when schools start later."

But not many schools around the world have chosen a later start time.

After all, most people do fit in with the working day, although they may be suffering from exhaustion.

Social jet lag

Prof Roenneberg has a catchy way of describing and measuring the sleep deprivation many suffer during the working or studying week, when we rely on alarm clocks to get us out of bed.

He calls it social jet lag.

He finds that the middle of people's sleep on work days is usually earlier than that on free days. The difference is their social jet lag.

"On average people accumulate one to two hours of social jet lag, though some can get up to five hours, particularly in the young, who still have to get to work at the same time as older people," says Prof Roenneberg.

Having social jetlag is like flying from New York to London every weekend. And it's harder to get over social jet lag than time zone jet lag.

But Prof Roenneberg says there are things we can do to overcome social jetlag.

"We should be changing work times and making them more individual to fit in with our chronotypes. If that's not possible we should be more strategic about light exposure.

"You should try to go to work not in a covered vehicle but on a bike. The minute the sun sets we should use things that have no blue light, like computer screens and other electronic devices."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Whether you prefer being up at dawn or burning the midnight oil depends on your genes, experts have found. Some of us leap out of bed each morning, raring to start the day. Others need at least one alarm clock - preferably one with a snooze button - to ensure they get to work on time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
CABINET // Caveman: An Interview with Michel Siffre

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Biopsychology: Infradian and Ultradian Rhythms Explained

# data[].attributes.headline
Exogenous and zeitgebers endogenous pacemakers

# data[].attributes.subject
Exogenous and zeitgebers endogenous pacemakers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Rhythms of Life: What your body clock means to you from eye disease to jet lag

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ultradian RhythmsThese are rhythmic cycles with a period of less than one day. Examples include levels of alertness throughout the day and the cycle of brain activity during sleep.

The sleep cycle:
1. Each cycle lasts for about 90 minutes.
2. The amount of Stage 3 & 4 sleep decreases with each cycle.
3. The amount of REM sleep increases with each cycle.

There are many methodological problems with researching the sleep cycle and the nature of sleep, most of which arise from the assumptions that researchers need to make that, for example, dreaming only occurs during REM sleep, and the subjective nature of dreaming. The link between REM sleep and dreaming is important as it may provide a way for researchers to understand the purpose of dreaming, but it does rely on the erroneous assumption that REM sleep equals dreaming.

Dement & Kleitman (1957) found participants were likely to be dreaming when woken from REM sleep, but many participants did not report dreams from REM sleep, and many reported dreaming outside REM sleep. This questions the assumption that dreaming only, and always, occurs during REM sleep.Infradian rhythms

Infradian rhythms have a cycle of longer than one day. Examples include the menstrual cycle and seasonal affective disorder.

The menstrual cycle lasts around 28 days, or one lunar month, and has been the subject of psychological research due to the behavioural changes that are often linked to the cycle, such as increase in accidents, lower academic achievement, suicides and crime (Dalton, 1964). Understanding biological rhythms has changed PMS from being a psychological disorder to a physiological event.

An interesting piece of research by Russell et al (1980) found that the menstrual cycle can be synchronized by exogenous cues, which explains the phenomenon that women who live together often have synchronized cycles. To demonstrate this the researchers used volunteer participants who did not live together, and transferred sweat from the upper lips of the participants to each other with the results that their cycles quickly became synchronized. They hypothesized that sweat must contain a pheromone, or chemical messenger, that resets the menstrual cycle.

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is an infradian rhythm that lasts about a year. Features of SAD include depression in winter months that improves to normal mood in summer months. SAD is believed to be caused by low light levels in winter, especially as an effective treatment for the disorder is to spend time exposed to bright light from a light box during the winter months, however the effectiveness of light box therapy may be psychological rather than physiological as Eastman et al (1998) found there was a placebo effect in 32% of participants who used light boxes.

Research into biological rhythms is determinist
Researching biological rhythms such as the menstrual cycle has led to a deterministic understanding of behavioural changes associated with pre-menstrual syndrome. The determinist argument has been used in court to defend women against charges of murder (Johnson, 1987), and psychiatrists such as Dalton (an expert witness) have argued that PMS is a severe mental disorder. To counter this, however, there is evidence that biological rhythms can be influenced by free will, for example Born et al (1999) found that people who will themselves to wake up earlier than usual had higher levels of ACTH in their blood (ACTH is part of the waking up cycle).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Infradian and ultradian rhythms for A level psychology - Psychteacher

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ultradian RhythmsThese are rhythmic cycles with a period of less than one day. Examples include levels of alertness throughout the day and the cycle of brain activity during sleep. The sleep cycle:1. Each cycle lasts for about 90 minutes. 2. The amount of Stage 3 & 4 sleep decreases with each cycle.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Wave Nature of Being: Ultradian Rhythms and Mind-Body Communication

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The question of what determines human behavior in health and illness has been conceptualized as the so-called "Nature versus Nature Controversy:" Is the source of a behavior to be found in endogenous, built-in genetic factors or is it better understood as an adaptive process to outer environmental circumstances?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is a video tutorial for A2 students studying A Level Psychology (AQA spec A). The tutorial outlines the features of human circadian, infradian and ultradian rhythms.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Being in tune with your natural Body Clock is about a lot more than knowing whether your are a "lark" or an "owl".

As the BBC's Day of the Body Clock has shown, it can also have a profound effect on our health.

Doctors are becoming increasingly interested in the science of chronotherapy - aligning medical treatment to our circadian rhythms.

Cancer and rheumatoid arthritis are two disease areas where chronotherapy is showing promise.

Chemotherapy

Every three weeks Philippe Maillol makes the 500 mile round trip from his home in Limoges to Paris for cancer treatment.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in August 2013 and began standard chemotherapy in Limoges with the drugs infused during the day.

But the side effects were hard to bear.

"I was completely exhausted," said Philippe. "When I got home from my local hospital I couldn't even speak, let alone eat. I suffered extreme nausea which lasted for days."

Six months ago Philippe switched to treatment at the Paul Brousse hospital in Villejuif in southern Paris.

Now his drug infusions are spaced during the day, with two happening overnight while he sleeps.

"The impact on my body is much gentler" he said. "So much so that I don't need to take the anti-nausea drugs which themselves carried their own side-effects."

He treatment is being led by Professor Francis Levi, one of the pioneers of chronotherapy.

He said: "We have clocks within our cells that govern the metabolism of drugs. So some drugs are best given at night and others during the day.

"We have found chronotherapy is reducing the toxicity of treatments and improving the quality of life of patients, by respecting the circadian rhythms of the patients.

Prof Levi is taking up a post at Warwick Medical School later this year.

He plans to continue his research into cancer chronotherapy and will treat patients at University Hospital Birmingham.

Rheumatoid arthritis

The University of Manchester is conducting a small chronotherapy trial for rheumatoid arthritis.

The inflammatory condition causes pain and swelling in the joints.

Ten patients are having their sleep/wake cycle and movements monitored for a week, culminating with a 24-hour stay at Manchester Royal Infirmary.

During this visit, their blood and saliva are analysed to examine immune cells.

Krystal Fayle, 27, is one of those on the trial.

She said: "I wake up in pain every day and it often hurts to walk.

"I don't really go out much anymore because I can't stand for long because my joints are swollen."

Patients with rheumatoid arthritis commonly find their symptoms are worse in the morning. But now doctors realise this is not simply because joints stiffen up through lack of use overnight.

"Rheumatoid arthritis is driven by cells in the immune system called T lymphocytes" said David Ray, Prof of Medicine at University of Manchester.

"These cells each have their own clock, and their inflammatory response varies depending on the time of day.

"Even when we remove them from the body and look at them in a dish they still keep a day/night rhythm."

Some of the drug treatments for rheumatoid arthritis are relatively toxic and carry a significant risk of side effects.

The trial is trying to determine the best time to deliver drugs so that they dampen the immune system only when needed.

Prof Ray said: "The processes that drive the disease are only active for part of 24 cycle - so if get our potent drug in at the right time we can avoid exposing patients to toxic drugs throughout the day."

Krystal Fayle suffered liver damage from one drug and hair loss from another. So she is hoping that the trial may identify a better treatment.

She said: "To have a drug that worked for me would be absolutely brilliant, and make life much easier."

The trial is still recruiting but should be completed later this year.

Timing medical treatment to fit our natural biological rhythms is still unusual.

Further patient trials of chronotherapy are needed for what remains an area at the fringe of medicine.

But it is a concept that is gaining ground as more doctors realise the importance of our body clock.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Being in tune with your natural Body Clock is about a lot more than knowing whether your are a "lark" or an "owl". As the BBC's Day of the Body Clock has shown, it can also have a profound effect on our health.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What are circadian rhythms?

Circadian rhythms are physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow a daily cycle. They respond primarily to light and darkness in an organism's environment. Sleeping at night and being awake during the day is an example of a light-related circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythms are found in most living things, including animals, plants, and many tiny microbes. The study of circadian rhythms is called chronobiology.

What are biological clocks?

Biological clocks are an organism's innate timing device. They're composed of specific molecules (proteins) that interact in cells throughout the body. Biological clocks are found in nearly every tissue and organ. Researchers have identified similar genes in people, fruit flies, mice, fungi, and several other organisms that are responsible for making the clock's components.

Are biological clocks the same thing as circadian rhythms?

No, but they are related. Biological clocks produce circadian rhythms and regulate their timing.

What is the master clock?

A master clock in the brain coordinates all the biological clocks in a living thing, keeping the clocks in sync. In vertebrate animals, including humans, the master clock is a group of about 20,000 nerve cells (neurons) that form a structure called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN. The SCN is located in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus and receives direct input from the eyes.

Does the body make and keep its own circadian rhythms?

Natural factors within the body produce circadian rhythms. However, signals from the environment also affect them. The main cue influencing circadian rhythms is daylight. This light can turn on or turn off genes that control the molecular structure of biological clocks. Changing the light-dark cycles can speed up, slow down, or reset biological clocks as well as circadian rhythms.

Do circadian rhythms affect body function and health?

Yes. Circadian rhythms can influence sleep-wake cycles, hormone release, eating habits and digestion, body temperature, and other important bodily functions. Biological clocks that run fast or slow can result in disrupted or abnormal circadian rhythms. Irregular rhythms have been linked to various chronic health conditions, such as sleep disorders, obesity, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, and seasonal affective disorder.

How are circadian rhythms related to sleep?

Circadian rhythms help determine our sleep patterns. The body's master clock, or SCN, controls the production of melatonin, a hormone that makes you sleepy. It receives information about incoming light from the optic nerves, which relay information from the eyes to the brain. When there is less light-like at night-the SCN tells the brain to make more melatonin so you get drowsy. Researchers are studying how shift work as well as exposure to light from mobile devices during the night may alter circadian rhythms and sleep-wake cycles.

How are circadian rhythms related to jet lag?

People get jet lag when travel disrupts their circadian rhythms. When you pass through different time zones, your biological clocks will be different from the local time. For example, if you fly east from California to New York, you "lose" 3 hours. When you wake up at 7:00 a.m. on the east coast, your biological clocks are still running on west coast time, so you feel the way you might feel at 4:00 a.m. Your biological clocks will reset, but this often takes a few days.

How do researchers study circadian rhythms?

Scientists learn about circadian rhythms by studying humans or by using organisms with similar biological clock genes, including fruit flies and mice. Researchers doing these experiments can control the subject's environment by altering light and dark periods. Then they look for changes in gene activity or other molecular signals. This research helps us understand how biological clocks work and keep time.

Scientists also study organisms with irregular circadian rhythms to identify which genetic components of biological clocks may be broken.

How does circadian rhythm research contribute to human health?

Understanding what makes biological clocks tick may lead to treatments for sleep disorders, obesity, mental health disorders, jet lag, and other health problems. It can also improve ways for individuals to adjust to nighttime shift work. Learning more about the genes responsible for circadian rhythms will also help us understand biological systems and the human body.

NIGMS is a part of the National Institutes of Health that supports basic research to increase our understanding of biological processes and lay the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. For more information on the Institute's research and training programs, visit https://www.nigms.nih.gov.

Content revised August 2017

Want to use this content on your website or other digital platform? This fact sheet and others are available for syndication through the HHS Syndication Storefront . For more information on how syndication works, see the HHS Syndication Storefront Questions and Answers page .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Circadian rhythms are physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow a daily cycle. They respond primarily to light and darkness in an organism's environment. Sleeping at night and being awake during the day is an example of a light-related circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythms are found in most living things, including animals, plants, and many tiny microbes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When a group of experimental psychologists moved into their new lab space in Cambridge earlier this year, they took a somewhat unconventional approach to refurbishing their tea room: they had the walls tiled with the Café Wall Illusion.

The illusion, so-named after it was spotted on the wall of a Bristol café in the 1970s, is a much-debated geometrical trick of the eye and brain in which perfectly parallel lines of black and white tiles appear wedge-shaped and sloped.

It's also an excellent demonstration of how the brain interprets the world in a way that moves beyond what the input is from the eye, as one of the experimental psychologists, Professor Zoe Kourtzi, explained. "In interpreting the world around us, our brains are challenged by a plethora of information. The brain is thought to integrate information from multiple sources and solve the puzzle of perception by taking into account not only the signals registered by the sensory organs but also their context in space and time.

"In the Café Wall Illusion, the brain takes into account the surrounding tiles, but it also relies on our previous knowledge acquired through training and experience when interpreting a new situation."

From the day we are born, neurons in the brain start to make connections that combine what we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell with our experiences and memories. Neuroscientists refer to the brain's 'plasticity' in explaining this ability to restructure and learn new things, continually building on previous patterns of neuronal interactions.

To unravel the mechanisms that underlie how brains learn, Kourtzi's team is looking at how brains recognise objects in a cluttered scene. "This aspect is vital for successful interactions in our complex environments," she explained. "It's how we recognise a face in a crowd or a landmark during navigation."

Visual perception is also highly trainable. The brain can use previous experience of similar cues to be quicker at identifying the image from the 'noise' - the proverbial needle from the haystack.

But although neuroscientists recognise that this type of brain plasticity is fundamental to our ability to cope with continually changing settings at home, school, work and play, little is known about how we can stimulate our brain to enhance this learning process, right across the life span.

"The process of 'learning to learn' is at the core of flexible human behaviours," explained Kourtzi. "It underpins how children acquire literacy and numeracy, and how adults develop work-related skills later in life."

One of the important determinants her team has discovered is that being able to multi-task is better than being able to memorise.

"The faster learners are those who can attend to multiple things at the same time and recruit areas of the brain that are involved in attention," she explained. "Those who are slower at learning try to memorise, as we can see from greater activity in the parts of the brain connected with memory."

"So, in fact, being able to do the sort of multi-tasking required when interacting in busy environments or playing video games - which requires the processing of multiple streams of information - can improve your ability to learn."

She also finds that age doesn't matter: "what seems to matter is your strategy in life - so if older people have really good attentive abilities they can learn as fast as younger people."

This has important implications for an ageing society. In the UK, there are now more people over State Pension age than there are children. The UK's Office for National Statistics predicts that, by 2020, people over 50 will make up almost a third of the workforce and almost half of the adult population. The average life expectancy for a man in the UK will have risen from 65 years in 1951 to 91 years by 2050. Older age has become an increasingly active phase of people's lives, one in which re-training and cognitive resilience is increasingly sought after.

Kourtzi and colleagues are using functional magnetic resonance imaging to detect when areas of the brain are activated in response to a sensory input and how these circuits change with learning and experience. While at the University of Birmingham, she showed that the visual recognition abilities of young and older adults can be enhanced by training, but that the different age groups use different neural circuits to do this.

Young adults use anterior brain centres that are often used in perceptual decisions, where sensory information is evaluated for a decision to be made; older adults, by contrast, use the posterior part of the brain, which is in charge of the ability to attend and select a target from irrelevant clutter. "The clear implication of this is that training programmes need to be geared for age," said Kourtzi.

Crucially, what she also observed is that some people benefit from training more than others: "although it's well known that practice makes perfect, some people are better at learning and may benefit more from particular interventions than others. But to determine how and why, we need to go beyond biological factors, like cognition or genetics, to look at social factors: what is it about the way a particular individual has learned to approach learning in their social setting that might affect their ability to learn?"

This multidisciplinary approach to understanding learning lies at the heart of her work. She leads the European-Union-funded Adaptive Brain Computations project, which brings together behavioural scientists, computer scientists, pharmacologists and neuroscientists across eight European universities, plus industrial partners, to understand and test how learning happens.

"In our work, there's a strong element of translating our findings into practical applications, so creating training programmes that are age appropriate is our ultimate goal," she added.

"The reason we like the Café Wall Illusion so much is because tricks of visual perception tell us that the brain can see things in a different way to the input. How the brain does this is influenced by context, just as the way we interpret our environment is influenced by learning and previous experience."
Inset image: Café Wall Illusion, Tony Kerr on Flickr

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
european union european union zoe kourtzi zoe kourtzi ageing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
teaching school of the biological sciences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
-department of psychology department of psychology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When a group of experimental psychologists moved into their new lab space in Cambridge earlier this year, they took a somewhat unconventional approach to refurbishing their tea room: they had the walls tiled with the Café Wall Illusion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Six weeks of computer brain training has little benefit beyond boosting performance on the specific tasks included in the training. That's according to an online study involving more than 11,000 participants conducted as part of the BBC's Bang Goes The Theory science programme.

Adrian Owen of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and his colleagues first measured participants' baseline performance on a battery of freely available 'benchmark' tests. Included were measures of reasoning, verbal short-term memory, spatial working memory and paired-associates learning (a test of longer-term verbal memory).

The participants, who had an average age of 39, then formed three groups. The first group spent six weeks, for a minimum of ten minutes a day, three times a week, performing computerised training tasks in reasoning, planning and problem solving. The second group spent the same time training on a broader range of tests of short-term memory, attention, visuospatial processing and mathematics, similar to those found in commercial brain training products. For both brain training groups, the tasks increased in difficulty in line with any gains in participant performance. The final, control group spent the same time using the internet to find answers to obscure quiz questions.

Participants in all groups showed improvements on the specific tasks included in their training regimens, but a repeat of the benchmark performance tests used at the study outset showed that these benefits had not generalised, not even when the training tests and benchmark tests involved similar cognitive processes.

The vanishingly modest transferable benefits of brain training that were observed, were no greater than those found in the control group after they'd spent time Googling the answers to obscure general knowledge questions. To take one example, consider changes to the number of digits participants could hold in memory. At the study end, the control group participants could remember, on average, two-tenths of a digit more than they could at the study outset. What about participants in the second brain training group? Their digit memory increased, on average, by a mere three-hundreths of a digit - actually less than the control group.

'These results provide no evidence for any generalised improvements in cognitive function following brain training in a large sample of healthy adults,' the researchers said.

What about the possibility that the training regimens in the current study weren't long enough to generate transferable benefits? This seems unlikely because there was a negligible link between the number of training sessions completed and the amount of observed transferable benefit. 'That said,' the researchers admitted, 'the possibility that an even more extensive training regime may have eventually produced an effect cannot be excluded'.

The results of this study will be shared and discussed on Bang Goes The Theory on BBC One at 9pm on 21 April and on the BBC's Lab UK website.

The new findings are just the latest to cast doubt on the value of commercial brain training products. A 2008 investigation by the consumer charity Which? concluded that 'none of the claims [of commercial brain training products] are supported by peer-reviewed research published in a recognised scientific journal and involving the specific product'. The Which? investigators, Adrian Owen among them, recommended a healthy diet, physical exercise and challenging mental activities, including learning a new instrument or language, or completing crosswords, as the most effective ways to maintain a healthy mind.
_________________________________

A.M. Owen, A. Hampshire, J.A. Grahn, R. Stenton, S. Dajani, A.S. Burns, R.J. Howard, & C.G. Gallard (2010). Putting brain training to the test. Nature [In Press].

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest .

Link to interactive website featuring the benchmark cognitive tests used in the current study, including useful background information.
Link to Which? investigation of brain training products.
Link to BBC Bang Goes The Theory programme.
Link to recent feature article in The Independent on brain training.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
bps research digest: brain training games don't work

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Six weeks of computer brain training has little benefit beyond boosting performance on the specific tasks included in the training. That's according to an online study involving more than 11,000 participants conducted as part of the BBC's Bang Goes The Theory science programme.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Loneliness increases the risk of poor sleep, higher blood pressure, cognitive and immune decline, depression, and ultimately an earlier death. Why? The traditional explanation is that lonely people lack life's advisors: people who encourage healthy behaviours and curb unhealthy ones. If so, we should invest in pamphlets, adverts and GP advice: ignorance is the true disease, loneliness just a symptom.

But this can't be the full story. Introverts with small networks aren't at especial health risk, and people with an objectively full social life can feel lonely and suffer the consequences. A new review argues that for the 800,000 UK citizens who experience it all or most of the time, loneliness itself is the disease: it directly alters our perception, our thoughts, and the very structure and chemistry of our brains. The authors - loneliness expert John Cacioppo, his wife Stephanie Cacioppo, and their colleague John Capitanio - build their case on psychological and neuroscientific research, together with animal studies that help show loneliness really is the cause, not just the consequence, of various mental and physical effects.

The review suggests lonely people are sensitive to negative social outcomes and accordingly their responses in social settings are dampened. We know the former from reaction time tasks involving negative social words (lonely people respond faster), and tasks involving the detection of concealed pain in faces (lonely people are extra sensitive when the faces are dislikeable). Functional imaging evidence also shows lonely people have a suppressed neural response to rewarding social stimuli, which reduces their excitement about possible social contact; they also have dampened activity in brain areas involved in predicting what others are thinking - possibly a defence mechanism based on the idea that it's better not to know. All this adds up to what the authors characterise as a social "self-preservation mode."

Meanwhile, animal models are helping us to understand the deeper, biological correlates associated with loneliness. For mice, being raised in isolation depletes key neurosteroids including one involved in aggression; it reduces brain myelination, which is vital to brain plasticity and may account for the social withdrawal and inflexibility seen in isolated animals; and it can influence gene expression linked to anxious behaviours.

What about changes to our neural tissue? Human research is suggestive: in one study, people who self-identified as lonelier were more likely to develop dementia. Here, initial cognitive decline could be causing loneliness, but animal work gives us some plausible mechanisms for loneliness' impact: animals kept in isolation have suppressed growth of new neurons in areas relating to communication and memory, just as very social periods such as breeding season see a pronounced spike in growth.

Other basic brain processes are also upset by isolation. Isolated mice show reduced delta-wave activity during deep sleep; and their inflammatory responses also change, meaning that in one study, three in five isolated mice died following an induced stroke, whereas every one of their cage-sharing peers survived the same process.

The research is clear that loneliness directly impacts health, so we need to do what we can to help people free themselves from social marginalisation. I've seen one approach during my time serving with time banking charities, in which people give their own time in return for someone else's in a different situation - a process that can build social networks. Also the issue is acquiring momentum through the Campaign to End Loneliness and technology solutions such as the RSA's Social Mirror project - an app that tells people about local social groups and activities. Mainstream health is also picking this up under the term " social prescription " (physicians advise patients of social groups and activities and "facilitators" help the patients take up the opportunities). But amongst all the institutional activity, we mustn't forget our individual duties: sometimes all that's needed is to reach out.

_________________________________ Cacioppo, S., Capitanio, J., & Cacioppo, J. (2014). Toward a neurology of loneliness. Psychological Bulletin, 140 (6), 1464-1504 DOI:
10.1037/a0037618

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Loneliness is a disease that changes the brain's structure and function

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Loneliness increases the risk of poor sleep, higher blood pressure, cognitive and immune decline, depression, and ultimately an earlier death. Why? The traditional explanation is that lonely people lack life's advisors: people who encourage healthy behaviours and curb unhealthy ones. If so, we should invest in pamphlets, adverts and GP advice: ignorance is the true...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By guest blogger David Robson

If you want to maximise a person's intellectual potential, the general consensus for a long time has been that you need to start young. According to this traditional view, early childhood offers a precious "window of opportunity" or "sensitive period" for learning that closes slowly as we reach adolescence. It's the reason that toddlers find it easier to master the accent of a foreign language, for instance.

This view has even shaped educational policy. If you want to help people from disadvantaged backgrounds, for instance, some psychologists had argued that you would do better to target primary schools, with diminishing returns for interventions later in life, as if badly performing teenagers were something of a lost cause.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore at University College London has spent the last decade over-turning some of these assumptions, showing that the adolescent brain is still remarkably flexible as it undergoes profound anatomical changes. "The idea that the brain is somehow fixed in early childhood, which was an idea that was very strongly believed up until fairly recently, is completely wrong," she told Edge in 2012. The transformation is particularly marked in the prefrontal lobes (located behind the forehead) and the parietal lobes (underneath and just behind the top of your head): two regions that are involved in abstract thought.

The upshot is that teenagers may go through a second sensitive period, in which they are particularly responsive to certain kinds of intellectual stimulation. A new paper from Blakemore's lab, published in Psychological Science, builds on this idea, showing that our ability to learn certain kinds of analytical skills doesn't diminish after childhood, but actually increases through adolescence and into early adulthood.

The team - led by Lisa Knoll - recruited more than 600 participants aged 11 to 33, and randomly assigned them to three groups, each trained in a different skill. They taught the first group "numerosity discrimination", which involved rapidly guessing the number of coloured dots to appear on a screen. They trained the second group in "relational reasoning": the ability to detect abstract rules and relationships using the kind of non-verbal puzzles (known as Raven's Matrices) that are common in some IQ tests (see image left). The third group, meanwhile, honed their facial perception: they judged repeatedly whether two photos, shown in rapid succession, represented the same person or not.

It's worth noting that these skills don't require any advanced factual knowledge. Instead, they represent a broader capacity for abstract thought and pattern recognition that might be useful for many kinds of academic work.

The online training sessions were short but frequent, lasting a maximum of 12 minutes a day for 20 days. The participants were then tested - with the same kinds of puzzles used in training - shortly after they had finished their last session, and again a few months later, to see whether the skills had stuck

Sadly, the participants in the third group would have been disappointed if they ever had hopes of being a " super-recogniser " - their facial perception showed next to no improvement.

But the hard work paid off for many of the other participants: those learning the relational reasoning and the numerosity discrimination had all boosted their scores. Based on these successes, Blakemore, Knoll and colleagues next examined whether those gains depended on the participants' age.

According to the accepted wisdom, they should have seen the greatest dividends among the youngest subjects aged 11-13, when they were closest to that childhood window of opportunity. But as the psychologists had expected, the older participants turned out to gain the most from the training. The late adolescents (aged 16-18) improved their relational reasoning by around 10 per cent, for instance: nearly twice the gains of younger participants. Even the adults in the group tended to perform better than the youngsters, suggesting that our 20s and early 30s may still be a fertile time for self-improvement.

At least in these kinds of analytical skills, the window of opportunity was still wide open, perhaps reflecting the greater neuroplasticity - the ability to forge new neural circuits - of the prefrontal cortex that Blakemore had previously observed in the brain scans. If so, it supports her idea that we may have multiple sensitive periods for different kinds of skills depending on the brain's development at that time. As one window of opportunity closes, another may open.

There are other potential explanations, though. The researchers tried to control for the participants' motivation, showing that the results still held when you took into account the number of completed training sessions. It seems the older participants weren't just trying harder. But it's also possible that the teenagers and adults had developed better cognitive strategies for learning: deliberate mental procedures that don't necessarily reflect greater anatomical plasticity.

Given the recent controversies surrounding brain training, it's also worth noting that we don't know whether these improvements led to meaningful changes in other areas of the participants' lives. Blakemore and Knoll couldn't find any corresponding boost in working memory, for instance, and we don't know if these abstract analytical skills would correspond to a greater aptitude for mathematics or science at school or university.

Even so, I'm intrigued about the potential implications and the promise this holds for future research, adding further evidence to the growing body of work showing that adolescence is a fascinating and potentially fertile period of intellectual growth. Contrary to our sometimes dim view of teenagers, there's much more to those years than the acne and the angst.

- A Window of Opportunity for Cognitive Training in Adolescence

Ravens pic credit: Wikipedia commons.
Post written by David Robson (@d_a_robson) for the BPS Research Digest. David is BBC Future's associate editor.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
There is a second "window of opportunity" for learning in late adolescence and early adulthood

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By guest blogger David Robson If you want to maximise a person's intellectual potential, the general consensus for a long time has been that you need to start young. According to this traditional view, early childhood offers a precious "window of opportunity" or "sensitive period" for learning that closes slowly as we reach adolescence.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By guest blogger David Robson

A patient researchers call "M.M." had lived for 40 years as if he was viewing the world through frosted-glass on a moonlit night. The reason? When he was just 3 years old, a chemical explosion destroyed one eye and left the other damaged beyond repair. Without a cornea to focus clear images on his retina, he could see no more than a vague perception of dark and bright.

Then, in the early 2000s, the seemingly unthinkable happened. Thanks to advances in stem cell research, doctors realised they could help regrow the delicate tissue around the white of the eye, allowing them to fit M.M. with a transplanted cornea from a donor.

From a surgical perspective, the operation was a success - but his doctors knew that patching up the eye was only half the battle. After decades of near-blindness, could M.M.s brain learn how to appreciate his richer visual world? The answer, sadly, was no - but his experience tells us a lot about the way the brain changes as we age.

Our first few years are an intense learning experience. Rather than coming fully programmed to understand the world, the baby's brain has to learn how to make sense of the extraordinarily complex information hitting the retina. Consider how even a simple object, like a chair, looks completely different from different angles.

That's not to mention an even more complex skill like face recognition. We can recognise people even if they are wearing make-up or have a new hair cut - and we instantly pick up on characteristics such as gender, or someone's emotions, even when the faces are as radically different as Scarlett Johansson and John Prescott. When you are very young, you come to almost every scene anew, as if you are seeing the world for the first time, until you learn the patterns that help you recognise what things look like in different situations.

But this adaptability doesn't last forever. Childhood is thought to consist of "sensitive periods", after which the brain finds it more difficult to forge the necessary circuits for learning. M.M. was partly down that road when he lost his sight, and as an adult, it was unclear whether he would be able to retrace those steps and relearn how to see.

Testing M.M. soon after his operation (pdf), Ione Fine at the University of Washington and colleagues found that he could recognise simple two-dimensional shapes, and he could pick out motion and colour, but he struggled to extract more complex visual information. When shown pictures and photos, he struggled to name objects, recognise facial emotions (happy, sad or neutral) or label the gender of a person. He also had some difficulty with 3D perception - failing to recognise if rotated shapes were the same or different. Clearly, he had not kept the skills he was developing before his accident.

It was still possible that M.M. would relearn them, so the researchers waited a further ten years before retesting him - but in a recent paper for Psychological Science, Fine reports that his progress has been disappointing. In many tests, M.M's performance remains no better than the results straight after the operation. Overall, his accuracy was between 30 and 70 per cent - much less than the healthy controls, who rarely made a mistake in any of the tasks.

Differences between M.M. and controls were also seen in brain scans. Typically, the ventral visual cortex shows different patterns of activity depending on whether you are viewing a face, an object, or a scene - but M.M. didn't seem to have developed the necessary networks.

Congenitally blind people's brains often adapt to use information from other senses. The sounds of echoes from a cane, for instance, can help them estimate the size and position of objects - and this seems to be processed in the visual cortex, as if the information were coming from the eyes. Similarly, reading Braille seems to trigger the same regions most of us would activate when seeing a written word, and the areas for face recognition light up when a blind person feels someone's features. At the moment, it's unclear whether these compensatory processes should help or hinder the return of vision after surgery. It will be interesting to test whether M.M. had developed any of these "cross-modal responses".

While that is still a distant prospect, M.M. has learnt to make the best of his situation. "I have learned what works with vision and what doesn't, so I really don't challenge my vision much anymore," he told the researchers. "Where motion or colour might be clues, I use my vision. Where details might be required, like reading print or recognising who someone is, I use tactile and auditory techniques." Even if the brain's circuits themselves are not as flexible as they once were, we shouldn't underestimate the astonishing ability of humans to adapt to their circumstances.

_________________________________ Huber, E., Webster, J., Brewer, A., MacLeod, D., Wandell, B., Boynton, G., Wade, A., & Fine, I. (2015). A Lack of Experience-Dependent Plasticity After More Than a Decade of Recovered Sight Psychological Science DOI:
10.1177/0956797614563957

- further reading-
The boy who learned to speak again after losing his left brain hemisphere
The age of the superhuman

Post written by David Robson (@d_a_robson) for the BPS Research Digest. David is BBC Future's feature writer. Image: Flickr/Jeff Ruane

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By guest blogger David RobsonA patient researchers call "M.M." had lived for 40 years as if he was viewing the world through frosted-glass on a moonlit night. The reason? When he was just 3 years old, a chemical explosion destroyed one eye and left the other damaged beyond repair.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Travelling in space can play havoc with the human mind. Because of micro-gravity, astronauts frequently experience weird sensory effects, such as the world suddenly appearing upside down. Even their ability to rotate objects in their mind's eye is sometimes affected. A new open-access study in the journal Microgravity is the first to explore the structural brain changes caused by spaceflight and which may contribute to, or reflect, these and other sensory and cognitive effects.

Vincent Koppelmans and his colleagues, including Jacob Bloomberg at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, compared brain scans taken of 27 astronauts before a space mission with a second scan taken once they were back on earth. The results revealed a mix of shrinkage and enlargement across the brain. There were widespread reductions in grey matter as well as some more localised increases in grey matter in regions that are involved in sensory processing and motor control.

Thirteen of the scanned astronauts had taken part in shuttle missions lasting around two weeks, the others had visited the International Space Station for a period of around six months. The pre-mission scans were conducted a median of 194 days before the mission, usually after significant amount of astronaut training had already been completed, which helps reduce, but not eliminate, the possibility that any observed brain changes were caused by training rather than spaceflight. The post-mission scans were taken between one to twenty days after landing back home.

On average, after experiencing spaceflight, the astronauts' brains had shrunk in various frontal and temporal regions and in the cerebellum (a region at the back of the brain involved in coordination, among other things). This is fairly similar to what's been found in a previous study of the effects of 70 days' bed rest on brain structure, which was intended to be an approximate simulation of micro-gravity.

Koppelmans and his colleagues think these widespread grey matter reductions - which were more extensive in astronauts who'd spent longer in space - might be caused by the way that micro-gravity leads to increased fluid pressure in the brain leading to a gradual upward shift of the brain's centre of mass in the skull (our bodies usually compensate for the downward pull of gravity on internal fluids; when gravity is reduced, the compensation processes continue, leading to pressure build up in the head and brain).

Meanwhile, there were also some more localised areas in which brain volume appeared to have increased, on average, including in parts of the parietal lobe, which are involved in motor control. This might reflect changes to brain structure involved in the astronauts' adaptation to a micro-gravity environment. However, the magnitude of these brain changes did not correlate with the amount of balance problems that the astronauts showed after landing back on earth.

This study marks a useful start in understanding how spaceflight affects the physical structure of the brain, which in turn could help inform counter-measures to help astronauts adapt to microgravity during flight and then cope with adapting back to life on earth. However, as the researchers acknowledge, the results are speculative because of the many methodological drawbacks. For example, the fact the astronauts had a range of spaceflight experiences and the initial brain scans were sometimes taken many months before take-off means that the study lacked precision. Moreover, some of the astronauts already had earlier spaceflight experiences, which may have already altered their brain structure.

- Brain structural plasticity with spaceflight

See also New Horizons: Christian Jarrett takes psychology into space, discovering how astronauts are selected and supported.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
First ever study into how spaceflight changes brain structure

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Travelling in space can play havoc with the human mind. Because of micro-gravity, astronauts frequently experience weird sensory effects, such as the world suddenly appearing upside down. Even their ability to rotate objects in their mind's eye is sometimes affected.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
.

A pair of thumb-sized structures deep in the center of the human brain are critical for our ability to learn and remember. Thanks to their shape, each of them is called hippocampus - which means seahorse in Greek. These brain areas have the unique capacity to generate new neurons every day. In fact, recent human studies have shown that there are 700 new brain cells in the hippocampus every day. Most of these neurons, however, do not survive. In their new-born (pre-mature) phase, they need a great deal of support to survive, grow, and become an active member of the hippocampal community of neurons.

Research shows that we have the capacity to grow new neurons above and beyond what is generally produced in our hippocampus and to make them become mature and strong within weeks and months.

The best way to generate new hippocampal neurons is to exercise. In one study comparing brains of two groups of mice, the group that was assigned to running (lived in a cage with a running wheel in it) generated far more new neurons in their hippocampus than the group that was assigned to a regular cage without a running refill. Other studies have shown that people who exercise regularly and are physically fit have a much bigger hippocampus. The more you walk, the bigger your hippocampus will get and the less would be your risk for developing Alzheimer's disease. One study showed that walking one mile a day lowers the risk of Alzheimer's disease by 48%.

Recent research has also provided information about how hippocampus can grow even without generating brand new neurons. The small premature neurons that are born every day have the capacity to grow taller, larger, and stronger by getting the right nutrition, plenty of oxygen, a molecule called BDNF (Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor) and stimulation. Some of the ways we can mature and nourish hippocampal neurons include eating a Mediterranean diet that includes olive oil, salmon and other food that are high in omega-3 fatty acids, and nuts. Omega-3 fatty acids are also available as DHA and EPA supplements. My recent research, published in Nature Reviews and referenced below, showed that higher blood levels of these important fatty acids, which are the building blocks of neurons, is associated with larger hippocampus size, better memory, and a much lower risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.

The fascinating new neuroscience discoveries have provided compelling evidence on how other simple lifestyle interventions can also grow the hippocampus size. Stress reduction and meditation, for example, have been shown to substantially expand the volume of hippocampus. Treatment of sleep apnea, with using a CPAP machine, is another way you can grow your hippocampus.

Learning a new language or challenging one's brain by learning new facts is yet another way to grow the very part of your brain that is critical for our ability to keep your memories alive for a lifetime and stay sharp as we get older.

Unfortunately, hippocampus can shrink as easily as it can grow. Some of the ways to quickly shrivel it within months or years include stress, anxiety, untreated depression, obesity, uncontrolled diabetes, sedentary lifestyle, eating junk food, and concussions. Each of these negative risk factors have been associated with a smaller size hippocampus and a higher likelihood of developing Alzheimer's disease in the future.

In summary, for the first time we have solid scientific evidence that we all have the capacity to grow the part of our brains that shrinks with aging and makes us prone to developing Alzheimer's disease. A bigger hippocampus can protect us against dementia symptoms in our 70s and 80s. These exciting new discoveries should empower all of us to be proactive in keeping our brain healthy today and to ward off Alzheimer's disease decades later.
References:

Modifiable factors that alter the size of the hippocampus with ageing. Nat Rev Neurol. 2012 Mar 13;8(4):189-202. doi: 10.1038/nrneurol.2012.27. Fotuhi M1, Do D, Jack C.

Low-intensity daily walking activity is associated with hippocampal volume in older adults. Hippocampus. 2015 May;25(5):605-15. doi: 10.1002/hipo.22397. Epub 2014 Dec 26. Varma VR1, Chuang YF, Harris GC, Tan EJ, Carlson MC.

Regular fish consumption and age-related brain gray matter loss. Am J Prev Med. 2014 Oct;47(4):444-51. doi: 10.1016/j.amepre.2014.05.037. Epub 2014 Jul 29. Raji CA1, Erickson KI2, Lopez OL3, Kuller LH4, Gach HM2, Thompson PM5, Riverol M6, Becker JT7.

- A Harvard and Johns Hopkins-trained neurologist and neuroscientist, Dr. Majid Fotuhi is chairman of Memosyn Neurology Institute, Medical Director of NeuroGrow Brain Fitness Center, and Affiliate Staff at Johns Hopkins Howard County General Hospital. He'll chair a fascinating session at the upcoming 2015 SharpBrains Virtual Summit (November 17-19th).

To learn more, read the article Solving the Brain Fitness Puzzle Is the Key to Self-Empowered Aging.

Categories: Cognitive Neuroscience, Health & Wellness

Tags: aging, Alzheimers-disease, BDNF, brain, Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor, Brain-Fitness-Center, exercise, hippocampus, lifestyle, Neurogenesis, Neurons, neuroscience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Can you grow your hippocampus? Yes. Here's how, and why it matters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A pair of thumb-sized structures deep in the center of the human brain are critical for our ability to learn and remember. Thanks to their shape, each of them is called hippocampus - which means seahorse in Greek. These brain areas have the unique capacity to generate new neurons every day.

# data[].attributes.body
ERP

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Using ERP to Investigate Reading Acquisition in Children  Anna Roth '13

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to see your brain working - Measuring electrical activity using EEG

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Types of Brain Waves and Their Functions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How does fMRI brain scanning work? Alan Alda and Dr. Nancy Kanwisher, MIT

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
After watching this, your brain will not be the same | Lara Boyd | TEDxVancouver

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Modern ways of studying the brain | Organ Systems | MCAT | Khan Academy

# data[].attributes.body
How hormones change the brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Birth control pills have some troubling possible side effects, including altering a woman's mood and even her choice of romantic partner. A new study adds another potential concern to the list: Hormonal contraception may shrink portions of the brain and affect their function.

It's possible that the synthetic hormones found in the Pill -- and possibly the suppression of natural hormones that occurs when women are using the Pill -- cause these alterations in brain structure and function, according to a new study published in the journal Human Brain Mapping.

In a study conducted on 90 women, neuroscientists at UCLA found that two key brain regions, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the posterior cigulate cortex, were thinner in women who used oral contraception than in women who did not.

The lateral orbitofrontal cortex plays an important role in emotion regulation and responding to rewards, while the posterior cigulate cortex is involved with inward-directed thought, and shows increased activity when we recall personal memories and plan for the future.

Changes in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex could be responsible for the increased anxiety and depressive symptoms that some women experience when they start taking the Pill.

"Some women experience negative emotional side effects from taking oral contraceptive pills, although the scientific findings investigating that have been mixed," Nicole Petersen, a neuroscientist at UCLA and the study's lead author, told The Huffington Post. "So it's possible that this change in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex may be related to the emotional changes that some women experience when using birth control pills."

Scientists have not yet determined if these neurological changes are permanent, or if they only last while a woman is on the Pill.

"We need to do more studies to find out what behaviors might be changed, but this study gives us some targets to start with, and I think the first place to look is at the effect of birth control pills on regulating emotions," Petersen said.

The new findings contradict a 2010 study that found that the Pill thickened brain areas associated with learning, memory and emotion regulation.

At this point, research on the Pill's neurological effects is limited, so it's difficult to draw conclusions. However, some scientists say that the preliminary research may give reason for caution.

"The possibility that an accepted form of chemical contraception has the ability to alter the gross structure of the human brain is a cause for concern, even if the changes seem benign -- for the moment," neuroscientist Craig Kinsey wrote in Scientific American about the 2010 study. "In any event, women need to have all of the medical and now, neurobiological, information they can use in informing their personal contraceptive decisions."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Pill Could Be Altering The Structure Of Your Brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Birth control pills have some troubling possible side effects, including altering a woman's mood and even her choice of romantic partner. A new study adds another potential concern to the list: Hormonal contraception may shrink portions of the brain and affect their function.

# data[].attributes.body
How learning changes the brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You may have heard that the brain is plastic.

As you well know. the brain is not made of plastic...Neuroplasticity, or brain plasticity, refers to the brain's ability to CHANGE throughout life.

The human brain has the amazing ability to reorganize itself by forming new connections between brain cells (neurons).

In addition to genetic factors, the environment in which a person lives, as well as the actions of each person, play a significant role in plasticity.

Neuroplasticity occurs in the brain...

1- At the beginning of life: when the immature brain organizes itself.

2- In case of brain injury: to compensate for lost functions or maximize remaining functions.

3- Through adulthood: whenever something new is learned and memorized

Plasticity, learning and memory

For a long time, it was believed that as we aged, the connections in the brain became fixed, and then simply faded. Research has shown that in fact the brain never stops changing through learning. Plasticity is the capacity of the brain to change with learning.

Changes associated with learning occur mostly at the level of connections between neurons: New connections form and the internal structure of the existing synapses change. Did you know that when you become an expert in a specific domain, the areas in your brain that deal with this type of skill will grow?

For instance, London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus (in the posterior region) than London bus drivers. Why is that? It is because this region of the hippocampus is specialized in acquiring and using complex spatial information in order to navigate efficiently. Taxi drivers have to navigate around London whereas bus drivers follow a limited set of routes.

Plasticity can also be observed in the brains of bilinguals. It looks like learning a second language is possible through functional changes in the brain: the left inferior parietal cortex is larger in bilingual brains than in monolingual brains.

Plastic changes also occur in musicians brains compared to non-musicians. Gaser and Schlaug compared professional musicians (who practice at least 1hour per day) to amateur musicians and non-musicians. They found that gray matter (cortex) volume was highest in professional musicians, intermediate in amateur musicians, and lowest in non-musicians in several brain areas involved in playing music: motor regions, anterior superior parietal areas and inferior temporal areas.

Finally, Draganski and colleagues recently showed that extensive learning of abstract information can also trigger some plastic changes in the brain. They imaged the brains of German medical students 3 months before their medical exam and right after the exam and compared them to brains of students who were not studying for exam at this time. Medical students' brains showed learning-induced changes in regions of the parietal cortex as well as in the posterior hippocampus. These regions of the brains are known to be involved in memory retrieval and learning.

Plasticity and brain injury

A surprising consequence of neuroplasticity is the fact that the brain activity associated with a given function can actually move to a different location as a consequence of experience or brain damage.

In his book " The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science," Norman Doidge describes numerous examples of functional shifts. In one of them, a surgeon in his 50s suffers a stroke. His left arm is paralyzed. During his rehabilitation, his good arm and hand are immobilized, and he is set to cleaning tables. The task is at first impossible. Then slowly the bad arm remembers how too move. He learns to write again, to play tennis again: the functions of the brain areas killed in the stroke have transferred themselves to healthy regions!

The brain compensates for damage by reorganizing and forming new connections between intact neurons. In order to reconnect, the neurons need to be stimulated through activity.

Finally, let me address a couple of questions we often get...
Can new neurons grow in my brain?
Yes, and regardless of how young or old you are. Here 's a good article.
Can you recommend a good book to learn more about neuroplasticity and how to harness it for good?
Indeed. We published The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness: How to Optimize Brain Health and Performance at Any Age precisely to provide a useful entry point into all this research and how to apply it. And we're happy to report that it's getting rave reviews!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brain Plasticity: How learning changes your brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You may have heard that the brain is plas­tic. As you well know. the brain is not made of plastic...Neuroplasticity, or brain plas­tic­i­ty, refers to the brain's abil­i­ty to CHANGE through­out life. The human brain has the amaz­ing abil­i­ty to reor­ga­nize itself by form­ing new con­nec­tions between brain cells (neu­rons).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Split brain patient born without a corpus callosum

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Imagine being attacked by one of your own hands, which repeatedly tries to slap and punch you. Or you go into a shop and when you try to turn right, one of your legs decides it wants to go left, leaving you walking round in circles.

Last summer I met 55-year-old Karen Byrne in New Jersey, who suffers from Alien Hand Syndrome.

Her left hand, and occasionally her left leg, behaves as if it were under the control of an alien intelligence.

Karen's condition is fascinating, not just because it is so strange but because it tells us something surprising about how our own brains work.

It started after Karen had surgery at 27 to control her epilepsy, which had dominated her life since she was 10.

Surgery to cure epilepsy usually involves identifying and then cutting out a small section of the brain, where the abnormal electrical signals originate.

When this does not work, or when the damaged area cannot be identified, patients may be offered something more radical. In Karen's case her surgeon cut her corpus callosum, a band of nervous fibres which keeps the two halves of the brain in constant contact.

It would take things out of my handbag and I wouldn't realise so I would walk away; I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on
Karen Byrne

Cutting the corpus callosum cured Karen's epilepsy, but left her with a completely different problem. Karen told me that initially everything seemed to be fine. Then her doctors noticed some extremely odd behaviour.

"Dr O'Connor said 'Karen what are you doing? Your hand's undressing you'. Until he said that I had no idea that my left hand was opening up the buttons of my shirt.

"So I start rebuttoning with the right hand and, as soon as I stopped, the left hand started unbuttoning them. So he put an emergency call through to one of the other doctors and said, 'Mike you've got to get here right away, we've got a problem'."

Out of control

Karen had emerged from the operation with a left hand that was out of control.

"I'd light a cigarette, balance it on an ashtray, and then my left hand would reach forward and stub it out. It would take things out of my handbag and I wouldn't realise so I would walk away. I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on."

Karen's problem was caused by a power struggle going on inside her head. A normal brain consists of two hemispheres which communicate with each other via the corpus callosum.

The left hemisphere, which controls the right arm and leg, tends to be where language skills reside. The right hemisphere, which controls the left arm and leg, is largely responsible for spatial awareness and recognising patterns.

Usually the more analytical left hemisphere dominates, having the final say in the actions we perform.

The discovery of hemispherical dominance has its roots in the 1940s, when surgeons first decided to treat epilepsy by cutting the corpus callosum. After they had recovered, the patients appeared normal. But in psychology circles they became legends.

That is because these patients would, in time, reveal something that to me is truly astonishing - the two halves of our brains each contain a kind of separate consciousness. Each hemisphere is capable of its own independent will.

Brain experiments

The man who did many of the experiments that first proved this was neurobiologist, Roger Sperry.

In a particularly striking experiment, which he filmed, we can watch one of the split brain patients trying to solve a puzzle. The puzzle required rearranging blocks so they matched the pattern on a picture.

First the man tried solving it with his left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere), and that hand was pretty good at it.

Then Sperry asked the patient to use his right hand (controlled by the left hemisphere). And this hand clearly did not have a clue what to do. So the left hand tried to help, but the right hand did not want help, so they ended up fighting like two young children.

Experiments like this led Sperry to conclude that "each hemisphere is a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting".

In 1981 Sperry received a Nobel prize for his work. But in a cruel twist of fate, by then he was suffering from a fatal degenerative brain disease himself.

Most people who have had their corpus collosum cut appear normal afterwards. You could cross them in the street and you would not know anything had happened.

Karen was unlucky. After the operation, the right side of her brain refused to be dominated by the left.

She has suffered from Alien Hand Syndrome for 18 years, but fortunately for Karen her doctors have now found a medication that seems to have brought the right side of her brain back under some form of control.

Even so I felt it was tactful, when I said goodbye, to give both hands a firm "thank you" shake.

Karen's story features in The Brain: A Secret History - Broken Brains BBC Four, Thu 20 Jan 2100GMT, repeated Tue 25 Jan 2300GMT or online via iPlayer (UK only) at the above link.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Imagine being attacked by one of your own hands, which repeatedly tries to slap and punch you. Or you go into a shop and when you try to turn right, one of your legs decides it wants to go left, leaving you walking round in circles.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
PSY 101 - Introduction to Psychology by Jeffry Ricker, Ph.D.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
1. A right-handed split-brain patient was asked to copy a picture from a book by drawing it with his right hand. He then was asked to draw the same picture with his left hand. What probably happened?

A. He was able to draw better with his right hand because the left hemisphere is better at drawing.
B. He was able to draw better with his left hand because the right hemisphere is better at drawing.
C. He was able to draw better with his right hand because the right hemisphere is better at drawing.
D. He was able to draw better with his left hand because the left hemisphere is better at drawing.

2. A major problem with using the results of split-brain studies to say something about the localization of mental functions in most humans is

A. the brains of humans who have not had split-brain surgery are significantly different from the brains of split-brain patients.
B. people who have had split-brain surgery also often have mental disorders associated with abnormal behaviors.
C. plasticity may have altered the localization of mental functions in people who have had split-brain surgery.

3. A split-brain patient is asked to state whether or not she recognizes faces flashed briefly on a screen. The faces are presented in such a way that the information goes to either the right or the left hemisphere. Which of the following is most likely to occur?

A. She will have more trouble recognizing faces presented only to the left hemisphere than faces presented only to the right hemisphere.
B. She will have more trouble recognizing faces presented only to the right hemisphere than faces presented only to the left hemisphere.
C. She will have trouble recognizing faces regardless of which hemisphere receives the visual information.

4. Which of the following discoveries most surprised researchers studying the functions of the corpus callosum?

A. Stroke patients with damaged corpus callosa show similarities to split-brain patients.
B. Some people born without corpus callosa show no behavioral or mental abnormalities.
C. Alien-hand syndrome disappears quickly after split-brain surgery in most patients.

5. A right-handed split-brain patient is first asked to name an object placed into her right hand without looking at it. She then is asked to name a different object placed into her left hand without looking at it. What probably will happen?

A. She will not be able to name either object.
B. She will be able to name both objects.
C. She will be able to name the object placed into her left hand but not be able to name the object placed into her right hand.
D. She will be able to name the object placed into her right hand hand but not be able to name the object placed into her left hand.

6. The "fighting" that sometimes occurs between the two hands in split-brain patients typically disappears quickly after the surgery. What is the most likely reason for this?

A. The normal plasticity of the brain quickly corrects the problem.
B. People generally don't like to act abnormally and supress these behaviors.
C. The two hemispheres eventually work together to quiet activity in the amygdala.

7. All but one of the following are typical functions of the right hemisphere. Which is not one of its typical functions?

A. orienting and navigating spatially
B. recognizing and imagining faces
C. identifying musical melodies
D. thinking sequentially and logically

8. With which of the following would the left hemisphere typically have the most trouble?

A. identifying objects with the right hand
B. solving math problems
C. copying a design using blocks
D. comprehending spoken language

Quiz Answers for Section 3-14
Reading for Section 3-14

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
1. A right-handed split-brain patient was asked to copy a picture from a book by drawing it with his right hand. He then was asked to draw the same picture with his left hand. What probably happened? A. He was able to draw better with his right hand because the left hemisphere is better at...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
PSY 101 - Introduction to Psychology by Jeffry Ricker, Ph.D.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As you saw in the previous section, the major function of the corpus callosum is to transfer information from one hemisphere of the cerebral cortex to the other. In the case study described there, we concluded that the damage to the policeman's corpus callosum may have caused his behavioral and cognitive impairments. However, single case studies are not sufficient for inferring causation - that is, we cannot conclude from that single case study that damage to the policeman's corpus callosum caused his difficulties. In this vein, it is interesting to note that some people born without a corpus callosum do not experience any behavioral, cognitive, or emotional problems. Treffert and Christensen (2005) noted that: "Neurologists joke that [the corpus callosum's] only two certain functions are to propagate seizures and hold the brain together" (p. 110).

The joking comment that one function of the corpus callosum is "to propagate seizures" refers to what sometines occurs in people with epilepsy caused by abnormal activity in the cerebral cortex. This abnormal electrical activity may spread from its starting point in one hemisphere of the cortex and travel across the corpus callosum, thereby involving both cortical hemispheres (for more information, see epilepsy.com). In this case, sufferers often become unable to function, lose awareness of the external world, and may convulse (if the motor cortex is affected). These seizures can last several minutes, but their after-effects can last much longer. The symptoms often can be reduced or eliminated with anti-convulsant medications; but some people are not helped by these medications. When seizures are frequent and severe in these intractable cases, it sometimes helps to sever the connection between the two cortical hemispheres by lesioning the corpus callosum. People who have had this operation are referred to as split-brain patients.

By studying split-brain patients, researchers have discovered much about the separate functions of the two cortical hemispheres (Gazzaniga, 1967; Gazzaniga, 1970; Springer & Deutsch, 1998; click here for a game based on the findings of split-brain experiments). After the corpus callosum has been cut, responses to stimuli depend on which hemisphere receives information.

A. With their right hemispheres, split-brain patients typically are unable to (a) use either written or spoken language, and (b) name objects, letters, and numbers. Activity in the right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex typically is important for:

orienting and navigating spatially,

recognizing faces,

imagining visual scenes and objects,

recognizing melodies and other components of music.

B. With their left hemispheres, split-brain patients typically are unable to (a) draw objects accurately, (b) copy a design using blocks, or (c) recognize faces and other complex visual objects. Activity in the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex typically is important for:

producing and comprehending language,

solving math problems,

thinking logically and sequentially.

In short, studies of split-brain patients offer strong support for:

1. the localization of cognitive functions in the cerebral cortex;

2. the specialization of each hemisphere for unique cognitive functions (that is, for laterality of functioning).

Nevertheless, there are individual differences in the location of cognitive functions in the cerebral cortex. For example, as mentioned in Section 3-8 (see Table 2 in that section WHERE IS THIS?), about 30% of left-handers have right-hemisphere dominance for language or bilateral (in both hemispheres) dominance. And, in a case noted by Gazzaniga (1998), the speech of a left-handed split-brain patient was associated with activity in the left hemisphere, whereas her ability to write was associated with activity in the right hemisphere! There is no reason to think that other functions, such as musical abilities, do not also show such variations among individuals. In fact, some research supports the claim that trained musicians use the left hemisphere when listening to and analyzing music, whereas nonmusicians use the right hemisphere ( Evers, Dannert, Rödding, Rötter, & Ringelstein, 1999; Schlaug, 2001). In this case, experience seems to affect the lateralization of musical abilities.

The brain exhibits a great deal of plasticity: when the brain is damaged, neural structures often reorganize, sometimes to such an extent that lost mental functions are regained. But in general, by the teenaged years, extensive brain damage becomes much more likely to lead to a relatively permanent loss of the functions associated with the damaged area; and definitely by adulthood, it becomes much more difficult for lost functions to reappear. Nevertheless, there are exceptions. Gazzaniga (1998) reported that one split-brain patient "developed the capacity to speak out of the right hemisphere - 13 years after surgery" (p. 53; also see Dodge, 2007).

The existence of plasticity suggests that the study of split-brain patients may be of limited use for making generalizations about the localization of mental functions in the human brain. Epilepsy is caused by abnormalities in the brain and because the brains of people with severe epilepsy have either been damaged or developed abnormally, we should expect that plasticity has modified and reorganized their brains to some degree. This might make the localization of functions in some epileptic brains significantly different from that of people without severe epilepsy. In other words, people with severe epilepsy may have brains that tend to be organized differently than the brains of people without epilepsy. Thus, we need to be careful about generalizing from studies of epileptic and split-brain patients to all humans. On the other hand, brain researchers are reasonably confident that much of the split-brain work has relevance for humans in general: research with others (both those suffering brain damage and those with intact brains) has often supported the split-brain findings. You should keep in mind that any one kind of evidence (such as the findings of split-brain research) always has limitations that can be controlled for only by considering other kinds of evidence (such as the findings of electrical-stimulation research). In short, researchers always need to consider evidence from many different sources before placing much confidence in their generalizations.

Alien-Hand Syndrome

A fascinating phenomenon has been observed in a number of split-brain patients. For a short time after their surgery, they seem to lose the ability to control their left hands - a problem called alien-hand syndrome (also know as anarchic hand syndrome). Preilowski (1975) described some examples:

In one case the patient (W. J.) would repeatedly pick up a newspaper with his right hand and lay it down with his left hand. This would be performed several times until finally the left hand threw the newspaper on the floor. Another patient (R. Y.) was described by a physiotherapist: "He was buttoning his shirt with his right hand and the left hand was coming along just behind it undoing the buttons just as quickly as he could fasten them." ... It is of interest that the same patients ... were able to use their left hand in a purposeful and cooperative manner "when not thinking of what they were doing." For example, they could pour coffee out of a pot held in the right hand into a cup held by its handle with the left hand. (quoted in Kolb & Whishaw, 1996, pp. 344-45)

Banks, et al. (1989) described another patient who exhibited similar types of strangely antagonistic behaviors between the two hands:

While playing checkers on one occasion, the left hand made a move [that the patient] did not wish to make, and he corrected the move with the right hand; however, the left hand, to the patient's frustration, repeated the false move. On other occasions, he turned the pages of the book with one hand while the other tried to close it; he shaved with the right hand while the left one unzipped his jacket; he tried to soap a washcloth while the left hand kept putting the soap back in the dish; and he tried to open a closet with the right hand while the left one closed it. (quoted in Wegner, 2002, p. 5)

This oppositional behavior between the right and left hands disappears quickly after the split-brain surgery. Split-brain patients then are able to engage in virtually all the behaviors that anyone else can perform. In fact, it takes special tests to demonstrate that their left and right hemispheres have been separated.

What is happening in these cases is that the patients' left hemispheres, which control the right hand and which also are language-dominant, are confused by the movements of the left hand, which is controlled by the patients' right hemispheres and which does not contain the language areas. In short, the "talking hemisphere" - the left hemisphere - is telling us that it is not controlling the left hand, which, in fact, it isn't: it is the nontalking right hemisphere that does so but, since it can't talk to us, it can't tell us that it is, in fact, making the left hand move. One would think that, once the hemispheres are disconnected, alien-hand syndrome would be a permanent problem, but it isn't. There must be changes in the brain soon after surgery that again allows the two hands to work in concert, another example of the brain's plasticity.

In rare instances, however, people who have not had split-brain surgery develop alien-hand syndrome in either their left or right hands, usually after experiencing a stroke. Because some of these people develop the syndrome in their right hands, which is controlled by the motor cortex in their left hemispheres - the language-dominant hemisphere - the syndrome cannot be explained by damage to the corpus callosum.

Study Questions for Section 3-14

1. What is split-brain surgery?

2. When is split-brain surgery used?

3. What can we infer about the localization of mental functions in humans based on studies of split-brain patients?

4. What is a major limitation of the use of split-brain studies when generalizing the results to all humans?

5. If you wanted to generalize the results of a study of the lateralization of language abilities to all humans, would you use right-handed individuals, left-handed individuals, or both? Why?

6. Would a person born without a corpus callosum show the same unusual behaviors as a person whose corpus callosum is destroyed during adulthood? Why or why not?

7. How would you describe alien-hand syndrome in your own words?

8. What usually causes alien-hand syndrome?

9. Based on what you've learned, what is your best guess about why alien-hand syndrome disappears quickly in almost all split-brain patients?

Quiz Questions for Section 3-14
Quiz Answers for Section 3-14

References

Banks, G., Short, P., Martinez, A. J., Latchaw, R., Ratcliff, G., & Boller, F. (1989). The alien hand syndrome: Clinical and postmortem findings. Archives of Neurology, 46, 456-459.

Dodge, N. (2007). The brain that changes itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science. New York: Viking Adult.

Evers, S., Dannert, J., Rödding, D., Rötter, G., & Ringelstein, E. (1999). The cerebral haemodynamics of music perception: A transcranial Doppler sonography study. Brain, 122, 75-85. doi: 10.1093/brain/122.1.75

Gazzaniga, M.S. (1967). The split brain in man. Scientific American, 217, 24-29.

Gazzaniga, M. S. (1970). The bisected brain. New York: Appleton Century Crofts.

Gazzaniga, M. S. (1998, July). The split brain revisited. Scientific American, 279(1), 50-55. Retrieved August 1, 2009, from http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~phils4/splitbrain.pdf

Kolb, B., & Whishaw, I. Q. (1996). Fundamentals of human neuropsychology (4th ed.). New York: Freeman.

Preilowski, B. (1975). Bilateral motor interaction: Perceptual-motor performance of partial and complete "split-brain" patients. In K. J. Zulch, O. Creutzfeldt, & C. C. Gailbraith (Eds.), Cerebral Localization. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Schlaug, G. (2001). The brain of musicians: A model for functional and structural adaptation. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 930, 281-299. Retrieved September 22, 2o11, from http://www.musicianbrain.com/papers/Schlaug_NYAS_2001.pdf

Springer, S. P., & Deutsch, G. (1998). Left brain, right brain: Perspectives from cognitive neuroscience (5th ed.). New York: Worth.

Treffert, D. A., & Christensen, D. D. (2006, June/July). Inside the mind of a savant. Scientific American Mind, 17(3), 50-55.

Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As you saw in the previous section, the major function of the corpus callosum is to transfer information from one hemisphere of the cerebral cortex to the other. In the case study described there, we concluded that the damage to the policeman's corpus callosum may have caused his behavioral and cognitive impairments.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Split brain experiment, Roger Sperry, left and right hemispheres, Brain, corpus callosum, Nobel Prize, medicine, game, Nobel, educational, tutorial

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Split brain experiment, Roger Sperry, left and right hemispheres, Brain, corpus callosum, Nobel Prize, medicine, game, Nobel, educational, tutorial, flash, brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Human Cognition | PSYCHOLOGY & BRAIN SCIENCE VIDEO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
University of Utah Neuroscience Initiative

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Brain - Language and speech, broca´s and wernicke´s area

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Human Brain Animation | Learn Anatomy Of Human Brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
University of Utah Neuroscience Initiative

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Song for learning parts of the brain and their functions. LYRICS BELOW. There's so much here packed into 3 minutes, that I recommend repeated viewings/listenings for anyone wanting to use this song as a memory/learning aid. The song is actually pretty catchy if you listen enough, although there's no exact repetition like most pop songs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Brain Plasticity--An Overview
What is brain plasticity? Does it mean that our brains are made of plastic? Of course not. Plasticity, or neuroplasticity, describes how experiences reorganize neural pathways in the brain. Long lasting functional changes in the brain occur when we learn new things or memorize new information. These changes in neural connections are what we call neuroplasticity.
To illustrate the concept of plasticity, imagine the film of a camera. Pretend that the film represents your brain. Now imagine using the camera to take a picture of a tree. When a picture is taken, the film is exposed to new information -- that of the image of a tree. In order for the image to be retained, the film must react to the light and "change" to record the image of the tree. Similarly, in order for new knowledge to be retained in memory, changes in the brain representing the new knowledge must occur.

To illustrate plasticity in another way, imagine making an impression of a coin in a lump of clay. In order for the impression of the coin to appear in the clay, changes must occur in the clay -- the shape of the clay changes as the coin is pressed into the clay. Similarly, the neural circuitry in the brain must reorganize in response to experience or sensory stimulation.

Facts About Neuroplasticity
FACT 1: Neuroplasticity includes several different processes that take place throughout a lifetime.

Neuroplasticity does not consist of a single type of morphological change, but rather includes several different processes that occur throughout an individual's lifetime. Many types of brain cells are involved in neuroplasticity, including neurons, glia, and vascular cells.

FACT 2: Neuroplasticity has a clear age-dependent determinant.

Although plasticity occurs over an individual's lifetime, different types of plasticity dominate during certain periods of one's life and are less prevalent during other periods.

FACT 3: Neuroplasticity occurs in the brain under two primary conditions:

1. During normal brain development when the immature brain first begins to process sensory information through adulthood (developmental plasticity and plasticity of learning and memory).

2. As an adaptive mechanism to compensate for lost function and/or to maximize remaining functions in the event of brain injury.

FACT 4: The environment plays a key role in influencing plasticity.

In addition to genetic factors, the brain is shaped by the characteristics of a person's environment and by the actions of that same person.

Developmental Plasticity: Synaptic Pruning
Gopnick et al. (1999) describe neurons as growing telephone wires that communicate with one another. Following birth, the brain of a newborn is flooded with information from the baby's sense organs. This sensory information must somehow make it back to the brain where it can be processed. To do so, nerve cells must make connections with one another, transmitting the impulses to the brain. Continuing with the telephone wire analogy, like the basic telephone trunk lines strung between cities, the newborn's genes instruct the "pathway" to the correct area of the brain from a particular nerve cell. For example, nerve cells in the retina of the eye send impulses to the primary visual area in the occipital lobe of the brain and not to the area of language production (Wernicke's area) in the left posterior temporal lobe. The basic trunk lines have been established, but the specific connections from one house to another require additional signals.
Over the first few years of life, the brain grows rapidly. As each neuron matures, it sends out multiple branches (axons, which send information out, and dendrites, which take in information), increasing the number of synaptic contacts and laying the specific connections from house to house, or in the case of the brain, from neuron to neuron. At birth, each neuron in the cerebral cortex has approximately 2,500 synapses. By the time an infant is two or three years old, the number of synapses is approximately 15,000 synapses per neuron (Gopnick, et al., 1999). This amount is about twice that of the average adult brain. As we age, old connections are deleted through a process called synaptic pruning.

Synaptic pruning eliminates weaker synaptic contacts while stronger connections are kept and strengthened. Experience determines which connections will be strengthened and which will be pruned; connections that have been activated most frequently are preserved. Neurons must have a purpose to survive. Without a purpose, neurons die through a process called apoptosis in which neurons that do not receive or transmit information become damaged and die. Ineffective or weak connections are "pruned" in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant the desired shape. It is plasticity that enables the process of developing and pruning connections, allowing the brain to adapt itself to its environment.

Plasticity of Learning and Memory
It was once believed that as we aged, the brain's networks became fixed. In the past two decades, however, an enormous amount of research has revealed that the brain never stops changing and adjusting. Learning, as defined by Tortora and Grabowski (1996), is the ability to acquire new knowledge or skills through instruction or experience. Memory is the process by which that knowledge is retained over time. The capacity of the brain to change with learning is plasticity. So how does the brain change with learning? According to Durbach (2000), there appear to be at least two types of modifications that occur in the brain with learning:

1. A change in the internal structure of the neurons, the most notable being in the area of synapses.

2. An increase in the number of synapses between neurons.

Initially, newly learned data are "stored" in short-term memory, which is a temporary ability to recall a few pieces of information. Some evidence supports the concept that short-term memory depends upon electrical and chemical events in the brain as opposed to structural changes such as the formation of new synapses. One theory of short-term memory states that memories may be caused by "reverberating" neuronal circuits -- that is, an incoming nerve impulse stimulates the first neuron which stimulates the second, and so on, with branches from the second neuron synapsing with the first. After a period of time, information may be moved into a more permanent type of memory, long-term memory, which is the result of anatomical or biochemical changes that occur in the brain (Tortora and Grabowski, 1996).
During brain repair following injury, plastic changes are geared towards maximizing function in spite of the damaged brain. In studies involving rats in which one area of the brain was damaged, brain cells surrounding the damaged area underwent changes in their function and shape that allowed them to take on the functions of the damaged cells. Although this phenomenon has not been widely studied in humans, data indicate that similar (though less effective) changes occur in human brains following injury.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Neuroscience for Kids - Brain Plasticity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What is brain plasticity? Does it mean that our brains are made of plastic? Of course not. Plasticity, or neuroplasticity, describes how experiences reorganize neural pathways in the brain. Long lasting functional changes in the brain occur when we learn new things or memorize new information.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Brain plasticity-also called neuroplasticity-is an odd term for most people, with the word "plastic" causing images of Tupperware or Saran Wrap to pop into your head. However, brain plasticity is a common term used by neuroscientists, referring to the brain's ability to change at any age-for better or worse. As you would imagine, this flexibility plays an incredibly important role in our brain development (or decline) and in shaping our distinct personalities. The science of neuroplasticity and the brain is the basis of our clinically proven brain training exercises.

Brain Plasticity at work

How the Brain Changes

Brain plasticity science is the study of a physical process. Gray matter can actually shrink or thicken; neural connections can be forged and refined or weakened and severed. Changes in the physical brain manifest as changes in our abilities. For example, each time we learn a new dance step, it reflects a change in our physical brains: new "wires" (neural pathways) that give instructions to our bodies on how to perform the step. Each time we forget someone's name, it also reflects brain change-"wires"that once connected to the memory have been degraded, or even severed. As these examples show, changes in the brain can result in improved skills (a new dance step) or a weakening of skills (a forgotten name).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What is Brain Plasticity? - BrainHQ from Posit Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brain plasticity-also called neuroplasticity-is an odd term for most people, with the word "plastic" causing images of Tupperware or Saran Wrap to pop into your head. However, brain plasticity is a common term used by neuroscientists, referring to the brain's ability to change at any age-for better or worse.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Phineas Gage had a hole in his head, and ev'ryone knew that he oughta be dead. Was it fate or blind luck, though it never came clear, kept keepin' on year after year..."

That song by banjo man Dan Lindner probably sounds like an outlandish myth, an old wives' tale passed around a small town.

But incredibly, his jaunty tune about Phineas Gage is true.

He did have a hole in his head, and against all the conceivable odds, he should have been dead. But instead, his remarkable story changed the study of neuroscience forever.

He loses his inhibitions, both in a social and emotional context. He would be rather high. Difficult company, to put it mildly
Professor John Aggleton, Cardiff University

Listen to Phineas Gage's full story on Health Check from the BBC World Service
A railway worker in Vermont, US, Phineas was responsible for clearing away rocks in order for railway tracks to be laid down.

For the biggest rocks, he would drill a hole and use an iron rod to tamp down explosives into the middle before lighting the fuse.

But on 13 September 1848, this relatively simple procedure took a vicious twist. Phineas' iron rod apparently scraped the side of the rock, creating a spark which set off the gunpowder early.

It sent the iron - about 1m long and 3cm in diameter - straight up into his skull, driving through just under his left eye, and out of the top of his head, landing some 30m away.

Phineas was unconscious for a few moments before getting up and riding an oxcart into town with, the old banjo song continues, "a big bleedin' hole in his head".

Changed man

Under the expert care of local doctor John Harlow, Phineas kept on living for 12 years.

Little did he know that his momentary lapse of concentration would lead to him becoming one of the most famous case studies in brain science to this day.

Because although Phineas survived, he was a changed man. Now he was reportedly unreliable, partial to swearing and often making inappropriate remarks.

"It's reported that he became what now would be classically described as 'disinhibited' - this is a classic term for what happens to some people after damage to their frontal lobes," says John Aggleton, professor of neuroscience at Cardiff University.

Other brain injury survivors

Henry Gustav Molaison's brain was partially removed to control his epilepsy, but he lost his ability to form new memories

James Brady was shot in the head during the assassination attempt on President Reagan, leaving him with partial paralysis

BBC Health: The symptoms of head injuries
"So, he loses his inhibitions, both in a social and emotional context. He would be rather high.

"Difficult company, to put it mildly."

For specialists, this was a staggering revelation. For the first time, this was evidence that damage to the brain could affect our behaviour and personality.

"When Phineas' accident occurred, there was no accepted doctrine of the brain having functions," says Malcolm Macmillan, professor of psychology at Melbourne University, and author of An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage.

It alerted people to the fact that a part of the brain - the frontal lobes - that we associate with sort of planning and intellectual strategies also had this important role in emotion
Professor John Aggleton, Cardiff University

"The only point of view that was opposed to that was that of the phrenologists, the people who thought that bumps on the outside of the skull indicated the organs within the brain - therefore the parts of the brain that had particular functions."

Soon after the accident, different brain specialists used evidence from Phineas' case as evidence of their own theories about the way the brain worked.

Those in favour of localisation - the idea that different parts of the brain had different tasks - said his changes in personality vindicated their position.

While others believed the fact that Phineas had survived at all showed that all parts of the brain could do everything and that one part could take over when another had failed.

Rehabilitation

Modern neuroscience would tell us that to an extent they were both right.

"It alerted people to the fact that a part of the brain - the frontal lobes - that we associate with sort of planning and intellectual strategies also had this important role in emotion," says Professor Aggleton.

"That raised the question how on earth are emotion and intellect linked together?"

Phineas' survival and rehabilitation demonstrated a theory of recovery which has influenced the treatment of frontal lobe damage today.

"There are something like 15 or 20 cases of people who've recovered from very serious frontal brain injury, of the kind that Phineas suffered from, without any professional assistance.

"In every case, what's common in the reports is that someone, or something, has taken over the lives of these people and given them structure."

In modern treatment, adding structure to tasks by, for example, mentally visualising a written list, is considered a key method in coping with frontal lobe damage.

"Phineas worked as a stage-coach driver," continues Professor MacMillan.

"The job is one that has got an external structure. You've got to be here for this part, then there's that part, then there's something else. Just as with these cases who have recovered."

Health Check

Health Check is the weekly health programme broadcast from the BBC World Service

It is broadcast on Monday at 1032GMT and repeated at 1632GMT, 2032GMT and on Tuesday at 0032GMT

Listen again to Health Check Download as a podcast More from BBC World Service
In 1859, Phineas was in very poor health. He moved to San Francisco to live with his mother, brother-in-law and sister.

Phineas had epilepsy and died in 1860.

Professor MacMillan says that although we cannot be certain, it is likely that Phineas' epilepsy and subsequent death were related to his injury.

"Some of the late-term effects of that sort of traumatic brain injury is the formation of scar tissue. Scar tissue frequently becomes the point from which epilepsy develops."

Phineas was buried, the story goes, with his tamping iron.

Seven years later, he was exhumed at Dr Harlow's request - and now both his skull and the tamping iron are on display at the Harvard Medical School.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Phineas Gage had a hole in his head, and ev'ryone knew that he oughta be dead. Was it fate or blind luck, though it never came clear, kept keepin' on year after year..." That song by banjo man Dan Lindner probably sounds like an outlandish myth, an old wives' tale passed around a small town.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Phineas Gage - Ripley's Believe it or Not

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A clip about Phineas Gage from Ripley's Believe it or Not.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Phineas Gage is often referred to as the "man who began neuroscience." He experienced a traumatic brain injury when an iron rod was driven through his skull, destroying much of his frontal lobe.

Gage miraculously survived the accident. However, his personality and behavior were so changed as a result of the frontal lobe damage that many of his friends described him as an almost different person entirely. The impact that the accident had has helped us better understand what the frontal lobe does, especially in relation to personality.

Phineas Gage's Accident

On September 13, 1848, 25-year-old Gage was working as the foreman of a crew preparing a railroad bed near Cavendish, Vermont. He was using an iron tamping rod to pack explosive powder into a hole.

Unfortunately, the powder detonated, sending the 43-inch-long, 1.25-inch-diameter rod hurling upward. The rod penetrated Gage's left cheek, tore through his brain, and exited his skull before landing 80 feet away.

Gage not only survived the initial injury but was able to speak and walk to a nearby cart so he could be taken into town to be seen by a doctor. He was still conscious later that evening and able to recount the names of his co-workers. Gage even suggested that he didn't wish to see his friends since he would be back to work in "a day or two" anyway.

The Recovery Process

After developing an infection, Gage spent September 23 to October 3 in a semi-comatose state. On October 7, he took his first steps out of bed, and, by October 11, his intellectual functioning began to improve.

Harlow noted that Gage knew how much time had passed since the accident and remembered clearly how the accident occurred, but had difficulty estimating the size and amounts of money. Within a month, Gage was well enough to leave the house.

In the months that followed, Gage returned to his parent's home in New Hampshire to recuperate. When Harlow saw Gage again the following year, the doctor noted that while Gage had lost vision in his eye and was left with obvious scars from the accident, he was in good physical health and appeared recovered.

Theories About Gage's Survival and Recovery

The type of injury sustained by Phineas Gage could have easily been fatal. While it cannot be said with certainty why Gage was able to survive the accident, let alone recover from the injury and still function, several theories exist. They include:

The rod's path. Some researchers suggest that the rod's path likely played a role in Gage's survival in that if it had penetrated other areas of the head-such as the pterygoid plexuses or cavernous sinus-Gage may have bled to death.

The brain's selective recruitment. In a 2022 study of another individual who also had an iron rod go through his skull-whom the researchers referred to as a "modern-day Phineas Gage"-it was found that the brain is able to selectively recruit non-injured areas to help perform functions previously assigned to the injured portion.

Work structure. Others theorize that Gage's work provided him structure, positively contributing to his recovery and aiding in his rehabilitation.

The Effects of Gage's Injury

Popular reports of Gage often depict him as a hardworking, pleasant man prior to the accident. Post-accident, these reports describe him as a changed man, suggesting that the injury had transformed him into a surly, aggressive heavy drinker who was unable to hold down a job.

Harlow presented the first account of the changes in Gage's behavior following the accident. Where Gage had been described as energetic, motivated, and shrewd prior to the accident, many of his acquaintances explained that after the injury he was "no longer Gage."

Since there is little direct evidence of the exact extent of Gage's injuries aside from Harlow's report, it is difficult to know exactly how severely his brain was damaged. Harlow's accounts suggest that the injury did lead to a loss of social inhibition, leading Gage to behave in ways that were seen as inappropriate.

Severity of Gage's Brain Damage

In a 1994 study, researchers utilized neuroimaging techniques to reconstruct Phineas Gage's skull and determine the exact placement of the injury. Their findings indicate that he suffered injuries to both the left and right prefrontal cortices, which would result in problems with emotional processing and rational decision-making.

Another study conducted in 2004 used three-dimensional, computer-aided reconstruction to analyze the extent of Gage's injury. It found that the effects were limited to the left frontal lobe.

Phineas Gage's Impact on Psychology

Gage's case had a tremendous influence on early neurology. The specific changes observed in his behavior pointed to emerging theories about the localization of brain function, or the idea that certain functions are associated with specific areas of the brain.

In those years, neurology was in its infancy. Gage's extraordinary story served as one of the first sources of evidence that the frontal lobe was involved in personality.

Today, scientists better understand the role that the frontal cortex has to play in important higher-order functions such as reasoning, language, and social cognition.

What Happened to Phineas Gage?

After the accident, Gage was unable to continue his previous job. According to Harlow, Gage spent some time traveling through New England and Europe with his tamping iron to earn money, supposedly even appearing in the Barnum American Museum in New York.

He also worked briefly at a livery stable in New Hampshire and then spent seven years as a stagecoach driver in Chile. He eventually moved to San Francisco to live with his mother as his health deteriorated.

After a series of epileptic seizures, Gage died on May 21, 1860, almost 12 years after his accident. Seven years after his death, Gage's body was exhumed. His brother gave his skull and the tamping rod to Dr. Harlow, who subsequently donated them to the Harvard University School of Medicine. They are still exhibited in its museum today.

Phineas Gage Summary

A Word From Verywell

Gage's accident and subsequent experiences serve as a historical example of how case studies can be used to look at unique situations that could not be replicated in a lab. What researchers learned from Phineas Gage's skull and brain injury played an important role in the early days of neurology and helped scientists gain a better understanding of the human brain and the impact that damage could have on both functioning and behavior.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Phineas Gage important to psychology?

Gage's accident helped teach us that different parts of the brain play a role in different functions. Through studying Gage's frontal lobe damage, we gained a better understanding of what the frontal cortex does with regard to personality. We also began to know more about the effects of frontal lobe damage and how it may change a person.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Famous Case of Phineas Gage's Astonishing Brain Injury

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Phineas Gage suffered a terrible accident that made him one of the most famous cases of traumatic brain injury. Learn Gage's story and its impact on psychology.

# data[].attributes.body
Nobel Prize Winners

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Three scientists who unravelled how our bodies tell time have won the 2017 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.

The body clock - or circadian rhythm - is the reason we want to sleep at night, but it also drives huge changes in behaviour and body function.

The US scientists Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young will share the prize.

The Nobel prize committee said their findings had "vast implications for our health and wellbeing".

A clock ticks in nearly every cell of the human body, as well as in plants, animals and fungi.

Our mood, hormone levels, body temperature and metabolism all fluctuate in a daily rhythm.

Even our risk of a heart attack soars every morning as our body gets the engine running to start a new day.

The body clock so precisely controls our body to match day and night that disrupting it can have profound implications.

The ghastly experience of jet lag is caused by the body being out of sync with the world around it.

In the short term, body clock disruption affects memory formation, but in the long term it increases the risk of diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

"If we screw that system up we have a big impact on our metabolism," said Prof Russell Foster, a body clock scientist at the University of Oxford.

He told the BBC he was "very delighted" that the US trio had won, saying they deserved the prize for being the first to explain how the system worked.

He added: "They have shown us how molecular clocks are built across all the animal kingdom."

The trio's breakthroughs were on fruit flies, but their findings explain how "molecular feedback loops" keep time in all animals.

Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash isolated a section of DNA called the period gene, which had been implicated in the circadian rhythm.

The period gene contained instructions for making a protein called PER. As levels of PER increased, it turned off its own genetic instructions.

As a result, levels of the PER protein oscillate over a 24-hour cycle - rising during the night and falling during the day.

Michael Young discovered a gene called timeless and another one called doubletime. They both affect the stability of PER.

If PER is more stable then the clock ticks more slowly, if it is less stable then it runs too fast. The stability of PER is one reason some of us are morning larks and others are night owls.

Together, they had uncovered the workings of the molecular clock inside the fly's cells.

Dr Michael Hastings, who researches circadian timing at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, told the BBC: "Before this work in fruit flies we really didn't have any ideas of the genetic mechanism - body clocks were viewed as a black box on a par with astrology."

He said the award was a "fantastic" decision.

He added: "We encounter the body clock when we experience jet lag and we appreciate it's debilitating for a short time, but the real public health issue is rotational shift work - it's a constant state of jet lag."

Follow James on Twitter.

Previous winners

2016 - Yoshinori Ohsumi for discovering how cells remain healthy by recycling waste.

2015 - William C Campbell, Satoshi Ōmura and Youyou Tu for anti-parasite drug discoveries.

2014 - John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser for discovering the brain's navigating system.

2013 - James Rothman, Randy Schekman, and Thomas Sudhof for their discovery of how cells precisely transport material.

2012 - Two pioneers of stem cell research - John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka - were awarded the Nobel after changing adult cells into stem cells.

2011 - Bruce Beutler, Jules Hoffmann and Ralph Steinman shared the prize after revolutionising the understanding of how the body fights infection.

2010 - Robert Edwards for devising the fertility treatment IVF which led to the first "test tube baby" in July 1978.

2009 - Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for finding the telomeres at the ends of chromosomes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Three scientists who unravelled how our bodies tell time have won the 2017 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. The body clock - or circadian rhythm - is the reason we want to sleep at night, but it also drives huge changes in behaviour and body function.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
"On the Brain" with Dr. Michael Merzenich

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Brain plasticity is a term that sounds odd to the average person, for whom the word "plastic" brings up images of tupperware and Saran Wrap. Among neuroscientists, though, brain plasticity refers to the brain's ability to change-for better or worse-throughout life. It's an incredibly important and personal process: by defining our brain development, it shapes each of our distinct personalities.

Brain plasticity is a concept that is at once very simple and extraordinarily complex. That the brain is not static; that it responds to circumstances, to new learning, is fairly easy to grasp. How and why it does so is quite a bit more complicated, and one that scientists are digging into.

Physical change
Brain plasticity is a physical process. Gray matter can actually shrink or thicken, neural connections can be forged and refined or (conversely) weakened and severed. Changes in the physical brain manifest as changes in our abilities. For example, each time we learn a new dance step, it reflects a change in our physical brains: new "wires" (neural pathways) that give instructions to our bodies on how to perform the step. Each time we forget someone's name, it also reflects brain change- "wires" that once connected to the memory have been degraded, or even severed. As these examples show, changes in the brain can result in improved skills (a new dance step) or a weakening of skills (a forgotten name).

Growth and decline
Often, people think of childhood and young adulthood as a time of brain growth-the young person constantly learns new things, embarks on new adventures, shows an inquisitive and explorative spirit. Conversely, older adulthood is often seen as a time of brain decline, with people becoming more forgetful, less inclined to seek new experiences, more "set in their ways."

But what recent research has shown is that under the right circumstances the older brain can grow, too. Although certain brain machinery tends to decline with age, there are steps people can take to tap into plasticity and reinvigorate that machinery. We just have to "exercise" the brain in the right way. Similarly, people suffering from a variety of cognitive conditions-from schizophrenia to "chemobrain"-may be able to retrain their brains to healthier function. The key-and the challenge-lies in identifying what brain mechanisms to target, and how to exercise them effectively.

The Senses, Memory and Cognition
One of the more important findings of recent research is how closely connected our senses (hearing, vision, and so on) are to our memory and cognition. Because of their interdependence, a weakness in one is often related to-or even the cause of-a weakness in the other. For example, we all know that Alzheimer's patients slowly lose their memories. One way this manifests is that they eat less food. Why? As it turns out, visual deficits are also a part of Alzheimer's. People eat less because they can't see the food as well. (For more on this, see the article on Alice Cronin-Golomb.) Another example is in normal age-related cognitive changes. As we grow older, we get more forgetful and distracted in large part because our brain does not process what we hear, see, and feel as well as it once did. The result is that we can't store images of our experiences as clearly, and so have trouble using them and recalling them later.

As scientists gain more knowledge about the relationship between sensory perception, memory and cognition, they are learning to design brain exercises that strengthen brain function. For example, a team of scientists at Posit Science has developed a plasticity-based program that helps normally aging adults retain or regain mental sharpness. It is effective because it does not just exercise memory-which is as much an effect as a cause of age-related cognitive changes. Instead, the program addresses other root causes of these changes, including the brain's increasing inability to quickly and accurately process what it hears and sees.

Non-invasive Treatment
One of the most attractive features of plasticity-based therapies is that they are drug free. They rely on retraining the brain through repetitious, challenging activity. Certainly there are conditions that require medications, and thank goodness science has made such incredible forward leaps in providing them. But in an era when people take more and more medications, with more and more side effects and interactions, it is exciting to think that the next great breakthrough in health might come from a less invasive source.

The Plasticity Revolution
The growing understanding of and interest in brain plasticity is driving a revolution in brain health and science. In addition to the work being done at Posit Science, scientists at institutions around the globe are beginning to look to plasticity-based therapies for treating a wide spectrum of other cognitive problems. Ultimately, brain-plasticity based programs might help schizophrenics improve their symptoms and live more normal lives. Musicians stricken with focal dystonia might learn to play again, without pain. People with mild cognitive impairment or early-stage Alzheimer's might halt the progression of their disease. Cancer patients whose ability to function has been impeded by the lasting cognitive effects of chemotherapy treatment might find their old selves again. Stroke or traumatic brain injury victims may relearn skills they thought were lost forever. The list goes on.

Exercising the Brain in Daily Life
Scientifically designed plasticity-based programs target specific brain machinery to improve function. On your own, you are unlikely to find ways to exercise that machinery as efficiently as with a clinically proven program. But there are science-based guidelines for choosing daily activities that are likely to engage the brain for positive change.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
About Brain Plasticity - "On the Brain" with Dr. Michael Merzenich

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brain plasticity is a term that sounds odd to the average person, for whom the word "plastic" brings up images of tupperware and Saran Wrap. Among neuroscientists, though, brain plasticity refers to the brain's ability to change-for better or worse-throughout... Continue Reading →

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Take our quiz and find out your true sleep identity. Here are the tips to manage your time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How does fMRI brain scanning work? Alan Alda and Dr. Nancy Kanwisher, MIT

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Brain A Secret History - Episode 03 Broken Brains

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Brain A Secret History - Episode 03 Broken Brains

# data[].attributes.body
Alien hand syndrome

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Imagine being attacked by one of your own hands, which repeatedly tries to slap and punch you. Or you go into a shop and when you try to turn right, one of your legs decides it wants to go left, leaving you walking round in circles.

Last summer I met 55-year-old Karen Byrne in New Jersey, who suffers from Alien Hand Syndrome.

Her left hand, and occasionally her left leg, behaves as if it were under the control of an alien intelligence.

Karen's condition is fascinating, not just because it is so strange but because it tells us something surprising about how our own brains work.

It started after Karen had surgery at 27 to control her epilepsy, which had dominated her life since she was 10.

Surgery to cure epilepsy usually involves identifying and then cutting out a small section of the brain, where the abnormal electrical signals originate.

When this does not work, or when the damaged area cannot be identified, patients may be offered something more radical. In Karen's case her surgeon cut her corpus callosum, a band of nervous fibres which keeps the two halves of the brain in constant contact.

It would take things out of my handbag and I wouldn't realise so I would walk away; I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on
Karen Byrne

Cutting the corpus callosum cured Karen's epilepsy, but left her with a completely different problem. Karen told me that initially everything seemed to be fine. Then her doctors noticed some extremely odd behaviour.

"Dr O'Connor said 'Karen what are you doing? Your hand's undressing you'. Until he said that I had no idea that my left hand was opening up the buttons of my shirt.

"So I start rebuttoning with the right hand and, as soon as I stopped, the left hand started unbuttoning them. So he put an emergency call through to one of the other doctors and said, 'Mike you've got to get here right away, we've got a problem'."

Out of control

Karen had emerged from the operation with a left hand that was out of control.

"I'd light a cigarette, balance it on an ashtray, and then my left hand would reach forward and stub it out. It would take things out of my handbag and I wouldn't realise so I would walk away. I lost a lot of things before I realised what was going on."

Karen's problem was caused by a power struggle going on inside her head. A normal brain consists of two hemispheres which communicate with each other via the corpus callosum.

The left hemisphere, which controls the right arm and leg, tends to be where language skills reside. The right hemisphere, which controls the left arm and leg, is largely responsible for spatial awareness and recognising patterns.

Usually the more analytical left hemisphere dominates, having the final say in the actions we perform.

The discovery of hemispherical dominance has its roots in the 1940s, when surgeons first decided to treat epilepsy by cutting the corpus callosum. After they had recovered, the patients appeared normal. But in psychology circles they became legends.

That is because these patients would, in time, reveal something that to me is truly astonishing - the two halves of our brains each contain a kind of separate consciousness. Each hemisphere is capable of its own independent will.

Brain experiments

The man who did many of the experiments that first proved this was neurobiologist, Roger Sperry.

In a particularly striking experiment, which he filmed, we can watch one of the split brain patients trying to solve a puzzle. The puzzle required rearranging blocks so they matched the pattern on a picture.

First the man tried solving it with his left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere), and that hand was pretty good at it.

Then Sperry asked the patient to use his right hand (controlled by the left hemisphere). And this hand clearly did not have a clue what to do. So the left hand tried to help, but the right hand did not want help, so they ended up fighting like two young children.

Experiments like this led Sperry to conclude that "each hemisphere is a conscious system in its own right, perceiving, thinking, remembering, reasoning, willing, and emoting".

In 1981 Sperry received a Nobel prize for his work. But in a cruel twist of fate, by then he was suffering from a fatal degenerative brain disease himself.

Most people who have had their corpus collosum cut appear normal afterwards. You could cross them in the street and you would not know anything had happened.

Karen was unlucky. After the operation, the right side of her brain refused to be dominated by the left.

She has suffered from Alien Hand Syndrome for 18 years, but fortunately for Karen her doctors have now found a medication that seems to have brought the right side of her brain back under some form of control.

Even so I felt it was tactful, when I said goodbye, to give both hands a firm "thank you" shake.

Karen's story features in The Brain: A Secret History - Broken Brains BBC Four, Thu 20 Jan 2100GMT, repeated Tue 25 Jan 2300GMT or online via iPlayer (UK only) at the above link.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Alien Hand Syndrome sees woman attacked by her own hand - BBC News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Imagine being attacked by one of your own hands, which repeatedly tries to slap and punch you. Or you go into a shop and when you try to turn right, one of your legs decides it wants to go left, leaving you walking round in circles.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Localisation of function is the idea that certain functions (e.g. language, memory, etc.) have certain locations or areas within the brain. This idea has been supported by recent neuroimaging studies, but was also examined much earlier, typically using case studies.

One such case study is that of Phineas Gage, who in 1848 while working on a rail line, experienced a drastic accident in which a piece of iron went through his skull. Although Gage survived this ordeal, he did experience a change in personality, such as loss of inhibition and anger. This change provided evidence to support the theory of localisation of brain function, as it was believed that the area the iron stake damaged was responsible for personality.

There are four key areas that you need to be aware of: motor, somatosensory, visual and auditory areas.

Motor Area
The motor area is located in the frontal lobe and is responsible for voluntary movements by sending signals to the muscles in the body. Hitzig and Fritsch (1870) first discovered that different muscles are coordinated by different areas of the motor cortex by electrically stimulating the motor area of dogs. This resulted in muscular contractions in different areas of the body depending on where the probe was inserted. The regions of the motor area are arranged in a logical order, for example, the region that controls finger movement is located next to the region that controls the hand and arm and so on.

Somatosensory Area

The somatosensory area is located in the parietal lobe and receives incoming sensory information from the skin to produce sensations related to pressure, pain, temperature, etc. Different parts of the somatosensory area receive messages from different locations of the body. Robertson (1995) found that this area of the brain is highly adaptable, with Braille readers having larger areas in the somatosensory area for their fingertips compared to normal sighted participants.

Visual Area

At the back of the brain, in the occipital lobe is the visual area, which receives and processes visual information. Information from the right-hand side visual field is processed in the left hemisphere, and information from the left-hand side visual field is processed in the right hemisphere. The visual area contains different parts that process different types of information including colour, shape or movement.
Auditory Area
The auditory area is located in the temporal lobe and is responsible for analysing and processing acoustic information. Information from the left ear goes primarily to the right hemisphere and information from the right ear goes primarily to the left hemisphere. The auditory area contains different parts, and the primary auditory area is involved in processing simple features of sound, including volume, tempo and pitch.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Biopsychology: Localisation of the Brain Function | tutor2u Psychology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Localisation of function is the idea that certain functions (e.g. language, memory, etc.) have certain locations or areas within the brain. This idea has been supported by recent neuroimaging studies, but was also examined much earlier, typically using case studies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Fight-or-flight Instincts Impact On Your Stress Levels

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How the Fight-or-Flight response explains stress.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sympathetic Nervous System: Crash Course Anatomy & Physiology #14

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Autonomic Nervous System: Crash Course Anatomy & Physiology #13

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Peripheral Nervous System: Crash Course Anatomy & Physiology #12

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Central Nervous System: Crash Course Anatomy & Physiology #11

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Nervous System, Part 2 - Action! Potential!: Crash Course Anatomy & Physiology #9

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Nervous System, Part 3 - Synapses!: Crash Course Anatomy & Physiology #10

# data[].attributes.body
Pioneer in the field of neuroscience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Life and Discoveries of Santiago Ramón y Cajal

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nobelprize.org, The Official Web Site of the Nobel Prize

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Lynne Malcolm: Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm, with a fascinating 2017 line-up of new explorations of the brain, the mind and our behaviour.

We begin today with one woman's quest to improve the control she has over her own brain, with all its imperfections. For a start she's been nick-named 'butterfly brain'.

Caroline Williams: Yeah, that was a really old friend of mine gave me that when I...I don't even remember what I was doing at the time and he just looked at me and wait, 'You are such a butterfly brain!' And it describes me perfectly. I'm just very easily distracted.

I am basically just a bit of a worrier and wanted to do something about it because it's not really who I feel like I am.

I just have this sort of not quite terror of maths but I have this feeling, you know, if a waiter is standing next to me and I need to work out his tip, it just makes me freeze and it's just like 'I can't do this'.

Part of my problem was I just didn't really want to sit still for 10 minutes a day, and I really resisted it, partly because there is this look people have when they are really into meditation and they just look really calm and bit smug and you just think, oh, stop it, stop being so in control! And I didn't want to be that person.

The bad news for me in terms of navigation is that I seem to be missing a bit of the kit that is required. I'm not saying that's true of anybody else, so don't panic.

Lynne Malcolm: Well, I'm not completely panic free, because I think I missed out on a bit of that sense of direction kit too.

That's science journalist and author Caroline Williams.

Over the last decade or so we've heard about research showing the brain's amazing powers of plasticity, stories of people harnessing this plasticity to recover from brain injury for example. And following on from this new understanding that the brain can constantly change throughout our lives, we've seen a huge industry develop around the potential of brain training.

However, science journalist Caroline Williams was sceptical about the true value of brain training games.

Caroline Williams: I didn't entirely buy it, and also over time, having been a science journalist for 15 years following the twists and turns in this, it became clear that these brain games don't do anything to make you smarter in general. So the recent evidence is it makes you better at the thing you are practising while you are still practising it, but it doesn't change anything in the rest of your life. And given that it is a billion-dollar industry, I wanted to say, okay, if that doesn't work, for a start why doesn't it work, if the brain is plastic and it can change, why doesn't it work? And if it doesn't, then what should we be doing to make the best of what we've got and to improve our brains?

Lynne Malcolm: Caroline Williams, author of Override: My quest to go beyond Brain Training and take control of my mind.

Part of Caroline Williams' challenge was that she felt she had a bit of a shopping list of brain weaknesses that she wanted to address. Firstly, her very short attention span, which has earned her the reputation of being a 'butterfly brain'.

Caroline Williams: And it describes me perfectly. You know, I'll start something with huge enthusiasm and then the classic example is I think, oh, I'll tidy up this area of the house and I get it all going and I spread it all over the floor, and then I flit off and do something else and start that with great enthusiasm. I'm just very easily distracted. The trouble is my working patterns now don't make that very useful because I work in theory in short bursts while my young son is out at school and I work at home and I have these set periods when I have to just get on with it, and I was finding it really, really difficult, and I was just flitting around making cups of tea, and somehow I couldn't force my brain to focus. And it was really, really frustrating, so I wanted to know if I could do anything about that.

Lynne Malcolm: Because there's two sides to this attention too, isn't there, there's a lack of focus but also procrastination, which a lot of people seem to suffer from.

Caroline Williams: Yes, and it's sort of two sides of the same coin really, it shows the hallmarks of a brain that is not under proper control of its owner. So we have the area of our brain behind the eyebrows is the sensible, grown-up frontal bits that resist impulses and make us knuckle down and not do all those distracting things that want to take our attention away. And if that bit isn't in control then procrastination and distractedness, that's the sort of thing that happens, your brain is flitting off doing what it wants to do because minds wander, that's what they do, it's just a feature of brains and minds in general.

Lynne Malcolm: Caroline Williams headed off to visit scientists at Boston University to see what she could do about her short attention span.

Caroline Williams: Yes, so at the Boston Attention and Learning Lab...so Joe DeGutis and Mike Esterman there, they have been working on a combination of cognitive training and magnetic brain stimulation. So the idea with it was that you have two sides of the brain and some things are done more dominantly on one side to the other. And the idea was I should be using the right side of my brain for attention. If I was using the left too much than what they wanted to do was turn down activity in the left-hand side using the magnetic pulse, it sort of interrupts the workings of the brain briefly and temporarily and painlessly. It's like the equivalent of strapping down your dominant arm to force you to strengthen the other one, and the idea being that that would force me to use the side of the brain I should be using in the first place, and then combined with the training that was supposed to give me the training wheels, if you like, to learn how to focus.

Lynne Malcolm: And you discovered the concept of being 'in the zone' when it comes to attention. What is this?

Caroline Williams: Well yes, this was the interesting thing about this training because having found out that brain training games don't do anything to your mind, what they were doing is a slightly different version of that. So rather than learning a skill in particular, you're learning how it feels to be in a particular mental state. And so looking at various measures of brain activity in their proper studies in large numbers of people, they found that the zone seems to be a perfect balance between what is called the dorsal attention network, which is the bit that helps you knuckle down, and the default mode network which is the mind-wandering part of the brain which is where your brain skips off. And in brain imaging studies they've found that if you have too much of one or too much of the other, you can't sustain attention for long periods of time.

So if you focus...like what I was doing when I couldn't knuckle down, I was trying too hard to focus and that was backfiring because you can't keep that up for long periods. So the key state seems to be holding onto your focus but allowing a little bit of mind wandering to come in, and so it's that sort of zone...I think everyone can probably think of a situation where they have been doing something that's enjoyable but it's just hard enough, it's not so hard you are stressed out but it's not so easy that your attention is skipping off and you are getting bored, it's just that middle zone. And you can sort of drive your brain into that zone with practice, I've found. The training seems to give me experience of what that felt like, and so I know when I'm in it and also know when I'm not in it and I can try and do something about it.

Lynne Malcolm: So you felt that you benefited with your attention skills through this training?

Caroline Williams: Definitely, and the numbers on the graphs they showed me afterwards, the before and after, I went from being as bad almost as somebody with a brain injury...you know, they work with a lot of people who have strokes and brain injuries, and I was almost in that ballpark, and by the end of it I was almost as good as their best healthy volunteer ever, so it was a huge, huge improvement. But more importantly...I mean, that's all very well in the lab, but more importantly in real life I felt like when I wanted to access that zone I could just say to myself, you know, 'relaxed and ready', which is the way I think of that sort of zone, and I can just sort of chill out and relax, and somehow that seems to make it happen better than sitting and fighting and trying to focus and trying to force myself to work.

Lynne Malcolm: Another area that you wanted to focus on which you say is one of your weaknesses was anxiety, that you've been quite an anxious person in your life. And you went to Oxford University to be part of a study on the cognitive basis of worrying. Tell me about that.

Caroline Williams: Yes, it turns out that anxiety is pretty bad for you, it's bad for your brain because it robs you of this processing power you need to control your impulses, it takes away resources you could be using for stuff you really want to be doing. It also narrows your focus. Or it either widens your focus to be constantly scouting for danger or it focuses it in too narrowly so you can't concentrate on anything else other than what you are freaking out about.

And I'm basically just a bit of a worrier and wanted to do something about it because it's not really who I feel like I am. And so what attracted me to this work at Oxford University was that it sort of treats anxiety as a kind of systems error in the brain, that it's about your attention being dragged in milliseconds around the scene wherever it you happen to be and picking out stuff on your behalf.

So our brains pick out important parts of wherever we are without us noticing. So you might walk into a party and some people might gravitate towards the smiley faces and the welcoming people. People who are more anxious might walk in and just think, oh my God, they are all staring at me, and see that in a very different way. And Elaine Fox's work is all about trying to harness those unconscious biases and move them into a more positive direction by working on your unconscious biases. So it's almost working under the radar of your mind.

Lynne Malcolm: So you went through some training with that as well to retrain your cognitive bias.

Caroline Williams: Yes, so the training that they do for this is an online game and it's like a grid of, say, 50 faces, and all of them are looking at you frowning or looking angry, and there's one face hidden in there that is smiling, and your job is to just click on the happy face. And once you've found it, it changes, and the face is somewhere else, it's a different face each time, and you just do it. And it sounds so simple, but over weeks I found it sort of seeping into my everyday life. You know, I'd go into a situation like a school playground at pickup and I just felt a lot more at ease, as if I was not noticing people looking grumpy or who may or may not be looking at me strangely or whatever. And it just sort of took away something that I didn't even know was there almost.

I mean, scientifically this is still a work in progress and it's not entirely clear whether it works for all people and how it works and what it's doing and whether it lasts, but I have to say for me it just sort of fixed something very fundamental. And the interesting thing was it did make a huge difference to me. It goes from a scale of -100 to +100, with zero being neutral. And I started off sort of -31. And by the end of seven months doing this every day I was up at 93 or something, it swung completely the opposite direction.

And then having finished the book I got busy with normal going back to work sort of thing, and it sort of slipped, I couldn't fit it in any more. And suddenly I found myself feeling the same as I did before, did my cognitive bias measurement again and I was back down at -51. So it's very telling that you have to keep these things up because if you have an adult brain that has a certain bias, it's been there for a really long time and if you want to override it, maybe you have to keep at it because your personality and life experience may want to drag you back there if you are not too careful. So I started doing it again and the benefits have come back again.

Lynne Malcolm: You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm, and I'm with Caroline Williams, author of Override: My quest to go beyond Brain Training and take control of my mind.

Another brain state Caroline Williams wanted to improve was her ability to be creative.

Caroline Williams: Well, the interesting thing that I found with that was as soon as I went into the lab to try and experience the creative brain state, it turned out that it was almost exactly the same brain state as the one I had been fighting when I couldn't focus, a sort of broad focus, slightly zoned out, not quite in the room sort of feeling. And so it occurred to me that what you really need to be able to control your brain really is to be able to slip into the right state for the job. So if you want to be focused, then you go 'relaxed and ready'. But if you want to be more creative than you have to let go of that focus and just let the mind wander wherever it wants to.

And it was quite a strange feeling because the way I got to this state was in a lab in Kansas where they do brain stimulation to turn down all the sensible frontal activity, which keeps you focused and on the job, and lets the mind free. And the second at the current went on, I'd been chatting quite happily to the researcher, and as soon as she turned the current on I sort of went off with the fairies, it was like I left the room and my focus went to the middle distance and I was off.

But then when she put me through the various tests of creative ideas, I doubled my ability to come up with creative ideas compared to when the current was off. So it obviously did something. But importantly the ideas that you come up with in that state are a bit random. The task I had was to look at various objects and come up with an unusual use for them. And when I was under stimulation they showed me a pair of fishing waders and I was saying, 'Trousers for a horse,' and all kinds of really random stuff. And as I was saying it out loud I thought this is really odd, because without the sensible shackles of the frontal bits of your brain to shut those kinds of thoughts down you can come up with any old stuff. So you need a bit of both.

So the ultimate state for creativity is this kind of freewheeling state but you do need the frontal bits of your brain if you are going to come up with anything useful because horse waders, horse trousers are clearly very creative but not very useful.

Lynne Malcolm: Now to one of the areas you've identified as a weakness of yours, which I'm particularly interested in because it is a weakness of mine too, and that's a very poor sense of direction. Very embarrassing. What did you find out about this and your brain in relation to spatial navigation?

Caroline Williams: Well, the bad news for me in terms of navigation is that I seem to be missing a bit of the kit that is required. I'm not saying that's true of anybody else so don't panic. But it did seem to me that this idea that you can just change your brain, you can go, do you know what, I'm going to become a better navigator and work on that and have it change might not be true. You know, the brain is not Play-Doh. Maybe there are some things you can't change.

But when it comes to navigation there are two strategies that you can use. And according to the research, women in general tend to use an egocentric strategy, which is basically where you navigate in relation to where you are, where your body is, and so you take routes and you get to a landmark. You walk down the road, you get to the church, you turn right, you walk down the road, you see the shop, you turn left, that kind of thing.

There's another strategy which is more of a mental map building strategy, which apparently is more common in men, where you just have this mental idea of the layouts of everywhere, and then you can move through it. Now, I cannot do that mental map building thing it seems. And I went through two days' worth of tests at the University of Pennsylvania to try and find out why that was, and they put me in a brain scanner and looked at which bits of the brain lit up when I was trying to solve the problem of getting around. And out of the three areas, one of mine just didn't show up at all and it was the area that is involved with putting yourself in space with regards to big areas. So if you imagine you are in a big bowl with mountains all around you, I would find it really, really difficult to navigate by the mountains.

And in fact one of the virtual reality tests they had me do was that in virtual reality, and there was one tiny landmark, a ball in the middle of the arena, and I was trying to navigate by the ball, by the tiny landmark when there were massive mountains. It just felt like my brain could not compute that information, in a similar sort of way to if I was to take my contact lenses out and you say, 'Read that sign over there,' I'd just say, 'I can't, I just can't do it.' You know, no amount of trying or trying to train my eyes to learn that is going to make any difference, I can't do it. And that's how it felt when I was trying to solve that problem.

Lynne Malcolm: So did you find out whether you can improve your sense of direction with practice or even with devices?

Caroline Williams: Yes, there is research that shows that people can learn to go from this egocentric strategy of navigating from the basis of me to a more map-based approach. And so what I did is I got in touch with some researchers in Germany who have a navigation belt called the FeelSpace Belt, and that has buzzers, haptic sensors, all the way around it and a GPS unit embedded as well. And what it does is it buzzes on your body where north is. And as you move around that buzz moves around to keep north at whatever point it is on your waist.

And so the idea was in their studies they have found that when people have worn this belt for six weeks they started to think about the environment in a different way. One of the volunteers told me that she started to feel like she was inside Google Maps, inside Google Street View but everything was transparent. And it sounded amazing, that you might just be able to have this sixth sense of where north is.

So I tried that for six weeks and stomped around the countryside with my dog and got lost many, many times and tried to retrain where north was. And it really did help me. In my hometown now I can tell you where north is at any point. But this is another example of where what you learn might not transfer to other skills. So you put me in a different town, I would have no clue where north was. You sort of have to use it as a tool, sort of as a bolt-on sense almost. And whereas some people seem to be able to integrate that information, for me it was very much like putting my contact lenses in or if I was trying to reach a high shelf standing on a chair. It was a tool to help me, a means to an end. Without it I was lost. So I don't feel like it changed my brain in any particular way but it did show how humans are really, really good at using tools and our brains can use that information and just assimilate it as if it was totally natural. I thought that was kind of fascinating, that the brain can take something it never evolved to sense and make sense of it.

Lynne Malcolm: So your last challenge was to set yourself the task of finding out if you can improve your sense of skill with numbers and mathematics. How did you go with that?

Caroline Williams: Yes, I was really, really reluctant to try this one because I've just had this sort of not quite terror of maps but I have this feeling...you know, if a waiter is standing next to me and I need to work out his tip it just makes me freeze and it's like 'I can't do this'. So I wanted to try and improve my maths skills. Because when I was at school I was fine at maths but it just seemed to disappear, it's just sort of left me.

And so I went to Oxford University, to a different group this time who do brain stimulation, to try and reduce emotional inputs, to try and stop that 'argh' moment so that you can actually get on with the job of working out what the problem is. And it was kind of comforting in a way to know that once they had turned down that 'argh' reaction, I could actually do it. So it was kind of nice to know that sometimes what you've got is already on board and you just have to find a way to release it.

Lynne Malcolm: Through this whole process I guess you've got a glimpse of what it might be possible to do in the future to help people change their mental control.

Caroline Williams: There are pieces of kit starting to come through, some of them you can buy now. So there are things like EEG headbands, so they monitor the electrical activity in your brain, and they are really a pared down version of what's available in the lab. And these can show the relative balance of different brain waves in the brain which correspond to different mental states. You can actually see on the screen as you are meditating or doing whatever it is that you are doing, you can track the state you want to be in and see how it looks on the screen. So it's a really simplified version of neurofeedback which has been used in labs for years to try and monitor what's going on in people's brains, have them look at it on a screen and be able to drive that at will, get themselves into the state they want to be in. And so that's kind of a less trial-and-error version of what I've been trying to do. So in the not too distant future you should be able to just kind of buy one of these things and think, okay, I need to be in the 'relaxed and ready' zone now, go! And make it happen by watching your brain on a screen, and that sounds pretty cool to me.

Lynne Malcolm: So overall what changes do you feel you've been able to make with your brain, and do you think that brain override is possible?

Caroline Williams: Broadly I would say yes. Nearly everything I tried, in fact everything I tried I was able to if not override by changing the way my brain works, to find out what the problem was and to find a way to work around it. So it almost feels like I feel more in control now than I did at the start of it. I have learnt a harsh lesson about keeping these things up, having dropped off on the clicking happy faces and the meditation I felt my stress levels start to soar again. And so I've definitely learnt that whatever it is that you find that works you've got to keep it going and make it a life change rather than just a quick fix.

When I've spoken to friends and family about the book and they just want to know what's the one thing, what do you have to do, it's like they want to know this one weird trick to sort your brain out, and it doesn't really exist. But there's a lot that you can do at its almost about knowing what you've got on board, experiencing different mental states and being able to switch from one to the other and just use the right tool for the right job, and chances are it's probably all in there waiting to be used.

Lynne Malcolm: So what would you say are the most useful mental states that you've been able to acquire through this process?

Caroline Williams: Definitely the relaxed and ready state has been an absolute revelation to me, the way that if you can just slip into being in the zone, which sounds...it's easy to say, not so easy to do, but once you've practised that feeling, it gets a little easier. So being able to just say to myself, okay, 'relaxed and ready', and just sort of slip into that zone has been amazing. Anything I have to do, if I'm sitting in a conference or meeting and I need to focus and I'm not really in the mood, slipping into that zone seems to really, really help, even just at home when my son wants me to play with him and I want to be doing a few jobs or whatever, just thinking, 'okay, relaxed and ready, 10 minutes, here we go', has been a really, really useful zone.

And also the mindlessness has been really, really useful. So I used to berate myself for my mind skipping off and just being off with the fairies and think that that was a weakness, but actually in some ways it's a strength having that there because it helps with creativity and I now know that if I'm trying to work on something and it's not working, I just down tools and go out for 20 minutes and walk the dog or throw a ball, stare at the window, it doesn't matter. I allow myself that state because I know that it's important for the brain.

And the most important one to try and get rid of was anxiety because that's a state that is really good for nothing. I searched the literature high and low and I could not find any evidence that being in an anxious state of mind was good for your brain.

Lynne Malcolm: And you seem to have changed your mind about mindfulness and meditation from the beginning to the end of the book. You feel that meditation has been surprisingly helpful.

Caroline Williams: Yes, it has been, and part of my problem was I just didn't really want to sit still for 10 minutes a day, and I really resisted it, partly because there's this look people have when they are really into meditation and they just look really calm and a bit smug and you just think, oh, stop it, stop being so in control! And I didn't want to be that person. But when I do do it, I do find it a better day. Just 10 minutes of focusing on the breath or doing the mindfulness of your body meditation, it just puts me into a better place to start the day. So yes, despite all my initial scepticism I'm glad I tried it and I still do it...I wouldn't say every day but I try to do it most days.

Lynne Malcolm: So how can you be sure that the changes that you felt are due to real changes that you've made in your brain?

Caroline Williams: Well, the truthful answer is you can't really because short of doing what they have done in mice, which sounds awful, strapping bits of glass to the head and putting a microscope on, you can't see. And even brain scanning studies...you know, at the start of this I had the idea that I would have a brain scan, I would do some kind of intervention, and then I'd have another scan and I'd say, oh look, that bit is much bigger than it was before and that means it must have changed. And it very quickly became apparent that that wasn't really the way to go about it because changes would be far too small to see on MRI, or...it's difficult to tell with short interventions what has changed, and there are changes all over the brain, and so it's kind of not really worth doing. Plus it is really expensive and people didn't want to do that as well.

But really the proof of the pudding is how it feels. And speaking to some neuroscientists who work on the connectome, which is the way the brain is wired up together, and I put it to one of them that actually maybe my brain hasn't physically changed, I've just learned how to use it better. And he said, well yes, perhaps but I would argue that something must have happened physically to allow that to happen. It just might be really, really small changes all over the brain. So yes, I can't put my hand on my heart and say this bit has got bigger, this bit is better connected, but something has changed, and the proof of the pudding really is not in pointing at things on a brain scan, it's about how you feel in your life. And I do feel that it was definitely worth doing.

Lynne Malcolm: Caroline Williams, author of Override: My quest to go beyond Brain Training and take control of my mind.

Head to the All in the Mind website for details from today's episode

Our producer is Diane Dean and the sound engineer is Andrei Shabunov.

I'm Lynne Malcolm. Thanks for your company, and I do hope you can join me again next time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lynne Malcolm: Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm, with a fascinating 2017 line-up of new explorations of the brain, the mind and our behaviour. We begin today with one woman's quest to improve the control she has over her own brain, with all its imperfections.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Lynne Malcolm: Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm. Today, our gendered minds; is testosterone still king?

[Music: 'Boys Will be Boys', Marlene Dietrich]

Marlene Dietrich, early 20th century Hollywood movie star and singer, with the ironic and entrancing 'Boys Will be Boys'. Throughout her long career, she was known to defy gender stereotypes, one of her many noted quotes being 'I am at heart a gentleman'.

The idea that there is a clear and biological distinction between female and male brains which drives our different behaviours remains a powerful belief. For example, aren't women better socially, and men better at spatial relationships? Men more competitive and women less promiscuous? Not necessarily, according to my guest today. It's essential to re-examine the science and to consider culture as a vital player in shaping us as individuals.

Dr Cordelia Fine is a Professor of History and Philosophy of science at the University of Melbourne, and author of a number of books on the mind, including A Mind of its Own and Delusions of Gender. Her latest book challenges the pervasive stereotypes that still exist around sex, gender and our minds.

She's called her book Testosterone Rex.

Cordelia Fine: Yes, I chose the nickname Testosterone Rex to refer to that very familiar and popular idea that risk-taking competitiveness is a masculine trait that increased reproductive success in males and is therefore wired into the male brain and is fuelled by testosterone. And the reason it seemed like an appropriate nickname to me is for two reasons. One is that it refers to Rex or King, and this Testosterone Rex story seems to offer us an explanation of why it is that even in our contemporary western societies men still have much more power and wealth than women overall. And secondly because the science on which this story is based has really moved on a great deal in the past two decades, and the Testosterone Rex story is actually scientifically extinct.

Lynne Malcolm: Cordelia Fine. In her book Testosterone Rex she says it's time to move beyond the nature vs nurture debate when it comes to sex, gender and the brain. She starts with debunking some myths from the field of evolutionary biology.

Cordelia Fine: So I think there are two really important ways in which changes and evolutionary biology need to update the stories that we have about sex differences and how persistent they necessarily need to be. So one is around this idea that competitiveness is a sort of exclusively male trait. So some decades ago biologists were very focused on the fact that reproduction is cheaper for males because a single sperm is cheaper than an egg, a large juicy egg, and particularly when we talk about mammals because of course female mammals have to gestate and lactate. So reproduction is cheaper and often quicker for males. And the chain of reasoning from this is that, well, for this reason it's really the cost benefit ratio of competing for resources, for status, the territory and for mates is going to be much more favourable for males than for females because females simply aren't going to have the same reproductive advantage from having those kinds of competitions as males are.

And so the idea here is that it's just a sort of intrinsic aspect of maleness throughout the animal kingdom, with a few well defined exceptions, that it's only to the males' benefit to be competitive. But it has turned out over the past decades that the biological economics of reproduction are quite a bit more complicated than this, and as a result of all sorts of other factors that weigh in, there is a lot of diversity in the animal kingdom. So this old idea of male competitiveness certainly does characterise some species extremely well, but less so for others.

And what has been overlooked until recently is, for example, the importance of competition for females, for their reproductive success. So rank and resources, particularly in female mammals, it turns out, can be an important part of female reproductive success. So, for example, high ranking female chimpanzees are able to reproduce at a faster rate than low ranking females, and their infants are more likely to survive. And this seems to be because those high ranking mothers have access to richer feeding sites than low ranking females. So the point here is not to say, well, we are closely related to chimpanzees so we must be just like them, but it's just to point out that that sort of old story, 'sperm are cheap so males compete', has been complicated a great deal and it's revealed a great deal of diversity and the importance of the number of different factors in competition in males and females.

And the second thing it's shown is that these sex roles, as biologists refer to them as, can be quite dynamic. So one example is a species of field cricket. So in the normal course of events the females are actually competitive for mates, and this is because their males provide them with this nutrient rich sperm packet, so the females compete for that. But it turns out that when their environment is rich with pollen they actually kind of sit back and relax and take the more conventional role and let the males compete for them. And this shows that whatever sex is doing in the brains of female field crickets, it's not fixed in but it's actually responsive to environmental conditions. And this is really important when we think about humans because, of all the species across the animal kingdom, I think it's fair to say that we humans have the most diverse arrangement of ways of bringing the next generation into being, and we also have the greatest capacity to change the social, economic, material, environmental, cultural conditions in which we do that.

Lynne Malcolm: One prominent behavioural stereotype is that men are more likely to take risks than women, and it's often linked to men's higher levels of testosterone. Cordelia Fine says that this is a myth.

Cordelia Fine: Well, risk-taking is a really nice example because we tend to think, well, men are risk taking, women are risk averse. Men have more testosterone, women have less testosterone. And it seems really intuitive and plausible to think that men's high levels of testosterone is what drives them to take more risks. But when we start to look more carefully at the breakdown of who takes risks and when, what we see is a much more nuanced pattern in which men are more likely on average to take some kinds of risks but women are equally likely to take other kinds of risks or maybe more likely to take particular kinds of risks. So we tend to overlook female forms of risk taking.

The other interesting aspect of risk-taking is that when we look more closely to see who's taking what kinds of risks we see that there isn't such a thing as an across-the-board risk taker on the whole. So psychologists used to think of risk-taking as this sort of single, domain-general personality trait. So you are either a risk taker or you're not or you're somewhere in the middle. But it turns out that people are quite idiosyncratic in the kinds of risks that they are willing to take. So some people might be very willing to take physical risks but much less willing to take financial risks, and that's why we have to be careful about saying, well look, boys and men are more likely to take certain kinds of physical risks, therefore they are always going to be the ones who are more likely to take financial risks, career risks, business risks and so on, the kinds of risks that are necessary to succeed in a competitive world.

But also when we look more closely at why there are differences between people in the kinds of risks that they take, you see that it is not due to a love for risk per se, most people don't really like risk that much. It's to do with differences in the perceived benefits and risks of a particular situation. So what's the cost-benefit ratio that you perceive? And we can easily see that in a gendered world, that kind of cost-benefit ratio may actually be objectively different for women versus men. So, for example, there's a lot of talk about women shying away from competition, needing to lean in.

But a really interesting research study by Michelle Ryan at Exeter University, when she looked at a large number of men and women who worked as consultants in a major consultancy firm, she found that it was true that women were less willing to take career risks and make those kinds of sacrifices for their career that are necessary to get ahead, but the reason for that was that they perceived less benefit of doing that. They didn't think it was going to work out as well for them as the men did, and the reason for that wasn't that they found that they didn't care so much about their careers but that they perceived the organisations to be less meritocratic, they didn't have the same role models that the men did, and they didn't feel that they had the same levels of support. So they were making these sort of calculations about what kinds of risks it was worth taking in a different environment to the men.

Lynne Malcolm: So there's a lot of research over the years looking at whether there is a male and a female brain, as distinct. Our brains are affected by hormones, so why wouldn't the brains of males be affected by their higher levels of testosterone?

Cordelia Fine: Yes, so there are sex differences in the brain, and I think until recently the debate has been very much on, well, which ones are robust and how big are those differences? But things have really started to shift a bit in the science talking about sex differences in the brain. So one shift is that we've moved away from models that see prenatal testosterone, which is much higher in males on average than in females, as being this sort of sole cause of sex differences in the brain. So the old idea was that testosterone rushed through the male brain, masculinising and de-feminising certain circuits, so creating quite distinct male and female brains.

It is now understood that that process involves many more factors, so various genetic and hormonal components of sex interacting with epigenetic factors and environmental factors. And what this creates is not discreet male versus female circuits but mosaics that are quite idiosyncratic across individuals. And what this means in terms of the concept of a male and female brain is that those sex differences that we often see reported in scientific studies, for example, the natural tendency is to assume that these sex differences, they add up and they add up and they create two quite different kinds of brain. But actually, as a study showed last year, when you look at the human brain you do find sex differences, but when you look at the largest sex differences in the brain you find that they don't add up in individuals in this internally consistent way. So people have a mixture of brain characteristics that are more common in males compared to females, some that are more common in females compared to males and some that are common in both. And so the number of people who have a brain that has only male typical characteristics or only female characteristics is actually very rare.

Lynne Malcolm: Cordelia Fine.

Did you happen to catch the YouTube clip of a little girl in a toy shop aisle in the US having a very angry rant about the sexist way toy companies market to boys and girls? Here she is:

YouTube video audio: The companies who make these try to trick the girls into buying the pink stuff instead of stuff that the boys want to buy, right? Yeah, so then why do all the girls have to buy princesses? Some girls like superheroes, some girls like princesses, some boys like superheroes, some boys like princesses. Why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff and all the boys have to buy different coloured stuff?

Lynne Malcolm: You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm, and I'm with Cordelia Fine, author of Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of our Gendered Minds.

Cordelia Fine argues against the commonly held belief that testosterone is the essence of masculinity and that biological sex is fundamental to the development of our natures. But how are some of the popular ideas explained, like men are better at map reading, and women are better in the social realm, with brains that are wired for nurturing?

Cordelia Fine: Well look, I think it's important to move away from generic statements of 'women are like this' and 'men are like that'. So when you look at the basic building blocks of cognition, so personality, cognitive ability, social abilities, you tend to find that sex differences, you certainly can see them often at the average level but they tend not to be that large. And the other interesting thing about sex differences is that, like the brain differences, they don't add up in this internally consistent way. So you can't locate someone on a line from femininity to masculinity, everyone has their own idiosyncratic array of characteristics. And this starts to tell us something important about what's causing those differences, because if you think it's something like testosterone makes men masculine, when you are thinking of masculinity as a kind of package deal, so you've got promiscuity, risk-taking, competitiveness, map reading, whatever it is, if you think of that as a package deal, you go, okay, more testosterone, more masculinity. Or less testosterone, in the case of women, less masculinity.

But once you start to see these as being not coming together but kind of breaking apart, everyone having these arrays of masculine and feminine attributes, that kind of explanation starts to seem much less plausible, particularly when you start to look at the size of sex differences in behaviour compared to the size of sex differences in, for instance, testosterone. So sex differences in testosterone are much larger than sex differences in behaviour. So what that means is there can't be a simple relationship between absolute level of testosterone differences and behaviour. And this actually makes sense with what we know about testosterone. The level of testosterone in the blood is just one part of a very, very complex system in which many factors can influence what testosterone is actually doing in the brain.

But I think just to step back from that nitty-gritty as well, I think this brings us to this really important point, is that people think, look, it just makes sense that in our evolutionary past it would have been reproductively advantageous for girls and women to have nurturing skills so they could take care of the babies that they had to breast feed and care for, and it just would have been advantageous for reproductive success for males to have the kinds of predispositions that would have made them want to have sex with lots of different partners and hunt or whatever it was.

Now, those assumptions are a bit problematic in themselves, but even if we take them at face value, there's an assumption going on here which is a really natural one which is that if something is adaptive, if it's behaviour that has developed because it was really important for our reproductive success, then it just must be built into some sort of in inalterable aspect of our biology. But it turns out that just isn't necessarily always the case.

So for development to happen you need all kinds of resources, not just genetic resources. So you need social resources and environmental resources and material resources. And what developmental biologists have realised is that if these resources, particularly if they can be reliably inherited by an animal along with its genetic inheritance, then that can be part of the package that they draw on to develop those adaptive traits, however important that particular characteristic is. A really striking example of this is sexual imprinting.

So, for example, if you cross-foster a baby lamb, particularly male lambs, and baby goats, with a mother of the other species, so a lamb raised by a goat mother and a little baby kid raised by a sheep mother, by a ewe, you actually find that when those babies grow up they prefer sexual partners of the other species, and that's quite a robust and persistent preference.

Having an attraction to the right species is really important for reproductive success. I don't think anyone would deny that, it's just not going to happen with the wrong species. But, bar a disaster, if you're a mammal you're going to inherit a mother who is going to take care of you in the early years of your life, so that's a reliable resource that you inherit that the evolutionary processes can recruit in the development of those adaptive traits.

Again, that's not to say this must be the case for humans. It's generally not a good idea to generalise willy-nilly from one species to another, but it serves just to illustrate this really important point that things that can be really important adaptively for reproductive success aren't necessarily built into our genes.

Lynne Malcolm: You've coined the term neuro-sexism when it comes to studying the brain in relation to gender. What do you mean by neuro-sexism and what are the implications of it?

Cordelia Fine: Well, I think one thing that's really important to say is that when I coined the term neuro-sexism I was explicit that it was not to say that there was something intrinsically sexist about studying the relation between sex and the brain. There are important reasons to look at sex influences in the brain, particularly because there are certain kinds of psychopathology of brain and mind that are more common in men versus women and vice versa. And I think this sort of new complex understanding of how the genetic and hormonal components of sex influence the brain are certainly important to study and investigate.

What I meant by neuro-sexism was it was a reference to both academic and popular tendency to refer to neuroscientific claims that justifies and reinforces old-fashioned gender stereotypes in ways that are not scientifically justified. So if you've got scientific literature that has a large number of studies that are likely to be throwing up false positive results because of small sample sizes, if you have speculations about what a sex difference in the brain means for behaviour that is not substantiated in any way with looking at actual behaviour, perhaps because of assumptions that women are more empathic than men, even though you don't show it in your particular sample, then that doesn't really lend itself to strong scientific progress.

Another tendency I noticed in the literature is to just take single snapshots of sex differences in the brain. So while neuroscientists certainly understand that 'in the brain' doesn't mean hardwired, it's interesting to observe that if you only ever study a single population in a single context and then leave it at that, you can't produce any data that can challenge the idea of those sex differences being fixed and universal and timeless.

So I think looking carefully at how implicit assumptions about sex differences, both from the behaviour and brain, influence how the experiments are designed, how the data are analysed and how the data are interpreted, and then of course how that feeds into popular often misrepresentation is really important. But I think it's also obviously socially important to be having rigorous science in this politically sensitive and important area.

Lynne Malcolm: Cordelia Fine believes strongly that culture and environment play a major role in the development of our gendered minds, but she suggests it's time to move beyond the social vs biological or the nature vs nurture debates.

Cordelia Fine: I think maybe a different way of thinking about it is how does a particular sex difference or gendered behaviour develop, because we all understand that biology and environmental aspects are part of the development of everything. Nature and nurture are always involved and they always interact. So the question is how did this particular sex difference or gender trait develop, and could it have developed differently in different circumstances?

So one example of this is research looking at the effect of masculine norms, for instance, on how young men respond to a perceived slight. This is a classic study done by Dov Cohen and colleagues, and they took participants who were either southerners in the US or northerners, and the reason being that southerners have a sort of cultural legacy of having to be a kind of tough man, and so it's very important in that culture to have a reputation of just not being someone that you should mess with.

And what they found is when they set up this quite infamous experiment where supposedly the participants were going to the real experiment but in fact on the way to the testing room they were jostled by a confederate of the experimenter who referred to them in a derogatory way. And what they were interested in is how did the southerners and the northerners respond to that situation. And what they found is that in the southerners there was a more aggressive response to that situation, and also their testosterone levels rose. And so this raises an interesting question, because you think if they respond aggressively in a particular situation, well, it's the testosterone. But stepping back a bit, the testosterone increase seemed to have something to do with that sort of masculine norm that was in play.

Lynne Malcolm: One of Cordelia Fine's previous books A Mind of Its Own looked at the way the brain distorts and deceives us. Does she think self-delusion plays a role in thinking about gender?

Cordelia Fine: One of the phenomena that I talked about in A Mind of Its Own was this idea of confirmation bias. So we interpret evidence or look for evidence in ways that is in keeping with the beliefs that we already hold or conclusions that we would prefer to reach. And there was actually a lovely study showing that scientists are prey to the confirmation bias, so they're much softer on a study that has results that are in keeping with their own preferred conclusion. This is important in relation to the debate because I think throughout Testosterone Rex there are just so many examples of female scientists saying, actually, let's re-examine this assumption, I'm seeing something that's not really fitting with the data. And it has often taken a long time for those insights to penetrate the rest of the field.

There can also seemed to be a tension between...feminist critiques of science can sometimes be seen as being anti-science or anti-difference, and it's simply not the case. It's actually just bringing the insights of gender scholarship into the scientific process. And so it's actually part of improving the quality of the science.

Lynne Malcolm: So you've looked very closely at the science, and you've come to this conclusion. Why then do you think that a counter to the Testosterone Rex concept is so slow to catch on?

Cordelia Fine: I think that's a really interesting question. In many ways the Testosterone Rex story scientifically was a story of its time. So it's in keeping with the ideas and assumptions of last century science. So our understanding of femininity and masculinity has changed, it's changed from this idea that masculinity and femininity are opposites, it's the idea that, okay, you can be both masculine and feminine or neither, to this idea that actually it's a real mix or a kind of gender pick and mix.

And again, in evolutionary biology this focus on the role of genes in development has shifted away to take account of the role of other resources. So in fairness to the Testosterone Rex story, it's sort of based on science that was current. The question is why is it taking so long for these changed understandings within science to be updated into our understanding of sex differences?

And I think one potential explanation is that we are still in a bit of a shift about thinking about the influence of sex on the brain, on development, away from this idea that it's a really powerful predominant cause of sex differences in brain and behaviour, to seeing it as one of many factors that is interacting in very complex ways. The society we live in now is nothing like the society that our Flintstone ancestors lived in. But I think there's a real shift happening in this sort of science of sex differences.

Lynne Malcolm: So how important or even urgent is it that we change our old assumptions and update our understandings of the basis of gender differences, that we bust this Testosterone Rex myth once and for all?

Cordelia Fine: I think from a scientific point of view, to me this seems like a really exciting time in the science of sex. We are starting to explore different ways in which sex actually works, that it doesn't just work directly in the very tight route from genes to hormones to brain, that it's much more complicated, and it's recruiting resources in the outside world to kind of do its developmental work. So I think it's quite an exciting time scientifically, and it would be exciting to see what comes out of that research program that I think we seem to be moving towards a little bit.

But I think from a social point of view it's also really important because if you think in the Testosterone Rex way that, look, it's just evolved that men seek status, compete, and women tend not to, and it's in our genes and it's in our hormones and it is therefore fixed, then that obviously has implications for what kind of society you think it's possible to see. So we know that having these kinds of 'boys will be boys'/'girls will be girls' beliefs do have a host of psychological effects on how we prefer to arrange our lives and how comfortable we feel with the status quo and our feelings towards progressive gender policies.

Lynne Malcolm: Dr Cordelia Fine, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne, and author of Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of our Gendered Minds.

Head to the All in the Mind website for details from today. Production by Diane Dean and sound engineer Judy Rapley.

I'm Lynne Malcolm. Thanks for your company, until next time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lynne Malcolm: Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm. Today, our gendered minds; is testosterone still king? [Music: 'Boys Will be Boys', Marlene Dietrich] Marlene Dietrich, early 20th century Hollywood movie star and singer, with the ironic and entrancing 'Boys Will be Boys'.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
[Excerpt from Her]

Lynne Malcolm: Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN. I'm Lynne Malcolm. Today, the challenge of artificial brain creation, and will the voice inside our computer ever be able to feel?

[Excerpt from Her]

Lynne Malcolm: From the film Her directed by Spike Jones, in which the main character Theodore falls in love with Samantha, the voice of his computer operating system.

Today I speak with two of the world's leading brain researchers about some of the latest international efforts to understand the brain. By combining neuroscience with leading edge computing, their projects are seeing unprecedented scientific collaborations aimed at unlocking the mysteries of the human brain.

Here's neuroscientist Christof Koch with where they're at so far:

Christof Koch: So we've been studying the brain at a serious level since roughly a century and a half, 150 years, and over that time span we realised that, unlike the ancients we know it's the seat of memory, consciousness, emotions, who you are, it's your brain, in particular the cerebral cortex, the top portion of the brain. And so now over the last 50 years we are focusing in on the atoms of perception, the atoms of consciousness and memory which are the nerve cells of which we have roughly 100 billion, and the interconnections, the so-called synapses. It's a vast, staggering complexity, much more complex than any physical system that physicists study like electrons or black holes, and so it has been very challenging.

We've made great advances, particularly on the practical engineering side, so your audience will have heard about brain-machine interfaces. Just last week there was a report in the Lancet where somebody who was paralysed after a bike accident has a set of electrodes implanted into his brain that connect to his muscles, bypassing the defect spinal cord. So now he can think and those thoughts are translated using this brain-machine interface into action. And so we are slowly beginning to unravel this most complex piece of highly organised matter in the universe.

Lynne Malcolm: Christof Koch is renowned for his work with the late Nobel laureate Francis Crick. Together they pioneered the scientific study of the neural basis of consciousness. More from him later.

Karlheinz Meier is Professor of Physics at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and he's one of the co-founders of the European Human Brain Project, one of two flagship projects started by the European Commission in 2013.

Karlheinz Meier: The goal is to use all the methods that modern computer science offers to advanced brain science, it's really about this connection between computers and the brain that concerns the storage of data, the capability of doing very large-scale simulations, and maybe most excitingly also the option to build machines that work like brains. So computers that are different from conventional computers in that they have the architecture of brains and hopefully the same advantages that brains have.

Lynne Malcolm: So what is it about the differences between the brain and conventional computers that make it challenging for us to go down this path of creating artificial brains?

Karlheinz Meier: So it's at the same time challenging but also very rewarding. So let's start with the challenges. Of course the brain is what we call a massively parallel system, it consists of 100 billion cells, biological cells that are interconnected by a network of about 10 to the 14, so that's 10,000 times more than the number of neuron synapses. And to emulate or to simulate that on a computer is indeed a big challenge because we have to wire up a network of the same complexity as the brain is. So why is it so rewarding? Of course there are three main advantages. One is that the brain evidently is very, very energy efficient. You can live from 10 bananas a day, whereas if you have a computer you have to charge your cell phone every night, supercomputers need entire power stations to operate. So the energy efficiency clearly is one of the very, very big interesting aspects of the brain that make it so rewarding to build computers that are brain-like.

Secondly, the brain is what we call fault tolerant. We typically lose one brain cell per second. That's about 100,000 a day. And we still function in a reasonable way, provided there is only normal ageing. If you do a similar thing with a microprocessor, you kill one transistor a day, within a couple of seconds probably this thing would stop working entirely, it would not work at all, it would just die. And so the brain goes through a process that is called graceful degradation which also is very interesting for computer science because you know the companies like Intel and Samsung, they are spending billions to make transistors very, very reliable in order to have microprocessors that really work. If they could work with failing components, that would be a huge step forward, in particular to save what we call Moore's law where we try to cram more and more transistors in the same area, and it starts to be more and more difficult because these things don't work anymore because they are so small. So to work with failing components, unreliable components, would be a big step forward for computer science.

Then there is a third advantage, and that's probably the most important one. If you think of your cell phone or your computer, what is the most annoying thing? Probably everybody agrees that the most annoying thing is that you have to update software in a regular way and it never really works the way you want. So predefined software is the biggest challenge of computer science. Our brain doesn't have software. You don't upload software to your brain, and you don't do updates. So what you do rather instead is that you have a continuous learning process, you learn from the environment, you adapt to the environment, and the learning is the most important thing that makes brains different from computers, and the learning is the most important thing that we try to implement into our brain-like computer systems.

Lynne Malcolm: So you're adopting an approach which is referred to as neuromorphic computing.

Karlheinz Meier: Yes, it's called neuromorphic because it emulates the shape of the neural system. And the original idea actually goes back to the time around 1980 or so when a US engineer, Carver Mead, had the idea of using transistors rather than cells to build networks that behave just like neural networks. That is very different from the neural networks that we use today which are simulated on a computer. So neuromorphic systems are not simulation systems but we call them emulation systems. So rather than moving ions through cells as we do in our own brains, we move electrons through transistors, but otherwise it is the same process. So it's really a copy of the brain going from carbon to silicon. And since the days of Carver Mead back in the 1980s, electronics has improved enormously, and these things are available now to build brain-like computer systems and that's what we do. And the challenge of course, as I said before, is to have many, many parallel elements interconnected in brain-like networks.

Lynne Malcolm: So we are hearing more and more these days about neuroplasticity of our brain. How important is that concept of neuroplasticity when it comes to designing a brain inspired computer?

Karlheinz Meier: It's the number one most important thing because I believe that you cannot just take a reconstructed brain network, put it onto silicon and hope that it does something useful. That would just not work. What we have to do is to build a network that is able to learn and able to adapt. So we have to give our synthetic systems neuroplasticity. That is on the cellular level the cells have to change their properties, the synaptic links have to change their strength, and also the network structure has to change by rewiring. This is exactly what is going on in our own brain in the learning processes which cover timescales from milliseconds to years, we learn our entire life. And to map those kind of plastic processes to synthetic systems is the number one science and also engineering challenge.

Lynne Malcolm: So how far are we away from creating an artificial brain?

Karlheinz Meier: Yes, there are small brains and large brains out there, and of course the ultimate challenge is the human brain with the numbers I just noted, 100 billion neurons, we are actually really, really far from that number. But what we can do today is to build networks of, say, thousands or millions of neurons and with billions of connections.

Let me give you a concrete example from our own work. We have what we call a physical model system back in our lab in Heidelberg where we have 4 million neurons and a billion synapses, and those are flexible, they are plastic, they can learn and they have the features that we want them to have. Of course this is a very small brain, it's more an insect type brain. But also insects do very, very cool things, like for example manoeuvring through unknown rooms, finding objects, finding food, controlling their wings to fly, and to navigate, so these kinds of things can be studied with the size of systems we have today.

Lynne Malcolm: So the big hope is for brain simulation, but we don't completely understand the science of the systems that we are stimulating yet, do we. So how do you start studying those simulations when you don't completely understand them?

Karlheinz Meier: That's a great question. In fact that is probably the aspect that received most criticism when we started the Human Brain Project. Everybody says how can you simulate something that you don't understand? And I have a very simple answer to that. My answer is we simulate to understand, because there are many other examples out there where we simulate things that we do not understand.

I'm a physicist so I have some affinity also to other areas of physics like astrophysics, for example. So people run what's called full universe simulations. Do we understand the universe? No, not at all. In fact there are aspects of the universe which are totally mysterious. Like you've probably heard about dark matter. We know that it's there from some effects, but we don't know what it is. So if you have a simulated universe on a supercomputer, you can do a great thing, you can switch on unknown physics and you can switch it off. So you can do controlled experiments and then you can compare the results you achieve from the simulation with the real world, with the observations of the universe.

And we try to do the same thing with the brain. So we run a simulation and the first thing we see is it doesn't work. That's what you expect. It doesn't work. It doesn't describe all the things you see in your experiments, and that's because there are things missing. The connectivity is wrong, the cell models are wrong. You make errors and errors and errors. And then it's hard scientific work to systematically change parameters and get closer to reality. Often people have this naive picture that a simulation is something you put in in software, you switch it on and it works, like weather prediction for example where it works reasonably well. But in science that's not the case, and in fact it took people a long time to come up with good weather simulation software. So this is a scientific process and it's likely to take us tens of years, if not 100 years.

But I think, I strongly believe that this is the time to do it because we have these very powerful conventional computers and we have all the technology to build brain-like computers. It's a wonderful time and it's the right time to introduce computer science to brain science.

Lynne Malcolm: And the quest to build an artificial brain seems to be opening the way to a whole new way of thinking about computing.

Karlheinz Meier: Absolutely. We typically today use computers to do precise numerical calculations. For example, you calculate your payroll, you send emails, you do text processing, and probably you don't really want to do this brain-like, because, you see, the brain is not really a precise instrument. If you do the same thing twice you often get slightly different results, and you don't want to have that on your Excel table.

But there are other things where this kind of approximate computing or stochastic computing are really, really important. For example, even outside neuroscience there is the field of cognitive computing where people try to interpret complex data. For example, business data, you have a big company and they have a very complex process of cash flow in the company, selling things, buying things, hiring people, and they need advice on if you change a parameter, what would change in the performance of the company. So you need kind of an overview of very complex systems and you have to make predictions about what happens if you do changes to the system. And this is what the brain is good at, it can make predictions based on complex data. It can find structure in complex data. And these are not calculations that are precise. These may be calculations that are approximate, but they may be very, very reasonable and help us to take good decisions. So this is the area of cognitive computing which I consider a completely new area of technology and industry that will evolve in coming years and it will happen now actually.

Lynne Malcolm: So what drives your passion to build an artificial brain for the good of humanity?

Karlheinz Meier: My passion really is to do this as a scientist, to be able to copy this amazing thing that we have in nature on an artificial substrate. And there are two reasons to do this. The scientific reason is to understand better how the brain works. I'm not saying to understand how the brain works, I am saying to understand better how the brain works, to make progress. And I think the computer systems that we build will help us to make progress. So that is reason number one. The reason number two of course is to help building this new industry of cognitive computing, which will help us a lot to control our complex world better than we do it at the moment, to have more reasonable decisions and, for example, to use the energy resources that we have better, human resources and other things.

Lynne Malcolm: So to what extent will these brain projects end up in the hands of large computer companies, and is this a concern?

Karlheinz Meier: This is not a concern, no. I think it's the natural way to go from basic science to applications, and there are very few areas in science where these two aspects are so close. Again, if you go to astrophysics or particle physics, for example, which is basic research. The way to applications which will eventually come but it is really, really far away, and until we can make use of things we learn in astrophysics we will probably take 100 or 200 years or more. In brain science, applications are amazingly close. The more we understand about the brain, the more we will be able to produce real products. And I strongly believe that there is nothing wrong about products. We need innovation, we need new ideas in industry, and brain science, together with computer science, can deliver this.

Lynne Malcolm: Karlheinz Meier, co-director and vice chair of the European Human Brain Project.

You're with All in the Mind on RN, I'm Lynne Malcolm, and we're hearing about some of the scientific efforts around the world to unravel the mysteries of the human brain.

One of the greatest mysteries has been consciousness; where is it and what is its nature?

These questions have become the life passion of neuroscientist Christof Koch. He's now president and chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in the United States. In a ten-year project the Institute is building brain observatories to map, analyse and understand the cerebral cortex of mice and humans.

Christof Koch: Most of neuroscience is done in small academic labs. There are roughly 60,000 of us worldwide distributed in 10,000 individual labs, mainly in academia but also in government labs. So it's essentially like 10,000 little small independent contractors, all doing their own thing at their own pace, using their own tools and their own model system. It might be the worm, it might be the fly, it might be a moth, it might be a monkey, a rat, or the human brain. So everybody does their own thing, heading off exuberantly in all possible directions.

What we are trying to do to initiate a change in the field similar to what happened in physics 60, 70, 80 years ago, to do one or two projects at scale with large teams and then also doing it open science. Everything we do is made available freely and globally to the public. So we are focusing on trying to understand in this most complex piece of highly organised matter the cortex both in the moth and in the human cortex. We work with human neurosurgical tissue that we get from neurosurgery to try to understand, just to get a glimpse of the lay of the land, how many different types of neurons there are. We don't even know that today.

So we know since 200 years that all biological organisms are made out of cells, that's the basic unit of biology. And we know that liver cells and heart cells and brain cells are all different but within the brain we don't really know how many types of nerve cells are there, and there are probably in the order of 1,000 different types of nerve cells. So think about a Lego set with 100 billion blocks, but first we want to figure out, well, how many different blocks either? You know, they are two by two and they are two by four and there are the roof tiles and then they have different colours and some only fit on other types of Lego bricks, so that's what we are trying to understand. And then also record at the level of individual nerve cells, not at the level of brain areas like you can do in brain imaging, but at the level of individual neurons. As an animal is thinking, or as an animal (in our case a moth) is making a particular decision, we can glimpse at its brain to infer its mind from this ever shifting activity of its nerves cells.

Lynne Malcolm: So your area of expertise is in consciousness, in biological and artificial brains. And earlier in your career you worked with the late Nobel laureate Francis Crick on consciousness. How did you both come to the view that you could now study it scientifically?

Christof Koch: Well, for the past 2,300 years, ever since the ancient Greeks, the study of consciousness has been primarily the domain of philosophers, but now with the rise of clinical neuroscience, neurology in the middle of the 19th century, and scientific neuroscience, we can now study its substrate. So we now know it's not the heart, as people used to think, it's the brain, and we can track the footprints of consciousness. This is what Francis Crick and I initiated, the so-called search for the neuronal correlates of consciousness. Those are the footprints of consciousness in your brain or my brain or the brain of another mammal, as we are experiencing, consciousness ultimately is experience. It might be pain, it might be the taste of Nutella, it might be seeing a movie. Those are all different experiences, and the question is where in the brain are the set of neurons that specifically give rise to that conscious sensation, and what is it about them? Are they of a particular type, are they in a particular location, do they operate in a particular mode? Those are all questions that we can now begin to ask and answer in a scientific way where previously we could just have late night philosophical discussions about it.

Lynne Malcolm: So before we talk about those parts of the brain and what you are finding out about that, a theory which you use is known as panpsychism. Would you mind explaining what that is and how it helps us to understand consciousness?

Christof Koch: Well, panpsychism is a very ancient religious philosophical belief shared by many religions, Buddhists by and large are panpsychists. We also have, going back all the way to Plato and Spinoza, Bertrand Russell in modern times, where panpsychism...the root from the Greek means 'pan', 'everywhere', 'psyche' is the soul, so it asserts that consciousness may be much more widespread than we usually believe. So usually we say, okay, you're conscious, I am conscious, a baby is conscious, a dog, a monkey is probably conscious but we aren't really 100% sure anymore. And then somewhere below a dog and a cat most people won't accord consciousness to any other creatures.

Panpsychists say that intuition is wrong, in fact this is also what modern science tells us. There is no discernible difference between the brain, let's say, of a mouse, of a monkey, a dog and a human, it's all the same stuff. We have a bigger brain but then there are other creatures like elephants and whales that have even bigger brains than ours. You know, only an expert armed with a microscope can tell a little piece of brain apart, whether it comes from a dog or a monkey. The hardware is all very similar. The behaviour across different species is similar, so it's very difficult to draw a Rubicon, to draw a bright line in the sand and say, well, these creatures are conscious, particularly us of course in Western culture, and these creatures are not, and there's really no scientific sound reason to say that. So this is the ancient intuition of panpsychism.

But we have to go beyond these intuitions about consciousness, we have to go to a theory, we have to really design theories of consciousness that tells us from a fundamental point of view what is it about a piece of matter that gives rise to conscious experience in this piece of matter, and what character does this piece of matter have to have, what sort of organisation does it have to have in order to be capable of having experiences? Because one of the questions we want to ask is what happens in patients that are seriously disabled, have been in a bad car accident and then they are unable to move and they may now be in a persistent vegetative state. Well, does it feel like something to be them, do they have agony or distress or pain, or are they truly not there anymore? The theory should be able to answer questions; how far down does consciousness go, does it extend to mice, to moles, to bees, to flies, to roundworms?

And then of course the question of our age; what about artificial machines? If Siri talks to me, if I imagine 20 years from now when I will be able to talk to Alexa, the Amazon voice, does it feel like something to be Alexa? She sure talks to me, I can call her up and she can talk to me, I can order stuff through her. Well, does it feel like anything to be Alexa, or can software never be conscious? Those are questions which a theory needs to answer, and we now have such a theory. People have built such a theory called the integrated information theory that tells us what is it about particular types of matter that gives rise to conscious experience.

Lynne Malcolm: So you are investigating the human brain and the mouse brain and what parts of the brain somehow associate with consciousness. What have you found out so far?

Christof Koch: It's a way of focusing on the cerebral cortex, the topmost portion of the brain that is expanded greatly in us, although it's present in many other mammals, in fact it's a defining feature of mammals, particularly a six-layer type of cortex known as new cortex. With us it's as big as a pizza, roughly the same thickness as a pizza, two or three millimetres, and there are two of them in the left and the right cortical hemisphere, and they are all wrapped up and put into your skull. And it seems a particular part of this cortex is associated with consciousness when it has appropriate types of electrical activity, like in waking behaviour right now, or like when you are asleep but you are dreaming, because then your brain inside your sleeping body is also producing experiences. So that's the portion of the brain that we are focusing on.

And then there's a structure that is just underneath the cortex that Francis Crick was particularly interested in. In fact in a paper that he finished literally on his deathbed, on the day he died in hospital, he was investigating this structure, is called the claustrum, it's underneath the cortex, we have it, all mammals have it. And what's remarkable about the claustrum, it's a thin that little structure embedded within fibre tracts. It projects to every cortical area and it receives important to every cortical area. And Francis Crick likened it to the conductor of the cortical symphony, because it listens to all the different cortical regions and it can send messages to all the cortical regions. The idea was, well, it makes sure that all the different cortical regions are tightly synchronised, the type of synchronisation that you need in order to have a conscious experience.

And so what we now just recently discovered, that if we analyse the nerve cells inside the claustrum of a neuron, they are amazingly widespread, much more widespread than anybody had previously realised, where single neuron, a tiny neuron will project to most of the cortex. If you look at them, the picture that immediately comes to mind is a crown-of-thorns. If you look at a video of the reconstructed axons, the output wiring, it's these massive projections that they have to the rest of the cortex. So it tells us something that in principle we can now take those neurons and we can try to turn them on or off experimentally. So far we can begin to do this in a mouse, and soon we will be able also to do this experimentally maybe in humans, and then we can study what happens if your claustrum is on, what happens if your claustrum is off? How will it impact your ability to experience things?

Lynne Malcolm: So just give me an example of that sort of experimentation, where you are turning these neurons on and off, just to visualise a little bit more about what the experimentation involves.

Christof Koch: So a classical experiment that we've done in Seattle is you can use this wonderful new technology of optogenetics, where you essentially use the oneness of molecular biology to engineer little light sensitive switches into particular types of neurons, not just everywhere but only in a subset of neurons. And now they respond to light, such as if you shine blue light onto them they will turn off, and if you shine red light onto them, they will be excited. So now you have all these millions of switches in the brain, but you can control a select part of them. So, for example, what you can do, you have a mouse running, you train it to stop when it sees certain pictures, so it is running on a track, and they are pictures that move by and it's supposed to stop at an appropriate picture that it had been trained to recognise, and if it stops at that picture it will be rewarded by some sugared water.

And so now you can see what happens if you turn a particular small part of the brain on and off as it runs past it, will it affect its behaviour or will it not affect its behaviour? And so you can see for instance if you put these light switches into neurons in the visual cortex, yes, it will affect its behaviour, it will run past those pictures as if it didn't see them. If you shine this blue or red light on a different part of the brain, activating or inactivating a different set of neurons, it may not be affected at all. So it means we can now begin to probe the brain in very specific ways, not just in turning the entire brain on and off like you might get if a person or an animal becomes unconscious, but you can just turn bits and pieces of the brain on and off, so that really helps us to track down causally which part of the brain are involved in which specific behaviours or in which particular type of conscious experience.

Lynne Malcolm: So all this is very physical. So basically the work is built on the premise that consciousness needs to have a body as well as a brain to exist.

Christof Koch: Consciousness needs a physical substrate, that's correct. Any scientific understanding of consciousness, i.e. experience, including experience of self, experience of pain, who I am, I'm going to die one day, my memory of that day when I last saw my mum alive, all of those different conscious experiences, they need a physical substrate, yes, which is part of the brain, that's correct.

Lynne Malcolm: I believe you spent a week a little while ago debating with the Dalai Lama about consciousness. Can you give me an idea of how that conversation went?

Christof Koch: Yes, so this was this past Christmas, I spent a week with His Holiness in India and the Tibetan community there, particularly the Buddhist scholars, arguing about their view of consciousness and our view of consciousness. They admit that empirically it is true that the brain is required for consciousness, we know this empirically; if I turn off your brain you will be in a coma, although your body is still alive, your heart is pumping away but you're not there anymore, they admit that.

But then they believe of course there is something else above and beyond the brain. They say, well, the brain is like a radio receiver, there are still the waves around but you need the radio receiver in order to receive the brain's. However, under any scientific understanding of consciousness, in order for you, for your memory for example, of that spring day long ago when you experienced your first kiss, that has to be instantiated in some sort of mechanism, and that requires a physical mechanism. Maybe not just neurons, maybe it could be done using silicon or using some other advanced technology, but it needs a physical mechanism.

Lynne Malcolm: So how hopeful are you that you will go some way to solving this mystery of consciousness, and even be able to create it in an artificial brain?

Christof Koch: Well, we have for the first time in the history of humanity we now have a quantitative theory of consciousness, that's a huge progress. We can use it to empirically build conscious meters for patients that tell us whether this particular patient who's moaning in her bed but she doesn't respond purposefully anymore because she had this massive accident, is she conscious or not. So there's really a lot of progress. This is the first time that this has happened since people [started] investigating this question 2,300 years ago. And yes, we can begin to think about consciousness in non-organic substrate in machines. To what extent is it or is it not possible that a machine will feel like something to be a machine? So it's an exciting time.

[Excerpt from Her]

Lynne Malcolm: So does Christof Koch expect that it will be possible to create consciousness in an artificial brain within his lifetime?

Christof Koch: No, because I don't think it can be simulated. So do you remember the movie Her, the Hollywood romantic comedy Her a few years ago where this sort of dorky guy fell in love with his iPhone, essentially a glorified version of Siri called Samantha. And at some point he asks her and she also asks herself am I really feeling anything or am I just going through the motions because I've been programmed to respond to people and I have this voice et cetera? Well, the claim of the theory is that you cannot compute consciousness, that consciousness actually is part of a physical system, you can emulate it, you can build a particular type of computer such as the one that some people like Karlheinz Meier is building, so-called neuromorphic computers. So if you build computers that are much closer to the physical substrate of brains, then yes, you can get consciousness. But if you just program computers using the current digital machines, for various technical reasons those machines will not be conscious, although they will behave in principle like they are conscious. You can talk to them, you can ask them how are you doing and the voice will say, 'Well, I'm doing fine,' but don't trust it doesn't feel like anything to her, there's nothing there, there is just pure behaviour. And consciousness is more than just pure behaviour.

Lynne Malcolm: So what is the good for humanity of identifying consciousness, and what are the ethical implications in that?

Christof Koch: Well, the ethical implications of finally having a theory that tells us who is conscious and who is not conscious is very important. So it tells us for instance when is a foetus first conscious, is it at conception, like Catholic dogma implies, is it at birth? Your newborn baby is clearly alive, but to what extent is he or she conscious, can it be tested? What about patients? What about animals? And of course if you are conscious, if you are capable of suffering, that means you are not an object any more, you are now a subject and we have to treat you differently.

So if I trash my expensive Tesla, nobody is going to come after me, I just wasted a lot of money by putting a hammer to my new shiny Tesla. But if I abuse my dog, rightfully the police will intervene. Why? Because my Tesla does it feel like anything. My Tesla is just a glorified washing machine. My dog though is a conscious being, it can suffer. And so conscious beings are subjects for themselves and they have some rights, at least some minimal rights.

And so I think if we can finally draw the line between conscious and non-conscious beings it will really help us to address the fundamental problem; how to treat ourselves, how to treat people or organisms where we today are not sure whether they are conscious. And a definite theory of consciousness will tell us are they conscious, do they have rights, are they subjects or are they mere objects, means for us to eat or to use in however we want?

Lynne Malcolm: So what drives your passion to find consciousness, to solve the mystery?

Christof Koch: I want to understand where this voice in my head comes from, the movie in my brain, because consciousness ultimately is the only way I know about the universe. This is pure René Descartes. The only way I know about the universe is because I have conscious sensation. If I didn't have conscious sensation, if I were just a zombie, if I were just moving and acting without there being any experience, I wouldn't know I exist. So the only way, the only thing I know beyond any doubt is my conscious experience. And so any final picture of the universe, any scientific picture of the universe has to include centre consciousness, where does it arise, what is its function, if any, and how does it connect to everything else in the universe?

Lynne Malcolm: Christof Koch, president and chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. And he and Karlheinz Meier, of the European Human Brain Project, were hosted in Australia by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Integrative Brain Function.

Thanks to producer Diane Dean and sound engineer Isabella Tropiano.

I'm Lynne Malcolm, catch you next time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Excerpt from Her] Lynne Malcolm: Hi, it's All in the Mind on RN. I'm Lynne Malcolm. Today, the challenge of artificial brain creation, and will the voice inside our computer ever be able to feel?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Neuroplasticity, Brain Fitness and Cognitive Health News