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An interesting study into perception that occurs during a one-hour nap. This website links you to the general summary but there is accessibility to the full study via ResearchGate.

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New research by neuroscientists at Monash University shows that the sleeping brain has the capacity to encode important pieces of information - even though the body is resting.

Imagine slowly drifting off to sleep in a bus or an airport after a hard day's work. As the body enters a restful state and consciousness dissolves, we might still want to pay attention to key information in these typically noisy settings - like when our bus stop is announced, boarding message is called or name is mentioned.

Amid the volume of disruptive influences in these overly-crowded settings, can the sleeping brain filter every piece of information it receives? Can our brains detect the most relevant piece of information from thousands of stimuli that could cause us to react?

In good news for habitual dozers, the latest research by neuroscientists at Monash University and in France shows that the sleeping brain is sensitive to the meaning of a sound and has the capacity to encode important pieces of information - even though the body is resting.

"When we sleep, we lose our ability to physically interact with our environment but that does not mean the brain is shutting down from what happens in the outside," Dr Thomas Andrillon, Research Fellow at the Monash Institute of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences, said.

"While previous studies have suggested that awakening can be attributed to sounds or semantic relevance (like the mention of someone's name), this is the first study to show how the sleeping brain covertly selects which piece of information to prioritise when multiple stimuli compete with each other.

"In an ever-changing environment, the ability to process relevant signals during light sleep offers substantial benefits, especially when considering that light sleep represents about half the total sleep time in humans."

As part of the study, published today (Tuesday 15 January 2019) in Nature Human Behaviour, 24 participants were presented with two competing audio stories as part of a controlled one-hour nap.

Participants had a reduced sleep time the previous night and were barred from consuming any stimulant that day to facilitate their nap.

In one ear, participants heard up to 80 news grabs and movie excerpts on loop while asleep. In the other ear, they received speech that was devoid of any meaning, like the Jabberwocky poem from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The aim was to see whether sounds carrying meaning would be preferentially processed by sleepers.

To do so, researchers used a technique called stimulus reconstruction in which participants' brain activity is used to reconstruct what they are hearing and detect the focus of their attention.

In both wakefulness and sleep, researchers observed that participants were focusing preferentially on the meaningful stimulus compared to the meaningless one. This means that, even during sleep, our brains remain sensitive to meaning and can extract what is most relevant out of a noisy, crowded acoustic environment.

"By playing stories simultaneously to healthy participants during daytime naps, we showed that sleepers have the tendency to prioritise stories that make sense over stories without meaning," Dr Andrillon said.

"This means that, even when we sleep, we can segregate meaningful and meaningless sources of information and prioritise the meaningful stimuli. This work further shows the extent to which our brains can remain active during sleep."

The study titled 'Sleepers track informative speech in a multi-talker environment' was a collaboration between Dr Andrillon and research colleagues Guillaume Legendre, Matthieu Koroma and Sid Kouider from Paris, France.

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Active sleep is more than just counting sheep

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New research by neuroscientists at Monash University shows that the sleeping brain has the capacity to encode important pieces of information - even though the body is resting. Imagine slowly drifting off to sleep in a bus or an airport after a hard day's work.

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I found this interesting for grasping key terms.

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All right. I'm going to start out with a challenge for you. I'm going to show you a series of shapes, and I want you to count the number of yellow stars that you see. Also, count the number of red X's that pop up on the screen, so that's two separate numbers, one for how many yellow stars you see and one for how many red X's come up on the screen. All right. So that was probably a challenging task because you had to count two different things and I kept talking to you while you were trying to do that. That's an example of divided attention, which we'll talk about in just a second. But first, you probably want to see how you did. So let me show you everything you just saw. All right, this is everything that popped up on your screen. There were 15 yellow stars and 13 red X's, and also one smiley face. Don't worry it if you didn't see this guy. We'll talk about that later. But now that you have a good example of how limited a resource your attention is, let's talk more about it. When you're paying attention to something, that means that you're concentrating on it at the exclusion of the other stimuli in the environment. A lot of times, though, we try to divide our attention and do multiple things at once. So maybe you watch TV while studying, or try to count yellow stars while trying to count red X's. The thing is, as you just saw, attention is a limited resource, and we can't split it all that well when it comes to complicated stimuli. So if you're trying to do two things at once, you usually end up switching between those tasks rather than doing them simultaneously, even if you're switching so fast you can barely tell. So think back to when you had to count the yellow stars and the red X's. You couldn't really do that at the same time. You had to kind of flip back and forth. When you switch, or if you do just intend to focus on one thing at a time, you're exercising your selective attention. You can think of selective attention like a flashlight beam on some aspect of your environment. You can move the flashlight around, depending on what you want to focus on, but at any given moment, it's illuminating one particular area of interest, and everything else is just kind of dimmer. So the question is, what causes your flashlight beam to swing around and focus on one thing or another? There are two types of cues that can direct our attention, exogenous and endogenous. Exogenous cues are external to any goals we might have, meaning we don't have to tell ourselves to look for them in order for them to capture our attention. They include things like bright colors or loud noises, because you can be in the middle of a gripping conversation and have every intention on focusing on it, but a loud noise will still cause your focus to shift. And with salient visual cues, the ones that really stand out, this is called the pop-out effect. Something just pops out at us, like a yellow circle amidst a bunch of green circles. Endogenous cues, on the other hand, are more internalized and higher order, meaning they involve the internal knowledge to understand the cue in the first place, and the intention to follow it. Take an arrow, for example. If you didn't know what an arrow meant, then you wouldn't know to follow it. It's just some random lines on a piece of paper. But because you have the internal knowledge of what an arrow is, you can carry out an intention to look where it's pointing. One really good example of selective attention is the cocktail party effect, which you've probably experienced yourself multiple times. And this is your ability to attend to one voice even amidst many others. And it most commonly occurs when you hear your own name amid those voices. So, for example, picture the last time you had a big family dinner, and you're at one end of the table talking with someone, and then Grandma down at the other end of the table says your name. And even though you haven't been listening to grandma's conversation, you instantly swing your flashlight beam of attention down to hear what she's saying about you. And if you had to guess what type of cue your name was in that situation, endogenous or exogenous, what would you say? If you said endogenous, then that's right. Because it was the meaning of your name that drew your attention to when Grandma said it. All right. So now we know that different cues draw our attention to certain stimuli, whether we want them to or not. But what happens to all the stuff we're not paying attention to? Scarily enough, we experience something called an inattentional blindness, which means that we're not consciously aware of things that happen in our visual field when our attention is directed elsewhere within that field. So think back to that smiley face from our demo in the beginning. Because you were focused on yellow stars and red X's, you might have missed the smiley face, especially because he kind of blended in with the yellow stars. And that's a minor example, but inattentional blindness happens in more important situations too. For example, can you say exactly where the nearest fire extinguisher is? If you're like most people, you probably go by this every day when you're going to your home or office or wherever you are, but very few people actually pay attention to where things like fire extinguishers are, even though they're bright red and they can be necessary for our survival. Usually your attention is directed elsewhere, so you fail to notice the fire extinguisher. Closely related to inattentional blindness is change blindness, which is when we fail to notice changes in the environment. Now be careful, because the difference between change blindness and inattentional blindness is subtle but important. Inattentional blindness means that you miss something right in front of you, while change blindness means that you fail to notice a difference between a previous state and a current state, like when you don't notice when your mom gets a haircut or you get back to your room and don't notice that furniture or books are in a different place. And this is actually very common as well, so don't feel bad if it happens to you. In fact, there's one really good example when a researcher stopped people on a busy street and asked for directions. And part way through when the people were giving their directions, a large bookcase was carried between them and the researcher, and he swapped places with a different person. And almost no one noticed. And very few people even noticed when the new person was a different race or gender. So it was just a great example of our limited attention and our ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else.

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Divided attention, selective attention, inattentional blindness, & change blindness

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All right. I'm going to start out with a challenge for you. I'm going to show you a series of shapes, and I want you to count the number of yellow stars that you see.

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-from Seduction of the Minotaur, by Anaïs Nin (1961)

On the 10th of April this year Pope Francis, President Salva Kiir of South Sudan and former rebel leader Riek Machar sat down together for dinner at the Vatican. They ate in silence, the start of a two-day retreat aimed at reconciliation from a civil war that has killed some 400,000 people since 2013. At about the same time in my laboratory at the University of Sussex in England, Ph.D. student Alberto Mariola was putting the finishing touches to a new experiment in which volunteers experience being in a room that they believe is there but that is not. In psychiatry clinics across the globe, people arrive complaining that things no longer seem "real" to them, whether it is the world around them or their own selves. In the fractured societies in which we live, what is real-and what is not-seems to be increasingly up for grabs. Warring sides may experience and believe in different realities. Perhaps eating together in silence can help because it offers a small slice of reality that can be agreed on, a stable platform on which to build further understanding.

We need not look to war and psychosis to find radically different inner universes. In 2015 a badly exposed photograph of a dress tore across the Internet, dividing the world into those who saw it as blue and black (me included) and those who saw it as white and gold (half my lab). Those who saw it one way were so convinced they were right-that the dress truly was blue and black or white and gold-that they found it almost impossible to believe that others might perceive it differently.

We all know that our perceptual systems are easy to fool. The popularity of visual illusions is testament to this phenomenon. Things seem to be one way, and they are revealed to be another: two lines appear to be different lengths, but when measured they are exactly the same; we see movement in an image we know to be still. The story usually told about illusions is that they exploit quirks in the circuitry of perception, so that what we perceive deviates from what is there. Implicit in this story, however, is the assumption that a properly functioning perceptual system will render to our consciousness things precisely as they are.

The deeper truth is that perception is never a direct window onto an objective reality. All our perceptions are active constructions, brain-based best guesses at the nature of a world that is forever obscured behind a sensory veil. Visual illusions are fractures in the Matrix, fleeting glimpses into this deeper truth.

Take, for example, the experience of color-say, the bright red of the coffee mug on my desk. The mug really does seem to be red: its redness seems as real as its roundness and its solidity. These features of my experience seem to be truly existent properties of the world, detected by our senses and revealed to our mind through the complex mechanisms of perception.

Yet we have known since Isaac Newton that colors do not exist out there in the world. Instead they are cooked up by the brain from mixtures of different wavelengths of colorless electromagnetic radiation. Colors are a clever trick that evolution has hit on to help the brain keep track of surfaces under changing lighting conditions. And we humans can sense only a tiny slice of the full electromagnetic spectrum, nestled between the lows of infrared and the highs of ultraviolet. Every color we perceive, every part of the totality of each of our visual worlds, comes from this thin slice of reality.

Just knowing this is enough to tell us that perceptual experience cannot be a comprehensive representation of an external objective world. It is both less than that and more than that. The reality we experience-the way things seem -is not a direct reflection of what is actually out there. It is a clever construction by the brain, for the brain. And if my brain is different from your brain, my reality may be different from yours, too.

The predictive brain

In Plato's Allegory of the Cave prisoners are chained to a blank wall all their lives, so that they see only the play of shadows cast by objects passing by a fire behind them, and they give the shadows names because for them the shadows are what is real. A thousand years later, but still a thousand years ago, Arabian scholar Ibn al-Haytham wrote that perception, in the here and now, depends on processes of "judgment and inference" rather than involving direct access to an objective reality. Hundreds of years later again Immanuel Kant realized that the chaos of unrestricted sensory data would always remain meaningless without being given structure by preexisting conceptions or "beliefs," which for him included a priori frameworks such as space and time. Kant's term "noumenon" refers to a "thing in itself"- Ding an sich -an objective reality that will always be inaccessible to human perception.

Today these ideas have gained a new momentum through an influential collection of theories that turn on the idea that the brain is a kind of prediction machine and that perception of the world-and of the self within it-is a process of brain-based prediction about the causes of sensory signals.

These new theories are usually traced to German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who in the late 19th century proposed that perception is a process of unconscious inference. Toward the end of the 20th century Helmholtz's notion was taken up by cognitive scientists and artificial-intelligence researchers, who reformulated it in terms of what is now generally known as predictive coding or predictive processing.

The central idea of predictive perception is that the brain is attempting to figure out what is out there in the world (or in here, in the body) by continually making and updating best guesses about the causes of its sensory inputs. It forms these best guesses by combining prior expectations or "beliefs" about the world, together with incoming sensory data, in a way that takes into account how reliable the sensory signals are. Scientists usually conceive of this process as a form of Bayesian inference, a framework that specifies how to update beliefs or best guesses with new data when both are laden with uncertainty.

In theories of predictive perception, the brain approximates this kind of Bayesian inference by continually generating predictions about sensory signals and comparing these predictions with the sensory signals that arrive at the eyes and the ears (and the nose and the fingertips, and all the other sensory surfaces on the outside and inside of the body). The differences between predicted and actual sensory signals give rise to so-called prediction errors, which are used by the brain to update its predictions, readying it for the next round of sensory inputs. By striving to minimize sensory-prediction errors everywhere and all the time, the brain implements approximate Bayesian inference, and the resulting Bayesian best guess is what we perceive.

To understand how dramatically this perspective shifts our intuitions about the neurological basis of perception, it is helpful to think in terms of bottom-up and top-down directions of signal flow in the brain. If we assume that perception is a direct window onto an external reality, then it is natural to think that the content of perception is carried by bottom-up signals-those that flow from the sensory surfaces inward. Top-down signals might contextualize or finesse what is perceived, but nothing more. Call this the "how things seem" view because it seems as if the world is revealing itself to us directly through our senses.

The prediction machine scenario is very different. Here the heavy lifting of perception is performed by the top-down signals that convey perceptual predictions, with the bottom-up sensory flow serving only to calibrate these predictions, keeping them yoked, in some appropriate way, to their causes in the world. In this view, our perceptions come from the inside out just as much as, if not more than, from the outside in. Rather than being a passive registration of an external objective reality, perception emerges as a process of active construction-a controlled hallucination, as it has come to be known.

Why controlled hallucination? People tend to think of hallucination as a kind of false perception, in clear contrast to veridical, true-to-reality, normal perception. The prediction machine view suggests instead a continuity between hallucination and normal perception. Both depend on an interaction between top-down, brain-based predictions and bottom-up sensory data, but during hallucinations, sensory signals no longer keep these top-down predictions appropriately tied to their causes in the world. What we call hallucination, then, is just a form of uncontrolled perception, just as normal perception is a controlled form of hallucination.

This view of perception does not mean that nothing is real. Writing in the 17th century, English philosopher John Locke made an influential distinction between "primary" and "secondary" qualities. Primary qualities of an object, such as solidity and occupancy of space, exist independently of a perceiver. Secondary qualities, in contrast, exist only in relation to a perceiver-color is a good example. This distinction explains why conceiving of perception as controlled hallucination does not mean it is okay to jump in front of a bus. This bus has primary qualities of solidity and space occupancy that exist independently of our perceptual machinery and that can do us injury. It is the way in which the bus appears to us that is a controlled hallucination, not the bus itself.

Tripping in the lab

A growing body of evidence supports the idea that perception is controlled hallucination, at least in its broad outlines. A 2015 study by Christoph Teufel of Cardiff University in Wales and his colleagues offers a striking example. In this study, patients with early-stage psychosis who were prone to hallucinations were compared with healthy individuals on their ability to recognize so-called two-tone images.

Take a look at the photograph of a two-tone image below. Probably all you will see is a bunch of black-and-white splotches. Now, after you read the rest of this sentence, look at the perceptual shift image below. Then have another look at the first photo; it ought to look rather different. Where previously there was a splotchy mess, there are now distinct objects, and something is happening.

What I find remarkable about this exercise is that in your second examination of the perceptual shift photo, the sensory signals arriving at your eyes have not changed at all from the first time you saw it. All that has changed are your brain's predictions about the causes of these sensory signals. You have acquired a new high-level perceptual expectation, and this is what changes what you consciously see.

If you show people many of these two-tone images, each followed by the full picture, they might subsequently be able to identify a good proportion of two-tone images, though not all of them. In Teufel's study, people with early-stage psychosis were better at recognizing two-tone images after having seen the full image than were healthy control subjects. In other words, being hallucination-prone went along with perceptual priors having a stronger effect on perception. This is exactly what would be expected if hallucinations in psychosis depended on an overweighting of perceptual priors so that they overwhelmed sensory prediction errors, unmooring perceptual best guesses from their causes in the world.

Recent research has revealed more of this story. Phil Corlett of Yale University and his colleagues paired lights and sounds in a simple design to engender expectations among their study subjects of whether or not a light would appear on a given experimental trial. They combined this design with brain imaging to uncover some of the brain regions implicated in predictive perception. When they looked at the data, Corlett and his team were able to identify regions such as the superior temporal sulcus, deep in the temporal lobe of the cortex, that were specifically associated with top-down predictions about auditory sensations. This is an exciting new development in mapping the brain basis of controlled hallucinations.

In my lab we have taken a different approach to exploring the nature of perception and hallucination. Rather than looking into the brain directly, we decided to simulate the influence of overactive perceptual priors using a unique virtual-reality setup masterminded by our resident VR guru, Keisuke Suzuki. We call it, with tongue firmly in cheek, the "hallucination machine."

Using a 360-degree camera, we first recorded panoramic video footage of a busy square in the University of Sussex campus on a Tuesday at lunchtime. We then processed the footage through an algorithm based on Google's AI program DeepDream to generate a simulated hallucination. What happens is that the algorithm takes a so-called neural network-one of the workhorses of AI-and runs it backward. The network we used had been trained to recognize objects in images, so if you run it backward, updating the network's input instead of its output, the network effectively projects what it "thinks" is there onto and into the image. Its predictions overwhelm the sensory inputs, tipping the balance of perceptual best guessing toward these predictions. Our particular network was good at classifying different breeds of dogs, so the video became unusually suffused by dog presences.

Many people who have viewed the processed footage through the VR headset have commented that the experience is rather reminiscent not of the hallucinations of psychosis but of the exuberant phenomenology of psychedelic trips.

By implementing the hallucination machine in slightly different ways, we could generate different kinds of conscious experience. For example, running the neural network backward from one of its middle layers, rather than from the output layer, leads to hallucinations of object parts, rather than whole objects. As we look ahead, this method will help us match specific features of the computational architecture of predictive perception to specific aspects of what experiences of hallucinations are like. And by understanding hallucinations better, we will be able to understand normal experience better, too, because predictive perception is at the root of all our perceptual experience.

The perception of reality

Although the hallucination machine is undoubtedly trippy, people who experience it are fully aware that what they are experiencing is not real. Indeed, despite rapid advances in VR technology and computer graphics, no current VR setup delivers an experience that is sufficiently convincing to be indistinguishable from reality.

This is the challenge we took up when designing a new "substitutional reality" setup at Sussex-the one we were working on when Pope Francis convened the retreat with Salva Kiir and Riek Machar. Our aim was to create a system in which volunteers would experience an environment as being real-and believe it to be real-when in fact it was not real.

The basic idea is simple. We again prerecorded some panoramic video footage, this time of the interior of our VR lab rather than of an outside campus scene. People coming to the lab are invited to sit on a stool in the middle of the room and to put on a VR headset that has a camera attached to the front. They are encouraged to look around the room and to see the room as it actually is, via the camera. But at some point, without telling them, we switch the feed so that the headset now displays not the live real-world scene but rather the prerecorded panoramic video. Most people in this situation continue to experience what they are seeing as real even though it is now a fake prerecording. (This is actually very tricky to pull off in practice-it requires careful color balancing and alignment to avoid people noticing any difference that would tip them off to the shift.)

I find this result fascinating because it shows that it is possible to have people experience an unreal environment as being fully real. This demonstration alone opens new frontiers for VR research: we can test the limits of what people will experience, and believe, to be real. It also allows us to investigate how experiencing things as being real can affect other aspects of perception. Right now we are running an experiment to find out whether people are worse at detecting unexpected changes in the room when they believe that what they are experiencing is real. If things do turn out this way (the study is ongoing), that finding would support the idea that the perception of things as being real itself acts as a high-level prior that can substantively shape our perceptual best guesses, affecting the contents of what we perceive.

The reality of reality

The idea that the world of our experience might not be real is an enduring trope of philosophy and science fiction, as well as of late-night pub discussions. Neo in The Matrix takes the red pill, and Morpheus shows him how what he thought was real is an elaborate simulation, while the real Neo lies prone in a human body farm, a brain-in-a-vat power source for a dystopian AI. Philosopher Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford has famously argued, based largely on statistics, that we are likely to be living inside a computer simulation created in a posthuman age. I disagree with this argument because it assumes that consciousness can be simulated-I do not think this is a safe assumption-but it is thought-provoking nonetheless.

Although these chunky metaphysical topics are fun to chew on, they are probably impossible to resolve. Instead what we have been exploring throughout this article is the relation between appearance and reality in our conscious perceptions, where part of this appearance is the appearance of being real itself.

The central idea here is that perception is a process of active interpretation geared toward adaptive interaction with the world through the body rather than a recreation of the world within the mind. The contents of our perceptual worlds are controlled hallucinations, brain-based best guesses about the ultimately unknowable causes of sensory signals. And for most of us, most of the time, these controlled hallucinations are experienced as real. As Canadian rapper and science communicator Baba Brinkman suggested to me, when we agree about our hallucinations, maybe that is what we call reality.

But we do not always agree, and we do not always experience things as real. People with dissociative psychiatric conditions such as derealization or depersonalization syndrome report that their perceptual worlds, even their own selves, lack a sense of reality. Some varieties of hallucination, various psychedelic hallucinations among them, combine a sense of unreality with perceptual vividness, as does lucid dreaming. People with synesthesia consistently have additional sensory experiences, such as perceiving colors when viewing black letters, which they recognize as not real. Even with normal perception, if you look directly at the sun you will experience the subsequent retinal afterimage as not being real. There are many such ways in which we experience our perceptions as not fully real.

What this means to me is that the property of realness that attends most of our perceptions should not be taken for granted. It is another aspect of the way our brain settles on its Bayesian best guesses about its sensory causes. One might therefore ask what purpose it serves. Perhaps the answer is that a perceptual best guess that includes the property of being real is usually more fit for purpose-that is, better able to guide behavior-than one that does not. We will behave more appropriately with respect to a coffee cup, an approaching bus or our partner's mental state when we experience it as really existing.

But there is a trade-off. As illustrated by the dress illusion, when we experience things as being real, we are less able to appreciate that our perceptual worlds may differ from those of others. (The leading explanation for the differing perceptions of the garment holds that people who spend most of their waking hours in daylight see it as white and gold; night owls, who are mainly exposed to artificial light, see it as blue and black.) And even if these differences start out small, they can become entrenched and reinforced as we proceed to harvest information differently, selecting sensory data that are best aligned with our individual emerging models of the world, and then updating our perceptual models based on these biased data. We are all familiar with this process from the echo chambers of social media and the newspapers we choose to read. I am suggesting that the same principles apply also at a deeper level, underneath our sociopolitical beliefs, right down to the fabric of our perceptual realities. They may even apply to our perception of being a self-the experience of being me or of being you-because the experience of being a self is itself a perception.

This is why understanding the constructive, creative mechanisms of perception has an unexpected social relevance. Perhaps once we can better appreciate the diversity of experienced realities scattered among the billions of perceiving brains on this planet, we will find new platforms on which to build a shared understanding and a better future-whether between sides in a civil war, followers of different political parties, or two people sharing a house and faced with washing the dishes.

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from Seduction of the Minotaur, by Anaïs Nin (1961) On the 10th of April this year Pope Francis, President Salva Kiir of South Sudan and former rebel leader Riek Machar sat down together for dinner at the Vatican.

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An Interesting clip showing place theory of hearing in work

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Anil Seth: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

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Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality."

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The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers

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The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers

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The surprising habits of original thinkers

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How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies “originals”: thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals -- including embracing failure. “The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most,” Grant says. “You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.”

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Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

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Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

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Anil Seth: Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

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Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality."

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Hippocampus Underlies the Link Between Slowed Walking and Mental Decline

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Hippocampus Underlies the Link Between Slowed Walking and Mental Decline

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Summary: A new study reports a connection between slowed walking speed and cognitive decline appears to arise in the right hippocampus. Researchers recommend older people may benefit if their doctors measure their walking speed and check for changes over time, which could be an early indicator of impending cognitive decline.
Source: University of Pittsburgh.
The connection between slowed walking speed and declining mental acuity appears to arise in the right hippocampus, a finger-shaped region buried deep in the brain at ear-level, according to a 14-year study conducted by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
The finding, published today in Neurology, indicates that older patients may benefit if their doctors regularly measure their walking speed and watch for changes over time, which could be early signs of cognitive decline and warrant referral to a specialist for diagnostic testing.

"Prevention and early treatment may hold the key to reducing the global burden of dementia, but the current screening approaches are too invasive and costly to be widely used," said lead author Andrea Rosso, Ph.D., M.P.H., assistant professor in Pitt Public Health's Department of Epidemiology. "Our study required only a stopwatch, tape and an 18-foot-long hallway, along with about five minutes of time once every year or so."

Rosso and her colleagues assessed 175 older adults ages 70 to 79 when they enrolled in the Health, Aging and Body Composition (Health ABC) study in Pittsburgh or Memphis, Tennessee. At the beginning of the study, the participants were all in good mental health and had normal brain scans. Multiple times over 14 years, the participants walked an 18-foot stretch of hallway at what they deemed a normal walking pace while a research assistant timed them. At the conclusion of the study, the participants were tested again for their mental acuity and received brain scans.

As previous studies have shown, slowing in the participants' gait, or walking speed, was associated with cognitive impairment. However, Rosso's research determined that participants with a slowing gait and cognitive decline also experienced shrinkage of their right hippocampus, an area of the brain important to both memory and spatial orientation. It was the only area of the brain where the researchers found a shrinking volume to be related to both gait slowing and cognitive impairment.

Rosso's study also found gait slowing over an extended period of time to be a stronger predictor of cognitive decline than simply slowing at a single time point, which is what other, similar research evaluated. All the participants slowed over time, but those who slowed by 0.1 seconds more per year than their peers were 47 percent more likely to develop cognitive impairment. The finding held even when the researchers took into account slowing due to muscle weakness, knee pain and diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and hypertension.

"A fraction of a second is subtle, but over 14 years, or even less, you would notice," said Rosso, also an assistant professor in Pitt's Clinical and Translational Science Institute. "People should not just write off these changes in walking speed. It may not just be that grandma's getting slow-it could be an early indicator of something more serious."

While the team noted that slowing gait speed is not a sensitive enough measure to diagnose a cognitive issue, they argue that it should be included in regular geriatric evaluations to determine if there's a need for further testing. If cognitive decline can be detected early, there are therapies that can delay its onset, and the extra time could allow patients and families to plan for the eventual need for assisted care.

"Typically when physicians notice a slowing gait in their patients, they'll consider it a mechanical issue and refer the patient to physical therapy," said Rosso. "What we're finding is that physicians also should consider that there may be a brain pathology driving the slowing gait and refer the patient for a cognitive evaluation."

About this neuroscience research article

Caterina Rosano, M.D., M.P.H., of Pitt Public Health, is senior author on this paper. Additional authors are Joe Verghese, M.B.B.S., M.S., of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Andrea L. Metti, Ph.D., M.P.H., Robert M. Boudreau, Ph.D., and Howard J. Aizenstein, M.D., Ph.D., all of Pitt; Stephen Kritchevsky, Ph.D., of Wake Forest University; Tamara B. Harris, M.D., M.S., and Stephanie A. Studenski, M.D., M.P.H., both of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); Kristine Yaffe, M.D., of the University of California San Francisco; and Suzanne Satterfield, M.D., Dr.P.H., of the University of Tennessee.

Funding: Health ABC was supported by NIH's National Institute on Aging (NIA) contracts N01-AG-6-2101, N01-AG-6-2103 and N01-AG-6-2106, and grant R01-AG-028050; as well as NIH's National Institute of Nursing Research grant R01-NR-012459. This study was supported by NIA grants K23-AG-028966 and R01-AG-029232. This research was supported in part by the Intramural Research Program at the NIH NIA, the Pittsburgh Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center grant P30-AG-024827-07, NIH grant KL2-TR000146 and NIA grant K01-AG053431.

Source: Allison Hydzik - University of Pittsburgh
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to University of Pittsburgh.
Video Credit: The video is credited to the University of Pittsburgh.
Original Research: The study will appear in Neurology.

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Hippocampus Underlies the Link Between Slowed Walking and Mental Decline

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A new study reports a connection between slowed walking speed and cognitive decline appears to arise in the right hippocampus. Researchers recommend older people may benefit if their doctors measure their walking speed and check for changes over time, which could be an early indicator of impending cognitive decline.

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The Power of Perception: How Information Sources Affect Voters

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The Power of Perception: How Information Sources Affect Voters

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Summary: People's opinions of political figures influence how plausible they believe the information they provide to be, even when the information is incorrect, a new study reports.
Source: MIT.
For all the fact-checking and objective reporting produced by major media outlets, U.S. voters are more likely to believe information when it comes from a candidate those voters support - and vice versa, according to a new study co-authored by MIT scholars.
The study, conducted during the U.S. presidential primaries for the 2016 election, uses a series of statements by President Donald J. Trump - then one of many candidates in the Republican field - to see how partisanship and prior beliefs interact with evaluations of objective fact.

The researchers presented study participants with both true and false statements Trump made, surveying voters from both parties about their responses. They found participants' opinions of Trump influenced how plausible people assumed the information to be. For instance, when Trump falsely suggested vaccines cause autism, a claim rejected by scientists, Republicans who supported Trump were more likely to believe the claim when it was attributed to Trump than they were when the claim was presented without attribution.

On the other hand, when Trump correctly stated the financial cost of the Iraq War, Democrats (and Republicans who did not support Trump) were less likely to believe his claim than they were when the same claim was presented in unattributed form.

"It wasn't just the case that misinformation attributed to Trump was less likely to be rejected by Republicans," says Adam Berinsky, a professor of political science at MIT and a co-author of the new paper. "The things Trump said that were true, if attributed to Trump, [made] Democrats less likely to believe [them]. ... Trump really does polarize people's views of reality."

Overall, self-identified Republicans who were surveyed gave Trump's false statements a collective "belief score" of about six, on a scale of 0-10, when those statements were attributed to him. Without attribution, the belief score fell to about 4.5 out of 10.

Self-identified Democrats, on the other hand, gave Trump's true statements a belief score of about seven out of 10 when those statements were unattributed. When the statements were attributed to Trump, the aggregate belief score fell to about six out of 10.

"People are currently presented with a vast quantity of information, and the onus is on the individual to sort fact from fiction," says Briony Swire, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Western Australia, in Perth, and a co-author of the study. "Using trust - or distrust - of a political figure is one shortcut we all use when it comes to assessing the validity of information."

The paper, "Processing Political Information," is being published today in the journal Royal Society Open Science. The co-authors are Swire; Berinsky; Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Western Australia and the University of Bristol, and Ullrich K.H. Ecker of the University of Western Australia. Swire helped develop the study as a researcher at MIT in 2015.

In conducting the study, the researchers surveyed 3,042 U.S. citizens during the fall of 2015, presenting them with four true statements from Trump as well as four false ones.

After correcting the false statements, the scholars also asked the survey's respondents if they were less likely to support Trump as a result - but found the matter was largely irrelevant to the respondents' voting choices.

"It just doesn't have an effect on support for him," Berinsky says. "It's not that saying things that are incorrect is garnering support for him, but it's not costing him support either."

The latest study is one in a series of papers Berinsky has published on political rumors, facticity, and partisan beliefs. His previous work has shown that, for instance, corrections of political rumors tend to be ineffective unless made by people within the same political party as the intended audience. That is, rumors about Democrats that are popular among Republican voters are most effectively shot down by other Republicans, and vice versa.

In a related sense, Berinsky thinks, solutions to matters of truth and falsehood in the current - and highly polarized - political moment may need to have a similar partisan structure, due to the blizzard of claims and counterclaims about truth, falsehoods, "fake news," and more.

"In a partisan time, the solution to misinformation has to be partisan, because there just aren't authorities that will be recognized by both sides of the aisle," he says.

"This is a tough nut to crack, this question of misinformation and how to correct it," he adds. "Anybody who tells you there's an easy solution, like, 'three easy things you can do to correct misinformation,' don't listen to them. If it were that easy, it would be solved by now."

About this psychology research article

Source: Peter Dizikes - MIT
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Full open access research for "Processing political misinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon" by Briony Swire, Adam J. Berinsky, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich K. H. Ecker in Royal Society Open Science. Published online March 1 2017 doi:10.1098/rsos.160802

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Abstract
Processing political misinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon

This study investigated the cognitive processing of true and false political information. Specifically, it examined the impact of source credibility on the assessment of veracity when information comes from a polarizing source (Experiment 1), and effectiveness of explanations when they come from one's own political party or an opposition party (Experiment 2). These experiments were conducted prior to the 2016 Presidential election. Participants rated their belief in factual and incorrect statements that President Trump made on the campaign trail; facts were subsequently affirmed and misinformation retracted. Participants then re-rated their belief immediately or after a delay. Experiment 1 found that (i) if information was attributed to Trump, Republican supporters of Trump believed it more than if it was presented without attribution, whereas the opposite was true for Democrats and (ii) although Trump supporters reduced their belief in misinformation items following a correction, they did not change their voting preferences. Experiment 2 revealed that the explanation's source had relatively little impact, and belief updating was more influenced by perceived credibility of the individual initially purporting the information. These findings suggest that people use political figures as a heuristic to guide evaluation of what is true or false, yet do not necessarily insist on veracity as a prerequisite for supporting political candidates.

"Processing political misinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon" by Briony Swire, Adam J. Berinsky, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Ullrich K. H. Ecker in Royal Society Open Science. Published online March 1 2017 doi:10.1098/rsos.160802

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The Power of Perception: How Information Sources Affect Voters

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Neuroscience News has recent neuroscience research articles, brain research news, neurology studies and neuroscience resources for neuroscientists, students, and science fans and is always free to join. Our neuroscience social network has science groups, discussion forums, free books, resources, science videos and more.

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Researchers Explore Why Those With Autism Avoid Eye Contact

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Researchers Explore Why Those With Autism Avoid Eye Contact

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Summary: A new study sheds light on the neural mechanism behind why some people with autism are unable to make eye contact with others.
Source: Mass General.
Imaging studies reveal overactivation of subcortical brain structures in response to direct gaze.
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often find it difficult to look others in the eyes. This avoidance has typically been interpreted as a sign of social and personal indifference, but reports from people with autism suggests otherwise. Many say that looking others in the eye is uncomfortable or stressful for them - some will even say that "it burns" - all of which points to a neurological cause. Now, a team of investigators based at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital has shed light on the brain mechanisms involved in this behavior. They reported their findings in a Scientific Reports paper published online this month.

"The findings demonstrate that, contrary to what has been thought, the apparent lack of interpersonal interest among people with autism is not due to a lack of concern," says Nouchine Hadjikhani, MD, PhD, director of neurolimbic research in the Martinos Center and corresponding author of the new study. "Rather, our results show that this behavior is a way to decrease an unpleasant excessive arousal stemming from overactivation in a particular part of the brain."

The key to this research lies in the brain's subcortical system, which is responsible for the natural orientation toward faces seen in newborns and is important later for emotion perception. The subcortical system can be specifically activated by eye contact, and previous work by Hadjikhani and colleagues revealed that, among those with autism, it was oversensitive to effects elicited by direct gaze and emotional expression. In the present study, she took that observation further, asking what happens when those with autism are compelled to look in the eyes of faces conveying different emotions.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Hadjikhani and colleagues measured differences in activation within the face-processing components of the subcortical system in people with autism and in control participants as they viewed faces either freely or when constrained to viewing the eye-region. While activation of these structures was similar for both groups exhibited during free viewing, overactivation was observed in participants with autism when concentrating on the eye-region. This was especially true with fearful faces, though similar effects were observed when viewing happy, angry and neutral faces.

The findings of the study support the hypothesis of an imbalance between the brain's excitatory and inhibitory signaling networks in autism - excitatory refers to neurotransmitters that stimulate the brain, while inhibitory refers to those that calm it and provide equilibrium. Such an imbalance, likely the result of diverse genetic and environmental causes, can strengthen excitatory signaling in the subcortical circuitry involved in face perception. This in turn can result in an abnormal reaction to eye contact, an aversion to direct gaze and consequently abnormal development of the social brain.

In revealing the underlying reasons for eye-avoidance, the study also suggests more effective ways of engaging individuals with autism. "The findings indicate that forcing children with autism to look into someone's eyes in behavioral therapy may create a lot of anxiety for them," says Hadjikhani, an associate professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. "An approach involving slow habituation to eye contact may help them overcome this overreaction and be able to handle eye contact in the long run, thereby avoiding the cascading effects that this eye-avoidance has on the development of the social brain."

The researchers are already planning to follow up the research. Hadjikhani is now seeking funding for a study that will use magnetoencephalography (MEG) together with eye-tracking and other behavioral tests to probe more deeply the relationship between the subcortical system and eye contact avoidance in autism.

About this neuroscience research article

The co-authors of the Scientific Reports study are Nicole R. Zürcher, Amandine Lassalle and Noreen Ward of the MGH Martinos Center; Jakob Åsberg Johnels, Eva Billstedt and Christopher Gillberg of Gothenburg University, Gothenburg, Sweden; Quentin Guillon of the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, Lyon, France; Loyse Hippolyte of the University of Lausanne, Lausanne, France; and Eric Lemonnier of CRA, of Limoges, France.

Funding: The study was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant PP00P3-130191), the Centre d'Imagerie BioMédicale of the University of Lausanne, as well as the Foundation Rossi Di Montalera, the LifeWatch Foundation, the AnnMarie and Per Ahlqvist Foundation, the Torsten Soderberg Foundation and the Swedish Science Council.

Source: Terri Ogan - Mass General
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Full open access research for "Look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism" by Nouchine Hadjikhani, Jakob Åsberg Johnels, Nicole R. Zürcher, Amandine Lassalle, Quentin Guillon, Loyse Hippolyte, Eva Billstedt, Noreen Ward, Eric Lemonnier & Christopher Gillberg in Scientific Reports. Published online June 9 2017 doi:10.1038/s41598-017-03378-5

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Abstract
Look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) seem to have difficulties looking others in the eyes, but the substrate for this behavior is not well understood. The subcortical pathway, which consists of superior colliculus, pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus, and amygdala, enables rapid and automatic face processing. A specific component of this pathway - i.e., the amygdala - has been shown to be abnormally activated in paradigms where individuals had to specifically attend to the eye-region; however, a direct examination of the effect of manipulating the gaze to the eye-regions on all the components of the subcortical system altogether has never been performed. The subcortical system is particularly important as it shapes the functional specialization of the face-processing cortex during development. Using functional MRI, we investigated the effect of constraining gaze in the eye-region during dynamic emotional face perception in groups of participants with ASD and typical controls. We computed differences in activation in the subcortical face processing system (superior colliculus, pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus and amygdala) for the same stimuli seen freely or with the gaze constrained in the eye-region. Our results show that when constrained to look in the eyes, individuals with ASD show abnormally high activation in the subcortical system, which may be at the basis of their eye avoidance in daily life.

"Look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism" by Nouchine Hadjikhani, Jakob Åsberg Johnels, Nicole R. Zürcher, Amandine Lassalle, Quentin Guillon, Loyse Hippolyte, Eva Billstedt, Noreen Ward, Eric Lemonnier & Christopher Gillberg in Scientific Reports. Published online June 9 2017 doi:10.1038/s41598-017-03378-5

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Researchers Explore Why Those With Autism Avoid Eye Contact

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Social Status of Listener Alters Our Voice

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Social Status of Listener Alters Our Voice

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Summary: According to researchers, people tend to change the pitch of their voice depending on who they are talking to and how dominant they feel. The study found that a person's vocal characteristics altered in response to people of different social status. When a person was believed to be more dominant, people's voices became more high pitched.
Source: University of Stirling.
People tend to change the pitch of their voice depending on who they are talking to, and how dominant they feel, a study by the University of Stirling has found.
The psychology research, published in PLOS ONE, put participants through a simulated job interview task and discovered that individuals' vocal characteristics - particularly pitch - are altered in response to people of different social status.

Regardless of self-perceived social status, people tend to talk to high status individuals using a higher pitch.

Dr Viktoria Mileva, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Stirling, said: "A deep, masculine voice sounds dominant, especially in men, while the opposite is true of a higher pitched voice. So, if someone perceives their interviewer to be more dominant than them, they raise their pitch. This may be a signal of submissiveness, to show the listener that you are not a threat, and to avoid possible confrontations.

"These changes in our speech may be conscious or unconscious but voice characteristics appear to be an important way to communicate social status. We found both men and women alter their pitch in response to people they think are dominant and prestigious."

The researchers also found that participants who think they are dominant - who use methods like manipulation, coercion, and intimidation to acquire social status - are less likely to vary their pitch and will speak in a lower tone when talking to someone of a high social status.

Individuals who rate themselves as high in prestige - they believe people look up to them and value their opinions, thereby granting them social status - do not change how loud they are speaking, no matter who they are speaking to. This may signal that they are more calm and in control of a situation.

The participants responded to introductory, personal, and interpersonal interview questions. They lowered the pitch of their voice most in response to the more complex, interpersonal questions, for example when explaining a conflict situation to an employer.

Dr Mileva added: "Signals and perceptions of human social status have an effect on virtually every human interaction, ranging from morphological characteristics - such as face shape - to body posture, specific language use, facial expressions and voices.

"Understanding what these signals are, and what their effects are, will help us comprehend an essential part of human behaviour."

Experts believe the vocal changes identified in this study could be true for other situations where there are perceived social status differences between two people talking. This includes talking with a rival on the football pitch or interacting with a colleague.

About this neuroscience research article

Source: University of Stirling
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is in the public domain.
Original Research: Full open access research for "Perceived differences in social status between speaker and listener affect the speaker's vocal characteristics" by Juan David Leongómez, Viktoria R. Mileva, Anthony C. Little, and S. Craig Roberts in PLOS ONE. Published online June 14 2017 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0179407

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Abstract
Perceived differences in social status between speaker and listener affect the speaker's vocal characteristics

Non-verbal behaviours, including voice characteristics during speech, are an important way to communicate social status. Research suggests that individuals can obtain high social status through dominance (using force and intimidation) or through prestige (by being knowledgeable and skilful). However, little is known regarding differences in the vocal behaviour of men and women in response to dominant and prestigious individuals. Here, we tested within-subject differences in vocal parameters of interviewees during simulated job interviews with dominant, prestigious, and neutral employers (targets), while responding to questions which were classified as introductory, personal, and interpersonal. We found that vocal modulations were apparent between responses to the neutral and high-status targets, with participants, especially those who perceived themselves as low in dominance, increasing fundamental frequency (F0) in response to the dominant and prestigious targets relative to the neutral target. Self-perceived prestige, however, was less related to contextual vocal modulations than self-perceived dominance. Finally, we found that differences in the context of the interview questions participants were asked to respond to (introductory, personal, interpersonal), also affected their vocal parameters, being more prominent in responses to personal and interpersonal questions. Overall, our results suggest that people adjust their vocal parameters according to the perceived social status of the listener as well as their own self-perceived social status.

"Perceived differences in social status between speaker and listener affect the speaker's vocal characteristics" by Juan David Leongómez, Viktoria R. Mileva, Anthony C. Little, and S. Craig Roberts in PLOS ONE. Published online June 14 2017 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0179407

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Social Status of Listener Alters Our Voice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
According to researchers, people tend to change the pitch of their voice depending on who they are talking to and how dominant they feel. The study found that a person's vocal characteristics altered in response to people of different social status. When a person was believed to be more dominant, people's voices became more high pitched.

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Key Mechanism Behind Some Forms of Deafness Identified

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Key Mechanism Behind Some Forms of Deafness Identified

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Summary: Researchers have identified a new protein, CIB2, that is key to helping the auditory system to turn soundwaves into meaningful brain signals. Mutations of this gene leave people unable to convert the soundwaves into signals that the brain can interpret, and are deaf.
Source: University of Maryland.
Study identifies a new protein that is essential to the process of turning sound waves into meaningful brain signals.
Although the basic outlines of human hearing have been known for years - sensory cells in the inner ear turn sound waves into the electrical signals that the brain understands as sound - the molecular details have remained elusive.

Now, new research from the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UM SOM), has identified a crucial protein in this translation process.

The findings were published today in the latest issue of Nature Communications. The study is the first to illuminate in detail how a particular protein, which is known as CIB2, allows hearing to work.

"We are very excited by these results," said the senior author of the study, Zubair Ahmed, professor in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at UM SOM. "This tells us something new about the fundamental biology of how hearing works on a molecular level."

CIB2, which is short for calcium and integrin-binding protein 2, is essential for the structure of stereocilia, the structures at the top of the sensory hair cells in the inner ear. Stereocilia are extremely small, less than a half a micrometer in diameter, which is about the wavelength of a visible light. Each ear contains 18,000 hair cells that do not divide or regenerate.

Dr. Ahmed and his colleague Saima Riazuddin, professor in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at UM SOM, along with their collaborators, discovered five years ago that CIB2 was involved in hearing. Since then, they have studied this protein in flies, mice, zebrafish and humans. The new study is the first to explain the mechanism behind CIB2 in hearing.

In this study, they genetically engineered mice without CIB2, as well as mice in which a human CIB2 gene mutation had been inserted. The researchers found that the human mutation affects the ability of the CIB2 protein to interact with two other proteins, TMC1 and TMC2, which are crucial in the process of converting sound to electrical signals. This process is known as mechanotransduction.

People with this mutation cannot turn soundwaves into signals that the brain can interpret, and so are deaf. When the researchers inserted the human CIB2 mutation into the mouse, they found that the mice were deaf.

"This is a big step in determining the identity of key components of the molecular machinery that converts sound waves into electrical signals in the inner ear," said the study's co-senior author, Gregory Frolenkov, of the Department of Physiology at the University of Kentucky.

Dr. Ahmed and his colleagues are now looking for other molecules beyond CIB2 that play a key role in the process. In addition, they are exploring potential therapies for CIB2-related hearing problems. In mice, they are using the gene editing tool CRISPR to modify dysfunctional CIB2 genes. They suspect that if this modification occurs in the first few weeks after birth, these mice, which are born deaf, will be able to hear. The scientists are also experimenting with gene therapy, using a harmless virus to deliver a normal copy of the normal CIB2 gene to baby mice that have the mutated version. Dr. Ahmed says the early results of these experiments are intriguing.

Nearly 40 million Americans suffer from some level of hearing loss. This includes around 74,000 children with profound, early-onset deafness. At least 50 percent of these deafness cases are due to genetic causes.

It is not clear how common CIB2 mutations are in the US population, or how large a role these mutations play in deafness in humans worldwide. In his research on a group of families in Pakistan that have a higher risk of deafness, Dr. Ahmed has found that about 8 to 9 percent seem to have mutations in CIB2. Overall, he says, the gene could play a role in tens of thousands of cases of deafness, and perhaps many more than that. He is also studying CIB2 among the general population. It may be that some versions of the gene also play a role in deafness caused by environmental conditions, creating a predisposition to hearing loss.

About this neuroscience research article

Arnaud Giese, a Post-Doc Fellow at UM SOM, and Yi-Quan Tang, from Cambridge University in England, are the first co-authors of this study. Other significant contributors include Dr. Riazuddin, William Schafer, from Cambridge University, Steve S.D. Brown, from the MRC Harwell Institute, UK, and Robert Fettiplace, from the University of Wisconsin.

Source: David Kohn - University of Maryland
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to BruceBlaus, licences CC BY 3.0.
Original Research: Full open access research for "CIB2 interacts with TMC1 and TMC2 and is essential for mechanotransduction in auditory hair cells" by Arnaud P. J. Giese, Yi-Quan Tang, Ghanshyam P. Sinha, Michael R. Bowl, Adam C. Goldring, Andrew Parker, Mary J. Freeman, Steve D. M. Brown, Saima Riazuddin, Robert Fettiplace, William R. Schafer, Gregory I. Frolenkov & Zubair M. Ahmed in Nature Communications. Published online June 29 2017 doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00061-1

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Abstract
CIB2 interacts with TMC1 and TMC2 and is essential for mechanotransduction in auditory hair cells

Inner ear hair cells detect sound through deflection of stereocilia, the microvilli-like projections that are arranged in rows of graded heights. Calcium and integrin-binding protein 2 is essential for hearing and localizes to stereocilia, but its exact function is unknown. Here, we have characterized two mutant mouse lines, one lacking calcium and integrin-binding protein 2 and one carrying a human deafness-related Cib2 mutation, and show that both are deaf and exhibit no mechanotransduction in auditory hair cells, despite the presence of tip links that gate the mechanotransducer channels. In addition, mechanotransducing shorter row stereocilia overgrow in hair cell bundles of both Cib2 mutants. Furthermore, we report that calcium and integrin-binding protein 2 binds to the components of the hair cell mechanotransduction complex, TMC1 and TMC2, and these interactions are disrupted by deafness-causing Cib2 mutations. We conclude that calcium and integrin-binding protein 2 is required for normal operation of the mechanotransducer channels and is involved in limiting the growth of transducing stereocilia.

"CIB2 interacts with TMC1 and TMC2 and is essential for mechanotransduction in auditory hair cells" by Arnaud P. J. Giese, Yi-Quan Tang, Ghanshyam P. Sinha, Michael R. Bowl, Adam C. Goldring, Andrew Parker, Mary J. Freeman, Steve D. M. Brown, Saima Riazuddin, Robert Fettiplace, William R. Schafer, Gregory I. Frolenkov & Zubair M. Ahmed in Nature Communications. Published online June 29 2017 doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00061-1

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Key Mechanism Behind Some Forms of Deafness Identified

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Researchers have identified a new protein, CIB2, that is key to helping the auditory system to turn soundwaves into meaningful brain signals. Mutations of this gene leave people unable to convert the soundwaves into signals that the brain can interpret, and are deaf.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/07/31/a-parent-s-touch-actually-transforms-a-baby-s-brain/

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How losing her hearing was one of the greatest gifts for Elise Roy, a Human Rights Advocate, Lawyer & an Artist

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Elise Roy: When we design for disability, we all benefit

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"I believe that losing my hearing was one of the greatest gifts I've ever received," says Elise Roy. As a disability rights lawyer and design thinker, she knows that being Deaf gives her a unique way of experiencing and reframing the world -- a perspective that could solve some of our largest problems. As she says: "When we design for disability first, you often stumble upon solutions that are better than those when we design for the norm."

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MRI Study to learn more about visual associations. 

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MRI Study to learn more about visual associations. 

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Summary: Researchers induce people to perceive colors that were't really there and provide evidence that the V1 and V2 visual areas are capable of associative learning.
Source: Brown University.
Researchers have made two new scientific points with a set of experiments in which they induced people to perceive colors that weren't really there - one concerning how the brain works and the other concerning how to work the brain.
Working with colleagues in Japan, the scientists at Brown University used a novel technique to surreptitiously train a small group of volunteers to associate vertical stripes with the color red and - to a lesser extent as a consequence - horizontal stripes with the color green.

The first point made by the researchers was that the association was induced by specifically targeting the early visual areas of the brain. Those "V1" and "V2" areas are the first parts of the cortex to process basic visual information coming from the eyes, but scientists had not previously seen associative learning occurring there.

"This is the first clear study that shows that V1 and V2 are capable of creating associative learning," said Takeo Watanabe, the Fred M. Seed Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown and co-corresponding author of the paper in the journal Current Biology.

The second point is that the association was learned strongly enough that subjects came to perceive the background colors paired with vertical bars as red even when the background was gray or sometimes a bit greenish. That learned misperception was evident in tests as much as five months later.

The demonstration raises the possibility that the training method could be used to induce other enduring associations in the brain, Watanabe said.
To assign association
Here is how Watanabe's team induced the association:

With volunteers in the magnetic resonance imaging scanner, the first step was to measure patterns of activity in V1 and V2 when they saw different combinations of colored backgrounds (red, green and gray) behind two different stripe orientations (vertical and horizontal). The researchers used that data to encode a "classifier" that could distinguish between red and green to recognize the brain activity the volunteers induced in those areas in future experiments.

Then the experimenters engaged in a subterfuge even greater than a little mind reading. With the intent of training 12 of their 18 volunteers to associate red with vertical stripes, they showed them gray backgrounded vertical stripes embedded within a circle and then a small plain white disk. They asked the volunteers to imagine ways of making the disk larger. The volunteers were offered a reward based on the size of the disk they could produce.

Over three days of such training, volunteers thought of a variety of ways they might use their brains to enlarge the disk, but really the disk only got larger when the classifier saw signs they were thinking of red (for whatever coincidental reason). In other words, the 12 volunteers were really being trained such that after seeing vertical stripes they would induce activity patterns in V1 and V2 similar to the activity that had occurred when they actually saw red.

"Participants were not aware of the purpose of the experiment or what kind of activation they learned to induce," Watanabe said.

After the 12 volunteers had been trained and the six others were left untrained, the researchers then measured their visual perceptions. Both groups of volunteers were shown circles with central patterns of vertical, horizontal or diagonal stripes. Each of those patterns had backgrounds colored somewhere along a continuum of eight settings ranging from obviously to faintly green to gray to faintly to obviously red.

The key question was whether the trained and untrained subjects would exhibit any differences in the colors they perceived in the backgrounds behind the vertical stripes. Sure enough, trained subjects were significantly more likely than untrained ones to perceive the gray background of vertical stripes - and even the faintly green background - as red. Meanwhile, trained subjects were more likely to associate backgrounds behind horizontal stripes as greener than untrained subjects.

Neither group showed any incorrect color bias in judging the backgrounds behind the diagonal stripes. In testing up to five months later, however, trained subjects still showed significant associations for vertical gratings.
Applications of associations
Associative learning and memory - "this goes with that" - is pervasive in the brain, but it was a novel finding of basic brain science to show that it can occur in early visual areas, Watanabe said.

In a more applied vein, Watanabe said he is eager to find out if scientists can use the study's technique of training subjects with (unwitting) MRI-based feedback to create associations in other parts of the brain for educational or therapeutic reasons.

"Our brain functions are mostly based on associative processing, so association is extremely important," Watanabe said. "Now we know that this technology can be applied to induce associative learning."

Through the technique, which Watanabe calls A-DecNef, perhaps people can learn even when they don't know what they are learning, or that they are learning at all.

About this computational neuroscience research article

The paper's lead author is Kaoru Amano of Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet) in National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. The co-corresponding author is Mitsuo Kawato of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Japan. The other authors are Kazuhisa Shibata and Yuka Sasaki of Brown.

Funding: The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the government of Japan supported the research.

Source: David Orenstein - Brown University
Image Source: This NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Watanabe et. al.
Original Research: Abstract for "Learning to Associate Orientation with Color in Early Visual Areas by Associative Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback" by Kaoru Amano, Kazuhisa Shibata, Mitsuo Kawato, Yuka Sasaki, and Takeo Watanabe in Current Biology. Published online June 30 2016 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.05.014

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

Abstract Learning to Associate Orientation with Color in Early Visual Areas by Associative Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback
Highlights
*There has been no evidence of associative learning of features in early visual areas
*Neurofeedback induced signals for red paired with an achromatic vertical grating
*Such paired presentations led to associative learning of orientation and color
*The results show that early visual areas may create associative learning

Summary
Associative learning is an essential brain process where the contingency of different items increases after training. Associative learning has been found to occur in many brain regions [ 1-4 ]. However, there is no clear evidence that associative learning of visual features occurs in early visual areas, although a number of studies have indicated that learning of a single visual feature (perceptual learning) involves early visual areas [ 5-8 ]. Here, via decoded fMRI neurofeedback termed "DecNef" [ 9 ], we tested whether associative learning of orientation and color can be created in early visual areas. During 3 days of training, DecNef induced fMRI signal patterns that corresponded to a specific target color (red) mostly in early visual areas while a vertical achromatic grating was physically presented to participants. As a result, participants came to perceive "red" significantly more frequently than "green" in an achromatic vertical grating. This effect was also observed 3-5 months after the training. These results suggest that long-term associative learning of two different visual features such as orientation and color was created, most likely in early visual areas. This newly extended technique that induces associative learning is called "A-DecNef," and it may be used as an important tool for understanding and modifying brain functions because associations are fundamental and ubiquitous functions in the brain.

"Learning to Associate Orientation with Color in Early Visual Areas by Associative Decoded fMRI Neurofeedback" by Kaoru Amano, Kazuhisa Shibata, Mitsuo Kawato, Yuka Sasaki, and Takeo Watanabe in Current Biology. Published online June 30 2016 doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.05.014

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MRI Technique Induces Strong and Enduring Visual Associations - Neuroscience News

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Summary: Researchers induce people to perceive colors that were't really there and provide evidence that the V1 and V2 visual areas are capable of associative learning. Source: Brown University. Researchers have made two new scientific points with a set of experiments in which they induced people to perceive colors that weren't really there - one concerning how the brain works and the other concerning how to work the brain.

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Antisocial cave fish may hold clues to schizophrenia, autism

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Antisocial cave fish may hold clues to schizophrenia, autism

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Cave fish have long fascinated biologists because of their missing eyes and pale skin. Now, one researcher is studying them for another reason: Their behavior may provide clues to the genetic basis of some human psychiatric disorders. Last week at the 23rd International Conference on Subterranean Biology in Fayetteville, Arkansas,he demonstrated how drugs that help people with schizophrenia and autism similarly affect the fish.

"I think there is a lot of potential" for these fish to teach us about mental disorders, says David Culver, an evolutionary biologist at American University in Washington, D.C., who was not involved in the study. Culver adds that- like other work on the cause of cave fish blindness -the new research may also have implications for human disease.

A decade ago, the lead author on the new study, Masato Yoshizawa, wanted to understand brain evolution by investigating the effects of natural selection on behavior. The Mexican tetra ( Astyanax mexicanus), a cave fish with very close surface relatives, seemed an excellent prospect for that work. Because the two populations can interbreed, it's easier to pin down genes that might be related to the neural defects underlying behavioral differences. Such breeding studies are not possible in humans.

The blind cave fish differ from their surface relatives in several notable ways. They don't have a social structure and they don't school. Instead, they lead solitary lives-a behavior that makes sense given their lack of natural predators. They also almost never sleep. They are hyperactive, and-unlike other fish-they are attracted to certain vibrations in the water. Finally, they tend to do the same behavior over and over again and seem to have higher anxiety than their surface relatives.

Yoshizawa, now an evolutionary developmental biologist at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, has been testing whether these fish might be useful in understanding the genetic basis of schizophrenia or autism. Studies in typical model animals-mice-are rarely illuminating, because the rodents often still behave normally when researchers manipulate genes that should cause these disorders. But even without genetic tinkering, the fish already show certain "symptoms" of the diseases, such as sleeplessness, hyperactivity, and asocial behavior.

What's more, 90% of the 101 classic risk factor genes for human psychiatric diseases are also found in the cave fish genome, according to Yoshizawa's comparison of genomes and transcriptomes-surveys of active genes-in cave fish and humans. Fully one-third of those genes are more or less active in the cave fish than they are in the surface fish.

As a first step toward assessing this new model, Yoshizawa and others have treated cave fish with several psychiatric drugs. Three years ago, a French team showed that the antidepressant Fluoxetine (commonly known as Prozac) caused the fish to become more aggressive toward each other. Yoshizawa has now shown that Fluoxetine-along with the antipsychotic Clozapine-made the fish sleep more and swim around less. "Overall, these drug responses in cave fish are very similar to what you see in human patients," he said last week at the meeting in Fayetteville. "These are strong evidence that cave fish could be a good model for human psychiatric disease."

Now, he and his colleagues are studying larger numbers of cave fish with variation in these behaviors, in the hopes that they can tease out which versions of which genes are associated with the extremes of these behaviors. From there, they plan to study how those genes interact with each other and the environment to alter fish behavior. Combined with insights into gene expression, nerve connections, and imaging the neural activity, the work could help prune the long list of genes implicated in autism and schizophrenia, Yoshizawa says.

Of course, Yoshizawa faces a long road ahead. "As with any model system, cave fish has limitations," says Houmam Araj, a program officer at the National Eye Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved with the work. Fish and humans are separated by 400 million years of evolution, so the control of these behaviors may not be the same in humans and fish. Still, Culver says, "I think this is really exciting stuff."

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