51 posts · 20,439 views
Psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, spirituality, quantum physics, and anything else worth writing about
William Lu
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- April 23, 2010
- 09:56 AM
- 152 views
Aggression spectrum disorders: The distinction between borderline personality disorder and psychopathy
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
I recently read a fascinating book chapter written by William Arsenio titled Happy Victimization: Emotion Dysregulation in The Context of Instrumental, Proactive Aggression. Early in the chapter, the author discussed how according to a study, 4-year-old children tended to predict that a bully would feel happy after pushing around some poor chump on the playground, aka happy victimization (Arsenio & Kramer, 1992). However, at age 6, children who were probed further not only predicted that the bul........ Read more »
Aaronson CJ, Bender DS, Skodol AE, & Gunderson JG. (2006) Comparison of attachment styles in borderline personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. The Psychiatric quarterly, 77(1), 69-80. PMID: 16397756
Blair, R. (2008) Review. The amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex: functional contributions and dysfunction in psychopathy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 363(1503), 2557-2565. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0027
FECTEAU, S., PASCUALLEONE, A., & THEORET, H. (2008) Psychopathy and the mirror neuron system: Preliminary findings from a non-psychiatric sample. Psychiatry Research, 160(2), 137-144. DOI: 10.1016/j.psychres.2007.08.022
Fertuck EA, Jekal A, Song I, Wyman B, Morris MC, Wilson ST, Brodsky BS, & Stanley B. (2009) Enhanced 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' in borderline personality disorder compared to healthy controls. Psychological medicine, 39(12), 1979-88. PMID: 19460187
Saltaris, C. (2002) Psychopathy in juvenile offenders Can temperament and attachment be considered as robust developmental precursors?. Clinical Psychology Review, 22(5), 729-752. DOI: 10.1016/S0272-7358(01)00122-2
- April 3, 2010
- 04:16 AM
- 195 views
The difference between softcore and hardcore insomnia
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Self-proclaimed insomniacs should be asking themselves right now if they've got either a "softcore" or a "hardcore" sleep problem on their hands. What's the difference between softcore and hardcore insomnia and why is it important you ask? First, let's define the terms. Softcore insomnia = complaint of insomnia with normal sleep duration greater than or equal to 6 hours of sleepHardcore insomnia = complaint of insomnia with less than or equal to 6 hours of sleepFernandez-Mendoza and colleagues f........ Read more »
ulio Fernandez-Mendoza, MSc1,2,3; Susan Calhoun, PhD1; Edward O. Bixler, PhD1; Slobodanka Pejovic, MD1; Maria Karataraki, PsyD1; Duanping Liao, PhD4; Antonio Vela-Bueno, MD2; Maria J. Ramos-Platon, PhD3; Katherine A. Sauder, BA1; Alexandros N. Vgontzas, M. (2010) Insomnia with Objective Short Sleep Duration is Associated with Deficits in Neuropsychological Performance: A General Population Study. SLEEP, 33(4), 459-465. info:/
- March 30, 2010
- 03:59 AM
- 183 views
How forming new memories help retain older ones
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Try to remember this visual paired associate (AB):Now recall visual paired associate AB:Next, I'm going to have you remember another visual paired associate (AC):Now recall visual paired associate AC:Can you still remember the first visual paired associate (AB)?What if I were to pay you ten cents to remember? How about a hundred bucks? Would your memory performance increase? Stay the same? Most of your would probably infer the former. More money = more motivation to memorize.That's what Kuhl and........ Read more »
Kuhl, B., Shah, A., DuBrow, S., & Wagner, A. (2010) Resistance to forgetting associated with hippocampus-mediated reactivation during new learning. Nature Neuroscience, 13(4), 501-506. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2498
- March 18, 2010
- 05:05 PM
- 196 views
Parkinsonian emotion recognition impairment better accounted for by sleep deprivation
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
The New York Times recently covered a paper by Grey and Tickle-Degnen, published in the journal Neuropsychology, finding that people with Parkinson's Disease (PD) are not able to recognize facial and vocal emotions very well. The article states that it's not clear why this seems to be the case. I briefly reviewed the original meta-analytic paper (the pdf can be found here) and saw that the research team accounted for 1) the emotion recognition tasks used, 2) the medication the participants were ........ Read more »
Gray HM, & Tickle-Degnen L. (2010) A meta-analysis of performance on emotion recognition tasks in Parkinson's disease. Neuropsychology, 24(2), 176-91. PMID: 20230112
Massicotte-Marquez J, Décary A, Gagnon JF, Vendette M, Mathieu A, Postuma RB, Carrier J, & Montplaisir J. (2008) Executive dysfunction and memory impairment in idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder. Neurology, 70(15), 1250-7. PMID: 18216303
Seugnet L, Galvin JE, Suzuki Y, Gottschalk L, & Shaw PJ. (2009) Persistent short-term memory defects following sleep deprivation in a drosophila model of Parkinson disease. Sleep, 32(8), 984-92. PMID: 19725249
Norlinah, M., Afidah, K., Noradina, A., Shamsul, A., Hamidon, B., Sahathevan, R., & Raymond, A. (2009) Sleep disturbances in Malaysian patients with Parkinson's disease using polysomnography and PDSS. Parkinsonism , 15(9), 670-674. DOI: 10.1016/j.parkreldis.2009.02.012
- March 16, 2010
- 01:53 AM
- 169 views
Earworms, lyrics, and tunes in the brain
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Last time I left off quoting Lady GaGa's masterwork "Poker Face". I continue to rag on it because I can't seem to escape it's repetitive and forced impingement on my vulnerable eardrums. Unfortunately, the city doesn't afford much auditory privacy and some people in the subway are really determined to lose their hearing before old age. Whatever happened to iPod etiquette? According to Oliver Sack's book Musicophilia I've got a bad case of the earworm. This is when a piece of music repeats compul........ Read more »
Sammler, D., Baird, A., Valabregue, R., Clement, S., Dupont, S., Belin, P., & Samson, S. (2010) The Relationship of Lyrics and Tunes in the Processing of Unfamiliar Songs: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Adaptation Study. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(10), 3572-3578. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2751-09.2010
- March 9, 2010
- 09:04 AM
- 201 views
Sleep deprivation impairs emotion recognition
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
The ability to read emotions is an important part of the human experience; the only way to successfully navigate through complex social environments. It comes in handy especially if you don the title of psychotherapist or professional poker player. Without it, you become socially inept. You enter the world of the autistic individual.Thanks to Charles Darwin we now know that it’s not just the eyes that are “the windows to the soul”. He first wrote about the subject of facial expressions in ........ Read more »
van der Helm E; Gujar N; Walker MP. (2010) Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Accurate Recognition of Human Emotions. SLEEP, 33(3), 335-342. info:/
Ekman P, & Friesen WV. (1971) Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of personality and social psychology, 17(2), 124-9. PMID: 5542557
Steadman, L. (1980) : Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands . Shirley Lindenbaum. American Anthropologist, 82(3), 692-694. DOI: 10.1525/aa.1980.82.3.02a01130
- March 1, 2010
- 07:39 AM
- 198 views
How looking away prevents pedestrian collisions
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
One day a friend and I were briskly strolling along a mall corridor, engaged in conversation, until something quite hilarious happened. A burly gentleman was quickly approaching my friend's direct line of trajectory. She and this man had to make either one of two choices; move to the left or to the right to avoid a disastrous collision. Simple, no? And so I thought. With about a foot between them, my tiny-sized friend and this large stranger began this seemingly unending and surprisingly well-co........ Read more »
Nummenmaa L, Hyönä J, & Hietanen JK. (2009) I'll Walk This Way: Eyes Reveal the Direction of Locomotion and Make Passersby Look and Go the Other Way. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS. PMID: 19883491
Pelphrey, K. (2005) Neural basis of eye gaze processing deficits in autism. Brain, 128(5), 1038-1048. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awh404
Mitchell P, Parsons S, & Leonard A. (2007) Using virtual environments for teaching social understanding to 6 adolescents with autistic spectrum disorders. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 37(3), 589-600. PMID: 16900403
Parsons, S., Mitchell, P., & Leonard, A. (2004) The Use and Understanding of Virtual Environments by Adolescents with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34(4), 449-466. DOI: 10.1023/B:JADD.0000037421.98517.8d
- February 25, 2010
- 02:56 PM
- 190 views
The power of prediction reduces activation in the primary visual cortex
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Prediction is an invaluable skill for navigating through complex environments. Somehow the brain generates predictions about perceptual inputs it's likely to receive using contextual information from recent memory. Statistical regularities are learned (e.g. movement and attack patterns of Mega Man bosses) and lead to less activation in corresponding brain areas. The brain is truly a miserly organ. "Why put in more work than I have to when I know what's gonna happen next", says the brain. Alink a........ Read more »
Alink, A., Schwiedrzik, C., Kohler, A., Singer, W., & Muckli, L. (2010) Stimulus Predictability Reduces Responses in Primary Visual Cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(8), 2960-2966. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3730-10.2010
Doppelmayr M, Klimesch W, Sauseng P, Hödlmoser K, Stadler W, & Hanslmayr S. (2005) Intelligence related differences in EEG-bandpower. Neuroscience letters, 381(3), 309-13. PMID: 15896490
- January 30, 2010
- 02:39 PM
- 265 views
Remembering returns brain states to when the actual experience happened
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
William James, the influential American philosopher and psychologist of the late 1800's argued that remembering events reactivated motor and sensory brain regions involved during the original event. How right he was! Danker and Anderson have written an extensive review of the research literature looking at how this all happens, cleverly titled "The Ghosts of Brain States Past". Here is there abstract from the latest issue of Psychological Bulletin.There is growing evidence that the brain regions........ Read more »
Danker, J., & Anderson, J. (2010) The ghosts of brain states past: Remembering reactivates the brain regions engaged during encoding. Psychological Bulletin, 136(1), 87-102. DOI: 10.1037/a0017937
- January 21, 2010
- 01:01 AM
- 234 views
Can distractions really enhance motor performance?
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Texting while driving seems to score pretty high up there on the "I really shouldn't be doing this right now" list. A 2009 study by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that truck drivers who were texting on the road were 23 times more likely to find themselves involved in an accident. Incidentally, and much to my bewilderment, truck drivers who talked on cell phones were found to have absolutely no increased risk for crashing. I suppose it's much easier to say over the phone than to........ Read more »
Hemond, C., Brown, R., & Robertson, E. (2010) A Distraction Can Impair or Enhance Motor Performance. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(2), 650-654. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4592-09.2010
- January 5, 2010
- 01:23 AM
- 299 views
Anticipating reward improves learning during sleep
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Rocking out on the guitar is by far one of my most cherished pastimes. At the angst ridden age of 15 I picked up a cheap Ibanez strat and learned my very first Nirvana song, "Teen Spirit". Little did I know a good night's rest would play such a crucial role in my learning those simple power chords. Furthermore, who would've thought my desire to become the next grunge icon would determine the rate at which I learned during those quiet nights of sleep. According to a study by Fischer and Born, pub........ Read more »
Fischer S, & Born J. (2009) Anticipated reward enhances offline learning during sleep. Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition, 35(6), 1586-93. PMID: 19857029
- December 24, 2009
- 02:00 PM
- 390 views
Can modern day gadgets help combat prejudice?
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Prejudice...we've all experienced it at one point or another. Defined as a preconceived belief, opinion, or judgment toward a group or person because of race, social class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc., it also means a priori beliefs that include any unreasonable attitude that is unusually resistant to rational influence. It's been the cause of countless wars and an infinite amount of unnecessary suffering. It must be put to an end once and for all! So how does today........ Read more »
Crisp, R., & Turner, R. (2009) Can imagined interactions produce positive perceptions?: Reducing prejudice through simulated social contact. American Psychologist, 64(4), 231-240. DOI: 10.1037/a0014718
Cunningham, W., Johnson, M., Raye, C., Chris Gatenby, J., Gore, J., & Banaji, M. (2004) Separable Neural Components in the Processing of Black and White Faces. Psychological Science, 15(12), 806-813. DOI: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00760.x
Greenwald, A. (2003) Targets of discrimination: Effects of race on responses to weapons holders. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(4), 399-405. DOI: 10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00020-9
Harris, L., & Fiske, S. (2006) Social groups that elicit disgust are differentially processed in mPFC. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(1), 45-51. DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsl037
Olsson, A. (2005) The Role of Social Groups in the Persistence of Learned Fear. Science, 309(5735), 785-787. DOI: 10.1126/science.1113551
Steckenfinger SA, & Ghazanfar AA. (2009) Monkey visual behavior falls into the uncanny valley. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(43), 18362-6. PMID: 19822765
Wiekens, C., & Stapel, D. (2008) The Mirror and I: When private opinions are in conflict with public norms. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(4), 1160-1166. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2008.02.005
- November 17, 2009
- 02:57 AM
- 401 views
The somniloquy hypothesis: How the immature brain learns facts
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
A while back I wrote about the possible adaptive function of somnambulism or sleep-walking. Well...I've come up with yet another hypothesis addressing a behavior falling under the category of parasomnias. Somniloquy or sleep-talking happens during stages of NREM sleep, the time declarative memory (i.e. factual knowledge) is consolidated. This seemingly bizarre behavior typically occurs in childhood and is outgrown by puberty. Presentation can vary from rhythmic nonsense words to long coherent sp........ Read more »
Gais S, & Born J. (2004) Declarative memory consolidation: mechanisms acting during human sleep. Learning , 11(6), 679-85. PMID: 15576885
- November 12, 2009
- 02:11 AM
- 320 views
The dual-tasking meditation master
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
I recently read an article in the latest Scientific American Mind magazine discussing the cell mechanisms underlying meditative states. The author briefly mentioned the fact that expert meditators were able to avoid the attentional blink that lay people are prone to experiencing when barraged with rapidly presented visual stimuli.This brought up a question for me. Would expert meditators perform better on dual-tasks compared to age-matched subjects?I believe the answer is in the affirmative. My ........ Read more »
Farb, N., Segal, Z., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., & Anderson, A. (2007) Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(4), 313-322. DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsm030
- October 6, 2009
- 12:23 AM
- 596 views
Children recruit higher-order brain mechanisms during a numerical comparison task
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
I've been endlessly scoring digit-symbol coding protocols (fun...), a subtest of the WAIS-IV measuring working memory, for the past few weeks at my new neuropsych externship so the following article seems particularly relevant. In a recent study by Cantlon and colleagues published in the latest Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, they decided to measure the brain activity of 6-7 year-old children during numerical comparison tasks using fMRI.An example of a numerical comparsion task:...participant........ Read more »
Song JH, & Nakayama K. (2008) Numeric comparison in a visually-guided manual reaching task. Cognition, 106(2), 994-1003. PMID: 17512516
Levitin, D. (2009) The Neural Correlates of Temporal Structure in Music. Music and Medicine, 1(1), 9-13. DOI: 10.1177/1943862109338604
Cantlon, J., Libertus, M., Pinel, P., Dehaene, S., Brannon, E., & Pelphrey, K. (2009) The Neural Development of an Abstract Concept of Number. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21(11), 2217-2229. DOI: 10.1162/jocn.2008.21159
- September 30, 2009
- 02:22 AM
- 634 views
Bye bye modular, hello cognit!
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
What is a cognit you ask? It's a basic unit of memory or knowledge defined by pattern of connections between a network of neurons associated by experience.Termed by Fuster in 2006, the construct was created to solve the problematic yet popular view that the human brain is made up of discrete cortical domains dedicated exclusively to visual discrimination, language, spatial attention, face recognition, motor programming, memory retrieval, and working memory.Although the modular modeling of the br........ Read more »
Fuster JM. (2009) Cortex and memory: emergence of a new paradigm. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 21(11), 2047-72. PMID: 19485699
FUSTER, J. (2006) The cognit: A network model of cortical representation. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 60(2), 125-132. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2005.12.015
- September 28, 2009
- 09:42 AM
- 361 views
Why primate eyes prefer the color black
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
A recent study by Yeh, Xing, and Shapley over at The Center for Neural Science, New York University made a fascinating discovery about the primary visual cortex of the macaque monkey and it's preference for black over white stimuli similar to that of humans. Here's a snippet from their abstract.From recordings of single-cell activity in the macaque monkey's primary visual cortex (V1), we found that black-dominant neurons substantially outnumbered white-dominant neurons in the corticocortical out........ Read more »
Yeh CI, Xing D, & Shapley RM. (2009) "Black" responses dominate macaque primary visual cortex v1. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 29(38), 11753-60. PMID: 19776262
- September 25, 2009
- 09:19 AM
- 392 views
Why middle-agers shouldn't join the army
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Enlisting in the army is a significant life-changing decision, especially for someone who's middle-aged. Apparently there's an age cap of 42 for active duty. The reasoning behind this seemingly arbitrary number is that it allow for a 20-year military career before retirement. However, perhaps they should look toward a younger cutoff point in light of a recent study investigating the effects of sleep deprivation on arousal levels of middle-aged rats. But before we continue with this line of argum........ Read more »
Wigren HK, Rytkönen KM, & Porkka-Heiskanen T. (2009) Basal forebrain lactate release and promotion of cortical arousal during prolonged waking is attenuated in aging. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 29(37), 11698-707. PMID: 19759316
- September 20, 2009
- 06:47 PM
- 658 views
Observation of tool use activates specific brain area only in humans
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
The discovery that a species other than human has the ability to use tools has, quite frankly, lost its novelty. Just look at the New Caledonian crow. If trained properly, it can utilize up to three different tools sequentially to reach for a target food reward (Wimpenny et. al, 2009). It does this by first picking up a stick-like tool with its beak. It then uses this tool to retrieve a second tool which is then used to retrieve a third tool. Finally, the third tool is used to retrieve the food......... Read more »
Wimpenny JH, Weir AA, Clayton L, Rutz C, & Kacelnik A. (2009) Cognitive processes associated with sequential tool use in New Caledonian crows. PloS one, 4(8). PMID: 19654861
Peeters R, Simone L, Nelissen K, Fabbri-Destro M, Vanduffel W, Rizzolatti G, & Orban GA. (2009) The representation of tool use in humans and monkeys: common and uniquely human features. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 29(37), 11523-39. PMID: 19759300
- September 17, 2009
- 12:48 PM
- 1,183 views
How your emotional state affects how you hear speech
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
I found an interesting study by Wang et. al investigating how the current emotional state that we find ourselves in modulates the auditory response of speech early in the sensory processing stream at the cortical level. Here's their abstract.In order to understand how emotional state influences the listener's physiological response to speech, subjects looked at emotion-evoking pictures while 32-channel EEG evoked responses (ERPs) to an unchanging auditory stimulus (“danny”) were collected. T........ Read more »
Wang J, Nicol T, Skoe E, Sams M, & Kraus N. (2009) Emotion modulates early auditory response to speech. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 21(11), 2121-8. PMID: 18855553
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