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Psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, spirituality, quantum physics, and anything else worth writing about
William Lu
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- March 9, 2010
- 09:04 AM
- 57 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
- 71 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
- 77 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
- 140 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 has 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
- 132 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
- 201 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
- 225 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
- 236 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
- 226 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
- 407 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
- 434 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
- 266 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
- 258 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
- 434 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
- 1,072 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
- September 15, 2009
- 12:21 AM
- 326 views
Coffee on the brain, spatial memory impairment, and how the immune system may help
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
I'm constantly on the lookout for new research findings further substantiating sleep's significant effects on memory...perhaps in an attempt to finally convince myself that continuously misplacing my keys is NOT a normal part of young adulthood...and that 5 hours of shut-eye just isn't cutting it anymore (note to self: resist late night treks to Starbucks). Coffee-drinking women on the other hand have an 18% lower chance of having visual and spatial memory declines according to a 2007 study by R........ Read more »
Ritchie, K., Carriere, I., de Mendonca, A., Portet, F., Dartigues, J., Rouaud, O., Barberger-Gateau, P., & Ancelin, M. (2007) The neuroprotective effects of caffeine: A prospective population study (the Three City Study). Neurology, 69(6), 536-545. DOI: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000266670.35219.0c
Girardeau1,G, Benchenane1, K, Wiener, S I, Buzsáki G, . (2009) Selective suppression of hippocampal ripples impairs spatial memory. . Nature Neuroscience . info:/10.1038/nn.2384
Ron-Harel N, Segev Y, Lewitus GM, Cardon M, Ziv Y, Netanely D, Jacob-Hirsch J, Amariglio N, Rechavi G, Domany E.... (2008) Age-dependent spatial memory loss can be partially restored by immune activation. Rejuvenation research, 11(5), 903-13. PMID: 18803478
- September 12, 2009
- 07:15 PM
- 352 views
Destabilizing old memories with novel information
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
What if one day we could disrupt unwanted consolidated memories like those of old traumatic experiences or even unforgettable heartbreaks and replace them with novel and more pleasant ones? Sounds like a tagline from the 2004 Oscar-winning film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doesn't it? Published in this month's issue of Learning & Memory, a study by Winters, Tucci, and DaCosta-Furtado over at the University of Guelph, Canada have managed to bring us one step closer to making this seeminl........ Read more »
Winters, B., Tucci, M., & DaCosta-Furtado, M. (2009) Older and stronger object memories are selectively destabilized by reactivation in the presence of new information. Learning , 16(9), 545-553. DOI: 10.1101/lm.1509909
- September 9, 2009
- 06:45 PM
- 406 views
Is inhibition a measure of free will?
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Reading Alwyn Scott's "Stairway to the Mind" I came across an interesting tidbit of information pointing out that human's have a greater percentage of inhibitory neurons compared to other animals (human 75% rabbit 31%). For some unknown reason this made me think about the tricky construct of free will and the question of whether free will could be better measured not by what we chose to do, but by what we chose not to do. In other words, could free will be measured by a capacity to inhibit certa........ Read more »
Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. (1989) Delay of gratification in children. Science, 244(4907), 933-938. DOI: 10.1126/science.2658056
- September 8, 2009
- 02:04 PM
- 368 views
Bullying boss disturbing your sleep?
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
Its not uncommon that we're forced to work/put up with a disgruntled boss at one point or another. Not surprisingly, the relationship between an employee and their boss is the best predictor for job satisfaction according to a 2006 survey conducted by Accountemps, a Menlo Park, California-based specialized staffing service for temporary accounting, finance, and bookkeeping professionals. Moreover, the relationship you have with your boss may not only determine your overall job satisfaction, but ........ Read more »
Niedhammer I, Chastang JF, & David S. (2008) Importance of psychosocial work factors on general health outcomes in the national French SUMER survey. Occupational medicine (Oxford, England), 58(1), 15-24. PMID: 17965447
Levin, R., & Nielsen, T. (2007) Disturbed dreaming, posttraumatic stress disorder, and affect distress: A review and neurocognitive model. Psychological Bulletin, 133(3), 482-528. DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.133.3.482
- September 6, 2009
- 02:41 AM
- 390 views
Erasing phobias early in life
by William Lu in The Quantum Lobe Chronicles
The model of fear extinction originated from the Pavlovian classical conditioning paradigm in the early 1900s. Defined as a reduction in a conditioned fear response following a non reinforced exposure to a feared conditioned stimulus, fear extinction is known to involve the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). It's also a frequently striven-for goal in cognitive behavioral therapy during the treatment of various phobias including arachibutyrophobia; the fear of peanut butter sticking to........ Read more »
Kim JH, Hamlin AS, & Richardson R. (2009) Fear extinction across development: the involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex as assessed by temporary inactivation and immunohistochemistry. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 29(35), 10802-8. PMID: 19726637
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