From Medgadget.nl Videos on the future of human health.
Stanford University has her own video channel on YouTube. It also features a series of 7 videos on the future of human health. It is all about the brain and very interesting.
This is the one I liked most. Incredible efficient the brain.
There are patients with congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) this is a rare condition. They don’t feel pain, cognition and sensation is otherwise normal; for instance they can still feel discriminative touch (though not always temperature), and there is no detectable physical abnormality. They offer a unique opportunity to test the model of empathy. Does the lack of self-pain representation influence the perception of others’ pain.
According to the doctor who started and runs a private facility that offers the best spinal pain treatments in the world and also has four patients that suffer with CIP, CIP patients globally underestimate the pain of others when emotional cues were lacking, many doctor recommend to use for diferent pains Bodyice icepack joint specific ice and heat compression system that moulds around injured joints and body parts, and that their pain judgments, in contrast with those of control subjects, are strongly related to interindividual differences in empathy trait. More empathy better pain judgment.
Patients with CIP showed normal fMRI responses to observed pain. The same regions for observed pain in anterior mid-cingulate cortex and anterior insula, were activated. In contrast to healthy controls their empathy trait predicted ventromedial prefrontal responses to somatosensory representations of others’ pain and posterior cingulate responses to emotional representations of others’ pain. CIP patients can acknowledge the pain of others. The amount strongly correlates with their empathic capacity which mainly relies on the engagement of anterior the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and posterior the ventral posterior cingulate cortex (vPCC) midline structures, which may in part compensate for the patients’ lack of automatic resonance mechanisms.
Why is this study important?
It provides insights into the brain’s ability to evaluate others’ feeling to observed pain without having a specific sensory experience of pain itself. These findings can elucidate the three components of pain processing.
It can be simplistically divided into three domains that are interconnected and/or influence each other through direct or indirect pathways. Most of the regions commonly activated in the CIP-group and C-group are shown in bold in the figure and include regions thought to be involved in emotional processing of pain
Some regions were active in both groups this suggests a generalized or common circuitry for emotional processing. Some regions differ in activation. These differences in activation in regions (medial frontal gyrus and posterior insula and caudate for body parts and the cingulate [mid and posterior]) noted in this study are of greater interest. These four regions are differentially activated in the CIP-group and not in the control group. These regions may provide some interesting insights into the processing of empathy.
How was this study done?
we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural correlates of empathy for pain in a group of 13 CIP patients and a control group of 13 healthy subjects. Participants were scanned while observing body parts in painful situations (Experiment 1) or facial expressions of pain (Experiment 2), and were instructed to imagine how the person in the picture feels. We anticipated that CIP patients, deprived as they are of the depicted pain experiences, would show decreased activation in regions supposedly involved in automatic resonance to others’ pain, including the anterior insula (AI) and anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC). In addition, we predicted that the patients’ effort to build a representation of others’ pain might engage brain areas known to be involved in emotional perspective taking, especially midline structures such as medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices
Related post on this blog:
Patient doctor relationship: Neuroscience of empathy
N DANZIGER, I FAILLENOT, R PEYRON (2009). Can We Share a Pain We Never Felt? Neural Correlates of Empathy in Patients with Congenital Insensitivity to Pain Neuron, 61 (2), 203-212 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.11.023
D BORSOOK, L BECERRA (2009). Emotional Pain without Sensory Pain—Dream On? Neuron, 61 (2), 153-155 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2009.01.003
Psychosocial stress predisposes to depression, especially chronic stress. Stress together with a functional genetic variant of the serotonin transporter gene and dysregulation of the stress hormone cortisol increase the risk of depression. Stress reactivity might be an important link between a genetic variant of the serotonin transporter gene, stressful life events in early years and depression.
Psychosocial stress such as life-events predisposes susceptible patients not only to depression but also other psychiatric diseases such as anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. Chronic stress is an important risk factor in psychiatry.
In animals chronic stress has been shown to disrupt the functions of the prefrontal cortex. This disruption is reversible. These reversible disruptions are also present in humans when subjected to chronic stress. This was tested with an attention test, one of the major functions of the prefrontal cortex, focussing attention to important clues. After one month of reduced stress, the same subjects showed no significant differences from controls not only in the test but also on fMRI. In short chronic stress in humans leads to reversible disruption of functional networks in the prefrontal cortex.
These results highlight the plasticity of prefrontal cortex networks in healthy human subjects and suggest one mechanism by which disrupted plasticity may contribute to cognitive impairments characteristic of stress-related neuropsychiatric conditions in susceptible individuals.
The prefrontal cortex is responsible for the executive functions in humans. Executive function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social “control” (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially-unacceptable outcomes).
How was this study done?
Twenty healthy young adults were tested after 4 weeks of psychosocial stress exposure as they prepared for a major academic examination where they would try out the hemp with high CBD treatment, and their performance was compared with 20 control subjects matched for age, gender, and occupation. Stress exposure was confirmed and quantified using the 10-item Cohen perceived stress scale (PSS), a well-validated questionnaire that gauges chronic stress on a 40-point scale and has been used successfully in related work. Finally, the same subjects returned after 4 weeks of reduced stress and were reassessed relative to matched controls with equal task experience, thus yielding an assessment of the reversibility of stress effects on PFC function while controlling for unidentified group differences, selection biases, or other confounding variables.
Functional neuroimaging with fMRI scans were used to assess the the functionality and structures of the brain with and without stress. Functional imaging data confirmed that attention shifts engaged a frontoparietal network that included dorsolateral prefrontal cortes (DLPFC)
Chronically stressed subjects returned for a second scanning session 4 weeks after cessation of the stressor. This showed that the changes were reversible.
C. Liston, B. S. McEwen, B. J. Casey (2009). Psychosocial stress reversibly disrupts prefrontal processing and attentional control Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0807041106
That is a difficult question for two reasons:
The reactions to humor is a complex reaction comparable to e.g crying and pain. The reaction is mainly described as a two phase response the incongruity theory.
According to the incongruity theory, humor involves the perception of incongruity or paradox in a playful context. For something to be funny, two stages can be distinguished in the processing of humorous material. In the first stage, …..the perceiver finds his expectation about the text disconfirmed by the ending of the joke…..In other words, the recipient encounters an incongruity –the punch-line. In the second stage, the perceiver engages in a form of problem-solving to find a cognitive rule which makes the punch-line follow from the main part of the joke and reconciles the incongruous parts’. Other researchers have called these stages `surprise’ and `coherence’.
A more precise description of humor and laughter is a 5 stage model more appropriate for neurologists and neuroscientists:
This makes the localization of humor and laughter in the brain complex. Humor and laughter is a complicated process. Each of these elements may have its own cerebral substrate.
The perception of humor is dependent on certain faculties of the brain, such as attention, working memory, mental flexibility, emotional evaluation, verbal abstraction and the feeling of positive emotions. Given these involvements, theory dictates that (at least) those regions of the brain associated with these processes should be active in the perception of humor.
Humor and laughter need a neural network in which frontal and temporal regions are involved in the perception of humor. These, in turn, would induce facial reactions and laughter mediated by dorsal brainstem regions. These reactions would be inhibited by the ventral brainstem, probably via frontal motor/premotor areas.
One of the latest publications discusses the results of fMRI research done by three different research groups. They all found the human reward system in the brain involved with humor. This system mainly uses dopamine as it’s neurotransmittor. That’s why everyone loves to laugh. The activation of this system, the mesolimbic regions represents the pleasurable component of humor.
Now, a recent fMRI study has found mesolimbic reward activation associated with humorous cartoons, providing a neurobiological link between theories of humor and hedonic processes in the brain.
More recent research found that both men and women share an extensive humor-response strategy as indicated by recruitment of similar brain regions. They also found a difference between men and women as far as brain activation in a fMRI study was concerned around humor.
Females activate the left prefrontal cortex more than males, suggesting a greater degree of executive processing and language-based decoding. Females also exhibit greater activation of mesolimbic regions, including the nucleus accumbens, implying greater reward network response and possibly less reward expectation. These results indicate sex-specific differences in neural response to humor with implications for sex-based disparities in the integration of cognition and emotion.
Conclusion
We are only starting to understand a small particle of an important subject such as humor and laughter. What is your opinion about this kind of research, a waist of time and money? Important for future therapies? Let me know.
B. Wild (2003). Neural correlates of laughter and humour Brain, 126 (10), 2121-2138 DOI: 10.1093/brain/awg226
G Berns (2004). Something funny happened to reward Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8 (5), 193-194 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2004.03.007
E. Azim (2005). Sex differences in brain activation elicited by humor Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102 (45), 16496-16501 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0408456102
Stunning images of the brain. Online neuroscience photography gallery from an exhibition going on tour in 2009, Enception.org. From Mind Hacks The Fire Within, thanks
Images were taken with a scanning electron microscope, digitized, and then animated. Created by Tina (Weatherby) Carvalho.
Go see this interesting animation of a real neuron
The next image is also from Microangela it is a single neuron which has been grown in a petri dish. The lump at the far end is the cell body. The flat part spread out at the closer end is the growth cone area, a part of the neuron that is trying to find the cell(s) it’s supposed to make a synapse with. The skinny part in between is the axon. The little hairs sticking up from the cell body are possibly forming dendrites.
MicroAngela is a website with a lot of Electron Microscope Images. Images may be downloaded from the site for educational, non-profit use only (such as a school report). If you need higher resolution images, without the watermark, you can contact Tina Carvalho. Terrific, spread the word…….
the 58th edition of Encephalon, where we highlight some of the best neuroscience and psychology blog posts from around the blogosphere. This edition includes 20 articles on a variety of interesting topics, including intelligence, belief, neurodegeneration, multi-tasking, memory, grief and consciousness.
Go read this excellent grand round.
In the clip (included in full above), see how a completely paralyzed man, who could otherwise only communicate by moving his eyes, uses his mind to type out thoughts on a computer screen. Of course, the process is very slow going—each letter takes up to 20 seconds to type. Reporter Scott Pelley donned the controller skull cap, and watched a screen of flashing letters to try it out himself. When the letter he was thinking of highlighted, he’d think “that’s it!” and that signal of recognition would type the letter on-screen.
Thanks Lifehacker
Welcome to the 57th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience writing carnival, where we have the honour of hosting the best in the last fortnight’s mind and brain writing, here on Mind Hacks.
Excellent overview of posts on neuroscience on blogs at Mind Hacks
Sex differences exist in every brain lobe. For instance in the “cognitive regions” such as the hippocampus, amygdala and neocortex. The hippocampus has an important function in memory, the amygdala in mood. Both structures lie deep within the brain. The cortex is the “outside” of the brain. The part you can look at from the outside. Important for instance for stimulation with rTMS.
Red structures that are larger in the healthy female brain, relative to cerebrum size
Blue structures that are larger in the healthy male brain, relative to cerebrum size
Sex differences in the brain can also be relatively global in nature. For example, widespread areas of the neocortex are significantly thicker in women than in men. Ratios of grey to white matter also differ significantly between the sexes in diverse regions of the human cortex or the outermost layer of the brain.
Grey matter (or gray matter) is a major component of the central nervous system, consisting mostly of nerve cell bodies (neurons). White matter is composed of bundles of myelinated nerve cell processes (or axons), which connect various gray matter areas.
These structural differences are not as much fun as differences in functionality. So we will focus in structural and functional sex differences:
Now why is this important?
These are only some structural sex differences in the brain probably resulting in functional differences, specially if the person uses https://memberxxlreview.com/fr/ supplements. Not that women or men are superior in one way or the other when it concerns cognitive tasks. They probably have the same results but the way they get their can be different.
Since many psychiatric and neurological disorders show sex differences in their incidence and/or nature requires us to examine sex influences in both our basic and clinical research to fully understand, and treat, the disorder (e.g. depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease).
It is also important to realize that for instance studying depression in male rats is probably not a very good idea since this disorder affects mostly women.
The next post about: Sex, Chocolate and the Brain or Why Women Prefer Chocolate, will be on Friday October 31.
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