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.
The coming week I will post articles about gender and/or sex and neuroscience. Topics with sex or gender and brains will be chocolate, computer game play, depression, medical education and brain sex differences, so stay tuned.
Now what is the difference between gender and sex?
Sex = male and female
Gender = masculine and feminine
So in essence:
Sex refers to biological differences; chromosomes, hormonal profiles, internal and external sex organs.
Gender describes the characteristics that a society or culture delineates as masculine or feminine.
So while your sex as male or female is a biological fact that is the same in any culture, what that sex means in terms of your gender role as a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ in society can be quite different cross culturally. These ‘gender roles’ have an impact on the health of the individual.
Some common misconceptions about sex and the brain, since that will be the main focus of this series:
Larry Cahill (2006). Why sex matters for neuroscience Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7 (6), 477-484 DOI: 10.1038/nrn1909
The new grand round from Encephalon: On August 26th, 2006, the blogger behind Neurophilosophy, launched the Encephalon blog carnival to present, every other week, a selection of the best neuroscience and psychology blog posts.
Welcome to a landmark edition of Encephalon, the cream of the crop of brain science blog carnivals. This is the 55th edition of Encephalon, an anniversary achieved by less than 5% of married couples. Thus, this edition is a testament to the dedication of neuroscience bloggers: they don’t even take vows, yet they still stay committed to providing their readers with scintillating perspectives on developments in brain science.
Just some examples of these interesting posts with topics close to the heart of Dr Shock:
Playing the blame game: Video games stand accused of causing obesity, violence, and lousy grades. But new research paints a surprisingly complicated and positive picture on SharpBrains.
On Cognitive Daily: a look at a study of teenagers’ sexual behavior.
Go read the rest on Neuroscientifically Challenged
In a prior post on this blog about empathy sometimes a distinction is made between cognitive and affective empathy. These two concepts refer to our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of another person, be it in their mental or emotional shoes. These concepts are difficult to differentiate. Especially for cognitive empathy this is a simplification since mental states could in principal also include feeling and emotional states.
Affective empathy refers to the process which allows us to experience what it feels like for another person to experience a certain emotion or sensation. The capacity to understand other people’s emotions by sharing their affective states is fundamentally different in nature from the capacity to mentalize.
That is to my opinion the reason why empathy can be taught to a certain level. We can teach empathy to a cognitive level not to an affective level as explained in another recent post on this blog about teaching empathy in med school.
The last post about this subject will be posted on next Monday 4th of August.
Prior neuroimaging studies of empathy have shown that by observing another’s emotional state, part of the neural circuitry underlying the same state becomes active in oneself, whether it is disgust, pain or social emotions.
In a recent review of the neuronal basis of empathy the authors concluded that:
sharing sensations and emotions with others is associated with activation of circuitries involved in the processing of similar states in ourselves, involving the secondary somato-sensory cortices for touch, insular cortex and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) for pain and disgust and amygdala for fear. Globally, these regions constitute the ‘‘emotional’’ brain and most of these structures are usually referred to as limbic and para-limbic structures. They are crucial for emotional processing and developed early in phylogeny. By contrast, mentalizing abilities have been shown to be associated with activation in pre-frontal and temporal cortices, most importantly the medial pre-frontal lobe (mPFC) and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS), structures which belong to the neo-cortex and developed late in phylogeny
This means that the ability for affective empathy was acquired earlier in our development throughout our evolution than cognitive empathy.
Empathy is based on limbic and para-limbic structures as well as on somato-sensory cortices should develop earlier than our ability for cognitive perspective taking because the former rely on structures which develop early in brain development, whereas the latter rely on structures of the neo-cortex which are among the latest to mature, such as the prefrontal cortex and lateral parts of the temporal cortex.
Moreover, the finding that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has not fully matured up to an age of 25 is interesting since this suggests that the full capacity for effective and adaptive empathic responding is not developed until late adolescence.
Anyway, far to less of hard results to fully understand empathy from a neuroscience view point but nevertheless an exciting area with a lot of new discoveries in the near future, and I will keep you posted.
Related posts in this series about patient doctor relationship:
Empathy
Can we teach empathy at Med School?
Consolation reduces stress, funny video
Patient doctor relationship: Self-Disclosure
Emotional Intelligence
T SINGER (2006). The neuronal basis and ontogeny of empathy and mind reading: Review of literature and implications for future research Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 30 (6), 855-863 DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2006.06.011
A robot with empathy sounds like the stuff of sci-fi movies, but with the aid of neural networks European researchers are developing robots in tune with our emotions. The tantalising work of the Feelix Growing project is grabbing the world’s attention.
Through the combination of cameras,sensors, artificial neural networks and software development ICT results are developing robots that can respond to human emotions.
If someone shows fear or cries out in pain, the robot may learn to change its behaviour to appear less threatening, backing away if necessary. If someone cries out in happiness, it may even detect the difference, and one day fine-tune its responses to individuals.
These developments can be promising to all kinds of employments:
Robots that can adapt to people’s behaviours are needed if machines are to play a part in society, such as helping the sick, the elderly, people with autism or house-bound people, working as domestic helpers, or just for entertainment, according to Canamero.
In the video on the website you can see some of the actions and uses of these robots, it is amazing.
Their main website: ICT Results
Why do we crave love so much, even to the point that we would die for it? To learn more about our very real, very physical need for romantic love, Helen Fisher and her research team took MRIs of people in love — and people who had just been dumped.
This talk starts slow but soon the information becomes very interesting. More about the Science of Love on the BBC, thanks Dr Confabula
Key Points from the science of love:
The last key point I am not so sure!
Forgetting May Be Part of the Process of Remembering – New York Times
Interesting article in Nature Neuroscience.
In all, this research suggests that memories are more often crowded out than lost. An ideal memory improvement program, Dr. Anderson said, “would include a course on how to impair your memory. Your head is full of a surprising number of things that you don’t need to know.”