Human Behavior

4 Universal Principles That Drive Our Behavior, According To A Neuropsychologist – mindbodygreen.com

Every day, most of us have moments when we think, "Why did I say that?" or, "If I had just..." We're sharp with our kids or partners over small things. We criticize our teammate in front of the others. We agree to a deadline we know isn't realistic. Or maybe the issues are bigger. Maybe we've lied about something important. Maybe we've taken an unethical shortcut, cheated, or lied.

The good news? These behaviors don't make us bad; they simply make us human. They are the coping strategies we use to survive in lifeand they've been with us a long time. Often they are grounded in good intentions that are turned upside down by our less-than-effective coping strategiesall because we have connected to fear. We all can be afraid, and much of the time we don't even realize what we're doing, let alone why.

But every day, we also make our best intentions a reality. Within 10 minutes of wishing we could pull words back into our mouths or make a different choice, we can be supportive, focused, honest, patient, and committed. How quickly the heart can shift from selfish to selfless, from judging to compassionate, motivated to depressed, constructive to destructive, full of doubt to confident. We can be effective one minute and ineffective the next.

We are all an and. Life is an and. Ineffective, below-the-line behavior coexists with effective, above-the-line behavior, and we are all able to switch from one to the other and back again in the blink of an eye.

That and is the essence of the line that exists within our heart and the four universal principles of life that drive our behavior. They are:

Continue reading here:
4 Universal Principles That Drive Our Behavior, According To A Neuropsychologist - mindbodygreen.com

Human Behavior

To find intelligent alien life, humans may need to start thinking like an extraterrestrial – Livescience.com

HONOLULU Our hunt for aliens has a potentially fatal flaw we're the ones searching for them.

That's a problem because we're a unique species, and alien-seeking scientists are an even stranger and more specialized bunch. As a result, their all-too human assumptions may get in the way of their alien-listening endeavors. To get around this, the Breakthrough Listen project, a $100-million initiative scouring the cosmos for signals of otherworldly beings as part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), is asking anthropologists to help unmask some of these biases.

"It's kind of a joke at Breakthrough Listen," Claire Webb, an anthropology and history of science student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said here on Jan. 8 at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Honolulu. "They tell me: 'We're studying aliens, and you're studying us.'"

Related: 9 Strange, Scientific Excuses for We Havent Found Aliens Yet

Since 2017, Webb has worked with Breakthrough Listen to examine how SETI researchers think about aliens, produce knowledge, and perhaps inadvertently place anthropocentric assumptions into their work.

She sometimes describes her efforts as "making the familiar strange."

For instance, your life might seem perfectly ordinary maybe involving being hunched over at a desk and shuttling electrons around between computers until examined through an anthropological lens, which points out that this is not exactly a universal state of affairs. At the conference, Webb presented a poster looking at how Breakthrough Listen scientists use artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through large data sets and try to uncover potential technosignatures, or indicators of technology or tool use by alien organisms.

"Researchers who use AI tend to disavow human handicraft in the machines they build," Webb told Live Science. "They attribute a lot of agency to those machines. I find that somewhat problematic and at the worst untrue."

Any AI is trained by human beings, who present it with the types of signals they think an intelligent alien might produce. In doing so, they predispose their algorithms to certain biases. It can be incredibly difficult to recognize such thinking and overcome its limitations, Webb said.

Most SETI research assumes some level of commensurability, or the idea that beings on different worlds will understand the universe in the same way and be able to communicate about it with one another, Webb said. Much of this research, for example, presumes a type of technological commensurability, in which aliens broadcast messages using the same radio telescopes we have built, and that we will be able to speak to them using a universal language of science and math.

Related: Greetings, Earthlings! 8 Ways Aliens Might Contact Us

But how universal is our language of science, and how inevitable is our technological evolution? Do alien scientists gather in large buildings and present their work to one another via slides and lectures and posters? And what bearing do such human rituals have on the types of scientific knowledge researchers produce?

It was almost like trying to take the perspective of a creature on another planet, who might wonder about humanity and our odd modern-day practices. "If E.T. was looking at us, what would they see?" Webb asked.

The assumptions and anxieties of alien-hunters can creep in in other ways. Because of the vast distances involved in sending a signal through space, many SETI researchers have imagined receiving a message from an older technological society. As astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan famously said in his 1980 book and television series "Cosmos," that might mean E.T. has lived through a "technological adolescence" and survived nuclear proliferation or an apocalyptic climate meltdown.

But those statements are based on the specific anxieties of our era, namely nuclear war and climate change, and we can't automatically assume that the history of another species will unfold in the same way, Webb said.

Veteran SETI scientist Jill Tarter has told Webb that, in some ways, we are looking for a better version of ourselves, speculating that a message from the heavens will include blueprints for a device that can provide cheap energy and help alleviate poverty.

The ideal of progress is embedded in such narratives, Webb said, first of scientific and technological progress, but also an implicit assumption of moral advancement. "It's the idea that, as your technology develops, so does your sense of ethics and morality," she said. "And I think that's something that can be contested."

Even our hunt for organisms like ourselves suggests "a yearning for connectivity, reflective to me of a kind of postmodern loneliness and isolation in the universe," she said.

Webb joked that SETI researchers don't always understand the point of her anthropological and philosophical examinations. But, she said, they are open to being challenged in their ideas and knowing that they are not always seeing the whole picture.

"One thing Jill [Tarter] has said many times is, 'We reserve the right to get smarter,'" she said. "We are doing what we think makes sense now, but we might one day be doing something totally different."

Ultimately, the point of this work is to get SETI researchers to start "noticing human behavior in ways that could push SETI to do novel kinds of searches," Webb said. "Inhabiting other mindscapes is potentially a very powerful tool in cultivating new ways to do science."

Perhaps beings on another planet might use gravitational waves, or neutrinos, or even some other unknown aspect of reality we have yet to come across to send messages into the heavens.

Originally published on Live Science.

Read the original post:
To find intelligent alien life, humans may need to start thinking like an extraterrestrial - Livescience.com

Human Behavior

A Stanford behavior strategist on three moments to save money – Quartz

Every now and then, a media story will propose another wild or surprising reason that millennials arent saving for retirement. Weve been told that some young adults dont believe civilization will exist by the time theyre ready to stop working, and that some are counting on a socialist future to save them from capitalisms indifference.

Whatever the spin, the common underlying theme is that millennials feel doomed by the circumstances of their time, which is fair enough. The pressures of student loan debt, stagnant wages, and job insecurity have led young people to feel that buying a home or saving for retirement are not real options. Many young and middle-aged adults have accepted that they cant expect the same kind of comfortable (and expensive) retirement that previous generations have financed for themselves, a problem that has economic implications for every generation.

In light of these realities, shaming millennials about their pathetic retirement savings or expensive lattes is slowly falling out of fashion. But it still happens. And Wendy De La Rosa, a PhD candidate at Stanford Universitys Graduate School of Business, and a millennial herself, believes we should push back.

Weve moved into the world where the onus is always on the individual. We expect the individuals to be an expert in all things related to financial matters, she says. However, she adds, If you start to see the individual as a human, as an imperfect human being, and not expect the superhuman of the human, now you can start to create environments that meet people where they are.

De La Rosa is also the co-founder of Common Cents Lab, a research group that tests behavioral solutions for low and middle-income earners who need to better manage their money. (Its part of the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, which is run by the famed behavioral economist Dan Ariely.)

Some of her work has tested ideas that build on the well-known and successful Save More Tomorrow concept, created by Nobel prize-winning behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi more than 15 years ago.

It says, look, fine. I know people arent going to save much for retirement today, she explains. But I can get them to enroll in something today where next time you get a raise in the future, then youre going to increase your retirement allocation.

In other words, rather than fight the well-documented tendency we have to see our future selves as more perfect and capable of saving than our present-day selves, the Save More Tomorrow idea works with it. Your future self gets to strut its superior self-discipline and commit now to an automatic increase tied to an event down the road.

According to De La Rosa, there are three golden moments, as she calls them, when people can easily harness this particular nudge.

First, theres tax refund time. In 2019, the average taxpayer got back about $2,700, which is meaningful, because 40% of Americans dont have $400 to cover an emergency savings fund, says De La Rosa, referring to a recent Federal Reserve survey. For many families its the largest payout they ever get at one time. She wants to help people save a large part of it.

Next is what she calls Five Fridays. The vast majority of Americans get paid on a weekly or biweekly basis, she points out, and [t]here are months that just naturally have five Fridays in them, meaning that in those months youre essentially going to get an extra paycheck. Meanwhile, the majority of your necessary expenses like rent or mortgage or loan payments are done on a monthly basis.

The third opportunity? Anytime people get unexpected bonuses, raises, gifts, or inheritance money.

To test ideas around the first moment, a few years ago De La Rosas lab conducted a randomized control experiment with a company called Digit, an app that automatically saves money for its users. In one condition, they texted people when they received their tax refund. (Digits technology recognized when the tax refund arrived in someones checking account.) The message said something like: Hey there! You just got your attached refund. What percentage would you like to save? In another condition, Digits clients were texted early in the tax season, hopefully before they even filed their taxes. This time the message said something like: You might get a tax refund. If you do, what percentage of it would you like to save?

Now thats a question thats much harder, right? says De La Rosa. People dont know if theyll get a refund or how much it might be, but they may have an inkling based on the previous years returns.

Still, the lab saw a sizable difference in responses. On average, people who were contacted the day they got the refund said they wanted to save 17% of it. People who were asked how to allocate a future, hypothetical bounty were prepared to save 27% of the total, agreeing to let the app automatically move that portion over to a savings account when the time came.

Customers had the opportunity to back out of their pledge, but most didnt. What we found was that two months out after an experiment, 85% of the savings were still in the account, says De La Rosa.

I think this is the crux of how were to be able to help young people save for retirement, she adds.

De La Rosas team has also experimented with messaging around major life milestones to see whether reaching people at symbolic junctions can help them pay more attention to their financial situation.

Recently, they partnered with a company called Silver Nest, which she compares to a modern day Golden Girls: The platform matches seniors who own a home with other older adults who need affordable accommodation. Both parties gain from the arrangement, whether as an owner who earns an extra income, or a renter who pays less for housing. Both also benefit from the health-boosting companionship that comes from living with a housemate. But, says De La Rosa, As you can imagine, asking an older adult to open up their home to a stranger is not an easy ask.

The team ran several trials to see what kind of message might get more attention. In the main test, they ran two ads on Facebook, both of which were targeting 64-year-olds. In one condition, the ad said, Hey, youre getting older, are you ready for retirement? House sharing can help. In the second condition, the message was: Hey, youre 64 turning 65. Are you ready for retirement? House sharing can help.

Those people who were reminded that they were hitting a significant birthday were more likely to click through on the ad and ultimately sign up. All it took was that reminder that they were aging.

Again, the idea takes a fault and turns it into a tool. Aging milestones can be depicted as life-crisis points, says De La Rosa, but what we did was sort of flip it on its head and say, because theres this motivation to make a change, we can essentially nudge people into making what we think is a positive change by highlighting that this change is happening.

Now, she believes, companies need to step up to use the same types of strategies. We know every employer has their employees birthdays. It would be great if, yes, you got a party, but also maybe you got a reminder to increase your retirement allocation when youre 39, turning 40, or about to turn 30.

HR departments could ping employees with a reminder to increase their savings well ahead of every new year, too, she adds, because people associate January 1 with a fresh start.

By plugging into our natural biases, every business, every store is getting faster, smarter, and better at getting us to spend our money, De La Rosa points out, adding, Its only getting more treacherous.

The institutions that want us to put more cash aside need to be just as wily and opportunistic.

Read the original:
A Stanford behavior strategist on three moments to save money - Quartz

Human Behavior

Google’s new ‘Digital Wellbeing’ tools, ranked from ingenious to offensive – Fast Company

Since 2018, Google (and Apple) have been addressing the 4.5-inch glass elephant in the room: that while smartphones have become essential to modern life, theyre sucking all the attention from the people around us, and making us measurably less happy in the process. Google launched a tool inside Android called Digital Wellbeing, which allows you to track your usage across apps and even set limiters. Then last year, it released a series of experiments, like a paper phone that has all the critical information from your smartphone, but none of the distractions. According to Google, the experiments are a showcase of ideas and tools that help people find a better balance with technology.

This week, the Google Creative Lab released three new experiments, all aimed to curb our smartphone addiction, and they range from inspired to downright insulting work. Lets take a look at each new experiment, ranked from best to worst.

Screen Stopwatch

So you want to use your phone less, but the minutes add up to hours fast. Screen Stopwatch replaces your wallpaper with a full-screen counter that literally ticks by every second that you are on your phone. Its a stupid-obvious idea, but, boy, does this wallpaper add a tension to my chest that makes checking Twitter for news on the impeachment feel like Im literally diffusing a bomb as quickly as possible. One nice touch is that the number count is an animated old split flap display, a touch of reviled skeuomorphism, sure, but the whimsy does help temper the core tension of the countdown . . . err . . . I should say, the count up!

Screen Stopwatch quickly illustrates that theres no number thats a good number, and all Im left wanting is for this clock to stop ticking as soon as possible. Im not sure what the longitudinal effect of using Screen Stopwatch would be; its only been on my phone for a couple of hours today. Would I learn to ignore it or learn to ignore my phone? I cant say for sure, but thats what makes the project such a reasonable experiment in a user interfaces impact on human behavior.

Activity Bubbles

When I saw the screenshots of Activity Bubblesanother wallpaper that depicts each app you open as its own gray bubble, with a volume that represents time spent insideI thought it would be a winner. Sure, people are terrible at weighing the numerical values depicted in radial graphics, but the idea seemed so delightful! I would be able to see my bad habits stacked up in front of me as infographic evidence of my lack of self-control! Neat!

It is neat. It is delightful. Too much so. I found myself opening more apps just to create a bigger stack of circles. And to make matters worse, each new circle plops into the pile like a satisfying raindrop. Its truly a wonderful little bit of UI, giving positive reinforcement to my terrible habits. I need Activity Bubbles for running, reading to my children, and consuming vegetables, not for stalking what frenemies are eating for brunch on Instagram.

Lest you think Im alone in this assessment, the first user comments about Activity Bubbles are all asking for more delight: more bouncy ball effects, and more colors! Make Activity Bubbles [even more] fun! People seem to be recognizing the core experience of joy that the experiment offers, but not the end effect. My feedback? No, dont make them any prettier, Google. Make them look like a pustule rash that has infected my phone.

Envelope

Having talked to several Google designersabout digital health, I know its a real concern to people inside the company. But every now and then, a little voice in my head chimes in: Google doesnt want you to give up your phone; they make billions of dollars a year off of the things you do on it. These Digital Experiments are just a red herring, lousy solutions doomed to fail, to put the onus on the user for their smartphone addiction, rather than taking responsibility as a sprawling monopoly to address it instead.

And its hard to silence that voice as I look at the third solution, Envelope. Its a paper phone that wraps around your real phone, designed by the U.K. studio Special Projects. The clever idea still allows you to dial, and even check the time. But you do miss very important things like text messages.

The idea is to try to last as long as possible before opening the envelope and getting your phone back, the team explains in the video above.

In another era, before smartphones took over our lives, I wouldve loved this idea for its wonky, playful UX. (Special Projects produced Googles printable phone that I mentioned above.) But the more I think about it, the more Envelope feels like an insult to those of us who rely on our smartphones, and the damage those phones are causing in the process.

Were addicted to screens, in part because theyre fun, in part because theyre essential, in part because theyre addictive by design. Imagine Molson Coors Brewing Company teasing an alcoholic with a koozie that locked booze inside a game, with a tagline like, The idea is to try to last as long as possible before opening the envelope and getting your Miller Lite back. The humor turns cruel pretty quickly.

The lives of everyday people are not a joke, and digital health is a real concern of our era. So Google, please, lets not turn phone addiction into a game that tests self-control. And dont even float an idea as infeasibly idiotic and downright condescending as using a piece of paper that you have to print out and wrap around your phone to defeat the active efforts of countless companies with unlimited budgets to get us back onto it. Its not helpful. And its not funny.

Read the original here:
Google's new 'Digital Wellbeing' tools, ranked from ingenious to offensive - Fast Company

Human Behavior

An Exploration Of Elevator Music At The Blanton – KUT

SoundSpace, the ongoing hybrid art series produced by Steve Parker at UTs Blanton Museum of Art, returns this weekend withNot Bad Muzak,a new installment inspired by elevator music and its close cousin, telephone on-hold music.

It aligns with a current exhibition by Ed Ruscha at the museum, Parker says. [Ruscha] uses text a lot in his work, and he often paints landscapes in the back. The text is the subject but the landscape in the back he refers to as elevator music."

Ruschas work inspired Parker to delve into the world of Muzak.

Elevator music was originally developed to manipulate behavior, Parker says. To soothe nerves in the elevator, to increase worker productivity in the factory, and also to get people to buy more things at the shopping malls. And were just looking at the different ways in which sound and music is used to manipulate human behavior.

To that end, Parker has partnered with radio producer Yowei Shaw to create what they callReally Good Elevator Music.

Weve commissioned a few different artists to create new elevator music for the Blantons elevator, Parker says. As you are travelling up and down on the Blantons elevator, youll experience new elevator music [that] at time has verbal prompts. Im most looking forward to audience reactions and what this new elevator music gets people to do, and what sort of interactions are facilitated as a result.

Among the other artists taking part inSoundSpace: Not Bad Muzakis choreographer Jennifer Sherburn, who is devising a new piece inspired by her complicated reaction to on-hold music.

When we started talking about elevator music or call center hold music, I realized that theres two versions of myself when Im on hold. One is, I quickly get mad and want to rebel and break things," she says. "And the other is, I just allow myself to get tugged away to a dream state, much like [when] you plunge into a pool of water and everything just kind of changes. So Im going to play with both of those things with movement.

Sherburns piece will be set to a new piece of music created by her brother Justin Sherburn, with whom she frequently collaborates.

Hes stoked about elevator music, Jennifer says. [And] whats cool is that if he goes into the direction Im thinking, its something he doesnt normally make, period. So itll be pretty refreshing for the both of us.

"SoundSpace: Not Bad Muzak" is Sunday, January 26 at 2:00 pm at the B;lanton Museum of Art.

Read the original:
An Exploration Of Elevator Music At The Blanton - KUT

Human Behavior

Resolving to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions – Daily Utah Chronicle

Its easy to boil down something such as a New Years resolution to a cliche. You can imagine a peer or family member telling you as such, that by February theyll have already forgotten what their resolutions even were. For myself, New Years Eve is not a remarkable or enjoyable holiday. Perhaps Im overly practical in that I see no point in missing out on good sleep to watch celebrities make television commentary on the New York City ball drop or dragging out a party for hours longer than it should last. The date simply changes, I think, and why should that be nearly as big of a deal as when any other day passes? Life goes on and progression is not linear burdening one week in January to an entire years worth of goal-making cant be a sustainable model for accomplishment. Can it?

Salt Lake City Sticks to Resolutions

Well, according to a recent study put out recently by WalletHub, from a variety of major cities across the United States, members of the community of Salt Lake City were the ninth most likely to achieve their New Years Resolutions. Why did Salt Lake do so well compared to other places across the nation? What is it that we are doing right, and that other cities are doing better than us? Some immediate answers one might think of to explain this success might include our own hardiness and determination. I mean, come on. Utahns are pretty scrappy on the whole. Could the explanation be that we take New Years as an occasion to take more seriously than other cities do? Though it could be easy to jump to such conclusions, the fact remains that other cities which are likewise well known for these traits didnt do so well in keeping their resolutions. New York City, for instance, which is again perhaps one of the most thrilling places to celebrate the new year with glitter and pizzazz, ranks quite a bit below Salt Lake in 30th place.

Financial writer Adam McCann, a contributor to WalletHubs study, instead determined the success of different resolutions according to outside environmental factors. Your location may be setting you up for failure, he wrote, adding that If you live in a neighborhood with no sidewalks or fitness centers nearby, for example, you may not feel as encouraged to exercise. The same goes if most of your restaurant options are limited to fast food you may be less likely to eat healthy on days you dine out. The statistics highlight interesting trends. For instance, cities with higher employment rates, highest median incomes and the least number of adults with health problems like smoking, obesity and alcoholism were the most likely to keep their resolutions. Other factors, such as parkland acreage and success of public schools also played into this, and the places with some of the most favorable factors were generally those at the top of the studys overall rankings, from San Francisco, California, to Gilbert, Arizona.

In the meanwhile, cities that generally fell at the bottom of the list most struggled across these areas or with certain problems to an extreme. Taken simply, goalkeeping isnt at all as simple as what a person is able to determine in the first few weeks of January, but what happens around oneself throughout the entirety of the year. Our success in our decisions about our own betterment cannot lie in instantaneous decisions. What we determine to surround ourselves by in our personal lives and our communities, in the long run, makes the difference.

Environment Matters

It might seem discouraging to imagine that it might not so much be our selected goals which matter to our growth than our surroundings. After all, most of us arent city planners or local government leaders, nor do any one of us make for the entirety of a consistently fluctuating economy. A city with more restaurants or nightlife than another is more likely to aid your start-of-the-year goal to socialize more often better than one which doesnt without your having to think so much about it. Yet, what can one do who does not live in such a place? Even Salt Lake City certainly has its sparse, financially underprivileged and more spread-out areas where community engagement is less accessible from the most well off parts of downtown. In response to WalletHubs research, Zlatan Krizan, a University of Iowa professor of psychology, suggested a solution. People are creatures of habit, and cues in our environment sustain them, he wrote. Not going to the mall will certainly eliminate any purchasing; you cannot spend if you are not there. As much as our world may change beyond the sense of individual control, consciously making what we are able to of our habits in relation to our surroundings is within reach.

As phrased by the iconic cleaning expert Marie Kondo, whom I adore, By starting with the easy things first and leaving the hardest for last, you can gradually hone your decision-making skills, so that by the end, it seems simple. Theres nothing wrong with writing out a five-year plan. However, as one of my favorite fictional characters once put it, you first have to choose a font to write it in. As well as it may do to outline grand hopes for ourselves we must remain mindful of how we curate our habits, to nurture the seeds that we decide to plant. As author James Clear explains in his New York Times bestselling book Nuclear Habits, In many cases, the environment matters more than motivation and skill alone, his calling it the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.

Clear recommends three important steps to shaping the spaces in which we live that I find quite effective, which includes automating good decisions, getting in the flow or remaining conscious of our behaviors and, lastly, avoiding negative influences that might distract us. Suppose I want to eat healthier. While this idea is a good resolution on its own, how can I affect my environment and daily living to achieve it? Following Clears suggestions, I could begin by proving myself with healthy ingredients and memorizing recipes I can make easily to support my new goal. My next step might be to keep a budget Im aware of and a plan I can check with intervals. Finally, I can quit purchasing so many Ramen cups as I currently do, since Ive come to notice that too strict a diet of vitamin-lacking noodles in salty water will make me feel drowsy and worn out.

With practice, I can change my simple hope for improvement into a real long-time track by immersing myself in a conducive environment in my habits, and supposing I take my goal a step further to organize and clean my kitchen, my physical environment as well. Remember, even though we treat New Years as a special day, its the ordinary days we tend not to pay attention to which count the most. After all, as Clear wrote, It is important to remember that the environment drives our good behaviors as well as our bad ones.

[emailprotected]

@NoWayBowe

See the original post here:
Resolving to Keep Your New Year's Resolutions - Daily Utah Chronicle

Human Behavior

Neuroscience study finds the brains response to emotional conflict predicts antidepressant treatmen … – PsyPost

Neuroimaging data from a large randomized controlled trial indicates that how people respond to antidepressant medication is predicted by how their brain processes conflicting emotional information. The findings have been published in Nature Human Behaviour.

This study addressed two questions central to the ability to meaningfully use biology to understand and guide psychiatric treatment and drug development, said study author Amit Etkin, the founder and CEO of Alto Neuroscience as well as a professor at Stanford University.

One was whether there are identifiable biological differences between patients with depression that determine who responds to an antidepressant compared to a placebo. The second was what role emotion regulation plays in defining those biological attributes.

Prior to this study, it has been unclear whether the apparent small difference in treatment outcome between antidepressants and placebo historically have been due to problems with the medications (i.e. they are not particularly effective) or problems with the diagnosis (i.e. definition of the disorder in broad clinical terms lumps together people with very different biology.)

The researchers examined functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from the EMBARC trial. EMBARC is by far the largest placebo-controlled neuroimaging study of antidepressants, Etkin said.

The trial randomly assigned 309 depressed outpatients to receive either the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor sertraline or placebo for 8 weeks.

The participants also underwent brain imaging prior to treatment, during which they were shown photographs in quick succession that offered sometimes conflicting messages such as an fearful face with the word happy or a smiling face with the word fear. The participants were instructed to identify the facial emotion with a key press, while trying to ignore the word.

The researchers then used machine learning analyses to identify specific brain regions that predicted whether participants would benefit from the SSRI treatment. The results showed that participants who had abnormal neural responses during emotional conflict were less likely to improve within eight weeks of starting the medication.

We found two very interesting things. First, it was very clear from our results that there are strong biological reasons for why a depressed patient responds to an antidepressant versus to a placebo, Etkin told PsyPost.

In other words, it seems that it is the catch-all way we make the clinical diagnosis of depression that is imprecise, and there are people for whom antidepressants work much better than placebo but others for whom there is no such difference. We were able to define these brain signatures in people using both conventional and machine learning analyses.

Second, we found that the reason people respond better to an antidepressant is that they seem to be better able to regulate emotion processing in an automatic manner. The better their brains did this, the greater the difference between the antidepressant and placebo, Etkin explained.

Another analysis of EMBARC data, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, found that patterns of functional connectivity in the brain appear to play an important role in identifying a favorable response for a drug treatment for major depressive disorder.

But there is still a need for more research.

As with any study, even one of a large population of patients studied over the course of a very detailed and exhaustive study, replication is needed to confirm the results. Such replications are unlikely to take the same form as EMBARC, which was a costly and effort-intensive study, and thus care must be taken to make sure that we progressively learn through each attempt at extension and generalization of these findings, Etkin said.

It would be nice in future work to see whether this kind of signal can be found with more clinic-ready brain imaging tools, such as EEG. Likewise, we have only started to scratch the surface of what it is that makes medication responders different from those who do not respond to medication, and thus a lot more work is needed at multiple levels (genetics, behavior, sleep, etc.)

Nonetheless, the general message from this paper is that it does seem that the imprecision inherent in our diagnoses is in large part to blame for the poor outcomes of the trial-and-error approach we currently rely on in psychiatric treatment, Etkin concluded.

The study, Brain regulation of emotional conflict predicts antidepressant treatment response for depression, was authored by Gregory A. Fonzo, Amit Etkin, Yu Zhang, Wei Wu, Crystal Cooper, Cherise Chin-Fatt, Manish K. Jha, Joseph Trombello, Thilo Deckersbach, Phil Adams, Melvin McInnis, Patrick J. McGrath, Myrna M. Weissman, Maurizio Fava, and Madhukar H. Trivedi.

Visit link:
Neuroscience study finds the brains response to emotional conflict predicts antidepressant treatmen ... - PsyPost

Human Behavior

‘landmark’ achievement: Scientists trace full wiring diagram of the fly brain’s core – STAT

Particle physicists are used to popping champagne corks when they make discoveries at lilliputian scales, but now its neuroscientists turn. After 12 years and more than $40 million, an eclectic team of 100 biologists, computer scientists, and neuronal proofreaders announced on Wednesday that they have mapped the connectome in the central region of the poppy-seed-sized brain of a fruit fly, working out the precise meanderings of 25,000 neurons and their 20 million connections.

The neural map covers one-third of the fly brain, making it the largest connectome, or wiring diagram, ever worked out; besides its 20 million synapses, the precise characterization of more than 4,000 cell types makes it the most detailed. All told, the feat by researchers at Google and the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute amounts to a big told you so to skeptics who said it couldnt be done this soon, this inexpensively, or this well.

With the connectome of the entire fly brain expected by 2022, the once-unimaginable rate of progress suggests that a human connectome is not the impossible dream skeptics believe.

advertisement

Its extraordinary, its huge, its a landmark in neuroscience, said Clay Reid of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, who is mapping the mouse connectome but was not involved in the flys. Nothing like this has ever happened in the field. It will be completely transformative.

Thats because although the Drosophila brain has only one-ten-thousandth the volume of the human brain, it is capable of sophisticated behavior, said Janelia director Gerry Rubin, who led the project. The connectome for its central region, or hemibrain, includes circuits for learning, remembering, navigating, sleeping, and maintaining circadian rhythms. By mining the data, which is publicly available and free to all, scientists will be able to identify the sequence of neurons that fire when a fruit fly detects the irresistible aroma of rotting banana, or follows a garbage truck like a long-lost love, among many other behaviors.

This tells you the whole chain of connections, including long-distance ones, Reid said. Instead of seeing maybe 300 connections as was possible with cruder connectomes, you can see millions, allowing you to trace neural circuits at a level that was completely unimaginable.

That matters for the holy grail of neuroscience: the human connectome. Although a Human Connectome Project ran from 2009 to 2014, it was more Google Earth than Google Street View, Reid said, mapping only the brains large-scale circuitry. In contrast, the Drosophila connectome shows every country lane, overpass, cloverleaf, and roundabout made by the 25,000 neurons, as the scientists describe in a preliminary paper (more are on the way). Thats what a passionate band of neuroscientists aspire to for the human brain: mapping the meanderings of its 86 billion neurons and their trillions of connections.

To neuroscientists, the appeal of the connectome is like that of the genome for geneticists. The Human Genome Project produced a blueprint of heredity and powered discoveries of the genetic causes of diseases and drugs to treat them. A human connectome could reveal the basic wiring that underlies thinking, remembering, reacting, moving, believing, and feeling. With more and more evidence that disorders such as autism and schizophrenia are caused by brain miswiring rather than, say, imbalances of neurochemicals, many neuroscientists believe mapping the connectome is more important than ever.

This is parallel to and will likely be as impactful as the genome project, which also started with non-human animals, said neuroscientist Diane Lipscombe of Brown University, the immediate past president of the Society for Neuroscience. Its critical to have a reference that everyone in the community can refer to. Although with current technology scientists cannot map the connectome in a living brain, they can make electrical and other measurements, she pointed out, which could be compared to a reference connectome for that species.

Based on the Drosophila connectome, Rubin estimates that you could do a 1,000-fold bigger project such as a mouse connectome with only 10 times the money in 10 years roughly $500 million (in addition to Janelias $40 million, Google contributed funding for the fly project). The Human Genome Project had $3 billion in government funding, and the 2020 budget of the National Institutes of Health tops $41 billion.

With a mouse connectome, which Reids team at the Allen Institute is pursuing (immediate goal: the 100,000 neurons and 1 billion synapses in 1 cubic millimeter of cortex), mouse versions of autism and schizophrenia and other brain diseases could reveal much more about the neural basis of such disorders.

As for a human connectome, the possibility of using it to understand human behavior and brain disorders is only the low-hanging fruit. Some scientists have even bolder and controversial ideas. If all of a brains wiring could be preserved after death, then if researchers can decode the connectome they might be able to read its content, and an individuals memories would transcend death.

Scaling up from mouse to human would probably require another 1-million-fold improvement in mapping speed, Rubin said, on top of the 1,000-fold improvement he and his team achieved since they began the fly connectome in 2008. But there has been a 1-trillion-fold increase in the speed of DNA sequencing since I did my Ph.D. thesis in 1973, Rubin said. (The sequencing of 158 bases of yeast RNA that took him two years can now be done by machines in a millisecond.) So these big numbers dont worry me.

In fact, it was technology that got the fly connectome this far.

Mapping a connectome begins with adding special stains to a brain (or hemibrain) to make neurons and other features stand out, then embedding it in epoxy. Technicians then cut it into slabs 20 microns thick, about the width of an extremely fine human hair.

Then comes a key technological breakthrough thats the microscopic equivalent of surface mining a seam of coal in Appalachia: focused ion beam milling combined with scanning electron microscopy, or FIB-SEM to its fans. A beam of gallium ions blasts off surface atoms, the microscope takes an image of whats revealed beneath, the beam mills off another 2 nanometers (thousandths of a micron), atomic layer, over and over. Eventually, the actual chunk of brain is gone. But 26 terabytes of image data (26 million photos) record what was. The entire fly brain would amount to 100 terabytes.

Computers stack the images in the same order as the brain slices. Identifying which little blob in one image belongs to the same neuron as a blob in other images, thereby tracing its path through the brain, has long been the bottleneck for constructing connectomes. Until recently, it was beyond the abilities of computers, and its so laborious for humans that Rubin originally estimated the fly connectome would take 250 people working for 20 years to map. The only animal whose connectome has been completed is the tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, with a piddling 302 neurons making about 7,000 synapses, and that took 15 years for a rough draft (released in 1986) and another 20 for a final.

Enter image segmentation, a technology that enables machines to recognize faces and objects in images, including to interpret medical scans and to make self-driving cars see. Looking to put segmentation technology to an acid test, computer scientist Viren Jain of Google began collaborating with the connectome team at Janelia, where hed worked previously. We thought we could push the state-of-the-art in image segmentation by working on a difficult scientific problem like connectomics, he said. Specifically, they could test whether segmentation algorithms could analyze the 50 trillion pixels in the Drosophila connectome dataset well enough to trace neurons from one imaged brain slice to the next.

The Googlers developed a tracing algorithm that detects a bit of neuron passing through one slice and determines where its next piece is in the next slice, and the next one, on and on until the neurons winding journey has been mapped as completely as Homer did Odysseus.

Algorithms aside, humans remained central to the process. The algorithm was trained on neurons that had been fully traced by Janelia researchers, for instance, and dozens of proofreaders at Janelia spent two years checking the algorithms output, making sure it didnt mistake one neurons branches for anothers. (Humans are more accurate than machines at such things, though much slower.)

Whether or not connectomes can illuminate the human mind, heathy and not, technologists believe even partial connectomes can improve machine intelligence by reverse engineering the brain. To that end, U.S. intelligence agencies are pouring $100 million into connectomics, including the Allen Institute mouse project, giving hope to dreamers that if scientists can map the human connectome they might one day be able to simulate a mind in silicon.

Such a prospect is likely decades away, if that. Even a mouse connectome will require algorithms that are 1,000 time faster and better than todays, Jain said, which is not a trivial thing to do. But when I started in connectomics in 2005, we couldnt [trace] a single neuron, let alone 25,000. And now look where we are.

Originally posted here:
'landmark' achievement: Scientists trace full wiring diagram of the fly brain's core - STAT

Human Behavior

Supernanny’s Jo Frost Takes on Modern-Day Family Issues and Wants an End to Father Knows Best – Parade

Americas favorite fictional nanny is either Mary Poppins or Fran Fine (Fran Drescher), but when it comes to real life, hands down the woman you want giving you advice on child rearing is Jo Frost, aka the Supernanny.

Supernanny has been on hiatus for a bit here in the U.S., but now its back on Lifetime with 20 all-new episodes that employ Frosts 30 years of expertise to help with the issues facing modern-day families, using her time-honored wisdom.

I change my techniques according to what the child or the parent needs, or the family as a whole needs, but as a professional, I do not move with a trend or a fad, she tells Parade.com in this exclusive interview. You dont fix something thats not broken, you know?

Frosts methods are tried and true, and she uses them to help families that have so much information at their fingertips, that it often causes more problems than it solves.

A lot of parents are confused because theyre reading a lot, and they cant make up their mind on what theyre doing, Frost continues. With human behavior, you go back to what you know, you go back to what you trust, you go back to what worked, because you know it worked for you and your family. Ive been in families homes now for 15 years, sat down on their sofas, drank a cup of tea with them, sat and cried with them, laughed with them, and got real with them, you know? So, the makeup of who I am will never change, because Im an honorable, integral person, who is really passionate about the work that I do.

Interview: Jo Frost Talks About Hitting the Road as the Nanny on Tour

One aspect of modern life that is different than when Frost first hit American shores is children having access to screens. Even though we are in the technology era, Frost insists the emphasis still should be on connecting with our families, which doesnt happen with too much screen time.

Technologys there to enhance our lives in so many ways, but if we abuse it and become addicted to it, then weve just created a whole heap of problems that not just myself, but many other parental professionals, psychologists, sociologists and psychiatrists predicted was going to happen 12 years ago.

And it isnt just theoretical for Frost. It is an issue she deals with in her life with her grandson, who loves to watch Dinotrux.

He gets a couple of episodes and then were out, she says. Were playing football, painting and drawing, and playing with his cars. We need to be able to find that balance.

Another new issue Frost is seeing is children being unnecessarily medicated. It is very easy to mislabel children, so parents should take on the responsibility of understanding how children should behave at specific ages before they rush to the doctor with a supposed ADHD child.

I think were pill happy, she says. I have very strong belief in bringing Western and Eastern medicine together. It doesnt have to be polarized. I dont want to underserve the importance of medication and how it serves us in the correct way, but I also want families to understand that we must embrace peace and stillness, and if we can bring Eastern and Western together, infuse it together, then I believe it will serve the family as a whole much better.

Movie Review: Emily Blunt Soars as Disneys Magical Nanny in Mary Poppins Returns

One problem that Frost deals with this season that is an old one is the idea that father knows best. She still sees families where the mother says, Wait until your father gets home, and that is something she would like to see go by the wayside.

Id like to see mothers at home be more assertive, be unapologetic, give themselves permission, and to stand up for themselves as an equal parent, whether that is being a parent whos authoritative and needs to discipline and put healthy boundaries in, or to serve out the candy. Its important for both parents to equally hold that stance in their home, because it undermines the other parent [if they dont].

Supernanny airs Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Lifetime.

View post:
Supernanny's Jo Frost Takes on Modern-Day Family Issues and Wants an End to Father Knows Best - Parade

Human Behavior

Study sheds light on the genetics of hibernation – Scope

When ground squirrels hibernate, their body temperatures drop dramatically -- roughly from 98.6 to 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks at a time.They also stop eating and enter into a state of torpor to conserve energy; their baseline physiology -- including metabolic, respiratory and heart rates -- slows to approximately 1-3% of normal function.

Arousing from that torpor and returning to their normal temperatures is an intense process akin to a heart attack, as the ground squirrels' heart rates essentially skyrocket so they can rewarm in just a couple of hours. Yet the squirrels emerge from hibernation undamaged and even protected from some conditions that are harmful to humans, such as heart attack and stroke, bone and muscle atrophy and metabolic diseases.

Though environmental factors, such as day length and temperature, influence when ground squirrels begin hibernation, individual genes also affect their behavior. In a recent paper published in Communications Biology, Stanford researchers Katharine Grabek, PhD, Carlos Bustamante, PhD, and their colleagues made strides in pinpointing the role of genetics in driving these large shifts in behavior and physiology -- insights that Grabek said could potentially be helpful in understanding humans.

"To hibernate, we think ground squirrels are using common mammalian genes shared with humans, but they are just utilizing them differently," she told me. "By identifying these genes, we can find new therapeutic avenues for human diseases."

To investigate, Grabek, Bustamante and their team took liver samples from 153 squirrels that were shipped to them by an OshKosh, Wisconsin breeder. They determined the genotype of each, and charted the familial relationships among the animals.

Then the scientists recorded the first day each subject's body temperature dropped, signaling the onset of hibernation. From there, they looked for patterns connecting the timing of hibernation with certain gene variants. They also applied a genome-wide association study -- which provided information about genetic mutations throughout each squirrel's genome to identify which genes statistically were most likely to be associated with the onset of hibernation.

The researchers found that hibernation onset in ground squirrels is strongly governed by genetics -- that is, after accounting for known environmental factors, the remaining differences in when squirrels started hibernation were due solely to genetic variation. The team also identified two genetic variants near FAM204A and EXOC4 -- both are genes shared with humans -- that are most likely responsible, as squirrels with these two mutations in their DNA went into hibernation later in the year than squirrels without the mutations. Twelve other variants also are likely associated with the onset of hibernation, according to the study, but the statistical values were not strong enough to be conclusive.

Grabek told me she was surprised by the definitive nature of the results: "I was expecting that there would be a genetic component explaining some of the variation in hibernation onset," she said, "I just didn't expect so much of variation in timing to be due to genetics."

Identifying genes behind the controlled process of torpor and hibernation could ultimately help scientists understand and develop treatments for conditions and diseases in humans, Grabek told me:

For example, prior to hibernation, the squirrels spend most of their days eating food and accumulating a lot of body fat. Then at the onset of hibernation, they stop eating altogether and, instead, use their fat reserves as a fuel source while they hibernate. Since the genes controlling this dramatic shift in food intake are likely shared with humans, after we identify them in squirrels, the human forms of the genes could be targeted with drugs to help people lose weight.

Other insights from the genes could help researchers formulate treatments to help people recover from heart attacks or strokes, or to maintain muscle mass during prolonged bouts of bed rest, she said.

Bustamante shares Grabek's excitement. He told me, "We believe this is the first of many insights that can be gleaned from studying the molecular basis of mammalian hibernation. Ultimately, we want to see this work translated into medicines and other therapies for the benefit of humankind."

Photo of a ground squirrel from the study, courtesy of Bryan Roeder and Sandra Martin

Go here to see the original:
Study sheds light on the genetics of hibernation - Scope