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Stranger Things And The History And Neuroscience Of Music Therapy - Forbes
Summary: Infiltrating gliomas are shaped by their genetic evolution and microenvironment, researchers report. The findings may help in the development of therapies to treat glioma brain tumors.
Source: University of Colorado
Researchers have discovered that infiltrating gliomas, a common brain and spinal cord tumor, are shaped by their genetic evolution and microenvironment, a finding that could lead to more targeted treatments.
We have identified epigenetic alterations at a recurrence that are not only prognostic in some cases, but may lead to different treatment options for the various subtypes that can improve long-term survival, said study co-author D. Ryan Ormond, MD, PhD, aUniversity of Colorado Cancer Centermember and associate professor of neurosurgery at the University of Colorado School of Medicine on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus.
Thestudywas published May 31 in the journalCell.
The researchers looked at how gliomas interact with the brain, change over time, develop treatment resistance and become more invasive.
They identified three distinct phenotypes or observable traits at glioma recurrence neuronal, mesenchymal and proliferative. Each of them converge with cellular, genetic and histological features that reveal themselves at recurrence. Some of these are associated with less favorable outcomes.
In this study, scientists used participant samples from the Glioma Longitudinal Analysis Consortium or GLASS cohort, a consortium created to identify the drivers of treatment resistance in glioma.
They analyzed RNA and/or DNA sequencing data from pairs of tumors from 304 adult patients with isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) wild type and IDH-mutant gliomas.
The tumors recurred in specific ways depending on the IDH mutation status. The changes they underwent during recurrence depended on how they interacted with the microenvironments they inhabited.
Researchers found that many IDH-wild type tumors were more invasive at recurrence. Their neoplastic cells showed increased neuronal signaling programs, suggesting a possible role for neuronal interactions in sparking the tumors progression.
They also discovered that hypermutation, often induced by treatment with drugs like temozolomide, along with deletion of the CDKN2A gene, which makes tumor-suppressing proteins, was associated with a proliferation of tumor cells at recurrence in both glioma subtypes.
In both IDH-wild type and IDH-mutant tumors, the hypermutation was associated with increased numbers of stem-like neoplastic cells. The growth of these cells reduced overall patient survival rates.
Collectively, these results indicate that genetic evolution at recurrence can alter neoplastic glioma cells toward a more proliferative phenotype that associates with poor prognosis, the study said.
Ormond said that therapy resistance remains a serious obstacle for patients with glioma and to improve quality of life and survival it needs to be overcome. These findings, he said, will enable physicians to better target the cancer with new therapies and treatments.
Author: David KellySource: University of ColoradoContact: David Kelly University of ColoradoImage: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access.Glioma progression is shaped by genetic evolution and microenvironment interactions by Ryan Ormond et al. Cell
Abstract
Glioma progression is shaped by genetic evolution and microenvironment interactions
The factors driving therapy resistance in diffuse glioma remain poorly understood. To identify treatment-associated cellular and genetic changes, we analyzed RNA and/or DNA sequencing data from the temporally separated tumor pairs of 304 adult patients with isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH)-wild-type and IDH-mutant glioma.
Tumors recurred in distinct manners that were dependent on IDH mutation status and attributable to changes in histological feature composition, somatic alterations, and microenvironment interactions.
Hypermutation and acquiredCDKN2Adeletions were associated with an increase in proliferating neoplastic cells at recurrence in both glioma subtypes, reflecting active tumor growth.
IDH-wild-type tumors were more invasive at recurrence, and their neoplastic cells exhibited increased expression of neuronal signaling programs that reflected a possible role for neuronal interactions in promoting glioma progression.
Mesenchymal transition was associated with the presence of a myeloid cell state defined by specific ligand-receptor interactions with neoplastic cells.
Collectively, these recurrence-associated phenotypes represent potential targets to alter disease progression.
Originally posted here:
Recurring Brain Tumors Shaped by Genetic Evolution and Microenvironment - Neuroscience News
Summary: Researchers have identified an area of the brain that appears to play a role in native realism and how we construct our own versions of reality.
Source: UCLA
Why are we so sure that the way we see people, situations and politics is accurate, and the way other people see them is foolishly wrong?
The answer, according to new research by UCLA psychology professor Matthew Lieberman, lies in a region of the brain he calls the gestalt cortex,which helps people make sense of information that is ambiguous or incomplete and dismiss alternative interpretations.
The research, based on an analysis of more than 400 previous studies,is publishedin the journalPsychological Review.
People often mistake their own understanding of people and events as objective truth, rather than as merely their own interpretation. That phenomenon, called naive realism,leads people to believe that they should have the final word on the world around them.
We tend tohave irrational confidence in our own experiences of the world, and to see others asmisinformed, lazy, unreasonable or biasedwhen they fail to see the world the way we do,Lieberman said.
The evidence from neural data is clearthat the gestalt cortex is central to how we construct our version of reality.
Naive realism may be the single most underappreciated source of conflict and distrust across individuals and groups, he said.
When others see the world differently than we do, it can serve as an existential threat to our own contact with reality and often leads to anger and suspicion about the others, Lieberman said. If we know how a person is seeing the world, their subsequent reactions are much more predictable.
While the question of how people make sense of the world has been an enduring topic in social psychology, the underlying brain mechanisms have never been fully explained, Lieberman said.
Mental acts that are coherent, effortless and based on our experiences tend to occur in the gestalt cortex. For example, a person might see someone else smiling and without giving it any apparent thought, perceive that the other person is happy.
Because those inferences are immediate and effortless,they typically feel more like seeing reality even though happiness is an internal psychological state than they do like thinking, Lieberman said.
Webelieve we have merely witnessed things as they are, which makes it more difficult to appreciate, or even consider,other perspectives, he said.
The mind accentuates its best answer and discards the rival solutions. The mind may initially process the world like a democracy where every alternative interpretation gets a vote, but it quickly ends up like an authoritarian regime where one interpretation rules with an iron fist and dissent is crushed. In selecting one interpretation, the gestalt cortex literally inhibits others.
Previous research by Lieberman has shown that when people disagree face to face for example on a political issue activity in their gestalt cortices is less similar than it is for people who agree with one another.
(That conclusion was supported bya2018 studyin the journal Nature Communications. UCLA psychologist Carolyn Parkinson and others found that similar neural patterns in the gestalt cortex were strong predictors of who was friends with whom.)
Gestalt was a German school of perceptual psychology whose motto was, The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The approach focused on how the human mind integrates elements of the world into meaningful groupings.
The gestalt cortex is located behind the ear, and it is situated between the parts of the brain responsible for processing vision, sound and touch; those parts are connected by a structure called the temporoparietal junction, which is part of the gestalt cortex.
In the new study, Lieberman proposes that the temporoparietal junction is central to conscious experience and that it helps organize and integrate psychological features of situations that people see so they can make sense of them effortlessly.
The gestalt cortex isnt the only area of the brain that enables people to quickly process and interpret what they see, he said, but it is an especially important one.
Using neurosurgical recordings to understand the social brain
In a separate study,published in April in the journalNature Communications, Lieberman and colleagues addressed how, given our complex social worlds, we are able to socialize with relative ease.
Using the first mass-scale neurosurgical recordings of the social brain, Lieberman, UCLA psychology graduate student Kevin Tan and colleagues at Stanford University showed that humans have a specialized neural pathway for social thinking.
Lieberman, author of thebestselling bookSocial: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect,said humans are social by nature and have an exceptional capacity for assessing the mental states of others. That ability requires the brain to process a large number of inferences from a vast array of idiosyncratic cues. So why does that process often feel so effortless compared to simple tasks like basic arithmetic?
Clear answers have been elusive for those who study social neuroscience. One culprit could be scientists reliance on functional magnetic resonance imaging, which is effective at scanning where brain activity occurs, but less effective at capturing the timing of that activity.
Researchers employed a technique called electrocorticography to record brain activity at millisecond and millimeter scales using thousands of neurosurgical electrodes. They found that a neurocognitive pathway that extends from the back to the front of the brain is especially active in areas closer to the front when people think about the mental states of others.
Their findings suggest that the temporoparietal junction may create a fast, effortless understanding of other peoples mental states, and that another region, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, may be more involved in thinking things through more slowly and carefully.
Author: Stuart WolpertSource: UCLAContact: Stuart Wolpert UCLAImage: The image is credited to Matthew Lieberman/UCLA Psychology
Original Research: The study is available in preprint via PsyArXiv Preprint
Summary: Researchers found no difference in the intensity of grief or the levels of distress between those who lost loved ones to medically assisted death or natural death in palliative care.
Source: University of Montreal
Is the grief experience different for individuals who have lost a loved one by medical assistance in dying (MAiD) compared to natural death with palliative care (NDPC)?
Philippe Laperle examines this sensitive issue in a recent article published in theJournal of Death and Dying, based on his Ph.D. research under the supervision of Marie Achille of the University of Montreals Department of Psychology and Deborah Ummel of the Universit de Sherbrookes Department of Psychoeducation.
Previous research suggests thatgrieffollowing the medically assisteddeathof a loved is no more challenging or complex than grief in other dying contexts, including sudden natural death or suicide. Some studies have even concluded that it may be easier.
Comparing two groups of bereaved individuals
To date, however, no one has compared bereavement following the loss of a loved one by MAiD and by NDPC, considered the gold standard in in end-of-life care and death preparation.
Laperle recruited 60 subjects who had been bereaved for at least six months. Twenty-five of them had lost a loved one by MAiD and 35 by NDPC. In the majority of cases (48), the cause of death was cancer.
The 51 women and 9 men first completed two questionnaires assessing different aspects of grief, symptoms of distress and the presence of prolonged grief disorder requiring professional psychological support. This quantitative component was followed by in-depth interviews with 8 members of each group.
No overall differences, but a diversity of experiences
Contrary to his initial hypothesis that grief would be easier after MAiD than after natural death, Laperle did not observe any significant differences in intensity or distress between the two groups.
The low scores for distress symptoms indicate that these two contexts tend to make grief easier in certain respects, said Laperle, although some bereaved individuals still reported a more difficult grief experience characterized by depression and guilt.
The interviews showed that the experiences of the bereaved were diverse and, sometimes, mixed in both groups. And that the traces, or imprints, left on the bereaved individual by their loved ones final moments and the separation brought by death could be painful, comforting or both at the same time.
When preparation for death and acceptance of its coming unfold at a similar pace in the dying person and their loved one, the two arrive at the same point mentally and emotionally at the time of death, which makes the subsequent grieving process easier, explained Laperle.
But if one of them accepts the impending death while the other remains in denial, this leaves imprints that are more difficult to overcome.
But regardless of whether the loved one passed away by MAiD or naturally under palliative sedation, in which case the person gradually slips into unconsciousness and death, some bereaved individuals felt the process was rushed.
In general, those who were in synchrony with their loved one experienced the death more serenely and felt it came at the right time.
Differences were also found n the subjects memories of the loved one. In the case of MAiD, some of the bereaved remembered the departed as a hero who embodied values of freedom, control, courage and/or immortality.
In the case of NDPC, the departed was more likely to be remembered as the embodiment of a beauty that never fades completely although it withers. Others felt left behind by their hero, which created a even greater void after their passing.
Its important to remember that every grieving process is different and that not everyone will be left with the same imprints, said Laperle.
In general, imprints fluctuate over time, arising momentarily to then dissipate and even transform. Other factors also impact grief, including the persons relationship with the deceased and degree of involvement during the illness. These factors can increase or decrease the effects of the imprints left by MAiD or NDPC.
Author: Press OfficeSource: University of MontrealContact: Press Office University of MontrealImage: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.To Lose a Loved One by Medical Assistance in Dying or by Natural Death with Palliative Care: A Mixed Methods Comparison of Grief Experiences by Philippe Laperle et al. OMEGAJournal of Death and Dying
Abstract
To Lose a Loved One by Medical Assistance in Dying or by Natural Death with Palliative Care: A Mixed Methods Comparison of Grief Experiences
The integration of assisted dying into end-of-life care is raising reflections on bereavement.
Patients and families may be faced with a choice between this option and natural death assisted by palliative care; a choice that may affect grief. Therefore, this study describes and compares grief experiences of individuals who have lost a loved one by medical assistance in dying or natural death with palliative care.
A mixed design was used. Sixty bereaved individuals completed two grief questionnaires. The qualitative component consisted of 16 individual semi-structured interviews.
We found no statistically significant differences between medically assisted and natural deaths, and scores did not suggest grief complications.
Qualitative results are nuanced: positive and negative imprints may influence grief in both contexts. Hastened and natural deaths are death circumstances that seem to generally help ease mourning.
However, they can still, in interaction with other risk factors, produce difficult experiences for some family caregivers.
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Does Grief Depend on How the Loved One Died? - Neuroscience News
Summary: Older adults who frequently experience bad dreams or nightmares are twice as likely to be diagnosed with Parkinsons disease, a new study reports.
Source: University of Birmingham
Older adults who start to experience bad dreams or nightmares could be exhibiting the earliest signs of Parkinsons disease, say researchers at the University of Birmingham.
A new study, published ineClinicalMedicine, showed that in a cohort of older men, individuals experiencing frequent bad dreams were twice as likely to be later diagnosed with Parkinsons as those who did not.
Previous studies have shown that people with Parkinsons disease experience nightmares and bad dreams more frequently than adults in the general population, but using nightmares as a risk indicator for Parkinsons has not previously been considered.
Lead author, Dr Abidemi Otaiku, of the Universitys Centre for Human Brain Health, said: Although it can be really beneficial to diagnose Parkinsons disease early, there are very few risk indicators and many of these require expensive hospital tests or are very common and non-specific, such as diabetes.
While we need to carry out further research in this area, identifying the significance of bad dreams and nightmares could indicate that individuals who experience changes to their dreams in older age without any obvious trigger should seek medical advice.
The team used data from a large cohort study from the USA, which contained data over a period of 12 years from 3818 older men living independently. At the beginning of the study, the men completed a range of questionnaires, one of which included a question about sleep quality.
Participants reporting bad dreams at least once per week were then followed up at the end of the study to see whether they were more likely to be diagnosed with Parkinsons disease.
During the follow-up period, 91 cases of Parkinsons were diagnosed. The researchers found that participants experiencing frequent bad dreams were twice as likely to develop the disease compared to those who did not.
Most of the diagnoses happened in the first five years of the study. Participants with frequent bad dreams during this period were more than three times as likely to go on to develop Parkinsons.
The results suggest that older adults who will one day be diagnosed with Parkinsons are likely to begin experiencing bad drams and nightmares a few years before developing the characteristic features of Parkinsons, including tremors, stiffness and slowness of movement.
The study also shows that our dreams can reveal important information about our brain structure and function and may prove to be an important target for neuroscience research.
The researchers plan to use electroencephalography (EEG) to look at the biological reasons for dream changes. They will also look at replicating the findings in larger and more diverse cohorts and explore possible links between dreams and other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers.
Author: Beck LockwoodSource: University of BirminghamContact: Beck Lockwood University of BirminghamImage: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.Distressing dreams and risk of Parkinsons disease: A population-based cohort study by Abidemi Otaiku et al. EClinicalMedicine
Abstract
Distressing dreams and risk of Parkinsons disease: A population-based cohort study
Parkinsons disease (PD) is associated with alterations to the phenomenology of dreaming including an increased frequency of distressing dreams. Whether distressing dreams may precede the development of PD is unknown. This study investigated the association between frequent distressing dreams and the risk of incident PD.
3818 men aged 67 years or older from the Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), a population-based cohort from the USA, who were free from PD at baseline (December 2003 April 2011) and completed item 5h of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index which probes the frequency of distressing dreams in the past month, were included in this analysis. Incident PD was based on doctor diagnosis. Multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios (OR) for incident PD according to distressing dream frequency, with adjustment for potential confounders.
During a mean follow-up of 73 years, 91 (24%) cases of incident PD were identified. Participants with frequent distressing dreams at baseline had a 2-fold risk for incident PD (OR, 201; 95% CI, 11-36,P=0.02). When stratified by follow-up time, frequent distressing dreams were associated with a greater than 3-fold risk for incident PD during the first 5 years after baseline (OR, 338; 95% CI, 13-87;P=001), however no effect was found during the subsequent 7 years (OR, 155; 95% CI, 07-33;P=026).
In this prospective cohort, frequent distressing dreams were associated with an increased risk for incident PD. The association was only significant within the 5 years prior to diagnosis, which suggests that frequent distressing dreams may be a prodromal symptom of PD.
The study received no external funding.
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Bad Dreams Could Be Early Warning of Parkinson's Disease - Neuroscience News
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Exponential Growth Expected for Neuroscience Market With Complete SWOT Analysis by Forecast From 2022 to 2028: Alpha Omega, Inc., GE Healthcare, Axion...
Summary: People with higher levels of omega-3 DHA in their blood are 49% less likely to develop dementia than those with lower levels. Researchers say adding additional omega-3 DHA to the diet, especially in those with the Alzheimers associated Apoe4 gene, could slow the development and progress of dementia.
Source: Wright On Marketing & Communications
New research published today inNutrientsshows that people with a higher blood DHA level are 49% less likely to develop Alzheimers disease vs. those with lower levels, according to theFatty Acid Research Institute(FARI).
The study, led by Aleix Sala-Vila, PhD, suggested that providing extra dietary omega-3 DHA, especially for those carrying the ApoE4 gene (which approximately doubles an individuals susceptibility to develop AD) might slow the development of the disease.
Such a cost-effective, low-risk dietary intervention like this could potentially save billions in health care costs.
In this prospective observational study conducted within theFramingham Offspring Cohort including 1490 dementia-free participants aged 65 years old researchers examined the association of red blood cell (RBC) docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) with incident Alzheimers Disease (AD), while also testing for an interaction with APOE-4 carriership.
Risk for incident AD in the highest RBC DHA quintile (Q5, >6.1%) was 49% lower compared with the lowest quintile (Q1, <3.8%). An increase in RBC DHA from Q1 to Q5 was predicted to provide an estimated 4.7 additional years of life free of AD.
Further, the researchers noted that an increased intake of DHA might lower risk for developing AD, particularly in higher-risk individuals such as those carrying theAPOE-4 allele, suggestingthat they may benefit more from higher DHA levels than non-carriers.
The public health impact of preventing AD with something as simple as a dietary intervention like DHA is also significant.
The researchers noted that Given that estimated health-care payments in 2021 for all patients with AD or other dementias amount to $355 billion in the US (not including caregiving by family members and other unpaid caregivers), any cost-effective strategy for delaying the onset of AD is of utmost public health interest, and that Delaying AD by 5 years leads to 2.7 additional years of life, and 4.8 additional AD-free years for an individual who would have acquired AD and is worth over $500,000.
So how does this paper stack up to others in this area? Our study is in line with that ofTan et al.who reported cross-sectional associations with RBC DHA on cognitive performance and brain volume measurements (with higher DHA being associated with beneficial outcomes) in the same cohort as studied here, said William S. Harris, PhD, President of FARI, and senior author on this recent study.
Most interestingly, 15 years ago similar findings were reported bySchaefer et al.in the parents of the individuals who were the focus of this present investigation (i.e., the Original Framingham Heart Study cohort).
Schaefer et al. reported that participants in the top quartile of plasma phosphatidylcholine DHA experienced a significant, 47% reduction in the risk of developing all-cause dementia compared with those with lower levels, Dr. Harris continued.
Similar findings a generation apart in a similar genetic pool provide considerable confirmation of this DHA-dementia relationship.
Author: Becky WrightSource: Wright on Marketing & CommunicationsContact: Becky Wright Wright On Marketing & CommunicationsImage: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: The findings will appear in Nutrients
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People With a High Omega-3 DHA Level in Their Blood Are at 49% Lower Risk of Alzheimer's - Neuroscience News
New research by Dr. Andrew Halley and the Krubitzer Lab at UC Davis details how bat brains are highly specialized for echolocation and flight
By MARGO ROSENBAUM science@theaggie.org
People often wonder how the mammals we see swinging through trees, swimming in the ocean or flying over our heads relate to us. We ponder how millions of years of evolution resulted in so many mammals of varying intelligence and abilities.
If only we could look right into their brains.
Dr. Andrew Halley, a postdoctoral researcher in the Krubitzer Lab at UC Davis, did just that. With the help of fellow researchers at UC Davis, Simon Fraser University and UC Berkeley, Halley performed brain surgeries on anesthetized bats to better understand the motor cortex the region of the brain controlling voluntary movement across the body.
Publishing the results on May 25 in the journal Current Biology, Halley and the other researchers discovered that bats brains are highly specialized for two unique aspects of their biology: echolocation and self-propelled flight.
To make this discovery, Halley, the lead author of the paper, and his colleagues mapped the brain regions controlling movements in these fruit bats, focusing on areas dedicated to echolocation and flight.
Bats represent a quarter of all living mammalian species, but until only recently, much of their brains and evolution remained a mystery. Halley and his fellow researchers sought to change that.
Before this study, a bat species full motor cortex had never been mapped. This achievement now allows researchers to understand the part of the brain involved in the planning, control and execution of voluntary movements.
Paths to studying evolution
Fascinated by evolutionary questions, Halley studies evolutionary neurobiology and comparative neuroscience. Originally from Philadelphia, he majored in psychology and worked in a genetics laboratory as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University. Halley said he grew up more interested in the humanities but always held a fascination for psychology.
Biology piqued his interest when he started taking biology classes in college, especially after learning about evolutionary theory. With the questions he started asking, he realized he needed to learn more about neuroscience to answer them and wanted to study brain evolution.
Halley completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 2016, after studying biological anthropology and working on a project tangentially related to neuroscience, in which he studied differences in embryonic development across species.
This fascination for evolution and neuroscience brought him to the Krubitzer Lab at the UC Davis Center for Neuroscience as a postdoctoral researcher.
The Krubitzer Lab was sort of a natural fit; [Dr. Krubitzer] is one of the preeminent brain evolution researchers thats around, Halley said.
Dr. Mackenzie Englund, a former graduate student in the lab and co-author of the paper, shares Halleys appreciation for evolution and sensory systems, which he said are this medium through which we interact with the world. Englund came to UC Davis for his Ph.D. to research similar questions.
Evolution was always just one of those things that made me feel really close to the world, Englund said.
Straying from the study of traditional model organisms
Led by Dr. Leah Krubitzer, the lab largely focuses on studying the evolution of the neocortex, which is the part of the brain that most people think of when they think of a brain, according to Halley. The lab is interested in multiple aspects of the neocortex: its function, interconnectivity within the structure and how it links to other parts of the brain.
By studying a range of mammals, the labs researchers seek to understand how evolution results in varied brain organization across species. Halley said the lab takes a comparative approach and studies animals that stray from traditional model organisms, such as mice and zebrafish.
The lab strives to understand whether parts of the brain have evolved to correspond to uniqueness in the bodies of mammals like opossums, platypi, primates, tree shrews and most recently with the help of Halley bats.
You can learn a lot of things just by looking at extreme adaptations that you find in the natural world, Halley said. Comparative research on the one hand is just inherently interesting because were interested in understanding how evolution works, and specifically how brain evolution works.
According to Halley, its important to study animals other than just model organisms, since studying only these animals tells researchers little about evolutions role in altering brains across many different species.
Theres a handful of biological models that are generally used to do sort of bread and butter neuroscience, and theyre also really widely used for translational research for trying to develop medicines, Halley said. There are limits to the degree to which a laboratory mouse is a good model for a human.
Brain surgery on bats
Halleys recent work is part of a larger project in the Krubitzer Lab to illustrate how regions of species brains are organized according to differences in their bodies and behaviors.
This study focused on understanding the motor cortex in bats: its variation, what it represents and whether flight and echolocation have resulted in unique morphologies, such as the extra elongated fingers of bats, with membranes connecting the digits, forelimbs and hind limbs to form their giant wings.
It varies from individual to individual motor cortex is so much more variable than other sensory areas because the cortex may be built by things that we do, our behaviors, Englund said.
All mammals have a motor cortex, so understanding this important part of the brain in bats could hint at understanding brain function and evolution in humans.
Whats really important is figuring out the common themes of the motor cortex across all species, and what things can vary, Englund said.
Using bats from a breeding colony at UC Berkeley, Halley, Englund and the other researchers performed brain surgery to study their questions.
After anesthetizing the bat under study, Halley and the scientists opened up the bats skull, exposed the neocortex and used electrodes to stimulate different areas of the motor cortex. By applying small bits of current, they sought to determine which muscle and limb movements were created by stimulating various parts of the motor cortex.
Applying small bits of current to different parts of the brain was essentially an artificial way of mimicking what happened in a naturally-behaving bat, Halley said
Halley and Englund worked together and took turns in the experiments, which often resulted in work days lasting from 12 to 15 hours. Because every animals life is so precious, they wanted to get the most data they could out of each experiment, Englund said.
Wed be switching off in the experiment room, giving each other breaks so we could go slam some coffee and maybe a granola bar, Englund said.
In the end, their novel findings were worth the grueling days.
The researchers notably discovered that in Egyptian fruit bats, large regions of the motor cortex are devoted to their tongue, which makes sounds for echolocation, and to the muscles propelling their limbs for flight.
Mapping a motor cortex
After the experiments, the researchers could create a map of the spatially-segregated areas of the brain that regulate body movements. The map is topographic compared to the body, meaning certain parts of the body are larger or smaller depending on the species. Larger areas on the map mean that part of the body is overrepresented in the brain, Halley said.
The central findings of our study were that different parts of the brain are enlarged in different species based on their behaviors or their body types, Halley said.
Areas of emphasis in the motor cortex can likely be explained by their unique biology and adaptations. Egyptian fruit bats have unusual methods of echolocation instead of using their larynx like most bats, these animals use their tongue. In the study, over 40% of the stimulated sensory and motor cortex controlled tongue movements. Additionally, the vast majority of the motor cortex was responsible for coordinated shoulder and hindlimb movements, explaining a possible reason for the special morphology of bat wings.
Despite all the work of Halley, Englund and others at the Krubitzer Lab, more study is necessary to understand the full scope of the motor cortex and other parts of the brain in bats.
These animals are becoming more common as model species of study, but still, many of their neurobiology basics remain poorly understood. Creating and maintaining colonies is complex, and their unique body morphology makes it more difficult to use them in neuroscience research, Halley said.
Future evolutionary neurology research could involve more study of bats based on Halleys findings: Mapping the motor cortex is just step one.
Written by Margo Rosenbaum science@theaggie.org
A massive, global study of social distancing motivations has yielded new, psychology-based insights into the effectiveness of different styles of social distancing messaging.
Illinois Institute of Technology associate professors of psychology Nikki Legate and Arlen Moller, in collaboration with co-lead coauthor Thuy-vy T. Nguyen, an assistant professor of psychology at Durham University, found that messages that encouraged personal agency were more likely to influence individuals' behaviors than those that were controlling or shaming.
Though the study began early into the pandemic, Moller says its findings may continue to prove helpful going forward.
As pandemic fatigue sets in, many people across the globe are considering abandoning risk-mitigating behaviors, while some even go out of their ways to defy them, despite threats of death and long-COVID to self and others, and rising case rates in many places."
Nikki Legate, Associate Professor of Psychology, Illinois Institute of Technology
The study was launched in response to a 2020 call for projects from the Psychological Science Accelerator, a democratic network of labs around the world, to use psychological science to help solve global problems related to COVID-19.
"The mission of this project [was] to find universally effective ways of motivating people to engage in social distancing around the world, and to see whether there are unintended costs of using common motivational strategies like shaming and pressuring people," Legate says.
The researchers engaged 27,190 study participants from 89 countries, and collected data from April to September 2020.
"There haven't been that many projects that have involved coordinating team science in this way," Moller says. "I think it's at the very edges of advancing how psychological science is done."
The team's paper, titled "A Global Experiment on Motivating Social Distancing During the COVID-19 Pandemic," was published in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences. It was also presented at the Society of Behavioral Medicine's Annual Meeting in April. More than 500 collaborators from around the world served as reviewers and coauthors on the paper.
"It's a pandemic that is affecting every corner of the world," Legate says. "It was very important to us to really know, if our messages were effective, were they effective globally? We're interested in finding solutions that can apply all over the world, not just in specific subsets. We're trying to figure out solutions for a global population, so the fact that we observed a few small generalizable effects is exciting."
Study participants were randomly assigned one of three conditions: an autonomy-supportive message that inspired reflective choices, a controlling message about social distancing that was forceful and shaming, or no message at all. They read a short passage that was an appeal to engage in social distancing, and then took a one-time survey in response.
"The messages were pretty identical except for some key words-;blaming and shaming versus those that promoted agency and personal choice," Legate says. "What we found is that these messages that we're calling autonomy supportive-;messages that encourage choice and personal agency around social distancing-;had some benefits compared to messages that were controlling, really shaming, or making people feel like a terrible person if they don't do it."
For example, participants reading an autonomy-supportive message experienced lower feelings of defiance, compared with those reading a message that was controlling or shaming. Moller cites news coverage of "COVID parties" during the pandemic-;instances where people showed up for large social gatherings despite government recommendations to stay home and socially distance, or to socialize in small groups only-;as an example of defiance. He also says the study's findings mirrored those of other studies around human behavior and motivational messaging.
"The correlational findings were almost entirely as predicted in terms of defiance and long-term intentions," Moller says. "There is a lot of behavioral medicine research that follows similar patterns to what we observed here-;to exercise, take your medicine, etc. But I don't think any study on motivating health behavior has been as large and diverse as this one."
The data set from this project is available to any researchers interested in conducting follow-up studies.
"The insights from the first stage of analyzing these data were about global messaging campaign strategies," Moller says. "Follow-up research could look at the many different dimensions that cultures vary on. Researchers who are interested in one or multiple aspects of culture can now go deeper to see, with more nuance, if in a particular culture, one messaging strategy was more or less effective. We hope to continue developing this research to help control COVID and future pandemics."
Source:
Journal reference:
Massey, D., et al. (2022) A global experiment on motivating social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2111091119
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Global study yields new insights into the effectiveness of social distancing messaging - News-Medical.Net
You think failure is hard? So is learning from it
Fail fast, fail often, goes the business mantra. But theres a problem. The Silicon Valley catchphrase doesnt tell the whole story of failure. It takes for granted that we actually learn from it. And thats not always so easy, explain Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach. In a new paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science, they outline the emotional and cognitive barriers that can get in the way of learning when things go wrong.
Emotionally, for example, failure is ego-bruising, and facing up to it means getting over the desire to protect our self-image. Cognitively, we may miss valuable information when we fail because understanding what went wrong is a less direct process than figuring out what went right. In their paper, Eskreis-Winkler and Fishbach offer ideas for ways to overcome these emotional and cognitive hurdles so that when the inevitable happens, we can make the most of it. [Perspectives on Psychological Science; open access]
Rediscovery: The norm of self-interest (1999)
What are we to make of evidence suggesting that material self-interest is a powerful force in peoples lives? asks Dale Miller in his 1999 essay in American Psychologist. In his article, Miller explains that this evidence is inherently ambiguous because the ideology of self-interest, widely celebrated in individualistic cultures, functions as a powerful self-fulfilling force.
A key aspect of the self-fulfilling force, and the focus of MIllers paper, is that individualistic cultures spawn social norms that induce people to follow their material self-interest rather than their principles or passions. What that means, he explains, is people act and sound as though they are strongly motivated by their material self-interest because scientific theories and collective representations derived from those theories convince them that it is natural and normal to do so.
Miller concludes: As Kagan (1989) observed, People treat self-interest as a natural law and because they believe they should not violate a natural law, they try to obey it. [American Psychologist, open access]
The misperception that equality is zero-sum
Is equality inherently zero-sum? A new Science Advances paper illustrates that those with the greatest power to enact change tend to think so, even in the face of evidence suggesting otherwise. Across nine studies, the authors examine the reactions of advantaged group members to equality-enhancing policies and find that they consistently and incorrectly assume that increasing equality harms their group.
In one study, they conducted a longitudinal field experiment examining support for affirmative action. The more the advantaged group (in this case, white and Asian Americans) believed that eliminating the ban would harm their own groups access to employment and education, the less likely they were to vote for the proposition. The perception of harm was more indicative of voting behavior than outright prejudice, political orientation, or opposition to equality, lending support to the authors argument that the misperception of harm is a significant roadblock in garnering support for real-world equality-enhancing policies.
In a separate series of lab studies, they tested whether incentives, collective benefit (i.e., policies that would increase resources for everyone, not just the disadvantaged group), and explicit guarantees that the advantaged group would be unaffected could help mitigate this false assumption. Nothing seemed to workacross scenarios ranging from mortgage lending discrimination to university admission, the authors observed the persistent and pernicious misbelief that equality itself is inherently zero-sum. [Science Advances]
Challenging the notion of slavery as the economic engine of the early United States
Did slavery play an indispensable role in the rise of the U.S. economy to world preeminence? asks economic historian Gavin Wright.
The answer, he argues, is no. Accounts of the sources of U.S. economic growth in the nineteenth-century suggest that slavery and the shift of the slave-owning South to cotton production early in the century had relatively little effect on growth for the nation as a whole, he writes. The deeper source of long-run U.S. economic growth were improvements in technology, internal transportation, finance, and education, and the slave-owning South lagged in all of these areas.
One reason for this lag was that slavery and growing cotton incentivized fractured and independent economic decisions, meaning there was little reason to invest in shared infrastructure, like roads or education. Becuase slaves were movable personal property in a well-developed regional market, their value was virtually independent of local development, Wright explains. Because slaves provided captive labor for setup tasks like land-clearing, owners had little reasons to engage in recruitment of workers or settlers, activities that engaged extensive entrepreneurial energies in the states where slavery was prohibited.
A simple summary of these patterns, Wright concludes, might be this: Slavery enriched slave-owners, but impoverished the southern region and did little to boost the U.S. economy as a whole. [Journal of Economic Perspectives]
American enslavement and the recovery of Black economic history
In the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Economist Trevon Logan makes the case for a more human-centered look at the economic history of slavery. Drawing on data and narratives from his own familys work growing cotton in the 1950s and 1960s, he illustrates what current methods of economic history miss and what could be gained if the methodological approach is expanded. Importantly, a deeper understanding the economic history of slavery can help inform contemporary conversations about its legacy and effects.
Racial identity and economic identity are deeply related in ways that are immediately obvious in qualitative data but are obscured in much of the current work on race in economic history, Logan writes. Race as an experience, he continues, means that it is a process that is not easily described by a fixed variable in a dataset. Limiting ourselves to the quantitative record gives us partial answers to the questions we ask about racial economic inequality and the endurance of those inequalities over time. [Journal of Economic Perspectives]
The possibility for peace in Colombia
After the emergence of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) in the 1950s, Colombia spent many years racked with internal conflict. In 2016, a peace deal was put to a popular vote through a national referendum. But it was rejected. Although a revised deal was ultimately ratified, peace remains an aspiration rather than a reality.
A peaceful resolution is unlikely without popular support for the reintegration of former FARC combatants into Colombian society. To help drive this support, a group of researchers and local filmmakers teamed up to develop a five-minute media intervention featuring interviews with former FARC combatants. The goal of the video was to assuage doubts among non-FARC Colombians about the ability and willingness of ex-FARC members to change. And they succeededacross three studies, the video helped reduce reported dehumanization of former FARC members and boosted support for peace and reintegration. The positive effect persisted even in a 10-12 week follow-up survey.
The authors are hopeful their media intervention approach could contribute to resolving conflict more broadly: Practically, this intervention can be scaled up relatively easily and thus has the potential to nudge Colombian society, as well as other societies immersed in conflict, towards more lasting peace. [Nature Human Behaviour]
People see political opponents as more stupid than evil
Conservatives think liberals are stupid, and liberals think conservatives are evil, wrote the political columnist Charles Krauthammer. But do they? Rachel Hartman, Neil Hester, and Kurt Gray probe this oft-cited but unstudied idea in an article in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Across four studies, they surveyed over 1,600 people to better understand how they viewed their political opponents intelligence and morality.
In each study, they asked participants to evaluate their political ingroup and political outgroup across six dimensions of unintelligence (e.g., not smart, illogical) and six dimensions of immorality (e.g., immoral, have bad intentions). Across the studies, they found that both conservatives and liberals perceived the other side as more unintelligent than immoral. Or, in Krauthammers framing, more stupid than evil. One caveat is the relative stakes of intelligence and moralityevil is a much more damning label than stupid.
The authors suggest a takeaway geared toward finding a way to come together: If partisans view each other as more unintelligent than immoral, there is reason to believe that asking them to reflect on the morality of their outgroup may reduce animosity toward them. [Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin]
The promises of summer youth employment programs: lessons from randomized evaluations
Summer youth employment programs (SYEPs) are a policy tool for supporting youth, particularly those from underserved communities, during their pivotal transition into adulthood. A team from J-PAL North America reviewed the results of 13 randomized controlled trials that evaluated the effectiveness of SYEPs in New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Across these studies, the authors found that most teens (90 percent) who received a summer employment offer through an SYEP accepted ita dramatic improvement from the 20-30 percent baseline summer employment rate. They also found that program participants were less likely to enter the criminal justice system. Encouragingly, the youth at the highest risk for negative outcomes (e.g., arrests, convictions, and premature death) were those that benefitted the most. [Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab]
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Research Lead: Is Equality Zero-Sum, The Norm of Self-Interest, Failing Better, and More - Heather Graci & Evan Nesterak - Behavioral Scientist