CWL

Open Your Mind to the New Psychedelic Science

‘The illegality of these drugs … is one of the greatest scandals in modern research’

Greg Miller over WiredScience writes an enticing piece on the development of psychedelic drug usage not just as a recreational activity but also for psychological health benefits. I picked out my favorite excerpts from the article but I recommend going over and reading the whole thing:

“Now that we’ve been able to start getting some evidence on the benefits, it changes people’s calculus,” said Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), one of the meeting’s sponsors.

Doblin and MAPS have been battling regulators since the mid-80s to allow research and clinical trials with psychedelics. The recent revival of psychedelic science may be one sign their efforts are finally paying off.

Public attitudes towards illegal drugs in general may be shifting. A recent Pew Research Center survey, for example, found for the first time that more than half of Americans think marijuana should be legal. Baby boomers in particular, who may have hidden their stash while raising kids, seem to be loosening up in their old age, the survey found.

The interest in psychedelics may also have something to do with a growing sense of frustration over the lack of promising new psychiatric drugs in the pipeline. Many of the current drugs are based on compounds discovered serendipitously in the 1950s, and true innovation has been so hard to come by that many companies are giving up.

Meanwhile, people have been using hallucinogens for centuries, often in religious healing ceremonies, and yes, sometimes just for the hell of it. But just because they’re party drugs for some doesn’t mean they can’t be the subject of serious scientific inquiry. Or does it? After all, it didn’t end so well the first time around.

From its inception in 2010, the Psychedelic Science meeting has brought together an interesting mix of people. A record 1,800 of them attended this year. The prevalence of ponytails, nose rings and hemp accessories is predictably higher than at a typical science conference. There was also a tea lounge, a psychedelic art gallery, and a quiet room for anyone in need of riding out a rough trip.

“Absolutely some scientists would see the rainbow colors on the logo and the psychedelic art exhibits and say ‘that’s not real science,’” said Brad Burge, the communication director for MAPS. At the same time, some of the more mystically inclined devotees of psychedelics are averse to the scientific dissection of what they see as a sacred experience, Burge says. The conference isn’t for the folks at those ends of the spectrum.

Burge acknowledges there’s a tricky balancing act involved in hosting a forum for scientists who want their work to be taken seriously without excluding those who use psychedelic drugs recreationally. Even so, “we’re trying to get around the idea that there has to be a separation,” he said.

After all, this latter group helps fund much of the research through their donations to MAPS and other private organizations like the Heffter Research Institute and Beckley Foundation. Government funders like the National Institutes of Health are still skittish about psychedelic research.

—

Dráulio Barros de Araújo, a neuroscientist at the Brain Institute at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, presented new findings from an fMRI brain scan study with 10 experienced ayahuasca users, followers of Santo Daime, a spiritual practice that uses the brew.

Araújo’s team found that ayahuasca reduces neural activity in something called the default mode network, an web of interconnected brain regions that fire up whenever people aren’t focused on any specific task. It’s active when people daydream or let their minds wander, for example.

The default mode network has been a hot topic in neuroscience in recent years. Scientists don’t really know what it does, but they love to speculate. One interpretation is that activity in this network may represent what we experience as our internal monologue and may help generate our sense of self.

Full Article

Memory Myths

As a lifelong user of human memory, you probably feel you’ve got a good idea of how it works, right? To test your understanding of memory, we compare several commonplace conceptions with insights from psychology.

by Christian Jarrett

Memory acts like a video recorder

In a US survey published in 2011, 63% of 1,838 respondents said they believed “strongly” or “mostly” that memory works like a video camera, “accurately recording events we see and hear so that we can review and inspect them later”. Memory is, in fact, a creative, fallible process, highly prone to suggestion and other distorting influences.

Some people have photographic memories

An extension to the memory as video recorder myth is the idea that some people have a “photographic memory”; that they can take a snap shot of a scene or a page in a book, and then bring it to mind whenever they want to.

It’s tempting to invoke such an ability to explain the achievements of celebrated memory champions such as Lu Chao. In 2005, he set a new world record (as recognised by the Guinness World Records) by reciting the first 67,890 digits of pi entirely from memory. However, studies of memory champions reveal that they depend on mnemonic devices and thousands of hours of practice.

A related concept is eidetic imagery, in which a person claims to “see” a detailed visual scene that is no longer visible. However, tests of “eidetikers” find their memory of images to be no more accurate than control participants. It seems they just feel as though the image is vivid and still “out there” rather than in their heads.

Forgetting occurs gradually

Some memory misconceptions have serious consequences for the way eye- (and ear-) witness testimony is treated in court. For example, many people, including psychologists (according to a recent Norwegian survey), believe that forgetting occurs gradually, as if memories decay like an ageing reel of film. In fact, most forgetting occurs immediately after an event.

Confidence is a reliable indicator of memory accuracy

While it’s true that accuracy and confidence can correlate within a single person’s repertoire of recollections, confidence is a poor marker of accuracy when judging a single act of recollection or when comparing across witnesses. One reason is that some factors, such as repeated questioning, can boost confidence without increasing accuracy. Also, we all vary in our baseline levels of memory confidence. So when judging a single witness, we don’t know if their confidence is high by their standards. In the legal system, when convicted people are exonerated by DNA evidence, confident testimony from an eye witness is the most common reason they were originally found guilty.

A related myth is that emotional events lead to more ingrained, accurate memories. Memories for dramatic events often feel more vivid and people feel more confident in these memories, but, in fact, they are just as prone to being forgotten as ordinary memories. Furthermore, if an event is stressful, this is likely to interfere with remembering details of that event.

Traumatic memories can be repressed and “recovered” years after they occurred

While subscribing to the erroneous idea that memories of emotive events are highly accurate, many people also often hold the somewhat paradoxical belief that traumatic memories, such as of abuse in childhood, are prone to repression. A related belief is that such memories can be “recovered” later in life, dug out with the help of a skilled therapist, or perhaps a hypnotist.

In fact, studies of child abuse victims suggest strongly that they usually do not forget their experiences. Moreover, research has shown that memories of abuse “recovered” in therapy are far less likely to be corroborated by third parties, or other evidence, than abuse memories recalled later in life outside of therapy, or never-forgotten abuse memories.

The consensus of the American Psychological Association on child abuse memories says that “most people who were sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them, although they may not fully understand or disclose it”.

Hypnosis can be used to retrieve forgotten memories

Many people believe that hypnosis can be used to unearth not only past traumas but all manner of long-forgotten memories, including recollections way back to the womb or even to past lives.

In a way, it is a belief that is consistent with the “memory as a video recorder” myth; the mistaken rationale being that because everything we experience is stored, we just need to find a way to reach it. In fact, nearly all the evidence suggests that hypnosis fails to aid recall, but instead has the potentially harmful effect of increasing people’s faith in their memories, whether or not they are accurate recollections of events.

Amnesiacs forget who they are

A persistent myth is the idea that people suffering from amnesia have lost their long-term memory, including any recollection of their identity. In fact, amnesia caused by illness or brain damage typically manifests as an inability to lay down new memories. Specifically what is broken is the ability to convert short-term memories into long-term memories. An amnesiac will usually be able to tell you who they are and share stories about their earlier lives, but they won’t be able to tell you what they had for breakfast.

• Dr Christian Jarrett is author of The Rough Guide to Psychology. He blogs for the British Psychological Society at bps-research-digest.blogspot.com and is currently writing Great Myths of the Brain (Wiley-Blackwell). Follow him on Twitter at @Psych_Writer

• This article was corrected on 16 January 2012 because it said Hideaki Tomoyori set a new world record for reciting the first 67,890 digits of pi entirely from memory. Lu Chao set this record.

neurosciencestuff:

A More Human Artificial Brain

Staying on task

Its full name is the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, but Spaun sounds way more epic. It’s the latest version of a techno brain, the creation of a Canadian research team at the University of Waterloo.

So what makes Spaun different from a mindboggingly smart artificial brain like IBM’s Watson? Put simply, Watson is designed to work like a supremely powerful search engine, digging through an enormous amount of data at breakneck speed and using complex algorithms to derive an answer. It doesn’t really care about how the process works; it’s mainly about mastering information retrieval.

But Spaun tries to actually mimic the human brain’s behavior and does so by performing a series of tasks, all different from each other. It’s a computer model that can not only recognize numbers with its virtual eye and remember them, but also can manipulate a robotic arm to write them down.

Spaun’s “brain” is divided into two parts, loosely based on our cerebral cortex and basil ganglia and its simulated 2.5 million neurons–our brains have 100 billion–are designed to mimic how researchers think those two parts of the brain interact.

Say, for instance, that its “eye” sees a series of numbers. The artificial neurons take that visual data and route it into the cortex where Spaun uses it to perform a number of different tasks, such as counting, copying the figures, or solving number puzzles.

Soon it will be forgetting birthdays

But there’s been an interesting twist to Spaun’s behavior. As Francie Diep wrote in Tech News Daily, it became more human than its creators expected.

Ask it a question and it doesn’t answer immediately. No, it pauses slightly, about as long as a human might. And if you give Spaun a long list of numbers to remember, it has an easier time recalling the ones it received first and last, but struggles a bit to remember the ones in the middle.

“There are some fairly subtle details of human behavior that the model does capture,” says Chris Eliasmith, Spaun’s chief inventor. “It’s definitely not on the same scale. But it gives a flavor of a lot of different things brains can do.”

Brain drains

The fact that Spaun can move from one task to another brings us one step closer to being able to understand how our brains are able to shift so effortlessly from reading a note to memorizing a phone number to telling our hand to open a door.

And that could help scientists equip robots with the ability to be more flexible thinkers, to adjust on the fly. Also, because Spaun operates more like a human brain, researchers could use it to run health experiments that they couldn’t do on humans.

Recently, for instance, Eliasmith ran a test in which he killed off the neurons in a brain model at the same rate that neurons die in people as they age. He wanted to see how the loss of neurons affected the model’s performance on an intelligence test.

One thing Eliasmith hasn’t been able to do is to get Spaun to recognize if it’s doing a good or a bad job. He’s working on it.

How to brake bad habits.. or any habits at all!

TEDxAlamo: David Eagleman Abuses Your Idea of Reality

Artificial Brain Mimics Human Abilities and Flaws

Side Note: I recommend this fascinating article for anyone who’s been as interested in developments of the brain in the past couple of weeks or in general and the refreshing data about how our pattern recognition works and how it can lead to not only a better understanding of our own minds but also a better understanding into building more accurate artificial intelligence in robots. The accuracy and how natural the intelligence comes off is important if we are to have robots that work for and aid us, if we are to have extensions of what our technology can do with what we know about the human body and brain I think robotics is one way to go about it. It’s like using technology as a canvas and expressing our own biological makeup through it. In this article LS gets into a new software model that accurately replicates certain human-like mistakes with a very limited amount of virtual pattern recognizers. Excuse me for leaving the whole bit of the article I just found it too interesting to leave anything out.

Spaun, a new software model of a human brain, is able to play simple pattern games, draw what it sees and do a little mental arithmetic. It powers everything it does with 2.5 million virtual neurons, compared with a human brain’s 100 billion. But its mistakes, not its abilities, are what surprised its makers the most, said Chris Eliasmith, an engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Ask Spaun a question, and it hesitates a moment before answering, pausing for about as long as humans do. Give Spaun a list of numbers to memorize, and it falters when the list gets too long. And Spaun is better at remembering the numbers at the beginning and end of a list than at recalling numbers in the middle, just like people are.

“There are some fairly subtle details of human behavior that the model does capture,” said Eliasmith, who led the development of Spaun, or the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network. “It’s definitely not on the same scale [as a human brain],” he told TechNewsdaily. “It gives a flavor of a lot of different things brains can do.”

Eliasmith and his team of Waterloo neuroscientists say Spaun is the first model of a biological brain that performs tasks and has behaviors. Because it is able to do such a variety of things, Spaun could help scientists understand how humans do the same, Eliasmith said. In addition, other scientists could run simplified simulations of certain brain disorders or psychiatric drugs using Spaun, he said.

A brain with thought and action

Researchers have made several brain models that are more powerful than Spaun. The Blue Brain model at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in France has 1 million neurons. IBM’s SyNAPSE project has 1 billion neurons. Those models aren’t built to perform a variety of tasks, however, Eliasmith said.

Spaun is programmed to respond to eight types of requests, including copying what it sees, recognizing numbers written with different handwriting, answering questions about a series of numbers and finishing a pattern after seeing examples.

Spaun’s myriad skills could shed light on the flexible, variable human brain, which is able to use the same equipment to control typing, biking, driving, flying airplanes and countless other tasks, Eliasmith said. That knowledge, in turn, could help scientists add flexibility to robots or artificial intelligence, he said. Artificial intelligence now usually specializes in doing only one thing, such as tagging photos or playing chess. “It can’t figure out to switch between those things,” he said.

In addition, artificial intelligence isn’t built to mimic the cellular structure of human brains as closely as Spaun and other brain models do. Because Spaun runs more like a human brain, other researchers could use it to run health experiments that would be unethical in human study volunteers, Eliasmith said. He recently ran a test in which he killed off the neurons in a brain model at the same rate that neurons die in people as they age, to see how the dying off affected the model’s performance on an intelligence test.

Such tests would have to be just first steps in a longer experiment, Eliasmith said. The human brain is so much more complex than models that there’s a limit to how much models are able to tell researchers. As scientists continue to improve brain models, the models will become better proxies for health studies, he said.

Next up: a brain in real time

There’s one major way Spaun differs from a human brain. It takes a lot of computingpower to perform its little tasks. Spaun runs on a supercomputer at the University of Waterloo, and it takes the computer two hours to run just one second of a Spaun simulation, Eliasmith said.

So Eliasmith’s next major step for improving Spaun is developing hardware that lets the model work in real time. He’ll cooperate with researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and hopes to have something ready in six months, he said.

In the far future, people may find Spaun’s humanlike flaws deliberately built into robot assistants, Eliasmith said. “Those kinds of features are important in a way because if we’re interacting with an agent and it has a kind of memory that we’re familiar with, it’ll more natural to interact with,” he added.

Eliasmith and his colleagues published their latest paper about Spaun today (Nov. 29) in the journal Science.

Moral evaluations of harm are instant and emotional

People are able to detect, within a split second, if a hurtful action they are witnessing is intentional or accidental, new research on the brain at the University of Chicago shows.

The study is the first to explain how the brain is hard-wired to recognize when another person is being intentionally harmed. It also provides new insights into how such recognition is connected with emotion and morality, said lead author Jean Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at UChicago.

“Our data strongly support the notion that determining intentionality is the first step in moral computations,” said Decety, who conducted research on the topic with Stephanie Cacioppo, a research associate (assistant professor) in psychology at UChicago. They published the results in a paper, “The Speed of Morality: A High-Density Electrical Neurological Study,” to be published Dec. 1 and now on early preview in the Journal of Neurophysiology.

The researchers studied adults who watched videos of people who suffered accidental harm (such as being hit with a golf club) and intentional harm (such as being struck with a baseball bat). While watching the videos, brain activity was collected with equipment that accurately maps responses in different regions of the brain and importantly, the timing between these regions. The technique is known as high-density, event-related potentials technology.

The intentional harm sequence produced a response in the brain almost instantly. The study showed that within 60 milliseconds, the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (also known as TPJ area), located in the back of the brain, was first activated, with different activity depending on whether the harm was intentional or accidental. It was followed in quick succession by the amygdala, often linked with emotion, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (180 milliseconds), the portion of the brain that plays a critical role in moral decision-making.

There was no such response in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex when the harm was accidental.

Why Impatience May Hurt Your Heart

Side Note: To keep the attention this blog has somewhat taken towards ‘getting to know yourself the science way’, I wanted to bring up this article from Livescience about how impatience can lead to health complications. I’m sure many of you will reply with the usual “WE’VE ALWAYS KNOWN THAT” but give this article a read so you can have the data that backs up your claims. But what’s more, I feel like actually knowing and having some understanding of how impatience alters our state of mind is also important within the realms of brain control. Because if outside conditions, however minute they could be, alter you into an impatient person, it can also make you less inclined to indulge in the patience required to learn new things. I have a little bit of impatience myself at times, and I notice that for the most part, living ‘the fast life’ of wanting it now can become a habit in itself and that’s when things like attention spans get shortened. Read the article for yourself and make your own judgement, but in any case please share this information with others. Not everyone knows what you know.

Now that the holiday season is here, nearly everyone’s patience will be tested at one time or another. Long lines, crowded malls and unbearable travel delays are among the reasons why some people will lose their cool.

But those episodes of impatience can trigger physiological responses that may sabotage your health. “Being impatient could cause anxiety and hostility,” said Daniel Baugher, dean of graduate programs at Pace University in New York City who has studied personality and social psychology. “And if you’re constantly anxious, your sleep could be affected, too.”

Baugher said living in the hyper-paced, technology-obsessed 21st century has left many people short on patience. “They seem to want everything yesterday,” he said. “People expect things to be done more quickly.”

But some individuals may simply be hardwired for impatience. “Everyone’s tolerance threshold is different,” he said. “We all feel impatient when certain things happen, but some more than others.”

Type A personalities are at high risk

Often high-strung and competitive, type A personalities seem suspended in a constant state of urgency. They’re unable to cope when things don’t go their way, be it snarled rush-hour traffic or the glacially slow line at the grocery store. “People with this personality type are more likely to experience anger when they’re held up,” said Dr. Redford Williams, an internist at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, who estimates that roughly 25 percent of Americans have a type A personality, which increases their risk for health problems such as high blood pressure and heart disease.

In a 2003 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers reported that the more impatient and hostile the 18- to 30-year-old study participants felt, the more likely they would develop high blood pressure later in life.”High blood pressure is a symptom that the body is going into overdrive,” Baugher said. “The whole body gets geared up for a fight.”

Impatience + hostility = stress

People who frequently become impatient and angry are in a constant state of stress. The body reacts to that stress by releasing hormones such as adrenaline or cortisol which help the body respond to a stressful situation.

“When you’re about to be attacked by a saber-toothed tiger, this response can help you survive, but not when you’re sitting in traffic or waiting in a long line,” Williams said. High levels of cortisol and adrenaline could ultimately lead to weight gain, high blood sugar and high blood pressure.

In a 2000 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers found that young adults who had high hostility levels were predisposed to plaque build-up in their coronary arteries. “Stress hormones stimulate platelets, making them more likely to clot in arteries already narrowed by heart disease, a process that can result in a heart attack,” Williams said. “These hormones also cause the body’s fat cells to release fat into the bloodstream.”

Williams said this fat can be deposited in plaque in the arteries that feed the heart, enlarging the plaques and raising the risk for an artery-clogging clot.

Coping with impatience

Some studies suggest that stress-management programs may help naturally impatient people relax. Teaching people how to head off or control feelings of anger and hostility could reduce blood pressure and lower body weight over time. “The evidence we have on stress training is encouraging, but studies haven’t shown that it can save lives,” Williams said.

The best way for people to handle a situation that taxes their patience and triggers negative responses is to take a deep breath and evaluate what they’re feeling, Williams said. “Ask yourself, ‘Is this important to me? Is it reasonable to be angry over this? Is it worth it?’” Williams advised. “Basically, try to talk yourself out of the anger.”

Pass it on: Being impatient can cause high blood pressure and heart disease.

psycholar:

Rhythmic Brain Waves: Fluctuations in Electrical Activity May Allow the Brain to Form Thoughts and Memories.

How do our brains encode thoughts, perceptions and memories at the cellular level? A new study from researchers at MIT and Boston University sheds some light on the processes. 

The researchers measured brain waves produced by monkeys as they completed and switched between tasks. They found that the different tasks - e.g. responding to colour or orientation - had different characteristic brain waves, and that in some tasks there was sometimes a wave of “inhibition” that would cause one set on neurons to quiet down (e.g. the orientation ones) so the other set (e.g. the colour ones) could focus so to speak. 

The researchers are now trying to figure out how these different sets of neurons coordinate their activity as the brain switches back and forth between different thoughts. 

Read the full story

approachingsignificance:

Skin-Tissue Culture

Photograph by Jean Claude Revy-ISM/Phototake USA

A researcher handles a skin tissue culture. Surgeons once grafted pigskin onto burn wounds as a temporary bandage. These days they use human skin tissue taken from another part of the body or skin substitutes engineered from synthetics or other materials such as cow collagen or shark cartilage.