Reuters' FaithWorld blog has been covering the University of Pennsylvania's Neuroscience Boot Camp, going on now, and one message has become clear:

You can forget about the "God spot" that headline writers love to highlight (as in "‘God spot' is found in Brain" or "Scientists Locate ‘God Spot' in Human Brain"). There is no one place in the brain responsible for religion, just as there is no single location in the brain for love or language or identity. Most popular articles these days actually say that, but the headline writers continue to speak of a single spot.

"There isn't a separate religious area of the brain, from what we can tell from the data," said Dr. Andrew Newberg, an associate professor of radiology and psychiatry at the Penn university hospital and author of several books on neuroscience and religion. "It's not like there's a little spiritual spot that lights up every time somebody thinks of God. When you look at religious and spiritual experiences, they are incredibly rich and diverse. Sometimes people find them on the emotional level, sometimes on an ideological level, sometimes they perceive a oneness, sometimes they perceive a person. It depends a lot on what the actual experience is."

The image above shows two different brain scans, one from someone who is singing, and the other one from someone who is speaking in tongues. They look almost entirely identical, but you can just about glimpse a slight difference in blood flow to the frontal lobe, and specifically to the left caudate, among the "speaking in tongues" brains. (Thanks to The NeuroCritic for the image, and for pointing out that the study's authors admit their "results were hypothesis driven.")

The FaithBlog quotes neurological researcher Geoff Aguirre as pouring cold water on the idea that an fMRI scanner is like a mind reader, and calls the idea that you could use an fMRI to catch terrorists "science fiction, science fantasy." Adds Aguirre:

There's definitely an esthetic in the presentation of this data. People see this as a natural aspect of the brain, not the result of tests. Some groups made a very wise investment in the display technology for how neuroimaging results were reported. Those were the images that got displayed on the covers of the top scientific journals and made a splash.

I also love his comments about "Cartesian dualism," in which people try to claim that someone's actions weren't his fault because "his brain did that." (As if he and his brain are two separate beings.)

[Reuters and The NeuroCritic]

So what has hip-hop done to incur the wrath of pediatric neurosurgeons? It gave the world car surfing, which involves one or more persons treating the head of a moving car as a surfboard. The paper points the finger at the Bay Area's Hyphy movement, in particular, for glamorizing an activity that tends to end in severe head trauma.

The study's authors don't lay exclusive blame on Hyphy, noting that the car-surfing meme (along with head injuries) spikes with each release of Grand Theft Auto, each YouTube video, and every incident of car surfing on the silver screen (Teen Wolf gets a mention, but Zoe Bell's nail-biting Death Proof stunt is conspicuously absent). But, unless they can travel back in time and kill the Hyphy movement's grandparents, it seems that these neurologists are stuck with the ages-old problem of keeping kids from doing stupid things.

Neurological injuries from car surfing [Journal of Neurosurgery]

Plaques are protein buildups (pictured) found in the brains of people suffering from age-related dementia, and are believed to be related to memory loss and other symptoms of Alzheimers. These can be signifcantly reduced if patients take drugs containing granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (GCSF), a human hormone that stimulates stem cells in bone marrow to produce more red blood cells. Scientists at University of South Florida and James A. Haley Hospital discovered in tests on mice that the surge in new blood cells acts as a purging agent, washing through the brain and cleansing neurons "clogged" by protein buildup. There was ultimately a 32-40 percent reduction in this dementia-causing protein, known as beta amyloid, in the mouse brains.

A release from the University of South Florida reports:

The researchers showed that injections under the skin of filgrastim [marketed as the proprietary drug Neupogen] — one of three commercially available GCSF compounds — mobilized blood stem cells in the bone marrow and neural stem cells within the brain and both of these actions led to improved memory and learning behavior in the Alzheimer's mice. "The beauty in this less invasive approach is that it obviates the need for neurosurgery to transplant stem cells into the brain," Dr. Sanchez-Ramos said.

Based on the promising findings in mice, the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation is funding a pilot clinical trial at USF's Byrd Alzheimer's Center.

So the testing in humans is about to begin.

How does GCSF work? Continues the release:

GCSF reduced the burden of beta amyloid deposited in the brains of the Alzheimer's mice by several means, the researchers found. One was by recruiting reinforcements to clear beta amyloid accumulating abnormally in the brain. The growth factor prodded bone-marrow derived microglia outside the brain to join forces with the brain's already-activated microglia in eliminating the Alzheimer's protein from the brain. Microglia are brain cells that act as the central nervous system's main form of immune defense. Like molecular "Pac-men," they rush to the defense of damaged or inflamed areas to gobble up toxic substances.

The growth factor also appeared to increase the production of new neurons in the area of the brain (hippocampus) associated with memory decline in Alzheimer's disease and to form new neural connections.

This is seriously great news. It means we can have stem cell treatments that don't involve injecting new stem cells into the body - you can just stimulate production in your already-existing stem cells. It also means that we may have figured out a way to help people grow new neurons - a golden ring of neuroscience - with an already-existing drug. Can't wait to see how the next round of tests come out in human subjects.

via USF

Through education Dr. Steven C. Schlozman is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a lecturer at the Harvard School of Education. He is also an avid sci-fi and horror fan - and, apparently, the world's leading authority on the neurobiology of the living dead. He has even drafted a fake medical journal article on the zombie plague, which he calls Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome, or ANSD (the article has five authors: one living, three "deceased" and one "humanoid infected").

Schlozman's foray into necro-diagnostics began when he volunteered to give a talk for the "Science on Screen" lecture series at the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, MA. He conducted extensive research by talking with George Romero and immersing himself in genre literature and memorabilia - which is why the alternate title for his lecture is "A Way Cool Tax Deduction for a Bunch of Cool Books, Action Figures and a Movie."

So yes, Schlozman's lecture is actually quite funny, and liberally sprinkled with other pop culture references including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. But the underlying science is serious. His lecture is a tour of the human brain, using the living dead as a narrative theme.

According to Dr. Steven C. Schlozman, this is your brain on zombies:

The Frontal Lobe

This part of the brain is involved with "executive functioning" - enabling us to think carefully and solve problems in an abstract way. Clearly, there's not much going on there if you have the misfortune of being afflicted with living deadness. But we do know that zombies can see us and sense us. Schlozman concludes that zombies possess just enough frontal lobe activity to "listen" to the thalamus, through which sensory input is processed.

But the frontal lobe function most relevant to understanding zombie behavior is the control of "impulsivity"-the general term for when you do something and, if you had two more seconds, you might not have done it. For instance, if in a fit of rage you have the sudden urge to punch your boss in the face, the frontal lobe intervenes and allows you to consider why that might be a bad idea.

The Amygdala and Anterior Cingulate Cortex

Absent a properly functioning frontal lobe, a zombie is driven entirely by base emotions - such as rage - that are housed in the primitive parts of our brain, notably the amygdala. There's precedence for this in nature. A crocodile brain, for instance, is mostly driven by the amygdala. Researchers have confirmed this by introducing lesions into the amygdala of animal specimens: the result is a drop in the attack and retreat response that correlates significantly with the amount of damage that's done to that region of the brain. A crocodile without an amygdala isn't really a crocodile. As such, Schlozman argues, "you can't really be mad at zombies, because that's like being mad at a crocodile," adding that it's the delicate balance between frontal lobe and amygdala "that makes us human."

That balance is maintained by the anterior cingulate cortex, which modulates and dampens the excitability of the amygdala as it talks to the frontal lobe. So, when the amygdala gets all stirred up by fear, anger or lust, the anterior cingulate cortex steps on it a little bit, giving the frontal lobe time to think everything through before it sends signals toward the motor cortex and we act upon those impulses.

A zombie would have a dysfunctional anterior cingulate cortex, rendering it unable to modulate feelings of anger. The result? Hyper-aggression.

The Cerebellum and the Basal Ganglia

Science may once and for all settle the heated debate over whether "the infected" in 28 Days Later could be classified as zombies.

Schlozman says "no," observing that "the infected" possess "some sort of higher cortical function going on that allows them to hunt humans." Moreover, the fake zombies in 28 Days Later exhibit fluidity of motion. They can run, jump, climb and quickly change direction-activities that the true Romero zombies are incapable of performing.

Clearly, zombies suffer from cerebellar and basal ganglia dysfunction (duh!). Those are the parts of the brain that make fluidity of motion possible. The basal ganglia helps us with coordinated movement. The cerebellum helps us with balance. In fact, if you visit the website of the National Institutes of Health and read about cerebellar degeneration (such as ataxia), the symptoms match the familiar gait of the living dead: "a wide-legged, unsteady, lurching walk, usually accompanied by a back and forth tremor in the trunk of the body…"

Mirror Neurons

This is recent, cutting-edge research in the field of neuroscience. Schlozman describes mirror neuron theory as a "neurobiological model for empathy, which suggests, in a very hopeful way, that we might be wired to connect with one another." Regions of the brain are recruited in response to social interactions in which we watch and thus experience the experiences of the "other."

As a press release issued by the European Science Foundation explains it: in

Just as the same mirror neurons fire when observing and doing certain tasks, so other mirror neurons may be triggered both when experiencing a particular emotion and when observing someone else with that emotion.

But, Schlozman asks, what if the things we're fighting have brains that are incapable of connecting? In response, we disconnect from each other. Schlozman quotes a veteran of the Battle of Yonkers in the book World War Z: "Shock and Awe! But what if the enemy can't be shocked and awed? Not just won't, but biologically can't?"

At the Battle of Yonkers, the humans hit the zombie horde with everything they've got. But the zombies keep coming. They don't look scared. They don't look excited. They don't look enraged. And that actually freaks out the humans more than anything else, prompting the humans to turn on each other.

Schlozman suggests that mirror neurons also help explain the popularity of the zombie genre among the living. While watching these movies, "we like the permission to look at these things that look human - but aren't human - and have utter and complete permission to blow their heads off." In other words, we get off on the thrill of guiltless violence. We enjoy a brief vacation from empathy, and take our crocodile brains out for a spin.

By way of example, I came across an interview with actor Mike Christopher Berhosky, who played the iconic Hare Krishna zombie in the 1978 movie, Dawn of the Dead. Berhosky describes the audience reaction to the film's screening:

I got bashed in the head and everyone CHEERED. Took the wind right outta' my sails. Everyone hated the Hare Krishna devotees for their incessant pestering and swarming them at the airports and such….Killing off my character had the effect of releasing a lot of pent up frustration….bashing in the Hare Krishna zombie's head was much more than getting rid of another pesky zombie…it was VENGEANCE.

But the fun lasts only up to a point. As the movies progress, Schlozman says, we start to feel uncomfortable with the loss of our humanity-that we are "so willing to forsake those mirror neurons."

The Ventromedial Hypothalamus

In the movies, zombies are always hungry, no matter how many supporting actors they consume. The most likely explanation is that zombies don't have a properly functioning ventromedial hypothalamus: the region of the brain that lets you know whether you've eaten enough. The result is hyperphagia. Zombies will eat and eat and eat, but never feel satiated.

That raises a slightly awkward question: If zombies are constantly eating, then how come they never poop?

Schlozman doesn't know for sure, but he has at least one promising theory: Maybe the living dead are constipated.

Now we know why zombies are always moaning.

Mark Strauss is a senior editor at Smithsonian magazine.

Writing in the journal BMC Neuroscience, Kristen Muller-Vahl and her team explained how they used a new technique, Magnetic Transfer Imaging (MTI) to scan the prefrontal areas of the brains of 19 Tourette's sufferers as well as 20 control subjects. They found alterations in the "frontostriatial circuitries" of the Tourette's brains, that may explain the causes of the disorder. In particular, Tourette's sufferers showed "significant decreases in grey matter volumes" in some key prefrontal areas, and decreased white matter in others.

So changes in the architecture of the frontal lobe lead to "disinhibition of the cingulate gyrus and abnormal basal ganglia function." How long before we can craft a drug to restore normal structure to people's prefrontal lobes? Or even cause a temporary abnormality in people, to reduce their self-control? Just imagine dosing people at a party, or using it as a weapon to cause confusion among our enemies. [via EurekAlert]

People who have lost their ability to speak still have active speech centers in their brain. Seeking to tap into the neurons firing in those centers, researchers at Boston University implanted a series of electrodes into the brain of Erik Ramsey, a man who has been in a locked in state since a brain stem injury when he was 16.

Of course, the electrodes are only there to pick up neuronal activity, so the researchers have had to come up with complex software to decode the raw signals into speech — in other words, to translate Ramsey's thoughts about speaking into actual sounds:

The software is designed to translate neural activity into what are known as formant frequencies, the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract. For example, if your mouth is open wide and your tongue is pressed to the base of the mouth, a certain sound frequency is created as air flows through, based on the position of the vocal musculature. Different muscle positioning creates a different frequency. Guenther trained the computer to recognize patterns of neural signals linked to specific movements of the mouth, jaw, and lips. He then translated these signals into the correlating sound frequencies and programmed a sound synthesizer to project these frequencies back out through a speaker in audio form.

So far, the technique's worked, albeit slowly. With a lot of concentration, Ramsey has been able to get the system to make all of the vowel sounds in the English language. But there are only a handful of those — the next stop is the hundreds of consonants, which could take years and a new, more sophisticated implant that can better understand what it is Ramsey is trying to say.

Source: Technology Review

Image, University of Pennsylvania

According to Scientific American's article on the study, taking psilocybin may help addicts get over their dependencies:

"It does sound counterintuitive," Griffiths says. But, "six of the 12 AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] steps are related to a higher power and surrendering to it. Many people don't engage fully into the 12-step program because they don't have a connection to a higher power. One can't help but wonder whether an experience like this might be useful."

Griffiths admits a lot more study is needed before alcoholics start dropping tabs, but he's hoping his research will help lift the taboo on what is still an illegal drug.

Source: SciAm, Associated Press

*Of course the other third experienced "significant fear" according to Griffiths, which we can take to mean they thought they were oranges and tried to peel their own skin off.

From therapy to drug addiction, humans try just about anything to beat depression, so it figures that the first hardware hack for the brain would try to put smiles on our faces. But instead of piping in porn, the pacemaker uses electrode to fire low-voltage juice into the mood and anxiety centers in your brain, rewiring your neurons to take you to happy land.

The method used is called deep-brain stimulation, and it's been around for a few years, but it's still an experimental technology. So yeah, statements like this one from Dr. Ali Rezai chief of the Cleveland Clinic's Center for Neurologic Restoration are pretty exciting: "We're rewiring the brain in many ways," he says.

But the researchers admit they're still working out the kinks in things like which brain areas are best to stimulate, and how much electrical prodding those areas need. So if you're not debilitated with depression, you might wait a few years before lining up for surgery for your very own happiness implant.

Source: Associated Press

Oxytocin is a chemical associated with many of the "pleasurable" feelings you have, from basic trust, to love and orgasm. Researchers in Switzerland theorized that people playing social trust games might change their behaviors if given doses of oxytocin, since the chemical might artificially enhance their willingness to trust someone. Indeed, they were right: subjects dosed with Oxytocin were willing to trust people even after they'd been explicitly told that those people had behaved in untrustworthy ways in the past. People who had not been dosed did not trust the "untrustworthy" people.

According to a release from Neuron:

In their experiments, the researchers asked volunteer subjects to play two types of games—a trust game and a risk game. In the trust game, subjects were asked to contribute money, with the understanding that a human trustee would invest the money and decide whether to return the profits, or betray the subjects' trust and keep all the money. In the risk game, the subjects were told that a computer would randomly decide whether their money would be repaid or not.

The subjects also received doses of either the brain chemical oxytocin (OT) or a placebo via nasal spray. They chose OT because studies by other researchers had shown that OT specifically increases people's willingness to trust others.

During the games, the subjects' brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging. This common analytical technique involves using harmless magnetic fields and radio waves to map blood flow in brain regions, which reflects brain activity.

The researchers found that—in the trust game, but not the risk game—OT reduced activity in two brain regions: the amygdala, which processes fear, danger and possibly risk of social betrayal; and an area of the striatum, part of the circuitry that guides and adjusts future behavior based on reward feedback.

Baumgartner and colleagues concluded that their findings showed that oxytocin affected the subjects' responses specifically related to trust . . . "If subjects face social risks, such as in the trust game, those who received placebo respond to the feedback with a decrease in trusting behavior while subjects with OT demonstrate no change in their trusting behavior although they were informed that their interaction partners did not honor their trust in roughly 50% of the cases."

Brain's Trust Machinery Identified [Eurekalert]

Medgadget has the news:

All of the studies being presented used the Medtronic DBS system to stimulate a target within the brain called the ventral anterior limb of the internal capsule/ventral striatum (VC/VS), which is a central node in the neural circuits that regulate mood and anxiety.

"The data we are presenting on 43 patients is the result of more than 10 years of work across multiple institutions worldwide. These data represent the largest number and the longest evaluation of patients with psychiatric disorders who have undergone DBS implants, including some with long-term follow up," said [Cleveland Clinic neurosurgeon] Dr. Ali Rezai, who represented an international working group of physicians studying DBS therapy for treatment resistant OCD and depression. "While OCD and depression treatment with DBS require additional clinical evaluation research, our early open-label experience to date is encouraging and indicates that DBS may help severely disabled and suffering patients who have exhausted other treatment options."

Deep Brain Stimulation Useful for Severe Depression and OCD [Medgadget]

Last year, Ricard told The Independent that he hasn't had sex since he was 30, but that he still loves football. And the only time he's really gotten mad in the past few decades was when somebody threw flour on his laptop as a joke.

Meanwhile, the researchers at the University of Wisconsin say they can measure anyone's happiness levels by registering the amount of electrical activity in their right frontal cortex. Happy serenity is associated with activity in that region, while depression is associated with activity in the left frontal cortex. Apparently, according to The Independent:

Out of hundreds of volunteers whose scores ranged from +0.3 (what you might call the Morrissey zone) to -0.3 (beatific) the Frenchman scored -0.45. He shows me the chart of volunteers' results, on his laptop. To find Ricard, you have to keep scrolling left, away from the main curve, until you eventually find him - a remote dot at the beginning of the x-axis.

Is it really possible that measuring happiness is as simple as monitoring electrical activity in a general region of your brain?

Sources: The Independent, and University of Wisconsin's Lab for Affective Neuroscience

According to Discovery News:

Dyslexia affects different parts of children's brains depending on whether they are raised reading English or Chinese. . . "This finding was very surprising to us. We had not ever thought that dyslexics' brains are different for children who read in English and Chinese," said lead author Li-Hai Tan, a professor of linguistics and brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Hong Kong. "Our finding yields neurobiological clues to the cause of dyslexia."

Reading an alphabetic language like English requires different skills than reading Chinese, which relies less on sound representation, instead using symbols to represent words . . . For children, learning to read is culturally important but is not really natural, Eden said, so when the brain orients toward a different writing system it copes with it differently. For example, English-speaking children learn the sounds of letters and how to combine them into words, while Chinese youngsters memorize hundreds of symbols which represent words.

However, another possibility is that English-speakers with dyslexia might be better-suited to read and write in Chinese. And vice-versa. Teaching children both languages could be another way to foster writing ability and reading comprehension. Image via Discovery.

Dyslexia Differs by Language [Discovery News]

According to Albert Y. Hung, a staff neurologist at Mass General and co-author of the study:

These opposite effects on different types of learning are reminiscent of the mixed features of autistic patients, who may be disabled in some cognitive areas but show enhanced abilities in others. The superior learning ability of these mutant mice in a specific realm is reminiscent of human autistic savants.

Hung said that while it seems counter-intuitive that loss of an important synaptic scaffold protein would result in improved learning among the mice in this study, the absence of this protein may "trap" the mice's synapses in a more plastic state, which means the synapses are ready to respond to input but not maintain it in long-term memory. Aberrant synapse development and faulty structure of dendritic spines—tiny protrusions on the surface of neurons that receive messages from other neurons—are often associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism, in humans.

Hypnosis. It's been proven (in court, no less) that hypnosis can create false memories. So you could pay a hypnotist to give you falsely happy memories of your childhood, erasing your sadistic home-ec teacher and replacing her with a friendly polar bear. You can also use hypnosis to regress yourself back to childhood (temporarily, we hope) so you can have a funner time the second time around. Just don't overshoot and regress to a past life. The best thing would be a version of the Tantalus machine from that Star Trek episode, which implants fake memories directly into your brain.

Falsify the evidence. Last fall, researchers reported that if you show people a picture of something that never happened, they start to believe it actually did. The researchers showed people doctored photos of a protest in Italy and the Tiananmen Square protests in China, and afterwards people remembered the events happening that way. In an older study, scientists showed people a picture of a child at Disney World shaking hands with Bugs Bunny. The subjects started to believe they'd met Bugs Bunny at Disney World when they were kids. Which is impossible, because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Bros. character, not a Disney character.

So in a few years when Photoshop gets way better, you may be able to pay someone to construct new family pictures for you, altering some details digitally to make your childhood seem happier. Maybe they can even be holographic and interactive, and you can display them around your home.

Take a pill. Researchers from the excitingly named Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics say that memory-erasing pills are probably not that far off. (They put out this press release to tie in with the movie Paycheck, which many people wanted to erase their memories of watching.) The tricky part would be selectively erasing the bad memories and keeping the good memories. Or maybe, like Johnny Mnemonic, you'd rather just erase your whole childhood. Then at least ignorance would be bliss.

Clone yourself. Despite what many science fiction shows and movies have told us, your clone will be a baby. So you'll be able to give your clone the perfect awesome childhood you never had. It won't be the same as fixing your own childhood, but you can have a happy one vicariously.

Change your birth order. Some psychologists claim that your birth order, whether you're the first, second or third born, alters how you remember your childhood and influences your personality traits. (First-borns are leaders, middle-borns are flexible, youngest-borns are creative.) Probably a lot of this has to do with how you experience childhood at the time. But some of it may also be retroactive, to do with how you reconstruct your childhood memories. So all you have to do is put your older siblings, or yourself, into cryogenic suspension or stasis, so that you swap ages. That will have the effect of making you the older (or younger) sibling, and may help to change how you view your childhood.

Travel in time. This is probably the hardest one to pull off at the moment. Plus, even if you could time-travel, you might have some fussy restrictions on meeting your past self. So you'd be stuck trying to find ways to fix your childhood without interacting with your young self. So you're stuck with killing everybody who was ever mean to you when you were young. But if you could get past that hurdle, you could become your own cool aunt/uncle.