Scientific American - Mind Matters

The Advantages of Being Helpless

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 EST

At every stage of early development, human babies lag behind infants from other species. A kitten can amble across a room within moments of birth and catch its first mouse within weeks, while its wide-eyed human counterpart takes months to make her first step, and years to learn even simple tasks, such as how to tie a shoelace or skip a rope, let alone prepare a three-course meal. Yet, in the cognitive race, human babies turn out to be much like the tortoise in Aesop’s fable: emerging triumphant after a slow and steady climb to the finish. As adults, we drive fancy sports cars, leap nimbly across football fields and ballet stages, write lengthy dissertations on every conceivable subject, and launch rockets into space. We have a mastery over our selves and our environments that is peculiar to our species.

Yet, this victory seems puzzling. In the fable, the tortoise wins the race because the hare takes a nap. But, if anything, human infants nap even more than kittens! And unlike the noble tortoise, babies are helpless, and more to the point, hopeless . They could not learn the basic skills necessary to their independent survival even if they tried. How do human babies manage to turn things around in the end?

[More]

Can a Brain Scan Predict a Broken Promise?

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 EST

Last time you told someone “I’ll call you,” did you mean it? [More]

An Almanac of Internet Emotion

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

[More]

The Pregnant Brain as a Revving Race Car

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:00:00 EST

What turns a young female concerned mainly about herself into a good mother who will make sure her offspring survive in an otherwise hostile world? The bodily changes of childbearing are obvious, but as we are discovering, the changes in the brain are no less dramatic.

[More]

Flattery Will Get You Far

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

[More]

Idle Minds and What They May Say about Intelligence

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 18:00:00 EST

For many years now, neuroscientists have been telling the subjects of experiments something like this: “Please lie in the MRI scanner and relax. When you see the task instructions come onto the screen in front of you, do your best.” The researcher would then use the brain’s activity during the “lie there and relax” period as a mere control condition; the object of scientific interest was always what “lights up” when a subject reads, makes financial decisions or performs some other task.

That has changed. It is now appreciated that the mind never rests. And that if we measure brain activation while a person lies in a scanner doing nothing, naturally occurring fluctuations will reveal networks that help elucidate the functional organization of the brain in fascinating new ways. Initial studies indicate that these “resting state” networks may help cast light on mental illness. And now, tantalizing new results suggest a significant link between these networks and intelligence.

[More]

Diary of a High-Functioning Person with Schizophrenia

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Elyn Saks is a law professor at the University of Southern California, a Marshall scholar, and a graduate of Yale Law School. She also suffers from schizophrenia -- an illness that many would assume makes her impressive resume an impossibility. In 2007, she published an acclaimed memoir of her struggle with the disease, “The Center Cannot Hold.” Her book is a frank and moving portrait of the experience of schizophrenia, but also a call for higher expectations -- a plea that we allow people with schizophrenia to find their own limits. If anything, she says, her work as a scholar has helped her to cope with the disease. In September, she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. She chatted with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

[More]

The Mechanics of Mind Reading

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:00:00 EST

As a favor to friends in my academic department, the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, I’ve frequently been a guinea pig in the fMRI scanner. Normally I fight valiantly against slumber as the stimuli flash on the small screen in front of me and the hypnotic, high-pitched beeps of the scanner reverberate around me. This time, though, it was very different. This time, my colleague Martin Monti was going to read my mind. As the bed I lay on robotically slid into the giant donut shape of the scanner, I had a strange sense that I was about to be mentally naked.

[More]

Portrait of a Multitasking Mind

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Are you a media multitasker? We know you're reading a blog, but what else are you doing right now? Take a quick inventory: Are you also listening to music? Monitoring the progress of a sports game on TV? Emailing your co-worker? Texting your friend? On hold with tech support? If your inventory has revealed a multitasking lifestyle, you are not alone. Media multitasking is increasingly common, to the extent that some have dubbed today’s teens "Generation M."

[More]

The Psychology of Social Status

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:00:00 EST

Nobel Laureate economist, John Harsanyi, said that “apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior.” The more noticeable status disparities are, the more concerned with status people become, and the differences between the haves and have-nots have been extremely pronounced during the economic recession of recent years. Barack Obama campaigned directly on the issue of the “dwindling middle class” during his 2008 presidential run and appointed vice-president Joe Biden to lead a middle class task force specifically to bolster this demographic. Despite some recent economic improvement, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont just two months ago cautioned that “the reality is that the middle class today in this country is in desperate shape and the gap between the very very wealthy and everyone else is going to grow wider.” Concerns about status likely will not be leaving the public consciousness any time soon. [More]

The Moral Call of the Wild

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

I love spending time outside. From wild places like the backcountry of the Sierra Nevada mountains, to the mundane nature in my back yard, I find comfort in my natural experiences. These places are restful. Peaceful. They restore my batteries, and help me to focus. And I am not alone in these experiences. People around the world seek out natural experiences. Even when confined to built spaces, we add pets, plants, pictures, and momentos from nature. It is part of who we are, and these experiences in nature help us reflect on what is important in life.

The benefits of spending time in nature have been well-documented. Psychological research has shown that natural experiences help to reduce stress, improve mood, and promote an overall increase in physical and psychological well-being. There is even evidence that hospital patients with a view of nature recover faster than do hospital patients without such a view. This line of research provides clear evidence that people are drawn to nature with good reason. It has restorative properties.

[More]

Watching the Brain Learn

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST

Practice makes perfect, but how? Two groups of neuroscientists using MRI brain imaging announced last month that they were able to see changes inside the brains of people after mastering a new skill. The big surprise is that the part of the brain that changed has no neurons or synapses in it! The cerebral remodeling during learning was seen in the mysterious and still largely unexplored “white matter” region of the brain.

“Grey matter” is synonymous with smarts, but in fact only half of the human brain is grey matter. White matter, the “other brain tissue”, is rarely mentioned. Neurons in the cerebral cortex are packed into in the top layers of the brain, where they are connected together through synapses. Learning takes place in the grey matter by linking neurons together into new circuits by strengthening synapses or forming new ones.

[More]

Your Brain on Books

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Stanislas Dehaene holds the chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collège de France, and he is also the director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpin, France’s most advanced neuroimaging research center. He is best known for his research into the brain basis of numbers, popularized in his book, “The Number Sense.” In his new book, “Reading in the Brain,” he describes his quest to understand an astounding feat that most of us take for granted: translating marks on a page (or a screen) into language. He answered questions recently from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. [More]

The Mind Is a Mirror

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

The discovery of mirror neurons in the brains of macaques about ten years ago sent shockwaves through the neuroscience community. Mirror neurons are cells that fire both when a monkey performs a certain task and when it observes another individual performing that same task. With the identification of networks of similarly-behaving cells in humans, there was much speculation over the role such neurons might play in phenomena such as imitation, language acquisition, observational learning, empathy, and theory of mind.