Originally posted on May 20, 2014. Three years ago, I gained a new appreciation of consciousness. My mom had an accident that caused her brain to bleed. It seemed to rip away her consciousness. As I slept next to her bed before she died, I wondered, “Is she conscious of what’s happening?” New research suggests that the brain can give us a clue. Prior to this research, you had limited options to know if someone had consciousness. You could ask them. That’s easy. But what about those cases, like my mom’s, when a person hasn’t experienced brain death but is still unresponsive? To find out, researchers scanned the brain of a woman who was in a vegetative state. They asked her to imagine playing tennis, along with several other activities. The results, published in Science, made a big splash. Although the woman couldn’t answer the questions, her brain did. When she imagined playing tennis, her brain reacted by increasing blood flow to the motor cortex. She was immobile, but her brain acted as if she was playing on Wimbledon’s Centre Court. To watch a wonderful video of the researcher leading this effort, click here. It might change the way you think about consciousness. I know it helped me. ... View more

Originally posted on May 27, 2014. Psychology is ripe with history. Unlike many sciences, psychology grips us because we are its main characters. People have more experience with quarrels than with quarks. But one of psychology’s most famous case studies continues to evolve. So, I ask, will the real Phineas Gage please step forward? The name Phineas Gage might not perk up a person’s ears as easily as Freud, Bandura, or Skinner. But the story of Phineas Gage occupies precious real estate in most psychology textbooks. He showed the world that people can survive a major brain trauma. Yet understanding his post-accident life grows fuzzier over time. In a recent article that foreshadows the upcoming book, “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons,” Sam Stein argues that what we think we know about the most famous name in neuroscience needs historical revision. Did Gage really become a psychopath? Why do people ignore Gage’s major life events, such as when he tried to make a new life in Chile? We’ll never know the true Phineas Gage. The riddle will always be partly unsolved. That isn’t such a bad thing. Sifting through material will inspire new questions—with the hope that they will inform how we understand friends, loved ones, or the many others who have suffered traumatic brain injuries. ... View more

Originally posted on May 29, 2014. How would you like to increase your brainpower? All you need is a 9-volt battery, some mad scientists, and a heaping portion of creativity. So says a slew of recent studies using a noninvasive, neuroscientific technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Think of tDCS as the ultimate symphony conductor. It can pep up certain brain regions by exciting neuronal impulses. But it can also quiet a crowd of neurons by decreasing their firing rate. A 9-volt battery powers the electrodes that rest on people’s scalps, giving people a slight twinge as the equipment increases or decreases their brain activity. In one study, Air Force pilots who received frequent tDCS stimulation, compared with those who didn’t, learned more information in less time. But tDCS isn’t merely a way to learn better. It can help people cope with upsetting situations. In a pair of papers, my colleagues and I showed that stimulating a brain region that aids emotion regulation reduced rejection-related distress and aggression. To succeed, people need some combination of talent, grit, and luck. Should a personal brain zapping machine get added to the list? ... View more

Originally posted on April 16, 2015. Our brains are amazing. I am endlessly fascinated by how the brain works. In nearly every interview I do, the reporter asks, “What part of the brain lights up when that happens?” Now reread the previous sentences. As you came upon each word, how did you read them? Did you look at each letter and arrange it into a word? Have you ever thought how we read? How can we skim so quickly through a passage and absorb its contents? Our brains don’t look at letters. So says a new study. Instead of seeing a group of letters, our brain sees the entire word as an image. Neurons in our brain’s visual word form area remember how the whole word looks, using what one researcher called a “visual dictionary.” Researchers tested their theories by teaching 25 adult participants a set of 150 nonsense words and investigating (using fMRI) how the brain reacted to the words before and after learning them. The results: The participants’ visual word form area changed after they learned the nonsense words. Pretty cool stuff. But, it’s also useful. Knowing how our brains process words could help us design interventions to help people with reading disabilities. People who have trouble learning words phonetically might have more success by learning the whole word as a visual object. Pavelen/E+/Getty Images ... View more

Originally posted on April 8, 2014. An editorial in yesterday’s New York Times questioned the nearly $1 billion the U.S. Transportation and Security Administration has invested in training and employing officers to identify high-risk airline passengers. In 2011 and 2012, T.S.A. behavior-detection officers at 49 airports “designated passengers for additional screening on 61,000 occasions.” The number successfully detected and arrested for suspected terrorism? Zero. But then again, the number of plane-destroying terrorists they failed to detect was also, I infer, zero. (Wonkish note:  A research psychologist might say the T.S.A. has made no Type II errors.) Regardless, psychological science studies of intuitive lie detection, as the Times’ John Tierney noted in an earlier article, suggest that this has not been a wise billion-dollar investment. Despite our brain’s emotion-detecting skill, we find it difficult to detect deceiving expressions. Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo reviewed 206 studies of people discerning truth from lies. The bottom line: People were just 54 percent accurate—barely better than a coin toss. I have replicated this in classroom demonstrations—by having some students either tell a true or a made-up story from their lives. When seeking to identify the liars, my students have always been vastly more confident than correct. Moreover, contrary to claims that some experts can spot lies, research indicates that few—save perhaps police professionals in high-stakes situations—beat chance. The behavioral differences between liars and truth-tellers are just too minute for most people to detect. Before spending a billion dollars on any safety measure, risk experts advise doing a cost-benefit analysis. As I reported in Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, some people were outraged when the Clinton administration did not require General Motors to replace ill-designed fuel tanks on older model pickup trucks. The decision spared General Motors some $500 million, in exchange for which it contributed $51 million to traffic safety programs. “GM bought off the government for a pittance,” said some safety advocates, “at the expense of thirty more people expected to die in fiery explosions.” Actually, argued the Department of Transportation, after additional time for litigation there would only have been enough of the old trucks left to claim 6 to 9 more lives. Take that $500 million ($70 million per life)—or the $1 billion more recently spent on behavior detection—and apply it to screening children for preventable diseases (or more vigorous anti-smoking education programs or hunger relief) and one would likely save many more lives. By doing such cost-benefit analyses, say the risk experts, governments could simultaneously save us billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Ergo, when considering how to spend money to spare injuries and save lives, critical thinkers seek not to be overly swayed by rare, dreaded catastrophes. The smart humanitarian says: “Show me the numbers.”  Big hearts can cohabit with cool heads. ... View more

Originally posted on July 1, 2014. In all of recent psychological science, there has been, to my mind, no more provocative studies those by Benjamin Libet.  His experiments have seemingly shown that when we move our wrist at will, we consciously experience the decision to move it about 0.2 seconds before the actual movement. No surprise there. But what startled me was his reporting that our brain waves jump about 0.35 seconds before we consciously perceive our decision to move! This “readiness potential” has enabled researchers (using fMRI brain scans) to predict participants’ decisions to press a button with their left or right finger. The startling conclusion: Consciousness sometimes appears to arrive late to the decision-making party. And so it has also seemed in Michael Gazzaniga’s reports of split-brain patients who readily confabulate (make up and believe) plausible but incorrect explanations for their induced actions. If Gazzinga instructs a patient’s right brain to “Walk,” the patient’s unaware left hemisphere will improvise an explanation for walking: “I’m going into the house to get a Coke.”  The conscious left brain is the brain’s public relations system—its explanation-constructing “interpreter.” So, do Libet’s and Gazzaniga’s observations destroy the concept of free will?  Does our brain really make decisions before our conscious mind knows about them?  Do we fly through life on autopilot?  Are we (our conscious minds) mere riders on a wild beast? Not so fast.  Stanislas Dehaene and his colleagues report that brain activity continuously ebbs and flows, regardless of whether a decision is made and executed.  The actual decision to move, they observe, occurs when the brain activity crosses a threshold, which happens to coincide with the average “time of awareness of intention to move” (about 0.15 second before the movement).  In their view, the mind’s decision and the brain’s activity, like a computer’s problem solving and its electronic activity, are parallel and virtually simultaneous. The late neuroscientist Donald MacKay offered a seemingly similar idea:  “When I am thinking, my brain activity reflects what I am thinking, as [computer’s] activity reflects the equation it is solving.”  The mind and brain activities are yoked (no brain, no mind), he argued, but are complementary and conceptually distinct.  As my colleague Tom Ludwig has noted, MacKay’s view—that mental events are embodied in but not identical to brain events—is a third alternative to both dualism and materialism (physicalism). ... View more

Originally posted on July 24, 2014. Some recent naturalistic observations illustrated for me the results of longitudinal studies of human development—studies that follow lives across time, noting our capacities for both stability and change. My procedure, though time-consuming, was simple: Observation Stage 1:  Attend a small college, living on campus with ample opportunity to observe my many friends. Intervening experience:  Let 50 years of life unfold, taking us to varied places. Observation Stage 2:  Meet and talk with these friends again, at a college reunion. Time and again, researchers have documented the remarkable stability of emotionality, intelligence, and personality across decades of life.  “As at age 7, so at 70” says a Jewish proverb. And so it was for my friends (with names changed to protect identities).  Thoughtful, serious Joe was still making earnest pronouncements.  Driven, status-conscious Louise continues to visibly excel.  Exuberant Mark could still talk for ten minutes while hardly catching a breath.  Gentle, kind Laura was still sensitive and kindhearted.  Mischievous, prankster George still evinced an edgy, impish spirit.  Smiling, happy Joanne still readily grinned and laughed.  I was amazed:  a half century, and yet everyone seemed the same person that walked off that graduation stage. In other ways, however, life is a process of becoming.  Compared to temperament and to traits such as extraversion, social attitudes are more amenable to change.  And so it was for us, with my formerly kindred-spirited dorm mates having moved in different directions . . . some now expressing tea partyish concerns about cultural moral decay and big government, and others now passionate about justice and support for gay-lesbian aspirations.  Before they opened their mouths, I had no idea which was going to be which. And isn’t that the life experience of each of us—that our development is a story of both stability and change.  Stability, rooted in our enduring genes and brains, provides our identity . . . while our potential for change enables us to grow with experience and to hope for a brighter future. (For more on the neurobiology that underlies our stable individuality, and on the brain plasticity that enables our changing, see Richard Davidson’s recent Dana Foundation essay.) ... View more

Originally September 7, 2014. My wife loves me, despite smirking that I am “boringly predictable.”  Every day, I go to bed at pretty much the same time, rise at the same time, pull on my khaki pants and brown shoes, frequent the same coffee shops, ride the same old bicycle, and exercise every weekday noon hour.  As I walk into my Monday-Wednesday-Friday breakfast spot, the staff order up my oatmeal and tea.  I’ll admit to boring. But there is an upside to mindless predictability.  As my colleagues-friends Roy Baumeister, Julia Exline, Nathan DeWall and others have documented, self-controlled decision-making is like a muscle.  It temporarily weakens after an exertion (a phenomenon called “ego depletion”) and replenishes with rest. Exercising willpower temporarily depletes the mental energy needed for self-control on other tasks.  It even depletes the blood sugar and neural activity associated with mental focus. In one experiment, hungry people who had resisted the temptation to eat chocolate chip cookies gave up sooner on a tedious task (compared with those who had not expended mental energy on resisting the cookies). President Obama, who appreciates social science research, understands this.  As he explained to Vanity Fair writer Michael Lewis, “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”  Lewis reports that Obama mentioned “research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions,” noting that Obama added, “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” So, amid today’s applause for “mindfulness,” let’s put in a word for mindlessness.  Mindless, habitual living frees our minds to work on more important things than which pants to wear or what breakfast to order.  As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead argued, “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” ... View more

Originally posted on December 16, 2014. The December APS Observer is out with an essay by Nathan on “The Neural Greenhouse:  Teaching Students How to Grow Neurons and Keep Them Alive.” Our brains are like greenhouses, he notes, with new neurons sprouting daily, “while others wither and die.” To take this neuroscience into the classroom, he offers three activities. In the same issue, I say, “Let’s Hear a Good Word for Self-Esteem.” Mindful of recent research on the perils of excessive self-regard—of illusory optimism, self-serving bias, and the like—I offer a quick synopsis of work on the benefits of a sense of one’s self-worth. I also offer Google ngram figures showing sharply increased occurrences of “self-esteem” in printed English over the last century, and of decreasing occurrences of “self-control.” ... View more

Originally posted on June 30, 2015. From the daily information stream that flows across my desk or up my computer screen, here is a recent new flashes: How marital support gets under the skin. A mountain of research shows that good marriages predict better health and longer life. But why? In a longitudinal study, Richard Slatcher and colleagues found that the perceived responsiveness of one’s partner predicted healthier stress hormone levels ten years later. “Our findings demonstrate that positive aspects of marriage—not only partner responsiveness but also provision of emotional support—may help shape the HPA axis in beneficial ways, potentially leading to long-term changes in cortisol production.” (The HPA axis is the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal network that controls our reactions to stress.) ... View more

Originally posted on October 27, 2015. Phantom limb sensations are one of psychology’s curiosities. Were you to suffer the amputation of a limb, your brain might then misinterpret spontaneous activity in brain areas that once received the limb’s sensory input. Thus, amputees often feel pain in a nonexistent limb, and even try to step out of bed onto a phantom leg, or to lift a cup with a phantom hand. Phantoms also haunt other senses as the brain misinterprets irrelevant brain activity. Therefore, those of us with hearing loss may experience the sound of silence—tinnitus (ringing in the ears in the absence of sound). Those with vision loss may experience phantom sights (hallucinations). Those with damaged taste or smell systems may experience phantom tastes or smells. And now comes word from the Turkish Journal of Psychiatry that 54 percent of 41 patients who had undergone a mastectomy afterwards experienced a continued perception of breast tissue, with 80 percent of those also experiencing “phantom breast pain.” As I shared this result (gleaned from the Turkish journal’s contents in the weekly Current Contents: Social and Behavioral Sciences) with my wife, I wondered: Is there any part of the body that we could lose without the possibility of phantom sensations? If an ear were sliced off, should we not be surprised at experiencing phantom ear syndrome? The larger lesson here: There’s more to perception than meets our sense receptors. We feel, see, hear, taste, and smell with our brain, which can experience perceptions with or without functioning senses. ... View more

Originally posted on February 2, 2016. You’ve likely heard the NPR ads for brain fitness games offered by Lumosity. “70 Million brain trainers in 182 countries challenge their brains with Lumosity,” declares its website. The hoped-for results range from enhanced cognitive powers to increased school and work performance to decreased late-life cognitive decline or dementia. But do brain-training games really makes us smarter or enlarge our memory capacity? In our just-released Exploring Psychology, 10th Edition, Nathan DeWall and I suggest “that brain training can produce short-term gains, but mostly on the trained tasks and not for cognitive ability in general.” As an earlier TalkPsych blog essay reported, Zachary Hambrick and Randall Engle have “published studies and research reviews that question the popular idea that brain-training games enhance older adults’ intelligence and memory. Despite the claims of companies marketing brain exercises, brain training appears to produce gains only on the trained tasks (without generalizing to other tasks).” And that is also the recently announced conclusion of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), when fining Lumosity’s maker, Lumos Labs, $2 million for false advertising. As FTC spokesperson Michelle Rusk reported to Science​, “The most that they have shown is that with enough practice you get better on these games, or on similar cognitive tasks...There’s no evidence that training transfers to any real-world setting.” Although this leaves open the possibility that certain other brain-training programs might have cognitive benefits, the settlement affirms skeptics who doubt that brain games have broad cognitive benefits. ... View more

Want to add a little psychopathy to your neuroscience or emotion lectures? Or add a little emotion and neuroscience to your psychopathy lecture? Kevin Dutton (University of Oxford), in a 5-minute video, presents a couple versions of the trolley problem and explains the role of emotion in responding to the dilemma. He notes that psychopaths respond in a purely utilitarian way, without emotion getting in the way. In the first video below, Dutton describes a scenario in which five people will die if a trolley continues on its path but where flipping a switch will send the trolley down a different track killing one person. Pause this video at the 49-second mark and give students an opportunity to think about their decision. Ask students to decide, but not reveal their response. If you use a student response system, ask students to click in with, say, A once they’ve made their decision. Return to playing the video. Dutton changes the scenario so that now you are faced with a different decision. The trolley, again, on its current course will kill five people. But now there is a “large stranger” in front of you. If you shove this person to their certain death in front of the trolley, the trolley will stop and the five people will be saved.  Pause the video at the 1:38 mark and give students time to mull over their decision. Again, ask students to decide, but not reveal their response. As before, if you use a student response system, ask students to click in with A once they’ve made their decision. Dutton goes on to say that the first decision involves primarily the cerebral cortex. But when it comes to the second decision of whether to physically push someone to their death, for most people the emotion-heavy amygdala becomes involved and the decision is much more difficult. What about psychopaths? The amygdala stays quiet, and psychopaths don’t feel a difference between the two dilemmas. The decision to shove the stranger feels no different than the decision to flip the switch. Video Link : 1665 If you have time and wish to continue the topic, Dutton has another 5-minute video that expands on this one. To introduce it, ask students if there are any benefits to having someone who is willing and able to sacrifice one person, regardless of circumstances, to save many people? If time allows, ask students to discuss in pairs or small groups, and then ask for volunteers to share their responses. Now, play this video. Video Link : 1666 After this, students will have a lot to think about and may not be able to focus on anything else you have to say. It may be best to time this activity so it ends when your class session ends. ... View more

The coverage of epigenetics in Intro Psych textbooks appears to be slowly on the rise. And with good reason. If you're not familiar with epigenetics, this 9-minute student-friendly video is a nice introduction Video Link : 1576 For a more scholarly introduction to epigenetics, this 2016 article from Child Development will get you up to speed. In Intro Psych, your textbook may give an overview of the topic wherever it covers genetics and revisit epigenetics again during coverage of psychology disorders. Research is stacking up. Our experiences influence the turning on and off of genes that are linked to psychological disorders. For example, "Exposure to stressful or traumatic life events, especially early in life (early life stress (ELS)), is one of the strongest risk factors for a number of psychiatric disorders, ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) over depression to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Over the past decade, an ever growing body of evidence indicates that exposure to stressful life events can lead to long lasting changes in a number of systems including the endocrine system, the immune system and brain structure and function" (Provencal & Binder, 2015). If a cause of psychological disorders is related to epigenetics, the effectiveness of treatments may also reside in epigenetics. Electroconvulsive therapy, for example, may alter epigenetic tags (Jong, et.al., 2014). Psychiatric drugs may also work this way (Boks, et.al., 2012). For Intro Psych, the specifics of epigenetics is probably not that important, but a broad overview and the implications of the research are certainly worth the time. References Boks, M. P., de Jong, N. M., Kas, M. J. H., Vinkers, C. H., Fernandes, C., Kahn, R. S., … Ophoff, R. A. (2012). Current status and future prospects for epigenetic psychopharmacology. Epigenetics, 7(1), 20–28. http://doi.org/10.4161/epi.7.1.18688 Jong, J. O., Arts, B., Boks, M. P., Sienaert, P., Hove, D. L., Kenis, G., . . . Rutten, B. P. (2014). Epigenetic effects of electroconvulsive seizures. The Journal of ECT, 30(2), 152-159. doi:10.1097/yct.0000000000000141  Lester, B. M., Conradt, E. and Marsit, C. (2016), Introduction to the Special Section on Epigenetics. Child Development, 87: 29–37. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12489 Provencal, N., & Binder, E. B. (2015). The neurobiological effects of stress as contributors to psychiatric disorders: Focus on epigenetics. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 30, 31-37. doi:10.1016/j.conb.2014.08.007  ... View more

I was looking at how my students did on my Intro Psych exam questions this past fall. One item on split-brain jumped out at me. I have such a question on the first exam and another on the final. Both questions posit that something is briefly shown in the left visual field and another something is briefly shown in the right visual field of someone who has had split brain surgery. The answer choices ask the student to identify what the person can do, e.g., use their right hand to point at the first something, say what the other something was. Last fall, how did my students do on the split brain questions? Not so well. On the module exam, about 50% of my students got the question right. On the final exam, about 20% did. I know this is a tricky concept. Initially I was thinking I could do some sort of in-class demo to help students see the difference. I had some ideas that involved student volunteers, but then when it came time to do it in class, I thought, "There is no way this is going to work. They're going to leave being more confused." So I didn't do it. At my next department meeting, I said that I was trying to find a way to help students grasp split brain and was wondering if anyone had ideas. Rod Fowers said that he had created a worksheet [download here] that helps students think it through. He acknowledged that a 2-page worksheet for this concept may feel like overkill, but he was also trying to model to students how to break something that is complex into smaller chunks to make it more digestible. That makes sense. I sent the worksheet to my students as a 5-point extra credit opportunity (over 600 points in the course) via our course management system on Friday. The instructions were to print it out (or manipulate it digitally), follow the instructions (which includes drawing), and get it to me by the beginning of class on Monday (day of their first exam, an exam that included a split brain question). About half of my students completed the worksheet correctly. (Only one student who turned it in didn't earn credit for it.) How did they do on that first exam split brain question? Of the 26 who successfully completed the worksheet, 69% answered the question correctly. Of the 28 who didn't do the worksheet, 25% answered the question correctly. I can see that difference even without a statistical test. Now, I know what you're thinking. "But Sue, it's the students who tend to do better on tests who do the extra credit." I removed the split brain question from my students' total exam scores. Was there a difference in their adjusted exam scores? Nope. Next up is the final exam. Will I see an increase in performance on that split brain question as well? I'll let you know in a couple months. I have data at this point to include this split brain worksheet in my classes next term as a required assignment. I may even make it part of an in-class small group activity like my colleague Ruth Frickle did yesterday. Although I will probably modify the worksheet, removing the questions about how each eye is halved since that's a bit more than I really want my students to know. If you try this worksheet, I'd love to hear how it works for you! ... View more