Brain & Behavior

[Michael Scally MD]

Mind-goggling
It is now possible to scan someone’s brain and get a reasonable idea of what is going through his mind
Reading the brain: Mind-goggling | The Economist

Using specifically trained motor imaginations learned in single dimensional cursor tasks, subjects control the three-dimensional movement of a virtual helicopter. Raw EEG is temporally and spatially filtered to produce individualized control signal components. These components are weighted and digitized in a subject specific manner and output to influence control in the virtual world.


Doud AJ, Lucas JP, Pisansky MT, He B. Continuous Three-Dimensional Control of a Virtual Helicopter Using a Motor Imagery Based Brain-Computer Interface. PLoS ONE 2011;6(10):e26322. http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0026322

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow a user to interact with a computer system using thought. However, only recently have devices capable of providing sophisticated multi-dimensional control been achieved non-invasively. A major goal for non-invasive BCI systems has been to provide continuous, intuitive, and accurate control, while retaining a high level of user autonomy. By employing electroencephalography (EEG) to record and decode sensorimotor rhythms (SMRs) induced from motor imaginations, a consistent, user-specific control signal may be characterized. Utilizing a novel method of interactive and continuous control, we trained three normal subjects to modulate their SMRs to achieve three-dimensional movement of a virtual helicopter that is fast, accurate, and continuous. In this system, the virtual helicopter's forward-backward translation and elevation controls were actuated through the modulation of sensorimotor rhythms that were converted to forces applied to the virtual helicopter at every simulation time step, and the helicopter's angle of left or right rotation was linearly mapped, with higher resolution, from sensorimotor rhythms associated with other motor imaginations. These different resolutions of control allow for interplay between general intent actuation and fine control as is seen in the gross and fine movements of the arm and hand. Subjects controlled the helicopter with the goal of flying through rings (targets) randomly positioned and oriented in a three-dimensional space. The subjects flew through rings continuously, acquiring as many as 11 consecutive rings within a five-minute period. In total, the study group successfully acquired over 85% of presented targets. These results affirm the effective, three-dimensional control of our motor imagery based BCI system, and suggest its potential applications in biological navigation, neuroprosthetics, and other applications.


Dresler M, Koch Stefan P, Wehrle R, et al. Dreamed Movement Elicits Activation in the Sensorimotor Cortex. Current biology. Current Biology - Dreamed Movement Elicits Activation in the Sensorimotor Cortex

Since the discovery of the close association between rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and dreaming, much effort has been devoted to link physiological signatures of REM sleep to the contents of associated dreams [1 4]. Due to the impossibility of experimentally controlling spontaneous dream activity, however, a direct demonstration of dream contents by neuroimaging methods is lacking. By combining brain imaging with polysomnography and exploiting the state of lucid dreaming, we show here that a predefined motor task performed during dreaming elicits neuronal activation in the sensorimotor cortex. In lucid dreams, the subject is aware of the dreaming state and capable of performing predefined actions while all standard polysomnographic criteria of REM sleep are fulfilled [5, 6]. Using eye signals as temporal markers, neural activity measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) was related to dreamed hand movements during lucid REM sleep. Though preliminary, we provide first evidence that specific contents of REM-associated dreaming can be visualized by neuroimaging. º

 

[tariq456]

Thanks for sharing the information!
I found this article very interesting and informative!
Keep sharing!

 

[ergomaniac]

http://news.yahoo.com/smart-kids-more-likely-try-illicit-drugs-young-140212779.html

im a genius. i knew it.

 

[ergomaniac]

kinda throws a wrench in the drug users as criminals and the whole drug war in general. IMHO.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

The Mere Anticipation of an Interaction with a Woman Can Impair Men’s Cognitive Performance

“What are you doing? What’s the matter? Be quiet, stupid!” he said to his heart. But the more he tried to be calm, the more labored grew his breath. (Tolstoy)

In Tolstoy’s famous novel Anna Karenina, Levin walks up to a skating pond to talk to Kitty. Determined to make a good impression on the girl, his heart starts racing as he thinks of what to say to Kitty and tries to picture her. At the time he arrives at the pond, he starts stuttering and blushing and is even unable to recognize a friend that passes by.

Novels and movies frequently feature men who are trying hard to impress a woman but are completely depleted by their attempts, causing them to stumble, forget where they live, or, in Levin’s case, stutter and fail to recognize a friend. Though these examples may seem far-fetched, recent research suggests that they contain a kernel of truth: men’s cognitive performance is depleted after a short interaction with a woman, especially if the woman is attractive and men report trying to impress her. Interactions that require impression management are cognitively taxing because people need to exert effort to strategically control their behavior and monitor the impression they make. Thus, men’s (but not women’s) cognitive performance is impaired after an interaction with someone of the opposite sex because they are trying to make a good impression on her, and impression management is cognitively costly.

In Levin’s case, however, it is not the actual interaction with Kitty that causes him to stutter: he was already depleted by the time he reached the pond. In everyday life, there are many such situations in which men merely anticipate an interaction with a woman (anticipated interactions) or in which they do not communicate with a woman face-to-face (pseudo-interactions) but do so via phone or the internet. In fact, these types of “pseudo-interactions” have become more and more frequent through the advance of the internet and mobile phones, to the point where 89% of college students use instant messaging (and have instant messaging programs turned on for an average of 10 h a day), and almost 30% of employees use instant messaging to communicate with customers or colleagues. Next to pseudo-interactions, there are many situations in which men expect an interaction with a woman (e.g., when waiting for a meeting with a new female coworker or before going on a blind date). Thus, from a practical point of view, an interesting question is if such pseudo-interactions and anticipated interactions with opposite-sex others lead to the cognitive impairment effect that has been found previously in studies in which males actually interacted with an opposite-sex other.

One important difference between actual interactions and pseudo- or anticipated interactions is that in anticipated interactions or pseudo-interactions, men frequently know little to nothing about the woman they are (going to be) interacting with. Men do not usually know if the female call center employee who contacts them about their car insurance is attractive, or whether their new accountant, with whom they have an appointment later that day, is single. It is unclear if men’s cognitive performance would decrease in such an uncertain situation, as people generally only expend cognitive resources if they find doing so is worthwhile, and men do not readily engage in impression management if a woman has low mate value. The first goal of the present research was to examine if men’s cognitive performance decreased after a pseudo-interaction with a woman in the absence of clear information about her mate value.

There are several lines of research suggesting that men may expend their cognitive resources on an anticipated or pseudo-interaction with a woman even if they have little to no information about her mate value. Men are likely to perceive relatively neutral situations in sexualized terms: compared to women, they have a higher sex drive, and they are so strongly attuned to sexual opportunities that they frequently over perceive women’s sexual intent. According to error management theory, evolutionary pressures shaped an adaptively biased system of judgment in men that minimizes the risk of missing mating opportunities, even though this means that men frequently invest resources in women who are not actually interested in them. In line with this, there is research suggesting that even subtle exposure to a woman can trigger men’s motivation to make a good impression, and could already instigate processes related to impression management (e.g., risk taking behavior). Thus, men are likely to be motivated to invest precious cognitive resources even in the absence of information about their interaction partner, because she might be an attractive mate. Therefore, we expect that men’s cognitive performance will decrease after a pseudo-interaction with a woman, even if they lack clear information about her attractiveness, age, and marital status.

The second goal of the present research was to investigate if men’s cognitive performance will decrease if they merely anticipate an interaction with a woman: a situation that does not require actual impression management. From a theoretical point of view, this question is interesting, as previous research suggests that certain types of interactions are cognitively taxing because they require people to manage their impressions and coordinate the interaction to make it run smoothly. In a prior study, men’s cognitive performance decreased after they had been talking to and interacting with an attractive young confederate or fellow student for five to seven minutes. In this situation, men could extensively monitor and strategically adjust their verbal and nonverbal behavior during the interaction, and they had to exert effort to make the interaction run smoothly and override habitual or dispositional responses in order to make the desired impression. This study suggests that interacting with a woman can be cognitively taxing for men as the males are expending their cognitive resources during the interaction on making a good impression, resulting in reduced cognitive resources to perform well on a subsequent task.

Would an anticipated interaction lead to a similar cognitive impairment effect? If only actively making a good impression would cause the cognitive impairment effect, we should not expect this effect to occur in the case of an anticipated interaction with a woman. However, we reason that there may be processes related to impression management that can spontaneously be induced when anticipating an interaction with a woman, and these processes may also be cognitively taxing. In Tolstoy’s novel, Levin thought about Kitty, the girl he would have to talk to later on, and practiced the interaction with her while walking to the pond to meet her. It seems likely that, when anticipating an interaction with a woman, men likewise try to envision their interaction partner and estimate which kind of impression they would like to make on her. Moreover, they may also envision how they will try to impress her. Relatedly, males may feel anxious when thinking about an upcoming interaction, which may negatively affect cognitive performance. Thus, psychological processes related to, or in the service of, impression management may hinder cognitive performance on other tasks.

In sum, although research suggests that men’s cognitive performance decreases after an interaction with an attractive woman because they try to make a good impression on her, it is unclear if having a pseudo-interaction or anticipating an interaction will yield the same effects. This question is interesting because such interactions are highly prevalent in the age of internet, mobile phones, and instant messaging and because such interactions lack some of the characteristics (i.e., often little or no information about the interaction partner; no possibility for actual impression management in case of the anticipated interaction) that have been implied in explaining previous results showing that interacting with a woman can impair men’s cognitive performance.

Researchers conducted two studies to address these issues.

In Study 1, they investigated if men’s cognitive performance would decrease after a pseudo-interaction in which men lacked clear information about the woman’s mate value. In this study, men were told that they were being observed by a female experimenter while doing a task.

In Study 2, they investigated if the cognitive impairment would occur for males in a situation in which they could not actually engage in impression management.

In this study, men merely anticipated having a pseudo-interaction with a woman later on. The situation they created in both experiments was fairly neutral: participants were told that they participated in an experiment about language, and their supposed interaction partner was an experimenter who would send them a message to let them know that they could start the task. They expected that men’s, but not women’s, cognitive performance would decrease after they had a pseudo-interaction with, or anticipated an interaction with, someone from the opposite sex.

The present research showed that men’s cognitive performance declined after they engaged in a pseudo-interaction with a woman (Study 1) or after they merely anticipated interacting with a woman (Study 2). These findings extent previous research by suggesting that actually interacting with a woman was not a necessary prerequisite for the cognitive impairment effect in men to occur. Men seem so strongly attuned to mating opportunities that they were influenced by rather subtle cues to a woman, even in the absence of clear information about her. Casually mentioning a female instead of a male name was sufficient to impair men’s cognitive performance. Outside of the laboratory, men frequently anticipate interactions or engage in pseudo-interactions in which they have limited information about their interaction partner. Thus, the present research suggests that the cognitive impairment effect for males can occur in more situations than previously assumed: men’s cognitive performance might be affected if they are talking to a woman on the phone (or already before that, while they were waiting for her phone call), if they are chatting with a woman online or if they are sitting in the waiting room of their new, female, doctor.


Nauts S, Metzmacher M, Verwijmeren T, Rommeswinkel V, Karremans J. The Mere Anticipation of an Interaction with a Woman Can Impair Men’s Cognitive Performance. Archives of Sexual Behavior 2011:1-6. http://www.springerlink.com/content/j5797p0205w350p6/fulltext.pdf / The Mere Anticipation of an Interaction with a Woman Can Impair Men’s Cognitive Performance

Recent research suggests that heterosexual men’s (but not heterosexual women’s) cognitive performance is impaired after an interaction with someone of the opposite sex (Karremans et al., 2009). These findings have been interpreted in terms of the cognitive costs of trying to make a good impression during the interaction. In everyday life, people frequently engage in pseudo-interactions with women (e.g., through the phone or the internet) or anticipate interacting with a woman later on. The goal of the present research was to investigate if men’s cognitive performance decreased in these types of situations, in which men have little to no opportunity to impress her and, moreover, have little to no information about the mate value of their interaction partner. Two studies demonstrated that men’s (but not women’s) cognitive performance declined if they were led to believe that they interacted with a woman via a computer (Study 1) or even if they merely anticipated an interaction with a woman (Study 2). Together, these results suggest that an actual interaction is not a necessary prerequisite for the cognitive impairment effect to occur. Moreover, these effects occur even if men do not get information about the woman’s attractiveness. This latter finding is discussed in terms of error management theory.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Familial Linkage between Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Intellectual Interests

A link between intellect and temperament has long been the subject of speculation. Aristotle claimed that “those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia”, while the physician Benjamin Rush noted a link between manic episodes and “talents for eloquence, poetry, music, and painting.” Studies of the artistically inclined report linkage with familial depression, while among eminent and creative scientists, a lower incidence of affective disorders is found. In the case of developmental disorders, a heightened prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has been found in the families of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers. These threads of evidence suggest that intellectual interests might be broadly linked to neuropsychiatric disorders.

Researchers had a unique opportunity to investigate such association in an entire defined population of high-functioning young adults, an incoming freshman class at a major private university. The students were ethnically and geographically diverse, and compared with the general population, academically motivated and relatively free to pursue their true interests. This student body was biased towards middle and high socioeconomic status, groups with high levels of medical care and for whom familial neuropsychiatric issues are more likely to be detected and reported than in the general population. Researchers obtained 1077 responses, which constitutes to their knowledge the largest cohort thus surveyed to date.

Consistent with prior findings, they noticed a relation between intended academic majors and ASDs. Looking for relations between other neuropsychiatric disorders and academic interest, they also noted a heightened prevalence of bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder and substance abuse in the families of those pursuing the humanities. A composite score based on these four heritable disorders was strongly correlated with a student's intended academic major. Thus, familial risk toward a spectrum of psychopathologies can predict propensity toward technical versus humanist interests.


Campbell BC, Wang SSH. Familial Linkage between Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Intellectual Interests. PLoS ONE 2012;7(1):e30405. PLoS ONE: Familial Linkage between Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Intellectual Interests

From personality to neuropsychiatric disorders, individual differences in brain function are known to have a strong heritable component. Here we report that between close relatives, a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders covary strongly with intellectual interests. We surveyed an entire class of high-functioning young adults at an elite university for prospective major, familial incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, and demographic and attitudinal questions. Students aspiring to technical majors (science/mathematics/engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder (p = 0.037). Conversely, students interested in the humanities were more likely to report a family member with major depressive disorder (p = 8.8×10?4), bipolar disorder (p = 0.027), or substance abuse problems (p = 1.9×10?6). A combined PREdisposition for Subject MattEr (PRESUME) score based on these disorders was strongly predictive of subject matter interests (p = 9.6×10?8). Our results suggest that shared genetic (and perhaps environmental) factors may both predispose for heritable neuropsychiatric disorders and influence the development of intellectual interests.

 

[PUMP THAT]

Very informative posts !

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Van Boven, Leaf, Loewenstein, George F., Welch, Edward and Dunning, David, The Illusion of Courage in Self-Predictions: Mispredicting One's Own Behavior in Embarrassing Situations (January 30, 2012). Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 1-12, January 2012 . The illusion of courage in self-predictions: Mispredicting one's own behavior in embarrassing situations - Van Boven - 2010 - Journal of Behavioral Decision Making - Wiley Online Library

People exhibit an "illusion of courage" when predicting their own behavior in embarrassing situations. In three experiments, participants overestimated their own willingness to engage in embarrassing public performances in exchange for money when those performances were psychologically distant: Hypothetical or in the relatively distant future. This illusion of courage occurs partly because of cold/hot empathy gaps. That is, people in a relatively "cold" unemotional state underestimate the influence on their own preferences and behaviors of being in a relative "hot" emotional state such as social anxiety evoked by an embarrassing situation. Consistent with this cold/hot empathy gap explanation, putting people "in touch" with negative emotional states by arousing fear (Experiments 1 and 2) and anger (Experiment 2) decreased people's willingness to engage in psychologically distant embarrassing public performances. Conversely, putting people "out of touch" with social anxiety through aerobic exercise, which reduces state anxiety and increases confidence, increased people's willingness to engage in psychologically distance embarrassing public performances (Experiment 3). Implications for self-predictions, self-evaluation, and affective forecasting are discussed.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Balcetis E, Dunning D. See what you want to see: motivational influences on visual perception. J Pers Soc Psychol 2006;91(4):612-25. http://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/news/dp_colloquia/Spring%202010/balcetis%20dunning%202006%20jpsp.pdf

People's motivational states--their wishes and preferences--influence their processing of visual stimuli. In 5 studies, participants shown an ambiguous figure (e.g., one that could be seen either as the letter B or the number 13) tended to report seeing the interpretation that assigned them to outcomes they favored. This finding was affirmed by unobtrusive and implicit measures of perception (e.g., eye tracking, lexical decision tasks) and by experimental procedures demonstrating that participants were aware only of the single (usually favored) interpretation they saw at the time they viewed the stimulus. These studies suggest that the impact of motivation on information processing extends down into preconscious processing of stimuli in the visual environment and thus guides what the visual system presents to conscious awareness.

 

[zkt]

Balcetis E, Dunning D. See what you want to see: motivational influences on visual perception. J Pers Soc Psychol 2006;91(4):612-25. http://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/news/dp_colloquia/Spring%202010/balcetis%20dunning%202006%20jpsp.pdf

People's motivational states--their wishes and preferences--influence their processing of visual stimuli. In 5 studies, participants shown an ambiguous figure (e.g., one that could be seen either as the letter B or the number 13) tended to report seeing the interpretation that assigned them to outcomes they favored. This finding was affirmed by unobtrusive and implicit measures of perception (e.g., eye tracking, lexical decision tasks) and by experimental procedures demonstrating that participants were aware only of the single (usually favored) interpretation they saw at the time they viewed the stimulus. These studies suggest that the impact of motivation on information processing extends down into preconscious processing of stimuli in the visual environment and thus guides what the visual system presents to conscious awareness.

Brings to mind scenes of interesting discussions upon the nature of consciousness.
You do good research, man, and your taste in music aint bad either/
Play?

 

[Michael Scally MD]

How To Be Creative
The image of the 'creative type' is a myth. Jonah Lehrer on why anyone can innovate—and why a hot shower, a cold beer or a trip to your colleague's desk might be the key to your next big idea.
Jonah Lehrer on How to Be Creative - WSJ.com

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Narcissism on Facebook

Facebook is one of the most popular websites in the world with over 600 million users (). Those who use Facebook enjoy many benefits. Some college students use Facebook to seek and receive social support when they feel upset. Recent experiments found when individuals are feeling distressed, they turn to Facebook to feel better. On the other hand, other research argues that although online interaction provides opportunities for positive social interaction, some users abuse the affordances of social networking sites like Facebook to behave in anti-social ways. They argue that researchers need to move past seeking to determine if computer-mediated communication (CMC) has positive or negative effects as a whole but to determine why people use websites like Facebook in ways that promote or harm interpersonal relationships.

This study sought to take a step in that direction by examining one possible predictor of anti-social Facebook use: trait narcissism. The narcissistic personality type will first be briefly explicated. Then the existing research on the relationship between narcissism and Facebook use will be explored to develop hypotheses. Investigating the relationship between narcissism and Facebook behavior is important because Facebook is becoming an increasingly important part of people’s lives. Several researchers have found a relationship between narcissism and frequency of using Facebook. Other researchers found that narcissism is associated with the number of friends their participants have on Facebook. If these findings are accurate, it suggests that when people are interacting with others on Facebook, they are more likely to be interacting with individuals who are high in trait narcissism than in other contexts.

If Facebook users are likely to be engaging in negative behaviors, the quality of the interpersonal interactions people experience on Facebook will be reduced. Furthermore, some research suggests that people are evaluated not just by their own profiles but by the comments others make on their profiles. The negative behavior of narcissists on Facebook may reflect poorly on the innocent friends of those narcissists. If the relationship between narcissism and various kinds of behaviors can be uncovered, perhaps interventions can be designed to improve the Facebook social skills of trait narcissists.


Carpenter CJ. Narcissism on Facebook: Self-promotional and anti-social behavior. Personality and Individual Differences 2012;52(4):482-6. ScienceDirect.com - Personality and Individual Differences - Narcissism on Facebook: Self-promotional and anti-social behavior

A survey was conducted that measured self-promoting Facebook behaviors (e.g. posting status updates and photos of oneself, updating profile information) and several anti-social behaviors (e.g. seeking social support more than one provides it, getting angry when people do not comment on one's status updates, retaliating against negative comments). The grandiose exhibitionism subscale of the narcissistic personality inventory was hypothesized to predict the self-promoting behaviors. The entitlement/exploitativeness subscale was hypothesized to predict the anti-social behaviors. Results were largely consistent with the hypothesis for the self-promoting behaviors but mixed concerning the anti-social behaviors. Trait self-esteem was also related in the opposite manner as the Narcissism scales to some Facebook behaviors.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Lehdonvirta M, Nagashima Y, Lehdonvirta V, Baba A. The Stoic Male. Games and Culture 2012;7(1):29-47. http://vili.lehdonvirta.com/files/fhbx4348/Lehdonvirta-2012-Avatar-gender-and-help-seeking.pdf

Men are more reluctant to seek help for their problems than women. This difference is attributed to social expectations regarding the male gender role. Today, help-seeking is moving online: instead of traditional peer groups and counselors, people depend on online communities and e-counselors. But online users can appear in guises that differ from their physical sex. An empirical study was conducted in an online game to examine whether users' avatars' gender influences how they seek and receive help. Analysis is based on user-to-user communications and back-end data. Results indicate that male avatars are less likely to receive sought-for help than female avatars and more likely to be the recipients of indirectly sought help. The authors conclude that avatar gender influences help seeking independent of physical sex: Men overcome their inhibition for help seeking when using female avatars. Practitioners should ensure that means for indirect help seeking are available in order not to exclude male-pattern help seekers.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Denkova E, Dolcos S, Dolcos F. Reliving emotional personal memories: Affective biases linked to personality and sex-related differences. Emotion. http://dolcoslab.beckman.illinois.edu/files/Denkoka-Dolcos-Dolcos2012_Emotion_Personality-Sex-PersonalMemories.pdf

Although available evidence suggests that the emotional valence and recollective properties of autobiographical memories (AMs) may be influenced by personality- and sex-related differences, overall these relationships remain poorly understood. The present study investigated these issues by comparing the effect of general personality traits (extraversion and neuroticism) and specific traits linked to emotion regulation (ER) strategies (reappraisal and suppression) on the retrieval of emotional AMs and on the associated postretrieval emotional states, in men and women. First, extraversion predicted recollection of positive AMs in both men and women, whereas neuroticism predicted the proportion of negative AMs in men and the frequency of rehearsing negative AMs in women. Second, reappraisal predicted positive AMs in men, and suppression predicted negative AMs in women. Third, while reliving of positive memories had an overall indirect effect on postretrieval positive mood through extraversion, reliving of negative AMs had a direct effect on postretrieval negative mood, which was linked to inefficient engagement of suppression in women. Our findings suggest that personality traits associated with positive affect predict recollection of positive AMs and maintenance of a positive mood, whereas personality traits associated with negative affect, along with differential engagement of habitual ER strategies in men and women, predict sex-related differences in the recollection and experiencing of negative AMs. These findings provide insight into the factors that influence affective biases in reliving AMs, and into their possible link to sex-related differences in the susceptibility to affective disorders.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Barbey AK, Colom R, Solomon J, Krueger F, Forbes C, Grafman J. An integrative architecture for general intelligence and executive function revealed by lesion mapping. Brain. http://www.decisionneurosciencelab.org/pdfs/Barbey_et_al_2012.pdf

Although cognitive neuroscience has made remarkable progress in understanding the involvement of the prefrontal cortex in executive control, the broader functional networks that support high-level cognition and give rise to general intelligence remain to be well characterized. Here, we investigated the neural substrates of the general factor of intelligence (g) and executive function in 182 patients with focal brain damage using voxel-based lesion–symptom mapping. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Delis–Kaplan Executive Function System were used to derive measures of g and executive function, respectively. Impaired performance on these measures was associated with damage to a distributed network of left lateralized brain areas, including regions of frontal and parietal cortex and white matter association tracts, which bind these areas into a coordinated system. The observed findings support an integrative framework for understanding the architecture of general intelligence and executive function, supporting their reliance upon a shared fronto-parietal network for the integration and control of cognitive representations and making specific recommendations for the application of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Delis–Kaplan Executive Function System to the study of high-level cognition in health and disease.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

 

[ergomaniac]

^^^ ive read left handed people access more of the right hemisphere. any info there. write, throw and catch. i do everything left handed.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Jack RE, Garrod OGB, Yu H, Caldara R, Schyns PG. Facial expressions of emotion are not culturally universal. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/04/10/1200155109.full.pdf

Since Darwin’s seminal works, the universality of facial expressions of emotion has remained one of the longest standing debates in the biological and social sciences. Briefly stated, the universality hypothesis claims that all humans communicate six basic internal emotional states (happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) using the same facial movements by virtue of their biological and evolutionary origins [Susskind JM, et al. (2008) Nat Neurosci 11:843–850]. Here, we refute this assumed universality. Using a unique computer graphics platform that combines generative grammars [Chomsky N (1965) MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] with visual perception, we accessed the mind’s eye of 30 Western and Eastern culture individuals and reconstructed their mental representations of the six basic facial expressions of emotion. Cross-cultural comparisons of the mental representations challenge universality on two separate counts. First, whereas Westerners represent each of the six basic emotions with a distinct set of facial movements common to the group, Easterners do not. Second, Easterners represent emotional intensity with distinctive dynamic eye activity. By refuting the long-standing universality hypothesis, our data highlight the powerful influence of culture on shaping basic behaviors once considered biologically hardwired. Consequently, our data open a unique nature–nurture debate across broad fields from evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience to social networking via digital avatars.

 

[ergomaniac]

^^^ ive read left handed people access more of the right hemisphere. any info there. write, throw and catch. i do everything left handed.

so i found this yesterday. http://www.lefthandersday.com/intelligence.html and my peeps. What is Mensa? | Mensa International i think id qualify. yes i have documentation. before turing age 5. still would like an education though.

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Sex Differences In Intimate Relationships

Social relationships, and in particular pairbonds, are the outcome of individuals' decisions about whom to invest their available social capital in. Such decisions typically reflect a choice between the payoffs offered by alternative candidates. However, in monogamous species, and especially those that live in multi-generational families, investment strategies may vary across the lifespan as a function of the individual's changing reproductive circumstances – notably the impact of constraints such as the risk of death or the cessation of active reproduction.

In species like humans, where menopause truncates female reproductive activity and investment in offspring typically continues into adulthood, evolutionary theory would predict that investment in relationships should vary across the lifetime as a function of the trade off between the relative opportunities for personal reproduction versus (grand-)parental investment. In this respect, evolutionary theory would also predict significant contrasts in the social strategies of the two sexes as a function of the differences in their reproductive strategies.

However, studying human social relationships in any detail on a large scale has proved unusually difficult. The bottom-up approach adopted by social psychologists and sociologists has commonly been limited by sample size, while the more recent top-down social network analysis approach inevitably suffers from a lack of detail about the individuals involved. More importantly, most large-scale network studies have tended to treat relationships as static, and ignore the fact that social relationships are dynamic and change over time, at the very least on the scale of a lifetime.

In humans, homophily (a tendency for individuals who share traits to preferentially form relationships) has emerged as an important organizing principle of social behaviour. In most such cases, studies of homophily have focused on psychological or social traits such as personality, interests, hobbies, and religious or political views. However, there is evidence that homophily may also arise through a tendency for close friendships to be gender-biased, and we exploit this to explore the changing patterns of relationship investment across the lifespan.

Researchers use a cross-sectional analysis of a very large mobile phone database to investigate gender preferences in close friendships:

i) to test the hypothesis that preferences in the choice of the “best friend” are gender-biased (homophilic with respect to gender); and
ii) to investigate how these preferences change over the lifespan.

They focus their attention on the three most preferred friends, as indexed by the frequency of contact. Several studies have demonstrated that frequency of contact is a reliable index of emotional closeness in relationships and these datasets confirm that frequency of contact by telephone and other digital media (text, email) correlates significantly with frequency of face-to-face contact (p 0.0001 in each case, N = 1006 and N = 8967, respectively). Recent research also reveals that personal social networks are hierarchically structured , having a layer-like structure with distinct differences in emotional closeness and frequency of contact with alters in the different layers, with an inner core of ~5 alters who between them account for about half our total social time.

On the assumption that mobile phone communication represents the most of important relationships of subscribers and that the strength of communication reflects the level of emotional closeness, these results allow us to draw four conclusions.

First, women are more focused on opposite-sex relationships than men are during the reproductively active period of their lives, suggesting that they invest more heavily in creating and maintaining pairbonds than men do.

Second, as they age, women's attention shifts from their spouse to younger females, whom we assume, on the basis of the age difference, to be their daughters. This transition is relatively smooth and slow for women (perhaps taking about 15 years to reach its new asymptote at around age 60), and may reflect the gradual arrival of grandchildren.

Third, women switch individuals around in their preference rankings much more than men do, suggesting that their relationships are more focused while men's are more diffuse. Men tend to keep a steadier pattern over a longer period, maintaining a preference for placing their spouse in pole position across time and a striking tendency to maintain a very even gender balance in the second position. If the latter represent offspring, then the data suggest a strong lack of discrimination. In contrast, women tend to switch individuals from one position to another in a more exaggerated way, perhaps reflecting shifts in their allegiances as their reproductive strategies switch more explicitly from mate choice to personal reproduction to (grand-)parental investment, particularly after age 40. Women's gender-biases thus tend to be stronger than men's, seemingly because their patterns of social contact are strongly driven by the changes in the patterns of reproductive investment across the lifespan. Women's stronger inclination toward parental and grandparental investment is attested to by the striking contrast with the pattern exhibited by men: men's gender-biases for both best and second/third best friends show much less evidence for any preference for contacting children. Indeed, the younger (25-year-old) peak for 50-year-old men is half that for women and shows a more even sex balance, whereas that for women is strongly biased in favour of female alters (presumably, daughters), presumably reflecting the maternal grandmother investment effects previously noted in demographic studies.

Finally, fourth, our results provide strong evidence for the importance of female matrilineal relationships in human social organisation. There has been a tendency to emphasise the importance of male-male relationships in an essentially patrilineal form of social organisation as defining human sociality, but our results tend to support the claim that mother-daughter relationships play a particularly seminal role in structuring human social relationships irrespective of dispersal pattern, as has been suggested by some sociological studies.


Palchykov V, Kaski K, Kertesz J, Barabasi A-L, Dunbar RIM. Sex differences in intimate relationships. Sci Rep 2012;2. http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/120419/srep00370/pdf/srep00370.pdf

Social networks based on dyadic relationships are fundamentally important for understanding of human sociality. However, we have little understanding of the dynamics of close relationships and how these change over time. Evolutionary theory suggests that, even in monogamous mating systems, the pattern of investment in close relationships should vary across the lifespan when post-weaning investment plays an important role in maximising fitness. Mobile phone data sets provide a unique window into the structure and dynamics of relationships. We here use data from a large mobile phone dataset to demonstrate striking sex differences in the gender-bias of preferred relationships that reflect the way the reproductive investment strategies of both sexes change across the lifespan, i.e. women's shifting patterns of investment in reproduction and parental care. These results suggest that human social strategies may have more complex dynamics than previously assumed and a life-history perspective is crucial for understanding them.