Secret Science Club Post Lecture Recap: Of Two Minds

Last night, I headed down to the beautiful Bell House in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn for the latest Secret Science Club lecture, featuring Dr Moran Cerf, who is one of those scientist/rockstar figures, a former hacker/security expert and Moth "Grand Slam" story winner.

Dr Cerf's lecture dealt with decision making and the brain/body interface. Why do individuals want one thing, but do the opposite thing? At times, it seems that an individual is two people fighting for dominance in one body. How does the brain interact with the body in everyday life?

Dr Cerf illustrated this conundrum by relating the tragic tale of Charles Whitman, the infamous University of Texas "tower sniper". After the mass shooting, the police tried to determine a cause for the shooting spree. Whitman was generally seen as a quiet, law abiding man, but his diary told an alarming tale. Whitman wrote that he "feels like he's not the same guy" and described having violent urges. Before he embarked on his murderous foray, he indicated that he wanted an autopsy performed on him and left a check to pay for it. When an autopsy was performed, a tumor the size of a walnut was found in his brain which impinged on his amygdala.

I another instance, a patient with a frontal lobe tumor began to exhibit signs of sexual deviancy, including pedophila. The removal of the tumor caused him to revert back to his previous sexual mores, but a partial recurrence of the tumor caused a return of the symptoms until it too was removed.

To illustrate the ability of individuals to "color" their perceptions of events, Dr Cerf cited a study (PDF) in which which a group of colonoscopy patients were told to rate the pain they experienced on a ten-point pain scale. Half of the patients experienced an interval at the end of the procedure in which the tip of the scope remained in their rectums. Oddly enough, the patients with the extended colonoscopy rated their experience as less painful than the patients whose colonoscopies were shorter in duration. It is probable that they experienced fewer "highs and lows" during the procedure than those with a quicker colonoscopy, and that the patients with the quicker procedure assessed it from moment to moment, rather than assessing it as one single event.

Studying the "competing influences" in the brain poses some ethical dilemmas- while studies using rats and monkeys can be conducted using electrodes implanted in the brain, human subjects typically refuse to have their brain tissue exposed and to have wires implanted in their brains. The ideal human subjects for such studies are patients who have brain injuries or illnesses. In extreme cases of epilepsy which cannot be treated medicinally (about 4% of cases), the corpus callosum, which connects the hemispheres of the brain is "cut". In these patients, the brain is typically open for two weeks, and electrodes are implanted in the brain to monitor it. The patients are asked for permission to be studied during this period of time.

The two hemispheres of the brain control "handedness" in the body, with a hemisphere controlling the motor functions of the opposite side of the body. The brain is not completely symmetrical, though, for instance, the language center of the brain is typically in the left hemisphere. Dr Cerf showed a couple of videos in which a subject with a "split brain" had to sort tiles or cards with various symbols on them, with one hand at times "correcting" the sorting performed by the other hand.

Electrodes in the brain can detect the stimulation of a single neuron (Dr Cern cited the "Simpsons" neuron also mentioned by Dr
André Fenton in his SSC lecture). Here's a video of the "Simpsons neuron" in action:





A neuron that fires for a concept came to be known as a "Jennifer Aniston Cell"- one patient's neuron fired not only when an image of Jennifer Aniston was displayed, but also when the patient heard her name or saw it in written form. In another patient a similar cell fired when images, text, and spoken words represented the Sydney Opera House. This neuron was "fooled" when a display of the Baha'ai Lotus Temple was shown, but it stopped doing so when the discrepancies between images of the two buildings was pointed out to the subject.

In another experiment, a subject was asked to manipulate images on a monitor. The images chosen were of icon Marilyn Monroe and actor Josh Brolin- the subject was asked to concentrate on image, then the other, and the image on the monitor would shift accordingly. In essence, two neurons would vie for dominance. Wired has a great summary of the experiment with an accompanying video.

Dr Cerf then moved on to the role that neurons play in movement- in quadriplegics, the brain cells responsible for movement work properly, but patient is immobile. Is it possible to manipulate objects with the brain? Dr Cerf showed a very poignant video of a paralyzed woman who has been able to manipulate a robot arm with an electrode implanted in her motor cortex in order to drink her coffee- I challenge you to try to watch it without tearing up:





Currently, there are flaws in the work. Dr Cerf discussed, as Dr Anne Churchland did in her lecture, the fact that, although computers can "master" the game of chess, they have not been able to direct the physical act of moving the pieces on the board. The mechanics are being improved- in one particular experiment a monkey was able to manipulate a prosthetic arm via an electrode implanted in its brain in order to grab marshmallows:





During the trials, the monkey's arm was immobilized, necessitating the use of the prosthetic arm. Once able to manipulate the arm properly, the monkey continued to use the prosthetic even when both of its arms were free, effectively giving it a "third arm". Imagine the possibilities, an individual could use the TV remote, drink a beer, and scratch oneself all at once. Now THAT's what I call multitasking!

Of course, there are ethical problems as well as technical ones- one cannot simply implant electrodes into people without an underlying therapeutic need. The human subjects described by Dr Cerf were individuals who needed drastic medical interventions. That being said, it may be possible that the limitations of the human body may be overcome through the use of machines. He cited the transition of the typewriter, from Pellegrino Turri's machine to allow his blind lover to write letters to a ubiquitous office staple.

Dr Cerf then described an experiment in which individuals were presented with a "clock face" graphic, and were instructed to use a button to stop the clock "hand" whenever they chose, and were then asked to indicate when they felt the "urge" to stop the "clock". Using an EEG to measure brain activity, the test administrators determined that brain activity increased three seconds before the button was pressed, and 1.5 seconds before the subject indicated an "urge" to stop the clock. In subsequent iterations of the experiment, the subject was manipulated in different ways- they were told that they couldn't stop the "clock" under certain circumstances and were given conflicting stimuli. In some cases, the subjects tried to "fool" the administrators, but the EEG always gave the subject away.

Dr Cerf wrapped up by reiterating the whole topic of contradictory desires and behaviors. He cited the "snooze alarm" conundrum, in which one's desire to wake, characterized by the setting of the alarm, is "at war" with one's decision to sleep more. He showed various novelty alarm clocks which "escape" the snooze-prone. He wrapped up with a hilarious photo of fitness club patrons taking an escalator one flight to the gym. In the Q&A some bastard asked the good doctor if he'd seen any evidence that the increasing use of electronic gadgets was making subjects more comfortable with electrode implants. Dr Cerf indicated that, to the contrary, the trend is for more conservative therapeutic measures, with the use of electrode implants and radical brain surgery becoming less common as less drastic measures are put into place.

In the middle of the lecture, an individual at the other end of the room from myself fell ill, and there was a brief interruption of the talk, but Dr Cerf recovered quickly without losing his stride. Kudos to Dr Cerf for not missing a beat and delivering a superb lecture. It was another feather in the cap of the Secret Science Club. Here's a brief animated feature covering some of the topics of Dr Cerf's talk:





In other news, I had a conversation with the brilliant and awesome **FUTURE BLOG POST**, a previous Secret Science Club lecturer, about some assistance in an upcoming project. I am looking forward to this project, so watch this space. Additionally, Secret Science Goddess (one of a pantheon of two!) and chanteuse Dorian Devins will be conducting a dialog with Richard Dawkins on Wednesday, 9/25 at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. A friend of mine who has just recently gotten into science via Dawkins' writings picked up tickets for a bunch of us to go, as soon as I texted him about the event. I feel bad about having told him about Dawkins' dickishness, but I feel that one needs to know about any warts that one's "heroes" may have. Me? I can see the beneficial accomplishments of Dr Dawkins as well as his dickery, and will be keenly interested in the possible controversies that will be brought to the fore in this forum. Of course, my primary reason for attending the event is my unwavering support for Dorian Devins, whose feminist credentials are as strong as her science-supporting community credentials. Put succinctly, I dig Devins more than Dawkins... nobody's ever had to make excuses for her behavior.

Post Lecture Recap: This One is Memorable!

On Tuesday night, I headed down to the beautiful Bell House in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, for the latest Secret Science Club lecture, by NYU neurobiologist and biomedical engineer André Fenton, who studies the "mechanics" of memory. Besides his academic endeavors, Dr Fenton started the Biosignal Group, which produces a miniature, wireless EEG monitor.

Dr Fenton started his lecture with a quote by Gautama Siddhartha: "All that we are is the result of what we have thought. What we think, we become."

Memory is characterized by "truthiness", memories have a certain "fuzziness" about them. Memory doesn't function like a recording device, it is a reconstructive process, not a reproductive process. Basically, we make up stories... memories are created out of what we expect of the world, not necessarily what happened. We even remember events that never happened. Dr Fenton illustrated this with a memory test in which words such as "bed", "slumber", and "wake" were flashed briefly on a screen, and the audience was quizzed afterword about which words had appeared in the test. A good portion of the audience misremembers the word "sleep" as having appeared, while a word such as "horse" is not falsely remembered.

After this brief illustration of the nature of memory, the talk proceeded to the biology of memory- how does memory work in the brain, and where in the brain should we start to look? The best estimate is that the human brain contains about 100 billion neurons. Each neuron is a "chemical factory" and the interaction of these chemicals have electrophysiological effects. The brain is an electrical organ, neurons send electrochemical signals. To illustrate the connection between neurons, and the role that synapses play in the formation of memory, Dr Fenton showed us a film of the firing of a single entorhinal neuron in the brain of an epilepsy patient who had had electrodes implanted into his brain as a therapeutic measure. The patient was shown various images, and this particular neuron was most active while the patient was shown "Simpsons" clips and while recollecting said "Simpsons" clips. It would seem that single neurons are tuned to particular features of the outside world.

As an example of such "tuning", Dr Fenton cited head direction cells, discovered in Brooklyn, which activate when a rat's head is facing in a particular direction. As another example, place cells activate when a subject is in a particular location. It's important to note that there are no sense organs for place or orientation, so a calculation must be made. Dr Fenton compared this process to a whole "symphony" of cells being active in sense of place, movement, and orientation. The business, and joy, of neuroscience is figuring out how this symphony works.

Dr Fenton then moved on to the topic of synapses, the contacts between neurons- synaptic connections are the fundamental property of neurons. Cognitive experiences leave a lasting imprint within synapses. Experience and other electrochemical relationships "tune" synapses, they set synaptic relationships and maintain them. As Guatama Siddhartha put it, experiences define who you are and who you are going to be.

In studying the anatomy of the brain, experiments on humans is unethical (again, the subject in the aforementioned "single neuron" experiment had had electrodes implanted for therapeutic reasons related to a severe case of epilepsy). As an aside, these ethical standards may be different in the antipodes. Rats and mice are the typical subjects in brain anatomy studies.

Anatomically, the region of the bain most involved in memory is the hippocampus. In the hippocampus, neurons form circuits for information flow and transformation. In an aside, Dr Fenton imparted to us an important life lesson: TRY NOT TO DAMAGE YOUR HIPPOCAMPUS. Dr Fenton then showed us an image of the hippocampus of a mouse which had been genetically engineered so that the neurons produced a protein which made them glow green when active, the image was similar to this. Images of the signals across the synapses shows the organization in the synapses. Information is created, organized, and stored in the synapses as far as we understand. As far as the long-term retention of information, changes occur in the strength of relationships between synapses. Dr Fenton expressed this in a simple, cute and (importantly) memorable fashion: Neurons that fire together wire together.

The next topic was the brain's ability to change despite the limitations of anatomy. Changes in brain activity are dependent on synaptic plasticity. Coincident activation changes synapses- if enough of a chemical is released in a reliable way, subsequent activation is easier.

In a droll aside, Dr Fention informed that audience that "stimulates" is a fancy word for "electrocutes"- stimulating neurons electrically creates a response and rapid stimulation makes the response bigger. Change is important and can be regulated, high frequency stimulation makes a response bigger, and the response remains bigger because of brain changes.

One particular chemical which plays a role in memory is protein kinase M zeta. For more information on PKM zeta, Ed Yong has several relevant blog posts. Experiments demonstrated that the actions of protein kinase M zeta could be inhibited through the use of another protein, zeta inhibitory peptide. Zeta inhibitory peptide undoes the strengthening of synapse sets, in effect resetting the relationship to a "baseline" level. Injecting zeta inhibitory peptide into rats makes even "educated" rats act as if they were naive- in effect, it "erases" memory. Dr Fenton noted that memory is not everything, how one uses memory is also important (I sure hope that using memory to blog about lectures on memory is a worthy use of memory).

Inquiries into how cognitive experience changes the brain involve such questions as: Where is the PKM zeta molecule made? Where does it go? Where in the brain is PKM zeta present? Mice are used as the subjects in theser experiments because their genome is better known and more easily manipulated than that of rats. Trained mice have more PKM zeta present in their brains than untrained mice, and the difference in how much PKM zeta is present in different synapses makes the organization of these synapses apparent. The functional changes are not only due to the fact that the protein is present, but also due to the fact that it changes the synapses- measurement of electrical activity in the brain shows that trained animals produce different signals than animals in an untrained control group. These differences are attributed solely to prior experience. One finding that could have potential therapeutic use is that the manipulation of experience made changes can mitigate brain damage.

Preemptive cognitive experience has the power to change brain and psychological function. To illustrate this, Dr Fenton showed us Sandro Del-Prete's Message d'Amour des Dauphins:





Experience determines how one interprets the world- while it may take a while for you dirty dogs to see the dolphins in the image, a five year old would probably spot them immediately.

The lecture then moved on to possible therapeutic implications of training. Cognitive control is the ability to coordinate the use of information from multiple sources, typically for optimizing actions. Mental illness impairs cognitive control, the basic challenge in psychiatry is to improve cognitive control in patients. Optimal outcomes depend on context, a determination must me made of which information is most relevant in any situation. To illustrate this, Dr Fenton subjected the audience to a Stroop test:





A Stroop test was developed for rats and it was determined that brain-damaged rats had difficulty with the test. The brains of the rats were lesioned in such a way as to mimic schizophrenia, which may be triggered by fetal trauma. The schizophrenic rats had problems recognizing the incongruent stimuli presented in the Stroop test. Cognitive training during adolescence was able to prevent these deficits... early cognitive training may be able to mitigate brain damage. The adolescent cognitive experience prevented the adult cognitive control deficit despite persistent brain damage- the syanpses were "tuned" by training. Early cognitive experience promotes normal brain function- a normal brain is well synchronized, and early cognitive training makes synchronization easier and promotes plasticity. Experience tunes the synaptic communication pathways that create and control information flow through the brain. Cognitive experience in adolescence may be the "therapeutic window" to manipulate the brain in order to mitigate damage.

Dr Fenton then briefly discussed the ethics of prophylactic measures- while he was dubious about the ethics of prophylactic medication, he indicated that cognitive behavioral therapy would be a better therapeutic technique. The inability to focus mentally is debilitating, and cognitive training can mitigate this problem.

In the Q&A, some bastard in the audience was going to ask Dr Fenton if there were different biological mechanisms for short and long-term memory, but some evil mother pre-empted him (just kidding, no offense- the bastard had a sore throat anyway, so he wasn't prepared to bellow anyway). Dr Fenton answered that there was no evidence that different processes were involved.

Once again, the Secret Science Club dished out a, heh heh, memorable lecture. This particular lecture hit that sweet spot at the intersection of hard science, human interest, and social relevance. Bravo SSC and Dr Fenton! For a taste of this lecture, here is a "Studio 360" presentation by Dr André Fenton:





If you pour yourself a drink before hitting play, you'll have some approximation of the awesome power of the Secret Science Club.