GS:
Emotions are establishing operations. They alter the
reinforcing efficacy of certain stimuli (to use a
stimulus-based definition of reinforcement) and alter
the probability of behavior that has been reinforced
by these stimuli. When we are made angry by someone,
for example, the reinforcing efficacy of damage to
them increases, and any behavior reinforced in similar
situations in the past becomes more probable. This is
the same sort of thing as when we increase the
reinforcing efficacy of food (alter the food "drive")
and make responses reinforced by food more probable by
food-restriction.

RKS:
'Emotion' is a word that has been with us (in the
English Language) since the early 16th century and
predominantly refers to the subjective feeling
associated with the response to certain environmental
conditions.

GS: Actually, this is largely incorrect. The
etymologies of virtually all mental terms appear to
once have been frank references to behavior. The word
"suffer," for example, once meant "to go through,"
just as "experience" once referred to the actual,
largely publicly-observable, things that happened. I
will return to the issue of what is felt.

RKS:
Just saying it doesn't make it true.  Where are your
references that establish what you are claiming?  I
have given mine (OED).

GS: The Origins of Cognitive Thought. BF Skinner. Just
Google the title, the paper is available online.

RKS:
You claim that it is academic philosophy that has
altered the meaning of the word.  Even if this were
true, the meaning of the word emotion has been with us
for many centuries longer than the specific
definitions of Ethology and Behaviourism.

GS: So? Check out the paper I referenced and follow up
on Skinner’s references. BTW, Stonjek, why do we call
sharp pains “sharp”?

RKS:
You example of maturation shows only the limited
nature of early communication between child and adult
and not the internal states present.

GS: Are you talking about the internal states of the
person being, for example, labeled “angry”? Or are you
talking about the child’s alleged “inferences”?

RKS:
Words are not defined by or for children but by adults
for adult useage.

GS: Oh! Did “we” get together and “define words”? Did
I not get the memo? Or does usage evolve and then
dictionaries write it down? And do dictionary writers
ever infuse the definitions with the epistemology of
the day? Perhaps “internal state” is pushing it, but
one’s physiology IS inside. But we do not observe the
insides when we name behavior as “anger” or
“embarrassment,” etc. any more than we observe
hydrogen and oxygen when we identify water.

RKS:
You say that dictionaries are not of much help - that
is a giveaway, you obviously don't consult a
dictionary to get your word definition and etymology.

GS: I use a dictionary for both. I temper what I read,
however, with what I know or guess about verbal
behavior. Do check out the paper and the references
Skinner gives.

RKS: "Terms that allegedly refer to mental "things"
were, as I have already pointed out, frank references
to behaviour or its controlling environment, and they
are still trained as such to this day."

RKS:
You give no evidence for this.  Emotion references are
commonly taught to children in the context of
feelings, which are first related to states such as
'feeling hungry', 'feeling tired', 'feeling angry, sad
etc'.

GS: References? Especially references that do not, as
is so often the case, confuse method and results with
assumptions? When what is “named” is publicly
observable children first learn to name the thing,
then to name their perceptual behavior. That is, they
learn to say, “cup” before they lean to say “I see a
cup.” Even if children are taught to name their own
emotions first (which is what I take you to be saying)
it is not clear that they are necessarily responding
to private aspects of the behavior being observed.
They might be responding to the same publicly
available behavior that we respond to when we label
emotions in the third person. Eventually the response
may come under stimulus control of strictly private
events. Either way, my claim is that when we identify
emotions in the third-person (as well as the
first-person) we are doing nothing more than what we
do when we call a chair a “chair.” Later, we acquire
verbal responses that are layered over these
responses, and we use logic to argue that others “feel
similar to us” when they display similar
publicly-observable behavior, but none of that changes
the response classes that we establish when we
reinforce “mental terms” in the presence of publicly
observable behavior.


RKS:
The distinction between "I feel sad" (subjectively
felt emotional state) and "he is angry" (observed
emotional _expression) is learnt quite early on with
the inference being that the _expression of emotion as
observed is accompanied by the subjective feeling of
that emotion by the person observed.

GS: I’m not sure I am following what you are saying,
but I think I am. And I have given my comments on this
issue above.

RKS:
But if we were to follow your lead, what word should
we use to describe the inner turmoil formally referred
to as 'emotion'??

GS: Colloquial language takes care of itself. We
already have the word “feelings.” As to the science of
subjectivity, I have already described the useful
terms. Verbal responses are usually under some sort of
stimulus control of features of the world, and
sometimes those verbal responses are largely freed
from control by specific conditions of deprivation and
aversive stimulation. Such responses have been
referred to as “tacts” (and the word is sometimes used
as a verb). The fact is that we come to tact our own
behavior, some of which is inaccessible to others. How
this is done was made explicit by Skinner, but has
been occasionally hinted at by others.

The very epitome of kind regards and warm feelings,
Glen

--- Robert Karl Stonjek <stonjek@...>
wrote:

> GS:
> Emotions are establishing operations. They alter the

Birth Of A Notion: Master Planners In Brain May Coordinate Other Areas' Roles In
Cognitive Tasks
Scientists have used data from scans of 183 subjects to identify brain areas
that consistently become active in a variety of cognitive tasks, such as
reading, learning a rhythm or analyzing a picture.

If the brain in action can be compared to a symphony, with specialized sections
required to pitch in at the right time to produce the desired melody, then the
regions highlighted by the new study may be likened to conductors, researchers
at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis assert.

"They appear to be helping to determine which brain regions will contribute to a
cognitive task and when those regions will play a part in that task," says lead
author Nico Dosenbach, an M.D./Ph.D. student. "Every time you move from not
working on a task to working on a task, these areas seem to become active."

The study, published in the June 1 issue of Neuron, highlighted three regions,
the dorsal anterior cingulate and the left and right frontal operculum. The
cingulate is found near the midline of the top of the brain; the opercula are at
the base of the brain in both the left and right hemispheres.

"For years, when you looked at maps of what different parts of the brain do, the
opercula have often been blank," notes senior author Steven Petersen, Ph.D.,
James S. McDonnell Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience; professor of
neuroscience, of neurobiology and of radiology; and associate professor of
neurological surgery. "We have been struggling to figure out what they do, and
now these data suggest the opercula may be involved in the creation of what
neuroscientists call a task set."

Task sets are plans for accessing different parts of the brain to achieve a
goal, such as reading the word "dog," coming up with verbs associated with the
word "dog" or determining the color of the letters in the word "dog."

Much of the human brain's power derives from what Petersen calls "flexible
configuration of processing systems," or the ability to take one stimulus and
process it in different ways to produce different feedback. Different parts of
the brain have specialized abilities that can contribute in various ways to
completion of different tasks. They just have to be lined up to play their part
when their abilities are needed.

Other neuroscientists previously have implicated the cingulate in a variety of
specialized cognitive tasks, Dosenbach notes, but the new analysis may change
their thinking.

"It's a question of whether the cingulate has specific contributions to make in
all these tasks, or whether it plays such a very basic role that its
participation is almost always required," he explains.

The researchers' theories are reinforced by akinetic mutism, a condition that
occurs in patients who suffer a lesion from stroke or surgery that includes the
cingulate. To varying degrees, such patients are minimally active.

"If you give them a cup of coffee, they'll drink it, but they'd never ask for a
cup of coffee," Petersen explains. "If you ask them how they are, they'll tell
you, 'I'm fine,' but they won't tell you a story."

"They seem to have problems voluntarily entering a task state," Dosenbach says.
"They can do tasks with very explicit instructions, but are much less proficient
at what's called random generation tasks, such as coming up with random words.
So there is some other evidence that the cingulate really is an important
contributor to task sets."

The analysis was based on data from eight separate functional brain imaging
studies conducted over the course of five years. According to Petersen, the
volume of data provided by the different studies was essential to making sure
that the areas highlighted in the analysis were contributing at a very basic
level, rather than at the specialized level of a particular task.

"Some neuroscientists were certain what we should have found with this analysis,
and they were concerned when we didn't find what they expected," he says. "But
it's a huge dataset, and the results were very clear."

For example, one brain area thought likely to be active in creating task sets,
the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, did not become active as consistently as the
cingulate and the opercula.

"We're not implying that this region isn't important," Petersen says. "In this
study, though, it just didn't come up as consistently as the cingulate and the
opercula."

Although many of the tasks in the eight studies were language-related (reading a
word or naming verbs associated with a given noun, such as "bark" for "dog"),
some were not. Subjects in one study had to tap their fingers in time to a
rhythm. Another group had to judge the orientation of lines. A third group was
asked to match short graphic squiggles. The non-linguistic tasks produced the
same results, according to Petersen.

Petersen and his colleagues plan follow-up studies to further understand the
roles of the cingulate and the opercula in creating task sets and to see if
these regions have similar roles in children of various ages. They are also
planning to use a new type of functional brain imaging to look at the
connections between other brain areas and the cingulate and the opercula.

Dosenbach NUF, Visscher KM, Palmer ED, Miezin FM, Wenger KK, Kang HC, Burgund
ED, Grimes AL, Schlaggar BL, Petersen SE. A core system for the implementation
of task sets. Neuron, June 1, 2006.

Funding from the National Institutes of Health, the John Merck Scholars Fund,
the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund and the Dana Foundation supported this research.

Washington University School of Medicine's full-time and volunteer faculty
physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's
hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research,
teaching and patient care institutions in the nation, currently ranked fourth in
the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with
Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals, the School of Medicine is
linked to BJC HealthCare.


Full Text at the Washington University School of Medicine
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060531165250.htm

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Wow! They’ve finally found the little man that pulls
the levers! Now, unfortunately, they must open up his
or her little head and start all over, presumably
looking for another little man, and so on. There will
never be a successful neurobiological understanding of
behavior until the mereological fallacy is
relinquished. I’m not saying there are not interesting
findings here, I am saying that the behavioral facts
can be conceptualized effectively. For example, in the
syndrome they mention, behavior that is powerfully
under stimulus control (give them a cup of coffee and
they drink) is intact, but behavior that would
otherwise occur, given states of deprivation, do not.


Thinking of you, my friends, and I know you’re
thinking affectionately of me,
Glen


--- Robert Karl Stonjek <stonjek@...>
wrote:

> Birth Of A Notion: Master Planners In Brain May
> Coordinate Other Areas' Roles In Cognitive Tasks
> Scientists have used data from scans of 183 subjects
> to identify brain areas that consistently become
> active in a variety of cognitive tasks, such as
> reading, learning a rhythm or analyzing a picture.
>
> If the brain in action can be compared to a
> symphony, with specialized sections required to
> pitch in at the right time to produce the desired
> melody, then the regions highlighted by the new
> study may be likened to conductors, researchers at
> Washington University School of Medicine in St.
> Louis assert.
>
> "They appear to be helping to determine which brain
> regions will contribute to a cognitive task and when
> those regions will play a part in that task," says
> lead author Nico Dosenbach, an M.D./Ph.D. student.
> "Every time you move from not working on a task to
> working on a task, these areas seem to become
> active."
>
> The study, published in the June 1 issue of Neuron,
> highlighted three regions, the dorsal anterior
> cingulate and the left and right frontal operculum.
> The cingulate is found near the midline of the top
> of the brain; the opercula are at the base of the
> brain in both the left and right hemispheres.
>
> "For years, when you looked at maps of what
> different parts of the brain do, the opercula have
> often been blank," notes senior author Steven
> Petersen, Ph.D., James S. McDonnell Professor of
> Cognitive Neuroscience; professor of neuroscience,
> of neurobiology and of radiology; and associate
> professor of neurological surgery. "We have been
> struggling to figure out what they do, and now these
> data suggest the opercula may be involved in the
> creation of what neuroscientists call a task set."
>
> Task sets are plans for accessing different parts of
> the brain to achieve a goal, such as reading the
> word "dog," coming up with verbs associated with the
> word "dog" or determining the color of the letters
> in the word "dog."
>
> Much of the human brain's power derives from what
> Petersen calls "flexible configuration of processing
> systems," or the ability to take one stimulus and
> process it in different ways to produce different
> feedback. Different parts of the brain have
> specialized abilities that can contribute in various
> ways to completion of different tasks. They just
> have to be lined up to play their part when their
> abilities are needed.
>
> Other neuroscientists previously have implicated the
> cingulate in a variety of specialized cognitive
> tasks, Dosenbach notes, but the new analysis may
> change their thinking.
>
> "It's a question of whether the cingulate has
> specific contributions to make in all these tasks,
> or whether it plays such a very basic role that its
> participation is almost always required," he
> explains.
>
> The researchers' theories are reinforced by akinetic
> mutism, a condition that occurs in patients who
> suffer a lesion from stroke or surgery that includes
> the cingulate. To varying degrees, such patients are
> minimally active.
>
> "If you give them a cup of coffee, they'll drink it,
> but they'd never ask for a cup of coffee," Petersen
> explains. "If you ask them how they are, they'll
> tell you, 'I'm fine,' but they won't tell you a
> story."
>
> "They seem to have problems voluntarily entering a
> task state," Dosenbach says. "They can do tasks with
> very explicit instructions, but are much less
> proficient at what's called random generation tasks,
> such as coming up with random words. So there is
> some other evidence that the cingulate really is an
> important contributor to task sets."
>
> The analysis was based on data from eight separate
> functional brain imaging studies conducted over the
> course of five years. According to Petersen, the
> volume of data provided by the different studies was
> essential to making sure that the areas highlighted
> in the analysis were contributing at a very basic
> level, rather than at the specialized level of a
> particular task.
>
> "Some neuroscientists were certain what we should
> have found with this analysis, and they were
> concerned when we didn't find what they expected,"
> he says. "But it's a huge dataset, and the results
> were very clear."
>
> For example, one brain area thought likely to be
> active in creating task sets, the dorsolateral
> prefrontal cortex, did not become active as
> consistently as the cingulate and the opercula.
>
> "We're not implying that this region isn't
> important," Petersen says. "In this study, though,
> it just didn't come up as consistently as the
> cingulate and the opercula."
>
> Although many of the tasks in the eight studies were
> language-related (reading a word or naming verbs
> associated with a given noun, such as "bark" for
> "dog"), some were not. Subjects in one study had to
> tap their fingers in time to a rhythm. Another group
> had to judge the orientation of lines. A third group
> was asked to match short graphic squiggles. The
> non-linguistic tasks produced the same results,
> according to Petersen.
>
> Petersen and his colleagues plan follow-up studies
> to further understand the roles of the cingulate and
> the opercula in creating task sets and to see if
> these regions have similar roles in children of
> various ages. They are also planning to use a new
> type of functional brain imaging to look at the
> connections between other brain areas and the
> cingulate and the opercula.
>
> Dosenbach NUF, Visscher KM, Palmer ED, Miezin FM,
> Wenger KK, Kang HC, Burgund ED, Grimes AL, Schlaggar
> BL, Petersen SE. A core system for the
> implementation of task sets. Neuron, June 1, 2006.
>
> Funding from the National Institutes of Health, the
> John Merck Scholars Fund, the Burroughs-Wellcome
> Fund and the Dana Foundation supported this
> research.
>
> Washington University School of Medicine's full-time
> and volunteer faculty physicians also are the
> medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis
> Children's hospitals. The School of Medicine is one
> of the leading medical research, teaching and
> patient care institutions in the nation, currently
> ranked fourth in the nation by U.S. News & World
> Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish
> and St. Louis Children's hospitals, the School of
> Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.
>
>
> Full Text at the Washington University School of
> Medicine
>
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060531165250.htm
>
> Posted by
> Robert Karl Stonjek
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been
> removed]
>
>

Semiconductor Brain: Nerve Tissue Interfaced With A Computer Chip
For the first time, scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry in
Martinsried near Munich coupled living brain tissue to a chip equivalent to the
chips that run computers. The researchers under Peter Fromherz have reported
this news in the online edition of the Journal of Neurophysiology (May 10,
2006).


A thin tissue slice of a rat hippocampus region (top) is cultivated on a
semiconductor chip with 16.384 sensory transistors per square millimetre
(center, dark coloured square). Following excitation the chip maps the
electrical activity of the neurons (bottom), caused by activity of synapses
(red: positive, blue: negative). (Copyright: Max Planck Institute of
Biochemistry)
Before informational input perceived by the mammalian brain is stored in the
long-term memory, it is temporarily memorised in the hippocampus*. Understanding
the function of the hippocampus as an important player in the memory process is
a major topic of current brain research. Thin slices of this brain region
provide the appropriate material to study the intact neural network of the
hippocampus.

Methods commonly used in neurophysiology are invasive, restricted to a small
number of cells or suffer from low spatial resolution. The scientists in
Martinsried developed a revolutionary non- invasive technique that enables them
to record neural communication between thousands of nerve cells in the tissue of
a brain slice with high spatial resolution. This technique involves culturing
razor-thin slices of the hippocampus region on semiconductor chips. These chips
were developed in collaboration with Infineon Technologies AG and excel in their
density of sensory transistors: 16384 transistors on an area of one square
millimeter record the neural activity in the brain.

Recording the activity patterns of the united cell structure of an intact
mammalian brain tissue represents a significant technological breakthrough.
Employing the new technique, the biophysicists working under the direction of
Peter Fromherz were able to visualize the influence of pharmaceutical compounds
on the neural network. This makes the "brain-chip" from Martinsried a novel test
system for brain and drug research.

As early as 1991, Peter Fromherz and his co-workers succeeded in interfacing
single leech nerve cells with semiconductor chips. Subsequent research gave rise
to bidirectional communication between chip and small networks of a few
molluscan nerve cells. In this project, it was possible to detect the signalling
between cells via their synapses. The chips used in these studies were developed
and produced by the scientists themselves. The production requirements of the
chip described above made collaboration with industry indispensable. With the
resulting novel hybrid system of neural tissue and semiconductor, the scientists
take a great step forward towards neurochip prosthetics and neurocomputation.

Original publication: M. Hutzler, A. Lambacher, B. Eversmann, M. Jenkner, R.
Thewes, and P. Fromherz: High- resolution multi-transistor array recording of
electrical field potentials in cultured brain slices. Journal of
Neuropyhsiology. Preprint online (May 10, 2006). doi:10.1152/jn.00347.2006.

Full Text from the Max Plank Institute of Biochemistry
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060602172512.htm

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Credit: Christie's Images/Corbis

Have We Met?
By Katherine Unger
ScienceNOW Daily News
2 June 2006

We all know that sinking feeling that comes when we just can't remember someone
who clearly recognizes us. So imagine how uncomfortable life might be for a
person incapable of recognizing anyone--even a close friend or relative--by face
alone. Preliminary results from a recent survey suggest that up to 2% of the
general population may be afflicted by this condition, known as prosopagnosia or
face blindness.
Developmental prosopagnosia, in which an individual has face blindness
apparently from birth, was thought to be extremely rare. The first case, in
fact, wasn't diagnosed until 1976. But cognitive neuroscientists Bradley
Duchaine of University College London and Ken Nakayama of Harvard University say
the condition may be far more common than believed.

Duchaine and Nakayama decided to use the Internet to measure the prevalence of
the condition. They recruited individuals for a barrage of psychological tests,
including an online facial recognition survey. Some 1600 participants were first
given a relatively easy task. They were "introduced" to an individual's face
with pictures flashed on screen for 3 seconds, then presented with three
additional photos--one of the prior person and two of other people--and asked to
choose the person they had seen before. More difficult tests followed, in which
participants were introduced to more faces and then presented with pictures of
the same individuals but in different poses in different lighting.

The researchers announced in a press release this week that 2% of their subjects
had serious enough problems with face blindness that their daily lives would
likely be affected. "Some people become socially reclusive, and some lead
extremely regimented lives" to avoid bumping into someone unexpectedly, says
Duchaine. "It's a neglected condition." The researchers say they have some
evidence that prosopagnosia may run in families, but the neurological cause
remains unclear.

"For many years, prosopagnosics were the Ivory Billed Woodpecker of neurological
patients--they were rare, and some researchers even doubted that they existed,"
Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia. "Now it turns out that a certain fraction of the healthy
population has prosopagnosia." Cognitive scientist Nancy Kanwisher of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who has worked on brain
scans of prosopagnosics, calls the new findings "really fascinating." She notes
that "an ongoing mystery of developmental prosopagnosia is that these people
have apparently intact face recognition areas in the brain."

Full Text from Science
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/602/1?etoc

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

The

Hudson

Review

Volume LIX, Number 1 (Spring 2006). Copyright © 2006 by The Hudson Review, Inc.



HAROLD FROMM



Daniel Dennett and

the Brick Wall of Consciousness





"Like" and "like" and "like"-but what is the thing that lies

beneath the semblance of the thing?

-Virginia Woolf, The Waves



How could a physical system give rise to conscious experience?

-David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind



Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of

unconscious events could explain consciousness at all.

-Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained




SWEET DREAMS IS BY NO MEANS THE BOOK you would want to start out with if you
have never read anything by Daniel Dennett. There are two distinguished classics
in his oeuvre to be read first, Consciousness Explained (1991) and Darwin's
Dangerous Idea (1995), in that order. Dealing as they do with two of the most
pressing themes in current philosophy (not to mention certain of the sciences),
these books would rank pretty close to the top of my list of what every
twenty-first century intellectual should know. Sweet Dreams, on the other hand,
is a slight book that has been patched together from various talks, articles in
professional journals, and newly written passages, all of which serve to tweak
Dennett's major doctrines in the light of subsequent criticisms and rethinkings.
Unlikely as it may seem, the book reads well-like everything else by Dennett.
It's sheer pleasure to be in the company of a consciousness like this-if you
could believe in consciousness at all after reading what he has to say.



Still, the basics are hardly in dispute in the matters of self, consciousness,
and free will, given the extraordinary accomplishments of the neurosciences over
the past twenty-five years and their assimilation by philosophers in the field
of consciousness studies. Although there might be demurrals about particular
points here and there, the current picture is clear enough. The brain involves
somewhere between fifty and a hundred fifty billion neurons; let's say a
hundred. These are a variety of fine, threadlike, long "brain cells" that are
not only wound up inside the brain but that extend throughout the body to link
to your brain everything from your big toe and five senses to your internal
organs. Within the brain these neurons connect with each other via synapses
across which neural impulses send electrochemical "messages." The sheer number
of connections is beyond reckoning, greater, it is said, than the number of
stars in the universe. Besides registering the performance of the body, this
network is the place where cerebration, emotion, and all forms of psychological
experience take place. The sheer activity going on every microsecond means that
our sense of the smooth continuity of our consciousness is a gross illusion,
like the illusion of visual continuity. In the case of our eyes, 100 million
rods and 7 million cones in our retinas-the receptors of light from the scenes
we behold-send electrochemical impulses to the brain via neurons. Since our
range of clear sight consists of a very small area directly in front of us, we
are constantly refocusing our eyes and moving our head at the rate of several
"saccades" (or eye movements) per second. This means that the smooth-seeming
panorama that we view is completely redrawn several times a second, since every
rod and cone receives a different light particle with each refocus. Just as we
don't hear the 44,000 interruptions per second between the samples of music
coded on a compact disk, don't see the individual frames of a movie film or the
many redrawings per second of our TV and computer monitors, we are completely
unaware of the pointillistic nature of our vision.


Full Text at The Hudson Review
http://www.hudsonreview.com/

PDF of the Article:
http://www.hudsonreview.com/frommSp06.pdf
[PDF, 8 pages, 31kb - Right Mouse Click on the above URL and select 'Save Target
As']

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Do Antidepressants Cure or Create Abnormal Brain States?
Joanna Moncrieff, David Cohen

Joanna Moncrieff is a senior lecturer in Psychiatry, University College London,
London, United Kingdom. David Cohen is a professor at the School of Social Work,
College of Health and Urban Affairs, Florida International University, Miami,
Florida, United States of America.

Funding: The authors received no funding to write this article.

Competing Interests: Joanna Moncrieff is Co-Chairperson of the Critical
Psychiatry Network, a group of psychiatrists who dispute the predominance of
biological models of mental disorder and campaign for a less coercive
psychiatry.

Published: June 6, 2006

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0030240

Copyright: © 2006 Moncrieff and Cohen. This is an open-access article
distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided
the original author and source are credited.

Abbreviations: RCT, randomised controlled trial; SSRI, selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitor; TCA, tricyclic antidepressant

Citation: Moncrieff J, Cohen D (2006) Do Antidepressants Cure or Create Abnormal
Brain States? PLoS Med 3(7): e240


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The term antidepressant refers to a drug that helps to rectify specific
biological abnormalities that give rise to the symptoms of depression. This
exemplifies what we have called the "disease-centred" model of psychotropic drug
action. Modelled on paradigmatic situations in general medicine-such as the use
of insulin in diabetes, antibiotics in infectious disease, chemotherapy in
cancer-the disease-centred model suggests that antidepressants help restore
normal functioning by acting on the neuropathology of depression or of
depressive symptoms.

In contrast, we propose in this Essay that an alternative "drug-centred" model
can better explain observed drug effects in psychiatric conditions. This
drug-centred model suggests that instead of relieving a hypothetical biochemical
abnormality, drugs themselves cause abnormal states, which may coincidentally
relieve psychiatric symptoms (Table 1). Alcohol's disinhibiting effects may
relieve symptoms of social phobia, but that does not imply that alcohol corrects
a chemical imbalance underlying social phobia. Sedation may lessen high arousal,
present in many acute psychiatric situations. Drugs that induce indifference,
such as neuroleptics or opiates, may help reduce the distress of acute psychotic
symptoms. Low-dose stimulants may help improve attention and concentration in
the short term.

The disease-centred model in psychiatry leads researchers to infer
antidepressant effects from patients' scores on symptom rating scales presumed
to assess the manifestations of the disease. The drug-centred model, on the
other hand, suggests that physiological and subjective effects of drugs should
be examined in their own right. These effects include various forms of sedation,
stimulation, and a plethora of biopsychological states. Depending on individual
inclination and context (including a person's emotional state upon drug
ingestion), intoxication with some drugs produces euphoria or mood elevation.
Because tolerance develops, however, euphoriant effects do not persist with
long-term use. If antidepressants or any other psychotropic drugs could be shown
to have mood-elevating effects that were long-term and not diminished by being
in a depressed emotional state, this would distinguish them from psychotropic
drugs that cause euphoria and might prove uniquely useful in depressed patients
(see Sidebar).

Full Text at PLoS (Free)
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10%2E1371%2F\
journal%2Epmed%2E0030240

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Serotonin, Acting In A Specific Brain Region, Promotes Sleep In Fruit Flies
Researchers have found that the neurotransmitter serotonin, known to affect many
behaviors, also appears to promote lasting, quality sleep in an animal model for
understanding how sleep is regulated. While central to the lives of most
animals, the proper regulation sleep remains a largely enigmatic process.

The findings are reported by Quan Yuan, William Joiner, and Amita Sehgal at the
University of Pennsylvania, and appear in the June 6th issue of Current Biology.

The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is now established as a useful model for
sleep research. The simple nervous system of the fly enables researchers to ask
basic questions about sleep regulation and function that have been difficult to
address in the more complicated mammalian systems.

Using the fly model in their new study, the researchers showed that
pharmacological treatment with serotonin increases the amount, as well as the
quality, of sleep. Serotonin even improves sleep in certain mutant flies that
normally sleep less or have fragmented sleep, suggesting that serotonin
treatment can overcome some deficits caused by other sleep problems. The
researchers also identified a serotonin receptor that affects sleep, and showed
that it acts in a specific region of the fly brain known as the mushroom bodies.
Interestingly, the mushroom bodies are required for learning and memory in
flies. Given that consolidation of memory is one of the functions hypothesized
for sleep, and that serotonin is known to be involved in learning and memory in
other animals, it is possible that the effect of serotonin on sleep is related
to its role in learning and memory.

The researchers include Quan Yuan, William Joiner, and Amita Sehgal of the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute and University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Full Text at ScienceDaily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060605200708.htm

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Are executive functions such as attention, w memory and
planning "vulnerable" to social factors?

There's a new discussion group that explores prenatal/neonatal Hev-b
protein insult and neuro-cognitive development in children.

See: http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/autismdocgroup/

Join the group and contribute!

Roche- Nature Medicine
Translational Neuroscience symposium

We are pleased to announce the first Roche-Nature Medicine
Translational Neuroscience Symposium and Prize
Psychiatric disorders
September 18-19, 2006,
Roche Palo Alto, LLC
Palo Alto, California

Recent advances in molecular and cognitive neuroscience have created
unprecedented means for the study of psychiatric disorders. This
affords a unique opportunity to translate scientific findings into
therapeutic strategies. This symposium will highlight recent progress
in the understanding of schizophrenia, anxiety and depression, as
well as the impact of these findings on the identification of
therapeutics.


SCIENTIFIC SESSIONS

  Session I. Translational medicine: mapping the pathophysiology of
  disease to create new drugs
  Session II. Mood disorders
  Session III. Schizophrenia and cognition
  Session IV. Keynote speakers and Roche Prize for Transitional Neuroscience


SPEAKERS

Chris Austin (NHGRI)
René Hen (Columbia)
Thomas Insel (NIMH)
Eric Kandel (Columbia)
Kenneth Kendler (VCU)
David Lewis (Pittsburgh)
Stephen Marder (UCLA)
Michael Meaney (McGill)
Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg (NIMH)
Kerry Ressler (Emory)
Trevor Robbins (Cambridge)
Lorna Role (Columbia)
Alcino Silva (UCLA)
Daniel Weinberger (NIMH)

ORGANIZERS

René Hen (Columbia)
Thomas Insel (NIMH)
Luca Santarelli (Roche Palo Alto)
Andrew Sleight (Roche Basel)
Juan Carlos López (Nature Medicine)

For more information about the event, registration and the
Roche Prize go to:
http://info.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/eYPm0CfMvE0DHy02Nb0ET

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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Is brain estradiol a hormone or a neurotransmitter?

Jacques Balthazart and Gregory F. Ball

Abstract:

Mounting evidence indicates that, besides their well-known hormonal mode of
action at the genetic level, estrogens such as 17?-estradiol also influence
brain function by direct effects on neuronal membranes. Experimentally induced
rapid changes in estradiol bioavailability in the brain have been shown to alter
the expression of male sexual behavior significantly within minutes - probably
too quickly to be accounted for by conventional genetic mechanisms. In parallel,
recent studies indicate that aromatase, the enzyme that converts testosterone to
estradiol in the brain, is expressed in presynaptic terminals and modulated
within minutes by Ca2+-dependent phosphorylation. In this article, we develop
the hypothesis that brain estrogens display many, if not all, functional
characteristics of neuromodulators or even neurotransmitters.


Abstract and full text links at Trends in Neurosciences
http://tinyurl.com/sxt32

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Brain's Receptors Sensitive To Pot May 'Open Door' In Treating Drug Dependence,
Brain Disorders
A team of Johns Hopkins researchers developed a new radiotracer-a radioactive
substance that can be traced in the body-to visualize and quantify the brain's
cannabinoid receptors by positron emission tomography (PET), opening a door to
the development of new medications to treat drug dependence, obesity,
depression, schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease and Tourette syndrome.

Discovery of the [11C]JHU75528 radioligand, a radioactive biochemical substance
that is used to study the receptor systems of the brain, "opens an avenue for
noninvasive study of central cannabinoid (CB1) receptors in the human and animal
brain," explained Andrew Horti, assistant professor of radiology at Johns
Hopkins Medicine, Baltimore, Md. He explained that there is evidence that CB1
receptors play an essential role in many disorders including schizophrenia,
depression and motor function disorders. "Quantitative imaging of the central
CB1 using PET could provide a great opportunity for the development of
cannabinergic medications and for studying the role of CB1 in these disorders,"
added the co-author of "PET Imaging of Cerebral Cannabinoid CB1 Receptors with
[11C]JHU75528."

Cannabinoid receptors are proteins on the surface of brain cells; they are most
dense in brain regions involved with thinking and memory, attention and control
of movement. The effects of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive
compound in marijuana, are due to its binding to specific cannabinoid receptors
located on the surface of brain cells. "Blocking CB1 receptors presents the
possibility of developing new, emerging medications for treatment of obesity and
drug dependence including alcoholism, tobacco and marijuana smoking," said
Horti.

The usefulness of in vivo (in the body) radioligands for studying cerebral
receptors by PET depends on the image quality, and a good PET radiotracer must
display a high level of specific receptor binding and low non-specific binding
(binding with other proteins, cell membranes, etc.), said Horti. "If the
non-specific binding is too high and specific binding is too low, the PET images
become too 'noisy' for quantitative measurements," he noted. "We developed a PET
radiotracer with a unique combination of good CB1 binding affinity and
relatively low non-specific binding in mice and baboon brains," he added.
"Previously developed PET radioligands for imaging of CB1 receptors were not
suitable for quantitative imaging due to the high level of image 'noise,'" he
added.

"Even though PET methodology was developed 30 years ago, its application for
studying cerebral receptors is limited due to the lack of suitable
radioligands," said Horti. "Development of [11C]JHU75528 will allow noninvasive
research of CB1 receptor," he added, indicating that Johns Hopkins researchers
need to complete various safety studies and obtain Food and Drug Administration
approval before [11C]JHU75528 can be used for PET imaging in people.

"This discovery would not have been possible without involvement of many highly
qualified researchers, including the teams of Robert Dannals and Dean Wong and
support of Richard Wahl, director of the nuclear medicine department," said
Horti.

Full Text at the Society of Nuclear Medicine
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060607082641.htm

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Long-Term Potentiation of Neuron-Glia Synapses Mediated by Ca2+-Permeable AMPA
Receptors
Woo-Ping Ge, Xiu-Juan Yang, Zhijun Zhang, Hui-Kun Wang, Wanhua Shen, Qiu-Dong
Deng, Shumin Duan

Interactions between neurons and glial cells in the brain may serve important
functions in the development, maintenance, and plasticity of neural circuits.
Fast neuron-glia synaptic transmission has been found between hippocampal
neurons and NG2 cells, a distinct population of macroglia-like cells widely
distributed in the brain. We report that these neuron-glia synapses undergo
activity-dependent modifications analogous to long-term potentiation (LTP) at
excitatory synapses, a hallmark of neuronal plasticity. However, unlike the
induction of LTP at many neuron-neuron synapses, both induction and expression
of LTP at neuron-NG2 synapses involve Ca2+-permeable AMPA receptors on NG2
cells.

Abstract and Full Text Links at Science
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5779/1533?etoc

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Language Control in the Bilingual Brain
J. Crinion, R. Turner, A. Grogan, T. Hanakawa, U. Noppeney, J. T. Devlin, T.
Aso, S. Urayama, H. Fukuyama, K. Stockton, K. Usui, D. W. Green, C. J. Price
How does the bilingual brain distinguish and control which language is in use?
Previous functional imaging experiments have not been able to answer this
question because proficient bilinguals activate the same brain regions
irrespective of the language being tested. Here, we reveal that neuronal
responses within the left caudate are sensitive to changes in the language or
the meaning of words. By demonstrating this effect in populations of
German-English and Japanese-English bilinguals, we suggest that the left caudate
plays a universal role in monitoring and controlling the language in use.

Abstract  and full texr links at Science
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5779/1537?etoc

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

--- Robert Karl Stonjek <stonjek@...>
wrote:

> Language Control in the Bilingual Brain
> J. Crinion, R. Turner, A. Grogan, T. Hanakawa, U.
> Noppeney, J. T. Devlin, T. Aso, S. Urayama, H.
> Fukuyama, K. Stockton, K. Usui, D. W. Green, C. J.
> Price
> How does the bilingual brain distinguish and control
> which language is in use? Previous functional
> imaging experiments have not been able to answer
> this question because proficient bilinguals activate
> the same brain regions irrespective of the language
> being tested. Here, we reveal that neuronal
> responses within the left caudate are sensitive to
> changes in the language or the meaning of words. By
> demonstrating this effect in populations of
> German-English and Japanese-English bilinguals, we
> suggest that the left caudate plays a universal role
> in monitoring and controlling the language in use.

So many little men in the brain. How will we ever keep
track of them all? Are mercury atoms silvery and
slippery yet? And what would we ever do without modern
imaging techniques to find out where all the little
men are hiding. No wonder there’s a breakthrough every
day! Now, if only meteorologists could find out where
the Wind God is hiding.

>
> Abstract  and full texr links at Science
>
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/312/5779/1537?etoc
>
> Posted by
> Robert Karl Stonjek
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been
> removed]
>
>

i'm searching for this articles:

Borkowski, J. G., & Burke, J. E. (1996). Theories, models, and
measurements of executive functioning: An information processing
perspective.

Esslinger, P. J. (1996). Conceptualizing, describing, and measuring
components of executive function: A summary. In G. R. Lyon &
N. A. Krasnegor (Eds.), Attention, memory, and executive
function (pp. 367–395). Baltimore, MD: Paul Brookes.

Gauvain, M., & Huard, R.D. (1999.)Family interaction, parenting style,
and the development of planning: A longitudinal analysis using archival
data. Journal of Family Psychology, 13, 75-92.


regards,

On the Analog Behavior of Neurons

The following points are made by Eve Marder (Nature 2006 441:702):

1. Much of what we know about electrical signalling in the brain comes from
extracellular recordings that detect when a neuron is firing action potentials.
These recordings do not, however, provide continuous monitoring of the
fluctuations of membrane potential, and do not capture sub-threshold changes in
membrane potential such as those caused by individual synaptic events. The
prevalence of extracellular recordings in the literature has contributed to a
collective consciousness in which the action potential or "spike" is viewed as
an invariant, all-or-nothing stereotyped event that occurs once a threshold
membrane potential is reached. This "digital" signal carries information from
the neuronal cell body, the soma, down the axon to presynaptic terminals, where
it evokes the release of neurotransmitter to excite or inhibit the next neuron.
In this simple framework, the spike frequency might influence the amount of
transmitter release by mechanisms such as facilitation and depression, but
sub-threshold events occurring in the soma and the dendrites (the projections
that receive inputs from other neurons) are thought to be too far away to
influence transmitter release from the axonal terminals.

2. New work  now shows, however, that the release of neurotransmitter from axon
terminals of certain vertebrate neurons is influenced by the somatic membrane
potential. So, in terms of neuronal signalling, the axon terminals and the soma
are electrically much closer than many would have assumed. The salient finding
in both papers, from which all of the rest of the results follow, is that the
length constant, lambda, of axons is surprisingly long, at about 420-450
microns, in two types of neuron: hippocampal mossy fibers from rats and layer 5
pyramidal cells from the prefrontal cortex of ferrets. Lambda is the distance
over which a voltage change imposed at one site will drop to approximately 37%
of its initial value. Although rapid changes in membrane potential are more
attenuated by distance than are slow signals, when two regions of a neuron are
less than lambda apart, they are commonly considered to be electrically "close".
Put another way, at a distance less than lambda, changes in membrane potential
at one place will appreciably alter the membrane potential at the other. In the
case of the mossy fibers, lambda was calculated using the distance between
recordings made from boutons (presumably presynaptic release sites) and the
soma. In the case of the prefrontal cortical neurons, simultaneous recordings
were made from the soma and axon at known distances apart.

3. How surprising is it that lambda is so long in these neurons? Some readers
will undoubtedly be taken aback to discover that vertebrate neurons can be so
electrically compact, at least for slow signals. But those who work with large
neurons in invertebrates already know of cases in which somatic voltages
influence the axon more than a millimeter away. In the vertebrate hippocampal
and layer 5 cortical neurons the consequence of lambda being so long is that
slow depolarizations (positive-going changes in membrane potential that bring
the neuron closer to threshold) of the membrane at the somatic and dendritic
regions are transmitted to the axon terminals, and can influence the release of
transmitter.

Full Text at ScienceWeek
http://scienceweek.com/2006/sw060616-4.htm

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Mon dieu!
Perhaps this sign makes more sense in French.

Credit: Corbis

Waiter, There is a Fly in Meiner Suppe
By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 June 2006

As far as the brain is concerned, all languages are pretty much the same.
Whether the conversation is in German or English or Japanese, recent research
suggests that fluent speakers use the same set of brain regions to make sense of
what's being said. But if there's really just a single language circuit, how do
bilingual people make sure it's only used for one language at a time? A study in
tomorrow's Science hints at a possible answer.
Studies of bilingual people have found that the same brain regions, particularly
parts of the left temporal cortex, are similarly activated by both languages.
But there must be some part of the brain that knows Deutsch from English,
reasoned cognitive neuroscientist Cathy Price at University College London.
Price, along with German and Japanese colleagues, used functional magnetic
resonance imaging and positron emission tomography to search for a language
switch in the brains of German-English and Japanese-English bilingual
volunteers.

The researchers showed the volunteers pairs of words one after another, for
example "trout" followed by "salmon." In this case, the words are similar in
meaning, and language regions in temporal cortex responded weakly to the second
word, as if recognizing that "salmon" is nothing new. The same regions responded
similarly to equivalent words in different languages, firing weakly to "salmon"
after seeing the German equivalent "lachs." As previous work suggested, these
regions of the temporal cortex seem to care about the meaning of words,
regardless of the language.

But a region deep in the brain, the left caudate did register the change in
language, responding strongly to "salmon" when preceded by "lachs," but only
weakly when preceded by "trout." The left caudate picked up the switch for other
equivalent German-English word pairs, as well as for Japanese-English pairs, the
researchers found. Together with case studies of bilingual patients with damage
to the left caudate--who are prone to switch languages involuntarily--the
findings suggest that this part of the brain helps control the language in use,
Price says.

The study is especially compelling because the results held up in both bilingual
groups and with two imaging techniques, says Daniela Perani of Vita-Salute San
Raffaele University in Milan, Italy. The work is "an important contribution to
understanding the bilingual brain," agrees Michael Chee, a cognitive
neuroscientist at SingHealth, a public research institute in Singapore. While
much of the research on language has focused on the cortex, Chee says the new
findings suggest that areas such as the caudate, tucked deep inside the brain,
may have important roles too.

Source: Science
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/608/2?etoc

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Inattention in ADHD

Children who are inattentive have a hard time keeping their minds on
any one thing and may get bored with a task after only a few
minutes. If they are doing something they really enjoy, they have no
trouble paying attention. But focusing deliberate, conscious
attention to organizing and completing a task or learning something
new is difficult.

Homework is particularly hard for these children. They will forget
to write down an assignment, or leave it at school. They will forget
to bring a book home, or bring the wrong one. The homework, if
finally finished, is full of errors and erasures. Homework is often
accompanied by frustration for both parent and child.

The DSM-IV-TR gives these signs of inattention:

Often becoming easily distracted by irrelevant sights and sounds
Often failing to pay attention to details and making careless
mistakes
Rarely following instructions carefully and completely losing or
forgetting things like toys, or pencils, books, and tools needed for
a task
Often skipping from one uncompleted activity to another.
Children diagnosed with the Predominantly Inattentive Type of ADHD
are seldom impulsive or hyperactive, yet they have significant
problems paying attention. They appear to be daydreaming, "spacey,"
easily confused, slow moving, and lethargic. They may have
difficulty processing information as quickly and accurately as other
children. When the teacher gives oral or even written instructions,
this child has a hard time understanding what he or she is supposed
to do and makes frequent mistakes. Yet the child may sit quietly,
unobtrusively, and even appear to be working but not fully attending
to or understanding the task and the instructions.

These children don't show significant problems with impulsivity and
overactivity in the classroom, on the school ground, or at home.
They may get along better with other children than the more
impulsive and hyperactive types of ADHD, and they may not have the
same sorts of social problems so common with the combined type of
ADHD. So often their problems with inattention are overlooked. But
they need help just as much as children with other types of ADHD,
who cause more obvious problems in the classroom.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/adhd.cfm

---

Inattention in the Epilepsies

Absence seizures are generalised seizures, so the epileptic activity
affects the
whole of the brain. This type of seizure usually affects children,
most commonly
beginning between the ages of six and 12. It is very rare in adults.

During an absence seizure the child stops what they are doing, loses
awareness
of their surroundings and stares. It can appear to onlookers that
they are
daydreaming or switching off. However, the child cannot be alerted
or woken up,
because they are momentarily unconscious.

Around half of children who have absences may also display other
symptoms during
the seizure, such as smacking their lips, chewing, swallowing
repeatedly or
fiddling with their clothes. Their eyelids may also flicker slightly.

When an absence is over, the child is unlikely to be aware of what
has happened,
but may have the feeling that they have `missed' something. Most
children do not
feel tired or ill after this type of seizure.

Absence seizures generally only last for a few seconds. They can
happen several
times a day. Some children may have hundreds of them during a day,
although this
is rare. However, if the seizures are very brief they can be
difficult to spot.

The old name for absence seizures is petit mal, which roughly
translated means
small illness. This name makes them sound fairly harmless and, for
many, they
are little more than an occasional nuisance. However, when absences
occur
frequently they can make life very confusing.

When absences occur, the child misses out on tiny snippets of
information. This
can affect their ability to learn and also to understand
instructions. For
example, they might hear the first part of a sentence but not the
end, so they
hear the instruction to go out and play but not the instruction to
be back in
ten minutes. When they do not return as requested, this can be easily
misinterpreted as misbehaviour.

Therefore, it is not unusual for parents and teachers to lose
patience with the
child unless it becomes obvious that something more serious is
causing this
behaviour.

Most absence seizures respond well to anti-epileptic drug treatment,
usually
sodium valproate or ethosuximide. Sometimes lamotrigine can be
effective. The
majority of children with typical absence seizures will grow out of
them by
puberty. Some children may go on to experience tonic-clonic seizures
later in
life.

Like many generalised seizures, doctors can rarely say why a child
develops
absences, although between 25 and 40 per cent of children with
absences have
relatives who have experienced similar seizures.

See the main section what to do when someone has a seizure to ensure
that you
know what to do next time you witness someone having a seizure...

http://www.epilepsy.org.uk/info/absence.html

---

CAPD

http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/voice/auditory.asp

Neuronal Oscillations Enhance Stimulus Discrimination by Ensuring Action
Potential Precision
Andreas T. Schaefer, Kamilla Angelo, Hartwig Spors, Troy W. Margrie

1 Department of Physiology, University College London, London, United Kingdom, 2
WIN Research Group of Olfactory Dynamics, Max-Planck-Institut für medizinische
Forschung, Heidelberg, Germany

Although oscillations in membrane potential are a prominent feature of sensory,
motor, and cognitive function, their precise role in signal processing remains
elusive. Here we show, using a combination of in vivo, in vitro, and theoretical
approaches, that both synaptically and intrinsically generated membrane
potential oscillations dramatically improve action potential (AP) precision by
removing the membrane potential variance associated with jitter-accumulating
trains of APs. This increased AP precision occurred irrespective of cell type
and-at oscillation frequencies ranging from 3 to 65 Hz-permitted accurate
discernment of up to 1,000 different stimuli. At low oscillation frequencies,
stimulus discrimination showed a clear phase dependence whereby inputs arriving
during the trough and the early rising phase of an oscillation cycle were most
robustly discriminated. Thus, by ensuring AP precision, membrane potential
oscillations dramatically enhance the discriminatory capabilities of individual
neurons and networks of cells and provide one attractive explanation for their
abundance in neurophysiological systems.

Full Text at PLoS Biology (Free)
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journ\
al.pbio.0040163

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

How a Lateralized Brain Supports Symmetrical Bimanual Tasks
Roland S. Johansson, Anna Theorin, Göran Westling, Mikael Andersson, Yukari
Ohki, Lars Nyberg

A large repertoire of natural object manipulation tasks require precisely
coupled symmetrical opposing forces by both hands on a single object. We asked
how the lateralized brain handles this basic problem of spatial and temporal
coordination. We show that the brain consistently appoints one of the hands as
prime actor while the other assists, but the choice of acting hand is flexible.
When study participants control a cursor by manipulating a tool held freely
between the hands, the left hand becomes prime actor if the cursor moves
directionally with the left-hand forces, whereas the right hand primarily acts
if it moves with the opposing right-hand forces. In neurophysiological
(electromyography, transcranial magnetic brain stimulation) and functional
magnetic resonance brain imaging experiments we demonstrate that changes in hand
assignment parallels a midline shift of lateralized activity in distal hand
muscles, corticospinal pathways, and primary sensorimotor and cerebellar
cortical areas. We conclude that the two hands can readily exchange roles as
dominant actor in bimanual tasks. Spatial relationships between hand forces and
goal motions determine hand assignments rather than habitual handedness.
Finally, flexible role assignment of the hands is manifest at multiple levels of
the motor system, from cortical regions all the way down to particular muscles.

Source PLoS (Free)
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journ\
al.pbio.0040158

Comment:
It would be interesting to see how this plays out in piano playing and typing
where both hands may play an equally dominating role (or switch more
frequently).

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Interacting Adaptive Processes with Different Timescales Underlie Short-Term
Motor Learning
Maurice A. Smith, Ali Ghazizadeh, Reza Shadmehr

Multiple processes may contribute to motor skill acquisition, but it is thought
that many of these processes require sleep or the passage of long periods of
time ranging from several hours to many days or weeks. Here we demonstrate that
within a timescale of minutes, two distinct fast-acting processes drive motor
adaptation. One process responds weakly to error but retains information well,
whereas the other responds strongly but has poor retention. This two-state
learning system makes the surprising prediction of spontaneous recovery (or
adaptation rebound) if error feedback is clamped at zero following an
adaptation-extinction training episode. We used a novel paradigm to
experimentally confirm this prediction in human motor learning of reaching, and
we show that the interaction between the learning processes in this simple
two-state system provides a unifying explanation for several different,
apparently unrelated, phenomena in motor adaptation including savings,
anterograde interference, spontaneous recovery, and rapid unlearning. Our
results suggest that motor adaptation depends on at least two distinct neural
systems that have different sensitivity to error and retain information at
different rates.

Source PLoS (Free)
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journ\
al.pbio.0040179

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

EPrints submitted by Gezgin, Dr. Ulas Basar
   Click here to see user's record.

   Number of EPrints submitted by this user: 7

   Gezgin, Dr. Ulas Basar (2006) RELATIONSHIP OF BODILY COMMUNICATION WITH
COGNITIVE AND PERSONALITY VARIABLES. PhD Thesis in Cognitive Science, Cognitive
Science, METU. http://cogprints.org/4902/

   Gezgin, Dr. Ulas Basar (2005) ‘The Turkish Currency Reform’: Naïve Inflation,
Endowment Effect, Anchoring and the Money Illusion. Technical Report, Cognitive
Science, METU. http://cogprints.org/4903/

   Gezgin, Dr. Ulas Basar (2004) The Pragmatics Of Cartoons: The Interaction Of
Bystander Humorosity Vs. Agent-Patient Humorosity. In Proceedings 2nd
Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics and Language Teaching (METU-PSTGRD),
METU, Ankara, Turkey. http://cogprints.org/4904/

   Gezgin, Dr. Ulas Basar (2004) On Flanagan’s Ideas On Dreams And Ahead: An
Attempt To Locate Dreaming Phenomenon Under The Superclass Of Consciousness.
http://cogprints.org/4905/

   Gezgin, Dr. Ulas Basar (2002) Economic Crisis as Trauma and Psychotherapy as
the Guardian of Status Quo. http://cogprints.org/4906/

   Gezgin, Dr. Ulas Basar (2003) THE MOST RECENT HETERODOXY IN LINGUISTICS:
INTEGRATIONIST SCHOOL or ON ‘RETHINKING LANGUAGE’. http://cogprints.org/4907/

   Gezgin, Dr. Ulas Basar (2002) The Psychological Correlates of Endowment
Effect: Individualism-Collectivism, Perspective Taking, and Real and
Hypothetical Endowment Effects. M.A. in psychology, Department of Psychology,
Bogazici University. http://cogprints.org/4908/



************************************************************************
   Dr. Ulas Basar Gezgin, PhD, bilissel bilimci/ cognitive scientist
Ag sayfasi/ Website: http://ulas.teori.org
   E-posta/ E-mail: ulas@...
   Almanya Havuz Dergisi ve Havuz Yayinevi editoru: http://www.dergi.havuz.de
   Gezgin's cognitive scientific works:
http://cogprints.org/perl/user_eprints?userid=6477
   Gezgin's linguistlist profile:
http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/people/personal/get\
-personal-page2.cfm?PersonID=63707

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Nature 441, 876-879 (15 June 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature04766; Received 7
February 2006; Accepted 30 March 2006

Cortical substrates for exploratory decisions in humans
Nathaniel D. Daw, John P. O'Doherty, Peter Dayan, Ben Seymour and Raymond J.
Dolan

Abstract:
Decision making in an uncertain environment poses a conflict between the
opposing demands of gathering and exploiting information. In a classic
illustration of this 'exploration-exploitation' dilemma, a gambler choosing
between multiple slot machines balances the desire to select what seems, on the
basis of accumulated experience, the richest option, against the desire to
choose a less familiar option that might turn out more advantageous (and thereby
provide information for improving future decisions). Far from representing idle
curiosity, such exploration is often critical for organisms to discover how best
to harvest resources such as food and water. In appetitive choice, substantial
experimental evidence, underpinned by computational reinforcement learning (RL)
theory, indicates that a dopaminergic, striatal and medial prefrontal network
mediates learning to exploit. In contrast, although exploration has been well
studied from both theoretical and ethological perspectives, its neural
substrates are much less clear. Here we show, in a gambling task, that human
subjects' choices can be characterized by a computationally well-regarded
strategy for addressing the explore/exploit dilemma. Furthermore, using this
characterization to classify decisions as exploratory or exploitative, we employ
functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that the frontopolar cortex and
intraparietal sulcus are preferentially active during exploratory decisions. In
contrast, regions of striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex exhibit
activity characteristic of an involvement in value-based exploitative decision
making. The results suggest a model of action selection under uncertainty that
involves switching between exploratory and exploitative behavioural modes, and
provide a computationally precise characterization of the contribution of key
decision-related brain systems to each of these functions.

Abstract and Full Text Links at Nature
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7095/abs/nature04766.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Backs To The Future: Aymara Language And Gesture Point To Mirror-Image View Of
Time
Tell an old Aymara speaker to "face the past!" and you just might get a blank
stare in return - because he or she already does.


The Aymara of the Andes have a reverse concept of time: Here, the speaker
indicates space ahead of himself when referring to the past. (Credit: Copyright
Rafael Nunez, UC San Diego)
New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous Aymara
people indicates a reverse concept of time.

Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans - a spatial
metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies' orientation and locomotion,
that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind - the Amerindian
group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past
ahead and the future behind.

Appearing in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science, the study is
coauthored, with Berkeley linguistics professor Eve Sweetser, by Rafael Nunez,
associate professor of cognitive science and director of the Embodied Cognition
Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego.

"Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world - from European
and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on - have not only
characterized time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future
as if it were in front of ego and the past in back. The Aymara case is the first
documented to depart from the standard model," said Nunez.

The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and
Chile, has been noticed by Westerners since the earliest days of the Spanish
conquest. A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara was particularly useful
for abstract ideas, and in the 19th century it was dubbed the "language of
Adam." More recently, Umberto Eco has praised its capacity for neologisms, and
there have even been contemporary attempts to harness the so-called "Andean
logic" - which adds a third option to the usual binary system of true/false or
yes/no - to computer applications.

Yet, Nunez said, no one had previously detailed the Aymara's "radically
different metaphoric mapping of time" - a super-fundamental concept, which,
unlike the idea of "democracy," say, does not rely on formal schooling and isn't
an obvious product of culture.

Nunez had his first inkling of differences between "thinking in" Aymara and
Spanish, when he went hitchhiking in the Andes as undergraduate in the early
1980s. More than a decade later, he returned to gather data.

For the study, Nunez collected about 20 hours of conversations with 30 ethnic
Aymara adults from Northern Chile. The volunteer subjects ranged from a
monolingual speaker of Aymara to monolingual speakers of Spanish, with a
majority (like the population at large) being bilinguals whose skills covered a
range of proficiencies and included the Spanish/Aymara creole called Castellano
Andino.

The videotaped interviews were designed to include natural discussions of past
and future events. These discussions, it was hoped, would elicit both the
linguistic expressions for "past" and "future" and the subconscious gesturing
that accompanies much of human speech and often acts out the metaphors being
used.

The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language
recruits "nayra," the basic word for "eye," "front" or "sight," to mean "past"
and recruits "qhipa," the basic word for "back" or "behind," to mean "future."
So, for example, the expression "nayra mara" - which translates in meaning to
"last year" - can be literally glossed as "front year."

But, according to the researchers, linguistic analysis cannot reliably tell the
whole story.

Take an "exotic" language like English: You can use the word "ahead" to signify
an earlier point in time, saying "We are at 20 minutes ahead of 1 p.m." to mean
"It's now 12:40 p.m." Based on this evidence alone, a Martian linguist could
then justifiably decide that English speakers, much like the Aymara, put the
past in front.

There are also in English ambiguous expressions like "Wednesday's meeting was
moved forward two days." Does that mean the new meeting time falls on Friday or
Monday? Roughly half of polled English speakers will pick the former and the
other half the latter. And that depends, it turns out, on whether they're
picturing themselves as being in motion relative to time or time itself as
moving. Both of these ideas are perfectly acceptable in English and grammatical
too, as illustrated by "We're coming to the end of the year" vs. "The end of the
year is approaching."

Analysis of the gestural data proved telling: The Aymara, especially the elderly
who didn't command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind
themselves when speaking of the future - by thumbing or waving over their
shoulders - and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past
- by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now
or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient
times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones - only
exactly in reverse.

"These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is
at least partly a cultural phenomenon," Nunez said. "That we construe time on a
front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead
and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral
morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been
blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn't have had the means to create and
bring forth these concepts.

"But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural
variation. With the same bodies - the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and
all - here we have a basic concept that is utterly different," he said.

Why, however, is not entirely certain. One possibility, Nunez and Sweetser
argue, is that the Aymara place a great deal of significance on whether an event
or action has been seen or not seen by the speaker.

A "simple" unqualified statement like "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue"
is not possible in Aymara - the sentence would necessarily also have to specify
whether the speaker had personally witnessed this or was reporting hearsay.

In a culture that privileges a distinction between seen/unseen - and
known/unknown - to such an extent as to weave "evidential" requirements
inextricably into its language, it makes sense to metaphorically place the known
past in front of you, in your field of view, and the unknown and unknowable
future behind your back.

Though that may be an initial explanation - and in line with the observation,
the researchers write, that "often elderly Aymara speakers simply refused to
talk about the future on the grounds that little or nothing sensible could be
said about it" - it is not sufficient, because other cultures also make use of
similar evidential systems and yet still have a future ahead.

The consequences, on the other hand, may have been profound. This cultural,
cognitive-linguistic difference could have contributed, Nunez said, to the
conquistadors' disdain of the Aymara as shiftless - uninterested in progress or
going "forward."

Now, while the future of the Aymara language itself is not in jeopardy - it
numbers some two to three million contemporary speakers - its particular way of
thinking about time seems, at least in Northern Chile, to be on the way out.

The study's younger subjects, Aymara fluent in Spanish, tended to gesture in the
common fashion. It appears they have reoriented their thinking. Now along with
the rest of the globe, their backs are to the past, and they are facing the
future.

Source: University of California - San Diego
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060613185239.htm

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Very interesting -- and it inspired me to go exploring the link.

http://www.cogsci.rpi.edu/CSJarchive/contents.html has many archived
articles through 2004 free for download. You can also edit the link or do
some navigating to see the rest of site, of course. Some very interesting
looking material here.

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Teach Computers To Perceive Three Dimensions In 2-D
Images
We live in a three-dimensional world but, for the most part, we see it in two
dimensions. Discerning how objects and surfaces are juxtaposed in an image is
second nature for people, but it's something that has long flummoxed computer
vision systems.

Now, however, researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer
Science have found a way to help computers understand the geometric context of
outdoor scenes and thus better comprehend what they see. The discovery promises
to revive an area of computer vision research all but abandoned two decades ago
because it seemed insoluble. It may ultimately find application in vision
systems used to guide robotic vehicles, monitor security cameras and archive
photos.

Using machine learning techniques, Robotics Institute researchers Alexei Efros
and Martial Hebert, along with graduate student Derek Hoiem, have taught
computers how to spot the visual cues that differentiate between vertical
surfaces and horizontal surfaces in photographs of outdoor scenes. They've even
developed a program that allows the computer to automatically generate 3-D
reconstructions of scenes based on a single image.

"The technique provides an approximate sense of the scene, a qualitative grasp
of the structure of a scene," said Efros, assistant professor of computer
science and robotics.

In their latest work, to be presented at the IEEE Computer Society Conference on
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 17-22 in New York City, the
Carnegie Mellon researchers will show that having a sense of 3-D geometry helps
computers identify objects, such as cars and pedestrians, in street scenes.

Identifying vertical and horizontal surfaces and the orientation of those
surfaces provides much of the information necessary for understanding the
geometric context of an entire scene. Only about three percent of surfaces in a
typical photo are at an angle, they have found.

Using 300 images gleaned from a Google search, Hoiem showed the computer
numerous examples of vertical and horizontal surfaces, allowing a machine
learning program to develop statistical associations between certain shapes,
shadings and other characteristics typical of each orientation.

The program also takes advantage of the constraints of the real world -- skies
are blue, horizons are horizontal and most objects sit on the ground.

"In our world," noted Hebert, a professor of robotics, "things don't just
float."

To demonstrate the utility of this technique, the researchers have designed a
graphics program to automatically generate 3-D reconstructions by "cutting and
folding" along vertical and horizontal lines in an image.

"It's like a children's pop-up book," Efros said.

"The amazing thing they did was show that it was actually possible," said
computer vision pioneer Takeo Kanade, the U.A. and Helen Whitaker University
Professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. "I would say it's
a breakthrough."

A Longstanding Problem

Inability to understand the geometric context of a scene has limited the ability
of computers to recognize objects. Though researchers have had some success at
identifying objects, such as faces or cars, the lack of context results in
preposterous mistakes, such as faces seen in clouds, or cars perched in
treetops.

Scientists have struggled since early times to understand how people visually
perceive three dimensions. Ancient Greeks reasoned that the eyes must emit rays
that bounce off objects, measuring distances much like today's laser
rangefinders. By the 19th century, scientists realized that a pair of eyes gives
humans binocular vision, allowing them to perceive depth. But stereoscopic
vision is useful at distances of no more than 50 meters. Even then, the mind
often overrides binocular vision, such as when watching a football game on
television.

Vision was an early problem that artificial intelligence researchers tried to
tackle and "context-based" outdoor scene analysis was a favorite subject during
the 1970s.

Researchers found they could describe the geometry of an object, such as a
chair, but matching the description with actual pixels proved a herculean task.
Statistical learning tools were limited then and research computers were about
100 times less powerful than a typical laptop today. By 1980, most had concluded
that the feat was either impossible or, if possible, computationally
impractical.

An Unexpected Advance

Even when Efros and Hebert assigned Hoiem to use machine learning techniques to
teach visual context to a computer two years ago, they regarded it primarily as
a learning exercise for their student. "We didn't believe it would work," Efros
said.

To their surprise, Hoiem found the computer often discerned which surfaces were
vertical or horizontal, and whether a vertical surface faced left, right or
toward the viewer. Based on the examples it was shown, the computer identified
each feature in an image and assigned to it a probability that it had a
horizontal or vertical orientation.

In their latest work, the researchers have used the geometric context
information to improve the ability of computer programs to recognize objects
within the scene. And improved object recognition, they note, should ultimately
provide feedback to further improve understanding of the geometric context.

"If you can find a car," Hebert explained, "you know it is on a flat surface."

Source: Carnegie Mellon University
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060614091016.htm

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

An Adaptive Interface For Controlling The Computer By Thought
Controlling a computer just by thought is the aim of cerebral interfaces. The
engineer from Pamplona, Carmen Vidaurre Arbizu, has designed a totally adaptive
interface that improves the performance of currently existing devices in,
reducing the time needed to become skilled in their operation and enhance the
control that users have over the interface. Moreover, according to Ms Vidaurre,
the majority of the population is capable of using it.

The results appear in the PhD thesis, Online Adaptive Classification for
Brain-Computer Interfaces, defended recently at the Public University of
Navarre.

Cerebral interface

A cerebral interface or brain-computer interface (BCI) allows people with
communication problems to relate to their surroundings using a computer and the
electrophysiological signals from the brain. The actual interface with which
Carmen Vidaurre has worked with is based on electroencephalograms (EEG) of the
individual, although there are others that use signals recorded from electrodes
fitted directly into the brain.

The user and the interface are highly interdependent "systems" that, up to
recently, adapted to each other independently. In the past, when a
non-experienced individual started to use a BCI, the systems were unable to
supply feedback, i.e. the individual was unable to see the results of their
brain patterns on the screen.

With those outdated systems and, after a number of prior, data-collecting
sessions, feedback was included and, in this way, the subjects started to adapt
themselves to the computer, using the interface response to the patterns
extracted from the signals. However, few users could use these interfaces
because the patterns generated during the trial sessions had to be greatly
similar to those sessions with feedback.

One of the biggest problems found by other users and researchers into these
"static" systems was that the patterns extracted from the signals recorded in
the trial sessions were quite different from those signals recorded in the
presence of feedback. For example, the visual input was different between both
types of sessions and this difference significantly changes brain activity in
specific areas thereof.

For inexpert users it is very difficult to adapt to the traditional interface
because they are unable to generate stationary patterns in time, probably due to
their inexperience. They find it very complicated to reproduce mental states
sufficiently similar to be correctly classified.

Pioneering research

This is why, this PhD has designed, in a pioneering way, two in-line adaptive
classifications, within a completely adaptive interface and capable of supplying
feedback to inexpert individuals in the first stages of its use. With this
system, the interface and the individual adjust to each other, one learning from
the other in a reciprocal manner. In this way it has been possible to eliminate
the initial trial sessions without feedback, thus diminishing the total skills
acquisition time and the individuals are able to find an operating strategy
directly with feedback.

Moreover, the experiments carried out with individuals without prior experience,
have demonstrated that the majority of the population are capable of learning to
control an adaptive BCI. Specifically, in the trials undertaken with 30 persons
in Austria and Pamplona, it was found that 20 had been able to control the
interface "very well" within 4 hours.

Four modules

The interface is basically made up of four modules that take charge of,
respectively, the acquisition and pre-processing of the signal; the extraction
of its characteristics; the classification of the signal in the various patterns
the interface possesses and, finally, the feedback, the stage in which it is
tested whether the action has been the expected one or not.

This research has mainly focused on the classification module, dealing with
identifying the type of signal that the subject is sending. In an interface that
has, for example, two patterns (imagination of the movement of the left hand and
of the movement of the right hand), the classification module tries to decide to
which pattern the current signal belongs.

Source: Elhuyar Fundazioa
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060614113301.htm

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Neurexins and new synapses

Synaptogenesis depends on the clustering of postsynaptic proteins in line with
the appropriate presynaptic axon terminals. In the formation of both glutamate-
and GABA (-aminobutyric acid)-containing synapses this process relies on
interactions between presynaptic neurexins and postsynaptic neuroligins. Writing
in The Journal of Neuroscience, Craig and colleagues report that the expression
of differentially spliced variants (leading to the formation of different mature
mRNA molecules and therefore different proteins) of neurexins influences the
types of synapse that develop by altering neurexin-neuroligin binding
affinities.

Neurexins are a set of transmembrane cell adhesion molecules that reside on the
presynaptic membrane and comprise six main isoforms and numerous naturally
occuring splice variants. It is possible that presynaptic expression of specific
neurexin isoforms promotes development of specific types of postsynaptic
machinery. However, all six isoforms are expressed in a differential but
overlapping fashion in different classes of neuron, which indicates that the
type of presynaptic isoform is not likely to regulate the assembly of different
types of postsynaptic machinery. Nevertheless, there is a single splice site
(splice site 4, or S4) on -neurexins, located on the LNS (laminin, neurexin, sex
hormone-binding protein) domain, that is both necessary and sufficient for
synaptogenesis, and so deserves particular consideration.

Source Nature Neuroscience
http://www.brainatlas.org/aba/2006/060615/full/nrn1939.shtml

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]