Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles published photos of schizophrenia affected brains, in 2001.  Those photos are available here.

Additionally, the site at Schizophrenia.com features a lot of additional information in different forms — go see what is there.

Your task is to profile one of the following people:

Mary Whiton Culkins
Jane Goodall
Jean Piaget
Erik Erikson
Elizabeth Kübler Ross
Roger Wolcott Sperry
Franz Anton Mesmer
Gustav Theodor Fechner
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
Elizabeth Loftus
Noam Chomsky
Paul Ekman
Howard Gardner
Carl Rogers
Deepak Chopra
Abraham Maslow
Dorothea Dix
Sigmund Freud
Linda L. McCarley
Oliver Sacks
Antonio Damasio
B. F. Skinner
Ellen Langer
William James
Carl Jung
Frederick Taylor

I want you to be able to tell why that person is important in the study of psychology, and a bit about their work.

So, tell who the person is, succinctly, and why they are important to psychology. Tell the key points of their work, or theory, or grand idea, or tell something about the “why.” Freud is the “father of psychoanalysis,” sure — but what is psychoanalysis?

You may tell your story

• in a movie
• in an essay
• on a poster
• in a diorama
• in a video
• in a radio-style production
• in a magazine-style article
• in a newspaper-style article
• in a stand-alone slide presentation
• in a presentation designed for a presenter (with fewer words on the slides, for sure)
• or in any other way the student and Mr. Darrell agree upon before hand.

We’ll spend a couple of days in the library, to give you access to computers and the internet — and to the resources of the library. The project is due on Thursday, April 24.

Any questions, please ask! Ask early. You may ask questions in the comments here.

Clive Wearing has what Dr. Oliver Sacks calls the worst ever case of amnesia. Mr. Wearing literally cannot remember what happened from one blink of the eye to the next — it’s a totally new world to him every time he blinks.

Here is the link to the Radiolab program of June 8, 2007, that we listened to in class: “Clive” (or scroll down to the story, “Clive”).

See also these links from Radiolab (the New Yorker article is particularly good):

Deborah’s book about Clive: Forever Today
Oliver Sacks’ new book: Musicophilia
Oliver Sacks’ website
Sacks’ article about Clive in the New Yorker

Radiolab noted the music played during the piece:

The music used during the Clive segment comes from Orlando Lassus, performed by the London Lassus Ensemble and conducted by Clive Wearing himself. Check out http://www.orlandodilasso.org/ for more information on the composer. And if anyone needs a specific playlist, hit us at radiolab@wnyc.org and we’ll send it to you!

Physicist Richard Feynman gave a commencement address at the California Institute of Technology in 1974 in which he spoke about “cargo cult” science, science practiced by doing what looks like science, but is devoid of real substance.  The story tells a lot about how scientists can be misled, how people who fail to understand what is going on in natural processes can be misled, and about superstition.

It’s a good read.  You’ll find it here.  And here’s a short excerpt:

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas–which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn’t work, to eliminate it.  This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked–or very little of it did.

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I’m overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences.  I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it’s a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn’t realize how much there was.

Read the rest of the speech; it’s worth it.

At this moment, the top post on more than two million WordPress blogs is a cryptic post titled “1207468165327” on a blog about gaming, Fallout 3 - A Post Nuclear Blog.

If you go to the blog, however, you get a note that there is no post there.

Are there that many curious people out there who would click to a cryptic blog title to make it the hottest post on WordPress?

What else is going on?  Please tell us in comments.

Ain’t brain research fun?

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore created a special keyboard that jazz musicians can play while having their brains scanned in a magnetic resonance imager (MRI).

Brain scans made while the musicians improvised music show they turn off their inhibitions and turn on their creativity to improvise. The research was an interesting marriage of work at the Peabody Institute and work in Hopkins’ medical research corridors.

Can any of this research be applied to general creativity, or to learning?

Here is the Hopkins press release:

The joint research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and musician volunteers from the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute, sheds light on the creative improvisation that artists and non-artists use in everyday life, the investigators say.
It appears, they conclude, that jazz musicians create their unique improvised riffs by turning off inhibition and turning up creativity.

In a report published Feb. 27 in Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE, the scientists from the University’s School of Medicine and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders describe their curiosity about the possible neurological underpinnings of the almost trance-like state jazz artists enter during spontaneous improvisation.

“When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm,” says Charles J. Limb, M.D., assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a trained jazz saxophonist himself. “It’s a remarkable frame of mind,” he adds, “during which, all of a sudden, the musician is generating music that has never been heard, thought, practiced or played before. What comes out is completely spontaneous.”

Though many recent studies have focused on understanding what parts of a person’s brain are active when listening to music, Limb says few have delved into brain activity while music is being spontaneously composed.

Curious about his own “brain on jazz,” he and a colleague, Allen R. Braun, M.D., of NIDCD, devised a plan to view in real time the brain functions of musicians improvising.

For the study, they recruited six trained jazz pianists, three from the Peabody Institute, a music conservatory where Limb holds a joint faculty appointment. Other volunteers learned about the study by word of mouth through the local jazz community.

The researchers designed a special keyboard to allow the pianists to play inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a brain-scanner that illuminates areas of the brain responding to various stimuli, identifying which areas are active while a person is involved in some mental task, for example.

Because fMRI uses powerful magnets, the researchers designed the unconventional keyboard with no iron-containing metal parts that the magnet could attract. They also used fMRI-compatible headphones that would allow musicians to hear the music they generate while they’re playing it.

Each musician first took part in four different exercises designed to separate out the brain activity involved in playing simple memorized piano pieces and activity while improvising their music. While lying in the fMRI machine with the special keyboard propped on their laps, the pianists all began by playing the C-major scale, a well-memorized order of notes that every beginner learns. With the sound of a metronome playing over the headphones, the musicians were instructed to play the scale, making sure that each volunteer played the same notes with the same timing.

In the second exercise, the pianists were asked to improvise in time with the metronome. They were asked to use quarter notes on the C-major scale, but could play any of these notes that they wanted.

Next, the musicians were asked to play an original blues melody that they all memorized in advance, while a recorded jazz quartet that complemented the tune played in the background. In the last exercise, the musicians were told to improvise their own tunes with the same recorded jazz quartet.

Limb and Braun then analyzed the brain scans. Since the brain areas activated during memorized playing are parts that tend to be active during any kind of piano playing, the researchers subtracted those images from ones taken during improvisation. Left only with brain activity unique to improvisation, the scientists saw strikingly similar patterns, regardless of whether the musicians were doing simple improvisation on the C-major scale or playing more complex tunes with the jazz quartet.

The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.

The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

“Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her,” says Limb. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.”

Limb notes that this type of brain activity may also be present during other types of improvisational behavior that are integral parts of life for artists and non-artists alike. For example, he notes, people are continually improvising words in conversations and improvising solutions to problems on the spot. “Without this type of creativity, humans wouldn’t have advanced as a species. It’s an integral part of who we are,” Limb says.

He and Braun plan to use similar techniques to see whether the improvisational brain activity they identified matches that in other types of artists, such as poets or visual artists, as well as non-artists asked to improvise.

This research was funded by the Division of Intramural Research, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health.

For additional information, go to:
http://hopkinsmedicine.org/otolaryngology/limb.html
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/otolaryngology/
http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/
http://www.peabody.jhu.edu/jazz

The fMRI scanner looks similar to this device, in a photo from Siemens:

Psychology is the study of human and animal behavior. Inevitably someone will want to guide human behavior in a specific direction, for less-than-noble reasons — and they will ask for help from psychologists and other scientists.

Case in point: Bug Girl* is an entomologist, a scientist who studies insects. She uses the name for her weblog.

Insect behavior, we know from research, is heavily influenced by phermones — scent chemicals emitted by other insects. For some insects, this is the sole way they find a mate. For other insects, like ants, pheromones are used as important means of communication to forage for food, defend the colony, and so on.

So, Bug Girl got a letter from a company selling a chemical they claim is a human pheromone, and they asked her evaluation. Here is her account, with the response. The post shows how scientists think, and how they limit their conclusions to what they really know. And, her post offers several links to good sources about the effects of human pheromones.

Now, there are a few human chemicals that do seem to meet the definition of a pheromone. You can read a nice introduction to what is known about human pheromones in this APA article. The pioneer in human pheromone research is Martha McClintock, who first isolated and showed that a pheromone was responsible for synchronizing women’s menstrual cycles.

This is probably not the compound for sale at the commercial website. At least, I hope not–I really don’t think a guy dousing himself in that compound will get the response he wants.

There are some other compounds that do seem to induce changes in human physiology. The compounds that have been studied most are steroid musks (androstenol and related compounds) produced by glands in men’s underarms. Yummy!

For your information, enrichment, and enjoyment — and warning, against getting ripped off by people preying on your human insecurities.

______________

* Don’t you just love internet handles? She’s a reputable scientist in my experience, despite the pseudonym.

Borrowed from Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, with permission:

This is a great ad. It gently pokes your pride in your ability to see what’s going on — from a bicycle safety campaign in Britain urging motorists to look out for bicyclists:

Pure Pedantry hosts the neuroscience blog carnival, Encephalon 41 — go see.

Mind Hacks hosted the 40th incarnation of the blog carnival known as Encephalon.  There are lots of links to articles on topics we’ve studied and will study — a fun place to point your browser toward.  It’s a good way to track current developments in psychology and neuroscience.

Encephalon 41 is due on March 17, at Pure Pedantry.  Watch for it there.