TRUST NBC=OXYTOCIN
SCIAM=To Trust or Not to Trust: Ask Oxytocin
When someone betrays us, how does the brain deal with it? A hormone associated with social attachment gives us clues.
By Mauricio Delgado
istockphoto/Julie Macpherson
The
development of trust is an essential social tool, allowing people to
form productive and meaningful relationships, both at a professional
and personal level. Bonds of trust are also extremely fragile, however
and a single act of betrayal—such as a marital affair—can instantly
erase years of trustworthy behavior. The consequences of such breaches
in confidence can be disastrous, and not only for a relationship.
People who have been betrayed in the past will sometimes start avoiding
future social interactions, which is a potential precursor to social
phobia. In light of these connections, recent research has attempted to
elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying trust behavior. This is the
goal of an exciting new study
by neuroscientist Thomas Baumgartner and colleagues at the University
of Zurich in Switzerland that combines different disciplines (economics
and neuroscience) and methodologies (neuroimaging and
neuropharmacology) to investigate how the brain adapts to breaches of
trust.
The Chemistry of Trust
To
study social interactions, economists, and more recently
neuroscientists, take advantage of a simple game played between two
people called the “trust game.” (For more on greed and altruism, see this.)
In a typical trust game, an investor (Player 1) is faced with a
decision to keep a sum of money (say, $10) or share it with a trustee
(Player 2). If shared, the investment is tripled ($30) and the trustee
now faces the decision to repay the trust by sending back a larger
amount of the initial investment (for example, $15 for each
participant) or to defect and violate trust by keeping the money. In
this game, the investor is therefore left with an important social
dilemma: to trust or not to trust. Although it is more profitable to
trust, doing so leaves the investor at risk of betrayal.
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Autism parents 'infection risk'
Children with autism struggle to communicate with those around them
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Caring for children with developmental problems such as autism or
Down's syndrome can weaken parents' immune systems, research suggests.
Researchers at Birmingham University found they had a poorer immune response to a vaccine against pneumonia.
It appears that stress causes the immune system to function less
efficiently, the team wrote in the journal Brain, Behavior, and
Immunity.
BBC=
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I Am Not Thereby Mary Elizabeth Frye (1932)
Do not stand at my grave and weep;
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sun on ripened grain.
I am the gentle Autumn rain.
When you awake in the morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.
ULTIMATE PANGON
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Mind Matters - July 1, 2008
The Mirror Neuron Revolution: Explaining What Makes Humans Social
Neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni discusses mirror neurons, autism and the potentially damaging effects of violent movies.
Marco
Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Los
Angeles, is best known for his work on mirror neurons, a small circuit
of cells in the premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex. What
makes these cells so interesting is that they are activated both when
we perform a certain action—such as smiling or reaching for a cup—and
when we observe someone else performing that same action. In other
words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing. In
recent years, Iacoboni has shown that mirror neurons may be an
important element of social cognition and that defects in the mirror
neuron system may underlie a variety of mental disorders, such as
autism. His new book, Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect to Others, explores these possibilities at length. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Iacoboni about his research.
LEHRER: What first got you interested in mirror neurons? Did you immediately grasp their explanatory potential?
IACOBONI: I actually became interested in mirror neurons gradually. [Neuroscientist] Giacomo Rizzolatti
and his group [at the University of Parma in Italy] approached us at
the UCLA Brain Mapping Center because they wanted to expand the research
on mirror neurons using brain imaging in humans. I thought that mirror
neurons were interesting, but I have to confess I was also a bit
incredulous. We were at the beginnings of the science on mirror
neurons. The properties of these neurons are so amazing that I
seriously considered the possibility that they were experimental
artifacts. In 1998 I visited Rizzolatti’s lab in Parma, I observed
their experiments and findings, talked to the anatomists that were
studying the anatomy of the system and I realized that the empirical
findings were really solid. At that point I had the intuition that the
discovery of mirror neurons was going to revolutionize the way we think
about the brain and ourselves. However, it took me some years of
experimentation to fully grasp the explanatory potential of mirror
neurons in imitation, empathy, language, and so on—in other words in
our social life.
LEHRER: Take us inside a social interaction. How might mirror neurons
help us understand what someone else is thinking or feeling?
IACOBONI: What do we do when we interact? We use our body to communicate our intentions and our feelings. The gestures, facial expressions,
body postures we make are social signals, ways of communicating with
one another. Mirror neurons are the only brain cells we know of that
seem specialized to code the actions of other people and also our own actions.
They are obviously essential brain cells for social interactions.
Without them, we would likely be blind to the actions, intentions and
emotions of other people. The way mirror neurons likely let us
understand others is by providing some kind of inner imitation of the
actions of other people, which in turn leads us to “simulate” the
intentions and emotions associated with those actions. When I see you
smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling fire up, too, initiating a
cascade of neural activity that evokes the feeling we typically
associate with a smile. I don’t need to make any inference on what you
are feeling, I experience immediately and effortlessly (in a milder
form, of course) what you are experiencing.
LEHRER: In 2006 your lab published a paper in Nature Neuroscience linking a mirror neuron dysfunction to autism.
How might reduced mirror neuron activity explain the symptoms of
autism? And has there been any progress on this front since 2006?
IACOBONI: Patients with autism have hard time understanding the mental
states of other people; this is why social interactions are not easy
for these patients. Reduced mirror neuron activity obviously weakens
the ability of these patients to experience immediately and
effortlessly what other people are experiencing, thus making social
interactions particularly difficult for these patients. Patients with
autism have also often motor problems and language problems. It turns
out that a deficit in mirror neurons can in principle explain
also these other major symptoms. The motor deficits in autism can be
easily explained because mirror neurons are just special types of
premotor neurons, brain cells essential for planning and selecting
actions. It has been also hypothesized that mirror neurons may be
important in language evolution and language acquisition. Indeed, a
human brain area that likely contains mirror neurons overlaps with a
major language area, the so-called Broca’s area.
Thus, a deficit in mirror neurons can in principle account for three
major symptoms of autism, the social, motor and language problems.
LEHRER: If we're wired to automatically internalize the movements and
mental states of others, then what does this suggest about violent
movies, television programs, video games, etcetera? Should we be more
careful about what we watch?
IACOBONI: I believe we should be more careful about what we watch. This
is a tricky argument, of course, because it forces us to reconsider our
long cherished ideas about free will and may potentially have
repercussions on free speech. There is convincing behavioral evidence
linking media violence with imitative violence.
Mirror neurons provide a plausible neurobiological mechanism that
explains why being exposed to media violence leads to imitative
violence. What should we do about it? Although it is obviously hard to
have a clear and definitive answer, it is important to openly discuss
this issue and hopefully reach some kind of “societal agreement” on how
to limit media violence without limiting (too much) free speech.
LEHRER: Are you worried about mirror neurons getting over-sold or over-hyped?
IACOBONI: I am a bit concerned about that. The good news is, the
excitement about mirror neurons reveals that people have an intuitive
understanding of how neural mechanism for mirroring work. When told
about this research, they can finally articulate what they already
“knew” at some sort of pre-reflective level. However, the hype can
backfire and mirror neurons may lose their specificity. I think there
are two key points to keep in mind. The first one is the one we started
with: mirror neurons are brain cells specialized for actions. They are
obviously critical cells for social interactions but they can’t explain
non-social cognition. The second point to keep in mind is that every
brain cell and every neural system does not operate in a vacuum.
Everything in the brain is interconnected, so that the activity of each
cell reflects the dynamic interactions with other brain cells and other
neural systems. Mind Matters is edited by Jonah Lehrer, the science writer behind the blog The Frontal Cortex and the book Proust was a Neuroscientist.
SCIAM-EDGE= LAT= //////////////////
Mysteries of time, and the multiverse
 Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times Sean Carroll is a physicist at Caltech in Pasadena. His recent article in Scientific American is called "The Arrow of Time."
In
his studies of entropy and the irreversibility of time, Caltech
physicist Sean Carroll is exploring the idea that our universe is part
of a larger structure.
By John Johnson Jr., Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 28, 2008
Caltech physicist Sean M. Carroll has been wrestling with the mystery
of time. Most physical laws work equally well going backward or
forward, yet time flows only in one direction. Writing in this month’s Scientific American,
Carroll suggests that entropy, the tendency of physical systems to
become more disordered over time, plays a crucial role. Carroll sat
down recently at Caltech to explain his theory.
What's the problem with time?
The irreversibility of time is sort of the most obvious unanswered question in cosmology.
Time has been talked about in cosmology for many years, but we have a toolbox now we didn't used to have.
We have general relativity, string theory, discoveries in particle physics that we can use to help us find the right answer.
What does entropy have to do with all this?
The most obvious fact about the history of the universe is the growth of entropy from the early times to the late times.
The fact that you can turn eggs into omelets but not vice versa is a thing we know from our kitchens.
You don't need to spend millions of dollars on telescopes to discover it.
Can you give me a simple explanation of entropy?
One way of explaining entropy is to say it's the number of ways you can
rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don't notice the
change macroscopically.
If you mix milk into a cup of coffee, the more mixing that occurs, the
more disordered the milk molecules become and the more entropy builds.
If all the milk was somehow separated from the coffee, that would be low entropy.
So what's the problem?
If you really believed the conventional story that the Big Bang was the
beginning, that there was nothing before the Big Bang, I think that's a
very difficult fact to explain. . . .
There's no law of physics that says it should start at a low-entropy state. But the actual universe did that.
From a layman's standpoint, it seems perfectly rational that things would start small and grow apart. You're saying that's wrong.
Many of my very smart colleagues say exactly the same thing. They say,
"Why are you thinking about this? It just makes sense that the early
universe was small and low-entropy."
But I think that is just a prejudice: . . . Because it is like that in our universe, we tend to think it is naturally like that.
I don't think there is an explanation for that in terms of our current
understanding of physics. I'm just saying it's not a fact that we
should take for granted.
So you think the way the universe began is unnatural?
Low-entropy configurations are rare.
If you take a deck of cards and you open it up, it's true that they're
in order. But if you randomly chose a configuration of a deck of cards
it would be very, very unlikely that they would be in perfect order.
That's exactly low entropy versus high entropy.
The universe is more than what we see?
The reason why you are not surprised when you open a deck of cards and
it's in perfect order is not because it's just easy and natural to find
it in perfect order, it's because the deck of cards is not a closed
system. It came from a bigger system in which there is a card factory
somewhere that arranged it. So I think there is a previous universe
somewhere that made us and we came out.
We're part of a bigger structure.
Are you saying that our universe came from some other universe?
Right. It came from a bigger space-time that we don't observe. Our
universe came from a tiny little bit of a larger high-entropy space.
I'm not saying this is true; I'm saying this is an idea worth thinking about.
You're saying that in some universes there could be a person like
you drinking coffee, but out of a blue cup rather than a red one.
If our local, observable universe is embedded in a larger structure, a
multiverse, then there's other places in this larger structure that
have denizens in them that call their local environs the universe. And
conditions in those other places could be very different. Or they could
be pretty similar to what we have here.
How many of them are there? The number could well be infinity. So it is
possible that somewhere else in this larger structure that we call the
multiverse there are people like us, writing for newspapers like the
L.A. Times and thinking about similar questions.
So how does the arrow of time fit into this?
Our experience of time depends upon the growth of entropy. You can't
imagine a person looking around and saying, "Time is flowing in the
wrong direction," because your sense of time is due to entropy
increasing. . . . This feeling that we're moving through time has to do
with the fact that as we live, we feed on entropy. . . . Time exists
without entropy, but entropy is what gives time its special character.
Entropy gives time its appearance of forward motion?
Yeah, its directionality. The distinction between past and future. If
you're floating in outer space, in a spacesuit, there would be no
difference between one direction and another. However, nowhere in the
universe would you confuse yesterday and tomorrow. That's all because
of entropy, and that's the arrow of time.
Does God exist in a multiverse?
I don't want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs,
but I do think that it's not smart to bet against the power of science
to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago,
that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you
needed to invoke God.
And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving.
Nowadays people say, "Well, you certainly can't explain the creation of
the universe without invoking God," and I want to say, "Don't bet
against it."
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POSTED BY bobby maz AT 7/21/2008 4:30 PM
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