Older Updates

>>> Introductory annotation to Darwin and the "HOLY YEAR" 2009 (the regular Updates follow just below this annotation):
_________________________________________
Annotation to "150 years of Darwin - 2009"

"... as if those who are going to read us will belong to a civilization more delicate and subtle than any we know" (Ad Reinhardt)

I cannot really understand today's media hype on the 200 year celebration of Darwin's birthday and the 150 year celebration of the publication of his "On the Origin of Species" (i.e., "the holy year 2009").
After all, the ultimate goal of all these scientists of the early 19th century was to match the (then...) very high level of (Newtonian) Physics, and to bring Biology up to the high level of Physics.
That means: people like Auguste Comte (and Darwin himself) tried to find the essential physical laws underlying Sociology, History (including mad actions performed by human agents...), Evolution and even Biology.
I really look forward to a (hopefully) much more intelligent ("subtle") time when biologists will not have to limp along with sloppy hypotheses and some "popular Evolutionary Psychology" any more, but will eventually find out that all their rather arbitrary hypotheses and anthropomorphic terms (including terms like "genealogical trees", "selection", "adaptation", "evolution", "costs", "fitness landscapes", "evolutionary stable strategies", "genes", "species", "mutations", etc.) will ultimately turn out to be just special cases of physical maps and physical terms — like "stability", "stabilization processes", "shifts" ("stochastic variability", "theory of variation and variance"), "balance", "free energy" (thermodynamic potentials!), "potential landscapes", "attractor landscapes", "permanently fluctuating stable equilibria within highly dynamical systems", "thermodynamic and chemical potentials", etc. (see here already Whitfield 2007 [1]): "using the laws of thermodynamics to explain natural selection—and life itself").

Hence, the whole problem of some "evolution" (i.e., "History") will — in a much subtler time than mine (see Ad Reinhardt) — ultimately boil down to a mere problem of stability on all levels and time-scales:
from the stability of protein foldings & genomes (but not "mutations", i.e., "shifts") up to the stability of population networks to the stability of individual bodies ("longevity") to the stability of financial markets and the stability of ("learnt") memories and maps themselves (including physical maps and theories or "memes").

Besides, terms like "evolution" (instead of just "history") and "selection" (instead of "historical, temporary stabilizations") have an age-old religious, anthropocentric, herd-breeding and intentional bias (see phrases like "God's selected flock / God's chosen people") and should — like all terms with an "intentional" connotation and "anthropocentric biases" — therefore not be used by scientists at all... (on all this see also [2] )

When Biology (and History) will ultimately be "explainable" (or better: mappable and "describable") by Physics and (mathematical) maps and mappings alone (i.e., problems of stability and shifts alone...), then we could really be proud of having made a very big step, and may celebrate Darwin and Dawkins again (because they will then have turned out-fashioned)...

But ironically, Neo-Neuro-Darwinists like J.-P. Changeux, Paul K. Feyerabend ("nearly any map goes...") and Richard Dawkins ("memes") may turn out to be right in the end, because there will perhaps never be any physical "explanation" or "total potential function" or "total theory of everything" regarding complex biological systems, but scientists (as higher primates and map-makers themselves...) will always be limping along with their rather mad and always imperfect (local, fragmentary) maps and mappings...(which do not have to be "true" at all, but which only have to be "good enough" or "fit enough" for a map-maker to survive & publish papers & earn money & replicate & reproduce...)
___________________________________________

December 5, 2009

In their paper entitled "Advances in visual perceptual learning and plasticity", the authors Yuka SASAKI et al. (in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) highlight the problem of "stability" vs. "plasticity" with regard to neural networks (i.e., maps). Maps have to be stable --- but not TOO STABLE (for learning and modifications -- i.e., SHIFTS -- to occur)... In addition, they also note that "paying attention " may not be necessary for visual learning to occur; in fact, "rewards" may do the job as well....
However, it is (as usual) still unclear, what the anthropomorphic terms "attention" and "reward" REALLY MEAN in neuroscience... (i.e., with regard to maps and shifts alone...).

November 22, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail to several so-called "human rights organizations", including christine.burmann@menschenrechte.org, kontakt@forum-menschenrechte.de, kontakt@friedenspaedagogik.de, office@menschenrechte.ac.at, info@humanrights.ch, info@institut-fuer-menschenrechte.de, info@lobby-fuer-menschenrechte.de, vorstand@ilmr.de:'

>>>>> Meine Damen und Herren

Es gibt keine "Menschenrechte" -- es gibt nur Körperrechte, also das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit (inkl. das körperliche Recht, den Mund aufmachen zu können).

Leider hat dies aber seit dem 17. Jh. ("habeas corpus act") und erst recht seit 1789 kein Depp kapiert.

Für Mediziner und Physiker ist das Konzept eines "Körpers" klar definiert -- im Gegensatz zum Konzept eines "Menschen", unter dem jeder (in Europa ausgebildete Diktator) natürlich etwas anderes versteht.

Also: schafft die "Menschenrechte" ab und ersetzt diese endlich mal mit den präziseren "Körperrechten".

Kein "Mensch" (auf Englisch viel genauer: "no body"...) spricht heute mehr von "Mensch" oder gar "Seele", sondern nur noch von "Körpern", die es weltweit zu schützen gilt... (was ja sicher noch der letzte Depp verstehen kann; was ja ein "Mensch" sein soll, weiss ja leider "nobody").

Darum haben all diese Tausende (!!!) von "Menschenrechts"-Organisationen weltweit (inkl. ihre eigene) ausser Geldmacherei und Spendenkonten noch nie was genützt....

Wie schon Konfuzius gesagt hat: stellt in der Politik zuerst die Begriffe richtig (statt "Menschen" eben "Körper"), und alles weitere ergibt sich von selbst... Und dann brauchen "wir" endlich auch keine korrupten und dummen Politiker mehr, die keine Ahnung von Begriffen haben...

Und wer bei all dem die "besten" Karten haben wird....

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org
<<<<<

November 20, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Prof. Valentin Amrhein and his Evolutionary Biology Group at the Uni Basel:'

>>>>> Sehr geehrter Herr Amrhein

Vielen Dank für Ihren Coffee Talk in der Basler Zeitung (BaZ) von heute ("Halbe Wahrheiten").

Wie immer: alle Karten (inkl. Theorien und Wissenschaften) sind immer selektiv und lokal... Es gibt (trotz Google Earth und "virtual cell") leider noch immer keine globalen Karten... Dazu bräuchte es zudem immer gestückte Atlanten (also eine meist ziemlich wirre und wahllose Ansammlung von vielen übereinandergestapelten lokalen Karten)...

Die "Natur" ("Evolution") hat "uns" primitive Kartenmacher (vulgo: "brains") leider nur mit lokalen und selektiven (neuronalen) Karten ausgestattet -- die gerade mal ausreichen, alle Kirschbäume unserer Umgebung (ca. 5 km Durchmesser) zu kartieren. Alles was über unsere Nasenspitze hinausgeht -- dafür hat uns die Natur (und auch die Ökonomen und "globalen Denker") nicht ausgestattet...

Dazu bräuchte es schon ein bisschen mehr Kartenkapazität -- z.B. neuronale Netzwerke in Tera-Computern und Robotern und immer bessere Überwachungs- und Kartierungs-Satelliten (aber auch diese werden vermutlich nicht ausreichen).

Also: Stückwerk und kleine lokale Ziele ("Nasenspitze") wie immer...

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org
<<<<<

November 19, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Prof. Klaus Guenther, Günther Frankenberg, Joachim Starbatty, and Georges Enderle:'

<<<<<
Sehr geehrte Professoren Guenther, Frankenberg, Starbatty, Enderle et al. / Sehr geehrter Deutschlandfunk

"Menschenrechte" gibt es nicht -- es gibt nur Körperrechte, d.h. das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit ("habeas corpus", 17. Jh.).

Leider hat dies aber scheinbar noch kein einziges Schwein ("H. sapiens") in den letzten Jahrtausenden (und vor allem seit 1789) kapiert....

Hätte es nämlich "jemand" mal kapiert, dann hätte es keine materiellen Kriege gegeben...

Und wer die "besten" Karten haben wird...

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org<<<<<<

November 5, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Prof. Gesa Lindemann (Oldenburg), Prof. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Berlin), and Prof. Bruno Latour with regard to their discussion of Latour's ANT-theory (see [3]):

<<<< Sehr geehrte Prof. Lindemann, Prof. Latour und Prof. Rheinberger

Mir war die ANT-Theorie von Prof. Latour sowieso noch nie sympathisch, da ich nie wusste, was ich als "Akteur" bzw. als (neuronales?) "Netzwerk" bezeichnen sollte.

Da ist mir sogar noch der alte Lukrez lieber: da wusste ich wenigstens immer, dass es letztlich IMMER um eine Interaktion zwischen Atomen (etc.) ging.

Obwohl natürlich auch die Idee bzw. das Modell eines "Atoms" letztlich auch nur eine Karte ist... (aber vielleicht sogar die Trumpf-Karte der letzten paar Jahrzehnte überhaupt).

Darum ist mir eben meine eigene "Mapology" am allerliebsten: denn da geht es immer nur um einen Kampf zwischen Kartenmachern und (ihren?) Karten ("a clash of maps, mappings, and map-makers").

And those who will have the "best" maps... (oder einfach nur die "besten" "mapping tools"?)

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org

November 1, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail to the Swiss architects Herzog & De Meuron, Peter Zumthor, and Valerio Olgiati:
<<<<<
Sehr geehrte Herren Architekten

Ich bin zwar kein religiöser Mensch (dafür aber ein Ästhet), und es ist schon traurig, dass die Architekten von heute keine Kirchenbauten mehr zustande bringen, die schöner sind als die Kathedralen und deren leuchtenden Glasfenster des Mittelalters.

Warum schafft Ihr Architekten es nicht, eine Kathedrale zu bauen, die einem lichtdurchfluteten Herbstwald (siehe Foto anbei) gleicht??? Vgl. hierzu auch die berühmte Taufkapelle von Bazaine in Audincourt bei Basel, die man aber eben um ca. 100fach vergrössern sollte (siehe ebenfalls Foto anbei).

Damit das Licht und die Farben auf ewig leuchten (chill out forever...). Denn die Kunst will ewige Schönheit... (im Gegensatz zum vergänglichen Herbst). Und die Leute hätten dann endlich mal was Schönes zu sehen...

Aber leider lebe ich ja nicht gerade in einer sehr sensiblen Zeit, sondern in einer äusserst brutal-totalitären Zeit, wo kein Sinn mehr für Schönheit existiert...

Gruss Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org

	Audincourt Bazaine 1950 AC
	My future "Autumn Forest Chapel" (ca. 2200 AC)

October 29, 2009'

And here is now my letter to Dr. Christian Lehmann from Munich regarding the "evoultionary usefulness of musicality":

<<<<< Sehr geehrter Herr Lehmann

Hier nun die volle Antwort: "warum singen Mütter mit ihren Babies"?

Die hypersoziale (Machiavellische) Antwort ist ja schon seit geraumer Zeit klar und gebetsmühlenartig in allen Zeitschriften (für hypersoziale Tiere) wiederholt: um den emotionalen Zustand des Babies zu regulieren bzw. zu manipulieren (arousal regulation) bzw. dessen dauernde Langeweile (aufgrund des zu grossen und meist nicht ausreichend stimulierten Gehirns) zu zerstreuen...

Die nicht-soziale Antwort ist aber ebenso klar: um die schon bei der Geburt reich angelegten auditorischen Karten (neural maps in the auditory cortex) hinreichend zu stimulieren und zu perfektionieren.

In der Regel ist nämlich beim Singen (Motherese) der Tonhöhenumfang sehr viel grösser (und differenzierter) als beim Sprechen (bigger shifts than usual....), sodass die Netzwerke vermutlich besonders gut erweitert (expandiert), stabilisiert und trainiert werden, insbesondere in dem dann später für die Sprache so wichtigen (und extrem kleinen) mittleren Teil des Tonhöhenumfangs. (Wie immer tendiert die Natur zu einer Stabilisierung der Mitte und des Durchschnitts...).

Dieses Training bzw. Perfektionieren von Karten ist natürlich "gut" FÜR WAS AUCH IMMER -- inklusive eben der sozialen Manipulation durch bessere "Entdeckung" der Gefühle im "Anderen" durch Herausfiltern auch noch der kleinsten (differenziertesten) Shifts in dessen Prosodie...

Allerdings gilt auch hier: der zentrale Selektionsvorteil des H. sapiens war die Bewusstwerdung um die (unsichtbaren) eigenen (auditorischen, visuellen, taktilen,...) Karten sowie die ungeheure Expansion derselben (meist via eine Vielzahl von Synapsen sowie über die Epigenetik) --- und zwar meist durch INDIREKTE Umwege (eben via Kunst und Technik, also: Musikinstrumente, Musiktheorie, Werkzeuge, Sprache, Malerei, "Erziehung", etc.). Diese "Bewusstwerdung" konnte möglicherweise sogar "münden" in eben einem (erschreckend seltenen!) Künstlertum, Erziehung und Wissenschaft (Perfektionierung der Karten und Kartenmacher um "ihrer selbst" willen).

Aber allerdings gilt auch hier: "die Natur" ist bei weitem nicht so viktorianisch-industriell "optimiert" und erlaubt sehr viel Zufälligkeit, Willkürlichkeit, Vielfalt (und sogar "stupide Dummheit") INNERHALB ERSTAUNLICH WENIGER knallharter physikalischer Rahmenbedingungen (z.B. konstante Sonneneinstrahlung, Stabilität der DNA, Stabilität der Futterplätze und der Vegetation, etc.).

Daher weigere ich mich auch, wie die primitiven viktorianischen Darwinisten gleich nach "Kosten / Nutzen" / "Vorteilen" / "Fitness" / "Adaptivität" etc. zu schielen bzw. in solchen primitiven Kategorien zu denken... Meist erlaubt die Natur so ziemlich alles ("neutrale Mutationen") --- es sei denn, es sei wirklich krass den Körper schädigend. Aber darüber hinaus gibt es eben sehr viel "Unangepasstes" bzw. "Willkürliches" bzw. letztlich "Sinnloses"... (inklusive vermutlich auch die Musik und Künste).

Denn leider hatten ja auch die Dinosaurier LETZTENENDES so schlechte Karten, in denen nicht einmal die wichtigsten Asteroiden verzeichnet waren....

Mit bestem Gruss
Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org <<<<<

October 25, 2009

After having seen the World Science Festival symposium 2009 on "Notes & Neurons" (see [4]), I was once again disappointed by the scientists (but pleased by the artists), so I had to write this e-mail to all these scientists (Jamshed Bharucha, Lawrence Parsons, Daniel Levitin):

>>>Dear Prof. Bharucha, Prof. Parsons, Prof. Levitin, John Schaefer

Thank you for the "World Science Festival" 2009 symposium on "Notes & Neurons".

However, apart from the social underpinnings of music (which are quite trivial and well-known for "us" hypersocial "Homo sapiens"), I really missed some annotations about the sound BOXES (i.e., reverberations etc.), i.e., the BODIES of resonance (be it a musical instrument or a big neolithic cave -- see Jourdain 1997).

Since there are NO experiments on "reverberations" (because reverberations are by definition NON-SOCIAL features, and hence being non-sexy matters for hypersocial beings, including scientists...), I had to design such an experiment myself (see my dissertation on Neuro-Esthetics 2005).

But no "hypersocial" (h.s) Homo sapiens (H.s.) has been interested in this my project so far (and I even know why...).

And by the way: in your symposium, you simple scientists are quite boring and predictable (see the textbooks) -- unlike Bobby McFerrin, who is really a big and complexly skilled musician (or technician, if you will), i.e., who is capable of playing masterfully with SHIFTS and MAPS (expectations etc.) of all kinds (be it in timbre, rhythm, sound, culture, or whatever...).

And here is Jourdain (1997) in extenso (since you certainly may not know it):

“Reverberations ... are relatively rare in nature, and our brains have not evolved a special mechanism for overlooking them. Like musical sound itself, reverberation is a minor aspect of our natural experience that we have magnified into art. Much music becomes lifeless without reverberation. Early recordings lacked reverberation and they sound off kilter, as if the music were played in the wrong style. Indeed, some Late Romantic music simply doesn‘t work outside halls with long reverberation times, where hundreds of reflections add up to the ‘big sound‘ such music requires“ (JOURDAIN 1997: 49), and: “In the late 1980s, French archaeologists explored prehistoric caves in southwestern France in a unique way – by singing. They discovered that the chambers with the most paintings were those that were the most resonant. This startling insight suggests that caves were the sites of religious ceremonies involving music“ (JOURDAIN 1997: 305).

Yours sincerely, and best wishes

Oliver Elbs, art historian, www.mapology.org
>>>>

October 23, 2009

In their rather uninspired paper entitled "´Neuroculture" in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, the authors Giovanni FRAZZETTO & Suzanne ANKER (see References) have even forgotten to quote my dissertation. But I know: no body will ever read (nor will be able to read) my dissertation — although EVERYTHING and EVERY DISCUSSION will converge onto my Mapology (within some "clash of maps and mappings") sooner of later...

October 19, 2009

“Nature” seems to allow for A LOT OF ARBITRARINESS (variance) – and sometimes even brute silliness – within some astonishingly VERY FEW “hard constraints” (i.e., mostly energetic-physical constraints).

October 10, 2009

Today, I had to post this annotation to "Nature" and its article by Bruce T. Lahn on "Genetic Diversity" (see it on Nature's Network page: [5])

>>>

Regarding the big (and natural) varieties of individual bodies and genomes, I think that the much more important distinction to be made may be the old philosophical (and quite mocked upon) distinction between bodies or genomes (here, e.g, the genome of “my own” body: XY-hsp.aab-70Syadde-eph345_BDNF45axx_R) and Selves (“minds” or “social interaction partners”, e.g. here: Oliver P. Elbs).

However, this distinction has never been made consistently throughout some “human history”, nor has it been told to pupils in the class-room — instead, most “humans” (!) seem to have permanently mistaken and confounded the one medical thing (i.e., genomes & bodies like XY-hsp.aab-70Syadde-ph345_BDNF45axx_R) with the other, socially and linguistically constructed one (here: Oliver P. Elbs).

Besides, ambiguous terms like “humans” (“bodies” OR “Selves”?) should be replaced by much more precise terms, e.g., “members of H. sapiens” or even better: “XY-hsp.aab-70Syadde-eph345_BDNF45axx_R” OR “Oliver P. Elbs”.

But alas, I certainly will still have to wait for a “much more subtle and delicate time & society than mine”, where everybody (or more correct: every one) will be able to separate and distinguish CLEARLY between these two both things (bodies/genomes vs. Selves).

Oliver P. Elbs (!)

<<<<

October 5, 2009

Now my dream has become true: Peter Turchin et al. have gone further by turning the old "cliometrics" of the 1960s into a sub-discipline of (mathematical) dynamical systems theory called "cliodynamics" (see [6] ). That means: History has finally become a sub-discipline of mathematics, i.e. a map of all historical shifts (or: "evolutions", "revolutions", "changes", etc.), including a map of all funny and crazy behaviours of (mostly) "unconscious" and stubborn-brute-silly-arbitrary agents or "physical particles" (i.e., arbitrary higher primates, neuronal cells, etc. etc.)

October 1, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail to some "participants" of the conference "Ontologia" at Stuttgart-Hohenheim (see [7]), including René John, Jana Rückert-John, Elena Esposito, et al.):

<<<<Sehr geehrte Teilnehmer des Symposions "Ontologia"

Hier noch drei Anmerkungen:

1) Kein NaturwissenschaftLER behauptet, dass er z.B. mit 100%-er Sicherheit weiss, dass eine "genetische Krankheit" in 20 Jahren ausbrechen wird. Das glaubt nämlich nur noch der Feuilletonschreiber bzw. der Versicherungsvertreter. Bitte lesen Sie doch auch immer die "Materials and Methods" in den Papers (mit Angabe von statistischen Konfidenzintervallen), und nicht nur die "Abstracts".

2) Wer glaubt denn schon noch an ein "Männer" vs. "Frauen"? -- Nur noch "Ehepaare" von gestern bzw. Populärpsychologen, also sicher kein perfekter Mediziner von heute. Denn die Mediziner kennen auch alles Graduelle dazwischen, also: XY, XXY, XO, XXXY, etc. -- geschweige denn von den Geschlechtsmarkern auf Chromosom X5 und X9, die ja auch noch was mitzubestimmen haben... (wer kennt die aber schon?????? Kein Schwein!).

3) Allein schon Ihr oft bemühter Begriff "WIR" ist vermutlich schon die verrückteste Konstruktion (eines "Hirns"?). Denn seit Jahrtausenden versuche ich ja schon rauszukriegen (z.B. durch Folter, durch fMRI, durch Sprache, etc.), was SIE wohl "denken" könnten, bzw. ob (!) Sie überhaupt denken "können"... (!)

P.S.: Schon komisch, dass ich "niemanden" (genauer: keinen "Körper") kenne, der die obigen drei Punkte wirklich "kennen" würde... Sie alle werden hier wohl auch keine Ausnahme machen... (trotz Tausender von Schulen, Universitäten, Konferenzen und von "Ehepaaren" (!)organisierten Symposia...).

Und wer bei all dem die "besten" Karten haben wird... (und am besten mit all diesen Karten spielt....)

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org <<<<<<

September 21, 2009

Today, there was an interesting radio broadcast entitled: "Darf's einbißchen mehr sein? Unsere Sucht nach Wirtschaftswachstum" on [8]. And here was my answer:

<<<Meine Anmerkung zu Ihrer anregenden Sendung (aber lesen Sie mal Gregory Bateson's "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", 1972):

In der Evolution war immer nur vorgesehen, lokal (national) möglichst schnell zu wachsen.
Der (globalere) Fressfeind deckelt dann automatisch dieses lokale (nationale) Wachstum, sodass es in der Natur global immer zu "temporären" Gleichgewichten kommt (die dann vielleicht wieder etwas verschoben werden -- auf lange Sicht).

Globales Denken bedeutet aber: in Prozessen hin zu einem globalen Gleichgewicht denken zu können.

Das war aber nie für ein Primatenhirn vorgesehen -- sondern muss durch Kultur, Bildung und WIRKLICH GLOBALER Wirtschaft geleistet werden. Bis heute sind alle "Volks(!)"-Wirtschaften immer noch nationalistisch nach dem 19. Jh. ausgerichtet...

Und wer bei all dem die besten Karten haben wird...

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org
>>>>

September 16, 2009

What will survive "our civilization"? -- Perhaps only garbage (atomic, plastic, papers), the Egyptian pyramids (still...), and my children (if I had any...).

September 13, 2009

In their paper entitled "Perineuronal Nets Protect Fear Memories from Erasure", the authors Nadine GOGOLLA et al. (in: Science, see References) note the importance of non-neuronal networks for the stabilization of neural maps (within some neuronal plasticity); besides, their study shows once again how selective all maps are (it does not suffice to study and to map neurons -- YOU HAVE TO MAP EVERYTHING, including perineuronal nets!):
"During the first few weeks of postnatal development, the so-called critical period, monocular sensory deprivation leads to long-lasting functional and structural changes. The absence of perineuronal nets (PNNs), a highly organized form of chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans (CSPG)-containing extracellular matrix, is considered to be a key permissive factor that allows the induction of ocular dominance plasticity during the critical period. The assembly of PNNs around parvalbumin (PV)-expressing inhibitory interneurons is thought to contribute to critical-period closure. Consistent with this notion, the degradation of PNNs in adults reenables the induction of ocular dominance plasticity. ... [Similarly, we have now shown that], in adults [adult animals], degradation of PNNs [in the Amygdala] by chondroitinase ABC specifically rendered subsequently acquired fear memories susceptible to erasure. This result indicates that intact PNNs mediate the formation of erasure-resistant fear memories and identifies a molecular mechanism closing a postnatal critical period during which traumatic memories can be erased by extinction".

September 11, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Niklas KREBS with regard to the latter's book and dissertation entitled "Evolutionäre Ursprünge des mathematischen Denkens" of 2009 (see References, but cf. also my paragraph on Mathematik!):

<<<< Sehr geehrter Herr Krebs

Ich denke, dass Sie mit Ihrer "Machiavelli-Hypothese" der Mathematik das Problem der biologischen Verankerung der Mathematik noch gehörig unterschätzen.
Wenn Sie neuere Bücher zum Thema "Conceptual Mathematics" lesen (z.B. LAWVERE & SCHANUEL), werden Sie schnell bemerken, dass die heutigen Grundbegriffe der Mathematik schon längst nicht mehr "Relation" (Beziehung) heissen, sondern "maps" (bzw. "mappings").

Und hier tun sich denn noch sehr viel grössere Zusammenhänge auf, als Sie (und die meisten Ihrer Kollegen) überhaupt vermutlich denken können. Daher habe ich ja die Wissenschaft der "Mapology" ins Leben gerufen (ELBS 2005), da es mittlerweile auf fast allen Stufen und Ebenen (von Google maps bis hin zu "neural maps" und "fMRI voxel maps") fast nur noch um Karten- und Kartierungsprobleme geht.
Das (soziale, Machiavellische) Problem des "wer kartiert wen (und mit welchem Recht)?" ist da nur ein kleiner Spezialfall eines viel grösseren "clash of maps, map-makers [brains?] and mappings" (vgl. Huntington, aber auch DODGE et al. 2009).

Und übrigens: "Muster" können ja erst durch "neuronale Karten" erkannt werden, sodass auch hier der Begriff "map" (oder: "neural map"? "visual map"?) sehr viel allgemeiner als der Begriff "pattern" ist...

Aber ich weiss natürlich auch, dass kein "Mensch" (auch nicht Kanitscheider) meine Bücher, geschweige denn meine Homepage liest... (was man - mutatis mutandis - von mir übrigens nicht behaupten kann, da ich in der Regel auf der Höhe der Zeit bin...). Also werde ich wohl noch einige Jahrzehnte warten müssen, bis ich in einer etwas "aufgeklärteren Gesellschaft" werde leben können...

Schönen Gruss und wie immer mit meinem ("evolutionären") Schlusssatz:
Und wer bei all dem die "besten" Karten haben wird...

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org
<<<<

September 10, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail to the authors of the book "Rethinking Maps: New frontiers in cartographic theory" by Martin DODGE, Rob KITCHIN, and Chris PERKINS (2009, see References):

<<< Dear Mr Dodge, Mr Kitchin, Mr Perkins

Thank you for your book "Rethinking maps"!

HOWEVER (like Geoff, Woodward, Wood, et al.), you seemingly have forgotten to mention "neural maps" and the "brain" as a "map-maker" itself -- and my introducing the new (ultimate) "Science" of "Mapology" in my dissertation on Neuro-Esthetics ("Mapological foundations and applications", Munich 2005).

Already in my dissertation I have criticized that most scientists (i.e., map-makers) musing about maps and mappings may simply forget the other sciences like neurobiology, Evolution, mathematics, arts, etc. when it comes to maps and mappings.

And nearly all sciences (i.e., maps) -- including Google (Maps) --- may converge to my "Mapology" in the end (which is perhaps the most advanced "philosophy of science" so far).

And those who will have the "best" maps...

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org<<<

September 5, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Peter Janich, Henrik Walter, Michael Pawlik et al.:

<<< Sehr geehrter Herr Prof. Janich (et al.)

Leider wird im heutigen Diskurs um ""kein neues Neuro-Menschen(!)bild" etc. oft vergessen, dass es letztlich (und vermutlich auch "evolutionär") immer um gigantische Karten- und Kartierungskämpfe unter Kartenmachern (aber nicht unbedingt: "Menschen") geht.

Auch ein Hirnforscher und Hirnkartierer sieht nie "direkt" ins "andere" (!) Hirn hinein, sondern immer nur vermittelt via (artifizielle) Kartierungen und Karten ("voxel maps", "human brain mappings", "mathematical maps and mappings", "mathematical functions", "statistical functions", etc.).

Insofern hatten im heutigen Zeitalter von "neural maps" und "Google maps" (etc.) die Philosophen Wittgenstein ("Alles nur ein Sprach- und Machtspiel" - bzw. genauer: alles nur ein Kartenspiel unter primitiv-primatären Kartenmachern, oder vulgo: "Gehirnen"...) und Samuel Huntington ("the clash of maps and mappings") vermutlich wirklich recht...

Denn: solange die "Gehirne" bzw. Kartenmacher nicht DIREKT miteinander verdrahtet sind (neuro-invasiv in einer fernen Zukunft?), solange wird es (seit der Inquisition im Mittelalter leider) immer nur INDIREKTE Zugänge zum "anderen" (!) "Hirn" -- d.h. immer vermittelt via Karten, Sprache (linguistische Karten), Folter, etc. -- geben...

Und wer dann die "besten" Karten haben wird...

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org <<<

September 2, 2009

In their paper entitled "Spontaneous cortical activity in awake monkeys composed of neuronal avalanches", the authors Thomas PETERMANN et al. (in: PNAS, see References) describe neuronal avalanches within some "self-organized criticality" in the intact cortex as follows:
"A critical state, as implied by the neuronal avalanche dynamics, does not arise arbitrarily in cortical networks. Instead, this property of spontaneous activity emerges when superficial layers of cortex first differentiate from the cortical plate during development. Given the dependence of neronal avalanches on the balance of fast synaptic excitation and inhibition and the neuromodulator dopamine, it seems clear that these properties arise from the specific organization of cortical circuitry."

Hence, such an "intrinsic dynamics of the cortex at the fringe of (fractal) criticality" may consist of several avalanches on several (nested) time scales and cluster sizes (spatial scales) -- and may be critical (!) for some better information processing ("hypersensitivity").

All this now immediately reminded me of my own animation of the brain as a Potential landscape, which shows you the intrinsic neuronal dynamics critically modulated (sometimes...) by some external "sensory input" (i.e., "contingent perturbations") from the "outer world":

August 26, 2009

According to today's BBC article (see in detail [9]), the so-called "Stirling Head carved medal" (see picture below) shows a digital musical notation made up from 0s, Is and IIs. This immediately reminded me of Leibniz's invention of a digital language (of 0s and 1s -- as in binary computers today).
Hence, even Leibniz may have learnt a lot from musicians and artists...?

August 25, 2009

The artists of the past (like Fra Angelico, or the anonymous stained glass painter of Strasbourg cathedral in 1340 AC -- see my own superb photo below, recently taken in Strasbourg by myself... [because no one else may have been capable of doing it]) were able to concentrate on genuinely artistic (esthetical) problems, since they had not to deal with problems of ideology in addition (since the ideological subject of their work was always clear and well defined by the Church in advance)... Hence, all these artists were really "pure artists".

In contrast to all that, modern painters like Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko had to solve the question "What shall I paint?" (i.e., the problem of some "subject matter") as well -- in addition to purely esthetic problems.
And that's why paintings by Newman and Rothko are so "scientific" (i.e., within the ruling ideology of the 20th c.).

Hence, today's artists (after the death of the Church) have a really big problem: they not only have to innovate on an esthetic level, but they have to find their own ideologies themselves, so that they cannot be "pure artists" any more... (like the old - and much better? - artists of the past...).

August 6, 2009

In his letter to "Nature", the author Ajit VARKI (in: Nature, see References) notes on some "Human uniqueness and the denial of death":
"He [Danny Brower] explained that with full self-awareness [via some "Theory of mind"] and inter-subjectivity would also come awareness of death and mortality. Thus, far from being useful, the resulting overwhelming fear would be a dead-end evolutionary barrier ... [and that's why] the transition [i.e., shift] to a fully human-like phenotype was blocked for tens of millions of years of mammalian (and perhaps avian) evolution. In his view, the only way these properties could become positively selected [i.e., stabilized] was if they emerged simultaneously with neural mechanisms for denying mortality" --
and this exactly shows why my definition of "religion" is so exact (see [10]): "religious people" have to look for "eternal stabilities" (as also some artists may do...), because they want to counter their awareness of some final "instability" (i.e., "the unknown hour of my death" -- but which in fact would be the ONLY real hyperstability...)...

August 3, 2009

In their great paper entitled "Reinforcement Learning of Active Inference?", the authors Karl J. FRISTON et al. (in: PLoS One, see References) make a strong case for eliminating old (psychologic, economic, hypersocially biased) concepts and terms from the 19th century. In their paper, they "question the need for reinforcement learning or control theory when optimising behaviour. We show that it is fairly simple to teach an agent complicated and adaptive behaviours using a free-energy formulation of perception. ... Critically, we do not need to invoke the notion of reward, value or utility. ... [Besides,] the free-energy formulation furnishes a unified account of both action and perception."

Or in molecular terms (following REDGRAVE & GURNEY 2006): "dopamine may encode the precision of prediction errors on sensory states. ... This may explain why salient stimuli, which elicit orienting responses, can excite dopamine activity even when they are not classical reward stimuli."

And now comes the criticism of hypersocial biases: "It is interesting to note that classical rewards and punishments only have meaning when one agent teaches another; for example in social neuroscience or exchanges between an experimenter and subject. ... From a neurobiological perspective, it may be that dopamine .. does not encode the prediction error of value but the value of prediction error, i.e., the precision of prediction errors that measure surprise to drive perception and action".

"The key point here is that the agent does not need to optimise a policy. In other words, it is us that have desired states in mind, not the agent. This means the notion that agents optimise their policy may be a category error, because the agent only needs to optimise its perceptual model [i.e., its map]. ... The only desirable state is a state the agent can [habitually? frequently?]] frequent, where these states defines the nature of that agent".

"In ethological terms, the implicit shift' is away from reinforcing desired behaviours and towards teaching agents the succession of sensory states that lead to desired outcomes".

August 2, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Martin Hubert, the Deutschlandfunk ("Wissenschaft im Brennpunkt", 2.8.2009, see [11] ), Prof. Dr. Karl Zilles (Jülich), and Dr. Hauke Heekeren (Berlin, MPI):

<<<< Sehr geehrter Martin Hubert, sehr geehrter Deutschlandfunk, sehr geehrter Prof. Zilles, sehr geehrter Dr. Heekeren

Ja, "was hat man von einer statischen, d.h. anatomischen, Karte des Gehirns"?

Zunächst einmal haben Sie wohl vergessen, dass z.B. bei Zilles et al. die einzelnen Synapsen (die tatsächlich die wichtigen computationalen Einheiten des Hirns sind) und die individuellen Synapsenmuster noch gar nicht individuell kartiert sind -- das macht ja erst Jeff Lichtman et al. in seinem gigantischen Ansatz ("connectome", siehe [12] ).

Zudem: der zentrale Punkt ist, dass Damasio (2003) "neural maps" dynamisch (und nicht statisch) definiert hat als "neural activity patterns" -- und da sind die individuellen Synapsengewichtungsmuster und permanent ablaufenden "re-wiring Prozesse" (die sich permanent ändern und areal-übergreifend erweitern) absolut zentral... (und überhaupt noch nicht kartiert -- denn so gute Kartierungsmethoden haben wir eben immer noch nicht...).

Dass "Empathie" in der heutigen (westlichen) Neuroforschung so hoch oben auf der Agenda steht, ist für hypersoziale (h.s.) Primaten wie den Homo sapiens (H.s.) eh klar -- Hitler hatte vermutlich das grösste Einfühlungsvermögen und die perfekteste Theory of Mind (und damit auch das grösste soziale Manipulationsvermögen), das es überhaupt gibt... Aber leider ist ja das Hirn von Hitler (im Gegensatz zu dem von Lenin) verschollen...
(Dieses grosse (motorische) Empathievermögen von Hitler können Sie z.B. im Film "Olympia" tatsächlich noch "sehen" [laut Prof. Onians, mündliche Mitteilung]...).

Dennoch Dank für die Ausstrahlung der (nicht ganz up-to-daten) Sendung und mit schönem Gruss (aber meine Homepage, meine Updates und meine Publikationen liest ja kein Schwein, wie ich seit Jahren bemerke...)

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org (... and those who will have the 'best' maps...)
<<<<

August 1, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail to the philosopher Dr. Daniel M. Feige (University of Frankfurt a.M., Germany):

<<< Sehr geehrter Herr Dr. Daniel Feige

Herzlichen Dank für Ihren Aufsatz "Kunst als Produkt der natürlichen Evolution" in ZfÄallgKW!

Dass es eine "Selbstzweckhaftigkeit" der Kunst gibt glaubte auch nur noch ein prä-darwinistischer Ideenzwerg namens Immanuel Kant.

Denn: das Selbst zu optimieren (also: die eigenen neuronalen Karten) und mit den eigenen unsichtbaren Karten zu spielen (genauer auf Englisch: playing with maps and shifts...) ist schliesslich auch ein "evolutionärer Zweck", oder etwas weniger anthropomorph und daher präziser formuliert: eine Verhaltensmöglichkeit, die sich in den letzten Jahrtausenden als ziemlich "stabil" (und immer grössere Populationen des H. sapiens stabilisierend und unterhaltend (!)...) herausgestellt hat...

Schliesslich hat H. sapiens nicht nur dank Technik (ars, techne) und Mathematik seine Karten gigantisch erweitert, globalisiert und perfektioniert (vor allem in der Mathematik, wo es fast nur noch um "maps" und "mappings", also: Funktionen und "Abbildungen" geht), sondern auch extrem stabilisiert (von den stabilen ägyptischen Pyramiden bis zu den "ewigen Wahrheiten" in der Mathematik...).

Und die (historisch gesehen) besten Kartenmacher (bzw. Kartenspieler) waren schon immer die Künstler (siehe den locus classicus: Svetlana Alpers 1983...).

Mit schönem Gruss und weiterhin viel Erfolg

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org (for further reading see: Elbs, Oliver (2005): Neuro-Esthetics. Mapological foundations and applications (Map 2003).)
<<<<

July 31, 2009

In their small article entitled "Mathematical Biology Education: Beyond Calculus", the authors Raina ROBEVA & Reinhard LAUBENBACHER (in: Science, see References) underline the importance of algebraic (discrete, Boolean) models beyond the more common (continous) differential equation modelling in biology. But such a "paradigm shift" would perhaps be necessary in Computational Neurobiology as well: replacing the continous models with (discrete) computing (inhibitory or excitatory) neurons... Such a shift may also be important for an upcoming "Sir Isaac Newton in Neurobiology" (whom "we" may still lack...) in order to map (and to model) the brain's working ever better...

July 17, 2009

I have now taken some marvellous photos of the stained glass windows of my favourite medieval town in France called Troyes.
See my photostream on : [13] - together with photos from Le Thoronet. But see also my own page on these two super perfect works of art at Le Thoronet and Troyes.

I had to take these photos myself BECAUSE I wanted to show to my children and to all other "normal folks" and laymen today — who, sadly enough, are only used to the big amount of dirty trash, dirty wars, dirty ideologies and awful pictures & sounds of today's brute mass media and social networks — some absolute (artistic, material) perfection and beauty (i.e., "total stability"). In fact, these perfect architectures and stained glass paintings have now been uninterruptly shining for several hundred years... (hence, that's some really stable "beauty"!).

July 10, 2009

When you are interested in the latest neural networks based on memristors, you may read the following paper by PERSHIN & DI VENTRA (2009), entitled "Experimental demonstration of associative memory with memristive neural networks (see in detail [14]).

July 7, 2009

In their review entitled "Inside the brain of an elite athlete", the authors Kielan YARROW et al. (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) note with some dynamic systems theory in mind (attractors, Potential landscapes, target maps ["goals"] etc.):
"Athletes ... fail to reproduce a precise kinematic pattern when performing a particular sports-specific activity. This seems sensible, given that sporting scenarios are often erratic, so goal-directed actions will rarely be initiated from an identical starting situation. Indeed, there is evidence from experiments using prolonged micro-stimulation that neurons in the primary motor cortex (M1) drive movements towards a consistent end point regardless of the initial posture. What matters is the outcome of the movement [i.e., the target map or "goal attractor"], not the movement itself."
And they also explain the need for coaches: "A coach can direct the trial-and-error search [during training] and thereby reduce the parameter space that needs to be explored to find the ideal policy. They can prevent an athlete from falling into local maxima [or: minima?] for immediate rewards by evaluating a local action with respect to the future goal of winning, and thereby allow the athlete to attain the global maxima with maximal future rewards".
Hence, a "skilled athlete could be considered a person [or: map-maker?] who has learnt very good forward models [or: who has optimized his basins of attractions within his Potential landscape?] at various levels of representation, which allows them to plan a better movement in any given context [thanks to an invariant, stable attractor within an ever wider basin of attraction, or: "map extension"!]. ... Increased perceptual skill is associated with various changes in primary sensory cortex, including map extension, sharpening of neural tuning and alteration in the temporal response characteristic of neurons. ... In rats, skill-related increases in cortical map representation have been reported, along with increases in the number of synapses per neuron in layer V of M1"."
That there is in fact a complex network of different attractors at work as well, you can see in this remark: "These motor plans [in fronto-striatal loops] compete through mutual inhibitory connections to generate a winner [map]; this competition represents the decision process, with biasing [i.e., shifting] signals from regions such as the prefrontal cortex tipping [i.e., shifting] the competition in favour of the selected motor act [or map]."
In the final paragraph, the authors also muse about the necessity of "mirror neurons" for observational learning (from coaches) and for a fast prediction of the opponent's movements (as in tennis).

June 17, 2009

When you read Michel Serres, you can see that he still hasn't managed to get to the "core of all", because he (like all post-modern map-makers speaking an extremely personifying playful language...) still plays with superficial linguistic terms and maps that may not be crucial at all.
For example, he speaks of some "angelological" "translation" — instead, he would better say: a "mapological" "mapping between maps" (e.g., the mapping of an Italian linguistic map ["language"] onto an English linguistic map).
In his "Atlas" (1994), he saw that maps are not static things at all — in fact, each atlas (and each neural map as well...) has to be updated every moment (because everthing is permanently shifting...).
Unfortunately, Michel Serres may be too old to read my own mapology (but not: "angelology") and he is too old to learn a new language (or map) — and thus cannot yet "see" that everyting just boils down to (a more or less intelligent play with) maps...

June 11, 2009

In his review entitled "Birdsong normalized by culture", the author W. Tecumseh FITCH (in: Nature, see References) has brought me to the idea, that "we" may have to rethink (memetic? neural?) attractors as being part of a much wider (stabilizational or "normalizing") process, since the attractor dynamics involved in "cultural and genetic transmission" can even extend beyond a single brain to a much wider biological and generational network (and on much longer time-scales):
"Adults thrown together with no common language develop pidgins ... But intriguingly, ... later generations transform such simple systems into true languages, with a full range of grammatical expressiveness. Pidgins can become complex, stable languages known as creoles in just a few generations."
Now, "birdsong is neither an instinct present at birth, nor an arbitrary cultural construction: it rests on biological foundations, but also requires specific inputs to develop properly. ... Birdsong acquisition provides ... an animal equivalent of human cultural transmission. In their study, Fehér et al. first raise young male zebra finches in isolation. At adulthood, these birds sing only a raspy, arrhythmic isolate (ISO) song. The authors then pair these adult male 'tutors' with young males. These first-generation young learners successfully imitate ISO song, but already begin to transform it in the direction of normal — wild type — song [that means: shifting back in direction to a former, more stable (genetically stabilized?) attractor]. Iterating this process, using first-generation song as input to a second generation of birds and so on, the authors follow the birds for up to five generations and find that each generation's song moves steadily closer to normal zebra finch song [i.e., toward the old and hyperstable attractor already existing in all former ancestors, i.e., belonging to the whole "species" — the whole generational-historical biochemical network — as such?]."

June 4, 2009

Today, I had to write the following e-mail to Andrei Ionut in Bucharest, with regard to Malevich's "square" (and unfortunately enough, no one seems to really have read all my publications, because I have already told everything):

>>> Dear Andrei

Have you ever read my dissertation on Neuro-Esthetics and Mapology (see Elbs 2005)?
And: have you ever read my online lecture at the CAA Conference in Dallas 2008 (see www.mapology.org/en/Publications) ?

I have nearly written about everything regarding Malevich - hence, there is nothing much left to somebody else.

Here is the history of it all (as told in my dissertation):

1) Malevich was a neuro-esthetician himself (see his own writings, from which I quoted extensively in my dissertation). So, you have to read all his writings first and to know all of them by heart (as first references). Here in a nut-shell:
Malevich wanted to paint some-"THING" that was absolutely stable and non-arbitrary (hence the black colour, because black [or white] is a non-arbitrary colour, because dependent only on the most primitive black and white sensors in the retina [the rods, but not the cones]). Secondly, as a communist, he wanted to paint for the "social masses", so he had to paint a "face" (albeit an abstract one, i.e., a square). He himself called his black square a "face" and "vera icon" (i.e., the "new icon" in a new era).

2) Semir Zeki (1999) wrote extensively about Malevich's "square" as a super-stimulus for edge-detectors in V2 (because a geometric square is very "hard-edged"). However, Semir Zeki was not as intelligent as Malevich to go further (i.e., beyond V2, i.e., beyond the secondary visual cortex).
Other neurologists writing about the Malevichian square have simply copied Zeki...

3) In 1995, Malach and co-workers have made the biggest discovery since then: they found the so-called "LOC", the lateral occipital complex (which lies just ahead of V2 at the junction of the occipital and temporal cortex, the latter being crucial for visual memories of objects and things), and on which I have written extensively in my dissertation and in my Dallas lecture (online), because this area is activated whenever you see a "closed wholeness", i.e., some-"THING", like the "closed shape of a square" or the closed shape of a "face" (!).
Interestingly enough, this "THING-attractor" attracts all things and objects (i.e., closable shapes) --- and especially, when these "things" are not hard-edged, but "soft-edged" (i.e., a bit "blurry").
And that's why Malevich was not the "end of art" (i.e., the end of this "search" for the [invisible!] LOC by artists and neurobiologists).

The absolute end of ("objective") art came with Mark Rothko -- the guy who painted not hard-edged squares (like Malevich), but blurry squares (in order to evoke "social feelings" in addition -- i.e., memories of the mother's face, which for new-born babies simply boil down to a "blurry some-thing").

4) However, Malevich would have rejected the further development by Mark Rothko, because in the time of the "Russian Revolution", he wanted to paint something "stable" (i.e., not blurry). However -- and ironically enough ---, the "blurry thing" (Rothko) turns out to be more stable (neurally) than a Malevich, because although the LOC is activated by all "things", it is nevertheless the best activated (and the most stable) when being activated by things (shapes) that are a bit "blurred".

5) The LOC itself is only an intermediate stage (a hub) toward more frontal areas in the brain (temporal cortex, frontal cortex). That's why you can even go further (as Malevich really did), and to associate the square with a "face" (or even with a "vera icon", when you know the "orthodox-christian tradition" like Malevich did, who was brought up in orthodox Russia), so that the "fusiform face area" (FFA) --- lying just ahead of the LOC --- may be activated as well.
But there are lots of people today, who do not see such a "vera icon" any more, because they are no longer christian themselves.
However, they may associate all other "things" that are possible as well, for example "a square" (no joke!), "a swimming pool with black water", a "toilet room tile", a "window" (toward the starry sky), etc.

6) From there, all other associations become possible, including "religious" ones (mainly driven by frontal cortices, including areas involved in some "Self" and "Self-control"). In fact, Malevich wanted to "bring up" a new "consciousness" in the "social masses", and to "awake them" and make them more "controlled" (Self-controlled).

That's all I can say about Malevich. It is just V2 => LOC => FFA => Frontal Cortex (and back again). That's the whole Malevich (and nearly the whole brain).

Please find enclosed a (visual) summary of all that from my dissertation (PDF enclosed).

Postscriptum:

When you closely read Zeki (1999), you will see that he links Malevich's coloured (i.e., not only black) squares with V4 as well, i.e., with the "colour area" of the brain (according to Zeki).

In fact, there happen to be partial overlaps between LOC and V4 (cf. Larsson & Heeger et al. 2006 - enclosed to this mail), which is not a wonder, because colours and colour contrasts are important for a perceptual "figure-background" (object - ground) distinction as well (hence: V4 => LOC).

But Malevich's BLACK square would not activate these areas in V4 at all, but only the LOC (certainly)...

However, as I said, Zeki (1999, 2003) did not know the paper by Malach et al (1995), and so he didn't know about the LOC and about more subtly differentiated neural maps (in fact, I had to teach him the LOC in a discussion in 2003 in Hamburg)....

Yours sincerely, and best wishes

Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org <<<

May 18, 2009

I am now more and more inclined to think that THE ONLY DIFFERENCE between a H. sapiens and a chimp is the former's ABILITY to draw (and hence: to make a map). Although some apes might be able to PAINT (with human-made tools...), they are not ABLE to draw, and hence to become "CONSCIOUS" of their mapping (drawing) process itself...
And: sadly enough, very few people CAN really draw...

Recently, I had to translate Cocteau's expression "la difficulté d'être" into German. Sadly enough, most writers and translators before me were not able to translate this expression correctly, presumably because they have never been "great artists" themselves (like Cocteau himself). And here is my translation: "Schwierigkeiten, in dieser Welt zu leben", i.e., difficulty to live in "this world".

I myself have never felt at home in "this world", either (and will certainly never feel so) — because I know (and have lived through...) so many other (and much more intelligent resp. much more beautiful) "worlds"...

May 13, 2009

In their paper entitled "The amusic brain: in tune, out of key, and unaware", the authors Isabelle PERETZ et al. (in: Brain, see References) have found that "the amusic brain can track [i.e., map] quarter-tone pitch differences [i.e., shifts] by exhibiting an early right-lateralized negative brain response, here termed N200. This is the first demonstration of near-normal neural processing of musical pitch incongruities in congenital amusia. It is important because it reveals that the amusic brain is equipped with the essential neural circuitry to perceive fine-grained pitch differences [i.e., shifts]. What distinguishes the amusic from the normal brain is the absence of awareness of this ability. ... [Hence,] one can predict that the amusic brain can normally pick up [i.e., map] acoustical pitch differences in the auditory cortex but that this acoustical information [i.e., map] cannot be integrated into a conscious percept because such a neural representation [i.e., map] is too weak or because its percept is not supported by long-term memory representations [i.e., maps] of [Western] musical key schemas [i.e., stable maps or biases]."
"Tonal pitch distance can only be computed by reference to the key of the melody, that is, by mapping [GREAT, at last...!] the incoming pitches onto scale steps. This knowledge is apparently missing in amusia [due to temporo-frontal cortical malformations]".

May 12, 2009

In his review of Desmurget et al., the author Patrick HAGGARD (in: Science, see References) notes on the "Sources of Human Volition":
"The neurosurgeon's electrode delivers a precisely known input to the motor system; when applied to the presupplementary motor area, this electrical stimulation can produce a distinct conscious experience of an "urge to move". Desmurget et al. now report that stimulation of another area, the inferior part of the posterior parietal cortex [including the TPJ], also generates experiences of intention. ... In fact, there are important differences between frontal and parietal stimulation. Stimulation of the presupplementary motor area at low current caused an experience of urge, whereas stronger stimulation caused actual movement. By contrast, Desmurget et al. found that parietal stimulation, even at high intensities, never caused movements, though it could produce the illusion that a movement had occurred [i.e., a déjà-vu experience?]. This difference suggests that there may be two distinct aspects of conscious intention. One would be a conscious correlate of preparing motor commands in the presupplementary motor area. Another would be a sensory prediction, in the parietal cortex, of the consequences of those commands. "
"But when patients with parietal lesions explicitly judged whetehr visual feedback reflected their own action or another person's action, they overattributed observed actions to themselves, contrary to the prediction [but see also Brass & Heyes 2005 on the TPJ as an inhibitor of mirror neuron activations!]. ... Could the conscious experience that patients call "urge" really be a sensory feedback from slight muscle contraction? Desmurget et al. exclude this ... by demonstrating that parietal stimulation does not produce any muscle activity...".

May 10, 2009

In a review entitled "A social hub for worms", Shawn R. LOCKERY (in: Nature, see References) describes how scientists — thanks to a total map ("wiring diagram") of all 302 neurons in C. elegans — have now pinned down a hub network that is crucial for the behavioural differences between "solitary" and "social" strains of C. elegans worms (i.e., why these strains behave differently in the presence of social pheromone cues). However, even this elegant study does not "explain" (i.e., does not map) why H. sapiens happens to be such a "hyper-social" (and hence also "criminal") animal.

April 21, 2009

It is really bad that I apparently have to live among idiots (i.e., old-fashioned brains and map-makers apparently designed in 1948) everywhere — just look at the so-called "anti-racism" conference in Geneva!

Only old-fashioned nationalist people like Hitler and Hitler's so-called "jews" as well as some very few "American" scientists still believe in the 19th-century concept of "race".

But today's top-biologists and top medical doctors know that there is even no possibility to define a "race" or "species" unambiguously -- these terms make no sense with regard to the biological continuous networks and syncytia of (horizontal) gene trafficking and retro-viruses. Besides, medical doctors and biologists are only interested in individual bodies and genomes (which may be more or less related to each other) -- THAT'S ALL.

And in order to keep upright all already existing bodies in a perfect way (i.e., within some personalized medicine), you do not have to use more biases (i.e., terms like "race", "Jews", "Americans" etc.) in addition...

But I strongly fear that I will never be able to live and to feel comfortable in a world with perfectly educated map-makers (but, alas, still only idiots everywhere).

April 16, 2009

Today, I had to write this e-mail (in German) to Karlheinz Walter, the journal "Natur + Kosmos", Prof. Joachim Bauer, and Prof. Thomas Junker - by pleading for replacing the anthropomorphic terms "evolution", "selection", "variation", "cooperation" by "History", "historical stabilizations", "shifts" (including genomic instabilities like "mutations", etc.):

<<<< Sehr geehrter Herr Walter / Sehr geehrte Redaktion des "Natur + Kosmos" / Sehr geehrter Herr Prof. Bauer

Als knallharter Naturwissenschaftler kenne ich keine anthropomorphen und tierzüchterischen Begriffe wie "Evolution", "Selektion" und "Kooperation" mehr.

Stattdessen kenne ich nur noch Begriffe wie "Geschichte" (statt: "Entwicklung") bzw. "historische Stabilisierungsprozesse" (statt: Selektion).

Interessanterweise kam Karlheinz Walter in seinem Essay in ihrem Heft 5/2009 (S. 55) zum selben Schluss: plötzlich ist da am Ende des Essays nur noch von "Evolutionsstabilität" bzw. "stabilisierender Selektion" (fast ein Pleonasmus!!!!) die Rede.

ALSO: Schafft zuerst die Wörter und Ideologien ab (wie "Evolution", "Selektion", etc etc.), dann sind alle Debatten um einen "Kreationismus" etc. schon von allein erledigt...

Und irgendwann wird auch noch der "letzte Mensch" einmal merken, dass es letztlich auf allen Ebenen nur um Stabilitätsprobleme geht:
angefangen von einer "genome stability" und "stability of protein foldings" über "stable memories" (= stabile neuronale Netzwerke, "Gedächtnis", "Meme") über "stable financial markets" und "stabile soziale Netzwerke" und "stabile Gefühle von Stabilität" (vulgo: "Liebe" bzw. "Vertrauen") bis hin zur individuellen "Langlebigkeit" bzw. "longevity"... (was wiederum von einer genome stability abzuhängen scheint).

Der Rest ist immer nur "Geschichte" (aber bitte NIE mehr: "Evolution")...

Mit freundlichem Gruss an alle
Oliver Elbs, www.mapology.org >>>>

April 9, 2009

As a scientist following up the most recent research on Neuroscience and Archaeology as well (since the beginning: see my dissertation on RENFREW 1994), I recommend you to read the book review by Merlin DONALD entitled "The sapient paradox: can cognitive neuroscience solve it?" in the journal "Brain" (see References).

Besides, today's scientists are now ABLE to construct ever more beautiful images and maps (partly online and in real-time) of cell activities thanks to the latest mapping tools; in their paper on "The DNA-damage effector checkpoint kinase 1", the authors Sirisha PEDDIBHOTLY et al. (in: PNAS, see References) show a picture that is really beautiful indeed (see image below): it maps mitosis and genome (in-)stability in a stained cell seen via a powerful microscope... Just enjoy it and its colours and glooming haloes!

April 2, 2009

In a rush, I have now written a paper (decidated to Semir Zeki) on "What is "love"? (The problem of stability Part II).
You may download and read it here (Elbs 2009d)[15]

March 19, 2009

In my dissertation, I introduced the term "Social Synchronization" (see also [16]) in order to describe possible (apparent) synchronizations between individual brains (e.g., via "music" or "religious rituals").
Now a paper has come out that shows (via EEG) exactly such a "SS" (Social Synchronization) via music -- just read the paper entitled "Brains swinging in concert: cortical phase synchronization while playing guitar" by Ulman LINDENBERGER et al. (in: BMC Neuroscience, see References).

Besides, if you are interested in the "neural mechanism of first impressions", than you may also read the article by Daniela SCHILLER et al. (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) noting the following:
"First impressions ... are tightly connected with the enduring biases subjects bring along [i.e., the subjects' Potential landscape...]. Such biases shape how subjects weight [yeah - stabilization processes following some complex emotional shifts...] different types of information [i.e., different shifts...] and which information is selected for additional processing [i.e., stabilization]. Even though these factors may vary widely between subjects, across subjects, the same brain regions, the PCC [posterior cingulate cortex], the amygdala and the thalamus, dissociated these two types of information. The extent to which these regions were recruited during encoding of person-descriptive information correlated with how subjects valued it, as was evident in their subsequent evaluation scores."

March 14, 2009

In their paper entitled "Use of Number by Fish", the authors Christian AGRILLO et al. (in: PLoS One, see References) note:
"[our] experiments suggest that although mosquitofish are capable of using both number and continuous extent, they spontaneously use the latter to estimate quantities. Similar results have been reported to occur in dolphins, macaques, six month old infants and human adults. For instance, a bottlenose dolphin trained to distinguish between two quantities spontaneously used overall surface area of the elements or brightness for performing the discrimination. However, controlling for non-numerical cues, these authors demonstrated that the dolphin could discriminate the stimuli solely on the basis of the numerosity feature and that eventually it was able to successfully transfer the discrimination to novel numerosities outside the former range.
Traditionally, the explanation for these results is that number requires more effortful processing compared with continuous extent, and therefore counting represents a ‘last resort’ strategy, when no other perceptual mechanism may suggest the quantity of the elements. However, recent studies have questioned this assumption, showing that adult humans, preverbal children, chimpanzees and macaques spontaneously and automatically encode information about continuous extent and numerosity simultaneously, and that the relative salience of these two dimensions depends on factors such as type of task, numerosity ratio and previous experience."
Now, "why do mosquitofish preferentially use continuous extent over numerical information given that the two alternatives are similar in cognitive demand? One possibility is that quantity information is ecologically more relevant for this species. For example, in foraging contexts animals often tend to maximise the amount of resources acquired with a minimum of energy expenditure. Even though number of items and total amount of resource gained frequently correlate, sometimes this does not occur, for example when there is a large variation in the size of food items. Selection for optimising food intake could have favoured mechanisms based on continuous extent, such as area, as they are more reliable indicators of the resource potentially gained. Alternatively, perceptual cues of the stimuli may simply be the quickest indicator of the numerosity, for example because they involve earlier stages in neural visual or auditory processing. Mosquitofish use quantity discrimination in fitness related contexts, such as choosing the safer social group or the larger number of potential mates."

March 11, 2009

What may be the reason for ADD (Attention-Deficit Disorder) and BCD (Bowling-for-Columbine Disorder; see Tim K. from D-Winnenden, March 11, 2009)?

1. Most male youngsters with ADD problems are not supervised and coerced by really demanding "fathers" (i.e., really demanding and well-educated Alpha-males).
2. Most male youngsters with ADD may not have any really demanding playgrounds any more (with the exception of motorways and the Wallstreet).
3. Most male youngsters with ADD may eat "junk food"...

February 28, 2009

In their paper entitled "Self-sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme", the authors Tracey A. LINCOLN & Gerald F. JOYCE (in: Science, see References) have built a self-stabilizing and self-replicating RNA biomolecular functional circuit ("sacred circles"...) for the first time (see also image below), and hence have achieved "a cross-catalytic system involving two RNA enzymes that catalyze each other's synthesis from a total of four component substrates".
This circuit can even recombine: "Recombination occurs when an enzyme binds and ligates a mismatched substrate. In principle, any A could become joined to any B or B', and any A' could become joined to any B' or B, resulting in 64 possible enzymes."
"An important challenge for an artificial RNA-based genetic system is to support a broad range of encoded functions, well beyond replication itself. Ultimately, the system should provide open-ended opportunities for discovering novel function, something that probably has not occurred on Earth since the time of the RNA world"...

February 22, 2009

In their small review entitled "MRI rides the wave", the authors Paul GLOVER & Richard BOWTELL (referring to Brunner et al. in the same journal) report a new MRI technique (relying on travelling waves instead of standing waves) giving more place to the subject in the scanner (and more space for more interesting experiments) as well as giving much larger (and sharper) pictures at 7 Tesla (see picture below). Interestingly enough, theoretical physicist Jürg Fröhlich (a co-author of Brunner et al.) happens to have been my teacher for electrodynamics when I was at the ETH of Zurich in 1993/94...

February 20, 2009

In their paper entitled "Attractors and Democratic Dynamics", the authors Yaneer BAR-YAM et al. (in: Science, see References) see cellular transcription networks as dynamical systems and "energy landscapes" displaying attractor dynamics, and warn about averaged data (by averaging out all interesting dynamics):
"The attractor paradigm has practical implications [in transcriptional regulatory architectures]: If distinct cell types (such as precursor cell and a fully differentiated cell) correspond to distinct attractors, then there are multiple parallel ways to shift the transcriptional state from one attractor to another. ... More generally, cells are robust [i.e., stable] to noise and small perturbations in transcription, but sensitive to small changes [i.e., shifts] in specific external and internal cues. ... Relating the variation of small sets of gene expression values to deviation or conformity to archetypes can provide a framework to study the interplay of attractors and master regulators. Such observation, best taken from unaveraged data, should identify the dispersal and convergence of cells near an attractor, and the mechanisms of homeostatic control".

February 18, 2009

In their paper entitled "Deep homology and the origins of evolutionary novelty", the authors Neil SHUBIN et al. (in: Nature, see References) note:
"The unexpected finding that the homologous transcription factors Eyeless and PAX6 have crucial roles in the formation of eyes of D. melanogaster and vertebrates was the first indication that the markedly different eyes of long-divergent phyla had more in common than was previously thought. ... Moreover, in all light-sensing organs in animals, the ability to detect light depends on a cascade involving opsin proteins. This observation led to the view that all modern variations of light sensing in bilaterians can be traced to the existence of photosensitive cells in a common ancestor with PAX6 and other transcription factors at the top of a genetic regulatory pathway leading to opsin production. This is a textbook example of deep homology: morphologically disparate organs whose formation (and evolution) depends on homologous genetic regulatory circuits."
And: "as was clear to Darwin, this homology is immediately appparent in the detailed similarities of morphology and development of the bones in the limbs of all tetrapods. More controversial, however, have been attempts to compare these bones with those in the paired fins of fish. It is here where deep genetic homologies and the discovery of fossils [like Tiktaalik] conspire to offer fresh insights".
As another example, the authors turn to the evolution of beetle horns: "Although analyses of the distribution of horns in adults have suggested numerous independent gains, even within a single genus, recent studies of development in larvae have shown that the potential to make horns is widespread, even among hornless species. ... [Although] certain members of the dung beetle genus Onthophagus develop pronotal horns during the late larval period and retain them to adulthood, many other species transiently develop horns as larvae and then resorb them in the pupal period. Furthermore, these authors uncovered evidence that the larval horns have an important role in the splitting of the head capsule during the larval-to-pupal moult. ... These findings explain why the capacity to make adult horns has been widely maintained and could therefore account for the multiple independent gains (and losses) of adult horns in this genus. Furthermore, the findings suggest that adult Onthophagus horns did not evolve from scratch for male combat but are exaptations (structures that first originated to serve another, unrelated, function)."

You see: the closer one looks, the more contiguous-continuous and shifting-stable all things (and maps) get in science...

February 8, 2009

In their extremely fascinating, but (alas!) not correctly titled paper entitled "Neural signature of the conscious processing of auditory [IR-!!!!]regularities", the authors Tristan A. BEKINSCHTEIN et al. (in: PNAS, see References) were able to detect (i.e., to map) via EEG and fMRI a "global effect" of "local stimulus violations" (local MMNs), co-occuring with "consciousness".
My reply to this paper (in fact, a homework done for one of my pupils in "Theory of Knowledge" and in fact a tour de force in the "History of Philosophy"...) can be downloaded here as a PDF (4 pages only!).

February 3, 2009

In their paper entitled "Compressed Scaling of Abstract Numerosity Representations in Adult Humans and Monkeys", the authors Katharina MERTEN & Andreas NIEDER (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) note in a follow-up study to Dehaene et al.:
"Children with minor mathematical training relied on logarithmic numerical scales that are probably derived from nonverbal quantity representations. On the other hand, advanced mathematical education led to linear representations of numerical magnitudes ... We suspect that this shift might stem from a gradual cultural transformation of a nonverbal logarithmic scheme to a linear scheme, during the course of mathematical education".

February 2, 2009

In their paper entitled "The Brain's Intention to Imitate: The Neurobiology of Intentional versus Automatic Imitation", the authors Nina BIEN et al. (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) note:
"In the current study, the existence, network connectivity [via Granger causality modeling], and functional relevance of the specific brain system enabling us to inhibit responses, particularly automatic imitative response tendencies, were investigated [via fMRI and fMRI-guided TMS]".
Their model now looks like this (see also the picture below):
"Right middle/inferior frontal cortex (red) sends neural input concerning response inhibition to premotor cortex (orange), which is involved in the process of automatic imitation. Subsequently, information is sent to bilateral posterior parietal and intraparietal cortices (yellow), which potentially return feedback to premotor cortex. Finally, left opercular cortex (green) receives information from premotor cortex and exerts its function in the specific inhibition of automatic imitation".
Now, the authors "propose that, besides the premotor cortex which is involved in automatic imitation and the middle frontal cortex which subserves general response inhibition, the described frontoparietal area is part of the cortical network enabling healthy human beings to imitate in an intentional manner and to inhibit their already planned imitative responses when needed ... According to our neurobiological model, patients suffering from echopraxia or imitation behaviour may have sustained defects at one or several levels of this network".
But sadly enough, the authors have forgotten to apply TMS to another crucial area involved in the inhibition of automatic mirror responses, namely the TPJ area (see Brass & Heyes 2005).

January 13, 2009

We (I) have always known that testosterone-laden males have only two playgrounds at their disposition: motor highways and the stock-exchange (Wall Street). Exactly this has now been "proven" by John M. COATES et al. (in: PNAS, see References), where these authors note with regard to some "2D:4D" digit ratio:
"2D:4D has been shown to predict success in highly competitive sports. Yet, little is known about the effects of prenatal androgens on an economically influential class of competitive risk taking—trading in the financial world. Here, we report the findings of a study conducted in the City of London in which we sampled 2D:4D from a group of male traders engaged in what is variously called ‘‘noise’’ or ‘‘high-frequency’’ trading. We found that 2D:4D predicted the traders’ long-term profitability as well as the number of years they remained in the business. 2D:4D also predicted the sensitivity of their profitability to increases both in circulating testosterone and in market volatility. Our results suggest that prenatal androgens increase risk preferences and promote more rapid visuomotor scanning and physical reflexes. The success and longevity of traders exposed to high levels of prenatal androgens further suggests that financial markets may select for biological traits rather than rational expectations."

Hence, I will still have to wait a long time for economics to become rational mathematics (and hence rationally co-controllable)... While Physics and Chemistry have recently become completely mathematized, Biology and Economics still linger in the swamps (alas...)....

January 9, 2009

In their review article entitled "Speech Production: How Does a Word Feel?" the authors Asif A. GHAZANFAR and Hjalmar K. TURESSON (in: Current Biology, see References) turn back to the notions of old scientists like Hippolyte Taine again:
"Production of speech is seen as a pure [!!!!!!!] motor act, involving muscles and the neurons controlling them, while perception of speech is seen as purely sensory, involving the ear and the auditory pathway. This parcellation of the systems appear intuitive and clear, but recent studies [beginning with Taine 1870!] ... suggest that such divisions may be fundamentally wrong. Rather than separate processes for motor outputs and individual sensory modalities, adaptive action seems to use all the available context-specific information. That is, neural representations across the brain may be centered on specific actions. This view on neural representations puts 'Molyneux's Problem' in a new light. Unisensory signals are fused into multisensory motor representations unified by an action, but since Molyneux does not suggest any action, his 'problem' may be better viewed as an ill-posed question -- at least from a neuroscientific perspective [beginning at the latest with Taine!]".
Already Hippolyt Taine denied the existence of "pure unisensory" maps; for him, the existence of some "pure (parcellated) senses" and "muscles" and "neurons" was just a late abstraction of adult scientists and their "professional deformation" by differentiating ever more, and inventing ever more specific maps and terms (and hence losing the "wholeness" of neuronal processing of a brain and body), including scientific terms like "muscles", "neurons", "the ear", "auditory pathway", "vision", etc.:
"”Les sensations élémentaires qui composent directement nos sensations ordinaires sont elles-mêmes des composés de sensations moindres … Quant aux éléments et aux éléments des éléments, la conscience ne les atteint pas, le raison-nement les conclut; ils sont aux sensations ce que les molecules secondaires et les atomes primitifs sont au corps; nous n’en avons qu’une conception abstraite, et ce qui nous les représente est non une image, mais une notation” (Taine 1870: 188, emphasis mine).

=> See here also my Update February 16, 2008 (with regard to GARRIGAN & KELLMAN 2008).

December 22, 2008

In their paper entitled "Perceiving is believing: a Bayesian approach to explaining the positive symptoms of schizophenia", the authors Paul C. FLETCHER & Chris D. FRITH (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) note that schizophrenia may not only involve a disturbed feeling of self-agency (i.e., activABILITY vs. non-activABILITY within a POTENTIAL landscape or landscape of attractors: see What is Mapology?), but a disturbance in "error-dependent updating of inferences and beliefs about the world" (please note here the mapologically sloppy and folk-psychological language of the authors!):

"Strikingly, many of the symptoms associated with schizophrenia involve misattribution of self-generated actions to others", and: "A significant difference between self-generated actions and something that occurs outside one's control is that in the former case one CAN predict what will happen ... By contrast, the hallmark of a sensory experience that derives from an external stimulus is that it is not predicted and hence not suppressed. UnpredictABLE things are difficult to ignore. Indeed, it is crucial to experience them and incorporate them into an updated understanding of the environment", and hence, "predictABILITY" is a"useful marker for internally generated actions".
Besides, "surprise -- a mismatch between what is expected and what actually happens -- drives learning."
All in all, in terms of a Bayesian hierarchical network (see Figure below), the authors note that "the problem that leads to the positive symptoms of schizophrenia starts with false prediction errors being propagated upwards through the hierarchy. These errors require higher levels of the hierarchy to adjust their models of the world [i.e., their maps]. However, as the errors are false, these adjustments can never fully resolve the problem. As a result, prediction errors will be propagated even further up the system to ever-higher levels of abstraction [well, that is the way of culture, "progress" and civilization!]. The severity of the insult to the Bayesian system may account for how far up the hierarchy a false precition error will go [perhaps even culminating in a erroneous feeling of "being persecuted by a God"????].
Hence, "stimuli accompanied by large prediction error would become more readily associable, perhaps accounting for the bizarre but compelling coincidences that patients frequently report. ... A noisy prediction-error signal could therefore lead to patients' strange experiences, together with their readiness to accept incidental stimuli and events as important and meaningful and to link them in unusual [i.e., creative/playful?] ways. ... The world will feel strange, and there may be a sense that there is some underlying change that must be discovered".

HOWEVER, as usual, the authors are still unABLE to give the exact dynamical neuronal (attractor?) processes and (shifting) neural maps involved in all these Bayesian "inference mechanisms".

December 21, 2008

The variety and variance of beauties is (like nature...) extremely large (throughout the whole History of Art), and sometimes, the ideals of beauty tend to be linked with climate shifts (see CASHDAN et al. 2008 in the december issue of Current Anthropology — see References). And that's why both the neanderthals (ice age!) and Peter Paul Rubens (little ice age in around 1638!) may have tended toward a massive breast : waist : hip ratio (see the respective pics below):

December 20, 2008

The best toy may not be your computer-game, your playing cards, your cars or conspecifics (i.e., your external device and toys), but rather your brain itself (i.e., the tool of all tools).
But alas, it sometimes takes a lot of time for youngsters to discover that their best (and fastest...) toy is not their computer-games (nor playing cards nor cars...), but their brains (i.e., map-makers or maps) themselves...

December 5, 2008

In their review entitled "Striatal Plasticity and Basal Ganglia Circuit Function", the authors Anatol C. KREITZER & Robert MALENKA (in: Neuron, see References) note — without defining the physiological mechanisms behind the terms "appropriate" and "wanted" at all (and that's why I still have to wait for a perfect neurobiology and non-reductionist mapology...):
"A primary function of the basal ganglia may be the selection of appropriate [!] actions. ... Importantly, goal-directed learning of new motor routines appears to be initiated in the dorsomedial striatum, whereas the long-term motor memory required to execute previously learned sequences may be stored in the dorsolateral striatum. Within this general context, activation of direct-pathway circuits [see image below] has been proposed to facilitate or select [!] appropriate [!] movements, whereas activity in the indirect pathway may inhibit unwanted [!] or inappropriate movements".
The authors then speculate about Huntington's disease and some "preferential loss of indirect-pathway neurons" which may "reduce the amount of inhibitory control over unwanted movements", and associations of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) with an "enhanced propensity to form both cognitive and motor habits".

December 3, 2008

In their paper entitled "The Representation of Object Viewpoint in Human Visual Cortex" (in: Neuroimage, see References) the authors David R. ANDRESEN et al. report that the fusiform gyrus is especially crucial for front-views (of faces, etc.) when compared to back-views.

However, artists (like Tiepolo) have used both views in parallel — the former (i.e., back-view "repoussoirs") in order to arouse the viewer's attention to be directed toward the main scene in the picture (i.e., frontally seen faces).

That's why I wrote this e-mail to Dr. Andresen:

"However, when looking at paintings by Franz Marc (showing back-views of horses ONLY -- see image enclosed), I wonder which areas are MORE activated, i.e., which areas are activated along with more interest being aroused in the viewer, because back-figures have always been used as arousing stimuli for the viewer in the History of Art (because clearly enough, viewers WANT to see MORE, i.e., want to shift from back-views to front-views in the end)."

	-------- >>>
Tiepolo, 1743 AC		Marc, 1911 AC

November 25, 2008

In issue 6,1 of the German journal "Bildwelten des Wissens" (edited by Matthias BRUHN 2008, see References), you will not only find papers by Horst Bredekamp, by David Poeppel (on maps...), and by Olaf Blanke on the "Self" in the brain (but without referring to Barnett Newman, sadly enough!), but also some recent projects (e.g., a project by the Raphael Rosenberg group at Heidelberg on eye tracking while "reading" works of art; and a project on grid cells in the Hippocampus and navigation in architectural rooms: see www.neurotopographics.com).

But sadly enough, all these authors do not seem to have read my dissertation...
As you can see here once again: I always try to be at the frontier of research (i.e., I know most books and papers published today on the subject of mapology and neuro-esthetics), but all these authors (lacking time...) do not know me...

As I always say: I may have written everything in vain... (see my Publications)

November 22, 2008

In their paper entitled "Sleep as a fundamental property of neuronal assemblies", the authors James M. KRUEGER et al. (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) note:
"[The position of this paper is] that sleep is initiated locally as a consequence of use [of the neuronal network], and only then consolidated by central mechanism ... There are also several findings which show that during sleep cerebral blood flow is targeted to, and highest in, areas that were disproportionately stimulated during prior waking. ... In summary, sleep intensity, a characteristic of sleep that is determined from EEG delta-wave power, is dependent on prior use and is highest in areas that were disproportionately used during prior wakefulness."
For example, there are many "sleep-regulatory substances" like adenosine that are "produced in response to cellular activity and metabolism", and most of them (including adenosine) enhance EEG delta-wave power (see image below).
"The flexible connectivity between neurons is experience-dependent and might therefore have required a mechanism — that is, sleep — by which to ensure the stability of synaptic networks that encode instinctual and learned memories".
However, although sleep is at first initiated locally and then spreads to — and synchronizes — other networks (and then the whole organism during "sleep"), the authors' theory "cannot yet address the question of how many assemblies need to be in the sleep-like state before consciousness changes".

In a related paper entitled "Consciousness and Anesthesia", the authors Michael T. ALKIRE (in: Science, see References) review the influence of anesthetic drugs on consciousness and brain networks:
"Thus, a complex of posterior brain areas comprising the lateral temporo-parieto-occipital junction [i.e., TPJ] and perhaps a mesial cortical core are most likely the final common target for anesthetic-induced unconsciousness".
Hence, the "Self" (located at the TPJ?) and some "cortical integration" disappear during "unconsciousness", along with the drug-induced "loss of feedback interactions" between (now disconnected) local neuronal networks.
"But then having any conscious experience, even one of pure darkness, must be extraordinarily informative, because we could have had countless other experiences instead ... On the other hand, every experience is an integrated whole [cf. Taine 1870!] that cannot be subdivided into independent components. ... Specifically, consciousness increases in proportion to a system's repertoire of discriminable states [that means: the RICHer the potential landscape of a map-maker is, i.e., the more discriminable maps the map-maker has, the more "conscious" he may be...]".

November 7, 2008

In their paper entitled "Olfactory perceptual stability and discrimination", the authors Dylan C. BARNES et al. (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) have discovered the analogon to hippocampal pattern separation and pattern completion in the olfactory pathway:
"In olfaction, the need for pattern separation and completion is particularly intense, as most natural odors derive from odorant mixtures, evoking complex spatio-temporal patterns of olfactory sensory neuron and olfactory bulb activity. Given this complexity, it is rare for a given stimulus to always have the exact same components in the exact same proportions, yet it is possible for a noisy or degraded stimulus to reliably evoke a stable percept. ... We found that ensembles or rat olfactory bulb neurons decorrelate complex mixtures that vary by as little as a single missing component, whereas olfactory (piriform) cortical neural ensembles perform pattern completion in response to an absent component, essentially filling in the missing information and allowing perceptual stability. This piriform cortical ensemble activity predicts olfactory perception".

And they note in the end: "The enhanced pattern completion observed in aPCX relative to its afferent olfactory bulb input is similar to that observed across subregions of the hippocampal formation, such as dentate gyrus (pattern separation) and area CA3 (pattern completion)".

November 4, 2008

In his review-paper entitled "Small regulatory RNAs pitch in", the author Ulrich TECHNAU (in: Nature 455: 1184-85) notes: "Indeed, Brimson and colleagues' data confirm a correlation between miRNA diversity and morphological complexity as measured, for instance, by the total number of neurons in an organism" - and in fact, while H. sapiens has 677 miRNAs, C. elegans "only" possesses 154... (and S. cerevisiae even 0).

November 3, 2008

I think that autists and psychopaths ("sociopaths") have been selected not by "nature", but by "culture" (i.e., civilizations) instead: the former in the role as magicians and scientists, the latter as fearless warriors...

And you may see here once again: "selection by culture" may be much more important than some rather old-fashioned "selection by nature"...

November 2, 2008

Today, I heard a nice interview with the ornithologist Wolfgang Wiltschko (who proved the existence of a magnetic compass in birds by the 1980s) on the German radio. Birds are really fascinating beings (especially crows), because (similarly to H. sapiens) they are not only singing, flying and making tools, but they also have incredibly precise maps for navigating around the whole globe -- and already Barnett Newman was fascinated by birds as well.....

October 31, 2008

In their paper entitled "Integrating Memories in the Human Brain: Hippocampal-Midbrain Encoding of Overlapping Events", the authors Daphna SHOHAMY & Anthony D. WAGNER (in: Neuron, see References) propose (following Richard Semon's mneme theory...) "that effective generalization may depend on integrating discrete experiences into a rich, cohesive [i.e., continous?] representation", performed by a concerted action between the Hippocampus and the Basal Ganglia (more precisely: Ventral Tegmental Area / Substantia Nigra):
"First, we demonstrate that the hippocampus may contribute not only to the encoding of individual experiences as separated, discrete representations, but may also contribute to the integration of memories of overlapping events. This observation suggests a possible mechanism for how the hippocampus may create a continuous link [i.e., a smoothly graded and interlinked attractor landscape?] across episodes that are experienced individually [i.e., as discrete basins of attraction] and at distinct moments in time [within a trajectory between attractors?] ...
For example, when encountering an event [e.g., F2-S1] that overlaps with a prior event [e.g., F1-S1], the presentation of the overlapping element (S1) may elicit retrieval of the prior event's features (e.g., F1). This reactivation of features from a prior event that differ from the features of the present event [i.e., F1 versus F2] may trigger a mismatch signal within the hippocampus that upregulates midbrain dopaminergic feedback onto the hippocampus..., the consequence of which is to increase the probability of encoding the present and prior event features into an integrated representation [i.e., map, or: attractor landscape?]".
The authors also note different levels of "integration" / "generalization" performance between their individual subjects: "In fact, among the six participants demonstrating the best generalization performance ... there was only a 39 ms difference in mean response latency on generalization versus trained probes — clearly insufficient time to permit mediated retrieval and logical inference — with half of these participants being faster on generalization trials."
Besides, this automatic (self-inherent!] dynamic process of building up integrated (and cohesively linked) attractor landscapes may also trigger not only creative, but also "false memories": "The present form of generalization may be thought of as a type of false memory, in that participants have the subjective sense of having already experienced the pairing of two elements [say, F2-S1] that in fact had never been encountered together. ... [But] By forming a thread [i.e., a new possible trajectory between more or less discrete basins of attraction within a more or less "smooth" "potential landscape"...?] that connects otherwise separate experiences, integrative encoding permits organisms to generalize across multiple past experiences to guide choices in the present".

October 27, 2008

"Truth" is never dangerous (because you CAN NOT change it -- you can only perhaps "measure" it: physically, chemically, experimentally, etc.).
The most dangerous things are always maps (because of some "neuro-plasticity"), or in other words: "POSSIbilities of thought", or: "ideas", or: "ideologies".

October 16, 2008 / October 26, 2008

Already Jean-Jacques Rousseau knew that the process of civilization (or more precisely: socialization) is corrumping the individual:
According to Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), even animals can feel "compassion" with other bodies, but only "Homo sapiens" is able to have some "theory of mind" (i.e., some "conscious compassion") of "OTHER" human beings in addition — and hence its ability to hate, to mob, to bully, to envy, to feel jealousy, to make ideological wars, to lie, to betray, etc.

In this sense, the process of "socialization" (mostly via silly and primitive peer-groups) is really H. sapiens' fatal (and most dangerous) faculty and ("social") bias...

And by the way: this same "human" bias (i.e., always thinking in terms of "inference machines" endowed with a "theory of mind") has led David H. Wolpert to write an article (in Physica D, 237 : 1257 ff.) about Cantor and some kind of "new" philosophy of science, where "inference machines" (i.e., modernized Turing computers) try to infer the state of other machines...
How boring this world of "higher primates" and some old-fashioned "philosophy of science" is!! All these philosophers have really no new ideas but always circle around old-fashioned (Cantorian) arguments and old-fashioned (primate, social, human....) biases...

October 13, 2008

In their paper entitled "The uncrowded window of object recognition", the authors Denis G. PELLI & Katharine A. TILLMAN (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) note with regard to the so-called "Bouma law":
"We can see a bird in the sky without crowding, but most of our visual world is cluttered, and each object that we identify must be isolated from the clutter. When an object is not isolated, it is crowded [especially when flanked by similar flankers...], and we cannot recognize it. Isolation depends on spacing and not size. To escape crowding, the object spacing must exceed the observer's critical spacing at that location in the observer's visual field (that is, 6 mm at V1). ... Typographers routinely increase 'tracking' (spacing) to maintain the legibility of text when it is made smaller".

"[Similarly,] Faces, like words, are recognized only if the visual system can isolate the parts: eyes, nose and mouth. Thus, we cannot recognize a face unless we look at or near it [see Figure below!]. ... The generality of [this] the Bouma law suggests that the critical spacing of crowding is a fundamental parameter of human vision. It is proportional to the distance from the fixation".

October 3, 2008

At last, I have seen the unearthly beautiful angels of Marienberg (Italy, South Tyrolia) with my own eyes!

There may have been two masters there - and the best one of them painted the angels. But art historians still do not know where this master came from (cf. Rocamadour and the rarely conserved French frescoes of that time!); but at least he was heavily influenced by older (ottonian) illuminations (like the Hitda Codex from Cologne).

But although this medieval master was nearly perfect (total "depth" and absolute "space" - see also Alois Riegl and the carolingian-pythagorean [atmo-]spheric "stripe grounds"), I must say with Plato that the highest perfection can never be seen in material worlds; instead, the highest perfection is only embodied in a perfect map-maker (i.e., "brain"). And educating perfect ("beautiful") brains may be the most difficult task at all... (especially in this world's financial crisis full of anxious and badly educated map-makers...).

September 23, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Prof. Julia Fischer (Göttingen):

<<< Sehr geehrte Frau Prof. Fischer

Im Deutschlandfunk werden Sie zitiert mit dem Satz: "Und das ist natürlich eine wichtige Voraussetzung [für menschliche Sprache und Kommunikation), um überhaupt das Bedürfnis zu entwickeln, den anderen zu informieren, den mentalen Zustand des anderen zu verändern, nicht nur sein Verhalten [wie die Paviane]".

Sehr wahr: zunächst ist es nur ein "Bedürfnis", den "mentalen Zustand eines Anderen ändern zu wollen". Denn: die Gewissheit, "den mentalen Zustand" eines "anderen (!) Menschen" TATSAECHLICH verändert zu haben, gab und gibt es (noch...) nicht (trotz disambiguierender Sprache, Ritualbeweise, Glaubensbeweise, Credos, etc.).

Und so hatten denn auch schon die Inquisitoren und Folterknechte des Mittelalters (vor allem in Spanien) reichlich Mühe damit, den mentalen Zustand eines Häretikers zu ändern, da ja nur indirekte Mittel (wie z.B. Folter des betreffenden Körpers) zur Verfügung standen. Und auch heutige neurobiologische fMRI-Techniken ("human brain mapping") dürften hier kaum besser abschneiden (von extrem individuellen und methodisch extrem selektiven "fMRI voxel maps" lässt sich eben kaum auf das Verhalten eines Subjektes schließen - und auch nicht umgekehrt).

Und so schrieb schon der spanische (!) Schriftsteller Miguel de Unanumo über einen "sozial" extrem erfolgreichen Priester, der aber "tief im Innersten" Atheist war (eben: das Verhalten ist nie aussagekräftig, siehe Nietzsche: der "Mensch" ist das Tier, das am besten lügen kann...).

Erst durch heutige neuroTECHNISCHE Methoden, die die Gehirne zweier co-evolvierender Körper ("Menschen") direkt verlinken würden ("neurotechnical linking" - vgl. Kevin Warwick et al.) wäre es vielleicht einmal möglich, diese bis heute andauernde und ubiquitäre "soziale Ungewissheit" (d.h. nie wissen zu können, was im "Kopf" eines "Anderen" tatsächlich vorgeht...) zu eliminieren. >>>

September 10, 2008

In their paper entitled "Brain correlates of aesthetic expertise", the authors Ulrich KIRK et al. (in: Brain and Cognition, see References) studied the behaviour and neural correlates of architecture experts and novices looking at more or less "pleasing" buildings and faces in the fMRI-scanner:
In fact, the authors found that experts and novices rated the buildings similarly, but the experts recruited not only subcortical reward areas (like Nucl. accumbens = NAcc), but also higher areas like the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) together with an increased activation of memory related areas (precuneus <> hippocampus):
"We found that only some regions associated with the processing of reward are modulated by expertise (OFC, subcallosal cingulate gyrus [i.e., monitoring the inner emotional status?]), while activity in NAcc was typical of both experts and non-experts, suggesting that these regions play different roles in reward processing. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that experts and non-experts differ in their neural response to expertise stimuli [i.e., buildings] per se, irrespective of aesthetic ratings ["pleasantness"]. This typological response was observed bilaterally in the hippocampus and precuneus, and suggests that experts [with their more differentiated and more wide-spread maps...] may integrate current input into a framework of prior knowledge [memory!] and use this information to organize aesthetic judgements".

September 4, 2008

In their paper entitled "Neural correlates of object indeterminacy in art compositions", the authors Scott L. FAIRHALL & Alumit ISHAI (in: Consciousness and Cognition, see References) compared "representational paintings" to "indeterminate" paintings to "abstract" paintings to "scrambled" paintings, and note:
"We found activation within a distributed cortical network that includes extrastriate ventral and dorsal visual regions, as well as parietal, limbic and prefrontal regions. Consistent with our hypotheses, representational paintings with meaningful content evoked stronger activation than abstract and indeterminate paintings in the fusiform gyrus. [cf. ELBS 2005!] Moreover, we found enhanced activation in the precuneus and medial frontal gyrus during the presentation of scrambled paintings. Finally, stronger activation in response to representational paintings was found in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ)."
And as I already noted in my dissertation and Dallas lecture, the strongest activation of the TPJ may occur when viewing ("abstract"!) paintings by Barnett Newman... Or as John Onians always says (quoting painters like Picasso): "there is no abstract art" - not least because "H. sapiens" is extremely biased toward seeing "meanings" everywhere...

September 3, 2008

In their "opinion"-paper entitled "Battle of the sexes may set the brain", the authors Christopher BADCOCK & Bernard CRESPI (in: Nature, see References) believe that "psychiatric illness may be less to do with the genes a mother and father pass down, and more to do with which genes they program for expression [i.e., maternal/paternal imprinting]. ... The religious, magical and mystical delusions that cause people with paranoia to see evidence of mind, intention and meaning in everything seem to be opposite of autistic deficits in theory of mind, which result in an inability to understand that others have their own beliefs and intents."
In detail, "small deviations in imprinted-gene expression towards a maternal bias should result in smaller babies that are energetically 'cheaper' to mothers, and who are easier behaviourally - more placid, less demanding and more mentalistically attuned to interpreting and understanding the mental state of others. Large maternally biased deviations should lead to psychosis. ... [In contrast, and on the other end of the spectrum,] Autistic disorders typically become noticeable in childhood [because of "our" social bias as "foremost ultra-social humans" and eagerly observing "parents"...?]; psychosis mostly develops in late adolescence or early adulthood".

September 2, 2008

In their paper entitled "Dissociable neural mechanisms for determining the perceived heaviness of objects and the predicted weight of objects during lifting: An fMRI investigation of the size-weight illusion", the authors Philippe A. CHOUINARD et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) try to track down the "locus" of density perception in the human brain by making experimental use of the size-weight illusion (i.e., when inferring two objects with the same weight but being different in size as having a different mass):
"Taken together, we conclude that the real-world properties of objects, such as size and weight, are computed by [temporal, parietal) sensory areas and by M1 [primary motor cortex] respectively, whereas the perceived heaviness of objects, presumably based on their apparent density, is computed by PMv [ventral premotor cortex]."

August 30, 2008

It is really sad to note that we have now hundreds of futuristic Sci-Fi computer games ("World of Warcraft" etc.), but we are still not able to reconstruct the past in FULL (authentic) DETAIL in the form of a "total movie of the whole history":

What I desperately need is some kind of "musée imaginaire" (Malraux) or virtual "Google History" or "movie of history", i.e., a total movie showing you ALL historical landscapes and shifts and changes (i.e., shifting territories, political alliances, philosophical ideas, paintings, music styles, monetary flows, energetic flows, etc.):

Imagine pupils learning "History" by just sitting in a cinema or virtual "Google History", and by watching a film (movie, time-machine) constructed and based on ALL original-authentic (digitalized) historical documents (paintings, texts, pieces of music, thoughts, costumes, poems, instruments, etc.).

And this "movie of History" would be continually updated and perfected by ALL historians of the world (perhaps working together via Google?) — so that I will have a totally smooth map of all times, showing all shifting networks and maps (alliances, battle frontiers, schools of painting, theatre, music etc.) IN REAL TIME without any cracks, gaps, missing links, and fissures.

In this way, the whole "chain of being" will then become completely transparent and crystal-clear to pupils (who love watching movies with music!).

Hence, within such an uninterrupted time flow and time scale (just scroll up and down in "Google History"!), there will be a big variety and complexity, and no ideologies any more, but only a time-scale without any gaps (i.e., stereotypes like "gothic style", "absolutism", etc.).

In fact, you could even choose between a "movie of history" flowing faster (i.e., showing only the most significant historical shifts, transitions, changes of style, changes of thought, changes of sciences, etc in a compressed and fast manner), or a movie shifting more slowly (i.e., showing the whole dense complex shifting networks and maps without any cracks and gaps, i.e., showing the "whole chain of being").

And thanks to this movie ("Google History"), I would perhaps even be able to "analyze" one day this whole (and ever denser...) movie of history with the help of physical (thermodynamic) theories explaining you the thermodynamics (i.e., the changes, shifts, flows, and histories) of all these maps, "ideas" (i.e., neural maps), ideologies, battle fields, financial markets, paintings, music styles, etc.

THIS WILL BE GREAT - because I could then communicate my head as a historian (which already has stored all these pictures, pieces of music, networks of ideas) to my pupils ADEQUATELY.

BUT in order to create (and continually update) such a movie materially, all historians (art historians, historians of technics, historians of politics, historians of science, historians of ideas, archaeologists, historians of music, ethnologists, etc.) would have to work together (via Google?) instead of publishing, digitalizing, and burying their work and discoveries in arbitrary journals, websites, and formats.

August 16, 2008

Following KUHN & LAND 2006 (see my S_Updates), the authors Stephen L. MACKNIK et al. have now written the perhaps first review of the methodological impact of "the magician's art" on today's neurobiological methods of investigation, i.e., when scanning brains for all kinds of ("unconscious") "biases", "visual illusions", "attention / awareness shifts", etc., and they once again note that the magician primarily manipulates the spectators' attention rather than their gaze, and that the magicians use the spectator's biases [including "causality" and all kinds of "social biases"] in an extremely controlled strategical way — e.g., the "skilled magician informs every motion with a convincing intention" so as to misdirect the suspicious spectator's attention:
"Just as visual scientists use visual illusions to identify the neural mechanisms of perception, neuroscientists could use illusory correlations to identify the neural mechanisms that underlie the cognitive computations of cause and effect".
All in all, "magic combines multiple principles of attention, awareness, trust and perception to both overtly and covertly misdirect the audience".
Notably, especially priming and repetition ("habituation", and hence: not looking attentively any more, but relying on "stereotypical anticipations" instead) are used by magicians (for example, in the "vanishing ball illusion" — see also KUHN & LAND 2006).
Besides, "To steal a watch directly from the wrist of a mark, the pickpocket might first squeeze the wrist while the watch is still on (invoking contrast-gain adaptation). This has two effects. First, it makes a highcontrast somatosensory impression that adapts the touch receptors in the skin, making them less sensitive to the subsequent light touches that are required to unbuckle and remove the watch. Second, the highcontrast impression leaves behind a somatosensory afterimage, giving rise to the illusion that the watch is still on after it has been removed."
"Social cues, such as the magician’s gaze (for instance, in the Vanishing Ball Illusion), their voice and verbal communication and their body language (pointing, tension/relaxation), also play an important part in manipulating the spectator’s attentional spotlight. [But] Misdirection occurs not only in space (what the audience looks at) but also in time (when the audience looks). ... Many magicians use comedy and laughter as a way to reduce focused attention at critical points in time. ... Usually a delay is introduced between method (that is, cause) and effect, preventing the spectator from causally linking the two".
And the magicians even know how to use the spectator's memory (which is involved only in "salient" things): "An apparently natural or spontaneous action [i.e., non-salient], such as scratching one’s head, will not be memorable (although it might be critical to the execution of the trick)."

August 13, 2008

In their paper entitled "Hierarchical coding for sequential task events in the monkey prefrontal cortex", the authors Natasha SIGALA et al. (in: PNAS, see References) use the (mathematical) language of "vector coding" for their study of hierarchical processing: "For each task phase (cue, delay, or target), and for different stimulus information (e.g., different cue identities) within each phase, we accordingly obtained a pattern or vector of activity across the population of all recorded cells. The results show that successive task phases are coded by successive, approximately orthogonal activity vectors [i.e., strongly different attractors and basins of attraction?]. Within each phase, activity patterns are strongly correlated for different stimuli, suggesting that stimulus information is coded by modulation of the basic task phase vector [i.e., by the modulation of an attractor?].”

“Together, these results show a hierarchical

representation, with one basic activity pattern [i.e., attractor or "neural map"?] associated with each task phase, and stimulus information coded by modulations of the phase pattern. Both within and between task phases, PFC representations were also modulated by hemifield, with generally lower correlations between hemifields.”
“Orthogonal codes may underlie the construction of complex behavioral sequences, each consisting of many, dissimilar cognitive segments. Within each step, in contrast, correlated codes describe different stimulus alternatives. Correlated codes are useful for similar operations, in this case, when fixed cognitive processes are applied to varying stimulus content.”

July 31, 2008

In their extremely clear paper (and map) entitled "A Motion Illusion Reveals Mechanisms of Perceptual Stabilization", the authors Anton L. BEER et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) investigate the "rotating snake" (or "rolling circles") illusion in detail (cf. also my Seminar-Script Seminar-Script, S3 Figure 41!), where the contrast gradient (from black-blue to white-yellow) elicits a peripheral drift illusion ("rotation") when the viewer does not fixate very 'well', i.e., when there are still micromovements (shifts) of the eye (more precisely: the fovea: see image below):
"Consistent with previous research, we found that the strength of the peripheral drift illusion varies with the degree of drift micromovements. ‘Poor’ fixation resulted in a larger variability of drift micromovements and stronger illusory motion than ‘good’ fixation. Other types of eye movements, such as microsaccades, seemed to be less relevant. Fixation instability (variability of drifts) was most pronounced immediately after pattern onset and declined as fixation continued. This is consistent with the literature showing that stimulus onset temporarily increases micromovements, and that voluntary attention that requires some time to become effective can suppress micromovements. Importantly, the decrease of fixational eye movements corresponds well with the phenomenological characteristics of the peripheral drift illusion, which is most strongly observed immediately after pattern onset and slowly fades after prolonged fixation. Although micromovements are crucial for the peripheral drift illusion they may not fully explain the phenomenology of this illusion. Instead the peripheral drift illusion demonstrates a failure to compensate for retinal image slips generated by micromovements. ... This compensatory mechanism seems to utilize visual (retinal) signals for estimating eye movements rather than extraretinal signals. Note that illusory motion was modulated by central but not peripheral drift patterns suggesting that eye movements were predominantly estimated based on visual signals from the central visual field."

July 23, 2008

And if you are interested in "corollary discharge across the animal kingdom", then you may read this paper by Trinity B. CRAPSE & Marc A. SOMMER (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) with nice — but perhaps already old-fashioned (see LOGOTHETIS 2008!) — Uexküllian "action-perception-cycle" schemata (see picture below) illustrating the difference between "corollary discharge" [from pre-motor or higher motor areas down to different levels of the sensory pathway] vs. "efference copy" [from motor neurons to sensory neurons] vs. "reafference" vs. "exafference" [the latter terms both introduced by Mittelstädt & Holst long ago]. Interestingly enough, even my Mapology has to differentiate between some "reafference" and "exafference" (see What is Mapology, points 5 ff.), i.e., between "non-contingent" (i.e., Self-produced, "activABLE") and "contingent" maps (not activated by my Self, i.e., within my "own" "Potential landscape"):

July 21, 2008

In their paper entitled "Arousal and Attention: Self-chosen Stimulation Optimizes Cortical Excitability and Minimizes Compensatory Effort", the authors Thomas FISCHER et al. (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) continue old (SCP = slow cortical EEG- potentials and Beta-activity) research about the inverted U-shaped relationship between general arousal and best performance reflected by the higher amplitude of the initial component of the so-called CNV [contingent negative variation] ("nature always prefers the average level"):
"General arousal appears to be reflected by the tonic cortical negativity (TCN), with stronger negativity related to higher arousal .... At first, as already postulated by Hull (1943), people try to seek out environments or tasks providing optimal stimulation for (effortless) bottom-up arousal regulation. If this is impossible in attention-demanding tasks, a top-down mechanism seems to be invoked for low-arousal compensation."
Now, one of the most important system for general arousal is not only the reticular formation, but also the NAS (noradrenergic system) linking (bidirectionally) the locus coeruleus (LC) to the medial prefrontal (mPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which play an important role in the top-down modulation of the NAS: "ACC exerts top-down control over LC activity in order to adjust arousability for optimal task performance. Increased task-related activity in ACC, the mPFC, and the thalamus, observed in low-arousal conditions, supports the view that these structures subserve effortful compensation. ... Th[is] effortful compensation process has [also] been linked to enhanced power in high-frequency bands of ... the range of 19-30 Hz [beta2]"
When now comparing task performance under "low" vs. "high" vs. "self-(!)chosen" conditions, the authors found the best performance and "the largest iCNV amplitude ... in the condition with self-chosen stimulation ... In comparison to self-chosen and high-stimulation levels, frontal beta2 power was significantly higher in the low-stimulation condition ... Based on our results, it may be conjectured that low ACC activity and concomitant good performance can be ascribed to an optimal arousal level, at which no compensatory activity [by ACC, mPFC and so forth] is necessary".

July 14, 2008

For a neurodynamic view of schizophrenia involving shifted (altered) "attractor landscapes" and "state spaces" (following Freeman, Kelso, Thelen & Smith, et al.), see the recent essay by Nico VAN BEVEREN & Lieuwe DE HAAN (in: PLoS One, see References [in this illustrative essay you will also find the reference to Ouzounis C & Maziere P (2006): Maps, books and other metaphors for systems biology, in: Biosystems 85 : 6-10]).
It nicely fits into my broader framework of "Potential landscapes" (for a respective animation of such a dynamic potential landscape see Potential landscapes!)...

July 9, 2008

In three recent papers, one of my most favourite subject is investigated by researchers: according to me (see ELBS 2005), experts build up ever larger attractors ("giant attractors") and hence some ever larger "coherent whole" or "differentiated associativity" (DA). Due to the ever larger catchment area of such "giant attractors", experts do not have to reach stable attractors (e.g., when categorizing faces), but it suffices for them to play with the catchment area of these attractors (i.e., with transients and trajectories leading to these attractors): hence, experts do not play (and navigate) with their attractors, but by hinting at them via the transients (or saddle points or shifts) in the large catchment area of their giant attractors (which ultimately lead to these attractors like rivers flowing to a common sink or "potential basin": see also my Seminar-Script, S5 Figure 44 [see the attached image below!] and my What is Mapology? point 23, where I called these transients or saddle points "shifts" or "tendencies" or "trajectories" [toward an attractor] ).

Hence, experts are much faster than laymen, and second, they have a more stable (and at the same time: more flexible) giant attractor that is also more sensitive to subtlest shifts and incongruities (due to a larger catchment area).

Exactly this has now been proven by three research groups:
In their paper entitled "Increased Brain Signal Variability Accompanies Lower Behaivoural Variability in Development", the authors Anthony Randal McINTOSH et al. (in: PLoS Computational Biology, see References) found that "brain signal variability increases in children from 8-15 y and is even higher in young adults. Importantly, we show that this increased brain variability correlates with reduced behavioural variability and more accurate performance. ... Myelination and neural pruning increase differentiation of information flow in the brain, enabling a shift from a system that responds in a slow and stimulus-locked manner, to one that responds more rapidly and where the internal variability reflects the parallel exploration of the functional repertoire before converging to an optimal response."
In a follow-up paper to DURSTEWITZ & DECO 2007 entitled "Transient Dynamics for Neural Processing", the authors Misha RABINOVICH et al. (in: Science, see References) compare the brain to a "liquid-state machine" where the succession of "metastable" states visited by the system (its trajectory, or transient) is stable (resistant to noise, and reliable "even in the face of small variations in initial conditions"), finally making up a "heteroclinic sequence linking saddle points [see once again the image attached below: the red arrows displaying these "transients", "saddle points" or "shifts-tensions-tendencies"!]. These saddles can be pictured as successive and temporary winners in a non-ending competitive game".

Furthermore, extremely "SENSITIVE" experts — while navigating and shifting within their giant attractors on the saddle points/transients/trajectories — may be cabABLE of detecting the slightest (subtlest) shifts and deviations (and "emotional" imbalances?) via their Insula (being adjacent to the posterior insular-vestibular cortex [PIVC] and temporoparietal junction or "Self"]: in a follow-up paper to DI DIO et al. 2007 [on the Insula being recruited when facing disturbed-distorted-imbalanced proportions in works of art like classic sculptures...] entitled "Early neuronal responses in right limbic structures mediate harmony incongruity processing in musical experts", the authors Clara E. JAMES et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) determined "the temporal dynamics of neuronal activity in highly trained pianists and musical laymen in response to syntactic harmonic incongruities in expressive music, which were easily detected by the experts but not by the laymen. Our results revealed that closure incongruity [i.e., an "imbalance"?] evokes a selective early response in musical experts ... in right temporal limbic areas, encompassing the hippocampal complex and amygdala, and in right insula".

July 7, 2008

In their paper entitled "Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex", the authors Patric HAGMANN et al. (in: PLoS Biology, see References) used the diffusion spectrum imaging method (see also Schmahmann et al. 2007 in my S_Update Feb 2007_Fig. 5c) in order to find evidence for the "existence of a structural core composed of posterior medial and parietal cortical regions that are densely interconnected and topologically central."
In fact, the authors "identified eight anatomical subregions as members of the structural core. These are the posterior cingulate cortex, the precuneus, the cuneus, the paracentral lobule, the isthmus of the cingulate, the banks of the superior temporal sulcus, and the inferior and superior parietal cortex, all of them in both hemispheres", which heavily overlap with key components ("bottom-up drivers") of the "default network".

However, these interindividual connectivity maps (of each individual Potential landscape of association [or more precisely: connectivity -- see image below]?) are still restricted to the cortex, but "future improvements in diffusion imaging and tractography, as well as computational network analysis, will no doubt reveal additional features of the connectional anatomy of the human brain. It will be important to include major subcortical regions, such as the thalamus [AND: the BASAL GANGLIA!!] into future network analyses. Another advance would be to parcellate the cortex not on the basis of sulcal and gyral landmarks, but rather on the basis of regularities in functional connections that are observed in individual participants [see image just below]".

Contents 1 June 28, 2008 2 December 9, 2007 3 My homepage is now completely completed (see [22], and my Dallas lecture at Publications).= 4 Thanks to everybody - and all of this work has cost me a lot of years and money. You perfectly know my German saying: Ich mache ja alles umsonst... 5 June 28, 2008 6 December 9, 2007 7 My homepage is now completely completed (see [30], and my Dallas lecture at Publications).= 8 Thanks to everybody - and all of this work has cost me a lot of years and money. You perfectly know my German saying: Ich mache ja alles umsonst...

June 28, 2008

At last, I have been able to escape from Germany (i.e., a country in which 99.9999% of all bodies seem to believe in the existence of "Jews", "Germans", "Americans", etc. etc. etc. etc., and in which I have been exploited in a more than slavish way...)!
I have now moved back to Switzerland...

June 20, 2008

In his important review entitled "What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI", the author Nikos K. LOGOTHETIS (in: Nature, see References) reviews the principles of fMRI — and he crucially notes that the fMRI signal is much more reflecting neuromodulatory effects (attention, motivation, learning, etc.) and some cortical excitatory-inhibitory (net) balance than some "sensory [subcortical] input" itself....

June 15, 2008

I didn't know that the U.S. Army may have copied Barnett Newman's painting style when designing their "Global War on Terrorism Medal" ribbon (see also my now updated Dallas lecture, slides 37 ff.!!! Publications):

June 13, 2008

I haven't known that the "ultra-social" Nationalsocialists also persecuted so-called "asocial" bodies.
See also EPLEY et al. 2008 (see References): the most "social" bodies ("people") are likely to be the most "de-humanizing" (i.e., the most "nationalsocialist") ones...
And that's why I largely prefer to live with peaceful and nice autists...

June 12, 2008

I have now looked through Barbara Maria STAFFORD's new book "Echo objects" (see References) and I must say that I am quite disappointed of its rather traditional contents.
I suggest to you reading my (much shorter, and much more up-to-date) Dallas lecture and regular Updates (here!) instead (see Publications) — and you will then certainly learn much more about today's Neuro-esthetics...

June 11, 2008

I have now updated my "Curriculum"-page with this Appendix (and "learning" may be nothing else than the adaptation/updating of permanently shifting maps (see [17]...):
(*) Please note:
Most things that are payABLE (i.e., that CAN be paid) have no value and no sense, and hence, there may be at least two ABILITIES which you CAN never pay (pace some primitive "neuro-economists"!):
1. A perfectly educated map-maker ("brain", "teacher", etc.).
2. Unconditioned (i.e., "erotic"? "aesthetic"?) "love" (which automatically excludes some quite primitive-primal "parental love", "marital love", "romantic love", "bindings", "bondings", etc. etc. etc.).
Unfortunately enough, both these "personality traits" (i.e., ABILITies of a map-maker or "brain") seem to be EXTREMELY RARE, and nor have "we" been ABLE to map (pace some primitive "neuro-economists"!) the neurobiological underpinnings of both these RICHEST ABILIties and capacities...

June 5, 2008

In their extremely important paper entitled "Perceiving the Present and a Systematization of Illusions", the authors Mark A. CHANGIZI et al. (in: Cognitive Science, see References) strenghten the old claim that the brain can only "predict" the present due to a processing latency of the neural system ("Given a stimulus at time t, to predict what an observer perceives, we must have some means by which we can say what the probable scene will be at time t+100 msec" — see also LLINAS 2001; cf. also my Seminar-script, S5 Figure 40 !!!).
With this fundamental "principle" (John Onians) in mind, the authors now categorize nearly all known visual illusions ("distortions") due to the empirical regularities following the "optic-flow regularity hypothesis": "A target in the region of the visual field toward which the observer is moving will undergo, in the next moment, a greater (A) increase in projected size, (B) increase in projected speed, (C) decrease in luminance contrast, and (D) decrease in distance from the observer".

In detail, the authors list 28 distinct ecological regularities that amount to 28 distinct predicted illusion classes: "This is because, under perceiving the present, the perception is predicted to be representative of the way the scene will be in the next moment ... therefore, perceiving the present expects observers to have perceptions that accord with these expected next-moment features".

The authors now demonstrate this "prediction (optic flow) bias" (even when looking at static pictures and "illusions"!!!!) with at least one example (see picture below):
"For two objects of similar distance from passing the observer, the one nearer the region of the visual field with smaller projected sizes tend to undergo, in the next moment, a greater percentage of increase in projected size", so that in the associated "Ebbinghaus illusion" "the left side of the figure has, overall, smaller projected size features than the right side of the figure; thus, the left target, being probably nearer to the direction of motion, should undergo, in the next moment, a greater percentage of increase in projected size. Because the two targets (i.e., the center circle on the left and the center circle on the right) have identical projected sizes, the left target will undergo, in the next moment, a greater increase in projected size than the one on the right; and perceiving the present expects observers to perceive the left target to project larger than the one on the right".

June 3, 2008

In their paper entitled "Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns", the authors Tom M. MITCHELL et al. (in: Science, see References) note (cf. KAY et al. 2008):
"We present a computational model that makes directly testable predictions of the fMRI activity associated with thinking about arbitrary concrete nouns, including many nouns for which no fMRI data are currently available. The theory underlying this computational model [i.e., a mapping that correlates and compares different maps and atlases: linguistic maps/atlases vs. visual fMRI voxel maps/atlases (i.e., Potential landscapes)] is that the neural basis of the semantic representation of concrete nouns is related to the distributional properties of those words in a broadly based corpus [atlas] of the language ... The success of the specific model, which uses 25 sensory-motor verbs [as basic vectors that are then linearly combined for each arbitrary word] (as compared with alternative models based on randomly sampled sets of 25 semantic features), lends credence to the conjecture that neural representations of concrete nouns are in part grounded in sensory-motor features [e.g., "eat" may activate especially insular cortices, "touch" activates somatosensory cortices]. However, the learned signatures associated with the 25 intermediate semantic features also exhibit significant activation in brain areas not directly associated with sensory-motor function, including frontal [i.e., "emotional"?] regions".

All in all, "this research represents a shift in the paradigm for studying neural representations in the brain [or more precisely: voxel maps and fMRI maps], moving from [analytic] work that has cataloged the patterns [maps] of fMRI activity associated with specific categories of words and pictures to instead building computational [i.e., synthetic] models [i.e., mappings] that predict the fMRI activity for abritrary words".

May 30, 2008

In their paper entitled "Log or Linear? Distinct Intuitions of the Number Scale in Western and Amazonian Indigene Cultures", the authors Stanislas DEHAENE et al. (in: Science, see References) report a shift from a more "naturally [stochastically] biased" logarithmic mapping of numbers onto space to some linear (Cartesian) mapping of numbers onto space during Western enculturation: "This compressive response fits nicely with animal and infant studies that demonstrate that numerical perception obeys Weber's law ... A shift from logarithmic to linear mapping occurs later in development, between first and fourth grade, depending on experience and the range of numbers tested ... The logarithmic code may have been selected during evolution for its compactness: Like an engineer's slide rule, a log scale provides a compact neural representation of several orders of magnitude with fixed relative precision".

Hence, you see once more: everything boils down to (shifting) maps...

May 16, 2008

In their paper entitled "The Reorienting System of the Human Brain: From Environment to Theory of Mind", the (aging) authors Maurizio CORBETTA et al. (in: Neuron, see References) note (cf. the Figure below):
"Survival can depend on the ability to change a current course of action to respond to potentially advantageous or threatening stimuli. This ‘‘reorienting’’ response involves the coordinated action of a right hemisphere dominant ventral frontoparietal network that interrupts and resets ongoing activity and a dorsal frontoparietal network specialized for selecting and linking stimuli and responses. At rest, each network is distinct and internally correlated, but when attention is focused, the ventral network is suppressed to prevent reorienting to distracting events."
While the dorsal network is activated during the execution of selective goal-directed tasks (simultaneously deactivating the default network), the ventral network (especially the TPJ) seems to be activated by all "behaviourally relevant stimuli" (i.e., stimuli relevant to some "Self" or intimate goal or target map):
"While the relationship between reorienting signals in the ventral attention network and sense of body remains to be explored, an intriguing hypothesis is that similar environmental and bodily representations and their comparison may be co-opted for ToM [theory of mind] interactions and that attention signals in TPJ may be important to switch between internal, bodily, or self-perspective and external, environmental, or other’s viewpoint, a key ingredient of ToM."

The TPJ seems to be innervated by norepinephrine neuromodulators (stemming from the LC = locus coeruleus): "LC neurons exhibit both tonic and phasic activity modes. Tonic activity is low in an unaroused state that facilitates sleep and disengagement from the environment, moderate when the organism is engaged in a focused task of high utility and filters out irrelevant stimuli, and high when the organism is not committed to a task, is exploring the environment, and there is uncertainty concerning the proper relationship between stimuli and responses."

Hence, the TPJ is mainly activated during the high tonic activity/exploratory LC mode, which may "correspond to the ABILITY of any salient [i.e., Self-relevant, or behaviourally relevant, or goal-relevant] stimulus".

As a result, the "ventral attention network is involved in reorienting [i.e., shifting] from one task state to another, either in the environment or between internally and externally directed activities".

HOWEVER, the authors "do not consider in this discussion the relationship between cortical and subcortical regions involved in the control of attention. There is strong evidence that subcortical structures like the superior colliculus are involved in stimulus-driven but also goal-driven attention", nor do the authors "know the timing of the activation of ventral and dorsal networks [and important subcortical "gating" structures like LC, SC, thalamus, basal ganglia] on timescales that are closer to the underlying neural signals".

Hence, this map proposed by these authors is rather "incomplete" and perhaps only a dreamful wish of (aging) neuroscientists (desperately) struggling for a total map of the (ever shifting) "brain"...

May 14, 2008

In their extremely informative paper entitled "Young Children Do Not Integrate Visual and Haptic Form Information", the authors Monica GORI et al. (in: Current Biology, see References) note:
"Before 8 years of age, children do not integrate visual and haptic spatial information, but one or the other sense dominates, irrespective of its reliability (as assessed by discrimination thresholds), at least over the range we studied. However, there is no evidence that either vision or touch acts as a ‘‘gold standard,’’ always dominating the other. For size discrimination, haptic information dominated in determining not only the perceived height but also in determining thresholds ... For orientation discriminations, vision dominated in conditions in which vision and haptic information should be weighted approximately equally. [See the Figure below!]."

"As different modalities, and indeed different tasks within each modality, develop at different rates, it is to be expected that maturation of crossmodal integration should also be task dependent, only developing after both relevant modalities are mature. ... Why should cross-sensory integration of spatial information develop so late? ... It is possible that for the developing child, calibration [i.e., the mapping between maps] is more important than optimizing perception by integration: Also, if sensory information is integrated, one sense [i.e., map] cannot be used to calibrate the other [map]. In addition, the rate of physical growth can vary between sensory systems, causing problems for integration.
But why should haptic information dominate size discriminations and visual-information-orientation discriminations? Orientation is a primary visual quality that can be gleaned directly from the retinal image, without correction for viewing distance or other variables. Indeed, one of the characterizing properties of neurons in primary visual cortex of primates is their selectivity to orientation. However, for haptic discrimination, this information is not encoded directly but needs to be recovered from the pattern of stimulation of sensor array [i.e., indirectly via touch, grasping, and hearing]."

Hence, while children still have to struggle with "calibrations" (i.e, the brain-internal mutual mapping between maps), adults may already have an optimally weighted (and hence totally interlinked and blurred) Potential landscape and neural network with perfectly mutually mapped maps (then being activated in an optimal cross-modal "integrative" fashion upon sensory stimulation...)...

May 12, 2008

In his paper entitled "Cerebellar contributions to speech production and speech perception", the author Hermann ACKERMANN (in: Current Biology, see References) tries to pin down all pathways involved in speech:
An "executive network" containing sensorimotor cortex, basal ganglia, inferior parts of the cerebellum, and a "preparative loop network" consisting of SMA, premotor cortex, superior parts of the cerebellum and anterior insula.
The basic processing units of speech are not phonemes, but rather syllables, which are linked together and "precisely timed" within words and letter strings via the basal ganglia and cerebellum (see also My map of the brain!).
ALL IN ALL, there may be several pathways for speech production:
1) an old pathway shared with other mammals for "shouting" / "calling" ("within emotional reactions"): anterior cingulate cortex > midbrain > brainstem > vocal tract.
2) "externally generated speech" ("naming"): visual cortex ("object to be named") > inferotemporal cortex > temporal pole > anterior insula (cf. SHAFTO et al. 2007!) > Broca area / basal ganglia / cerebellum > motor cortex > brainstem (direct route).
3) "internally generated speech": SMA > Broca / basal ganglia / cerebellum > motor cortex > brain stem (direct route).

And here is where the FOXP2 may come in: "Investigations of the distributional pattern of FOXP2 expression in songbirds provide some preliminary insights. The avian brain network supporting vocal imitative learning – a circuitry assumed homologous to the human basal ganglia motor loop ... – upregulates FOXP2 expression during periods of song acquisition. ... Given these data, the FOXP2 gene appears especially to influence cortico-subcortical circuits participating in the acquisition and execution of sensorimotor skills – such as the loops traversing the basal ganglia and the cerebellum."

May 7, 2008

Yesterday, I attended a lecture given by the physicist (or: experimentalist) Robert B. Laughlin in Tübingen — and symptomatically, he even had to use an old art historical (!) example to make his point about "self-organizing" "emergent laws" (and Gestalt theories) clear: when stepping back from Monet's seemingly "abstract" late paintings, the "realistic pattern" (or: "attractor"? "meaning"? "map"?) "emerges" from the "meaningless" dots of paint... — provided the map-maker (or "observer", or "brain"?) "knows" (i.e., has a map about) what pond plants may look like... (see here also my Dallas Lecture in Publications!).

Laughlin was really astonished about the high-precision maps (and mathematical numbers) in his own (and extremely narrow) field.
Well, for "sociologists of science", the extreme exactitude of his measurements is no miracle: after all, the extremely narrow circle of physicists (and co-related technicians, engineers, etc.) has co-evolved for a long time during a successful history, so that their mutual (circular?) mappings have become ever more interlinked ("entangled"? "synchronized"? "adapted"?), standardized, purified, linearized and logarithmized — eventually yielding exact linear and local "laws" (i.e., mathematical mappings) like U = I*R in a wide range of (not yet logarithmized?) scales...

It may be similar to social relationships (i.e., interactions, mutual mappings, etc.): the longer, the more interlinked, and the more intense the mutual mappings within a narrow circle of map-makers (say, between husband and wife), the more exact their mutual (standardized, ritualized, etc.) mappings may eventually become... (especially when you have high-precision mapping tools and some other extremely expensive technical equipment that only a few map-makers [like physicists paid by cold-war politicians?] can afford...).

Hence, you see once more: all boils down to ever more precise and ever more local-selective (mutual) map(ping)s between and within map-makers...

And by the way: what Laughlin called "ideologies" or "belief systems", is nothing else than my "maps": but "we" have to act and to earn money, so that "we" really need (even mathematical) maps in order to be able to act and to "persuade" (within social games)... — even if they may turn out to be "wrong" or "merely religious" in the end...

May 6, 2008

Today, I received an e-mail by Marc Schoenwiesner (following my own request and reminder in an e-mail to him and Robert Zatorre, Isabelle Peretz, and Diana Deutsch) that the BRAMS institute (see www.brams.org) is now in fact preparing a paper about the perception of reverberation.

That means: my old dream about such an fMRI study and data (see ELBS 2005: the Wagner-Project) has become true!!!!!!

I eagerly wait for their paper now (to appear in a few months from now) — although I have a bit some doubts whether these authors will really see the impact and multidisciplinary links of their rather specialist research approach (see my own sketch of such a project on "roomyness", and the impressive links to Music History, Psychology, Philosophy, Paleohistory, Neuro-Esthetics and Art History in general in my Wagner-Project: Future Projects).

May 5, 2008

If you are interested in the latest methods (and mapping tools) for "obtaining a complete physical map of the nervous system" (Lichtman et al.) by "high-throughput electron microscopy", "nanoscopy" and most recent "Brainbow microscopy", you may read the paper entitled "A technicolour approach to the connectome" by Jeff LICHTMAN et al. (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References).

April 30, 2008

In a follow-up paper to their own paper (see SCHULTE-RUETHER et al. 2007), the authors Martin SCHULTE-RUETHER et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) note (see also my updated Dallas Lecture in Publications!):
"Subjects either focused on their own emotional response to emotion expressing [!] faces (SELF-task) or evaluated the emotional state expressed by the faces (OTHER-task). Behaviourally, females rates SELF-related emotions significantly stronger than males. ... During SELF-related processing, females recruited the right inferior frontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus stronger than males. In contrast, there was increased neural activity in the left temporoparietal junction [TPJ] in males (relative to females). ... The data suggest that females recruit areas containing mirror neurons to a higher degree than males during both SELF- and OTHER-related processing in empathic face-to-face interactions. This may underlie emotional "contagion" in females. Together with the observation that males differentially rely on the temporoparietal junction (an area mediating the distinction between the SELF and OTHERS) the data suggest that females and males rely on different strategies when assessing their own emotions in response to other people".

Now, this is what "we" medieval theologians and scientists always already have known for a long time: so-called "females" seem to be less ABLE to inhibit their ("unconscious"?) "social biases" and "emotional contagions", and hence activate their TPJs (in order to inhibit the mirror neuron network, and in order to clearly differentiate between some SELF and OTHERs) to a lesser degree than so-called "males".

April 29, 2008

In their paper entitled "Generalized Voice-Leading Spaces", the authors Clifton CALLENDER et al. (in: Science, see References) note:
"Musicians generate equivalence classes of objects by ignoring five kinds of transformation: octave shifts, [O]... permutations [P], .. transpositions [T], .. inversions, ... and cardinality changes, which insert duplications into an object ... A number of traditional music-theoretical concepts can be understood in this way, including chord (OPC), chord type (OPTC), set class (OPTIC), chord-progression (individual OPC), voice-leading (uniform OP), pitch class (single notes under O), and many others."

"Geometrically, a musical object can be represented as a point in R^n. The four OPTI equivalences create quotient spaces by identifying (or "gluing together") points in R^n. ... Our model ... describ[es] the complete family of continuous n-note spaces corresponding to the 32 OPTIC equivalence relations. Of these, the most useful are the OP, OPT, and OPTI spaces, representing voice-leading relations among chords, chord types, and set classes, respectively. ... Beyond modeling musical similarity, the geometrical perspective provides a unified framework for investigating a wide range of contemporary music-theoretical topics, including "contour", and "K-nets". This reflects the fact that the OPTIC equivalences have been central to Western musical discourse since at least the seventeenth century. Our model translates [i.e., maps] these music-theoretical terms into precise geometrical language, revealing a rich set of mathematical consequences."

And needless to say that "voice-leading" is defined as "mappings between adjacent chords in a score” (Rachel Wells Hall) – and hence the future goal of all these multidisciplinary mappings may be: to find correlations between musicological (geometric) maps and a musician's brain (i.e., neural maps), when both are contiguously-continuously shifting around within their (neuronal) maps...

April 27, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Diane Colye (and Stephen Marglin):

Dear Mrs Coyle

Thank you for your nice book ("The Soulful Science", 2007)!

The best sentence in your book was the following (: 253):
"I predict that during the next ten years the astonishing mapping of our societies taking place now...".

But I hope that you will soon see the problem of "maps", "mappings", and "map-maker(s!)" (see [18]).
Including the all-pervading problem of a "social bias" and H. sapiens as an extremely biased "ultrasocial animal" (HERRMANN et al. 2007) or better: map-maker (i.e., "brain?").

My own personal experience with a lot of students in Economy, Law, and Politics is that all these egotistical beings obsessed with sex didn't want to hear anything about theoretical issues any more (because there may be no such thing as an "economical theory"), but only headed for one single thing as fast as possible (as good Adam Smithian animals): "making money as fast as possible" and having sex and fun...

By the way: you should never refer to religious terms like "trust" etc.
Instead, when economies do grow and try to establish themselves in new territories ("expansion"), they first bother about issues of law.

Only when you have functioning (i.e., "independent" and "non-corrupt" (!)) institutions of law in a territory, economic growth will be able in these new territories... (see the OLD East European and NOW European-law adherent countries like Slovenia, etc.).

Hence, you may have greatly underrated the importance of "law" and "jurisprudence" in your book...

But please be also careful as well: even "Jurisprudence" is not an objective theory --- laws and "jurisprudence" are an extremely arbitrary thing... (only the Physics of Energy would be objective? - See Wilhelm Ostwald's futile attempt to transform the economical sciences into the physical science of Entropy and Thermodynamics already in 1909 [OSTWALD 1909] --- long before Georgescu-Roegen et al. !!!!!!!!!...).

Yours sincerely (and with a greeting to Marglin's "Dismal Science" of 2008) --- OE "

April 26, 2008

In his very good review entitled "General anaesthesia: from molecular targets to neuronal pathways of sleep and arousal", the author Nicholas P. FRANKS (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) notes that the most important receptors targeted by anaesthetics may be (inhibitory) GABAergic neurons (in Cortex, Hypothalamus, brain stem etc.), and:
"certain regions are consistently more deactivated than others. Studies with propofol, sevoflurane and xenon showed deactivation of the thalamus and some midbrain structures that are associated with the ascending reticular activating system, together with varying degrees of deactivation of particular association cortices, such as the precuneus and the posterior cingulate cortex ... Interestingly, the polymodal association cortices tend to be affected more profoundly than the primary and secondary sensory cortices. This functional dissociation between unimodal and polymodal cortices implies that during sleep the brain can respond to external stimuli (such as loud noises) but lacks the higher levels of processing that are necessary to make meaningful sense of the input."

In fact, "the thalamus is the major gateway for the flow of sensory information from the periphery into the cortex and can switch [i.e., shift] between a state that allows the flow of ascending information and one that essentially isolates the cortex from the environment" (see also my distinction between contingent "activity circles" and seemingly non-congingent (simulation-like) "activation circles" and "default-modes" in My map of the brain !).

"Thus, when the brain is in an activated, wakeful state, the corticofugal pathway (which is exclusively excitatory) provides a tonic depolarization of the thalamocortical neurons, tending to prevent them from entering synchronized, oscillatory states. This provides some degree of positive feedback, because if the TC [thalamocortical] neurons enter into an oscillatory mode as a result of a diminished excitation of the arousal pathways, then the tonic corticofugal excitation will also be reduced, further favouring synchronous oscillation. Anaesthetics could act, at least in part, by inhibiting cortical neurons and thus favouring TC burst firing and a sleep-like state. ... An explanation for the sudden switch between consciousness and unconsciousness might lie in the intrinsic bi-stability [once again: two stable attractors!!!] of thalamocortical neurons, together with the reciprocal inhibitory connections that exist between hypothalamic sleep-promoting centres and the arousal nuclei in the midbrain and the brainstem...".

April 24, 2008

When you read the paper by J. Dylan CLYNE & Gero MIESENBOECK entitled "Sex-Specific Control and Tuning of the Pattern Generator for Courtship Song in Drosophila" (in: Cell, see References), you can see once more that all scientific maps (and map-makings) are indeed heavily local, selective, and (necessarily) methodically extremely biased (because there is no total map of everything):
"By photoactivating all ~2000 fru neurons of males at once, we were able to elicit courtship behaviors, such as abdominal thrusting and unilateral wing vibrations, but only in a small fraction of 1.7% of all trials (n = 240). The lack of consistent responses under these circumstances is not entirely surprising: different subsets of fru neurons likely play antagonistic roles in courtship ... so that their simultaneous activation may result in conflicts. However, when the fru circuitry of the ventral ganglion was isolated by physically severing the neck connectives [and hence isolating the spinal ganglions and song pattern generators from the upper brain], headless male torsos (‘‘flyPods’’) sang readily and reliably when exposed to light."

With regard to the two kinds of song patterns generated by the Drosophila males and stimulated fru-females (two bistable attractors and "order-parameters": sine or pulse song...), the authors hypothesize that there may be (triodic) master-controllers in the upper brain, so that "one type of descending interneuron could then set the value of this parameter and thereby control the type of acoustic input (sine or pulse song), whereas a second class of interneuron could signal the decision to sing, without specifying a particular song rhythm".

April 23, 2008

In their paper entitled "Lateral asymmetry of bodily emotion expression", the authors Claire L. ROETHER et al. (in: Current Biology, see References) note:
"Our experiment provides the first demonstration of pronounced lateral asymmetries in human emotional full-body movement. These motor asymmetries influence the perceived expressiveness of emotional gait. Lateral asymmetry of emotional expression is thus not specific to the face, but extends to the movement of the human body [here: the left body side moving with significantly higher joint-angle amplitudes], consistent with a general dominance of the right hemisphere in the control of emotional expression, independent of the effector. Such asymmetries in locomotion patterns seem surprising given the selection pressure towards symmetry in locomotion".

April 21, 2008

In their paper entitled "Intrinsic noise, dissipation cost, and robustness of cellular networks: The underlying energy landscape of MAPK signal transduction", the authors Saul LAPIDUS (in: PNAS, see References) note:
"The ultimate goal of biology is to understand the function of specific systems. At the cell level, the function of the system is realized through the network of interactions between molecules. ... The purpose of this article was to study the global robustness or stability against intrinsic fluctuations and random perturbation to the inherent chemical reaction rates directly from the properties of the potential energy landscape [cf. [19]] of the network. ... Noisy conditions thus play a very important role in these chemical reaction networks and are much more realistic than the average mean concentrations. To describe the system under noisy conditions, we will define a potential energy function that is derived from the steady-state probability of the network. After this landscape is determined, the probability of each state is known and we can begin to analyze global features. ... The potential energy function U(x) can be related to steady-state probability: Pss(x) = 1/Z*exp(-U(x)). ... For certain configurations of concentrations, the network adopts a certain potential energy (or the corresponding probability). The dimensionality of the configurational state space is huge. We are interested, first of all, in the most probable configuration that corresponds to the lowest energy state."

"We used the experimentally inferred rate parameters to prove that the network is funneled in configurational space of protein concentrations toward the ground nonequilibrium steady-state fixed point under the intrinsic statistical fluctuations."

And now comes the most important point (cf. also WHITFIELD 2007), which shows that "evolution" may only be a subcase and subdiscipline of Physics (and ultimately Mathematics):
"We show that natural evolution might only select certain parameter space with the funneled underlying energy landscape. The other part of the parameter space that generates the rough potential landscape cannot guarantee the global robustness and therefore is not able to appropriately perform the specific biological function required for efficient transformation of the information signals. They are more likely to phase out from evolution. The funneled landscape, therefore, may be a realization of the Darwinian principle of natural selection at the cellular network level for efficient transformation of the information (signal transduction). As we see, the funneled landscape provides an optimal criterion to select the suitable parameter subspace of cellular networks, guarantee the robustness, cost the least dissipations, and perform specific biological functions."

April 19, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to the editors and authors of 2008's "Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science" (Martin Curd, Stathis Psillos, et al.):

"Dear Editors and Authors

Thank you for your book, but sadly enough, this your "Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science" (2008) seems to be neither up-to-date, nor complete:

It is a pity that your book does not contain the extremely important term "map" (or: "mapping"?) — a term which happens to be used in nearly all "sciences" (i.e., maps) and by nearly all "scientists" (i.e., map-makers) in an ever increasing way (you may only scan this week's issue of the magazine "Science" [see, e.g., ENSERINK 2008]...).

That's why I --- being funded by no body --- have tried to start a "competely new" and extremely consistent "Philosophy of Science" (i.e., map of maps) based on this nicely ambiguous term (**): see http://www.mapology.org/en/Main_Page .

This extremely short text is not easy to read — but there may be two easier books (ELBS 2005, ELBS 2006 — see References).

Yours sincerely, and as usual with my last sentence:

** And those who will have the "best" (neural?) maps... (or more prosaically with Ernan McCullin referring to Kurt Lewin in your book above on p. 498: The virtues of a "good" [i.e., "fitting"?] map...).

OE "

April 17, 2008

In a follow-up (?) study to BRASS & HEYES 2005 on "Face-Specific and Domain-General Characteristics of Cortical Responses during Self-Recognition", the authors Motoaki SUGIURA et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) compared "cortical activation during recognition of self-face and self-name" vs. the faces and names of "familiar persons", and then conclude with regard to the prominent shift in (de-)activation at the TPJ (Temporoparietal Junction):
"The domain-nonspecific reduction of temporoparietal activation during self-recognition revealed in this study may reflect the developmental process of self-recognition. The acquisition of self-recognition ABILITY is manifested as a disappearance of social behaviour directed at one's own mirror image. All animals confronted with their own mirror images first show the same social behaviour, such as aggressive displays, as to their conspecifics; then, a limited number of species stop showing this social behaviour before they show evidence of self-recognition. ... If temporoparietal activation reflects automatic preparation for social behaviour, and the developmental process of self-recognition involves the suppression of social behaviour, it may be reasonable to assume that self-specific reduction of temporoparietal activation is an active suppression process". (Cf. also my Dallas Lecture, Slide 36 Publications!).

April 15-16, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Ernst Fehr and Harvey Whitehouse:

"I was quite astonished to see an article in the New Scientist on your Oxfordian "explaining religion" project (EXREL).
First of all, the title of this project may already have a "religious" bias from the very start: in my view, map-makers like "scientists" NEVER look for "explanations" (only "religious map-makers" may do that...), but ONLY try to develop ever more precise mapping tools and maps enABLing them to predict (and especially to manipulate) "the uncertain future" ever "better" (i.e., in a "better" "fitting" way).

All this may only be another "religious bias" of a seemingly extremely "socially biased" animal (like the "ultrasocial" H. sapiens), partly correlated with H. sapiens's extreme "ontological bias" (i.e., "our" desperate struggling for some "truth" and "stability" and "stable absolute maps and coordinates") and "historical bias" (i.e., "our" struggling for "evolutionary reasons", "historical causes", "final purposes", "explanations", "causal maps", etc.).

And no wonder that people like Richard Dawkins have recently got into serious trouble when fighting with creationists (and vice versa)...

After all, "our" "brains" (or: "neural maps"?) have not been "designed" for looking for (ontological) "explanations" (down to childish things like "big bangs", "first movers", "evolutionary causes", etc.), but rather for making ever "better" (i.e., ever MORE "fitting") predictions based on ever MORE precise maps...

And by the way: the EXREL project seems to be largely funded by the European Union, that means: by politicians who do not care about "explanations", but who do want to be ABLE to make (hopefully) ever better predictions of "religious behaviours" (especially by mapping and predicting the behaviours of so-called "Islamic terrorists", of course?...)?

Best wishes for your project nevertheless --- OE".

And by the way: all this is nicely illustrated in this week's article in Science on Derek Smith as a "Mapmaker for the world of influenza" (ENSERINK 2008): Derek Smith only tries to develop ever more precise (real-time) global maps of the genomes and distribution of different influenza strains in order to be ABLE to predict (and to manipulate) flu outbreaks and shifting genomes (i.e., shifts and "changes") ever better...

April 14, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Kevin Ochsner:
"Thank you very much for your paper on the necessity of an "interactive" view of "empathy" in Psychological Science (entitled "It Takes TWO").
You note that: "Empathy — the capacity to feel the emotions of other individuals — is so critical to social relationships and prosocial behavior", but (as an art historian) I always have to remind and to add that this definition of "empathy" may also hold for Hitler's perfect "anti-social" (or yet: "pro-social"?) capacity to feel (and to quickly respond to) the emotions of his "(national)social(ist) mass".
But nevertheless, thank you very much for underlining that empathy (in your sense above) necessarily remains a tremendously ambiguous capacity and challenge (due to inferring "other" minds and emotions ONLY by means of CLOSELY reading bodily expressions), which may only be ever more disambiguated via extended interactive feedback sequences, including perhaps linguistic interactions (and hence the "necessity" of the evolution of some "language" in an extremely "ultrasocial" and socially biased "H. sapiens"?), or via future "direct" and "totally" disambiguated (i.e., neurotechnical?) linkings of TWO brains...?

Yours sincerely and best wishes --- OE"

April 13, 2008

Everyone is now talking about the increasing hunger in the world (or better: in the so-called "poor countries") — due to the grains wasted in favour of biofuel etc.
But look at my pupils and my conspecifics here in "Germany": all these my dirty conspecifics driving cars on Sundays, feeding their pets with bio-fuel (etc. etc.).
And you see here once more that H. sapiens is still rather "neolithic" (because being still dependent on agriculture and pets), and you also see that not even my first GOAL ("maintaining upright all already existing individual bodies as best as POSSIBLE") has been fulfilled in the last thousand years.
Hence, "we" (H. sapiens, including "politicians", "lawyers", "economists" etc.) seem to be really "imPOTENT" and "poor" (i.e., "selfish", "inconsistent, "neolithic", and "single-minded") map-makers indeed...

April 12, 2008

In their paper entitled "Virtual reality study of paranoid thinking in the general population", the authors Daniel FREEMAN et al. (in: British Journal of Psychiatry, see References) demonstrate "that virtual reality is a safe and acceptable method of studying paranoia in the laboratory. Computer characters can elicit paranoid reactions. Consistent with the latest epidemiological research, over 40% of our general population sample had paranoid thoughts".

Now, this result is not very surprising (and that's why I had to write an e-mail to Freeman et al. with the following text here:), given the increasing evidence that "Homo sapiens" seems to be an extremely "ultrasocial" animal (HERRMANN et al. 2007) with an extreme "social bias", so that nearly all its thoughts may revolve around "social inferences".
That means: H. sapiens may excel at making inferences, e.g., when making up or simulating "hidden intentions" & "hidden causes" & "other minds" in "other" "bodies" (e.g., when being in a "typically human"(?) "default-state" of a "wandering mind" [MASON et al. 2007], or when being in a task-free situation like traveling on the underground [FREEMAN et al. 2008]?).
And this excessive capacity of a "Theory of mind" (and default-state?) may even extend to paranoid thinkings in some (pathological?) individuals...?
After all, according to CHENEY & SEYFARTH 2007, "most of the problems facing baboons can be expressed in two words: other baboons”.

April 10, 2008

In their paper entitled "Drifting grating stimulation reveals particular activation properties of visual neurons in the caudate nucleus", the authors Attila NAGY et al. (in: EJN, see References) performed a study on cats concerning the responses of the caudate nucleus (CN) to (visual) sinewave drifting gratings (and hence crucially extend the primitive notion of a "visual cortical brain" to much more important subcortical structures like the CN...):
"Earlier morphological findings in cats and rabbits stressed the predominant role of the geniculostriate pathway that conveys visual information toward the CN ... However, recent morphological and physiological studies support the suggestion that the extrageniculate ascending tectofugal pathways [including the superior colliculi [SC]] project to the CN in reptiles, birds and mammals ..."
Now, the authors corroborate earlier findings (in cats) that the "spatiotemporal visual properties of the CN neurons are extremely similar to those of the subset SC, LM-Sg and the AES [anterior ectosylvian sulcus] cortex, with their preference for very low spatial and very high temporal frequencies and narrow spatial and temporal tuning characteristics [!]."
In fact, the AES cortex may even be "the origin of the modulation in the CN." Besides, the "CN neurons are good candidates for tasks involved in the perception of motion and probably in the perception of changes [i.e, shifts] in the visual environment during self-motion, with their extremely large receptive fields, their preferences for low spatial frequencies, and their fine spatial and temporal tuning" (cf. also REDGRAVE & GURNEY 2006, and My map of the brain!).

April 6, 2008

In a follow-up paper to MUCKLI et al. 2005, the authors Bashir AHMED et al. in their paper entitled "Cortical Dynamics Subserving Visual Apparent Motion" (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) note (and you see here once again the increasing use of mapologically crucial linguistic terms like "shifts" and "maps"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!):
"Motion can be perceived when static images are successively presented with a spatial shift. This type of motion is an illusion and is termed apparent motion (AM). Here we show, with a voltage sensitive dye applied to the visual cortex of the ferret, that presentation of a sequence of stationary, short duration, stimuli which are perceived to produce AM are, initially, mapped in areas 17 and 18 as separate stationary representations. But time locked to the offset of the 1st stimulus, a sequence of signals are elicited. First, an activation traverses cortical areas 19 and 21 in the direction of AM. Simultaneously, a motion dependent feedback signal from these areas activates neurons between areas 19/21 and areas 17/18. Finally, an activation is recorded, traveling always from the representation of the 1st to the representation of the next or succeeding stimuli. This activation elicits spikes from neurons situated between these stimulus representations in areas 17/18."

"In summary, the results showed that after the offset of the 1st stimulus, a moving activation wave-front appears in areas 19/21 and a motion feedback is sent to areas 17/18. Immediately, the area 17/18 wave-front starts and progresses together with the area 19/21 wave-front in the direction of AM. In the time interval during which the 17/18 wave-front traverses from one retinotopic to the next retinotopic site, the neurons located between these retinotopic sites generate spike responses."

April 4, 2008

In their paper entitled "Aversive Learning Enhances Perceptual and Cortical Discrimination of Indiscriminable Odor Cues", the authors Wen LI et al. (in: Science, see References) "combined multivariate functional magnetic resonance imaging with olfactory psychophysics to show that initially indistinguishable odor enantiomers (mirror-image molecules) become discriminable after aversive conditioning, paralleling the spatial divergence of ensemble activity patterns [i.e., "odor maps"] in primary olfactory (piriform) cortex. ... Twelve healthy human subjects ... were presented with four enantiomers (two different pairs), one of which (the target CS+, “tgCS+”) was repetitively paired with an electric shock (US) during a conditioning phase, whereas its chiral counterpart (“chCS+”) was not accompanied by shock ... The second pair of odor enantiomers served as nonconditioned control stimuli (“CS–” and “chCS–”). ... The central prediction was that associative learning would enhance behavioral discrimination of related CS+ odorants, in parallel with reorganization of neural coding in human primary olfactory (piriform) cortex".

In fact, the authors not only found a more and more differentiating Potential landscape (i.e., ever MORE differentiated maps or attractor landscapes with ever more differentiated attractors - see my Figure below), but they also found post-conditionally "increased mean responses to tgCS+ (versus CS– odors) in the OFC bilaterally."

You see: the more differentiated the maps "you" (i.e., your SELF or POTENTIAL landscape...) have, the higher your (discriminative) ABILITIes and SENSITIVities (cf. also my now updated Dallas lecture, Publications, Slide 21b!):
"Clinically, our data raise the intriguing possibility that neurobiological derangements in the ability to distinguish between salient cues and perceptually related inconsequential stimuli may underlie the emergence of anxiety disorders characterized by exaggerated sensory sensitivity and hypervigilance."

March 27, 2008

In their paper entitled "Emotional environments retune the valence of appetitive versus fearful functions in nucleus accumbens", the authors Sheila M. REYNOLDS & Kent C. BERRIDGE (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) note with regard to shifting (remapped) functional maps in the (limbic) nucleus accumbens:
"The capacity of situations to retune [i.e., to re-map] limbic function has hardly been explored. Here we examined how environmental ambience shapes adaptive behaviors by reorganizing appetitive versus defensive function maps in nucleus accumbens. Appetitive and defensive motivations are generated along an anatomical rostrocaudal gradient by glutamatergic circuits in the medial shell, analogous to a limbic ‘affective keyboard’. Each microinjection of the AMPA glutamate antagonist 6,7-dinitroquinoxaline-2,3-dione (DNQX, or related drug) disrupts glutamate signals from the prefrontal cortex, amygdala and hippocampus in a spherical < 0.75-mm radius of the shell. Just as a keyboard has many notes, microinjections of DNQX evoke many different combinations of appetitive and fearful behaviors, corresponding to their location along the rostrocaudal gradient. In rostral regions of the medial shell, DNQX microinjections generate intense appetitive behaviors in rats: large increases in eating behavior and food intake, and the establishment of conditioned place preferences. In contrast, identical DNQX microinjections in the caudal shell generate equally intense, but negatively valenced, fearful behaviors: distress vocalizations, escape attempts, conditioned place avoidance and 'defensive treading'... Intermediate sites in the shell evoke various mixtures of appetitive and fearful behaviors corresponding to their relative position along the rostrocaudal gradient."

"In summary [cf. the Figure below], our data suggest that the incentive or fearful valence of motivation generated by a particular local glutamate disruption in nucleus accumbens depends at least on two factors: the location along a rostrocaudal affective keyboard, which assigns an anatomically determined bias of appetitive or fearful valence, and current signals about environmental ambience ["home environment" vs. "stressful environment"] that can flip the valence generated by disruption of moderately biased local circuits in the medial shell. Corticolimbic circuits involving nucleus accumbens may therefore flexibly remap affective-generating functions from moment to moment as external situations change."

March 25, 2008

Recently, "my parents" have asked me the question (while reading Richard Dawkins): "Why is there religion, and why are there (religious) wars?".

And here is my extremely short answer (already given in my extremely short book entitled "Map 2020" - see Publications): "Because" of the "social bias" of an extremely "ultrasocial" H. sapiens ("we"), or "because" of the "ontological bias" ("our" desperate struggling for "truth" and "stability"), or "because" of some "historical bias" (i.e., struggling for "evolutionary reasons", "historical causes", "final purposes", "(scientific!) explanations", etc.).

But unfortunately enough, badly educated map-makers like the evolutionary (!) socio(!)biologist Richard Dawkins never name (nor discuss) these (seemingly) "age-old" biases with their correct names (despite Francis Bacon, Xenophanes, etc.).

Hence, if "we" were all solipsist (i.e., "socially incompetent") autists, monads, or perfectly educated (i.e., unbiased) map-makers (who only try to develop ever more precise maps in order to manipulate "this world" ever better and in a more predictable way), there might be no "religious" people (and "wars"...) any more...

March 20, 2008

In their paper entitled "The representation of Egomotion in the Human Brain", the authors Matthew B. WALL & Andrew T. SMITH (in: Current Biology, see References) "identify two areas of the human brain that represent visual cues to egomotion more directly than does [the optic-flow sensitive area] MST. These areas respond strongly to a single optic-flow stimulus but become relatively unresponsive when the stimulus is surrounded with further flow patches and thereby made inconsistent with egomotion. One is putative area VIP in the anterior portion of the intraparietal sulcus. The other is a new visual area, which we refer to as cingulate sulcus visual area (CSv) [lying anterior to the posterior cingulate cortex]. Areas V1–V4 and MT respond about equally to both types of flow stimulus. MST has intermediate properties, responding well to multiple patches but with a modest preference for a single, egomotion-compatible patch. We suggest that MST is merely an intermediate processing stage for visual cues to egomotion and that such cues are more comprehensively encoded by VIP and CSv."

March 18, 2008

In their paper entitled "Synaptic Theory of Working Memory", the authors Gianluigi MONGILLO et al. (in: Science, see References) remind "us" once again that there is not only some attractor dynamics on the level of (spiking) neurons, but also on the (lower) levels of single neurons and their synaptic trees (including oscillating biochemical networks and calcium buffers):
"It is usually assumed that enhanced spiking activity in the form of persistent reverberation for several seconds is the neural correlate of working memory [WM]. Here, we propose that working memory is sustained by calcium-mediated synaptic facilitation in the recurrent connections of neocortical networks. In this account, the presynaptic residual calcium is used as a buffer that is loaded, refreshed, and read out by spiking activity. Because of the long time constants of calcium kinetics, the refresh rate can be low, resulting in a mechanism that is metabolically efficient and robust. The duration and stability of working memory can be regulated by modulating the spontaneous activity in the network [i.e., by non-specific periodic inputs to the network]."
"In the above scenario, the network has a single stable activity state [i.e., attractor] corresponding to the spontaneous activity, thus appropriately timed external signals are required to extract the memory from synaptic to spiking form. A more persistent form of WM requires the selective population to exhibit a bistable activity regime [i.e., two attractors], where the spontaneous state coexists with another stable state. Our network can be forced into this regime by increasing spontaneous activity by means of a global nonspecific background input ... In the bistable regime, post-synaptic spikes [PSs] become persistent without reactivating inputs ... Each reactivation increases u [the residual calcium level) and decreases x [the available resources], the latter terminating the PS. The time between subsequent PSs is controlled by the recovery from synaptic depression so that the PSs tend to occur with a period on the order of tD [which ...] would correspond to cortical oscillations in the theta-range, as observed during WM experiments."

March 10, 2008

The EXTREMELY important paper entitled "Identifying natural images from human brain activity" by the authors Kendrick N. KAY et al. (in: Nature, see References) seems to be the first step toward a so much longed-for "Potential function" (U(x,t)) of each individual brain (see also my Dallas lecture at Publications and [20]):
"Our experiment consisted of two stages [cf. Figure below!]. In the first stage, model estimation, fMRI data were recorded from visual areas V1, V2 and V3 while each subject viewed 1,750 natural images [i.e., visual maps]. We used these data to estimate a quantitative receptive-field model for each voxel. The model [i.e., the mathematical map U(x)] was based on a Gabor wavelet pyramid and described tuning along the dimensions of space, orientation and spatial frequency."
"In the second stage, image identification, fMRI data [i.e., visual fMRI voxel maps] were recorded while each subject viewed 120 novel natural images. This yielded 120 distinct voxel activity patterns for each subject. For each voxel activity pattern we attempted to identify which image had been seen. To do this, the receptive-field models estimated in the first stage of the experiment were used to predict the voxel activity pattern that would be evoked by each of the 120 images. The image whose predicted voxel activity pattern [i.e., map] was most correlated (Pearson’s r) with the measured voxel activity pattern was selected."
"A general visual decoder would be especially useful if it could operate on brain activity evoked by a single perceptual event. However, because fMRI data are noisy, the results reported above were obtained using voxel activity patterns averaged across 13 repeated trials. ... Single-trial performance was 51% (834/1620) and 32% (516/1620) for subjects S1 and S2, respectively; once again, chance performance is just 0.8%."

You see: "we" now get very clever at mapping (linking) maps of different kinds (obtained with mathematical, neurobiological or visual methods)...
And that's why I always say: the clash of maps (and mappings) and the mapping of (individual) map-makers (i.e., brains? nervous systems? V1-V3?) has now really begun (and hence also the following virulent problems: Who maps whom? Who maps what? What maps what? And who has the legal right to map Afghanistan by Tornado fighters?)...

However (and sadly enough), the authors only give a function U(x) that crucially lacks time-dependency (and hence, "real neuronal attractor dynamics"), so that the authors have to note grudgingly at the end of their paper: "Why does identification sometimes fail? Inspection revealed that identification errors tended to occur when the selected image was visually similar to the correct image"...

March 8, 2008

In their paper entitled "The Spatial Attention Network Interacts with Limbic and Monoaminergic Systems to Modulate Motivation-Induced Attention Shifts", the authors Aprajita MOHANTY et al. (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) show that the posterior Cingulate Cortex (which receives substantial input from the anterior Cingulate Cortex being Crick's "location of the will", and from the posterior Insula) may feedforward viscerosomatic information about the "motivational" state (hungry) to the posterior Parietal Cortex (involved in attentional shifts and building up "salience maps"):
"Amygdala, posterior cingulate, locus coeruleus, and substantia nigra showed selective sensitivity to food-related cues when hungry but not when satiated, an effect that did not generalize to tools. Posterior parietal cortex (PPC), including intraparietal sulcus, posterior cingulate, and the orbitofrontal cortex displayed correlations with the speed of attentional shifts that were sensitive not just to motivational state but also to the motivational value of the target. Stronger functional coupling between PPC and posterior cingulate occurred during attentional biasing toward motivationally relevant food targets. These results reveal conjoint limbic and monoaminergic encoding of motivational salience in spatial attention. They emphasize the interactive role of posterior parietal and cingulate cortices in integrating motivational information with spatial attention, a process that is critical for selective allocation of attentional resources in an environment where target position and relevance can change rapidly."
And: "Hence, the PC is ideally suited to serve as a neural interface between motivation, as encoded by the limbic system, and spatial attention. We have previously found that neural activity in the PC correlates positively with anticipatory shifts of spatial attention and that this relationship is strengthened by the presence of monetary incentives, indicating that the PC is involved in anticipatory biasing of spatial attention to motivationally relevant events."

March 7, 2008

In their paper entitled "Misattribution of movement agency following right parietal TMS", the authors Catherine PRESTON & Roger NEWPORT (in: SCAN, see References) use TMS to disturb the normal functioning of the right TPJ [rIPL] during virtual own/other hand movements (the trajectories of which were partly artificially shifted, so as to disturb feedback and hence the sense of agency).
Interestingly, the authors now note: "When TMS is applied over the rlPL, participants are more likely to give a judgment of other ... compared with when no TMS is applied", so that the (socially biased?] default response of the TPJ seems to be attribution of agency to "others".
However, the authors now speculate that this misattribution is due to a "disruption of predicted state mechanisms" carried out by the TPJ (but cf. also BRASS & HEYES 2005: this misattribution could also be due to a failed inhibition of mirror neurons in other areas? Unfortunately enough, these authors do not seem to know this paper by Brass & Heyes. You see: nobody is perfect...).

March 1, 2008

In their paper entitled "Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation", the authors Charles J. LIMB & Allen R. BRAUN (in: PLoS ONE, see References) note:
"Because musical improvisation incorporates a broad range of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic invention that is intrinsically difficult to control (while retaining musical integrity), we designed to [improvisation] paradigms [based upon the same notes], one that was relatively low (which we have termed Scale) and one that was high (which we have termed Jazz) in musical complexity. ... In Scale's control condition ... subjects repeatedly played a one-octave C major scale in quarter notes [cf. also ELBS 2005, the "Wagner-Project"!]. ... In the Jazz paradigm, ... during the control condition ..., subjects played the composition with the auditory accompaniment of a pre-recorded jazz quartet. During the corresponding improvisation condition ... subjects were given freedom to improvise, using the chord structure of the composition and the same auditory accompaniment as the basis for improvisation."

The authors now found that "spontaneous improvisation, independent of the degree of musical complexity, is characterized by widespread deactivation of lateral portions of the prefrontal cortex together with focal activation of medial prefrontal cortex [MPFC, BA 10]. ... In jazz music, improvisation is considered to be a highly individual expression of an artist's own musical viewpoint [or: Self?]. The association of MPFC activity with the production of autobiographical narrative is germane in this context [cf. also FARB et al. 2007 in my Update below, December 31, 2007!], and as such, one could argue that improvisation is a way of expressing one's own musical voice or story."
"Whereas activation of the lateral regions appears to support self-monitoring and focused attention, deactivation may be associated with defocused, free-floating attention that permits spontaneous unplanned associations, and sudden insights or realizations ... The idea that spontaneous composition relies to some degree on intuition, the "ability to arrive at a solution without reasoning", may be consistent with the dissociated pattern of prefrontal activity we observed."

"Moreover, a comparable dissociated pattern of activity in prefrontal regions has been reported to occur during REM sleep ..., a provocative finding when one considers that dreaming is exemplified by a sense of defocused attention, an abundance of unplanned, irrational associations and apparent loss of volitional control".

February 29, 2008

In their (MEG-)paper entitled "A Specific and Rapid Neural Signature for Parental Instinct", the authors Morten L. KRINGELBACH et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) have tried to map the neural maps underlying Konrad Lorenz' "Kindchenschema" (infant schema) via MEG, since "no published studies have compared responses to unfamiliar infant faces with responses to unfamiliar adult faces":
"At around 130 ms after presentation of a face, significantly more activity was found in the medial orbitofrontal cortex [MOFC] in response to infant than to adult faces in the 10-15 Hz band ... This striking difference in activity elicited by infant compared to adult faces was not found in the right fusiform face area [FFA], where the initial activity occurred earlier around 100 ms in the 10-20 Hz and in the 25-35 Hz bands".
"To test whether these results held when restricted to participants who were not parents, we excluded the three parents from the analysis. Using solely the data from the non-parents produced the same results. ... [However,] It might also be of interest to future studies to investigate the brain responses to infants of other species."

Hence, you see (once again, cf. also KVERAGA et al. 2007 in my Update below of December 10, 2007!) that during the propagation of neural activity along the ventral visual stream (Thalamus > Occipital visual area V1 > LOC > FFA) a lot of modulations of this stream (FFA) via parallel processed "top-down" areas may occur at the same time (e.g., via Thalamus > Amygdala [containing face-selective neurons!] > MOFC > FFA ?)...

February 28, 2008

In their paper entitled "Predicting Human Interactive Learning by Regret-Driven Neural Networks", the authors Davide MARCHIORI & Massimo WARGLIEN (in: Science, see References) note that three factors may drive learning: reinforcement learning, a player's beliefs about other players' moves (ToM!), and post-decision regret for foregone payoffs:
"Our model maps the structure of a strategic game onto a neural network in a very straightforward way, by having an input node xj corresponding to each payoff in the game matrix and by also including the opponent's payoffs and an output node yj for each action available to a player k. ... Thus far, the model is a very conventional, simple analog perceptron, where learning is modeled, as usual, as adaptive updating of the connections' weights. ... Regret is computed as the difference between the actual payoff received by a player k and the maximum payoff obtainable, given other players' actions. Thus, the psychological intuition ... is that connection weight adjustment is driven by a series of factors that can be summarized as adjustment = learning rate x distance from ex-post best response x regret x input saliency. ... As compared with Hopfield's perceptron rule, the main difference of this variant is that the error feedback is multiplied by the regret size".
The authors now found that "regret-based models always fared better than the other models ... demonstrating the determinant role played by the introduction of regret as a source of feedback for learning" (perhaps mediated by regret and disappointment networks in the lateral habenula, VTA, Striatum, Amy, or MOFC?).

February 26, 2008

In their extremely important paper entitled "Creating Social Connection Through Inferential Reproduction", the authors Nicholas EPLEY et al. (in: Psychological Science, see References) note:
"People engage in a variety of behaviors to alleviate the pain of social disconnection. For example, they actively seek connections with other people ... imagine important social relationships ... and increase attention to social cues in the environment ... Such behaviors involve attempts to establish connections with other existing humans, but we suggest that disconnected people may adopt an even more creative approach by inventing humanlike agents in their environment to serve as potential sources of connection. People may do so in at least two distinct ways: by anthropomorphizing nonhuman agents such as mechanical devices and nonhuman animals to make them appear more humanlike or by increasing belief in the existence of commonly anthropomorphized religious agents (such as God) ... Chronic isolation has been a long-standing explanation for classic examples of anthropomorphism — from seeing mermaids in the ocean to naming geological features by their humanlike features [cf. Art history: from neolithic cave-sculptors to Mantegna!]."

Now, the authors conducted a test for such "mental state attributions" to mechanical gadgets, pets, and religious agents, and they predicted that "participants who were chronically lonely or momentarily induced to think about loneliness would create agents of social connection by altering the mental states they attributed to nonhuman agents ... or by increasing their belief in supernatural agents."

AND NOW COMES THE MOST IMPORTANT HYPOTHESIS (cf. also my Curriculum Vitae, Curriculum, and cf. also my online Dallas lecture 2008, Slide 37 Publications):
"If social disconnection increases the tendency to seek humanlike agents in one’s environment, then a strong sense of social connection should decrease this tendency to seek humanlike agents. A lack of motivation to connect with other humans should decrease the tendency to perceive humanlike traits in these other humans as well. This reasoning suggests that when evaluating other individuals, people who are especially socially connected might also be more likely to dehumanize those to whom they are not socially connected ... We found exactly this pattern in one recent experiment in which participants induced to feel strongly connected to another person were less likely to attribute humanlike mental states to members of an out-group than were those not induced to feel connected to another person ... Although being socially connected has many desirable consequences for one’s mental and physical health, it may have some undesirable consequences as well [cf. e.g., nationalsocialist biases and "dehumanizations"?]."

February 20-25, 2008

I am currently in Dallas at the CAA conference session on "Neuro-Art-History" where I give a (as usually non-paid, i.e., non-corrupted...) talk about Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman (see Publications).
I am not sure whether the audience will grasp all things involved in my lecture (which is extremely dense...).
And it is sad to say that I may have (in vain...) spent several thousand dollars and many decades of extremely hard work (see Curriculum) JUST for seeing Philip Johnson's Thanksgiving Square Chapel with the beautiful French stained glass by Gabriel Loire...

February 19, 2008

In their paper entitled "Korean Preschoolers' Advanced Inhibitory Control and Its Relation to Other Executive Skills and Mental State Understanding", the authors Seungmi OH & Charlie LEWIS (in: Child Development, see References) note with regard to Theory of Mind [ToM] and inhibitory skills (including the inhibition of mirror neurons via the TPJ?):
"Some [authors] have asserted that understanding of internal states [i.e., ToM] facilitates self-control ... According to this view, some degree of mental state understanding is itself a precursor to later developments in the executive system. ... In contrast, others have argued that advances in different aspects of executive control are necessary or even sufficient for the development of mind awareness. ... A third perspective about the effects of executive control on theory-of-mind development holds that inhibitory control is a key to developing social understanding [cf. also BRASS & HEYES 2005!]."
By comparing Korean preschoolers with their "Western" conspecifics, the authors now find that "on three of the four measures of inhibitory control ..., not only was the difference between the two cultures significant, but on each measure, the younger Korean 3-year-olds were performing above the level of their English counterparts who were almost 5 years old. ... [HOWEVER,] The lack of consistent relations between executive skills and mental state understanding, particularly in the Korean sample, may well be explained by the high levels of performance on the former, particularly the measures of inhibitory control, in the Korean children. The lack of transfer of these precocious executive skills into false belief understanding in the Korean preschoolers casts doubts on the necessity of a functional relationship between these two areas of cognitive development that has been assumed with reference to Western data."
"Although there is agreement between parents and teachers on the importance of socializing Korean children into a society emphasizing self-control within [Confucian] harmonized social interactions, there might be other possible reasons why Korean children appear to show higher levels of performance on tests involving inhibition. For example, child-directed speech may be a cradle for learning the elements of control. Such speech directed towards babies in Korea is characterized by a greater use of verbs than that in other languages ... The emphasis is on action and, by implication, its control ... It seems likely that this input and a related early child output of action terms are geared towards stressing the importance of self-control".

February 18, 2008

In their extremely interesting paper entitled "An Agent Harms a Victim: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study on Specific Moral Emotions", the authors Gayannée KEDIA et al. (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) try to disentangle four different "moral emotions" by a two factorial "agent harms a victim" LOTTERY scenario ("Self-anger": "You discover your lucky numbers but then you remember that you have forgotten to validate your ticket"; "guilt": "You discover your colleague's lucky numbers but then you remember that you forgotten to validate his ticket", "other-anger": "You discover your lucky numbers but then your colleage remembers that he has forgotten to validate your ticket", and "compassion": "You discover your colleague's lucky numbers but then he remembers that he has forgotten to validate his ticket"):
"First, we found that the stories involving someone else (guilt, other-anger, and compassion conditions) recruited more intensely the ToM network [TPJ, dMPFC, precuneus] than the self-focused ones (self-anger condition). ... The involvement of the amygdala in the experience of guilt and other-anger is of particular interest given that this structure has been associated with the capacity to detect possible threat ... The statistical interaction between the two experimental factors also indicated that stories in which both the self and someone else were concerned exhibited greater activity in the ToM network ... than those involving only the self or other ... On this note, Saxe has hypothesized that the dMPFC would support shared attention between "ME," someone, and an object or a goal. In the present study, this triadic relation was carried out by the guilt and other-anger stories: Each type of situation involved "ME" and someone else faced with a harmful act relying on an object (e.g., the lottery ticket that was not validated)."

February 17, 2008

In their paper entitled "Binding 3-D Object Perception in the Human Visual Cortex", the authors Yang JIANG et al. (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) note:
"How do visual luminance, shape, motion, and depth bind together in the brain to represent the coherent percept of a 3-D object within hundreds of milliseconds? We provide evidence from simultaneous MEG and EEG data that perception of 3-D objects defined by luminance or elicits sequential activity in human visual cortices within 500 ms."
The authors now show not only the whole temporal dynamics involved with object perception (V1 > hMT > LO > vTemp), but also that "activity in the lateral occipital (LO) complex is associated with an increase of induced power in the gamma band, a hallmark of binding. The close correspondence of an induced gamma response with concurrent sources located in the LO in both experimental conditions (~ 200 ms for luminance and ~300 ms for dynamic cues) strongly suggests that the LO is the key region for the assembly of object features."

February 16, 2008

In their paper entitled "Perceptual learning depends on perceptual constancy", the authors Patrick GARRIGAN & Philip J. KELLMAN (in: PNAS, see References) note the following:
"We perceive by means of energy received at the senses, but it is the properties of the material world — objects, surfaces, spatial arrangements, and events — that matter most for thought and action. Early responses in each sensory system necessarily relate to energy dimensions, but obtaining perceptual attributes that reflect properties of the material world requires computing relations among sensory activations. ... Sensory data fluctuate continually. ... Sensory values may be encoded at early stages, but relational processing derives higher-order regularities, and only the latter comprise perceptual representations and accessible inputs for learning."

Now, their sentence that "our view is consistent with that of Ahissar and Hochstein, who proposed a "reverse hierarchy" theory of perceptual learning: the idea that "learning is a top-down process, which begins at high-level areas of the visual system, and when these do not suffice, progresses backwards to the input levels" definitely reminded of Hippolyte Taine (see also my Seminar Script, Seminar-Script, S4 Figure 15):
”Les sensations élémentaires qui composent directement nos sensations ordinaires sont elles-mêmes des composés de sensations moindres … Quant aux éléments et aux éléments des éléments, la conscience ne les atteint pas, le raison-nement les conclut; ils sont aux sensations ce que les molecules secondaires et les atomes primitifs sont au corps; nous n’en avons qu’une conception abstraite, et ce qui nous les représente est non une image, mais une notation” (Taine 1870: 188, emphasis mine).

You see: there is nothing "new" under the sun... (But, alas, people do not know all former writings any more...?)

February 13, 2008

This evening, I have attended a lecture given by Michael Hagner (ETHZ) and Charlotte Klonk (HU Berlin) at Tübingen University (within the "Studium Generale").

Unfortunately enough, I had to remember them that (among other things ranging from Dürer, LeBrun & Lavater up to "functional circles" already drawn by Descartes, Meynert, Uexüll, and today's "perception-action cycle" theorists):

All maps are selective (and extremely local). And all mapping tools are extremely (methodically) biased.
And: "we" (still) have no global maps (in real-time)... (and according to Nicholas of Cusa: will never have).

And unfortunately enough: "we" are damned to make maps, because "we" are damned to "act" [see Lenin and the poor medical doctors who have to save lives and brains...]. ... AND YOU CAN NOT ACT without a (neural?) map...?

February 12, 2008

More and more, I have enough of (biased) "Evolution" and "Biology" (etc. — and despite the GREAT book by John ALCOCK (2005) on Animal Behavior (see References), which I can only warmly recommend to you all!).

Instead, I am more and more turning back to some hard Physics and Mathematics (and Mapology), and to great articles like those by Valdur SAKS et al. 2007 (see also References), where Saks and co-workers show their struggling for precise (physical, mathematical) maps and for (desperately needed!) better mappings of cellular energetic landscapes and (thermo-)dynamic molecular processes...

After all, Biology (including some "evolution" and its physical constraints) should always be understood as a mere subdiscipline of Physics (excluding Astronomy and Cosmology, which - alas! - still happen to be rather a kind of "Astrology"...)...

And I still cannot understand how "my conspecifics" can indulge in dinner partys, warfare, social games, and egotistical short-lived goals, instead of struggling for better maps and manipulations (for fighting not other "people" and other "races", but rather cancer, diseases, world-wide stupidity and short-comings, etc.)...

And with regard to some (biased) "stupidity", I can only welcome articles like the one by Sally Lehrman in the February issue of "Scientific American" (p. 23 f.: "From Race to DNA"), where the author strongly argues for an (overdue) replacement of biased terms and obsolete-obscene concepts like "race" with less biased terms like "ancestry" (within some nearly unbiased "personalized medicine"), while always taking into account not only phylo- and ontogenetical, but also strong environmental factors (i.e., strong physical and energetic constraints that still remain to be mapped at large...).

February 9, 2008

In their extremely interesting paper entitled "Brain Activation for Consonants and Vowels", the authors Manuel CARREIRAS & Cathy J. PRICE (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) note:
"Perea and Lupker (2004) found significant masked priming effects for consonant transpositions (relovucion-REVOLUCION vs. retosucion-REVOLUCION), but not for vowel transpositions (revulocion-REVOLUCION vs. revalicion-REVOLUCION). ... Interestingly, Semitic languages attest to the role of consonants in making lexical distinctions. In these languages, lexical roots are formed exclusively by consonants, whereas vowels are inserted to indicate morphological patterns."
In fact, "vowel processing shares neural resources with prosodic processing", and "prosodic processing is typically associated with right hemisphere activation ... and lexical processing is typically associated with the left hemisphere activation."
"To this end, pseudowords were created by transposing or replacing 2 nonadjacent letters. For example (PRIVAMERA) from the word PRIMAVERA "SPRING" and their replaced consonant controls (PRISALERA) as well as transposed letter-vowel pseudowords (PRIMEVARA) and their replaced vowel [sic!] controls (PRIMOVURA)."
"Notably, we observed increased activation in the right STS [superior temporal sulcus] for vowels relative to consonants during visual word processing tasks, with this effect being stronger during reading aloud than lexcial decision. ... Vowel changes alter prosodic information more than consonant changes ... Transposed-letter consonant pseudowords are more similar to words than the transposed vowel or the replaced-letter pseudowords, as the error rates and reaction times show. ... Thus, the rejection process is more difficult in the case of transposed consonants than in any other experimental condition, and right middle frontal activation is also higher."

February 7, 2008

In their article entitled "Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics", the authors Linda SMITH & Chen YU (in: Cognition, see References) note:
"The experiment reported here shows for the first time that infants rapidly learn multiple word-referent pairs by accruing statistical evidence across multiple and individually ambiguous word-scene pairings. The indeterminacy problem is solved not in a single trial but across trials, not for a single word and its referent but for a data set of many words and referents. ... In sum, these results tell us that cross-situational statistical learning is in the repertoire of young [14 months old] word learners. Despite the ambiguity of word-referent mappings on any individual training trial, infants clearly accumulate information across trials and use that information to determine the underlying mappings. In less than four minutes, with six different word forms and six different objects, infants learned enough to systematically look longer at the objects more strongly associated with the forms than those more weakly associated. ... Nonetheless, the present findings, like the earlier ones showing statistical learning of sequential probabilities, suggest that solutions to fundamental problems in learning language may be found by studying the statistical patterns in the learning environment and the statistical learning mechanisms in the learner ... However, statistical learning need not be the result of highly specialized statistical learning mechanisms ... The learner could solve this learning task via simple ... associative learning mechanisms ... the learner could equally associate "ball" with BALL and BAT [when two objects are presented] but after the experience of "ball" in the context of BALL and DOG, the association between "ball" and BALL would be stronger than that between "ball" and BAT. Over enough trials, these association strengths would converge on the real world statistics. ... If human learners possess the right learning mechanisms, they may mine this complexity [by attractor dynamics!] and in so doing solve the problem of referential uncertainty."

February 6, 2008

For a very good review on entorhinal and hippocampal spatial maps and attractor networks (grid cells and place cells) and their partial and global "re-mappings" due to contextual changes (shifts), I warmly recommend you the excellent review entitled "Self-localization and the entorhinal-hippocampal system" by Kathryn J. JEFFERY (in: Current Opinion in Neurobiology, see References):

February 5, 2008

I have now updated my lecture for Dallas (see Publications with an important annotation on mirror neurons, because many people and neuroscientists do not seem to "get it right":
"As a result – and as already noted by PANOFSKY 1957 and OLSSON & OCHSNER 2008 – mirror neurons may be neither necessary nor sufficient for some "empathy" and "Theory of Mind", because "similar motor responses" do not guarantee "similar feelings" or similar "Selves" or similar "Potential landscapes" on both sides: just take the famous example of a man from Ladakh who is greeting a man from Europe by protruding his tongue toward the latter... Hence, mirror neurons may only be necessary for quite simple mass-synchronizations of bodies (see some "nationalsocialist soldiers" and "folks"). But in daily life, "social uncertainties", failed communications and misunderstandings between "cultures" and individuals due to INDIRECT linkings (via words, gaze, etc.) will always prevail – unless "our" brains were synchronized directly, i.e., neurotechnically via DIRECT "brain-gates" (see my Seminar Script, Seminar-Script, S6 Figure 15)... ]
And that's why other structures (like TPJ, mACC etc.) are extremely crucial for "empathy" and "ToM" (see OLSSON & OCHSNER 2008 below), especially the TPJ as a major hub lying between visual cortices (occipital), viscerosomatic (vestibular, insular) cortices (extending to the anterior insula and cingulate), secondary somatosensory cortices (SII), parietal cortices (involved in coordinate transformations and shifts in perspective?), auditory cortices (Wernicke), and posterior cingulate cortex.

Besides, I have now seen through Suzanne KEEN's book "Empathy and the Novel" (see KEEN 2007).

February 4, 2008

In their paper entitled "The role of social cognition in emotion", the authors Andreas OLSSON & Kevin N. OCHSNER (in: TICS, see References) remind us once again that mirror neurons may not be sufficient for some "emotion understanding" (especially in "non-familiar" situations, where some "mental state attribution" or MSA is crucially needed), "because nonverbal cues to emotion are often ambiguous. In such cases, additional information is needed to constrain attributions about a person's intentions and hence their emotional state".
In such more complex cases, "these controlled MSAs enable us actively to take other peoples' perspectives and make judgments about their emotions or diagnostic elements of stable emotional dispositions, thereby changing empathic responding and activation in the AI [anterior insula] and mACC [medial anterior cingulate]. By and large, they depend on a network of regions, including the right temporal parietal junction (TPJ) and dorsal-rostral regions of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), including Brodmann area (BA) 10 [which "has a key role integrating information about the internal state of the body with higher-level mental state knowledge needed to categorize affective states"].
"If the mACC and AI support direct experiential awareness of intentional states, it is possible that the MPFC network supports meta-cognitive reflective awareness of them. ... Interestingly, some of the same regions involved in reflecting upon others' emotional states are involved in reflecting upon our own emotions [cf. CORRADI-DELL'ACQUA et al. 2008: "self-objectification"!], consistent with theories suggesting that in some cases we treat ourselves as an 'other' when making self-judgments. The reverse might also be true: we use information about our own states and traits when we reflect upon the states and traits of others who seem to be like ourselves."
Besides, the authors also note that MSAs may play a key role in "learning from others": "For example, watching another's fear expression to an unfamiliar dog could provide valuable information about potential danger, that individual's anxious disposition or both. These abilities to learn from and about others crucially depend on understanding others' emotions using both stimulus-driven and reflective MSAs".

February 3, 2008

I have now read the (old) short review entitled "Gain Modulation: A Major Computational Principle of the Central Nervous System" by Emilio SALINAS & Peter THIER 2000 (in: Neuron, see References) where the authors describe the first experiments (by Andersen et al.) on this subject:
"In their experiments, eye position was first held fixed, and the response of a parietal neuron was plotted as a function of the position of a spot of light in retinal coordinates [see the inserted image just below!]. We call this position x. Typically, the resulting curve had a single peak that could be fitted by a Gaussian function; we refer to it as f(x). Then the measurements were repeated using a different fixation point and thus a different gaze direction, y. In this case, the neural responses followed curves with similar shapes and preferred locations, but their amplitudes changed. Thus, the amplitude or gain of the receptive fields of these parietal neurons depended on gaze. The term “gain field” was coined to describe this gaze-dependent gain modulation. The gain field refers to the function g(y), where the firing rates of these neurons are well fitted by the expression r = f(x)g(y)."
All in all, all these results indicated that input and "gain modulation" via other areas "could provide an efficient solution to the coordinate transformation [i.e., a "re-"mapping] problem."

The authors now show that such gain fields not only exist in the parietal reach region, where "final and initial hand positions are represented by x and y ... and, according to the theories discussed, neurons downstream might respond as functions of x - y, which is the difference between final and initial hand positions, or motor error", but also gaze-dependent gain-fields in the superior colliculus ("the SC may be more involved in coordinate transformations than commonly thought"), and attention-dependent gain fields in the inferotemporal cortex (with "receptive fields that can somehow move around, scanning the visual field independently of eye position", so that "people have great difficulty in recognizing objects that are away from the attended point"; cf. also Van Essen's and Andersen's "shifter circuit"!!).
Besides, Dobbins et al. "tested the size selectivity of V4 neurons at multiple distances and found that V4 neurons did not exhibit object size constancy; rather, they preferred images of specific sizes and had gain fields that depended on viewing distance. ... Through mechanisms similar to those discussed, this type of gain modulation may give rise to size constancy in neurons downstream."
Furthermore, "neurons in area MSTd are sensitive to optic flow and are gain modulated by eye and head velocity. Thus, the source of the gain modulation here is the time derivative of the gaze angle ... [so] that MST may, in general, be in charge of compensating for distortions caused by eye-movements".

February 2, 2008

In their paper entitled "Molecular and electrophysiological evidence for net synaptic potentiation in wake and depression in sleep", the authors Vladyslav V. VYAZOVSKIY et al. (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) give additional evidence that an 'optimization of Potential landscapes' (and attractor landscapes) may be occurring during sleep, where only the most stable attractors will survive some (homeostatic) pruning of synapses during sleep:
"In summary, wakefulness is associated with an increased number of AMPAR GluR1 subunits and with an increased expression of phosphorylated CamKII. Sleep is associated instead with a decreased number of AMPAR GluR1 subunits and with the dephosphorylation [inactivation] of GluR1 at Ser845. These data provide molecular evidence that is consistent with the occurrence of net synaptic potentiation during wakefulness and synaptic depression during sleep in two large forebrain areas, the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus. ... SWA [slow-wave activity] in the cortical EEG ... increases in proportion to the time spent awake and decreases during sleep. For this reason, SWA is thought to reflect the accumulation of sleep need during wakefulness and its discharge during sleep. ... If our finding that AMPAR density and the slope and amplitude of field potential responses increase after periods of waking is indeed indicative of a net increase in synaptic strength, and if the converse is the case after periods of sleep, then it should be more difficult to induce LTP in animals that have been awake for several hours than in animals that have been awake for just a few minutes after a long period of sleep [and indeed, "prolonged wakefulness may pose an increasing burden on plastic circuits, consistent with theoretical and computational analyses suggesting that a progressive strengthening of synapses with experience cannot continue indefinitely because of constraints on energy, space, supplies and saturation of the [Potential landscape's] ability to learn"]."

"Altogether, net cortical synaptic strength appears to be homeostatically regulated in a way that is similar to sleep pressure, which grows as a function of waking duration and intensity and decreases with sleep. ... Indeed, a progressive downscaling of synaptic strength [i.e., the optimization of Potential landscapes and of "net synaptic potentiations"] may represent a key function of NREM sleep."

January 31, 2008

It is interesting to see how today's mapping tools (i.e., robots, fully automated EEG-recording devices etc.) are becoming ever more perfect — but not today's imperfect map-makers and scientists trying to interpret these perfect data (with seemingly no background of vast reading and knowledge) and today's seemingly overbusy reviewers:

In their study entitled "The Influence of Mozart's sonata K.448 on Visual Attention: An ERPs study", the authors Weina ZHU et al. (in: Neuroscience Letters, see References) note:
"In the present study, the effects of Mozart's sonata K.448 on voluntary and involuntary attention were investigated by recording and analyzing behavioural and event-related potentials (ERPs) data in a three-stimulus visual oddball task. P3a (related to involuntary attention) and P3b (related to voluntary attention) were analyzed. The "Mozart effect" was showed on ERP but not on behavioral data."
"The 'distractor' P300 was called 'P3a', and the parietal maximum P300 from the target stimulus 'P3b'. P3a derived from stimulus-driven frontal attention mechanisms during task processing, whereas P3b originated from temporal-parietal [junction?] activity associated with voluntary attention and subsequent memory processing."

In order to rule out the possibility that sound in general (and not specifically Mozart) may account for their principal findings (decreased P3a [as evidence for a better voluntarily control over the involuntary distraction] and P3b amplitudes when subjects were performing the task while listening to Mozart in the background, but not when being in the control condition of silence), the authors ran a second experiment, where "the repeated playing of the chromatic scales was used to replace the Mozart's K448 as the sound background."

And now you should read the authors' interpretation:
"Another interpretation could be that music has simply increased the workload of cognition, in another word, it is the sound effect on the amplitude of P3b rather than the Mozart effect. But the results of our supplemented Experiment 2 ruled out that possibility. Unlike the results in Experiment 1, there is no significant difference between music [i.e., chromatic scales!] and silence conditions".

Now, the authors do not seem to have read Ernst KURTH's Musikpsychologie (1930 — cf. also today's epigonal music psychologists like Levitin et al.), who noted that all "meaningful" music (not only Mozart...) involves heightened "voluntarily" auditory shifts, because cultured (!) subjects are always ("automatically", "endogenously") trying to predict (to "foresee", to "will") the future trajectories (the "development") of the music, e.g., while ("voluntarily") longing for "target maps" and for the resolution and fulfillment of their expectations.
Hence, any "meaningful" music has to do with heightened voluntary shifts and "attentional" resources (cf. also ELBS 2005), so that it is quite clear that Mozart's music with its "voluntary structure" (in the background) may have interfered with both the "voluntary" ("endogenous", "top-down") and "involuntary" shifts involved in the (foreground) task — as perfectly shown by the authors' great (perfect & automatically mapped) results... (and that's why I presented here this study)

January 29, 2008

I have now read ECCLES 1953, where John C. Eccles not only discusses neural networks, but also speculates about "the will" exerting (and being based on) spatiotemporal "fields of influence“ (which later on will be called "attractors" and "attractor landscapes"?) and about the "detector function of the active cerebral cortex“, that means: the Cortex "detects" shifts in attractor dynamics (i.e., shifts in "fields of influence”), and (in this way) influences the "fields of influence" by itself in turn (thus modulating the attractor landscapes by itself).
Besides, Eccles also speaks about “maps” being a good illustration for "neural networks", because of their unlikeness to the “physical world”, since every map is not (just) a mapping (of some "physical world" "we" all "agree on"), but is just a highly selective and rather “symbolic” entity (and YOU and your brain may POSSEss and deal with nothing else than just such maps or neural networks or attractor landscapes...).

Besides, I have now commented SANDKUEHLER & BHATTACHARYA 2008 at:
http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?inReplyTo=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F4b110aad-c671-4b46-b213-7e059589528a&root=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F4b110aad-c671-4b46-b213-7e059589528a

January 27, 2008

In one of the first "real-time" studies on the "insight-problem" (see also the Droodle-Project in my Future Projects!), the authors Simone SANDKUEHLER & Joydeep BHATTACHARYA ("Deconstructing Insight: EEG Correlates of Insightful Problem Solving", in: PLoS One, see References) differentiate between four possible stages involved in "insight" and try to map the neural underpinnings of each stage (but, alas, they fail to refer to elegant models of attractor dynamics!): "mental impasse" > "restructuring" / "deeper understanding" > "suddenness":
"From an information processing point of view, the system has reached a limiting point at mental impasse: any new possible options or interpretations from long-term memory are blocked from further processing within working memory. ... thus, mental impasse may be caused by an "attentional overload". ... Restructuring is made possible either by internal retrieval processes which search long-term memory for concepts which can be utilized to reinterpret the available knowledge in the problem space or by the availability of external cues. ... According to the first hypothesis, restructuring is a controlled, conscious and attention-intense process, and the second hypothesis suggests an automatic and subconscious recombination where relevant pieces of information in long-term memory [i.e., stable attractors!] are automatically and subconsciously recombined".
As stimuli, the authors "used the compound remote associate problems, where each problem consists of three test words (e.g., back, clip, wall) and the subject needs to generate a solution word (paper), which forms a valid compound word or phrase with each of the three test words (paperback, paperclip, wallpaper)."
The authors' results now "indicate a neural correlate of mental impasse in parieto-occipital brain regions in the gamma frequency band ... This may suggest that selective attentional processes are accountable for an excessive focus on an inappropriate problem representation [i.e., in the words of attractor dynamics and Hopfield nets and spin-glass transitions: the system gets "stuck" or "trapped" in several local minima attractors]... Additionally, we found a theta frequency band effect [which] ... is possibly associated with an increased search in the memory space for possible solution words [i.e., some "desperate search for attractors" and "meanings"!] prior to mental impasse. ... Hints to insight problems are more effective when presented to the left visual field (i.e., right hemisphere) ... We suggest that the alpha ERS may be related to a weak, unconscious processing of the solution in the right temporal area, consistent with previous research showing that a solution [i.e., finding a stable unique final attractor or global minimum] to a verbal problem can be weakly activated in the right hemisphere. With the aid of the hint the initially weakly activated solution related information became intensified and reached the level of awareness [i.e., in the words of attractor dynamics: subcortical inputs may shift the system away from the local minima toward the final stable global minimum, in this way "solving" the "impasse" by "re-flexibilizing" and "restructuring" the attractor landscapes...]."
"The gamma band power of a mental impasse is still higher in comparison to timeout, which possibly reflects the problem solvers excessive focus on an inappropriate problem representation [i.e., a "local minimum" trap] and thus "attentional overload". ... One could thus speculate that the degree of gamma band oscillations must remain at an optimal (i.e., sub-maximal) level to maximize the performance."
Now, the "neural correlate of conscious restructuring (full vs. no) was mainly found in the alpha band (8-12 Hz) and in right prefrontal brain regions ... The present results indicate the neuronal correlate of suddeness ... at parieto-occipital areas in the gamma (38-44 Hz) frequency band from -1.5 to -1 s and from -0.75 to 0 s before solution response."
"After hint presentation we observed for 84.3% of all correct solutions a high restructuring rating ... indicating a strong conscious awareness of the ongoing restructuring process. This explanation also predicts that the frequency of sudden solutions with hint should decrease because of the increased metacognitive processes that are involved after hint presentation."

And by the way: this "insightful" optimization of attractor landscapes (while minimizing "net potentiations" and "Potential landscapes"?) may also occur ("unconsciously") during sleep (see Kekulé, Jan Born, and VYAZOVSKIY et al. 2008).

January 26, 2008

In his paper entitled "Holes, objects, and the left hemisphere", the author Sheng HE (in: PNAS, see References) notes in his review (but, alas, forgets to mention the LOC, stable attractors, etc. as well!):
"The emphasis on global properties in perception is not new (e.g., Gestalt theory of perception), but the topological perception theory [of Chen et al.] specifically defines the global properties as topological invariants. In addition, this theory states that the primitives of visual form perception are geometric invariants at different levels of structural stability under transformations. Thus, a more stable property would be more primitive and more important to extract early in the process. ... Chen suggests that during possible transformations, the most stable form properties are described by topological invariance — one shape will not break into two, nor will any new holes be created. Because topological properties are the most stable properties under transformation, it makes sense that in normal visual perception, the extraction of topological properties serves as the starting point of object perception [yes, this is exactly what the LOC does!]... Indeed, the ultimate reason for the left hemisphere's advantage could be in the properties' importance in defining objects ... Topological perception has an advantage in both hemispheres, but more so in the left hemisphere [clearly, because of the downward projections to the anterior Insula and Broca area involved in "naming" - see SHAFTO et al. 2007!). ... With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures, Wang et al. also searched for the potential neural correlates of enhanced topological sensitivity. Two sets of fMRI experiments converge to a region in the left temporal lobe, a site somewhat anterior to category-selective visual cortical sites...".

And that's why closABLE objects without holes (triangles, circles, etc.) look much more "topologically similar" than objects with holes. HOWEVER, even Moore's reclining nudes (with holes) activated the LOC in Malach et al. 1995 (because "we" "know" that bodies have no holes, after all....).
But for all this, see also my online Dallas lecture (Publications)...

January 25, 2008

In a nice paper (following Galton et al.) on "100% Accuracy in Automatic Face Recognition", the authors R. JENKINS & A. M. BURTON (in: Science, see References) note:
"National security and crime prevention often depend on our ability [!] to establish the identities of individuals and check that they are whom they claim to be. ... The only system that can reliably cope with real-world image variability is a human observer who is familiar with the faces concerned. We have recently proposed that human familiarity with a particular face can be modeled with by a process of image averaging, whereby different photos of that face are merged to form a single image. Here, we show that image averaging can also greatly improve performance of an automatic face-recognition system".

BADLY ENOUGH, these authors do not refer to "attractors", however: in fact, a human brain HAS built up a stable attractor by averaging across statistical learning processes (i.e., across multiple encounters with shifting variants of the "same" face), so that humans are really CAPABLE of face recognition DUE TO SUCH STABILIZED and INVARIANT ATTRACTORS in their brains.

But for all this, see also my online Dallas lecture (Publications) on "attractors", "familiarity", "reliability from non-reliable systems", and "stability from variability"...

January 22, 2008

In their extremely important review of the Temporoparietal Junction (TPJ or PTO) entitled "Effects of shifting [!] perspective of the self: an fMRI study", the authors Corrado CORRADI-DELL'ACQUA et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) note:
"A large number of both neurophysiological and neuropsychological studies have investigated the neural correlates of disembodiment, the cognitive ability [of a map-maker or POTENTIAL landscape...] to project properties of the self outside the boundaries of one's own body, and as a consequence to process an external entity as an objectified (or disembodied) self. ... The authors found that macaques can be trained to make productive use of the tool or the images displayed; this newly acquired skill is associated with the emergence of cortico-cortical connections between neurons in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS - typically responding to visual stimuli in the peri-personal space ...) and temporo-parietal junction ... Mastering tool-use skills requires the ability to project one’s own motor intention towards an external object, the tool. It has been suggested that the involvement of both the temporo-parietal complex in the human brain for observations such autoscopic phenomena and homologous regions in the monkey brain for the emergence of tool-use skills, is suggestive of this part of the brain being recruited whenever properties of the self are externalized towards an external entity (namely whenever disembodiment occurs, which in turn leads subject, based on the equivalence between the external tool and own body, to regard its own body as an external object, namely self-objectification)".

In their study, the participants "faced a video-game like display in which fictional players were throwing each other a ball. Participants were engaged in an Agency task in which their key-presses were synchronous with the movement’s onset of one of the players, which in turn represented the self. In a control condition, participants’ key-presses were instead unrelated to the action of the players in the video-game".
"Thus, employing the Agency (but not the Control) task under Changeable (but not Fixed) views would require, at each trial, reassigning the player which we consider to be ourself towards a different position in the outside space, that is labeling a new agent as the self. Based on the existing findings we hypothesized that the analysis of this condition would reveal increased neural activity in the right hemisphere over and around the temporo-parietal junction."

"It has been suggested ... that, in order to recognize an external agent as a disembodied self (e.g., looking at one’s own photograph), one needs to establish an equivalence relationship between a representation of the self and the agent. It is on the basis of recognizing that what is true of the self is also true of the agent, therefore the two must be equivalent, and therefore the agent eventually is an objectified self. ... This process resulted in the recruitment of the PTO junction which, in turn, makes the agent coded as an disembodied self, that is, included in what we consider to be "ours"."

In fact, all this may be "a process of mental simulation in which someone represents which his own bodily states would be, if moved in a position that is different from his own. This process may explain the implication of neurons within the PTO junction in experimental paradigms, such as the visual-perspective tasks [and in mentalizing tasks]."

"To conclude, disembodiment of one’s own mental states cannot account for all the instances involving mentalizing, but it can account for the instances in which one predicts what his internal states would be in a context that is different from his own. Mentalizing tasks under these constraints were associated with the activation in temporo-parietal regions ..., just like in the present study where the PTO junction was found to be implicated in seeing one’s own action performed from a different points of view. This strengthens the hypothesis that the disembodiment process, as described in the present study, is also recruited during mentalizing tasks."

And in the end, as an example of this simulational ("mentalizing") process, the authors refer to a fortunate gag in the movie Seven Years of Bad Luck (1921)...

January 20, 2008

In their nice paper entitled "The logic of indirect speech", the authors Steven PINKER et al. (in: PNAS, see References) note:
"Indirect speech [as in allusions, polite requests, trying to bribe a police officer, etc.] is inefficient, vulnerable to being understood, and seemingly unnecessary (because only a naif could fail to see past the literal meaning). Yet politeness and other forms of indirectness in speech appear to be universal or nearly so".
The authors now not only show (within game theory) that indirect speech could maximize the payoff matrices involved in communication games (e.g., when maintaining one's face), but that indirect speech may be used [especially by highly intelligent speakers...] for cautiously sounding out (and simulating) social POSSIbilities when navigating, predicting, and manipulating complex social landscapes before actually acting:
"With some of their fellows (typically kin, lovers, and friends), they freely share and do favors; with others, they jockey for dominance; with still others, they trade goods and favors. People [as "ultrasocial animals"!!!] distinguish between these relationships sharply, and when one person breaches the logic of a relationship with another, they both suffer an emotional cost. Nonetheless, humans often have to risk these breaches to get on with the business of life, and they often use language [and indirect speech] to do so. In exploring [i.e., sounding out the possibilities...] the boundaries of relationship types, humans anticipate [i.e., simulate] what other humans [or other "baboons"?] think about the relationship: what the other party in the relationship thinks; what overhearers and gossipers think; and what the other party thinks about what they think about what the other party thinks about what they think, and so on. The need to preserve their relationships while transacting [i.e., navigating] the business of their lives can thus explain humans' tendency to fill their social life with innuendo, hypocrisy, and taboo [and indirect speeches!]".

January 19, 2008

In their paper entitled "Ultra-fine frequency tuning revealed in single neurons of human auditory cortex," the authors Y. BITTERMAN et al. (in: Nature, see References) note:
"In the auditory system, frequency just-noticeable differences in well-trained subjects may be 30 times smaller than the presumed [!!!] bandwidth of the peripheral filters (‘critical bands’, typically about a sixth of an octave in humans, as measured in psychoacoustical tests). ... Responses of neurons in human auditory cortex were recorded from four patients with intractable epilepsy monitored with intracranial depth electrodes to identify seizure foci for potential surgical treatment ... We therefore suggest that the neural responses we observed in human auditory cortex reflect a readout of information available in the activity of large neuronal ensembles in subcortical stations, and that the auditory cortex is necessary for this readout to be performed, resulting in the behavioural hyperacuity of frequency discrimination in humans”.

January 18, 2008

And now come "our" so cherished mirror neurons again:

In their paper entitled "Precise auditory-vocal mirroring in neurons for learned vocal communication," the authors J. F. PRATHER et al. (in: Nature, see References) note with regard to the HVC complex in the avian brain (as a part of the neostriatum, i.e., the Basal Ganglia!) while using "a lightweight chronic recording device to sample neural activity in male swamp sparrows ..., a wild songbird that resembles humans in its dependence on auditory experience to learn its vocal communication":
"HVC contains two distinct populations of projection neurons, including one (HVCra) that innervates song premotor neurons in the robust nucleus of the arcopallium (RA) and another (HVCx) that innervates a[nother] striatal region of the avian basal ganglia (area X) important to song learning and perception. ... We recorded from identified projection neurons in the HVC of awake and freely behaving adult male swamp sparrows during auditory presentation of bird song and during singing."
The authors now find that "HVCx neurons display auditory responses highly selective in the stimulus domain, typically being activated by only one song type in the bird's repertoire. ... To investigate whether auditory HVCx neurons also were active during singing, we relied on the tendency of swamp sparrows to countersing ... - this is a territorial singing behaviour triggered by presentation of either the bird's own songs or those of other swamp sparrows." (And no miracle that when hundreds of sparrows now countersing, the may all be mass-synchronized by their neurons?!).
However, these auditory mirror neurons in HVCx were slightly (selectively) modulated "between the singing and listening states", while the "singing-related activity involved short bursts of action potentials, whereas the auditory-evoked activity typically consisted of single action potentials."
Importantly, the authors found that HVCx cells were "unresponsive to other swamp sparrow songs chosen at random", and that these HVCx cells "respond exclusively to self-generated [i.e., "familiar"] vocalizations."
However, they found that these neurons may indeed be attractors, i.e., that this "selective auditory responsiveness of HVCx cells extends to similar vocal sequencs produced by other birds, making auditory-vocal HVCx neurons well suited to a role in communication".
The authors then speculate about these neurons' role in a motor corollary discharge (sent to further areas in the cortex and other striatal structures for auditory-motor comparison, mismatch-detection, and song learning) and in similar neurons in the human brain: "In the human brain, cortical neurons similar to HVCx auditory-vocal neurons could transmit speech-related auditory and motor information to striatal regions implicated in speech development".

AND WHAT DO We LEARN FROM ALL THAT?
a) Do never forget subcortical (striatal) areas (like the HVC) when you look for mirror neurons (they may be found everywhere!)
b) If there were only mirror neurons, "we" would be all "mass-synchronized" (like Hitler's soldiers or those poor territorial countersinging birds above; see also my Seminar-Script, S6 Figure 24!).
BUT FORTUNATELY enough, there may also be many inhibitory neurons which may selectively shape (modulate, inhibit) all these primitive mirror neurons...

January 12, 2008

In their paper entitled "Learning-related long-term potentiation [LTP] of inhibitory synapses in the cerebellar cortex", the authors Bibiana SCELFO et al. (in: PNAS, see References) note:
"Recent studies, both in the hippocampus and cerebellum, have shown that feed-forward inhibition plays a fundamental role in shaping the time window in which excitatory inputs can summate to reach the threshold for spike generation. In fact, this time window is an indication of the temporal resolution for neuronal integration. Recently, it has been shown that the tme window for multiple input coincidence detection by hippocampal neurons is unchanged after in vitro LTP only when both excitatory and inhibitory synapses are potentiated. Thus, the temporal fidelity for spike generation within a neuronal network requires adequates levels of excitation and inhibition to be maintained. ... In addition, in the cerebellar cortex fear conditioning is accompanied by LTP of the excitatory synapses formed between parallel fibres (PFs) and Purkinje cells (PCs). ... The fact that fear learning is accompanied by an LTP of both the excitatory PF input and of the inhibitory GABAergic synaptic input to PCs raises the question of the possible significance of this concomitant potentiation."
And now the authors summarize (and you now see once more the involvement of the cerebellum in precise timing, as in "My map of the brain" as well!): "When a beam of PFs is stimulated, PCs show an excitatory response, which is truncated by the incoming stellate inhibition. By this mechanism, the inhibition contributes to sharpening the temporal pattern of the signal processing. On the other hand, the off-beam inhibition exerted by the basket cells provides a means to define the spatial pattern of the PC firing. By applying these concepts to our model, the simultaneous LTP of excitatory and inhibitory inputs should be seen as a mechanism of controlling the spatiotemporal pattern of PC firing. ... These results demonstrate that the presence of both forms of plasticity ensures a more effective coincidence detection without degrading the time resolution of the system. In addition, although these data do not establish a role for changes in inhibitory synaptic transmission in fear conditioning, they add further correlational evidence that cerebellar plasticity is involved in fear learning."

January 3, 2008

In their extremely interesting neuro-linguistic paper entitled "Event-related potential characterisation of the Shakespearean functional shift in narrative sentence structure", the authors Guillaume THIERRY et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) summarize:
"Some four hundred years ago, Shakespeare already crafted verses in which the functional status of words was changed, as in "to lip a wanton in a secure couch". Here, we tested the effect of word class conversion as used by Shakespeare — the functional shift — on event-related brain potential waves traditionally reported in neurophysiolinguistics: the left anterior negativity (LAN), the N400 and the P600. Participants made meaningfulness decisions to sentences containing (a) a semantic incongruity, (b) a functiona lshift, (c) a double violation, or (d) neither a semantic incongruity or a syntactic violation. The Shakespearean functional shift elicited significant LAN and P600 modulations but failed to modulate the N400 wave. This provides evidence that words which had their functional status changed triggered both an early syntactic evaluation process thought to be mainly automatic and a delayed re-evaluation / repair process that is more controlled, but semantic integration required no additional processing. We propose that this dissociation between syntactic and semantic evaluation enabled Shakespeare to create dramatic effects without diverting his public away from meaning".
In their experiment, "participants read sentences pertaining to the four conditions, i.e., semantically expected and syntactically correct (control sentences, e.g., I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would accompany me), semantically expected but syntactically incorrect, i.e. a functional shift (e.g., …you said you would companion me), semantically unexpected but syntactically correct (semantic violation, e.g., …you said you would incubate me), and both semantically unexpected and syntactically incorrect (double violation, e.g., …you said you would charcoal me)."
HOWEVER, the authors carefully note in the end: "It must be kept in mind, however, that studies attempting to measure the neurophysiological effects of literary works in an “ecological” fashion will inevitably face two major challenges: (a) the spirit of the time and the way in which contemporaries of Shakespeare appreciated his works is forever lost; [cf. dito my same objection to some "Neuroarthistory" to John Onians in September 2006!] (b) using excerpts from literary works in their original format precludes virtually all forms of stimulus control."

December 31, 2007

In their extremely important paper (directly relating to Barnett Newman?) entitled "Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference", the authors Norman A. S. FARB et al. (in: SCAN, see References) differentiate between a narrative Self (supported by cortical midline structures also involved in some default mode or simulational mode; NF), and an "immediate, agentic 'I' supporting the notion of momentary experience [EF] as an expression of selfhood":
And because the brain always seems to be biased toward this default state ("mind wandering"), it may not be so easy to shift one's focus to this "immediate I" without training (e.g., by meditation), in order to clearly differentiate between these two modes: "It may, therefore, be important to study individuals with specific training in monitoring moment-to-moment experience to more reliably recruit the the brain regions supporting momentary self-focus in the face of a narrative generation bias. ... The current study examined individuals with mindfulness meditation training (MT) in addition to a novice group without such training, in an effort to determine whether the MT group would show an increased capacity [i.e., ABILITy] to disengage from narrative generation and reveal the neural networks supporting present-centred self-awareness".
"In response to reading trait-related adjectives, participants in the present study were asked to engage eighter: (i) a NF mode, reflecting on what the adjective meant about them as a person or (ii) an EF mode, monitoring their moment-to-moment experience in response to the adjectives".
Their principal finding was now that "moment-by-moment self-experience may rely simply on task-related suppression of midline cortical representations very similar to those supporting narrative self-focus ... MT may afford greater access to distinct modes of self-focus by promoting a shift away from viewing viscerosomatic activity through the lens of the mPFC towards a distinct mode of sensory awareness supported by the lateral PFC."
Accordingly, while participants "engaged midline prefrontal cortices (ventral and dorsal mPFC) and a left lateralised linguistic-semantic network (inferior lateral PFC, middle temporal and angular gyri) during NF", novices showed "restricted reductions in the cortical midline network ... when attention was explicitly directed towards a moment-to-moment EF." In fact, the EF network comprised "ventral and dorsolateral PFC, as well as right insula, SII and inferior parietal lobule [i.e., "evolutionary older neural regions"]."
Hence, "the narrative mode of self-reference may represent an over-learned mode of information processing that has become automatic through practice", and this "detached or objective mode of self-focus may be aided by the recruitment of the right angular gyrus of the inferior parietal lobule. In addition to studies showing that this region is involved in switching between first and third person perspectives (RUBY & DECETY 2004), stimulation of this region has been associated with 'out of body experiences' where an individual experiences stepping outside of themselves, affording a detached perspective on their corporeal self."

December 28, 2007

In their important paper entitled "Investigating Action Understanding: Inferential Processes versus Action Simulation", the authors Marcel BRASS et al. (in: Current Biology, see References) directly compare the two hypotheses concerning action understanding: "Our findings support the assumption that action understanding in novel situations is primarily mediated by an inferential interpretative system rather than the mirror system".
"Clearly, direct matching [via mirror neurons] provides a plausible mechanism for the quick and effortless recognition of goals of actions that are highly familiar to the observer. ... [However, inferential processes] have been consistently related to regions along the superior temporal sulcus (STS), the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the anterior frontomedian cortex [aFMC], and the posterior cingulate cortex, which are brain areas lacking mirror properties. Clearly, the inference-based model provides a plausible mechanism of action interpretation when the observed behaviour in a given context is unfamiliar or improbable and when intention recognition must rely on interpreting the action in relation to situational constraints."
"When comparing a situation where an unusual action was highly implausible with one where the same action was very plausible, we found strong and reliable activations along the STS and a less reliable activation in the aFMC. ... Identifying the goal of a familiar action observed in its stereotypic context can be easily and automatically achieved by mapping it onto the corresponding motor representations already present in the observer's action schemes [i.e., Potential landscape]. In contrast, inferring the purpose of an unusual action and the reason why it is performed in an implausible context necessitates a great deal of active inferencing to evaluate the efficiency of the action in relation to its situational constraints. ... We suggest that in contrast to most previous studies, the present experiment captures a crucial type of context-sensitive inferential activity (rationalization) that is necessary for a generative understanding of intentional actions across variable contexts."

In a related paper on ""What Are You Feeling? Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Assess the Modulation of Sensory and Affective Responses during Empathy for Pain", the authors Claus LAMM et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) asked participants "to focus on either the sensory or the affective consequences of painful stimulations":
"The different instructions recruited distinct neural networks. Focusing on pain intensity was associated with increased signal in contralateral somatosensory (S1) and in contralateral premotor cortex. ... The contralateral middle insular cortex has intrinsic connections to the basal ganglia, and a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies shows that it is most consistently activated during the first-hand experience of pain. ... This part of the insula also shows stronger signal changes when participants imagine pain from a first-person perspective. ... Focusing on the sensory consequences also resulted in stronger activations in the action anticipation network outlined above (inferior parietal cortex [TPJ!] and ventral premotor cortex), as well as in two distinct clusters in the anterior cingulate"
"A recent meta-analysis documented that the TPJ is not only involved in various high-level cognitive phenomena such as empathy and theory of mind but also in lower-level computations. The putative basis for these phenomena are neural computations related to updating and reorienting attention due to violations of expectations and the detection of change [i.e., the detection of shifts]. Such a mechanism was also required in the current study where the displayed situation [biopsy of a numbed hand] does not result in the aversive consequences it would bear under normal circumstances."
Their results now cast "doubts on simulation accounts of empathy, which claim that the commonalities in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex indicate the actual emotion sharing between observer and target ... In the case of the biopsies on the numbed hand, however, no affect has to be shared and yet insular and cingulate cortices are clearly activated. This initial response might be down-regulated by cognitive mechanism of top-down control [i.e., via the TPJ]."

December 27, 2007

In their extremely important paper entitled "fMRI Activity Patterns in Human LOC Carry Information about Object Exemplars within Category", the authors Evelyn EGER et al. (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) show that the LOC is in fact a (category-invariant) giant attractor containing at the same time several fine attractors (categories, exemplars, protoypes):
"The LOC is considered a structure subserving general shape processing (common to all object types), but the precise nature of object-selective information within the LOC (i.e., in how far, and at what level of representation, LOC distinguishes individual objects) remains to be established."
Pattern classification of different object categories (with different exemplars) was performed using multivariate linear support vector machines, and prediction accuracies "tended to increase with larger numbers of voxels and plateau at around 200 voxels. ... although the mean signal in the LOC (as for conventional fMRI analyses) did not discriminate between and within object categories, the multivariate pattern signal now allowed successful classification performance. This indicates that neural population responses within the human LOC, in addition to discriminating between categories, also carry information sufficient to discriminate finer detail between individual object exemplars.
"In the first experiment, prediction accuracies were also higher for between-category than within-category comparisons, resulting in within-category comparisons being close to chance in the anterior LOC. This data are somewhat inconsistent with the notion of a simple object processing hierarchy according to which more posterior subregions [i.e., the LOC as a giant attractor] would just be responsive to any object, potentially subserving 'object detection,' whereas more anterior regions in the ventral temporal cortex (as also our anterior ROI) contain subregions discriminative between objects [i.e., prototypes and categories, i.e., several fine attractors]".
However, more studies (perhaps using morphing techniques?) "will be required to reveal the extent of generalization ("tuning") of fMRI response patterns across a wider range of changes, and across a broader range of (potentially parameterized) changes in object shape".

December 26, 2007

In their paper entitled "Individual faces elicit distinct response patterns in human anterior temporal cortex", the authors Nikolaus KRIEGESKORTE et al. (in: PNAS, see References) used only two face images in an event-related design, in which "subjects ... performed an anomaly-detection task, requiring them to pay close attention to each repeated presentation of an [slightly varied] image".
They now report that "in left aIT, face-exemplar information remains insignificant, independent of the number of voxels included. In right aIT, by contrast, face-exemplar information becomes highly significant when more than approximately 200 voxels are included. ... In monkey electrophysiology, in fact, face-identity effects appear stronger in anterior than in posterior inferotemporal cortex. ... The face-processing stages of detection and identification have been associated with the successive components M100 and M170 in a magnetoencephalography study. ... In a simple template-matching framework, detection would require something like an [posterior] average-face template, whereas identification would require multiple templates [i.e., attractors] sensitive to the subtle differences between faces [in anterior areas]..
In fact, "congenital prosopagnosics can detect faces and often exhibit intact [posterior] FFA activity. However, they cannot identify faces, and there is evidence of decreased cortical volume in the right anterior temporal cortex."

December 25, 2007

In their nice paper entitled "Computational significance of transient dynamics in cortical networks", the authors Daniel DURSTEWITZ & Gustavo DECO (in: European Journal of Neuroscience, see References) push the theory of attractor networks and dynamic Potential landscapes a few steps further:
"in these [attractor] networks, patterns and memory states, corresponding for instance to visual objects, scenes, or sequences of events, were stored as attractors of the system dynamics, mostly fixed points or simple (low-period) limit cycles. Upon environmental stimulation, the network converged to one of these attractors representing the outcome of the computational process. Usually neither the transient dynamics while approaching the attractor state nor the time it took the system to settle were of computational significance themselves. While this framework remains very attractive until today with regards to both its conceptual simplicity and its apparent power in accounting for a number of neurobiological and psychological phenomena, it may not be so easy to map onto the neurophysiological reality. We started off with a specific experimental example ... in which the fixed point of the neural dynamics is both less informative about a sensory stimulus than the transient trajectory and might actually never be reached within the brief exposition times in real-life situations."

And now comes the age-old problem of (un-)stability of attractors (and their functional significance):
"Within this context, the idea is that true attractors of an underlying deterministic dynamics still exist, representing spontaneous activity and decision states. However, the cortex resides in a fluctuation-driven regime where the dynamics are characterized by probabilistic flipping between attractor states making them unstable (metastable) under the noisy dynamics. Again, it is exactly this unstable transient dynamical regime [i.e., the shift from one attractor to another], that could account for behavioural regularities (Weber’s law) and trial-averaged neurophysiological observations, and not the deterministic convergence to one of the attractors. ... More generally, one may ask whether true attractors indeed exist in the dynamics of the cerebral cortex, and which role they would ultimately play [right — attractors seem to be rather virtual Platonic "ideals" indeed...]."
"Real neural systems are never really stationary but produce high-dimensional wandering dynamics within which local temporarily attracting (metastable) states are embedded, sporadically visited by the system’s dynamics [see my Potential landscape animation at [21]... ]... In terms of nonlinear dynamics, there are several possibilities for the nature of such states. In the simplest case, for instance, it might just be noisy fluctuations moving the system among states which would be stable under deterministic dynamics, or there could be ‘quasi-stable’ states, former attractor states that have just lost their stability ..., are still attracting along most dimensions but allow trajectories to slowly escape along one or a few others ... A somewhat related phenomenon are ‘unstable’ attractors, a term that has been used to refer to objects which attract trajectories from certain regions of state space (have a basin of attraction) but are unstable locally and hence lose trajectories again in their vicinity ... Attractor ruins and unstable attractors may form chains such that the system may cycle between them in an irregular yet not completely random fashion, and this wandering trajectory may be at the heart of the computational process implemented by the system."

December 17, 2007

In their paper entitled "Unravelling Boléro: progressive aphasia, transmodal creativity and the right posterior cortex", the authors William W. SEELEY et al. (in: Brain, see References) report a case of "improved visual creativity" emerging "in the context of focal anterior brain disease", when posterior areas are presumably released from inhibition by frontal areas:
"Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) deficits ... result from atrophy of the dominant perisylvian cortex, and patients with a frontal-insular variant [cf. also SHAFTO et al. 2007!)develop difficulty with grammar, syntax and articulation in conjunction with non-fluent, effortful and apractic speech. ... Even PPA patients without new talents show superior visuospatial cognition when compared to other dementia patients. ... In this report, we describe ... a patient [AA] with the frontal-insular form of PPA who developed new and extraordinary visual creativity during the course of her illness ... [and] we provide convergent structural and functional imaging evidence that specific regions within AA's non-dominant posterior neocortex were not only intact but enhanced in structure and function."
In fact, AA was drawn to "themes of repetition, texture, and symmetry, because their thriving posterior cortices are increasingly tuned to these stimulus qualities."
And interestingly enough, left inferior frontal lesions (and hence some weakened "default mode" or "simulational mode"?) may be accompanied by some increased "environmental dependency" (Lhermitte)...

This now brings me to another topic:
On Friday, Dec 15, I attended a symposium in Tübingen(www.kyb.mpg.de/schnittstellemensch ) which featured a neuroscientific approach to Robert Musil (who first began as an engineer, experimental psychologist, and then ended up as a writer).
However, the speakers (Prof. Birbaumer, Prof. Wertheimer) did not seem to know the latest papers on Whiteouts (Ganzfelds—Robert Musil described such an experience!) and on "default modes" (simulational modes) — and why Robert Musil rather preferred to be a philosopher and novelist than an experimentalist... And: both speakers did not know that not only Robert Musil, but also Adolf Hitler may have had extremely strong mirror neurons... (and as usual, both speakers did not answer to my e-mails with an attachment of the latest papers...).
OF COURSE, I know that I may be the only person being completely independent, and having enough time for reflection (simulational modes...), dialogues, and necessary (interdisciplinary) syntheses...

December 15, 2007

In their extremely interesting paper entitled "Homer1a is a core brain molecular correlate of sleep loss", the authors Stéphanie MARET et al. (in: PNAS, see References) note:
"A highly reliable index of the homeostatic process is provided by the amplitude and prevalence of delta (1- to 4-Hz) oscillations in the EEG of nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep ... Among hypotheses concerning the physiological function of waking-induced changes in sleep, the most compelling suggests that sleep plays a key role in synaptic plasticity ... In the brain, Homer1a expression best reflects the response to sleep loss. ... By generating a transgenic mouse line, we show that in Homer1-expressing cells specifically, apart from Homer1a, three other activity-induced genes ... are overexpressed after sleep loss. All four genes play a role in recovery from glutamate-induced neuronal hyperactivity. The consistent activation of Homer1a suggest a role for sleep in intracellular calcium homeostasis for protecting and recovering from the neuronal activation imposed by wakefulness."

December 13, 2007

In their paper entitled "Neural correlates of trust", the authors Frank KRUEGER et al. (in: PNAS, see References) investigate some "(un-)conditional trust", and their findings of the paracingulate cortex (PcC) being involved in all that reminded me of Crick's assumption of the "will" being "localizable" at the anterior cingulate cortex:
"Decisions to trust contrasted with the control condition activated the PcC. ... In building mutual goodwill [!], partners must infer each other's intentions to determine whether to trust their partners and whether their partners will reciprocate their trust in future. ... Decisions to trust contrasted with the control condition also activated the SA [septal area] ... the SA plays a putative role in controlling anterior hypothalamic functions and the release of the neuropeptides vasopressin and oxytocin."

In a similar vein, Judith M. BURKART et al. studied the (genetically conditioned) "prosocial" behaviours of marmosets ("Other-regarding preferences in a non-human primate: Common marmosets provision food altruistically", in: PNAS, see References):
"The great majority of primates do not show food sharing, mutual interdependence, and high social tolerance involving all independent group members. The most prominent exceptions among non-human primates are callitrichid monkeys, which are cooperative breeders."
The authors now show that the donor's unsolicited generous behaviours were not driven by the expectation of reciprocation; however, "the unsolicited prosociality need not be indiscriminate because the nonkin in this experiment were actual or potential mates rather than same-sex strangers".
Hence, "adding unsolicited prosociality to the ape-like brain of our ancestors, which in contrast to marmosets already had some basic knowledge of psychological states, may have released a cascade of further developments toward shared intentionality, and all its consequences: joint attention, language, instructed learning, and uniquely human forms of cooperation, as well as fully developed theory of mind".

AND one may add here: only humans (H. sapiens) seem to be silly enough to even feed members of other species (including dogs, cats, horses, etc.)... — and to withhold food from members of their own species at the same time...

December 12, 2007

If you have ever wondered why the French painter Yves Klein admired the blue light, then you may read the paper by Gilles VANDEWALLE et al. entitled "Brain Responses to Violet, Blue, and Green Monochromatic Light Exposures in Humans: Prominent Role of Blue Light and the Brainstem" (in: PLoS ONE, see References), where the authors used "fMRI to specifically assess early effects of light over the entire brain while participants were performing an auditory working memory task. We used alternating violet (430 nm), or green (527 nm) monochromatic light exposures of equal photon density to investigate the processing of stimuli preferentially triggering S-cones, melanopsin-expression retinal ganglion cells [RGC], or M-cones, respectively. Light exposures lasted 50 s, a very short duration from a human circadian biology perspective."
And now their interesting results (think here of Yves Klein's spiritual worshipping of the blue colour, and my own hypotheses regarding some "non-specific arousal" and the involvement of the brainstem when seeing Yves Klein's blue paintings in my dissertation, ELBS 2005!): "Collectively, these [cortical and subcortical] sustained and transient responses show the efficacy of short wavelength (473 nm) light in modulating brain activity ... The brainstem area which was recruited by blue light corresponds to the Locus Coeruleus [LC]. ... The LC may be a key structure in establishing effects of light ... As the major source of brain norepinephrine, it is in a position to modify the level of arousal" — and the IKB (the International Yves Klein Blue) may be extremely arousing indeed...

December 11, 2007

In their paper entitled "Gamma Oscillations of Spking Neural Populations Enhance Signal Discrimination", the authors Naoki MASUDA and Brent DOIRON note (in: PLoS Comp Bio, see References):
"Attention raises the firing rate and the input-output gain of orientation-selective neurons in the visual cortex, and shifts response curves so that physiologically relevant stimuli fall in the high-gain region. ... Attention is thought to influence cholinergic neuromodulation, which presumably affects synchrony of interneuron networks involved in gamma oscillations. ... We show that gamma oscillations endow population spike counts with binomial-like statistics, which improve signal discrimination over a range of stimuli through reduced spike-count variability."
All in all, "oscillatory activity of the same presynaptic neural populations enhances coding where decoding neurons integrate incoming spikes on much longer timescales".

December 10, 2007

In their paper entitled "Magnocellular Projections as the Trigger of Top-Down Facilitation in Recognition", the authors Kestutits KVERAGA et al. (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) propose an extension of the standard model of object perception by taking into account possible top-down facilitations by the orbitofrontal cortex as well (OFC — see image below):
"According to this model, a coarse version of the visual input, comprising mainly the low spatial frequencies (LSFs), is rapidly projected from early visual regions to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The LSF image is sufficient to activate "initial guess" predictions about what objects might have given rise to such visual input" (see here also VOLZ & CRAMON 2006 in my S_Update Dec 2006 on the crucial involvement of the OFC in "intuition" and "guessing"!).
However, other subcortical areas may be involved as well: "Another intriguing possbility is a subcortical projection from the pulvinar or mediodorsal nuclei of the thalamus. ... The amygdala receives a subcortical projection from the superior colliculus via the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus ... Our findings of greater BOLD signal in the amygdala for M-biased stimuli, compared with the activity elicited by P-biased stimuli, provide some support to this hypothesis [or may all this only be due to LSF images — including Rothko's blurred rectangles? — eliciting more "uncertainty" in the amygdala than HSF stimuli? (See here also WHALEN 2007) - And see also BAR & NETA 2007 on the amygdala being biased towards sharp [vs. curved] object features of spatial low-frequency stimuli — and many thanks to Moshe Bar for reminding me of this latter paper via e-mail!]."

December 9, 2007

My homepage is now completely completed (see [22], and my Dallas lecture at Publications).=

Thanks to everybody - and all of this work has cost me a lot of years and money. You perfectly know my German saying: Ich mache ja alles umsonst...

December 8, 2007

In their paper entitled "Social Comparison Affects Reward-Related Brain Activity in the Human Ventral Striatum", the authors K. FLIESSBACH et al. (in: Science, see References) criticize that "traditional economic theories focus on the role of absolute rewards, whereas behavioral evidence suggests that social comparisons influence well-being and decisions. ... comparison with other individuals is a central phenomenon within human societies [due to some fatal "Theory of Mind" abilities?]."
"By showing that social comparisons affect activation levels in the ventral striatum, our findings complement recent work on other-regarding preferences such as reciprocity or empathy ... In this sense, our study shows that mere contextual information about another person has an immediate impact on motivation-related brain processes".

In another study on "How emotions colour our perception of time", the authors Sylvie DROIT-VOLET & Warren H. MECK (in: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, see References) note:
"The subjective experience of time is lengthened (durations seem longer than normal [e.g., in boredom]) by increases in arousal. According to the internal-clock models, increased arousal accelerates the pacemaker, thus causing more pulses to accumulate within the same physical unit of time. ... For example, the administration of psychostimulants, such as cocaine and methamphetamine, increases arousal and produces an overestimation of durations, which is characteristic of an increase in clock speed."
And "whereas DA [Dopamine] primarily affects clock speed, cholinergic drugs have their primary effects on memory for time."
Accordingly, "negative sounds were judged to be longer than positive ones, suggesting that negative stimuli produce a greater increase in arousal. ... These data also suggest that negative images in the high arousal condition activate the defensive system ... [and] these results showed that a period of time spent in an eye-contact task was judged longer with an angry than with a friendly partner [with whom I want to stay longer in contact, of course...]."
Furthermore, it has been shown "that individuals automatically imitate perceived facial expressions and that this voluntary adoption of emotional facial expressions produces autonomic changes that are correlated with the emotional states. ... The nature of the social relationship with other individuals (mother–child, boss–employee) that motivates us to imitate them might thus modulate the effects of facial expressions on timing and time perception. Mondillon et al. also found an ‘in-group’ advantage with a temporal bias occurring when Caucasian participants were presented with Caucasian, but not with Chinese, facial expressions."

December 7, 2007

In his review entitled "Adaptive Behavior: Humans Act as Bayesian Learners", the author Angela J. YU (in: Current Biology, see References) notes:
"A recent study combining behavioral experiments with functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) has shown that human subjects can accurately track changing reward contingencies based on noisy inputs. Critical for this behavior is the ability to estimate the frequency of change, or environmental volatility, and the new work indicates that this ability involves the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). ... Behrens et al. show that human subjects’ performance resembles that of an ideal Bayesian learner. Specifically, the ideal Bayesian observer model, which tracks changing volatility over time [or better: "which maps shifts over time"...] ... Under the Bayesian framework, unexpected observations increase internal uncertainty, and sustained level of such uncertainty results in a high estimate for volatility, which in turn leads to a high learning rate. Pearce and Hall were early pioneers in positing that, in addition to reward prediction error, uncertainty about stimulus–outcome relationships plays a major role in driving associative learning in animals. In particular, stimuli with greater predictive uncertainty should be accorded greater attention and faster learning. Animals indeed learn faster about stimuli with uncertain predictive consequences, and selective lesion studies indicate that the cholinergic projection from the basal forebrain to the parietal cortex is essential for this enhanced learning. These data have been interpreted as evidence that the neuromodulator acetylcholine reports expected uncertainty. Another neuromodulator, norepinephrine, has been suggested to signal unexpected uncertainty".
"From a theoretical point of view, a tonically high level of unexpected uncertainty (putatively signaled by norepinephrine) provides strong evidence that the environment is in a state of high volatility (putatively represented in ACC); conversely, high perceived volatility (ACC) enhances the ability of unexpected observations to induce unexpected uncertainty (norepinephrine). ... Further substantiating the suggestion that ACC activities represent volatility and drive learning, Behrens et al. report that the Bayesian estimate of volatility correlates with ACC activity in some subjects better than in others [due to some genetic variability among subjects?]."

December 6, 2007

In their paper entitled "When Outgoing and Incoming Signals Meet: New Insights from the Zona Incerta [ZI]", the authors Mathew E. DIAMOND & Ehud AHISSAR (in: Neuron, see References) note on the function of this brain area:
"Although ZI catches the eye as a large, horizontally elongated region wedged just below the ventral tier of the thalamus, its possible functions have been overlooked; indeed its very existence is unknown to many neuroscientists. ... On a timescale of seconds, the behavior of the animal switches back and forth between two states: one in which the animal is quiet and immobile and does not whisk, and another in which it explores, whisks, and palpates objects. In the quiescent periods, neurons in the lemniscal pathways are unadapted and bursty — object contact with the passively resting whisker produces an enormous response in cortex. In the active periods, neurons in the lemniscal pathways are adapted and tonic — object contact with the protracting whisker produces a linear response in VPM [a ventral thalamic area] and cortex. This state is believed to be characterized by high capacities for processing information".
As usual (with regard to brain mechanisms), we have to do here with an inhibition of an inhibition: "The present study predicts that in these epochs, M1 output to ZIv would act to release the paralemniscal system from ZIv inhibition. ... releasing POm [a posterior thalamic area] from ZIv inhibition during the active state thus allows a detailed record of whisking to flow freely from sensory receptors to cortex. ... For M1 to shift whisking frequency to a higher, stable level, it can simply shift the set-point of the POm loop by adding a fixed number of spikes to POm's output. And here we return to the possible function of ZIv: by ctonrolling the amount of ZIv inhibition on POm, M1 could add or subtract spikes from POm's output and thus shift the whisking frequency upward or downward."

In a related paper by the same group of scientists, the authors Moritz von HEIMENDAHL et al. ("Neuronal Activity in the Rat Barrel Cortex Underlying Texture Discrimination", in: PLoS Biology, see References) note the following:
"In the barrel cortex of anesthetized rats, the whisker vibrations associated with different textures evoke cortical responses that differ according to texture — coarser textures evoke more spikes per sweep. By extending this line of investigation to awake rats, we now ask which features of sensory coding are conserved during active exploration of the environment, when stimuli are not imposed on the receptors, but are generated by the animal through its own motor program."
"On a typical trial, the rat made 1-3 touches of 24-62-ms duration each (interquartile ranges) before making its choice. ... The measured texture-related response difference in multiunit activity was more reliable in rats that had all but a few whiskers trimmed ... On the other hand, in a rat whose full whisker array was left intact, the texture difference was highly significant in the LFP [local field potential]".

December 5, 2007

In their paper entitled "Visual grouping in human parietal cortex", the authors Yaoda XU & Marvin M. CHUN (in: PNAS, see References) show that "grouped shapes elicited lower functional MRI (fMRI) responses than ungrouped shapes in inferior intraparietal sulcus (IPS) even when grouping was task-irrelevant", which very much reminded me of Wolfgang Köhler's classic text "Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand..." (1920).
The authors here note: "a fixed number of objects are first represented and selected by the inferior IPS by their spatial locations; depending on their complexity, a subset of these selected objects are then retained in VSTM [visual short term memory] with great detail by the superior IPS. Activities in these parietal mechanisms thus reflect the number of discrete visual objects represented in the mind at different stages of visual processing [beginning with the LOC, and ending up in counting these objects numerically with the IPS...]."
"in a recently completed study, we found that when identical objects were presented simultaneously at different spatial locations, the brain area involved in object individuation (the inferior IPS) treated them as multiple entries to the system. Thus, the inferior IPS represented four identical objects as four different objects. In contrast, brain areas involved in representing detailed object features and identity information (the superior IPS and LOC for object shapes) treated multiple identical objects as a single unique object because the demand to represent the features of multiple identical objects was the same as that of a single unique object. In this case, the superior IPS and LOC represented four identical objects as one unique object."
And: "To guide the shift of visual attention across the different levels of the visual hierarchy and to select objects [i.e., attractors] at the appropriate level, we would like to argue that two processing systems are needed during visual perception: one tracking the overall hierarchical structure of the visual display, and the other processing the current objects of attentional selection. Our results suggest that the inferior IPS carries such a hierarchical representation of the visual display, with the LOC and superior IPS possibly representing what is most relevant to the current goal of visual processing. Work by Yantis and colleagues indicates that the control of the attentional shift signal may originate from the superior parietal lobule, which is involved in the shift of visual attention among objects, visual features, spatial locations, and even different sensory modalities. We argue that the interactions among these different cognitive and neural mechanisms enable us to perceive both an individual tree and the entire forest."

December 4, 2007

In an extremely interesting extension to PALMERI & GAUTHIER 2004, the authors Karalyn PATTERSON et al. ("Where do you know what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the human brain", in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) propose a new model for semantic knowledge and semantic processing: "the sensory-, motor- and language-specific aspects of conceptual knowledge are necessary but not sufficient: this is the distributed-plus-hub view ... From the distributed-plus-hub perspective, damage to the hub should produce a semantic impairment that is independent of the modality of input (objects, pictures, words, sounds, tastes, and so on) and of the modality of output (for example, naming an object, drawing it or using it correctly)."
"This review summarizes evidence for the hypothesis that, first, semantic generalization requires a single amodal hub and, second, that the neuroanatomical site of this hub is the anterior temporal lobe (ATL [see image below: AT]). .. It is worth noting that cross-modal is not the same as a-modal: the region around the angular gyrus might serve to combine information from several modalities but still not have the genuinely amodal function of a semantic hub."
And whereas "healthy controls are faster and more accurate at classifying items at the basic level (for example, 'dog') relative to a more general level (for example, 'animal'), patients with Semantic Dementia show the reverse pattern."
Accordingly, the AT seems to underlie some "differentiated associativity" (ELBS 2005) or read-out of a hierarchically nested and extremely differentiated (giang) attractor landscape (built up from the more general LOC up to the more specialized and differentiated IT), the attractor dynamics of which the authors exemplify at length as follows:
"According to this model, naming a particular bird as a ‘robin’ requires the ATL hub to instantiate the robin representation almost exactly, as the name does not apply to other kinds of birds, many of which nevertheless have representations that are very similar to the robin. To name the same item ‘bird’, however, the robin pattern need not be instantiated exactly. Because the name applies to all birds and all birds share similar representations, it is only necessary for the hub to find a representation that is sufficiently ‘bird-like’ to activate the name. Thus, small distortions of the ‘robin’ representation — perhaps resulting from ATL atrophy — will prevent the network from retrieving the robin’s specific name (and other properties that differentiate it from other birds) without disrupting the retrieval of properties that are common to birds. ... Specific features of conceptual knowledge are almost certainly represented elsewhere and in a widely distributed network; but people’s ability to receive information in one modality and express it in another, to generalize across conceptually similar entities that differ in almost every specific modality, and to differentiate between entities that resemble each other in many modalities — all quintessentially semantic abilities — seem to depend on the ATl."

Interestingly enough, this mapping and read-out of a complex attractor landscape ("hub") may be followed by "naming" (via the anterior Insula and Broca-Area: see SHAFTO et al. 2007 and PETRIDES & PANDYA 2007!), which may explain the fact that semantic dementia also goes along with naming problems (and which cannot be helped by "first letter" hints: see SHAFTO et al. 2007).
(Cf. also CHENEY & SEYFARTH 2007: the naming of complex hierachically nested socio-emotional networks in baboons — a task crucially depending on a massive link between AT and Insula/OFC/PFC?).

December 3, 2007

I have now read (in one night) CHENEY & SEYFARTH's well-reading book "Baboon metaphysics" of 2007 – which was a great delight (despite some redundancies in it).
Here may be the best (or at least most entertaining) sentences out of it:
“The result of all this social intrigue [among baboons] is a kind of Jane Austen melodrama ... Any way you look at it, most of the problems facing baboons can be expressed in two words: other baboons” (:12) – cf. also Sartre's "l’enfer, c’est les autres".
And now this one (giving you a glimpse at the extreme evolutionary pressure by predators and infanticides) from the first "scientist" to study baboon groups as a whole, Eugene Marais (1939): „It was not long before we came to realize that the life of the baboon is in fact one continual nightmare of anxiety“ (:35).
In fact, the book mirrors recent findings and theories about "ultrasocial humans" by the Tomasello group in Leipzig (cf. in detail HERRMANN et al. 2007): “they [vervet monkeys] make good psychologists but poor naturalists" (:129), and: “A rudimentary theory of mind, therefore, is fundamental to word learning" (:264).
The authors also propose their (and Fodor's) “Language of Thought”-theory: baboons can think in extremely complex social nested hierarchies, but they cannot verbalize it; their perceptual (passive) social repertoire (learning about social ranks etc.) is extremely high, but their motor skills and motor repertoire to communicate these differentiations are minimal, since their simple calls do not allow for a combinatorial play with words within hierarchically nested sentences (which map the social nested hierarchies so that "social thinking" may be a necessary precursor of speaking, i.e., thinking in complex hierarchically nested words).
“This view, that a theory of mind and the motivation to share knowledge [i.e., to gossip] served as the driving forces behind the evolution of flexible vocal production” (:281).
Besides, baboons have no "mapping impulse" and impulse for "mental simulations" and "what-if loops": "They [baboons] lack the insight to imagine a different world” (:275), and: “Baboons are also not motivated to change their physical world” (:282).

And I suppose that this "lack to imagine a different world" may also largely hold for my conspecifics – who prefer reading melodramas by Jane Austen or books by primate reserachers...

November 26, 2007

In their paper entitled "The Golden Beauty: Brain Responses to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures", the authors Cinzia DI DIO et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) believe to have found the cortical site of the objective and subjective "sense of beauty" (in Insula and Amygdala, respectively) by artificially shifting and distorting the golden proportions of the Doryphoros (etc. – see image below).
HOWEVER, as you know from my Seminar script (see Seminar-Script, S5 Figures 45 ff., S6 Figure 20a, S7 Figures 33 f. on some "variation and stability"), you already know that the golden ratio has much to do with the stability of attractors and "average faces" (see LEOPOLD et al. 2006).
Hence, when you take the "average body" (by simply being exposed to a multitude of everyday variants of natural bodies with a lot of varying proportions...), you will get the (evolutionarily) most stable proportion and body (as rather a virtual Platonic "ideal body": see POSNER & KEELE 1968) – which in fact happens to be the golden ratio (as in most biological dynamical systems varying and shifting around a stable attractor: see WORG 1993; see also my upcoming lecture in Dallas 2008 Publications, Slide 5).
Hence, the "sense of beauty" may only boil down to the most stable attractor (here: with regard to some ideal "average body" displaying the evolutionarily most stable proportion built up by genetic and developmental dynamical systems). That's all.

November 23, 2007

In an interesting (and desperately needed...) longitudinal PET-study on "Time-Dependent Central Compensatory Mechanisms of Finger Dexterity After Spinal Cord Injury", the authors Yukio NISHIMURA et al. (in: Science, see References) note:
"The area of co-[contralateral]M1 with increased activity expanded during the late recovery stage compared with that during the early recovery stage, and the increased activity extended into co-PMv [i.e., premotor areas!]. ... This suggests that early recovery depends strongly on increased activity of the co-M1. ... The inactivation of ip-M1 resulted in no deficit in the preoperative trials but caused a deficit during the early recovery stage and no deficit during the late recovery stage. ... We thus suggest that the brain uses existing systems by reducing inhibition during the early recovery stage and gradually enhancing the original neural systems or recruiting other systems by synaptic plasticity during the late recovery stage for more stable control."
All in all, it is interesting to note that "our finding of an increased area of activation [i.e., involving broadened attractors becoming gradually more stable?] in co-M1 agrees with previous observations that the representation of trained movement in M1 expanded with learning".

November 22, 2007

In their paper entitled "Maternal Enrichment during Pregnancy Accelerates Retinal Development of the Fetus", the authors Alessandro SALE et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) note:
"Despite these data on the harmful effects of prenatal stress, the possibility that maternal exposure to conditions of increased sociality and sensory-motor activity could influence embryonic development remains unexplored. In the present study, we investigated this issue by analyzing whether maternal environmental enrichment during pregnancy affects the visual system development of the fetus. We found that maternal enrichment influences the anatomical and molecular development of the retina, accelerating the migration of neuronal progenitors and causing a marked increase in the rate of naturally occurring cell death, an essential developmental event until now considered to be programmed only by intrinsic signals, independently of experience. These changes were accompanied by a marked increase in insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) expression in the retinas of enriched rats compared with standard reared animals. ... Therefore, we propose a model in which three distinct temporal phases during pup development are differently controlled by the richness of the environment. In the first phase, maternal enrichment during pregnancy affects IGF-I expression in the offspring RGC layer, resulting in an accelerated retinal development. Subsequently, enhanced maternal care levels in EC provide to the developing subject a robust tactile stimulation which can induce higher levels of BDNF in the retina and visual cortex, and a precocious eye opening. Finally, when pups begin to actively explore the surroundings, the complex sensory-motor stimulation provided by EC may directly influence their visual system development, contributing to further accelerate the maturation of visual acuity. ... These studies suggest that the influence of environment on the development and plasticity of visual system is due not only on changes [i.e., shifts...] in the levels of sensory visual stimulation, but mostly on factors activated even in the absence of vision."

November 21, 2007

In his short review entitled "The uncertainty of it all", Paul J. WHALEN (in: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, see References) tries to get at THE general function of the Amgydala – signalling "uncertainty" (cf. also the Striatum signalling "novelty": REDGRAVE & GURNEY 2006!):
"The recent study by Herry, Bach and colleagues provides a glimpse of the amygdala as a clear learner of environmental contingencies before it takes on its role in emotional response. In their study, both mouse and human subjects were exposed to a simple repeating tone. Sometimes the tone occurred predictably (e.g. every 200 ms) and at other times the tone occurred unpredictably (e.g. at a variable interval with a mean of 200 ms). When segments of time comprising unpredictable tones were compared with segments comprising predictable tones, the amygdala was more responsive during the unpredictable tones ... Thus, unpredictability per se, even for events that are not biologically relevant, is enough to engage the amygdala. ... Neuroimaging data support a similar role for the human amygdala in response to facial expressions that are ambiguous with respect to the outcomes that they predict. For example, the human amygdala is responsive to fearful and suprised facial expressions whose 'wide-eyes' signal the occurrence of a significant, but as yet, unidentified [i.e., not mapped yet] environmental event."
"If clear predictive signals are lacking, the amygdala can boost vigilance (e.g. lower sensory thresholds throughout sensory cortex in response to uncertain events, in an attempt to help determine any causal relationships between such events). ... In short, at least a portion of the healthy amygdala acts as if it has an anxiety disorder – searching for threat in response to uncertainty. This design enables the amygdala to operate based on principles that are more primal and rigid while the more educated [!!!!!!] and flexible prefrontal cortex possesses [!!!] the ability [!] to bend these rules".

November 20, 2007

In their paper entitled "Fast-Forward Playback of Recent Memory Sequences in Prefrontal Cortex During Sleep", the authors David R. EUSTON et al. (in: Science, see References) note the following:
"In both rats and humans, activity in the mPFC is greater during the retrieval of remote memories than during retrieval of recent memories; an opposite pattern is seen in the hippocampus. ... The hippocampus reportedly replays events at 5 to 20 times their behavioural rate; however, in the hippocampus, spikes representing adjacent place fields occur in rapid succession within a single theta cycle during behavior. Relative to this within-theta cycle rate, reactivation during sleep is not accelerated. In contrast, reactivation in rat mPFC is clearly compressed five to eight times, and a similar effect may be present in primary visual cortex. Fast replay in neocortex may reflect the speed of the brain's intrinsic dynamics [yes, as a highly dynamic Potential landscape!] (e.g., conduction speeds, synaptic delays, etc) when not constrained by [contingent] behavioural events. However, the episodes of sequential replay during sleep are limited to windows of a few hundred milliseconds."

November 19, 2007

In a VERY interesting paper on "the Tip-of-the-Tongue Correlates of Increased Word-finding Failures in Normal Aging" (because it is related to "Aha-experiences" and my own favourite "Droodle-Project" – see my Future Projects), the authors Meredith A. SHAFTO et al. note (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References):
"The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience is a common and dramatic word-finding failure where a person is temporarily unABLE to produce a well-known word. TOTs increase in frequency during adulthood and become one of older adults' most irksome and distressing cognitive problems. ... TOTs occur when semantic and lexical information have been selected, producing a strong feeling of knowing, but phonological retrieval is insufficient for computation of the complete phonological code".
However, the whole attractor and the whole word (that is searched for) can nevertheless be immediately retrieved when being given some "partial phonological information that often is availABLE to a person in the TOT state such as the initial letter or number of syllables".
In their results, the authors now report that "TOTs increased with age-related gray matter atrophy in the left insula [together with the anterior cingulate cortex, and the left rolandic operculum], but TOT frequency correlated with insula atrophy even with the effect of age removed in both the whole-brain and ROI analyses".
Unfortunately enough, however, the authors did not map the exact time-course (online) of this very interesting dynamic process when subjects are desperately looking for a stable attractor (as when looking for a stable meaning in seemingly "meaningless" droodles...).

November 18, 2007

If we could measure the whole dynamics of synaptic plasticity and (ever shifting...) "weight distributions", it would be a great step towards understanding memory and Potential landscapes ("in which attractor states are stored via synaptic plasticity mechanisms"), as pointed out by Boris BARBOUR et al. in their paper entitled "What can we learn from synaptic weight distributions?" (in: Trends in Neurosciences, see References).

November 17, 2007

If you want to learn more about the dynamic of spatial (target) maps in the hippocampal place cells of rats, then you may read the paper by Adam JOHNSON & A. David REDISH entitled "Neural Ensembles in CA3 Transiently Encode Paths Forward of the Animal at a Decision Point" (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References), where the authors note the following:
"Neural ensembles recorded from the CA3 region of rats running on T-based decision tasks displayed transient activity at decision points indicative of positions different from the rat's current position (leading to nonlocal reconstruction). Projection of these activities onto spatial location showed that during these decision-making events the location reconstructed from the neural ensemble swept forward of the animal, first down one path and then the other. Reconstructed representations were coherent and preferentially swept ahead of the animal rather than behind the animal. ... Reconstruction in front of but not behind the animal suggests that the information is related to representation of future paths rather than a replay of recent history. ... The results presented here show that when animals pause during behavior [and when they display some "vicarious trial and error" behaviour, i.e., small head movements alternating between the POTENTIAL choices of running to the left or to the right in the T-maze], the hippocampal representation becomes transiently nonlocal. At high-cost choice points and at the correction of errors, the hippocampal representation sweeps forward along the POTENTIAL paths available to the animal. These transient nonlocal signals could provide a potential substrate for the prediction of the consequences of decisions and the planning of paths to goals ..."
In the end, the authors muse about further downstream activations: while the "hippocampus may only be providing the prediction component", neurons in the ventral striatum may anticipate predicted reward, whereas neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex (still further downstream) may encode "parameters relating the value of POTENTIAL choices" (i.e., the whole space of POSSIBilities).

November 15, 2007

In their paper entitled "Specialized Color Modules in Macaque Extrastriate Cortex", the authors Bevil R. CONWAY et al. (in: Neuron, see References) try to resolve the contradictory findings about the function of area V4 (shape perception, colour, colour constancy, etc.) by differentiating this large area further into globs and interglobs:
"Here we re-evaluate the role of this brain region in processing color, in the alert macaque, by combining whole-brain functional imaging with targeted single-unit physiology in the same subjects. ... Color-biased activity in this region is not uniform, but localized to discrete, reproducible hotspots. We adopted the term "glob" to describe these hotspots. ... The location and number of globs varies somewhat from animal to animal... Color would then appear to be processed by a series of specialized color domains that get progressively larger at subsequent hierarchical stages: the blobs in V1, the thin stripes in V2, and the globs in posterior inferior temporal cortex; the interglobs, on the other hand, would seem to be involved in elaborating the form signals relayed by the V1 interblobs and V2 interstripes. ... Interglob cells lacked strong color tuning but did show weak color sensitivity not present in area MT (a motion area). This sensitivity may be a sufficient basis for color-based attention to modulate V4 response".

November 12, 2007

If you are interested in today's state of the art with regard to building brain-like devices by using theoretical "maps of the brain" and neuromorphic computer chips (neurogrids), then you may read the article by Rae SILVER et al. entitled "Neurotech for Neuroscience: Unifying Concepts, Organizing Principles, and Emerging Tools" (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) and this picture just below:

November 11, 2007

If you are interested in other fMRI approaches (than just indirect BOLD fMRI), you may read the up-to-date review of Alan JASANOFF entitled "Bloodless fMRI" (in: Trends in Neurosciences, see References):
From Lorentz-effect imaging (LEI - the Lorentz force acting on current-carrying neural fibres) to manganese-enhanced MRI imaging (depending on voltage-gated calcium channels) to diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI - mapping neuronal changes in diffusion due to glial cell swelling without temporal delays)...

November 10, 2007

In their paper entitled "Efferent Association Pathways from the Rostral Prefrontal Cortex in the Macaque Monkey", the authors PETRIDES & PANDYA (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) report that macaque BA 9 and BA 10 (rostral PFC) project to 1) ACC and PCC via the cingulate bundle, 2) Amygdala and Temporal Pole (via uncinate fasc.), 3) superior temporal sulcus (TAa, TPO and Insula - via capsula extrema) and hence to centres “interpreting the intentions of other individuals”, but not to posterior visual centres:
“Thus, the rostral prefrontal cortex, by not interacting with these posterior [visual, parietal] cortical areas, does not regulate attention to events occurring in external space. This is the domain of the caudal prefrontal cortical region via special pathways such as the three brances of the superior longitudinal and the fronto-occipital fasciculus ... The present study demonstrates the specific pathways that underlie cognitive control operations emanating from the rostral prefrontal region. The cingulate and uncinate fasciculi enable interactions between the rostral prefrontal cortex with limbic structures, such as the cingulate cortex, the temporopolar proisocortex, and the amygdala and therefore provide the basis for control over one’s own and other persons’ motivational/emotional states. In contrast, the extreme capsule fiber system permits interactions between the lateral rostral prefrontal region and auditory and multisensory cognitive processing in the temporal lobe, namely cognitive processing underlying conceptual knowledge and abstract thought. There appears to be a caudal-to-rostral gradient in lateral prefrontal functional organization: the caudal prefrontal region via its own unique efferent pathways (i.e., the superior longitudinal and fronto-occipital fasciculi) modulates attention to the external environment and action within it, but, as one proceeds rostrally, control is shifted away from the external environment and is focused on abstract multisensory processing and internal emotional states”.

November 9, 2007

In their paper entitled "Biomimetic Brain Machine Interfaces for the Control of Movement", the authors Andrew H. FAGG et al. (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) note:
"For the most part, these brain machine interfaces (BMIs) build either directly or indirectly on the work of Georgopoulos et al. (1982), who discovered that movement-related discharge in the motor cortex (M1) depends on movement "kinematics", or the trajectory of the hand through space ... However, other work, including that of Evarts, suggests that the activity of M1 neurons [which are also targeted by input from S1 via PMv and PMd!] is also related to movement "kinetics," or the force-related variables that ultimately cause movement ... Existing BMIs use only visual feedback to control movement, lacking the critical somatosensory feedback from sensory receptors in the muscles, skin, and joints of the moving limb."
Besides, the authors note that "a particular nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique (Isomap) was considerably more successful than [only linear!] Principal Component Analysis in identifying low-dimensional structures within the [brain] data."
"Therefore, in the context of an afferent BMI, it is likely that the somatosensory cortex [by integrating from the other senses that are still operating after spinal cord injury] will remain capable of detecting electrical stimulation supplying limb state information and relaying the sensation to the higher cortical areas that form perception. ... We will explore the feasibility of incorporating somatosensory feedback into an afferent BMI application, in a manner that would compement the efferent interface."

November 7, 2007

Today, I attended a discussion between Prof. Andrea Kübler (from the Birbaumer-Group Tübingen) and the regrogradist artist Adi Hösle (see www.retrogradist.com).
Both have modified the P300 / mu-rhythm spelling device (a brain-computer-interface[BCI]-machine) by substituting the grid of 6 x 6 letters from the alphabet with visual basic elements (circles, rectangles, colours, ...), out of which one element can be chosen and projected on a screen ("brain painting"). However, all these elements are still rather limited, and all have to be arranged in a more or less discrete and serial manner ("stepwise volitional choice"). But since only the Cortex (with its discrete differentiated patterns like visual features and glyphs and letters) is mapped (and no subcortical areas), we may still be far away from some "direct creative painting with the brain". Besides, the choice of the 36 visual elements is still rather arbitrary (why rectangles and circles?).
A "direct playing music with the brain" may be more feasible, since music has only three parameters (that can be continously varied): rhythm (timing), melody (high-low), roominess (echo).
And besides: you see once more that artists (and also technicians like scientists...?) simply love to try out and to play with all kinds of new techniques and tools (here: a computer-BCI) in order to enlarge their "possibilities" and "Potential landscapes" (or: "Selves").
But artists will only be "free from all stuff" when they will be able to directly send their paintings and visual patterns in their brain to another's brain (see my Seminar-script, S6 Figure 15: "direct linking of brains") - without the need of a detour via material computers, BCI-machines, projection screens, etc.

November 1, 2007

According to the media (if they really had the best maps, but which I doubt...), several assholes (politicians, economists, lawyers, etc.) now muse about a war between "Turkey" and "Irak". All these assholes do not seem to take into account hypersensitive map-makers like me - i.e., map-makers who (beginning with their birth...) are permanently violated, shocked, and puzzled by the stubborness, insensitivity, and primitiveness of homo sapiens... Excuse me that I had to say all this... But as an animal that is permanently pushed into a corner (the last single and lonely corner of sensitivity, as it seems), I sometimes get really upset...

October 30, 2007

In their paper entitled "Small is bright and big is dark in synaesthesia", the authors Roi COHEN KADOSH et al. (in: Current Biology, see References) report "evidence of a systematic organisation relating luminance and number magnitude in digit-colour synaesthesia. ... Our results challenge the underlying assumptions about the mechanisms underlying synaesthesia and its developmental trajectories, and the link between luminance level and numerical magnitude strongly supports the idea of a shared magnitude representation. ... Our results demonstrate that, in contrast to the long held view that synaesthetic perceptions are random between individuals, there is a common organisation underlying the synaesthetes' experience in digit-colour synaesthesia. This common organisation is based on a linear relation between numerical magnitude and luminance level: as the numerical magnitude of the inducer increases, the luminance level of the subsequent synaesthetic experience decreases. Unlike adults and older children, two-year old children associate brightness with small objects and darkness with large objects".
"The existence of a luminance-number mapping in synaesthetic binding also indicates that even so-called 'abnormal' binding, whether caused by extra connections between cortical areas or by abnormal levels of disinhibition, are bounded by the principles of cortical organisation and mapping; and it seems that the maps linking magnitudes are inextricably linked."

October 29, 2007

In their paper entitled "Genomic imprinting effects on brain development and function", the authors WILKINSON et al. (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) note the following with regard to the "conflict" between maternal and paternal "selfish genes" to be expressed (or: suppressed) in embryos: "It is thought that some genes in the q11-q13 region of chromosome 15 (the interval that is disrupted in Angelman syndrome and Prader-Willi-syndrome (PWS)) might also act antagonistically on the way in which infants elicit care from their mother. A key characteristic of Angelman syndrome is an unusually sociable disposition and reduced display of negative-affect signals. ... This indicates that one or both of the two known maternally expressed genes in the critical region ... normally acts as brakes that limit positive-affect signals. ... The direction of the effects seen in Angelman syndrome and, to some extent, those seen in PWS would, according to the conflict hypothesis, suggest that the interest of the paternal genome is to maximize the amount of care and attention received from the mother by the current offspring and that the interest of the maternal genome is to divide these resources more equally across all her maternally related kin. ... Such asymmetries of relatedness also occur in matrilineal and patrilineal social groups, in which maternal and paternal genes, respectively, are more common and are shared with other group members. Here, the differential interests between parental genomes are predicted to affect social and affiliative behaviours. ... One [other] provocative hypothesis on which to end this Review is the suggestion that brain-expressed imprinted genes have the potential to contribute to the long-term risk of psychopathology by modifying the postnatal experience of infants ... notably mother-infant interactions."

Besides, if you are interested for another proof (via Pavlovian delay eyeblink conditioning in animals) for Braitenberg's hypothesis of the cerebellum acting as a "timing machine" [see My_map_of_the_brain], then you may read the paper entitled "A spiking network model for passage-of-time representation in the cerebellum" by Tadashi YAMAZAKI & Shigeru TANAKA (in: European Journal of Neuroscience, see References), where the authors consider the cerebellar circuitry to be comparable not to a multilayered perceptron (according to Marr's view), but rather to a "liquid state machine".

October 27, 2007

In his short review entitled "Has evolution primed humans to 'beware the beast'?", Arne OEHMAN (in: PNAS, see References) notes the following with regard to "animacy bias" and "change-blindness" (i.e., the ability to detect or to miss shifts in the environment): "participants failed to detect (were 'change blind' to) 34% of the added inanimate objects [in a visual display] but missed only 11% of added animals or humans." Then, he goes on to muse about the evolutionary underpinnings of these results (following Isbell 2006 on koniocellular pathways involved in snake detection and linking the retina directly to the superior colliculi and inferior pulvinar): "constrictor snakes, which fed on the mole-like small nocturnal mammals destined to become primates, were the only available predators ~ 100 million years ago. Thus, it is likely that the neural circuitry for defense behaviour (the amygdala with associated input and output circuitry) originally was designed to deal with snakes and other reptiles rather than with attacking raptors or felines that were not around until ~ 50 million years later. Second, snakes with a very effective and potent venom delivery system appeared in Africa ~ 60 million years ago. Because venomous snakes are often cryptic and difficult to detect, they provided a critical pressure to expand the visual system and integrate it with the fear system in the brains of anthropoid (i.e., monkeys and apes) primates. ... Old world monkeys, who display fear of snakes and have the most advanced visual system, remained in Africa under continuing pressure from snake predators. However, with the breaking apart of the southern supercontinent, Gondwanaland, lemurs evaded this pressure by dispersing to Madagascar, which lacks venomous snakes. ... As a consequence, the contemporary descendents of primates who escaped venomous snakes by an early African exodus display less snake fear and more primitive and variable visual systems than their old world relatives.

In their paper entitled "Brain Dynamics Underlying the Nonlinear Threshold for Access to Consciousness", Antoine DEL CUL et al. push the technical limits of DEHAENE et al. 2001 even further while backing their "global neuronal workspace theory", i.e., while looking at the brain as a whole and dynamic Potential landscape (in: PLoS Biology, see References):
By varying target-mask stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) in small steps (from 16 to 100 ms between target and subsequent mask) and taking into account subjective and objective reports as well as cortical ERP data (and hence, alas, without mapping subcortical [thalamic, striatal] activations as well!!!) the authors note: "A precise sequence of cortical events was observed: Activation began around 85 ms in the occipital cortex contralateral to the stimulus, corresponding to the P1a. It was present at all SOAs [see Figure below: please do also note the early transition from P1a-peaks to P1b-peaks setting in at an SOA of 50 ms [red curve], i.e., at the threshold for "conscious reports"!]. Starting at around 115 ms, activation spread to the ipsilateral occipital cortex and bilaterally to the posterior parietal cortex. ... In most regions, these activations increased monotonically with SOA. A notable exception was the contralateral mid-ventral temporal cortex, where initial activation intensity was the same for all SOAs > 16 ms (corresponding to the scalp N1). This region thus activated quite strongly to subliminal symbolic stimuli... Finally, starting at around 300 ms, target-evoked activation associated with the scalp P3 quickly expanded to a broad fronto-parieto-temporal network. Crucially, its activation occured only for SOAs associated with conscious reports. Ventral frontal regions showed a particular sudden burst of activation whose intensity traced a sigmoidal curve comparable to subjective reports. However, this effect was not restricted to the ventral frontal cortex, but it was very global and seen with a smaller amplitude in most frontal , parietal, and temporal regions of interest. It was broadly distributed to bilateral cortical areas, regardless of the hemifield of stimulus presentation, in agreement with the hypothesis that a global cortical 'broadcasting' underlies conscious reportability".
Well, this may mean now: reaching a stable global (and unique) attractor may be necessary for some "consciousness" to occur: "As demonstrated in computer simulations of a global neuronal workspace, highly interconnected thalamo-cortical networks, although evolving continously over time, may present a dynamical phase transition leading them, over a brief divergence period, into one of two radically distinct states [i.e., attractors] (either global ignited or quickly decaying)."

October 25, 2007

Although he has written a new book (together with Christa Sütterlin, in German), the best paper by Eibl-Eibesfeldt still remains his short essay in English (see References, EIBL-EIBESFELDT 1988).
In his new book entitled "Weltsprache Kunst", Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Sütterlin deal with several biases: social biases (including mirror neurons, ToM, etc.), family (clan) biases (with regard to monuments), prototypical biases (although they do not mention the concept of "attractors" and dynamical systems theory), body bias, face bias, etc.
Already in his essay of 1988, Eibl-Eibesfeldt referred to Galton's "average face" as being a very attracting one - but perhaps not the "most beautiful" one (and Eibl-Eibesfeldt still seems to be obsessed with "beauty"...). Since a "most beautiful" face is always gender- and sex-specific (e.g., slightly smaller mouth, bigger eyes and widened pupils, and higher front for "females"), only non-primitive higher primates (of the future...) will definitely prefer the androgynous average face - because it is not (primitively-primately) sex-specific...?

And if you want to know more about baboons and homo sapiens, then you should read the must-read: CHENEY & SEYFARTH 2007: "Baboon Metaphysics" (see References).

October 15, 2007

In their paper entitled "Cortical Activity Time Locked to the Shift and Maintenance of Spatial Attention", the authors IKKAI & CURTIS (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) conclude:
"Given the strong cortical overlap of evoked responses during overt and covert shifts of attention, we conclude that one key mechanism for the voluntary control of attention is mediated within the classic oculomotor system. On the one hand, the ability to attend to locations away from our fovea may have evolved by co-opting eye-movement mechanisms within cortical oculomotor centers, like the FEF. The so-called premotor theory of attention posits that subthreshold presaccadic activity in neurons that code for eye movements may be the mechanism by which we shift our attention covertly. On the other hand, the FEF may be best thought of as an area that contains a map of prioritized locations in the visual environment, not strictly a motor ‘‘eye field.’’ In this case, an ongoing map of prioritized locations could be built by bottom-up inputs from sensory cortices and top-down goals from the prefrontal cortext. A readout of such a map by the superior colliculus or brain stem saccade generator may be used to plan eye movements. Moreover, a readout by posterior visual areas may be used to select or tag portions of space, provide a boost in gain to neurons with matching receptive fields, and bias competition for neural representation. Implicit in this idea is that a unitary mechanism, like a dynamic spatial priority map, could contribute to a variety of cognitive behaviors, like attention, intention, and working memory, depending on the afferents used to construct the map and the efferents that readout the map."

In their paper entitled "Supplementary Motor Area [SMA] and Presupplementary Motor Area: Targets of Basal Ganglia and Cerebellar Output", the authors Dalila AKKAL et al. (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) found - via virus injections and retrograde transneuronal transports - that "the SMA and the pre-SMA are the targets of outputs from both the basal ganglia and the cerebellum [cf. also My map of the brain!]. Second, our results indicate that the SMA and pre-SMA each receives relatively more basal ganglia input than cerebellar input. ... Our data are fully consistent with the view that the SMA is one of the premotor areas in the frontal lobe. Like other premotor areas, the SMA (1) has dense projections to M1, (2) has substantial projections directly to the spinal cord, (3) receives basal ganglia and cerebellar input from the motor domains of GPi [internal globus pallidus] and dentate ..., and (4) lacks dense interconnections with prefrontal cortex. ... In contrast, the pre-SMA is anatomically more like a region of prefrontal cortex because it (1) does not project directly to M1, (2) does not project to the spinal cord, (3) receives basal ganglia and cerebellar input from the nonmotor domain of GPi and dentate, ... and (4) is densely interconnected with several regions of the prefrontal cortex."
Besides, the authors even speculate that "increased cerebellar activation may be part of an adaptive response to compensate for the cortical hypoactivity that would result from basal ganglia dysfunction in PD [Parkinson disease]".

October 14, 2007

In their paper entitled "Light adaptation in cone vision involves switching between receptor and post-receptor sites", the authors Felice A. DUNN et al. (in: Nature, see References) underline once more the importance of early visual processings in the retina:
"Even highlights and shadows within a single visual scene can differ ~10,000-fold in intensity - exceeding the range of distinct neural signals by a factor of ~100. The effectiveness of daylight vision under these conditions relies on at least two retinal mechanisms that adjust sensitivity in the ~200 ms intervals between saccades. One mechanism is in the cone photoreceptors (receptor adaptation) and the other is at a previously unknown location within the retinal circuitry that benefits from convergence of signals from multiple cones (post-receptor adaptation). Here we find that post-receptor adaptation occurs as signals are relayed from cone bipolar cells to ganglion cells. Furthermore, we find that the two adaptive mechanisms are essentially mutually exclusive: as light levels increase the main site of adaptation switches from the circuitry to the cones. ... As we make saccades to explore a visual scene, retinal neurons encounter a wide range of light intensities. Receptor and post-receptor adaptation permit the amplification required to see objects in shadows while avoiding saturation from the sky. The combination of these adaptive mechanisms allows the visual system to encode details in a scene with greater fidelity than a standard camera at a single exposure setting. The strategy the retina employs - shifting the dominant site of adaptation to match the reliability of the input signals - demonstrates an elegant principle for accurate information processing in sensory perception."

Besides, visual illusions still seem to be very popular:

In their paper entitled "What Are Lightness Illusions and Why Do We See Them", the authors CORNEY & LOTTO (in: PLoS Computational Biology, see References) have trained backpropagation multilayer perceptrons with 3-D dead-leaf scenes under varying illuminations. Interestingly enough, when tested with well-known illusion-inducing visual stimuli (Vasarely illusion, Mach bands, Hermann grids, and White's illusion), their artificial neuronal networks "behaved" like humans: "the emergent similarity between human perception and the ANNs’ output provides direct support for the view that illusions are caused by (as opposed to merely correlated with) the statistics of past visual experience towards surfaces in space under spatially heterogeneous illumination given ambiguous image data. Because stimulus ambiguity is an inherent challenge of natural visual ecology, illusions must also be inevitable in nature, suggesting that human illusions are common to all visual animals despite vast differences in their underlying neural machinery, which has important consequences for thinking about the biological and computational principles of vision. Evolving or training synthetic systems in ecologically relevant environments provides an important new strategy for uncovering what these principles are that usefully map images to scenes according to the statistics of experience. [Cf. also PURVES 2003!] Finally, the study provides a clear description of what an illusion is, and why we see them: an illusion describes the condition in which the actual source of a stimulus differs from the stimulus’ most likely source given the observer’s past experience."

Or in other words: all depends on the context (within some statistical learning), which you can clearly see when you vary the spatial frequency and size of the stripes in White's illusion (see image below).

And if you are interested in my first (real!) Flash-animation on a related subject on visual illusions (here: "verticality bias" and "inverted perspective"), then you may download and look at it here (just enjoy yourself!):

October 9, 2007

In their paper entitled "Chimpanzees Are Rational Maximizers in an Ultimatum Game", the authors Keith JENSEN et al. (in: Science, see References) show that "in an ultimatum game, humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are rational maximizers and are not sensitive to fairness. These results support the hypothesis that other-regarding preferences and aversion to inequitable outcomes, which play key roles in human social organization, distinguish us from our closest relatives".
HOWEVER (cf. also HERRMANN et al. 2007 and my entry of September 14, 2007 further below), this seems to be only another support for (Tomasello's) old hypothesis of Homo sapiens being an extremely social ("ultra-social") Machiavellian animal: only "civilized" humans can have some dubious "lust for revenge" and an extreme hate of "others" - with both "noble faculties" being heavily dependent on some fatal and dangerous Theory of Mind, as the authors do not hesitate to note: "sensitivity to fairness in the ultimatum game requires that responders and proposers each know what [and perhaps much more crucially: that] the other gains"...

In a related paper on "social neuroscience" entitled "Intact automatic imitation of human and robot actions in autism spectrum disorders [ASD]", the authors Geoffrey BIRD et al. (in: Proceedings of the Royal Society London B, see References) question the popular hypothesis that autists merely have bad imitative skills (and putatively bad mirrror neurons): "The present study assessed imtiation in high-functioning adults with ASD using an automatic imitation procedure. We chose an automatic, rather than a voluntary, imitation test in order to minimize the demands that it would make on non-specific mechanisms. In tests of automatic imitation, participants are not asked, and do not intend, to imitate modelled movements. Instead, they are required merely to observe actions, either passively or with a simple movement task, while the experimenter measures involuntary muscular responses".
The authors now find that "the ASD group showed an equivalent automatic imitation effect, and signs of an increased animacy bias, namely, a greater difference in automatic imitation of human and robot actions".
IN FACT, the ASD group even showed a "significantly greater animacy bias than the Control group ... The increased animacy bias in the ASD group was largely due to enhanced automatic imitation of human actions .... It has been shown [cf. BRASS & HEYES 2005!] that imitation inhibition and theory of mind depend on similar neural substrates, and a positive correlation between the ability to inhibit imitation and performance on theory of mind tasks has been found in patients with both frontal and posterior brain lesions ... Therefore, this hypothesis suggests that the ASD group showed a greater compatibility effect because they had problems inhibiting imitation of human actions. Such a suggestion is consonant with two clinical features of autism which indicate problems with imitation inhibition: echolalia ... and echopraxia."

In their article entitled "Impaired familiarity with preserved recollection after anterior temporal-lobe resection that spares the hippocampus", the authors Ben BOWLES et al. (in: PNAS, see: References) note:
"Recollection is a retrieval process that involves remembering specific details from episodic memory regarding a past experienced event. Familiarity, by contrast, is a process that gives rise to recognition without recovery of any contextual episodic detail."
Within their neuropsychological approach (i.e., lesion study), the authors now confirm dual-process models with regard to medial temporal lobe organization and "propose a mapping of familiarity and recollection onto perirhinal and hippocampal functions, respectively."

October 7, 2007

My lecture for the upcoming CAA conference in Dallas in February 2008 entitled "The attraction of Neuro-Art-History: Getting at Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman" (on Potential landscapes, LOC, TPJ, and the mapping of biases) is now available on my homepage as a Flash-Slideshow (see Publications) - with the exception of an animation of a Potential landscape, which still has to be done...
But I am now extremely happy and looking forward to the conference...

October 5, 2007

When you look at Gerhard Richter's new stained glass window in the southern transept of Cologne Cathedral, and when you look at it from the northern transept with slightly closed eyes ("blurred vision"), and if you know some well-known stained glass windows from the 14th century (like the ones at Augsburg Cathedral), you will suddenly be reminded of those older stained glass windows.

Accordingly, Richter's seemingly "abstract" and "a-religious" and "a-historical" window may only be a blurred version of a very old "figurative" stained glass window from the 14th c.

I have now "proved" this myself by blurring the Augsburg window (see picture below, left) with the help of Photoshop, and then tiling it - and this is the nearly unbelievable result:

	-------- >>>
Augsburg, 1340 AC		Augsburg (cf. left), blurred and tiled with Photoshop (OE)

October 3, 2007

When I first saw a trailer of the movie "Ratatouille" made by the PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS (2007), and when I saw the transparent ears of the digital protagonist "Rémy", I was immediately reminded of Lovis Corinth's book "Das Erlernen der Malerei" (1908), where he wrote on "transparency" as one of the most convincing rhetorical means in painting: „Die Transparenz ist neben dem Reflex die letzte Eigenschaft, die durch das Licht an den Objekten hervorgebracht wird. Sie kommt namentlich bei scharfer Lichtquelle, Sonnenlicht und Lampenlicht vor, und zwar dann, wenn die Objekte gegen diese Lichtquelle stehen und durch Flachheit ihres Körpers das Durchscheinen möglich machen. So leuchten in bestimmten Stellungen die Ohren der Menschen blutig rot…“.

And in fact, today's latest CGI (computer-generated images) seem to have now outstripped the older painters, as you can clearly see here in this digital picture of "Rémy" the rat with its transparent (and rhetorically extremely convincing) lovely ears:

October 1, 2007

In their paper entitled "Gray Matter Differences Correlate with Spontaneous Strategies in a Human Virtual Navigation Task", the authors BOHBOT et al. (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) note:
"To reach a target location, one may use a 'spatial memory strategy' by learning the relationships between environmental landmarks (stimulus-stimulus associations). This strategy is a form of explicit memory based on a cognitive map ... Alternatively, one can navigate without knowledge of the relationships between environmental landmarks, but instead by using a series of turns at precise decision points or stimuli ... The successful repetition of this nonspatial strategy leads to a 'response strategy'".
Now, their results "showed that spatial learners had significantly more gray matter in the hippocampus and less gray matter in the caudate nucleus compared with response learners. Furthermore, the gray matter in the hippocampus was negatively correlated to the gray matter in the caudate nucleus, suggesting a competitive interaction between these two brain areas ... Consequently, the most efficient navigators are likely to be those that are flexible at using spatial or response strategies on demand".

And if you are interested in the latest findings of a cross-species "speech error research" (including hand signers), then you may read the short review by Michael ERARD entitled "Read My Slips: Speech Errors Show How Language is Processed" (in: Science, see References): "Not until children speak in sentences of three or more words do syntactic errors, such as 'sit down this immediately!' (a blend of 'sit down this minute' and 'sit down immediately') appear ... As a result, the more practice a speaker has, the higher the proportion of anticipatory errors, although overall errors decrease".
And with regard to "spoonerisms" (e.g., "jeef berky" instead of "beef jerky"), the author notes: "speakers don't substitute one whole sound segment for another as was previously thought. Rather, they attempt to pronounce the two sounds at the same time. This way of thinking about speech errors - as a collision of motor commands rather than as substitutions of mental symbols - might be more reliably investigated in slips of the hand, ... because researchers can capture [i.e., map] the slower hand movements more clearly than tongue movements".

September 30, 2007

If you are interested in the brain activations involved in the "perception of socially relevant facial expressions" (comprising classical face motor areas, [posterior] cingulate cortex, precuneus, hippocampus, and the dorsal midbrain [optic tectum]), then you might read the article by SCHILBACH et al. (in: Social Neuroscience, see References).

Two other papers now show that not only subcortical areas (like the optic tectum) are very early processing (visual) areas, but already the retina itself as well (cf. also MASLAND & MARTIN 2007!):

In his paper entitled "Retinal Encoding of Ultrabrief Shape Recognition Cues", Ernest GREENE (in: PLoS One, see References) notes:
"Shape encoding mechanisms can be probed by the sequential brief display of dots that mark the boundary of the shape, and delays of less than a millisecond between successive dots can impair recognition. ... The results make it likely that simultaneity of cues is being registered within the retina. A potential mechanism is suggested, calling for linkage of stimulated sites through activation of PA1 [polyaxonal amacrine] cells. ... Wertheimer used the term 'common fate' to describe the ability to see the gestalt of a moving pattern of points. While we commonly think of gestalt operations as being very cognitive, the early advocates of these concepts [like Wolfgang Köhler] believed them to be fundamental... The current evidence supports Kohler's conjecture that the process begins in the retina."

In their paper entitled "Synchronized Firing among Retinal Ganglion Cells Signals Motion Reversal", the authors SCHWARTZ et al. (in: Neuron, see References) note: "These results indicate that not only can the retina anticipate the location of a smoothly moving [i.e., shifting] object, but that it can also signal violations [i.e., deviant shifts] in its own prediction. We show that the reversal response cannot be explained by models of the classical receptive field and suggest that nonlinear receptive field subunits [including amacrine / bipolar cells] may be responsible."

September 27, 2007

It is interesting to see that "UNCERTAINTY" (and hence "unconsciousness") seems to rule EVERYWHERE on this (not very nice, not very bright, and not very perfect...) planet: there are no precise maps, no clear goals, and only higher corrupt primates with very short-lasting and small-primitive egotistical goals...
HOWEVER, on my planet (where I originally came from... (;-)), EVERYTHING is clearly mapped (on all spatiotemporal scales, of course), EVERYTHING is clearly defined, and there are only TWO clear BIG goals which are to be pursued and satisfied by all perfectly trained (and hence perfectly "conscious" and Self-controlled) map-makers (see Ceterum censeo).
Too beautiful, isn't it...?

September 25, 2007

In their paper entitled "Neural correlates of the Pythagorean ratio rules", the authors Alexander H. FOSS et al. (in: NeuroReport, see References) note with regard to the finding of Pythagoras, that simpler interval ratios in music (1:2, 2:3, etc.) are more "pleasant" than complex ones (e.g., 243:128):
"In musicians, the [left] inferior frontal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule and anterior cingulate respond with progressively more activation to perfect consonances, [<] imperfect consonances [<] and dissonances. In nonmusicians only the right inferior frontal gyrus follows this pattern".
Besides, "the neural activation to dissonant intervals is significantly greater overall than consonant intervals when we examine activation of all participants" - which is no wonder, since "the brain" always "looks for" abrupt changes, deviances, etc., but NOT for unity, harmony, etc. (which seems to be rather a genuinely "cultural" struggle and achievement...).

And if you are interested in a short review of the latest achievements and problems of Neuroeconomics, then you may read P. Read MONTAGUE 2007 (see References) on "valuation", "the intuitive concept of 'time' [and money]" (with the "perceptual present actually being more valuable than the perceptual future - which is also a problem of Self-control, of course!), "fairness", and the brain's simulation of "outcomes about the world and other humans" (which, including "theories of mind", is extremely important in game theories, strategies, etc. - as you know...).

September 23, 2007

When reading SINHA et al. 2006 (see References), I stumbled over something which already puzzled Gombrich: Why are line-drawings so powerful? After all, there are no contours in nature... (however, there are discontinuities, of course...).
In fact, when you compare those extremely artificial "high-frequency" stimuli (edge maps) used by neuroscientists with real line-drawings by artists, you in fact see the differences: "such depictions [by artists] do, in fact, contain [not only high-frequency, but also] significant photometric cues and ... the contours included in such a depiction by an accomplished artist correspond not just to a low-level edge map, but in fact embody a faces photometric structure" (Sinha et al.).

Similarly, when re-reading CAVANAGH 2005, he already puts the same question: "why do line drawings work?", which he now answers as follows (but while, unfortunately, not referring to the LOC, which is crucially involved in processing contours vs. scrambled images: see MALACH et al. 1995, GERLACH et al. 2002 etc.): "Artists have discovered which key contours must be perceived by the visual brain to identify the essential structure of an object".
“The blurry global shapes and colours may convey emotional content directly to emotional centres of the brain while the irrelevant fine detail typical of Impressionist pieces distracts conscious perception” - and in fact, as you already know from my dissertation and MALACH et al. 1995, the LOC is highly activated by blurred stimuli (as some kind of "super-stimuli" for the LOC).
Besides, Cavanagh notes: "gross deviations from the optics of refraction are rarely noticed by the viewer [see Flemish paintings of the 15th c.!], indicating again that the visual brain only computes a small set of the possible physical properties of a transparent material in assessing whether or not a surface is transparent”, and: "[Cubist paintings] demonstrate the minimal skeletons of visual forms that are capable of evoking remembered images” -this is exactly the crucial point of attractor dynamics (and pattern completion)... (see below, September 18: John Constable's "reminding"...).

September 18, 2007

In their paper entitled "Perspectives on science and art", the authors CONWAY & LIVINGSTONE (in: Current Opinion in Neurobiology, see References) seem to be amazed at the fact that it is not "physics" that rules perception, but rather some "'alternative' physics" (see CAVANAGH 2005), which now reminds me of the power of attractors (including the LOC) and Gombrich's seeing with "hypotheses / schemata" (or better: inferring schemata).
These authors note: "Our tolerance of multiple points of view in a single painting suggest that one characteristic of this alternative (psycho) physics is that depth cues are processed locally ... our interpretation of the three-dimensional organization of a scene is generated by stitching together multiple impressions".
But here I would rather say: inferring attractors (schemata, pattern completion) from multiple impressions (or rather: incomplete local hints and cues).
The authors now go on: "The fragmented nature of seeing makes the discovery of single-point perspective, and the subsequent obligation of paintings to conform to it, a remarkable demonstration of the power of connoisseurship and of the importance of cognitive function (learning) in aesthetic appreciation" - in fact, this is the power of (acquired) "schemata" (hypotheses, inferences) or stable attractors...
Actually, the simultaneous discovery of tonal unity in the 15th century (along with 1-point perspective) mentioned by the authors may indeed show that "people" are looking for stable attractors ("unity") all the while...
When the authors note that "Picasso pays particular attention to the outer configuration of the faces, even if the internal features are grossly exaggerated", this is for me a clear indication that the LOC (as a giant attractor for "figures", "shapes", and "forms", i.e., Cusanus' "forma formarum" or Cernuschi's "containment schema" of "closedness" or "closability") can never be left out in perception, as exaggerated the caricatures or drawings of faces may be (see exactly MALACH et al. 1995; see also my Seminar script, Seminar-Script S5 Figure 36, on Hopfield networks and attractors capable of fault tolerance, pattern completion, etc.).

Or in other words: all this may not be the result of some crudely hypothesized "alternative physics", but rather a quite nice outcome of (massively parallel processing) dynamical systems and their automatic attractor dynamics (with degradation tolerance, automatic pattern completion, etc.). But "we" scientists still think along (seemingly) static and serial (linguistic) attractors instead of dynamical systems and developmental "histories", describable nevertheless (by the way) by the most advanced physics and mathematics. Or in short with John Constable (from GOMBRICH 1977): "The art pleases by reminding [i.e., by eliciting attractors], not by deceiving" - which perhaps would have been a nice motto to CONWAY & LIVINGSTONE 2007 and their "alternative physics"...?

September 17, 2007

Thanks to a hint by John Onians, I have now read BLAKEMORE & GREENFIELD 1987 (see References). I now would like to turn your attention to four articles in it:
First, already Larry Weiskrantz in his essay entitled "Neuropsychology and the Nature of Consciousness" notes the "ultra-social bias" of Homo sapiens involved in ToMs [!] (cf. also SUBIAUL et al. 2007): “[it is] the fact that we [!!!!] have the capacity [i.e., ABILITY? POTENTIAL? POWER?] to think and be aware and consider what other people might be thinking about us that produces, I think, the uniquely human condition of paranoia. I do not know that paranoia, as a really damaging social-psychiatric condition, exists in any creature other than man, and human beings can have it only because their consciousness is so highly developed”. He then ends with a monitoring theory of "consciousness" (cf. my "maps mapping maps"!): „It is not a little man doing the looking, but a part of the nervous system itself that monitors other neural networks, rather than being firmly enmeshed as a link in a closed serial chain of processing. It is a matter of organization rather than of peeping Toms [!].”
Secondly, Nicholas Humphrey comes to the same conclusion of "Homo sapiens" being the "most social" animal: “Human beings have evolved to be the most highly social creatures the world has ever seen. Their social relationships have a depth, a complexity, and a biological importance to them which no other animals’ relationships come near. No accident, I think, that human beings are so far as we know unique in their ability to use self-knowledge to interpret others”.
Thirdly, Peter Hacker quotes a (still!) socially biased Wittgenstein: “Only of a living human being [or less socially biased: "of me"] can one [or better: "I"] say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious“. (Cf. also my What is Mapology?, point 22).
Fourthly, Rodolfo Llinás has developed his tensor network theory of coordinate-invariant sensory-motor transformations (but which may have more to do with attractors, I suppose): according to him, thinking is just “internalized movement” (perhaps when the Basal Ganglia are switching from contingent processings and activity circles to seemingly non-contingent simulations and activation circles via the PFC? - See My map of the brain!).

September 16, 2007

It seems that scientists are now converging: a very similar paper to the one by Herrmann et al. (see Sept. 14) is the paper by SUBIAUL et al. (in: KAAS et al. 2007, Vol. 4, pp. 509-28, see References) on "Human Cognitive Specializations", which I have now read, and from which I now quote their reference to the philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce: "[The typically “human”] ability to reinterpret observable phenomena in terms of unobservable concepts [such as "minds" in ToM] may depend on a specific type of inference which the philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce called retroductive inferences ... Pierce viewed retroduction as fundamental to the scientific enterprise because it depended upon the development of hypotheses about observable phenomena. ... [But] there is a difference between a mind that predicts events and one that seeks to explain them. But, of course, there is nothing trivial about predictions. Note that predictions come in two varieties: forward (e.g., classic conditioning), and backward (e.g., descriptive). If the reinterpretation hypothesis is correct, we can imagine, on the one hand, a mind that responds in a predictive manner to event and cues, and, on the other, a mind that generates rules that makes predictions (from hypotheses) across domains. ... Only through a systematic exploration of these various problems will we ultimately come to understand human and nonhuman cognitive specializations”.

You see: scientists make only descriptive predictions (within map-makings), but they give no "explanations" or "first causes" (which perhaps will always be reserved to the religious or philosophical realms)...

September 14, 2007

And by the way: if you read HERRMANN et al. 2007 in detail (see also my annotation below, September 10), you see that "causality seeking" - i.e., seeking for (hidden, unobservable) "causes" - may be the first "cause" for the development of some "Theory of Mind" (about "first movers" and "agents"), "social mind" etc.
This reminds me of the neuro-theologian Andrew NEWBERG's et al. 2001 (and d'Aquili's) "causality operator" in the brain (including the brains of "religious believers" looking for "gods"):
already small children love terrorizing their parents with stupid questions about "first causes" (and always ultimately ending up with some "Big Bang", "first mover", or even worse...)...

HOWEVER, SCIENTISTS (as TECHNICIANS rather than astrologists, philosophers, and theologians) DO NOT SEEK FOR "FIRST CAUSES" (including childish things like "Big Bangs", "first movers", etc.) NOR FOR some "EXPLANATIONS", but RATHER PRAGMATICALLY TRY TO DEVELOP ever MORE precise MAPS that enABLE them to manipulate "the world" ever BETTER (that means: with a success-rate or expected outcome eventually approaching a hit-rate of 100%).
THAT's ALL.
And today's success-rate in medicine may have hardly approached 50% yet, by the way...

September 13, 2007

By the way (which I didn't know before): the now dead parrot "ALEX" of Mrs Pepperberg had learnt his astonishing skills while observing (and competing with) a human student learning the same things (words, etc.) in parallel at the same time.

This reminds me of the bonobo "KANZI", who has learnt his astonishing skills by observing his mother (who was much less successful than Kanzi himself).

You see here (once more) how important and "motivating" some "social learning" (including "social competition") can be...

September 12, 2007

In their paper entitled "Shared Neural Resources between Music and Language Indicate Semantic Processing of Musical Tension-Resolution Patterns", the authors STEINBEIS & KOELSCH (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) note the following: "Meyer (1956) [see MEYER 1956 in References) was the first to embrace the possible link between the kind of tension-resolution patterns described above and meaning in music. He endorsed the possibility of absolute musical meaning, which refers to the music's intrinsic structural properties, a form that can be juxtaposed against meaning arising from extramusical associations. ... In other words, one type of meaning of a musical event is borne out of its implicit suggestion of a number of possible subsequent musical events. This of course applies to all types of meaning that are driven by expectations. These possibilities are constrained by the expectations, which have been implicitly learned and are subject to particular rules and hierarchies impinging on the perceptual system. It can thus be argued that the meaning arising out of tension-resolution patterns in music is of a similar sort as that derived from hierarchical relations of linguistic utterances."
The authors now show that "2 event-related potentials in response to harmonic expectancy violations, the early right anterior negativity (ERAN) and the N500, could be systematically modulated by simultaneously presented language material containing either a syntactic or a semantic violation. Whereas the ERAN was reduced only when presented concurrently with a syntactic language violation and not with a semantic language violation, this pattern was reversed for the N500. This is the first piece of evidence showing that tension-resolution patterns represent a route to meaning in music ... This meaning can be, but need not be, mediated via feelings or emotions (Meyer 1956) but more likely arises out of a knowledge of musical rules and regularities, which can be implicitly learned through exposure to music".

If you are interested in the same terms (learning of "possibilities" and statistical "regularities"), you may not only read Ernst Kurths classical books on "potentials" and "possibilities" in musical tension-resolution patterns (or rather: shifts), but you may also read Paul CHURCHLANDs new book "Neurophilosophy at Work" on some ''Map-Indexing Theory of Perception":
"Our [!!! - unreflected "social bias"!]] assembled sensory inputs, at any given moment, serve to activate a specific pattern of activation-levels across each of our waiting neuronal populations, a unique pattern for each map (remember: each map has its own abstract subject matter), a pattern that constitutes a 'you-are-here pointer' to a specific possibility among the many background possibilities [a nice term: see my attractor landscapes being actually assumed and activated one after another out of a vast "background" of possible attractor landscapes or maps potentially building up some "Potential landscape" on the whole in [23]!] chronically portrayed in that map. We might call this the Map-Indexing Theory of Perception. ... If we ask, instead, how the brain develops its manifold maps of various abstract feature domains, developmental neuroscience already holds out the sketch of an answer. Hebbian learning is a mindless, subconceptual process that continually adjusts the strengths or 'weights' of the trillions of synaptic connections that intervene between one neuronal population and another, the very connections whose assembled weights determine the complex landscape [! - cf. my attractor landscapes or "maps"!?] of prototype regions that constitutes the abstract map embodied in the receiving population. Modify the synaptic weights and you modify the map".

September 10, 2007

I now first refer the reader to three papers on the famous "mirror neurons", then I will turn to a paper on the "social brain hypothesis", which will then be followed by a short annotation of Bruce Lahn's lecture at the MPI Tübingen today:

    First, the authors HAMILTON & GRAFTON in their paper entitled "Action Outcomes Are Represented in Human Inferior Frontoparietal Cortex" (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) show that "the left aIPS [anterior intraparietal sulcus] encodes the object goal of an action, whereas the inferior frontal [IFG] and lateral occipital regions encode kinematic features of an observed action, such as trajectory and hand shape. ... Together, these data on action planning and execution support the idea that there is a hierarchy for performed action representations, with kinematic parameters found in the IFG, planning of goals, such as taking a tool in the left IPL [inferior parietal lobe], and monitoring of action sequences and action outcomes in right IPL."
    Second, in their paper entitled "Anthropomorphism influences perception of computer-animated characters' actions", the authors CHAMINADE ET AL. (in: SCAN, see References) found that while "using a biological motion classification task [i.e., using more or less artificial or anthropomorphical runners with more or less biologically reasonable motion], ... the tendency to perceive a simple running motion as natural is modulated by the appearance of the character used to render the motion. Anthropomorphism of artificial agents decreases the tendency to report their motion as biological [so that the viewer appears to be stuck in some "uncanny valley of eeriness"], and an fMRI investigation found that the response bias towards 'biological' is correlated with an increase of activity in regions involved in mentalizing [left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)] and a decrease of activity in regions belonging to the mirror system". And you see here once more: perception (and intermingled expectancies and inferences) is quite tricky and complex in general...
    Third, the authors CATMUR ET AL. in their paper entitled "Sensorimotor Learning Configures the Human Mirror System" (in: Current Biology, see References) note the following: "If the development of the mirror system depends on sensorimotor learning, it should be possible to use sensorimotor training to change the functioning of mature mirror systems and even to give them "countermirror" properties. To test this prediction, we measured mirror-system functioning [via TMS on motor-evoked potentials] before and after incompatible ("countermirror") sensorimotor training, in which human participants performed index-finger movements while observing little-finger movements and vice versa. The control group received compatible ("mirror") sensorimotor training, in which they performed the same finger movements as those they observed." The authors now conclude from their results that "the mirror properties of the mirror system are neither wholly innate nor fixed once acquired; instead they develop through sensorimotor learning. Our findings indicate that the human mirror system is, to some extent, both a product and a process of social interaction."

This now brings me to another paper that further corroborates the "cultural intelligence hypothesis" put forward by Tomasello et al., i.e., the hypothesis according to which "humans" are not only "social", but rather "ultra-social" beings:
    In their paper entitled "Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis", the authors HERRMANN ET AL. (in: Science, see References) have administered a "comprehensive battery of cognitive tests to a large number of chimpanzees ... orangutans ... and human children [at 2,5 years]" in parallel. They now show that chimps are more skillful in mathematics ("addition") and tool use, whereas human children excel at "causality tasks not involving active tool manipulation, as well as [at] ... tasks of social cognition".
"It is possible that what is distinctively human is not social-cultural cognition as a specialized domain, as we have hypothesized. Rather, what may be distinctive is the ability to understand [or much better: "to infer"??? - cf. Gombrich's and Popper's "human beings" as extremely "hypotheses-making & guessing & inferencing & simulating animals"?] unobserved causal forces in general, including (as a special case) the mental states of others as causes of behavior. Even in this case, however, it is a plausible hypothesis that understanding hidden causal forces evolved first to enable humans to understand the mental states of other persons, and this generalized only later to the physical domain".
Besides, they note that "domestic dogs ... do not perform as well as chimpanzees on tasks of physical cognition but outperform them on tasks of social cognition".

All in all: what makes "us" really "human" is perhaps this extreme ("ultra-social") and often fatal "social bias": you just have to look at the last six thousand years of "human history", and you may then find this "social bias" and its fatal consequences everywhere (up to the National-Social-ists having perhaps been the "humans" with the most "extreme" "social biases" so far...). Accordingly, instead of being "extremely social primates", "we" perhaps would have better remained chimps with outstanding mathematical and technical skills... (This is a joke, of course (;-)).

And by the way: even the skillful use of "causality" may have fatal consequences in "grown-up" "humans": just think of neuroscientists (and children) still musing about "reasons" and "first causes" (from some childish infinite regress problem up to Libet et al. ...).

This (only 6000 years of evolution - which is now "evolution" on a "historical" time-scale!!) now brings me to my last comment: Today, I attended a lecture given by Bruce LAHN (and I also e-mailed him on this annotation here) at the MPI Tübingen on genes involved in the "outstanding" brain development of "humans" (cf. also DEDIU & LADD 2007 in my S_Update Jun Fig. 8a): while the Microcephalin-gene (found with a modern allele throughout the whole globe) may have been positively selected for 40000 years, the ASPM-gene (found in a modern allele especially in Eurasiates) may have been positively selected only for the last 6000 years - i.e., when some extreme "social bias" began to manifest itself (historically!) in complex wheat-producing "civilizations" (with altered brain-sugar-metabolisms?) and some "social hyperstructures" like (National-Socialist?) States, etc. ...? However, Bruce Lahn was not able to find any correlational relationship between IQ and the aforementioned modern alleles - AND I NOW GUESS WHY: Bruce Lahn would definitely have better correlated these genes not with the IQ-scale, but rather with some "social [cultural] intelligence" [SQ?] (sub-)scale...?

September 3, 2007

In a quite important paper (in the wake of MASLAND & MARTIN 2007, see References) entitled "Spatio-temporal prediction and inference by V1 neurons", the authors GUO ET AL. (in: European Journal of Neuroscience, see References) have found that the responses of orientation selective neurons in V1 heavily depend on the context, i.e., on sensory input like "predictor bars" moving in a "linear"-"contiguous" sequence from the outside towards their classical receptive fields: "As we expected, when the visual stimulus was presented in a highly predictable spatial and temporal sequence towards a neuron's CRF [classical receptive field], a substantial number of V1 neurons responded to the predictable events prior to and distant from the stimulation of their CRFs and transmitted more information about the CRF stimulation, suggesting V1 neurons directly contribute to the coding of spatio-temporal regularities in our visual world". The authors now conclude that "neuronal responses of V1 neurons were significantly modulated by spatio-temporal information occurring well outside and prior to stimulation of their CRFs. Predictors presented in a linearly ordered sequence caused 'early' orientation tuned responses. Moreover the orientation of predictors could significantly affect the orientation tuning elicited by bars occurring inside the CRF, and could result in tuned predictive responses when in fact the CRF stimulus was omitted. ... In light of our results, a natural interpretation is that neurons in area V1 are not only specialized for extracting local features (i.e., orientation), but also represent and encode signals that reflect the statistical structure of the visual world, such as spatio-temporal regularities, as proposed by the model of 'vision-as-inference'. On this interpretation, a neurophysiologically mapped CRF represents the neuron's projection of an inferred probability onto the world, and not the result of simple analysis of the local features within the CRF".

August 28-31, 2007

For four days, I was at Norwich (UK) with the art historian Prof. John ONIANS for talking about the forthcoming CAA conference on "Neuro-Art-History" in Dallas 2008. I was also able to give him the address of Prof. Dennis Proffitt (with regard to the verticality bias), and Prof. Onians once again referred me to SEGALL ET AL. 1966 (which I have now added to my References list, as nice forerunners of PURVES 2003). Besides, I turned his attention to Taine and Lamettrie ("L'homme machine" 1748) as presumable forerunners for Changeux' "L'homme neuronal" of 1983 (which, contrary to the more crucial and later text of Changeux 1994, lacks a discussion of mirror neurons of course). I am extremely thankful to Prof. Onians for taking his time - and for criticizing my overloaded presentation for the Dallas conference 2008, which I have now reduced to a light and convincing introductory lecture on Potential landscapes, the LOC, and the TPJ (forthcoming on this homepage!). Besides, I have now finished my collaborational work for the multidisciplinary Museum of the University of Tübingen (after, unfortunately, having been extremely exploited for three and a half months by some rather insensitive people - comme toujours, malheureusement).

August 27, 2007

In their paper entitled "How emotions inform judgment and regulate thought", the authors CLORE & HUNTSINGER (in: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, see References) note: "People have a surprising ability to zoom in and out mentally, focusing on either the big picture or the details. But some people favour a focus on the forest, whereas other favor the trees. ... A different kind of global-local perception concerns whether people see others as members of groups or as individuals. ... Contrary to most people's intuitions, happy moods promote group stereotyping, whereas sad moods promote a focus on individuals. ... Participants in positive moods tend to rely more on stereotypes to guide their thinking about members of various social groups than do those in negative moods. ... When angry, one believes oneself to be correct, which should increase confidence in one's own cognitions. Thus, anger would be expected to show the same processing effects as happiness [i.e., fostering stereotypes]. ... For example, words such as bed, pillow, rest, awake and blanket all activate the word 'sleep', which might then be falsely recalled. Such false memories are assumed to reflect relational or gist processing. According to the affect-as-information hypothesis, positive moods should promote and negative moods should inhibit such relational processing, making false-memory studies ideal for hypothesis testing."

And if you are interested in "Boolean maps" and the "Limits of Human Visual Awareness" and "our apparently rich visual experience ... [being] a substantial overestimation of what is actually consciously available", you may read the article by HUANG ET AL. (in: Science, see References): "The Boolean map theory predicts that multiple features can only be consciously accessed one by one, whereas multiple locations can be accessed at the same time ... The present results can also be seen as showing that multiple location values can be represented as a holistic pattern or surface (i.e., observers can encode them together as a unit), thus avoiding competition. Feature values, on the contrary, evidently cannot constitute a comparable sort of pattern in feature space (e.g., color space), and thus each needs its own separate visual representation".

And if you are interested in "closed-loop experimental settings" for investigating sensory systems with optimal "adaptive sampling" strategies (to find out the properties of sensory neurons, e.g.), you may turn to BENDA ET AL. (in: Current Opinion in Neurobiology, see References).

August 22, 2007

When I read the paper by HUNG ET AL. on "perceived luminance" (brightness), Purves, and surface perception resp. "filling-in" (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References), and when studying the Cornsweet illusion, I was immediately reminded of the Cubists' famous (and quite simple and structural-compositional) "trick" of shaded contours (compare the images just below).

<------------->

August 18, 2007

In her review on a paper by Wang et al. on thalamic bursts (occuring during sleep, when the thalamus is uncoupled from contingent visual input), Pamela REINAGEL (in: Neuron, see References) notes: "The functional implication [of the study by Wang et al.] is that bursts indicate surprise: a burst means an excitatory stimulus appeared where there had not been any recently."

In an even more interesting study on "corticothalamic projections control[ling] synchronization in locally coupled bistable thalamic oscillators", the authors MAYER ET AL. (in: Physical Review Letters, see References) note:
"A widespread phenomenon in populations of periodic, noisy, and chaotic oscillators (or maps [!!!]) is the appearance of synchronous collective oscillations."
The authors now propose a system (modelled by a double well potential possessing either one stable fixed point or bistability with a stable fixed point and a stable limit cycle) in order to simulate these thalamic oscillations: "The results clearly show that also in the human sleep the spindles become synchronized by corticothalamic projections. ... slow waves also occur with extensive destruction of the thalamus and transected corpus callosum; these facts indicate that the thalamus is not essentially involved in the genesis of slow wave rhythm. ... [Hence] we post that synchronization in the thalamus mainly is controlled through open loop repetitive phase resetting by the cortex."

Is this now "our" next step in "our" "hunt" (Cusanus) for some TOTAL POTENTIAL function (of "the brain")? (See also [24], and see also BUKOWSKI ET AL. 2007 on the "water potential" in References)

August 17, 2007

In an extremely intriguing study on "fixation-related brain potentials [FRPs] for ecologically valid settings", the authors HUTZLER ET AL. (in: Brain Research, see References) show that - exemplified by the well known old/new effect in the domain of visual word recognition - an "alternative approach that utilizes brain potentials corresponding to eye fixations during free exploration reveals effects as reliable as conventional event-related brain potentials ... Contrary to the ERP paradigm, in the FRP approach synchronization is not realized by the externally triggered presentation of a stimulus. Rather, an eye tracker is used to assess a subject's eye movements in order to determine when a subject is looking at what (e.g., a word) in a complex, visual pattern (e.g., a sentence). By doing so, the exact point in time at which certain visual information (that is crucial for triggering a specific cognitive process) is taken in can be assessed - allowing to synchronize the recording of electrophysiological data to the start of a specific cognitive process. ... With the rise of easy-to-use eye trackers it is now unproblematic to determine a subject's gaze position with high spatial resolution while recording electrophysiological data."

You see here once again the importance of technics and mapping tools... (the only things that may have really improved and made progress in the last 5000 years...).

In their paper entitled "The earliest electrophysiological correlate of visual awareness?", the authors KOIVISTO ET AL. (in: Brain and Cognition, see References) aim at studying, "by using a simple perceptual detection task as possible, which one of the previously suggested effects (P1, VAN, or P3) is the primary electrophysiological correlate of visual awareness ... In both experiments [masking paradigm vs. low contrast threshold paradigm], the observers indicated after each trial whether they had consciously detected [i.e., mapped] a stimulus [i.e., shift] or not. The differences in ERPs between hits (correctly detected stimuli) and misses (undetected stimuli) were defined as the electrophysiological correlates of visual awareness." Now, the authors found two electrophysiological correlates: "First, a negative wave (VAN) was elicited by hits as compared to misses, peaking at posterior temporal and occipital sites around 200-350 ms after the stimulus. VAN was followed by a positive wave after 400 ms, peaking at parietal sites."

Hence: "consciousness" may boil down to a mapping (detection) of shifts (VAN, called "visual phenomenal consciousness" by the authors above), followed by a (more strictly speaking) "conscious" mapping of maps (P400, called "reflective consciousness" by the authors above)?

August 16, 2007

In his review on a paper by Mahon et al. on tool-selective brain areas studied by repetition-suppression (RS), Maximilian RIESENHUBER (in: Neuron, see References) notes: "This suggests the intriguing possibility that tool-selective neurons cluster in the MFG [medial fusiform gyrus] because of that region's connectivity with the IPL [inferior parietal lobule]. For instance, during the learning of novel tools, IPL could provide "top-down" signals that gate plasticity of visual tool information in the MFG, and the learned representation could in turn provide input to IPL when interacting with tools."

In their paper entitled "The unsolved mystery of vision", the authors MASLAND & MARTIN (in: Current Biology, see References) put the question: "Why, after more than a half century of work, have physiological descriptions of visual coding lagged so far behind anatomical knowledge, and what can be done to improve matters?". They answer the question by proposing a new model for the visual system (pathways) in the brain, and by taking into account non-standard cells in the retina as well (see the image just below).
As they note: "if one's experimental apparatus [i.e., mapping tool...] is restricted to the presentation of drifting gratings, the suppressed-by-contrast cell appears only as an 'outlier', about which the investigator can say nothing else."
You see here once again: nearly everything depends on "our" (always selective and limited) mapping tools...

August 15, 2007

Today, I had my second (unofficial) "rigorosum" in Valentino BRAITENBERGs lab at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics at Tübingen. I am really thankful to him (and his co-workers: Almut Schüz, Steffen Stoewer, Matthias Valverde, and Anna Lena Keller) for lending me his extremely sensitive (and extremely quick) ears (POSSIbly due to his playing the violin and his early education by women in Southern Tyrolia?).

August 14, 2007

In an interesting paper entitled "Borderline personality disorder and emotion regulation: Insights from the Polyvagal Theory", the authors AUSTIN ET AL. (in: Brain and Cognition, see References) sketch out a theory (by Porges) I haven't known before:
"The theory emphasizes an integrated Social Engagement System that regulates the muscles of the face and head involved in social engagement behaviours (e.g., gaze, expression, prosody, and gesture) and a component of the parasympathetic nervous system, the myelinated vagal pathways to the heart that calm visceral state and dampen sympathetic and HPA activity. ... According to the Polyvagal Theory, the myelinated vagus, which phylogenetically evolved with mammals, is critical for two reasons: to inhibit defensive limbic circuits, and to establish social bonds. Phylogenetically, as mammals expressed special visceral efferent pathways to regulate the striated muscles of the face and head (e.g., facial expressions, head gesture), there was a parallel shift [!!] in the neural regulation of the heart from an unmyelinated to a myelinated vagus. This new myelinated (i.e., mammalian) vagus actively inhibits the sympathetic nervous system's influence on the heart and dampens HPA-axis activity. The mammalian vagus functions as an active vagal brake ... to maintain calm states in social contexts. ... The amplitude of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) indexes the state of the vagal brake. ... By quantifying RSA during various challenges, it is possible [!] to measure the dynamic regulation of the vagal brake."

In their paper entitled "A deletion variant of the Alpha2b-adrenoceptor is related to emotional memory", the authors QUERVAIN ET AL. (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) note that "emotionally arousing events are recalled better than neutral events. This phenomenon, which helps us to remember important and potentially [!!]vital information, depends on the activation of noradrenergic transmission in the brain. Here we show that a deletion variant of ADRA2B, the gene encoding the Alpha2b-adrenergic receptor, is related to enhanced emotional memory".

August 13, 2007

When I read the paper entitled "Neural Dynamics of Event Segmentation in Music" by SRIDHARAN ET AL. (in: Neuron, see References), I burst out in laughter when I read the following (ironic?) sentence:
"A strikingly right-lateralized network of brain regions showed peak response during the movement transitions when, paradoxically, [!!!!!] there was no physical stimulus". Well, these authors do not seem to have read my Seminar-script yet (see S4 Figure 45 ff. on the Gestaltists, see Seminar-Script): the "always predictive brain" is never at rest - and especially not in musical silences (i.e., when "attentional predictions", i.e., the longing for target maps and "expectations", play an important role). The authors then provide evidence for two distinct functional networks at the movement transition: "a ventral fronto-temporal network associated with detecting salient events [i.e., shifts], followed in time by a dorsal fronto-parietal network associated with maintaining attention and updating working memory" (please note the sloppy terms here: "attention", "working memory", etc.).

In their paper entitled "Early experience impairs perceptual discrimination", the authors HAN ET AL. (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) write that rat pups exposed to 7.1-kHz tone pips during growth show impaired frequency-discrimination due to the development of a "giant attractor" in this frequency range (see the image just below, including a tonotopic auditory map and tuning-curves with an attractor at 7.1 kHz).

August 6, 2007

My homepage is now completely rewritten in the Wiki-style (thanks to my colleague and Webmaster, Armin Elbs).

My updates will now come in this Blog-style (and you may make annotations yourself one day!):

All museums world-wide should take this format to edit their archives and collections online.

By the way: It is not "the religions" that are the problem in "our" world. Since "religions" seem to be mere "social" and "evolutionary" strategies (cf. my Update July 2007 in Update 2006/07), the problem is rather the fatal and dangerous "social fallacy" or "social bias" (see What is Mapology?), i.e., that map-makers do not seem to be able to DIFFERENTIATE between bodies and Selves (i.e., map-makers). (Cf. also my Ceterum censeo).

December 22, 2008

In their paper entitled "Perceiving is believing: a Bayesian approach to explaining the positive symptoms of schizophenia", the authors Paul C. FLETCHER & Chris D. FRITH (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) note that schizophrenia may not only involve a disturbed feeling of self-agency (i.e., activABILITY vs. non-activABILITY within a POTENTIAL landscape or landscape of attractors: see What is Mapology?), but a disturbance in "error-dependent updating of inferences and beliefs about the world" (please note here the mapologically sloppy and folk-psychological language of the authors!):

"Strikingly, many of the symptoms associated with schizophrenia involve misattribution of self-generated actions to others", and: "A significant difference between self-generated actions and something that occurs outside one's control is that in the former case one CAN predict what will happen ... By contrast, the hallmark of a sensory experience that derives from an external stimulus is that it is not predicted and hence not suppressed. UnpredictABLE things are difficult to ignore. Indeed, it is crucial to experience them and incorporate them into an updated understanding of the environment", and hence, "predictABILITY" is a"useful marker for internally generated actions".
Besides, "surprise -- a mismatch between what is expected and what actually happens -- drives learning."
All in all, in terms of a Bayesian hierarchical network (see Figure below), the authors note that "the problem that leads to the positive symptoms of schizophrenia starts with false prediction errors being propagated upwards through the hierarchy. These errors require higher levels of the hierarchy to adjust their models of the world [i.e., their maps]. However, as the errors are false, these adjustments can never fully resolve the problem. As a result, prediction errors will be propagated even further up the system to ever-higher levels of abstraction [well, that is the way of culture, "progress" and civilization!]. The severity of the insult to the Bayesian system may account for how far up the hierarchy a false precition error will go [perhaps even culminating in a erroneous feeling of "being persecuted by a God"????].
Hence, "stimuli accompanied by large prediction error would become more readily associable, perhaps accounting for the bizarre but compelling coincidences that patients frequently report. ... A noisy prediction-error signal could therefore lead to patients' strange experiences, together with their readiness to accept incidental stimuli and events as important and meaningful and to link them in unusual [i.e., creative/playful?] ways. ... The world will feel strange, and there may be a sense that there is some underlying change that must be discovered".

HOWEVER, as usual, the authors are still unABLE to give the exact dynamical neuronal (attractor?) processes and (shifting) neural maps involved in all these Bayesian "inference mechanisms".

December 21, 2008

The variety and variance of beauties is (like nature...) extremely large (throughout the whole History of Art), and sometimes, the ideals of beauty tend to be linked with climate shifts (see CASHDAN et al. 2008 in the december issue of Current Anthropology — see References). And that's why both the neanderthals (ice age!) and Peter Paul Rubens (little ice age in around 1638!) may have tended toward a massive breast : waist : hip ratio (see the respective pics below):

December 20, 2008

The best toy may not be your computer-game, your playing cards, your cars or conspecifics (i.e., your external device and toys), but rather your brain itself (i.e., the tool of all tools).
But alas, it sometimes takes a lot of time for youngsters to discover that their best (and fastest...) toy is not their computer-games (nor playing cards nor cars...), but their brains (i.e., map-makers or maps) themselves...

December 5, 2008

In their review entitled "Striatal Plasticity and Basal Ganglia Circuit Function", the authors Anatol C. KREITZER & Robert MALENKA (in: Neuron, see References) note — without defining the physiological mechanisms behind the terms "appropriate" and "wanted" at all (and that's why I still have to wait for a perfect neurobiology and non-reductionist mapology...):
"A primary function of the basal ganglia may be the selection of appropriate [!] actions. ... Importantly, goal-directed learning of new motor routines appears to be initiated in the dorsomedial striatum, whereas the long-term motor memory required to execute previously learned sequences may be stored in the dorsolateral striatum. Within this general context, activation of direct-pathway circuits [see image below] has been proposed to facilitate or select [!] appropriate [!] movements, whereas activity in the indirect pathway may inhibit unwanted [!] or inappropriate movements".
The authors then speculate about Huntington's disease and some "preferential loss of indirect-pathway neurons" which may "reduce the amount of inhibitory control over unwanted movements", and associations of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) with an "enhanced propensity to form both cognitive and motor habits".

December 3, 2008

In their paper entitled "The Representation of Object Viewpoint in Human Visual Cortex" (in: Neuroimage, see References) the authors David R. ANDRESEN et al. report that the fusiform gyrus is especially crucial for front-views (of faces, etc.) when compared to back-views.

However, artists (like Tiepolo) have used both views in parallel — the former (i.e., back-view "repoussoirs") in order to arouse the viewer's attention to be directed toward the main scene in the picture (i.e., frontally seen faces).

That's why I wrote this e-mail to Dr. Andresen:

"However, when looking at paintings by Franz Marc (showing back-views of horses ONLY -- see image enclosed), I wonder which areas are MORE activated, i.e., which areas are activated along with more interest being aroused in the viewer, because back-figures have always been used as arousing stimuli for the viewer in the History of Art (because clearly enough, viewers WANT to see MORE, i.e., want to shift from back-views to front-views in the end)."

	-------- >>>
Tiepolo, 1743 AC		Marc, 1911 AC

November 25, 2008

In issue 6,1 of the German journal "Bildwelten des Wissens" (edited by Matthias BRUHN 2008, see References), you will not only find papers by Horst Bredekamp, by David Poeppel (on maps...), and by Olaf Blanke on the "Self" in the brain (but without referring to Barnett Newman, sadly enough!), but also some recent projects (e.g., a project by the Raphael Rosenberg group at Heidelberg on eye tracking while "reading" works of art; and a project on grid cells in the Hippocampus and navigation in architectural rooms: see www.neurotopographics.com).

But sadly enough, all these authors do not seem to have read my dissertation...
As you can see here once again: I always try to be at the frontier of research (i.e., I know most books and papers published today on the subject of mapology and neuro-esthetics), but all these authors (lacking time...) do not know me...

As I always say: I may have written everything in vain... (see my Publications)

November 22, 2008

In their paper entitled "Sleep as a fundamental property of neuronal assemblies", the authors James M. KRUEGER et al. (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) note:
"[The position of this paper is] that sleep is initiated locally as a consequence of use [of the neuronal network], and only then consolidated by central mechanism ... There are also several findings which show that during sleep cerebral blood flow is targeted to, and highest in, areas that were disproportionately stimulated during prior waking. ... In summary, sleep intensity, a characteristic of sleep that is determined from EEG delta-wave power, is dependent on prior use and is highest in areas that were disproportionately used during prior wakefulness."
For example, there are many "sleep-regulatory substances" like adenosine that are "produced in response to cellular activity and metabolism", and most of them (including adenosine) enhance EEG delta-wave power (see image below).
"The flexible connectivity between neurons is experience-dependent and might therefore have required a mechanism — that is, sleep — by which to ensure the stability of synaptic networks that encode instinctual and learned memories".
However, although sleep is at first initiated locally and then spreads to — and synchronizes — other networks (and then the whole organism during "sleep"), the authors' theory "cannot yet address the question of how many assemblies need to be in the sleep-like state before consciousness changes".

In a related paper entitled "Consciousness and Anesthesia", the authors Michael T. ALKIRE (in: Science, see References) review the influence of anesthetic drugs on consciousness and brain networks:
"Thus, a complex of posterior brain areas comprising the lateral temporo-parieto-occipital junction [i.e., TPJ] and perhaps a mesial cortical core are most likely the final common target for anesthetic-induced unconsciousness".
Hence, the "Self" (located at the TPJ?) and some "cortical integration" disappear during "unconsciousness", along with the drug-induced "loss of feedback interactions" between (now disconnected) local neuronal networks.
"But then having any conscious experience, even one of pure darkness, must be extraordinarily informative, because we could have had countless other experiences instead ... On the other hand, every experience is an integrated whole [cf. Taine 1870!] that cannot be subdivided into independent components. ... Specifically, consciousness increases in proportion to a system's repertoire of discriminable states [that means: the RICHer the potential landscape of a map-maker is, i.e., the more discriminable maps the map-maker has, the more "conscious" he may be...]".

November 7, 2008

In their paper entitled "Olfactory perceptual stability and discrimination", the authors Dylan C. BARNES et al. (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) have discovered the analogon to hippocampal pattern separation and pattern completion in the olfactory pathway:
"In olfaction, the need for pattern separation and completion is particularly intense, as most natural odors derive from odorant mixtures, evoking complex spatio-temporal patterns of olfactory sensory neuron and olfactory bulb activity. Given this complexity, it is rare for a given stimulus to always have the exact same components in the exact same proportions, yet it is possible for a noisy or degraded stimulus to reliably evoke a stable percept. ... We found that ensembles or rat olfactory bulb neurons decorrelate complex mixtures that vary by as little as a single missing component, whereas olfactory (piriform) cortical neural ensembles perform pattern completion in response to an absent component, essentially filling in the missing information and allowing perceptual stability. This piriform cortical ensemble activity predicts olfactory perception".

And they note in the end: "The enhanced pattern completion observed in aPCX relative to its afferent olfactory bulb input is similar to that observed across subregions of the hippocampal formation, such as dentate gyrus (pattern separation) and area CA3 (pattern completion)".

November 4, 2008

In his review-paper entitled "Small regulatory RNAs pitch in", the author Ulrich TECHNAU (in: Nature 455: 1184-85) notes: "Indeed, Brimson and colleagues' data confirm a correlation between miRNA diversity and morphological complexity as measured, for instance, by the total number of neurons in an organism" - and in fact, while H. sapiens has 677 miRNAs, C. elegans "only" possesses 154... (and S. cerevisiae even 0).

November 3, 2008

I think that autists and psychopaths ("sociopaths") have been selected not by "nature", but by "culture" (i.e., civilizations) instead: the former in the role as magicians and scientists, the latter as fearless warriors...

And you may see here once again: "selection by culture" may be much more important than some rather old-fashioned "selection by nature"...

November 2, 2008

Today, I heard a nice interview with the ornithologist Wolfgang Wiltschko (who proved the existence of a magnetic compass in birds by the 1980s) on the German radio. Birds are really fascinating beings (especially crows), because (similarly to H. sapiens) they are not only singing, flying and making tools, but they also have incredibly precise maps for navigating around the whole globe -- and already Barnett Newman was fascinated by birds as well.....

October 31, 2008

In their paper entitled "Integrating Memories in the Human Brain: Hippocampal-Midbrain Encoding of Overlapping Events", the authors Daphna SHOHAMY & Anthony D. WAGNER (in: Neuron, see References) propose (following Richard Semon's mneme theory...) "that effective generalization may depend on integrating discrete experiences into a rich, cohesive [i.e., continous?] representation", performed by a concerted action between the Hippocampus and the Basal Ganglia (more precisely: Ventral Tegmental Area / Substantia Nigra):
"First, we demonstrate that the hippocampus may contribute not only to the encoding of individual experiences as separated, discrete representations, but may also contribute to the integration of memories of overlapping events. This observation suggests a possible mechanism for how the hippocampus may create a continuous link [i.e., a smoothly graded and interlinked attractor landscape?] across episodes that are experienced individually [i.e., as discrete basins of attraction] and at distinct moments in time [within a trajectory between attractors?] ...
For example, when encountering an event [e.g., F2-S1] that overlaps with a prior event [e.g., F1-S1], the presentation of the overlapping element (S1) may elicit retrieval of the prior event's features (e.g., F1). This reactivation of features from a prior event that differ from the features of the present event [i.e., F1 versus F2] may trigger a mismatch signal within the hippocampus that upregulates midbrain dopaminergic feedback onto the hippocampus..., the consequence of which is to increase the probability of encoding the present and prior event features into an integrated representation [i.e., map, or: attractor landscape?]".
The authors also note different levels of "integration" / "generalization" performance between their individual subjects: "In fact, among the six participants demonstrating the best generalization performance ... there was only a 39 ms difference in mean response latency on generalization versus trained probes — clearly insufficient time to permit mediated retrieval and logical inference — with half of these participants being faster on generalization trials."
Besides, this automatic (self-inherent!] dynamic process of building up integrated (and cohesively linked) attractor landscapes may also trigger not only creative, but also "false memories": "The present form of generalization may be thought of as a type of false memory, in that participants have the subjective sense of having already experienced the pairing of two elements [say, F2-S1] that in fact had never been encountered together. ... [But] By forming a thread [i.e., a new possible trajectory between more or less discrete basins of attraction within a more or less "smooth" "potential landscape"...?] that connects otherwise separate experiences, integrative encoding permits organisms to generalize across multiple past experiences to guide choices in the present".

October 27, 2008

"Truth" is never dangerous (because you CAN NOT change it -- you can only perhaps "measure" it: physically, chemically, experimentally, etc.).
The most dangerous things are always maps (because of some "neuro-plasticity"), or in other words: "POSSIbilities of thought", or: "ideas", or: "ideologies".

October 16, 2008 / October 26, 2008

Already Jean-Jacques Rousseau knew that the process of civilization (or more precisely: socialization) is corrumping the individual:
According to Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), even animals can feel "compassion" with other bodies, but only "Homo sapiens" is able to have some "theory of mind" (i.e., some "conscious compassion") of "OTHER" human beings in addition — and hence its ability to hate, to mob, to bully, to envy, to feel jealousy, to make ideological wars, to lie, to betray, etc.

In this sense, the process of "socialization" (mostly via silly and primitive peer-groups) is really H. sapiens' fatal (and most dangerous) faculty and ("social") bias...

And by the way: this same "human" bias (i.e., always thinking in terms of "inference machines" endowed with a "theory of mind") has led David H. Wolpert to write an article (in Physica D, 237 : 1257 ff.) about Cantor and some kind of "new" philosophy of science, where "inference machines" (i.e., modernized Turing computers) try to infer the state of other machines...
How boring this world of "higher primates" and some old-fashioned "philosophy of science" is!! All these philosophers have really no new ideas but always circle around old-fashioned (Cantorian) arguments and old-fashioned (primate, social, human....) biases...

October 13, 2008

In their paper entitled "The uncrowded window of object recognition", the authors Denis G. PELLI & Katharine A. TILLMAN (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) note with regard to the so-called "Bouma law":
"We can see a bird in the sky without crowding, but most of our visual world is cluttered, and each object that we identify must be isolated from the clutter. When an object is not isolated, it is crowded [especially when flanked by similar flankers...], and we cannot recognize it. Isolation depends on spacing and not size. To escape crowding, the object spacing must exceed the observer's critical spacing at that location in the observer's visual field (that is, 6 mm at V1). ... Typographers routinely increase 'tracking' (spacing) to maintain the legibility of text when it is made smaller".

"[Similarly,] Faces, like words, are recognized only if the visual system can isolate the parts: eyes, nose and mouth. Thus, we cannot recognize a face unless we look at or near it [see Figure below!]. ... The generality of [this] the Bouma law suggests that the critical spacing of crowding is a fundamental parameter of human vision. It is proportional to the distance from the fixation".

October 3, 2008

At last, I have seen the unearthly beautiful angels of Marienberg (Italy, South Tyrolia) with my own eyes!

There may have been two masters there - and the best one of them painted the angels. But art historians still do not know where this master came from (cf. Rocamadour and the rarely conserved French frescoes of that time!); but at least he was heavily influenced by older (ottonian) illuminations (like the Hitda Codex from Cologne).

But although this medieval master was nearly perfect (total "depth" and absolute "space" - see also Alois Riegl and the carolingian-pythagorean [atmo-]spheric "stripe grounds"), I must say with Plato that the highest perfection can never be seen in material worlds; instead, the highest perfection is only embodied in a perfect map-maker (i.e., "brain"). And educating perfect ("beautiful") brains may be the most difficult task at all... (especially in this world's financial crisis full of anxious and badly educated map-makers...).

September 23, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Prof. Julia Fischer (Göttingen):

<<< Sehr geehrte Frau Prof. Fischer

Im Deutschlandfunk werden Sie zitiert mit dem Satz: "Und das ist natürlich eine wichtige Voraussetzung [für menschliche Sprache und Kommunikation), um überhaupt das Bedürfnis zu entwickeln, den anderen zu informieren, den mentalen Zustand des anderen zu verändern, nicht nur sein Verhalten [wie die Paviane]".

Sehr wahr: zunächst ist es nur ein "Bedürfnis", den "mentalen Zustand eines Anderen ändern zu wollen". Denn: die Gewissheit, "den mentalen Zustand" eines "anderen (!) Menschen" TATSAECHLICH verändert zu haben, gab und gibt es (noch...) nicht (trotz disambiguierender Sprache, Ritualbeweise, Glaubensbeweise, Credos, etc.).

Und so hatten denn auch schon die Inquisitoren und Folterknechte des Mittelalters (vor allem in Spanien) reichlich Mühe damit, den mentalen Zustand eines Häretikers zu ändern, da ja nur indirekte Mittel (wie z.B. Folter des betreffenden Körpers) zur Verfügung standen. Und auch heutige neurobiologische fMRI-Techniken ("human brain mapping") dürften hier kaum besser abschneiden (von extrem individuellen und methodisch extrem selektiven "fMRI voxel maps" lässt sich eben kaum auf das Verhalten eines Subjektes schließen - und auch nicht umgekehrt).

Und so schrieb schon der spanische (!) Schriftsteller Miguel de Unanumo über einen "sozial" extrem erfolgreichen Priester, der aber "tief im Innersten" Atheist war (eben: das Verhalten ist nie aussagekräftig, siehe Nietzsche: der "Mensch" ist das Tier, das am besten lügen kann...).

Erst durch heutige neuroTECHNISCHE Methoden, die die Gehirne zweier co-evolvierender Körper ("Menschen") direkt verlinken würden ("neurotechnical linking" - vgl. Kevin Warwick et al.) wäre es vielleicht einmal möglich, diese bis heute andauernde und ubiquitäre "soziale Ungewissheit" (d.h. nie wissen zu können, was im "Kopf" eines "Anderen" tatsächlich vorgeht...) zu eliminieren. >>>

September 10, 2008

In their paper entitled "Brain correlates of aesthetic expertise", the authors Ulrich KIRK et al. (in: Brain and Cognition, see References) studied the behaviour and neural correlates of architecture experts and novices looking at more or less "pleasing" buildings and faces in the fMRI-scanner:
In fact, the authors found that experts and novices rated the buildings similarly, but the experts recruited not only subcortical reward areas (like Nucl. accumbens = NAcc), but also higher areas like the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) together with an increased activation of memory related areas (precuneus <> hippocampus):
"We found that only some regions associated with the processing of reward are modulated by expertise (OFC, subcallosal cingulate gyrus [i.e., monitoring the inner emotional status?]), while activity in NAcc was typical of both experts and non-experts, suggesting that these regions play different roles in reward processing. Furthermore, we have demonstrated that experts and non-experts differ in their neural response to expertise stimuli [i.e., buildings] per se, irrespective of aesthetic ratings ["pleasantness"]. This typological response was observed bilaterally in the hippocampus and precuneus, and suggests that experts [with their more differentiated and more wide-spread maps...] may integrate current input into a framework of prior knowledge [memory!] and use this information to organize aesthetic judgements".

September 4, 2008

In their paper entitled "Neural correlates of object indeterminacy in art compositions", the authors Scott L. FAIRHALL & Alumit ISHAI (in: Consciousness and Cognition, see References) compared "representational paintings" to "indeterminate" paintings to "abstract" paintings to "scrambled" paintings, and note:
"We found activation within a distributed cortical network that includes extrastriate ventral and dorsal visual regions, as well as parietal, limbic and prefrontal regions. Consistent with our hypotheses, representational paintings with meaningful content evoked stronger activation than abstract and indeterminate paintings in the fusiform gyrus. [cf. ELBS 2005!] Moreover, we found enhanced activation in the precuneus and medial frontal gyrus during the presentation of scrambled paintings. Finally, stronger activation in response to representational paintings was found in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ)."
And as I already noted in my dissertation and Dallas lecture, the strongest activation of the TPJ may occur when viewing ("abstract"!) paintings by Barnett Newman... Or as John Onians always says (quoting painters like Picasso): "there is no abstract art" - not least because "H. sapiens" is extremely biased toward seeing "meanings" everywhere...

September 3, 2008

In their "opinion"-paper entitled "Battle of the sexes may set the brain", the authors Christopher BADCOCK & Bernard CRESPI (in: Nature, see References) believe that "psychiatric illness may be less to do with the genes a mother and father pass down, and more to do with which genes they program for expression [i.e., maternal/paternal imprinting]. ... The religious, magical and mystical delusions that cause people with paranoia to see evidence of mind, intention and meaning in everything seem to be opposite of autistic deficits in theory of mind, which result in an inability to understand that others have their own beliefs and intents."
In detail, "small deviations in imprinted-gene expression towards a maternal bias should result in smaller babies that are energetically 'cheaper' to mothers, and who are easier behaviourally - more placid, less demanding and more mentalistically attuned to interpreting and understanding the mental state of others. Large maternally biased deviations should lead to psychosis. ... [In contrast, and on the other end of the spectrum,] Autistic disorders typically become noticeable in childhood [because of "our" social bias as "foremost ultra-social humans" and eagerly observing "parents"...?]; psychosis mostly develops in late adolescence or early adulthood".

September 2, 2008

In their paper entitled "Dissociable neural mechanisms for determining the perceived heaviness of objects and the predicted weight of objects during lifting: An fMRI investigation of the size-weight illusion", the authors Philippe A. CHOUINARD et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) try to track down the "locus" of density perception in the human brain by making experimental use of the size-weight illusion (i.e., when inferring two objects with the same weight but being different in size as having a different mass):
"Taken together, we conclude that the real-world properties of objects, such as size and weight, are computed by [temporal, parietal) sensory areas and by M1 [primary motor cortex] respectively, whereas the perceived heaviness of objects, presumably based on their apparent density, is computed by PMv [ventral premotor cortex]."

August 30, 2008

It is really sad to note that we have now hundreds of futuristic Sci-Fi computer games ("World of Warcraft" etc.), but we are still not able to reconstruct the past in FULL (authentic) DETAIL in the form of a "total movie of the whole history":

What I desperately need is some kind of "musée imaginaire" (Malraux) or virtual "Google History" or "movie of history", i.e., a total movie showing you ALL historical landscapes and shifts and changes (i.e., shifting territories, political alliances, philosophical ideas, paintings, music styles, monetary flows, energetic flows, etc.):

Imagine pupils learning "History" by just sitting in a cinema or virtual "Google History", and by watching a film (movie, time-machine) constructed and based on ALL original-authentic (digitalized) historical documents (paintings, texts, pieces of music, thoughts, costumes, poems, instruments, etc.).

And this "movie of History" would be continually updated and perfected by ALL historians of the world (perhaps working together via Google?) — so that I will have a totally smooth map of all times, showing all shifting networks and maps (alliances, battle frontiers, schools of painting, theatre, music etc.) IN REAL TIME without any cracks, gaps, missing links, and fissures.

In this way, the whole "chain of being" will then become completely transparent and crystal-clear to pupils (who love watching movies with music!).

Hence, within such an uninterrupted time flow and time scale (just scroll up and down in "Google History"!), there will be a big variety and complexity, and no ideologies any more, but only a time-scale without any gaps (i.e., stereotypes like "gothic style", "absolutism", etc.).

In fact, you could even choose between a "movie of history" flowing faster (i.e., showing only the most significant historical shifts, transitions, changes of style, changes of thought, changes of sciences, etc in a compressed and fast manner), or a movie shifting more slowly (i.e., showing the whole dense complex shifting networks and maps without any cracks and gaps, i.e., showing the "whole chain of being").

And thanks to this movie ("Google History"), I would perhaps even be able to "analyze" one day this whole (and ever denser...) movie of history with the help of physical (thermodynamic) theories explaining you the thermodynamics (i.e., the changes, shifts, flows, and histories) of all these maps, "ideas" (i.e., neural maps), ideologies, battle fields, financial markets, paintings, music styles, etc.

THIS WILL BE GREAT - because I could then communicate my head as a historian (which already has stored all these pictures, pieces of music, networks of ideas) to my pupils ADEQUATELY.

BUT in order to create (and continually update) such a movie materially, all historians (art historians, historians of technics, historians of politics, historians of science, historians of ideas, archaeologists, historians of music, ethnologists, etc.) would have to work together (via Google?) instead of publishing, digitalizing, and burying their work and discoveries in arbitrary journals, websites, and formats.

August 16, 2008

Following KUHN & LAND 2006 (see my S_Updates), the authors Stephen L. MACKNIK et al. have now written the perhaps first review of the methodological impact of "the magician's art" on today's neurobiological methods of investigation, i.e., when scanning brains for all kinds of ("unconscious") "biases", "visual illusions", "attention / awareness shifts", etc., and they once again note that the magician primarily manipulates the spectators' attention rather than their gaze, and that the magicians use the spectator's biases [including "causality" and all kinds of "social biases"] in an extremely controlled strategical way — e.g., the "skilled magician informs every motion with a convincing intention" so as to misdirect the suspicious spectator's attention:
"Just as visual scientists use visual illusions to identify the neural mechanisms of perception, neuroscientists could use illusory correlations to identify the neural mechanisms that underlie the cognitive computations of cause and effect".
All in all, "magic combines multiple principles of attention, awareness, trust and perception to both overtly and covertly misdirect the audience".
Notably, especially priming and repetition ("habituation", and hence: not looking attentively any more, but relying on "stereotypical anticipations" instead) are used by magicians (for example, in the "vanishing ball illusion" — see also KUHN & LAND 2006).
Besides, "To steal a watch directly from the wrist of a mark, the pickpocket might first squeeze the wrist while the watch is still on (invoking contrast-gain adaptation). This has two effects. First, it makes a highcontrast somatosensory impression that adapts the touch receptors in the skin, making them less sensitive to the subsequent light touches that are required to unbuckle and remove the watch. Second, the highcontrast impression leaves behind a somatosensory afterimage, giving rise to the illusion that the watch is still on after it has been removed."
"Social cues, such as the magician’s gaze (for instance, in the Vanishing Ball Illusion), their voice and verbal communication and their body language (pointing, tension/relaxation), also play an important part in manipulating the spectator’s attentional spotlight. [But] Misdirection occurs not only in space (what the audience looks at) but also in time (when the audience looks). ... Many magicians use comedy and laughter as a way to reduce focused attention at critical points in time. ... Usually a delay is introduced between method (that is, cause) and effect, preventing the spectator from causally linking the two".
And the magicians even know how to use the spectator's memory (which is involved only in "salient" things): "An apparently natural or spontaneous action [i.e., non-salient], such as scratching one’s head, will not be memorable (although it might be critical to the execution of the trick)."

August 13, 2008

In their paper entitled "Hierarchical coding for sequential task events in the monkey prefrontal cortex", the authors Natasha SIGALA et al. (in: PNAS, see References) use the (mathematical) language of "vector coding" for their study of hierarchical processing: "For each task phase (cue, delay, or target), and for different stimulus information (e.g., different cue identities) within each phase, we accordingly obtained a pattern or vector of activity across the population of all recorded cells. The results show that successive task phases are coded by successive, approximately orthogonal activity vectors [i.e., strongly different attractors and basins of attraction?]. Within each phase, activity patterns are strongly correlated for different stimuli, suggesting that stimulus information is coded by modulation of the basic task phase vector [i.e., by the modulation of an attractor?].”

“Together, these results show a hierarchical

representation, with one basic activity pattern [i.e., attractor or "neural map"?] associated with each task phase, and stimulus information coded by modulations of the phase pattern. Both within and between task phases, PFC representations were also modulated by hemifield, with generally lower correlations between hemifields.”
“Orthogonal codes may underlie the construction of complex behavioral sequences, each consisting of many, dissimilar cognitive segments. Within each step, in contrast, correlated codes describe different stimulus alternatives. Correlated codes are useful for similar operations, in this case, when fixed cognitive processes are applied to varying stimulus content.”

July 31, 2008

In their extremely clear paper (and map) entitled "A Motion Illusion Reveals Mechanisms of Perceptual Stabilization", the authors Anton L. BEER et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) investigate the "rotating snake" (or "rolling circles") illusion in detail (cf. also my Seminar-Script Seminar-Script, S3 Figure 41!), where the contrast gradient (from black-blue to white-yellow) elicits a peripheral drift illusion ("rotation") when the viewer does not fixate very 'well', i.e., when there are still micromovements (shifts) of the eye (more precisely: the fovea: see image below):
"Consistent with previous research, we found that the strength of the peripheral drift illusion varies with the degree of drift micromovements. ‘Poor’ fixation resulted in a larger variability of drift micromovements and stronger illusory motion than ‘good’ fixation. Other types of eye movements, such as microsaccades, seemed to be less relevant. Fixation instability (variability of drifts) was most pronounced immediately after pattern onset and declined as fixation continued. This is consistent with the literature showing that stimulus onset temporarily increases micromovements, and that voluntary attention that requires some time to become effective can suppress micromovements. Importantly, the decrease of fixational eye movements corresponds well with the phenomenological characteristics of the peripheral drift illusion, which is most strongly observed immediately after pattern onset and slowly fades after prolonged fixation. Although micromovements are crucial for the peripheral drift illusion they may not fully explain the phenomenology of this illusion. Instead the peripheral drift illusion demonstrates a failure to compensate for retinal image slips generated by micromovements. ... This compensatory mechanism seems to utilize visual (retinal) signals for estimating eye movements rather than extraretinal signals. Note that illusory motion was modulated by central but not peripheral drift patterns suggesting that eye movements were predominantly estimated based on visual signals from the central visual field."

July 23, 2008

And if you are interested in "corollary discharge across the animal kingdom", then you may read this paper by Trinity B. CRAPSE & Marc A. SOMMER (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) with nice — but perhaps already old-fashioned (see LOGOTHETIS 2008!) — Uexküllian "action-perception-cycle" schemata (see picture below) illustrating the difference between "corollary discharge" [from pre-motor or higher motor areas down to different levels of the sensory pathway] vs. "efference copy" [from motor neurons to sensory neurons] vs. "reafference" vs. "exafference" [the latter terms both introduced by Mittelstädt & Holst long ago]. Interestingly enough, even my Mapology has to differentiate between some "reafference" and "exafference" (see What is Mapology, points 5 ff.), i.e., between "non-contingent" (i.e., Self-produced, "activABLE") and "contingent" maps (not activated by my Self, i.e., within my "own" "Potential landscape"):

July 21, 2008

In their paper entitled "Arousal and Attention: Self-chosen Stimulation Optimizes Cortical Excitability and Minimizes Compensatory Effort", the authors Thomas FISCHER et al. (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) continue old (SCP = slow cortical EEG- potentials and Beta-activity) research about the inverted U-shaped relationship between general arousal and best performance reflected by the higher amplitude of the initial component of the so-called CNV [contingent negative variation] ("nature always prefers the average level"):
"General arousal appears to be reflected by the tonic cortical negativity (TCN), with stronger negativity related to higher arousal .... At first, as already postulated by Hull (1943), people try to seek out environments or tasks providing optimal stimulation for (effortless) bottom-up arousal regulation. If this is impossible in attention-demanding tasks, a top-down mechanism seems to be invoked for low-arousal compensation."
Now, one of the most important system for general arousal is not only the reticular formation, but also the NAS (noradrenergic system) linking (bidirectionally) the locus coeruleus (LC) to the medial prefrontal (mPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which play an important role in the top-down modulation of the NAS: "ACC exerts top-down control over LC activity in order to adjust arousability for optimal task performance. Increased task-related activity in ACC, the mPFC, and the thalamus, observed in low-arousal conditions, supports the view that these structures subserve effortful compensation. ... Th[is] effortful compensation process has [also] been linked to enhanced power in high-frequency bands of ... the range of 19-30 Hz [beta2]"
When now comparing task performance under "low" vs. "high" vs. "self-(!)chosen" conditions, the authors found the best performance and "the largest iCNV amplitude ... in the condition with self-chosen stimulation ... In comparison to self-chosen and high-stimulation levels, frontal beta2 power was significantly higher in the low-stimulation condition ... Based on our results, it may be conjectured that low ACC activity and concomitant good performance can be ascribed to an optimal arousal level, at which no compensatory activity [by ACC, mPFC and so forth] is necessary".

July 14, 2008

For a neurodynamic view of schizophrenia involving shifted (altered) "attractor landscapes" and "state spaces" (following Freeman, Kelso, Thelen & Smith, et al.), see the recent essay by Nico VAN BEVEREN & Lieuwe DE HAAN (in: PLoS One, see References [in this illustrative essay you will also find the reference to Ouzounis C & Maziere P (2006): Maps, books and other metaphors for systems biology, in: Biosystems 85 : 6-10]).
It nicely fits into my broader framework of "Potential landscapes" (for a respective animation of such a dynamic potential landscape see Potential landscapes!)...

July 9, 2008

In three recent papers, one of my most favourite subject is investigated by researchers: according to me (see ELBS 2005), experts build up ever larger attractors ("giant attractors") and hence some ever larger "coherent whole" or "differentiated associativity" (DA). Due to the ever larger catchment area of such "giant attractors", experts do not have to reach stable attractors (e.g., when categorizing faces), but it suffices for them to play with the catchment area of these attractors (i.e., with transients and trajectories leading to these attractors): hence, experts do not play (and navigate) with their attractors, but by hinting at them via the transients (or saddle points or shifts) in the large catchment area of their giant attractors (which ultimately lead to these attractors like rivers flowing to a common sink or "potential basin": see also my Seminar-Script, S5 Figure 44 [see the attached image below!] and my What is Mapology? point 23, where I called these transients or saddle points "shifts" or "tendencies" or "trajectories" [toward an attractor] ).

Hence, experts are much faster than laymen, and second, they have a more stable (and at the same time: more flexible) giant attractor that is also more sensitive to subtlest shifts and incongruities (due to a larger catchment area).

Exactly this has now been proven by three research groups:
In their paper entitled "Increased Brain Signal Variability Accompanies Lower Behaivoural Variability in Development", the authors Anthony Randal McINTOSH et al. (in: PLoS Computational Biology, see References) found that "brain signal variability increases in children from 8-15 y and is even higher in young adults. Importantly, we show that this increased brain variability correlates with reduced behavioural variability and more accurate performance. ... Myelination and neural pruning increase differentiation of information flow in the brain, enabling a shift from a system that responds in a slow and stimulus-locked manner, to one that responds more rapidly and where the internal variability reflects the parallel exploration of the functional repertoire before converging to an optimal response."
In a follow-up paper to DURSTEWITZ & DECO 2007 entitled "Transient Dynamics for Neural Processing", the authors Misha RABINOVICH et al. (in: Science, see References) compare the brain to a "liquid-state machine" where the succession of "metastable" states visited by the system (its trajectory, or transient) is stable (resistant to noise, and reliable "even in the face of small variations in initial conditions"), finally making up a "heteroclinic sequence linking saddle points [see once again the image attached below: the red arrows displaying these "transients", "saddle points" or "shifts-tensions-tendencies"!]. These saddles can be pictured as successive and temporary winners in a non-ending competitive game".

Furthermore, extremely "SENSITIVE" experts — while navigating and shifting within their giant attractors on the saddle points/transients/trajectories — may be cabABLE of detecting the slightest (subtlest) shifts and deviations (and "emotional" imbalances?) via their Insula (being adjacent to the posterior insular-vestibular cortex [PIVC] and temporoparietal junction or "Self"]: in a follow-up paper to DI DIO et al. 2007 [on the Insula being recruited when facing disturbed-distorted-imbalanced proportions in works of art like classic sculptures...] entitled "Early neuronal responses in right limbic structures mediate harmony incongruity processing in musical experts", the authors Clara E. JAMES et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) determined "the temporal dynamics of neuronal activity in highly trained pianists and musical laymen in response to syntactic harmonic incongruities in expressive music, which were easily detected by the experts but not by the laymen. Our results revealed that closure incongruity [i.e., an "imbalance"?] evokes a selective early response in musical experts ... in right temporal limbic areas, encompassing the hippocampal complex and amygdala, and in right insula".

July 7, 2008

In their paper entitled "Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex", the authors Patric HAGMANN et al. (in: PLoS Biology, see References) used the diffusion spectrum imaging method (see also Schmahmann et al. 2007 in my S_Update Feb 2007_Fig. 5c) in order to find evidence for the "existence of a structural core composed of posterior medial and parietal cortical regions that are densely interconnected and topologically central."
In fact, the authors "identified eight anatomical subregions as members of the structural core. These are the posterior cingulate cortex, the precuneus, the cuneus, the paracentral lobule, the isthmus of the cingulate, the banks of the superior temporal sulcus, and the inferior and superior parietal cortex, all of them in both hemispheres", which heavily overlap with key components ("bottom-up drivers") of the "default network".

However, these interindividual connectivity maps (of each individual Potential landscape of association [or more precisely: connectivity -- see image below]?) are still restricted to the cortex, but "future improvements in diffusion imaging and tractography, as well as computational network analysis, will no doubt reveal additional features of the connectional anatomy of the human brain. It will be important to include major subcortical regions, such as the thalamus [AND: the BASAL GANGLIA!!] into future network analyses. Another advance would be to parcellate the cortex not on the basis of sulcal and gyral landmarks, but rather on the basis of regularities in functional connections that are observed in individual participants [see image just below]".

June 28, 2008

At last, I have been able to escape from Germany (i.e., a country in which 99.9999% of all bodies seem to believe in the existence of "Jews", "Germans", "Americans", etc. etc. etc. etc., and in which I have been exploited in a more than slavish way...)!
I have now moved back to Switzerland...

June 20, 2008

In his important review entitled "What we can do and what we cannot do with fMRI", the author Nikos K. LOGOTHETIS (in: Nature, see References) reviews the principles of fMRI — and he crucially notes that the fMRI signal is much more reflecting neuromodulatory effects (attention, motivation, learning, etc.) and some cortical excitatory-inhibitory (net) balance than some "sensory [subcortical] input" itself....

June 15, 2008

I didn't know that the U.S. Army may have copied Barnett Newman's painting style when designing their "Global War on Terrorism Medal" ribbon (see also my now updated Dallas lecture, slides 37 ff.!!! Publications):

June 13, 2008

I haven't known that the "ultra-social" Nationalsocialists also persecuted so-called "asocial" bodies.
See also EPLEY et al. 2008 (see References): the most "social" bodies ("people") are likely to be the most "de-humanizing" (i.e., the most "nationalsocialist") ones...
And that's why I largely prefer to live with peaceful and nice autists...

June 12, 2008

I have now looked through Barbara Maria STAFFORD's new book "Echo objects" (see References) and I must say that I am quite disappointed of its rather traditional contents.
I suggest to you reading my (much shorter, and much more up-to-date) Dallas lecture and regular Updates (here!) instead (see Publications) — and you will then certainly learn much more about today's Neuro-esthetics...

June 11, 2008

I have now updated my "Curriculum"-page with this Appendix (and "learning" may be nothing else than the adaptation/updating of permanently shifting maps (see [25]...):
(*) Please note:
Most things that are payABLE (i.e., that CAN be paid) have no value and no sense, and hence, there may be at least two ABILITIES which you CAN never pay (pace some primitive "neuro-economists"!):
1. A perfectly educated map-maker ("brain", "teacher", etc.).
2. Unconditioned (i.e., "erotic"? "aesthetic"?) "love" (which automatically excludes some quite primitive-primal "parental love", "marital love", "romantic love", "bindings", "bondings", etc. etc. etc.).
Unfortunately enough, both these "personality traits" (i.e., ABILITies of a map-maker or "brain") seem to be EXTREMELY RARE, and nor have "we" been ABLE to map (pace some primitive "neuro-economists"!) the neurobiological underpinnings of both these RICHEST ABILIties and capacities...

June 5, 2008

In their extremely important paper entitled "Perceiving the Present and a Systematization of Illusions", the authors Mark A. CHANGIZI et al. (in: Cognitive Science, see References) strenghten the old claim that the brain can only "predict" the present due to a processing latency of the neural system ("Given a stimulus at time t, to predict what an observer perceives, we must have some means by which we can say what the probable scene will be at time t+100 msec" — see also LLINAS 2001; cf. also my Seminar-script, S5 Figure 40 !!!).
With this fundamental "principle" (John Onians) in mind, the authors now categorize nearly all known visual illusions ("distortions") due to the empirical regularities following the "optic-flow regularity hypothesis": "A target in the region of the visual field toward which the observer is moving will undergo, in the next moment, a greater (A) increase in projected size, (B) increase in projected speed, (C) decrease in luminance contrast, and (D) decrease in distance from the observer".

In detail, the authors list 28 distinct ecological regularities that amount to 28 distinct predicted illusion classes: "This is because, under perceiving the present, the perception is predicted to be representative of the way the scene will be in the next moment ... therefore, perceiving the present expects observers to have perceptions that accord with these expected next-moment features".

The authors now demonstrate this "prediction (optic flow) bias" (even when looking at static pictures and "illusions"!!!!) with at least one example (see picture below):
"For two objects of similar distance from passing the observer, the one nearer the region of the visual field with smaller projected sizes tend to undergo, in the next moment, a greater percentage of increase in projected size", so that in the associated "Ebbinghaus illusion" "the left side of the figure has, overall, smaller projected size features than the right side of the figure; thus, the left target, being probably nearer to the direction of motion, should undergo, in the next moment, a greater percentage of increase in projected size. Because the two targets (i.e., the center circle on the left and the center circle on the right) have identical projected sizes, the left target will undergo, in the next moment, a greater increase in projected size than the one on the right; and perceiving the present expects observers to perceive the left target to project larger than the one on the right".

June 3, 2008

In their paper entitled "Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns", the authors Tom M. MITCHELL et al. (in: Science, see References) note (cf. KAY et al. 2008):
"We present a computational model that makes directly testable predictions of the fMRI activity associated with thinking about arbitrary concrete nouns, including many nouns for which no fMRI data are currently available. The theory underlying this computational model [i.e., a mapping that correlates and compares different maps and atlases: linguistic maps/atlases vs. visual fMRI voxel maps/atlases (i.e., Potential landscapes)] is that the neural basis of the semantic representation of concrete nouns is related to the distributional properties of those words in a broadly based corpus [atlas] of the language ... The success of the specific model, which uses 25 sensory-motor verbs [as basic vectors that are then linearly combined for each arbitrary word] (as compared with alternative models based on randomly sampled sets of 25 semantic features), lends credence to the conjecture that neural representations of concrete nouns are in part grounded in sensory-motor features [e.g., "eat" may activate especially insular cortices, "touch" activates somatosensory cortices]. However, the learned signatures associated with the 25 intermediate semantic features also exhibit significant activation in brain areas not directly associated with sensory-motor function, including frontal [i.e., "emotional"?] regions".

All in all, "this research represents a shift in the paradigm for studying neural representations in the brain [or more precisely: voxel maps and fMRI maps], moving from [analytic] work that has cataloged the patterns [maps] of fMRI activity associated with specific categories of words and pictures to instead building computational [i.e., synthetic] models [i.e., mappings] that predict the fMRI activity for abritrary words".

May 30, 2008

In their paper entitled "Log or Linear? Distinct Intuitions of the Number Scale in Western and Amazonian Indigene Cultures", the authors Stanislas DEHAENE et al. (in: Science, see References) report a shift from a more "naturally [stochastically] biased" logarithmic mapping of numbers onto space to some linear (Cartesian) mapping of numbers onto space during Western enculturation: "This compressive response fits nicely with animal and infant studies that demonstrate that numerical perception obeys Weber's law ... A shift from logarithmic to linear mapping occurs later in development, between first and fourth grade, depending on experience and the range of numbers tested ... The logarithmic code may have been selected during evolution for its compactness: Like an engineer's slide rule, a log scale provides a compact neural representation of several orders of magnitude with fixed relative precision".

Hence, you see once more: everything boils down to (shifting) maps...

May 16, 2008

In their paper entitled "The Reorienting System of the Human Brain: From Environment to Theory of Mind", the (aging) authors Maurizio CORBETTA et al. (in: Neuron, see References) note (cf. the Figure below):
"Survival can depend on the ability to change a current course of action to respond to potentially advantageous or threatening stimuli. This ‘‘reorienting’’ response involves the coordinated action of a right hemisphere dominant ventral frontoparietal network that interrupts and resets ongoing activity and a dorsal frontoparietal network specialized for selecting and linking stimuli and responses. At rest, each network is distinct and internally correlated, but when attention is focused, the ventral network is suppressed to prevent reorienting to distracting events."
While the dorsal network is activated during the execution of selective goal-directed tasks (simultaneously deactivating the default network), the ventral network (especially the TPJ) seems to be activated by all "behaviourally relevant stimuli" (i.e., stimuli relevant to some "Self" or intimate goal or target map):
"While the relationship between reorienting signals in the ventral attention network and sense of body remains to be explored, an intriguing hypothesis is that similar environmental and bodily representations and their comparison may be co-opted for ToM [theory of mind] interactions and that attention signals in TPJ may be important to switch between internal, bodily, or self-perspective and external, environmental, or other’s viewpoint, a key ingredient of ToM."

The TPJ seems to be innervated by norepinephrine neuromodulators (stemming from the LC = locus coeruleus): "LC neurons exhibit both tonic and phasic activity modes. Tonic activity is low in an unaroused state that facilitates sleep and disengagement from the environment, moderate when the organism is engaged in a focused task of high utility and filters out irrelevant stimuli, and high when the organism is not committed to a task, is exploring the environment, and there is uncertainty concerning the proper relationship between stimuli and responses."

Hence, the TPJ is mainly activated during the high tonic activity/exploratory LC mode, which may "correspond to the ABILITY of any salient [i.e., Self-relevant, or behaviourally relevant, or goal-relevant] stimulus".

As a result, the "ventral attention network is involved in reorienting [i.e., shifting] from one task state to another, either in the environment or between internally and externally directed activities".

HOWEVER, the authors "do not consider in this discussion the relationship between cortical and subcortical regions involved in the control of attention. There is strong evidence that subcortical structures like the superior colliculus are involved in stimulus-driven but also goal-driven attention", nor do the authors "know the timing of the activation of ventral and dorsal networks [and important subcortical "gating" structures like LC, SC, thalamus, basal ganglia] on timescales that are closer to the underlying neural signals".

Hence, this map proposed by these authors is rather "incomplete" and perhaps only a dreamful wish of (aging) neuroscientists (desperately) struggling for a total map of the (ever shifting) "brain"...

May 14, 2008

In their extremely informative paper entitled "Young Children Do Not Integrate Visual and Haptic Form Information", the authors Monica GORI et al. (in: Current Biology, see References) note:
"Before 8 years of age, children do not integrate visual and haptic spatial information, but one or the other sense dominates, irrespective of its reliability (as assessed by discrimination thresholds), at least over the range we studied. However, there is no evidence that either vision or touch acts as a ‘‘gold standard,’’ always dominating the other. For size discrimination, haptic information dominated in determining not only the perceived height but also in determining thresholds ... For orientation discriminations, vision dominated in conditions in which vision and haptic information should be weighted approximately equally. [See the Figure below!]."

"As different modalities, and indeed different tasks within each modality, develop at different rates, it is to be expected that maturation of crossmodal integration should also be task dependent, only developing after both relevant modalities are mature. ... Why should cross-sensory integration of spatial information develop so late? ... It is possible that for the developing child, calibration [i.e., the mapping between maps] is more important than optimizing perception by integration: Also, if sensory information is integrated, one sense [i.e., map] cannot be used to calibrate the other [map]. In addition, the rate of physical growth can vary between sensory systems, causing problems for integration.
But why should haptic information dominate size discriminations and visual-information-orientation discriminations? Orientation is a primary visual quality that can be gleaned directly from the retinal image, without correction for viewing distance or other variables. Indeed, one of the characterizing properties of neurons in primary visual cortex of primates is their selectivity to orientation. However, for haptic discrimination, this information is not encoded directly but needs to be recovered from the pattern of stimulation of sensor array [i.e., indirectly via touch, grasping, and hearing]."

Hence, while children still have to struggle with "calibrations" (i.e, the brain-internal mutual mapping between maps), adults may already have an optimally weighted (and hence totally interlinked and blurred) Potential landscape and neural network with perfectly mutually mapped maps (then being activated in an optimal cross-modal "integrative" fashion upon sensory stimulation...)...

May 12, 2008

In his paper entitled "Cerebellar contributions to speech production and speech perception", the author Hermann ACKERMANN (in: Current Biology, see References) tries to pin down all pathways involved in speech:
An "executive network" containing sensorimotor cortex, basal ganglia, inferior parts of the cerebellum, and a "preparative loop network" consisting of SMA, premotor cortex, superior parts of the cerebellum and anterior insula.
The basic processing units of speech are not phonemes, but rather syllables, which are linked together and "precisely timed" within words and letter strings via the basal ganglia and cerebellum (see also My map of the brain!).
ALL IN ALL, there may be several pathways for speech production:
1) an old pathway shared with other mammals for "shouting" / "calling" ("within emotional reactions"): anterior cingulate cortex > midbrain > brainstem > vocal tract.
2) "externally generated speech" ("naming"): visual cortex ("object to be named") > inferotemporal cortex > temporal pole > anterior insula (cf. SHAFTO et al. 2007!) > Broca area / basal ganglia / cerebellum > motor cortex > brainstem (direct route).
3) "internally generated speech": SMA > Broca / basal ganglia / cerebellum > motor cortex > brain stem (direct route).

And here is where the FOXP2 may come in: "Investigations of the distributional pattern of FOXP2 expression in songbirds provide some preliminary insights. The avian brain network supporting vocal imitative learning – a circuitry assumed homologous to the human basal ganglia motor loop ... – upregulates FOXP2 expression during periods of song acquisition. ... Given these data, the FOXP2 gene appears especially to influence cortico-subcortical circuits participating in the acquisition and execution of sensorimotor skills – such as the loops traversing the basal ganglia and the cerebellum."

May 7, 2008

Yesterday, I attended a lecture given by the physicist (or: experimentalist) Robert B. Laughlin in Tübingen — and symptomatically, he even had to use an old art historical (!) example to make his point about "self-organizing" "emergent laws" (and Gestalt theories) clear: when stepping back from Monet's seemingly "abstract" late paintings, the "realistic pattern" (or: "attractor"? "meaning"? "map"?) "emerges" from the "meaningless" dots of paint... — provided the map-maker (or "observer", or "brain"?) "knows" (i.e., has a map about) what pond plants may look like... (see here also my Dallas Lecture in Publications!).

Laughlin was really astonished about the high-precision maps (and mathematical numbers) in his own (and extremely narrow) field.
Well, for "sociologists of science", the extreme exactitude of his measurements is no miracle: after all, the extremely narrow circle of physicists (and co-related technicians, engineers, etc.) has co-evolved for a long time during a successful history, so that their mutual (circular?) mappings have become ever more interlinked ("entangled"? "synchronized"? "adapted"?), standardized, purified, linearized and logarithmized — eventually yielding exact linear and local "laws" (i.e., mathematical mappings) like U = I*R in a wide range of (not yet logarithmized?) scales...

It may be similar to social relationships (i.e., interactions, mutual mappings, etc.): the longer, the more interlinked, and the more intense the mutual mappings within a narrow circle of map-makers (say, between husband and wife), the more exact their mutual (standardized, ritualized, etc.) mappings may eventually become... (especially when you have high-precision mapping tools and some other extremely expensive technical equipment that only a few map-makers [like physicists paid by cold-war politicians?] can afford...).

Hence, you see once more: all boils down to ever more precise and ever more local-selective (mutual) map(ping)s between and within map-makers...

And by the way: what Laughlin called "ideologies" or "belief systems", is nothing else than my "maps": but "we" have to act and to earn money, so that "we" really need (even mathematical) maps in order to be able to act and to "persuade" (within social games)... — even if they may turn out to be "wrong" or "merely religious" in the end...

May 6, 2008

Today, I received an e-mail by Marc Schoenwiesner (following my own request and reminder in an e-mail to him and Robert Zatorre, Isabelle Peretz, and Diana Deutsch) that the BRAMS institute (see www.brams.org) is now in fact preparing a paper about the perception of reverberation.

That means: my old dream about such an fMRI study and data (see ELBS 2005: the Wagner-Project) has become true!!!!!!

I eagerly wait for their paper now (to appear in a few months from now) — although I have a bit some doubts whether these authors will really see the impact and multidisciplinary links of their rather specialist research approach (see my own sketch of such a project on "roomyness", and the impressive links to Music History, Psychology, Philosophy, Paleohistory, Neuro-Esthetics and Art History in general in my Wagner-Project: Future Projects).

May 5, 2008

If you are interested in the latest methods (and mapping tools) for "obtaining a complete physical map of the nervous system" (Lichtman et al.) by "high-throughput electron microscopy", "nanoscopy" and most recent "Brainbow microscopy", you may read the paper entitled "A technicolour approach to the connectome" by Jeff LICHTMAN et al. (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References).

April 30, 2008

In a follow-up paper to their own paper (see SCHULTE-RUETHER et al. 2007), the authors Martin SCHULTE-RUETHER et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) note (see also my updated Dallas Lecture in Publications!):
"Subjects either focused on their own emotional response to emotion expressing [!] faces (SELF-task) or evaluated the emotional state expressed by the faces (OTHER-task). Behaviourally, females rates SELF-related emotions significantly stronger than males. ... During SELF-related processing, females recruited the right inferior frontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus stronger than males. In contrast, there was increased neural activity in the left temporoparietal junction [TPJ] in males (relative to females). ... The data suggest that females recruit areas containing mirror neurons to a higher degree than males during both SELF- and OTHER-related processing in empathic face-to-face interactions. This may underlie emotional "contagion" in females. Together with the observation that males differentially rely on the temporoparietal junction (an area mediating the distinction between the SELF and OTHERS) the data suggest that females and males rely on different strategies when assessing their own emotions in response to other people".

Now, this is what "we" medieval theologians and scientists always already have known for a long time: so-called "females" seem to be less ABLE to inhibit their ("unconscious"?) "social biases" and "emotional contagions", and hence activate their TPJs (in order to inhibit the mirror neuron network, and in order to clearly differentiate between some SELF and OTHERs) to a lesser degree than so-called "males".

April 29, 2008

In their paper entitled "Generalized Voice-Leading Spaces", the authors Clifton CALLENDER et al. (in: Science, see References) note:
"Musicians generate equivalence classes of objects by ignoring five kinds of transformation: octave shifts, [O]... permutations [P], .. transpositions [T], .. inversions, ... and cardinality changes, which insert duplications into an object ... A number of traditional music-theoretical concepts can be understood in this way, including chord (OPC), chord type (OPTC), set class (OPTIC), chord-progression (individual OPC), voice-leading (uniform OP), pitch class (single notes under O), and many others."

"Geometrically, a musical object can be represented as a point in R^n. The four OPTI equivalences create quotient spaces by identifying (or "gluing together") points in R^n. ... Our model ... describ[es] the complete family of continuous n-note spaces corresponding to the 32 OPTIC equivalence relations. Of these, the most useful are the OP, OPT, and OPTI spaces, representing voice-leading relations among chords, chord types, and set classes, respectively. ... Beyond modeling musical similarity, the geometrical perspective provides a unified framework for investigating a wide range of contemporary music-theoretical topics, including "contour", and "K-nets". This reflects the fact that the OPTIC equivalences have been central to Western musical discourse since at least the seventeenth century. Our model translates [i.e., maps] these music-theoretical terms into precise geometrical language, revealing a rich set of mathematical consequences."

And needless to say that "voice-leading" is defined as "mappings between adjacent chords in a score” (Rachel Wells Hall) – and hence the future goal of all these multidisciplinary mappings may be: to find correlations between musicological (geometric) maps and a musician's brain (i.e., neural maps), when both are contiguously-continuously shifting around within their (neuronal) maps...

April 27, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Diane Colye (and Stephen Marglin):

Dear Mrs Coyle

Thank you for your nice book ("The Soulful Science", 2007)!

The best sentence in your book was the following (: 253):
"I predict that during the next ten years the astonishing mapping of our societies taking place now...".

But I hope that you will soon see the problem of "maps", "mappings", and "map-maker(s!)" (see [26]).
Including the all-pervading problem of a "social bias" and H. sapiens as an extremely biased "ultrasocial animal" (HERRMANN et al. 2007) or better: map-maker (i.e., "brain?").

My own personal experience with a lot of students in Economy, Law, and Politics is that all these egotistical beings obsessed with sex didn't want to hear anything about theoretical issues any more (because there may be no such thing as an "economical theory"), but only headed for one single thing as fast as possible (as good Adam Smithian animals): "making money as fast as possible" and having sex and fun...

By the way: you should never refer to religious terms like "trust" etc.
Instead, when economies do grow and try to establish themselves in new territories ("expansion"), they first bother about issues of law.

Only when you have functioning (i.e., "independent" and "non-corrupt" (!)) institutions of law in a territory, economic growth will be able in these new territories... (see the OLD East European and NOW European-law adherent countries like Slovenia, etc.).

Hence, you may have greatly underrated the importance of "law" and "jurisprudence" in your book...

But please be also careful as well: even "Jurisprudence" is not an objective theory --- laws and "jurisprudence" are an extremely arbitrary thing... (only the Physics of Energy would be objective? - See Wilhelm Ostwald's futile attempt to transform the economical sciences into the physical science of Entropy and Thermodynamics already in 1909 [OSTWALD 1909] --- long before Georgescu-Roegen et al. !!!!!!!!!...).

Yours sincerely (and with a greeting to Marglin's "Dismal Science" of 2008) --- OE "

April 26, 2008

In his very good review entitled "General anaesthesia: from molecular targets to neuronal pathways of sleep and arousal", the author Nicholas P. FRANKS (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) notes that the most important receptors targeted by anaesthetics may be (inhibitory) GABAergic neurons (in Cortex, Hypothalamus, brain stem etc.), and:
"certain regions are consistently more deactivated than others. Studies with propofol, sevoflurane and xenon showed deactivation of the thalamus and some midbrain structures that are associated with the ascending reticular activating system, together with varying degrees of deactivation of particular association cortices, such as the precuneus and the posterior cingulate cortex ... Interestingly, the polymodal association cortices tend to be affected more profoundly than the primary and secondary sensory cortices. This functional dissociation between unimodal and polymodal cortices implies that during sleep the brain can respond to external stimuli (such as loud noises) but lacks the higher levels of processing that are necessary to make meaningful sense of the input."

In fact, "the thalamus is the major gateway for the flow of sensory information from the periphery into the cortex and can switch [i.e., shift] between a state that allows the flow of ascending information and one that essentially isolates the cortex from the environment" (see also my distinction between contingent "activity circles" and seemingly non-congingent (simulation-like) "activation circles" and "default-modes" in My map of the brain !).

"Thus, when the brain is in an activated, wakeful state, the corticofugal pathway (which is exclusively excitatory) provides a tonic depolarization of the thalamocortical neurons, tending to prevent them from entering synchronized, oscillatory states. This provides some degree of positive feedback, because if the TC [thalamocortical] neurons enter into an oscillatory mode as a result of a diminished excitation of the arousal pathways, then the tonic corticofugal excitation will also be reduced, further favouring synchronous oscillation. Anaesthetics could act, at least in part, by inhibiting cortical neurons and thus favouring TC burst firing and a sleep-like state. ... An explanation for the sudden switch between consciousness and unconsciousness might lie in the intrinsic bi-stability [once again: two stable attractors!!!] of thalamocortical neurons, together with the reciprocal inhibitory connections that exist between hypothalamic sleep-promoting centres and the arousal nuclei in the midbrain and the brainstem...".

April 24, 2008

When you read the paper by J. Dylan CLYNE & Gero MIESENBOECK entitled "Sex-Specific Control and Tuning of the Pattern Generator for Courtship Song in Drosophila" (in: Cell, see References), you can see once more that all scientific maps (and map-makings) are indeed heavily local, selective, and (necessarily) methodically extremely biased (because there is no total map of everything):
"By photoactivating all ~2000 fru neurons of males at once, we were able to elicit courtship behaviors, such as abdominal thrusting and unilateral wing vibrations, but only in a small fraction of 1.7% of all trials (n = 240). The lack of consistent responses under these circumstances is not entirely surprising: different subsets of fru neurons likely play antagonistic roles in courtship ... so that their simultaneous activation may result in conflicts. However, when the fru circuitry of the ventral ganglion was isolated by physically severing the neck connectives [and hence isolating the spinal ganglions and song pattern generators from the upper brain], headless male torsos (‘‘flyPods’’) sang readily and reliably when exposed to light."

With regard to the two kinds of song patterns generated by the Drosophila males and stimulated fru-females (two bistable attractors and "order-parameters": sine or pulse song...), the authors hypothesize that there may be (triodic) master-controllers in the upper brain, so that "one type of descending interneuron could then set the value of this parameter and thereby control the type of acoustic input (sine or pulse song), whereas a second class of interneuron could signal the decision to sing, without specifying a particular song rhythm".

April 23, 2008

In their paper entitled "Lateral asymmetry of bodily emotion expression", the authors Claire L. ROETHER et al. (in: Current Biology, see References) note:
"Our experiment provides the first demonstration of pronounced lateral asymmetries in human emotional full-body movement. These motor asymmetries influence the perceived expressiveness of emotional gait. Lateral asymmetry of emotional expression is thus not specific to the face, but extends to the movement of the human body [here: the left body side moving with significantly higher joint-angle amplitudes], consistent with a general dominance of the right hemisphere in the control of emotional expression, independent of the effector. Such asymmetries in locomotion patterns seem surprising given the selection pressure towards symmetry in locomotion".

April 21, 2008

In their paper entitled "Intrinsic noise, dissipation cost, and robustness of cellular networks: The underlying energy landscape of MAPK signal transduction", the authors Saul LAPIDUS (in: PNAS, see References) note:
"The ultimate goal of biology is to understand the function of specific systems. At the cell level, the function of the system is realized through the network of interactions between molecules. ... The purpose of this article was to study the global robustness or stability against intrinsic fluctuations and random perturbation to the inherent chemical reaction rates directly from the properties of the potential energy landscape [cf. [27]] of the network. ... Noisy conditions thus play a very important role in these chemical reaction networks and are much more realistic than the average mean concentrations. To describe the system under noisy conditions, we will define a potential energy function that is derived from the steady-state probability of the network. After this landscape is determined, the probability of each state is known and we can begin to analyze global features. ... The potential energy function U(x) can be related to steady-state probability: Pss(x) = 1/Z*exp(-U(x)). ... For certain configurations of concentrations, the network adopts a certain potential energy (or the corresponding probability). The dimensionality of the configurational state space is huge. We are interested, first of all, in the most probable configuration that corresponds to the lowest energy state."

"We used the experimentally inferred rate parameters to prove that the network is funneled in configurational space of protein concentrations toward the ground nonequilibrium steady-state fixed point under the intrinsic statistical fluctuations."

And now comes the most important point (cf. also WHITFIELD 2007), which shows that "evolution" may only be a subcase and subdiscipline of Physics (and ultimately Mathematics):
"We show that natural evolution might only select certain parameter space with the funneled underlying energy landscape. The other part of the parameter space that generates the rough potential landscape cannot guarantee the global robustness and therefore is not able to appropriately perform the specific biological function required for efficient transformation of the information signals. They are more likely to phase out from evolution. The funneled landscape, therefore, may be a realization of the Darwinian principle of natural selection at the cellular network level for efficient transformation of the information (signal transduction). As we see, the funneled landscape provides an optimal criterion to select the suitable parameter subspace of cellular networks, guarantee the robustness, cost the least dissipations, and perform specific biological functions."

April 19, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to the editors and authors of 2008's "Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science" (Martin Curd, Stathis Psillos, et al.):

"Dear Editors and Authors

Thank you for your book, but sadly enough, this your "Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Science" (2008) seems to be neither up-to-date, nor complete:

It is a pity that your book does not contain the extremely important term "map" (or: "mapping"?) — a term which happens to be used in nearly all "sciences" (i.e., maps) and by nearly all "scientists" (i.e., map-makers) in an ever increasing way (you may only scan this week's issue of the magazine "Science" [see, e.g., ENSERINK 2008]...).

That's why I --- being funded by no body --- have tried to start a "competely new" and extremely consistent "Philosophy of Science" (i.e., map of maps) based on this nicely ambiguous term (**): see http://www.mapology.org/en/Main_Page .

This extremely short text is not easy to read — but there may be two easier books (ELBS 2005, ELBS 2006 — see References).

Yours sincerely, and as usual with my last sentence:

** And those who will have the "best" (neural?) maps... (or more prosaically with Ernan McCullin referring to Kurt Lewin in your book above on p. 498: The virtues of a "good" [i.e., "fitting"?] map...).

OE "

April 17, 2008

In a follow-up (?) study to BRASS & HEYES 2005 on "Face-Specific and Domain-General Characteristics of Cortical Responses during Self-Recognition", the authors Motoaki SUGIURA et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) compared "cortical activation during recognition of self-face and self-name" vs. the faces and names of "familiar persons", and then conclude with regard to the prominent shift in (de-)activation at the TPJ (Temporoparietal Junction):
"The domain-nonspecific reduction of temporoparietal activation during self-recognition revealed in this study may reflect the developmental process of self-recognition. The acquisition of self-recognition ABILITY is manifested as a disappearance of social behaviour directed at one's own mirror image. All animals confronted with their own mirror images first show the same social behaviour, such as aggressive displays, as to their conspecifics; then, a limited number of species stop showing this social behaviour before they show evidence of self-recognition. ... If temporoparietal activation reflects automatic preparation for social behaviour, and the developmental process of self-recognition involves the suppression of social behaviour, it may be reasonable to assume that self-specific reduction of temporoparietal activation is an active suppression process". (Cf. also my Dallas Lecture, Slide 36 Publications!).

April 15-16, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Ernst Fehr and Harvey Whitehouse:

"I was quite astonished to see an article in the New Scientist on your Oxfordian "explaining religion" project (EXREL).
First of all, the title of this project may already have a "religious" bias from the very start: in my view, map-makers like "scientists" NEVER look for "explanations" (only "religious map-makers" may do that...), but ONLY try to develop ever more precise mapping tools and maps enABLing them to predict (and especially to manipulate) "the uncertain future" ever "better" (i.e., in a "better" "fitting" way).

All this may only be another "religious bias" of a seemingly extremely "socially biased" animal (like the "ultrasocial" H. sapiens), partly correlated with H. sapiens's extreme "ontological bias" (i.e., "our" desperate struggling for some "truth" and "stability" and "stable absolute maps and coordinates") and "historical bias" (i.e., "our" struggling for "evolutionary reasons", "historical causes", "final purposes", "explanations", "causal maps", etc.).

And no wonder that people like Richard Dawkins have recently got into serious trouble when fighting with creationists (and vice versa)...

After all, "our" "brains" (or: "neural maps"?) have not been "designed" for looking for (ontological) "explanations" (down to childish things like "big bangs", "first movers", "evolutionary causes", etc.), but rather for making ever "better" (i.e., ever MORE "fitting") predictions based on ever MORE precise maps...

And by the way: the EXREL project seems to be largely funded by the European Union, that means: by politicians who do not care about "explanations", but who do want to be ABLE to make (hopefully) ever better predictions of "religious behaviours" (especially by mapping and predicting the behaviours of so-called "Islamic terrorists", of course?...)?

Best wishes for your project nevertheless --- OE".

And by the way: all this is nicely illustrated in this week's article in Science on Derek Smith as a "Mapmaker for the world of influenza" (ENSERINK 2008): Derek Smith only tries to develop ever more precise (real-time) global maps of the genomes and distribution of different influenza strains in order to be ABLE to predict (and to manipulate) flu outbreaks and shifting genomes (i.e., shifts and "changes") ever better...

April 14, 2008

Today, I had to write this e-mail to Kevin Ochsner:
"Thank you very much for your paper on the necessity of an "interactive" view of "empathy" in Psychological Science (entitled "It Takes TWO").
You note that: "Empathy — the capacity to feel the emotions of other individuals — is so critical to social relationships and prosocial behavior", but (as an art historian) I always have to remind and to add that this definition of "empathy" may also hold for Hitler's perfect "anti-social" (or yet: "pro-social"?) capacity to feel (and to quickly respond to) the emotions of his "(national)social(ist) mass".
But nevertheless, thank you very much for underlining that empathy (in your sense above) necessarily remains a tremendously ambiguous capacity and challenge (due to inferring "other" minds and emotions ONLY by means of CLOSELY reading bodily expressions), which may only be ever more disambiguated via extended interactive feedback sequences, including perhaps linguistic interactions (and hence the "necessity" of the evolution of some "language" in an extremely "ultrasocial" and socially biased "H. sapiens"?), or via future "direct" and "totally" disambiguated (i.e., neurotechnical?) linkings of TWO brains...?

Yours sincerely and best wishes --- OE"

April 13, 2008

Everyone is now talking about the increasing hunger in the world (or better: in the so-called "poor countries") — due to the grains wasted in favour of biofuel etc.
But look at my pupils and my conspecifics here in "Germany": all these my dirty conspecifics driving cars on Sundays, feeding their pets with bio-fuel (etc. etc.).
And you see here once more that H. sapiens is still rather "neolithic" (because being still dependent on agriculture and pets), and you also see that not even my first GOAL ("maintaining upright all already existing individual bodies as best as POSSIBLE") has been fulfilled in the last thousand years.
Hence, "we" (H. sapiens, including "politicians", "lawyers", "economists" etc.) seem to be really "imPOTENT" and "poor" (i.e., "selfish", "inconsistent, "neolithic", and "single-minded") map-makers indeed...

April 12, 2008

In their paper entitled "Virtual reality study of paranoid thinking in the general population", the authors Daniel FREEMAN et al. (in: British Journal of Psychiatry, see References) demonstrate "that virtual reality is a safe and acceptable method of studying paranoia in the laboratory. Computer characters can elicit paranoid reactions. Consistent with the latest epidemiological research, over 40% of our general population sample had paranoid thoughts".

Now, this result is not very surprising (and that's why I had to write an e-mail to Freeman et al. with the following text here:), given the increasing evidence that "Homo sapiens" seems to be an extremely "ultrasocial" animal (HERRMANN et al. 2007) with an extreme "social bias", so that nearly all its thoughts may revolve around "social inferences".
That means: H. sapiens may excel at making inferences, e.g., when making up or simulating "hidden intentions" & "hidden causes" & "other minds" in "other" "bodies" (e.g., when being in a "typically human"(?) "default-state" of a "wandering mind" [MASON et al. 2007], or when being in a task-free situation like traveling on the underground [FREEMAN et al. 2008]?).
And this excessive capacity of a "Theory of mind" (and default-state?) may even extend to paranoid thinkings in some (pathological?) individuals...?
After all, according to CHENEY & SEYFARTH 2007, "most of the problems facing baboons can be expressed in two words: other baboons”.

April 10, 2008

In their paper entitled "Drifting grating stimulation reveals particular activation properties of visual neurons in the caudate nucleus", the authors Attila NAGY et al. (in: EJN, see References) performed a study on cats concerning the responses of the caudate nucleus (CN) to (visual) sinewave drifting gratings (and hence crucially extend the primitive notion of a "visual cortical brain" to much more important subcortical structures like the CN...):
"Earlier morphological findings in cats and rabbits stressed the predominant role of the geniculostriate pathway that conveys visual information toward the CN ... However, recent morphological and physiological studies support the suggestion that the extrageniculate ascending tectofugal pathways [including the superior colliculi [SC]] project to the CN in reptiles, birds and mammals ..."
Now, the authors corroborate earlier findings (in cats) that the "spatiotemporal visual properties of the CN neurons are extremely similar to those of the subset SC, LM-Sg and the AES [anterior ectosylvian sulcus] cortex, with their preference for very low spatial and very high temporal frequencies and narrow spatial and temporal tuning characteristics [!]."
In fact, the AES cortex may even be "the origin of the modulation in the CN." Besides, the "CN neurons are good candidates for tasks involved in the perception of motion and probably in the perception of changes [i.e, shifts] in the visual environment during self-motion, with their extremely large receptive fields, their preferences for low spatial frequencies, and their fine spatial and temporal tuning" (cf. also REDGRAVE & GURNEY 2006, and My map of the brain!).

April 6, 2008

In a follow-up paper to MUCKLI et al. 2005, the authors Bashir AHMED et al. in their paper entitled "Cortical Dynamics Subserving Visual Apparent Motion" (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) note (and you see here once again the increasing use of mapologically crucial linguistic terms like "shifts" and "maps"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!):
"Motion can be perceived when static images are successively presented with a spatial shift. This type of motion is an illusion and is termed apparent motion (AM). Here we show, with a voltage sensitive dye applied to the visual cortex of the ferret, that presentation of a sequence of stationary, short duration, stimuli which are perceived to produce AM are, initially, mapped in areas 17 and 18 as separate stationary representations. But time locked to the offset of the 1st stimulus, a sequence of signals are elicited. First, an activation traverses cortical areas 19 and 21 in the direction of AM. Simultaneously, a motion dependent feedback signal from these areas activates neurons between areas 19/21 and areas 17/18. Finally, an activation is recorded, traveling always from the representation of the 1st to the representation of the next or succeeding stimuli. This activation elicits spikes from neurons situated between these stimulus representations in areas 17/18."

"In summary, the results showed that after the offset of the 1st stimulus, a moving activation wave-front appears in areas 19/21 and a motion feedback is sent to areas 17/18. Immediately, the area 17/18 wave-front starts and progresses together with the area 19/21 wave-front in the direction of AM. In the time interval during which the 17/18 wave-front traverses from one retinotopic to the next retinotopic site, the neurons located between these retinotopic sites generate spike responses."

April 4, 2008

In their paper entitled "Aversive Learning Enhances Perceptual and Cortical Discrimination of Indiscriminable Odor Cues", the authors Wen LI et al. (in: Science, see References) "combined multivariate functional magnetic resonance imaging with olfactory psychophysics to show that initially indistinguishable odor enantiomers (mirror-image molecules) become discriminable after aversive conditioning, paralleling the spatial divergence of ensemble activity patterns [i.e., "odor maps"] in primary olfactory (piriform) cortex. ... Twelve healthy human subjects ... were presented with four enantiomers (two different pairs), one of which (the target CS+, “tgCS+”) was repetitively paired with an electric shock (US) during a conditioning phase, whereas its chiral counterpart (“chCS+”) was not accompanied by shock ... The second pair of odor enantiomers served as nonconditioned control stimuli (“CS–” and “chCS–”). ... The central prediction was that associative learning would enhance behavioral discrimination of related CS+ odorants, in parallel with reorganization of neural coding in human primary olfactory (piriform) cortex".

In fact, the authors not only found a more and more differentiating Potential landscape (i.e., ever MORE differentiated maps or attractor landscapes with ever more differentiated attractors - see my Figure below), but they also found post-conditionally "increased mean responses to tgCS+ (versus CS– odors) in the OFC bilaterally."

You see: the more differentiated the maps "you" (i.e., your SELF or POTENTIAL landscape...) have, the higher your (discriminative) ABILITIes and SENSITIVities (cf. also my now updated Dallas lecture, Publications, Slide 21b!):
"Clinically, our data raise the intriguing possibility that neurobiological derangements in the ability to distinguish between salient cues and perceptually related inconsequential stimuli may underlie the emergence of anxiety disorders characterized by exaggerated sensory sensitivity and hypervigilance."

March 27, 2008

In their paper entitled "Emotional environments retune the valence of appetitive versus fearful functions in nucleus accumbens", the authors Sheila M. REYNOLDS & Kent C. BERRIDGE (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) note with regard to shifting (remapped) functional maps in the (limbic) nucleus accumbens:
"The capacity of situations to retune [i.e., to re-map] limbic function has hardly been explored. Here we examined how environmental ambience shapes adaptive behaviors by reorganizing appetitive versus defensive function maps in nucleus accumbens. Appetitive and defensive motivations are generated along an anatomical rostrocaudal gradient by glutamatergic circuits in the medial shell, analogous to a limbic ‘affective keyboard’. Each microinjection of the AMPA glutamate antagonist 6,7-dinitroquinoxaline-2,3-dione (DNQX, or related drug) disrupts glutamate signals from the prefrontal cortex, amygdala and hippocampus in a spherical < 0.75-mm radius of the shell. Just as a keyboard has many notes, microinjections of DNQX evoke many different combinations of appetitive and fearful behaviors, corresponding to their location along the rostrocaudal gradient. In rostral regions of the medial shell, DNQX microinjections generate intense appetitive behaviors in rats: large increases in eating behavior and food intake, and the establishment of conditioned place preferences. In contrast, identical DNQX microinjections in the caudal shell generate equally intense, but negatively valenced, fearful behaviors: distress vocalizations, escape attempts, conditioned place avoidance and 'defensive treading'... Intermediate sites in the shell evoke various mixtures of appetitive and fearful behaviors corresponding to their relative position along the rostrocaudal gradient."

"In summary [cf. the Figure below], our data suggest that the incentive or fearful valence of motivation generated by a particular local glutamate disruption in nucleus accumbens depends at least on two factors: the location along a rostrocaudal affective keyboard, which assigns an anatomically determined bias of appetitive or fearful valence, and current signals about environmental ambience ["home environment" vs. "stressful environment"] that can flip the valence generated by disruption of moderately biased local circuits in the medial shell. Corticolimbic circuits involving nucleus accumbens may therefore flexibly remap affective-generating functions from moment to moment as external situations change."

March 25, 2008

Recently, "my parents" have asked me the question (while reading Richard Dawkins): "Why is there religion, and why are there (religious) wars?".

And here is my extremely short answer (already given in my extremely short book entitled "Map 2020" - see Publications): "Because" of the "social bias" of an extremely "ultrasocial" H. sapiens ("we"), or "because" of the "ontological bias" ("our" desperate struggling for "truth" and "stability"), or "because" of some "historical bias" (i.e., struggling for "evolutionary reasons", "historical causes", "final purposes", "(scientific!) explanations", etc.).

But unfortunately enough, badly educated map-makers like the evolutionary (!) socio(!)biologist Richard Dawkins never name (nor discuss) these (seemingly) "age-old" biases with their correct names (despite Francis Bacon, Xenophanes, etc.).

Hence, if "we" were all solipsist (i.e., "socially incompetent") autists, monads, or perfectly educated (i.e., unbiased) map-makers (who only try to develop ever more precise maps in order to manipulate "this world" ever better and in a more predictable way), there might be no "religious" people (and "wars"...) any more...

March 20, 2008

In their paper entitled "The representation of Egomotion in the Human Brain", the authors Matthew B. WALL & Andrew T. SMITH (in: Current Biology, see References) "identify two areas of the human brain that represent visual cues to egomotion more directly than does [the optic-flow sensitive area] MST. These areas respond strongly to a single optic-flow stimulus but become relatively unresponsive when the stimulus is surrounded with further flow patches and thereby made inconsistent with egomotion. One is putative area VIP in the anterior portion of the intraparietal sulcus. The other is a new visual area, which we refer to as cingulate sulcus visual area (CSv) [lying anterior to the posterior cingulate cortex]. Areas V1–V4 and MT respond about equally to both types of flow stimulus. MST has intermediate properties, responding well to multiple patches but with a modest preference for a single, egomotion-compatible patch. We suggest that MST is merely an intermediate processing stage for visual cues to egomotion and that such cues are more comprehensively encoded by VIP and CSv."

March 18, 2008

In their paper entitled "Synaptic Theory of Working Memory", the authors Gianluigi MONGILLO et al. (in: Science, see References) remind "us" once again that there is not only some attractor dynamics on the level of (spiking) neurons, but also on the (lower) levels of single neurons and their synaptic trees (including oscillating biochemical networks and calcium buffers):
"It is usually assumed that enhanced spiking activity in the form of persistent reverberation for several seconds is the neural correlate of working memory [WM]. Here, we propose that working memory is sustained by calcium-mediated synaptic facilitation in the recurrent connections of neocortical networks. In this account, the presynaptic residual calcium is used as a buffer that is loaded, refreshed, and read out by spiking activity. Because of the long time constants of calcium kinetics, the refresh rate can be low, resulting in a mechanism that is metabolically efficient and robust. The duration and stability of working memory can be regulated by modulating the spontaneous activity in the network [i.e., by non-specific periodic inputs to the network]."
"In the above scenario, the network has a single stable activity state [i.e., attractor] corresponding to the spontaneous activity, thus appropriately timed external signals are required to extract the memory from synaptic to spiking form. A more persistent form of WM requires the selective population to exhibit a bistable activity regime [i.e., two attractors], where the spontaneous state coexists with another stable state. Our network can be forced into this regime by increasing spontaneous activity by means of a global nonspecific background input ... In the bistable regime, post-synaptic spikes [PSs] become persistent without reactivating inputs ... Each reactivation increases u [the residual calcium level) and decreases x [the available resources], the latter terminating the PS. The time between subsequent PSs is controlled by the recovery from synaptic depression so that the PSs tend to occur with a period on the order of tD [which ...] would correspond to cortical oscillations in the theta-range, as observed during WM experiments."

March 10, 2008

The EXTREMELY important paper entitled "Identifying natural images from human brain activity" by the authors Kendrick N. KAY et al. (in: Nature, see References) seems to be the first step toward a so much longed-for "Potential function" (U(x,t)) of each individual brain (see also my Dallas lecture at Publications and [28]):
"Our experiment consisted of two stages [cf. Figure below!]. In the first stage, model estimation, fMRI data were recorded from visual areas V1, V2 and V3 while each subject viewed 1,750 natural images [i.e., visual maps]. We used these data to estimate a quantitative receptive-field model for each voxel. The model [i.e., the mathematical map U(x)] was based on a Gabor wavelet pyramid and described tuning along the dimensions of space, orientation and spatial frequency."
"In the second stage, image identification, fMRI data [i.e., visual fMRI voxel maps] were recorded while each subject viewed 120 novel natural images. This yielded 120 distinct voxel activity patterns for each subject. For each voxel activity pattern we attempted to identify which image had been seen. To do this, the receptive-field models estimated in the first stage of the experiment were used to predict the voxel activity pattern that would be evoked by each of the 120 images. The image whose predicted voxel activity pattern [i.e., map] was most correlated (Pearson’s r) with the measured voxel activity pattern was selected."
"A general visual decoder would be especially useful if it could operate on brain activity evoked by a single perceptual event. However, because fMRI data are noisy, the results reported above were obtained using voxel activity patterns averaged across 13 repeated trials. ... Single-trial performance was 51% (834/1620) and 32% (516/1620) for subjects S1 and S2, respectively; once again, chance performance is just 0.8%."

You see: "we" now get very clever at mapping (linking) maps of different kinds (obtained with mathematical, neurobiological or visual methods)...
And that's why I always say: the clash of maps (and mappings) and the mapping of (individual) map-makers (i.e., brains? nervous systems? V1-V3?) has now really begun (and hence also the following virulent problems: Who maps whom? Who maps what? What maps what? And who has the legal right to map Afghanistan by Tornado fighters?)...

However (and sadly enough), the authors only give a function U(x) that crucially lacks time-dependency (and hence, "real neuronal attractor dynamics"), so that the authors have to note grudgingly at the end of their paper: "Why does identification sometimes fail? Inspection revealed that identification errors tended to occur when the selected image was visually similar to the correct image"...

March 8, 2008

In their paper entitled "The Spatial Attention Network Interacts with Limbic and Monoaminergic Systems to Modulate Motivation-Induced Attention Shifts", the authors Aprajita MOHANTY et al. (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) show that the posterior Cingulate Cortex (which receives substantial input from the anterior Cingulate Cortex being Crick's "location of the will", and from the posterior Insula) may feedforward viscerosomatic information about the "motivational" state (hungry) to the posterior Parietal Cortex (involved in attentional shifts and building up "salience maps"):
"Amygdala, posterior cingulate, locus coeruleus, and substantia nigra showed selective sensitivity to food-related cues when hungry but not when satiated, an effect that did not generalize to tools. Posterior parietal cortex (PPC), including intraparietal sulcus, posterior cingulate, and the orbitofrontal cortex displayed correlations with the speed of attentional shifts that were sensitive not just to motivational state but also to the motivational value of the target. Stronger functional coupling between PPC and posterior cingulate occurred during attentional biasing toward motivationally relevant food targets. These results reveal conjoint limbic and monoaminergic encoding of motivational salience in spatial attention. They emphasize the interactive role of posterior parietal and cingulate cortices in integrating motivational information with spatial attention, a process that is critical for selective allocation of attentional resources in an environment where target position and relevance can change rapidly."
And: "Hence, the PC is ideally suited to serve as a neural interface between motivation, as encoded by the limbic system, and spatial attention. We have previously found that neural activity in the PC correlates positively with anticipatory shifts of spatial attention and that this relationship is strengthened by the presence of monetary incentives, indicating that the PC is involved in anticipatory biasing of spatial attention to motivationally relevant events."

March 7, 2008

In their paper entitled "Misattribution of movement agency following right parietal TMS", the authors Catherine PRESTON & Roger NEWPORT (in: SCAN, see References) use TMS to disturb the normal functioning of the right TPJ [rIPL] during virtual own/other hand movements (the trajectories of which were partly artificially shifted, so as to disturb feedback and hence the sense of agency).
Interestingly, the authors now note: "When TMS is applied over the rlPL, participants are more likely to give a judgment of other ... compared with when no TMS is applied", so that the (socially biased?] default response of the TPJ seems to be attribution of agency to "others".
However, the authors now speculate that this misattribution is due to a "disruption of predicted state mechanisms" carried out by the TPJ (but cf. also BRASS & HEYES 2005: this misattribution could also be due to a failed inhibition of mirror neurons in other areas? Unfortunately enough, these authors do not seem to know this paper by Brass & Heyes. You see: nobody is perfect...).

March 1, 2008

In their paper entitled "Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation", the authors Charles J. LIMB & Allen R. BRAUN (in: PLoS ONE, see References) note:
"Because musical improvisation incorporates a broad range of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic invention that is intrinsically difficult to control (while retaining musical integrity), we designed to [improvisation] paradigms [based upon the same notes], one that was relatively low (which we have termed Scale) and one that was high (which we have termed Jazz) in musical complexity. ... In Scale's control condition ... subjects repeatedly played a one-octave C major scale in quarter notes [cf. also ELBS 2005, the "Wagner-Project"!]. ... In the Jazz paradigm, ... during the control condition ..., subjects played the composition with the auditory accompaniment of a pre-recorded jazz quartet. During the corresponding improvisation condition ... subjects were given freedom to improvise, using the chord structure of the composition and the same auditory accompaniment as the basis for improvisation."

The authors now found that "spontaneous improvisation, independent of the degree of musical complexity, is characterized by widespread deactivation of lateral portions of the prefrontal cortex together with focal activation of medial prefrontal cortex [MPFC, BA 10]. ... In jazz music, improvisation is considered to be a highly individual expression of an artist's own musical viewpoint [or: Self?]. The association of MPFC activity with the production of autobiographical narrative is germane in this context [cf. also FARB et al. 2007 in my Update below, December 31, 2007!], and as such, one could argue that improvisation is a way of expressing one's own musical voice or story."
"Whereas activation of the lateral regions appears to support self-monitoring and focused attention, deactivation may be associated with defocused, free-floating attention that permits spontaneous unplanned associations, and sudden insights or realizations ... The idea that spontaneous composition relies to some degree on intuition, the "ability to arrive at a solution without reasoning", may be consistent with the dissociated pattern of prefrontal activity we observed."

"Moreover, a comparable dissociated pattern of activity in prefrontal regions has been reported to occur during REM sleep ..., a provocative finding when one considers that dreaming is exemplified by a sense of defocused attention, an abundance of unplanned, irrational associations and apparent loss of volitional control".

February 29, 2008

In their (MEG-)paper entitled "A Specific and Rapid Neural Signature for Parental Instinct", the authors Morten L. KRINGELBACH et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) have tried to map the neural maps underlying Konrad Lorenz' "Kindchenschema" (infant schema) via MEG, since "no published studies have compared responses to unfamiliar infant faces with responses to unfamiliar adult faces":
"At around 130 ms after presentation of a face, significantly more activity was found in the medial orbitofrontal cortex [MOFC] in response to infant than to adult faces in the 10-15 Hz band ... This striking difference in activity elicited by infant compared to adult faces was not found in the right fusiform face area [FFA], where the initial activity occurred earlier around 100 ms in the 10-20 Hz and in the 25-35 Hz bands".
"To test whether these results held when restricted to participants who were not parents, we excluded the three parents from the analysis. Using solely the data from the non-parents produced the same results. ... [However,] It might also be of interest to future studies to investigate the brain responses to infants of other species."

Hence, you see (once again, cf. also KVERAGA et al. 2007 in my Update below of December 10, 2007!) that during the propagation of neural activity along the ventral visual stream (Thalamus > Occipital visual area V1 > LOC > FFA) a lot of modulations of this stream (FFA) via parallel processed "top-down" areas may occur at the same time (e.g., via Thalamus > Amygdala [containing face-selective neurons!] > MOFC > FFA ?)...

February 28, 2008

In their paper entitled "Predicting Human Interactive Learning by Regret-Driven Neural Networks", the authors Davide MARCHIORI & Massimo WARGLIEN (in: Science, see References) note that three factors may drive learning: reinforcement learning, a player's beliefs about other players' moves (ToM!), and post-decision regret for foregone payoffs:
"Our model maps the structure of a strategic game onto a neural network in a very straightforward way, by having an input node xj corresponding to each payoff in the game matrix and by also including the opponent's payoffs and an output node yj for each action available to a player k. ... Thus far, the model is a very conventional, simple analog perceptron, where learning is modeled, as usual, as adaptive updating of the connections' weights. ... Regret is computed as the difference between the actual payoff received by a player k and the maximum payoff obtainable, given other players' actions. Thus, the psychological intuition ... is that connection weight adjustment is driven by a series of factors that can be summarized as adjustment = learning rate x distance from ex-post best response x regret x input saliency. ... As compared with Hopfield's perceptron rule, the main difference of this variant is that the error feedback is multiplied by the regret size".
The authors now found that "regret-based models always fared better than the other models ... demonstrating the determinant role played by the introduction of regret as a source of feedback for learning" (perhaps mediated by regret and disappointment networks in the lateral habenula, VTA, Striatum, Amy, or MOFC?).

February 26, 2008

In their extremely important paper entitled "Creating Social Connection Through Inferential Reproduction", the authors Nicholas EPLEY et al. (in: Psychological Science, see References) note:
"People engage in a variety of behaviors to alleviate the pain of social disconnection. For example, they actively seek connections with other people ... imagine important social relationships ... and increase attention to social cues in the environment ... Such behaviors involve attempts to establish connections with other existing humans, but we suggest that disconnected people may adopt an even more creative approach by inventing humanlike agents in their environment to serve as potential sources of connection. People may do so in at least two distinct ways: by anthropomorphizing nonhuman agents such as mechanical devices and nonhuman animals to make them appear more humanlike or by increasing belief in the existence of commonly anthropomorphized religious agents (such as God) ... Chronic isolation has been a long-standing explanation for classic examples of anthropomorphism — from seeing mermaids in the ocean to naming geological features by their humanlike features [cf. Art history: from neolithic cave-sculptors to Mantegna!]."

Now, the authors conducted a test for such "mental state attributions" to mechanical gadgets, pets, and religious agents, and they predicted that "participants who were chronically lonely or momentarily induced to think about loneliness would create agents of social connection by altering the mental states they attributed to nonhuman agents ... or by increasing their belief in supernatural agents."

AND NOW COMES THE MOST IMPORTANT HYPOTHESIS (cf. also my Curriculum Vitae, Curriculum, and cf. also my online Dallas lecture 2008, Slide 37 Publications):
"If social disconnection increases the tendency to seek humanlike agents in one’s environment, then a strong sense of social connection should decrease this tendency to seek humanlike agents. A lack of motivation to connect with other humans should decrease the tendency to perceive humanlike traits in these other humans as well. This reasoning suggests that when evaluating other individuals, people who are especially socially connected might also be more likely to dehumanize those to whom they are not socially connected ... We found exactly this pattern in one recent experiment in which participants induced to feel strongly connected to another person were less likely to attribute humanlike mental states to members of an out-group than were those not induced to feel connected to another person ... Although being socially connected has many desirable consequences for one’s mental and physical health, it may have some undesirable consequences as well [cf. e.g., nationalsocialist biases and "dehumanizations"?]."

February 20-25, 2008

I am currently in Dallas at the CAA conference session on "Neuro-Art-History" where I give a (as usually non-paid, i.e., non-corrupted...) talk about Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman (see Publications).
I am not sure whether the audience will grasp all things involved in my lecture (which is extremely dense...).
And it is sad to say that I may have (in vain...) spent several thousand dollars and many decades of extremely hard work (see Curriculum) JUST for seeing Philip Johnson's Thanksgiving Square Chapel with the beautiful French stained glass by Gabriel Loire...

February 19, 2008

In their paper entitled "Korean Preschoolers' Advanced Inhibitory Control and Its Relation to Other Executive Skills and Mental State Understanding", the authors Seungmi OH & Charlie LEWIS (in: Child Development, see References) note with regard to Theory of Mind [ToM] and inhibitory skills (including the inhibition of mirror neurons via the TPJ?):
"Some [authors] have asserted that understanding of internal states [i.e., ToM] facilitates self-control ... According to this view, some degree of mental state understanding is itself a precursor to later developments in the executive system. ... In contrast, others have argued that advances in different aspects of executive control are necessary or even sufficient for the development of mind awareness. ... A third perspective about the effects of executive control on theory-of-mind development holds that inhibitory control is a key to developing social understanding [cf. also BRASS & HEYES 2005!]."
By comparing Korean preschoolers with their "Western" conspecifics, the authors now find that "on three of the four measures of inhibitory control ..., not only was the difference between the two cultures significant, but on each measure, the younger Korean 3-year-olds were performing above the level of their English counterparts who were almost 5 years old. ... [HOWEVER,] The lack of consistent relations between executive skills and mental state understanding, particularly in the Korean sample, may well be explained by the high levels of performance on the former, particularly the measures of inhibitory control, in the Korean children. The lack of transfer of these precocious executive skills into false belief understanding in the Korean preschoolers casts doubts on the necessity of a functional relationship between these two areas of cognitive development that has been assumed with reference to Western data."
"Although there is agreement between parents and teachers on the importance of socializing Korean children into a society emphasizing self-control within [Confucian] harmonized social interactions, there might be other possible reasons why Korean children appear to show higher levels of performance on tests involving inhibition. For example, child-directed speech may be a cradle for learning the elements of control. Such speech directed towards babies in Korea is characterized by a greater use of verbs than that in other languages ... The emphasis is on action and, by implication, its control ... It seems likely that this input and a related early child output of action terms are geared towards stressing the importance of self-control".

February 18, 2008

In their extremely interesting paper entitled "An Agent Harms a Victim: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study on Specific Moral Emotions", the authors Gayannée KEDIA et al. (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) try to disentangle four different "moral emotions" by a two factorial "agent harms a victim" LOTTERY scenario ("Self-anger": "You discover your lucky numbers but then you remember that you have forgotten to validate your ticket"; "guilt": "You discover your colleague's lucky numbers but then you remember that you forgotten to validate his ticket", "other-anger": "You discover your lucky numbers but then your colleage remembers that he has forgotten to validate your ticket", and "compassion": "You discover your colleague's lucky numbers but then he remembers that he has forgotten to validate his ticket"):
"First, we found that the stories involving someone else (guilt, other-anger, and compassion conditions) recruited more intensely the ToM network [TPJ, dMPFC, precuneus] than the self-focused ones (self-anger condition). ... The involvement of the amygdala in the experience of guilt and other-anger is of particular interest given that this structure has been associated with the capacity to detect possible threat ... The statistical interaction between the two experimental factors also indicated that stories in which both the self and someone else were concerned exhibited greater activity in the ToM network ... than those involving only the self or other ... On this note, Saxe has hypothesized that the dMPFC would support shared attention between "ME," someone, and an object or a goal. In the present study, this triadic relation was carried out by the guilt and other-anger stories: Each type of situation involved "ME" and someone else faced with a harmful act relying on an object (e.g., the lottery ticket that was not validated)."

February 17, 2008

In their paper entitled "Binding 3-D Object Perception in the Human Visual Cortex", the authors Yang JIANG et al. (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) note:
"How do visual luminance, shape, motion, and depth bind together in the brain to represent the coherent percept of a 3-D object within hundreds of milliseconds? We provide evidence from simultaneous MEG and EEG data that perception of 3-D objects defined by luminance or elicits sequential activity in human visual cortices within 500 ms."
The authors now show not only the whole temporal dynamics involved with object perception (V1 > hMT > LO > vTemp), but also that "activity in the lateral occipital (LO) complex is associated with an increase of induced power in the gamma band, a hallmark of binding. The close correspondence of an induced gamma response with concurrent sources located in the LO in both experimental conditions (~ 200 ms for luminance and ~300 ms for dynamic cues) strongly suggests that the LO is the key region for the assembly of object features."

February 16, 2008

In their paper entitled "Perceptual learning depends on perceptual constancy", the authors Patrick GARRIGAN & Philip J. KELLMAN (in: PNAS, see References) note the following:
"We perceive by means of energy received at the senses, but it is the properties of the material world — objects, surfaces, spatial arrangements, and events — that matter most for thought and action. Early responses in each sensory system necessarily relate to energy dimensions, but obtaining perceptual attributes that reflect properties of the material world requires computing relations among sensory activations. ... Sensory data fluctuate continually. ... Sensory values may be encoded at early stages, but relational processing derives higher-order regularities, and only the latter comprise perceptual representations and accessible inputs for learning."

Now, their sentence that "our view is consistent with that of Ahissar and Hochstein, who proposed a "reverse hierarchy" theory of perceptual learning: the idea that "learning is a top-down process, which begins at high-level areas of the visual system, and when these do not suffice, progresses backwards to the input levels" definitely reminded of Hippolyte Taine (see also my Seminar Script, Seminar-Script, S4 Figure 15):
”Les sensations élémentaires qui composent directement nos sensations ordinaires sont elles-mêmes des composés de sensations moindres … Quant aux éléments et aux éléments des éléments, la conscience ne les atteint pas, le raison-nement les conclut; ils sont aux sensations ce que les molecules secondaires et les atomes primitifs sont au corps; nous n’en avons qu’une conception abstraite, et ce qui nous les représente est non une image, mais une notation” (Taine 1870: 188, emphasis mine).

You see: there is nothing "new" under the sun... (But, alas, people do not know all former writings any more...?)

February 13, 2008

This evening, I have attended a lecture given by Michael Hagner (ETHZ) and Charlotte Klonk (HU Berlin) at Tübingen University (within the "Studium Generale").

Unfortunately enough, I had to remember them that (among other things ranging from Dürer, LeBrun & Lavater up to "functional circles" already drawn by Descartes, Meynert, Uexüll, and today's "perception-action cycle" theorists):

All maps are selective (and extremely local). And all mapping tools are extremely (methodically) biased.
And: "we" (still) have no global maps (in real-time)... (and according to Nicholas of Cusa: will never have).

And unfortunately enough: "we" are damned to make maps, because "we" are damned to "act" [see Lenin and the poor medical doctors who have to save lives and brains...]. ... AND YOU CAN NOT ACT without a (neural?) map...?

February 12, 2008

More and more, I have enough of (biased) "Evolution" and "Biology" (etc. — and despite the GREAT book by John ALCOCK (2005) on Animal Behavior (see References), which I can only warmly recommend to you all!).

Instead, I am more and more turning back to some hard Physics and Mathematics (and Mapology), and to great articles like those by Valdur SAKS et al. 2007 (see also References), where Saks and co-workers show their struggling for precise (physical, mathematical) maps and for (desperately needed!) better mappings of cellular energetic landscapes and (thermo-)dynamic molecular processes...

After all, Biology (including some "evolution" and its physical constraints) should always be understood as a mere subdiscipline of Physics (excluding Astronomy and Cosmology, which - alas! - still happen to be rather a kind of "Astrology"...)...

And I still cannot understand how "my conspecifics" can indulge in dinner partys, warfare, social games, and egotistical short-lived goals, instead of struggling for better maps and manipulations (for fighting not other "people" and other "races", but rather cancer, diseases, world-wide stupidity and short-comings, etc.)...

And with regard to some (biased) "stupidity", I can only welcome articles like the one by Sally Lehrman in the February issue of "Scientific American" (p. 23 f.: "From Race to DNA"), where the author strongly argues for an (overdue) replacement of biased terms and obsolete-obscene concepts like "race" with less biased terms like "ancestry" (within some nearly unbiased "personalized medicine"), while always taking into account not only phylo- and ontogenetical, but also strong environmental factors (i.e., strong physical and energetic constraints that still remain to be mapped at large...).

February 9, 2008

In their extremely interesting paper entitled "Brain Activation for Consonants and Vowels", the authors Manuel CARREIRAS & Cathy J. PRICE (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) note:
"Perea and Lupker (2004) found significant masked priming effects for consonant transpositions (relovucion-REVOLUCION vs. retosucion-REVOLUCION), but not for vowel transpositions (revulocion-REVOLUCION vs. revalicion-REVOLUCION). ... Interestingly, Semitic languages attest to the role of consonants in making lexical distinctions. In these languages, lexical roots are formed exclusively by consonants, whereas vowels are inserted to indicate morphological patterns."
In fact, "vowel processing shares neural resources with prosodic processing", and "prosodic processing is typically associated with right hemisphere activation ... and lexical processing is typically associated with the left hemisphere activation."
"To this end, pseudowords were created by transposing or replacing 2 nonadjacent letters. For example (PRIVAMERA) from the word PRIMAVERA "SPRING" and their replaced consonant controls (PRISALERA) as well as transposed letter-vowel pseudowords (PRIMEVARA) and their replaced vowel [sic!] controls (PRIMOVURA)."
"Notably, we observed increased activation in the right STS [superior temporal sulcus] for vowels relative to consonants during visual word processing tasks, with this effect being stronger during reading aloud than lexcial decision. ... Vowel changes alter prosodic information more than consonant changes ... Transposed-letter consonant pseudowords are more similar to words than the transposed vowel or the replaced-letter pseudowords, as the error rates and reaction times show. ... Thus, the rejection process is more difficult in the case of transposed consonants than in any other experimental condition, and right middle frontal activation is also higher."

February 7, 2008

In their article entitled "Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics", the authors Linda SMITH & Chen YU (in: Cognition, see References) note:
"The experiment reported here shows for the first time that infants rapidly learn multiple word-referent pairs by accruing statistical evidence across multiple and individually ambiguous word-scene pairings. The indeterminacy problem is solved not in a single trial but across trials, not for a single word and its referent but for a data set of many words and referents. ... In sum, these results tell us that cross-situational statistical learning is in the repertoire of young [14 months old] word learners. Despite the ambiguity of word-referent mappings on any individual training trial, infants clearly accumulate information across trials and use that information to determine the underlying mappings. In less than four minutes, with six different word forms and six different objects, infants learned enough to systematically look longer at the objects more strongly associated with the forms than those more weakly associated. ... Nonetheless, the present findings, like the earlier ones showing statistical learning of sequential probabilities, suggest that solutions to fundamental problems in learning language may be found by studying the statistical patterns in the learning environment and the statistical learning mechanisms in the learner ... However, statistical learning need not be the result of highly specialized statistical learning mechanisms ... The learner could solve this learning task via simple ... associative learning mechanisms ... the learner could equally associate "ball" with BALL and BAT [when two objects are presented] but after the experience of "ball" in the context of BALL and DOG, the association between "ball" and BALL would be stronger than that between "ball" and BAT. Over enough trials, these association strengths would converge on the real world statistics. ... If human learners possess the right learning mechanisms, they may mine this complexity [by attractor dynamics!] and in so doing solve the problem of referential uncertainty."

February 6, 2008

For a very good review on entorhinal and hippocampal spatial maps and attractor networks (grid cells and place cells) and their partial and global "re-mappings" due to contextual changes (shifts), I warmly recommend you the excellent review entitled "Self-localization and the entorhinal-hippocampal system" by Kathryn J. JEFFERY (in: Current Opinion in Neurobiology, see References):

February 5, 2008

I have now updated my lecture for Dallas (see Publications with an important annotation on mirror neurons, because many people and neuroscientists do not seem to "get it right":
"As a result – and as already noted by PANOFSKY 1957 and OLSSON & OCHSNER 2008 – mirror neurons may be neither necessary nor sufficient for some "empathy" and "Theory of Mind", because "similar motor responses" do not guarantee "similar feelings" or similar "Selves" or similar "Potential landscapes" on both sides: just take the famous example of a man from Ladakh who is greeting a man from Europe by protruding his tongue toward the latter... Hence, mirror neurons may only be necessary for quite simple mass-synchronizations of bodies (see some "nationalsocialist soldiers" and "folks"). But in daily life, "social uncertainties", failed communications and misunderstandings between "cultures" and individuals due to INDIRECT linkings (via words, gaze, etc.) will always prevail – unless "our" brains were synchronized directly, i.e., neurotechnically via DIRECT "brain-gates" (see my Seminar Script, Seminar-Script, S6 Figure 15)... ]
And that's why other structures (like TPJ, mACC etc.) are extremely crucial for "empathy" and "ToM" (see OLSSON & OCHSNER 2008 below), especially the TPJ as a major hub lying between visual cortices (occipital), viscerosomatic (vestibular, insular) cortices (extending to the anterior insula and cingulate), secondary somatosensory cortices (SII), parietal cortices (involved in coordinate transformations and shifts in perspective?), auditory cortices (Wernicke), and posterior cingulate cortex.

Besides, I have now seen through Suzanne KEEN's book "Empathy and the Novel" (see KEEN 2007).

February 4, 2008

In their paper entitled "The role of social cognition in emotion", the authors Andreas OLSSON & Kevin N. OCHSNER (in: TICS, see References) remind us once again that mirror neurons may not be sufficient for some "emotion understanding" (especially in "non-familiar" situations, where some "mental state attribution" or MSA is crucially needed), "because nonverbal cues to emotion are often ambiguous. In such cases, additional information is needed to constrain attributions about a person's intentions and hence their emotional state".
In such more complex cases, "these controlled MSAs enable us actively to take other peoples' perspectives and make judgments about their emotions or diagnostic elements of stable emotional dispositions, thereby changing empathic responding and activation in the AI [anterior insula] and mACC [medial anterior cingulate]. By and large, they depend on a network of regions, including the right temporal parietal junction (TPJ) and dorsal-rostral regions of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), including Brodmann area (BA) 10 [which "has a key role integrating information about the internal state of the body with higher-level mental state knowledge needed to categorize affective states"].
"If the mACC and AI support direct experiential awareness of intentional states, it is possible that the MPFC network supports meta-cognitive reflective awareness of them. ... Interestingly, some of the same regions involved in reflecting upon others' emotional states are involved in reflecting upon our own emotions [cf. CORRADI-DELL'ACQUA et al. 2008: "self-objectification"!], consistent with theories suggesting that in some cases we treat ourselves as an 'other' when making self-judgments. The reverse might also be true: we use information about our own states and traits when we reflect upon the states and traits of others who seem to be like ourselves."
Besides, the authors also note that MSAs may play a key role in "learning from others": "For example, watching another's fear expression to an unfamiliar dog could provide valuable information about potential danger, that individual's anxious disposition or both. These abilities to learn from and about others crucially depend on understanding others' emotions using both stimulus-driven and reflective MSAs".

February 3, 2008

I have now read the (old) short review entitled "Gain Modulation: A Major Computational Principle of the Central Nervous System" by Emilio SALINAS & Peter THIER 2000 (in: Neuron, see References) where the authors describe the first experiments (by Andersen et al.) on this subject:
"In their experiments, eye position was first held fixed, and the response of a parietal neuron was plotted as a function of the position of a spot of light in retinal coordinates [see the inserted image just below!]. We call this position x. Typically, the resulting curve had a single peak that could be fitted by a Gaussian function; we refer to it as f(x). Then the measurements were repeated using a different fixation point and thus a different gaze direction, y. In this case, the neural responses followed curves with similar shapes and preferred locations, but their amplitudes changed. Thus, the amplitude or gain of the receptive fields of these parietal neurons depended on gaze. The term “gain field” was coined to describe this gaze-dependent gain modulation. The gain field refers to the function g(y), where the firing rates of these neurons are well fitted by the expression r = f(x)g(y)."
All in all, all these results indicated that input and "gain modulation" via other areas "could provide an efficient solution to the coordinate transformation [i.e., a "re-"mapping] problem."

The authors now show that such gain fields not only exist in the parietal reach region, where "final and initial hand positions are represented by x and y ... and, according to the theories discussed, neurons downstream might respond as functions of x - y, which is the difference between final and initial hand positions, or motor error", but also gaze-dependent gain-fields in the superior colliculus ("the SC may be more involved in coordinate transformations than commonly thought"), and attention-dependent gain fields in the inferotemporal cortex (with "receptive fields that can somehow move around, scanning the visual field independently of eye position", so that "people have great difficulty in recognizing objects that are away from the attended point"; cf. also Van Essen's and Andersen's "shifter circuit"!!).
Besides, Dobbins et al. "tested the size selectivity of V4 neurons at multiple distances and found that V4 neurons did not exhibit object size constancy; rather, they preferred images of specific sizes and had gain fields that depended on viewing distance. ... Through mechanisms similar to those discussed, this type of gain modulation may give rise to size constancy in neurons downstream."
Furthermore, "neurons in area MSTd are sensitive to optic flow and are gain modulated by eye and head velocity. Thus, the source of the gain modulation here is the time derivative of the gaze angle ... [so] that MST may, in general, be in charge of compensating for distortions caused by eye-movements".

February 2, 2008

In their paper entitled "Molecular and electrophysiological evidence for net synaptic potentiation in wake and depression in sleep", the authors Vladyslav V. VYAZOVSKIY et al. (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) give additional evidence that an 'optimization of Potential landscapes' (and attractor landscapes) may be occurring during sleep, where only the most stable attractors will survive some (homeostatic) pruning of synapses during sleep:
"In summary, wakefulness is associated with an increased number of AMPAR GluR1 subunits and with an increased expression of phosphorylated CamKII. Sleep is associated instead with a decreased number of AMPAR GluR1 subunits and with the dephosphorylation [inactivation] of GluR1 at Ser845. These data provide molecular evidence that is consistent with the occurrence of net synaptic potentiation during wakefulness and synaptic depression during sleep in two large forebrain areas, the cerebral cortex and the hippocampus. ... SWA [slow-wave activity] in the cortical EEG ... increases in proportion to the time spent awake and decreases during sleep. For this reason, SWA is thought to reflect the accumulation of sleep need during wakefulness and its discharge during sleep. ... If our finding that AMPAR density and the slope and amplitude of field potential responses increase after periods of waking is indeed indicative of a net increase in synaptic strength, and if the converse is the case after periods of sleep, then it should be more difficult to induce LTP in animals that have been awake for several hours than in animals that have been awake for just a few minutes after a long period of sleep [and indeed, "prolonged wakefulness may pose an increasing burden on plastic circuits, consistent with theoretical and computational analyses suggesting that a progressive strengthening of synapses with experience cannot continue indefinitely because of constraints on energy, space, supplies and saturation of the [Potential landscape's] ability to learn"]."

"Altogether, net cortical synaptic strength appears to be homeostatically regulated in a way that is similar to sleep pressure, which grows as a function of waking duration and intensity and decreases with sleep. ... Indeed, a progressive downscaling of synaptic strength [i.e., the optimization of Potential landscapes and of "net synaptic potentiations"] may represent a key function of NREM sleep."

January 31, 2008

It is interesting to see how today's mapping tools (i.e., robots, fully automated EEG-recording devices etc.) are becoming ever more perfect — but not today's imperfect map-makers and scientists trying to interpret these perfect data (with seemingly no background of vast reading and knowledge) and today's seemingly overbusy reviewers:

In their study entitled "The Influence of Mozart's sonata K.448 on Visual Attention: An ERPs study", the authors Weina ZHU et al. (in: Neuroscience Letters, see References) note:
"In the present study, the effects of Mozart's sonata K.448 on voluntary and involuntary attention were investigated by recording and analyzing behavioural and event-related potentials (ERPs) data in a three-stimulus visual oddball task. P3a (related to involuntary attention) and P3b (related to voluntary attention) were analyzed. The "Mozart effect" was showed on ERP but not on behavioral data."
"The 'distractor' P300 was called 'P3a', and the parietal maximum P300 from the target stimulus 'P3b'. P3a derived from stimulus-driven frontal attention mechanisms during task processing, whereas P3b originated from temporal-parietal [junction?] activity associated with voluntary attention and subsequent memory processing."

In order to rule out the possibility that sound in general (and not specifically Mozart) may account for their principal findings (decreased P3a [as evidence for a better voluntarily control over the involuntary distraction] and P3b amplitudes when subjects were performing the task while listening to Mozart in the background, but not when being in the control condition of silence), the authors ran a second experiment, where "the repeated playing of the chromatic scales was used to replace the Mozart's K448 as the sound background."

And now you should read the authors' interpretation:
"Another interpretation could be that music has simply increased the workload of cognition, in another word, it is the sound effect on the amplitude of P3b rather than the Mozart effect. But the results of our supplemented Experiment 2 ruled out that possibility. Unlike the results in Experiment 1, there is no significant difference between music [i.e., chromatic scales!] and silence conditions".

Now, the authors do not seem to have read Ernst KURTH's Musikpsychologie (1930 — cf. also today's epigonal music psychologists like Levitin et al.), who noted that all "meaningful" music (not only Mozart...) involves heightened "voluntarily" auditory shifts, because cultured (!) subjects are always ("automatically", "endogenously") trying to predict (to "foresee", to "will") the future trajectories (the "development") of the music, e.g., while ("voluntarily") longing for "target maps" and for the resolution and fulfillment of their expectations.
Hence, any "meaningful" music has to do with heightened voluntary shifts and "attentional" resources (cf. also ELBS 2005), so that it is quite clear that Mozart's music with its "voluntary structure" (in the background) may have interfered with both the "voluntary" ("endogenous", "top-down") and "involuntary" shifts involved in the (foreground) task — as perfectly shown by the authors' great (perfect & automatically mapped) results... (and that's why I presented here this study)

January 29, 2008

I have now read ECCLES 1953, where John C. Eccles not only discusses neural networks, but also speculates about "the will" exerting (and being based on) spatiotemporal "fields of influence“ (which later on will be called "attractors" and "attractor landscapes"?) and about the "detector function of the active cerebral cortex“, that means: the Cortex "detects" shifts in attractor dynamics (i.e., shifts in "fields of influence”), and (in this way) influences the "fields of influence" by itself in turn (thus modulating the attractor landscapes by itself).
Besides, Eccles also speaks about “maps” being a good illustration for "neural networks", because of their unlikeness to the “physical world”, since every map is not (just) a mapping (of some "physical world" "we" all "agree on"), but is just a highly selective and rather “symbolic” entity (and YOU and your brain may POSSEss and deal with nothing else than just such maps or neural networks or attractor landscapes...).

Besides, I have now commented SANDKUEHLER & BHATTACHARYA 2008 at:
http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?inReplyTo=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F4b110aad-c671-4b46-b213-7e059589528a&root=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fannotation%2F4b110aad-c671-4b46-b213-7e059589528a

January 27, 2008

In one of the first "real-time" studies on the "insight-problem" (see also the Droodle-Project in my Future Projects!), the authors Simone SANDKUEHLER & Joydeep BHATTACHARYA ("Deconstructing Insight: EEG Correlates of Insightful Problem Solving", in: PLoS One, see References) differentiate between four possible stages involved in "insight" and try to map the neural underpinnings of each stage (but, alas, they fail to refer to elegant models of attractor dynamics!): "mental impasse" > "restructuring" / "deeper understanding" > "suddenness":
"From an information processing point of view, the system has reached a limiting point at mental impasse: any new possible options or interpretations from long-term memory are blocked from further processing within working memory. ... thus, mental impasse may be caused by an "attentional overload". ... Restructuring is made possible either by internal retrieval processes which search long-term memory for concepts which can be utilized to reinterpret the available knowledge in the problem space or by the availability of external cues. ... According to the first hypothesis, restructuring is a controlled, conscious and attention-intense process, and the second hypothesis suggests an automatic and subconscious recombination where relevant pieces of information in long-term memory [i.e., stable attractors!] are automatically and subconsciously recombined".
As stimuli, the authors "used the compound remote associate problems, where each problem consists of three test words (e.g., back, clip, wall) and the subject needs to generate a solution word (paper), which forms a valid compound word or phrase with each of the three test words (paperback, paperclip, wallpaper)."
The authors' results now "indicate a neural correlate of mental impasse in parieto-occipital brain regions in the gamma frequency band ... This may suggest that selective attentional processes are accountable for an excessive focus on an inappropriate problem representation [i.e., in the words of attractor dynamics and Hopfield nets and spin-glass transitions: the system gets "stuck" or "trapped" in several local minima attractors]... Additionally, we found a theta frequency band effect [which] ... is possibly associated with an increased search in the memory space for possible solution words [i.e., some "desperate search for attractors" and "meanings"!] prior to mental impasse. ... Hints to insight problems are more effective when presented to the left visual field (i.e., right hemisphere) ... We suggest that the alpha ERS may be related to a weak, unconscious processing of the solution in the right temporal area, consistent with previous research showing that a solution [i.e., finding a stable unique final attractor or global minimum] to a verbal problem can be weakly activated in the right hemisphere. With the aid of the hint the initially weakly activated solution related information became intensified and reached the level of awareness [i.e., in the words of attractor dynamics: subcortical inputs may shift the system away from the local minima toward the final stable global minimum, in this way "solving" the "impasse" by "re-flexibilizing" and "restructuring" the attractor landscapes...]."
"The gamma band power of a mental impasse is still higher in comparison to timeout, which possibly reflects the problem solvers excessive focus on an inappropriate problem representation [i.e., a "local minimum" trap] and thus "attentional overload". ... One could thus speculate that the degree of gamma band oscillations must remain at an optimal (i.e., sub-maximal) level to maximize the performance."
Now, the "neural correlate of conscious restructuring (full vs. no) was mainly found in the alpha band (8-12 Hz) and in right prefrontal brain regions ... The present results indicate the neuronal correlate of suddeness ... at parieto-occipital areas in the gamma (38-44 Hz) frequency band from -1.5 to -1 s and from -0.75 to 0 s before solution response."
"After hint presentation we observed for 84.3% of all correct solutions a high restructuring rating ... indicating a strong conscious awareness of the ongoing restructuring process. This explanation also predicts that the frequency of sudden solutions with hint should decrease because of the increased metacognitive processes that are involved after hint presentation."

And by the way: this "insightful" optimization of attractor landscapes (while minimizing "net potentiations" and "Potential landscapes"?) may also occur ("unconsciously") during sleep (see Kekulé, Jan Born, and VYAZOVSKIY et al. 2008).

January 26, 2008

In his paper entitled "Holes, objects, and the left hemisphere", the author Sheng HE (in: PNAS, see References) notes in his review (but, alas, forgets to mention the LOC, stable attractors, etc. as well!):
"The emphasis on global properties in perception is not new (e.g., Gestalt theory of perception), but the topological perception theory [of Chen et al.] specifically defines the global properties as topological invariants. In addition, this theory states that the primitives of visual form perception are geometric invariants at different levels of structural stability under transformations. Thus, a more stable property would be more primitive and more important to extract early in the process. ... Chen suggests that during possible transformations, the most stable form properties are described by topological invariance — one shape will not break into two, nor will any new holes be created. Because topological properties are the most stable properties under transformation, it makes sense that in normal visual perception, the extraction of topological properties serves as the starting point of object perception [yes, this is exactly what the LOC does!]... Indeed, the ultimate reason for the left hemisphere's advantage could be in the properties' importance in defining objects ... Topological perception has an advantage in both hemispheres, but more so in the left hemisphere [clearly, because of the downward projections to the anterior Insula and Broca area involved in "naming" - see SHAFTO et al. 2007!). ... With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures, Wang et al. also searched for the potential neural correlates of enhanced topological sensitivity. Two sets of fMRI experiments converge to a region in the left temporal lobe, a site somewhat anterior to category-selective visual cortical sites...".

And that's why closABLE objects without holes (triangles, circles, etc.) look much more "topologically similar" than objects with holes. HOWEVER, even Moore's reclining nudes (with holes) activated the LOC in Malach et al. 1995 (because "we" "know" that bodies have no holes, after all....).
But for all this, see also my online Dallas lecture (Publications)...

January 25, 2008

In a nice paper (following Galton et al.) on "100% Accuracy in Automatic Face Recognition", the authors R. JENKINS & A. M. BURTON (in: Science, see References) note:
"National security and crime prevention often depend on our ability [!] to establish the identities of individuals and check that they are whom they claim to be. ... The only system that can reliably cope with real-world image variability is a human observer who is familiar with the faces concerned. We have recently proposed that human familiarity with a particular face can be modeled with by a process of image averaging, whereby different photos of that face are merged to form a single image. Here, we show that image averaging can also greatly improve performance of an automatic face-recognition system".

BADLY ENOUGH, these authors do not refer to "attractors", however: in fact, a human brain HAS built up a stable attractor by averaging across statistical learning processes (i.e., across multiple encounters with shifting variants of the "same" face), so that humans are really CAPABLE of face recognition DUE TO SUCH STABILIZED and INVARIANT ATTRACTORS in their brains.

But for all this, see also my online Dallas lecture (Publications) on "attractors", "familiarity", "reliability from non-reliable systems", and "stability from variability"...

January 22, 2008

In their extremely important review of the Temporoparietal Junction (TPJ or PTO) entitled "Effects of shifting [!] perspective of the self: an fMRI study", the authors Corrado CORRADI-DELL'ACQUA et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) note:
"A large number of both neurophysiological and neuropsychological studies have investigated the neural correlates of disembodiment, the cognitive ability [of a map-maker or POTENTIAL landscape...] to project properties of the self outside the boundaries of one's own body, and as a consequence to process an external entity as an objectified (or disembodied) self. ... The authors found that macaques can be trained to make productive use of the tool or the images displayed; this newly acquired skill is associated with the emergence of cortico-cortical connections between neurons in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS - typically responding to visual stimuli in the peri-personal space ...) and temporo-parietal junction ... Mastering tool-use skills requires the ability to project one’s own motor intention towards an external object, the tool. It has been suggested that the involvement of both the temporo-parietal complex in the human brain for observations such autoscopic phenomena and homologous regions in the monkey brain for the emergence of tool-use skills, is suggestive of this part of the brain being recruited whenever properties of the self are externalized towards an external entity (namely whenever disembodiment occurs, which in turn leads subject, based on the equivalence between the external tool and own body, to regard its own body as an external object, namely self-objectification)".

In their study, the participants "faced a video-game like display in which fictional players were throwing each other a ball. Participants were engaged in an Agency task in which their key-presses were synchronous with the movement’s onset of one of the players, which in turn represented the self. In a control condition, participants’ key-presses were instead unrelated to the action of the players in the video-game".
"Thus, employing the Agency (but not the Control) task under Changeable (but not Fixed) views would require, at each trial, reassigning the player which we consider to be ourself towards a different position in the outside space, that is labeling a new agent as the self. Based on the existing findings we hypothesized that the analysis of this condition would reveal increased neural activity in the right hemisphere over and around the temporo-parietal junction."

"It has been suggested ... that, in order to recognize an external agent as a disembodied self (e.g., looking at one’s own photograph), one needs to establish an equivalence relationship between a representation of the self and the agent. It is on the basis of recognizing that what is true of the self is also true of the agent, therefore the two must be equivalent, and therefore the agent eventually is an objectified self. ... This process resulted in the recruitment of the PTO junction which, in turn, makes the agent coded as an disembodied self, that is, included in what we consider to be "ours"."

In fact, all this may be "a process of mental simulation in which someone represents which his own bodily states would be, if moved in a position that is different from his own. This process may explain the implication of neurons within the PTO junction in experimental paradigms, such as the visual-perspective tasks [and in mentalizing tasks]."

"To conclude, disembodiment of one’s own mental states cannot account for all the instances involving mentalizing, but it can account for the instances in which one predicts what his internal states would be in a context that is different from his own. Mentalizing tasks under these constraints were associated with the activation in temporo-parietal regions ..., just like in the present study where the PTO junction was found to be implicated in seeing one’s own action performed from a different points of view. This strengthens the hypothesis that the disembodiment process, as described in the present study, is also recruited during mentalizing tasks."

And in the end, as an example of this simulational ("mentalizing") process, the authors refer to a fortunate gag in the movie Seven Years of Bad Luck (1921)...

January 20, 2008

In their nice paper entitled "The logic of indirect speech", the authors Steven PINKER et al. (in: PNAS, see References) note:
"Indirect speech [as in allusions, polite requests, trying to bribe a police officer, etc.] is inefficient, vulnerable to being understood, and seemingly unnecessary (because only a naif could fail to see past the literal meaning). Yet politeness and other forms of indirectness in speech appear to be universal or nearly so".
The authors now not only show (within game theory) that indirect speech could maximize the payoff matrices involved in communication games (e.g., when maintaining one's face), but that indirect speech may be used [especially by highly intelligent speakers...] for cautiously sounding out (and simulating) social POSSIbilities when navigating, predicting, and manipulating complex social landscapes before actually acting:
"With some of their fellows (typically kin, lovers, and friends), they freely share and do favors; with others, they jockey for dominance; with still others, they trade goods and favors. People [as "ultrasocial animals"!!!] distinguish between these relationships sharply, and when one person breaches the logic of a relationship with another, they both suffer an emotional cost. Nonetheless, humans often have to risk these breaches to get on with the business of life, and they often use language [and indirect speech] to do so. In exploring [i.e., sounding out the possibilities...] the boundaries of relationship types, humans anticipate [i.e., simulate] what other humans [or other "baboons"?] think about the relationship: what the other party in the relationship thinks; what overhearers and gossipers think; and what the other party thinks about what they think about what the other party thinks about what they think, and so on. The need to preserve their relationships while transacting [i.e., navigating] the business of their lives can thus explain humans' tendency to fill their social life with innuendo, hypocrisy, and taboo [and indirect speeches!]".

January 19, 2008

In their paper entitled "Ultra-fine frequency tuning revealed in single neurons of human auditory cortex," the authors Y. BITTERMAN et al. (in: Nature, see References) note:
"In the auditory system, frequency just-noticeable differences in well-trained subjects may be 30 times smaller than the presumed [!!!] bandwidth of the peripheral filters (‘critical bands’, typically about a sixth of an octave in humans, as measured in psychoacoustical tests). ... Responses of neurons in human auditory cortex were recorded from four patients with intractable epilepsy monitored with intracranial depth electrodes to identify seizure foci for potential surgical treatment ... We therefore suggest that the neural responses we observed in human auditory cortex reflect a readout of information available in the activity of large neuronal ensembles in subcortical stations, and that the auditory cortex is necessary for this readout to be performed, resulting in the behavioural hyperacuity of frequency discrimination in humans”.

January 18, 2008

And now come "our" so cherished mirror neurons again:

In their paper entitled "Precise auditory-vocal mirroring in neurons for learned vocal communication," the authors J. F. PRATHER et al. (in: Nature, see References) note with regard to the HVC complex in the avian brain (as a part of the neostriatum, i.e., the Basal Ganglia!) while using "a lightweight chronic recording device to sample neural activity in male swamp sparrows ..., a wild songbird that resembles humans in its dependence on auditory experience to learn its vocal communication":
"HVC contains two distinct populations of projection neurons, including one (HVCra) that innervates song premotor neurons in the robust nucleus of the arcopallium (RA) and another (HVCx) that innervates a[nother] striatal region of the avian basal ganglia (area X) important to song learning and perception. ... We recorded from identified projection neurons in the HVC of awake and freely behaving adult male swamp sparrows during auditory presentation of bird song and during singing."
The authors now find that "HVCx neurons display auditory responses highly selective in the stimulus domain, typically being activated by only one song type in the bird's repertoire. ... To investigate whether auditory HVCx neurons also were active during singing, we relied on the tendency of swamp sparrows to countersing ... - this is a territorial singing behaviour triggered by presentation of either the bird's own songs or those of other swamp sparrows." (And no miracle that when hundreds of sparrows now countersing, the may all be mass-synchronized by their neurons?!).
However, these auditory mirror neurons in HVCx were slightly (selectively) modulated "between the singing and listening states", while the "singing-related activity involved short bursts of action potentials, whereas the auditory-evoked activity typically consisted of single action potentials."
Importantly, the authors found that HVCx cells were "unresponsive to other swamp sparrow songs chosen at random", and that these HVCx cells "respond exclusively to self-generated [i.e., "familiar"] vocalizations."
However, they found that these neurons may indeed be attractors, i.e., that this "selective auditory responsiveness of HVCx cells extends to similar vocal sequencs produced by other birds, making auditory-vocal HVCx neurons well suited to a role in communication".
The authors then speculate about these neurons' role in a motor corollary discharge (sent to further areas in the cortex and other striatal structures for auditory-motor comparison, mismatch-detection, and song learning) and in similar neurons in the human brain: "In the human brain, cortical neurons similar to HVCx auditory-vocal neurons could transmit speech-related auditory and motor information to striatal regions implicated in speech development".

AND WHAT DO We LEARN FROM ALL THAT?
a) Do never forget subcortical (striatal) areas (like the HVC) when you look for mirror neurons (they may be found everywhere!)
b) If there were only mirror neurons, "we" would be all "mass-synchronized" (like Hitler's soldiers or those poor territorial countersinging birds above; see also my Seminar-Script, S6 Figure 24!).
BUT FORTUNATELY enough, there may also be many inhibitory neurons which may selectively shape (modulate, inhibit) all these primitive mirror neurons...

January 12, 2008

In their paper entitled "Learning-related long-term potentiation [LTP] of inhibitory synapses in the cerebellar cortex", the authors Bibiana SCELFO et al. (in: PNAS, see References) note:
"Recent studies, both in the hippocampus and cerebellum, have shown that feed-forward inhibition plays a fundamental role in shaping the time window in which excitatory inputs can summate to reach the threshold for spike generation. In fact, this time window is an indication of the temporal resolution for neuronal integration. Recently, it has been shown that the tme window for multiple input coincidence detection by hippocampal neurons is unchanged after in vitro LTP only when both excitatory and inhibitory synapses are potentiated. Thus, the temporal fidelity for spike generation within a neuronal network requires adequates levels of excitation and inhibition to be maintained. ... In addition, in the cerebellar cortex fear conditioning is accompanied by LTP of the excitatory synapses formed between parallel fibres (PFs) and Purkinje cells (PCs). ... The fact that fear learning is accompanied by an LTP of both the excitatory PF input and of the inhibitory GABAergic synaptic input to PCs raises the question of the possible significance of this concomitant potentiation."
And now the authors summarize (and you now see once more the involvement of the cerebellum in precise timing, as in "My map of the brain" as well!): "When a beam of PFs is stimulated, PCs show an excitatory response, which is truncated by the incoming stellate inhibition. By this mechanism, the inhibition contributes to sharpening the temporal pattern of the signal processing. On the other hand, the off-beam inhibition exerted by the basket cells provides a means to define the spatial pattern of the PC firing. By applying these concepts to our model, the simultaneous LTP of excitatory and inhibitory inputs should be seen as a mechanism of controlling the spatiotemporal pattern of PC firing. ... These results demonstrate that the presence of both forms of plasticity ensures a more effective coincidence detection without degrading the time resolution of the system. In addition, although these data do not establish a role for changes in inhibitory synaptic transmission in fear conditioning, they add further correlational evidence that cerebellar plasticity is involved in fear learning."

January 3, 2008

In their extremely interesting neuro-linguistic paper entitled "Event-related potential characterisation of the Shakespearean functional shift in narrative sentence structure", the authors Guillaume THIERRY et al. (in: NeuroImage, see References) summarize:
"Some four hundred years ago, Shakespeare already crafted verses in which the functional status of words was changed, as in "to lip a wanton in a secure couch". Here, we tested the effect of word class conversion as used by Shakespeare — the functional shift — on event-related brain potential waves traditionally reported in neurophysiolinguistics: the left anterior negativity (LAN), the N400 and the P600. Participants made meaningfulness decisions to sentences containing (a) a semantic incongruity, (b) a functiona lshift, (c) a double violation, or (d) neither a semantic incongruity or a syntactic violation. The Shakespearean functional shift elicited significant LAN and P600 modulations but failed to modulate the N400 wave. This provides evidence that words which had their functional status changed triggered both an early syntactic evaluation process thought to be mainly automatic and a delayed re-evaluation / repair process that is more controlled, but semantic integration required no additional processing. We propose that this dissociation between syntactic and semantic evaluation enabled Shakespeare to create dramatic effects without diverting his public away from meaning".
In their experiment, "participants read sentences pertaining to the four conditions, i.e., semantically expected and syntactically correct (control sentences, e.g., I was not supposed to go there alone: you said you would accompany me), semantically expected but syntactically incorrect, i.e. a functional shift (e.g., …you said you would companion me), semantically unexpected but syntactically correct (semantic violation, e.g., …you said you would incubate me), and both semantically unexpected and syntactically incorrect (double violation, e.g., …you said you would charcoal me)."
HOWEVER, the authors carefully note in the end: "It must be kept in mind, however, that studies attempting to measure the neurophysiological effects of literary works in an “ecological” fashion will inevitably face two major challenges: (a) the spirit of the time and the way in which contemporaries of Shakespeare appreciated his works is forever lost; [cf. dito my same objection to some "Neuroarthistory" to John Onians in September 2006!] (b) using excerpts from literary works in their original format precludes virtually all forms of stimulus control."

December 31, 2007

In their extremely important paper (directly relating to Barnett Newman?) entitled "Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference", the authors Norman A. S. FARB et al. (in: SCAN, see References) differentiate between a narrative Self (supported by cortical midline structures also involved in some default mode or simulational mode; NF), and an "immediate, agentic 'I' supporting the notion of momentary experience [EF] as an expression of selfhood":
And because the brain always seems to be biased toward this default state ("mind wandering"), it may not be so easy to shift one's focus to this "immediate I" without training (e.g., by meditation), in order to clearly differentiate between these two modes: "It may, therefore, be important to study individuals with specific training in monitoring moment-to-moment experience to more reliably recruit the the brain regions supporting momentary self-focus in the face of a narrative generation bias. ... The current study examined individuals with mindfulness meditation training (MT) in addition to a novice group without such training, in an effort to determine whether the MT group would show an increased capacity [i.e., ABILITy] to disengage from narrative generation and reveal the neural networks supporting present-centred self-awareness".
"In response to reading trait-related adjectives, participants in the present study were asked to engage eighter: (i) a NF mode, reflecting on what the adjective meant about them as a person or (ii) an EF mode, monitoring their moment-to-moment experience in response to the adjectives".
Their principal finding was now that "moment-by-moment self-experience may rely simply on task-related suppression of midline cortical representations very similar to those supporting narrative self-focus ... MT may afford greater access to distinct modes of self-focus by promoting a shift away from viewing viscerosomatic activity through the lens of the mPFC towards a distinct mode of sensory awareness supported by the lateral PFC."
Accordingly, while participants "engaged midline prefrontal cortices (ventral and dorsal mPFC) and a left lateralised linguistic-semantic network (inferior lateral PFC, middle temporal and angular gyri) during NF", novices showed "restricted reductions in the cortical midline network ... when attention was explicitly directed towards a moment-to-moment EF." In fact, the EF network comprised "ventral and dorsolateral PFC, as well as right insula, SII and inferior parietal lobule [i.e., "evolutionary older neural regions"]."
Hence, "the narrative mode of self-reference may represent an over-learned mode of information processing that has become automatic through practice", and this "detached or objective mode of self-focus may be aided by the recruitment of the right angular gyrus of the inferior parietal lobule. In addition to studies showing that this region is involved in switching between first and third person perspectives (RUBY & DECETY 2004), stimulation of this region has been associated with 'out of body experiences' where an individual experiences stepping outside of themselves, affording a detached perspective on their corporeal self."

December 28, 2007

In their important paper entitled "Investigating Action Understanding: Inferential Processes versus Action Simulation", the authors Marcel BRASS et al. (in: Current Biology, see References) directly compare the two hypotheses concerning action understanding: "Our findings support the assumption that action understanding in novel situations is primarily mediated by an inferential interpretative system rather than the mirror system".
"Clearly, direct matching [via mirror neurons] provides a plausible mechanism for the quick and effortless recognition of goals of actions that are highly familiar to the observer. ... [However, inferential processes] have been consistently related to regions along the superior temporal sulcus (STS), the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the anterior frontomedian cortex [aFMC], and the posterior cingulate cortex, which are brain areas lacking mirror properties. Clearly, the inference-based model provides a plausible mechanism of action interpretation when the observed behaviour in a given context is unfamiliar or improbable and when intention recognition must rely on interpreting the action in relation to situational constraints."
"When comparing a situation where an unusual action was highly implausible with one where the same action was very plausible, we found strong and reliable activations along the STS and a less reliable activation in the aFMC. ... Identifying the goal of a familiar action observed in its stereotypic context can be easily and automatically achieved by mapping it onto the corresponding motor representations already present in the observer's action schemes [i.e., Potential landscape]. In contrast, inferring the purpose of an unusual action and the reason why it is performed in an implausible context necessitates a great deal of active inferencing to evaluate the efficiency of the action in relation to its situational constraints. ... We suggest that in contrast to most previous studies, the present experiment captures a crucial type of context-sensitive inferential activity (rationalization) that is necessary for a generative understanding of intentional actions across variable contexts."

In a related paper on ""What Are You Feeling? Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Assess the Modulation of Sensory and Affective Responses during Empathy for Pain", the authors Claus LAMM et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) asked participants "to focus on either the sensory or the affective consequences of painful stimulations":
"The different instructions recruited distinct neural networks. Focusing on pain intensity was associated with increased signal in contralateral somatosensory (S1) and in contralateral premotor cortex. ... The contralateral middle insular cortex has intrinsic connections to the basal ganglia, and a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies shows that it is most consistently activated during the first-hand experience of pain. ... This part of the insula also shows stronger signal changes when participants imagine pain from a first-person perspective. ... Focusing on the sensory consequences also resulted in stronger activations in the action anticipation network outlined above (inferior parietal cortex [TPJ!] and ventral premotor cortex), as well as in two distinct clusters in the anterior cingulate"
"A recent meta-analysis documented that the TPJ is not only involved in various high-level cognitive phenomena such as empathy and theory of mind but also in lower-level computations. The putative basis for these phenomena are neural computations related to updating and reorienting attention due to violations of expectations and the detection of change [i.e., the detection of shifts]. Such a mechanism was also required in the current study where the displayed situation [biopsy of a numbed hand] does not result in the aversive consequences it would bear under normal circumstances."
Their results now cast "doubts on simulation accounts of empathy, which claim that the commonalities in the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex indicate the actual emotion sharing between observer and target ... In the case of the biopsies on the numbed hand, however, no affect has to be shared and yet insular and cingulate cortices are clearly activated. This initial response might be down-regulated by cognitive mechanism of top-down control [i.e., via the TPJ]."

December 27, 2007

In their extremely important paper entitled "fMRI Activity Patterns in Human LOC Carry Information about Object Exemplars within Category", the authors Evelyn EGER et al. (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References) show that the LOC is in fact a (category-invariant) giant attractor containing at the same time several fine attractors (categories, exemplars, protoypes):
"The LOC is considered a structure subserving general shape processing (common to all object types), but the precise nature of object-selective information within the LOC (i.e., in how far, and at what level of representation, LOC distinguishes individual objects) remains to be established."
Pattern classification of different object categories (with different exemplars) was performed using multivariate linear support vector machines, and prediction accuracies "tended to increase with larger numbers of voxels and plateau at around 200 voxels. ... although the mean signal in the LOC (as for conventional fMRI analyses) did not discriminate between and within object categories, the multivariate pattern signal now allowed successful classification performance. This indicates that neural population responses within the human LOC, in addition to discriminating between categories, also carry information sufficient to discriminate finer detail between individual object exemplars.
"In the first experiment, prediction accuracies were also higher for between-category than within-category comparisons, resulting in within-category comparisons being close to chance in the anterior LOC. This data are somewhat inconsistent with the notion of a simple object processing hierarchy according to which more posterior subregions [i.e., the LOC as a giant attractor] would just be responsive to any object, potentially subserving 'object detection,' whereas more anterior regions in the ventral temporal cortex (as also our anterior ROI) contain subregions discriminative between objects [i.e., prototypes and categories, i.e., several fine attractors]".
However, more studies (perhaps using morphing techniques?) "will be required to reveal the extent of generalization ("tuning") of fMRI response patterns across a wider range of changes, and across a broader range of (potentially parameterized) changes in object shape".

December 26, 2007

In their paper entitled "Individual faces elicit distinct response patterns in human anterior temporal cortex", the authors Nikolaus KRIEGESKORTE et al. (in: PNAS, see References) used only two face images in an event-related design, in which "subjects ... performed an anomaly-detection task, requiring them to pay close attention to each repeated presentation of an [slightly varied] image".
They now report that "in left aIT, face-exemplar information remains insignificant, independent of the number of voxels included. In right aIT, by contrast, face-exemplar information becomes highly significant when more than approximately 200 voxels are included. ... In monkey electrophysiology, in fact, face-identity effects appear stronger in anterior than in posterior inferotemporal cortex. ... The face-processing stages of detection and identification have been associated with the successive components M100 and M170 in a magnetoencephalography study. ... In a simple template-matching framework, detection would require something like an [posterior] average-face template, whereas identification would require multiple templates [i.e., attractors] sensitive to the subtle differences between faces [in anterior areas]..
In fact, "congenital prosopagnosics can detect faces and often exhibit intact [posterior] FFA activity. However, they cannot identify faces, and there is evidence of decreased cortical volume in the right anterior temporal cortex."

December 25, 2007

In their nice paper entitled "Computational significance of transient dynamics in cortical networks", the authors Daniel DURSTEWITZ & Gustavo DECO (in: European Journal of Neuroscience, see References) push the theory of attractor networks and dynamic Potential landscapes a few steps further:
"in these [attractor] networks, patterns and memory states, corresponding for instance to visual objects, scenes, or sequences of events, were stored as attractors of the system dynamics, mostly fixed points or simple (low-period) limit cycles. Upon environmental stimulation, the network converged to one of these attractors representing the outcome of the computational process. Usually neither the transient dynamics while approaching the attractor state nor the time it took the system to settle were of computational significance themselves. While this framework remains very attractive until today with regards to both its conceptual simplicity and its apparent power in accounting for a number of neurobiological and psychological phenomena, it may not be so easy to map onto the neurophysiological reality. We started off with a specific experimental example ... in which the fixed point of the neural dynamics is both less informative about a sensory stimulus than the transient trajectory and might actually never be reached within the brief exposition times in real-life situations."

And now comes the age-old problem of (un-)stability of attractors (and their functional significance):
"Within this context, the idea is that true attractors of an underlying deterministic dynamics still exist, representing spontaneous activity and decision states. However, the cortex resides in a fluctuation-driven regime where the dynamics are characterized by probabilistic flipping between attractor states making them unstable (metastable) under the noisy dynamics. Again, it is exactly this unstable transient dynamical regime [i.e., the shift from one attractor to another], that could account for behavioural regularities (Weber’s law) and trial-averaged neurophysiological observations, and not the deterministic convergence to one of the attractors. ... More generally, one may ask whether true attractors indeed exist in the dynamics of the cerebral cortex, and which role they would ultimately play [right — attractors seem to be rather virtual Platonic "ideals" indeed...]."
"Real neural systems are never really stationary but produce high-dimensional wandering dynamics within which local temporarily attracting (metastable) states are embedded, sporadically visited by the system’s dynamics [see my Potential landscape animation at [29]... ]... In terms of nonlinear dynamics, there are several possibilities for the nature of such states. In the simplest case, for instance, it might just be noisy fluctuations moving the system among states which would be stable under deterministic dynamics, or there could be ‘quasi-stable’ states, former attractor states that have just lost their stability ..., are still attracting along most dimensions but allow trajectories to slowly escape along one or a few others ... A somewhat related phenomenon are ‘unstable’ attractors, a term that has been used to refer to objects which attract trajectories from certain regions of state space (have a basin of attraction) but are unstable locally and hence lose trajectories again in their vicinity ... Attractor ruins and unstable attractors may form chains such that the system may cycle between them in an irregular yet not completely random fashion, and this wandering trajectory may be at the heart of the computational process implemented by the system."

December 17, 2007

In their paper entitled "Unravelling Boléro: progressive aphasia, transmodal creativity and the right posterior cortex", the authors William W. SEELEY et al. (in: Brain, see References) report a case of "improved visual creativity" emerging "in the context of focal anterior brain disease", when posterior areas are presumably released from inhibition by frontal areas:
"Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) deficits ... result from atrophy of the dominant perisylvian cortex, and patients with a frontal-insular variant [cf. also SHAFTO et al. 2007!)develop difficulty with grammar, syntax and articulation in conjunction with non-fluent, effortful and apractic speech. ... Even PPA patients without new talents show superior visuospatial cognition when compared to other dementia patients. ... In this report, we describe ... a patient [AA] with the frontal-insular form of PPA who developed new and extraordinary visual creativity during the course of her illness ... [and] we provide convergent structural and functional imaging evidence that specific regions within AA's non-dominant posterior neocortex were not only intact but enhanced in structure and function."
In fact, AA was drawn to "themes of repetition, texture, and symmetry, because their thriving posterior cortices are increasingly tuned to these stimulus qualities."
And interestingly enough, left inferior frontal lesions (and hence some weakened "default mode" or "simulational mode"?) may be accompanied by some increased "environmental dependency" (Lhermitte)...

This now brings me to another topic:
On Friday, Dec 15, I attended a symposium in Tübingen(www.kyb.mpg.de/schnittstellemensch ) which featured a neuroscientific approach to Robert Musil (who first began as an engineer, experimental psychologist, and then ended up as a writer).
However, the speakers (Prof. Birbaumer, Prof. Wertheimer) did not seem to know the latest papers on Whiteouts (Ganzfelds—Robert Musil described such an experience!) and on "default modes" (simulational modes) — and why Robert Musil rather preferred to be a philosopher and novelist than an experimentalist... And: both speakers did not know that not only Robert Musil, but also Adolf Hitler may have had extremely strong mirror neurons... (and as usual, both speakers did not answer to my e-mails with an attachment of the latest papers...).
OF COURSE, I know that I may be the only person being completely independent, and having enough time for reflection (simulational modes...), dialogues, and necessary (interdisciplinary) syntheses...

December 15, 2007

In their extremely interesting paper entitled "Homer1a is a core brain molecular correlate of sleep loss", the authors Stéphanie MARET et al. (in: PNAS, see References) note:
"A highly reliable index of the homeostatic process is provided by the amplitude and prevalence of delta (1- to 4-Hz) oscillations in the EEG of nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep ... Among hypotheses concerning the physiological function of waking-induced changes in sleep, the most compelling suggests that sleep plays a key role in synaptic plasticity ... In the brain, Homer1a expression best reflects the response to sleep loss. ... By generating a transgenic mouse line, we show that in Homer1-expressing cells specifically, apart from Homer1a, three other activity-induced genes ... are overexpressed after sleep loss. All four genes play a role in recovery from glutamate-induced neuronal hyperactivity. The consistent activation of Homer1a suggest a role for sleep in intracellular calcium homeostasis for protecting and recovering from the neuronal activation imposed by wakefulness."

December 13, 2007

In their paper entitled "Neural correlates of trust", the authors Frank KRUEGER et al. (in: PNAS, see References) investigate some "(un-)conditional trust", and their findings of the paracingulate cortex (PcC) being involved in all that reminded me of Crick's assumption of the "will" being "localizable" at the anterior cingulate cortex:
"Decisions to trust contrasted with the control condition activated the PcC. ... In building mutual goodwill [!], partners must infer each other's intentions to determine whether to trust their partners and whether their partners will reciprocate their trust in future. ... Decisions to trust contrasted with the control condition also activated the SA [septal area] ... the SA plays a putative role in controlling anterior hypothalamic functions and the release of the neuropeptides vasopressin and oxytocin."

In a similar vein, Judith M. BURKART et al. studied the (genetically conditioned) "prosocial" behaviours of marmosets ("Other-regarding preferences in a non-human primate: Common marmosets provision food altruistically", in: PNAS, see References):
"The great majority of primates do not show food sharing, mutual interdependence, and high social tolerance involving all independent group members. The most prominent exceptions among non-human primates are callitrichid monkeys, which are cooperative breeders."
The authors now show that the donor's unsolicited generous behaviours were not driven by the expectation of reciprocation; however, "the unsolicited prosociality need not be indiscriminate because the nonkin in this experiment were actual or potential mates rather than same-sex strangers".
Hence, "adding unsolicited prosociality to the ape-like brain of our ancestors, which in contrast to marmosets already had some basic knowledge of psychological states, may have released a cascade of further developments toward shared intentionality, and all its consequences: joint attention, language, instructed learning, and uniquely human forms of cooperation, as well as fully developed theory of mind".

AND one may add here: only humans (H. sapiens) seem to be silly enough to even feed members of other species (including dogs, cats, horses, etc.)... — and to withhold food from members of their own species at the same time...

December 12, 2007

If you have ever wondered why the French painter Yves Klein admired the blue light, then you may read the paper by Gilles VANDEWALLE et al. entitled "Brain Responses to Violet, Blue, and Green Monochromatic Light Exposures in Humans: Prominent Role of Blue Light and the Brainstem" (in: PLoS ONE, see References), where the authors used "fMRI to specifically assess early effects of light over the entire brain while participants were performing an auditory working memory task. We used alternating violet (430 nm), or green (527 nm) monochromatic light exposures of equal photon density to investigate the processing of stimuli preferentially triggering S-cones, melanopsin-expression retinal ganglion cells [RGC], or M-cones, respectively. Light exposures lasted 50 s, a very short duration from a human circadian biology perspective."
And now their interesting results (think here of Yves Klein's spiritual worshipping of the blue colour, and my own hypotheses regarding some "non-specific arousal" and the involvement of the brainstem when seeing Yves Klein's blue paintings in my dissertation, ELBS 2005!): "Collectively, these [cortical and subcortical] sustained and transient responses show the efficacy of short wavelength (473 nm) light in modulating brain activity ... The brainstem area which was recruited by blue light corresponds to the Locus Coeruleus [LC]. ... The LC may be a key structure in establishing effects of light ... As the major source of brain norepinephrine, it is in a position to modify the level of arousal" — and the IKB (the International Yves Klein Blue) may be extremely arousing indeed...

December 11, 2007

In their paper entitled "Gamma Oscillations of Spking Neural Populations Enhance Signal Discrimination", the authors Naoki MASUDA and Brent DOIRON note (in: PLoS Comp Bio, see References):
"Attention raises the firing rate and the input-output gain of orientation-selective neurons in the visual cortex, and shifts response curves so that physiologically relevant stimuli fall in the high-gain region. ... Attention is thought to influence cholinergic neuromodulation, which presumably affects synchrony of interneuron networks involved in gamma oscillations. ... We show that gamma oscillations endow population spike counts with binomial-like statistics, which improve signal discrimination over a range of stimuli through reduced spike-count variability."
All in all, "oscillatory activity of the same presynaptic neural populations enhances coding where decoding neurons integrate incoming spikes on much longer timescales".

December 10, 2007

In their paper entitled "Magnocellular Projections as the Trigger of Top-Down Facilitation in Recognition", the authors Kestutits KVERAGA et al. (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) propose an extension of the standard model of object perception by taking into account possible top-down facilitations by the orbitofrontal cortex as well (OFC — see image below):
"According to this model, a coarse version of the visual input, comprising mainly the low spatial frequencies (LSFs), is rapidly projected from early visual regions to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The LSF image is sufficient to activate "initial guess" predictions about what objects might have given rise to such visual input" (see here also VOLZ & CRAMON 2006 in my S_Update Dec 2006 on the crucial involvement of the OFC in "intuition" and "guessing"!).
However, other subcortical areas may be involved as well: "Another intriguing possbility is a subcortical projection from the pulvinar or mediodorsal nuclei of the thalamus. ... The amygdala receives a subcortical projection from the superior colliculus via the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus ... Our findings of greater BOLD signal in the amygdala for M-biased stimuli, compared with the activity elicited by P-biased stimuli, provide some support to this hypothesis [or may all this only be due to LSF images — including Rothko's blurred rectangles? — eliciting more "uncertainty" in the amygdala than HSF stimuli? (See here also WHALEN 2007) - And see also BAR & NETA 2007 on the amygdala being biased towards sharp [vs. curved] object features of spatial low-frequency stimuli — and many thanks to Moshe Bar for reminding me of this latter paper via e-mail!]."

December 9, 2007

My homepage is now completely completed (see [30], and my Dallas lecture at Publications).=

Thanks to everybody - and all of this work has cost me a lot of years and money. You perfectly know my German saying: Ich mache ja alles umsonst...

December 8, 2007

In their paper entitled "Social Comparison Affects Reward-Related Brain Activity in the Human Ventral Striatum", the authors K. FLIESSBACH et al. (in: Science, see References) criticize that "traditional economic theories focus on the role of absolute rewards, whereas behavioral evidence suggests that social comparisons influence well-being and decisions. ... comparison with other individuals is a central phenomenon within human societies [due to some fatal "Theory of Mind" abilities?]."
"By showing that social comparisons affect activation levels in the ventral striatum, our findings complement recent work on other-regarding preferences such as reciprocity or empathy ... In this sense, our study shows that mere contextual information about another person has an immediate impact on motivation-related brain processes".

In another study on "How emotions colour our perception of time", the authors Sylvie DROIT-VOLET & Warren H. MECK (in: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, see References) note:
"The subjective experience of time is lengthened (durations seem longer than normal [e.g., in boredom]) by increases in arousal. According to the internal-clock models, increased arousal accelerates the pacemaker, thus causing more pulses to accumulate within the same physical unit of time. ... For example, the administration of psychostimulants, such as cocaine and methamphetamine, increases arousal and produces an overestimation of durations, which is characteristic of an increase in clock speed."
And "whereas DA [Dopamine] primarily affects clock speed, cholinergic drugs have their primary effects on memory for time."
Accordingly, "negative sounds were judged to be longer than positive ones, suggesting that negative stimuli produce a greater increase in arousal. ... These data also suggest that negative images in the high arousal condition activate the defensive system ... [and] these results showed that a period of time spent in an eye-contact task was judged longer with an angry than with a friendly partner [with whom I want to stay longer in contact, of course...]."
Furthermore, it has been shown "that individuals automatically imitate perceived facial expressions and that this voluntary adoption of emotional facial expressions produces autonomic changes that are correlated with the emotional states. ... The nature of the social relationship with other individuals (mother–child, boss–employee) that motivates us to imitate them might thus modulate the effects of facial expressions on timing and time perception. Mondillon et al. also found an ‘in-group’ advantage with a temporal bias occurring when Caucasian participants were presented with Caucasian, but not with Chinese, facial expressions."

December 7, 2007

In his review entitled "Adaptive Behavior: Humans Act as Bayesian Learners", the author Angela J. YU (in: Current Biology, see References) notes:
"A recent study combining behavioral experiments with functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) has shown that human subjects can accurately track changing reward contingencies based on noisy inputs. Critical for this behavior is the ability to estimate the frequency of change, or environmental volatility, and the new work indicates that this ability involves the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). ... Behrens et al. show that human subjects’ performance resembles that of an ideal Bayesian learner. Specifically, the ideal Bayesian observer model, which tracks changing volatility over time [or better: "which maps shifts over time"...] ... Under the Bayesian framework, unexpected observations increase internal uncertainty, and sustained level of such uncertainty results in a high estimate for volatility, which in turn leads to a high learning rate. Pearce and Hall were early pioneers in positing that, in addition to reward prediction error, uncertainty about stimulus–outcome relationships plays a major role in driving associative learning in animals. In particular, stimuli with greater predictive uncertainty should be accorded greater attention and faster learning. Animals indeed learn faster about stimuli with uncertain predictive consequences, and selective lesion studies indicate that the cholinergic projection from the basal forebrain to the parietal cortex is essential for this enhanced learning. These data have been interpreted as evidence that the neuromodulator acetylcholine reports expected uncertainty. Another neuromodulator, norepinephrine, has been suggested to signal unexpected uncertainty".
"From a theoretical point of view, a tonically high level of unexpected uncertainty (putatively signaled by norepinephrine) provides strong evidence that the environment is in a state of high volatility (putatively represented in ACC); conversely, high perceived volatility (ACC) enhances the ability of unexpected observations to induce unexpected uncertainty (norepinephrine). ... Further substantiating the suggestion that ACC activities represent volatility and drive learning, Behrens et al. report that the Bayesian estimate of volatility correlates with ACC activity in some subjects better than in others [due to some genetic variability among subjects?]."

December 6, 2007

In their paper entitled "When Outgoing and Incoming Signals Meet: New Insights from the Zona Incerta [ZI]", the authors Mathew E. DIAMOND & Ehud AHISSAR (in: Neuron, see References) note on the function of this brain area:
"Although ZI catches the eye as a large, horizontally elongated region wedged just below the ventral tier of the thalamus, its possible functions have been overlooked; indeed its very existence is unknown to many neuroscientists. ... On a timescale of seconds, the behavior of the animal switches back and forth between two states: one in which the animal is quiet and immobile and does not whisk, and another in which it explores, whisks, and palpates objects. In the quiescent periods, neurons in the lemniscal pathways are unadapted and bursty — object contact with the passively resting whisker produces an enormous response in cortex. In the active periods, neurons in the lemniscal pathways are adapted and tonic — object contact with the protracting whisker produces a linear response in VPM [a ventral thalamic area] and cortex. This state is believed to be characterized by high capacities for processing information".
As usual (with regard to brain mechanisms), we have to do here with an inhibition of an inhibition: "The present study predicts that in these epochs, M1 output to ZIv would act to release the paralemniscal system from ZIv inhibition. ... releasing POm [a posterior thalamic area] from ZIv inhibition during the active state thus allows a detailed record of whisking to flow freely from sensory receptors to cortex. ... For M1 to shift whisking frequency to a higher, stable level, it can simply shift the set-point of the POm loop by adding a fixed number of spikes to POm's output. And here we return to the possible function of ZIv: by ctonrolling the amount of ZIv inhibition on POm, M1 could add or subtract spikes from POm's output and thus shift the whisking frequency upward or downward."

In a related paper by the same group of scientists, the authors Moritz von HEIMENDAHL et al. ("Neuronal Activity in the Rat Barrel Cortex Underlying Texture Discrimination", in: PLoS Biology, see References) note the following:
"In the barrel cortex of anesthetized rats, the whisker vibrations associated with different textures evoke cortical responses that differ according to texture — coarser textures evoke more spikes per sweep. By extending this line of investigation to awake rats, we now ask which features of sensory coding are conserved during active exploration of the environment, when stimuli are not imposed on the receptors, but are generated by the animal through its own motor program."
"On a typical trial, the rat made 1-3 touches of 24-62-ms duration each (interquartile ranges) before making its choice. ... The measured texture-related response difference in multiunit activity was more reliable in rats that had all but a few whiskers trimmed ... On the other hand, in a rat whose full whisker array was left intact, the texture difference was highly significant in the LFP [local field potential]".

December 5, 2007

In their paper entitled "Visual grouping in human parietal cortex", the authors Yaoda XU & Marvin M. CHUN (in: PNAS, see References) show that "grouped shapes elicited lower functional MRI (fMRI) responses than ungrouped shapes in inferior intraparietal sulcus (IPS) even when grouping was task-irrelevant", which very much reminded me of Wolfgang Köhler's classic text "Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand..." (1920).
The authors here note: "a fixed number of objects are first represented and selected by the inferior IPS by their spatial locations; depending on their complexity, a subset of these selected objects are then retained in VSTM [visual short term memory] with great detail by the superior IPS. Activities in these parietal mechanisms thus reflect the number of discrete visual objects represented in the mind at different stages of visual processing [beginning with the LOC, and ending up in counting these objects numerically with the IPS...]."
"in a recently completed study, we found that when identical objects were presented simultaneously at different spatial locations, the brain area involved in object individuation (the inferior IPS) treated them as multiple entries to the system. Thus, the inferior IPS represented four identical objects as four different objects. In contrast, brain areas involved in representing detailed object features and identity information (the superior IPS and LOC for object shapes) treated multiple identical objects as a single unique object because the demand to represent the features of multiple identical objects was the same as that of a single unique object. In this case, the superior IPS and LOC represented four identical objects as one unique object."
And: "To guide the shift of visual attention across the different levels of the visual hierarchy and to select objects [i.e., attractors] at the appropriate level, we would like to argue that two processing systems are needed during visual perception: one tracking the overall hierarchical structure of the visual display, and the other processing the current objects of attentional selection. Our results suggest that the inferior IPS carries such a hierarchical representation of the visual display, with the LOC and superior IPS possibly representing what is most relevant to the current goal of visual processing. Work by Yantis and colleagues indicates that the control of the attentional shift signal may originate from the superior parietal lobule, which is involved in the shift of visual attention among objects, visual features, spatial locations, and even different sensory modalities. We argue that the interactions among these different cognitive and neural mechanisms enable us to perceive both an individual tree and the entire forest."

December 4, 2007

In an extremely interesting extension to PALMERI & GAUTHIER 2004, the authors Karalyn PATTERSON et al. ("Where do you know what you know? The representation of semantic knowledge in the human brain", in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) propose a new model for semantic knowledge and semantic processing: "the sensory-, motor- and language-specific aspects of conceptual knowledge are necessary but not sufficient: this is the distributed-plus-hub view ... From the distributed-plus-hub perspective, damage to the hub should produce a semantic impairment that is independent of the modality of input (objects, pictures, words, sounds, tastes, and so on) and of the modality of output (for example, naming an object, drawing it or using it correctly)."
"This review summarizes evidence for the hypothesis that, first, semantic generalization requires a single amodal hub and, second, that the neuroanatomical site of this hub is the anterior temporal lobe (ATL [see image below: AT]). .. It is worth noting that cross-modal is not the same as a-modal: the region around the angular gyrus might serve to combine information from several modalities but still not have the genuinely amodal function of a semantic hub."
And whereas "healthy controls are faster and more accurate at classifying items at the basic level (for example, 'dog') relative to a more general level (for example, 'animal'), patients with Semantic Dementia show the reverse pattern."
Accordingly, the AT seems to underlie some "differentiated associativity" (ELBS 2005) or read-out of a hierarchically nested and extremely differentiated (giang) attractor landscape (built up from the more general LOC up to the more specialized and differentiated IT), the attractor dynamics of which the authors exemplify at length as follows:
"According to this model, naming a particular bird as a ‘robin’ requires the ATL hub to instantiate the robin representation almost exactly, as the name does not apply to other kinds of birds, many of which nevertheless have representations that are very similar to the robin. To name the same item ‘bird’, however, the robin pattern need not be instantiated exactly. Because the name applies to all birds and all birds share similar representations, it is only necessary for the hub to find a representation that is sufficiently ‘bird-like’ to activate the name. Thus, small distortions of the ‘robin’ representation — perhaps resulting from ATL atrophy — will prevent the network from retrieving the robin’s specific name (and other properties that differentiate it from other birds) without disrupting the retrieval of properties that are common to birds. ... Specific features of conceptual knowledge are almost certainly represented elsewhere and in a widely distributed network; but people’s ability to receive information in one modality and express it in another, to generalize across conceptually similar entities that differ in almost every specific modality, and to differentiate between entities that resemble each other in many modalities — all quintessentially semantic abilities — seem to depend on the ATl."

Interestingly enough, this mapping and read-out of a complex attractor landscape ("hub") may be followed by "naming" (via the anterior Insula and Broca-Area: see SHAFTO et al. 2007 and PETRIDES & PANDYA 2007!), which may explain the fact that semantic dementia also goes along with naming problems (and which cannot be helped by "first letter" hints: see SHAFTO et al. 2007).
(Cf. also CHENEY & SEYFARTH 2007: the naming of complex hierachically nested socio-emotional networks in baboons — a task crucially depending on a massive link between AT and Insula/OFC/PFC?).

December 3, 2007

I have now read (in one night) CHENEY & SEYFARTH's well-reading book "Baboon metaphysics" of 2007 – which was a great delight (despite some redundancies in it).
Here may be the best (or at least most entertaining) sentences out of it:
“The result of all this social intrigue [among baboons] is a kind of Jane Austen melodrama ... Any way you look at it, most of the problems facing baboons can be expressed in two words: other baboons” (:12) – cf. also Sartre's "l’enfer, c’est les autres".
And now this one (giving you a glimpse at the extreme evolutionary pressure by predators and infanticides) from the first "scientist" to study baboon groups as a whole, Eugene Marais (1939): „It was not long before we came to realize that the life of the baboon is in fact one continual nightmare of anxiety“ (:35).
In fact, the book mirrors recent findings and theories about "ultrasocial humans" by the Tomasello group in Leipzig (cf. in detail HERRMANN et al. 2007): “they [vervet monkeys] make good psychologists but poor naturalists" (:129), and: “A rudimentary theory of mind, therefore, is fundamental to word learning" (:264).
The authors also propose their (and Fodor's) “Language of Thought”-theory: baboons can think in extremely complex social nested hierarchies, but they cannot verbalize it; their perceptual (passive) social repertoire (learning about social ranks etc.) is extremely high, but their motor skills and motor repertoire to communicate these differentiations are minimal, since their simple calls do not allow for a combinatorial play with words within hierarchically nested sentences (which map the social nested hierarchies so that "social thinking" may be a necessary precursor of speaking, i.e., thinking in complex hierarchically nested words).
“This view, that a theory of mind and the motivation to share knowledge [i.e., to gossip] served as the driving forces behind the evolution of flexible vocal production” (:281).
Besides, baboons have no "mapping impulse" and impulse for "mental simulations" and "what-if loops": "They [baboons] lack the insight to imagine a different world” (:275), and: “Baboons are also not motivated to change their physical world” (:282).

And I suppose that this "lack to imagine a different world" may also largely hold for my conspecifics – who prefer reading melodramas by Jane Austen or books by primate reserachers...

November 26, 2007

In their paper entitled "The Golden Beauty: Brain Responses to Classical and Renaissance Sculptures", the authors Cinzia DI DIO et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) believe to have found the cortical site of the objective and subjective "sense of beauty" (in Insula and Amygdala, respectively) by artificially shifting and distorting the golden proportions of the Doryphoros (etc. – see image below).
HOWEVER, as you know from my Seminar script (see Seminar-Script, S5 Figures 45 ff., S6 Figure 20a, S7 Figures 33 f. on some "variation and stability"), you already know that the golden ratio has much to do with the stability of attractors and "average faces" (see LEOPOLD et al. 2006).
Hence, when you take the "average body" (by simply being exposed to a multitude of everyday variants of natural bodies with a lot of varying proportions...), you will get the (evolutionarily) most stable proportion and body (as rather a virtual Platonic "ideal body": see POSNER & KEELE 1968) – which in fact happens to be the golden ratio (as in most biological dynamical systems varying and shifting around a stable attractor: see WORG 1993; see also my upcoming lecture in Dallas 2008 Publications, Slide 5).
Hence, the "sense of beauty" may only boil down to the most stable attractor (here: with regard to some ideal "average body" displaying the evolutionarily most stable proportion built up by genetic and developmental dynamical systems). That's all.

November 23, 2007

In an interesting (and desperately needed...) longitudinal PET-study on "Time-Dependent Central Compensatory Mechanisms of Finger Dexterity After Spinal Cord Injury", the authors Yukio NISHIMURA et al. (in: Science, see References) note:
"The area of co-[contralateral]M1 with increased activity expanded during the late recovery stage compared with that during the early recovery stage, and the increased activity extended into co-PMv [i.e., premotor areas!]. ... This suggests that early recovery depends strongly on increased activity of the co-M1. ... The inactivation of ip-M1 resulted in no deficit in the preoperative trials but caused a deficit during the early recovery stage and no deficit during the late recovery stage. ... We thus suggest that the brain uses existing systems by reducing inhibition during the early recovery stage and gradually enhancing the original neural systems or recruiting other systems by synaptic plasticity during the late recovery stage for more stable control."
All in all, it is interesting to note that "our finding of an increased area of activation [i.e., involving broadened attractors becoming gradually more stable?] in co-M1 agrees with previous observations that the representation of trained movement in M1 expanded with learning".

November 22, 2007

In their paper entitled "Maternal Enrichment during Pregnancy Accelerates Retinal Development of the Fetus", the authors Alessandro SALE et al. (in: PLoS ONE, see References) note:
"Despite these data on the harmful effects of prenatal stress, the possibility that maternal exposure to conditions of increased sociality and sensory-motor activity could influence embryonic development remains unexplored. In the present study, we investigated this issue by analyzing whether maternal environmental enrichment during pregnancy affects the visual system development of the fetus. We found that maternal enrichment influences the anatomical and molecular development of the retina, accelerating the migration of neuronal progenitors and causing a marked increase in the rate of naturally occurring cell death, an essential developmental event until now considered to be programmed only by intrinsic signals, independently of experience. These changes were accompanied by a marked increase in insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I) expression in the retinas of enriched rats compared with standard reared animals. ... Therefore, we propose a model in which three distinct temporal phases during pup development are differently controlled by the richness of the environment. In the first phase, maternal enrichment during pregnancy affects IGF-I expression in the offspring RGC layer, resulting in an accelerated retinal development. Subsequently, enhanced maternal care levels in EC provide to the developing subject a robust tactile stimulation which can induce higher levels of BDNF in the retina and visual cortex, and a precocious eye opening. Finally, when pups begin to actively explore the surroundings, the complex sensory-motor stimulation provided by EC may directly influence their visual system development, contributing to further accelerate the maturation of visual acuity. ... These studies suggest that the influence of environment on the development and plasticity of visual system is due not only on changes [i.e., shifts...] in the levels of sensory visual stimulation, but mostly on factors activated even in the absence of vision."

November 21, 2007

In his short review entitled "The uncertainty of it all", Paul J. WHALEN (in: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, see References) tries to get at THE general function of the Amgydala – signalling "uncertainty" (cf. also the Striatum signalling "novelty": REDGRAVE & GURNEY 2006!):
"The recent study by Herry, Bach and colleagues provides a glimpse of the amygdala as a clear learner of environmental contingencies before it takes on its role in emotional response. In their study, both mouse and human subjects were exposed to a simple repeating tone. Sometimes the tone occurred predictably (e.g. every 200 ms) and at other times the tone occurred unpredictably (e.g. at a variable interval with a mean of 200 ms). When segments of time comprising unpredictable tones were compared with segments comprising predictable tones, the amygdala was more responsive during the unpredictable tones ... Thus, unpredictability per se, even for events that are not biologically relevant, is enough to engage the amygdala. ... Neuroimaging data support a similar role for the human amygdala in response to facial expressions that are ambiguous with respect to the outcomes that they predict. For example, the human amygdala is responsive to fearful and suprised facial expressions whose 'wide-eyes' signal the occurrence of a significant, but as yet, unidentified [i.e., not mapped yet] environmental event."
"If clear predictive signals are lacking, the amygdala can boost vigilance (e.g. lower sensory thresholds throughout sensory cortex in response to uncertain events, in an attempt to help determine any causal relationships between such events). ... In short, at least a portion of the healthy amygdala acts as if it has an anxiety disorder – searching for threat in response to uncertainty. This design enables the amygdala to operate based on principles that are more primal and rigid while the more educated [!!!!!!] and flexible prefrontal cortex possesses [!!!] the ability [!] to bend these rules".

November 20, 2007

In their paper entitled "Fast-Forward Playback of Recent Memory Sequences in Prefrontal Cortex During Sleep", the authors David R. EUSTON et al. (in: Science, see References) note the following:
"In both rats and humans, activity in the mPFC is greater during the retrieval of remote memories than during retrieval of recent memories; an opposite pattern is seen in the hippocampus. ... The hippocampus reportedly replays events at 5 to 20 times their behavioural rate; however, in the hippocampus, spikes representing adjacent place fields occur in rapid succession within a single theta cycle during behavior. Relative to this within-theta cycle rate, reactivation during sleep is not accelerated. In contrast, reactivation in rat mPFC is clearly compressed five to eight times, and a similar effect may be present in primary visual cortex. Fast replay in neocortex may reflect the speed of the brain's intrinsic dynamics [yes, as a highly dynamic Potential landscape!] (e.g., conduction speeds, synaptic delays, etc) when not constrained by [contingent] behavioural events. However, the episodes of sequential replay during sleep are limited to windows of a few hundred milliseconds."

November 19, 2007

In a VERY interesting paper on "the Tip-of-the-Tongue Correlates of Increased Word-finding Failures in Normal Aging" (because it is related to "Aha-experiences" and my own favourite "Droodle-Project" – see my Future Projects), the authors Meredith A. SHAFTO et al. note (in: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, see References):
"The tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience is a common and dramatic word-finding failure where a person is temporarily unABLE to produce a well-known word. TOTs increase in frequency during adulthood and become one of older adults' most irksome and distressing cognitive problems. ... TOTs occur when semantic and lexical information have been selected, producing a strong feeling of knowing, but phonological retrieval is insufficient for computation of the complete phonological code".
However, the whole attractor and the whole word (that is searched for) can nevertheless be immediately retrieved when being given some "partial phonological information that often is availABLE to a person in the TOT state such as the initial letter or number of syllables".
In their results, the authors now report that "TOTs increased with age-related gray matter atrophy in the left insula [together with the anterior cingulate cortex, and the left rolandic operculum], but TOT frequency correlated with insula atrophy even with the effect of age removed in both the whole-brain and ROI analyses".
Unfortunately enough, however, the authors did not map the exact time-course (online) of this very interesting dynamic process when subjects are desperately looking for a stable attractor (as when looking for a stable meaning in seemingly "meaningless" droodles...).

November 18, 2007

If we could measure the whole dynamics of synaptic plasticity and (ever shifting...) "weight distributions", it would be a great step towards understanding memory and Potential landscapes ("in which attractor states are stored via synaptic plasticity mechanisms"), as pointed out by Boris BARBOUR et al. in their paper entitled "What can we learn from synaptic weight distributions?" (in: Trends in Neurosciences, see References).

November 17, 2007

If you want to learn more about the dynamic of spatial (target) maps in the hippocampal place cells of rats, then you may read the paper by Adam JOHNSON & A. David REDISH entitled "Neural Ensembles in CA3 Transiently Encode Paths Forward of the Animal at a Decision Point" (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References), where the authors note the following:
"Neural ensembles recorded from the CA3 region of rats running on T-based decision tasks displayed transient activity at decision points indicative of positions different from the rat's current position (leading to nonlocal reconstruction). Projection of these activities onto spatial location showed that during these decision-making events the location reconstructed from the neural ensemble swept forward of the animal, first down one path and then the other. Reconstructed representations were coherent and preferentially swept ahead of the animal rather than behind the animal. ... Reconstruction in front of but not behind the animal suggests that the information is related to representation of future paths rather than a replay of recent history. ... The results presented here show that when animals pause during behavior [and when they display some "vicarious trial and error" behaviour, i.e., small head movements alternating between the POTENTIAL choices of running to the left or to the right in the T-maze], the hippocampal representation becomes transiently nonlocal. At high-cost choice points and at the correction of errors, the hippocampal representation sweeps forward along the POTENTIAL paths available to the animal. These transient nonlocal signals could provide a potential substrate for the prediction of the consequences of decisions and the planning of paths to goals ..."
In the end, the authors muse about further downstream activations: while the "hippocampus may only be providing the prediction component", neurons in the ventral striatum may anticipate predicted reward, whereas neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex (still further downstream) may encode "parameters relating the value of POTENTIAL choices" (i.e., the whole space of POSSIBilities).

November 15, 2007

In their paper entitled "Specialized Color Modules in Macaque Extrastriate Cortex", the authors Bevil R. CONWAY et al. (in: Neuron, see References) try to resolve the contradictory findings about the function of area V4 (shape perception, colour, colour constancy, etc.) by differentiating this large area further into globs and interglobs:
"Here we re-evaluate the role of this brain region in processing color, in the alert macaque, by combining whole-brain functional imaging with targeted single-unit physiology in the same subjects. ... Color-biased activity in this region is not uniform, but localized to discrete, reproducible hotspots. We adopted the term "glob" to describe these hotspots. ... The location and number of globs varies somewhat from animal to animal... Color would then appear to be processed by a series of specialized color domains that get progressively larger at subsequent hierarchical stages: the blobs in V1, the thin stripes in V2, and the globs in posterior inferior temporal cortex; the interglobs, on the other hand, would seem to be involved in elaborating the form signals relayed by the V1 interblobs and V2 interstripes. ... Interglob cells lacked strong color tuning but did show weak color sensitivity not present in area MT (a motion area). This sensitivity may be a sufficient basis for color-based attention to modulate V4 response".

November 12, 2007

If you are interested in today's state of the art with regard to building brain-like devices by using theoretical "maps of the brain" and neuromorphic computer chips (neurogrids), then you may read the article by Rae SILVER et al. entitled "Neurotech for Neuroscience: Unifying Concepts, Organizing Principles, and Emerging Tools" (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) and this picture just below:

November 11, 2007

If you are interested in other fMRI approaches (than just indirect BOLD fMRI), you may read the up-to-date review of Alan JASANOFF entitled "Bloodless fMRI" (in: Trends in Neurosciences, see References):
From Lorentz-effect imaging (LEI - the Lorentz force acting on current-carrying neural fibres) to manganese-enhanced MRI imaging (depending on voltage-gated calcium channels) to diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI - mapping neuronal changes in diffusion due to glial cell swelling without temporal delays)...

November 10, 2007

In their paper entitled "Efferent Association Pathways from the Rostral Prefrontal Cortex in the Macaque Monkey", the authors PETRIDES & PANDYA (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) report that macaque BA 9 and BA 10 (rostral PFC) project to 1) ACC and PCC via the cingulate bundle, 2) Amygdala and Temporal Pole (via uncinate fasc.), 3) superior temporal sulcus (TAa, TPO and Insula - via capsula extrema) and hence to centres “interpreting the intentions of other individuals”, but not to posterior visual centres:
“Thus, the rostral prefrontal cortex, by not interacting with these posterior [visual, parietal] cortical areas, does not regulate attention to events occurring in external space. This is the domain of the caudal prefrontal cortical region via special pathways such as the three brances of the superior longitudinal and the fronto-occipital fasciculus ... The present study demonstrates the specific pathways that underlie cognitive control operations emanating from the rostral prefrontal region. The cingulate and uncinate fasciculi enable interactions between the rostral prefrontal cortex with limbic structures, such as the cingulate cortex, the temporopolar proisocortex, and the amygdala and therefore provide the basis for control over one’s own and other persons’ motivational/emotional states. In contrast, the extreme capsule fiber system permits interactions between the lateral rostral prefrontal region and auditory and multisensory cognitive processing in the temporal lobe, namely cognitive processing underlying conceptual knowledge and abstract thought. There appears to be a caudal-to-rostral gradient in lateral prefrontal functional organization: the caudal prefrontal region via its own unique efferent pathways (i.e., the superior longitudinal and fronto-occipital fasciculi) modulates attention to the external environment and action within it, but, as one proceeds rostrally, control is shifted away from the external environment and is focused on abstract multisensory processing and internal emotional states”.

November 9, 2007

In their paper entitled "Biomimetic Brain Machine Interfaces for the Control of Movement", the authors Andrew H. FAGG et al. (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) note:
"For the most part, these brain machine interfaces (BMIs) build either directly or indirectly on the work of Georgopoulos et al. (1982), who discovered that movement-related discharge in the motor cortex (M1) depends on movement "kinematics", or the trajectory of the hand through space ... However, other work, including that of Evarts, suggests that the activity of M1 neurons [which are also targeted by input from S1 via PMv and PMd!] is also related to movement "kinetics," or the force-related variables that ultimately cause movement ... Existing BMIs use only visual feedback to control movement, lacking the critical somatosensory feedback from sensory receptors in the muscles, skin, and joints of the moving limb."
Besides, the authors note that "a particular nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique (Isomap) was considerably more successful than [only linear!] Principal Component Analysis in identifying low-dimensional structures within the [brain] data."
"Therefore, in the context of an afferent BMI, it is likely that the somatosensory cortex [by integrating from the other senses that are still operating after spinal cord injury] will remain capable of detecting electrical stimulation supplying limb state information and relaying the sensation to the higher cortical areas that form perception. ... We will explore the feasibility of incorporating somatosensory feedback into an afferent BMI application, in a manner that would compement the efferent interface."

November 7, 2007

Today, I attended a discussion between Prof. Andrea Kübler (from the Birbaumer-Group Tübingen) and the regrogradist artist Adi Hösle (see www.retrogradist.com).
Both have modified the P300 / mu-rhythm spelling device (a brain-computer-interface[BCI]-machine) by substituting the grid of 6 x 6 letters from the alphabet with visual basic elements (circles, rectangles, colours, ...), out of which one element can be chosen and projected on a screen ("brain painting"). However, all these elements are still rather limited, and all have to be arranged in a more or less discrete and serial manner ("stepwise volitional choice"). But since only the Cortex (with its discrete differentiated patterns like visual features and glyphs and letters) is mapped (and no subcortical areas), we may still be far away from some "direct creative painting with the brain". Besides, the choice of the 36 visual elements is still rather arbitrary (why rectangles and circles?).
A "direct playing music with the brain" may be more feasible, since music has only three parameters (that can be continously varied): rhythm (timing), melody (high-low), roominess (echo).
And besides: you see once more that artists (and also technicians like scientists...?) simply love to try out and to play with all kinds of new techniques and tools (here: a computer-BCI) in order to enlarge their "possibilities" and "Potential landscapes" (or: "Selves").
But artists will only be "free from all stuff" when they will be able to directly send their paintings and visual patterns in their brain to another's brain (see my Seminar-script, S6 Figure 15: "direct linking of brains") - without the need of a detour via material computers, BCI-machines, projection screens, etc.

November 1, 2007

According to the media (if they really had the best maps, but which I doubt...), several assholes (politicians, economists, lawyers, etc.) now muse about a war between "Turkey" and "Irak". All these assholes do not seem to take into account hypersensitive map-makers like me - i.e., map-makers who (beginning with their birth...) are permanently violated, shocked, and puzzled by the stubborness, insensitivity, and primitiveness of homo sapiens... Excuse me that I had to say all this... But as an animal that is permanently pushed into a corner (the last single and lonely corner of sensitivity, as it seems), I sometimes get really upset...

October 30, 2007

In their paper entitled "Small is bright and big is dark in synaesthesia", the authors Roi COHEN KADOSH et al. (in: Current Biology, see References) report "evidence of a systematic organisation relating luminance and number magnitude in digit-colour synaesthesia. ... Our results challenge the underlying assumptions about the mechanisms underlying synaesthesia and its developmental trajectories, and the link between luminance level and numerical magnitude strongly supports the idea of a shared magnitude representation. ... Our results demonstrate that, in contrast to the long held view that synaesthetic perceptions are random between individuals, there is a common organisation underlying the synaesthetes' experience in digit-colour synaesthesia. This common organisation is based on a linear relation between numerical magnitude and luminance level: as the numerical magnitude of the inducer increases, the luminance level of the subsequent synaesthetic experience decreases. Unlike adults and older children, two-year old children associate brightness with small objects and darkness with large objects".
"The existence of a luminance-number mapping in synaesthetic binding also indicates that even so-called 'abnormal' binding, whether caused by extra connections between cortical areas or by abnormal levels of disinhibition, are bounded by the principles of cortical organisation and mapping; and it seems that the maps linking magnitudes are inextricably linked."

October 29, 2007

In their paper entitled "Genomic imprinting effects on brain development and function", the authors WILKINSON et al. (in: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, see References) note the following with regard to the "conflict" between maternal and paternal "selfish genes" to be expressed (or: suppressed) in embryos: "It is thought that some genes in the q11-q13 region of chromosome 15 (the interval that is disrupted in Angelman syndrome and Prader-Willi-syndrome (PWS)) might also act antagonistically on the way in which infants elicit care from their mother. A key characteristic of Angelman syndrome is an unusually sociable disposition and reduced display of negative-affect signals. ... This indicates that one or both of the two known maternally expressed genes in the critical region ... normally acts as brakes that limit positive-affect signals. ... The direction of the effects seen in Angelman syndrome and, to some extent, those seen in PWS would, according to the conflict hypothesis, suggest that the interest of the paternal genome is to maximize the amount of care and attention received from the mother by the current offspring and that the interest of the maternal genome is to divide these resources more equally across all her maternally related kin. ... Such asymmetries of relatedness also occur in matrilineal and patrilineal social groups, in which maternal and paternal genes, respectively, are more common and are shared with other group members. Here, the differential interests between parental genomes are predicted to affect social and affiliative behaviours. ... One [other] provocative hypothesis on which to end this Review is the suggestion that brain-expressed imprinted genes have the potential to contribute to the long-term risk of psychopathology by modifying the postnatal experience of infants ... notably mother-infant interactions."

Besides, if you are interested for another proof (via Pavlovian delay eyeblink conditioning in animals) for Braitenberg's hypothesis of the cerebellum acting as a "timing machine" [see My_map_of_the_brain], then you may read the paper entitled "A spiking network model for passage-of-time representation in the cerebellum" by Tadashi YAMAZAKI & Shigeru TANAKA (in: European Journal of Neuroscience, see References), where the authors consider the cerebellar circuitry to be comparable not to a multilayered perceptron (according to Marr's view), but rather to a "liquid state machine".

October 27, 2007

In his short review entitled "Has evolution primed humans to 'beware the beast'?", Arne OEHMAN (in: PNAS, see References) notes the following with regard to "animacy bias" and "change-blindness" (i.e., the ability to detect or to miss shifts in the environment): "participants failed to detect (were 'change blind' to) 34% of the added inanimate objects [in a visual display] but missed only 11% of added animals or humans." Then, he goes on to muse about the evolutionary underpinnings of these results (following Isbell 2006 on koniocellular pathways involved in snake detection and linking the retina directly to the superior colliculi and inferior pulvinar): "constrictor snakes, which fed on the mole-like small nocturnal mammals destined to become primates, were the only available predators ~ 100 million years ago. Thus, it is likely that the neural circuitry for defense behaviour (the amygdala with associated input and output circuitry) originally was designed to deal with snakes and other reptiles rather than with attacking raptors or felines that were not around until ~ 50 million years later. Second, snakes with a very effective and potent venom delivery system appeared in Africa ~ 60 million years ago. Because venomous snakes are often cryptic and difficult to detect, they provided a critical pressure to expand the visual system and integrate it with the fear system in the brains of anthropoid (i.e., monkeys and apes) primates. ... Old world monkeys, who display fear of snakes and have the most advanced visual system, remained in Africa under continuing pressure from snake predators. However, with the breaking apart of the southern supercontinent, Gondwanaland, lemurs evaded this pressure by dispersing to Madagascar, which lacks venomous snakes. ... As a consequence, the contemporary descendents of primates who escaped venomous snakes by an early African exodus display less snake fear and more primitive and variable visual systems than their old world relatives.

In their paper entitled "Brain Dynamics Underlying the Nonlinear Threshold for Access to Consciousness", Antoine DEL CUL et al. push the technical limits of DEHAENE et al. 2001 even further while backing their "global neuronal workspace theory", i.e., while looking at the brain as a whole and dynamic Potential landscape (in: PLoS Biology, see References):
By varying target-mask stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) in small steps (from 16 to 100 ms between target and subsequent mask) and taking into account subjective and objective reports as well as cortical ERP data (and hence, alas, without mapping subcortical [thalamic, striatal] activations as well!!!) the authors note: "A precise sequence of cortical events was observed: Activation began around 85 ms in the occipital cortex contralateral to the stimulus, corresponding to the P1a. It was present at all SOAs [see Figure below: please do also note the early transition from P1a-peaks to P1b-peaks setting in at an SOA of 50 ms [red curve], i.e., at the threshold for "conscious reports"!]. Starting at around 115 ms, activation spread to the ipsilateral occipital cortex and bilaterally to the posterior parietal cortex. ... In most regions, these activations increased monotonically with SOA. A notable exception was the contralateral mid-ventral temporal cortex, where initial activation intensity was the same for all SOAs > 16 ms (corresponding to the scalp N1). This region thus activated quite strongly to subliminal symbolic stimuli... Finally, starting at around 300 ms, target-evoked activation associated with the scalp P3 quickly expanded to a broad fronto-parieto-temporal network. Crucially, its activation occured only for SOAs associated with conscious reports. Ventral frontal regions showed a particular sudden burst of activation whose intensity traced a sigmoidal curve comparable to subjective reports. However, this effect was not restricted to the ventral frontal cortex, but it was very global and seen with a smaller amplitude in most frontal , parietal, and temporal regions of interest. It was broadly distributed to bilateral cortical areas, regardless of the hemifield of stimulus presentation, in agreement with the hypothesis that a global cortical 'broadcasting' underlies conscious reportability".
Well, this may mean now: reaching a stable global (and unique) attractor may be necessary for some "consciousness" to occur: "As demonstrated in computer simulations of a global neuronal workspace, highly interconnected thalamo-cortical networks, although evolving continously over time, may present a dynamical phase transition leading them, over a brief divergence period, into one of two radically distinct states [i.e., attractors] (either global ignited or quickly decaying)."

October 25, 2007

Although he has written a new book (together with Christa Sütterlin, in German), the best paper by Eibl-Eibesfeldt still remains his short essay in English (see References, EIBL-EIBESFELDT 1988).
In his new book entitled "Weltsprache Kunst", Eibl-Eibesfeldt and Sütterlin deal with several biases: social biases (including mirror neurons, ToM, etc.), family (clan) biases (with regard to monuments), prototypical biases (although they do not mention the concept of "attractors" and dynamical systems theory), body bias, face bias, etc.
Already in his essay of 1988, Eibl-Eibesfeldt referred to Galton's "average face" as being a very attracting one - but perhaps not the "most beautiful" one (and Eibl-Eibesfeldt still seems to be obsessed with "beauty"...). Since a "most beautiful" face is always gender- and sex-specific (e.g., slightly smaller mouth, bigger eyes and widened pupils, and higher front for "females"), only non-primitive higher primates (of the future...) will definitely prefer the androgynous average face - because it is not (primitively-primately) sex-specific...?

And if you want to know more about baboons and homo sapiens, then you should read the must-read: CHENEY & SEYFARTH 2007: "Baboon Metaphysics" (see References).

October 15, 2007

In their paper entitled "Cortical Activity Time Locked to the Shift and Maintenance of Spatial Attention", the authors IKKAI & CURTIS (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) conclude:
"Given the strong cortical overlap of evoked responses during overt and covert shifts of attention, we conclude that one key mechanism for the voluntary control of attention is mediated within the classic oculomotor system. On the one hand, the ability to attend to locations away from our fovea may have evolved by co-opting eye-movement mechanisms within cortical oculomotor centers, like the FEF. The so-called premotor theory of attention posits that subthreshold presaccadic activity in neurons that code for eye movements may be the mechanism by which we shift our attention covertly. On the other hand, the FEF may be best thought of as an area that contains a map of prioritized locations in the visual environment, not strictly a motor ‘‘eye field.’’ In this case, an ongoing map of prioritized locations could be built by bottom-up inputs from sensory cortices and top-down goals from the prefrontal cortext. A readout of such a map by the superior colliculus or brain stem saccade generator may be used to plan eye movements. Moreover, a readout by posterior visual areas may be used to select or tag portions of space, provide a boost in gain to neurons with matching receptive fields, and bias competition for neural representation. Implicit in this idea is that a unitary mechanism, like a dynamic spatial priority map, could contribute to a variety of cognitive behaviors, like attention, intention, and working memory, depending on the afferents used to construct the map and the efferents that readout the map."

In their paper entitled "Supplementary Motor Area [SMA] and Presupplementary Motor Area: Targets of Basal Ganglia and Cerebellar Output", the authors Dalila AKKAL et al. (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) found - via virus injections and retrograde transneuronal transports - that "the SMA and the pre-SMA are the targets of outputs from both the basal ganglia and the cerebellum [cf. also My map of the brain!]. Second, our results indicate that the SMA and pre-SMA each receives relatively more basal ganglia input than cerebellar input. ... Our data are fully consistent with the view that the SMA is one of the premotor areas in the frontal lobe. Like other premotor areas, the SMA (1) has dense projections to M1, (2) has substantial projections directly to the spinal cord, (3) receives basal ganglia and cerebellar input from the motor domains of GPi [internal globus pallidus] and dentate ..., and (4) lacks dense interconnections with prefrontal cortex. ... In contrast, the pre-SMA is anatomically more like a region of prefrontal cortex because it (1) does not project directly to M1, (2) does not project to the spinal cord, (3) receives basal ganglia and cerebellar input from the nonmotor domain of GPi and dentate, ... and (4) is densely interconnected with several regions of the prefrontal cortex."
Besides, the authors even speculate that "increased cerebellar activation may be part of an adaptive response to compensate for the cortical hypoactivity that would result from basal ganglia dysfunction in PD [Parkinson disease]".

October 14, 2007

In their paper entitled "Light adaptation in cone vision involves switching between receptor and post-receptor sites", the authors Felice A. DUNN et al. (in: Nature, see References) underline once more the importance of early visual processings in the retina:
"Even highlights and shadows within a single visual scene can differ ~10,000-fold in intensity - exceeding the range of distinct neural signals by a factor of ~100. The effectiveness of daylight vision under these conditions relies on at least two retinal mechanisms that adjust sensitivity in the ~200 ms intervals between saccades. One mechanism is in the cone photoreceptors (receptor adaptation) and the other is at a previously unknown location within the retinal circuitry that benefits from convergence of signals from multiple cones (post-receptor adaptation). Here we find that post-receptor adaptation occurs as signals are relayed from cone bipolar cells to ganglion cells. Furthermore, we find that the two adaptive mechanisms are essentially mutually exclusive: as light levels increase the main site of adaptation switches from the circuitry to the cones. ... As we make saccades to explore a visual scene, retinal neurons encounter a wide range of light intensities. Receptor and post-receptor adaptation permit the amplification required to see objects in shadows while avoiding saturation from the sky. The combination of these adaptive mechanisms allows the visual system to encode details in a scene with greater fidelity than a standard camera at a single exposure setting. The strategy the retina employs - shifting the dominant site of adaptation to match the reliability of the input signals - demonstrates an elegant principle for accurate information processing in sensory perception."

Besides, visual illusions still seem to be very popular:

In their paper entitled "What Are Lightness Illusions and Why Do We See Them", the authors CORNEY & LOTTO (in: PLoS Computational Biology, see References) have trained backpropagation multilayer perceptrons with 3-D dead-leaf scenes under varying illuminations. Interestingly enough, when tested with well-known illusion-inducing visual stimuli (Vasarely illusion, Mach bands, Hermann grids, and White's illusion), their artificial neuronal networks "behaved" like humans: "the emergent similarity between human perception and the ANNs’ output provides direct support for the view that illusions are caused by (as opposed to merely correlated with) the statistics of past visual experience towards surfaces in space under spatially heterogeneous illumination given ambiguous image data. Because stimulus ambiguity is an inherent challenge of natural visual ecology, illusions must also be inevitable in nature, suggesting that human illusions are common to all visual animals despite vast differences in their underlying neural machinery, which has important consequences for thinking about the biological and computational principles of vision. Evolving or training synthetic systems in ecologically relevant environments provides an important new strategy for uncovering what these principles are that usefully map images to scenes according to the statistics of experience. [Cf. also PURVES 2003!] Finally, the study provides a clear description of what an illusion is, and why we see them: an illusion describes the condition in which the actual source of a stimulus differs from the stimulus’ most likely source given the observer’s past experience."

Or in other words: all depends on the context (within some statistical learning), which you can clearly see when you vary the spatial frequency and size of the stripes in White's illusion (see image below).

And if you are interested in my first (real!) Flash-animation on a related subject on visual illusions (here: "verticality bias" and "inverted perspective"), then you may download and look at it here (just enjoy yourself!):

October 9, 2007

In their paper entitled "Chimpanzees Are Rational Maximizers in an Ultimatum Game", the authors Keith JENSEN et al. (in: Science, see References) show that "in an ultimatum game, humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are rational maximizers and are not sensitive to fairness. These results support the hypothesis that other-regarding preferences and aversion to inequitable outcomes, which play key roles in human social organization, distinguish us from our closest relatives".
HOWEVER (cf. also HERRMANN et al. 2007 and my entry of September 14, 2007 further below), this seems to be only another support for (Tomasello's) old hypothesis of Homo sapiens being an extremely social ("ultra-social") Machiavellian animal: only "civilized" humans can have some dubious "lust for revenge" and an extreme hate of "others" - with both "noble faculties" being heavily dependent on some fatal and dangerous Theory of Mind, as the authors do not hesitate to note: "sensitivity to fairness in the ultimatum game requires that responders and proposers each know what [and perhaps much more crucially: that] the other gains"...

In a related paper on "social neuroscience" entitled "Intact automatic imitation of human and robot actions in autism spectrum disorders [ASD]", the authors Geoffrey BIRD et al. (in: Proceedings of the Royal Society London B, see References) question the popular hypothesis that autists merely have bad imitative skills (and putatively bad mirrror neurons): "The present study assessed imtiation in high-functioning adults with ASD using an automatic imitation procedure. We chose an automatic, rather than a voluntary, imitation test in order to minimize the demands that it would make on non-specific mechanisms. In tests of automatic imitation, participants are not asked, and do not intend, to imitate modelled movements. Instead, they are required merely to observe actions, either passively or with a simple movement task, while the experimenter measures involuntary muscular responses".
The authors now find that "the ASD group showed an equivalent automatic imitation effect, and signs of an increased animacy bias, namely, a greater difference in automatic imitation of human and robot actions".
IN FACT, the ASD group even showed a "significantly greater animacy bias than the Control group ... The increased animacy bias in the ASD group was largely due to enhanced automatic imitation of human actions .... It has been shown [cf. BRASS & HEYES 2005!] that imitation inhibition and theory of mind depend on similar neural substrates, and a positive correlation between the ability to inhibit imitation and performance on theory of mind tasks has been found in patients with both frontal and posterior brain lesions ... Therefore, this hypothesis suggests that the ASD group showed a greater compatibility effect because they had problems inhibiting imitation of human actions. Such a suggestion is consonant with two clinical features of autism which indicate problems with imitation inhibition: echolalia ... and echopraxia."

In their article entitled "Impaired familiarity with preserved recollection after anterior temporal-lobe resection that spares the hippocampus", the authors Ben BOWLES et al. (in: PNAS, see: References) note:
"Recollection is a retrieval process that involves remembering specific details from episodic memory regarding a past experienced event. Familiarity, by contrast, is a process that gives rise to recognition without recovery of any contextual episodic detail."
Within their neuropsychological approach (i.e., lesion study), the authors now confirm dual-process models with regard to medial temporal lobe organization and "propose a mapping of familiarity and recollection onto perirhinal and hippocampal functions, respectively."

October 7, 2007

My lecture for the upcoming CAA conference in Dallas in February 2008 entitled "The attraction of Neuro-Art-History: Getting at Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman" (on Potential landscapes, LOC, TPJ, and the mapping of biases) is now available on my homepage as a Flash-Slideshow (see Publications) - with the exception of an animation of a Potential landscape, which still has to be done...
But I am now extremely happy and looking forward to the conference...

October 5, 2007

When you look at Gerhard Richter's new stained glass window in the southern transept of Cologne Cathedral, and when you look at it from the northern transept with slightly closed eyes ("blurred vision"), and if you know some well-known stained glass windows from the 14th century (like the ones at Augsburg Cathedral), you will suddenly be reminded of those older stained glass windows.

Accordingly, Richter's seemingly "abstract" and "a-religious" and "a-historical" window may only be a blurred version of a very old "figurative" stained glass window from the 14th c.

I have now "proved" this myself by blurring the Augsburg window (see picture below, left) with the help of Photoshop, and then tiling it - and this is the nearly unbelievable result:

	-------- >>>
Augsburg, 1340 AC		Augsburg (cf. left), blurred and tiled with Photoshop (OE)

October 3, 2007

When I first saw a trailer of the movie "Ratatouille" made by the PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS (2007), and when I saw the transparent ears of the digital protagonist "Rémy", I was immediately reminded of Lovis Corinth's book "Das Erlernen der Malerei" (1908), where he wrote on "transparency" as one of the most convincing rhetorical means in painting: „Die Transparenz ist neben dem Reflex die letzte Eigenschaft, die durch das Licht an den Objekten hervorgebracht wird. Sie kommt namentlich bei scharfer Lichtquelle, Sonnenlicht und Lampenlicht vor, und zwar dann, wenn die Objekte gegen diese Lichtquelle stehen und durch Flachheit ihres Körpers das Durchscheinen möglich machen. So leuchten in bestimmten Stellungen die Ohren der Menschen blutig rot…“.

And in fact, today's latest CGI (computer-generated images) seem to have now outstripped the older painters, as you can clearly see here in this digital picture of "Rémy" the rat with its transparent (and rhetorically extremely convincing) lovely ears:

October 1, 2007

In their paper entitled "Gray Matter Differences Correlate with Spontaneous Strategies in a Human Virtual Navigation Task", the authors BOHBOT et al. (in: The Journal of Neuroscience, see References) note:
"To reach a target location, one may use a 'spatial memory strategy' by learning the relationships between environmental landmarks (stimulus-stimulus associations). This strategy is a form of explicit memory based on a cognitive map ... Alternatively, one can navigate without knowledge of the relationships between environmental landmarks, but instead by using a series of turns at precise decision points or stimuli ... The successful repetition of this nonspatial strategy leads to a 'response strategy'".
Now, their results "showed that spatial learners had significantly more gray matter in the hippocampus and less gray matter in the caudate nucleus compared with response learners. Furthermore, the gray matter in the hippocampus was negatively correlated to the gray matter in the caudate nucleus, suggesting a competitive interaction between these two brain areas ... Consequently, the most efficient navigators are likely to be those that are flexible at using spatial or response strategies on demand".

And if you are interested in the latest findings of a cross-species "speech error research" (including hand signers), then you may read the short review by Michael ERARD entitled "Read My Slips: Speech Errors Show How Language is Processed" (in: Science, see References): "Not until children speak in sentences of three or more words do syntactic errors, such as 'sit down this immediately!' (a blend of 'sit down this minute' and 'sit down immediately') appear ... As a result, the more practice a speaker has, the higher the proportion of anticipatory errors, although overall errors decrease".
And with regard to "spoonerisms" (e.g., "jeef berky" instead of "beef jerky"), the author notes: "speakers don't substitute one whole sound segment for another as was previously thought. Rather, they attempt to pronounce the two sounds at the same time. This way of thinking about speech errors - as a collision of motor commands rather than as substitutions of mental symbols - might be more reliably investigated in slips of the hand, ... because researchers can capture [i.e., map] the slower hand movements more clearly than tongue movements".

September 30, 2007

If you are interested in the brain activations involved in the "perception of socially relevant facial expressions" (comprising classical face motor areas, [posterior] cingulate cortex, precuneus, hippocampus, and the dorsal midbrain [optic tectum]), then you might read the article by SCHILBACH et al. (in: Social Neuroscience, see References).

Two other papers now show that not only subcortical areas (like the optic tectum) are very early processing (visual) areas, but already the retina itself as well (cf. also MASLAND & MARTIN 2007!):

In his paper entitled "Retinal Encoding of Ultrabrief Shape Recognition Cues", Ernest GREENE (in: PLoS One, see References) notes:
"Shape encoding mechanisms can be probed by the sequential brief display of dots that mark the boundary of the shape, and delays of less than a millisecond between successive dots can impair recognition. ... The results make it likely that simultaneity of cues is being registered within the retina. A potential mechanism is suggested, calling for linkage of stimulated sites through activation of PA1 [polyaxonal amacrine] cells. ... Wertheimer used the term 'common fate' to describe the ability to see the gestalt of a moving pattern of points. While we commonly think of gestalt operations as being very cognitive, the early advocates of these concepts [like Wolfgang Köhler] believed them to be fundamental... The current evidence supports Kohler's conjecture that the process begins in the retina."

In their paper entitled "Synchronized Firing among Retinal Ganglion Cells Signals Motion Reversal", the authors SCHWARTZ et al. (in: Neuron, see References) note: "These results indicate that not only can the retina anticipate the location of a smoothly moving [i.e., shifting] object, but that it can also signal violations [i.e., deviant shifts] in its own prediction. We show that the reversal response cannot be explained by models of the classical receptive field and suggest that nonlinear receptive field subunits [including amacrine / bipolar cells] may be responsible."

September 27, 2007

It is interesting to see that "UNCERTAINTY" (and hence "unconsciousness") seems to rule EVERYWHERE on this (not very nice, not very bright, and not very perfect...) planet: there are no precise maps, no clear goals, and only higher corrupt primates with very short-lasting and small-primitive egotistical goals...
HOWEVER, on my planet (where I originally came from... (;-)), EVERYTHING is clearly mapped (on all spatiotemporal scales, of course), EVERYTHING is clearly defined, and there are only TWO clear BIG goals which are to be pursued and satisfied by all perfectly trained (and hence perfectly "conscious" and Self-controlled) map-makers (see Ceterum censeo).
Too beautiful, isn't it...?

September 25, 2007

In their paper entitled "Neural correlates of the Pythagorean ratio rules", the authors Alexander H. FOSS et al. (in: NeuroReport, see References) note with regard to the finding of Pythagoras, that simpler interval ratios in music (1:2, 2:3, etc.) are more "pleasant" than complex ones (e.g., 243:128):
"In musicians, the [left] inferior frontal gyrus, superior temporal gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, inferior parietal lobule and anterior cingulate respond with progressively more activation to perfect consonances, [<] imperfect consonances [<] and dissonances. In nonmusicians only the right inferior frontal gyrus follows this pattern".
Besides, "the neural activation to dissonant intervals is significantly greater overall than consonant intervals when we examine activation of all participants" - which is no wonder, since "the brain" always "looks for" abrupt changes, deviances, etc., but NOT for unity, harmony, etc. (which seems to be rather a genuinely "cultural" struggle and achievement...).

And if you are interested in a short review of the latest achievements and problems of Neuroeconomics, then you may read P. Read MONTAGUE 2007 (see References) on "valuation", "the intuitive concept of 'time' [and money]" (with the "perceptual present actually being more valuable than the perceptual future - which is also a problem of Self-control, of course!), "fairness", and the brain's simulation of "outcomes about the world and other humans" (which, including "theories of mind", is extremely important in game theories, strategies, etc. - as you know...).

September 23, 2007

When reading SINHA et al. 2006 (see References), I stumbled over something which already puzzled Gombrich: Why are line-drawings so powerful? After all, there are no contours in nature... (however, there are discontinuities, of course...).
In fact, when you compare those extremely artificial "high-frequency" stimuli (edge maps) used by neuroscientists with real line-drawings by artists, you in fact see the differences: "such depictions [by artists] do, in fact, contain [not only high-frequency, but also] significant photometric cues and ... the contours included in such a depiction by an accomplished artist correspond not just to a low-level edge map, but in fact embody a faces photometric structure" (Sinha et al.).

Similarly, when re-reading CAVANAGH 2005, he already puts the same question: "why do line drawings work?", which he now answers as follows (but while, unfortunately, not referring to the LOC, which is crucially involved in processing contours vs. scrambled images: see MALACH et al. 1995, GERLACH et al. 2002 etc.): "Artists have discovered which key contours must be perceived by the visual brain to identify the essential structure of an object".
“The blurry global shapes and colours may convey emotional content directly to emotional centres of the brain while the irrelevant fine detail typical of Impressionist pieces distracts conscious perception” - and in fact, as you already know from my dissertation and MALACH et al. 1995, the LOC is highly activated by blurred stimuli (as some kind of "super-stimuli" for the LOC).
Besides, Cavanagh notes: "gross deviations from the optics of refraction are rarely noticed by the viewer [see Flemish paintings of the 15th c.!], indicating again that the visual brain only computes a small set of the possible physical properties of a transparent material in assessing whether or not a surface is transparent”, and: "[Cubist paintings] demonstrate the minimal skeletons of visual forms that are capable of evoking remembered images” -this is exactly the crucial point of attractor dynamics (and pattern completion)... (see below, September 18: John Constable's "reminding"...).

September 18, 2007

In their paper entitled "Perspectives on science and art", the authors CONWAY & LIVINGSTONE (in: Current Opinion in Neurobiology, see References) seem to be amazed at the fact that it is not "physics" that rules perception, but rather some "'alternative' physics" (see CAVANAGH 2005), which now reminds me of the power of attractors (including the LOC) and Gombrich's seeing with "hypotheses / schemata" (or better: inferring schemata).
These authors note: "Our tolerance of multiple points of view in a single painting suggest that one characteristic of this alternative (psycho) physics is that depth cues are processed locally ... our interpretation of the three-dimensional organization of a scene is generated by stitching together multiple impressions".
But here I would rather say: inferring attractors (schemata, pattern completion) from multiple impressions (or rather: incomplete local hints and cues).
The authors now go on: "The fragmented nature of seeing makes the discovery of single-point perspective, and the subsequent obligation of paintings to conform to it, a remarkable demonstration of the power of connoisseurship and of the importance of cognitive function (learning) in aesthetic appreciation" - in fact, this is the power of (acquired) "schemata" (hypotheses, inferences) or stable attractors...
Actually, the simultaneous discovery of tonal unity in the 15th century (along with 1-point perspective) mentioned by the authors may indeed show that "people" are looking for stable attractors ("unity") all the while...
When the authors note that "Picasso pays particular attention to the outer configuration of the faces, even if the internal features are grossly exaggerated", this is for me a clear indication that the LOC (as a giant attractor for "figures", "shapes", and "forms", i.e., Cusanus' "forma formarum" or Cernuschi's "containment schema" of "closedness" or "closability") can never be left out in perception, as exaggerated the caricatures or drawings of faces may be (see exactly MALACH et al. 1995; see also my Seminar script, Seminar-Script S5 Figure 36, on Hopfield networks and attractors capable of fault tolerance, pattern completion, etc.).

Or in other words: all this may not be the result of some crudely hypothesized "alternative physics", but rather a quite nice outcome of (massively parallel processing) dynamical systems and their automatic attractor dynamics (with degradation tolerance, automatic pattern completion, etc.). But "we" scientists still think along (seemingly) static and serial (linguistic) attractors instead of dynamical systems and developmental "histories", describable nevertheless (by the way) by the most advanced physics and mathematics. Or in short with John Constable (from GOMBRICH 1977): "The art pleases by reminding [i.e., by eliciting attractors], not by deceiving" - which perhaps would have been a nice motto to CONWAY & LIVINGSTONE 2007 and their "alternative physics"...?

September 17, 2007

Thanks to a hint by John Onians, I have now read BLAKEMORE & GREENFIELD 1987 (see References). I now would like to turn your attention to four articles in it:
First, already Larry Weiskrantz in his essay entitled "Neuropsychology and the Nature of Consciousness" notes the "ultra-social bias" of Homo sapiens involved in ToMs [!] (cf. also SUBIAUL et al. 2007): “[it is] the fact that we [!!!!] have the capacity [i.e., ABILITY? POTENTIAL? POWER?] to think and be aware and consider what other people might be thinking about us that produces, I think, the uniquely human condition of paranoia. I do not know that paranoia, as a really damaging social-psychiatric condition, exists in any creature other than man, and human beings can have it only because their consciousness is so highly developed”. He then ends with a monitoring theory of "consciousness" (cf. my "maps mapping maps"!): „It is not a little man doing the looking, but a part of the nervous system itself that monitors other neural networks, rather than being firmly enmeshed as a link in a closed serial chain of processing. It is a matter of organization rather than of peeping Toms [!].”
Secondly, Nicholas Humphrey comes to the same conclusion of "Homo sapiens" being the "most social" animal: “Human beings have evolved to be the most highly social creatures the world has ever seen. Their social relationships have a depth, a complexity, and a biological importance to them which no other animals’ relationships come near. No accident, I think, that human beings are so far as we know unique in their ability to use self-knowledge to interpret others”.
Thirdly, Peter Hacker quotes a (still!) socially biased Wittgenstein: “Only of a living human being [or less socially biased: "of me"] can one [or better: "I"] say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious“. (Cf. also my What is Mapology?, point 22).
Fourthly, Rodolfo Llinás has developed his tensor network theory of coordinate-invariant sensory-motor transformations (but which may have more to do with attractors, I suppose): according to him, thinking is just “internalized movement” (perhaps when the Basal Ganglia are switching from contingent processings and activity circles to seemingly non-contingent simulations and activation circles via the PFC? - See My map of the brain!).

September 16, 2007

It seems that scientists are now converging: a very similar paper to the one by Herrmann et al. (see Sept. 14) is the paper by SUBIAUL et al. (in: KAAS et al. 2007, Vol. 4, pp. 509-28, see References) on "Human Cognitive Specializations", which I have now read, and from which I now quote their reference to the philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce: "[The typically “human”] ability to reinterpret observable phenomena in terms of unobservable concepts [such as "minds" in ToM] may depend on a specific type of inference which the philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce called retroductive inferences ... Pierce viewed retroduction as fundamental to the scientific enterprise because it depended upon the development of hypotheses about observable phenomena. ... [But] there is a difference between a mind that predicts events and one that seeks to explain them. But, of course, there is nothing trivial about predictions. Note that predictions come in two varieties: forward (e.g., classic conditioning), and backward (e.g., descriptive). If the reinterpretation hypothesis is correct, we can imagine, on the one hand, a mind that responds in a predictive manner to event and cues, and, on the other, a mind that generates rules that makes predictions (from hypotheses) across domains. ... Only through a systematic exploration of these various problems will we ultimately come to understand human and nonhuman cognitive specializations”.

You see: scientists make only descriptive predictions (within map-makings), but they give no "explanations" or "first causes" (which perhaps will always be reserved to the religious or philosophical realms)...

September 14, 2007

And by the way: if you read HERRMANN et al. 2007 in detail (see also my annotation below, September 10), you see that "causality seeking" - i.e., seeking for (hidden, unobservable) "causes" - may be the first "cause" for the development of some "Theory of Mind" (about "first movers" and "agents"), "social mind" etc.
This reminds me of the neuro-theologian Andrew NEWBERG's et al. 2001 (and d'Aquili's) "causality operator" in the brain (including the brains of "religious believers" looking for "gods"):
already small children love terrorizing their parents with stupid questions about "first causes" (and always ultimately ending up with some "Big Bang", "first mover", or even worse...)...

HOWEVER, SCIENTISTS (as TECHNICIANS rather than astrologists, philosophers, and theologians) DO NOT SEEK FOR "FIRST CAUSES" (including childish things like "Big Bangs", "first movers", etc.) NOR FOR some "EXPLANATIONS", but RATHER PRAGMATICALLY TRY TO DEVELOP ever MORE precise MAPS that enABLE them to manipulate "the world" ever BETTER (that means: with a success-rate or expected outcome eventually approaching a hit-rate of 100%).
THAT's ALL.
And today's success-rate in medicine may have hardly approached 50% yet, by the way...

September 13, 2007

By the way (which I didn't know before): the now dead parrot "ALEX" of Mrs Pepperberg had learnt his astonishing skills while observing (and competing with) a human student learning the same things (words, etc.) in parallel at the same time.

This reminds me of the bonobo "KANZI", who has learnt his astonishing skills by observing his mother (who was much less successful than Kanzi himself).

You see here (once more) how important and "motivating" some "social learning" (including "social competition") can be...

September 12, 2007

In their paper entitled "Shared Neural Resources between Music and Language Indicate Semantic Processing of Musical Tension-Resolution Patterns", the authors STEINBEIS & KOELSCH (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) note the following: "Meyer (1956) [see MEYER 1956 in References) was the first to embrace the possible link between the kind of tension-resolution patterns described above and meaning in music. He endorsed the possibility of absolute musical meaning, which refers to the music's intrinsic structural properties, a form that can be juxtaposed against meaning arising from extramusical associations. ... In other words, one type of meaning of a musical event is borne out of its implicit suggestion of a number of possible subsequent musical events. This of course applies to all types of meaning that are driven by expectations. These possibilities are constrained by the expectations, which have been implicitly learned and are subject to particular rules and hierarchies impinging on the perceptual system. It can thus be argued that the meaning arising out of tension-resolution patterns in music is of a similar sort as that derived from hierarchical relations of linguistic utterances."
The authors now show that "2 event-related potentials in response to harmonic expectancy violations, the early right anterior negativity (ERAN) and the N500, could be systematically modulated by simultaneously presented language material containing either a syntactic or a semantic violation. Whereas the ERAN was reduced only when presented concurrently with a syntactic language violation and not with a semantic language violation, this pattern was reversed for the N500. This is the first piece of evidence showing that tension-resolution patterns represent a route to meaning in music ... This meaning can be, but need not be, mediated via feelings or emotions (Meyer 1956) but more likely arises out of a knowledge of musical rules and regularities, which can be implicitly learned through exposure to music".

If you are interested in the same terms (learning of "possibilities" and statistical "regularities"), you may not only read Ernst Kurths classical books on "potentials" and "possibilities" in musical tension-resolution patterns (or rather: shifts), but you may also read Paul CHURCHLANDs new book "Neurophilosophy at Work" on some ''Map-Indexing Theory of Perception":
"Our [!!! - unreflected "social bias"!]] assembled sensory inputs, at any given moment, serve to activate a specific pattern of activation-levels across each of our waiting neuronal populations, a unique pattern for each map (remember: each map has its own abstract subject matter), a pattern that constitutes a 'you-are-here pointer' to a specific possibility among the many background possibilities [a nice term: see my attractor landscapes being actually assumed and activated one after another out of a vast "background" of possible attractor landscapes or maps potentially building up some "Potential landscape" on the whole in [31]!] chronically portrayed in that map. We might call this the Map-Indexing Theory of Perception. ... If we ask, instead, how the brain develops its manifold maps of various abstract feature domains, developmental neuroscience already holds out the sketch of an answer. Hebbian learning is a mindless, subconceptual process that continually adjusts the strengths or 'weights' of the trillions of synaptic connections that intervene between one neuronal population and another, the very connections whose assembled weights determine the complex landscape [! - cf. my attractor landscapes or "maps"!?] of prototype regions that constitutes the abstract map embodied in the receiving population. Modify the synaptic weights and you modify the map".

September 10, 2007

I now first refer the reader to three papers on the famous "mirror neurons", then I will turn to a paper on the "social brain hypothesis", which will then be followed by a short annotation of Bruce Lahn's lecture at the MPI Tübingen today:

    First, the authors HAMILTON & GRAFTON in their paper entitled "Action Outcomes Are Represented in Human Inferior Frontoparietal Cortex" (in: Cerebral Cortex, see References) show that "the left aIPS [anterior intraparietal sulcus] encodes the object goal of an action, whereas the inferior frontal [IFG] and lateral occipital regions encode kinematic features of an observed action, such as trajectory and hand shape. ... Together, these data on action planning and execution support the idea that there is a hierarchy for performed action representations, with kinematic parameters found in the IFG, planning of goals, such as taking a tool in the left IPL [inferior parietal lobe], and monitoring of action sequences and action outcomes in right IPL."
    Second, in their paper entitled "Anthropomorphism influences perception of computer-animated characters' actions", the authors CHAMINADE ET AL. (in: SCAN, see References) found that while "using a biological motion classification task [i.e., using more or less artificial or anthropomorphical runners with more or less biologically reasonable motion], ... the tendency to perceive a simple running motion as natural is modulated by the appearance of the character used to render the motion. Anthropomorphism of artificial agents decreases the tendency to report their motion as biological [so that the viewer appears to be stuck in some "uncanny valley of eeriness"], and an fMRI investigation found that the response bias towards 'biological' is correlated with an increase of activity in regions involved in mentalizing [left temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC)] and a decrease of activity in regions belonging to the mirror system". And you see here once more: perception (and intermingled expectancies and inferences) is quite tricky and complex in general...
    Third, the authors CATMUR ET AL. in their paper entitled "Sensorimotor Learning Configures the Human Mirror System" (in: Current Biology, see References) note the following: "If the development of the mirror system depends on sensorimotor learning, it should be possible to use sensorimotor training to change the functioning of mature mirror systems and even to give them "countermirror" properties. To test this prediction, we measured mirror-system functioning [via TMS on motor-evoked potentials] before and after incompatible ("countermirror") sensorimotor training, in which human participants performed index-finger movements while observing little-finger movements and vice versa. The control group received compatible ("mirror") sensorimotor training, in which they performed the same finger movements as those they observed." The authors now conclude from their results that "the mirror properties of the mirror system are neither wholly innate nor fixed once acquired; instead they develop through sensorimotor learning. Our findings indicate that the human mirror system is, to some extent, both a product and a process of social interaction."

This now brings me to another paper that further corroborates the "cultural intelligence hypothesis" put forward by Tomasello et al., i.e., the hypothesis according to which "humans" are not only "social", but rather "ultra-social" beings:
    In their paper entitled "Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis", the authors HERRMANN ET AL. (in: Science, see References) have administered a "comprehensive battery of cognitive tests to a large number of chimpanzees ... orangutans ... and human children [at 2,5 years]" in parallel. They now show that chimps are more skillful in mathematics ("addition") and tool use, whereas human children excel at "causality tasks not involving active tool manipulation, as well as [at] ... tasks of social cognition".
"It is possible that what is distinctively human is not social-cultural cognition as a specialized domain, as we have hypothesized. Rather, what may be distinctive is the ability to understand [or much better: "to infer"??? - cf. Gombrich's and Popper's "human beings" as extremely "hypotheses-making & guessing & inferencing & simulating animals"?] unobserved causal forces in general, including (as a special case) the mental states of others as causes of behavior. Even in this case, however, it is a plausible hypothesis that understanding hidden causal forces evolved first to enable humans to understand the mental states of other persons, and this generalized only later to the physical domain".
Besides, they note that "domestic dogs ... do not perform as well as chimpanzees on tasks of physical cognition but outperform them on tasks of social cognition".

All in all: what makes "us" really "human" is perhaps this extreme ("ultra-social") and often fatal "social bias": you just have to look at the last six thousand years of "human history", and you may then find this "social bias" and its fatal consequences everywhere (up to the National-Social-ists having perhaps been the "humans" with the most "extreme" "social biases" so far...). Accordingly, instead of being "extremely social primates", "we" perhaps would have better remained chimps with outstanding mathematical and technical skills... (This is a joke, of course (;-)).

And by the way: even the skillful use of "causality" may have fatal consequences in "grown-up" "humans": just think of neuroscientists (and children) still musing about "reasons" and "first causes" (from some childish infinite regress problem up to Libet et al. ...).

This (only 6000 years of evolution - which is now "evolution" on a "historical" time-scale!!) now brings me to my last comment: Today, I attended a lecture given by Bruce LAHN (and I also e-mailed him on this annotation here) at the MPI Tübingen on genes involved in the "outstanding" brain development of "humans" (cf. also DEDIU & LADD 2007 in my S_Update Jun Fig. 8a): while the Microcephalin-gene (found with a modern allele throughout the whole globe) may have been positively selected for 40000 years, the ASPM-gene (found in a modern allele especially in Eurasiates) may have been positively selected only for the last 6000 years - i.e., when some extreme "social bias" began to manifest itself (historically!) in complex wheat-producing "civilizations" (with altered brain-sugar-metabolisms?) and some "social hyperstructures" like (National-Socialist?) States, etc. ...? However, Bruce Lahn was not able to find any correlational relationship between IQ and the aforementioned modern alleles - AND I NOW GUESS WHY: Bruce Lahn would definitely have better correlated these genes not with the IQ-scale, but rather with some "social [cultural] intelligence" [SQ?] (sub-)scale...?

September 3, 2007

In a quite important paper (in the wake of MASLAND & MARTIN 2007, see References) entitled "Spatio-temporal prediction and inference by V1 neurons", the authors GUO ET AL. (in: European Journal of Neuroscience, see References) have found that the responses of orientation selective neurons in V1 heavily depend on the context, i.e., on sensory input like "predictor bars" moving in a "linear"-"contiguous" sequence from the outside towards their classical receptive fields: "As we expected, when the visual stimulus was presented in a highly predictable spatial and temporal sequence towards a neuron's CRF [classical receptive field], a substantial number of V1 neurons responded to the predictable events prior to and distant from the stimulation of their CRFs and transmitted more information about the CRF stimulation, suggesting V1 neurons directly contribute to the coding of spatio-temporal regularities in our visual world". The authors now conclude that "neuronal responses of V1 neurons were significantly modulated by spatio-temporal information occurring well outside and prior to stimulation of their CRFs. Predictors presented in a linearly ordered sequence caused 'early' orientation tuned responses. Moreover the orientation of predictors could significantly affect the orientation tuning elicited by bars occurring inside the CRF, and could result in tuned predictive responses when in fact the CRF stimulus was omitted. ... In light of our results, a natural interpretation is that neurons in area V1 are not only specialized for extracting local features (i.e., orientation), but also represent and encode signals that reflect the statistical structure of the visual world, such as spatio-temporal regularities, as proposed by the model of 'vision-as-inference'. On this interpretation, a neurophysiologically mapped CRF represents the neuron's projection of an inferred probability onto the world, and not the result of simple analysis of the local features within the CRF".

August 28-31, 2007

For four days, I was at Norwich (UK) with the art historian Prof. John ONIANS for talking about the forthcoming CAA conference on "Neuro-Art-History" in Dallas 2008. I was also able to give him the address of Prof. Dennis Proffitt (with regard to the verticality bias), and Prof. Onians once again referred me to SEGALL ET AL. 1966 (which I have now added to my References list, as nice forerunners of PURVES 2003). Besides, I turned his attention to Taine and Lamettrie ("L'homme machine" 1748) as presumable forerunners for Changeux' "L'homme neuronal" of 1983 (which, contrary to the more crucial and later text of Changeux 1994, lacks a discussion of mirror neurons of course). I am extremely thankful to Prof. Onians for taking his time - and for criticizing my overloaded presentation for the Dallas conference 2008, which I have now reduced to a light and convincing introductory lecture on Potential landscapes, the LOC, and the TPJ (forthcoming on this homepage!). Besides, I have now finished my collaborational work for the multidisciplinary Museum of the University of Tübingen (after, unfortunately, having been extremely exploited for three and a half months by some rather insensitive people - comme toujours, malheureusement).

August 27, 2007

In their paper entitled "How emotions inform judgment and regulate thought", the authors CLORE & HUNTSINGER (in: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, see References) note: "People have a surprising ability to zoom in and out mentally, focusing on either the big picture or the details. But some people favour a focus on the forest, whereas other favor the trees. ... A different kind of global-local perception concerns whether people see others as members of groups or as individuals. ... Contrary to most people's intuitions, happy moods promote group stereotyping, whereas sad moods promote a focus on individuals. ... Participants in positive moods tend to rely more on stereotypes to guide their thinking about members of various social groups than do those in negative moods. ... When angry, one believes oneself to be correct, which should increase confidence in one's own cognitions. Thus, anger would be expected to show the same processing effects as happiness [i.e., fostering stereotypes]. ... For example, words such as bed, pillow, rest, awake and blanket all activate the word 'sleep', which might then be falsely recalled. Such false memories are assumed to reflect relational or gist processing. According to the affect-as-information hypothesis, positive moods should promote and negative moods should inhibit such relational processing, making false-memory studies ideal for hypothesis testing."

And if you are interested in "Boolean maps" and the "Limits of Human Visual Awareness" and "our apparently rich visual experience ... [being] a substantial overestimation of what is actually consciously available", you may read the article by HUANG ET AL. (in: Science, see References): "The Boolean map theory predicts that multiple features can only be consciously accessed one by one, whereas multiple locations can be accessed at the same time ... The present results can also be seen as showing that multiple location values can be represented as a holistic pattern or surface (i.e., observers can encode them together as a unit), thus avoiding competition. Feature values, on the contrary, evidently cannot constitute a comparable sort of pattern in feature space (e.g., color space), and thus each needs its own separate visual representation".

And if you are interested in "closed-loop experimental settings" for investigating sensory systems with optimal "adaptive sampling" strategies (to find out the properties of sensory neurons, e.g.), you may turn to BENDA ET AL. (in: Current Opinion in Neurobiology, see References).

August 22, 2007

When I read the paper by HUNG ET AL. on "perceived luminance" (brightness), Purves, and surface perception resp. "filling-in" (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References), and when studying the Cornsweet illusion, I was immediately reminded of the Cubists' famous (and quite simple and structural-compositional) "trick" of shaded contours (compare the images just below).

<------------->

August 18, 2007

In her review on a paper by Wang et al. on thalamic bursts (occuring during sleep, when the thalamus is uncoupled from contingent visual input), Pamela REINAGEL (in: Neuron, see References) notes: "The functional implication [of the study by Wang et al.] is that bursts indicate surprise: a burst means an excitatory stimulus appeared where there had not been any recently."

In an even more interesting study on "corticothalamic projections control[ling] synchronization in locally coupled bistable thalamic oscillators", the authors MAYER ET AL. (in: Physical Review Letters, see References) note:
"A widespread phenomenon in populations of periodic, noisy, and chaotic oscillators (or maps [!!!]) is the appearance of synchronous collective oscillations."
The authors now propose a system (modelled by a double well potential possessing either one stable fixed point or bistability with a stable fixed point and a stable limit cycle) in order to simulate these thalamic oscillations: "The results clearly show that also in the human sleep the spindles become synchronized by corticothalamic projections. ... slow waves also occur with extensive destruction of the thalamus and transected corpus callosum; these facts indicate that the thalamus is not essentially involved in the genesis of slow wave rhythm. ... [Hence] we post that synchronization in the thalamus mainly is controlled through open loop repetitive phase resetting by the cortex."

Is this now "our" next step in "our" "hunt" (Cusanus) for some TOTAL POTENTIAL function (of "the brain")? (See also [32], and see also BUKOWSKI ET AL. 2007 on the "water potential" in References)

August 17, 2007

In an extremely intriguing study on "fixation-related brain potentials [FRPs] for ecologically valid settings", the authors HUTZLER ET AL. (in: Brain Research, see References) show that - exemplified by the well known old/new effect in the domain of visual word recognition - an "alternative approach that utilizes brain potentials corresponding to eye fixations during free exploration reveals effects as reliable as conventional event-related brain potentials ... Contrary to the ERP paradigm, in the FRP approach synchronization is not realized by the externally triggered presentation of a stimulus. Rather, an eye tracker is used to assess a subject's eye movements in order to determine when a subject is looking at what (e.g., a word) in a complex, visual pattern (e.g., a sentence). By doing so, the exact point in time at which certain visual information (that is crucial for triggering a specific cognitive process) is taken in can be assessed - allowing to synchronize the recording of electrophysiological data to the start of a specific cognitive process. ... With the rise of easy-to-use eye trackers it is now unproblematic to determine a subject's gaze position with high spatial resolution while recording electrophysiological data."

You see here once again the importance of technics and mapping tools... (the only things that may have really improved and made progress in the last 5000 years...).

In their paper entitled "The earliest electrophysiological correlate of visual awareness?", the authors KOIVISTO ET AL. (in: Brain and Cognition, see References) aim at studying, "by using a simple perceptual detection task as possible, which one of the previously suggested effects (P1, VAN, or P3) is the primary electrophysiological correlate of visual awareness ... In both experiments [masking paradigm vs. low contrast threshold paradigm], the observers indicated after each trial whether they had consciously detected [i.e., mapped] a stimulus [i.e., shift] or not. The differences in ERPs between hits (correctly detected stimuli) and misses (undetected stimuli) were defined as the electrophysiological correlates of visual awareness." Now, the authors found two electrophysiological correlates: "First, a negative wave (VAN) was elicited by hits as compared to misses, peaking at posterior temporal and occipital sites around 200-350 ms after the stimulus. VAN was followed by a positive wave after 400 ms, peaking at parietal sites."

Hence: "consciousness" may boil down to a mapping (detection) of shifts (VAN, called "visual phenomenal consciousness" by the authors above), followed by a (more strictly speaking) "conscious" mapping of maps (P400, called "reflective consciousness" by the authors above)?

August 16, 2007

In his review on a paper by Mahon et al. on tool-selective brain areas studied by repetition-suppression (RS), Maximilian RIESENHUBER (in: Neuron, see References) notes: "This suggests the intriguing possibility that tool-selective neurons cluster in the MFG [medial fusiform gyrus] because of that region's connectivity with the IPL [inferior parietal lobule]. For instance, during the learning of novel tools, IPL could provide "top-down" signals that gate plasticity of visual tool information in the MFG, and the learned representation could in turn provide input to IPL when interacting with tools."

In their paper entitled "The unsolved mystery of vision", the authors MASLAND & MARTIN (in: Current Biology, see References) put the question: "Why, after more than a half century of work, have physiological descriptions of visual coding lagged so far behind anatomical knowledge, and what can be done to improve matters?". They answer the question by proposing a new model for the visual system (pathways) in the brain, and by taking into account non-standard cells in the retina as well (see the image just below).
As they note: "if one's experimental apparatus [i.e., mapping tool...] is restricted to the presentation of drifting gratings, the suppressed-by-contrast cell appears only as an 'outlier', about which the investigator can say nothing else."
You see here once again: nearly everything depends on "our" (always selective and limited) mapping tools...

August 15, 2007

Today, I had my second (unofficial) "rigorosum" in Valentino BRAITENBERGs lab at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics at Tübingen. I am really thankful to him (and his co-workers: Almut Schüz, Steffen Stoewer, Matthias Valverde, and Anna Lena Keller) for lending me his extremely sensitive (and extremely quick) ears (POSSIbly due to his playing the violin and his early education by women in Southern Tyrolia?).

August 14, 2007

In an interesting paper entitled "Borderline personality disorder and emotion regulation: Insights from the Polyvagal Theory", the authors AUSTIN ET AL. (in: Brain and Cognition, see References) sketch out a theory (by Porges) I haven't known before:
"The theory emphasizes an integrated Social Engagement System that regulates the muscles of the face and head involved in social engagement behaviours (e.g., gaze, expression, prosody, and gesture) and a component of the parasympathetic nervous system, the myelinated vagal pathways to the heart that calm visceral state and dampen sympathetic and HPA activity. ... According to the Polyvagal Theory, the myelinated vagus, which phylogenetically evolved with mammals, is critical for two reasons: to inhibit defensive limbic circuits, and to establish social bonds. Phylogenetically, as mammals expressed special visceral efferent pathways to regulate the striated muscles of the face and head (e.g., facial expressions, head gesture), there was a parallel shift [!!] in the neural regulation of the heart from an unmyelinated to a myelinated vagus. This new myelinated (i.e., mammalian) vagus actively inhibits the sympathetic nervous system's influence on the heart and dampens HPA-axis activity. The mammalian vagus functions as an active vagal brake ... to maintain calm states in social contexts. ... The amplitude of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) indexes the state of the vagal brake. ... By quantifying RSA during various challenges, it is possible [!] to measure the dynamic regulation of the vagal brake."

In their paper entitled "A deletion variant of the Alpha2b-adrenoceptor is related to emotional memory", the authors QUERVAIN ET AL. (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) note that "emotionally arousing events are recalled better than neutral events. This phenomenon, which helps us to remember important and potentially [!!]vital information, depends on the activation of noradrenergic transmission in the brain. Here we show that a deletion variant of ADRA2B, the gene encoding the Alpha2b-adrenergic receptor, is related to enhanced emotional memory".

August 13, 2007

When I read the paper entitled "Neural Dynamics of Event Segmentation in Music" by SRIDHARAN ET AL. (in: Neuron, see References), I burst out in laughter when I read the following (ironic?) sentence:
"A strikingly right-lateralized network of brain regions showed peak response during the movement transitions when, paradoxically, [!!!!!] there was no physical stimulus". Well, these authors do not seem to have read my Seminar-script yet (see S4 Figure 45 ff. on the Gestaltists, see Seminar-Script): the "always predictive brain" is never at rest - and especially not in musical silences (i.e., when "attentional predictions", i.e., the longing for target maps and "expectations", play an important role). The authors then provide evidence for two distinct functional networks at the movement transition: "a ventral fronto-temporal network associated with detecting salient events [i.e., shifts], followed in time by a dorsal fronto-parietal network associated with maintaining attention and updating working memory" (please note the sloppy terms here: "attention", "working memory", etc.).

In their paper entitled "Early experience impairs perceptual discrimination", the authors HAN ET AL. (in: Nature Neuroscience, see References) write that rat pups exposed to 7.1-kHz tone pips during growth show impaired frequency-discrimination due to the development of a "giant attractor" in this frequency range (see the image just below, including a tonotopic auditory map and tuning-curves with an attractor at 7.1 kHz).

August 6, 2007

My homepage is now completely rewritten in the Wiki-style (thanks to my colleague and Webmaster, Armin Elbs).

My updates will now come in this Blog-style (and you may make annotations yourself one day!):

All museums world-wide should take this format to edit their archives and collections online.

By the way: It is not "the religions" that are the problem in "our" world. Since "religions" seem to be mere "social" and "evolutionary" strategies (cf. my Update July 2007 in Update 2006/07), the problem is rather the fatal and dangerous "social fallacy" or "social bias" (see What is Mapology?), i.e., that map-makers do not seem to be able to DIFFERENTIATE between bodies and Selves (i.e., map-makers). (Cf. also my Ceterum censeo).