"Feeling the future": experiments on precognition divide scholars

This will be, for sure, a study that will make scientists discuss a lot. The paper has been accepted from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology after quite a lot of work from the reviewers, which of course didn't want to accept in their journal a paper about a study on precognition and, moreover, titled "Feeling the future".

In fact, Charles Judd, the editor of the Journal, already announced that the issue of JPSP which will contain the referred paper will have an editorial in which some doubts are expressed, and moreover an invitation to all the investigartors interested in the topic to try to replicate the data.
The author of the paper, Daryl Bem, prof. at Cornell University, New York, USA, is anyway sure about his results, and also the reviewers themselves didn't find any fawl in his work. Now it's necessary only to replicate the results to see if they are generalizable. To download the final version of the paper (still unpublished), click here.

Basically, Bem made 9 experiments in which some classical paradigms used in research in cognitive psychology are temporally inverted: for example, to evaluate the affective priming, instead of using the usual sequence of prime word and image, which the subject had to judge as fast as possible in terms of positive or negative affective meaning, he presented in his experiments first the target image to be judged, collecting the data of the reaction times of the subject, and then the prime word. The same he did for the other time-reversed experiments, with annexed resulting significant percentage of hits not caused by chance (that would be a 50%):

• Approach/avoidance
  

  1. Precognitive Detection of Erotic Stimuli: 53.1%
  2. Precognitive Avoidance of Negative Stimuli: 53.5%

• Affective priming
  

  3. Retroactive Priming I: 60.8% (percent. obtained with the classical priming: 64.9%)
  4. Retroactive Priming II: 59.6% (percent. obtained with the classical priming: 61.6%)

• Habituation
  

  5. Retroactive Habituation I: 53.1%
  6. Retroactive Habituation II: 51.8%
  7. Retroactive Induction of Boredom: not significantly different from chance, 49.1% (the author said that this occurred because to induce boredom he used supraliminal exposures of images)

• Facilitation of recall (they use another measure of accuracy, defined differential recall (DR), which weights the actual recalled words subtracting the control ones and ranking from -100% and +100%, positive DR% denote more recalled target words than control ones)
  

  8. Retroactive Facilitation of Recall I: DR=2.27%
  9. Retroactive Facilitation of Recall II: DR=4.21%

So, what can we conclude from this work? That humans' cognitive system could process the information coming from the future but is not well-trained enough to do so, therefore from time to time we get some "feelings" about what's going to happen but most of the times we don't?
We know that some theories postulate that matter always take two directions: forward and backward...but still I cannot figure out how can it be received and perceived from the cognitive system: if the sent information has the same nature either when it goes backward and forward, then the information coming back from the future must be perceived within the same brain substrate that perceives the forward one...therefore, how can we differentiate? And, more importantly, why it doesn't happen always but it looks like some people (if true) have this ability more developed than others? If the information is the same, we should not TRAIN in order to be able to process it, it should come natural.
Click on the following link to read the original article: "Sentire il futuro": esperimenti su precognizione dividono gli scienziati (articolo in italiano).

Voluntary control of brain neurons with our thought: it's possible

Ok, this looks like "another BCIs stuff". I don't think it is...I think it's something more.

With this experiment (click here to read the paper on Nature), leaded by Moran Cerf and funded by Christof Koch e ItzhakFried at Caltech (University of Technology of California), we get some additional information about attentional control, showing how strong the top-down processes are, able even to alter the competition between external images (bottom-up stimuli) and internal ones (mental representations of the same images) making the second ones win even in a disadvantage situation.

After interviewing the subjects on their tastes about actors, musicians, politicians, football teams and so on, Cerf selected 4 between the preferred images for each of the 12 epileptic patiens who participated to the study (to which, since they were undergoing a surgery for diminishing the seizures, because were pharmacological treatments-resistant, some electrodes were surgically implanted directly in the medio temporal lobe, MTL) which aroused the strongest neural activity recorded by the electrodes. With these "best" neuronal-represented images he made the patients train with some BCIs to learn how to make a mouse cursor perform some movements on a computer screen or even play videgames, just by exciting/inhibiting the involved neurons.

The first part of the experiment then, was to make the desired image (let's say, Marilyn Monroe, or Clinton) appear on the screen, just thinking about it. Later, a difficulty was added: a competitive image was merged with the target image (with different percentages of presence of one or the other figure), and the task of the patients was to make the target figure win over the distractor and be the only figure on the screen (for example, an image containing a certain percentage of Marilyn Monroe, or Clinton and another percentage of Michael Jackson, or Bush). Cerf noticed that even when the percentage of the distractor presence on the image was prominent (i.e. more than 50%), the subjects managed to make the target figure be the only represented one, and reports also that they found the task extremely interesting, because they really had the feeling that they could influence the result of what was on the display with their thought.

What Koch then adds about the outcomings of the research

“is the discovery that the part of the brain that stores the instruction ‘think of Clinton’ reaches into the medial temporal lobe and excites the set of neurons responding to Clinton, simultaneously suppressing the population of neurons representing Bush, while leaving the vast majority of cells representing other concepts or familiar person untouched.”

I think that Koch said this because he wants to point out that his 2005 theory was right, that a single neuron can recognize people, landmarks, and objects (like it happens for the place cells, found by O'Keefe and Dostrovsky), so he stresses the fact that in this research is proved that there's not a generalized activation of all the neurons in the MTL, but only the ones "related" to the task.
What I think about this last comment is that I would expect such a thing to happen, since the task was to make Clinton's figure win over Bush's figure, and obviously there's no need for the other populations that represent, let's say, the grandmother of the patient, to participate to the activation/suppression...if there is something that is pretty known is that our brain works in a very economic way, trying to "save" whenever it's possible: so it makes sense that it's not a "generalized" neuronal population's activation against Bush (all the MLT neurons against the Bush ones), but just the few ones that are involved in the task. This, at most, can prove that even few neurons can make a mental representation win the competition against a real, external image, which is perceived through one's eyes, but it doesn't look so outstanding to me to think that the activation is limited to these neurons and leaves untouched the other groups which are not involved in the moment.

Click on the following link to read the original article: Controllare volontariamente i neuroni nel nostro cervello: è possibile (articolo in italiano).

[Source: neurosciencenews.com]

Meditation, psychological well-being promotes cellular longevity by means of telomerase enzyme

The article (read a review here) is about a study promoted by University of California, Davis (UCD), and University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
It maybe opens the way to a series of scientific investigations aimed to the understanding of the biological processes which occur in human body during and following meditation. The scientific paper has been accepted by the Journal Psychoneuroendocrinology (click on the link to read the abstract).

So it could be true that meditating makes our well-being improve. But this happens not for something "magical" or misterious, it could be due to a series of modifications of psychological processes that, by means of the reaching of "mindfulness" states, in turn stimulate the production of an enzyme, naturally present in our body-cells, which ensures them a longer life.

This enzyme, in fact, allows the chromosome to recode more than normal the genic information contained in the DNA by "registering" the information and re-proposing it even after duplicating of the cell. We know that everytime the cell duplicates, it lose some of the genic information contained at its end (telomeres) and when there is no more information, the cell dies because it cannot reproduce anymore. With the telomerase, instead, the enzyme that we are talking about, the telomeres present on the RNA of the chromosomes are enlongated and transcription is always possible, so basically the cell is long-lived.

For the description of the telomerase process, Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak won the medicine Nobel prize in 2009.

Click here to read the orignal article: Meditazione, benessere psicologico e longevità cellulare: merito di un enzima (articolo in Italiano).

Genetic "switch" of depression found

The social cost of depression is impressive: over 100 billion dollars for the 16% of population that every year is victim of this disease.

Now in the Yale University, New Haven (Connecticut), the research group leaded by prof. Duman, isolated this gene, MKP-1, which has the role to promote the depression symptoms in some lab mice when activated. The gene has been first noticed in a greater percentage in dead people to which depression has been diagnosed during their lives with respect to the gene-presence percentage of some healthy people used as controls. Then it has been isolated in mice and activated/deactivated in order to make experiments, and they found that the mice enacted depressive behaviors when the gene was activated. The paper has been published by Nature Medicine.

After reading the paper, I still have a question: how and by means of which mechanisms this "switch" is activated? Is there an event or a series of events which "activate" the gene?? I don't think that all the genetically predisposed people necessarily have to be depressed.

In sum, I guess that also the gene has to be somehow "activated" by something, in order to trigger depressive behaviors by means of the production of these "wrong" proteines, in turn influencing the serotonine reuptaking!!
Of course, the practical outcome of this direction of studies will be (hopefully) the production of a new series of medical drugs which will be able to target directly the gene, limitating the well known problem of those "treatment-resistant patients".

Personally, I'm still in the opinion that there are some top-down ways of de-activate the wrong functioning of the serotonine reuptake triggered by the gene, and that the only usage of pharmacological treatments is pretty useless, since when you stop assuming the medicine, your activated gene is producing the wrong stuff again (unless they don't find a way to definitively deactivate the gene in people's genetic code)...I guess that, if there are some external (or internal) events which "activate" the beginning of the wrong chain process, there is also a way to de-activate it...maybe finding the thing that started everything, or trying to find an alternative way to regulate the process bypassing the main problem, without the necessity to assume drugs.

Click on the link to see the original article: Scoperto “interruttore” genetico della depressione (articolo in italiano).

Localized brain area for the control of impulsive behavior

The investigation has been carried out by a group of researchers in the Queen’s University in Kingston, (Ontario, Canada), leaded by the PhD Scott Hayton. The paper can be found here. They found an increased contribution of AMPA to NMDA receptors at excitatory synapses in the prefrontal cortex during the process of learning how to inhibit some "impulsive" behaviors.
As usual, by "localized" we don't mean that there is a "group of neurons", placed exactly "there", in every brain, which is responsible of that or that process...we know so far that the brain works "in concert", but there are some areas which are "specialized" in the elaboration of some kind of information, which occur usually in some areas and not in others. In particular, the ones in the frontal lobes are the most evolved cortices than humans developed with respect to other species, and scholars tend to describe them as the "centers" for the control and inhibition of "lower" level impulses, which should occur in internal structures in the brain and are associated with "instinctual" behaviors or reactions. They do this by suppressing in a top-down way the activity of the lower level circuits.

It looks extremely interesting to me how the more we study about these things, the more number of questions come to our mind related to the new findings. For example, the origin of these disfunctions is only genetic or it's also necessary a triggering event to unleash the chain reaction which affects the whole system??
And, moreover, which are the mechanisms which "cause" a bad functioning of this system for the control of the impulsive behavior that they found in the study?? They are supposed to be some pharmacological derangements...well, and when do they occur the first time? How are they promoted? From which other processes?
Are they triggered by some specific external behaviors/situations/events (bottom-up), influencing therefore also the top-down processes?? Or could be the "event" also internal, as for example, a specific set of thoughts (so, also top-down processes) which can influence the subsequent way of working of the system?

Click here to read the original article: Localizzata l’area cerebrale per il controllo del comportamento impulsivo (articolo in Italiano).