Month: February 2015

Problematic research that excluded the most influential human epigenetic environments

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Epigenetics ,

This 2014 ivy league human study found that what appeared to be genetic links may have been epigenetic responses to our environment.

Curiously, none of the news articles covering this study highlighted the lack of the most influential environments on epigenetic DNA changes:

  • The mother’s prenatal environment provided for the fetus, and
  • The family environment during infancy and early childhood.

This omission may have been because the study intentionally didn’t support such an interpretation. Here’s a partial explanation from the study’s supplementary material of the “family fixed-effects model” the researchers developed:

“The family fixed-effects model blocks both genetic factors and parental characteristics/behaviors that are common to family members (e.g., siblings), including unmeasured factors; therefore, from the perspective of confounding, the fixed-effect specification is preferred.”

When the preferred model blocked the most important environments in which epigenetic DNA changes occur, what environments remained?

“These results suggest genetic influences on complex traits like obesity can vary over time, presumably because of global environmental changes that modify allelic penetrance.”

Although a finding attributing “global environmental changes” made more funding available to the researchers, it was rightly an outlier from the majority of epigenetic studies.

This finding made me start a negative rating for studies that DETRACT from science!

Why was the reviewer okay with the study’s model omitting the most important factors in human development? The study’s model defined away both the:

  • Out-of-favor genetic factors, and the
  • Predominant but nonpolitically-correct epigenetic factors

in order to manufacture a politically-correct epigenetics meme!

How else to interpret this statement, if not intended to generate a meme?

“Our results underscore the importance of interpreting any genetic studies with a grain of salt and leave open the possibility that new genetic risk factors may be seen in the future due to different genetically driven responses to our ever-changing environment.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/2/354.full “Cohort of birth modifies the association between FTO genotype and BMI”

Measuring the effectiveness of scientific gatekeeping

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work

This 2014 study found that unconventional and groundbreaking research was routinely rejected by medical journals:

“Our research suggests that evaluative strategies that increase the mean quality of published science may also increase the risk of rejecting unconventional or outstanding work.”

The study was also a collateral indication of the degree to which peer reviewers didn’t try to advance science.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/2/360.full “Measuring the effectiveness of scientific gatekeeping”

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Why do researchers title their study the cortex vs. the limbic system or lower brain?

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Brain development, Brainstem, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain, Stress ,

This 2012 review of 89 studies was ostensibly of the prefrontal cortex. The review title showed how researchers characterize their work as studying the cerebrum, even when they primarily deal with the limbic system and lower brains.

For example, the reviewer discussed rodent studies of the developing pup fetus regarding:

  • Sensory/motor – Paternal complex housing, maternal complex housing
  • Stress – Mild stress, bystander stress, moderate stress
  • Psychoactive drugs – Stimulants
  • Adult stimulants – Ethanol

The active brain areas of the rodent fetus are the brainstem and the limbic system, and those areas were primarily what was studied. The cerebrum of the developing pup is a tiny strip that has little cognitive function.

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/Supplement_2/17186.full “Experience and the developing prefrontal cortex”

Maternal depression and antidepressants epigenetically change infant language development

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Brain development, Epigenetics, Neurochemicals, Serotonin , , , , ,

This 2012 human study found that infant language development accelerated when the depressed mother-to-be took antidepressants:

“Language acquisition reflects a complex interplay between biology and early experience.

Psychotropic medication exposure has been shown to alter neural plasticity and shift sensitive periods in perceptual development.”

Infant language development was delayed when the depressed mother-to-be didn’t take serotonin reuptake inhibitor medication:

“Prenatal depressed maternal mood and (S)SRI exposure were found to shift developmental milestones bidirectionally on infant speech perception tasks.”

Contrast this study with Problematic research with telomere length, which pretended that maternal depression had negligible epigenetic effects on the developing fetus, infant, and child.

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/Supplement_2/17221.full “Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception”

Early human brain development can be greatly modified by environmental factors

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Brain development, Brain hemispheres, Epigenetics , , ,

This 2014 Brazilian human study found that the brains of people born without the corpus callosum, the major connection between brain hemispheres, adapted to this loss:

“The authors believe that the development of alternative pathways results from the brain’s ability for long-distance plasticity and occurs in the utero during embryo development, which indicates that connections formed in the human brain early in development can be greatly modified, and most likely by environmental or genetic factors.”

BRAVO! MORE STUDIES LIKE THIS ONE!

People have limited capability to adapt later in life to corpus callosum injuries or to brain hemisphere disconnection.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/21/7843.full “Structural and functional brain rewiring clarifies preserved interhemispheric transfer in humans born without the corpus callosum”

The amygdala is where we integrate our perception of human facial emotion

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Amygdala, Hippocampus, Limbic system ,

We all have specialized brain circuits for recognizing faces.

Each person has their own historical judgment of the emotion in a human face, which may or may not be the emotion objectively displayed by the face.

The amygdala, not the hippocampus, was found to be where we integrate our perception of human facial emotion.

The facial information conveyed by the eyes, not the mouth, was primarily how the amygdala perceived emotion.

This 2014 study was performed on seven neurology patients who had deep-brain electrodes implanted for other purposes of diagnosis or treatment, including epilepsy and autism, and six healthy control subjects. With the electrodes, the researchers were able to measure individual neurons instead of functional MRI aggregate results.

This increased measuring capability enabled the researchers to develop other findings, such as:

“Neuronal selectivity for fear faces in the amygdala comes mainly from a suppression of activity in happy-face trials, whereas selectivity for happy faces is mainly due to an increase in activity for happy-face trials.”

Also:

“The long latency of the amygdala responses we observed already argues for considerable synthesis, consistent with the integration of face input from temporal cortex with signals from other brain regions, as well as substantial processing internal to the amygdala.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/30/E3110.full “Neurons in the human amygdala selective for perceived emotion”

Face-selective neurons maintain consistent visual responses across months

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Brain development, Memory

This 2014 primate study provided additional details on the specialized brain circuits for recognizing faces:

“The current finding that neurons commonly give similar responses upon seeing the same faces months apart raises the possibility that some neurons might respond the same way to the same individual faces over most of the animal’s lifespan.”

But the finding could also have been:

“Another example of a biological system maintaining its complex organization as the constituent components are exchanged.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/22/8251.full “Face-selective neurons maintain consistent visual responses across months”

Both sexes can be skilled child caregivers when we put time and effort into it

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Amygdala, Brain development, Cerebrum, Limbic system

My POV of this 2014 Israeli study’s findings, at the risk of being dragged into the politically-correct quagmire:

  • Mothers (heterosexual primary-caregiving) mainly used areas of their limbic systems to care for children;
  • Fathers (heterosexual secondary-caregiving) mainly used areas of their cerebrums to care for children;
  • Fathers (homosexual primary-caregiving) mainly used both their limbic systems and cerebrums to care for children.

Findings of the “duh” variety:

  • Women have a built-in capacity to care for children before they have children;
  • Men can learn to care for children;
  • Both sexes can be skilled child caregivers when we put time and effort into it.

“Although only mothers experience pregnancy, birth, and lactation, and these provide powerful primers for the expression of maternal care via amygdala sensitization, evolution created other pathways for adaptation to the parental role in human fathers, and these alternative pathways come with practice, attunement, and day-by-day caregiving.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/27/9792.full “Father’s brain is sensitive to childcare experiences”

Problematic research: If you don’t feel empathy for a patient, is the solution to fake it?

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Beliefs, Cerebrum, Hippocampus, Limbic system, Memory, Primal Therapy , , , ,

If you don’t experience empathy for another person, this 2014 Harvard study showed how to use your cerebrum to manipulate your limbic system into displaying a proxy of empathy.

Is this what we want from our human interactions? To have a way to produce an emotion the same way that an actor would as they read their lines?

How to finesse the effect of “no empathy” was the focus. Because these researchers didn’t define a lack of genuine empathy as a symptom of a fundamental problem, they absolved themselves from investigating any underlying causes.

Nice trick in the academic world.

In the real world, in which we are feeling human beings, what may be a cause of no empathy?

Let’s say that someone is in a position that helps people. They have daily encounters where they may be expected to be empathetic, but they seldom have these feelings for others.

One hypothesis of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy is this condition’s origin may be that in the past, a person needed help as a matter of survival, and they weren’t helped. Their unconscious memories of being helpless impel them to act out being helpful in their current life.

This person’s frequent reaction to any hint in the present of the agony of not receiving help back when they desperately needed it is to act out what they needed to have done back then. Helping others also gives them momentary distraction from such painful memories, but any relief is transitory. So they repeat the process.

Let’s say that unconscious needs pressed them into making a career choice of actively helping people. They’re usually too caught up in their own thoughts and feelings and behavior, though, to sense feelings of the people they’re helping.

Something isn’t right, but what’s the problem? They see indicators such as: their actions that should feel fulfilling aren’t fulfilling, they seldom feel empathy, and so on.

Primal Therapy allows patients to therapeutically address origins of such conditions. A symptom such as lack of empathy for others will resolve as historical pains are ameliorated.

Or we can do as this study suggested: produce an inauthentic display – and thereby ignore the lack of empathy as a symptom – and never address causes of no empathy.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/12/4415.full “Episodic simulation and episodic memory can increase intentions to help others”

Problematic research on hardwired differences in human male and female brains

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Brain development, Brain hemispheres, Epigenetics

At the risk of wading into a quagmire, it’s hard to take this 2013 Pennsylvania study’s findings seriously, that there were new and significant hardwired differences in human male and female brains in addition to what we already knew. The authors didn’t explain all the factors involved in why they found what they did.

For example, can we raise kids in our culture along typical gender roles and biases, then at ages 12-14, say that the differences in their brains are solely due to their genders? To do so would be to ignore what’s known about epigenetic and environmental influences in shaping the brain.

Here’s an ancient (2011), 90-minute, poor-quality-of-science panel discussion of the subject that included the author of Is the purpose of research to define opportunities for interventions?

Kevin Mitchell had the last word in his 2017 post Debunking the male-female brain mosaic where he both exposed this and other conceptual fallacies, and explained how framing and data cherry-picking can mislead accurate analysis. Feel free to apply what he said to the above video and to the below study.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/2/823.full “Sex differences in the structural connectome of the human brain”

We feel anxious even when making a choice from multiple good options

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain

This 2014 Harvard/Princeton research studied brain areas as people made choices among multiple good options:

“Our results show that choice conflict can at least lead to substantial short-term anxiety, that this anxiety increases with the number and value of one’s options (potentially enhanced by time pressure), and that it is not attenuated by awareness of the objectively negligible costs of a “bad” choice.”

There was a problem with the way the researchers evaluated “positive feelings” through the subjects’ computerized self-reporting. The subjects’ cerebral assessments of “positive feelings” didn’t match their limbic system functional MRI measurements.

These discrepancies showed that what the subjects assessed weren’t emotions originating from their limbic system or lower brains. “Positive feelings” were, instead, constructs of the subjects’ cerebrums.

“This is what I think I should be feeling” may have been a more appropriate characterization of the subjects’ assessments.

The study had better accuracy when fMRI measurements showed that limbic system areas were more activated in people who self-reported feeling more conflicted at the time they made their choice. The conflicted subjects were also more likely than subjects whose limbic system areas weren’t similarly activated, to reverse their choice when given the opportunity.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/30/10978.full “Neural correlates of dueling affective reactions to win–win choices”

Problematic research on human happiness

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Beliefs, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain

This 2014 UK study provided an example of researchers inappropriately ignoring the limbic system and lower brains when allegedly researching emotions. Only cerebral areas were measured and considered in the researchers’ efforts to measure the subjects’ happiness.

Efforts to determine emotions by cerebral measurements seldom reveal what people actually feel. What’s measured is a construct of people’s cerebrums – a proxy for their emotions – that may not have anything to do with what people actually feel at the time.

It may have been more appropriate to characterize the subjects’ self-reports of happiness as “This is what I think I should tell the researchers about what I think I should feel.”

What we think we should feel is separate from what we actually feel. Limbic system and lower brain measurements need to be taken and considered when subjects self-report degrees of happiness if the researchers intend to draw conclusions about feelings of happiness.

“We show that emotional reactivity in the form of momentary happiness in response to outcomes of a probabilistic reward task is explained not by current task earnings, but by the combined influence of recent reward expectations and prediction errors arising from those expectations.”

It was the researchers’ cerebral exercise of expectations and prediction errors to find:

“Moment-to-moment happiness reflects not just how well things are going, but whether things are going better than expected.”

Informed by the Using expectations of oxytocin to induce positive placebo effects of touching is a cerebral exercise study, I consider the current study to be one big demonstration of how researchers can be fooled by a positive placebo effect!

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/33/12252.full “A computational and neural model of momentary subjective well-being”

Reciprocity behaviors differ as to whether we seek cerebral vs. limbic system rewards

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Cerebrum, Limbic system , ,

This 2014 Japanese human study showed which brain areas were involved in indirect reciprocity. It was mainly cerebral areas that were active in:

“Reputation-based reciprocity, in which they help others with good reputations to gain good reputations themselves.”

Previous studies found much the same with direct reciprocity, where an individual was reimbursed by someone who directly owed them a debt of cooperation.

It was mainly limbic system areas that were active in:

“Pay-it-forward reciprocity, in which, independently of reputations, they help others after being helped by someone else.”

The researchers compared and contrasted self-interested behaviors of:

  • direct reciprocity and
  • reputation-based reciprocity,

both of which sought rewards in the cerebrum, with empathetic behaviors of:

  • pay-it-forward reciprocity,

where the subjects sought emotional rewards in the limbic system.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/11/3990.full “Two distinct neural mechanisms underlying indirect reciprocity”

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Want empathy from your therapist? Don’t give a scientific explanation of your condition

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain

This 2014 Yale study found that providing scientific explanations of patients’ conditions actually REDUCED an important part of what patients may need from therapists – empathy.

That finding summed up the malaise throughout the current dog-and-pony-show approaches in psychotherapy, where:

  • Efforts to treat symptoms are maximized, and approaches to treat causes are minimized;
  • The therapist is in charge, not the patient;
  • The cerebrum is the all-in-all, while the limbic system and instinctual parts of the patient’s brain that drive behavior are suppressed.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/50/17786.full “Effects of biological explanations for mental disorders on clinicians’ empathy”

Our early experiences are maintained and unconsciously influence us for years, if not indefinitely

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Brain development, Brain hemispheres, Memory , , , ,

This 2014 Montreal study provided more evidence of critical periods during human development:

“Clearly illustrates that early acquired information is maintained in the brain and that early experiences unconsciously influence neural processing for years, if not indefinitely.

We show that internationally adopted children (aged 9–17 years) from China, exposed exclusively to French since adoption (mean age of adoption, 12.8 mo), maintained neural representations of their birth language despite functionally losing that language and having no conscious recollection of it.

We show that neural representations are not overwritten and suggest a special status for language input obtained during the first year of development.”

YES! GIVE US MORE STUDIES LIKE THIS ONE!

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/48/17314.full “Mapping the unconscious maintenance of a lost first language”