Author: gettingwell4

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”

This post has somehow become a target for spammers, and I’ve disabled comments. Readers can comment on other posts and indicate that they want their comment to apply here, and I’ll re-enable comments.

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”

Chronic stress changes the architecture of the hippocampus, leading to depression and cognitive impairment

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Brain development, Cortisol, Epigenetics, Hippocampus, Limbic system, Memory, Neurochemicals, Stress ,

This 2014 rodent study gave further details that:

“Chronic stress, which can precipitate depression, induces changes in the architecture and plasticity of apical dendrites that are particularly evident in the CA3 region of the hippocampus.”

Other studies on the hippocampus CA3 region include:

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/45/16130.full “Role for NUP62 depletion and PYK2 redistribution in dendritic retraction resulting from chronic stress”

The same brain areas are used for spontaneous and rehearsed speech

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Brain hemispheres, Primal Therapy

This 2014 human study found:

“..(brain) areas that respond reliably during spontaneous and rehearsed speech production of the same real-world story are the same.”

This finding highlighted the difficulty a therapist or researcher may encounter in objectively determining another person’s reality.

If the listener relied solely on words and speech, they may not be able to tell whether what’s heard was a planned narrative or if the speech had some other origin. That’s why in Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy, for example, the therapist is trained to look beyond the patient’s words to ascertain the feeling being expressed.

Also:

“Production of a real-life narrative is not localized to the left hemisphere but recruits an extensive bilateral network.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/43/E4687.full “Coupled neural systems underlie the production and comprehension of naturalistic narrative speech”

Non-PC alert: Treating the mother’s obesity symptoms positively affects the post-surgery offspring

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Epigenetics , ,

This 2013 Quebec human epigenetic study found that DNA methylation – chemical modification that causes genes to express differently – as durably detectable between siblings born before and after their mother’s gastric bypass surgery.

The younger, post-maternal-surgery siblings were found to have DNA indicating reduced risks of developing diabetes and heart disease when compared with the DNA of their older, pre-maternal-surgery siblings. The mothers’ average weight loss was 103 lbs.

It was notable to see this famous research reference cited:

“Prenatal exposure to famine during the Dutch hunger winter of 1944 is associated with obesity with less DNA methylation (“undermethylation”) of the imprinted insulin-like growth factor 2 (IGF2) gene in exposed offspring relative to their unexposed siblings.”

It was also notable to see the reactions to this non-politically-correct finding. For one example, this news article was in full-fledged denial, stating:

“Nor do investigators know whether a father’s weight loss might have a similar impact. It’s also possible that epigenetic inheritance wasn’t at play.”

Other news coverage expressed the memes that:

  • Pregnant women can abuse anything and everything with impunity without any consequent damage to their fetus, and
  • There wasn’t the tiniest chance that the mother was involved in any of their child’s adverse outcomes. When the child’s diverted developmental and behavioral consequences manifested, political correctness would dictate that these arose out of some unknown factors.

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/28/11439.full “Differential methylation in glucoregulatory genes of offspring born before vs. after maternal gastrointestinal bypass surgery”

Improvements in tracking and predicting single cell epigenetic changes during embryonic development

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Brain development, Epigenetics, Immune system

This 2014 Harvard rodent study demonstrated improvements in tracking and predicting how, during embryonic development, a cell’s environment epigenetically changed the cell’s genetic expression. The researchers stated applicability to human B-cell development in the immune system.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/52/E5643.full “Bifurcation analysis of single-cell gene expression data reveals epigenetic landscape”

Treating the father’s symptoms of an inherited disease can epigenetically treat the son

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

This 2014 La Jolla rodent study showed that treating the symptoms of an inherited disease can, through epigenetic DNA methylation, positively treat the symptoms in the subjects’ offspring.

The disease studied was Huntington’s, which is the most common inherited neurodegenerative disease:

  • The treatment induced epigenetic changes in the expression of genes on the male Y chromosome.
  • The treated male subjects were bred, and their sperm carried both the Huntington’s disease and the epigenetic changes that reduced the symptoms.
  • The male offspring showed both delayed onsets of Huntington’s disease and reductions of specific symptoms when compared with both the treated subjects’ female offspring and the control group non-treated subjects’ male offspring.

Per the definitions in A review of epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of reproductive disease and Transgenerational effects of early environmental insults on aging and disease, for the term in the study’s title “transgenerational effects” to apply, the researchers needed to provide evidence in at least the next 2 male and/or 3 female generations of:

“Altered epigenetic information between generations in the absence of continued environmental exposure.”

The study instead provided evidence for intergenerational effects.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/1/E56.full “HDAC inhibition imparts beneficial transgenerational effects in Huntington’s disease mice via altered DNA and histone methylation”

Activation of brainstem neurons induces REM sleep

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Acetylcholine, Brainstem, Lower brain, Neurochemicals

This 2014 MIT/Harvard rodent study provided evidence that specific brainstem neurons (cholinergic, or containing acetylcholine) regulated dream sleep.

The researchers used a more exact technique that selectively activated just one neuron. They made the neurons in this study sensitive to light using an algae protein that responded to a specific light frequency. Once expressed in the neuron, the protein activated the neuron when that specific frequency of light was shown onto it.

“Interestingly, both manipulations resulted in a change in the number of REM [rapid eye movement] sleep episodes and did not change REM sleep episode duration, suggesting that the PPT [pedunculopontine tegmentumis part of the brainstem] involved in REM sleep initiation but not REM sleep maintenance.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/2/584.full “Optogenetic activation of cholinergic neurons in the PPT or LDT induces REM sleep”

The brainstem nucleus locus coeruleus is the primary source of norepinephrine

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Brainstem, Cerebrum, Cortisol, Locus coeruleus, Lower brain, Neurochemicals

This 2014 rodent study provided further information on the locus coeruleus segment of the brainstem:

“The brainstem nucleus locus coeruleus is the primary source of norepinephrine to the mammalian neocortex.

Neurons in the locus coeruleus maintain segregated connections to brain regions with distinctly different functions. Specifically, cells that communicate with the prefrontal cortex, a region involved in cognition and executive function, are characterized by properties that allow for independent and asynchronous modulation of operations in this area, compared with those that project to the motor cortex and regulate movement generation.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6816.full “Heterogeneous organization of the locus coeruleus projections to prefrontal and motor cortices”