Cerebrum

Do strong emotions cause our brain hemispheres to interact more closely?

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Brain hemispheres, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Memory, Primal Therapy , ,

This 2015 human/macaque study found:

“The functional coordination between the two hemispheres of the brain is maintained by strong and stable interactions.

These findings suggest a notable role for the corpus callosum in maintaining stable functional communication between hemispheres.”

The human subjects were asked to:

“Generate four negative autobiographical memories and create word cues that reminded them of each event. Participants then underwent a 6-min IR fMRI scan during which they were cued with the words they had created to recall the two most negative autobiographic memories generated outside the scanner.”

However, the study’s supplementary material didn’t address why the researchers used this particular technique.

Does recalling strong emotional memories that engage our limbic systems cause our brain hemispheres to interact more closely than do cerebral exercises?

This study demonstrated that including emotional content in brain studies was essential. It may have provided additional information had the researchers also used the two least-negative emotional memories.

As noted in Agenda-driven research on emotional memories, one hypothesis of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy is that recalling an emotional memory engages one’s brain differently than does re-experiencing an emotional memory. Asking the subjects to attempt to re-experience the two least-negative emotional memories may have provided data relevant to the study.

I didn’t understand why macaques were used as subjects. The researchers didn’t provide any tasks for the monkeys during the scans. The information this study gained only duplicated other studies.

Also, the monkeys were anesthetized throughout the experiments. An assumption that wasn’t addressed: fMRI scan data on anesthetized macaques provided comparable evidence to fMRI scan data on normal non-anesthetized humans who were recalling emotional memories?

Did the researchers use macaques simply because they were available?

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/20/6473.full “Stable long-range interhemispheric coordination is supported by direct anatomical projections”

Do popular science memes justify researchers’ cruelties to monkeys?

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Anterior cingulate cortex, Cerebrum, Limbic system

This 2015 Oxford study of 38 humans and 25 macaques drew correlations of brain activities between the two species. The study title included buzzwords such as “reward” and “decision making” and the study focused on the ever-popular “frontal cortex.”

Humans and macaques are separated by 25 million years of evolutionary adaptations and developments. Studies done with macaque subjects don’t automatically have human applicability.

Was a major reason for the study’s comparisons to provide justifications for keeping macaques as study subjects? Accepting these justifications and going along with the popular memes would ease the way for whatever cruelties researchers want to inflict on our primate relatives.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/20/E2695.full “Connectivity reveals relationship of brain areas for reward-guided learning and decision making in human and monkey frontal cortex”

Do our unique visual perceptions arise from brain structural differences?

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

This 2014 UK/German human study involved fMRI scans of the subjects inferior temporal cortex while viewing images:

“Brain representational idiosyncrasies accessible to fMRI are expressed in an individual’s perceptual judgments.

We found evidence for an individually unique representation predictive of perceptual idiosyncrasies in hIT [human inferior temporal cortex] (but not in early visual areas) and for personally meaningful (but not for unfamiliar) objects.”

Citing other studies, the researchers said:

“The size of primary visual cortex varies across individuals by a factor of about 2.5.

Although other areas might vary by smaller factors, many parts of the brain, including cortical and subcortical structures, show gross anatomical variation across individuals that is predictive of cognitive and behavioral differences.”

The researchers asserted:

“Functional differences as reported here ultimately must arise from differences in the physical structure of each individual brain.”

However, no evidence was provided for this assertion.

The researchers acknowledged this lack of evidence, but in a way that required further evidence:

“Our study demonstrates individual differences in high-level semantic representations but cannot address their structural basis. Our current interpretation is that the representational idiosyncrasies might arise from the microstructural plasticity of cortex, which is driven by individual experience.”

The researchers’ assertion beyond the study’s supporting data was at best a statement of their goal. Further, their bias to focus on the inferior temporal cortex area of the cerebrum led them to not investigate other areas of the brain that may have been involved with the “personally meaningful (but not for unfamiliar) objects” finding, such as the subjects’ limbic systems.

I hope that researchers won’t think that their research is complete when they reach their goal of finding “differences in the physical structure of each individual brain.” It would be far more informative to understand the causes for these effects.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/40/14565.full “Unique semantic space in the brain of each beholder predicts perceived similarity”

People who donated a kidney to a stranger have a larger amygdala

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

This 2014 Georgetown study was of people who had donated a kidney to a stranger. The study found that the subjects had a larger right amygdala part of their limbic systems:

“Our results support the possibility of a neural basis for extraordinary altruism.

In sum, our findings suggest that individuals who have performed an act of extraordinary altruism can be distinguished from healthy controls by increased right amygdala volume, as well as heightened responsiveness in right amygdala to fearful facial expressions, which may support enhanced recognition of these expressions.”

The researchers stopped short of causal explanations. They stated in the study’s abstract that:

“Individual variation in altruistic tendencies may be genetically mediated”

but didn’t develop any evidence to support this statement.

It would have been within the scope of the study had the researchers continued on to examine:

  • What may have happened in the subjects’ lives to possibly cause their neurobiological and psychological attributes?
  • What were the causes for the subjects’ extreme altruistic behavior?
  • Were these the same causes for their larger, more sensitive amygdala?

An accompanying PNAS commentary from a Harvard researcher made other points. However, the author showed his biases that the cerebrum rules human behavior with an out-of-left-field question at the end of a paragraph in which he developed specious reasoning.

The commentator was completely off base when he stated:

“Could it be that extraordinary altruists such as Maupin [a study participant] and the 19 individuals studied by Marsh et al. [the researchers] are special, not only because of how they feel when they see people in distress, but because of how they think?”

I don’t imagine that the brilliant commentator’s attempt to upstage the study’s subjects and put the spotlight on himself for some brilliant idea was much appreciated by anyone involved.

The amygdala is the central hub of a person’s limbic system. The study’s findings had very little to say about the subjects’ cerebral activity – thinking.

To postulate that the researchers missed that there was something different about the subjects’ thinking was out of touch with the realities of both the researchers’ scientific bases and the subjects. It’s another example of the current research mindset/social meme of cerebral dominance.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15036.full “Neural and cognitive characteristics of extraordinary altruists”

What causes disconnection between the limbic system and the cerebrum?

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Cerebrum, Dopamine, Glutamate, Hippocampus, Limbic system, Memory, Neurochemicals

This 2014 Swedish human study with 339 subjects aged 25-80 years old found that as the subjects’ age increased, their hippocampus became less connected to their cerebrums:

“Age-related cortico–hippocampal functional connectivity disruption leads to a more functionally isolated hippocampus at rest, which translates into aberrant hippocampal decoupling and deficits in active mnemonic processing.”

The lead researcher said:

“What we can now show is that memory problems that come with increased age are most likely due to a process where the interaction among different regions of the hippocampus increases in response to less inhibitory cortical input. This in turn means that the hippocampus risks being more isolated from other important networks in the brain which impacts our ability to actively engage the hippocampus, for example to remember different events.”

Like other researchers commonly do, they excluded emotional content from the study. See another Swedish study Emotional memories and out-of-body–induced hippocampal amnesia as an example of why emotional memories are necessary in order to properly study the hippocampus.

1) As a result of excluding emotional content and other aspects of the study’ design such as using 25 as the beginning age of the subjects, all the researchers could muster as a explanatory factor was age. However, they had to couch their findings as “age-related” because age in and of itself wasn’t a causal explanation for the observed effects.

2) The findings weren’t even truly “age-related”  because, for example, the study didn’t necessarily apply to people below the age of 25. Had the study included 10-18 year old subjects, the researchers may have found that “less inhibitory cortical input” may also be present before puberty, as The prefrontal cortex develops more repressive function at puberty study indicated.

3) Had the study design included neurochemicals, the researchers may have found that “cortico–hippocampal functional connectivity disruption” was due to factors that influenced dopamine and glutamate levels, as A mechanistic study of neurotransmitters in the hippocampus indicated.

4) A finding that “cortico–hippocampal functional connectivity disruption” was influenced by other factors may also have been made had the study design included the subjects’ histories. Per my Welcome page, the findings of much of the recent research I’ve curated on this blog, and the references in those studies show that when basic needs aren’t met, especially early in people’s lives, and the painful conditions persist, enduring physiological changes may occur.

5) What the researchers noted in the study’s limitation paragraph were references to fMRI scans rather than limitations such as those mentioned above regarding the study design. The study provided unconvincing evidence for causes of “cortico–hippocampal functional connectivity disruption” and it wasn’t because of fMRI limitations.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/49/17654.full “Elevated hippocampal resting-state connectivity underlies deficient neurocognitive function in aging”

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Kids who have a larger and better-connected hippocampus learn math better when tutored

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Brain development, Cerebrum, Hippocampus, Limbic system, Memory, Thalamus ,

This 2013 Stanford study of 24 eight- and nine-year-old children found that measurements of limbic system areas predicted how well the 11 boys and 13 girls would respond to 8 weeks of one-on-one math tutoring!

“Pretutoring hippocampal volume predicted performance improvements. Furthermore, pretutoring intrinsic functional connectivity of the hippocampus with dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices and the basal ganglia also predicted performance improvements.

Brain regions associated with learning and memory, and not regions typically involved in arithmetic processing, are strong predictors of responsiveness to math tutoring in children. More generally, our study suggests that quantitative measures of brain structure and intrinsic brain organization can provide a more sensitive marker of skill acquisition than behavioral measures.”

None of the assessments, such as IQ and working memory tests, predicted how much benefit a child would receive from one-on-one math tutoring. The 16 children in the control group who didn’t receive one-on-one math tutoring didn’t improve their math performance over the 8-week period. Adults use different brain areas when solving math problems.

Much of the news coverage was from vested interests who dismissed the findings. A typical headline was “Your child’s brain on math: Don’t bother?”

The No Child Left Behind people were concerned that science could predict that some children were better suited to math tutoring than others. Psychiatrists and psychologists responded with general dismissals like small sample size, and the journalist let that stand without asking them how they disagreed with any of the specific P-, T- and other values found in the study’s supplementary material.

The researchers were careful to invoke a politically-correct meme of “individual differences“ 19 times, including the study’s title!

“Individual differences” isn’t a causal explanation, however. The journalist whiffed and also gave a pass to the researchers on this uninformative-but-PC meme.

It certainly would have been within the scope of this study for the researchers to inquire further into causes for the findings. It possibly could have informed us of causal factors had the children’s test battery included emotional content, as did the subjects in the Early emotional experiences change our brains: Childhood maltreatment is associated with reduced volume in the hippocampus study.

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/20/8230.full “Neural predictors of individual differences in response to math tutoring in primary-grade school children”

The critical period for some aspects of human sight can be extended past childhood

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

This 2013 human study provided further details of critical periods in human development. The study subjects were:

“11 children enrolled in a humanitarian and scientific effort in India that provides corrective surgery to children with treatable cataracts and subsequently studies their visual abilities.”

The researchers found:

“The human visual system can retain plasticity beyond critical periods, even after early and extended blindness.

We define “early-onset” blindness as occurring before 1 y of age. We define “extended” blindness as lasting at least until early childhood, when many visual abilities in normally developing children reach adult levels. Contrast sensitivity in particular develops until approximately age 7 in normally sighted humans.

Of the 11 children, five had no discernible improvement, whereas one child’s vision grew worse, probably because of post-surgical complications. Five of the patients showed remarkable enhancement, however, and of these, an 11-year-old and a 15-year-old showed 30-fold improvement in contrast sensitivity.

“The visual brain can be plastic for longer than we originally thought,” concludes Kalia. “Many of the kids dramatically improve their quality of life.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/5/2035.full “Development of pattern vision following early and extended blindness”

The prefrontal cortex develops more repressive function at puberty

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Brain development, Cerebrum, Primal Therapy , ,

This 2014 primate study found:

“The average magnitude of functional connections measured between neurons was lower overall in the prefrontal cortex of peripubertal [age when puberty starts] monkeys compared with adults. The difference resulted because negative functional connections (indicative of inhibitory interactions) were stronger and more prevalent in peripubertal compared with adult monkeys.”

The researchers found more inhibitory functional connections at the onset of puberty than during adulthood. This repressive functionality presumably develops at puberty because that’s when it’s relatively more needed:

“The bias toward increased inhibitory connectivity we report here for young monkeys might also be an intrinsic feature of human prefrontal cortex at a comparable stage of development.”

One hypothesis of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy is that repression is an important function that the prefrontal cortex evolved.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/10/3853.full “Age-dependent changes in prefrontal intrinsic connectivity”

Agenda-driven research on emotional memories

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain, Memory, Primal Therapy , , ,

I curated this 2013 study because one of the authors has made a career out of denying that people accurately remember and re-experience emotional memories. I’ll show how this viewpoint created problems with the study.

For background, one relevant hypothesis of Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy is that there are differences in the levels of consciousness of: (1) an emotional memory; (2) the recall of an emotional memory; and (3) a verbal description of the recall of an emotional memory.

  1. The retrieval and re-experiencing of an emotional memory can engage our lower-level brain areas without our higher-level brain areas’ participation.
  2. The recall of 1 above is a product of our cerebrum in response to input from limbic system and lower brain areas.
  3. The verbal description of 2 above is a product of our brain’s language areas in response to input from the cerebral areas that recalled the emotional memory.

Clinical principles of Primal Therapy that follow are:

  • A patient won’t re-experience an emotional memory when they only just recall it.
  • It’s another level of consciousness even further removed from an emotional memory when someone describes their recall of the memory.

The researchers asserted that they studied emotional memories in one part of this study. Their method was to ask the subjects to recall and verbally describe the emotions they felt the week after 9/11/2001.

The researchers introduced factors to try to confuse the subjects about their recall of their emotions, and their verbal descriptions of their recall. The researchers were very sure that confusing the subjects’ cerebral recalls and descriptions produced evidence that the subjects’ emotional memories were changed and falsified.

Can you see how far removed the researchers were from studying emotional memories? They didn’t demonstrate that they understood how emotional memories were stored because they didn’t attempt to engage the subjects’ limbic system and lower brain areas.

Let’s illustrate the study’s inappropriate characterizations with an example. I burned my left index fingertip last week while toasting bread on an infrared oven grill. The pain is still stored with my emotional memory, and is probably why my memory is very clear.

I can recall the visual details of the grill, how my fingertip looked, the pain I initially felt, and the relief I felt when I held my finger under running cold water. I can retrieve and re-experience my emotional memory in a calm environment such as lying in bed with no aural or visual distractions.

Let’s imagine that the researchers analogously studied my burned fingertip accident. They would deny that I can accurately retrieve and re-experience my emotional memory of the accident if they could create problems with my verbal descriptions of my recall. For example, if I initially said that I pushed the kitchen faucet handle all the way in the cold direction, then after repeated questioning, I said that I wasn’t sure that the handle was pushed all the way over to Cold.

The researchers intentionally conflated the falsifiability of emotional memories with a strawman definition of false emotional memories.

They purposely misidentified both:

  • The subjects’ recalls of post-9/11 emotions; and
  • The subjects’ descriptions of their recalls

as emotional memories.

The study was designed to be lawyering, not science. The researchers DETRACTED from science.

Maybe their purposeful error could be overlooked if it was confined to this study. But it isn’t.

Imagine the damage this viewpoint creates when mental health professionals deny the reality of their patients’ feelings, experiences, and emotional memories!

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/52/20947.full “False memories in highly superior autobiographical memory individuals”

Who benefits when research promotes a meme of self-sacrifice?

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Cerebrum, Limbic system, Lower brain

The main purpose of this 2014 Illinois human study was to make findings directed toward high school students that:

“Well-being may depend on attending to higher values related to family, culture, and morality, rather than to immediate, selfish pleasure.”

The study’s messages to young people and to those who control young people were:

  • You have to give up trying to live your own life if you want to be happy.
  • For your own “well-being” just follow the “higher values” where other people tell you what to do and think.
  • Other people know how you should live your life better than you do. Science says so.

The researchers embedded many assertions into the study, most of which weren’t supported by the study’s data. The researchers’ main assertion was:

“Optimal well-being may be achieved through eudaimonic activities.”

The researchers repeated this assertion multiple times in multiple ways, such as citing philosophy and other research. The short version of the term “eudaimonic” was defined as: “Meaning and purpose, a life well-lived.”

The study’s ONLY measurement of “eudaimonic” activities was the subjects’

“Neural activation when making a donation to the family that involves self-sacrifice.”

The study’s main finding involving this SOLE measurement was:

“Eudaimonic decisions predicted longitudinal declines in depressive symptoms.”

Depressive symptoms were determined by “a self-report measure” where the subjects, 47 adolescents aged 15-17:

  • “Completed the internalizing symptoms subscale of the Youth Self-Report form of the Child Behavior Checklist
  • Underwent a brain scan during which they completed a family donation task and a risk-taking task.”

39 of the subjects returned one year later to reanswer the checklist.

I wonder what bases the reviewer used to approve the researchers’ methods.

1. In the study’s verbiage the researchers extrapolated the significance of the sole measurement of eudaimonic activities – the initial fMRI scan – many times past what it actually measured. One-time measurements of the blood flow in the ventral striatum of a few Los Angeles teenagers can’t validly be assigned as the bases for all of what the researchers went on and on about to glorify “prosocial eudaimonic decisions.”

2. No method checked the subjects’ personal impact of the experiments’ monetary rewards and donations. The subjects didn’t scale their personal relative importance of the monetary rewards and donations.

Consider the relative importance of a dime for a kid whose parents gave them a BMW to drive to high school. Compare that with a kid who searched the sidewalk for dropped coins as they walked to high school.

Absent subjective scaling, the monetary rewards and donations data couldn’t be used as the basis to produce informative results.

3. The balloon test used in this study to measure “risky hedonic decisions” was the same as in the Who benefits when research with no practical application becomes a politically correct meme? study. The same objection applies here: a video game task of popping balloons that engages the cerebrum was NOT informative to the cause-and-effect of the emotions and instincts and impulses from limbic system and lower brain areas that predominantly drive risky behavior.

Scientific justification for memes like the self-sacrifice promoted by this study helps rush people past what really happened in their lives. A popular cultural meme is to “live in the present” and purposefully overlook how we arrived at our present lives.

I wonder how we would evaluate the “higher values related to family, culture, and morality” if we felt and honestly understood our real history.

Do you feel that young people benefit when they sacrifice their lives in the name of “family, culture, and morality?” Who benefits when people don’t pause to reflect on how their history impacts what’s going on now with their lives?

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6600.full “Neural sensitivity to eudaimonic and hedonic rewards differentially predict adolescent depressive symptoms over time”

Problematic research on suppressing unwanted memories

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Brain hemispheres, Cerebrum, Hippocampus, Limbic system, Memory , , ,

This 2014 French/UK human study found:

“Motivated forgetting mechanisms, known to disrupt conscious retention, also reduce unconscious expressions of memory, pointing to a neurobiological model of this process.”

There were multiple problems with this study.

1. The researchers excluded emotional content, although the study involved areas of the brain involved in processing emotions:

roi

How could the study’s findings apply to:

“The distressing intrusions that accompany posttraumatic stress disorder“

when emotional memories were excluded? It was an unsupported assertion for one of the researchers to state:

“The better understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying this process arising from this study may help to better explain differences in how well people adapt to intrusive memories after a trauma.”

2. The term “unconscious” was used 27 times, including in the title, without defining it. The cited studies defined “unconscious” several meaningfully different ways. How could the findings achieve validity when they contained an undefined term?

3. The experiments involved short-term memories and visual perception, and the subjects took longer to visually perceive objects that they had been directed to suppress than those that they had been directed to think about. However, the researchers didn’t show that these experimental results could be extrapolated into findings about long-term unconscious memories.

4. Data manipulation:

  • The researchers noted:

    “We did not observe less hippocampal activation during no-think than think trials.”

  • This data didn’t fit what they wanted to find, so they:

    “Restricted the search volume to anatomically defined regions of interest.”

  • They still couldn’t make their predetermined finding, so they discarded:

    “An outlier which compromised the significance of this effect.”

The above process didn’t support the statement that immediately followed:

“Thus, suppression robustly engaged the brain regions associated with memory control, and this was accompanied by reduced activation in the hippocampus.”

Didn’t the reviewer have something to say about these four problem areas?

It was a letdown to read the details of the study when its title held out such promise for informing us about the unconscious influence of memories. Per the Scientific evidence page, it would really help a person as a first step to become somewhat aware of their unconscious memories and feelings, especially when these are expressed through behavior.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/13/E1310.full “Suppressing unwanted memories reduces their unconscious influence via targeted cortical inhibition”

Do you know a stranger’s emotional motivations for smiling?

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Beliefs, Cerebrum

The premise of this combination of two studies was:

“Emotional understanding is the central problem of human interaction.”

The researchers reanalyzed a 2008 study’s data, supplemented it with their own 2015 study, and found:

“Social-historical factors..explain cross-cultural variation in emotional expression and smile behavior.

We also report an original study of the underlying states that people believe [my emphasis] are signified by a smile.”

The researchers presented the subjects with a survey that asked them to rate 15 possible reasons for a person to smile at them on a seven-point scale of -3 to +3 for disagreeing/agreeing.

The research methodology didn’t take the additional necessary steps of establishing paired experiments that included presenting a similar survey to a control group of subjects to self-report their emotional motivations for smiling, and then processing the two surveys.

Did the study’s reviewer have anything to say about this lack of validation of the subjects’ beliefs to any factual measurements of a stranger’s corresponding “emotional expression and smile behavior?”

This combination of studies didn’t inform us about the “emotional understanding is the central problem of human interaction” premise. The researchers only provided evidence that the subjects’ cultures were one of many causal factors for the subjects’ beliefs about a hypothetical stranger’s smiling behavior.

The combined studies didn’t contain any emotional content to establish experimental conditions toward the goal of “emotional understanding.” No emotions were involved, for example, when a subject rated “strongly agree” to the “Wants you to like them” reason on a survey for a hypothetical stranger’s smiling behavior.

The studies didn’t show that the subjects rating their beliefs contributed to their real “emotional understanding.” Including emotional content, such as experimentally evoking an actual emotion in response to an actual stranger smiling, possibly could have contributed to real “emotional understanding.”

Research that strips out emotional content can’t factually provide evidence for real “emotional expression and smile behavior.” The degrees to which beliefs about and perceptions of a stranger’s smiling actually match their emotional reality remain to be shown.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/19/E2429.full “Heterogeneity of long-history migration explains cultural differences in reports of emotional expressivity and the functions of smiles”

Can a Romanian orphan give informed consent to be an experimental subject?

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Amygdala, Brain development, Cerebrum, Cortisol, Hypothalamus, Limbic system, Neurochemicals, Stress , ,

This 2015 study used Romanian orphans as lab rats for findings of which I failed to see the value. The world didn’t really need any further research to demonstrate that foster care would be better for a child than staying in an orphanage.

The researchers placed the orphans in five separate stressful situations, and measured their cortisol and DHEA-S levels, along with their electrocardiograph and impedance cardiograph activity. The findings were:

“Children who were removed from the Romanian institutions and placed with foster parents before the age of 24 months had stress system responses similar to those of children being raised by families in the community.

The children raised in institutions showed blunted responses in the sympathetic nervous system, associated with the flight or fight response, and in the HPA axis, which regulates cortisol.”

One unsupported assertion from the researchers was:

“We provide evidence for a causal link between the early caregiving environment and stress response system reactivity in humans with effects that differ markedly from those observed in rodent models.”

The researchers stated that rodent studies have converged to find:

“Early-life adversity results in hyperreactivity of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis.”

It’s baloney that the same results from early life adversity in rodents haven’t also been present in humans. Even the lead researcher herself said in a news article:

“More significantly, McLaughlin said, their [the orphans] stress response systems might have been initially hyperactive at earlier points in development, then adapted to high levels of stress hormones.”

The difference was that the rodents were monitored 24/7 until researchers killed and dissected them. The children’s periods of adversity likely started while in the womb, and their lives had been monitored for research purposes sporadically after their births.

Everybody knows that just because adverse events and effects in these children’s lives weren’t recorded by researchers didn’t mean these effects weren’t present at some point.

Particularly irksome was another unsupported assertion from the lead reviewer:

“The children involved in the study are now about 16 years old, and researchers next plan to investigate whether puberty has an impact on their stress responses. It could have a positive effect, McLaughlin said, since puberty might represent another sensitive period when stress response systems are particularly tuned to environmental inputs. “It’s possible that the environment during that period could reverse the impacts of early adversity on the system,” she said.”

No, this is NOT possible. We may as well expect an apple to fall upward.

The impacts of early adversity persist with enduring physiological changes as shown in experimental studies. Studies have NOT provided evidence that the subjects’ environment can cause the effects of complete reversal of all these changes, no matter the stage of life of the subjects.

This point was addressed in The effects of early-life stress are permanent alterations in the child’s brain circuitry and function rodent study:

“The current study manipulates the type and timing of a stressor and the specific task and age of testing to parallel early-life stress in humans reared in orphanages.

The results provide evidence of both early and persistent alterations in amygdala circuitry and function following early-life stress.

These effects are not reversed when the stressor is removed nor diminished with the development of prefrontal regulation regions.”

That study had the same reviewer as the current study. The current study’s lead researcher knew or should have known of this and other relevant research. She knew or should have known of the irreversibility of critical periods, during which developments either occurred or were forever missed.

Did the lead researcher make assertions not supported by the study or relevant research – assertions made counter to her scientific knowledge – show her unease about treating the orphans as lab rats? Was there was some other agenda in play?

The larger problem was the study’s informed consent with this group of Romanian orphans. If you were in contact with a damaged person, and implicitly gave them hope that you would improve their life, then who are you as a feeling human being when you don’t personally carry through? Does the legal documentation matter?

Also, I’ve noticed problems with several studies that had this particular reviewer:

Add the current study to the list.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/18/5637.full “Causal effects of the early caregiving environment on development of stress response systems in children”

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Is IQ an adequate measure of the quality of a young man’s life?

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Cerebrum, Primal Therapy , ,

This 2015 Virginia study used Swedish data to find:

“Adoption into improved socioeconomic circumstances is associated with a significant advantage in IQ.”

The study’s all-male subjects were in 436 sibling relationships:

“..in which at least one member was reared by one or more biological parents and the other by adoptive parents. IQ was measured at age 18–20 as part of the Swedish military service conscription examination.”

One researchers said:

“Environmental effects have to be inferred, as in the rare event when pairs of siblings are raised by different parents in different socioeconomic circumstances. Swedish population data allowed us to find that homes led by better educated parents produce real gains in cognitive abilities of children they raise.”

The biological families’ situations had to be hellishly tragic in order to separate siblings and put one of them up for adoption. I didn’t find at what age separations typically took place, but can you imagine what the adopted child felt?

Let’s approach this study from the adopted boys’ perspectives:

  • Children are very sensitive to caregivers’ words, body language, facial expressions, physical touches – to all the things that show them they are loved.
  • A child learns at an early age from both implicit and overt expressions whether or not they are accepted for who they are.

It’s extremely traumatic for a child to be rejected for who they are. Consider this passage from Dr. Arthur Janov’s book The Primal Scream:

“Parental need becomes the child’s implicit command.

The child is born into his parents’ needs and begins struggling to fulfill them almost from the moment he is alive.

He may be pushed to smile (to appear happy), to coo, to wave bye-bye, later to sit up and walk, still later to push himself so that his parents can have an advanced child.

As the child develops, requirements upon him become more complex:

  • He will have to get A’s;
  • Be helpful and do his chores;
  • Be quiet and undemanding;
  • Not talk too much;
  • Say bright things; and
  • Be athletic.

What he will not do is be himself.”

All of the above can happen within a stable family.

Can you imagine what a child in an unstable family felt as they learned they weren’t accepted, and how they tried to adapt?

Everything these adopted children did to be accepted by their original caregivers failed. They were rejected by and ejected from the people who were supposed to love them!

Can you imagine how desperate these adopted children would have been in their new environment?

What wouldn’t they have done to be accepted?

The researchers made a point of cognitive development. But of all of the things that were important to the adopted child, that described his quality of life, does the finding of a higher IQ give even the slightest hint of his reality?

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/15/4612.full “Family environment and the malleability of cognitive ability: A Swedish national home-reared and adopted-away cosibling control study”

How well can catastrophes be predicted?

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Beliefs, Cerebrum, Primal Therapy

This 2015 study found a way of modeling catastrophic shifts that smoothed the processes with selectively introduced randomness:

“Most computer models created for the purpose of predicting catastrophes are based on deterministic math—that is, they assume a perfect world where nothing is random. That approach cannot work in the real world of course, because real catastrophes quite often have several contributing factors that are random in nature.

In real life, such events exhibit another common trait of catastrophes, a group of rapid transitions that come about due to a small change in a system.”

If this study’s findings were correct, it would seem that researchers who put together models that used deterministic algorithms to predict catastrophes may have been just expressing their beliefs instead of assessing reality.

There apparently are many researchers whose models incorporate catastrophes. A search on PNAS.org for “catastrophic” shows over 100 studies published since the beginning of last year.

In a related question: Does everything happen for a reason?

  • If randomness is included as a reason, maybe things do.
  • If randomness is excluded, then we’re back to beliefs instead of reality.

In perhaps an unrelated question: Can catastrophes be predictably avoided in our personal lives?

  • Maybe most of them can, if we can eliminate sources of potential harm.
  • Probably not entirely avoided, though, because of the randomness factor.

It’s difficult to have a balanced degree of concern about future harm. Here’s a view from Dr. Arthur Janov in his Primal Healing book p. 70:

“Worrying is not a problem, it is the symptom of something that is occurring physiologically within the brain. What causes the worrying is the problem.

Constant worry is anticipating catastrophe. But what we don’t realize is that the catastrophe already has happened; we simply have no access to it.

We are actually worried about the past, not the future.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/15/E1828.full “Eluding catastrophic shifts”

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