This 2014 human study showed that the way our cerebrums visually processed objects depended on what use we think we would make of the objects.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/10/E962.full “Task context impacts visual object processing differentially across the cortex”
This 2013 human study provided details of which areas of the cerebrum participated in objective performance of a task vs. the subjects’ subjective confidence in their task responses:
“These results suggest the existence of functional brain networks indexing objective performance and accuracy of subjective beliefs distinctively expressed in a set of stable mental states.”
The subjects’ limbic systems were monitored during the fMRI and subsequent reporting, but the subjects’ limbic system areas weren’t activated during any of the experiments.
The researchers demonstrated that both task participation and subjective beliefs about the tasks were only cerebral exercises.
These findings should inform studies such as:
to neither characterize subjects’ task responses as “positive feelings” nor to ascribe emotions such as happiness to the subjects’ cerebral exercises.
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/28/11577.full “Distinct patterns of functional brain connectivity correlate with objective performance and subjective beliefs”
This 2014 Princeton human study was proof that cognitive researchers are stuck in the cerebrum. That and gadgets.
The researchers didn’t measure limbic system or lower brain areas, yet from their use of cartoon faces and magnetically zapping their subjects’ brains they proclaimed:
“The findings suggest a fundamental connection between private awareness and social cognition.”
For just one example of the gross omissions of the study’s design, look at the limbic system’s part in “social cognition” for The amygdala is where we integrate our perception of human facial emotion.
And it’s a very limited scope of “private awareness” that excludes conscious awareness of what’s in our own feeling, instinctual, and impulsive levels of consciousness.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/13/5012.full “Attributing awareness to oneself and to others”
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.
This 2014 human study was notable for defining away the limbic system and lower brain from consideration in processing positive and negative stimuli for value.
However, the researchers didn’t fully reveal their biases until the last paragraph of the supplementary material, where they were obligated to comment on a previous study that included the limbic system. Good for the reviewer if that was how the researchers became obligated to deal with the previous study.
It isn’t difficult to include the limbic system in studies of value. For example, the Teenagers value rewards more and are more sensitive to punishments than are adults study found:
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/13/5000.full “Disentangling neural representations of value and salience in the human brain”
This 2013 human study found that adolescents placed more value on rewards than did adults. Adolescents were also more sensitive to punishments than were adults.
Cerebral areas increased activity when the expected value of the reward increased. Limbic system areas increased activity when the expected value of the reward decreased.
The left ventral striatum was the brain area that had the most increase in activity in adolescents compared with adults when the expected value of the reward increased. This brain area is usually not fully developed until people are in their mid 20s.
As the researchers noted as a limitation of the study:
“Without including preadolescents it is not possible to say with certainty whether the observed difference is a uniquely adolescent sensitivity to expected value or part of an ongoing developmental trajectory.”
Another limitation of the study was that it studied only 22 teens aged 13 to 17. Nineteen adults were studied with an average age of 28.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/4/1646.full “Neural representation of expected value in the adolescent brain”
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:
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”
My POV of this 2014 Israeli study’s findings, at the risk of being dragged into the politically-correct quagmire:
Findings of the “duh” variety:
“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”
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”
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”
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”
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:
both of which sought rewards in the cerebrum, with empathetic behaviors of:
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.
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:
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/50/17786.full “Effects of biological explanations for mental disorders on clinicians’ empathy”
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”
This 2014 German rodent study showed how the thalamus actively controlled and gated information to and from the cerebrum.
The researchers elaborated in news coverage on how thalamic control and gating represented a form of memory:
“Q. When asked if, given that
- Sensory signals en route to the cortex undergo profound signal transformations in the thalamus,
- A key thalamic transformation is sensory adaptation in which neural output adjusts to statistics and dynamics of past stimuli, and
- The thalamus, hypothalamus and hippocampus being part of the limbic system, might memory reconsolidation play a role in the cortico-thalamic pathway?
A. “It’s conceivable that the cortico-thalamic pathway is subject to long term plasticity,” Groh conjectures. “In fact, on a synaptic level, these inputs can change their strength and retain adjusted strengths for long periods. This process represents another – albeit much slower – form of adaptation which some interpret as memory.”
Q. Conversely, might the thalamic-cortical pathway affect memory?
A. “If particular sensory-evoked activity patterns would cause long-term changes in the cortico-thalamic pathway, and thereby change the way incoming signals are processed before reaching the cortex,” he opines, “then this would indeed reflect a form of information storage.”
In other words, there are ways in addition to our usual ideas about memory that the limbic system remembers.
Other items in news coverage included:
“Rodents, cats, primates and humans show a common architecture of two feedback pathways from cortex to thalamus in the auditory, visual and somatosensory (but not olfactory) systems.
In this study we looked at processing of touch information, and we’d like to know how homologous pathways affect visual or auditory processing. It’s fascinating that despite fundamental differences between visual, auditory and somatosensory signals, basic layouts of thalamocortical systems for each modality are quite similar.”
Other areas of research that might benefit from their study include any medical research involving the thalamocortical system that might involve inappropriate gating of sensory signals.
For a given stimulus, output neural response will not be static, but will depend on recent stimulus and response history.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6798.full “Cortical control of adaptation and sensory relay mode in the thalamus”
This 2013 human study was of decision making under stressful conditions.
Acute stress (ice water immersion) evoked habitual behavior rather than deliberative behavior. In my view, the subjects’ behaviors when under stress were driven more by their limbic system and lower brain areas than their cerebrum.
This finding wasn’t a big surprise. However, the researchers went on to state:
“Subjects with more executive resources to spare find themselves less susceptible to the behavioral changes brought about by stress response.”
I interpreted this statement to mean that when stressed, the more-capable subjects didn’t act out as much as the less-capable subjects acted out their respective feelings, instincts and impulses.
I felt that to understand this statement called for more investigation into the individual histories of the subjects:
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/52/20941.full “Working-memory capacity protects model-based learning from stress”
Surface Your Real Self 