If a study didn’t measure feelings, then its findings may not pertain to genuine empathy

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

This 2014 UK study tried to show that empathetic actions were very context-dependent. It mainly studied causing overt pain to another person.

The lead researcher stated:

“We were interested in quantifying how much people care about others, relative to themselves. A lack of concern for others’ suffering lies at the heart of many psychiatric disorders such as psychopathy, so developing precise laboratory measures of empathy and altruism will be important for probing the brain processes that underlie antisocial behavior.”

The researchers didn’t provide direct evidence of genuine empathy – the subjects’ emotions of sensing and sharing the emotions of another person.

The study was designed to cause sensations of pain and draw conclusions about empathetic feelings. The subjects’ limbic system and lower brains were never measured, however.

Why did the researchers decide to only infer these feelings and sensations from actions and reports? Why wasn’t this inferred evidence confirmed with direct measurements of the brain areas that primarily process feelings and sensations?

  1. At no time during the experiment did the subjects see or hear or touch the person whom they caused pain. Wouldn’t it be difficult for the subjects to feel authentic empathy for a disembodied presence?
  2. We’re informed by the Task performance and beliefs about task responses are solely cerebral exercises study that it’s inaccurate to characterize subjects’ task responses as feelings.
  3. We know from the Problematic research: If you don’t feel empathy for a patient, is the solution to fake it? study that people’s cerebrums are easily capable of generating a proxy for empathy.

This study’s findings concerning empathy involved inauthentic empathy – the non-feeling, cerebral exercise, faking-it kind.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/48/17320.full “Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making”

If research treats “Preexisting individual differences” as a black box, how can it find causes for stress and depression?

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Epigenetics, Immune system, Stress ,

This 2014 research studied both humans and rodents to provide further evidence on the physiology of defeat. The researchers demonstrated that with mice:

“Bone marrow transplants of stem cells that produce leucocytes lacking IL-6 (the cytokine interleukin 6) or when injected with antibodies that block IL-6 prior to stress exposure, the development of social avoidance was reduced.”

The researchers also showed in humans that standard antidepressants didn’t act to lower IL-6.

So, what were we to make of this finding?

“Preexisting differences in the sensitivity of a key part of each individual’s immune system to stress confer a greater risk of developing stress-related depression or anxiety.”

  • Was it sufficient for the researchers and the news articles covering the research to treat “preexisting differences” as a black box that nobody could enter to find causes for the effects of “developing stress-related depression or anxiety?”
  • Did things happen in each individual’s history to cause the “preexisting differences” or was each individual born that way?
  • Why was the research directed at symptoms with no mention of any underlying causal factors?

It wasn’t sufficient for the researchers to carry on their experiments with assumptions that there weren’t early-life causes for the above symptoms. Such a pretense leads to the follow-on pretense that later-life consequences weren’t effects of causes, but were instead, mysteries due to “preexisting individual differences.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/45/16136.full “Individual differences in the peripheral immune system promote resilience versus susceptibility to social stress”

More from the researchers that found people had the same personalities at age 26 that they had at age 3

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

This 2014 research came from the Dunedin Study in New Zealand that has studied a group of over 1,000 people for 40+ years now. They first came to worldwide fame by finding that the study’s participants at age 26 largely had the same personality that each did at age 3.

The current study linked the participants’ childhood cognitive abilities and self-control to their current cardiac age.

Would a US doctor have the knowledge and foresight to understand that significant factors in a middle-aged patient’s cardiac health came from their early childhood, infancy, or womb life experiences?

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/48/17087.full “Credit scores, cardiovascular disease risk, and human capital”

An example of how we are unaware of some of the unconscious bases of our decisions

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

This 2014 human study provided details of how we are unaware of some of the unconscious bases of our decisions:

“We show that unconscious information can be accumulated over time and integrated with conscious elements presented either before or after to boost or diminish decision accuracy.

The unconscious information could only be used when some conscious decision-relevant information was also present.

Surprisingly, the unconscious boost in accuracy was not accompanied by corresponding increases in confidence, suggesting that we have poor metacognition for unconscious decisional evidence.”

I wouldn’t agree that these findings apply as broadly as the researchers said they did during interviews.

The first reason is that the researchers restricted the study to the subjects’ cerebrums’ visual processing. In everyday life, though, our limbic systems and lower brains are also very much involved with visual processing.

As an example, have you ever taken a nature walk where you instinctually jumped back from a vague initial impression only to find that the object was a stick? I’ve done that many times, and our shared human instincts operating with the limbic system and lower brain saved me once in childhood from stepping on a copperhead snake.

Secondly, the researchers limited the term “unconscious” to mean below visual perception of the subjects’ cerebrums.

What if, for example, the study’s visual cues included emotional content that involved the subjects’ limbic systems? The researchers may have able to develop a basis for findings that applied to common operations such as making decisions that are influenced by unconscious emotional content.

The third reason to not apply the findings as broadly as the researchers may have desired is that the researchers limited the term “metacognition” to operations of the the subjects’ cerebrums. We know that Task performance and beliefs about task responses are solely cerebral exercises, which accurately describes the metacognition experiment.

As an example of how people’s metacognitions are much broader than just their cerebrums, I take a crowded train to and from work everyday. It’s fairly straightforward to understand people’s actions, body postures, and facial expressions in terms of the combined metacognition operations of their entire brains.

Also, the metacognition finding sample size may have been too small by involving only five subjects.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/45/16214.full “Unconscious information changes decision accuracy but not confidence”

One way that an infant unconsciously knows the emotions of the humans in their environment

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

This 2014 human study found one way that an infant unconsciously recognized the emotions of the humans in their environment:

“The current study provides neural evidence for the unconscious detection of emotion and gaze cues from the sclera in 7-mo-old infants.

Wide-open eyes, exposing a lot of white, indicate fear or surprise. A thinner slit of exposed eye, such as when smiling, expresses happiness or joy.”

The basis for finding that the subjects’ responses were unconscious was that the researchers determined that displaying images of eyes for 50 milliseconds fell below the threshold of infants’ conscious awareness.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/45/16208.full “Unconscious discrimination of social cues from eye whites in infants”

Are you feeling kinda blue? Think your brain cells are too few? Get your fat cells on that bike and ride!

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Hippocampus, Limbic system

This 2014 rodent study found that fat cells released a certain hormone during exercise that produced two beneficial effects:

  • the hormone increased hippocampal neurogenesis;
  • it also reduced depression-like behaviors.

So if you’re feeling kinda blue,

Think your brain cells are too few?

Get your fat cells on that bike and ride!

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/44/15810.full “Physical exercise-induced hippocampal neurogenesis and antidepressant effects are mediated by the adipocyte hormone adiponectin”

The degree of epigenetic DNA methylation may be used as a proxy to measure biological age

gettingwell4 4-5 stars Advanced knowledge, Epigenetics

This fascinating 2014 human study developed the new use of a somewhat intuitive marker of aging. The researchers used the degree of methylation – an epigenetic chemical modification of DNA – as an epigenetic clock to measure biological age.

The researchers found that, on average, the epigenetic age of the liver increased by 3.3 years for every increase in 10 body mass index (BMI) units. Other studied tissue areas weren’t similarly affected.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/43/15538.full “Obesity accelerates epigenetic aging of human liver”

Fear extinction is the learned inhibition of retrieval of previously acquired responses

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

This 2014 rodent study showed that fear extinction doesn’t depend on memory retrieval:

“These results show that extinction and retrieval are separate processes and strongly suggest that extinction is triggered or gated by the conditioned stimulus even in the absence of retrieval.”

Key to my understanding this finding came from a definition in another summary study by the authors, The learning of fear extinction, where they stated:

“Extinction is the learned inhibition of retrieval of previously acquired responses.”

These two studies and Hippocampal mechanisms involved in the enhancement of fear extinction caused by exposure to novelty should inform researchers of studies such as If rodent training has beneficial epigenetic effects, how can the next step be human gene therapy? of desirable alternative treatments, rather than proceeding from rodent training directly to human gene therapy.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/2/E230.full “Extinction learning, which consists of the inhibition of retrieval, can be learned without retrieval”

A biologically relevant event can drive long-term memory in a single training session

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

This 2014 fruit fly study found:

“A biologically relevant event such as finding food under starvation conditions or being poisoned can drive long-term memory in a single training session.”

I don’t think that we need to discover at these extremes, though, whether or not the finding has human applicability.

We do know from the Dutch hunger winter of 1944 study referenced in the Non-PC alert: Treating the mother’s obesity symptoms positively affects the post-surgery offspring study that prenatal exposure to famine had lifelong ill effects on the children. The exposed children had epigenetic DNA changes – a form of long-term memory – from their mothers’ starvation, which resulted in relative obesity compared with their unexposed siblings.

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/2/578.full “Distinct dopamine neurons mediate reward signals for short- and long-term memories”

Problematic research on stress that will never make a contribution toward advancing science

gettingwell4 < 0 Detracted from science, Cortisol, Neurochemicals, Stress

This 2014 UK human study found:

“Type 2 diabetes is characterized by disruption of stress-related processes across multiple biological systems and increased exposure to life stress.”

HOWEVER, the stress effects weren’t conclusively shown to be either a cause or consequence of type 2 diabetes. Correlation wasn’t causation.

Looking around for clues as to what went wrong, I found this data sample of cortisol in a small table that comprised the total amount of information in the supplementary material:

“Geometric means, adjusted for education, marital status, BMI, smoking status, use of statins, and time of day.”

It’s hubris for the researchers to state that they improved data measurements by averaging them after adjusting for all of the above six factors.

Maybe the problem was elsewhere, maybe in the study design. Wherever the problems were, they guaranteed that the researchers would NEVER find cause and effect.

But maybe that’s the point?

There appeared to be other agendas that ensured studies like these failed to make a contribution toward advancing science. The researchers inevitably used buzzwords such as “allostatic load” and cited the need for further studies (money). Everybody was okay with that, including the reviewer, and everybody kept their safe jobs.

Such studies also had limiting effects on how we “do something” about real problems because the researchers wouldn’t produce findings that weren’t politically correct.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/44/15693.full “Disruption of multisystem responses to stress in type 2 diabetes: Investigating the dynamics of allostatic load”

We are attuned to perceive what our brains predict will be rewarding

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

What I got from this 2014 human study is that from the beginnings of our lives, we are attuned to perceive what our brains predict will be rewarding.

The subjects’ whole brains were monitored, but only areas of the cerebrum participated in the findings to a significant degree.

“Sounds associated with high rewards increase the sensitivity of vision.

The same neurons that process sensory information are modulated by reward..and thereby influence perception from the earliest stages of cortical processing.

Reward associations modulated responses in regions associated with multisensory processing in which the strength of modulation was a better predictor of the magnitude of the behavioral effect than the modulation in classical reward regions.”

Sounds a little bit like we all might have a mild case of synesthesia.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15244.full “Cross-modal effects of value on perceptual acuity and stimulus encoding”

If rodent training had beneficial epigenetic effects, how can the next step be human gene therapy?

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Epigenetics, Memory , ,

This 2014 rodent study detailed significant and lasting epigenetic DNA methylation in the hippocampus part of the limbic system as a result of fear-extinction training.

The researchers missed the boat when explaining in interviews how their research could apply to humans. What I understood from the interviews was that the researchers were focused on targeting human genes with some outside action.

Recommending human gene therapy smelled like an agenda. If these epigenetic modifications were induced by training in rodents, wouldn’t the next step be research into reversal training or therapeutic activity for humans?

The researchers also found:

“Importantly, these effects were specific to extinction training and did not occur in mice that had been fear conditioned, followed by a single reactivation trial, therefore arguing against the possibility that such epigenetic modifications are nonspecifically induced by the retrieval or reconsolidation of the original fear memory.”

This was fine for rodent studies where the origins of both the disease and the cure were all exerted externally. I didn’t see that it necessarily applied to humans.

After all, we’re not lab rats. We can perform effective therapy that doesn’t involve some outside action being done to us.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/19/7120.full “Neocortical Tet3-mediated accumulation of 5-hydroxymethylcytosine promotes rapid behavioral adaptation”

What is the purpose of music? A review of evolutionary and pleasurable research findings

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Amygdala, Anterior cingulate cortex, Cerebrum, Dopamine, Hippocampus, Hypothalamus, Limbic system, Lower brain, Neurochemicals

Ever wonder what happens in your brain and body when you get chills from a musical performance?

This 2013 summary review of 126 studies provided details of brain areas that contribute to our enjoyment of music.

Much of the review addressed Darwin’s observation that music had no readily apparent functional consequence and no clear-cut adaptive function. The researchers noted that:

“There is scant evidence that other species possess the mental machinery to decode music in the way humans do, or to derive enjoyment from it.”

The reasons why different types of music affect us differently are similar to the findings of the Reciprocity behaviors differ as to whether we seek cerebral vs. limbic system rewards study.

Here are the “We seek limbic system rewards” similarities:

“The nucleus accumbens played an important role with both familiar and novel music. In the case of familiar music, hemodynamic activity in the nucleus accumbens was associated with increasing pleasure, and maximally expressed during the experience of chills, which represent the peak emotional response; these were the same regions that showed dopamine release. The nucleus accumbens is tightly connected with subcortical limbic areas of the brain, implicated in processing, detecting, and expressing emotions, including the amygdala and hippocampus. It is also connected to the hypothalamus, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex, all of which are implicated in controlling the autonomic nervous system, and may be responsible for the psychophysiological phenomena associated with listening to music and emotional arousal.”

Here is the “We seek cerebral rewards” part.

“Finally, the nucleus accumbens is tightly integrated with cortical areas implicated in “high-level” processing of emotions that integrate information from various sources, including the orbital and ventromedial frontal lobe. These areas are largely implicated in assigning and maintaining reward value to stimuli and may be critical in evaluating the significance of abstract stimuli that we consider pleasurable.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/Supplement_2/10430.full “From perception to pleasure: Music and its neural substrates”

Using expectations of oxytocin to induce positive placebo effects of touching

gettingwell4 2-3 stars Required further work, Amygdala, Beliefs, Brain hemispheres, Limbic system, Neurochemicals, Oxytocin, Thalamus

This 2013 Scandinavian study detailed which brain structures were involved when fooling oneself about actual sensations in favor of expected sensations.

It was hilarious how the researchers used studies of oxytocin to create expectations in the subjects:

“To induce expectation of intranasal oxytocin’s beneficial effects on painful and pleasant touch experience, participants viewed a 6-min locally developed video documentary about oxytocin’s putative prosocial effects such as involvement in bonding, love, grooming, affective touch, and healing. As all of the material was based on published research, there was no deception. The video concluded that a nasal spray of oxytocin might enhance the pleasantness of:

  • (i) stroking and
  • (ii) warm touch, and
  • (iii) reduce the unpleasantness of pain.”

Other items:

  • Only the placebo effects for the warm and pain-reducing touches were statistically significant, not the stroking touch;
  • The a priori brain areas monitored in the “sensory circuitry” included the thalamus and were all in the right brain hemisphere;
  • The a priori brain areas monitored in the “emotional appraisal circuitry” included the amygdala.

One way the researchers summarized the study was:

“Pain reduction dampened sensory processing in the brain, whereas increased touch pleasantness increased sensory processing.”

This finding demonstrated how the thalamus part of the limbic system actively controls and gates information to and from the cerebrum, similar to the Thalamus gating and control of the limbic system and cerebrum is a form of memory study.

There was a terminology problem in the study, evidenced by statements such as:

“We induced placebo improvement of both negative and positive feelings (painful and pleasant touch).”

Touch is a sensation, not a feeling or emotion. This placebo study created expectations of sensations in the subjects’ cerebrums, not expectations of emotions.

Also, including parts of the limbic system such as the amygdala in the “emotional appraisal circuitry” didn’t mean that the researchers studied feelings or emotions. We know from research summarized in the Conscious mental states should not be the first-choice explanation of behavior study that:

“Neither amygdala activity nor amygdala-controlled responses are telltale signatures of fearful feelings.“

The current study cast additional light on the dubious Problematic research on human happiness study. Those researchers were fooled by a positive placebo effect!

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/44/17993.full “Placebo improves pleasure and pain through opposite modulation of sensory processing”

What happens next after a detox program predictably fails?

gettingwell4 0-1 star Wasted resources, Beliefs, Limbic system, Lower brain, Memory, Primal Therapy , ,

This 2014 study was a misguided example of looking solely at the presenting parts of a person’s condition rather than the whole historical person.

What did this study’s researchers decide after finding:

“Alcohol-dependent subjects..remained with high scores of depression, anxiety, and alcohol craving after a short-term detoxification program.”

Was it that the detox program didn’t work because it dealt with suppressing symptoms rather than addressing causes?

NO!

The researchers decided:

“Gut microbiota seems to be a previously unidentified target in the management of alcohol dependence.”

The researchers proceeded on some trendy, in-vogue aspect of their patients with which to tinker.

The researchers ignored that the correlation of the new treatment course didn’t show causation. They also ignored underlying causes for the ineffectiveness of the preceding treatments of symptoms.

Hard to see how the reviewer believed that this study would advance science.

Meanwhile, the researchers continued to ignore the elephants in the room: the relationships of the patients’ histories and their pain.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/E4485.full “Intestinal permeability, gut-bacterial dysbiosis, and behavioral markers of alcohol-dependence severity”