Intellectual Love, by me

Wikileaks, has recently released the sensitive but unclassified US Special Forces counterinsurgency manual FM 31-20-3, which outlines tactics to be used in the suppression of rebellions and guerilla movements worldwide. Official Special Forces policy, the document promotes pervasive surveillance, censorship, warrantless searches, imprisonment without charges, hiding human rights violations from the media, and particularly psychological operations (PsyOps) to facilitate population and resource control.

But it was the recent death in Afghanistan of UK’s Corporal Sarah Bryant, a member of the Psychological Operations Group, a tri-service PsyOps support service to the British Armed Forces, which really brought PsyOps to the news foreground. The key role of PsyOps is Target Audience Analysis (TAA), similar to US military’s human terrain system, or for that matter, market research. It is the systematic study of people’s attitudes to map the military psychological environment, identifying weaknesses, and using them to base lines of persuasion. The key to its success is ‘maneuverism’, that is, striking suddenly and unpredictably at weak spots, instead of trying to overwhelm by sheer force. Armies recruit human scientists (a mixture of psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, economist) for their PsyOps branches. The US Army is forbidden from carrying out such operations within the country, but the FBI and police seem to be excluded from this ban, as PsyOps tactics were used in the 1993 Waco Siege.

US Special Forces counterinsurgency manual FM 31-20-3, Wikileaks.org
‘I love her now and always’ - husband’s tribute to Sarah Bryant, first female soldier killed in Afghanistan,TimesOnline.Co.Uk
15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group Annual Report 2007/08, PsyWar.org
PsyWar.org

Researchers, including Dr Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the International Center for Young Scientists, Tsukuba, Japan, have created a chemical ‘brain’ capable of remotely controlling multiple nano-machines. The ‘logic device’ composed of 17 molecules of the chemical duroquinone, is only two and a half nanometers in size. It looks like a ring with four spokes, which can be rotated to four different states. One duroquinone molecule sits in the middle, surrounded by the other 16, connected by hydrogen bonds. The state of the molecule in the middle can be switched using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a standard issue nanotech tool. Since instructing one molecule simultaneously activates 16 others, there are four billion different possible combinations of outcome. Researchers say the idea was inspired by the communication of glial cells in the human brain. They tested the logic device by hooking it up to eight nano-elevators, which can be commanded to move up and down about one nanometer, and were able to make all eight function successfully. This development could have big implications for computer technology. Whereas a typical CPU only carries one instruction at a time, one modeled on the logic device could carry 16 simultaneously. The researchers they have already completed faster machines that are capable of 256 and even 1024 concurrent operations. Of course, such a computer’s application is limited, because it relies on STM to work, still, soon these molecular brains may be integrated in other nanobots to bring significant advances in nano-assembly and targeted drug delivery.

Chemical brain controls nanobots, BBCNews.com

There is a lot of research to suggest that we have more bad dreams than we realize. Asked to state how many nightmares they have, most people say only 2 or 3 a year, but once they start keeping dream diaries, the number goes up to one or two a month. The frequency of nightmares varies with age, with about 25% of children ages 5-12 having them at least once a week, more as they climb thru adolescence to peak in young adulthood, and then dropping gradually into old age. Women have significantly more nightmares than men, which some believe is due to their higher rates of anxiety.

Interestingly, bad dreams may serve to create ‘fear extinction memories’, allowing us to process, demistify and forget dreadful memories, thereby allowing us to move on and make room in the brain for new things to be afraid of. Otherwise, we would fear the same things in adulthood as we did in childhood.

In the dreamscape of nightmares, why we dream at all, NYTimes.com 

While it is true that people with higher IQs tend to have higher incomes, it does not mean that they have a greater net worth, found a new study by Jay Zagorsky of Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research. Based on data gathered from 7,403 American participants in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, who are now in their mid-40s and have been interviewed repeatedly since 1979, the study found that a person’s income increases $202-616 with each IQ point, something we’ve known for a while. But, Zagorsky went a step further to analyze the likelihood of participants falling into financial difficulties. Strangely, he got mixed results. Take the percentage of people who maxed out their credit cards: it starts rising from 7.7% of people with IQ less than 75 until it peaks at 12.1% for IQ 90, then it starts falling irregularly to 5.4% for IQ 115, only to start rising again. Similar irregularities can be found regarding participants claiming bankruptcy or missing bill payments. Even with people of IQ 125 and above, 6% have maxed out their credit cards and 11% miss payments from time to time. So, there is no direct relationship between intelligence and total wealth, college campuses can testify to that. "Professors tend to be very smart people. But if you look at university parking lots, you don’t see a lot of Rolls Royces, Porsches or other very expensive cars. Instead you see a lot of old, low-value vehicles" said Zagorsky, who is currently finishing a new study to account for how people with higher incomes can have the same total wealth as those with low-medium. To hazard a guess, it probably has to do with them spending more on today instead of worrying about tomorrow, while also supporting other people in their lives.

You don’t have to be smart to be rich, OSU.edu
IQ Table

The Princeton University website has some great lectures in its WebMedia archive on their website. Notably, the three part Search for a Fundamental Reality by Nobel prize physicist David Gross, and Antonio Damasio’s Advances on the Neurobiology of Emotion, which I had the pleasure of attending. Recent lectures include David Mermin’s Spooky Actions at a Distance? and Hendrik Lenstra’s Escher and the Droste Effect. Of particular interest to fellow locals: Kenneth Jackson’s If All the World Were New Jersey: The Past and Future of the Garden State. The archive has dozens of lectures from the last decade, on a wide range of topics, including physics, cognitive science, philosophy, and politics, most in both RealMedia and WindowsMedia, high and low resolution.

WebMedia Archive, Princeton.edu

A new study shows that musical training in children improves memory, as students studying music under the Suzuki method over the course of a year scored better on a memory test correlated with general intelligence skills like literacy, math, verbal memory, IQ and visiospatial processing. According to the author of the study, Dr Laurel Trainor, Profesor of Psychology and Director of the McMaster (great name!) Institute for Music and the Mind at McMaster University: "The finding of very rapid maturation of the N250m component to violin sounds in children taking music lessons fits with their large improvement on the memory test. It suggests that musical training is having an effect on how the brain gets wired for general cognitive functioning related to memory and attention."

First evidence that musical training affects brain development in young children, ScienceDaily.com

Professors Vladimir Parpura and Umar Mohideen of the University of California, Riverside used atomic force microscopy (AFM) to look at how neurons release neurotransmitters. AFM can magnify things up to a million times and provides pretty little three-dimensional models. For the first time, a video of the topography of a network of neurofilaments is available here.

Neurotransmitter release examined using atomic force microscopy, Neurophilosophy.wordpress.com

Roland Griffiths of John Hopkins University led a recent study on psilocybin, the chemical in hallucinogenic magic mushrooms that mimics the effects of serotonin on the brain. There were 36 American test subjects, 14 men and 22 women, ages 24-64, none of whom had tripped (used hallucinogenics) before. They were mostly college graduates with successful careers and some spiritual practice. There were two sessions, in one the subjects were given psilocybin, the other Ritalin. Without knowing which is which, the results would not be clouded by participants’ preconceptions of what’s supposed to happen when you shroom. Of the 36 subjects, 22 (61%) described psilocybin as a mystical experience, listing feelings of unity with all things, abiding joy and transcendence of time and space. In a follow-up two months later, 67% rated the psilocybin trip as one of the most meaningful of their lives, comparable to the birth of a child or death of a parent, 79% said it increased their overall well being and satisfaction with life. Meanwhile, interviews with family members, friends and co-workers revealed positive changes in the subject’s behavior. Further follow-ups will determine effects after a year and more.

Neuroscientists Probe Psychedelic Psilocybin, SciAm.com

I’ve written before about home-brewed brain imaging via the OpenEEG project at SourceForge.net. Now, please welcome the Open-rTMS. As noted previously, rTMS, or repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation is a technique that uses variable magnetic fields to stimulate specific areas of the brain for various ends, e.g. to treat depression, relieve pain, even enhance intelligence and creativity. Because of safety regulations, it takes forever before medical hardware is made available to the public. But, thanks to SourceForge, you will not only be able make your own EEG to monitor the magnetic fields in your brain, but also an rTMS to mess with them. Naturally, tweaking with new technology has its risks, in this case brain seizures, though these dangers are low when basic precautions are observed. All in all, the OpenEEG/Open-rTMS projects are revolutionary in that they open a vast new unmapped horizon, allowing anybody to explore and experiment with new mental states, advancing our understanding of our understanding.

Open-rTMS Project
OpenEEG Project

General Intelligence Factor, Scientific American

BrainMaps.org is an interactive zoomable high-resolution digital brain atlas and virtual microscope that is based on more than 10 million megapixels of scanned images of serial sections of both primate and non-primate brains and that is integrated with a high-speed database for querying and retrieving data about brain structure and function over the internet. Currently, the species featured in the atlas include Macaca mulatta, Mus musculus, Felis catus, as well as us Homo sapiens. The site also includes a forum for discussing the brainscans, though it is not yet very active.

BrainMaps.org

Sins of forgetting
Transience: gradual loss of information from short and long-term memory as a result of time.
Absent-mindedness: failure of attention during retrieval or encoding.
Blocking: inability to retrieve previously stored information, "tip of the toungue" phenomenon.

Sins of distortion
Misattribution: failure of source memory, when incorrect source is identified and when it is not.
Suggestibility: influence that things like question phrasing can have on memory. Manifestation of misinformation.
Bias: largely the consistency bias, in which people overestimate the similarity between their current and previous attitudes, allowing their present state alter past memories.

Sin of intrusion
Persistence: inability to forget the things we most want to. Cause of problems like post-traumatic stress disorder.

Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Paperback), Amazon.com

In May 2005, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, bought a multimillion-dollar IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer for a two-year project in which they hope to create a 3D blueprint of the human brain to further cognition research. So far, the group has simulated the firing of 10,000 neurons in a single column (a column typically contains 100,000 neurons) of the neocortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher-level thought and action. The current simulation produces a terabyte of data and is but a small fraction of what it takes to map the brain’s billions of neurons. With enough money, current technology could compute all those neurons, which is why the project is trying to get more funding from the Swiss government to buy two more Blue Genes (hehe, jeans). The supercomputer is running Phil Goodman’s MPI-based Neocortical Simulator (NCS) software, to be combined with Michael Hines’ NEURON, and has a media center to display the 3D simulations, which is apparently like sitting inside the brain. According to Henry Markram, head of the Brain and Mind Institute at EPFL, it "immediately allows us to assess the value of the data to discern: Is this something we want to save and analyze later? It’s also a lot of fun."

Blueprinting the human brain, ZDnet.com
Brain Mind Institute - Blue Brain Project, EPFL.ch

A team of Emory neuroscientists, led by Gregory Berns MD, Phd, have identified the part of the brain activated during the experience of dread. The research was conducted as part of a program in neuroeconomcs, a new field that applies neurology to economic questions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the team examined the brains of participants while delivering a series of 96 low voltage shocks of varying frequency and intensity to their feet. Having first screened the participants for their pain thresholds, before each shock they they told them how strong it would be (in % of threshold), and offered the choice between more pain sooner or less pain later. Most preferred to speed up the process at least a little, "mild dreaders," while 28% were willing to take more pain just to avoid waiting, termed "extreme dreaders." The degree to which people opted for more voltage sooner, seems to indicate the dread they felt from waiting.

The brain scans showed localized activity in areas associated with pain, as well as attention, which reflects that dread is more than fear or anxiety, feelings found in other parts of the brain. Further, the extreme dreaders had more attentional activity, which was seen much earlier compared the mild dreaders. "Taken together, the anatomical locations of dread responses suggest that the subjective experience of dread that ultimately drives an individual’s behavior comes from the attention devoted to the expected physical response, and not simply a fear or anxiety response," explains Dr. Berns. So, it is not so much the amount of pain a person can bear, as how attentively the pain is experienced, that determines the amount of dread produced. An extremely attentive person, then, may have a more dreadful life than someone who is abscent-minded, who sometimes might not even notice being hurt. While attentiveness has its benifits, taken to an extreme it can be paralyzing. Take Dostoyevsky’s underground man, whose hyper-attention to the most minute social gestures led him to live in isolation on the fringes of society, incapable of normal interaction. The study, supported by the National Institutes of Drug Abuse (NIDA), was published in the May 5 issue of Science.

Neurobiology of dread gives scientists clues about human decision making, Emory.edu

According to a new study done by the Harvard Medical School and the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the dietary supplement melatonin improves one’s ability to sleep at unusual times, especially helpful for rotating-shift workers, jet-lagged travelers or those with delayed sleep phase syndrome. Melatonin is a hormone produced by the body when it’s dark, retinal light exposure inhibits the hormone’s release. The double-blind placebo-controlled clinical study had thirty-six participants (21 men, 15 women, ages 18 to 30) who were kept on 20 hour sleep-wake schedules, ingesting either a placebo, 0.3 mg, or 5 mg of pharmaceutical grade melatonin. Researchers found that those taking a melatonin supplement had a significantly higher efficiency of sleep during times when the body was not producing melatonin. “Melatonin enabled these participants to obtain an extra half hour of sleep when they attempted to do so during the day” said Dr. Charles Czeisler, Chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and senior author of the study, “these findings have implications for millions of people who attempt to sleep at a time that is out of synch with the brain’s internal clock.” The findings appear in the May 1, 2006 issue of the journal Sleep.

Melatonin Most Effective For Sleep When Taken For Off-Hour Sleeping, Rush.edu

Depending on what we are thinking, how hard we are concentrating, our brain chemistry, environment, and a number of other factors, our brains have a certain electromagnetic signature, a wave frequency, which we can measure with available technology, namely electroencephalographs (EEG). Traditionally, these continuous rhythmic sinusoidal EEG waves were classified into four types: delta, theta, alpha and beta waves. Delta had a frequency range up to 4 Hz, associated with infants and children. Theta ranged from 4-8 Hz, and was linked with adolescence, trance and the preconscious state just before waking. Alpha (Berger’s) waves, 8-12 HZ, were tied to relaxed, alert consciousness. While, Beta waves, 12 Hz and above, were related to anxious thinking and active concentration. However, as increasing evidence for higher frequency brain activity came to light, Gamma waves lay claim the 26-80 Hz range, known euphemistically as “coherent 40 Hz oscillations.” These waves seem to go together with higher mental processes, perception and consciousness, making them the brain waves you probably want to have.

Gamma waves do not result from axonal-dendritic synapses, but rather from dentro-dendritic gap junctions that form after a synapse activation that links neurons together. Neurons connected by gap junctions have one common membrane, fire simultaneously and generally behave like a single giant neuron. These mega-neurons have membranes that depolarize coherently and can spread across different parts of the cortex (potentially allowing for brain-wide states). Normally, these networks are transient, as gap junctions form and dissolve constantly. But, recent research showing that practiced meditators like Tibetan monks can muscle 25-42 Hz easy, with some pushing 80-120 Hz, suggests that it is possible to keep the gap junctions open longer.

The relation between meditation and high wave frequency is not surprising, since the middle frequency (12-16 Hz), the sensorimotor rhythm, goes together with physical stillness. Just sitting still for a while is already half-way to Gamma. From there on, it almost seems it is just a matter of how much of your brain you have under control. Heightened consciousness, known as Samadhi in the meditation traditions, is an experience unclouded by cognitive contents. One usually arrives at it gradually, after years of practice, disciplining the mind that delights in distraction, learning how to focus all attention on a single thing. To focus completely on a single thing means to be able to let go of everything else. So, once you can do that, you can rid yourself from all undesired cognitive contents and enjoy a pure unmediated experience of reality. Now, if the Gamma wave frequency goes up as more of the brain is connected through gap junctions, it seems that advanced practitioners are simply able to network more of their brains, having trained to concentrate their minds. The benefits of meditation do not all wear off, advanced practitioners have a higher baseline gamma synchrony, suggesting a higher general awareness, concentration and consciousness. Other research has shown that meditation also thickens grey matter in parts of the cortex where it normally gets thinner with age. 

Breakthrough study on EEG of meditation, Stuart Hameroff MD, Director, Center for Consciousness Studies, U. of Arizona-Tucson

Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine found that brain cells use a mixture of analog and digital signals. Neurons communicate with each other by sending neurotransmitters through axons (output) and synapses (input). When a cell receives transmitters through a synapse, the voltage inside the cell fluctuates. If there is enough voltage to pass a certain threshold, it generates an action potential, sending a specialized waveform out the axon, thus releasing a transmitter to the next neuron in the chain, which sends one to the next, and so on until the power runs out. This helps overturn the old belief that signals between neurons were sent solely through rate and timing of the action potentials, digitally.

Moreover, they found that the analog signal already present in a nuron is also sent down the axon, further influencing the synaptic transmission. So, the sent waveform is altered with each neuron it passes through. As the voltage of the sending signal becomes more positive, the amplitude of future transmissions is enhanced. This explains in part how neuron nets that store our experiences are formed. David McCormick, neurobiology professor at Yale and senior author of the study, says: "It’s as if everyone thought communication in the brain was like a telegraph, but actually it turned out to be more similar to a telephone."

Brain Communicates in Analog and Digital Modes Simultaneously, Yale.edu 

Ambien, the most popular sleep medication in the US with over 24 million prescription in 2004, may cause sleep-walking, driving, talking, even stealing. Timothy Morgenthaler of the Mayo Clinic Sleep Disorders Center says he has seen many cases of people sleepwalking and sleep-eating after taking the drug, behavior that stopped when they went off Ambien. He reported 5 such cases in the journal Sleep Medicine in 2002 and others at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center reported 19 more last year. Reports to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) show more instances of sleepwalking with Ambien than with all the other sleep aids combined.

Somnambulism, or partial arousal, is a disorder in which a person is neither awake or asleep. Ambien might prevent people from waking up completely when something disturbs their sleep, so they end up in partial arousal. This would explain why they are able to carry out routine tasks, albeit imperfectly at times, and why they do not remember doing so when questioned afterwards. The most absurdly hilarious case of Ambien-related somnambulism is probably Lt. Judith Renee Lasswell, 39. Last September, she was arrested for shoplifting after she sleepwalked into a Navy base exchange, picked up an "X-Files" DVD and tried to return it for store credit. As a result, her top-secret security clearance was revoked and, in addition to larceny charges, she could face a dishonorable discharge. "I’ve never had a problem before in my life until I took Ambien, and it’s literally ruined my career and everything I ever worked for," said Lasswell. "I have gaps in memory from the whole time I was on Ambien, which is very terrref=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somnambulism”>Sleepwalking, Wiki
Automatism (case law), Wiki

The free-content multilingual online encyclopedia, Wiki, has launched two new portals: the mind and brain portal started by Lacatosias (Italian philosopher Francesco Franco), the psychology portal started by Zelifg (New York philosophy/psychology student). In addition to the usual reference entries, these portals feature psychology and neuroscience news, as well as recent research. Wikipedia has many other portals, including religion (from Baha’i to Zoroastrianism), history (incl. egyptology, war), arts and culture (anime and manga, fictional countries and worlds), science, sports, and technology. There are also geographically specific portals for a good number of countries around the world.

Mind and brain portal, Wiki
Psychology portal, Wiki

Adrian North, University of Leicester, UK, conducted a market research experiment in which he played traditional French accordion and traditional German brass music for costumers and analyzed the sales of wine from the experimental shelves containing French and German wine. On French music days, 77% of the wine sold was French, German days, 73% German. Only 1/44 costumers immediately stated that the music was the reason they chose the wine they did, while the others, when asked if the music effected their choice, 86% said ‘no’. So, eventhough there is a definite influence here, most people are unaware of it.

Music, wine and will, MindHacks.com

MIT has a free open educational resource, the OpenCourseWare (OCW), where it shares reading lists, lecture notes and problem sets, for many of its undergraduate and graduate courses from an array of disciplines including ‘Brain and Cognitive Science’, ‘Linguistics and Philosophy’, and ‘Science, Technology, and Society.’ Susan Hockfield, MIT’s president, believes the OCW "expresses in an immediate and far-reaching way MIT’s goal of advancing education around the world." Word, I could read this site for weeks, it’s an invaluable resource and I’m beaming I found it. A few of the many available course materials are:

Animal Behavior
Human Memory and Learning
Cognitive and Behavioral Genetics
Language and Thought
Mind and Machines
Cultural History of Technology
Drugs, Politics, and Culture

Full listings at OCW.mit.edu

According to a study by Stuart Brody, psychologist at University of Paisley, UK, penetrative sex can ease the stress of nervous public speakers. 24 women and 22 men were asked to keep a diary of their sexual activity for two weeks and then had to make a speech in public and perform mental arithmetic out loud. Those who had sex during the previous week had the least stress, as their blood presure returned to normal fastest. Oral sex and masturbation were much less effective. "The effects are not attributable to the short-term relief afforded by orgasm but, rather, endure for at least a week," says Brody, who thinks that sex releases a special pair-bonding hormone called oxytocin that produces the calming effect.

Sex before public speaking calms nerves, NerdShit.com
Blood pressure reactivity to stress is better for people who recently had penile-vaginal intercourse than for people who had other or no sexual activity, ScienceDirect.com