A newly discovered daguerreotype of Phineas Gage, the only image of the man known to exist, recalls one of the most bizarre incidents in railroading and neurological history. (Today's story: "A piercing image of Phineas Gage.")
Gage was the foreman of a construction crew laying a railroad roadbed in 1848, using powder to blast rock. As he was packing powder and sand into a hole in rock, the powder detonated, sending the 13-pound tamper into his cheek and out of the top of his head. It landed 25 to 30 yards behind him.
Surprisingly, Gage was unconscious only momentarily, if at all, though most of the front of the left side of his brain was destroyed. He made a full physical recovery over the following 10 weeks, but his personality was irreversibly altered. Whereas he had once been an intelligent and even-tempered worker, he had overnight become irreverent, grossly profane, obstinate, capricious and ill-tempered. His friends said he was "no longer Gage."
Gage's case influenced 19th century thinking about the localization of functions in the brain and was perhaps the first to tie specific behavioral attributes to localized areas of the brain. His case has subsequently been the subject of many books and scholarly papers. Some authors have stated that his experience provided insights into brain surgery, but most authors now agree that the only conclusive fact to arise from it was that surgery could be performed on the brain without being inevitably lethal.
Gage was never able to resume his job on the railroad. He spent some time at P.T. Barnum's American Museum in New York City, where patrons apparently paid to see him, and made appearances in several large cities in New England. He later found work in a livery, eventually moving to Chile to pursue this occupation. In 1859, feeling unwell, he returned to the United States to live with his mother and sister. In February 1860, he began to suffer a series of increasingly severe convulsions, and he died in May of that year.
-- Thomas H. Maugh II
Photo: Reproduction of a daguerreotype of Phineas Gage, the railroad construction worker.
Credit:Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Copyright Taylor and Francis Group LLC.
Sometimes, men have affairs. Sometimes, their wives stand by them. (The reverse also happens, but those scenarios are rarely played out for public consumption, as is the exceedingly common case with U.S. politicians.) For people seeking some public explanation for such intensely private matters, evolutionary psychology has offered one-stop shopping.
The notion is that evolution has bestowed upon us certain predispositions. That is, men are hard-wired to procreate, regardless of the emotional toll on others; women are hard-wired to protect their existing offspring, regardless of the emotional toll on themselves. As for politicians -- well, it all goes double for them, with the need for power, stature, conquest, etc.
Done. And on to the next public display of emotion and remorse.
Now, evolutionary psychology is getting a more skeptical look.
Sharon Begley writes in Newsweek:
"In some environments it might indeed be adaptive for women to seek sugar daddies. In some, it might be adaptive for stepfathers to kill their stepchildren. In some, it might be adaptive for men to be promiscuous. But not in all. And if that's the case, then there is no universal human nature as evo psych defines it. That is what a new wave of studies has been discovering, slaying assertions about universals right and left."
Here's the article, "Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves."
And David Brooks attests in the New York Times:
"Far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert, our brains are fluid and plastic. We’re learning that evolution can be a more rapid process than we thought. It doesn’t take hundreds of thousands of years to produce genetic alterations. Moreover, we’ve evolved to adapt to diverse environments."
Begley in particular has taken some flak for her article. Gad Saad questions her assessment and defends the field in Psychology Today:
"Evolutionary psychologists are perfectly aware that humans are an inextricable mélange of their genes and idiosyncratic life experiences. This is known as the interactionist perspective. ... That said this does not imply that human nature is infinitely malleable.
Here's his full response, "The Never-Ending Misconceptions About Evolutionary Psychology."
David Sloan Wilson, meanwhile, says on the Huffington Post that "Begley's article made some cheap shots but it also made some fair shots about evolutionary psychology that need to be acknowledged." He lays them out here in "Evolutionary Psychology and the Public Media: Rekindling the Romance."
The discussion about evolution's influence on our behavior will continue, but clearly the media seem less inclined to accept it as explanation.
-- Tami Dennis
Photo: People looking for a simple answer to infidelity may have to keep looking.
Our brains may empathize along racial lines, even if we report no such bias.
Observers shown video clips of subjects receiving painful stimuli showed increased brain activation in the areas associated with empathy and emotion when subjects shared the observer’s race, Chinese researchers reported in a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience on Wednesday.
The study is the first to use brain imaging technology to confirm subconscious in-group prejudice, a topic that has been investigated since the 1950s.
Perceiving others’ pain is an automatic reaction that activates the same neural circuit in the brain as the one that is activated during first-person pain. This kind of empathic response has been shown, in studies, to be stronger if there is a connection between individuals. For example, a 2002 study showed that white college students who read a passage involving a black or white man charged with a criminal act reported greater empathy for, and assigned more lenient punishments to, the white defendant.
In this study, from Peking University in Beijing, Chinese and Caucasian university participants watched video clips showing faces of Chinese and Caucasian models with neutral expressions receiving either a painful (needle penetration) or non-painful (Q-tip touch) stimulation on the cheek.
The participants were then asked to rate the amount of pain the model felt, as well as their own level of discomfort while watching the jabs.
Race had no effect on the survey responses by either Chinese or Caucasian observers. But the same was not true in their brains.
While participants watched the videos, researchers used functional MRI to scan what was going on inside their heads. The scans revealed increased activation in the brain regions that mediate the empathic neural response. But when the painful simulations were applied to subjects who shared a race with observers, the neural responses increased significantly more than when the ones being stuck with needles were of the other racial group.
The findings suggest that bias against those from other groups may exist at a fundamental level in the human mind, despite what self-reports reveal.
“If this is confirmed in future research, people then should be careful about their own behaviors during social interaction even though we intend to deal with in-group and out-group members equally well at the conscious level of the mind,” says coauthor Shihui Han, a professor at Peking University's Department of Psychology, in an e-mail.
The answer to your question may depend on which ear you ask. We tend to offer our right ear to speakers and are more likely to say yes to a request addressed into it, reported Italian researchers in a study published in the journal Naturwissenschaften.
Although knowledge of right-ear dominance is nothing new, how the results were generated in this study was: The scientists talked to strangers in nightclubs.
Right-ear preference is one of the best-known asymmetries in humans, transcending gender, ethnicity, age and right- or left-handedness. It is thought to be due to the right ear’s speediness in transmitting information to our brain’s left hemisphere, which dominates in processing language.
Until now, however, most studies on the phenomenon were performed in laboratory-controlled settings, not more “natural” environments.
To change this, researchers Daniele Marzoli and Luca Tommasi of the Gabriele d'Annunzio University in Italy gathered observational evidence from what they called an “ecological situation”: noisy Italian discotheques.
First, the researchers watched 286 clubbers while they were talking, and observed that 72% of all interactions happened on the listener’s right side.
Next, the researchers had a woman approach 80 men and 80 women, mumble a meaningless request and observe which ear the listener offered. (She then asked for a cigarette.)
Overall, 58% of the subjects lent their right ear, with females showing a significant preference for doing so. In this situation, when the people who were approached chose the ear they offered, the woman was just about as likely to get a cigarette regardless of which ear she spoke into.
In the final leg of the experiment, the woman went up to a person and chose which ear she spoke into. When this was done, the likelihood of the woman being given the cigarette doubled with requests that were spoken into the right ear: 34 of 88 clubbers offered a cigarette to an asker addressing the right
ear, and only 17 of 88 clubbers did the same when addressed on the
left.
Why should this be? It is thought that activation of the left and right brain hemispheres correspond with positive and negative judgments, respectively. This asymmetry is linked to two motivational systems: “approach” in the left and “avoidance” in the right.
The data, which suggest specialization of different sides of the brain for different emotions, are consistent with previous findings. For example, one study from 1991 found that subjects showed a better memory of arguments with which they agreed when the sentences were heard through the right ear, and better remembering of disagreements heard through their left ear.
However, the scientists caution, “Unequal distribution of sound sources in space, type of music played, [or] effect of alcohol intake” all may have had an effect on results.
Parents of children with obsessive-compulsive disorder are often faced with a tough choice: not indulge the behavior, or soothe the anxiety. While many parents often opt for the latter, they may do so at a price. A recent study shows that accommodating OCD behavior may trigger more serious symptoms, but therapy may help in reversing that.
In the study, which appears in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 49 children aged 6 to 18 with OCD took part in 14 sessions of family-based cognitive-behavioral therapy with their parents. In those sessions, emphasis was placed on helping parents reduce "family accommodation," or trying to relieve the anxiety by offering comfort, giving the child objects, or even doing tasks like homework. The therapy also included exposure-response prevention, a method of treatment based on the idea that by facing their fears and realizing they're baseless, people will eventually stop their behaviors as they find better ways to cope.
Before the sessions, tests were given to measure the children's level of OCD and note how often parents indulged their behavior. Researchers (from the University of Florida) noticed that the more serious the symptoms, the more the parents accommodated them.
But after therapy, families did not try to soothe their children's anxiety as much or facilitate their behavior. Parents who changed the most also saw the most progress in improving their children’s OCD symptoms.
Despite the results, researchers caution that the study had its limitations, including the lack of a control group, the fact that most study participants were white and middle or upper-middle class, and that parents reported their own levels of family accommodation. They recommend that future studies delve into what factors could influence families accommodating their kids' behavior, such as subtypes of OCD, comorbidities, or family patterns.
Everyone hates that cellphone that rings in an inappropriate setting -- a classroom, during a concert or movie, in a church (how about during a wedding?) These calls are not only annoying, a new study has found, they pose the kind of distraction that can impair learning or derail someone's train of thought.
"Nuisance noises have real-life impacts," said Jill Shelton of Washington University in St. Louis, the author of the study, in a news release.
In one study, Shelton posed as a student in a crowded, undergraduate psychology lecture and allowed her cellphone to ring loudly for about 30 seconds. The students exposed to the ringing scored 25% worse on a test of material presented before the distraction. Students tested later scored about 25% worse for recall of content during the distraction even though the same information was covered by the professor just prior to the phone ring and was projected as text in a slide show during the distraction. Students scored even worse when Shelton added to the disturbance by frantically searching her handbag as if attempting to find and silence her phone.
The study, published online in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, also found that cellphones that play a popular song for a ring tone can have an even longer-lasting negative impact on attention. A custom tone that identifies the caller as a particular person, such as mom or the boss, can be especially distracting.
"Depending on how familiar people are with these songs, it could lead to an even worse impairment in their cognitive performance," she said.
The findings raise the question of what other types of everyday disturbances -- such as beeping and buzzing from incoming e-mail -- jar attention and learning processes. But the study showed that, with repeated exposure, students were able to block the distracting effects and reduce the cognitive impairment caused by the noise. Evidence also suggests that being prepared in advance for nuisance noises lessens their impact.
"There's definitely some evidence to suggest that people can become habituated to a distracting noise," she said. "If you're in an office where the phones are just ringing all the time everyday, it may initially be distracting to you, but you will probably get over it."
She writes: "In recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted."
She tells her story in some part through a recent Harvard graduate named Alex. He makes a compelling case for what can be accomplished with a little help.
Photo: Ritalin -- the little helper for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and overworked, over-stressed students -- is going mainstream.
“The question of why people are motivated to act altruistically has been an important one for centuries,” begins an article in Psychological Science. The authors don’t claim to have solved that little mystery, but they did, at least, find something kind of interesting.
They enrolled 46 students in an experiment with several parts. In one part, the subjects were asked to copy a list of words and think carefully about what each word meant to them, then write a story about themselves in which they used the words. (They were told it was a “handwriting test,” though one or two of them, we’re sure, might have wondered why Northwestern University’s psych department should be quite so interested in calligraphy.)
Some got neutral words like “book” and “house” to copy. Some got nice words, such as “caring” and “kind.” Others got mean words like “disloyal” and “selfish.” This drill had been shown, in earlier experiments, to influence how a person felt about themselves.
Next: Subjects were asked whether they would like to make a small donation to a charity of their choice. Result? Those who had the mean list of words pledged more money to the charity than those who’d been primed to feel good about themselves.
The conclusion: If you’re feeling pretty darn good about yourself you’re more likely to act shabbily -- hey, you’ve got credits in the bank, you can afford it. But if you’re feeling pretty shabby about yourself to begin with, you need to build up your saintly quotient. Better be nice.
Or, as the authors put it: “We suggest that people aspire to maintain a comfortable self-image. Deviation in either direction ... results in compensatory behavior.”
Why? Well, altruism, they note, is a component of human social behavior. But it carries a personal cost. You give that last piece of pie to someone else and that means it doesn’t go to you. Human beings, therefore, might be tuned to constantly gauge how they’re morally measuring up, and not lay on the niceness any thicker than it needs to be.
For more on the science of altruism and various scholarly theories scientists have put forth to explain it, go here and here.
Musicians who play in sync also have brains that fall into alignment, according to a study published today. The study showed that the brain waves of guitarists playing a jazz tune together became synchronized as they performed.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the University of Salzburg examined eight pairs of guitarists while they were hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which measures electrical activity in the brain. The study showed that the brain waves of the guitarists became more synchronized as they played. Several regions of the brain reflected the coordination. The frontal and central regions of the brain exhibited the strongest synchronization. But even the temporal and parietal regions showed a high level of synchronization in at least half of the pairs of musicians.
The study, which is published online today in BMC Neuroscience, suggests that things people do together, called "interpersonally coordinated actions," are preceded and accompanied by brain wave coordination.
"In everyday life, people often need to coordinate their actions with that of others," the authors wrote. "Some common examples are walking with someone at a set pace, playing collective sports or fighting, dancing, playing music in a duet or group, and a wide range of social bonding behaviors (e.g., eye-gaze coordination between mother and infant or between partners)."
The study cannot prove, however, whether this coupling occurs in response to the beat of the music, watching each other's movements and listening to each other or whether the synchronization takes place first and fosters the coordinated performance. A video clip of the experiment is on the BMC Neuroscience website.
Joaquin Phoenix's bizarre appearance on the "Late Show with David Letterman" on Feb. 11 could be a publicity stunt or evidence Phoenix was drunk or high. But a different explanation is also making the rounds in the blogosphere. Perhaps Phoenix is mentally ill.
The actor-turned-singer looked and acted spaced-out on his appearance on "Letterman." The awkward interview, which drew jokes from Letterman and nervous laughter from the audience, has been the talk of the entertainment industry and even led to a spoof by actor Ben Stiller on the Oscars telecast Sunday. "Letterman" has listed Phoenix as a guest on his show Thursday night.
That's sure to draw high ratings. Perhaps it will also clear up the question of whether Phoenix is still an actor at heart or has truly undergone a behavior change. If taken at face value, the actor would appear to be mentally ill, says Chicago-based psychiatrist Paul Dobransky, a relationships expert and author of "The Secret Psychology of How We Fall in Love."
Dobransky says Phoenix's "socially inappropriate" behavior reflects some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, a brain-based disease that causes people to lose touch with reality. Phoenix's appearance as well as his career change, poor hygiene and grooming, vocal tics (such as muttering) and lack of facial emotion are classic symptoms of mental illness, Dobransky says.
"I was pretty offended by that skit at the Oscars," Dobransky said today in an interview. "It struck me as potentially beating down on the mentally ill."
Dobransky said much of Phoenix's behavior on "Letterman" hinted at mental illness, such as wearing sunglasses, which may suggest paranoia. "There is something wrong. And it's beyond drug abuse." The public should refrain from mocking Phoenix, the psychiatrist said, because real mental illness is cause for compassion.
"The jury is not exactly in on what is happening," Dobransky said. "Whatever it is, it's not funny --whether it's drug abuse, mental illness coming on, or the clumsiest attempt ever at a career change."
-- Shari Roan
Photo: Joaquin Phoenix appeared on the "Late Show with DavidLetterman" on Feb. 11. Credit: AP photo / CBS / J.P. Flio
Tami Dennis, who takes the word "skeptic" to previously uncharted territory, is the Times' Health and Science editor. She's adamant that pitches promoting awareness days, weeks or months are, by their nature, non-stories. And, because she's an adult, she refuses to use words like "veggies," "tummy" and "yummy."
Rosie Mestel, deputy Health and Science editor, studied genetics before abandoning flies, fungi and DNA for health/medical writing. Her hero is the biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose jellyfish paintings inspired snazzy chandeliers. Her favorite toast-spread is Marmite, a British delicacy made of yeast extract. Her least-favorite word is "millenniums."
Melissa Healy is a staff writer for the Health section reporting from Washington D.C. Healy's a veteran of The Times' National staff, having covered the Pentagon, Congress, poverty and social welfare, the environment, and the White House before shifting to Health in 2003. She writes frequently about mental health and human behavior, about federal health policy, prescription medication and ethics in medicine. More wonk than wellness freak, Healy chooses to believe in the health benefits of coffee and wine, and considers water a better work-out medium than beverage.
Karen Kaplan covers genetics, stem cells and cloning. She and colleague Thomas H. Maugh II comprise about 25% of the unofficial MIT-Alumni-in-Journalism Club, and she is proud to have taken more math (5) than English (0) courses in college. Her contributions to Booster Shots will, she hopes, appear more frequently than postings to her mommy blog.
Thomas H. Maugh II has been a science and medical writer at the Times for 23 years. Before that, he was on the staff of the journal Science for 13 years.
He has bachelor's degrees in English and chemistry from MIT and a doctorate in chemistry from UC Santa Barbara.
After a brief stint as a sports writer, Shari Roan turned to health journalism and has covered the topic for The Times for 18 years. She is the author of three books and the mother of two daughters, both teenagers who refer to her as a "health freak." She likes to jog, watch baseball and is very happy that dark chocolate contains some health benefit.
Jeannine Stein writes about fitness, sports medicine and obesity for the Health section. She’s a gym rat from way back and never met an elliptical trainer she didn’t like. Well, maybe one or two. She tempers exercise with a steady diet of reality television because she believes it’s all about balance.
