Non-visual illusions #1: The famous rubber hand

Mimi has been flooding our facebook with visual illusions for some time now. It's time to redmind ourselves that vision is not the only sense we have and certainly not the only one that can get fooled.

Let's start with some basics; if you have never heard of the Rubber Hand Illusion (or worse, you have, but you never got around to check it out), you know nothing Jon Snow and you should at least watch this video. Now.



moar sciency here: Botvinick, Matthew, and Jonathan Cohen. "Rubber hands' feel'touch that eyes see." Nature 391.6669 (1998): 756-756. (very readable and informative)

This illusion is closely related to the Mirror Box illusion, which you may know from the TV show House. Mirror box has been succesfully used to treat chronic pain in phantom limbs by generating a illusory visal perception of the missing limb. It's all (and more) very well explained in this TED talk by its inventor Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, a famous neuroscientist also known for his works on mirror neurons:




In the local news, bright young scientists from our very own LEVYNA are currently doing research on the effect of meditation on body scheme using a modified version of rubber hand experiment. Stay tuned for the results!

Conference on Experimental Study of Religion

What: "Homo Experimentalis: Experimental Approaches in the Study of Religion"
Where: Masaryk University, Brno
When: 25.10.-27.10

PROGRAM

The new Laboratory for Experimental Research of Religion (aka LEVYNA) in Brno throws its first conference. It's free, however, registration is required. Hurry up, only two more days left to register!

For more info go to LEVYNA's webpage.

(Artistic) renderings of the brain

Can neuroscience be artistic?

Carl Schoonover ( a very schön young scientist, for a proof see a photo )  is a very accomplished young scientist who earned his degree at Columbia University. What makes him very interesting, beside his schönhood, is also his unique PHD project later on transformed into a book titled Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. The book offers an amazing journey to visual brain renderings. It encompasses brain images of great diversity, dating back to medieval times, through 19th century drawings. The first two chapters are dedicated to biologists studying the neural system, such as Galen, Golgi or Ramon y Cajal. Later chapters are focused on more current versions of the brain study.

Some of the images are displayed below. Enjoy!

                                                    The book cover.

                                         Early drawings of visual pathways. 11th century.

                                                                        Cortical blood vessels.

                                                           Image of rat' s hipocampus.

The art of metaphors

Each of us remembers  being a little kid, lying under the warm comforter, full of expectation, followed by awe as your parent reads a passage from your favorite book .Stories are important is our life, not only because they reflect of how we feel, how we live or how we want to live, but because they bring us to a new reality, the unexperienced one.

Current research is showing evidence of what happens inside of our brain when reading a story, encountering an emotional exchange between story characters or when reading a metaphor. Much of language processing occurs in two essential language-related center: Broca and Wernicke area. However, reading words related to sense also activates respective brain area. When reading a word "rose" or " vinegar", areas connected to smells, i.e., primary olfactory areas, are activated.

In a research  published in Brain and Language, researchers were interested what brain regions are involved in processing of metaphors. Having a rough day; a singer having a velvet voice....All those metaphors activate also primary somatosensory areas responsive to texture processing. Interestingly, visual areas were not stimulated showing evidence for primacy of touch in texture perception.

The research demonstrates how our brain constructs an internal simulation when processing metaphors. Authors of the study concludes by saying:


" This also demonstrates how complex processes involving symbols, such as appreciating a painting or understanding a metaphor, do not depend just on evolutionarily new parts of the brain, but also on adaptations of older parts of the brain."

The impossibility of unlearning: Deep down, we still believe the Sun revolves around the Earth

Maybe some of you remember believing it's Sun revolving around the Earth. The Sun is so small in the sky and we can't feel any rotation, can we? This kind of theory that people naturally hold without scientific education and cultural influence is called the naive theory. Later we came to school, learned that it's actually the other way around, our old theory got replaced and we can laugh at stupid Americans till the end of our days.

At least that's what our naive theory of learning predicts. However, it seems science will once again teach us otherwise. Recent study says it seems the naive childhood beliefs aren't replaced by new scientific facts but merely suppressed.

meditation modulates usage of attentional resources

Assuming that many readers are college students, going through various strenuous activities, studying for exams and running around like chickens without heads when writing their papers, this article is aimed at helping you improve your attentional span.

A recent study (and many other before) suggests that meditation might improve at attentional span or capacity, defined by the number of items one can hold and manipulate with in their working memory. In the study of Slagter et al. (2007), participants had to perform attentional blind paradigm. In the paradigm, items are presented very quickly in succession and subjects are supposed to identify two white letters among black letters. When the letters are in a close temporal proximity from each other, the percentage of identification of the second letter decreases. See the video with only red letters.

The reason why this phenomenon called attentional blink occurs is the limited attentional resources we have when allocating our attention. Thus, identification of the first letter exerts the attention that needs to be restored and when that does not happen, attention "blinks".

In the study, subject who performed intensive three-months long meditation were far better at identifying the second letter and not experiencing attentional blink then control subjects. Thus, meditation helps the training of attention via the mechanisms of selecting and concentrating on task-relevant goal and exerting less of attentional resources for particular attention-demanding task.

Conference on Consciousness and Volition in Poland.

Consciousness and Volition: 1st International Krakow Conference in Cognitive Science

27-29 September 2012

Institute of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University in cooperation with the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University and AGH University of Science and Technology.

Unexpected events strike believers more than non-believers

The strength of higher level beliefs can be predicted by something as basic- or low-level as attentional capture. Attentional capture is an automatic, involuntary phenomenon when an unattended or very salient (attractive) stimulus literally grabs our attention. Imagine a huge octopus entering a classroom and trying to sneak upon your teacher, regardless of how much you want to pay attention to the lesson, you just cannot resist noticing the octopus. Regardless of the goal-directed (top-down) actions, the attention cannot be helped since the stimulus is so salient (stimulus-driven attention), regardless of its relevance to the task. This is attentional capture.

In a study of Bressan, Kramer & Germani (2008), attentional capture (AC) has been found to be correlated with the beliefs in meaningfulness of coincidence which mediated the relationship between AC and religiosity. Participants saw always pair of two words in white color presented on black background. They had to press a key when a dot appeared on the screen. The meaning of the words and the task (pressing the keyboard when dot appeared) was irrelevant to the nature of the experiment. However, at a specific trial, one of the words was presented in white rectangle (attentional capture). The reaction time to responding to the dot appearing on the screen after this particular, critical trial was a measure of attentional capture (longer RT= greater AC). Participants had to indicate how surprised this event was; they had to judge how surprising and how frequent certain coincidences were,  and also filled out religiosity and meaningfulness of coincidences questionnaires.

The experiment demonstrate that believers in meaningfulness of coincidence are more surprised by unexpected events- experience greater attentional capture than non-believers. However, they have a greater tendency to disregard and forget this particular information if it is inconsistent with their beliefs.
Furthermore, beliefs in meaningfulness was correlated (to no surprise) with religiosity.

The results of the current study show that higher order cognition might be modulated/ might modulate low-level information processing.

Free online courses in Neuroscience

Have you already been to coursera.org? Are you already learning at top speed? No? Well, see you later in your dark age.

I picked this cheeky intro to redmind you that summer is not for slacking off and you can start a nice online course on Basic Behavioral Neurology. Some repetition can be useful for our more advanced readers and those of you who are new to cognition and related stuff, why not try to attend University of Pennsylvania for free?

According to their web page, "the course will cover content on basic behavioral neurology, including an overview of cognitive localization in the brain; the neural basis of language processing; executive function and decision-making; how the brain sees; how the brain represents the body, numbers, and space; an introduction to dementia (i.e. when is some forgetfulness too much?); and an introduction to cool tools for studying thinking (fMRI, TMS, tDCS, MEG, EEG)."

Well, see you in the discussion boards of the course. Have fun.

Author: Ján Struhár

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Students' CogSci Conference in Bratislava

This conference is organized by the Middle European Interdisciplinary Master Programme in Cognitive Science (MEi:CogSci). Students of this programme from various Central European universities will present their work and invited speakers will talk about their current research.

When: June 22 – June 23, 2012
Where: Comenius University in Bratislava, Mlynská dolina, Bratislava, Slovak Republic
Website: http://www.univie.ac.at/meicogsci/php/ocs/index.php/meicog/meicog2012/index

Illusion of the day

The following illusions created by prof. Kokichi Susihara is at time favorite illusion of mine. Once watched, you feel like you should never really trust what you see.

The video shows a real, constructed scene depicting four slopes with balls that seem to be rolling against gravity. However, the fundamental presumption our eyes makes is wrong. The shading and linear perspective dictate us that this cannot happen. Meanwhile, our eyes are tricked.

Enjoy!

When brain exercises

There has been a lot of research showing what improves our brain (lecitine, ginkgo biloba, working memory practices, etc.). In search for another factors, an interesting study conducted at University of California, Irvine examined the role of exercise in the brain power. It seems that exercise is a very effective tool in improving the performance of your brain, and more so than thinking itself (One could always think of the Greek concept of kalokagatia- equlibrium between body and mind).

In the research by Berchtold et al. (2005), they looked at how lab animals brains response to various degrees of busy, or enriched environments- environments either furnished with toys and running wheels OR  environments devoid of any of those.  It was shown that leaning of very specific cognitive tasks (e.g., navigation) is domain specific, not allowing newly acquired brain network to respond to any other stimuli than those of the navigation task. This is NOT the case for exercise. When the mice ran, many other neural networks were activated- creating agile neurons later responding to various kinds of tasks. Thus, exercise lead to neurogenesis through the release of so called B.D.N.F. (brain-derived neurotropic factor).

Research of Arthur F. Kramer examined effects of exercise on elderly brain examining one-year walking versus stretching.  One area of the brain where neurogenesis occurs is hippocampus, a center involved in memory consolidation and storage. The volume of hippocampus after one year of exercise has increased for the walkers, but stretchers´s volume returned to normal atrophy. Walkers also showed improvement  in cognitive abilities and higher level of B.D.N.F in their blood stream.

Hippocampal size seems to be an indicator of many things, see also our post on Deja Vu.

Unveiling the Mystery of Deja Vu

(study summary)

Study shows differences in gray matter between brains of people experiencing deja vu and control subjects. These are most prominent in hippocampi and surrounding areas, which have been linked to deja vu before. Due to structural similarities between "healthy" deja vu subjects and mesial temporal lobe epilepsy patients, authors of the study suggest deja vu experiences in healthy patients might be caused by "small seizures". 

The "error in the Matrix" hypothesis has a serious rival 

Deja vu is an eerie experience during which you get the impression a situation is familiar even though you know the feeling of familiarity is inappropriate. It occurs both in healthy subjects and as a manifestation of brain disease, particularly temporal lobe epilepsy. Various theories of how deja vu originates have been suggested, for example “the theory that a disruption of attention or perception leads to anomalous ‘dual’ processing of sensory information” - which would cause information to be processed both as a percept and as a memory.

Blink and forget everything: The case of Clive Wearing.

Imagine that with every blink of an eye, you forget almost everything you know, and you can´t remember anything new. You have a constant impression of being just awoken from a  long-term coma, and this happens every 30 seconds of your life. This nightmarish conception is exactly what happened to Clive Wearing, once a successful composer and musician. At the age of 47, he was struck down by a herpes simplex virus, normally a rather harmless one, which in Wearing resulted into a bad case of encephalitis. As a consequence, his both hippocampi (playing a major role in the transfer of information from short-term into long-term memory), but also surrounding areas of his temporal lobes as well as portions of his left frontal lobe got badly damaged, which has manifested in profound changes in his memory. Actually, it is the worst case of amnesia ever recorded.

Ever since his condition started, Wearing has been unable to form any new memories and recall majority of the past ones. This means he suffers from an extreme case of both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. He can remember some fundamental facts, like the fact he has been married (but doesn´t know for how long) and that he has children (not knowing how many and who they are) (Sacks, 2007). Apart from these few facts, his long-term memory has been completely erased.

Clive´s wife Deborah has documented their life together, affected by this condition, in her book "Forever Today"

Psychoactive drugs can change your (or rats´) brain structure

Recent study by Vernon et al. (2012) published on May 15th 2012 in Biological Psychiatry (Impact Factor 8.674- a bit higher than Journal of Czechoslovak Psychology) demonstrated fascinating, yet worrisome effects of psychoactive drugs on brain structure.

Researchers at King´s College London studied rats´ brain structure after exposure to psychotropic drugs via  magnetic resonance imaging. Haloperidol (drug used for treating of schizophrenia and psychotic symptoms) or lithium (used for treatment of bipolar disorder or as we call "maniodepression" in Czecho/Slovak) was administered for 8 weeks ("somehow" equivalent to human 5 years- but do now ask how). Results illustrate that chronic treatment of haloperidol led to decrease of gray cortical matter by 6%, while treatment using lithium led to increase in grey matter by 3% (but not rats´ intelligence (which was not tested), just to point out).

However, one has to keep in mind that human etiology of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder is complex (the rats in the study which were normal without any symptoms), based on combination of genetics, psychological mechanisms as well as environmental contributions.

Nevertheless, those findings are important (or we believe so) in understanding (if nothing at least) the side-effects of the aforementioned drugs.

Zombie Vison

Visual perception is an important part of our conscious experience. For us visual people, it's almost impossible to imagine "being conscious" of the surrounding world without a nice, colorful image. We might be used to the notion of subconscious thoughts, but being able to respond to visual stimuli without realizing it is a very counterintuitive idea.

 Actually, there are people who are able to process visual information (to some extent) even though they think they are completely blind to one half of visual field. This rare condition is called blindsight and occurs in patients suffering from cortical blindness, which means nothing is wrong with the eyes or optical nerves and the damage occurs in part of their cortex that is concerned with processing visual information. These patients can tell apart simple stimuli presented in the "blind" part of the field when confronted with forced-answer questions, but they will admit they´re only guessing. Even more surprising is that they can even discriminate between colors while completely lacking any subjective experience of "redness" or "blueness".

Illusion your brain

Visual illusions are particularly interesting phenomena providing insights into mechanisms of how our brain process (mostly) visual stimuli.
All of you might experience illusion of self-motion when travelling by train, perceiving the train moving when the neighbouring train starts moving.
Visual Illusion Contest is an annual event that celebrates scientific endeavour to find new illusions and explain the mechanisms by means of which they work.

In 2010, Jan Kremlacek, a Czech scientist won a third prize for his illusion of rotating double-helix.

One of the winners of this year- the team from prof. Tangen lab- demonstrated an excellent illusion of how a combination of presented stimuli can change the final percept (similarly as Gestalt school of psychology pointed to a century ago). In the video, faces of celebrities turn "ugly" when perceived while focused on fixation cross (a cross in the centre of scene one has to attend).
The explanation could be that using two very different stimuli simultaneously, they can exaggerate a particular feature of each of the pair. More illusions from this and also past years can be found here.

The original illusion:

The altered version (with celebrities):

Now, one could also hope that the opposite effect will be found one day too.

Cognitive Neuroscience meeting at Ceitec, Brno

a great event for anybody interested in neuroscience!
Date: June 2012
Where: INBIT building, Conference Room, Kamenice 34, Brno
Speakers: Todd Ogden, Tamer Demiralp, Ovidiu Lungu, M. van den Heuvel
More: http://www.ceitec.eu/1st-international-cognitive-neuroscience-meeting/

You are not (ONLY) your brain

After reading first book by Alva Noe- Out of our heads- I was quite astounded how revolutionary his ideas were. Alva is in favor of embodied cognition, believing that the relationship between mind and body is not single-directional. It posits that body can affect mind in various ways and it is an essential mediator of the final results of our cognition.

In this vein, Proffitt' s lab demonstrated that even a very low perception, such as judging of steepness of hill is dependent on tuning of our body. Participants who were fatigued, in a bad shape or burdened by a heavy backpack judged the hill as much steeper than those who were not. Furthermore, judging a hill when viewed from a side (thus the steepness is quite evident) is very imprecise and overestimated when done verbally, however, motor estimations of the angle are quite accurate.