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.