They Read Minds

... or thought reading (as they say)

For the basics about multivariate fMRI "mind-reading" techniques, see the video below. Some of it is based on this 2007 Haynes et al paper from Current Biology, described in more detail following the video.

What Haynes et al have done is to ask 8 subjects to freely decide either to add or subtract two numbers, and to select among 4 options an answer corresponding to the task they chose. After repeating this process many times, the authors ran a pattern classifier on the metabolic activity recorded in the brain.

This pattern classifier was run on the unsmoothed fMRI data - smoothing is normally applied because fMRI is thought to be a relatively noisy recording technique. Critically, the use of a pattern classifier allows the use of unsmoothed data (and in fact requires it) because buried within the noise is a distributed signal reflecting the distributed neural patterns encoding the subject's intention. Such data is presumably lost in averaging/smoothing operations.

Haynes et al trained their pattern classifier (a linear support vector machine) using a "multivariate searchlight" (described here) approach. This means that for every recorded voxel, they fed the classifier information about both that voxel and those surrounding it. The classifier was trained on 87.5% of the data (using 8-fold validation), and maps were produced of the classifier's accuracy at each voxel in the brain. These "accuracy maps" were averaged across subjects to produce the following figure:

As you can see above, the results showed that intention is decodable both prior to and during the intended response in numerous regions in the prefrontal cortex. In particular, the anterior & posterior medial prefrontal cortices as well as lateral frontopolar cortex, right middle frontal gyrus, and left operculum contained information that allowed the decoding of intentions at a level significantly above chance. Intentions prior to responses were also decoded based on activity in the temporo-parietal junction, although it is not illustrated in the above figure (see the supporting online material here). Much debate focuses on the precise roles of these regions, but their involvement here would be predicted by the majority of cognitive neuroscientists.

Conspicuously absent from these maps is the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), which has been argued to reflect numerical processing. An interesting possibility is that the numerical processing accomplished by this region cannot be distinguished based on the numerical operation (addition vs. subtraction), which would support a process-independent representation of quantity. Note that this conflicts with some theories of numerical processing in the IPS.

What's fairly amazing about this work is that they used a pretty standard scanner (only 3 tesla) with a reasonable sampling time (a TR of just over 2.7s). Peter Bandettini has suggested that this unsmoothed multivariate approach would benefit from higher resolution MRI, but Haynes et al have demonstrated surprising success with much more widely-available technology.

Related Posts:

Soon we'll be reading your mind!

However, all we ask you to do is create your Vita profile sitting on your bean bag in your apartment by just clicking your mouse/pressing space bar. And, I can assure you that although it wouldn't involve any mumbo-jumbo and wouldn't put a hole in your pocket; it would for sure help you understand and explore things about yourself that you'd never expect a machine to be able to figure out! !

Split Brain - Literally

A marvel to observe and know which side of your brain does what !

To reduce the severity of his seizures, Joe had the bridge between his left and right cerebral hemisphers (the corpus callosum) severed. As a result, his left and right brains no longer communicate through that pathway.

Here's what happens as a result:

Psychology quote of the day

"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing."

- William James, American psychologist and philosopher (1842 - 1910)

Letting my common sense do its bit ... new study shows this ! ( why do people even bother and take all that pain, I fail to grasp ?)

Certainly Uncertain

"Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it."

- Stuart Sutherland (British psychologist)

#1. More than fifty years ago a middle−aged woman walked into the clinic of Kurt Goldstein, a world−renowned neurologist with keen diagnostic skills. The woman appeared normal and conversed fluently; indeed, nothing was obviously wrong with her. But she had one extraordinary complaint — every now and then her left hand would fly up to her throat and try to strangle her. She often had to use her right hand to wrestle the left hand under control, pushing it down to her side — much like Peter Sellers portraying Dr. Strangelove. She sometimes even had to sit on the murderous hand, so intent was it on trying to end her life.

#2. Not long ago, at the Rivermead Rehabilitation Center in Oxford, England, I gripped a woman's lifeless left hand and, raising it, held it in front of her eyes. "Whose arm is this?" She looked me in the eye and huffed, "What's that arm doing in my bed?" "Well, whose arm is it?" "That's my brother's arm," she said flatly. But her brother was nowhere in the hospital. He lives somewhere in Texas.

(from Phantoms in the Brain, VS Ramachandran)

The above two cases are only a handful of clinical examples which have repeatedly questioned the nature of what we call as Self or Consciousness. A few cases have even ended up as interesting lawsuits that fell deep into moral, spiritual & psychological grounds.

During my college life at BITS Pilani, I've had a good share of conversations that revolved around selfishness, altruism, social definitions of good-bad & so on. And at all those times, it was very evident that most issues related to human values, behavior & evolution, inevitably lead us into uncertain grounds. The reason for uncertainty being - the lack of objective understanding of everything that is remotely human. But I've always believed it is possible, to understand ourselves in a much deeper & scientific way than we presently do.

This blog will be my attempt to put together everything that comes close to answering the mysteries surrounding our understanding of Self, Consciousness & Human Behavior. I'm not sure how well individual posts I write here connect later on, but here I am.... pondering on things that are certainly uncertain.

Brain - Mind

The 90s decade was dedicated to the Brain, as can be clearly seen from this. However, it seems that the scientists felt the need to study something that could have immediate application ... like the mind. The current decade has therefore been dedicated to Mind, (more here).

The Decade of the Mind initiative focuses on four broad areas:

Healing and protecting the mind: This is the notion of improving the public health by curing diseases of the brain that affect the mind. An example of such a disease is Alzheimer’s disease.

Understanding the mind: This aspect of the initiative seeks to understand how mind actually emerges from brain functional activity. Some of the key characteristics of the mind that are still not understood include consciousness, memory and dreams.

Enriching the mind: Improving learning outcomes in education is a key component of this part of the initiative.

Modeling the mind: A key approach to understanding the mind is to model it either analytically or using computation. Such models of mind may facilitate the creation of new hypotheses which can then be tested in the laboratory or clinic. Modeling the mind may also allow for the creation of new applications, technologies and inventions.

Which bring us to the question, Does activity in Brain result in Mind or is it the other way round? Though science likes to believe that its the former, the Hindu philosophy mentions that Mind controls not only the brain, but the whole body.

Tony Buzan a proponent of mind mapping and mind literacy has come up with various techniques to read mind. Yet, the most recent psychometric studies believe that they know nothing about how brain/mind works.

In James Randerson's "We know nothing about brain evolution" (Guardian UK, February 19, 2008) we learn that Harvard's Richrd Lewontin has pointed out the obvious:

"Why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition". He systematically dismissed every assumption about the evolution of human thought, reaching the conclusion that scientists are still completely in the dark about how natural selection prompted the massive hike in human brain size in the human line.

The main problem is the poor fossil record. Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m years or so, we can't be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us. Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches.

Worse, the fossils we do have are difficult to interpret. "I don't have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means," Lewontin confessed. What does a particular brain size tell us about the capabilities of the animal attached to it?

Of course Lewontin is right! First, cranial capacity is not the best measure of intelligence, as brain absent humans show. While we are here, a number of studies show that some birds (notably crows) are smart - even though they do not have the brain parts we humans associate with smartness. At the time, I said,

I've long been skeptical of claims that intelligence evolved as an aid to survival. The vast majority of life forms that have survived for millions or even hundreds of millions of years did not require - or acquire - intelligence. The newer notion that intelligence is spurred by the need for complex social interactions seems a bit closer to the mark, though not entirely satisfactory. After all, many insects have achieved complex social interactions without anything like what we humans regard as intelligence.

There is no "survival of the fittest" reason why humans should be conscious! None whatever. Bacteria are way more fit than humans, but do they have thoughts? And they are probably better off without them.

So we are stuck being human and having minds, and we really can't claim that our minds give us a survival advantage. Its more the opposite. We give our minds a survival advantage.

Wouldn't it be great to explore your MIND and know how it works ?!

Gossip - Good for you ! ... are u kidding ?

In today's Face Time, the gossip column that runs most days inside this section,

we learn that police believe last month's jewelry theft from Paris Hilton's mansion was an inside job, and the remaining Grateful Dead members are reuniting.

We'll pause here while you scurry away to read those tidbits, but only if you promise to come back rather than, say, poking around the Internet for more about Hilton's baubles.

There.

And now that you're back (thank you!), we promise not to censure you for your morbid curiosity, your prurient interest or your moral outrage.

It's only a matter of "doin' what comes natur'lly," as it was phrased in the show tune debuted by the four-times-married Broadway star Ethel Merman, whose 32-day hitch to actor Ernest Borgnine in 1964 presaged Britney Spears' brief betrothal to Jason Alexander in 2004.

It's easy to get caught up in today's riptide of gossip. The Internet has turned it into an ever-present force, like spam e-mail and gravity, and traditional media have responded to the competitive pressure by offering more of it.

Celebrity babies, divorces and dalliances are as inescapable as daybreak, and the result has been a rise in people bemoaning the form's ubiquity and what they see as concurrent cultural debasing. Even with names that aren't often written in bold, social networking tools, from Facebook to Twitter, allow us to keep up with "status changes" in the lives of both friends and "friends" to a degree that gives many of us pause.

But we should all relax, at least a little. As much as we may hold our noses while reading it, as much as we profess to skip right past it (or wish we could), having a taste for gossip, it turns out, is as fundamental as sleep.

Gossiping about neighbors, co-workers and, increasingly, celebrities all grows from the same evolutionary root: survival. Back in the day, if you didn't care to find out what was going on, you were more likely to die and less likely to pass on your incurious genes.

"People who had no interest in the private affairs of other people just got left in the dust," says Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, who has written about gossip.

To that end he wrote a cover article for October's Scientific American Mind magazine, "The Science of Gossip: Why We Can't Stop Ourselves."

For his purposes, McAndrew chose to ignore the negative effects as self-evident and often discussed. After a brief acknowledgment that gossip can, obviously, harm its targets, can separate those who indulge in it from real life and, McAndrew says, "can undermine the cohesiveness of the group when group members become careless or aggressive in the use of gossip among themselves," we'll set aside the negatives as well, condensing them to a common-sense reminder: You can gossip, but don't be a jerk about it, and don't become consumed by it. Even if Britney's life actually is more interesting than yours, you can't trust that what you read about her is anything more than well-placed spin from a highly paid press agent.

In his article, McAndrew summed up the voluminous research on gossip: In addition to providing vital intelligence—Why is the tribe leader behaving erratically? Where are the berries?—it teaches social norms, deters deviance from group values, reinforces bonds among group members and lets us rank ourselves in comparison to others. 

Among the topics: Who's in rehab? What's the latest about Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie and their mutual interest, Brad Pitt? Are the Pitt-Jolie babies showing superior style to the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes baby?

Eckert's use of gossip underscores two of the other functions it serves, says Gary Alan Fine, the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern.

"One is compensation," says Fine, co-author of the 1976 book "Rumor and Gossip." "People look at their own lives, which tend not to be so interesting, and celebrities provide this other side, this fantasy life. Some are leading lives we're envious of, and others are—I guess the term of art is 'train wrecks.' "

More compensation: In a time of "Bowling Alone," as Robert Putnam's book labeled the contemporary tendency to lead more isolated lives than our parents', we do less chatting in barbershops or over actual back fences. Celebrity gossip columns are a metaphorical back fence.

The second function, Fine said, "has to do with consumption. Rather than compensating for our own lives, it is entertainment in itself. You're going ... for the story. And there's an economics to it. It's a product. It's a form of consumption."

"Gossip is really a way that people show we're all part of the same sort of human community," says Grove, who now writes a much more detailed interview column for Portfolio's Web site. "The appeal is: We like reading about the high and mighty and knowing they're just like us"—members of the same tribe, hunting for the same necessities.

So the next time you think of gossiping ... do us a favour; tell your friends about Vita Beans !

...or would you be interested in this ?

Journey to the centre of your mind

Before approaching the core of your mind, let us get a glimpse of a few pointers that everyone must know about their mind !

The Hidden Workings of Our Minds

How great artists create? How do brilliant scientists solve the hardest problems in their field? Listen to them try to explain and you'll probably be disappointed. Artists say mysterious things like: "The picture just formed in my mind." Writers tell us that: "I don't know where the words come from." Scientists say they: "Just had a hunch."

Read more here.

What We Don't Know About Shopping, Reading, Watching TV & Judging People

Psychology studies that rely on deceiving participants have shown we often have little clue what's going on in our own minds. But what about in everyday situations where trickery isn't involved?

Here are four everyday situations - shopping, reading, watching TV and judging other people - and four experiments that show how little we know in each situation about what's really going on in our minds (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977)

Read more here.

At the Heart of Attraction Lies Confusion: Choice Blindness

Across a crowded room your eyes lock with an attractive stranger. You look away, you look back. The first hint of a smile plays across their lips. Suddenly you're nervous, your mind goes blank, you want to go over and you want to run away, both at the same time.

You turn around too fast, bump into someone, almost spilling your drink. 'Wow,' you think as you recover, 'Now, that's what I'm talking about!'.

Read more here.

Now, traveling further, into the brain we seek V Ramachandran's help. Vilayanur Ramachandran tells us what brain damage can reveal about the connection between celebral tissue and the mind, using three startling delusions as examples.

Using three very cool examples -

• Capgras syndrome: where a man looks at his mother and says: "It looks like my mother but she's an imposter." How can a person recognise his mother's face yet feel it's not her?
• Phantom limbs: why would an amputated limb still hurt? Can this pain be relieved?
• Synaesthesia: Numbers are colours. Notes are colours. Cross-talk between the senses has a higher incidence in creative people: why?

Walk the Line

How about I shut up for today and pass you on this,( oh ya ...go on click on it) so that, I could be as said... Predictably Irrational and yet let you get a glimpse of what I want to tell you.

Psst: Once you are done, you could hop on to this, and get to know how you could apply that to waggle your web marketing strategy !

A Delusion or you did Distort Time ?

Demystifying Delusions -

Delusions are pathological beliefs which persist despite clear evidence that they are actually false. They can vary widely in content, but are always characterized by the absolute certainty with which they are held. Such beliefs reflect an abnormality of thought processes; they are often bizarre and completely unrelated to conventional cultural or religious belief systems, or to the level of intelligence of the person suffering from them.

The delusions experienced by psychiatric patients are sometimes categorized according to their theme. For example, schizophrenics often suffer from delusions of control (the belief that an external force is controlling their thoughts or actions), delusions of grandeur (the belief that they are a famous rock star or historical figure) or delusions of persecution (the belief that they are being followed, attacked or conspired against).

Although often associated with psychiatric disorders, delusions can also occur as a symptom of neurodegenerative disorders, and improved diagnostic methods have led to an increase in the identification of brain damage in patients who suffer from them. To date, however, there has not been an all-encompassing theory of how the brain generates delusions. Now though, Orrin Devinsky, a professor of neurology, neurosurgery and psychiatry at New York University, proposes that delusions are generated by a combination of right hemisphere damage and left hemisphere hyperactivity.

In a review published in the journal Neurology, Devinsky examines the neuropathologies underlying two delusional syndromes with the aim of identifying anatomical abnormalities that are common to all four. Specifically, he looks at Capgras syndrome, the delusional belief that close friends or relations are imposters or have identical body doubles with different identities and reduplicative paramnesia (or Capgras for places), in which one believes that a familiar place exists in two locations simultaneously.

These syndromes are related to, and often co-exist with, confabulation (the pathological production of false memories) and anosognosia, a condition in which one fails to recognize, or is unaware of, a neurological deficit such as blindness or paralysis. They also share common mechanisms and pathologies. However, whereas confabulating patients can be convinced that their memories are false, deluded patients hold on to their beliefs firmly.

Devinksy looked at numerous case studies of individuals with these syndromes and, when possible, pinpointed the site of brain damage in each. His analysis showed that the four conditions do indeed share common pathological features. In 69 patients with replicative paramnesia, for example, 52% had incurred damage to the right frontal lobe (as a result of stroke or Alzheimer's Disease), 41% had damage to both, and 7% had damage to the left. Likewise, the case studies of patients with Capgras syndrome showed that they had damage primarily to the right frontal lobe.

The ubiquity of frontal lobe damage in the cases studies supports the hypothesis that these delusions involve impairments in executive function, working memory, decision-making and the abilities to make accurate predictions and to estimate and sequence time. One consequence of damage to the right frontal lobe would therefore be an impairment in the patients' ability to monitor the accuracy of their own cognitive processes.

According to Devinsky's hypothesis, this leads to increased left hemisphere activity - the left hemisphere compensates for the lack of inappropriate inputs from the right, "filling in" the gaps and conjuring a creative and extravagant narrative which leads to false explanations of the patient's experiences. Damage to the right hemisphere may prevent the patient from recognizing his or her cognitive errors, and therefore from changing their false beliefs.

From a different perspective, you could have distorted time to quantify the experience you had, isn't it?

"Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming." - William James, 1890

Extremely dangerous, traumatic, or surprising moments are often accompanied by reports that time seemed to "slow down" or "fly by." The perceptual basis of these subjective temporal distortions is unclear, but not for lack of trying: one recent experiment went so far as to drop subjects off a 400 foot tower while testing their ability to decipher a rapidly flashing string of numbers - a test of perceptual processing speed. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Subjects were no better at deciphering these numbers than they were under more mundane circumstances.

Ironically, temporal distortion may be more noticeable in such mundane experiences. A 2004 study by Tse and colleagues reviews evidence that durations are estimated as somewhat longer as more complex stimuli are being presented - as though time is subjectively expanding. In contrast, when subjects must actively attend to those stimuli or perform a secondary task while estimating durations, they tend to estimate those elapsed durations as slightly shorter - as though time is subjectively contracting.

Tse et al. suggested that these effects might emerge in the same way distraction might impair your ability to count the "ticks" from a clock's second hand. According to this "missed temporal cues" hypothesis, duration judgments are accomplished by attending to "temporal units." When attention is fully directed towards these temporal judgments, fewer "temporal units" are missed and duration estimates increase; however, when attention is divided, more of those "temporal units" are missed and so the estimates decrease.

Tse et al also suggest an alternative hypothesis: "attentional boost." According to the "attentional boost" theory, the processing of relatively low probability stimuli may somehow speed information processing of that stimulus, causing more "temporal units" to be counted.

To distinguish between these hypotheses, Tse et al. combined several methods of temporal estimation with the oddball paradigm, in which relatively low-probability stimuli are embedded inside series of more high-frequency stimuli. (For example, in auditory oddball, subjects might hear a string of sounds like "ROOF ROOF ROOF WOOF ROOF." Bizarre, I know.)

In a first experiment, subjects reliably estimated that an oddball visual stimulus was similar in duration to a much more frequent visual stimulus when, in fact, its duration was around half as long (675 msec vs. 1050 msec)!

A second experiment demonstrated that this temporal expansion of "oddballs" occurs only when the more frequent standard stimuli are longer than ~150 msec in duration. In fact, there's a subjective temporal contraction when standard stimuli are around 75 msec in duration - as though attention cannot be allocated to the oddball quickly enough, and the subsequent blank interval or standard stimulus itself undergoes the subjective temporal expansion, instead of the oddball.

An interesting feature of the data is a peculiar "dip" in the degree of temporal distortion measured by these methods when the more frequent standard stimuli last only around 375 msec. Shorter or longer standards cause more temporal distortions. Furthermore, this dip occurs at different times between individuals, and Tse et al. argue that it could reflect what many consider to be the dual mechanisms of attentional reorienting: a transient component and a sustained component.

Subsequent experiments replicated the effect with a variety of stimuli and temporal estimation methods. These temporal distortions (and to some extent the pecular "dip") were apparent when using auditory stimuli and were present with visual stimuli regardless of whether subjects were asked to rate the magnitude of the oddball's duration, to reproduce the duration of the oddball, or to rate whether the oddball lasted longer or shorter than the average of all previous stimuli (all of these are established psychophysics techniques for duration perception).

Tse et al note their results could be an example of the "time order error" (TOE) in which the second of two sequentially judged stimuli is altered along the dimension of judgment. For example, when two weights of large mass are lifted in succession, subjects tend to say the second is heavier. In contrast, when two weights of small mass are lifted one after the other, subjects tend to rate the second as lighter. So, in the case of temporal distortion, subjective duration lengthens if the oddball is presented for longer than 150 msec, but shortens if the oddball is presented for less than 150 msec. They discuss several reasons to doubt this possibility, including that TOE theory seems to contradict several findings in the duration psychophysics literature, as though it might not apply to duration judgments.

There are clear evolutionary advantages to subjective temporal distortion - as Tse et al note, increasing temporal resolution could allow for greater depth of processing and thus more adaptive responding when an organism is endangered or surprised. Although intuitively far-fetched, visual psychophysics has demonstrated that spatial attention can alter the spatial resolution of vision. Thus it seems at least plausible that "temporal attention" could alter the temporal resolution of duration judgments, causing them to contract or expand.

Finally, an interesting question for future research is how these phenomena might interact, given the time-frequency tradeoffs that are inherent to signal processing. For example, increased spatial attention could cause decreased resolution in temporal judgments, and vice versa.

Related:

• Anatomy of a false memory
  
• Neurobiology of a hallucination
• Reversing Time: Temporal Illusions (this post covers work by Eagleman and colleagues that reveals a perceptual form of latency or "delay compensation)
• Reichardt Detectors and Illusory Motion Reversal (This post covers yet another work by Eagleman et al., in which they demonstrate that illusory motion reversal may occur because of "temporally tuned" motion detectors in the visual system)
• Tuned and Pruned: Syneasthesia