Research Shows Strategic Thinking Strengthens Intellectual Capacity

Strategy-based cognitive training has the potential to enhance cognitive performance and spill over to real-life benefit according to a data-driven perspective article by the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. The research-based perspective highlights cognitive, neural and real-life changes measured in randomized clinical trials that compared a gist-reasoning strategy-training program to memory training in populations ranging from teenagers to healthy older adults, individuals with brain injury to those at-risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

“Our brains are wired to be inspired,” said Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, founder and chief director of the Center for BrainHeath and Dee Wyly Distinguished University Chair at The University of Texas at Dallas. “One of the key differences in our studies from other interventional research aimed at improving cognitive abilities is that we did not focus on specific cognitive functions such as speed of processing, memory, or learning isolated new skills. Instead, the gist reasoning training program encouraged use of a common set of multi-dimensional thinking strategies to synthesize information and elimination of toxic habits that impair efficient brain performance.”

The training across the studies was short, ranging from 8 to 12 sessions delivered over one to two months in 45 to 60 minute time periods. The protocol focused on three cognitive strategies — strategic attention, integrated reasoning and innovation. These strategies are hierarchical in nature and can be broadly applied to most complex daily life mental activities.

At a basic level, research participants were encouraged to filter competing information that is irrelevant and focus only on important information. At more advanced levels, participants were instructed to generate interpretations, themes or generalized statements from information they were wanting or needing to read, for example. Each strategy built on previous strategies and research participants were challenged to integrate all steps when tackling mental activities both inside and outside of training.

“Cognitive gains were documented in trained areas such as abstracting, reasoning, and innovating,” said Chapman. “And benefits also spilled over to untrained areas such as memory for facts, planning, and problem solving. What’s exciting about this work is that in randomized trials comparing gist reasoning training to memory training, we found that it was not learning new information that engaged widespread brain networks and elevated cognitive performance, but rather actually deeper processing of information and using that information in new ways that augmented brain performance.

Strengthening intellectual capacity is no longer science fiction; what used to seem improbable is now in the realm of reality.”

Positive physical changes within the brain and cognitive improvement across populations in response to strategy-based mental training demonstrate the neuro-regenerative potential of the brain.

“The ability to recognize, synthesize and create the essence of complex ideas and problems to solve are fundamental skills for academic, occupational and real-life success,” Chapman said. “The capacity to enhance cognition and complex neural networks in health, after injury or disease diagnosis will have major implications to preventing, diagnosing and treating cognitive decline and enhancing cognitive performance in youth to prepare them for an unknown future and in middle age to older adults who want to remain mentally robust.”

Your stress is my stress

Stress is contagious. Observing another person in a stressful situation can be enough to make our own bodies release the stress hormone cortisol. This is the conclusion reached by scientists involved in a large-scale cooperation project between the departments of Tania Singer at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and Clemens Kirschbaum at the Technische Universität Dresden. Empathic stress arose primarily when the observer and stressed individual were partners in a couple relationship and the stressful situation could be directly observed through a one-way mirror. However, even the observation of stressed strangers via video transmission was enough to put some people on red alert. In our stress-ridden society, empathic stress is a phenomenon that should not be ignored by the health care system.

Stress is a major health threat in today’s society. It causes a range of psychological problems like burnout, depression and anxiety. Even those who lead relatively relaxed lives constantly come into contact with stressed individuals. Whether at work or on television: someone is always experiencing stress, and this stress can affect the general environment in a physiologically quantifiable way through increased concentrations of the stress hormone cortisol.

“The fact that we could actually measure this empathic stress in the form of a significant hormone release was astonishing,” says Veronika Engert, one of the study’s first authors. This is particularly true considering that many studies experience difficulties to induce firsthand stress to begin with. The authors found that empathic stress reactions could be independent of (“vicarious stress”) or proportional to (“stress resonance”) the stress reactions of the actively stressed individuals. “There must be a transmission mechanism via which the target’s state can elicit a similar state in the observer down to the level of a hormonal stress response.“

During the stress test, the test subjects had to struggle with difficult mental arithmetic tasks and interviews, while two supposed behavioural analysts assessed their performance. Only five percent of the directly stressed test subjects managed to remain calm; the others displayed a physiologically significant increase in their cortisol levels.

In total, 26 percent of observers who were not directly exposed to any stress whatsoever also showed a significant increase in cortisol. The effect was particularly strong when observer and stressed individual were partners in a couple relationship (40 percent). However, even when watching a complete stranger, the stress was transmitted to ten percent of the observers. Accordingly, emotional closeness is a facilitator but not a necessary condition for the occurrence of empathic stress.

When the observers watched the events directly through a one-way mirror, 30 percent of them experienced a stress response. However, even presenting the stress test only virtually via video transmission was sufficient to significantly increase the cortisol levels of 24 percent of the observers. “This means that even television programmes depicting the suffering of other people can transmit that stress to viewers,” says Engert. “Stress has enormous contagion potential.”

Stress becomes a problem primarily when it is chronic. “A hormonal stress response has an evolutionary purpose, of course. When you are exposed to danger, you want your body to respond with an increase in cortisol,” explains Engert. “However, permanently elevated cortisol levels are not good. They have a negative impact on the immune system and neurotoxic properties in the long term.” Thus, individuals working as caregivers or the family members of chronically stressed individualshave an increased risk to suffer from the potentially harmful consequences of empathic stress. Anyone who is confronted with the suffering and stress of another person, particularly when sustained, has a higher risk of being affected by it themselves.

The results of the study also debunked a common prejudice: men and women actually experience empathic stress reactions with equal frequency. “In surveys however, women tend to assess themselves as being more empathic compared to  men’s self-assessments. This self-perception does not seem to hold if probed by implicit measures”

Future studies are intended to reveal exactly how the stress is transmitted and what can be done to reduce its potentially negative influence on society.

You Took the Words Right Out of My Brain

Our brain activity is more similar to that of speakers we are listening to when we can predict what they are going to say, a team of neuroscientists has found. The study, which appears in the Journal of Neuroscience, provides fresh evidence on the brain’s role in communication.

“Our findings show that the brains of both speakers and listeners take language predictability into account, resulting in more similar brain activity patterns between the two,” says Suzanne Dikker, the study’s lead author and a post-doctoral researcher in New York University’s Department of Psychology and Utrecht University. “Crucially, this happens even before a sentence is spoken and heard.”

“A lot of what we’ve learned about language and the brain has been from controlled laboratory tests that tend to look at language in the abstract—you get a string of words or you hear one word at a time,” adds Jason Zevin, an associate professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Southern California and one of the study’s co-authors. “They’re not so much about communication, but about the structure of language. The current experiment is really about how we use language to express common ground or share our understanding of an event with someone else.”

The study’s other authors were Lauren Silbert, a recent PhD graduate from Princeton University, and Uri Hasson, an assistant professor in Princeton’s Department of Psychology.

Traditionally, it was thought that our brains always process the world around us from the “bottom up”—when we hear someone speak, our auditory cortex first processes the sounds, and then other areas in the brain put those sounds together into words and then sentences and larger discourse units. From here, we derive meaning and an understanding of the content of what is said to us.

However, in recent years, many neuroscientists have shifted to a “top-down” view of the brain, which they now see as a “prediction machine”: We are constantly anticipating events in the world around us so that we can respond to them quickly and accurately. For example, we can predict words and sounds based on context—and our brain takes advantage of this. For instance, when we hear “Grass is…” we can easily predict “green.”

What’s less understood is how this predictability might affect the speaker’s brain, or even the interaction between speakers and listeners.

In the Journal of Neuroscience study, the researchers collected brain responses from a speaker while she described images that she had viewed. These images varied in terms of likely predictability for a specific description. For instance, one image showed a penguin hugging a star (a relatively easy image in which to predict a speaker’s description). However, another image depicted a guitar stirring a bicycle tire submerged in a boiling pot of water—a picture that is much less likely to yield a predictable description: Is it “a guitar cooking a tire,” “a guitar boiling a wheel,” or “a guitar stirring a bike”?

Then, another group of subjects listened to those descriptions while viewing the same images. During this period, the researchers monitored the subjects’ brain activity.

When comparing the speaker’s brain responses directly to the listeners’ brain responses, they found that activity patterns in brain areas where spoken words are processed were more similar between the listeners and the speaker when the listeners could predict what the speaker was going to say.

When listeners can predict what a speaker is going to say, the authors suggest, their brains take advantage of this by sending a signal to their auditory cortex that it can expect sound patterns corresponding to predicted words (e.g., “green” while hearing “grass is…”). Interestingly, they add, the speaker’s brain is showing a similar effect as she is planning what she will say: brain activity in her auditory language areas is affected by how predictable her utterance will be for her listeners.

“In addition to facilitating rapid and accurate processing of the world around us, the predictive power of our brains might play an important role in human communication,” notes Dikker, who conducted some of the research as a post-doctoral fellow at Weill Cornell Medical College’s Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology. “During conversation, we adapt our speech rate and word choices to each other—for example, when explaining science to a child as opposed to a fellow scientist—and these processes are governed by our brains, which correspondingly align to each other.”

Research in the News: Brain at rest yields clues to origins of mental illness

While at rest, multiple regions of the brain remain engaged in a highly heritable, stable pattern of activity called the default mode network. Researchers have found that this network is often disrupted in people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which appear to share underlying genetic causes. This network is often abnormal in their unaffected close relatives, suggesting common genetic roots.

Now researchers at the Yale University School of Medicine and the Institute of Living in Hartford have devised a method to simultaneously identify many genes that play a role in disrupting this network. “Previous studies have identified small numbers of different genes which each contribute in a small way to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder but tell us little overall about the development of psychosis in an individual,” said Godfrey Pearlson, professor of psychiatry and neurobiology and senior author of the study. “Now we have begun to identify markers for these conditions that consist of hundreds of such genes acting simultaneously in recognized pathways that will eventually help in our designing novel ways to intervene in the disease process.”

The study was published April 28 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Depression is detectable in the blood

Researchers at the MedUni Vienna have demonstrated the possibility of using a blood test to detect depression. While blood tests for mental illnesses have until recently been regarded as impossible, a recent study clearly indicates that, in principle, depression can in fact be diagnosed in this way and this could become reality in the not too distant future.

Serotonin transporter (SERT) is a protein in the cell membrane that facilitates the transport of the neurotransmitter serotonin (popularly known as the “happiness hormone”) into the cell. In the brain, serotonin transporter regulates neural depression networks. Depressive conditions can frequently be caused by a lack of serotonin. As a result, the serotonin transporter is also the point of action for the major antidepressant drugs.

The serotonin transporter, however, also occurs in large quantities in numerous other organs such as the intestines or blood. Recent studies have shown that the serotonin transporter in the blood works in exactly the same way as in the brain. In the blood, it ensures that blood platelets maintain the appropriate concentration of serotonin in the blood plasma.

Researchers at the MedUni Vienna have now used functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain and pharmacological investigations to demonstrate that there is a close relationship between the speed of the serotonin uptake in blood platelets and the function of a depression network in the brain.

This network is termed the “default mode network” because it is primarily active at rest and processes content with strong self-reference. Findings from recent years have also demonstrated that it is actively suppressed during complex thought processes, which is essential for adequate levels of concentration. Interestingly, patients with depression find it difficult to suppress this network during thought processes, leading to negative thoughts and ruminations as well as poor concentration.

“This is the first study that has been able to predict the activity of a major depression network in the brain using a blood test. While blood tests for mental illnesses have until recently been regarded as impossible, this study clearly shows that a blood test is possible in principle for diagnosing depression and could become reality in the not too distant future,” explains study leader Lukas Pezawas from the Department of Biological Psychiatry at the University Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy within the MedUni Vienna. This result means that the diagnosis of depression through blood tests could become reality in the not too distant future.

Oxytocin promotes social behavior in infant rhesus monkeys

The hormone oxytocin appears to increase social behaviors in newborn rhesus monkeys, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health, the University of Parma in Italy, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The findings indicate that oxytocin is a promising candidate for new treatments for developmental disorders affecting social skills and bonding.

Oxytocin, a hormone produced by the pituitary gland, is involved in labor and birth and in the production of breast milk. Studies have shown that oxytocin also plays a role in parental bonding, mating, and in social dynamics. Because of its possible involvement in social encounters, many researchers have suggested that oxytocin might be useful as a treatment for conditions affecting social behaviors, such as autism spectrum disorders. Although oxytocin has been shown to increase certain social behaviors in adults, before the current study it had not been shown to do so in primate infants of any species.

Working with infant rhesus monkeys, the NIH researchers found that oxytocin increased two facial gestures associated with social interactions— one used by the monkeys themselves in certain social situations, the other in imitation of their human caregivers.

“It was important to test whether oxytocin would promote social behaviors in infants in the same respects as it appears to promote social interaction among adults,” said the study’s first author, Elizabeth A. Simpson, Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow of the University of Parma, conducting research in the Comparative Behavioral Genetics Section of the NIH’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. “Our results indicate that oxytocin is a candidate for further studies on treating developmental disorders of social functioning.”

The study was published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers began by gauging the ability of rhesus macaques to imitate two facial gestures: lip smacking and tongue protrusion. In lip smacking, the lips are protruded and open, then smacked together repeatedly. The study authors wrote that rhesus mothers will engage in this facial gesture with their infants in the first month after giving birth. Tongue protrusion involves a brief protrusion and retraction of the tongue. Although this gesture is seen in other primates and typically not seen in macaques, macaques will imitate it when their human caregivers display it, the study authors added.

By observing the monkeys’ ability to imitate the two gestures, the researchers sought to determine if oxytocin could promote social interaction through a gesture that was natural to them as well as through a gesture not part of their normal communication sequence.

The researchers tested the infants in the first week after birth. Three times a day, every other day, the caregivers would demonstrate the facial gestures in sequence to the infant monkeys, while the animals’ responses were recorded on video. At this phase of the study, the researchers found that some of the monkeys mimicked their caregivers’ gestures more frequently than did other monkeys. The researchers referred to the monkeys who gestured more frequently as strong imitators.

Beginning in the second week of life, the researchers tested the monkeys on two separate days. The infant monkeys inhaled an aerosolized dose of oxytocin in one session, and a dose of saline in the other. In each session, the dose was delivered through an inhalation mask held gently over the animal’s face.

Overall, the monkeys were more communicative after receiving oxytocin, more frequently making facial gestures, than they were after receiving the saline. The monkeys were more likely to engage in lip smacking than tongue protrusion, but were more likely still to engage in either of these gestures after oxytocin than after the saline. There also were differences in the frequency of gesturing among the individual monkeys, with the strong imitators becoming even stronger imitators after receiving oxytocin.

After oxytocin exposure, the strong imitators were more likely to look at caregivers and stand close to them than they were after the saline. Looking into a caregiver’s face and remaining in close proximity to a caregiver are indicators of social interaction and social interest, Dr. Simpson said.

In another test, the researchers found that after exposure to oxytocin, monkeys had lower levels of cortisol in their saliva. Cortisol is produced by the adrenal glands in response to stress. Lower cortisol levels after oxytocin exposure indicate that oxytocin may also function to diminish anxiety, the researchers wrote.