First man to hear people before they speak

"I told my daughter her living room TV was out of sync. Then I noticed the kitchen telly was also dubbed badly. Suddenly I noticed that her voice was out of sync too. It wasn’t the TV, it was me."

Ever watched an old movie, only for the sound to go out of sync with the action? Now imagine every voice you hear sounds similarly off-kilter – even your own. That’s the world PH lives in. Soon after surgery for a heart problem, he began to notice that something wasn’t quite right.

"I was staying with my daughter and they like to have the television on in their house. I turned to my daughter and said ‘you ought to get a decent telly, one where the sound and programme are synchronised’. I gave a little chuckle. But they said ‘there’s nothing wrong with the TV’."

Puzzled, he went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. “They’ve got another telly up on the wall and it was the same. I went into the lounge and I said to her ‘hey you’ve got two TVs that need sorting!’.”

That was when he started to notice that his daughter’s speech was out of time with her lip movements too. “It wasn’t the TV, it was me. It was happening in real life.”

PH is the first confirmed case of someone who hears people speak before registering the movement of their lips. His situation is giving unique insights into how our brains unify what we hear and see.

It’s unclear why PH’s problem started when it did – but it may have had something to do with having acute pericarditis, inflammation of the sac around the heart, or the surgery he had to treat it.

Brain scans after the timing problems appeared showed two lesions in areas thought to play a role in hearing, timing and movement. “Where these came from is anyone’s guess,” says PH. “They may have been there all my life or as a result of being in intensive care.”

Disconcerting delay

Several weeks later, PH realised that it wasn’t just other people who were out of sync: when he spoke, he registered his words before he felt his jaw make the movement. “It felt like a significant delay, it sort of snuck up on me. It was very disconcerting. At the time I didn’t know whether the delay was going to get bigger, but it seems to have stuck at about a quarter of a second.”

Light and sound travel at different speeds, so when someone speaks, visual and auditory inputs arrive at our eyes and ears at different times. The signals are then processed at different rates in the brain. Despite this, we normally perceive the events as happening simultaneously – but how the brain achieves this is unclear.

To investigate PH’s situation, Elliot Freeman at City University London and colleagues performed a temporal order judgement test. PH was shown clips of people talking and was asked whether the voice came before or after the lip movements. Sure enough, he said it came before, and to perceive them as synchronous the team had to play the voice about 200 milliseconds later than the lip movements.

The team then carried out a second, more objective test based on the McGurk illusion. This involves listening to one syllable while watching someone mouth another; the combination makes you perceive a third syllable.

Since PH hears people speaking before he sees their lips move, the team expected the illusion to work when they delayed the voice. So they were surprised to get the opposite result: presenting the voice 200 ms earlier than the lip movements triggered the illusion, suggesting that his brain was processing the sight before the sound in this particular task.

And it wasn’t only PH who gave these results. When 37 others were tested on both tasks, many showed a similar pattern, though none of the mismatches were noticeable in everyday life.

Many clocks

Freeman says this implies that the same event in the outside world is perceived by different parts of your brain as happening at different times. This suggests that, rather than one unified “now”, there are many clocks in the brain – two of which showed up in the tasks – and that all the clocks measure their individual “nows” relative to their average.

In PH’s case, one or more of these clocks has been significantly slowed – shifting his average – possibly as a result of the lesions. Freeman thinks PH’s timing discrepancies may be too large and have happened too suddenly for him to ignore or adapt to, resulting in him being aware of the asynchrony in everyday life. He may perceive just one of his clocks because it is the only one he has conscious access to, says Freeman.

PH says that in general he has learned to live with the sensory mismatch but admits he has trouble in noisy places or at large meetings. Since he hears himself speak before he feels his mouth move, does he ever feel like he’s not in control of his own voice? “No, I’m definitely sure it’s me that’s speaking,” he says, “it’s just a strange sensation.”

Help may be at hand: Freeman is looking for a way to slow down PH’s hearing so it matches what he is seeing. PH says he would be happy to trial a treatment, but he’s actually not that anxious to fix the problem. “It’s not life-threatening,” he says. “You learn to live with these things as you get older. I don’t expect my body to work perfectly.”

To Preserve Memory Into Old Age, Keep Your Brain Active!

A new study from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago claims reading and writing may preserve memory into old age. By keeping your brain active, says study author Robert S. Wilson, PhD, you’re able to slow the rate at which your memory decreases in later years.

This is not the first time researchers have arrived at such a conclusion, of course. Previous studies have also found keeping the brain active by reading, writing, completing crossword puzzles and more can essentially exercise the brain and keep it limber far into old age. One study also concluded that keeping television consumption to a minimal amount may also boost brain power over the years. Wilson’s study was recently published in the journal Neurology.

“Our study suggests that exercising your brain by taking part in activities such as these across a person’s lifetime, from childhood through old age, is important for brain health in old age,” said Wilson in a statement.

For his study, Wilson gathered nearly 300 people around the age of 80. He then gave them tests which were designed to measure both their memory and cognition each year until they passed away at an average age of 89. The same participants also answered questions about their past, such as whether they read books, did any writing, or engaged in any other mentally stimulating activities. The volunteers answered these questions for every part of their life, from childhood to adolescence, middle age and beyond.

When the participants passed away, their brains were then examined at an autopsy as Wilson’s team looked for physical evidence of dementia, such as lesions in the brain, tangles or plaques. After examining the brains of these volunteers and compiling the data from the questionnaires, Wilson’s team found those who had kept their minds active throughout their lives had a slower rate of memory decline than those who did not often participate in mentally challenging activities. Based on the amount of plaques and tangles in the brains, keeping your brain active is responsible for a 15 percent differential in memory decline.

The study also found the rate of memory decline was reduced by 32 percent in people who kept their brains active late in life. Those who were not mentally active had it much worse; their memories declined 48 percent faster than their actively reading and writing peers.

“Based on this, we shouldn’t underestimate the effects of everyday activities, such as reading and writing, on our children, ourselves and our parents or grandparents,” said Wilson.

And this news is hardly surprising. Doctors, teachers and parents have been admonishing children to turn off the television and pick up a book for years. There is no shortage of studies to back up their claims. A 2009 study, for example, found people who keep their brains active saw a 30 to 50 percent decrease in risk of developing memory loss. This study, conducted by doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota observed people between the ages of 70 and 89 with and without diagnosed memory loss.

Those who were likely to read magazines or engage in other social activities were 40 percent less likely to develop memory loss than homebodies who did not read. Furthermore, those who spent less than seven hours a day watching television were 50 percent less likely to develop memory loss than those who planted themselves in front of the tube for long stretches of time.

Why Do We Yawn and Why Is It Contagious?

Snakes and fish do it. Cats and dogs do it. Even human babies do it inside the womb. And maybe after seeing the picture above, you’re doing it now: yawning.

Yawning appears to be ubiquitous within the animal kingdom. But despite being such a widespread feature, scientists still can’t explain why yawning happens, or why for social mammals, like humans and their closest relatives, it’s contagious.

As yawning experts themselves will admit, the behavior isn’t exactly the hottest research topic in the field. Nevertheless, they are getting closer to the answer to these questions. An oft-used explanation for why we yawn goes like this: when we open wide, we suck in oxygen-rich air. The oxygen enters our bloodstream and helps to wake us up when we’re falling asleep at our desks.

Sounds believable, right? Unfortunately, this explanation is actually a myth, says Steven Platek, a psychology professor at Georgia Gwinnett College. So far, there’s no evidence that yawning affects levels of oxygen in the bloodstream, blood pressure or heart rate.

The real function of yawning, according to one hypothesis, could lie in the human body’s most complex system: the brain.

Yawning—a stretching of the jaw, gaping of the mouth and long deep inhalation, followed by a shallow exhalation—may serve as a thermoregulatory mechanism, says Andrew Gallup, a psychology professor at SUNY College at Oneonta. In other words, it’s kind of like a radiator. In a 2007 study, Gallup found that holding hot or cold packs to the forehead influenced how often people yawned when they saw videos of others doing it. When participants held a warm pack to their forehead, they yawned 41 percent of the time. When they held a cold pack, the incidence of yawning dropped to 9 percent.

The human brain takes up 40 percent of the body’s metabolic energy, which means it tends to heat up more than other organ systems. When we yawn, that big gulp of air travels through to our upper nasal and oral cavities. The mucus membranes there are covered with tons of blood vessels that project almost directly up to the forebrain. When we stretch our jaws, we increase the rate of blood flow to the skull, Gallup says. And as we inhale at the same time, the air changes the temperature of that blood flow, bringing cooler blood to the brains.

In studies of mice, an increase in brain temperature was found to precede yawning. Once the tiny rodents opened wide and inhaled, the temperature decreased. “That’s pretty much the nail in the coffin as far as the function of yawning being a brain cooling mechanism, as opposed to a mechanism for increasing oxygen in the blood,” says Platek.

Yawning as a thermoregulatory system mechanism could explain why we seem to yawn most often when it’s almost bedtime or right as we wake up. “Before we fall asleep, our brain and body temperatures are at their highest point during the course of our circadian rhythm,” Gallup says. As we fall asleep, these temperatures steadily decline, aided in part by yawning. But, he added, “Once we wake up, our brain and body temperatures are rising more rapidly than at any other point during the day.” Cue more yawns as we stumble toward the coffee machine. On average, we yawn about eight times a day, Gallup says.

Scientists haven’t yet pinpointed the reason we often feel refreshed after a hearty morning yawn. Platek suspects it’s because our brains function more efficiently once they’re cooled down, making us more alert as result.

A biological need to keep our brains cool may have trickled into early humans and other primates’ social networks. “If I see a yawn, that might automatically cue an instinctual behavior that if so-and-so’s brain is heating up, that means I’m in close enough vicinity, I may need to regulate my neural processes,” Platek says. This subconscious copycat behavior could improve individuals’ alertness, improving their chances of survival as a group.

Mimicry is likely at the heart of why yawning is contagious. This is because yawning may be a product of a quality inherent in social animals: empathy. In humans, it’s the ability to understand and feel another individual’s emotions. The way we do that is by stirring a given emotion in ourselves, says Matthew Campbell, a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University. When we see someone smile or frown, we imitate them to feel happiness or sadness. We catch yawns for the same reasons—we see a yawn, so we yawn. “It isn’t a deliberate attempt to empathize with you,” Campbell says. “It’s just a byproduct of how our bodies and brains work.”

Platek says that yawning is contagious in about 60 to 70 percent of people—that is, if people see photos or footage of or read about yawning, the majority will spontaneously do the same. He has found that this phenomenon occurs most often in individuals who score high on measures of empathic understanding. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, he found that areas of the brain activated during contagious yawning, the posterior cingulate and precuneus, are involved in processing the our own and others’ emotions. “My capacity to put myself in your shoes and understand your situation is a predictor for my susceptibility to contagiously yawn,” he says.

Contagious yawning has been observed in humans’ closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, animals that are also characterized by their social natures. This begs a corollary question: is their capacity to contagiously yawn further evidence of the ability of chimps and bonobos to feel empathy?

Along with being contagious, yawning is highly suggestible, meaning that for English speakers, the word “yawn” is a representation of the action, a symbol that we’ve learned to create meaning. When we hear, read or think about the word or the action itself, that symbol becomes “activated” in the brain. “If you get enough stimulation to trip the switch, so to speak, you yawn,” Campbell says. “It doesn’t happen every time, but it builds up and at some point, you get enough activation in the brain and you yawn.”

Sugar solution makes tissues see-through

Japanese researchers have developed a new sugar and water-based solution that turns tissues transparent in just three days, without disrupting the shape and chemical nature of the samples. Combined with fluorescence microscopy, this technique enabled them to obtain detailed images of a mouse brain at an unprecedented resolution.

The team from the RIKEN Center for Developmental biology reports their finding today in Nature Neuroscience.

Over the past few years, teams in the USA and Japan have reported a number of techniques to make biological samples transparent, that have enabled researchers to look deep down into biological structures like the brain.

“However, these clearing techniques have limitations because they induce chemical and morphological damage to the sample and require time-consuming procedures,” explains Dr. Takeshi Imai, who led the study.

SeeDB, an aqueous fructose solution that Dr. Imai developed with colleagues Drs. Meng-Tsen Ke and Satoshi Fujimoto, overcomes these limitations.

Using SeeDB, the researchers were able to make mouse embryos and brains transparent in just three days, without damaging the fine structures of the samples, or the fluorescent dyes they had injected in them.

They could then visualize the neuronal circuitry inside a mouse brain, at the whole-brain scale, under a customized fluorescence microscope without making mechanical sections through the brain.

They describe the detailed wiring patterns of commissural fibers connecting the right and left hemispheres of the cerebral cortex, in three dimensions, for the first time. They also report that they were able to visualize in three dimensions the wiring of mitral cells in the olfactory bulb, which is involved the detection of smells, at single-fiber resolution.

“Because SeeDB is inexpensive, quick, easy and safe to use, and requires no special equipment, it will prove useful for a broad range of studies, including the study of neuronal circuits in human samples,” explain the authors.

Validating maps of the brain’s resting state

Kick back and shut your eyes. Now stop thinking.

You have just put your brain into what neuroscientists call its resting state. What the brain is doing when an individual is not focused on the outside world has become the focus of considerable research in recent years. One of the potential benefits of these studies could be definitive diagnoses of mental health disorders ranging from bipolar to post-traumatic stress disorders.

A team of psychologists and imaging scientists at Vanderbilt has collaborated on a study that provides important corroboration of the validity of recent research examining the relationship of functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI maps of the brain’s resting state networks with it’s underlying anatomical and neurological structure. The study is published in the June 19 issue of the journal Neuron.

“Previous studies have suggested that resting state connectivity shown in brain scans is anchored by anatomical connectivity,” said co-senior author Anna Roe, professor of psychology at Vanderbilt. “But our study has confirmed this relationship at the single neuron level for the first time.”

For the last decade, neuroscientists have been using the non-invasive brain-mapping technique fMRI to examine activity patterns in human and animal brains in the resting state in order to figure out how different parts of the brain are connected and to identify the changes that occur in neurological and psychiatric diseases. For example, there are indications that Alzheimer’s may be associated with decreased connectivity; depression with increased connectivity; epilepsy with disruptions in connectivity and Parkinson’s with alterations in connectivity.

The new findings from Vanderbilt are important because fMRI doesn’t measure brain activity directly. It does so by measuring changes in blood-oxygen levels in different areas. The technique relies on the observation that when activity in an area of the brain increases, blood-oxygen levels in that region rise, which modulates the MRI signal. Neuroscientists have taken this a step further by assuming that different areas in the brain are connected if they show synchronized variations while the brain is in a resting state.

“This is an important validation,” said co-senior author John Gore, director of the Institute of Imaging Science at Vanderbilt and Hertha Ramsey Cress University Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering. “There has always been a sense of unease that we might be interpreting something incorrectly but this gives us confidence that resting state variations can be interpreted in a meaningful way and encourages us to continue the research we have been doing for a number of years. Resting state fMRI provides a uniquely powerful, non-invasive technology to look at the circuits in the human brain.”

To examine the relationship between fMRI scans, patterns of neuronal activity and anatomical structure of the brain, the researchers examined the region of the parietal lobe of squirrel monkeys devoted to monitoring touch sensations. Specifically, they looked at an area linked to the hand that consists of a series of adjacent areas each devoted to a different finger.

Using one of the strongest MRI machines available, with a field strength three to six times that of typical clinical scanners, the researchers produced brain scans that resolved millimeter-scale networks for the first time.

To compare these patterns to the actual electrical activity in the brains, the researchers inserted electrodes capable of recording the firing patterns of individual neurons. In addition, they used optical techniques to trace the anatomical connections between the neurons throughout the region.

“With all three techniques, we found the same pattern of connectivity. Connections coming from other areas in the brain tend to link to individual digits while connections that originate within the area tend to link to multiple digits,” said Roe. “Our results demonstrate that fMRI images of the resting state brain accurately reflect the brain’s anatomical and functional connectivity down to an extremely fine scale.”

The quest to build a brain in the lab

"I’m a neuroengineer, and one of my goals is building brains."

Prof Steven Potter was disarmingly understated as he introduced himself.

It’s not that tissue engineering is unusual. Nor even that doing it with neural cells should be an issue.

If heart cells or skin cells can be reprogrammed, why not neurons?

But “building brains” had been my flip way of labelling an intriguing, indeed unnerving, branch of science: the neurophysiology of disembodied brain-cell cultures. It was not a term I was expecting a serious scientist to turn to, as I set out on making "Build Me a Brain" for BBC Radio 4’s Frontiers Programme.

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