This Is Your Brain On Movies: Neuroscientists Weigh In On The Brain Science of Cinema

In movies, we explore landscapes far removed from our day-to-day lives. Whether experiencing the fantastical adventures of Star Wars or the dramatic throes of The English Patient, movies demand that our brains engage in a complex firing of neurons and cognitive processes. We enter into manipulated worlds where musical scores enhance feeling; where cinematography clues us into details we’d normally gloss over; where, like omniscient beings, we voyeuristically peek into others’ lives and minds; and where we can travel from Marrakech to Mars without ever having left our seat. Movies reflect reality, yet are anything but.

“Movies are highly complex, multidimensional stimuli,” said Uri Hasson, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Princeton University. “Some areas of the brain analyze sound bites, some analyze word context, some the sentence content, music, emotional aspect, color or motion.” Just as many people must come together to work on different elements of a movie’s script, score, visuals or costumes, he explained, so many areas of the brain must also be engaged in processing those disparate elements.

The relatively new field of neurocinematic studies seeks to untangle our neurological experience of film and, in doing so, learn not only the mechanisms behind movie watching but also how movies might teach us more about ourselves.

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The Cost of War Includes at Least 253,330 Brain Injuries and 1,700 Amputations

Here are indications of the lingering costs of 11 years of warfare. Nearly 130,000 U.S. troops have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and vastly more have experienced brain injuries. Over 1,700 have undergone life-changing limb amputations. Over 50,000 have been wounded in action. As of Wednesday, 6,656 U.S. troops and Defense Department civilians have died.

That updated data (.pdf) comes from a new Congressional Research Service report into military casualty statistics that can sometimes be difficult to find — and even more difficult for American society to fully appreciate. It almost certainly understates the extent of the costs of war.

Start with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Counting since 2001 across the U.S. military services, 129,731 U.S. troops have been diagnosed with the disorder since 2001. The vast majority of those, nearly 104,000, have come from deployed personnel.

But that’s the tip of the PTSD iceberg, since not all — and perhaps not even most — PTSD cases are diagnosed. The former vice chief of staff of the Army, retired Gen. Peter Chiarelli, has proposed dropping the “D” from PTSD so as not to stigmatize those who suffer from it — and, perhaps, encourage more veterans to seek diagnosis and treatment for it. (Not all veterans advocates agree with Chiarelli.)

The congressional study also brings to light the extent of one of the signature injuries of the post-9/11 wars, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), often suffered by survivors of explosions from homemade insurgent bombs. From 2000 (a pre-9/11 year probably chosen for inclusion for control purposes) to the end of 2012, some 253,330 troops have experienced TBI in some form. About 77 percent of those cases are classified by the Defense Department as “mild,” meaning a “confused or disoriented state lasting less than 24 hours; loss of consciousness for up to thirty minutes; memory loss lasting less than 24 hours; and structural brain imaging that yields normal results.”

More-severe TBI is measured along those metrics, lasting longer than a day. Nearly 6,500 of of those cases are “severe or penetrating TBI,” which include the effects of open head injuries, skull fractures, or projectiles lodged in the brain.

Like with PTSD, the TBI diagnoses scratch the surface. The military’s screening for TBI is notoriously bad: One former Army chief of staff described it as “basically a coin flip.” Worse, poor military medical technology, particularly in bandwidth-deprived areas like Iraq and Afghanistan, have made it uncertain that battlefield diagnoses of TBI actually transmit back to troops’ permanent medical files.

Amputations are a feature of any prolonged war. Almost 800 Iraq veterans have undergone “major limb” amputations, such as a leg, and another 194 have experienced partial foot, finger or other so-called “minor limb” losses. For Afghanistan veterans, those numbers are 696 and 28, respectively.

The Iraq war is over for all but a handful of U.S. troops and thousands of contractors. The Afghanistan war is in the process of a troop drawdown through 2014 of unknown speed and will feature a residual troop presence of unknown size. Even if the U.S. deaths and injuries in those wars may almost be over, the aftereffects of the wars on a huge number of veterans will not end.

Sensing the light, but not to see: Study offers insight on the evolution of photosensitive cells

In a primitive marine organism, MBL scientists find photosensitive cells that may be ancestral to the “circadian receptors” in the mammalian retina.

Among the animals that are appealing “cover models” for scientific journals, lancelets don’t spring readily to mind. Slender, limbless, primitive blobs that look pretty much the same end to end, lancelets “are extremely boring. I wouldn’t recommend them for a home aquarium,” says Enrico Nasi, adjunct senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL). Yet Nasi and his collaborators managed to land a lancelet on the cover of the Journal of Neuroscience last December. These simple chordates, they discovered, offer insight into our own biological clocks.

Nasi and his wife, MBL adjunct scientist Maria del Pilar Gomez, are interested in phototransduction, the conversion of light by light-sensitive cells into electrical signals that are sent to the brain. The lancelet, also called amphioxus, doesn’t have eyes or a true brain. But what it does have in surprising abundance is melanopsin, a photopigment that is also produced by the third class of light-sensitive cells in the mammalian retina, besides the rods and cones. This third class of cells, called “intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells” (ipRGCs), were discovered in 2002 by Brown University’s David Berson and colleagues. Now sometimes called “circadian receptors,” they are involved in non-visual, light-dependent functions, such as adjustment of the animal’s circadian rhythms.

"It seemed like colossal overkill that amphioxus have melanopsin-producing cells," Nasi says. "These animals do nothing. If you switch on a light, they dance and float to the top of the tank, and then they drop back down to the bottom. That’s it for the day." But that mystery aside, Gomez and Nasi realized that studying amphioxus could help reveal the evolutionary history of the circadian receptors.

'Zombie' replica cells may outperform live ones as catalysts and conductors

"Zombie" mammalian cells that may function better after they die have been created by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico (UNM).

The simple technique coats a cell with a silica solution to form a near-perfect replica of its structure. The process may simplify a wide variety of commercial fabrication processes from the nano- to macroscale.

The work, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), uses the nanoscopic organelles and other tiny components of mammalian cells as fragile templates on which to deposit silica. The researchers then heat the cell to burn off its protein. The resultant hardened silica structures are faithful to the exterior and interior features of the formerly living cell, can survive greater pressures and temperatures than flesh ever could, and can perform some functions better than when they were alive, said lead researcher Bryan Kaehr, a Sandia materials scientist.

"It’s very challenging for researchers to build structures at the nanometer scale," said Kaehr. "We can make particles and wires, but 3-D arbitrary structures haven’t been achieved yet. With this technique, we don’t need to build those structures—nature does it for us. We only need to find cells that possess the machinery we want and copy it using our technique. And, using chemistry or surface patterning, we can program a group of cells to form whatever shape seems desirable."

UNM professor and Sandia Fellow Jeff Brinker added, “The process faithfully replicates features from the nanoscale to macroscale in a robust, three-dimensionally stable form that resists shrinkage even upon heating to over 500 degrees Centigrade [932 degrees Fahrenheit]. The refractoriness of these delicate structures is amazing.”

Listening to Cells: Scientists probe human cells with high-frequency sound

Sound waves are widely used in medical imaging, such as when doctors take an ultrasound of a developing fetus. Now scientists have developed a way to use sound to probe tissue on a much tinier scale. Researchers from the University of Bordeaux in France deployed high-frequency sound waves to test the stiffness and viscosity of the nuclei of individual human cells. The scientists predict that the probe could eventually help answer questions such as how cells adhere to medical implants and why healthy cells turn cancerous.

“We have developed a new non-contact, non-invasive tool to measure the mechanical properties of cells at the sub-cell scale,” says Bertrand Audoin, a professor in the mechanics laboratory at the University of Bordeaux. “This can be useful to follow cell activity or identify cell disease.” The work will be presented at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society (BPS), held Feb. 2-6, 2013, in Philadelphia, Pa.

The technique that the research team used, called picosecond ultrasonics, was initially applied in the electronics industry in the mid-1980s as a way to measure the thickness of semiconductor chip layers. Audoin and his colleagues, in collaboration with a research group in biomaterials led by Marie-Christine Durrieu from the Institute of Chemistry & Biology of Membranes & Nano-objects at Bordeaux University, adapted picosecond ultrasonics to study living cells. They grew cells on a metal plate and then flashed the cell-metal interface with an ultra-short laser pulse to generate high-frequency sound waves. Another laser measured how the sound pulse propagated through the cells, giving the scientists clues about the mechanical properties of the individual cell components.

“The higher the frequency of sound you create, the smaller the wavelength, which means the smaller the objects you can probe” says Audoin. “We use gigahertz waves, so we can probe objects on the order of a hundred nanometers.” For comparison, a cell’s nucleus is about 10,000 nanometers wide.

The team faced challenges in applying picosecond ultrasonics to study biological systems. One challenge was the fluid-like material properties of the cell. “The light scattering process we use to detect the mechanical properties of the cell is much weaker than for solids,” says Audoin. “We had to improve the signal to noise ratio without using a high-powered laser that would damage the cell.” The team also faced the challenge of natural cell variation. “If you probe silicon, you do it once and it’s finished,” says Audoin. “If you probe the nucleus you have to do it hundreds of times and look at the statistics.”

The team developed methods to overcome these challenges by testing their techniques on polymer capsules and plant cells before moving on to human cells. In the coming years the team envisions studying cancer cells with sound. “A cancerous tissue is stiffer than a healthy tissue,” notes Audoin. “If you can measure the rigidity of the cells while you provide different drugs, you can test if you are able to stop the cancer at the cell scale.”

(Photo: Image courtesy of UCSD Jacobs)

Robovie talking robot joins science class at Higashihikari Elementary School in Japan

Robovie a 1.2-meter robot developed by ATR joined the science class at Higashihikari Elementary School in Japan on Feb. 5 for the start of a 14-month experiment. Data will be gathered to improve the robot’s ability to interact naturally with multiple people. The robot has been given facial photos and voiceprints of 119 fifth graders and teachers. On the first day of class, Robovie greeted the students, and was asked by a teacher to answer what a “wound up copper wire” was. It answered, “A copper coil. It’s part of the motors that move my body.” During class Robovie waited at the back of the room, recognizing the faces of the students and recording their movements. After class it shook hands with sixth graders and answered their questions.

As part of research into the co-existence of humans and robots, the experiment with Robovie is being carried out at a school because the environment allows for the acquisition of large amounts of data from the movements of the children. The robot has been given facial photos and voiceprints of 119 fifth graders and teachers. Robovie’s daily conversation level is equivalent to a five-year-old human, but it has been programmed with the entire contents of a fifth-grade science textbook. This is the first experiment using a robot at a school to last over a year.

If you give a bioengineer a cookie…

“When you grab a cookie and want to break off a piece with a chocolate chip,” says Maurice Smith, balancing a crumbly bit between two of his fingers, “your brain must represent that action plan extrinsically, as it is an activity based in the world.”

The cookies are on hand to celebrate the bioengineer’s birthday in his lab at 60 Oxford Street, a white squat building located on the northernmost edge of the Harvard campus. A half moon of chocolate cake with a line of colored candles still intact also sits nearby.

Gesticulating with the cookie, Smith, Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), further teases out the intricacies of motor memory.

“An intrinsic representation is one that’s body-based and procedural. It relates to the complex series of muscle and joint movements your body has to make to complete a task,” Smith says. 

“When I first had the thought to grab the cookie and rip off a chunk with a chocolate chip, my body responded appropriately,” he notes.

Understanding the way the brain represents extrinsic and intrinsic actions, and the relationship between the two, has been of great interest to researchers who seek to understand motor control and motor learning—or, put simply, how we learn to move. 

Just a few months ago, Smith and his colleagues in the Neuromotor Control Lab laid out a generalizable theory about how the brain encodes such motor memories. Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience, they showed that units of motor memory are not so binary after all, but instead a mixture of both the intrinsic and the extrinsic.

“There’s no question that our actions are inherently spatial, but the nature of the coordinate frame used in motor memory to represent space for action planning has been hotly debated,” explains Smith. “The predominant idea had been that in memory we maintain separate intrinsic and extrinsic representations of action and translate between the two when necessary. But our work shows that memory representations are combinatorial rather than separate.” 

Individual neurons in several different motor areas of the brain encode multiplicative combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic representations, a property that neurophysiologists have called gain-field encoding. This much was known before, but it was thought that gain-field encoding simply provided a way to translate between intrinsic and extrinsic representations.

“We found that this gain-field encoding, which leads to a combinatorial representation of space, is not simply an intermediary in the transformation between representations, but is in fact the encoding on which motor memories are based,” says Smith. “This suggests that the neurons which display gain-field encoding are the same ones that store the motor memories associated with the actions we learn.”

UAB researchers cure type 1 diabetes in dogs

Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), led by Fàtima Bosch, have shown for the first time that it is possible to cure diabetes in large animals with a single session of gene therapy. As published this week in Diabetes, the principal journal for research on the disease, after a single gene therapy session, the dogs recover their health and no longer show symptoms of the disease. In some cases, monitoring continued for over four years, with no recurrence of symptoms.

The therapy is minimally invasive. It consists of a single session of various injections in the animal’s rear legs using simple needles that are commonly used in cosmetic treatments. These injections introduce gene therapy vectors, with a dual objective: to express the insulin gene, on the one hand, and that of glucokinase, on the other. Glucokinase is an enzyme that regulates the uptake of glucose from the blood. When both genes act simultaneously they function as a “glucose sensor”, which automatically regulates the uptake of glucose from the blood, thus reducing diabetic hyperglycemia (the excess of blood sugar associated with the disease).

As Fàtima Bosch, the head researcher, points out, “this study is the first to demonstrate a long-term cure for diabetes in a large animal model using gene therapy.”

This same research group had already tested this type of therapy on mice, but the excellent results obtained for the first time with large animals lays the foundations for the clinical translation of this gene therapy approach to veterinary medicine and eventually to diabetic patients.

The study was led by the head of the UAB’s Centre for Animal Biotechnology and Gene Therapy (CBATEG) Fàtima Bosch, and involved the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology of the UAB, the Department of Medicine and Animal Surgery of the UAB, the Faculty of Veterinary Science of the UAB, the Department of Animal Health and Anatomy of the UAB, the Spanish Biomedical Research Centre in Diabetes and Associated Metabolic Disorders (CIBERDEM), the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (USA) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of Philadelphia (USA).

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