When the going gets tough, the tough get… more relief from a placebo?

Are you good at coping when life gets tough? Do people call you a straight-shooter? Will you help others without expecting anything in return?

Those personality traits might do more than help you win a popularity contest. According to new University of Michigan-led neuroscience research, those qualities also might make you more likely to get pain relief from a placebo – a fake medicine.

And, the researchers show, it’s not just your mind telling you the sham drug is working or not. Your brain’s own natural painkiller chemicals may actually respond to the pain differently depending on your personality.

If you’re more of an angry, hostile type, they find, a placebo won’t do much for you.

For the first time, the new findings link specific, established personality traits with an individual’s susceptibility to the placebo effect from a sham medicine for pain. The researchers showed a significant link between certain personality traits and how much relief people said they felt when given the placebo – as well as the level of a specific chemical that their brains released.

The work, published online in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, was done by a team of U-M Medical School researchers and their colleagues at the University of North Carolina and University of Maryland.

One neuron has huge impact on brain behaviour

Researchers from Queensland and the USA have made a unique discovery about how the brain computes sensory information.

The study by scientists at the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) at The University of Queensland (UQ) and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the USA was conducted to better understand how circuits of nerve cells underlie behaviour.

Using advanced optical imaging in animal models, the research team was able to pinpoint a single neuron in the neocortex that signaled sensory behavior. This led to the discovery that active processes in its thin dendritic appendages are responsible for implementing the integration of sensory and motor signals.

“We have long known that active dendrites provide neurons with powerful processing capabilities,” says QBI’s Associate Professor Stephen Williams, who collaborated on the study. “However, little has been known about the role of neuronal dendrites in behaviourally related circuit computations. “We were pleasantly surprised to discover that the dendrites of nerve cells operate during behaviour to implement the integration of sensory and motor signals,” he said.

Such multi-modal integration enables the brain to perform at lightning speed, allowing animals to react to their environment in relation to existing knowledge. The paper, titled ‘Nonlinear dendritic integration of sensory and motor input during an active sensing task’ was published in the prestigious journal, Nature.

This is Your Brain on Freestyle Rap: NIDCD Study Reveals Characteristic Brain Patterns of Lyrical Improvisation

Researchers in the voice, speech, and language branch of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study the brain activity of rappers when they are “freestyling”—spontaneously improvising lyrics in real time. The findings, published online in the November 15 issue of the journal Scientific Reports, reveal that this form of vocal improvisation is associated with a unique functional reallocation of brain activity in the prefrontal cortex and proposes a novel neural network that appears to be intimately involved in improvisatory and creative endeavors. 

The researchers, led by Siyuan Liu, Ph.D., scanned the brains of 12 freestyle rap artists (who had at least 5 years of rapping experience) while they performed two tasks using an identical 8-bar musical track. For the first task, they improvised rhyming lyrics and rhythmic patterns guided only by the beat. In the second task, they performed a well-rehearsed set of lyrics.

During freestyle rapping, the researchers observed increases in brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region responsible for motivation of thought and action, but decreased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal regions that normally play a supervisory or monitoring role. Like an experienced parent who knows when to lay down the law and when to look the other way, these shifts in brain function may facilitate the free expression of thoughts and words without the usual neural constraints. 

Freestyling also increased brain activity in the perisylvian system (involved in language production), the amygdala (an area of the brain linked to emotion), and cingulate motor areas, suggesting that improvisation engages a brain network that links motivation, language, mood, and action. Further studies of this network in other art forms that involve the innovative use of language, such as poetry and storytelling, could offer more insights into the initial, improvisatory phase of the creative process.

Uncommon Features of Einstein’s Brain Might Explain His Remarkable Cognitive Abilities

Portions of Albert Einstein’s brain have been found to be unlike those of most people and could be related to his extraordinary cognitive abilities, according to a new study led by Florida State University evolutionary anthropologist Dean Falk.

Falk, along with colleagues Frederick E. Lepore of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Adrianne Noe, director of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, describe for the first time the entire cerebral cortex of Einstein’s brain from an examination of 14 recently discovered photographs. The researchers compared Einstein’s brain to 85 “normal” human brains and, in light of current functional imaging studies, interpreted its unusual features.

“Although the overall size and asymmetrical shape of Einstein’s brain were normal, the prefrontal, somatosensory, primary motor, parietal, temporal and occipital cortices were extraordinary,” said Falk, the Hale G. Smith Professor of Anthropology at Florida State. “These may have provided the neurological underpinnings for some of his visuospatial and mathematical abilities, for instance.”

The study, “The Cerebral Cortex of Albert Einstein: A Description and Preliminary Analysis of Unpublished Photographs,” was published in the journal Brain.

Please amputate this leg: it’s not mine

This wasn’t the first time that David had tried to amputate his leg. When he was just out of college, he’d tried to do it using a tourniquet fashioned out of an old sock and strong baling twine. David (not his real name) locked himself in his bedroom at his parents’ house, his bound leg propped up against the wall to prevent blood from flowing into it. After two hours the pain was unbearable, and fear sapped his will.

Undoing a tourniquet that has starved a limb of blood can be fatal: injured muscles downstream of the blockage flood the body with toxins, causing the kidneys to fail. Even so, David released the tourniquet himself; it was just as well that he hadn’t mastered the art of tying one.

Failure did not lessen David’s desire to be rid of the leg. It began to consume him, to dominate his awareness. The leg was always there as a foreign body, an impostor, an intrusion.

He spent every waking moment imagining freedom from the leg. He’d stand on his “good” leg, trying not to put any weight on the bad one. At home, he’d hop around. While sitting, he’d often push the leg to one side. The leg just wasn’t his. He began to blame it for keeping him single; but living alone in a small suburban townhouse, afraid to socialise and struggling to form relationships, David was unwilling to let anyone know of his singular fixation.

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Insects change the way they communicate when drowned out by man-made noises

Birds and frogs do it, even whales have been known to do it. Now scientists have for the first time shown that insects also change the way they sing to one another when drowned out by man-made noises.

Click HERE to listen to a grasshopper battling traffic noise

Grasshoppers living next to a main road respond to the increased background volume of passing traffic by adjusting their summer courtship songs, scientists have discovered.

In order to make themselves heard above the low-rumble noise pollution of moving vehicles, male bow-winged grasshoppers of central Europe alter the pitch of their songs’ lower notes so that they rise to a mini-crescendo, the scientists found.

“Bow-winged grasshoppers produce songs that include low and high frequency components,” said Ulrike Lampe of the University of Bielefeld in Germany, who led the study published in the journal Functional Ecology.

“We found that grasshoppers from noisy habitats boost the volume of the lower-frequency part of their song, which makes sense since road noise can mask signals in this part of the frequency spectrum,” Dr Lampe said.

Study Confirms AKT1 Genotype Contributes to Risk of Cannabis Psychosis

The ability of cannabis to produce psychosis is an important public health concern. Some studies have suggested that cannabis exposure during adolescence may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia.

For these reasons, it would be valuable if a biological test could be developed that predicted the risk of developing psychosis in people who abuse cannabis or use marijuana as a medication.

A recent study has implicated a variation in the gene that codes for a protein called RAC-alpha serine/threonine-protein kinase in the risk for cannabis psychosis. However, independent verification of these finding is critical for genetic associations with complex genetic traits, like cannabis-related psychosis, because these findings are difficult to replicate.

Dr Forti’s team carried out a case control study to investigate variation in the AKT1 gene and cannabis use in increasing the risk of psychosis.

“We studied the AKT1 gene as this is involved in dopamine signaling which is known to be abnormal in psychosis. Our sample comprised 489 patients with their first episode of psychosis and 278 healthy controls,” explained Dr Forti, who, with colleagues, reports on the results in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Worm Regeneration May Lend A Hand in Human Healing

About the size of toenail clippings, planarians are freshwater flatworms that can re-form from tiny slivers. This feature not only lets them repair themselves, but it lets them reproduce by breaking apart and then creating new worms.   

Here are two other important features: More than half of planarian genes have parallels in people, and some of their basic physiological systems operate like ours. By studying how these features behave as the worms regenerate, scientists might move one step closer to learning how to generate or regenerate human tissue and cells, such as insulin-producing cells for people with diabetes or nerve cells for patients with spinal cord injuries.

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Ever wondered what your brain sounds like? Now you can hear the sweet melody of the mind by listening to sound composed from an analysis of brain activity.

Hear the best music yet from a maestro brain