Posts tagged science
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Altruism connected to size of grey matter
What makes a person altruistic? Philosophers throughout the ages often pondered the question but failed to get concrete answers. New research from the University of Zurich in Switzerland shows that the answer may lie in our brains, or more accurately, that the volume of a small brain region can influences one’s predisposition for altruistic behaviour. The results, presented in the journal Neuron, indicate that individuals who behave more altruistically than others have more grey matter at the junction between the parietal and temporal lobe. This shows for the very first time that there is a connection between brain anatomy, brain activity and altruistic behaviour.
Contary to past studies that showed that social categories like gender, income or education cannot fully explain differences in altruistic behaviour, recent research in the area of neuroscience have demonstrated that differences in brain structure might be linked to differences in personality traits and abilities. Now, for the first time, a team of researchers from the University of Zurich, headed by Ernst Fehr, the director of the Department of Economics, demonstrates that there is a connection between brain anatomy and altruistic behaviour.
For their study, the researchers asked volunteers to divide money between themselves and someone else who was anonymous. The participants always had the option of sacrificing a certain portion of the money for the benefit of the other person. The monetary sacrifice was considered to be altruistic because it helped someone else at one’s own expense. The researchers found major differences in this respect: some participants were almost never willing to sacrifice money to benefit others while others behaved very altruistically.
Previous studies showed that the place where the parietal and temporal lobes meet is linked to the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes in order to understand their thoughts and feelings, an ability the researchers considered closely related to altruism.
So the team hypothesised that individual differences in this part of the brain might be linked to differences in altruistic behaviour. And, according to Yosuke Morishima, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich, they were right: ‘People who behaved more altruistically also had a higher proportion of grey matter at the junction between the parietal and temporal lobes.’
The researchers also discovered that the subjects displayed marked differences in brain activity while they were deciding how to split up the money. In the case of selfish people, the small brain region behind the ear is already active when the cost of altruistic behaviour is very low. In altruistic people, however, this brain region only becomes more active when the cost is very high. The brain region is activated especially strongly when people reach the limits of their willingness to behave altruistically. The reason, the researchers suspect, is that this is when there is the greatest need to overcome man’s natural self-centeredness by activating this brain region.
Said Dr Fehr: ‘These are exciting results for us. However, one should not jump to the conclusion that altruistic behaviour is determined by biological factors alone.’
It appears that the volume of grey matter can also be influenced by social processes. According to Dr Fehr, the findings therefore raise the question as to whether it is possible to promote the development of brain regions that are important for altruistic behaviour through training or social norms.
(Source: cordis.europa.eu)
![How artificial intelligence is changing our lives
The ability to create machine intelligence that mimics human thinking would be a tremendous scientific accomplishment, enabling humans to understand their own thought processes better. But even experts in the field won’t promise when, or even if, this will happen.
"We’re a long way from [humanlike AI], and we’re not really on a track toward that because we don’t understand enough about what makes people intelligent and how people solve problems," says Robert Lindsay, professor emeritus of psychology and computer science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and author of “Understanding: Natural and Artificial Intelligence.”
"The brain is such a great mystery," adds Patrick Winston, professor of artificial intelligence and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. “There’s some engineering in there that we just don’t understand.”](http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mahqd9aqNG1rog5d1o1_500.jpg)
How artificial intelligence is changing our lives
The ability to create machine intelligence that mimics human thinking would be a tremendous scientific accomplishment, enabling humans to understand their own thought processes better. But even experts in the field won’t promise when, or even if, this will happen.
"We’re a long way from [humanlike AI], and we’re not really on a track toward that because we don’t understand enough about what makes people intelligent and how people solve problems," says Robert Lindsay, professor emeritus of psychology and computer science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and author of “Understanding: Natural and Artificial Intelligence.”
"The brain is such a great mystery," adds Patrick Winston, professor of artificial intelligence and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. “There’s some engineering in there that we just don’t understand.”
Giving a voice to the voiceless has been a cause that many have championed throughout history, but it’s safe to say that none of those efforts involved packing a bunch of sensors into a glove. A team of Ukrainian students has done just that in order to translate sign language into vocalized speech via a smartphone.
The inspiration for the gloves came from observing fellow college students who were deaf have difficulty communicating with other students, which results in them being excluded from activities. Initially, the team looked at commercially available gloves that could be modified to interpret a range of signs, but in the end, they opted to develop their own.
In their glove, a total of 15 flex sensors in the fingers measure the degree of bending while a compass, accelerometer, and gyroscope determine the motion of the glove through space. The sensor data are processed by a microcontroller on the glove then sent via Bluetooth to a mobile device, which translates the positions of the hand and fingers into text when the pattern is recognized. Using Microsoft APIs for Speech and Bing, the text is spoken by the phone running Windows Phone 7. The glove can also plug into a PC for data syncing and charging of its battery.
This is how a heart becomes a heart
A “synchronised dance” of thousands of genes generates a healthy heart, but one faux pas may result in congenital heart defects.
Congenital heart defects (CHD) are one of the most common birth abnormalities in the world. In Australia six babies are born with a heart disease every day and more than 32,000 children under the age of 18 live with a CHD, but a team of researchers at the Gladstone Institutes have found the genetic switches that translate as a functional heart.
Using next-generation DNA sequencing and stem cell technology, the researchers were able to decipher the genomic blueprint (the instruction manual) of a heart. The finding will help understand how certain CHDs such as holes in the heart (septal defects) are formed. “Congenital heart defects are the most common type of birth defects,” said Gladstone Senior Investigator Benoit Bruneau to UCFS news. “But how these defects develop at the genetic level has been difficult to pinpoint because research has focused on a small set of genes. Here, we approach heart formation with a wide-angle lens by looking at the entirety of the genetic material that gives heart cells their unique identity.”
A glance at a star-nosed mole (Condylura cristata) is enough to convince most people that something very strange has evolved in the bogs and wetlands of North America. There’s nothing else on the planet quite like this little palm-sized mammal. Its nose is ringed by 22 fleshy appendages, called rays, which are engorged with blood and in a constant flurry of motion when the animal searches for food.
What is this star? How did it evolve and what is it for? What advantage would be worth sporting such an ungainly structure? To a neuroscientist interested in sensory systems, this kind of biological anomaly represents an irresistible mystery. I first began studying star-nosed moles in the early ’90s in an attempt to answer some of these basic questions. But I soon discovered that this unusual animal, like many other specialized species, could reveal general principles about how brains process and represent sensory information. In fact, star-nosed moles have been a gold mine for discoveries about brains and behavior in general—and an unending source of surprises. The most obvious place to start the investigation was with that bizarre star.
(Source: the-scientist.com)
Learning faster with neurodegenerative disease
People who bear the genetic mutation for Huntington’s disease learn faster than healthy people. The more pronounced the mutation was, the more quickly they learned. This is reported by researchers from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and from Dortmund in the journal Current Biology. The team has thus demonstrated for the first time that neurodegenerative diseases can go hand in hand with increased learning efficiency. “It is possible that the same mechanisms that lead to the degenerative changes in the central nervous system also cause the considerably better learning efficiency” says Dr. Christian Beste, head of the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group “Neuronal Mechanisms of Action Control” at the RUB.
Passive learning through repeated stimulus presentation
In a previous study, the Bochum psychologists reported that the human sense of vision can be changed in the long term by repeatedly exposing subjects to certain visual stimuli for short periods (we reported in May 2011). The task of the participants was to detect changes in the brightness of stimuli. They performed better if they had viewed the stimuli passively for a while first. In the current study, the researchers presented the same task to 29 subjects with the genetic mutation for Huntington’s disease, who, however, did not yet show any symptoms. They also tested 45 control subjects without such mutations in the genome. In both groups, the learning efficiency was better after passive stimulus presentation than without the passive training. Subjects with the Huntington’s mutation, however, increased their performance twice as fast as those without the mutation.
Glutamate may have paradoxical effect
Degenerative diseases of the nervous system are based on complex changes. A key mechanism is an increased release of the neurotransmitter glutamate. However, since glutamate is also important for learning, in some cases it could lead to the paradoxical effect: better learning efficiency despite degeneration of the nerve cells.
Detecting differences in brightness under aggravated conditions
In each experimental run, the subjects saw two consecutive small bars on a computer screen that either had the same or different brightness. Sometimes, however, not only the brightness changed from bar one to bar two, but also the orientation of the bar (vertical or horizontal). “Normally, the distraction stimulus, i.e. the change in orientation, draws all the attention” Christian Beste explains. “But after the passive training with the visual stimuli, the distraction stimulus has no effect at all.” The shift of attention from the non-relevant to the relevant properties of the stimulus was also visible in the electroencephalogram (EEG) in brain areas for early visual processing.
Better performance with stronger mutation
In Huntington’s disease, a short segment of a gene is repeated. The number of repetitions determines when the disease breaks out. In the present study, a greater number of repetitions was, however, also associated with higher learning efficiency. “This shows that neurodegenerative changes can cause paradoxical effects” says Christian Beste. “The everyday view that neurodegenerative changes fundamentally entail deterioration of various functions can no longer be maintained in this dogmatic form.”
(Source: aktuell.ruhr-uni-bochum.de)
Animation of bionic eye being developed in Melbourne, Australia by the Bionic Vision Australia consortium.