It seems I have been Boing Boinged! Thanks to Mark for linking to one of the posts, there has been a dramatic increase in viewership. Welcome abroad the Boing Boing readers and I hope that while you are here you would like to check the other popular articles on the left sidebar to get a falavor of The Mouse Trap. Dont forget to subscribe or visit later if you find some artciles to your taste!
In a study that could have potentially far-reaching effects for the Bipolar research and treatment, Dr Colleen and her group have reported on a mouse model of bipolar disorder.
The association between circadian rhythms and bipolarity is well established and a bipolar episode is characterized with disruptions in daily sleeping, eating rhythms etc. Till now the biological basis of this was not clear.
In this study, mice with Clock gene knocked out were tested on a number of measures of bipolairty and it was found that these mice lacking the Clock gene, which is essential for proper circadian rhythms, suffered from human manic like symptoms. Moreover treating these bipolar mice with lithium resulted in the subsiding of symptoms.
The study included putting the mutant mice through a series of tests, during which they displayed hyperactivity, decreased sleep, decreased anxiety levels, a greater willingness to engage in "risky" activities, lower levels of depression-like behavior and increased sensitivity to the rewarding effects of substances such as cocaine and sugar.The clock gene is expressed widely in the human brain, but the focus till now was only on the area called suprachiasmatic nucleus. In this study the area of brain associated with reward learning, VTA/ Striatum etc was studied and expressing the clock gene there in KO mice resulted in subsiding of symptoms."These behaviors correlate with the sense of euphoria and mania that bipolar patients experience," said Dr. McClung. "In addition, there is a very high co-morbidity between drug usage and bipolar disorder, especially when patients are in the manic state."
During the study, lithium was given to the mutant mice. Lithium, a mood-stabilizing medication, is most commonly used in humans to treat bipolar patients. Once treated with the drug on a regular basis, the majority of the study's mice reverted back to normal behavioral patterns, as do humans.
The researchers also injected a functional Clock gene protein – basically giving the mice their Clock gene back – into a specific region of the brain that controls reward functions and where dopamine cells are located. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with the "pleasure system" of the brain and is released by naturally rewarding experiences such as food, sex and the use of certain drugs. This also resulted in the mice going back to normal behaviors.
There is an intriguing article at BPS Research Digest regarding a study which has reported on a "Chameleon man". No this is not a super hero like spider man or super man, but a 65 yr old AD, who after a stroke has acquired a capacity to assume any social role that his circumstances and situations demand.
According to the report, when in presence of doctors and in a hospital setting , he would assume the role of a doctor, with ad hoc explanations about how he came to become a doctor.
When with doctors, AD assumes the role of a doctor; when with psychologists he says he is a psychologist; at the solicitors he claims to be a solicitor. AD doesn't just make these claims, he actually plays the roles and provides plausible stories for how he came to be in these roles.
To investigate further, Giovannina Conchiglia and colleagues used actors to contrive different scenarios. At a bar, an actor asked AD for a cocktail, prompting him to immediately fulfil the role of bar-tender, claiming that he was on a two-week trial hoping to gain a permanent position. Taken to the hospital kitchen for 40 minutes, AD quickly assumed the role of head chef, and claimed responsibility for preparing special menus for diabetic patients. He maintains these roles until the situation changes. However, he didn't adopt the role of laundry worker at the hospital laundry, perhaps because it was too far out of keeping with his real-life career as a politician.
There is a decent article in NYT that explores the work of Dr. Frans De Waal and his assertion that the root of human morality is grounded in the sociality exhibited by the primates. His contention is that animals (esp Apes and Monkeys) show emotions and empathy; as well as for the evolution of co-operative behavior many other factors underlying Morality- like reciprocity and peace-making evolved and these in turn set up the stage for the evolution of Human morality.
Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.
Macaques and chimpanzees have a sense of social order and rules of expected behavior, mostly to do with the hierarchical natures of their societies, in which each member knows its own place. Young rhesus monkeys learn quickly how to behave, and occasionally get a finger or toe bitten off as punishment. Other primates also have a sense of reciprocity and fairness. They remember who did them favors and who did them wrong. Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them. Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task, like a piece of cucumber instead of a grape.
These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality
But biologists like Dr. de Waal believe reason is generally brought to bear only after a moral decision has been reached. They argue that morality evolved at a time when people lived in small foraging societies and often had to make instant life-or-death decisions, with no time for conscious evaluation of moral choices. The reasoning came afterward as a post hoc justification. “Human behavior derives above all from fast, automated, emotional judgments, and only secondarily from slower conscious processes,” Dr. de Waal writes.
This is an FYI post about a great article by Bruce Schneier, assessing the psychological issues involved in assessing various security trade-offs. He touches on all aspects of behavioral finance,psychological biases, prospect theory, decision-making etc that are relevant and affect our felling of security vis-a-vis actual and objective security. Although, he is not that strong when it comes to discussing the neurological basis of these, I would highly recommended reading the article in its entirety!
Check out the brand new edition of Encephalon at Pharyngula. My favorites include the Musical harmony as grammar studies. With my obsession of extending grammar to Universal Moral Grammar or Universal Spiritual Grammar; this new direction of Universal Musical Grammar seems very attractive and feasible. Chris has already presented evidence that Musical Melody serves the function of Semantics; so we are left with Morphology and Pragmatics as the two remaining broad domains of language that need to be mapped to the musical concepts like Rhythm and Dynamics.
I've recently come across a new blog the Situationist and have just read a three part article by the famed Phillip Zimbardo (who has conducted the Stanford prison experiments) titled Situational sources of evil.
In the part I, he discusses Stanley Milgram's compliance experiments wherein under the authority of a professor, subjects were forced to apply outrageous electric shocks to the confederates. This experiment was a classical one in social psychology and showed how under the situations of authority, normal individuals can be made to do evil deeds in the laboratory. Milgram also did a number of variations of this experiment to find out what factors facilitated compliance and which factors enabled resistance to authority.
In Part II, Zimbardo discusses how these laboratory results can be extended to the real world phenomenons like the holocaust/ palestentain suicide bombers/ suicide cults and how most of the perpetrators are very common people (banality of evil).
In part III, Zimbardo outlines 10 learnings from Milgram's experiments and I find then worth summarizing here -
Compliance can be increased by :
A recent article in Current Biology by Foote et al (courtsey Ars Technica) posits that rats have metacognition abilities. till now only Humans and primates were assumed to have metacognitive abilities. One feature or defining characteristic of metacognition is knowing what you know and also knowing what you don't know. It means one can think about one's own mental states and determine what knowledge one already has and what knowledge one has not yet learned. So a related ability would be the ability to decline a test of knowledge if one thinks that one has not learned enough to ace the test. For those who gave GRE/ any other exam recently and maybe postponed that exam, they would have no difficulty appreciating this that postponing/declining a test involves metacognition.
Taking this line of reasoning further, Foote et al surmise that if a rat could decline a test, under conditions when the rat was not sure of its learned knowledge regarding the test and doubted its ability to successfully complete the test, then such a declining behavior would indicate that the rat has metacognitive abilities. I find no flaws in this reasoning, but have a few quips about their particular experimental setup, which may have confounded the results by not factoring in the risk aversion.
First regarding their hypothesis of the experiment:
Here, we demonstrate for the first time that rats are capable of metacognition—i.e., they know when they do not know the answer in a duration-discrimination test. Before taking the duration test, rats were given the opportunity to decline the test. On other trials, they were not given the option to decline the test. Accurate performance on the duration test yielded a large reward, whereas inaccurate performance resulted in no reward. Declining a test yielded a small but guaranteed reward. If rats possess knowledge regarding whether they know the answer to the test, they would be expected to decline most frequently on difficult tests and show lowest accuracy on difficult tests that cannot be declined [4]. Our data provide evidence for both predictions and suggest that a nonprimate has knowledge of its own cognitive state.
Each trial consisted of three phases: study, choice, and test phases (Figure 1). In the study phase, a brief noise was presented for the subject to classify as short (2–3.62 s) or long (4.42–8 s). Stimuli with intermediate durations (e.g., 3.62 and 4.42 s) are most difficult to classify as short or long [11, 12]. By contrast, more widely spaced intervals (e.g., 2 and 8 s) are easiest to classify. In the choice phase, the rat was sometimes presented with two response options, signaled by the illumination of two nose-poke apertures. On these choice-test trials, a response in one of these apertures (referred to as a take-the-test response) led to the insertion of two response levers in the subsequent test phase; one lever was designated as the correct response after a short noise, and the other lever was designated as the correct response after a long noise. The other aperture (referred to as the decline-the-test response) led to the omission of the duration test. On other trials in the choice phase, the rat was presented with only one response option; on these forced-test trials, the rat was required to select the aperture that led to the duration test (i.e., the option to decline the test was not available), and this was followed by the duration test. In the test phase, a correct lever press with respect to the duration discrimination produced a large reward of six pellets; an incorrect lever press produced no reward. A decline response (provided that this option was, indeed, available) led to a guaranteed but smaller reward of three pellets.
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