(First published on Huffington Post Science)

The job of a scientist is to predict the future and get there first.  We do this by looking for patterns in subtle clues; organizing the fragments thoughtfully to project their likely trajectory.  It is this process that moves me to write this essay; in essence an epitaph from the future. 

 

            After giving a guest lecture at a departmental seminar in one of the nation’s leading medical schools a few weeks ago, I met with a group of eager graduate students and postdoctoral fellows over a lunch of sandwiches and chips as is customary for visiting speakers.  I enjoy these sessions immensely as we go around the table and listen to each of the enthusiastic budding scientists share in turn their current research project with passion.  This was an exceptionally bright and highly motivated group, but before any of us took a bite of lunch the meeting went off script.  No one shared their research.  Instead the group confessed fear.  Uncertainty and bewilderment for the life choices they had made began to spill out. 

 

            All of them have seen their colleagues struggle and fail to find jobs at universities as funds dry up to support scientific research in this country.  Depleted state budgets are unable to sustain higher education and scientific research in the face of so many other demands on public funds.  Sequestration of federal funding has been most brutal and cruel in suddenly kicking out the supports of scientific research.  The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will fund 1357 fewer research grants this year, funding the lowest number of grants for biomedical research in a decade. 

 

            Only a few insiders saw the impending collapse of the housing market long before the rest of us heard the deafening roar that swept away prosperity around the globe.  Insiders can see the same thing happening now in science.  Soon everyone will hear the boom, but by then it will be too late.

 

            “The barista at Starbucks makes more money than I do,” one of the postdocs said.  His comment was not made begrudgingly, but rather reflected serious concern that his own future was not as bright.   “I have decided to not have a family,” one woman said, regret surfacing on her face as she made the confession.  Like all scientists and artists, these people are driven by an intense passion.  A scientist has to be driven to succeed, and to sacrifice with single-minded focus for ultimate success.  But ambition alone is not enough.  Science requires opportunity and support.  We are at risk of losing a generation of scientists.

 

            The lack of jobs for highly educated scientists may raise little sympathy among many citizens who have also suffered in this economy.  The economic disaster caused by greedy Wall Street banking barons swept away life savings of retirees; young families lost their homes; blue collar workers and white collar professionals lost their jobs and many cannot find suitable work.  But the difference is that hiring in other professions will resume with the recovery and rise in economic demand, but the financial and political torrent undermining the foundation of scientific research creates a unique calamity for scientists in training, which will have profound and long-lasting consequences for society.  This is because training of scientists and the pursuit of science require long-term commitments, and timing is critical in successfully grasping a faculty position upon completion of one’s training as a scientist.  Because science is constantly changing, those who cannot land a faculty position soon after completing their postdoctoral fellowship will be left in the wake.  If there are no opportunities the consequence is more than a personal disappointment, because it is to science that we look to for our future.

 

            Consider that these were some of the brightest kids in high school.  They went on to study in the best universities.  They took difficult courses and worked hard for 4-5 years to graduate with a degree in science.  Many left school as indentured students to Sallie Mae, now crushed under decades of servitude to bear the burden of student-loan debt.  After graduation they were admitted to top graduate schools to pursue advanced studies for another 5-7 years and receive degrees in medicine or a PhD.  Most of this group had then won competitive postdoctoral fellowships, and they now toil in the laboratory after their PhD degree as apprentice scientists.  Postdoctoral fellows are the talented individuals who actually perform the experiments that are funded by grants awarded to lab heads and tapped by universities for income.  Postdoctoral fellows are supported by a modest stipend, not a salary, and they are strictly limited to a maximum 5-year term.  After this the fellow must quickly land a job as a faculty member at a university, but what if there is no hiring?  The timing is treacherous.  Many now feel left without options, used up by a system that works them to generate income and then discards them at the end of 5 postdoctoral years. 

 

            Breakthroughs in science will carry a society into the future; relieve human disease and suffering, and power new billion dollar branches of the economy, such as electronics and the internet, revolutions in genetics, and the aerospace industry.  Most basic scientists give their research away without extracting windfall compensation in a fair exchange for the privilege of doing scientific research at a university or government institution such as the NIH.  Let others with the resources, time, and knowhow turn their new discoveries into commercial success rather than be burdened by undertaking that demanding work and getting distracted from tackling the next scientific question on the horizon.  This is what society expects of scientists and this is what society has trained them to do.  But the fruits of a scientist’s labor take time to mature, so when research is killed, the loss is not perceived until years later.  This puts basic scientists at a disadvantage in times of competitive budgets and political expediency. 

 

            I reassured the group that the transition from postdoctoral fellowship to professor is always a stressful and treacherous transition.  Even as I offered encouragement, though, it is clear to me that things have changed.  Perhaps the business model that fueled the expansion of higher education, scientific research, and prosperity in America after WWII through government contracts and grant funding was an aberration.  Universities of the future may contract back to the scholarly sanctuaries for the elite that they were for centuries.  The modern requirement of having a college degree just to be considered eligible for employment may shatter as students leave expensive brick-and-mortar institutions of higher learning in favor of affordable, flexible, and job-pertinent, on-line courses providing certificates of education in specific fields.  Basic scientific research will dwindle.  Those with scientific aspirations will enter industry to tackle applied science problems selected to bring quick financial profit. 

 

            The future is unknowable, but our present predicate is clear as are the reasons for it:  the dysfunctional government.  On this point everyone in the room regardless of political persuasion agreed. 

 

            On September 17, 1787 when our founding fathers broke free from the tyranny of Great Britton’s monarchy and declared independence from the most powerful empire in the world, they set down on paper deliberate plans for a prosperous and free society.  In laying out the responsibilities and priorities of a federal government, Article I of the United States Constitution states that the function of the federal government is “To promote Progress of Science and useful Arts [technology].”   This is inscribed in the document ahead of many other vital government responsibilities, including “To declare War…support Armies…to provide and maintain a Navy,” and many other functions that are listed after the responsibility of government to support science.   These courageous and wise founders of our democracy saw that a society without a scientific future is not sustainable or defensible.  This priority for supporting science is written into our United States Constitution years before other rights and responsibilities that we now hold sacred–freedom of speech, religion, the press, and many others that were added as amendments.  They saw, as archeologists plainly see when studying the rise and fall of civilizations of the past, that a society may be enriched and characterized by its art and commerce, but its survival and prosperity are determined by its science.  Whether that be spear points, agriculture, smart bombs, or cures for disease, science is the future. 

 

            Looking a century into the future from 1902, H.G. Wells predicted that democracy would become “a conspicuous phenomenon in the world only in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.”  In his analysis:

 

            I know of no case for the elective democratic government of modern states that cannot be knocked to pieces in five minutes.  It is manifest that upon countless important public issues there is no collective will, and nothing in the mind of the average man except blank indifference; that an electional system simply places power in the hands of the most skillful electioneers; that neither men nor their rights are identically equal, but vary with every individual, and, above all, that the minimum or maximum of general happiness is related only so indirectly to the public control that people will suffer great miseries from their governments unresistingly, and, on the other hand, change their rulers on account of the most trivial irritations–H.G. Wells, 1902, p 162. 

 

            In Well’s analysis the inevitable outcome by the year 2000 was–War.  In wars of the 21st century, Wells predicted that bravery and strength on the battlefield will not determine the victor, because “first, the steady development of the new and quite unprecedented educated class as a necessary aspect of the expansion of science and mechanism [technology]; and, secondly the absolute revolution in the art of war that science and mechanism are bringing about…a new class of intelligent and scientifically educated men.” 

 

            H. G. Well’s analysis seems frightfully prescient and it is supported by roots extending back to our founding fathers.  Ben Franklin and the others laid out matters in an order that placed preparation for war secondary to science.  They saw that a society weak in science faces a weak and indefensible future. 

 

            Science will bring us into the future and provide a better life for us and our children, but the need to support science goes beyond winning wars and practical rewards.  Every human being is curious about the natural world around them.  I believe that every citizen holds this truth in their heart.  Even as every individual works to contribute to society in his or her own way and raise their families in a better world, they give willingly for the greater good to sustain things that matter.  Every man, woman, and child wants to understand the mysteries of the natural world and their place in it. 

 

            I never got to hear what scientific research the graduate and postdoctoral students were pursuing.

 

            A democracy only provides the government that the citizens deserve, I have often heard.  “We demanded more from our government,” I told the students thinking back to my college days.  “Maybe we were dreamers, but we demanded that they listen.” 

 

            How naïve we were back in the 1960s and 1970s when we thought we could stop the war and save the whales with nothing more than protest and song. 

 

            Wait a minute.  We did stop the war and save the whales.

 

 

P. S.

            I believe scientists should take opportunities to step out of their ivory towers and explain to the public what they are doing with the money that tax payers have given them, and do it in terms that anyone without special expertise can appreciate and understand.  One expects no less from an automobile mechanic in return for money given them for their service. 

 

            Last weekend I had the privilege of participating in the World Science Festival in NY City, organized by physicist Brian Greene and Tracy Day http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/.  In a city with so many world-class entertainment opportunities it was heartening to see the theater sold out to members of the public who had paid to sit and listen to scientists talk about their research.  People care about science.  Science is a partnership.  The questions I received after my talk showed a deep understanding, appreciation, and curiosity about science.  Indeed, many questions I received were the same questions, stripped of jargon, that scientists in my field are asking and working to answer.

 

References

J. Kaiser (2013)  Science.  NIH Details Impact of 2013 Sequester Cuts http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2013/05/nih-details-impact-of-2013-seque.html

 

H.G Wells (1902)  Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought.  Chapman and Hall, London.

 

 

Related articles of possible interest

R.D. Fields (2011) Obama’s Vision of National Security, Science, and Children.  Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-douglas-fields/obamas-vision-of-national_b_826976.html

 

R.D. Fields (2011) Can Politicians be Trusted with Science?  Scientific American
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/08/31/can-politicians-be-trusted-with-science/

This may seem like old news.  Thanks to Will Smith’s “neuralizer” blasting away horrific memories of alien attacks in the 1997 movie “Men in Black,” and the quest to bury the heartbreak of a broken romance in the 2004 flick “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the concept of erasing memory has become commonplace.  More recently research to relieve PTSD using propranolol and other drugs to quell traumatic memories has edged fiction closer to fact, but the method has produced mixed results.  Certainly memories can be obliterated in experimental animals, but the drugs used on lab rats cannot be given to people because of serious side effects and other issues related to the more complex cognitive processing in humans.  The fact is, there is no convincing evidence that the memory of specific experience (called declarative memory) can be erased in humans–until now.

A new study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science reports that memory of a specific event was impaired by targeting it selectively.  What’s more, the study used no drugs, electroshock, or other invasive measures to wipe away the memory.  They used a cleaver deception to hack into the biological process at a critical point when experiments on laboratory animals indicate that memories can become vulnerable to tampering.

When neuroscientist Jason Chan first presented his findings together with Jessica LaPaglia at a scientific meeting he received a sharply polarized response.  “Some liked it a lot, but some did not…they didn’t believe the results,” he said.  “I didn’t believe it myself three years ago when we first got the data.”

So Chan and LaPaglia, working at Iowa State University, repeated the experiments and tested the results in several other ways.  The results are now clear:  the researchers had blotted out a specific memory by intervening at the precise time in the multi-phase biological process that makes memories stick.

“What’s nice about his particular study,” memory researcher Daniela Schiller, who was not involved in the research explained, “is that they used a memory that is very similar to real-life memories (a movie in this case).”  Moreover they demonstrated that the memory interference was very specific; rather than causing some sort of global amnesia, a specific memory was targeted for ablation, and the method only worked when launched at a particular phase in the process of memory storage and recall.  “The memory has to be reactivated and thus active during the interference” to suppress the memory she explained.

This fits perfectly with the results from laboratory animal research identifying an aspect of memory called “reconsolidation.”  New experiences can be held in mind temporarily but soon forgotten (short-term memory), or they can be stamped into long-term memory through a complex biochemical process that requires the synthesis of new proteins to make long-lasting connections between neurons.  Block the synthesis of new proteins with a drug right after learning something new and the event will never get stored in long-term memory.  Timing, however, is critical.  Wait too long to block protein synthesis, generally a few hours after training, and it is too late–the memory has already been cemented into long-term storage.  Interestingly, animal research has found that when a well-established memory stored in long-term memory is later recalled, the cycle of memory encoding and storage begins again, making the recalled event vulnerable to being forgotten.  Protein synthesis inhibitors given right after recalling a long-term memory blocks its reconsolidation and the memory is lost.

Chan and LaPaglia had subjects watch a movie: a pilot episode of a TV drama “24” involving a terrorist attack in which the villain jabs a hypodermic needle into a flight attendant to disable her with a drug injection.  Later they quizzed the viewers about details in the video, allowing only 25 seconds to answer each of 24 questions about specific events in the 40 minute thriller.  The purpose of the quiz was in fact to make the subjects recall specific events from memory.  Now, according to reconsolidation theory, the memories that were retrieved could be disrupted as they were re-encoded into memory after recall.  Rather than give the subjects drugs to block protein synthesis, they instead manipulated reconsolidation by having the people listen to an 8 min audio recap of the movie they had seen, but some of the facts were altered in the recap.  For example, the recap stated that the flight attendant had been rendered unconscious, not by a hypodermic needle, but rather by using a stun gun.  When the test subjects were tested later, only 17% recalled the hypodermic as the weapon used, instead of 42% who had been similarly misinformed by the false recap, but they heard the recap after playing a computer game rather than after taking a quiz to force them to reactivate the original memory.   Disrupting the memory required that it first be recalled.

Now it might have been that futzing with the facts in this way could have simply confused matters in the minds of participants.   That is, people might have remembered the hypodermic needle being jabbed into the flight attendant perfectly well, but they were uncertain whether that particular memory was the correct answer to the question.  The subjects might have remembered events in both the video and audio recap perfectly well, but they simply got confused about which murder weapon went with which context.  Also difficult to say is whether the original memory had been erased or instead the process of retrieving it had failed.

The researchers were able to greatly discount these alternative hypotheses by clever experimental design.  When they were latter quizzed, participants could only give true or false answers to the probing factual questions–and, the scientists never mentioned a stun gun.  Instead they asked questions like “The terrorist used a hypodermic syringe on the flight attendant, true or false?”  Or, the terrorist used a chloroform rag on the flight attendant, true or false?”  This is a test of recognition, not recall.  Why, if they had simply been confused by the disinformation conflicting with their memory of events, would anyone pick the chloroform rag scenario as fact unless they had lost the true memory of what they had originally observed?  In another experiment the researchers asked participants to respond “old” or “new,” to the questions, to indicate whether the events were recognized in relation to the video or the audio recap afterwards.  Memory probed this way still failed if the participants had been given the quiz before the recap to force them to recall the specific memory compared to people who were asked the same questions, but had not been forced to recall the event before the final test.

Also very telling were experiments that spaced the misinformation and recall at different times after watching the video.  As predicted by the time line of the biological process of memory encoding into long-term memory and memory reconsolidation, the method did not work if applied at the wrong times.  If the false recap was given 48 hours after watching the video instead of 20 minutes after, the original memory remained intact, exactly as happens when drugs are used too late to block protein synthesis.  They only work if given before the memory is reconsolidated.  The researchers probed their findings with 6 different kinds of experiments, all of which fit the pattern of disrupting reconsolidation of a well-established memory.

“There is a time-window for the interference to occur–beyond a certain time, when reconsolidation is complete and the memory is safely stored, the opportunity to interfere is lost,” explains Schiller, whose own research on reconsolidation of fearful memories conducted at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine is leading to the similar conclusions.  Most importantly, she emphasizes “Not any new information at the time of retrieval could modify the original memory.  It has to be directly relevant but novel or contradictory for it [the misinformation] to have an effect.”  If the false recap involved a flight attendant getting knocked out on a flight in the context of a different plot– a drug trafficking scenario rather than terrorism, for example– the new information did not overwrite the original memory.

This new research suggests that memory reconsolidation is an update mechanism.  After all, we continue to learn and add new relevant information to existing memories all the time.  Your memory of the name “Obama,” for example, has no doubt changed considerably from the time you first heard the word.  Indeed, this is why we are so often delightfully surprised when we view an old photo of a loved one.  Even though your mother, for example, is seared into our memory, you have in fact forgotten how she looked back in the days of polyester leisure suits and disco.  That memory is gone.  Memory is not a recording; memory is a construction.  To be useful to us in the present and future, that reconstruction must constantly change.

This research no doubt leads to some troubling issues related to witness tampering by authorities and the reliability of eye witness testimony.  That reality, now backed by science, is indeed very old news–something that should never be forgotten.

Reference

Chan and LaPaglia (2013)  Impairing existing declarative memory in humans by disrupting reconsolidation.  PNAS
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/05/16/1218472110.abstract

More to explore

R. Douglas Fields  (2005)  Making Memories Stick, Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=making-memories-stick

R. Douglas Fields (2005)  Erasing Memories, Scientific American Mind 
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=erasing-memories

R. Douglas Fields (2010)  Nightmares in PTSD:   Don’t get your blood pressure up.  Huffington post 
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-douglas-fields/nightmares-in-ptsd-dont-g_b_422368.html

(First published on BrainFacts.org )

The last time I was on Boylston Street it was to give a lecture in November at a scientific meeting in the Weston Hotel.  Today, Sunday, I’m looking out onto an empty street, barricaded.  An eerie modern-day ghost town festooned with yellow police tape rippling in the cold Boston wind.  I look across an enormous pile of fresh-cut flowers, teddy bears, helium balloons, baseball caps, candles, and hand-written notes.  American flags spout from the mound like brilliant poppies.  Grief, still raw, is slipping away, drifting as if carried helplessly on a current, and transforming into something else.  Defiance, but shaken with bewilderment.  Tourists gather now, out of sorrow and the need to understand.  “Do we have anything to give?”  a woman asks her companion desperately.  “Do we have anything to give?” she repeats, and turns back to survey the makeshift shrine empty handed.  It must have begun with a single bouquet.  Now it has grown into a mountain.

Many tendrils of this tragedy penetrate neuroscience:  PTSD, grief, fear, chronic pain, body language conveyed in photographs, neural rehabilitation, phantom limb sensation, prosthetic devices, memory formation and forgetting.  Several speakers at the Experimental Biology meeting this week made reference to the heartbreaking disaster in sharing their new scientific research with colleagues and students assembled in Boston, but underlying everything we all ask the same question.  It is the question uttered by President Obama in disbelief, “Why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?”  How does a teenager riding a skateboard and attending college classes suddenly become a violent mass murder of innocents, committing heartlessly cruel and depraved violence toward fellow citizens, innocent children, families, and others who intersected their sphere only momentarily through fleeting chance?

Can we unearth the root of this and so many other similar atrocities by tracking the tangled vines of politics?  People often share political views and goals but few could conceive or accept violence.  Politics change.  Look instead to neuroscience for insight.  All behavior is the product of the brain.  It is the challenge of neuroscience to understand the human brain and how it develops in every person to make each one of us unique and develop into a productive member of society or an outcast.

No one imagines their newborn infant growing into a violent gang member, but in certain environments the draw becomes overwhelming.  Many adolescents and young adults are unable to resist despite all parental and societal efforts to prevent it.  Regardless of the violence and almost certain tragic outcome of gang association, many join gangs and become criminals at a young age.  It would appear from what we know at present that the families of these two brothers acted selflessly to protect their children from growing up in a hostile environment, uprooting themselves from their homeland and fleeing half way around the world to seek a better life for their family.  But their efforts failed horribly.  We need to understand what went wrong.

Perversion of the wholesome biological process of forming allegiances and personal identities during the late teens and early twenties is the core of the problem.  The bombings and robberies committed by the Weather Underground and similar radical groups in the 1970’s are fundamentally no different, except for the political veneer and the less deadly potency of their weapons of terror.   Many of the young members of the Weather Underground who committed terrorist bombings and other acts of violence in the early 1970’s went on to live normal and productive lives after being released from incarceration or after living lives as law-abiding fugitives for decades.  What is different now is that the gangs have grown from local neighborhoods and pockets of radicals to become world-wide in scope, drawing the most vulnerable and compliant into the domain of the most evil among us on the planet.  In the past the nucleus of the gang would have been the meanest person on the block, today it is the worst criminals on the entire globe.

The intentions of those drawn to violence against society have not changed, but the global torrent of instant electronic information has multiplied the capability for destruction and terror, making the criminal acts far more dangerous.  The radicals of the 1970’s were amateurs, but today video instruction on bomb-making is available over the internet to anyone.   The ease of international travel enables a disgruntled young person to receive first-hand instruction on making and deploying horrific devices of mass destruction for the price of a plane ticket.

But there have been other changes.  In the 1970’s we had little hope of understanding the neurobiology gone awry in adolescents who become gang members and criminals.  Today there is more than hope; there is data.  New information and new methods of brain imaging are nurturing a new field of social neuroscience, which seeks to understand how the brain controls social interactions and conversely, how these interactions affect the brain.  In the past, such questions in brain science could only be tentatively approached through animal studies, a feeble approximation of complex human nature and the unparalleled capacity of the human brain.  Today we can see inside a person’s brain at work.  We can see the malformations in brain structure that make it difficult for some people with certain developmental disorders to interact socially. We can see how environmental experience in early life augments or undermines normal development of brain circuits that control social interactions, emotion, aggression, propensity to violence, and empathy.  Brain systems that motivate humans to form emotional bonds are being discovered and probed.  Many of these circuits of social bonding interact with motivational systems in the brain.  Circuits involved in fear, novelty seeking, and modifying behavior based on negative events are influenced by experiences while the brain is forming–now understood to continue actively through the first 20 years of life.  Altered development of these reward circuits can lead to increased aggressiveness, diminished fear and anxiety.  In the absence of adequate rewarding interpersonal relationships and bonding to societal and cultural values, alternative means of stimulating reward pathways in the brain are often substituted through sex, aggression, drugs, and by intimidating others.  Substance abuse during these critical years when these emotional and social brain networks are forming can have lasting effects that increase the risk of mental illness as adults.  Cannabis use in adolescence risks developing schizophrenia as an adult, and the molecular and cellular defects can be reproduced in experimental animals (Anglin et al., 2012).

Peer rejection in adolescence can lead to depression and leave marks on the brain that can be seen by brain imaging.  For a teenager, peer groups are among the most powerful environmental influences.  Verbal abuse in middle-school years marks the brain by decreasing connections between the left and right brain (the corpus callosum) leading to psychological problems as adults  (Teicher et al., 2010).  Neural correlates of impaired emotional processing (Dogan et al, 2013) and the neural basis of moral evaluation can be seen at work inside the human brain (including the medial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, and insula–brain regions implicated in introspective processes ( Englander et al, 2012), as well as brain regions involved in emotion, notably the amygdala).  Empathy activates the same brain circuits that process physical pain (Beeny et al., 2011).  “Unmet need for social bonding and acceptance early in life might increase emotional allure of groups (gangs, sects) with violent and authoritarian values and leadership,” concludes psychologist Cort Pedersen (2004) who analyzed the biological aspects of social bonding and violence.

We are only beginning to uncover the neural basis of human behavior, violence, social integration, and how experience forms the brain.  Psychiatrists today are like heroic surgeons of the Civil War, desperately working to save lives with the crude and woefully inadequate understanding of the biology involved, but developmental neuroscience is converging with psychology and leading us to biological understanding.  None of this scientific insight can excuse the horrible acts of violence–many lives will never be the same and the bombers must face responsibility and justice for what they have done, but this research may help prevent such acts in the future.  The function of the brain is to perceive and respond to the environment.  Truth be told we don’t begin to understand it, either the brain or the crime in Boston, but we can’t stop trying.

Scientists sharing research at the Experimental Biology Meeting

References

Anglin, D.M. (2012)  Early cannabis use and schizotypal personality disorder symptmms from adolescence to middle adulthood.  Schizophr. Res. 137, 45-9.

Beeney, J.E. et al., (2011)  I feel your pain:  Emotional closeness modulates neural resonses to empathically experienced rejection.  Social Neuroscience, 6, 369-76.

Dogan, I., (2013)  Neural correlates of impaired emotion processing in manifest Huntington’s disease.  SCAN, in press.

Englander, Z.A et al., (2012)  Neural basis of moral elevation demonstrated through inter-subject synchronization of cortical activity during free viewing.  Plos One, 7, e39384.

Pedersen, C.A.. (2004)  Biological aspects of social bonding and the roots of human violence.  Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1036, 106-127.

Teicher, M.H. et al, (2010)  Hurtful words:  association of exposure to peer verbal abuse with elevated psychiatric symptom scores and corpus callosum abnormalities.  Am. J. Psychiatry 167, 1464-71

The cherry trees are blooming in Washington, D.C.  The splendor of pink petals transforms the Tidal Basin for only a few glorious days each spring, but even for local residents it is easy to miss the fleeting display.  I am told that in Buddhism the cherry blossoms represent life itself–short but beautiful.  So I make an effort to appreciate them each spring if I can.

The Metro subway was packed with tourists and like-minded locals this week in route to the Tidal Basin.  I spotted an empty a seat next to a middle aged woman perched next to the window.  As I approached, she made brief eye contact, then lifted her large gold purse and placed it on the empty portion of the bench seat next to her and extended her legs diagonally like a goalie screening a shot.

Maybe it was my black leather jacket; I don’t know.  People make determinations about other people based on nothing but appearances instantly and subconsciously.  It is a life-saving marvel of neural circuitry that we are only beginning to understand.  At the same time this neural circuitry is the basis for racial profiling and discrimination in social interactions and employment.   “Excuse me,” I said as I proceeded to plop down on her gold purse, which she snatched to safety.  She did not reply or speak the rest of our ride together as she sat shriveled up next to the window.

From an evolutionary perspective, our brains would not have developed circuitry to form instant subconscious judgments from people’s appearances if it were not biologically useful and important to our survival.  Do you think it is possible to identify a murder, for example, from facial features alone?  It sounds a bit like phrenology, but a new study has applied the most advanced imaging method, fMRI, to answer this very question.

             60 color photographs of male faces were collected; half of them were images of prisoners convicted of first-degree murder, and half were non-convicts matched with respect to race and age.  Then the researchers cropped the images to leave only eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth revealed in an ellipse-shaped vignette.  Participants viewed the photos while inside an MRI scanner monitoring regions of neural activity inside their brains.  Parts of the brain processing facial recognition and also regions controlling vigilance and fear were activated by the images, as expected.  But when the scientists compared the brain responses to seeing the face of convicted murders to control faces, the nugget of brain tissue well known for emotion, vigilance, and fear, the amygdala, was not more highly activated by the murders’ faces than controls.  Interestingly, when participants were asked to score how threatening each face appeared to them, without knowing whether the image was in fact a murder or honest citizen, they did judge the murderers’ faces as being significantly more threatening than controls.  The test subjects were able to suss out the murders on appearance alone, even though the photos were tightly cropped to reveal nothing but the parts of the human face that communicates emotion and internal states–eyes, nose, and mouth.

My explanation would be that murders do not look different from anyone else, but photos capture the emotions and internal state of a person as conveyed through body language, and the photographs of the convicts were likely taken under circumstances when the prisoners were feeling in a threatening situation, in contrast to when the photos of control subjects were snapped.  Still, this reveals the power of our subconscious mind to instantly ascertain a great deal about what is going on inside another person’s mind by a glimpse of their face.  The photos were flashed to subjects for only 2 sec.

The old idea that specific spots in the brain control specific behaviors or carry out a particular cognitive process is expanding into a new understanding of the importance of networks of communication between brain regions.  Rather than looking for hotspots of activity in the brain, such as the amygdala, the researchers wondered if circuits of activity between brain regions might explain how people make instantaneous assessments of others based on appearances.   When the researchers sorted their data according to how the participants scored the faces as to how threatening it appeared, with the level of connectivity in neural activity between the amygdala and the part of the cortex involved in facial recognition, a clear pattern emerged in the brain scans.  Activity in the amygdala and facial recognition regions of the brain became less well coupled when faces of murders were presented.

Reduced connectivity between these brain regions makes sense because previous research has  associated this with increased vigilance.  Reduced functional connectivity between the amygdala and cortical regions is also reported in women with posttraumatic stress disorder, in people with social anxiety disorder, and in mothers with postnatal depression.  The reduced connectivity between these regions leads to hypervigilance.

The take-home message is that instant judgments are made by everyone about strangers based on appearances alone and that these subconscious assessments can increase our vigilance to possible threat.  I have a clean record, but from this new MRI study I now know that something about my appearance squelched the circuitry between the woman’s amygdala and cortex and prompted her to undertake avoidance behavior.  Alternatively, these connections in this woman’s brain may have already been biased toward hyperviligance, either through genetics or past experiences.  In that case, any stranger on the Metro would have triggered the same reaction.  Considering the importance of experience on brain function, one wonders what an fMRI might show on the way back from the Tidal Basin, after the woman had spent her lunch break strolling beneath the canopy of pink blossoms donated to the United States from the people of Japan as a gift of peace and friendship.

 Reference

Miyahara, M., et al., (2013)  Functional connectivity between amygdala and facial regions involved in recognition of facial threat.  SCAN 8, 181-189.

 

              For many non-Irish, who are not exactly sure what St. Patrick’s Day is supposed to commemorate (and for many Irish who presumably do know the roots of the holiday), St. Patty’s is best celebrated at the local pub overindulging Jamison’s and Guinness with green-haired fun loving mates in a mutual state of inebriation.  If you awake the next morning with a hangover, and this is your annual tradition, a new study shows that you have doubled your risk of suffering a brain stroke.  One hangover/year is all it takes, according to researchers at the Institute of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition at the University of Eastern Finland. 

The effects of alcohol on the brain are complicated.  Research shows that light alcohol consumption may provide a protective effect on the cardiovascular system, but heavy drinking increases the risk of disease.  But how much is too much?  Moreover, the way alcohol is consumed is just as important to consider as how much alcohol a person drinks.  Sipping wine all evening provokes a different physiological response than downing shots in rapid succession, even if the total amount of alcohol consumed is the same.  Studies have shown that binge drinking in particular increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, for example.

The new study examined 2466 men in Finland over a 15.7 year period.  The results showed that the risk of suffering a brain stroke was more than doubled in those who reported having one or more hangovers/year.   Brain stroke can be a serious disorder, leading to sudden life-altering disability or death.  Even after correcting for other known risks for stroke, such as age, smoking, cholesterol levels, cardiac disease, etc., a single hangover a year significantly increased the risk of stroke to over twice that of people who reported no hangovers/year according to these researchers.   “The study shows that at least one hangover a year is related to an increased risk of ischemic stroke in men,” the researchers conclude.

Unfortunately the study included no women or elderly, and only people of one race were involved.  Another possible issue is that the data rely on self-reporting, and definitions of what a hangover is can vary among individuals.  Underreporting could also skew the results.  Nevertheless, the biological mechanisms underlying the increased risk of stroke following binge drinking are quite clear.  They include increased blood pressure during heavy alcohol consumption, changes in cholesterol, reduced blood flow to the brain, abnormal heartbeat (atrial fibrillation), and many other biochemical and toxic effects on brain tissue.

So enjoy the Guinness and green, but don’t press your luck on St. Patty’s Day by greeting the next day with a hangover.

The study by S. H. Rantakomi and colleagues is reported in Acta Neurological Scand.  (2013) 127:186-191.

This article was first published on my Psychology Today Blog

 Glia are brain cells that cannot generate electrical impulses.  As a consequence glia were thought to have no function in information processing or transmission.  In fact glia were communicating with themselves and with neurons all along, but without using electricity.  For a century neuroscientists were deaf to glial communication as they passionately studied neurons, because they were using the wrong tools for the job.  Probing the brain with electrodes, the way neuroscientists do to understand neuronal communication, is useless to intercept glial communications.  What revealed glia communicating was a new technique called calcium imaging, developed in the 1980s and 90s.  These videos will allow you to see with your own eyes glia communicating using waves of calcium.

1 astrocyte calcium communication high power

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            What you are seeing is a type of glia called astrocytes taken from a rat brain and growing in a culture dish in my laboratory at the NIH.  I have added a dye to the cultures that enters the cytoplasm of cells, and fluoresces brightly when the concentration of calcium ions in the cell rises.  You can see that waves of calcium are sweeping through the cytoplasm of astrocytes and passing through networks of astrocytes in complex ways.  Imagine the shock of this discovery the first time this was done (or read about it in my book The Other Brain.) 

 

How astrocytes communicate

            Astrocytes (and other types of glial cells) communicate using neurotransmitters.  When a neurotransmitter binds a receptor on the cell membrane this causes a rise in concentration of calcium in the cytoplasm of the cell.  The astrocyte releases neurotransmitters in response to the rise in calcium, which spreads to other cells exciting a chain reaction throughout the population of astrocytes. 

            Neurons also use neurotransmitters to communicate across synapses, and this allows glia to respond to neuronal signaling and to control transmission of information between neurons by releasing or taking up neurotransmitters near the synapse.  Whereas neurons signal serially, like land-line telephones, glia broadcast their signals like cell phones.  Notice in the videos that the calcium signals do not spread symmetrically like a shock wave surrounding an astrocyte, they propagate through astrocyte networks that are tuned with different types neurotransmitter receptors to respond to specific types of signaling compounds released by different cells. 

            In the second video you can see the astrocytes respond after I stimulate nerve axons to fire electrical impulses.  The axons are seen as bundles of fibers traversing the microscope field that suddenly glow when I give them a brief electric shock to make them fire impulses.  Glia sense neuronal firing at synapses (and along axons), control the transmissions of information between neurons across synapses, communicate the neuronal firing through a non-neuronal network without using electricity to subsequently control the transmission of information through a distant synapse somewhere else in the brain that is not necessarily hardwired into a network of neurons.  This is the other brain at work.

 

NatureRev RDF_Short1Mbps_Stream

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Note that these time-lapse videos have been sped up.  Calcium signaling is much slower than electrical signaling.

 

References:

Fields, R.D. (2010)  Visualizing calcium signaling in astrocytes.  Sci. Signal. 3, 147, tr5.

Fields, R.D. and Burnstock, G. (2006)  Purinergic signaling in neuron-glia interactions.  Nature Reviews Neurosci. 7, 423-436.

Fields, R.D. (2009)  The Other Brain, Simon and Schuster, NY.

 

Climber takes a a brief break on the way to the summit. Photo credit, Dylan Fields.

If you have ever been backpacking you know the problem neuroscientist Mathias Pessiglione and his colleagues are interested in solving–when to take a break.  This subtle question may seem trivial at first, until you realize that this decision-making process affects every one of us, every day, in everything we do, and yet we don’t know how we do it.  Whether you are an athlete or a desk jockey, success in your endeavor hinges on allocating your effort and rest periods optimally.  In the extreme, this decision can be perilous.  High altitude mountain climbers, who operate at the limits of human endurance and physiology in the freezing low-oxygen environment of the world’s highest mountains, manage rests rigorously (even down to taking rest intervals every few paces), but even long-haul truck drivers grapple with this decision as a potential life-or-death matter.   

            The decision to stop and rest is a difficult one, involving balancing many different factors.  Resting too frequently or for too long will undermine reaching the goal.  On the other hand, pushing on past the point of utter fatigue can be just as counterproductive and sometimes dangerous.  Yet all of this neural computation governing our behavior in prolonged exertion is solved by our brain largely unconsciously.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, Florent Meyniel and colleagues at the Hôpital de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, in Paris, asked participants to squeeze a handgrip to win a given amount of money.  The cash payoff was proportional to the time spent in exertion above a given force level, versus time spent resting.  The researchers were able to manipulate the force required to squeeze the handgrip to vary the costs and benefits.  The size of the incentive was always displayed to the subject just before each trial, but the difficulty of closing the handgrip was unknown until the subject began to squeeze it.  In this way, researchers could measure precisely how the difficulty of the task affected how often breaks were taken, and for how long, and they could gauge the influence of motivation on how we allocate break time against effort.

The first findings are what one would expect:  the subjects spent less time squeezing the grip as the difficulty of the task increased, and they spent more time squeezing and less time resting in direct proportion to the higher incentive of the monetary reward.  But how did the brain decide when the cost/benefit balance had reached a point where taking a break was the best decision?

All of these studies were done while the participants were undergoing brain scans with a functional MRI machine, which enabled the scientists to see which parts of the brain were at work as the subjects were making this unconscious decision.  They also used magnetoencephalography (MEG), to measure electrical activity in the brains of the subjects as they were being tested.    What the researchers saw was that as the effort required to squeeze the grip increased, activity in certain brain regions also increased and the activity accumulated with prolonged effort.  This included both the posterior insula, which is a region of cerebral cortex known to be involved in somatosensory function, as well as the ventromedial thalamus, deep inside the brain.

These two brain regions are part of a network known to be activated in response to physical pain.  The new data showed that these regions continuously signal the costs of the effort and rejuvenation provided during the rest periods.  Exactly what physiological or sensory input these brain regions monitor to determine the “cost” i.e., pain associated with prolonged effort, is not known.  It might be muscle contraction or metabolic load, for example, but the signal these brain regions are constantly monitoring remains for now a mystery.  What is known is that direct electrical stimulation of this brain region induces a painful sensation.

Monetary incentives slowed the accumulation of the cost signal in these brain regions during sustained effort, and they speeded the dissipation of the “cost signal” during the break.    The authors speculate that this might reflect a motivational signal being subtracted from the cost.  They propose that these positive signals could arise from other brain circuits that are involved in reward processing, such as the ventral striatum or other regions.

Interestingly, the range over which the cost signal in these brain regions fluctuates was also adjusted by the incentive.  This, they believe could be related to the psychological phenomenon that when motivated, we literally push back our limits, allowing our body to work closer to exhaustion.  Even a mountain climber thoroughly exhausted and collapsed in his tracks, would instantly spring to his feet with newfound energy and flee upon hearing the thunder of an avalanche.  Placebos (sugar pills believed by a patient to be medicine) have been shown to reduce responses to painful stimulation in these brain regions.  Therefore the brain can adjust the sensitivity of its pain circuits depending on expectations.

I asked Dr. Pessiglione if this new insight might help explain the extraordinary abilities of elite athletes like Lance Armstrong (before we learned he was cheating) to push on when others quit.  He says that individual differences in brain signals among the test subjects does account for their differences in behavior, but that it is not safe to infer how the brain of Lance Armstrong might have behaved in these experiments from studies performed on lay people.  Elite athletes could be different.  “It is actually a very interesting issue whether elite athletes show outstanding performance by pushing to their limit the same regulatory mechanisms we reveal in our study or whether completely different mechanisms are involved,” Pessiglione says.

Author waiting for activity in his posterior insula and ventromedial thalamus to subside on Mount Rainier.  Photo Credit, Dylan Fields.

One wonders if these new findings could lead to new kinds of performance enhancing drugs that strengthen the brain instead of the body.  “We are currently testing drugs on this paradigm in our lab,” he says.  This includes analgesic drugs (pain killers) such as morphine that might slow the cost accumulation in the pain regions, and drugs that boost motivation, such as dopamine enhancers.  “Amphetamine for instance may push back the bounds of cost accumulation,” he notes.  Developing performance enhancing drugs is not what Pessiglione and his colleagues are interested in achieving.  At present their new findings are only correlations.  The next step will be to seek proof of causation, and by using pain killers in future studies to change the subject’s sense of pain, they can determine if the time allocated to work and rest changes.  This would provide direct evidence that these correlations between brain responses and behavior are linked causally.

How can you apply this new information to optimize your own effort and rest allocation?  Dr. Pessiglione suggests that, “Perhaps they should listen to their brain signals!  That is, instead of planning breaks in advance, monitor their fatigue online, and have a break when it reaches a given threshold.  The other possibility is to increase the incentive.”

The results of this investigation provide a neurobiological correlate of a human behavior previously considered within the realms of psychology and philosophy.  These new data illuminate how the brain decides when to cease work and rest.  From how athletes pace their running in competition, to when people take breaks during work, these brain regions constantly monitor the cost/benefit of sustaining effort, and add into the calculation the incentive anticipated upon reaching the goal, to determine when to stop and take a break.

Reference:

Meyniel et al., (2013)  Neurocomputational account of how the human brain decides when to have a break.  PNAS, doi/10.1073/pnas.1211925110.

This article was first published on my blog on BrainFacts.org

            What is an itch?  That insistent tickle demanding that you cease whatever you are doing and claw with your fingernails at a particular spot on your skin.  It can come from anywhere—the top of your head to the soles of your feet–inside your ear to your eyeballs.  NOTHING will satisfy an itch except scratching it.  Sometimes scratching doesn’t stop a nagging itch and you can claw your skin bloody and raw trying to satisfy the ceaseless urge–mosquito bites, poison ivy, “don’t pick that scab!”  Itching can lead to misery when it is associated with disorders such as eczema, an irritating skin rash.   Now neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins University can answer this prickly question–itching comes from a unique type of nerve cell that seems to exist for only one reason–to make us itch.  So an itch is not some variation of pain or touch–those sensations are the job of different kinds of neurons.

The sense of touch

One of the most important functions of the skin is to sense the environment through touch and temperature, and to alert us to injury with the urgent alarm of pain.  All of these sensations derive from specialized sensors (nerve endings) in the skin that generate neural impulses (action potentials).  These signals are transmitted through long sensory nerves that squeeze through the space between each of the bones in our backbone (vertebrae) to enter the spinal cord.  The sensory neurons are not located in the skin or the brain, but rather they are bundled like marbles in tiny sacks tucked next to each vertebra in a row down the left and right side of the spinal cord.  Like marbles, sensory neurons come in many different varieties and sizes.  Each sensory neuron in the sack has two sprouts:  one fiber receives signals from the skin and the other sprout connects to the spinal cord.  After entering the spinal cord the sensory fibers relay signals to other neurons that transmit the messages to the appropriate part of the brain for analyzing different types of sensation from our skin, for example, light touch, a tickle, deep pressure, pain, heat, or cold.

An itch might not be a unique sense, but rather itching could be a flavor of the many sensations communicated by other sensory neurons.  Alternatively, there might be one special type of sensory neuron that does nothing other than generate the sensation of itch when it detected something like a bug crawling on our skin or a chemical in a noxious plant.  How, looking at the enormous variety of neuronal “marbles” in the sensory neuron sacks could you determine if only one type was responsible for itch?

Tracking down the itchy neurons

In previous research neuroscientists Liang Han and colleagues noticed that some of the sensory neurons in the sacks had a unique protein receptor on them known by the initials, Mrgpr.  This protein was known to be a receptor molecule on the cell membrane that responds to certain chemicals in the environment, including several substances that cause itching.  Using genetic engineering, the scientists generated a mouse in which these receptor proteins emitted red fluorescent light so that the researchers could see where in the brain and body these receptors are located.  When they looked through the microscope the scientists saw some tiny neurons in the sensory neuron sacks glowing red, but most sensory neurons did not emit the red light, indicating that most of them lacked the protein.  No other cells in the brain or body shined with the marker for Mrgpr protein.  This strongly supported their hypothesis that a special type of neuron could be responsible for the sensation of itch and that the Mrgpr protein on the surface of these cells was a critical part of the sensory apparatus that generates itch in response to certain chemicals.  This evidence, while compelling, is far from proof, however.

So the researchers traced out the sensory fibers from these fluorescent red neurons to see where their nerve endings terminated.  All of these fibers ended in the skin.  The rest of the body, including lung, heart, stomach, and muscle had no traces of these nerve endings.  This is exactly what one would expect of a neuron that received itch-producing stimulation from the skin.  Following the other sprout from the neuron leading into the spinal cord they found that all the fluorescent red fibers connected to spinal cord neurons in circuits that were known to be dedicated to scratching behavior.

So the wiring diagram of these sensory neurons fit with the hypothesis that they could be “itch neurons,” but do these nerve cells actually respond to substances that cause itching?  To test this hypothesis, the investigators applied chemicals that stimulate itching behavior (chloroquinine, for example), and they saw that a gene in the neurons, c-Fos became switched on.  This gene is known to respond to stimulation and activate cellular responses to many kinds of environmental signals in many types of cells.  The c-Fos marker indicated that the Mrgpr neurons had responded to the itch-producing chemical.  Interestingly, applying hot water, or other noxious stimuli failed to activate c-Fos in these neurons, indicating that they were tuned to respond specifically to itch-provoking chemicals.  This conclusion was confirmed by using electrodes to monitor electrical signals transmitted by sensory neurons when they are stimulated.  Only chemicals that were known to cause itching provoked these particular sensory neurons to fire action potentials.  Capsaicin, the potent substance in hot peppers that produces fiery pain, for example, did not stimulate impulses in the Mrgpr neurons, but the hot-pepper juice caused other sensory neurons to fire intensely.

The final proof of their hypothesis came from further genetic engineering that selectively killed the entire population of Mrgpr neurons in mice while leaving all the other neuronal “marbles” in the sacks of sensory neurons intact.  Tests showed that these mice lost the scratching behavior that is induced by many different itch-producing chemicals as well as dry skin and allergic itch, but these mice showed no changes at all in responding to touch or pain-producing stimulation.

This result shows that Mrgpr-containing neurons are essential for the sensation of itch, but the evidence does not rule out the possibility that these neurons might also respond to other sensations as well.  To test answer this more demanding question one would need to stimulate Mrgpr neurons specifically, without stimulating any other kind of sensory neurons, and see if some other behaviors, such as wincing in pain were induced.  To accomplish this, the neuroscientists engineered a different receptor protein that responds to capsaicin into the Mrgpr neurons.  As mentioned, capsaicin stimulates other sensory neurons to generate the intense heat and pain of eating a hot pepper, but they did this in a mutant mouse that lacked the capsaicin receptor in all other cells.  Now the only neurons that would be stimulated by capsaicin in these mice would be the Mrgpr-containing neurons.  If they injected capsaicin into a tiny spot in the skin, the mouse should start to scratch it rather than react in pain, which is exactly what happened.

Now we know that one particular kind of sensory neuron is responsible for the sensation of itch, and that itch is distinct from other kinds of touch or temperature sensation.  We also know what protein receptor molecule stimulates these neurons to fire action potentials (Mrgpr) so in the future we will be able to put away dubious home remedies and apply a new drug that will silence the raging itch of poison ivy or eczema without affecting any other senses.

Han, L., et al., (2012)  A subpopulation of nociceptors specifically linked to itch.  Nature Neuroscience doi:10.1038/nn.3289

This article is also published on BrainFacts.org  http://blog.brainfacts.org/2012/12/just-itching-to-know/#.UO7G4G_AdyQ

 Mark Twain’s Classic Huckleberry Finn begins with an explanation to readers:

“In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit:  the Missouri negro dialect ; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect ; the ordinary “Pike-Country” dialect ; and four modified varieties of this last… I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.” (1884)

My article below concerning something we all have–accents– was first published in my blogs for Scientific American and Huffington Post.

            Studies have shown that whether you are from the North or South, a Southern twang pegs the speaker as comparatively dimwitted, but also likely to be a nicer person than folks who speak like a Yankee.  Stereotypes based on accent are deep rooted and they have profound consequences.  Accents influence who we select as friends, who we respect with authority and leadership, where we prefer to live, employment, and to the very real extent our personal aspirations in life as a consequence of self-perception directing ambition in education and other endeavors.  Strange, isn’t it?  From a biological point of view there is no “correct” or “incorrect” accent.

This is not just a smoldering relic from the Civil War; accent-based bias is universal.  Even on a tiny island country like the United Kingdom, accents abound and they pigeonhole individuals into strict social strata that have persisted for centuries.  I wondered about this when I was swept away by Adele’s supreme singing voice but had the bliss shattered rudely when she addressed the audience in her “lowly” Cockney accent.  She articulates lyrics beautifully with a perfect American accent, but it was if a different person had sprung out when she started to talk the way everyone does in Tottenham England.  I wonder; would Adele have attracted notice outside the walls of a Tottenham pub if that same sterling singing voice resonated with a Cockney accent?

Numerous studies show that we instantly attach cultural stereotypes and subjective judgments about people’s knowledge and abilities from hearing their accent in speech.  A 2011 study by Rakic and others found that in categorizing people, a person’s accent carried more weight than even visual cues to ethnicity.   Americans can be taken back when hearing a black person speak with a proper British accent, for example, or be just as perplexed when they discover that a rapper singing with a “black” accent is Caucasian.  Interestingly, attributes of character that are attached to different accents are widely shared among the population. In surveys ranking where in the country people speak “correctly” or “incorrectly,” the Southern states always get the lowest marks.  Italian is judged as sounding beautiful while German sounds ugly.  You might presume, viewing human speech like naturalists studying songbird dialects, that people would simply prefer the accent of speech spoken where they grew up, but it’s not that simple.  Adults from Mississippi rate their own region as relatively low in linguistic “correctness.”  How can that be?

Katherine Kinzler and Jasmine DeJesus in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago have just published a study of children’s attitudes toward accents that provides some surprising answers.  Children 5-6 years of age from Chicago and a small town in Tennessee were shown pictures of people accompanied by a brief 3 second audio clip of speech in either a Northern or Southern accent.  When asked if they would want to be friends with the person, the Northerners overwhelmingly selected the Northern-accented speakers as friends.  Interestingly, the kids from Tennessee had no preference based on accent.

What do you think happened when the young children were asked who was “nicer,” “smarter,” or “in charge?”  The children from Chicago attached these positive attributes to the Northern speakers, but the children from Tennessee were indifferent to how these attributes were associated with people speaking with either accent.

This last result, as I mentioned above, deviates from how Southern adults associate positive attributes to people speaking with a Northern rather than a Southern accent.  So the researchers then gave the same test to 10-year-old children.  The results after children had aged 4-5 years were quite different. Ten-year-old children from both Chicago and Tennessee thought the Northern-accented individuals were “smarter” and “in charge,” and that the Southern-accented individuals were “nicer.”

Clearly, children must learn these attitudes from us; that is parents and other adults.   This develops in part by the attitudes we subtly convey to our children and by how we adults organize our society and culture.  This is where human nature takes a nasty departure from the way songbirds utilize dialect.  Our attitudes toward accents are strongly influenced by what we hear in infancy and childhood, but learning and acculturation are imposed on us by subtle indoctrination and experience.

Here’s the telling experimental result:  When children of either age were asked whether the speaker was “American” or “lives around here,” children from Chicago selected Northern rather than Southern speakers as being locals or Americans.  The kids from Tennessee did not show any such preference at either age.  The authors suggest that Southerners do not categorize speakers of either accent as being alien, because they hear Northern accents at a young age from national news anchors, film and television characters.  The kids in Chicago don’t have the same opportunity to hear a Southern accent.  As they grow up, attend school, and develop social awareness, Southern children begin to associate the Northern accent with people being “in charge and smarter,” because these prestigious “celebrities” of high social status and respect speak with a Northern accent.  This nurtures a self-perpetuating stereotype which takes root by at least the age of nine.

Preference for the sound of local language is established at birth according to what the fetus hears as its auditory nervous system is developing, but stereotypes based on accents, whether a regional English accent or a foreign accent, are learned in childhood.  The subtle attitudes we attach to accents have a profound impact on others, and on ourselves.

Thanks Adele for the music and the insight!

Kinzler, K.D., and DeJames, J.M. (2012)  Northern = smart and Southern = nice:  The development of accent attitudes in the United States.  The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology  in advance of print on-line.

Most people are aware of the negative effects of the profound changes in newspaper and magazine publishing in the digital age, but fewer are aware of the effects the same forces are having on science.  An article on the front page of yesterday’s Washington Post (November 24, 2012) concerned the corruptive influence drug companies can have on published studies of scientific research.  My article below, first published in the Huffington Post last week, is relevant to these issues that arise at the intersection of science and publishing.

Newsweek Magazine is dead.  But we have Twitter.  Harper-Collins just closed its last warehouse of books in the United States.  Cambridge University Press, the oldest publisher of scholarly books and journals in the world, printing continuously since 1584, ceased printing operations this year and will outsource printing to another company.  The Press survived tumultuous changes since the Middle Ages; the coming and going of plagues, the rise and fall of empires, wars and famine, but it could not sustain itself in the new environment of digital publication and self-publication that the electronic medium feeds.  Most people are acutely aware of the devastation of print journalism by the rise of digital media, but most people are oblivious to the consequences the same upheaval is having on scientific publication.  There is no science without scholarly publication, and scholarly publication as we have known it is dying.

As readers witness their daily newspapers thin, wither away and die, citizens worry about the digital tidal wave sweeping away the once vigorous independent press.  Many fear that one of the three vital legs of democracy is buckling under the combined weight of government power, ruthless capitalistic self-interest, and an uninformed public.  Scientific publication is undergoing a drastic transformation as it passes deeper into government and capitalistic control, while weakened from struggling simultaneously to cope with unprecedented transformations brought about by electronic publication.

The final step in the Scientific Method:  Publication

A scientific discovery is useless if it is not communicated with authority to the scientific community.  For centuries scientists submitted their research findings for publication in scientific journals that were run by the leading scientists with expertise in a specialized field who served as journal editors.  The editors evaluated the submission, and if the findings appeared to be important and technically sound, they sought out other scientists around the world with recognized expertise in the area to read the manuscript critically and advise the editor and authors (anonymously) on its suitability for publication.

This process is essential to root out poor science and pseudoscience, and to prevent bogging down the advancement of science by cluttering the literature with contradictory and erroneous findings.  The expert peer reviewers evaluated the potential strengths, weaknesses, technical flaws, significance, and novelty of the finding, and they suggested the need for further experiments.  If the study failed to be accepted for publication by the editor, the authors benefited from the editorial review process and they revised their work for submission to another journal.  Recent government-mandated changes in scientific publishing are undermining this critical process of validation in scientific publication.

 

The end of scientific publication as we have known it

Two transformational changes in scientific publishing are undermining the system of scientific publication:  mandated open access and electronic publication.   The Federal Government has mandated that scientific research that is funded in part by federal grants should be made freely available to anyone over the internet.  As most scientific research receives some public funding, this mandate impacts most biomedical science conducted in the United States, and through international collaborations, much of the science conducted in Europe and Asia.  The well-intentioned reasoning of the mandate is that, if the research is supported by public funds, then the public should have the right to obtain the published results free of charge.  The idea sounds great, but nothing is free.

With traditional scientific publication, after a manuscript was accepted by the editor it was passed to the production department.  Here, as at any book, magazine or newspaper publisher, the text was copyedited, typeset, figure layouts were determined, the article was proofread and, often with much back-and-forth communication between author and publisher, the new study was incorporated into an issue with other papers, printed, bound, and delivered to subscribers around the world.  Individual articles of general importance were publicized through press releases penned by professional science writers and distributed to the popular media.  The journal was marketed to scientists and libraries to attract a wide readership.  In this way the quality of the journal was validated by its readers.  If the journal consistently published important and accurate studies, subscriptions would rise, income would increase, and authors would strive to publish in those prestigious journals.

All of this requires a highly educated and expensive workforce.  Even as scientific journals (like magazines) transition entirely to digital publication, most of these costs and new ones unique to electronic publication must be paid.  The government mandate, however, undercuts all of the investment involved in validating and publishing the research studies it funds.

In the absence of income derived from subscriptions, scientific journals must now obtain the necessary funds for publication by charging the authors directly to publish their scientific study.  The cost to authors ranges from $1000 to $3000 or more/article.  Scientists must publish several articles a year so these costs are substantial.

The funding model fueling open access publication is a modern rendition of the well-known “vanity” model of publication, in which the author pays to have his or her work printed.  The same well-appreciated negative consequences result when applied to scientific publication.  Since the income is derived from the authors rather than from readers, the incentive for the publisher is to publish as much as possible, rather than being motivated by a primary concern for quality and significance that would increase subscription by readers (libraries and institutions) and thus income.  In the open access “author pays” financial model, the more articles that are published, the more income the publishers collect.

In place of rigorous peer review and editorial oversight by the leading scientists in the field, these publishers are substituting “innovative” approaches to review submissions or they apply no authoritative review at all.  Some open access journals ask reviewers to evaluate only whether the techniques used in the study are valid, rather than judging the significance or novelty of the findings.  Others replace rigorous anonymous peer review from the best experts in the field with open review on-line where the critics must identify themselves.  Anonymous reviewers can be more critical without fear of retribution.  Many such open access journals have no focus, publishing anything in any field of science.  Working scientists serving as editors are being replaced by staff who, like factory managers, serve to facilitate production.  Nearly all of this published material is dumped into the government-run PubMed and PubMed Central biomedical indexes.  At one time it took years for a new journal to prove itself before PubMed would index the journal, but not now.  PubMed, once the authoritative index of biomedical publication, is now apparently competing with Google Scholar.

Thus we have seen an explosion of open access scientific publishers around the world soliciting articles for rapid publication on-line for a fee.  I receive direct e-mail solicitations to contribute articles to such journals almost daily now.  I have never heard of most of these journals.  Weekly I receive formal invitations to speak at an “international conference,” the proceedings of which will be published in an open access journal.  The production tasks are now done by the author without traditional support for copyediting etc.  The production is replaced by automated desk-top publishing systems that allow the author to put their text and figures into the journal’s template upon submission.

Validation by consensus

The argument is made that the loss of rigorous scrutiny and validation provided by the traditional subscription-based mechanism of scientific publication will be replaced by the success of an article in the market after it is published.  It’s the “cream-will-rise-to-the-top theory.”  What if, rather than ceasing printing, Newsweek Magazine had adopted this “author pays” mode of open access publishing?  The ploy would have sustained the magazine financially, generating profitable income from authors of every persuasion, advancing special interests and eagerly paying to fill the pages of Newsweek with their articles.  Readers would have been left to sort out the worthy from the unsound.  The same situation is faced by readers of many open access scientific journals.  Now when a scientist writes up new research for publication in a prestigious journal, they must deal with all the contradictory findings of questionable rigor and accuracy being published by these vanity-publishing, open access journals.

Similar changes are eroding literary publication as direct electronic publication by authors on the internet has led to erotic and reportedly pornographic works “Fifty Shades of Grey” and spinoffs sweeping the best sellers list for months.  The issue is not whether erotica or pornography is or should be popular; rather one wonders what literary work might have filled those slots on the best sellers list if traditional mechanisms of editor-evaluated publication had been applied, which consider more than simply the potential popularity of a work in deciding what to publish.

Scientific publishing is fundamentally different.  Science has profound consequences for society that go well beyond the entertainment value or popularity of a publication or its business profits.  Scientists and the public are rightfully outraged and we all suffer when flawed scientific studies are published.   Even with the most rigorous review at the best journals, flawed studies sometimes slip through, such as the “discovery” of cold fusion published in Science, but it is the rarity of this lapse that makes this so sensational when it happens.  With the new open access model of author-financed publication, the “outstanding” is drowned in a flood of trivial or unsound work.  Open access publishing threatens to become the scientific publication equivalent of blogging.  (Nothing wrong with blogging, but it is not the same thing as scientific publication.)

 

Well-intentioned but twisted logic

The logic for this government mandate is peculiar.  Why do this to science?  The scientific journals claim no rights to the results of publically funded scientific research; they only seek financial compensation for the expenses required for editing, reviewing, and producing the article to validate and disseminate the findings as effectively as possible.  The government can and does make results of government funded research freely available through its own publication resources, but such publications from the Government Printing Office lack the scrutiny and validation provided by expert scientists and editors at scientific journals who rigorously and independently evaluate the research.

Do we want a government-run system in which the money for research is supplied by the same body that validates and publishes it?  Would you feel confident in a government-run study on a new drug from the pharmaceutical industry made freely available from a government internet site or would you want that research rigorously and independently evaluated by expert and impartial scientists before it was published in a scientific journal with an established authority in the field?  It is the government that now pays the publication costs for the research it funds.  The authors must use the tax payer money obtained from government research grants to pay the publication costs now required by mandated open access publishing, rather than use these precious dollars to pay for research supplies.  Now the public must foot the bill for what was previously paid by subscribers of journals.

Why does this twisted logic apply only to science?  Newspapers thrive on publishing publically financed political processes.  By the same reasoning, shouldn’t the political results, including outcomes of elections and other publically funded political activities, be made freely available by newspapers and TV rather than allowing the media to charge for publishing it?  If you accept this, what would become of independent and rigorous review of the results of any publically funded political processes?

The end of an era

The same thing that is happening to newspaper and magazine publishers is happening to science publishers.  A few large publishing corporations with clout are consolidating power.  These operations  can exploit the new environment and build monopolies, but many scientific journals and scholarly publishers will fail.  New journals are often inspired by working scientists seeing a new field of science emerging, which is as yet unknown by others.  These new journals may not launch into the present turbulence.  A corporate/government financial alliance is replacing scholarly publication once organized and run by scientists and academics.

I appreciate that there are benefits to digital print, open access, and self-publication.  My intent here is not to provide a balanced argument, but rather to alert readers to dangers that I feel have not received adequate attention.  This is not an abstract issue for me, and I openly declare my bias.  Neuron Glia Biology was a scientific journal that was launched in 2004 by me and like-minded scientists to advance scientific research on neuron-glia interactions, and it was published by Cambridge University Press until this year.    Neuron Glia Biology provided the opportunity for 1400 authors to introduce their new research on neuron-glia interactions into the scientific literature and it helped advance a new field of science, but no longer.  One wonders how many new advances in scientist will never have an opportunity to take root now that scientific publication is an increasingly corporate and government business rather than the scholarly academic activity that it was for centuries.  Science is advanced by scientific publication.  These changes in publishing will affect the future of science profoundly.