Neuroscience of Leaders Who "Work Well With Others"

From my perspective, one of the most troublesome problems of the human species blocking the next evolutionary leap is the apparent reduction in empathy, compassion and the ability to "put oneself in another's shoes."

 During the past decade, the discovery of the "controversial" mirror-neurons in chimps, the potential of non-invasive, magnetic brain  stimulation, and the promise of empathy- enhancing substances such as oxytocin appear to be encouraging breakthroughs.

However, despite these and other physiological advances, the growing stress of living in a dangerously competitive world continues to ignite the flames of fear-based aggression among nations, cultures, races, businesses, families, groups and individuals.

 Moreover, I find it difficult to ignore the willful, self-serving fanning of those flames by powerful governments, industries, politicians and corporations and individuals who profit in many ways from the fear of difference that seems to be rampant on the planet.

 Consequently, my wish for the next advance in brain research would be the development of methods to permit populations to scientifically evaluate the brains of candidates before electing them to powerful positions of authority.

 In such a brave, new world, strength of leadership might include such characteristics as better control of impulsivity, a capacity to tolerate and understand the complexity of reality without false simplifications, better deductive reasoning and higher quality decision-making abilities. And although "even  paranoids may have real enemies," leaders should possess an enhanced capacity for actual empathy and compassion as well as an ability to quickly analyze risk and act decisively when necessary.

And while I'm dreaming, I should recommend development of a Gross National Happiness statistic to be added to the material indices we watch so carefully. It might produce data with which we could really evaluate the  value of our leaders.

Hidden Agendas in American News

More Evidence about the need for skepticism when watching news programs on TV.

• Suboptimal facial expression primes in textual media messages: Evidence for the affective congruency effect

  Original Research Article
• Pages 64-77
• Niklas Ravaja, Jari Kätsyri
• • 
    

  Abstract

  The effectiveness of suboptimal affective primes in real media applications has remained debatable. We investigated the effects of suboptimally (at 10-ms exposure) presented facial expression primes on emotional responses to, and cognitive evaluations of, textual (business news) messages ranging from slightly unpleasant to slightly pleasant among 33 participants. Facial expression primes were presented repeatedly on a simulated small screen of a mobile device during a news reading task. Facial electromyography (EMG) recordings were used as physiological indices of positive and negative emotions. Our results showed affective congruency effects between news messages and facial expression primes: joyful facial expressions, compared to angry primes or no priming, elicited higher positive affect evaluations and more positive facial EMG responses, as well as higher interest, when embedded in affectively more positive news. On the other hand, the mere presence of suboptimal primes was detrimental to the perceived trustworthiness of news. These results suggest that embedding suboptimal facial expression primes into textual media messages may exert an influence on affectively congruent messages; at the same time, our results highlight the potential hazards and difficulties of utilizing such primes.

  Citing articles (0)

Do You Choose Your Thoughts?

NAC

http://www.plosone.org/annotation/listThread.action?root=81739

Increased Coupling of Intrinsic Networks in Remitted Depressed Youth Predicts Rumination and Cognitive Control

Rachel H. Jacobs and 

Lisanne M. Jenkins, et. al.

Published: August 27, 2014DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0104366

"The authors have chosen to investigate a common symptom in most individuals who experience depression as well as those who suffer from many other psychiatric conditions.  Moreover, the capacity to choose what one wishes to think about without the mood-changing interruptions of invasive rumination and obsession may be less common than previously considered in many individuals with or without a psychiatric diagnosis.

Anecdotally, my experience with N-Acetyl Cysteine  in psychiatric patients (as well as personal-development clients with rumination and obsession who carry no official psychiatric diagnosis) suggests a potentially significant beneficial effect.  It would appear that the authors have established an evaluation paradigm with which this finding might be tested.

10-Lipid Profile May Identify Future Alzheimer's Patients

Longitudinal Change in CSF Biomarkers in Autosomal-Dominant Alzheimer’s Disease

1. Anne M. Fagan, et. al.

1. ¹Department of Neurology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA.
2. ²Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA.
3. ³Division of Biostatistics, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA.
4. ⁴Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA.
5. ⁵Department of Radiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA.
6. ⁶Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA.
7. ⁷WA Center for Alzheimer’s Research and Care, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia 6009, Australia.
8. ⁸Mental Health Research Institute, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia.
9. ⁹Department of Neurology, The Taub Institute and the Sergievsky Center, Columbia University, New York, NY 10032, USA.
10. ¹⁰Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research, Department of Neurology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
11. ¹¹Dementia Research Center, University College London, London WC1N 3BG, UK.
12. ¹²Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry, Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Butler Hospital, Providence, RI 02906, USA.
13. ¹³Neuroscience Research Australia, Sydney, New South Wales 2031, Australia.
14. ¹⁴School of Medical Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales 2031, Australia.
15. ¹⁵Department of Neurology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02129, USA.
16. ¹⁶Department of Pathology and Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO 63110, USA.
17. ¹⁷http://www.dian-info.org/personnel.htm

1. ↵*Corresponding author. E-mail: fagana@neuro.wustl.edu

Abstract

Clinicopathological evidence suggests that the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) begins many years before the appearance of cognitive symptoms. Biomarkers are required to identify affected individuals during this asymptomatic (“preclinical”) stage to permit intervention with potential disease-modifying therapies designed to preserve normal brain function. Studies of families with autosomal-dominant AD (ADAD) mutations provide a unique and powerful means to investigate AD biomarker changes during the asymptomatic period. In this biomarker study, we collected cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), plasma, and in vivo amyloid imaging cross-sectional data at baseline in individuals from ADAD families enrolled in the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network. Our study revealed reduced concentrations of CSF amyloid-β_1–42 (Aβ_1–42) associated with the presence of Aβ plaques, and elevated concentrations of CSF tau, ptau₁₈₁ (phosphorylated tau₁₈₁), and VILIP-1 (visinin-like protein-1), markers of neurofibrillary tangles and neuronal injury/death, in asymptomatic mutation carriers 10 to 20 years before their estimated age at symptom onset (EAO) and before the detection of cognitive deficits. When compared longitudinally, however, the concentrations of CSF biomarkers of neuronal injury/death within individuals decreased after their EAO, suggesting a slowing of acute neurodegenerative processes with symptomatic disease progression. These results emphasize the importance of longitudinal, within-person assessment when modeling biomarker trajectories across the course of the disease. If corroborated, this pattern may influence the definition of a positive neurodegenerative biomarker outcome in clinical trials.

• Copyright © 2014, American Association for the Advancement of Science

But, It's Only a Dog...?

Feeling Simpatico with Your Dog? It May Be Based on Similar Human–Canine Brain Structures

New research shows that humans and dogs have very similar voice-sensitive brain regions, which may help explain our intense bonds with these furry, four-legged friends

Feb 20, 2014 |By Annie Sneed

A dog lies motionless in an fMRI brain scanner at the MR Research Center in Budapest.
Credit: Flickr/Eniko Kubinyi

You may snicker when you see dog owners talk to their pets as though they were human or view YouTube videos of dogs supposedly speaking English back to their owners, saying words like “banana” and “I love you.” And with good reason: although dogs have the capacity to understand more than 100 words, studies have demonstrated Fido can’t really speak human languages or comprehend them with the same complexity that we do. Yet researchers have now discovered that dog and human brains process the vocalizations and emotions of others more similarly than previously thought. The findings suggest that although dogs cannot discuss relativity theory with us, they do seem to be wired in a way that helps them to grasp what we feel by attending to the sounds we make.

To compare active human and dog brains, postdoctoral researcher Attila Andics and his team from MTA-ELTE Comparative Ethology Research Group in Hungary trained 11 dogs to lie still in an fMRI brain scanner for several six minute intervals so that the researchers could perform the same experiment on both human and canine participants. Both groups listened to almost two hundred dog and human sounds—from whining and crying to laughter and playful barking—while the team scanned their brain activity.

The resulting study, published in Current Biology today, reveals both that dog brains have voice-sensitive regions and that these neurological areas resemble those of humans. Sharing similar locations in both species, they process voices and emotions of other individuals similarly. Both groups respond with greater neural activity when they listen to voices reflecting positive emotions such as laughing than to negative sounds that include crying or whining. Dogs and people, however, respond more strongly to the sounds made by their own species. “Dogs and humans meet in a very similar social environment but we didn’t know before just how similar the brain mechanisms are to process this social information,” Andics says.

These striking similarities help clarify the timeline and stages of mammalian evolutionary history. Until now researchers had identified voice-sensitive brain regions only in humans and macaque monkeys, whose last common ancestor lived 30 million years ago. The last common ancestor of humans and dogs—a mammalian carnivore with a brain the size of an egg—existed around 100 million years ago. The canine finding thus suggests that the voice-sensitive brain regions in both species evolved at least that long ago, if not earlier. Other mammals on the same evolutionary branch as humans and hounds that also arose from that last mutual ancestor likely share the same brain areas as well.

But dog owners might be most interested in what this study says about our special relationship with canine pets. Humans domesticated dogs somewhere between 18,000 and 32,000 years ago, and since then they have become people’s best friends, hunting partners, guards and even purse accessories. Andics thinks the parallel brain sensitivity to voices and emotions may account in part for our unique bond. “This similarity helps explain what makes vocal communication between dogs and humans so successful,” he says. “It’s why dogs can tune into their owners’ feelings so well.”

Turns out, people who talk to their poodles or golden retrievers aren’t so silly after all.

 Rights & Permissions

Consciousness As Part of the Cosmos

An excellent review and discussion of one of the most exciting and controversial theories of Consciousness.

Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory

• Stuart Hameroff^a, , 1, , 
• Roger Penrose^b, 2

• ^a Anesthesiology, Psychology and Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
• ^b Mathematical Institute and Wadham College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Abstract

The nature of consciousness, the mechanism by which it occurs in the brain, and its ultimate place in the universe are unknown. We proposed in the mid 1990ʼs that consciousness depends on biologically ‘orchestrated’ coherent quantum processes in collections of microtubules within brain neurons, that these quantum processes correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity, and that the continuous Schrödinger evolution of each such process terminates in accordance with the specific Diósi–Penrose (DP) scheme of ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’) of the quantum state. This orchestrated OR activity (‘Orch OR’) is taken to result in moments of conscious awareness and/or choice. The DP form of OR is related to the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and space–time geometry, so Orch OR suggests that there is a connection between the brainʼs biomolecular processes and the basic structure of the universe. Here we review Orch OR in light of criticisms and developments in quantum biology, neuroscience, physics and cosmology. We also introduce a novel suggestion of ‘beat frequencies’ of faster microtubule vibrations as a possible source of the observed electro-encephalographic (‘EEG’) correlates of consciousness. We conclude that consciousness plays an intrinsic role in the universe.

Highlights

•

The Orch OR theory proposes quantum computations in brain microtubules account for consciousness.

•

Microtubule ‘quantum channels’ in which anesthetics erase consciousness are identified.

•

Evidence for warm quantum vibrations in brain microtubules is cited.

•

Interference of microtubule vibrations are ‘beat frequencies’ seen as EEG.

•

Orch OR links consciousness to processes in fundamental space–time geometry.

Potential Neuroscience Breakthrough

Chronometric Electrical Stimulation of Right Inferior Frontal Cortex Increases Motor Braking

1. Jan R. Wessel¹,*, 
2. Christopher R. Conner²,*, 
3. Adam R. Aron¹, and 
4. Nitin Tandon²,³

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/33/50/19611.short?sid=74bee42e-deee-43c6-8227-5c8aed06b44f

Potential Neuroscience Breakthrough May Advance Psychotherapy Practice

If this study is replicated, it could be a major breakthrough in neuroscience, permitting clarification of the commonly misunderstood distinction among feelings, impulses and behaviors--a major problem in psychiatric treatment of "irresistible impulses," commonly seen in most mental health disorders, (intrusive, unwanted thoughts and feelings), but often inappropriately diagnosed. Examples include obsessive worry, self-criticism, and anger resulting in aggressive behavior designed to hide more vulnerable feelings from ourselves and others. Most people use the words anger and aggression interchangeably, despite the reality that anger is a feeling and aggression is a behavior. We often hear patients describe their aggressive behavior as a "necessary" outcome of their feelings of anger, denying that the behavior was "chosen." This is often better understood when one realizes that the feelings of anger are usually "used" to hide from ourselves, more vulnerable feelings, such as helplessness, shame, abandonment, or other feelings of being hurt. Once the neuro-circuitry is elaborated, trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, pharmaceutical or neutraceutical (eg. N-Acetylcysteine, NAC) modification together with effective psychotherapeutic reframing of thoughts and feelings content, could replace the electricity-induced model. Because of neurons' plasticity, many of these modalities, including effective psychotherapy alone, have been postulated to produce neurogenesis and the replacement of unwanted connections with more desirable tracts, often resulting in apoptotic removal of the undesirable tracts. If confirmed in peer reviewed research, this study should be considered a ground-breaking accomplishment. 

Ange Lobue, MD, MPH, BSPharm

American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology

Academy of Television Arts & Sciences

5244 Patrick Creek Drive

McKinleyville, CA

trinidadca@gmail.com