A Stroke of Insight

Once the firehose of sensory information reaches the brain, a bewildering process of making sense of this data begins. The objective is to create an accurate internal model of the world that you can base your next decisions upon. To do this, all of the many bits of data flowing along the sensory neurons have to be knitted together somehow. Thanks to the unfortunate circumstances of minor strokes, brain researchers have been able to track down many of the important steps in this information processing.

brainspecial

You might have heard of the experiences of limb amputees who, for a time, experience the ‘phantom limb’ effect. The neurons having been severed still report back to the brain that their stimulation means the limb still exists, and for a period of time the amputee has to deal with the ghost limb that is not really there. In another bizarre situation, a stroke victim has a perfect understanding that their left arm belongs to them, but insists that their right arm belongs to a relative living 1000 miles away. This malady is called asomatognosia by neurophysiologists.

From many studies of how pinpoint strokes affect brain function, neuroanatomists have identified specific regions of the brain that allow us to integrate our sensory information and create a coherent model of the outside world as it exists in space and time. The first thing the brain has to do is to have a ‘sense’ of its own body and how it is located in space. It also has to identify this ‘self’ as being different from that of other people. If it cannot do this accurately, it cannot decide how to move in space, anticipate the consequences of that movement, or how to anticipate and empathize with the actions of other people. Nearly all of this activity seems to be relegated to a single area in the brain.

The temporoparietal junction (TPJ) takes information from the limbic system (emotional state) and the thalamus (memory) and combines it with information from the visual, hearing and internal body sensory systems to create an integrated internal model of where your body is located in space. The TPJ has left and right ‘lobes’ that control your ability to pay attention (right) and to anticipate other people’s emotions and desires (left). Patients with schizophrenia have abnormal levels of stimulation in the TPJ and cannot discern the intentions of other people. Stimulation of the right TPJ by placing electrodes in unesthetized patients leads to out-of-body experiences, schizophrenic behavior, and the phantom limb effect. The right TPJ tries to create a coherent body image from many different, and sometimes contradictory sensory inputs. When this process breaks down because the contradictory information is too strong to inhibit or ignore, you experience that you actually have two distinct bodies in space. This seems to be the direct, neural basis for out-of-body experiences.

But there is an even stranger brain region whose stimulation leads to an error in deciding where the body and self ends in space, and where the outside world begins.

The posterior cingulate body plays a huge role in self-location and body ownership. What this means is that we experience our body as having a definite location in space, and that this location is where you, the ‘Self’ is located. Strokes in this region cause asomatognosia patients not to recognize a limb as belonging to them. But you don’t have to be a stroke victim to experience this dislocation of body and self.

If you sit at a table facing a barrier that lets you see an artificial, life like right hand but not your real right hand, and you rhythmically stroke the real hand, eventually your brain gets fooled into believing that the artificial right hand is actually yours. If someone suddenly stabs the artificial hand, you will actually jump reflexively as though, for just an instant, the brain got confused about which was your real right hand being attacked!

The Posterior Superior Parietal Lobule gives us a sense of the boundary between our physical body and the rest of the world. When activity in this brain region is reduced, the individual seems to lose a sense of where their body ends and the rest of the world begins. The feeling is one of having ‘merged with the universe’ and your body is in some way infinite. Mindfulness practices such as meditation can modify the stimulation of this region and give the practitioner exactly this dramatic experience.

So you see, once sensory data gets to the brain, it is in for an amazing ride through many brain regions that help us build up the person or self that we feel we are through space and time.

By the way, for a fascinating introduction to these topics, read V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee’s book ‘Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the mysteries of the human mind’

Here is an interesting 2013 research paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology ‘Alterations in the sense of time, space, and body in the mindfulness-trained brain: a neurophenomenologically-guided MEG study’ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3847819/

The connection between meditation and brain region function and stimulation is covered in this article: Mindfulness Practices and Meditation. https://neurowiki2012.wikispaces.com/Mindfulness+Practices+and+Meditation

But now let’s consider how the brain actually makes its models.

Check back here on Friday, December 2 for the next installment!

Stranger than Science?

Most of my childhood was spent in a wonderful twilight of comprehension between my imaginary world and the world I was being introduced to in school, and through my many science-related hobbies. I make no apologies for this as an adult scientist, and consider my tenure in this wonderful place, time well spent in nurturing the person I am today.

What the ....

Even now, as I look back over 64 years of amazing life, there remain a handful of events that standout, and for which I have no good explanation…nor do I chose to seek for one!

The first of these was in 9th grade, when as I was walking home from school, leaping one-by-one up the 52 stairs from Galindo Street to Carrington in Oakland. Suddenly, my breathless and speedy stride was broken by the sight of a paperback book tossed to the side of one of the steps. I picked it up and noted the author was Franck Edwards; the title of the book was ‘Stranger than Science’. For the next few days I stayed up late into the night reading about spontaneous human combustion, strange disappearances, and a whole host of other ‘documented’ occurrences that science could not explain. So, where did the book come from and why did I happen upon it at exactly that moment?

The next event happened while I was visiting my cousins Dan and Annika at their summer home in Sweden. Dan and I decided to take his moped out for a ride down a rocky deserted road, several miles from their house. It was an overcast swampland scene with seagulls screeching overhead. We randomly stopped and I hopped off to turn over some large stones, looking for whatever might be under them. A salamander? A nest of peculiar insects? After a few tries, and under the fourth stone, there laid a 5-krown paper note. What were the odds of finding Swedish paper money out in the middle of nowhere? Who had put it there? Swedish lore is rife with tales of trolls who live under rocks and stash their valuables there. Sounds like a good explanation to me!

In college, while camping in the high country of Yosemite near Merced Lake, I was shocked to hear, out of nowhere, a peculiar and powerful musical sound. Two deep-base notes rang out from the distant deserted, alpine valley where a thunder storm had been in progress, and for 20 seconds I was entertained in the twilight as these two tones switched back and forth, never changing their pitch in-between cycles. Had the sounds from the thunder been somehow been converted to these pure tones by reflection from canyon walls?

Also in college, I was again standing in the twilight, gazing up at the UC Berkeley urban sky, when eight pinpoint lights forming a V-shape, glided silently by over-head at an apparent speed that eliminated airplane landing lights, or a flock of birds. The shape spanned a dozen full-moons, but made absolutely no sound at all. My first and only ‘UFO’ sighting?

Finally in graduate school at Harvard, I was spending a few days with my brother Richard’s family at their home some two months after his wife, my sister-in-law Darlene, had died. I was still in shock over losing my dear sister, and was spending the night that Christmas in her former home. At about 3:00 am I was awaken by some thing just beyond my view, stroking my cheek. To this day I have poetically interpreted it as my sister-in-law reaching out to console me over my grief in losing her.

Given some thought, we all have accumulated over our lifetimes unusual anecdotes like this, that could not be readily explained because in each instance we did not have the complete set of facts at our disposal from which to form a plausible explanation. In most cases, we even refuse to delve too deeply into them because we have discovered it is rather fun and comforting not to actually know what happened!

Not long after I received my PhD in astronomy in 1982, I happened upon another book that captured my adult imagination. William Corliss (1926-2011) had published the quotidian ‘Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena’ in which he had culled from a variety of reputable scientific journals, descriptions of unusual events such as strange sounds, inexplicable lights, and other phenomena. I read it from cover to cover, with both the practiced gaze of a freshly-minted scientist, and that 10-year-old that I used to be. I still like to turn its pages from time to time and read 19th century reports of ball lightning, earthquake lights, unusual aurora and other things that probably do have a rational explanation. But what to I make of ‘ghost lights’, ‘rains of frogs’ and other things that stir up human emotions of deep mystery and ‘things going bump in the night’?

A future science will no doubt find explanations for them, but for now I remain happy that they are a part of my world, though not currently explained. In the end, we do have to leave SOMETHING for our children to explore!

In the next blog, I will describe how strokes have helped neuroscientists understand how human brains create consistent explanatory models of the world, and how this process can break down with some rather unbelievable results!

Check back here on Tuesday, November 29 for the next installment!

Aurora picture Credit Tommy Richardsen – https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150504.html

Making Sense of the Senses!

If you are trying to understand the world beyond your body, it’s probably a good idea to also understand just how your observations are being made and then interpreted. Our brains process a lot of sensory information, but interpreting it is a lot more fluid and fallible than you might believe!

First of all, there is no ‘person’ inside your head looking through a TV screen into the outside world through your eyes.

Sensory information is received in small bits of impulses traveling along neurons. A visual scene dissolves into clusters of rod and cone cells in the retina that sense edges, colors, and other elemental features of what you are looking at. These qualities are not stored in the visual cortex adjacent to each other like pixels in a picture, but grouped together by thematic features. It is only at the next level of neural connections (called synapses) that associations between areas in the visual cortex are made in order to identify archetypical objects such as cars, houses and, yes, grandmothers! These neurons also make many different synaptic connections along the way to help process the information flow long before you perceive it as an integrated whole. This figure shows, for example, a few of the neural pathways that connect the visual cortex regions ( V1, V2, V3) all the way to the prefrontal cortex (PF).

visualcircuit
What you see is sometimes not always what you get. Your neural networks may actually remove information from your conscious perception of the world. A frog’s retinas only pass information to its brain when something is moving in the visual field. Its brain doesn’t even GET the basic information that things like perfectly edible flies are standing still on a nearby leaf! Only when they move does the retina communicate to the frog’s brain that there is a fly ‘out there’ to go after and eat. You know that ‘blind spot’ in your eye? The brain fills it in with fabricated information so that you do not see a black spot the size of a quarter at arms-length. Our brain is actually lying to our conscious perception of the world!

Second of all, many of the neurons at the lowest level make connections to the limbic system and are ‘tagged’ with many different emotional states .

The most important of these taggings being the self-preservation, fight-or-flight response. For example, there is very high survival value to quickly tagging a distant shadow as either a predator or a non-predator. Not all shadows will be a lion, but in the grand scheme of evolution even a rule-of-thumb that works only 10% of the time can mean the difference between vital genes being passed on to the next generation or not. This identification has to be made very quickly before you have time to logically consider all the non-threatening possibilities for what the shadow might actually be.

This tendency towards making snap decisions that over-ride time-consuming reasoning has high survival value and is hard-wired into our brains, but it also screws things up as we apply the same data to rationally understanding the world around us. The best case of this is in the eyewitness reporting of crimes. Eyewitnesses are almost always in a highly-emotional state, and great care has to be taken in the courtroom to compare accounts and distill from them the actual facts. Sometimes eyewitness accounts have to be thrown out entirely.

Another big problem with the brain is that it has a nasty habit of using the same neural circuits to handle different tasks. This leads to some extremely crazy situations.

We all like to visually imagine ourselves in different situations as we day dream, read a good novel, or are fast asleep in bed. These visual images and other imagined relationships often use the same circuitry needed for carefully examining the outside world and making sense of it. What this means is that there is actually a neural connection between our imagined world and the hard-rock world we live in. Most people can easily distinguish the difference, but sometimes our imagination, dosed with the limbic system’s associations, can confuse what we are actually seeing or experiencing, not based on an actual experience, but based instead on an imagined one. You can actually improve some elements of sports performance by internally visualizing in detail the actions you want to perform. It seems that imagined activity can train the cerebellum almost as well as the actual act!

Our brain and sensorium have to work together to identify patterns that help us survive, or at least not get injured too badly. There can be some sloppiness in this process that allows a few people to misunderstand gravity and walk out a 35th floor window, but we have evolved so that this is a very rare occurrence. But still, there are many ways in which human perceptions can be misinterpreted or even distorted by the brain as it tries to process billions of bits of information every second against a wash of emotions and other states-of-mind.

In the next blog, I will describe how strokes have helped neuroscientists understand how human brains create consistent models of the world, and how this process can break down with some rather unbelievable results!

Check back here on Sunday, November 27 for the next installment!

Making Sense of the World

Ask just about anyone how many senses a normal human has and the immediate answer will be five: sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. By the way, I always manage to forget that last one for some reason!

ebrainsciam

The oldest mention of this particular list goes all the way back to the Hindu Katha Upanashad written in the 6th century BCE. Even Shakespeare mentions them as the ‘five wits’ in King Lear! But a lot has happened since way back when. The entire idea of ‘scientific research’ came into its own, and now there are a whole lot of other human senses that have been added to the classical mix we learn in grade school.

Sense Number Six: You can detect heat and the temperature of any object you touch or are placed close to. Your skin has thousands of little ‘receptors’ that individually detect the attributes of cold and warm.

Sense Number Seven: You can detect whether you are standing upright or lying down through the balance receptors in your inner ear, which are hollow loops filled with liquid. The movement of this liquid in each loop is sensed by neurons and tells the brain your head’s position in 3-dimensions.

Sense Number Eight: Pain is a sense that is not just the overloading of touch or pressure receptors in the skin. In fact we have three different groups of pain receptors that signal internal organ damage, external skin damage, or damage to our bones and joints.

Sense Number Nine: Another overlooked sense is proprioception: the ability for you to sense the orientation of your body and limbs in 3-dimensional space. Without this very important sense, you would not be able to walk, jump, dance, type at your keyboard, or a thousand other activities that make up your life.

Sense Number Ten: Chemoreception is the ability of your body to detect changes in the foods you eat, and signal the body to reject that food if it fails to pass certain internal tests. This sense can cause your stomach to contract, cause you to vomit, and cause changes in your vascular system,: ‘OMG I just ate rotten fish!’

Sense Number Eleven: Although not a specific cellular feature of the nervous system, every normal human has a perception of their place in time. Part of this is our 24-hour circadian rhythm, but through brain activity, we have a timing sense that allows us to sing, dance and play a musical instrument correctly. It also helps us locate ourselves in the present moment within our accumulated memories.

Sense Number Twelve: Outside versus inside. We have a unique sense of where our body ends and where the outside world begins. Without this, we would identify every sensory stimulus as originating within our body, and that our body has grown to encompass the entire physical world ‘outside’. More on this later!

Sense Number Thirteen: Friend versus Foe. Our cells have proteins on their surfaces that identify to our immune systems whether a cell is part of our own body, or is a foreign interloper.

If you think this range of senses covers all of the biological possibilities, there are many more senses that some animals have, and perhaps we also do at some very, very low level.

Sharks and some other fish can detect electrical fields with specialized receptors in their skin. Many animals can detect earth’s magnetic field and use this to navigate. Bees can detect polarized light, which they also use for navigation. The vomeronasal sense allows animals to detect the pheromones of other members of their species and use this to identify a mate in estrus, or members of their own clan. Plants can directly sense gravity and use this to help them grow upwards. Both animals and plants can detect slight changes in air moisture to precisely identify where a source of water is located.

The earliest known senses were developed by single cells to detect changes in various chemical concentrations in water – a potential food source. But by far the oldest sense among complicated organisms is vision. This particular sensory skill has been re-invented literally hundreds of times by evolution across millions of different organisms.

So there you have it. Senses are a brain’s way of detecting an organism’s place and situation in the physical world. Amazingly enough, human brains do not take-in all of the information generated by our senses. If it did, we would be in a near-constant state of epilepsy! So what our brains do is to actively suppress most of the sensory information our receptors generate before it even reaches our consciousness. In fact, if you were to look at the neural activity of the brain, far more neurons are devoted to the brain talking to itself, than checking on what’s happening in the outside world!

So what does the brain do with all of this information?

That will be the topic of my next blog!

Check back here on Friday, November 25 for the next installment!

The Universe and Etc!

Hi there!

It’s exciting to start a fresh new blog project. It’s kind of like your first day in class with a new pencil and a binder with blank sheets of paper. Even as late as graduate school at Harvard I always found that first day of class exciting and filled with such promise.

You have probably GOOGLEd me by now and discovered I am a professional astronomer and educator. No I am obviously not one of those famous ones you may know by name. There are thousands of astronomers and physicists in this country, many of them far more famous than I am, but chances are you have never actually met one. Even fewer people have astronomers as members of their families!

rainbow

So here I am, one of those back-roads professional astronomers who has also spent a lifetime studying space and delving deeply into the nuances of the physical world. If you decide to make it a habit of reading my blogs, you may be pleasantly surprised how a slightly different perspective might help you see the world around you a bit more clearly. I hope you will at least appreciate the connections that I see, and why they have been such a source of joy and wonderment to me all my life. As they say, it is not the destination that matters but the journey!

I have always been interested in science: the exploration of the physical world. My mother used to tell me that when she would take me out into the fragrant spruce forests surrounding my hometown Karlskoga in Sweden, she would always have to empty out the rocks in my stroller that I collected along the way. This evolved into a progression of interests leading to a passion for astronomy by 5th Grade.

But as I was exploring the hard facts and theories of astronomy and physics, it was hard for me to give up my interests in ESP and UFOs. For you see, well into middle school I used to plot the positions of UFO sightings on a map of the USA on my bedroom wall, and marvel at the descriptions of the many sightings reported in newspapers and magazines. By high school,  I was reading Carl Sagan’s ‘Intelligent Life in the Universe’, but I was also reading von Daniken’s  ‘Chariots of the Gods’ and Frank Edwards ‘Stranger than Science’. As a Junior in college, I had my own experience of sighting a UFO in the twilight sky.    I also developed an interest in ESP because my Swedish mother beguiled me with many family stories of spirit sightings and telepathic incidents during my early childhood. In high school, my friends and I conducted séances…which [fortunately?] failed, and I had my own experiences with family ghosts and inexplicable events.

Then something peculiar happened around age 23 when I was beginning my Senior Year at UC Berkeley working on my degree in astronomy.  By then, these interests in ESP and UFOs had subsided and simply vanished from the palette of issues I wanted to keep up with.  What had happened?

As I became more steeped in science, its history, its many spectacular successes, and endless rounds of homework to learn  physics from the inside out, I spent less and less time with ideas that entertained, but had far less substance and productivity to them. At some point, the hard data and objective mathematical rigor of science became a far more compelling story than the endless presentations of subjective evidence from ESP and UFO enthusiasts. It seemed to me  that there was not one shred of hard evidence about ESP and UFOs that could not be dismissed as wishful thinking, unsubstantiated anecdotes, statistical variation, or out-right fakery.

darknebula2

In science, advances are made when data is obtained under controlled, repeatable conditions by parties whose only goal is to collectively create an accurate model of how the world works. I decided in college that this was drastically different from ‘ghost chasers’ and UFO hoaxers, who often flooded these subjects for fame and personal gain. But there was one subject area that I immediately gravitated to, that replaced all of these entertaining ideas: Brain research.

I am going to try to explain advances in our understanding of both the physical world and our mental world in a series of blogs that my non-scientist mother would have enjoyed reading. If you want more extensive details, you are free to GOOGLE the words and topics and look to other professionals for explanations who are also popularizers. I will recommend their insights and explanations as my blogs develop.

So where do we start?

Well, for my next few blogs, let’s begin with the brain and how we perceive and make sense of the world around us. That, after all, seems to be the biggest ingredient in creating a rational picture of the world around us.

It is also the biggest impediment!

Return here on November 21 for my next blog in this series!