Neuroscience

Scientists Successfully Implant Chip That Controls The Brain; Allowing Thoughts, Memory & Behavior To Be Transferred From One Brain To Another

November 28, 2011 By T Kelly 1 Comment

Scientists working at the University of Southern California, home of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, have created an artificial memory system that allows thoughts, memories and learned behavior to be transferred from one brain to another.

In a scene right out of a George Orwell novel, a team of scientists working in the fields of “neural engineering” and “Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems” have successfully created a chip that controls the brain and can be used as a storage device for long-term memories. In studies the scientists have been able to record, download and transfer memories into other hosts with the same chip implanted. The advancement in technology brings the world one step closer to a global police state and the reality of absolute mind control.

More terrifying is the potential for implementation of what was only a science fiction fantasy – the “Thought Police” – where the government reads people’s memories and thoughts and can then rehabilitate them through torture before they ever even commit a crime based on a statistical computer analysis showing people with certain types of thoughts are likely to commit a certain type of crime in the future.

We already pre-emptively invade nations and torture alleged terrorist suspects with absolutely no due process of law, so the idea of pre-emptively torturing a terrorist suspect beforehand to prevent them from committing an act of terrorism in the future really isn’t that far fetched of an idea.

Perhaps a less sensational example than those I just depicted from Orwell’s famous dystopian novels would be using the technology as it is depicted the modern day Matrix movies, in which computer programs are uploaded into people’s brains allowing them to instantly learn how to perform a wide variety of tasks.

That is exactly the example that Smart Planet uses in their write-up on the USC press release.

The Matrix reality: Scientists successfully implant artificial memory system It seems the sci-fi industry has done it again. Predictions made in novels like Johnny Mnemonic and Neuromancer back in the 1980s of neural implants linking our brains to machines have become a reality.

Back then it seemed unthinkable that we’d ever have megabytes stashed in our brain as Keanu Reeves’ character Johnny Mnemonic did in the movie based on William Gibson’s novel. Or that The Matrix character Neo could have martial arts abilities uploaded to his brain, making famous the line, “I know Kung Fu.” (Why Keanu Reeves became the poster boy of sci-fi movies, I’ll never know.) But today we have macaque monkeys that can control a robotic arm with thoughts alone. We have paraplegics given the ability to control computer cursors and wheelchairs with their brain waves. Of course this is about the brain controlling a device. But what about the other direction where we might have a device amplifying the brain? While the cochlear implant might be the best known device of this sort, scientists have been working on brain implants with the goal to enhance memory. This sort of breakthrough could lead to building a neural prosthesis to help stroke victims or those with Alzheimer’s. Or at the extreme, think uploading Kung Fu talent into our brains.

Decade-long work led by Theodore Berger at University of Southern California, in collaboration with teams from Wake Forest University, has provided a big step in the direction of artificial working memory. Their study is finally published today in the Journal of Neural Engineering. A microchip implanted into a rat’s brain can take on the role of the hippocampus—the area responsible for long-term memories—encoding memory brain wave patterns and then sending that same electrical pattern of signals through the brain. Back in 2008, Berger told Scientific American, that if the brain patterns for the sentence, “See Spot Run,” or even an entire book could be deciphered, then we might make uploading instructions to the brain a reality. “The kinds of examples [the U.S. Department of Defense] likes to typically use are coded information for flying an F-15,” Berger is quoted in the article as saying.

In this current study the scientists had rats learn a task, pressing one of two levers to receive a sip of water. Scientists inserted a microchip into the rat’s brain, with wires threaded into their hippocampus. Here the chip recorded electrical patterns from two specific areas labeled CA1 and CA3 that work together to learn and store the new information of which lever to press to get water. Scientists then shut down CA1 with a drug. And built an artificial hippocampal part that could duplicate such electrical patterns between CA1 and CA3, and inserted it into the rat’s brain. With this artificial part, rats whose CA1 had been pharmacologically blocked, could still encode long-term memories. And in those rats who had normally functioning CA1, the new implant extended the length of time a memory could be held.

Source: Smart Planet

The Smart Planet article goes on to point out that the next phase in testing will be done on primates and will eventually be tested on humans.

From the USC press release:

USC: Restoring Memory, Repairing Damaged Brains

Biomedical engineers analyze—and duplicate—the neural mechanism of learning in rats

LOS ANGELES, June 17, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/

Scientists have developed a way to turn memories on and off—literally with the flip of a switch.

For stroke or Alzheimer’s victims, the promise of Dr. Theodore Berger’s recent breakthrough is enormous: imagine a prosthetic chip inserted in the brain that imitates the function of a brain’s damaged hippocampus (the region associated with long term memory). The current successful laboratory tests on rats, restoring long term memory at the flick of a switch, will next be duplicated in primates (monkeys) and eventually humans. (PRNewsFoto/USC Viterbi School of Engineering)

Using an electronic system that duplicates the neural signals associated with memory, they managed to replicate the brain function in rats associated with long-term learned behavior, even when the rats had been drugged to forget.

“Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget,” said Theodore Berger of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Berger is the lead author of an article that will be published in the Journal of Neural Engineering. His team worked with scientists from Wake Forest University in the study, building on recent advances in our understanding of the brain area known as the hippocampus and its role in learning.

In the experiment, the researchers had rats learn a task, pressing one lever rather than another to receive a reward. Using embedded electrical probes, the experimental research team, led by Sam A. Deadwyler of the Wake Forest Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, recorded changes in the rat’s brain activity between the two major internal divisions of the hippocampus, known as subregions CA3 and CA1. During the learning process, the hippocampus converts short-term memory into long-term memory, the researchers prior work has shown.

“No hippocampus,” says Berger, “no long-term memory, but still short-term memory.” CA3 and CA1 interact to create long-term memory, prior research has shown.

In a dramatic demonstration, the experimenters blocked the normal neural interactions between the two areas using pharmacological agents. The previously trained rats then no longer displayed the long-term learned behavior.

“The rats still showed that they knew ‘when you press left first, then press right next time, and vice-versa,’” Berger said. “And they still knew in general to press levers for water, but they could only remember whether they had pressed left or right for 5-10 seconds.”

Using a model created by the prosthetics research team led by Berger, the teams then went further and developed an artificial hippocampal system that could duplicate the pattern of interaction between CA3-CA1 interactions.

Long-term memory capability returned to the pharmacologically blocked rats when the team activated the electronic device programmed to duplicate the memory-encoding function.

In addition, the researchers went on to show that if a prosthetic device and its associated electrodes were implanted in animals with a normal, functioning hippocampus, the device could actually strengthen the memory being generated internally in the brain and enhance the memory capability of normal rats.

“These integrated experimental modeling studies show for the first time that with sufficient information about the neural coding of memories, a neural prosthesis capable of real-time identification and manipulation of the encoding process can restore and even enhance cognitive mnemonic processes,” says the paper.

Next steps, according to Berger and Deadwyler, will be attempts to duplicate the rat results in primates (monkeys), with the aim of eventually creating prostheses that might help the human victims of Alzheimer’s disease, stroke or injury recover function.

The paper is entitled “A Cortical Neural Prosthesis for Restoring and Enhancing Memory.” Besides Deadwyler and Berger, the other authors are, from USC, BME Professor Vasilis Z. Marmarelis and Research Assistant Professor Dong Song, and from Wake Forest, Associate Professor Robert E. Hampson and Post-Doctoral Fellow Anushka Goonawardena.

Berger, who holds the David Packard Chair in Engineering, is the Director of the USC Center for Neural Engineering, Associate Director of the National Science Foundation Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems Engineering Research Center, and a Fellow of the IEEE, the AAAS, and the AIMBE.

SOURCE USC Viterbi School of Engineering
RELATED LINKS
https://www.viterbi.usc.edu

Following the link to the University website we find the following research centers and programs associated with the school.

Programs
» Aviation Safety and Security Program
» Distance Education Network
» Masters and Professional Programs
» Globalization and International Programs

National Research Centers
» Biomimetic MicroElectronic Systems
» Center for Energy Nanoscience
» Integrated Media Systems Center
» DHS Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events
» The National Center for Metropolitan Transportation Research
» Listing of Viterbi School Research Centers and Labs

This technology has potential for a wide array of applications. It could even be the breakthrough needed to create the the first long-imagined artificial intelligence network.

However, given the association between the University and the Federal Government’s Department of Homeland Security, and related studies on terrorism, which is constantly being used as an excuse to chip away at the civil liberties and constitutional rights of US citizens, my bets are the Feds will use this in the war on terror before they try using it for good.

That means the potential for misuse to enact a true Orwellian-style “thought police” and even the ability to implement complete mind control among hosts.

Perhaps an even scarier thought is what becomes of this technology when it becomes wireless?

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/06/scientists-successfully-implant-chip.html

Filed Under: Neuroscience, Psychology, Science, Surveillance, Technology Tagged With: Brain Implant

Amping Up Brain Function: Transcranial Stimulation Shows Promise in Speeding Up Learning

November 27, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Electrical stimulation of subjects’ brains is found to accelerate learning in military and civilian subjects, although researchers are yet wary of drawing larger conclusions about the mechanism

WASHINGTON, D.C.—One of the most difficult tasks to teach Air Force pilots who guide unmanned attack drones is how to pick out targets in complex radar images. Pilot training is currently one of the biggest bottlenecks in deploying these new, deadly weapons.

So Air Force researchers were delighted recently to learn that they could cut training time in half by delivering a mild electrical current (two milliamperes of direct current for 30 minutes) to pilot’s brains during training sessions on video simulators. The current is delivered through EEG (electroencephalographic) electrodes placed on the scalp. Biomedical engineer Andy McKinley and colleagues at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright–Patterson Air Force Base, reported their finding on this so-called transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) here at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting on November 13.

“I don’t know of anything that would be comparable,” McKinley said, contrasting the cognitive boost of TDCS with, for example, caffeine or other stimulants that have been tested as enhancements to learning. TDCS not only accelerated learning, pilot accuracy was sustained in trials lasting up to 40 minutes. Typically accuracy in identifying threats declines steadily after 20 minutes. Beyond accelerating pilot training, TDCS could have many medical applications in the military and beyond by accelerating retraining and recovery after brain injury or disease.

The question for the Air Force and others interested in transcranial stimulation is whether these findings will hold up over time or will land in the dustbin of pseudoscience.

“There is so much pop science out there on this right now,” says neurobiologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque, referring to sensational media reports, the widely varying protocols and sometimes lax controls used in different studies of brain stimulation to power learning or elevate mood.

Indeed, electrical stimulation for therapeutic effect has a long and checkered history extending back to the 19th century when “electrotherapy” was the rage among adventurous medical doctors as well as quacks. Pulses of electric current were applied to treat a wide range of conditions from insomnia to uterine cancer. The placebo effect might have been at work in the case of those historical results, and although the experiments were carefully controlled, it is unclear to skeptics if it is a factor in the case of the Air Force’s research on transcranial stimulation and learning.

Subjects definitely register the stimulation, but it is not unpleasant. “It feels like a mild tickling or slight burning,” says undergraduate student Lauren Bullard, who was one of the subjects in another study on TDCS and learning reported at the meeting, along with her mentors Jung and Michael Weisend and colleagues of the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. “Afterward I feel more alert,” she says. But why?

Bullard and her co-authors sought to determine if they could measure any tangible changes in the brain after TDCS, which could explain how the treatment accelerates learning. The researchers looked for both functional changes in the brain (altered brain-wave activity) and physical changes (by examining MRI brain scans) after TDCS.

They used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record magnetic fields (brain waves) produced by sensory stimulation (sound, touch and light, for example), while test subjects received TDCS. The researchers reported that TDCS gave a six-times baseline boost to the amplitude of a brain wave generated in response to stimulating a sensory nerve in the arm. The boost was not seen when mock TDCS was used, which produced a similar sensation on the scalp, but was ineffective in exciting brain tissue. The effect also persisted long after TDCS was stopped. The sensory-evoked brain wave remained 2.5 times greater than normal 50 minutes after TDCS. These results suggest that TDCS increases cerebral cortex excitability, thereby heightening arousal, increasing responses to sensory input, and accelerating information processing in cortical circuits.

Remarkably, MRI brain scans revealed clear structural changes in the brain as soon as five days after TDCS. Neurons in the cerebral cortex connect with one another to form circuits via massive bundles of nerve fibers (axons) buried deep below the brain’s surface in “white matter tracts.” The fiber bundles were found to be more robust and more highly organized after TDCS. No changes were seen on the opposite side of the brain that was not stimulated by the scalp electrodes.

The structural changes in white matter detected by the MRI technique, called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), could be caused by a number of microscopic physical or cellular alterations in brain tissue, but identifying those is impossible without obtaining samples of the tissue for analysis under a microscope.

An expert on brain imaging, Robert Turner of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved in the study, speculated that the changes detected by DTI could represent an increase in insulation on the fibers (myelin) that would speed transmission of information through the fibers. “In my present view, the leading hypothesis for the observed rapid changes…is that previously unmyelinated axonal fibers within white matter become rapidly myelinated when they start to carry frequent action potentials,” he says. There are, however, several other possible explanations, he cautions.

Matthias Witkowski, now at the Institute for Medicine, Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, described the rapid changes in white matter in these experiments as “incredible.” “That [white matter changes] would not have been my first guess,” he said. “It will be very interesting to see if there are cellular changes.” This is the next step in research planned by Jung and colleagues. They hope to obtain brain tissue from patients who would be willing to participate in TDCS studies prior to undergoing necessary brain surgery in which tissue would be removed as a required part of their treatment.

Witkowski is convinced by these new studies and his own research that transcranial stimulation can accelerate many kinds of learning, and research on brain–machine interfacing, which he presented at the meeting, demonstrates the potential for TDCS in speeding patient rehabilitation after injury. People with paralyzed limbs can be taught to control a robotic glovelike device that will move their fingers in response to the patient’s own thoughts. Electrodes on the person’s scalp pick up brain waves as the person imagines moving his or her hand. The brain waves are analyzed by a computer to control the robotic artificial hand. But learning to generate the proper brain waves to control the artificial hand through thought alone requires considerable training. Witkowski found that if patients received 20 minutes of TDCS stimulation once during five days of training, they learned to control the hand with their thoughts much more rapidly.

The new studies reported at this meeting suggest that there is far more to speed learning produced by TDCS than can be explained by the placebo effect. And the evidence now shows that TDCS produces physical changes in the brain’s structure as well as physiological changes in its response. TDCS increases cortical excitability, which can be measured in recordings of brain waves, and it also causes changes in the structure of the brain’s connections that can be observed on an MRI. By using electricity to energize neural circuits in the cerebral cortex, researchers are hopeful that they have found a harmless and drug-free way to double the speed of learning.

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=amping-up-brain-function

Filed Under: Neuroscience, Psychology, USA

Junk food can hijack brain like drugs do, experts say

November 18, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

A growing body of medical research at leading universities and government laboratories suggests that processed foods and sugary drinks aren’t simply unhealthy. They can hijack the brain in ways that resemble addictions to cocaine, nicotine and other drugs.

“The data is so overwhelming the field has to accept it,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We are finding tremendous overlap between drugs in the brain and food in the brain.”

The idea that food may be addictive was barely on scientists’ radar a decade ago. Now the field is heating up. Lab studies have found sugary drinks and fatty foods can produce addictive behavior in animals. Brain scans of obese people and compulsive eaters, meanwhile, reveal disturbances in brain reward circuits similar to those experienced by drug abusers.

Twenty-eight scientific studies and papers on food addiction have been published this year, according to a National Library of Medicine database. As the evidence expands, the science of addiction could become a game-changer for the $1 trillion food and beverage industries.

If fatty foods and snacks and drinks sweetened with sugar and high fructose corn syrup are proven to be addictive, food companies may face the most drawn-out consumer safety battle since the anti-smoking movement took on the tobacco industry a generation ago.

“This could change the legal landscape,” said Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity and a proponent of anti-obesity regulation. “People knew for a long time cigarettes were killing people, but it was only later they learned about nicotine and the intentional manipulation of it.”

Food company executives and lobbyists are quick to counter that nothing has been proven, that nothing is wrong with what PepsiCo Chief Executive Officer Indra Nooyi calls “fun-for-you” foods, if eaten in moderation. In fact, the companies say they’re making big strides toward offering consumers a wide range of healthier snacking options. Nooyi, for one, is as well known for calling attention to PepsiCo’s progress offering healthier fare as she is for driving sales.

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft Foods and Kellogg declined to grant interviews with their scientists.

No one disputes that obesity is a fast-growing global problem. In the U.S., a third of adults and 17 percent of teens and children are obese, and those numbers are increasing. Across the globe, from Latin America, to Europe to Pacific Island nations, obesity rates are also climbing.

Shorter lifespans

The cost to society is enormous. A 2009 study of 900,000 people, published in the Lancet, found that moderate obesity reduces life expectancy by two to four years, while severe obesity shortens life expectancy by as much as 10 years. Obesity has been shown to boost the risk of heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea and stroke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The costs of treating illness associated with obesity were estimated at $147 billion in 2008, according to a 2009 study in Health Affairs.

Sugars and fats, of course, have always been present in the human diet and our bodies are programmed to crave them. What has changed is modern processing that creates food with concentrated levels of sugars, unhealthy fats and refined flour, without redeeming levels of fiber or nutrients, obesity experts said. Consumption of large quantities of those processed foods may be changing the way the brain is wired.

Those changes look a lot like addiction to some experts. Addiction “is a loaded term, but there are aspects of the modern diet that can elicit behavior that resembles addiction,” said David Ludwig, a Harvard researcher and director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Children’s Hospital Boston. Highly processed foods may cause rapid spikes and declines in blood sugar, increasing cravings, his research has found.

Education, diets and drugs to treat obesity have proven largely ineffective and the new science of obesity may explain why, proponents say. Constant stimulation with tasty, calorie-laden foods may desensitize the brain’s circuitry, leading people to consume greater quantities of junk food to maintain a constant state of pleasure.

In one 2010 study, scientists at Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla., fed rats an array of fatty and sugary products including Hormel Foods bacon, Sara Lee pound cake, Cheesecake Factory cheesecake and Pillsbury Creamy Supreme cake frosting. The study measured activity in regions of the brain involved in registering reward and pleasure through electrodes implanted in the rats.

The rats that had access to these foods for one hour a day started binge eating, even when more nutritious food was available all day long. Other groups of rats that had access to the sweets and fatty foods for 18 to 23 hours per day became obese, Paul Kenny, the Scripps scientist heading the study wrote in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The results produced the same brain pattern that occurs with escalating intake of cocaine, he wrote.

“To see food do the same thing was mind-boggling,” Kenny said in an interview.

Filed Under: Big Pharma, Biotechnology, Consumerism, Corporations, Corruption, Drugs, Food, Health, Media, Money, Neuroscience, Obesity, Politics, Propaganda, Rights

Depression in Women doubles since 1970s

November 18, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

Women have taken on more responsibilities and challenges over the years, such as handling a family and working simultaneously. Along with these responsibilities came feelings of depression and unhappiness, researchers say.

While women used to be the happy ones, the tables have turned, with women being the unhappy gender in today’s world. Women reported being much happier and less stressed decades ago compared to recent years. Since the 1970′s, depressive episodes have doubled, with further increasing up until the 1990′s. Since then, the amount of depression women face has stagnated, with it leveling off in recent years.

A Daily Mail Online reporter writes the following:

Researchers who have studied the extent of mental health problems across Europe say rates of depression in women have doubled since the 1970s.

They found that women are most at risk from the age of 16 to 42, when they tend to have children.

These age groups have between 10 and 13.4 per cent chance of developing depression – twice as high as men in the same age bracket.

Professor Hans-Ulrich Wittchen, who led the study, said: ‘In depression you see this 2.6 times higher rate amongst females.

‘There are clusters in the reproductive years between the ages of 16 to 42.

‘In females you see these incredibly high rates of depressive episodes at the time when they are having babies, where they raise children, where they have to cope with the double responsibilities of having a job and a family.

‘This is what is causing the tremendous burden.

‘It’s the effect on the females who can’t care any more for their family and are trying to be active in their profession, which is one of these major drivers of these higher rates.

‘We have seen compared to the 1970s a doubling of depressive episodes amongst females.

‘It happened in the 1980s and 1990s, there are no further increases now.

‘It’s now levelling off, it’s pretty much stabilised but it’s much much higher than the 1970s.’

The German researchers looked at the extent of mental health problems including dementia, eating disorders and even insomnia across the continent using previous studies and surveys.

Their work, which is published in the journal European Neuropsychopharmacology, found that 38 per cent of people are suffering from some form of mental illness. The most common of these are depression, insomnia, phobias and dementia in old age.

Just last month American researchers found that ‘supermums’ – women who try to juggle careers and families – are far more likely to be depressed.

Their study of 1,600 young women was carried out at the University of Washington.

It concluded that the women who try to do it all are more likely to feel like failures.

But other experts said men are just as likely to suffer from depression.

The difference is that men tend not to admit it so they are often never diagnosed, researchers say.

Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity SANE, said: ‘The reason we believe that depression is twice as common amongst women than men is that women are more prepared to talk about it.

‘Men can find it more difficult to describe their feelings of anxiety, depression or loneliness and may lack the language to express their inner feelings.’

Source: https://naturalsociety.com/depression-in-women-doubles-since-1970s/

Filed Under: Capitalism, Consumerism, Corporations, Corruption, Drugs, Economy, Employment, Family, Health, Income Inequality, Mental Health, Money, Neuroscience, Poverty, Psychology, Rights, Science, Vaccines and Medicine

American lifestyle breeds depression

November 18, 2011 By T Kelly 1 Comment

Although widely known, new research shows how excessive amounts of television watching combined with a sedentary lifestyle is a sure recipe for depression.

Unfortunately, these are the very activities that generally describe the typical American lifestyle, excluding poor nutrition and pharmaceutical dependency. Therefore, is it any surprise that depression and mental illness run rampant in the United States, with half of all Americans to be diagnosed with a mental disorder within their lifetime?

The study, conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, observed thousands of older women with varying degrees of physical activity and television watching. What the study found is that the women who exercised the most and watched the least television were least likely to be diagnosed as being depressed, with physical activity having the largest impact.

The researchers’ findings, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, stated that women who reported exercising most were about 20 percent less likely to develop depression than those who rarely exercised.

Depression feeds on excessive television watching, fended off by physical activity

Including close to 50,000 women, the study participants filled out health surveys every 2 years from the year 1992 to 2006. The women were asked to fill out the time they spent watching TV each week in 1992, and answered questions about how often they walked, ran, biked, and swam between 1992 and 2000. In addition, the women were instructed to report any new diagnosis of clinical depression or medication taken to treat depression.

The analysis started in 1996, including only women who did not have depression. Over the next decade, there were 6,500 new cases of depression.

‘Higher levels of physical activity were associated with lower depression risk,’ wrote study author Michel Lucas, from the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

While peak physical activity slashed the risk of depression by 20%, women who watched 3 hours or more of television per day were 13% more likely to develop depression than those who hardly watched television at all.

Source: https://www.activistpost.com/2011/11/american-lifestyle-breeds-depression.html

Filed Under: Big Pharma, Corporations, Corruption, Drugs, Family, Genetics, Health, Media, Mental Health, Money, Neuroscience, Propaganda, Rights, Science, Spirituality, Symbolism, USA

Is empathy in our genes?

November 16, 2011 By T Kelly Leave a Comment

A large part of how we relate to people emotionally may be hardwired into our DNA. A new study suggests that character traits such as being open, caring, and trusting are so strongly linked to a certain gene variation that a total stranger, simply by watching us listen to another person, may be able to guess whether we have the variation with a high degree of accuracy.

Previous studies have linked several personality traits to variations in this gene, which acts as a docking station (or receptor) for the brain chemical oxytocin — often referred to as the “love hormone” because it plays a role in social behaviors such as bonding, empathy, and anxiety.

People who have two “G” variants of this oxytocin receptor gene tend to have better social skills and higher self-esteem, research has shown. Conversely, those with at least one “A” variant tend to have a harder time dealing with stress, worse mental-health outcomes, and a greater likelihood of being autistic.

“We’ve known that genotype can influence personality, but we’d only ever studied what goes on inside a person — things like behavioral scales and heart-rate measurements,” says Serena Rodrigues Saturn, Ph.D., a senior author of the study and an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University, in Corvallis. “This is the first time anyone has observed how different genotypes manifest themselves in behaviors that complete strangers can pick up on.”

To explore the relationship between a person’s genetics and demeanor, Rodrigues Saturn and her colleagues recruited 23 romantic couples, and videotaped them while one partner recalled and discussed a time of suffering in their lives. The other partner, who had given a saliva sample to determine his or her genotype, was simply asked to sit and listen.

The researchers then showed 20 seconds of each video clip to a group of 116 people. None of the viewers knew the video subjects, and they watched the clips with the sound off so they had no knowledge of the situations being discussed. They were then asked to rate how kind, caring, and trustworthy the listening partner seemed, based only on visual cues.

“They looked for things like nodding along with their partner, holding eye contact, keeping an open body posture,” Rodrigues Saturn says. “Those people were judged as more social and caring, as opposed to others who seemed much more aloof.”

Although they expected to find some association between the subjects’ genotypes and their rankings, the researchers were “blown away” by how accurate the observers’ intuition actually was, Rodrigues Saturn says. Out of the 10 people who were ranked as “most prosocial,” six had the GG genotype, and of the 10 ranked “least trusted,” nine were carriers of at least one A variant.

The findings were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Keith Kendrick, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, in Chengdu, says it’s important to note that genes besides the oxytocin receptor gene — not to mention other, non-genetic factors — influence social behavior as well. Oxytocin receptors have been shown to be modified by a person’s environment, for example, so life experiences presumably play a large role too, he says.

“Just because you have an ‘A’ version of this one receptor gene clearly does not mark you down as a completely unsocial individual,” says Kendrick, who was not involved in the study. “Obviously many different genes contribute to something as complex as social behavior, but it is interesting that this particular one appears to be so influential.”

One genotype isn’t necessarily better or healthier than the other, Rodrigues Saturn says. Although scientists used to refer to the gene’s “A” variant as a “risk” variant (because it increases risk of autism and social dysfunction), many experts now think of the variations as just that: variations that may—along with many other forces — play out in personalities.

“It’s important to understand that some people are… naturally more held back, or may be overcome by their own personal stresses and have a hard time relating to others,” Rodrigues Saturn says. Putting these people in more comfortable environments that naturally induce the production of oxytocin may help to coax them out of their shells and help them feel more “warm and fuzzy,” she says.

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/15/health/empathy-genes/index.html

Filed Under: Corporations, Drugs, Education, Genetics, Health, Money, Neuroscience, Politicians, Politics, Population, Psychology, Science

Scientists Successfully Implant Chip That Controls The Brain; Allowing Thoughts, Memory & Behavior To Be Transferred From One Brain To Another

USC: Restoring Memory, Repairing Damaged Brains

Biomedical engineers analyze—and duplicate—the neural mechanism of learning in rats