Category: Neuroscience Page 13 of 15

Hope for Understanding Ourselves Goes to the Dogs

On April 29, 2013

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Genetics/Genomics, Neuroscience

By Ashley Yeager

Brian Hare and Evan MacLean, co-directors of Duke’s Canine Cognition Center, play with Lilu, a labradoodle. Credit: Ashley Yeager, Duke.

Lilu, a beautiful brown poodle-labradoodle mix, couldn’t sit still. Scents of pizza and peanut butter dog treats and the sights of new people easily distracted her.

The ADD behavior could be one trait that made her fail out of service-dog training.

“Six out of every ten dogs wash out of service training. But it’s hard right now for scientists to understand why,” said Duke evolutionary anthropologist Evan MacLean, co-director of the university’s Canine Cognition Center.

He, along with biological anthropologist Brian Hare and geneticist Misha Angrist spoke about ‘Genes, Brains and Games’ in man’s best friend as part of the Science and Society Journal Club on April 26.

MacLean and Hare explained that dogs have taken on many jobs in human society, acting as everything from pets, to our eyes and ears to being like coal-mine canaries searching for hidden bombs and missing people.

“Dog vocations require different sets of cognitive skills,” MacLean said. He studies military dogs, looking for traits that make them more suited for service tasks than pets like Lilu.

MacLean would ultimately like to identify the genetic components that underlie the characteristics suited for each type of job that a dog might do.

Scientists are interested in correlating dogs’ cognitive traits to their associated genes because the animals are “the most exquisite example of artificial selection,” Angrist said.

In Portuguese water dogs, for example, just six substitutions in individual DNA bases of the dogs explain variations in body size. In humans, nearly every gene could factor into height. It’s the same challenge that makes understanding human cognition and intelligence difficult at the genetic level.

Of course, defining cognition and intelligence at the conceptual level isn’t so clear cut either. “It’s so hard for people, journalists and the general public, to understand multiple intelligences,” Hare said.

He explained that at a basic level, cognition is the ability to make inferences, and that when we think of intelligence we think of IQ and standardized tests. These tests, however, measure only one type of intelligence. They don’t measure the ability to empathize, to verbalize a new idea or to put two completely separate ideas together to form a new one, which are other, important facets of intelligence, or really multiple intelligences.

At the Canine Cognition Center, and through the citizen science website Dognition, Hare and MacLean use standardized tests to study the variation in dogs’ intelligence. The tests, unlike the SAT or ACT, “cast a wide net across skills sets dogs could use for different vocations,” Hare said.

Dogs like Lilu, he added, are “really the hope of the world” for understanding cognition.

The Phishing Market Beyond the Internet

By Ashley Mooney

On April 29, 2013

In Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Lecture, Neuroscience

By Ashley Mooney

Most people have heard of phishing scams on Internet, in which a person is tricked into giving up their money or identity by a clever ruse.

Temptations like this are found throughout all of capitalist society, says George Akerlof, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences. He discussed ideas from his upcoming book, “Phishing for Phools” wth a Duke audience on April 25 to kick off “Decision Making Across the Disciplines,” a two-day symposium sponsored by the Duke Center for Interdisciplinary Decision Sciences.

Akerloff studies connections between individual’s decision biases and larger economic phenomena.

George Akerlof won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 for his research on economic decision making. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

“Standard economics assumes that the people are smart, they may not know everything but they can be smart,” he said. “But there may be only one way in which you can be smart, but there are many, many ways in which you can be stupid.”

Akerlof, who is also Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, developed his idea of phishing for phools from his paper, “The Market for ‘Lemons,’” which secured his Nobel nod.

“A fool with an f is a stupid or silly person, but it’s perfectly possible to make an error when… making a perfectly intelligent decision,” he said. “Somebody who makes a mistake is a phool with a ph.”

Although markets have the ability to maximize wealth, Akerlof said it is a double-edged sword.

“Free markets open us up to be phools. They open us up to those who seek to influence us to do what they want, but it’s not necessarily good for our sake,” he said. “We live in a world where some 5 billion adults can phish us for being a phool. We’ve intentionally opened ourselves up to such exploitation because of obvious advantages, but then we must also think about the other side.”

Markets, Akerlof noted, aim for three weak spots: emotional weaknesses, cognitive weaknesses and ignorance due to blocked channels of information.

Phishing is common on the internet, but occurs throughout the market. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

When people are aware of phishing, it has relatively little effect. But when one doesn’t know about a phish, it can have a major impact. He proposed that obesity, product misinformation and the recent economic recession were all caused by phishing for phools.

“In the United States, the goal of almost every businessman is to get you to spend your money,” he said. “Life in capitalist economy is a continual temptation.”

Akerlof said according to economics textbooks, people decide on their demand by budgeting spending and then choosing the things that will maximize their happiness. But most people, he added, are not honest with themselves and as a consequence do not engage in rational budgeting.

“A very significant fraction of consumers are worried about how they’re going to make ends meet,” Akerlof said. “Almost 50 percent of people probably could not come up with $2,000 in a month for unforeseen situations.”

The only way to prevent phishing is to know about it, and to make informed decisions with that knowledge.

“Phishing for phools… creates bad equilibrium, especially if we don’t know about phishing for phools, we think that markets are totally benign,” Akerlof said.

UPDATE – June 28, 2013

The Economics Department has posted a YouTube video of Ackerlof’s entire talk.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U85MKnS8i8U?rel=0]

Visible Thinking 2013!

By Pranali Dalvi

On April 24, 2013

In Biology, Environment/Sustainability, Faculty, Field Research, Neuroscience, Students

By Pranali Dalvi

Students explain their research to peers and faculty at Visible Thinking 2013 in the French Family Science Center. Photo credit: Pranali Dalvi

On April 19, Duke undergrads gathered in the French Family Science Center for Visible Thinking 2013.

The event showcases the exciting research undergraduates are doing in every discipline from the biological sciences to the humanities. For many students, it was also a celebration of several semesters and summers of hard work. Like seasoned scientists, students explained their research to their mentors, peers and prospective Dukies during the annual poster session.

Renata Dinamarco, a Trinity senior, studied the entrepreneurial preparedness of small businesses in Pembroke Pines, Florida.

Renata Dinamarco, Trinity’13. Photo credit: Pranali Dalvi

People are moving to the newer, western front of the city, so the eastern portion of Pembroke Pines is being redeveloped. Many people believed business owners in the east were underprepared as compared to the west when it came to opening small businesses.

When Renata interviewed 55 small business owners, she found that there was no statistical difference between entrepreneurs in the east versus the west. But, she did find that business owners in the east were more likely to view the city government negatively. Renata’s study of the demographics of small business populations is important for making informed policy decisions.

Christine Tsai, Trinity’14. Photo credit: Pranali Dalvi

Junior Christine Tsai studied the expression of gut-specific genes three days after fertilization in zebrafish. In a healthy developing embryo, epithelial cells line the internal organs.

To explore what genes are turned on and off during the development of the cells, Tsai compared gene expression from the gut cells to gene expression of cells from the entire body. Zebrafish have clear embryos that develop quickly, making them easy to study and use as a system to study genetics.

“I plan to continue conducting undergraduate research and know that the techniques and skills I have acquired and continue to develop through my research will further my understanding of processes in cell and molecular biology,” she said.

Ben Finkel, Trinity’13. Photo credit: Pranali Dalvi

For his honors thesis in evolutionary anthropology, Ben Finkel worked in Dr. Brian Hare’s lab combining his interest in education outreach with his passion for conservation. Finkel’s project examines how portrayals of chimpanzees as either aggressive or affiliative can affect our conservation perception. Through his research, Finkel wanted to understand how media steers conservation beliefs. He found that people were less likely to promote conservation of chimanzees if they showed aggressive behaviors rather than affiliative behaviors.

For more from Visible Thinking, check out my video about senior Emily Ngan who studies the brain’s immune system cells and their role in addiction.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waqFuqbukG0?rel=0]

Blasting away glioblastomas

By Ashley Mooney

On February 21, 2013

In Biology, Cancer, Medicine, Neuroscience, Students

By Ashley Mooney

The purple area of this brain is a glioblastoma tumor.

Some undergraduates get to see the fruits of their lab labor early in their careers.

Junior Anirudh Saraswathula, a biology major and neuroscience minor, has been doing research at Duke since his first week on campus.

He started as a work-study student in professor of cell biology Blanche Capel’s lab, but said the basic sciences were not his true passion. Now, Saraswathula works on translating basic research with the Duke Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program.

“A lot of what I do in the lab involves looking at protocols that are used in basic science research and trying to apply them to what we’re doing here,” he said. “So a lot of it is going to be culturing cells from patients, and then doing a variety of tests depending on what it is that I want to do.”

He is currently studying immune-system therapy for glioblastoma, a type of malignant brain tumor. By reprogramming a patient’s T-cells, researchers can direct the immune system to fight glioblastoma. Although Saraswathula was not involved in developing the treatment, he is working to evaluate the treatment’s mechanism and its long-term effects on the immune system.

“One of the reasons that brain tumors are so devastating (with treatment they can extend survival to about 18 months) is that they’re just so recurrent,” he said. “These types of tumors also change who you are as a person because of where they happen.”

Saraswathula’s day-to-day work involves culturing tissue, using flow cytometry — a technique used to sort cells, detect biomarkers and engineer proteins — and PCR, which copies DNA.

Saraswathula is also studying the quality of T-cell responses to different clinical trials and understanding whether certain types of B-cells are repressing the function of the tumor vaccine.

“Those projects are focused on future trials. How can we improve, how can we modify these therapies to better improve the immune system’s response in order to fight these tumors,” he said.

Although he began his research just for the experience of doing it, Saraswathula said that applicability is now what is most important to him.

“If I discover some obscure gene in stem cells, there’s not going to be any real application there for maybe 30 years,” he said. “With my current research, if I find something, [in] the next trial a few years from now, there will be a patient getting the drug, and I would have had a contribution to that.”

Finding Consciousness

By sa160@duke.edu

On February 21, 2013

In Lecture, Medicine, Neuroscience

By Nonie Arora

Brain scans of various disorders of consciousness. Credit: Wiki Commons

Can we be certain whether a patient is minimally conscious or in a persistent vegetative state?

What kinds of rights do minimally conscious patients have?

How should minimally conscious patients be treated?

Scientists, ethicists, lawyers and physicians asked these questions at the Finding Consciousness workshop at Duke in January 2013.

Recently, neuroscientists have devised methods to detect consciousness in patients with severe brain injury who may not appear to be aware of themselves and others. But as the science develops so do new ethical dilemmas.

Patients with severe brain injury are often written off, despite growing scientific evidence of potential improvement, said Joseph Fins from Cornell University. Fins gave the annual Nancy Weaver Emerson Lecture sponsored by the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine as part of the workshop, and he focused on the application of neuroethics to the minimally conscious state.

Fins believes that family members of patients are often forced to make decisions about withholding or withdrawing care without complete, understandable information. They are compelled to consider organ donation, even prematurely. In his work, Fins interviews family members of brain injury patients. In one conversation, a mother of a patient described an interaction with a neurologist who called the patient “basically an organ donor now” and said, “He doesn’t have the reflexes of a frog.”

Then, the neurologist urged the mother to consider organ donation — all within 72 hours of the injury. Fins called for patients and family members to be treated with more sensitivity and respect.

Jeremy Fins. Credit: Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine

The vegetative state has been seen as medical futility, and the paradigm was “once you’re vegetative, you’re done,” Fins said. However, physicians in the field have begun to see families and patients who have looked vegetative, but then suddenly showed some level of response to stimulus.

While some patients become permanently vegetative, others can become minimally conscious, Fins said, referencing a study where about 40 percent of patients who were diagnosed as vegetative were actually minimally conscious.

“This is unconscionable, but that’s where we are,” he said, adding that much of the disparity could come from disinterest, neglect and marginalization of these patients. People would not accept this level of misdiagnosis in cancer or diabetes care, he said.

It is our obligation to give voice to minimally conscious patients as a basic civil right, Fins said, especially as better methods of identifying these patients and stimulating recovery are likely to come in the future.

SNCURCS "Snickers" Conference Brings NC Undergrads Together

By sa160@duke.edu

On November 26, 2012

In Neuroscience, Students

By Nonie Arora

Duke student Katie Shpanskaya is excited about how education can change our brains. She had the chance to share her work with other students in a poster session at the State of North Carolina Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium (SNCURCS).

Hundreds of undergraduates from several North Carolina universities came together to talk about research at SNCURCS (pronounced like Snickers, the candy bar) hosted by Duke University on November 17th.

In the lab of Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, Shpanskaya studies the effects of education on Alzheimer’s disease. Originally from Raleigh, Shpanskaya is a sophomore in Trinity College studying Neuroscience. When she’s not in classes or working in the lab, she tutors through UNITED (a high school tutoring organization that she is the president of) and mentors others through the Women’s Mentoring Network.

In Alzheimer’s, the part of the brain called the hippocampus experiences great neuronal cell death and amyloid plaques accumulate throughout the brain, Shpanskaya said. The hippocampus is important for memory, and Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by progressive memory loss. In the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s, the protein amyloid-beta builds up whereas this protein is normally broken down, Shpanskaya clarified.

Shpanskaya explained that the study she is working on has found that patients with higher education (17 or more years) had greater hippocampal volume size than those with less education (less than 12 years). Those with more education also had less overall loss of hippocampal volume. Shpanskaya also said that those who challenge themselves cognitively benefit: they retain more functionality when afflicted by Alzheimer’s.

MRI image depicting the hippocampal region of interest used in computing hippocampal volume. Courtesy of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI).

“Education likely acts through neuroprotective mechanisms, thereby decreasing volume loss to delay cognitive decline. This is supported by our results,” said Shpanskaya.

At the conference, students also had a chance to interact with faculty members from other institutions, and attend “Lunchbox Learning” sessions on topics such as avoiding research misconduct and applying to graduate school.

Overall, students appreciated the opportunity to attend the symposium and meet students from around the state. “I thought SNCURCS was a great symposium that really did a good job of bringing together students from all sorts of research backgrounds together to learn from each other and share their work,” said Trinity sophomore Akhil Sharma. “SNCURCS really showed a good sample of the great research institutions North Carolina houses and it was a great feeling to be a part of it all.”

New Technologies Threaten Cognitive Liberty

By sa160@duke.edu

On November 15, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Lecture, Medicine, Neuroscience

By Nonie Arora

Nita Farahany, Duke Law School Professor

Where do we draw the lines when it comes to new technologies in neuroscience?

Duke Law professor Nita Farahany is setting out to answer this question through an exploration of something she calls cognitive liberty. She spoke to a crowd of physicians, nurses, faculty members, and students at the last Trent Center Humanities in Medicine Lecture Series event.

“What does it mean if our conscious awareness of making a decision happens after the decision has already been made by our brains? Does that tell us anything about the concepts of responsibility or freedom of thought?” Farahany asked.

She doesn’t buy into the idea that we are absolved of responsibility because we are essentially predetermined machines, even if scientists like Benjamin Libet have shown that there is brain activity before conscious awareness. She argues that although some things are predetermined, we still have the flexibility of choice. For instance, having many fast-twitch muscle fibers may be a precondition of becoming a world-class track athlete, but the choice remains of whether to train extremely hard to reach the goal.

“We are more than preprogrammed bits and bytes,” Farahany said. Under the assumption that we retain flexibility of our thoughts, Farahany is exploring how those thoughts ought to be protected.

Although neuroscience is still in its infancy, it holds the potential to detect and tamper with memories, she said. But she hopes to explore what types of rights we ought to retain and what limitations there ought to be on the technology.

Farahany said that the mind might hold a lot of information that is very valuable to the government and to businesses. She pointed out that our brains can uniquely identify speakers and sounds. New technologies could detect this information, which could be very valuable to a criminal investigation. But it is it permissible to detect our recognition of objects or people?

Eyewitness testimony has a high rate of falsity and sometimes witnesses lack memories of key information. However, what if false memories could be planted in eyewitnesses easily? Most people would agree that it would be impermissible for the government to create its own “star witness,” Farahany maintained.

Propranolol, a beta-blocker that may stop consolidation of fear. Courtesy of Mind Disorders

While many may worry about enhancement of selves or memories, diminishing memories is another concern. The drug propranolol, a beta-blocker, has significant promise for people who have suffered from a traumatic experience because it can block consolidation of fear, said Farahany. For instance, rape victims who take propranolol may be less likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. “When given the opportunity to intentionally diminish experience of an emotion, should [people] be able to do so?” she asked. Compensation through the tort system is based upon the degree of suffering. Would the compensation for a victim of a rape be decreased by using the drug? Alternatively, do victims have a responsibility to reduce their own suffering by taking the drug?

There are many more questions to answer, and Farahany hopes to do so with her framework of cognitive liberty that considers the pillars of self-determination, consent, freedom of thought, and risks and benefits to individuals and society when deciding where to draw the lines.

Monkey Marketing and Poop-Dodging

By Ashley Mooney

On September 12, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Business/Economics, Neuroscience, Students

by Ashley Mooney

Have you ever thought of advertising to a monkey?

Junior Yavuz Acikalin, an economics and neuroscience double major, is doing an independent research project with the Platt Lab that deals with just that—monkey advertising. Acikalin’s project deals with whether or not one can influence primate reward preferences by branding rewards. Branding involves using associations between brand logos and images of female monkey perinea—“sexy images” for monkeys in his words—and high status male faces.

“Finding similarities between how mainstream methods of marketing affect humans and monkeys can lead to a better understanding of the evolutionary factors that affect consumer behavior,” he said. “Experiments on monkeys can help us better understand the irrationalities that happen in the markets, and more importantly, the brain mechanisms that underlie the effects of advertising on consumer behavior.”

The lab, run by Michael Platt, director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, studies how the brain decides between different actions. A main focus of the lab is on value-based decision making, and the brain mechanisms responsible for these processes—in summary, neuroeconomics, Acikalin said.

His daily duties include writing Matlab code for the touch-screen interface that the monkeys use, he said. He also writes code for data analysis and runs the experiments.

Acikalin noted that he loves animals and cannot live without having multiple pets at home, making his time with the monkeys rewarding. His research, however, does come with its downsides.

“My least favorite part is dealing with all the biohazard on a daily basis—or more precisely, monkey poop,” he said.

A Different Kind of "Knock Out Mouse"

By Ashley Mooney

On August 30, 2012

In Animals, Behavior/Psychology, Neuroscience, Students

by Ashley Mooney

What is the best method to test anxiety in mice? I spent my summer at home in Portland, Ore. figuring out just that.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in five adults in the United States have an anxiety disorder, but only about a third of those people are receiving treatment. In order to develop better medications, we wanted to understand the mechanism by which injuries—such as traumatic brain injury—lead to anxiety disorders.

The "guillotine" I helped build to model traumatic brain injury in mice

The lab was using six tests on mice, including the elevated plus maze, acoustic startle response and the “hyponeophagia test”—which examined how long it took a mouse to consume a new food. My boss, a postdoctoral researcher, ran a series of correlations on test results to find that some are not as effective in testing anxiety as scientific journals say they are.

I helped build two of the other tests that were new to the lab. One of them was a guillotine of sorts to test traumatic brain injury. While the guillotine does not do anything gruesome to the mice, it does give them a minor concussion to model the type of injury that many people experience in sports, car accidents and other mishaps.

We were looking at whether traumatic brain injury increases your chance of developing anxiety. To do this, we conditioned 80 mice and put them through mazes before and after knocking them on the head.

Although the mice kept me pretty busy, the head veterinarian of the research institute allowed me to shadow him in the mornings and help out with the pigs and rodents.

And a lesson from all of my maze-building experiences: chloroform is useful for more than knocking people unconscious—one can use it to bind plastic together and create a plethora of fun experiments for mice to run around.

Solving the mystery of the American psycho

By Ashley Mooney

On April 23, 2012

In Behavior/Psychology, Lecture, Neuroscience

by Ashley Mooney

New studies show that psychopathy in criminals is the best predictor of future offenses.

Kent Kiehl, associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, spoke Friday, April 20 on his research on psychopathy—a personality disorder characterized by a persistent pattern of disregard for the rights of others and the rules of society—in prison populations in the United States and Canada. Using a trailer equipped with a mobile MRI unit that could travel to prisons, Kiehl scanned the brains of 2,000 inmate volunteers, which included 200 female offenders and 250 juvenile offenders, in medium and maximum-security prisons in Wisconsin and New Mexico.

Mugshot of Charles Manson, an infamous psychopath. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

“Psychopathy is currently considered the single best predictor of future behavior,” Kiehl said. “If you have a diagnosis of psychopathy and you’re going for parole or something, they view that as a risk factor.”

He found that compared to the average offender, 60 percent of psychopaths reoffend within the next 200 days. Maximum-security juveniles showed a similar pattern: 68 percent of individuals who were at high risk for psychopathy reoffended.

Using images of the brain, Kiehl said he could predict psychopathy as well as one can with clinical error.

“If you have different behavior, you’re going to have a different brain. Just like men and women: different behaviors, different brains.”

Kiehl noted the role of the MAOA gene in violent behavior. He said if one has the gene and comes from a stressful environment, he or she has a significantly elevated risk for committing a violent offense. The gene may contribute to variability in grey matter density in some parts of the brain, which is a risk factor for psychopathy.

Although Kiehl noted the strengths of group therapy in prisons, he said treatment might actually make things worse. Treating psychopaths leads to “violent failure,” meaning that they have a high chance of violent recidivism (relapsing into the behavior).

In juveniles, however, Kiehl said positive reinforcement techniques have reduced recidivism by deemphasizing punishment and treating impulsivity. The kids in the program show a 50 percent reduction in violent recidivism compared to those who undergo normal treatment. Besides the reduction in violent recidivism, the juveniles are also less likely to commit the same types violent crimes, such as murder.

Diagnosing psychopathy and using cost-effective treatments, such as positive reinforcement, can help alleviate the burden of the prison system in the United States.

“We have a problem in the United States: We incarcerate a lot of people,” he said. “We incarcerate more per capita than any other country. It’s expensive—it costs $2.34 trillion per year, which is about the same as the annual estimate for all health care [in the country].”