MITPressLog

Eye Candy That You Can Taste

Today's eye candy focuses on “sense-ational perceptions.” On April 16, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman discovered the hallucinogenic effects of LSD when he accidently consumed part of the drug. In Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia, Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman explain the neuroscience and genetics behind synesthesia's multisensory experiences, a phenomenon that can be imitated by taking LSD.

According to Cytowic and Eagleman, “synthesia” means “joined sensation, such that a voice or music, for example, is not only heard but also seen, tasted, or felt as a physical touch.” Other examples of synesthesia include an “icy voice” or a “warm color,” creating a union of separate sensory perceptions.

In the following passage, Cytowic and Eagleman explain how LSD creates synesthetic effects in users:

LSD, mescal, and other anti-serotonergic hallucinogens sometimes produce synesthesia, particularly the sound-to-sight variety. Almost all measures of color vision are affected in volunteers given LSD. Given the drug’s rapid onset of action, we conclude that it must operate on preexisting pathways. LSD is thought to have two main effects: increasing transmission of primary sensory inputs at early levels while inhibiting pathways within the cortex.

In general, serotonin dampens overactive neurons to various internal and external stimuli. Given that serotonin is primarily an inhibitory neurotransmitter and LSD blocks its receptors, the resulting disinhibition allows neural targets to be more easily activated by abnormal inputs, hence synesthesia. Serotonin receptors are maximally concentrated in the hippocampus, thalamic nuclei, basal ganglia, and cerebral cortex. Depth electrodes implanted in animals and humans while on LSD reveal a desynchronized cortex and synchronized, paroxysmal discharges in hippocampus and amygdale. This means that such individuals are aroused but unable to discriminate among sensory channels. In humans, these subcortical discharges coincide behaviorally with heightened emotion and perceptual distortion during the drug high.

Synesthesia is also a naturally occurring phenomenon. Take a Synesthesia Test to see if you can taste the colors of the rainbow.

Neuroscience 2009

Promotions Coordinator, Allison Hoch, was one of four MIT Pressers manning our booth at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Chicago last month.   Here are some highlights:

Society for Neuroscience is one of my favorite meetings to attend as an exhibitor. The folks at this meeting - all 30,000+ of them - spend plenty of time on the exhibits floor and especially along publisher's row. Our reputation seems to proceed us - our strong history in this field garners us a lot of attention. I love getting to interact with our customers who seem as equally passionate about buying our books as I am about selling them. It was a thrill to attend this conference for the fourth time and be greeted by familiar faces returning to our booth to purchase new titles and beloved favorites for their friends or students.

 
This is the largest conference we attend and one of the longest; my co-workers and I spent a week in Chicago where this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting was held. Two days of travel, one day to set-up, four days of selling, and one day off in-between. The days in the convention center start for us at 8:30 am when we arrive early to set-up our computers and end at 5:30 when we finally close up shop and usher the last straggling customers out of the booth. This year things were so busy that we even brought packed lunches to eat between sales. And we celebrated successful work days with hot pastrami, deep-dish pizza, or one of the famous Illinois "Horseshoe" sandwiches.

This year was a record one for us - we practically sold out of every title we brought. Whether it was our new 30% conference discount or just a hunger for knowledge, we'd be hard-pressed to say, but the economy did not seem to waylay the majority of our customers. As always, our bestseller was Ramon y Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator but we also saw a lot of interest in our new titles: Charles Gross' A Hole in the Head, Why We Cooperate by Michael Tomasello,  Computational Modeling Methods for Neuroscientists by Erik De Schutter, Wednesday is Indigo Blue by Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman, and of course Michael Gazzaniga's new book (4th) editon of The Cognitive Neurosciences.

Charles Gross Reading in SoCal

MIT Press author and Princeton neuroscientist Charles Gross reads from his latest book, A Hole in the Head tonight at The Book Works in Southern California. If you're in the neighborhood, stop in and listen to this great storyteller.

Scholarpedia

Wikipedia is useful for finding quick information, answering trivia questions, and for getting up to speed on things you think you should know.  But whether Wikipedia ought to be used for an academic citation is another story. 
One scholar, Eugene M. Izhikevich (author of Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience), has decided to harness the concept of Wikipedia into a format that is more likely to please academics:  he has founded Scholarpedia, a peer-reviewed version of Wikipedia.  Each article in Scholarpedia has a "curator", usually a leading researcher or scholar in that field.  The initial version of an article is submitted for a peer review process, and each successive version is permanently saved for purposes of citation.  While (in the spirit of a Wiki) anyone can propose changes to an article, the curator is responsible for approving these changes. 
Scholarpedia's current content focuses on Computational Neuroscience, Dynamical Systems and Computational Intelligence, but it plans to move in other directions if all goes well. 
An exciting aspect of Scholarpedia is that some articles are written and curated by the very people who discovered the concept - as in the case of Lotfi Zadeh, who has written about Fuzzy Logic, or Mandlebrot, who is slated to write the article on Mandelbrot sets.   And who can argue with that kind of citation?

The Truth Behind Fiction

If you've ever met someone who would rather make up an elaborate false answer to a question, rather than say, "I don't know", you may have experienced an example of confabulation. Confabulation happens when one fails to recognize a false answer as fantasy rather than reality. William Hirstein's latest book, Brain Fiction, looks into this phenomenon, which has been getting a lot of media attention lately.  BoingBoing's David Pescovitz encourages you to check it out in this post. 

What are you waiting for?

If you've ever wondered what keeps you listening to music, you may have the answers in the book Sweet Anticipation by David Huron.  Huron proposes that your sense of expectation plays a large role in music, and he outlines a range of aesthetic responses that are created by expectation.  If you'd like to hear a bit more about this interesting theory, it is discusssed in a podcast on a new website devoted to music cognition (Sound and Mind).  To listen, click here.  You can also read more new ideas about our brain's appreciation for music in this Boston Globe article.

Blending the Senses

Richard E. Cytowic is best known for rediscovering synesthesia in 1980 and returning it to the scientific mainstream where it is now seen as crucial to basic theories of how the brain works.   Sharing a root with anesthesia (“no sensation”), synethesia means “joined sensation,” whereby a voice, for example, is not only heard but also seen felt, or tasted.  The trait is involuntary, hereditary, and fairly common.  It stayed a scientific mystery for two centuries until Cytowic’s original experiments led to a neurological explanation—and to a new concept of brain organization that accentuates emotion over reason.

Last night, Dr. Cytowic spoke with Chris Cuomo for a special ABC News segment called Medical Mysteries.  A clip of the program can be seen here. 

For more information about synesthesia and how it illuminates a wide swath of mental life and leads to a new view of what it mean to be human, check out The Man Who Tasted Shapes. 

Our Behavior Toward "The Other"

Why did the inhabitants of Hawaii welcome the great ocean explorer Captain Cook with welcome arms on his first visit to the island, but killed him on his second visit to the island?  What explains this sort of behavior? Why do we tend to be hostile to those who are different?  According to Yale psychiatrist, Bruce Wexler, the fate of Captain Cook, as well as many others who have to deal with problems including racism and cultural conflict, can be explained by looking at how the brain is programmed.  To explain why people behave the way that they do and participate in violent acts  like the genocide in Rwanda the even the Crusades, Wexler looks at how the cultural environment shapes the brain and the implications for social theory of the decrease in neuroplasticity from childhood to adulthood.

Recently, Paul Allen spoke with Bruce Wexler on BBC 3’s Night Waves about his new book, Brain and Culture as well a his latest ideas in social-neuroscience and finds out how his theory of  'neuroplasticity' might help resolve areas of sectarian conflict such as the Middle East.

Listen to the interview here.

Pomp & Circumstance...and Science?

Around this time, as graduation speeches and ceremonies and celebrations come to an end, young scientists are preparing for the beginning of their new careers.  But where does one begin?  What kind of life can a new scientist expect?  How does one find meaning and purpose?

Those who are looking for some good old fashioned advice might turn to Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern anatomy and neurobiology.  In 1897, he published a book in Spanish giving some pretty bold advice to young scientists. The MIT Press publishes the English-language edition, Advice for a Young Investigator. 

From chapters titled "Beginner's Traps" to "Diseases of the Will", Ramón y Cajal addresses - in a startlingly relevant and humanistic way - the questions, problems, self-doubts and fears that scientists must face, the qualities that a good scientist requires, and the pitfalls and failings of bad scientists.

"Defect for defect, arrogance is preferable to diffidence, boldness measures its strengths and conquers or is conquered, and undue modesty flees from battle, condemned to shameful activity."

The book reads like a Poor Richard's Almanack of witty aphorisms, amusing instructions, and moral proclamations.

"It is fair to say that, in general, no problems have been exhausted; instead, men have been exhausted by the problems.  Soil that appears impoverished to one researcher reveals its fertility to another."

"Most people who lack self-confidence are unaware of the marvelous power of prolonged concentration.  This type of cerebral polarization (which involves a special ordering of perceptions) refines judgment, enriches analytical powers, spurs constructive imagination, and - by focusing all light of reason on the darkness of a problem - allows unforseen and subtle relationships to be discovered."

"If a solution fails to appear after all of this, and yet we feel success is just around the corner, try resting for a while.  Several weeks of relaxation and quiet in the countryside brings calmness and clarity to the mind."

And lest we forget the book was written in the late 19th century, Ramón y Cajal also includes some advice about the proper type of woman suitable for the "man of science"...

"What qualities should grace the young woman chosen by the man of science?  This is an extremely serious question because it is undoubtedly true that the moral qualities of the wife are a decisive factor in the success of scientific work...so many careers have been thwarted because of feminine vanity or capriciousness!"

This book has remained a perennial conference bestseller.  Not bad for a 109-year old book!

Luck and Potential

Recently, Steven J. Luck answered a few of our questions about his work on event-related potentials. An ERP (to use the insiders' lingo) is a measurable electrophysiological response to a thought or mental perception. Steve's book on ERPs was published in August, and below he discusses how he came to the topic while working in the lab of Steve Hillyard, of UC San Diego, and how the experience in the lab directed his own research.

MITP: What would you like potential readers to know about your book?

SJL: It's really intended to be a how-to book. It's not quite "ERPs for dummies," but my goal was for it to be a practical guide to designing experiments, recording high-quality data, and analyzing the data. But it doesn't just provide a cookbook -- it also explains the reasons why things are done in a particular way.