Brain Activity Differs For Creative And Noncreative Thinkers

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071027102409.htm

ScienceDaily (Oct. 29, 2007) — Why do some people solve problems more creatively than others? Are people who think creatively different from those who tend to think in a more methodical fashion?
These questions are part of a long-standing debate, with some researchers arguing that what we call “creative thought” and “noncreative thought” are not basically different. If this is the case, then people who are thought of as creative do not really think in a fundamentally different way from those who are thought of as noncreative. On the other side of this debate, some researchers have argued that creative thought is fundamentally different from other forms of thought. If this is true, then those who tend to think creatively really are somehow different.
A new study led by John Kounios, professor of Psychology at Drexel University and Mark Jung-Beeman of Northwestern University answers these questions by comparing the brain activity of creative and noncreative problem solvers. The study, published in the journal Neuropsychologia, reveals a distinct pattern of brain activity, even at rest, in people who tend to solve problems with a sudden creative insight -- an “Aha! Moment” – compared to people who tend to solve problems more methodically.
At the beginning of the study, participants relaxed quietly for seven minutes while their electroencephalograms (EEGs) were recorded to show their brain activity. The participants were not given any task to perform and were told they could think about whatever they wanted to think about. Later, they were asked to solve a series of anagrams – scrambled letters that can be rearranged to form words [MPXAELE = EXAMPLE]. These can be solved by deliberately and methodically trying out different letter combinations, or they can be solved with a sudden insight or “Aha!” in which the solution pops into awareness. After each successful solution, participants indicated in which way the solution had come to them.
The participants were then divided into two groups – those who reported solving the problems mostly by sudden insight, and those who reported solving the problems more methodically – and resting-state brain activity for these groups was compared. As predicted, the two groups displayed strikingly different patterns of brain activity during the resting period at the beginning of the experiment – before they knew that they would have to solve problems or even knew what the study was about.
One difference was that the creative solvers exhibited greater activity in several regions of the right hemisphere. Previous research has suggested that the right hemisphere of the brain plays a special role in solving problems with creative insight, likely due to right-hemisphere involvement in the processing of loose or “remote” associations between the elements of a problem, which is understood to be an important component of creative thought. The current study shows that greater right-hemisphere activity occurs even during a “resting” state in those with a tendency to solve problems by creative insight. This finding suggests that even the spontaneous thought of creative individuals, such as in their daydreams, contains more remote associations.
Second, creative and methodical solvers exhibited different activity in areas of the brain that process visual information. The pattern of “alpha” and “beta” brainwaves in creative solvers was consistent with diffuse rather than focused visual attention. This may allow creative individuals to broadly sample the environment for experiences that can trigger remote associations to produce an Aha! Moment.
For example, a glimpse of an advertisement on a billboard or a word spoken in an overheard conversation could spark an association that leads to a solution. In contrast, the more focused attention of methodical solvers reduces their distractibility, allowing them to effectively solve problems for which the solution strategy is already known, as would be the case for balancing a checkbook or baking a cake using a known recipe.
Thus, the new study shows that basic differences in brain activity between creative and methodical problem solvers exist and are evident even when these individuals are not working on a problem. According to Kounios, “Problem solving, whether creative or methodical, doesn’t begin from scratch when a person starts to work on a problem. His or her pre-existing brain-state biases a person to use a creative or a methodical strategy.”
In addition to contributing to current knowledge about the neural basis of creativity, this study suggests the possible development of new brain imaging techniques for assessing potential for creative thought, and for assessing the effectiveness of methods for training individuals to think creatively.
Journal reference: Kounios, J., Fleck, J.I., Green, D.L., Payne, L., Stevenson, J.L., Bowden, E.M., & Jung-Beeman, M. The origins of insight in resting-state brain activity, Neuropsychologia (2007), doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.07.013
See also:
Jung-Beeman, M., Bowden, E.M., Haberman, J., Frymiare, J.L., Arambel-Liu, S., Greenblatt, R., Reber, P.J., & Kounios, J. (2004). Neural activity when people solve verbal problems with insight. PLoS Biology, 2, 500-510.
Kounios, J., Frymiare, J.L., Bowden, E.M., Fleck, J.I., Subramaniam, K., Parrish, T.B., & Jung-Beeman, M.J. (2006). The prepared mind: Neural activity prior to problem presentation predicts subsequent solution by sudden insight. Psychological Science, 17, 882-890.
Adapted from materials provided by Drexel University.

Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com

Humans Perceive Others' Fear Faster Than Other Emotions

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071014081055.htm

Science Daily — You may not be fully dressed without a smile, but a look of horror will make a faster first impression. Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered that the brain becomes aware of fearful faces more quickly than those showing other emotions.

"There are reasons to believe that the brain has evolved mechanisms to detect things in the environment that signal threat. One of those signals is a look of fear," David Zald, associate professor of psychology and a co-author of the new study, said. "We believe that the brain can detect certain cues even before we are aware of them, so that we can direct our attention to potentially threatening situations in our environment."
Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology, and Eunice Yang, doctoral student, were co-authors of the study, which will appear in the November 2007 issue of Emotion.
The researchers set out to determine if we become aware of fearful, neutral or happy expressions at the same speed, or if one of these expressions reaches our awareness faster than the others. To do this, they needed to find a way to slow down the speed at which subjects processed facial information -- which usually takes less than 40 milliseconds. At those high speeds it is difficult to tell which images rise to awareness the fastest.
Yang, the lead author of the study, realized that a technique being used in Blake's lab might provide a solution to the problem. The technique, continuous flash suppression, keeps people from becoming aware of what they are seeing for up to 10 seconds. Using this technique, the team had research subjects look at a screen through a viewer, similar to the eyepieces on a microscope, which allowed different images to be presented to each eye.
Many images were rapidly presented to one eye while a static image of a face was presented to the other. The multiple images served as visual 'noise,' suppressing the image of the face. The subjects indicated when they first became aware of seeing a face, enabling the researchers to determine if the expression on the face had any impact on how quickly the subject became aware of it.
The team found that subjects became aware of faces that had fearful expressions before neutral or happy faces. They believe a brain area called the amygdala, which shortcuts the normal brain pathway for processing visual images, is responsible.
"The amygdala receives information before it goes to the cortex, which is where most visual information goes first. We think the amygdala has some crude ability to process stimuli and that it can cue some other visual areas to what they need to focus on," Zald said.
Zald and his colleagues believe the eyes of the fearful face play a key role.
"Fearful eyes are a particular shape, where you get more of the whites of the eye showing," he said."That may be the sort of simple feature that the amygdala can pick up on, because it's only getting a fairly crude representation. That fearful eye may be something that's relatively hardwired in there."
A surprising finding was that subjects perceived happy faces the slowest.
"What we believe is happening is that the happy faces signal safety. If something is safe, you don't have to pay attention to it," Zald said.
Next, the researchers will explore how this information influences our behavior.
"We are interested in now exploring what this means for behavior," Yang said. "Since these expressions are being processed without our awareness, do they affect our behavior and our decision making? If so, how?"
The research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health. Blake and Zald are Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development investigators.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Vanderbilt University.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Why Emotionally Charged Events Are So Memorable

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071004121045.htm

Science Daily — Both extensive psychological research and personal experiences confirm that events that happen during heightened states of emotion such as fear, anger and joy are far more memorable than less dramatic occurrences.

"This phenomenon is something everyone can identify with," said Roberto Malinow of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. "You can probably remember where you were when you heard about 9/11, but you probably don't know where you were on 9/10. We've identified one mechanism that may underlie this effect."
The parts of the brain where memories are stored need to distinguish between significant experiences and those that carry less importance, giving priority to the transformation of the former into long-term memory, the researchers explained.
One factor that scientists believe to be critical in that process is the emotional load of an event. Indeed, studies have shown that heightened states of emotion can facilitate learning and memory. In some situations, this process can even become pathological, Malinow said, as occurs in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition characterized by persistent vivid memories of traumatic events.
In a report in Cell, Johns Hopkins researchers and their collaborators at Cold Spring Harbor and New York University have identified the likely biological basis for this: a hormone released during emotional arousal "primes" nerve cells to remember events by increasing their chemical sensitivity at sites where nerves rewire to form new memory circuits.
Describing the brain as a big circuit board in which each new experience creates a new circuit, Hopkins neuroscience professor Richard Huganir, Ph.D. says that he and his team found that during emotional peaks, the hormone norepinephrine dramatically sensitizes synapses -- the site where nerve cells make an electro-chemical connection -- to enhance the sculpting of a memory into the big board.
Norepinephrine, more widely known as a "fight or flight" hormone, energizes the process by adding phosphate molecules to a nerve cell receptor called GluR1. The phosphates help guide the receptors to insert themselves adjacent to a synapse. "Now when the brain needs to form a memory, the nerves have plenty of available receptors to quickly adjust the strength of the connection and lock that memory into place," Huganir says.
Huganir and his team suspected that GluR1might be a target of norepinephrine since disruptions in this receptor cause spatial memory defects in mice. They tested the idea by either injecting healthy mice with adrenaline or exposing them to fox urine, both of which increase norepinephrine levels in brain. Analyzing brain slices of the mice, the researchers saw increased phosphates on the GluR1 receptors and an increased ability of these receptors to be recruited to synapses.
When the researchers put mice in a cage, gave a mild shock, took them out of that cage and put them back in it the next day, mice who had received adrenaline or fox urine tended to "freeze" in fear -- an indicator they associated the cage as the site of a shock -- more frequently, suggestive of enhanced memory.
However, in a similar experiment with mice genetically engineered to have a defective GluR1 receptor that phosphates cannot attach to, adrenaline injections had no effect on mouse memory, further evidence of the "priming" effect of the receptor in response to norepinephrine.
The researchers plan on continuing their work by going in the opposite direction and engineering another mouse strain that has a permanently phosphorylated or "primed" receptor. "We're curious to see how these mice will behave," Huganir says. "We suspect that they'll be pretty smart, but at the same time constantly anxious."
Reference: Hu et al.: "Emotion Enhances Learning via Norepinephrine Regulation of AMPA-Receptor Trafficking." Publishing in Cell 131, 160--173, October 5, 2007. DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2007.09.017
Authors on the paper are Hailan Hu, Eleonore Real, and Roberto Malinow of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory; Joe LeDoux of New York University; and Kogo Takamiya, Myoung-Goo Kang, and Huganir of Johns Hopkins.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship, NARSAD, and the Ale Davis and Maxine Harrison Foundation
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

Fausto Intilla

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Brain Images Make Cognitive Research More Believable

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071002151837.htm

Science Daily — People are more likely to believe findings from a neuroscience study when the report is paired with a colored image of a brain as opposed to other representational images of data such as bar graphs, according to a new Colorado State University study.

Persuasive influence on public perception:

Scientists and journalists have recently suggested that brain images have a persuasive influence on the public perception of research on cognition. This idea was tested directly in a series of experiments reported by David McCabe, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Colorado State, and his colleague Alan Castel, an assistant professor at University of California-Los Angeles. The forthcoming paper, to be published in the journal Cognition, was recently published online.
"We found the use of brain images to represent the level of brain activity associated with cognitive processes clearly influenced ratings of scientific merit," McCabe said. "This sort of visual evidence of physical systems at work is typical in areas of science like chemistry and physics, but has not traditionally been associated with research on cognition.
"We think this is the reason people find brain images compelling. The images provide a physical basis for thinking."

Brain images compelling:

In a series of three experiments, undergraduate students were either asked to read brief articles that made fictitious and unsubstantiated claims such as "watching television increases math skills," or they read a real article describing research showing that brain imaging can be used as a lie detector.
When the research participants were asked to rate their agreement with the conclusions reached in the article, ratings were higher when a brain image had accompanied the article, compared to when it did not include a brain image or included a bar graph representing the data. This effect occurred regardless of whether the article described a fictitious, implausible finding or realistic research.
Conclusions often oversimplified and misrepresented
"Cognitive neuroscience studies which appear in mainstream media are often oversimplified and conclusions can be misrepresented," McCabe said. "We hope that our findings get people thinking more before making sensational claims based on brain imaging data, such as when they claim there is a 'God spot' in the brain."
Article: "Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments and scientific reasoning."
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Colorado State University.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Brain Center For 'Sound Space' Identified

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070919121602.htm

Science Daily — While the visual regions of the brain have been intensively mapped, many important regions for auditory processing remain terra incognita. Now, researchers have identified the region responsible for a key auditory process--perceiving "sound space," the location of sounds.

The findings settle a controversy in earlier studies that failed to establish the auditory region, called the planum temporale, as responsible for perceiving auditory space. Leon Y. Deouell and colleagues published their findings in the journal Neuron.
Studies by other researchers had shown that the planum temporale was activated when people were asked to perform tasks in which they located sounds in space. However, many researchers believed that the region was responsible only for intentional processing of such information. And in fact, previous studies had failed to establish that the planum temporale was responsible for automatic, nonintentional representation of spatial location.
However, Deouell and colleagues used an improved experimental design that enabled them to more sensitively determine the brain's auditory spatial location center. For example, they presented their human subjects with sounds against a background of silence, used headphones that more accurately reproduced sound location, used noise with a rich spectrum which has been shown to be more readily locatable in space, and created an individually tailored sound space for each subject by using sounds previously recorded directly from the subjects' own ears.
In their experiments, they presented bursts of the noise to the volunteers wearing the headphones while the subjects' brains were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging. In this widely used brain-scanning technique, harmless magnetic fields and radio waves are used to image blood flow in brain regions, which reflects brain activity in those locations.
The subjects were instructed to ignore the sounds. And, to divert their attention, they either watched a movie with the sound turned off or were given a simple button-pushing task.
When the position of the noise bursts was varied in space, the researchers found that the planum temporale in the subjects' brain was, indeed, activated. What's more, the greater the number of distinct sound locations subjects heard during test runs, the greater the activity in the planum temporale.
The researchers concluded that their experiments "suggest that neurons in this region represent, in a nonintentional or preattentive fashion, the location of sound sources in the environment." They wrote that "Space representation in this region may provide the neural substrate needed for an orientation response to critical auditory events and for linking auditory information with information acquired through other modalities."
The researchers include Leon Y. Deouell of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and University of California at Berkeley; Aaron S. Heller of University of California at Berkeley; Rafael Malach of Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot; and Mark D'Esposito and Robert T. Knight of University of California at Berkeley.
This work was supported by NINDS Grant NS21135 to R.T.K. and an Israel Science Foundation grant 477-05 to L.Y.D.
Reference: Deouell et al.: "Cerebral Responses to Change in Spatial Location of Unattended Sounds." Publishing in Neuron 55, 985--996, September 20, 2007. DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2007.08.019.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Cell Press.

Fausto Intilla

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Brain Network Related To Intelligence Identified

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070911092117.htm

Science Daily — A primary mystery puzzling neuroscientists – where in the brain lies intelligence? – just may have a unified answer.

In a review of 37 imaging studies related to intelligence, including their own, Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine and Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico have uncovered evidence of a distinct neurobiology of human intelligence. Their Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT) identifies a brain network related to intelligence, one that primarily involves areas in the frontal and the parietal lobes.
“Recent neuroscience studies suggest that intelligence is related to how well information travels throughout the brain,” said Haier, a professor of psychology in the School of Medicine and longtime human intelligence researcher. “Our review of imaging studies identifies the stations along the routes intelligent information processing takes. Once we know where the stations are, we can study how they relate to intelligence.”
The data suggest that some of the brain areas related to intelligence are the same areas related to attention and memory and to more complex functions like language. Haier and Jung say this possible integration of cognitive functions suggests that intelligence levels might be based on how efficient the frontal-parietal networks process information.
Brain imaging studies of intelligence are relatively new, with Haier doing some of the first ones only 20 years ago. Although there is still discussion about how to define and measure intelligence, Haier and Jung found surprising consistency in the studies they reviewed despite the fact the studies represented a variety of approaches.
A detailed report on this research including peer commentary from 19 researchers appears online in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
In his peer commentary, University of Washington psychologist Earl Hunt writes: “The Jung & Haier P-FIT model shows how far we have progressed toward understanding the biological basis of intelligence. Twenty-five years ago researchers in the field were engaged in an unedifying discussion of the relation between skull sizes and intelligence test scores. By taking advantage of the huge advances in measurement of the brain that have occurred in the past quarter century, [Jung and Haier] can take the far more sophisticated view that individual differences in intelligence depend, in part, upon individual differences in specific areas of the brain and in the connections between them.”
Haier and Jung have made some of the seminal findings in intelligence studies. In a 2004 study, they found that regions related to general intelligence are located throughout the brain and that a single “intelligence center,” such as the frontal lobe, is unlikely. And in a 2005 study, they found that while there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, women have more white matter and men more gray matter related to intelligence test scores, suggesting that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs can produce equivalent intellectual performance.
“Genetic research has demonstrated that intelligence levels can be inherited, and since genes work through biology, there must be a biological basis for intelligence,” Haier said. “We have a long way to go before we understand the details, but our P-FIT model provides a framework for testing new hypotheses in future experiments.”
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of California - Irvine.

Fausto Intilla

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Reading Process Is Surprisingly Different That Previously Thought, Technology Shows

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070910092543.htm

Science Daily — Being able to read competently is one of the most important skills we need to function in today’s fast-paced society. Analysing the way we read can offer valuable insights into how we process visual information.

Scientists have been interested in the movements of our eyes while reading for forty years. However, until now most assumed that when we read both eyes look at the same letter of a word concurrently.
Now ground-breaking research by cognitive psychologist Professor Simon Liversedge and his team at the University of Southampton has shown that this is not actually the case. They found that our eyes are actually up to something much more exciting when we read - our eyes look at different letters in the same word and then combine the different images through a process known as fusion.
The research Prof. Liversedge will present at the BA Festival of Science in York shows that the reading process is not as simple as one might think; it is rarely a case of the eyes scanning the page smoothly from left to right. Depending on what we are reading and how hard we are finding the information to digest our eyes make small jerky movements, that allow us to focus on a particularly difficult word or often re-read passages we didn’t get the first time. Analysing these eye movements enables psychologists to understand how our brain processes the sentence.
With sophisticated eye tracking equipment able to determine which letter of a font-size 14 word a person is looking at every millisecond from 1 metre away, Prof. Liversedge’s team went one further and looked at the letters within the word within the sentence. They were able to deduce that when our eyes are not looking at the same letter of the word, they are usually about two letters apart. Prof. Liversedge explains: ‘Although this difference might sound small, in fact it represents a very substantial difference in terms of the precise "picture" of the world that each eye delivers to the brain.'
So if our eyes are looking at different parts of the same word, thereby receiving different information from each eye, how is it that we are able to see the words clearly enough to read them? There are two ways the brain can do this; either the image from one of the eyes is blocked or the two different images are somehow fused together. To test how the latter mechanism might work, the team chose words that could easily split in two, such as cowboy, and presented half of the word to the left eye, and half to the right eye separately. They then analysed readers’ eye movements when reading sentences containing these particular words presented in this way.
‘We were able to clearly show that we experience a single, very clear and crisp visual representation due to fusion of the two different images from each eye,’ he explains. ‘Also when we decide which word to look at next we work out how far to move our eyes based on the fused visual representation built from the disparate signals of each eye.
‘A comprehensive understanding of the psychological processes underlying reading is vital if we are to develop better methods of teaching children to read and offer remedial treatments for those with reading disorders such as dyslexia. Our team are now measuring the range of visual disparities over which both adult and child readers can successfully fuse words.’
Professor Simon Liversedge will give his talk, ‘What our eyes get up to while we read’ as part of the session entitled ‘What eye movements tell us about the brain and language’ on 14 September at Vanbrugh V/045, University of York as part of the BA Festival of Science.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Fausto Intilla

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Adult Brain Can Change, Study Confirms

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070905155440.htm

Science Daily — It is well established that a child's brain has a remarkable capacity for change, but controversy continues about the extent to which such plasticity exists in the adult human primary sensory cortex.

Now, neuroscientists from MIT and Johns Hopkins University have used converging evidence from brain imaging and behavioral studies to show that the adult visual cortex does indeed reorganize--and that the change affects visual perception.
The authors believe that as scientists find ways to use this adaptive ability, the work could have relevance to topics ranging from learning to designing interventions for improving recovery following stroke, brain injury, or visual disorders.
Animal studies conducted two decades ago and using single cell recording of neurons found that the adult animal brain can change, but shed little information about the adult human brain. In 2005, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study led by Professor Nancy Kanwisher at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT found evidence of plasticity in the visual cortex of adults with macular degeneration, an eye disease that deprives regions of the cortex of visual information.
But another fMRI study of macular degeneration found no such evidence, and an animal study using both single cell recordings and fMRI also questioned the 20-year-old animal work.
Lead author Daniel Dilks, a postdoctoral associate in Kanwisher's lab who conducted the current work while a graduate student at Johns Hopkins in senior author Michael McCloskey's lab, jumped into the fray when he found BL, a stroke patient.
BL's stroke damaged the optic radiation fibers, which transmit information from the eye to the primary visual cortex, but the cortex itself remained intact. The damage eliminated input from the upper left visual field to the corresponding region of the primary visual cortex, thereby depriving a region of cortex and creating a blind area in the upper left visual field.
The researchers wanted to find out what happened to that deprived piece of cortex. "We discovered that it took on new functional properties, and BL sees differently as a consequence of that cortical reorganization," explains Dilks.
BL had reported that things "looked distorted" in the lower left visual field (below his blind area). The researchers hypothesized that the distortions resulted from cortical reorganization in the deprived cortex. To isolate that distortion, they had BL fixate on a center dot while objects, such as squares, appeared in various parts of the visual field. As expected, BL saw nothing when a square appeared in his blind area.
But when the square appeared just below the blind area, he perceived the square as a rectangle extending upwards into the blind area. Likewise, he saw triangles as "pencil-like", and circles as "cigar-like".
Subsequent fMRI studies confirmed that the visually deprived cortex (representing the upper left visual field) was responding to information coming from the lower left visual field. The deprived cortex assumed new properties, a hallmark of plasticity, and that explained the visual distortions.
Dilks is continuing this work in postdoctoral studies in Kanwisher's lab. In addition to Michael McCloskey, John Serences of University of California Irvine, and Benjamin Rosenau and Steven Yantis, both of Johns Hopkins, coauthored the Journal of Neuroscience paper. An Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship and a Graduate Research Fellowship, both from the National Science Foundation, and the NIH funded the Johns Hopkins work.
The study appears online Sept. 5 in an advance publication of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Fausto Intilla

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