Interacting with a person really is different from interacting with a computer - and the brain knows it.

Researchers have discovered that a region of the brain known to be important for understanding others' minds only gets active when people have to make decisions about social situations, but not when they have to make similar decisions without other human involvement.

"Basically, it's triggering the brain to play by different rules," said study researcher Scott Huettel, a neuroscientist at Duke University.

Making decisions

A long line of economics and psychology studies have found that humans tend to make different decisions when they're interacting with people than when they're interacting with a computer, Huettel told LiveScience. People are usually very good at weighing social information in decision-making: They focus on key players when making group decisions, they can tell the different between someone employing a strategy and someone acting randomly, and when they need to compare themselves to others, they tend to draw conclusions based on similar people.

Huettel and his colleagues wanted to understand how the brain differs when it has to make decisions in a social context versus a non-social one. To find out, they arranged for 18 volunteers to play a series of simplified poker games with both computers and a human opponent.

In both cases, the decision to make was the same. Participants were given either a high or low card and had to decide whether to bet against their opponent. If their card beat out their opponent's, or if they bluffed with a low card so that their opponent folded, the participant won money. Otherwise, the opponent got paid.

Before the experiments, the participants met their opponent and shook hands, making the situation as obviously social as possible, Huettel said. They were also told which games would be against a person and which were against a computer. The games then took place as participants rested inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI). The fMRI measured blood flow to various brain regions in real time. An increase in blood flow to a specific region is a sign that region is becoming more active.

As each day passes, the pace of life seems to accelerate -- demands on productivity continue ever upward and there is hardly ever a moment when we aren't, in some way, in touch with our family, friends, or coworkers. While moments for reflection may be hard to come by, a new article suggests that the long-lost art of introspection -- even daydreaming -- may be an increasingly valuable part of life.

In the article, published in the July issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and colleagues survey the existing scientific literature from neuroscience and psychological science, exploring what it means when our brains are 'at rest.'

In recent years, researchers have explored the idea of rest by looking at the so-called 'default mode' network of the brain, a network that is noticeably active when we are resting and focused inward. Findings from these studies suggest that individual differences in brain activity during rest are correlated with components of socioemotional functioning, such as self-awareness and moral judgment, as well as different aspects of learning and memory. Immordino-Yang and her colleagues believe that research on the brain at rest can yield important insights into the importance of reflection and quiet time for learning.

Worrying almost destroyed her life.

I could tell Elizabeth was a worrier before she opened her mouth: she had a haunted look and wrung her hands together so compulsively I thought the skin would come off. With a loving, supportive husband, healthy children, a good job, and sufficient income, what did she have to worry about?

Everything, it turned out. In the first session it was a headache she was sure signalled a brain tumor. In the next session, she'd moved on to the polar ice caps melting ("shouldn't we relocate to higher ground?"). Her inner world was a hellish place where incessant worries bound her in a web of doom.

You might not worry like Elizabeth. But most of us suffer from some version of negative thinking. For you it might be complaints about life or self-criticism. Whatever the content, repetitious thoughts create a negative energy that envelopes you. We call this the Black Cloud.

The Black Cloud screens out everything positive. All you can see is what's wrong with life. Pretty soon you can't enjoy anything. Elizabeth couldn't settle in with a good book, take in a movie, or meet a friend for lunch. The Black Cloud also alienates people. Elizabeth's husband was losing patience with her, and her college-bound daughter complained, "When you help me with my applications it feels like you aren't doing it for me - you're doing it to quell your own anxiety about me getting into a good school."

Before she came to me, Elizabeth had tried to solve her problem by thinking positively. "For three days I tried to substitute a positive thought for every negative one. But I ended up feeling like I was just sticking my head in the sand. I don't know why they call it the power of positive thinking - the negative thoughts have all the power."

"We want to be free! We want to be free to do what we want to do!" ~ Heavenly Blues in the film The Wild Angels

You're probably familiar with reverse psychology: it's when you try to get someone to do something by telling them to do the opposite.

In theory people don't like to have their freedom restricted so they rebel. But what does the psychological research tell us? Do people really react to restrictions on their freedom by wanting the restricted object more?

Stress really does mess with your mind. A new study has found that chronic stress can create many of the brain changes associated with mood disorders by blocking a gene called neuritin - and that boosting the gene's activity can protect the brain from those disorders. The results provide new insight into the mechanisms behind depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder, and could offer researchers a novel target for drugs to treat those conditions.

Research has shown that mood disorders take a toll on patients' brains as well as on their lives. Postmortem studies and brain scans have revealed that the hippocampus (the brain's memory center) can shrink and atrophy in people with a history of depression and other mood disorders. People who live with mood disorders are also known to have low levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a growth factor that keeps neurons healthy. They also have low activity in the neuritin gene, which codes for a protein of the same name that may protect the brain's plasticity: its ability to reorganize and change in response to new experiences.

Ronald Duman, a neurobiologist at Yale University, and colleagues wondered if the poorly understood neuritin might play an important -- and heretofore overlooked -- role in depression and other mood disorders. They induced depression in a group of rats by subjecting them to chronic, unpredictable stress. Depriving them of food and play, isolating them, and switching around their day/night cycles for about 3 weeks left the rats with little interest in feeding or enjoying a sweetened drink. The rats also gave up and became immobile instead of swimming when placed in a tub of water - another measure of rodent depression.

Researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (BSI) in Japan have uncovered two brain signals in the human prefrontal cortex involved in how humans predict the decisions of other people. Their results suggest that the two signals, each located in distinct prefrontal circuits, strike a balance between expected and observed rewards and choices, enabling humans to predict the actions of people with different values than their own.

Every day, humans are faced with situations in which they must predict what decisions other people will make. These predictions are essential to the social interactions that make up our personal and professional lives. The neural mechanism underlying these predictions, however, by which humans learn to understand the values of others and use this information to predict their decision-making behavior, has long remained a mystery.

Researchers at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (BSI) in Japan have now shed light on this mystery with a paper to appear in the June 21st issue of Neuron. The researchers describe for the first time the process governing how humans learn to predict the decisions of another person using mental simulation of their mind.

A longstanding question in brain research is how information is processed in the brain. Neuroscientists at the Charité -- Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Cluster of Excellence NeuroCure and University of Newcastle have made a contribution towards answering this question. In a new study, they have shown that signals are generated not only in the cell body of nerve cells, but also in their output extension, the axon. A specific filter cell regulates signal propagation.

These findings have now been published in the journal Science.

Until now it has been assumed that information flow in nerve cells proceeds along a "one-way street." Electrical impulses are initiated at the cell body and propagate along the axon to the next neuron, where they are received by extensions, the dendrites, acting as antennae. However, the team around Charité researchers Tengis Gloveli and Tamar Dugladze has demonstrated that this model needs to be revised. They discovered that signals can also be initiated in axons, i.e. outside the cell body. This happens during highly synchronous neuronal activity as, for example, in a state of heightened attention. Moreover, these axonally generated signals flow bidirectionally and represent a new principle of information processing: on the one hand, impulses propagate from their origin towards other nerve cells; on the other hand, the signals also backpropagate towards the cell body, i.e. in the "wrong direction" down the one-way street. A potential problem is that backpropagating signals could lead to excessive cell activation.

The Vancouver-based Dr. Gabor Maté argues that too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption - that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness and in the restoration of health. Based on medical studies and his own experience with chronically ill patients at the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital, where he was the medical coordinator for seven years, Dr. Gabor Maté makes the case that there are important links between the mind and the immune system. He found that stress and individual emotional makeup play critical roles in an array of diseases. [includes rush transcript]

Most of us assume that confidence and certainty are preferred over uncertainty and bewilderment when it comes to learning complex information. But a new study led by Sidney D'Mello of the University of Notre Dame shows that confusion when learning can be beneficial if it is properly induced, effectively regulated, and ultimately resolved.

The study will be published in a forthcoming issue of Learning and Instruction.

Notre Dame Psychologist and Computer Scientist D'Mello, whose research areas include artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and the learning sciences, together with Art Graesser of the University of Memphis, collaborated on the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.

They found that by strategically inducing confusion in a learning session on difficult conceptual topics, people actually learned more effectively and were able to apply their knowledge to new problems.

In a series of experiments, subjects learned scientific reasoning concepts through interactions with computer animated agents playing the roles of a tutor and a peer learner. The animated agents and the subject engaged in interactive conversations where they collaboratively discussed the merits of sample research studies that were flawed in one critical aspect. For example, one hypothetical case study touted the merits of a diet pill, but was flawed because it did not include an appropriate control group. Confusion was induced by manipulating the information the subjects received so that the animated agents' sometimes disagreed with each other and expressed contradictory or incorrect information. The agents then asked subjects to decide which opinion had more scientific merit, thereby putting the subject in the hot-spot of having to make a decision with incomplete and sometimes contradictory information.

A feel-good brain chemical called dopamine has been linked to everything from laziness and creativity to impulsivity and a tendency to partake in one-night stands. Now, we can add sleep regulation to that list.

When dopamine latches onto its receptor in a special part of the brain, it seems to signal the body to "wake up" by turning down levels of the sleepiness hormone melatonin, the researchers found.

The first clue to this new discovery came when researchers noticed that dopamine receptor 4, a protein on the outside of certain cells that binds to dopamine, was active in the part of the brain called pineal gland.

This gland regulates our internal clock, known as our circadian rhythm, by releasing melatonin in response to light.

Interestingly, the presence of this dopamine receptor on pineal gland cells seemed to cycle with the time of the day - the receptor numbers were higher at night and lower during the day.