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Bilingualism comes naturally to our brains


New York University
Wed, 03 Nov 2021 03:19 UTC
Brain & Bilingualism
© Elen11/Getty Images
The brain uses a shared mechanism for combining words from a single language and for combining words from two different languages, indicating that language switching is natural for those who are bilingual.

The brain uses a shared mechanism for combining words from a single language and for combining words from two different languages, a team of neuroscientists has discovered. Its findings indicate that language switching is natural for those who are bilingual because the brain has a mechanism that does not detect that the language has switched, allowing for a seamless transition in comprehending more than one language at once.

"Our brains are capable of engaging in multiple languages," explains Sarah Phillips, a New York University doctoral candidate and the lead author of the paper, which appears in the journal eNeuro. "Languages may differ in what sounds they use and how they organize words to form sentences. However, all languages involve the process of combining words to express complex thoughts."

"Bilinguals show a fascinating version of this process--their brains readily combine words from different languages together, much like when combining words from the same language," adds Liina Pylkkänen, a professor in NYU's Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper.

An estimated 60 million in the U.S. use two or more languages, according to the U.S. Census. However, despite the widespread nature of bi- and multilingualism, domestically and globally, the neurological mechanisms used to understand and produce more than one language are not well understood.
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MindMatters: The Molecule of More: The Strange Psychology of Dopamine

Adam Daniels, Elan Martin, Harrison Koehli
Sott.net
Sat, 06 Nov 2021 00:00 UTC
molecule more
When is a stop sign just a stop sign, and not a hidden message from your mother? Why are we excited about new things, only to become bored with them when the novelty wears off? This week on MindMatters we discuss the book The Molecule of More by Dr. Daniel Lieberman and Michael E. Long. During the discussion we cover the fine line between creativity and madness, how it is that most of what we tell ourselves about our behavior is post-hoc narrative creation, and more. Join us as we take a closer look at dopamine, a chemical that has a strong influence over our behavior and is responsible for much of our modern world.


Running Time: 01:10:48

Download: MP3 — 64.8 MB


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Empathy is the most important leadership skill according to research

Tracy Brower
Forbes
Sun, 19 Sep 2021 18:00 UTC
empathy
Empathy has always been a critical skill for leaders, but it is taking on a new level of meaning and priority. Far from a soft approach it can drive significant business results.

You always knew demonstrating empathy is positive for people, but new research demonstrates its importance for everything from innovation to retention. Great leadership requires a fine mix of all kinds of skills to create the conditions for engagement, happiness and performance, and empathy tops the list of what leaders must get right.

The Effects of Stress

The reason empathy is so necessary is that people are experiencing multiple kinds of stress, and data suggests it is affected by the pandemic — and the ways our lives and our work have been turned upside down.
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SOTT Focus: MindMatters: Gurdjieff, Fourth Way, and Solioonensius in the New Normal - with Alan Francis

Harrison Koehli and Elan Martin
Sott.net
Wed, 20 Oct 2021 00:00 UTC
alan francis
Gurdjieff escaped the Russian Empire during the outbreak of mass madness otherwise known as the Great Russian Revolution. He lived and taught in France during the Nazi occupation. But the connection between Gurdjieff, the Fourth Way, and totalitarianism isn't much discussed, so on this episode of MindMatters we welcome back Alan Francis of the International School of the Fourth Way to discuss the place and function of the Work in the current rumblings of mass madness.

Alan stresses the importance of maintaining a personal inner presence, working with others and for a larger aim. Large social projects inevitably devolve - often to mass murder and injustice. But meaningful change can only come from the individual. Alan also discusses fear - its purpose and and how to manage it - the opportunities offered by the present times for self-development, and updates us on his progress opening a Fourth Way school in Spain (click here to support his work), as well as his upcoming book.

Running Time: 01:29:36

Download: MP3 — 82 MB


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Our brains have a 'fingerprint' too

Valérie Geneux
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Mon, 18 Oct 2021 17:40 UTC
An EPFL scientist has pinpointed the signs of brain activity that make up our brain fingerprint, which - like our regular fingerprint - is unique.
Dimitri Van De Ville and Enrico Amico

"I think about it every day and dream about it at night. It's been my whole life for five years now," says Enrico Amico, a scientist and SNSF Ambizione Fellow at EPFL's Medical Image Processing Laboratory and the EPFL Center for Neuroprosthetics. He's talking about his research on the human brain in general, and on brain fingerprints in particular. He learned that every one of us has a brain "fingerprint" and that this fingerprint constantly changes in time. His findings have just been published in Science Advances.
"My research examines networks and connections within the brain, and especially the links between the different areas, in order to gain greater insight into how things work," says Amico. "We do this largely using MRI scans, which measure brain activity over a given time period." His research group processes the scans to generate graphs, represented as colorful matrices, that summarize a subject's brain activity. This type of modeling technique is known in scientific circles as network neuroscience or brain connectomics. "All the information we need is in these graphs, that are commonly known as "functional brain connectomes". The connectome is a map of the neural network. They inform us about what subjects were doing during their MRI scan - if they were resting or performing some other tasks, for example. Our connectomes change based on what activity was being carried out and what parts of the brain were being used," says Amico.
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Adults who stutter stop if they think no one is listening - study

David Nield
Science Alert
Sun, 10 Oct 2021 12:00 UTC
stage perform
© Jacobs Stock Photography Ltd/DigitalVision/Getty Images
More than 70 million people worldwide are thought to have some kind of stuttering speech impediment - including the current President of the United States - and experts are still continuing to learn more about the condition and what causes it.


Comment: Biden's case is quite different, and the evidence shows that he's probably suffering from dementia.


Now a new study has revealed something that may give us a big clue into why stuttering happens and how we can treat it: When adults who stutter are on their own and think no one is listening, their stutter suddenly goes away.

And it seems to be that perception of having a listener that's key. What's important about this particular piece of research is that the study participants were convinced that no one was around to hear what they were saying, providing solid scientific evidence for how different scenarios affect the condition.

Comment: See also: Social contagion: A mysterious spike in Tourette's leads back to YouTube star

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Highly processed foods harm memory in the aging brain

Emily Caldwell
The Ohio State University
Thu, 14 Oct 2021 20:44 UTC
Processed Food
© ShutterstockThe study diet mimicked ready-to-eat human foods that are often packaged for long shelf lives, such as salty snacks, frozen entrees and deli meats containing preservatives.
Four weeks on a diet of highly processed food led to a strong inflammatory response in the brains of aging rats that was accompanied by behavioral signs of memory loss, a new study has found.

Researchers also found that supplementing the processed diet with the omega-3 fatty acid DHA prevented memory problems and reduced the inflammatory effects almost entirely in older rats.

Neuroinflammation and cognitive problems were not detected in young adult rats that ate the processed diet.

The study diet mimicked ready-to-eat human foods that are often packaged for long shelf lives, such as potato chips and other snacks, frozen entrees like pasta dishes and pizzas, and deli meats containing preservatives.

Highly processed diets are also associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes, suggesting older consumers might want to scale back on convenience foods and add foods rich in DHA, such as salmon, to their diets, researchers say - especially considering harm to the aged brain in this study was evident in only four weeks.

"The fact we're seeing these effects so quickly is a little bit alarming," said senior study author Ruth Barrientos, an investigator in The Ohio State University Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research and associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral health.

"These findings indicate that consumption of a processed diet can produce significant and abrupt memory deficits - and in the aging population, rapid memory decline has a greater likelihood of progressing into neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. By being aware of this, maybe we can limit processed foods in our diets and increase consumption of foods that are rich in the omega-3 fatty acid DHA to either prevent or slow that progression."

The research is published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.
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Hair analysis shows meditation training reduces long-term stress


Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Fri, 08 Oct 2021 21:42 UTC
A study provides the first objective evidence that mental training reduces physical signs of long periods of stress.
Meditation
© ShutterstockAfter six months of meditation training, the amount of cortisol in the subjects’ hair had decreased significantly, on average by 25 percent.
Mental training that promotes skills such as mindfulness, gratitude or compassion reduces the concentration of the stress hormone cortisol in hair. This is what scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Social Neuroscience Research Group of the Max Planck Society in Berlin have found out. The amount of cortisol in hair provides information about how much a person is burdened by persistent stress. Earlier positive training effects had been shown in acutely stressful situations or on individual days - or were based on study participants' self-reports.

According to a study by the Techniker Krankenkasse, 23 percent of people in Germany frequently suffer from stress. This condition not only puts a strain on the well-being of those affected, but it is also linked to a number of physiological diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and psychological disorders such as depression, one of the world's leading causes of disease burden (Global Burden of Disease Study, 2017).

Therefore, effective methods are being sought to reduce everyday stress in the long term. One promising option is mindfulness training, in which participants train their cognitive and social skills, including attention, gratitude and compassion, through various meditation and behavioural exercises. Various studies have already shown that even healthy people feel less stressed after a typical eight-week training programme. Until now, however, it has been unclear how much the training actually contributes to reducing the constant burden of everyday stress. The problem with many previous studies on chronic stress is that the study participants were usually asked to self-assess their stress levels after the training. However, this self-reporting by means of questionnaires could have distorted the effects and made the results appear more positive than they actually were.

Comment:

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Logic of the body's 'second brain'

Matt Davenport
Michigan State University
Fri, 01 Oct 2021 17:45 UTC
Spartans are discovering new science in the gut and, potentially, new leads on how to treat irritable bowel syndrome and other disorders.
Glial Cells
© Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci./Gulbransen LabA network of glial cells, the logic gates of the gut’s nervous system, are seen in this micrograph. The cells — the dark orbs enveloped in gray — have been colorized according to how they respond to a chemical signal.
Researchers at Michigan State University have made a surprising discovery about the human gut's enteric nervous system that itself is filled with surprising facts. For starters, there's the fact that this "second brain" exists at all.

"Most people don't even know that they have this in their guts," said Brian Gulbransen, an MSU Foundation Professor in the College of Natural Science's Department of Physiology.

Beyond that, the enteric nervous system is remarkably independent: Intestines could carry out many of their regular duties even if they somehow became disconnected from the central nervous system. And the number of specialized nervous system cells, namely neurons and glia, that live in a person's gut is roughly equivalent to the number found in a cat's brain.

"It's like this second brain in our gut," Gulbransen said. "It's an extensive network of neurons and glia that line our intestines."
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How therapy, not pills effectively treats back pain

Lisa Marshall
University of Colorado Boulder
Wed, 29 Sep 2021 17:52 UTC
Researchers
© University of Colorado BoulderResearchers at the Intermountain Neuroimaging Consortium on the CU Boulder campus watch as a subject undergoes an fMRI bran scan. New research shows a psychological therapy can not only provide lasting relief from chronic pain but may allso influence brain regions related to pain generation.
As many as one in five Americans suffer from chronic pain, an often intractable problem that costs the country more than $600 billion in treatments and lost work-time and has helped fuel a deadly opioid epidemic.

But new CU Boulder research, published today in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, provides some of the strongest evidence yet that a non-drug, psychological treatment can provide potent and durable relief.

The study found that two-thirds of chronic back pain patients who underwent a four-week psychological treatment called Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) were pain-free or nearly pain-free post-treatment. And most maintained relief for one year. They also showed changes in pain-generating brain regions after therapy.

"For a long time we have thought that chronic pain is due primarily to problems in the body, and most treatments to date have targeted that," said lead author Yoni Ashar, who conducted the study while earning his PhD in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU Boulder. "This treatment is based on the premise that the brain can generate pain in the absence of injury or after an injury has healed, and that people can unlearn that pain. Our study shows it works."
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