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"MID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. Researchers have long known that the "classical" language regions, like Broca's area and Wernicke's area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like "lavender," "cinnamon" and "soap," for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for "perfume" and "coffee," their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean "chair" and "key," this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like "a rough day" are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like "The singer had a velvet vo

"Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness. Those transformed states have traditionally been understood in transcendent terms, as something outside the world of physical measurement and objective evaluation. But over the past few years, researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with Tibetan monks have been able to translate those mental experiences into the scientific language of high-frequency gamma waves and brain synchrony, or coordination. And they have pinpointed the left prefrontal cortex, an area just behind the left forehead, as the place where brain activity associated with meditation is especially intense. "What we found is that the longtime practitioners showed brain activation on a scale we have never seen before," said Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the university's new $10 million W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior. "Their mental practice is having an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance." It demonstrates, he said, that the brain is capable of being trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine. Scientists used to believe the opposite -- that connections among brain nerve cells were fixed early in life and did not change in adulthood. But that assumption was disproved over the past decade with the help of advances in brain imaging and other techniques, and in its place, scientists have embraced the concept of ongoing brain development and "neuroplasticity." "

"You may think you decided to read this story -- but in fact, your brain made the decision long before you knew about it. In a study published Sunday in Nature Neuroscience, researchers using brain scanners could predict people's decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them. The decision studied -- whether to hit a button with one's left or right hand -- may not be representative of complicated choices that are more integrally tied to our sense of self-direction. Regardless, the findings raise profound questions about the nature of self and autonomy: How free is our will? Is conscious choice just an illusion? "Your decisions are strongly prepared by brain activity. By the time consciousness kicks in, most of the work has already been done," said study co-author John-Dylan Haynes, a Max Planck Institute neuroscientist. Haynes updated a classic experiment by the late Benjamin Libet, who showed that a brain region involved in coordinating motor activity fired a fraction of a second before test subjects chose to push a button. Later studies supported Libet's theory that subconscious activity preceded and determined conscious choice -- but none found such a vast gap between a decision and the experience of making it as Haynes' study has. In the seven seconds before Haynes' test subjects chose to push a button, activity shifted in their frontopolar cortex, a brain region associated with high-level planning. Soon afterwards, activity moved to the parietal cortex, a region of sensory integration. Haynes' team monitored these shifting neural patterns using a functional MRI machine. Taken together, the patterns consistently predicted whether test subjects eventually pushed a button with their left or right hand -- a choice that, to them, felt like the outcome of conscious deliberation. For those accustomed to thinking of themselves as having free will, the implications are far more unsettling than learning about the physiological basis

"Modern art is an explosion of colors, smooth lines, flat portraits - and it turns out, neuroscience. It also once triggered some strong psychology. A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public," the criticCamille Mauclair, said in outrage over a Paris showing of the artist Henri Matisse's vibrant works. His condemnation today seems more colorful than the paintings themselves, many now hanging in museums all over the world. What was really going on at the turn of the last century to excite such controversy? Brain researchers have increasingly turned their eyes on artists, in an effort to enrich our understanding of how we see art and of the time when paintings could shake society. "When we look at a picture and feel rewarded, we know something is occurring in our brain," says neuroscientist and artist Bevil Conway of Wellesley (Mass.) College. Conway and other neuroscientists, such as Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel, author of the just-released The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, represent the latest voices among brain researchers taking a look at art. "By closely examining artists' paintings and practices, we can discover hints to how the brain works, and achieve insight into the discoveries and inventions of artists and their impact on culture," Conway writes in the current Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, looking at color in the paintings of Matisse , Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet . Public domain Montross Gallery 1915 exhibition catalogue image of 'Gold Fish' by Henri Matisse. Color depends on more than the wavelength of light reaching your eye. Five decades ago, brain researchers thought only the cone-shaped "photoreceptor" cells in the retina determined what colors we see. But we now know that starting from the retina and proceeding through at least five brain regions, our perception of color is shaped not so much by the redness of the paint used to hang an apple from a tree, but

"A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis of long-term effects of violent video game play on the brain has found changes in brain regions associated with cognitive function and emotional control in young adult men after one week of game play. The results of the study were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The controversy over whether or not violent video games are potentially harmful to users has raged for many years, making it as far as the Supreme Court in 2010. But there has been little scientific evidence demonstrating that the games have a prolonged negative neurological effect. "For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home," said Yang Wang, M.D., assistant research professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis. "These brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior." For the study, 22 healthy adult males, age 18 to 29, with low past exposure to violent video games were randomly assigned to two groups of 11. Members of the first group were instructed to play a shooting video game for 10 hours at home for one week and refrain from playing the following week. The second group did not play a violent video game at all during the two-week period. Each of the 22 men underwent fMRI at the beginning of the study, with follow-up exams at one and two weeks. During fMRI, the participants completed an emotional interference task, pressing buttons according to the color of visually presented words. Words indicating violent actions were interspersed among nonviolent action words. In addition, the participants completed a cognitive inhibition counting task. The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members s

"As neurologists, psychologists and biologists have zeroed in more and more precisely on the physical causes of mental disorders, they have found themselves addressing a much deeper mystery, a set of interrelated conundrums probably as old as humanity: What, precisely, is the mind, the elusive entity where intelligence, decision making, perception, awareness and sense of self reside? Where is it located? How does it work? Does it arise from purely physical processes-pulses of electricity zapping from brain cell to brain cell, helped along their way by myriad complex chemicals? Or is it something beyond the merely physical-something ethereal that might be close to the spiritual concept of the soul? Great thinkers have had no shortage of ideas on the subject. Plato was convinced that the mind must be located inside the head, because the head is shaped more or less like a sphere, his idea of the highest geometrical form. Aristotle insisted that the mind was in the heart. His reasoning: warmth implies vitality; the blood is warm; the heart pumps the blood. By the Middle Ages, though, pretty much everyone agreed that the mind arose from the brain -- but still had no clear idea how it arose. Finally, in the 17th century, the French philosopher Rena Descartes declared that the mind, while it might live in the brain, was a nonmaterial thing, entirely separate from the physical tissues found inside the head. Furthermore, said Descartes in one of history's most memorable sound bites, "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). His point: consciousness is the only sure evidence that we actually exist. Until just a few years ago, unraveling the relationship of mind and brain was beyond the realm of observation and experimentation. But science has finally begun to catch up with philosophy. Using sensitive electrodes inserted deep into the gray matter of test animals, researchers have watched vision as it percolates inward from the eye's retina to the inner brain. Powerful te

"The new technology is, to its critics, Orwellian. Others view it as a silver bullet against terrorism that could render waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods obsolete. Some scientists predict the end of lying as we know it. Now, well before any consensus on the technology's readiness, India has become the first country to convict someone of a crime relying on evidence from this controversial machine: a brain scanner that produces images of the human mind in action and is said to reveal signs that a suspect remembers details of the crime in question. For years, scientists have peered into the brain and sought to identify deception. They have shot infrared beams through liars' heads, placed them in giant magnetic resonance imaging machines and used scanners to track their eyeballs. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has plowed money into brain-based lie detection in the hope of producing more fruitful counterterrorism investigations. The technologies, generally regarded as promising but unproved, have yet to be widely accepted as evidence - except in India, where in recent years judges have begun to admit brain scans. But it was only in June, in a murder case in Pune, in Maharashtra State, that a judge explicitly cited a scan as proof that the suspect's brain held "experiential knowledge" about the crime that only the killer could possess, sentencing her to life in prison."

"Talking about ourselves-whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter-triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money, researchers reported Monday. About 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think. Now, through five brain imaging and behavioral experiments, Harvard University neuroscientists have uncovered the reason: It feels so rewarding, at the level of brain cells and synapses, that we can't help sharing our thoughts. Bragging gives the same sensation of pleasure as food and money. The same areas of the brain are activated, scans show. "Self-disclosure is extra rewarding," said Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir, who conducted the experiments with Harvard colleague Jason Mitchell. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "People were even willing to forgo money in order to talk about themselves," Ms. Tamir said. To assess people's inclination for what the researchers call "self disclosure," they conducted laboratory tests to see whether people placed an unusually high value on the opportunity to share their thoughts and feelings. They also monitored brain activity among some volunteers to see what parts of the brain were most excited when people talked about themselves as opposed to other people. The dozens of volunteers were mostly Americans who lived near the university. In several tests, they offered the volunteers money if they chose to answer questions about other people, such as President Obama, rather than about themselves, paying out on a sliding scale of up to four cents. Questions involved casual matters such as whether someone enjoyed snowboarding or liked mushrooms on a pizza. Other queries involved personality traits, such as intelligence, curiosity or aggression."

"Jerome Kagan's "Aha!" moment came with Baby 19. It was 1989, and Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, had just begun a major longitudinal study of temperament and its effects. Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. Eager to take a peek at the early results, he grabbed the videotapes of the first babies in the study, looking for the irritable behavior he would later call high-reactive. Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Related Letters: The Anxious Mind (October 18, 2009) Health Guide: Anxiety Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Enlarge This Image Mickey Duzyj Readers' Comments Readers shared their thoughts on this article. Read All Comments (191) » No high-reactors among the first 18. They gazed calmly at things that were unfamiliar. But the 19th baby was different. She was distressed by novelty - new sounds, new voices, new toys, new smells - and showed it by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying. Here was what Kagan was looking for but was not sure he would find: a baby who essentially fell apart when exposed to anything new. Baby 19 grew up true to her temperament. This past summer, Kagan showed me a video of her from 2004, when she was 15. We sat in a screening room in Harvard's William James Hall - a building named, coincidentally, for the 19th-century psychologist who described his own struggles with anxiety as "a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach ... a sense of the insecurity of life." Kagan is elfin and spry, ba

"SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child's academic and intellectual development. They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual's brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn't so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins - one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin m

"The scientists exchanged one last look and held their breath. Everything was ready. The electrode was in place, threaded between the two hemispheres of a living cat's brain; the instruments were tuned to pick up the chatter passing from one half to the other. The only thing left was to listen for that electronic whisper, the brain's own internal code. The amplifier hissed - the three scientists expectantly leaning closer - and out it came, loud and clear. "We all live in a yellow submarine, yellow submarine, yellow submarine ...." "The Beatles' song! We somehow picked up the frequency of a radio station," recalled Michael S. Gazzaniga, chuckling at the 45-year-old memory. "The brain's secret code. Yeah, right!" Dr. Gazzaniga, 71, now a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is best known for a dazzling series of studies that revealed the brain's split personality, the division of labor between its left and right hemispheres. But he is perhaps next best known for telling stories, many of them about blown experiments, dumb questions and other blunders during his nearly half-century career at the top of his field. "

"Why do we sleep? We spend a third of our lives doing so, and all known animals with a nervous system either sleep, or show some kind of related behaviour. But scientists still don't know what the point of it is. There are plenty of theories. Some researchers argue that sleep has no specific function, but rather serves as evolution's way of keeping us inactive, to save energy and keep us safely tucked away at those times of day when there's not much point being awake. On this view, sleep is like hibernation in bears, or even autumn leaf fall in trees. But others argue that sleep has a restorative function-something about animal biology means that we need sleep to survive. This seems like common sense. Going without sleep feels bad, after all, and prolonged sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture. We also know that in severe cases it can lead to mental disturbances, hallucinations and, in some laboratory animals, eventually death. Waking up after a good night's sleep, you feel restored, and many studies have shown the benefits of sleep for learning, memory, and cognition. Yet if sleep is beneficial, what is the mechanism? Recently, some neuroscientists have proposed that the function of sleep is to reorganize connections and "prune" synapses-the connections between brain cells. Last year, one group of researchers, led by Gordon Wang of Stanford University reviewed the evidence for this idea in a paper called Synaptic plasticity in sleep: learning, homeostasis and disease."

"A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found. Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability. The scandal, involving about a decade of work, is the latest in a string of embarrassments in a field that critics and statisticians say badly needs to overhaul how it treats research results. In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged. "The big problem is that the culture is such that researchers spin their work in a way that tells a prettier story than what they really found," said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "It's almost like everyone is on steroids, and to compete you have to take steroids as well." "