Evolution of the Brain

Melatonin,Thank you for your comments. How does creativity and the brain function. As I mentioned, a number of the women in my family (apart from my mother) were extremely creative, but none the less eccentric. My grandmother won a scholarship at the age of 18 years to study art in Italy - this would have been in the turn of the 19th/ 20th century - an unheard of achievement for a woman in this period. Her father a typical Vicorian, refused to let her go. She and her sister were both very gifted, but seemed quite unconscious of social mores. My grandmother attacked a policemen with an umbrella, resulting in her being placed in a mental institution and chained to a bed. This would have been about late 1920's. After six months they released her saying they could find no mental illness. She must have had ability of great self-control as she was well aware of her situation. During her time in the asylum, she said that she lived entirely in the moment, e.g when brushing her hair she was conscious of every stroke she made. Yet she did not know IF, OR WHEN she would be released. This would, I think, be enough to cause some mental disturbance in a normal person. Nonetheless, when released she resumed her eccentric ways. She would make very inappropriate comments in public; walking in the street she would attack any dog that came at her by pushing her umbrella (her obvious choice of weapon) down its throat. She had no hesitation in making very public scenes, albeit if just being a "drama queen" She was fastidiously clean, but her "get-up" could be quite unnerving. My mother refused to be go out in public with her. My grandmother was completely insensitive to other's feelings. How does this fit with a very creative intelligence. I always thought that creativity in the arts would make a person more perceptive to those around them. Is creativity and intelligence two different things. Incidentally, all these examples I have presented occurred on one side of my family, my maternal, I have no idea what my father's side were like as they all perished, including him, during the war. The obvious "dottiness" that ran though my maternal side, made me very hesitant of having children. However, can you explain creativity and the brain, and whether creativity is also a part of the scientific mind. Personally, I would have thought creativity in science a necessity.

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Lucy

I have no doubt that creativity is required in science. Scientists need to make links between concepts and data that may be fairly distant and seem pretty unrelated. Divergent thinking is seen as a trait of creativity and such approaches ('thinking out the box') can only be helpful in such circumtances. Pure logical approaches are fairly limited, but scientists also need to use a logical approach, so pure divergent thinking wouldn't be ideal either.Science is really just a formalised approach to assessing natural phenomena, there is no limit to what a scientific mind can create to explain phenomena, but it is constrained by evidence, logic, and method. Creativity would be useful in developing new methods to test phenomena of interest and new theories to explain evidence we have and make future predictions.Creativity is a nebulous concept and can't be confined to one area, you can have musical, visual, verbal, numerical, and why not scientific etc, it most certainly isn't a homogenous concept.But on the neuro evidence, I'll have a look for some articles, but I would suggest that creativity would need efficient linking between functional areas of the brain, maybe the emotional and more cognitive areas of the brain. There is a school of thought in neuropsych that the right hemisphere is predominately emotional and the left, more spatial/logical. I'm a bit busy tonight though, so I'll have a gander through some lit. for you tomorrow.But as usual, that would be all a bit simplistic. we do know that lesions to areas in right hemisphere do tend to result in emotional deficits (for example, damage to L. hemi language areas cause pure verbal deficits; damage to the corresponding R. Hemi language areas can result in emotional language issues - prosody etc.).Edited by melatonin, : spelling

Saw an interesting doco on TV years ago where a lawyer sustained damage to his Broka`s area. When confronted with a law book after recovery, he said he knew what the words meant, but couldn`t pronounce them. One word i.e. 'tort' was shown to him and the explanation given. He reflected for a moment and said 'I recognise the word , but that`s not the meaning'. However he couldn`t dig up his own meaning. So I guess we must retain a dictionary of sorts in one section and a corresponding explanation elsewhere. Too simplistic?

Nighttrain,Would this be a form of aphasia?

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Lucy

Yup, that Aphasia. There's Broca's and wernicke forms of aphasia but the conditions are separated into a collection of disorders depending on lesion area and symptomology. Broca's lesions usually results in non-fluent aphasia, language output is sparse but comprehension spared. Whereas, Wernicke lesions result in fluent aphasia, output at the surface sounds good, but tends to lack content. So Broca' lesions are motor cortex related and suggest production issues, wernicke's close to secondary auditory cortex and suggest comprehension issues.I think they show differences in reading/writing as well, not sure, should re-read all the stuff. I did a masters in clinical neuro but it's a few years since, we had behavioural neurology case studies, so I've seen a range of lesion patients, agnosics to Balint's syndrome. I tend to just see orbitofrontal & emotion-related lesion patients now, much more interesting. Just saw a new one yesterday.Theories of language suggest phonologic, lexical, and sematic processing. Phonologic is breaking language into units, lexical is related to matching of acoustic units to memory (a sort of word library, lexical deficits show by difficulty in differentiating words and non-words). Semantic is obviously involved in processing word meaning.But I'm sure if you asked someone researching psycholinguistics on the above, they'd tell you that is very simplistic, haha. I think that's close to the modern theory though.ABE: what I wanted to add is that, as I mentioned, if the lesions are in the non-dominant hemi (right for right handers) then we see a similar result for emotional language - broca = prosody production (lack of emotion inflection); wernicke = prosody comprehension. And like aphasia, there are a collection of disorders depending on lesion site.Quite interesting. I prefer the emotion stuff as you can tell...Edited by melatonin, : No reason given.Edited by melatonin, : No reason given.

Melatonin,I studied linguistics some time ago - must revisit my texts. However, I understand that there is considerable research into the evolution of language, and it is "still out" as to when languge first developed. I believe that there is some evidence in study of the evolutionary development of the brain for physiological and anatomic preconditions for language development.Roger Sperry argued that split-brain patients have two minds - surgery results in two separate spheres of consciousness - each hemisphere completely outside the realm of experience of the other hemisphere.
Sir John Eccles disagreed - indeed did not think that the right hemisphere can think, but is mere consciousness which is shared by all animals. He identifies the human aspect of human nature in the left hemisphere. What is your opinion?Melantonin, I am very interested in your particular specialty - can you enlarge on it?

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Lucy

My major focus is affective neuroscience (emotion), from a psychology viewpoint. But my research is tending towards social neuroscience at the moment. The patients I am particularly interested in are orbitofrontal and associated lesions - they show deficits in social cognition, emotion-based learning, confabulation (I have seen one patient who believes he can fly of helicopter and uses it to spray the fields he works on - he's a farm-hand and wanted to fly 'copters as a kid).The archetypal OMPFC patient was Phineas Gage. If you read Damasio's book, 'descartes error', it would give an outline of the sort of deficits and area I'm interested in, saying that, I'm no great fan of damasio's somatic marker hypothesis.But in short, emotion is essential for decision-making and social judgement - particualrly in situations of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Individuals with lesions of emotion-related areas show deficits in these processes (poor social judgement, poor decision-making etc). For a long-time it was thought emotion was a purely disruptive phenomena for rational processes, now we know it actually aids rational thought in some circumstances.But, I also study the normal population, and am focusing on the emotional components of prejudice in this case - hoping to show that pre-exisiting affective bias can disrupt evidence-based emotional learning (e.g. the pre-exisiting belief/bias disrupts new learning - it does, just cleaning up a few things at the moment). We could say we see it on this forum, haha. Drew Weston has some interesting stuff in this area, apparently an individual's political bias will affect information processing, a sort of confirmation bias, this effect is orbito-frontal PFC mediated - emotion can overcome fact and rational thought as well.ABE: found a linky to an outline by Michael Shermer of Drew's study...We're Sorry - Scientific AmericanEdited by melatonin, : typosEdited by melatonin, : added link

Melatonin,Your research sounds extremely interesting. I knew of one case, where a man thought he had glass legs, therefore, wouldn't stand.It would appear you may have insight into my grandmother and his sister's eccentricities. As I mentioned, they were very artistic, great verbal skills, no recognition of social mores (I've given you the example of my grandmother), but could when necessary, exert extreme self control (as her time in the asylum demonstrates). Both these women were extremely clever with money - and not only from a purely practical point of view. In my grandmother's later years (her mid 70's) she took to going to the races. She wouldn't have known one end of a horse from another, but just by analysing form and history, was able to pick out winners. She always came away with more money than she had left with. But her bets were very small, never large amounts, she was cautious and not a gambler in the usual sense. She was also a secretive person, distrusting of others and family members, - I suspect that she had a form of paranoia. My grandmother was also overly dramatic about any incident. What would you make of this type of personality? Going back as far as I can, it seems the whole family were completely dysfunctional, albeit in different way.Thanks for the link. I will read it asap.There are quite a lot of questions I have regarding evolution of the brain (unrelated to family you will be glad to know). But I am just curious about the above.

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Lucy

Melatonin,Regarding your research into pre-existing bias. Do you have an age range by which time bias is firmly established. I found that young university students were fairly open to new ideas, especially those they may not have embraced growing up in certain families. I would imagine that pre-existing bias would determine one's politics. It is indeed grim if bias cannot be overcome by informed debate or logic. If a certain bias is demonstrated at a young age, does it mean that it comes from the environment only, or is it solely in response to an individual's mental processes - strikes a responsive chord so to speak, or both. I would have thought there would be a predisposing mentality before bias could become established. Speaking as a novice, I hope you can understand what I am getting at. Is there no way of removing bias once developed. I am thinking of atheists who become religious. I believe in WW I, this was referred to as "Trench" conversion, which was obviously the result of extreme stress.

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Lucy

Answering the previous post, to get any real insight into an individual, you'd really need to see them, and I'm not a clinical expert. I would tend to look at the poor social skills as indicative of some form of emotional dysfuntion. It could well be of either extreme - people suffering histrionic personality disorder and related conditions show difficulties in social skills and so do people with schizotypy, autistic spectrum, bipolar etc. So it would be hard to say. All could be creative and show high levels of IQ.I would think that the younger a person is, the more open to new ideas and conflicting information they are, as the associations would be fairly weak. In the prejudice area, implicit associations between groups and 'affective labels' are forming continuously. Children do easily separate into in- and out-groups, once achieved affective labels become associated with these groups. Affective labels/bias can be implicit (unconscious) and/or explicit (conscious). Once formed, these affective associations will mediate behaviour. Challenging explicit pre-existing beliefs is associated with cognitive dissonance (a negative emotion) and so we see the confirmation bias processes to shore up the favoured belief. I'm more interested in the more subtle implicit processes, below the level of consciousness.We tend to see these processes as social learning but embedded in normal psychological processes. Explicit pre-exisitng biases can readily be altered but only if the individual is open to accepting the evidence and information that challenges their prior belief - as Drew's study shows, there are processes that enable one to bias processing, usually emotional processes. But that would still leave the implicit processes.At the implicit level, we would expect exposure to positive associations to very slowly alter pre-existing bias, at this point, my studies show they are very difficult to overcome, they are supposedly amygdala-mediated and therefore relatively indelible (low neural plasticity), major positive reinforcement is needed in most cases (evidence from conditioning experiments). Orbitofrontal processes can mediate much faster neural plasticity (it's a major function - reversal learning).

Melatonin,Once again I thank you. I have had the extraordinary experience of an extremely anti-semitic blogger on another site. His positions are totally concrete in his mind, and he does not see his comments as antisemitic, just fact. For example he states that we were not fighting the nazis during WWII, but this is a vicious slur put out by the peoples of David. To me this is beyond being irrational, or obsessional. Other bloggers have tried to reason with him, but he is beyond any sense in this matter. Yet on other matters he is quite coherent. It is just not bias or prejudice, but goes much deeper. How would you analyse such a personality.

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Lucy

I'm not sure that Greenwald has created one, but I would make him complete an Implicit Association Test (IAT) that measures the differences between his implicit associations of the jewish and his own racial group. Although the test is not perfect at the individual level, it can make one question their own mind-set, especially if he suggests he holds no form of prejudice.You can find them on the harvard IAT website and participate in their experiments.If I was of the psychoanalytic tendency, I would question him on whether he had a negative experience with a jewish person during his formative years Edited by melatonin, : No reason given.

Hi, Mel, might as well pump you while the insights are free. Can you give us a clinical definition of delusion? What would separate 'normal' people with strongly-held views from delusional folk? How do you rate hypnosis as a tool of psychology? Does it help effect a lasting 'cure'? Does selective breeding (say academics marrying)lead to more intelligent offspring and possibly point out a natural selection in evolution of the brain. Disregard my questions if they take up too much of your time.

After Nighttrain's questions have been answered, could one of you experts tell me if there is any difference in the brains of orangutan (from Malaysia), gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos.Also from which species did humans evolve? Also is the evidence in one site only in Africa. How long ago do indications suggest that evolution had taken place, and what was the significant factor showing evolution had occurred.

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Lucy

haha, well, I'll try to answer, but remember we do become quite specialised in research.Well, a delusion is a false belief. A belief held contrary to the evidence. Clinically, it can be seen in people with emotional deficits and it can be associated with orbitofrontal disorders Schizophrenics, anosognosics, frontal patients all can hold obvious delusions. However, normal people also confabulate (what we generally call it), especially when they have holes in memory (but it's considered to be more than a memory disorder). There was a good summary of research in the new scientist a couple of weeks back. But Oliver Sack's book is a good read ('the man who mistook his wife for a hat').It's seen as a dysfunion of reality monitoring and an inability to suppress irrelevant memories (Armin Schnider). But in many cases, the false belief seems to have an emotional component. For example, anosognosics are stroke patients who deny their disability and can come up with elaborate expalanations as to why the can't move their arm etc (wishful-thinking?). Well that's a line of thought of some I know with psychoanalytic tendencies.Hmm, hypnosis, not my area at all. I tend to fall towards the the suggestability/social ideas, i.e. not a true altered state of consciousness.Academics and breeding intelligence, I think it would be hard to pull apart the environmental and heritable components.Edited by melatonin, : No reason given.Edited by melatonin, : added stuff