V. S. Ramachandran

I’ve mentioned V. S. Ramachandran before when noting some data points about Mirror Neurons. He is a prolific speaker, researcher and writer, and on the Advisory Board of Scientific American MIND, a magazine that seeks to inform while making emerging brain science accesible.

Ramachandran and his wife, Diane Rogers-Ramachandran, write Illusions, a regular column for Scientific American Mind. Their August/September 2007 column, It’s All Done with Mirrors, discusses how they made use of a mirror box to help people finally disengage from phantom limbs – limbs that have been amputated but still felt paralyzed and painful – even though the individual logically knew that the limb was no longer attached.

I’ve also mentioned TED Talks before (ah, the interconnectedness of it all) and in this TED Talk, Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind, he explains three curious brain mashups, including phamtom limbs, prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces), and synesthesia (where senses merge together, for example, seeing the number six as vivid blue).

If you thought the amygdala was a small component of the brain, now you can learn about the insula, mentioned several times by Ramachandran in his TED Talk. The insula and amygdala communicate with one another in the process of dealing with understanding your own emotions. In February, 2007, the New York Times talked up the insula in the article A Small Part of the Brain, and Its Profound Effects. (Stick with it till the advert passes.)

Creativity was a tag earlier this year in the March, 2007 TED Talks, and Ramachandran concluded his talk with a tidbit involving creativity, synesthesia, metaphor, and how artists, poets and musicians see the world. Don’t take my word for it – go listen to his talk!

Mirror Neurons: A Distillation of NOVA

The discovery of mirror neurons began with monkeys being studied in Italy. Neuroscientists, among them Daniel Glaser of University College London, noticed that the same neurons (the motor neurons) that fired in the monkey’s brain when the monkey reached for a peanut, also fired when the monkey saw someone else reach for that peanut. Among the conclusions was that “watching somebody do something is just like doing it yourself”. These neurons, which are on both sides of the brain, came to be called mirror neurons due to the brain mirroring what it was seeing.

Now, if you think about one way that people learn, especially babies and children, they do it by mimicking what they see and hear. That is how humans transfer language, kids pick up the motions of sports, dance steps are learned, and we wince or cry or laugh or smile upon watching the ouches, hurts, humor and joy experienced by others.

Wait a minute, how did an emotional component creep into the idea of mirror neurons!

UCLA researcher Marco Iacobini thinks that these mirror neurons impact our empathetic system; they are what lets us feel what others feel, and allows us to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. “Mirror neurons can send messages to the limbic or emotional system in our brains.”

Think about how you react to movies you see or books you read or sports teams you follow, or news your friends share with you. Something in most of our brains allows us to feel emotion without actually experiencing the event that leads to the emotion. Whoa.

Check out the Jaunary, 2005 NOVA Science NOW episode about Mirror Neurons for more information. I guarantee it will entertain and illuminate.

Also check out Your Amazing Brain, a site where you can “Explore your brain, take part in real-life experiments and test yourself with our games, illusions and brain-benders.” This site hosts the page referenced above in the link for Daniel Glaser.

Emotions

Until I began blogging about the brain, it never occurred to me to think rationally about emotions as a chemical response to an external stimulus. Rather, emotions were a heartfelt, for better or worse, feel-it-in-your gut experience. Now I know that the amygdala plays a huge role in monitoring emotions.

I think of the amygdala and its cohorts, the hippocampus and hypothalamus, as gatekeepers to emotional stability. You may recall that the hippocampus handles factual information, while the hypothalamus monitors how your body is doing internally and directs the pituitary gland to release hormones on the basis of functions such as body temperature, appetite, and sexual functioning; this last function surely a cause for many emotions.

The purpose of this next activity is twofold. The first is to bring home the role of emotions in a person’s ability to focus, concentrate and function. The second is to highlight that not everyone learns best from reading text. While the words (see the full size text here) convey more information, the movie Emotions in the brain, from The Secret Life of the Brain makes the point quite visually. Which works best for you?

This is the eleventh of about twenty or fewer posts, and for further information about this series please read Closings and Openings. As you follow the development of this activity, please feel free to chime in with suggestions or questions!

Amygdala – Small on Size, Big on Function

The amygdala deals with our emotions, helps process our memories, and gets totally absorbed in managing our response to fear and stress. Combined, these are biggies, so the hippocampus and hypothalamus chime in with some assistance.

We all have, built-in from birth, this automatic response system that triggers a fight or flight reaction based upon an event. The amygdala’s job is to determine how to respond to a “wow” type of event, be it an emergency or something that simply startles you, or indeed any type of event that produces an emotional response. In so responding the amygdala causes the release of neurohormones such as adrenaline and cortisol.

You can read more about The Autonomic Nervous System at Neuroscience for Kids. Jim Phelps, on his PsychEducation.org site, provides an explanation of fear and the amygdala from a psychological perspective, and includes several detailed diagrams and images. Lastly, especially if you are a visual learner, see what the Amygdala is up to in this animated opening page for Joseph LeDoux’s Laboratory site, sponsored by the Center for Neural Science at New York University.

In addition to interpreting incoming sensory information, the amygdala is involved with processing memory, particularly memories with emotional impact. Given how intense emotions can be, perhaps you can understand why memories tagged with emotions would be among the strongest memories we have. However, if you get stressed over something, the stress response may actually make it more difficult for you to recall a specific memory by inhibiting your ability to think clearly. The interplay between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex is such that the amygdala may respond before the thinking part of your brain has an opportunity to compose a response. The result can range from a lifesaving solution to a red-faced embarrassment!

Garr Reynolds writes about presentations in his Presentation Zen blog, and in a recent post he wrote about Dan Pink’s presentations. It has relevancy here as Dan Pink is perhaps best known for his book, A Whole New Mind, which discusses the need for beefing up the emotional side of human functioning in order to be an engaged participant in the 21st century. Surely it can’t hurt to read the book and give your amygdala some pointers!

STATES of Mind & the Small Yet Mighty Amygdala

Throughout your life you have probably experienced a vast range of emotions, and on a daily basis you undoubtedly go through a variety of states. Emotions are a chemical response to an external stimulus; they are a physiological and biological happening. From what I gather, states are like moods, making them a combination of how you feel emotionally, physically, and generally. If that’s the case, it would seem we are always in one state or another, or progressing from one state to another.

With our “selves” experiencing emotions and states, you can begin to understand how feedback can be so important. According to Eric Jensen, “the longer a person is [in] a stable state, the more likely he or she is to re-enter that state at another time.” This is a clear case of the more you do something, the better you are bound to get at doing it. Learning is Heavily Influenced by Brain Chemistry, an article on the Oshkosh Area School District site, provides a clear rationale as to why and suggestions for how to manage states.

There is a part of our brain that handles our emotions. The amygdala is a small, almond-shaped nugget located underneath the hypothalamus and next to the hippocampus. While the amygdala is very small and buried deep within the center of the brain, it has a very large responsibility – to monitor your emotions and process your memories. According to Sprenger, “emotional stimulus and novelty are the two biggest attention-getters. … Active emotional engagement appears to be a key to learning.” Given the powerful combination of these tasks, it is no wonder that emotional memory is the strongest memory we have, and therefore something we would want to be able to positively manage.

Jensen provides some practical suggestions for how we can help students to become metacognitive about their emotional states by considering:

• The questions we ask students.
• The postures, movement, and activities we use and incorporate in classroom activities.
• The personal encouragement we provide.
• The attitudes and opinions we hold of them.
• The respect and affirmation we give them.
• The hobbies and habits we encourage and support.
• The learning and successes they gain.