Current Science, December 10th

Here is the link to the pdf file of the column that invites readers to three key papers in the 10th December issue of Current Science:
http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/109/11/1906.pdf

This one page pdf is equivalent to three postings - as per the earlier standard of this blog.

I went to Bangalore to meet the editorial board members. They had organised a series of talks by the members of the editorial board.
I've not sat through lectures even in my student days. Never had the patience. It was faster to read and understand. So I used to spend more time in the library than in lecture halls. But this was different. I sat through all of them. A fantastic series of talks for one and a half days!

And thus I had a chance to meet a classmate, a senior and a Professor from my JNU days. More than 25 years have passed since I met them. But it felt like it was only yesterday. I guess we all looked slightly older.

Then there was a short meeting of the editorial board.

It looks as if my goal of changing the look and feel of the journal may soon be realised. 

A new life line for this blog

Having moved from IISER Pune to freelance work again, I was feeling rather hopeless about this blog. No time to read papers let alone writing about them.

But now it will get a new breath of life. Current Science has called me in to be a science writing consultant for them. A part of the work will be to highlight three scientific papers/articles in each issue - in the very first page of the journal! More or less what I have been doing here in this blog. So instead of quoting Nature, PNAS or Science, I will be pointing out some interesting papers in Current Science. And I can post more regularly.

Of course, the style will change a little to suit the column titled In This Issue. But hope I will be able to entertain you at least once or twice a week with tidbits from science.

Thanks to all the readers of this blog who encouraged me by peeping in.

A microphone that selects the speaker

Human beings are wonderful creatures. They can have a conversation in busy streets and other noisy areas. We select what we want to listen to.

But a microphone? Believe me, I have a tough time recording interviews in such situations. I spend effort in selecting the microphone. Should I use a gun mike, a collar mike, ....?

And at the end of the exercise I have to spend time cleaning up the audio track and ultimatly end up with a bad sound track.

A recent paper in PNAS (August 25, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 34 | 10595–10598) gives me hope that, one day, I will carry a microphone that is as selective as I am.

The cocktail-party-listener prototype was fabricated with a metamaterial - acrylonitrile butadiene styrene plastics using fused filament fabrication 3D printing technology.

Guys, are you listening or what?

The Magic of Making a Mighty Brained Mouse

There is a gene that scientists have nicknamed Pax6. Plays a major role in embryonic development. Though it is found both in Mice and Men, Pax6 is much less in mice. Scientists in Germany made a transgenic mice that expresses more of Pax6 gene. And found that the mice developed much bigger brains.

Now, don't get ideas that we could perhaps use this technique to make humans more intelligent. Pax6 controls the expression of may other genes and is officially called Paired Box 6 gene. Evidently it has a role beyond making a bigger brain.

Moreover, bigger brain does not necessarily mean more intelligence.

But wait - there are more discoveries coming in this direction. We are in a state of scientific development where we indeed need to reflect on eugenics and utopia.

For details on the present work on Pax 6 see the August 7th issue of open access, peer reviewed journal PLoS Biology  - DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002217
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002217#abstract0

Delaying first child: wisdom or folly?

Many young people of today delay their marriage and child rearing for the sake of their career and profession. Now, here is a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (http://www.pnas.org/content/112/13/4021.full) that questions the wisdom in this tendency. 

They report that progeny of older parents tend to have lower reproductive fitness in a sex specific manner: Sons of older fathers and daughters of older mothers may end up having less children in natural conditions.

The possible cause for this phenomenon is attributed to the shortening of the protective repetitive DNA sequences at the ends of our chromosomes. These ends, called telomeres, tend to shorten during one’s life span. These modifications are passed down to the next generation... 

Behavioural Synchronisation

When I lie next to my wife and relax, I find that I invariably synchronise my breathing with hers. Most of the time without noticing it. And whenever I am tense because of some work situation, she tells me that my breathing is noisy.

Synchronising of footsteps in soldiers, synchronization of the twinkling of the fireflies, … nature abounds in cases of entrainment of cycles.

Normally - I thought - it is the dominant individual who manages to force the others to fall in step. They extend their individual cycles a bit so that over time it is synchronised with the rhythm of the dominant individual. At least, this is the perspective that emerges from the studies on synchronization of menstrual cycles in women living together, as in jails and nunneries.

But a recent paper in PNAS reports that the brain activity of the leaders tend to synchronise with those of the followers.

This is indeed surprising.

Of course, the leaders obviously need to know the pulse of the followers. There has been this brouhaha about emotional intelligence in leaders. Leaders do need to know the minds of their followers before deciding the courses of action.

But is such empathy attained by synchronizing brain activity?

A whiff of love

It was end of August 1984, Pondicherry. My wife was in the hospital, about to deliver our first child. The doctor asked me to go get some Oxytocin injection.

I knew that Oxytocin was a small piece of protein made in hypothalamus of the brain and secreted by the pituitary. It induces uterine contractions. Thank god it is not a caesarian, I thought, while running around to look for a chemist's shop, early in the morning.

It is not that I did not have any misgivings. I had read somewhere that it elicited maternal behaviour in virgin female rats [Oxytocin induces maternal behavior in virgin female rats. Science 216, 648–650 (1982)]. Will she become extra maternal because of the Oxytocin injection? Or would the external input of oxytocin shut off the internal production and release, as it happens with the opiate medicines? I wondered while going back to the hospital with Oxytocin in my pocket.

Later, in the 90's, I saw a large number of papers on Oxytocin and the coordinated role that it plays with Vasopressin and other hormones. How prairie voles with higher oxytocin had high affinity pair bonding and lived in monogamy while those with less are rather promiscuous and so on. Nature, the British multidisciplinary journal suggested that it may aid in establishing monogamy. And recently, there were a spate of newspaper articles touting Oxytocin as the love hormone. As befitting the Shakesperean fantasy of a love potion that inhaled as a nasal spray, creating bonding and love...

And then there are scientific papers that claim that nasal spray is a good antidote for anxiety. Pyar huan to darna kya?

The  spray allowed quite a large amount of experimentation in the last few years. Creating trust, generosity, a sense of group identity (PNAS vol. 108 in 2011),.... it was even called a social hormone in the media. Its use in autism was mooted soon.

I thought I should try it. Perhaps I am not very social because of low oxytocin?

But the funny thing is - oxytocin when given as an injection is removed from the blood rather quickly, in a matter of minutes. But this nasal spray continues to act for some 3-4 hours. Why?

I checked. Oxytocin does not cross the blood brain barrier. So the action due to secretion from pituitary is quite transient and only in organs except the brain. Thus perhaps as an aid to child birth, the hormone does not have long lasting effects.

However, oxytocin is supplied to other parts of the brain directly from hypothalamus - even to neurons in the cortex of the brain. So - are there oxytocin channels in the vomeronasal region that these nasal sprays go through, in order to impact on cognition and behaviour?

I would not go hunting for that nasal spray yet. Because there are some other studies that do not really show the same effects. The problem of non-reproduceability is serious, in science.

Looking for possible reasons for these inconsistent results, I came across a series of papers on the oxytocin receptors. There are oxytocin receptors in the brain, as well as in many other parts of the body. If these receptors are not responsive, there is no point in using either the injections or the spray. Like in Diabetes Type 2, where there is insulin circulating in blood, but the person is still diabetic, since insulin can't act without functional insulin receptors...

What is even more interesting is that these receptors are under epigenetic control. Meaning, that you may be born with some predilection for receptivity to oxytocin, but because of your life experiences, these receptors may be made in larger or smaller quantities and perhaps with lesser or greater sensitivity. Social and cultural upbringing can have an impact on how responsive one is, to the nasal spray of Oxytocin.

Still, I for one, would not have minded experimenting with it. I don't seem to notice social cues that fall like a ton of bricks on people around me. I am like a monstrous bull in the proverbial china shop when it comes to social niceties.

The perception of social cues from sounds, facial expressions are increased with Oxytocin. In a recent report in Nature (15th April 2015) scientists claim that these skills are lateralised - to the left hemisphere, like in the case of language. I am terrible in small talk and weak in language that leads to social bonding. But my wife is a person with large variety of social bonds. She is highly perceptive of other people's pains and is kind, considerate and nourishing in her relationships. So external Oxytocin does not seem to have had any consequences, neither for my wife nor my son. I am still human since I breath in the love that they spread around them.

Do people emit Oxytocin? 

Recording your brainwaves

Soon you will be able to walk around and do your daily routines while your brainwaves are being recorded.

It is more than 90 years since the electroencephalogram (EEG) machines started recording human brainwaves. But even now the EEG machines you see in hospitals are formidable devices that attaches metallic electrodes to the skin of your head. You can tolerate it for some minutes. But to continuously record the brainwaves over weeks? Even when you are mobile and active?

Now here is the first step: soft and cuddly electrodes that you can wear around your head for weeks without any discomfort. Scientists from 14 different organisations had to collaborate to make the proof of concept – something that can be molded to attach itself to even a complex surface like the ear. (http://www.pnas.org/content/112/13/3920.full)

The immediate use of this innovation will for epileptics to provide prior warning of onset of fits, for doctors to come to quick differential diagnosis in neurological disorders and for scientists studying human cognition.. 

But it is still one step away from the dream that I have: feed the signals to a deep brain magnetic stimulator attached to another person and through error feedback and correction, achieve telepathy.  

Or is it one step away from my nightmare: mind reading and mind control? 

The difference between narcissism and self-esteem

One often sees people who think that they are superior to others and that they deserve special treatment. If they don’t get the special treatment they expect, they may get angry or even violent. 

There are two hypotheses that explain why people become like this. The first is that narcissism is caused by parental over valuation of the person in early years. The second points a finger at parental warmth as the cause.

So researchers looked at children and their parents to settle the argument. This phenomenon emerges when the children are between 7 years to 12 years of age. So researchers collected data from 565 such children and their parents - data on narcissism, self esteem, parental over valuation and parental warmth as reported by the children and parents.

What they find it that there is indeed a connection between parental over valuation of the child and the child showing narcissistic behavior. They seem to internalize the parents’ perception and start believing that they are indeed superior to others.  

The researchers found that parental warmth, however, did not produce the same results as parental over valuation. Instead of being narcissistic, the children acquire high self-esteem and are confident about themselves, with parental warmth. 

For details see the latest issue of PNAS -  http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/03/05/1420870112

Stop my mind from wandering where it will go….

The Beatles, of the famous music group, were influenced by concepts of yoga and meditation. To hold your mind still is not an easy task. The mind wanders where it will go. If you are a student and are listening to a lecture, the wanderings of the mind could be academically costly. But often, the wandering mind finds connections between the old and new information, leading to discoveries. A wandering mind sometimes finds rich fields for creativity in its reveries.  And if you cannot allow your mind to ponder on the tasks ahead in your office while travelling in busy city streets, you will become totally stressed out by the noise and unproductive in your work. Can you imagine a childhood without daydreams?

The execution of most mechanical tasks is usually handed over to the lower parts of the brain, releasing the higher parts that control thoughts to wander. So this ability must reside somewhere in the forebrain. Scientists use different methods to investigate this phenomenon. Using the now famous fMRI technique, scientists had found that the brain just above and between the eyes (medial frontal) and just where your hair starts receding first (dorsolateral prefrontal), there are activities related to daydreaming. But it remained a correlation. There was no clear evidence of causation of day dreaming by prefrontal cortex. 

Now I find a paper which uses a low voltage electric current – not the alternating one that supplies your house, but a direct current – on nearly 50 volunteers. Entry point of the current is on the rise on your left hairline, under which lie the dorsolateral frontal cortex of the brain, The cathode or exit point for the current is above the right eye. The current is passed for 20 minutes. The volunteers are supposed to press a key every time they see any number other than 3 flashed on a monitor. And they have to do this for 40 minutes.

Such a boring task! Designed to create opportunities for thoughts unrelated to the task emerging in one’s mind!  And indeed, the mind wandering reported by the volunteers increased. They repeated the experiment with sham stimulation, and with the entry point of the current is the back of the head, above, what scientists call, occipital lobe. But these had no effect on the tendency to day dream. For details see PNAS vol. 112 no. 11, pages 3314–3319, March 17, 2015 

So then, this is really a neat trick to start my mind from wandering. But what about it in case I want to stop my mind from wandering, like Beatles? Is plugging the holes where the rain gets in the only way? Will, in the near future, such trans-cranial stimulation with low voltage direct current, be a boon to students who are forced to attend boring lectures?