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? 

Video Recording at Hundred Billion frames per second

I work in TV and Video media. And record at 25 frames per second. Enough to fool the eye into thinking it is continuous. Even with 11 frames one can create a sense of continuity.
But when we want to observe transient events of smaller time scales, something that happens in much less than 1/25th of a second, my cameras are not much of use.
In early 21st century, a Japanese scientist claimed to reach a speed of 10 million frames per second, with CMOS technology. Not bad.
But now there is a report on recording of a hundred billion frames per second. The new technology will expose physical, chemical and biological phenomena that are not amenable to perception by our neuronal mechanisms. Since fluorescent and luminescent objects are captured by the camera, many researchers will want to use it. Take a look at the description in a recent paper. Nature 516, 74–77 (04 December 2014). Now we can see a video of a laser pulse moving in air and resin at -  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v516/n7529/fig_tab/nature14005_SV4.html

Liquid inclusions make soft solids stiffer

When you include liquid drops into a soft solid like a gel, the anticipation is that it will become softer. But if you keep reducing the radius of the drops, then there comes a time when it will actually become stiffer.
This rather counter-intuitive result was published a recent paper in Nature Physics (Published online on 15 December 2014) by collaborating scientists from three countries. The phenomenon occurs only when the radius of the droplets become smaller than the elastocapillary length (the ratio of surface tension of the liquid solid interface and the young's modulus of the solid).
Besides designing new composites, the result has implications in biology where such phenomena may be rampant, without being noticed by biologists. 

Radio stations disrupt magnetic navigation in birds

Pigeons and migratory birds are known to use the earth's magnetic field for navigation. But experiments in this area of study are found to be difficult to replicate. There are times when researchers fail to see any evidence of magnetic navigation in birds. A recent paper in Nature 509, 353–356 (2014) gives us a clue why: radio waves!

Radio waves in the range of 50 kHz to 5 MHz seem to suppress the ability of the birds to use the magnetic field. Our radio stations seem to disrupt a sensibility that has evolved over millions of years. 

Strange, though it may seem, it becomes quite understandable when we consider that there are radio waves that are not produced by radio stations. Changes in solar activity induces changes in the ionosphere of the earth and cause the whistlers - strange sounds that you hear when you try and tune amplitude modulated (AM) radio. This is the time when there are also magnetic storms and using magnetic navigation would cause the birds to go astray anyway. So shutting down the sense of magnetic navigation momentarily is, in a way, useful. 

But consider that the radio stations are mostly 24/7 - unlike whistlers. :(

Does an injection from a female doctor hurt more?

Probably. If we extrapolate from a recent paper in Nature Methods (doi:10.1038/nmeth.2935).

• Jeffrey S Mogil's pain research lab was initially flummoxed by the results of their experiments: they could not get consistent results when testing pain behaviour in rodents. First they thought that it was because of the experimenters' presence that changed the behaviour of the rodents. Even human cutouts produced a change in the exhibition of pain. But that did not explain the results. When the male experimenter injected pain producing chemicals into the foot pads of the rodents they demonstrated less pain. Is it some smell that they were responding to? Scientists tested again in the presence of T-shirts worn by male and female researchers. And reconfirmed the results using smells of male and female rodents. The male smell did reduce the pain behaviour! 
• • Don't be too hasty to take the sweat shirts of male athletes to surgical aftercare yet. It is only the behaviour that the scientists could observe. Not the pain that is felt. 
  • • • Perhaps the rodents are showing less pain in the presence of male because display of pain would be construed as a weakness. Perhaps there could be evolutionary pressures to display less pain in the presence of males, though the pain actually felt is the same.