Out-of-Body Experiences Aren't as Far Out as You Think.

Hey All! I've been neglecting my blog for the sake of science, but never fear, I've found loads of really intriguing things to share with you!

Today's tasty tidbit comes to us from radio WNYC's podcast show "Radio Lab", a show that investigates a wide assortment of cutting-edge and curious topics in science. Their podcast is available in iTunes.

During their "Where Am I?" issue on body image, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich explore the relationship between brains and bodies and how they can get way out of synch. Here's just one item from their show.

In the summer of 1952 the pilots-in-training at Luke Airforce Base suffered 9 fatal accidents during routine training exercises. Another pilot from the same training group reported that once, during a training exercise he felt as though he was sitting on the wing of his plane watching someone (actually himself) fly the plane. Eventually he realized that he was watching himself and resumed conscious control of the plane.

They called in Jim Whinnery, Chief Flight Surgeon and Chief Aeromedical Scientist at the Naval Air Warfare Center. He decided to put volunteer pilots in a centrifuge (the whirling mechanisms used to train astronauts) that had been set up to feel and work like a cockpit and see if OOBs can be induced. The body goes through a specific sequence as the centrifuge gains speed: first the blood is pulled from the brain, and you experience 'gray-out' vision, followed by tunnel vision, black-out, and, if you take it far enough, you lose consciousness. When the pilots come to they are very disoriented, they don't know who or where they are or what they're supposed to be doing. Then it all comes back to them in a rush.

Whinnery tested around 500 pilots in 15 years and recorded their experiences. He noted that the average black-out lasted 12-24 seconds. During black-outs pilots experienced strange visions, so of which included OOBs. Whinnery thinks that the visions happen when the brain loses communication with the body. The visions are the brains way of explaining its sensory experience to itself.

Of the 500, 40 had OOBs. Of that 40, a small subgroup had visions of a tunnel with white light. They were the ones with the most intense black-outs.

As far as I'm concerned, this discovery poses way more questions than it answers. Any thoughts?

Brains, Computing and Computers

This an amazing talk about brains and brain theory from the guy who invented the PalmPilot. Totally worth 20 minutes of your life.

Myspace, Myworld, Myself

I found a really interesting snippet in the latest issue of The Atlantic about some of the social implications of the Myspace generation. Some psychologists have used a"Narcissistic Personality Inventory" test to measure how 16,475 college kids (starting in 1982 and continuing through 2006) view themselves. The results? "Overall, almost two-thirds of the most recent sample display a higher level of narcissism than the 1982 average." They further noted that students born after the invention/spread of the internet (i.e. the demographic most likely to use sites like Myspace and YouTube) are especially prone to narcissism.

Myspace aside, increasing narcissism is a source of concern because independent studies have showed that "narcissists have trouble forming meaningful relationships, tend to be materialistic, and are prone to higher levels of infidelity, substance abuse, and violence." I find it ironic that the same system that makes it amazingly easy to connect with people may be a reason that young people are becoming more self-involved.

Introductory Neuroanatomy

Turning Our Words into Actions.

Linguists have been trying to map language (and all it's cognitive aspects) in the brain. We now know (generally) where speech is produced, where grammar comes into the picture, where written language is decoded, etc.

Recently, linguists have been looking for meaning in the brain. For example, you just heard the word 'cat', but is your concept of 'cat' stored in the same place as your perception of someone saying the word 'cat'? The short answer is 'no'. Most studies of this nature (trying to localize word meaning in the brain) have focused on concrete, visual nouns. In a study by Hauk, Johnsrude, and Pavermuller (2004), the question of word localization is applied to action words with very interesting results.

Their experiment was elegant. They chose three categories of action words, each related to a different region of the body (specifically face/tongue words like "lick", arm words, "throw", and leg words, "kick"). They selected 50 words for each category and then had their subjects read them (silently), all while in an fMRI brain scanning machine. Turns out that the (non-language-specific) areas of the brain that are activated by DOING the physical action (of the word) overlap significantly with the brain areas activated be just READING the word. Let me run that by you again. Reading an action word like "throw" activates the arm-related area of the motor cortex as well as normal language areas.

Now, no experiment should be taken too seriously, but this data implies that the meaning of a word (at least the meaning of an action word) lies somewhere between understanding the word and doing the action.

In My Mind's Ear

I was talking with a friend today who told me to "listen to something with my mind's eye." This made me wonder whether or not there is such a thing as a 'mind's ear'. Upon further discussion an reflection, we concluded that there must be a 'mind's ear', at least metaphorically, because otherwise it could never get too loud to hear yourself think. Now, I like working out kinks in common metaphors as much as the next person, but this conclusion of ours lead to another, more complicated question: How can there be a listener (the mind's ear) and a speaker (the self) within a single (sane) mind, what areas of the self/cognition are responsible for hearing and speaking, and how is all this synthesized into a cohesive whole? These are essentially questions that lie at the heart of Cognitive Science. Any thoughts on the subject?

Dreaming = Normal?