The third Brain Awareness Week @Duke (held March 12-17, 2012) featured 5 public lectures, science demos at the Museum of Life & Science, 23 Durham Public School Classroom visits (grades 4-12), and an Open House event with lab tours, science demos, and brain-related art projects for all ages. If you missed the events, or if you want a recap, we’ve pulled together the blog posts that Sandra Ackerman wrote during the week to capture the events…

March 12th, 2012: Public Lecture: Dr. Lasana Harris, Assistant Professor, Psychology & Neuroscience “The Social Neuroscience of Mental State Inferences”

“Don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology… .” Music from the West End Wine Bar in downtown Durham wafted up to the mezzanine where about 30 people gathered on Monday evening for a little light neuroscience. In the first public lecture of this year’s Brain Awareness Week at Duke, Dr. Lasana Harris, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience, introduced us to his research in a corner of the field where social psychology meets up with brain anatomy—and, despite the words of the popular song, history and biology also make it into the discussion.

Dr. Harris and his colleagues work on identifying the neural correlates of mental state inferences—in other words, the kinds of activity in your brain that allow you to think about what might be going on in someone else’s brain. Through a combination of fMRI scans and carefully delineated storytelling, the researchers have been able to map the two main areas of the brain most involved in inferring the mental state of another person. These patterns of brain activity are instinctual, not learned—even very young children show evidence of the same patterns—and in normal life they take place with lightning speed, in tenths of a second. Inferring the mental states of others is a brain exercise we perform dozens of times every day without ever being aware of it. Truth to tell, most of us wouldn’t recognize a mental state inference if it were served up on a plate with a side of green beans.

“That being so,” you may say, “why is it important for me to know about this crucial-but-invisible pattern of brain activity?” It’s important because this pattern helps to shape so many of your interactions with the world—not just with other people but with pets, machines, or even corporations that skimp on customer service. We’re so strongly inclined toward making these mental state inferences that all too often we fall into the trap of treating some non-human entity as if it were a person. Think of that the next time your computer freezes on you and you’re tempted to give it a swift smack in the monitor!

March 13th, 2012: Public Lecture: Dr. Christina Williams, Professor, Psychology & Neuroscience “Food for Thought: Maternal Diet and Memory Enhancement”

We can all agree that food is good. But did you know that certain foods are good for your brain in particular—especially if you can manage to ingest them before you’re born? In the second public lecture for Brain Awareness Week, this one given at the Duke Center for Living, Dr. Christina Williams, professor of psychology and neuroscience, made a strong case for the long-term benefits of good prenatal nutrition. Of course, all-around good nutrition is important for the health of both an expectant mother and her baby, but in her talk on Tuesday evening Dr. Williams focused on choline, “the essential nutrient you’ve probably never heard of.”

Choline is one of those innumerable B vitamins that rarely make it onto a nutrition label. But it deserves to become famous, because choline is important not only for the building of membranes and the proper working of the liver (both very useful in the human body) but also as a basis for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine—the chemical signal that lets us move our muscles. Oh, and it serves another purpose as well: acetylcholine is the main neurotransmitter used in the function of memory.

It is in the realm of memory that prenatal choline really shines. In extensive studies with rats at all stages of their lifespan, Dr. Williams and her colleagues have found that adding choline to the usual prenatal diet gives a major boost to the developing brain. As a result, the offspring have brains that not only prove more resilient to shock or trauma but also demonstrate healthy, high-functioning memory well into old age. In the hippocampus, the brain structure most responsible for memory, the prenatally-choline-supplemented rats even show an advantage in the proliferation of new neurons, which enable them to keep learning long after the normal rat retirement age (about 24 months).

All this is not to say that pregnant women should start gulping down choline, says Dr. Williams—least of all as a “supplement” purchased from a health store, because these non-drug compounds don’t undergo strict standardization and scrutiny from the FDA. You may, however, want to beef up the choline in your regular diet, and in fact beef liver is one of the best dishes for this purpose. Tofu and other soy-based foods, legumes, eggs, and fish will also fill the bill. So lift high your fork, egg cup, or peanut butter-covered knife, and let us keep in mind the power of choline.

March 14th, 2012: Public Lecture: Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, Professor, Neurobiology “Computing with Neural Ensembles to Liberate Brain Activity from the Body”

Robotic arms, a monkey walking on a treadmill, and lab equipment that dispenses drops of Brazilian orange juice—the Nasher Museum hosted one of its more unusual presentations on Wednesday evening as Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, professor of neurobiology, presented the third public lecture of Brain Awareness Week. His presentation, while grounded in solid scientific research and state-of-the-art technology, was as wildly imaginative as any of the art in the surrounding galleries: Dr. Nicolelis’s aim is nothing less than to liberate the human brain from the physical confines of the human body.

Okay, let’s back it up a bit. No one is trying to remove the living brain from a human head; that happens only in science fiction. Rather, in this burgeoning area of research known as neuroprosthetics or brain-machine interfaces, Dr. Nicolelis and his colleagues want to extend the limits of what we humans can do with the incredible computing abilities of the ordinary human brain. Their work takes as its starting point the (theoretically) simple premise that the electrical signals of the brain can, like any other electrical signals, be recorded, decoded, analyzed, transduced, and/or transmitted to any entity that is prepared to receive them. For instance, in the standard human package, signals sent out from your motor cortex enable you to move your arm. But if those signals could be captured and sent outside the body, could they move a robotic arm instead?

This is where the state-of-the-art technology comes in. Motor signals from the brain can indeed work a robotic arm. A monkey walking on a treadmill in a Duke lab can transmit signals that propel the gait of a robot in Kyoto—and Dr. Nicolelis has the video to prove it. Moreover, even if the treadmill is stopped but the monkey continues the mental process associated with walking, the robot in Kyoto will keep putting one metallic foot in front of the other, just as long as the monkey keeps those brain signals coming. And one day not too far in the future, Dr. Nicolelis hopes to be able to help paraplegic patients walk again after spinal-cord injury by routing the signals from the motor cortex of their brain directly to their legs, bypassing the damaged area.

One nagging question remains. Well-grounded as these amazing advances may be, they all rest on a single unverifiable claim: the magic power of the orange juice that’s dispensed to the monkeys in the lab as a training reward. According to Dr. Nicolelis, a native of Sao Paolo, the lab must use Brazilian orange juice for this purpose—because only Brazilian orange juice “will make the monkeys do whatever you want.” Could this story contain a drop of science fiction after all?

March 13th-15th, 2012: Museum of Life and Science Demos

During the last few days, the Museum of Life & Science has offered visitors some great hands-on activities for Brain Awareness Week. Cried of “Eew!” and “Squishy!” and a fair amount of giggling have provided the soundtrack.

Up on the second floor, the ever-popular Lab this week became the Brain Lab, where kids and adults learned about the three layers of protection that Nature has provided to our brains. First they examined half a dozen animal skulls and tried to identify them. There was a beaver, a boar, a deer… . What was that huge one, a toothed whale? No way!

The next step was to check out a few specimens of preserved brains, each tightly encased in the tough membrane called the meninges. The most courageous or curious visitors even got the opportunity, after donning latex gloves, to touch the surface of a human brain—an experience they will not soon forget.

Finally, for the purpose of active experimentation, each lab visitor was given a raw egg in its shell, representing the human brain within the meninges. If the egg was shaken vigorously inside a plastic container (the “skull”), the shell often cracked, spilling its precious contents. However, after adding water (“cerebrospinal fluid”) and a new egg to the container, a participant could shake the container or even slam it down on the counter, most often with the result that the egg just bobbed gently in the protective liquid. In cases of extreme trauma, the eggshell sometimes cracked after all—thereby showing vividly why cyclists and skateboarders should always wear a fourth layer of protection, a helmet.

Nearby, kids wearing vision-distorting “prism glasses” took turns throwing sponge balls at targets marked on the wall. Before putting on the glasses, most participants took a few tries to hit the target, then quite a few more to home in on it while their vision was distorted by the prisms. What really shocked them, though, was how hard it was throw accurately once they had taken the glasses off again.

Among all the demonstration stations, a clear favorite emerged. Asked to give her overall opinion of the scientific experience, one tired participant said, “Hmm, kind of dumb.”

“You think it’s dumb?” her mother asked, surprised.

“Except—except the squishy part!”

March 15th, 2012: Public Lecture: Dr. Jaak Panksepp, Professor, Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacy, Physiology, Washington State University “The Evolved Emotional Feelings of the Brain…and the Mind”

Sometimes the simplest questions are the most challenging to answer. Attempts to understand ourselves and our place in nature tend to produce a lot of these questions, such as “Do animals have feelings?” and “Where do emotions come from?” In the fourth public lecture of Brain Awareness week, Dr. Jaak Panksepp, who holds an endowed chair in the college of veterinary medicine at Washington State University, tackled the challenge as one in a long line of thinkers stretching back hundreds of years. A professor of veterinary and comparative anatomy, pharmacology, and physiology, as well as head of affective neuroscience research at Northwestern University, Dr. Panksepp is qualified to address these questions from a lot of different perspectives.

But the perspective he uses is unexpectedly—well, vertical. Dr. Panksepp looks at the brain as if he were peering down into the Grand Canyon, with the most ancient parts at the bottom and the most recent layers (the cerebral cortex, where we do our conscious thinking) at the top. And as with the Grand Canyon, whose entire ecosystem depends on the sustenance of the Colorado River far below, the topmost layers can appear arid and lifeless if considered on their own. “We will not understand how the top of the brain works until we understand the bottom,” he declares.

The question then becomes, what constitutes the bottom, or Colorado River, of the brain? Dr. Panksepp believes that very early in the course of evolution, animal brains developed the capacity for affective feelings for a very simple reason: they helped the animal to stay alive. For instance, the act of eating produced a positive affect that meant, in the animal’s terms, “I’m surviving,” whereas meeting up with a predator produced a negative affect that meant, “I’m in danger.” Animals may not create art or consult therapists about their feelings, but Dr. Panksepp is in no doubt that they have feelings. He has even been able to show that the capacity for affective feelings in some animals extends beyond mere survival value, by the unorthodox means of tickling lab rats. Their response—an ultrasonic chirping that they emit spontaneously when playing with one another—uncannily resembles human laughter.

Laughing lab rats: they may not be able fill in all the answers about animals and the origin of emotions, but they certainly raise some intriguing new questions.

March 12th-16th, 2012: Durham Public School Classroom Visits

The circumstances were less than ideal—a basement classroom, the last class period of the day, and a balmy Friday at that—when two undergraduates from Duke visited the Durham School of the Arts to introduce high-schoolers to Brain Awareness Week. But senior Sunny Qiu and sophomore Daniel Wei came prepared with all kinds of attention-grabbing accessories, from colorful diagrams to a bag of Skittles and from a tricky hand-eye coordination test to a preserved sheep’s brain in a jar. The visitors valiantly held their own, beginning their presentation by projecting the photo of a dissected hippocampus like a three-foot-high poster on the class whiteboard. This gigantic, all-too-real-looking image quickly cut through the fog of spring fever in the room, allowing Wei and Qiu to explain how the brain formulates, stores, and later retrieves memories.

Questions from the class came slowly at first, then picked up speed. “Why do people start losing their memory when they get older?” “What’s going on in the brain when we have the feeling of deja vu?” “What causes brain tumors?” The toughest question, and very possibly the most appropriate on that beautiful spring afternoon: “What happens when we lose our train of thought?” There’s a puzzle that may have to wait for the next generation of neuroscientists, some of whom—who knows?—may have been sitting, more or less mindful, in that very classroom.

March 16th, 2012: Public Lecture: Dr. John Pearson, Senior Scientist, Neurobiology and Neurosurgery “Impulse Control Disorders in Parkinson’s Disease”

There’s no way around it: even if you try to imagine every possible type of connection that could exist among all the billions of cells in your brain, some inquisitive team of researchers somewhere will always come up with a connection that’s completely new to you. Such was the case on Friday evening, in the fifth public lecture of Brain Awareness Week, when Dr. John Pearson startled his audience at the Regulator Bookshop with a talk that drew a link between Parkinson’s disease and compulsive gambling.

Parkinson’s disease, usually described as a movement disorder, comes from a gradual shutdown of the brain cells that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. From a small region deep in the center, dopamine is distributed throughout the brain, where it fills two vital roles. One role has to do with the brain signals that begin or control movements of the muscles in the body. As dopamine becomes scarce in the brain, patients lose their ability to regulate movement; hence the shuffling walk, rigid body posture, and muscle tremor that characterize this disease. Standard treatment is a dopamine precursor, a compound from which the brain can make the dopamine it needs.

But these drugs are far from an ideal solution to Parkinson’s disease. One problem is that the drugs can’t completely replace the brain’s natural production of dopamine but can only slow down the course of the disease. And Dr. Pearson, a senior scientist in neurobiology and neurosurgery, told of another problem: in a small subset of patients, treatment with these dopamine precursor drugs seems to unleash an overwhelming urge toward risky behavior. People who had scarcely gambled before might now find themselves unable to stop; others might become compulsive shoppers or develop a sex addiction.

What could be causing this curious side effect? The answer has to do with dopamine’s other important role in the brain, which is less well understood. According to Dr. Pearson and his colleagues, dopamine is not exactly the “reward chemical” it has been called, even though its release in the brain causes a feeling of pleasure. Rather, emotion-signaling pathways of the brain either release or withhold dopamine in response to “reward prediction error.” To put it simply, if a particular action or event turns out better than we expected, we get a hit of dopamine and feel great; if something turns out worse than expected, dopamine is withdrawn and we feel crummy. The notion of this elegant system, which allows the brain to deal with both the expected outcome and the actual outcome, is gaining attention across an array of neuro-specialties. Such a system could explain certain features of thrill-seeking behavior, of cocaine addiction, of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and perhaps of other brain processes as well. And so the connections continue to spread…

March 17th, 2012: Brain Awareness Week Open House

Lab tours and strobe-lit games of catch, brain origami, and the ever-useful sheep’s brain were just a few of the temptations on offer at the Open House held on Saturday as the climax of Brain Awareness Week at Duke. DIBS hosted the event at the Levine Science Research Center, where the lobby soon filled with students, families, and other members of the Duke and local community who came for an afternoon of entertainment and/or education.

DIBS-affiliated volunteers—a grad student here, a staff member there—sported bright gold t-shirts emblazoned with a giant drawing of the human brain. On entering the lobby, visitors picked up informative booklets or brain-shaped squeeze toys, then headed to any of a dozen different presentations. Children at the crafts table colored in outline drawings of the brain, obliterating sulci and gyri with their magic markers. At a couple of tables devoted to the sense of smell, fruit flies circled one another in a dish, disinclined to mate after genetic manipulation of their olfactory system, while human subjects nearby sniffed at vials containing samples of two different-smelling enantiomers—chemical compounds with identical, but mirror-image, molecular structure. (The smells were caraway and spearmint, by the way.)

One table, manned by an enthusiastic sophomore majoring in neuroscience, laid out information about a neuroimaging project that aims to put together a more detailed view of the structural changes that occur in the brain during the course of Alzheimer’s disease; the project, already large, is about to get larger, adding numerous study sites throughout the country. Across the room, a researcher explained how strobe lighting (provided through specially adapted glasses) is serving a serious purpose in a study of “motion coherence thresholds”: since it gives us the feeling of moving in slow motion, can strobe lighting be applied in athletic training to improve the performance of elite athletes? (It can, and it does.) And every so often a gold-shirted volunteer would lead away a small group for a tour and demonstration in a real working lab, where EEG lines wavered across a screen or pulses of transcranial magnetic stimulation twitched the fingers of another long-suffering volunteer. The whole event gave off a busy, eager hum, like something in between a classroom and a county fair.

As we look back on this week of cerebrum-centered celebration, perhaps we should try to assess its impact. Some estimates were made available for the purposes of this blog: about a hundred people took part in the Open House, and dozens attended each public lecture. Scores of kids threw hundreds of sponge balls under conditions of extreme visual confusion; no casualties were reported. Nearly two dozen classrooms in Durham benefited from the talks and demonstrations of Duke students, and stickers and fliers were dispensed en masse. A lot, in other words, went on.

What was most important about Brain Awareness Week, though, would be hard to quantify. How many kids are now thinking, “Next year I won’t be too scared to touch that human brain”? What value can we place on a smoker’s acceptance of a leaflet from the Duke Center for Nicotine and Smoking Cessation Research? Who knows whether a lethargic eighth-grader, resigned to yet another class lecture, might look up and think, “Hey, that grad student actually looks like me!” and begin to consider a completely new career choice? The most worthwhile activity in all these busy days took place inside the brains of the hundreds of people who took part, from the organizers to the audiences. Traces from this week will become evident only over the long term, as they are filtered and shaped by other processes in those hundreds of brains—and that’s exactly as it should be.

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