I spend time reading through a lot of online magazines and blogs…some relate to technology, others to education topics, and related to both of these areas of endeavor lies psychology. I am always looking for the latest science news, in futurist topics, and the general area of psychology and how the brain works (as a mechanism in this case), as well as its emergent counterpart, the brain.
As a result I felt the need to put up some of the more interesting and thought provoking articles I’ve run across this week. This set of quotes only suggests what the original (linked) articles hold, so of you are interested in how Dopamine works in the brain, and how it relates to Genius and/or madness; a list of some of the things which we presume about the brain/mind (but are usually quite wrong), the connections between eccentricity and real creativity, or the seemingly perplexing notion that there are mental abilities which can come with age…which don’t correspond to brain growth…this is a big platter of stuff…
I found these articles interesting, and hope that you do too…
Genius and Madness
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201105/genius-and-madness
If you have an interest in the fabulous story of evolution and of humans achieving greatness, you might be surprised that, neurologically, your exploration will lead you straight to the neurotransmitter called dopamine. In the Dopamine Primer, I covered (briefly) the four major dopamine tracts in the brain. Today I’ll break down the two most important ones, the mesolimbic, and the mesocortical pathways.
Don’t panic – those snazzy words "mesolimbic" and "mesocortical" don’t have a whole lot of meaning unless you are versed in neuroanatomy, and turns out they have even less meaning because the mesolimbic system ends in the cortex, so it is also mesocortical, and that’s very confusing! Therefore I’m going to call them the "medial" and "lateral" dopamine tracts respectively.
The medial tracts go from the central, primitive, animal parts of the brain up to the emotional centers, and then to the front part of your brain (literally the center of your forehead, more or less). The lateral tracts go from the central, primitive, animal parts of the brain up around the outside and end up more by your eyeballs (more or less).
Both tracts carry dopamine, but the tracts are responsible for rather different human behaviors.
The lateral tracts are responsible for the following:
- Future-orientation in predicting events
- Strategic thinking
- Rational, abstract thought
- Focus and control
- These tracts are unemotional
Someone who has an optimal amount of dopamine in the lateral system is going to be self-contained, practical, self-confident, and able to forgo immediate gratification in order to ensure greater reward later on. He or she might be the perfect person to bring with you on an expedition somewhere. However, an extreme "lateral dopamine" type person wouldn’t be the one you might confide in with emotional problems. Also, on that expedition, if you break your leg and no longer become practical, it might be just a little too easy for the "lateral dopamine person" to leave your burdensome self there in the wilderness. So the dark side of dominant lateral tracts would be grandiosity, ruthlessness and sociopathy.
The medial tracts (more emotional in nature rather than rational thought) are responsible for:
- Action
- Aggression
- Future-orientation in exploration (motivation and drive)
- Creativity (along with paranormal experiences and psychosis)
- Hyperactivity and impulsive behaviors
- Euphoria and pleasure-seeking
A more medial dopamine personality might be a bit wacky, impulsive, and free-thinking. A hippie or an artist. Not particularly good at planning, but often compelling, creative and interesting. Maybe not the first person you would want to take into the wilderness, but perhaps capable of intuitive leaps of logic that could get you out of a real jam. As it is the serotonin/norepinephrine right brain tracts that are more responsible for emotional sensitivity and understanding social cues, the medial dopamine dominant personality may not be particularly empathetic, and might wander off and leave you alone in the wilderness as he or she might think of something better to do. The dark side of the medial dopamine dominance would be psychosis, paranoia, and irresponsibility. (Keep in mind that these are all generalizations – all the tracts interact in complex ways so there is rarely any such thing as a pure "medial dopamine personality.")
Top Ten Myths about the Brain
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Top-Ten-Myths-About-the-Brain.html
2. “Flashbulb memories” are precise, detailed, and persistent.
We all have memories that feel as vivid and accurate as a snapshot, usually of some shocking, dramatic event—the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the attacks of September 11, 2001. People remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, which they were with, what they saw or heard. But several clever experiments have tested people’s memory immediately after a tragedy and again several months or years later. The test subjects tend to be confident that their memories are accurate and say the flashbulb memories are more vivid than other memories. Vivid they may be, but the memories decay over time just as other memories do.
3. It is all downhill after 40 (or 50 or 60 or 70).
It’s true; some cognitive skills do decline as you get older. Children are better at learning new languages than adults—and never play a game of concentration against a 10-year-old unless you’re prepared to be humiliated. Young adults are faster than older adults to judge whether two objects are the same or different; they can more easily memorize a list of random words, and they are faster to count backward by sevens.
But plenty of mental skills improve with age. Vocabulary, for instance—older people know more words and understand subtle linguistic distinctions. Given a biographical sketch of a stranger, they’re better judges of character. They score higher on tests of social wisdom, such as how to settle a conflict. And people get better and better over time at regulating their own emotions and finding meaning in their lives.
The Learning Brain Gets Bigger–Then Smaller
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-learning-brain-gets-bigger-then-smaller
With age and enough experience, we all become connoisseurs of a sort. After years of hearing a favorite song, you might notice a subtle effect that’s lost on greener ears. Perhaps you’re a keen judge of character after a long stint working in sales. Or maybe you’re one of the supremely practiced few who tastes his money’s worth in a wine.
Whatever your hard-learned skill is, your ability to hear, see, feel, or taste with more nuance than a less practiced friend is written in your brain; but where, and how, exactly? What are the biological pen strokes that spell perceptual expertise?
One classical line of work has tackled these questions by mapping out changes in brain organization following intense and prolonged sensory experience. In rough overview, many of these studies support a model of learning that might be in line with your intuition. Namely, the parts of the brain allotted for discrete sensory skills – hearing the note middle C, feeling a piano key on your thumb tip – expand when those skills are repeatedly called upon. Or, shamelessly dispensing with the biological details: practice makes bigger and bigger means better.
But don’t adopt that slogan quite yet. In a recent study from the University of Texas at Dallas, Dr. Michael Kilgard’s lab questions the tidy relationship between altered size and enhanced skill. Studying the auditory cortex of rats, they found that the expansion of a ‘skill-specific’ brain area with training is only short lived, even when changes in ability are long lasting. Instead of working like a muscle, where training adds size and size begets prowess, learning seems to involve some heavy duty trimming as well. In fact, if Kilgard’s theory of learning holds up, both the biology of learning and our experience of it share a common principle: skill must be culled from a string of mistakes. Lots of them.
The Link between Creativity and Eccentricity
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/05/21/the-link-between-creativity-and-eccentricity
It is common knowledge that creative’s can be eccentric. We’ve seen this throughout history. Even Plato and Aristotle observed odd behaviors among playwrights and poets, writes Harvard University researcher Shelley Carson, author of Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life, in the May/June 2011 issue of Scientific American.
She gave several examples of creative’s’ strange behaviors:
“Albert Einstein picked up cigarette butts off the street to get tobacco for his pipe; Howard Hughes spent entire days on a chair in the middle of the supposedly germ-free zone of his Beverly Hills Hotel suite; the composer Robert Schumann believed that his musical compositions were dictated to him by Beethoven and other deceased luminaries from their tombs; and Charles Dickens is said to have fended off imaginary urchins with his umbrella as he walked the streets of London.”
But what’s most compelling is that research has corroborated the connection between creativity and eccentricity. And it starts, interestingly enough, with schizotypal personality, a milder version of schizotypal personality disorder.
According to Carson in the article:
“Schizotypal personality can appear in a variety of forms, including magical thinking (fanciful ideas or paranormal beliefs, such as Schumann’s belief that Beethoven channeled music to him from the grave), unusual perceptual experiences (distortions in perception, such as Dickens’s belief that he was being followed by characters from his novels), social anhedonia (a preference for solitary activities — Emily Dickinson, Nikola Tesla and Isaac Newton, for example, favored work over socializing), and mild paranoia (unfounded feelings that people or objects in the environment may pose a threat, such as Hughes’s legendary distrust of others).”
Not everyone with schizotypal personality has a personality disorder, however. Many are bright and high-functioning.
Carson cited various studies that found that creative people tend to score higher on schizotypal surveys. For instance, her research has revealed that some creative students tend to report magical thinking and odd perceptual experiences.
“In my research at Harvard, done in part with my colleague Cynthia A. Meyersburg, I have found that study participants who score high in a measure of creative achievement in the arts are more likely to endorse magical thinking — such as belief in telepathic communication, dreams that portend the future, and memories of past lives. These participants are also more likely to attest to unusual perceptual experiences, such as having frequent déjà vu and hearing voices whispering in the wind.”
