As a favor to friends in my academic department, the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, I’ve frequently been a guinea pig in the fMRI scanner. Normally I fight valiantly against slumber as the stimuli flash on the small screen in front of me and the hypnotic, high-pitched beeps of the scanner reverberate around me. This time, though, it was very different. This time, my colleague Martin Monti was going to read my mind. As the bed I lay on robotically slid into the giant donut shape of the scanner, I had a strange sense that I was about to be mentally naked.

Nobel Laureate economist, John Harsanyi, said that “apart from economic payoffs, social status seems to be the most important incentive and motivating force of social behavior.” The more noticeable status disparities are, the more concerned with status people become, and the  differences between the haves and have-nots have been extremely pronounced during the economic recession of recent years.  Barack Obama campaigned directly on the issue of the “dwindling middle class” during his 2008 presidential run and appointed vice-president Joe Biden to lead a middle class task force specifically to bolster this demographic.  Despite some recent economic improvement, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont just two months ago cautioned that “the reality is that the middle class today in this country is in desperate shape and the gap between the very very wealthy and everyone else is going to grow wider.”  Concerns about status likely will not be leaving the public consciousness any time soon.   [More]

Practice makes perfect, but how? Two groups of neuroscientists using MRI brain imaging announced last month that they were able to see changes inside the brains of people after mastering a new skill.  The big surprise is that the part of the brain that changed has no neurons or synapses in it!  The cerebral remodeling during learning was seen in the mysterious and still largely unexplored “white matter” region of the brain.

“Grey matter” is synonymous with smarts, but in fact only half of the human brain is grey matter.  White matter, the “other brain tissue”, is rarely mentioned.   Neurons in the cerebral cortex are packed into in the top layers of the brain, where they are connected together through synapses.  Learning takes place in the grey matter by linking neurons together into new circuits by strengthening synapses or forming new ones.

The discovery of mirror neurons in the brains of macaques about ten years ago sent shockwaves through the neuroscience community. Mirror neurons are cells that fire both when a monkey performs a certain task and when it observes another individual performing that same task. With the identification of networks of similarly-behaving cells in humans, there was much speculation over the role such neurons might play in phenomena such as imitation, language acquisition, observational learning, empathy, and theory of mind.