Max, the brave one but with TOM

Theory of Mind (TOM) in dogs is a common phenomena to help us anthropomorphize them. I am not qualified to speculate on it except reflecting on what my somatic markers pronounce. Nevertheless, I can deduce to some extent that dogs are much better than humans at interpreting what's going on in other persons head. Theory of Mind has two routes, first one is self reflection and second one is capacity to capture what others think (may be dogs do it without reflecting on it but why bother reflecting if what they capture is already precise?).

Starting out on that premise, Max scans me much better than any airport full body scanner will ever do. His days and nights depends completely on my mood, so reading precisely even my occasional poker face and any subtle changes in my emotions helps his clairvoyance. All this makes evolutionary sense since dogs depends on humans for survival and there are no qualms about it. But lately started noticing something astonishing. Max has been learning or I should say replicating some of my innate survival instincts (well, so far one instinct).

We spend most of our time in the basement where Moore's Law helps us connect with the world. Thanks to winter, the time spent there has increased exponentially as well. Anyways, there is this door to the garage from the basement and sometimes when its not properly closed, it opens suddenly with a creepy sound. Being human et al, I usually get startled by the noise. Max never got startled but he would stop whatever he was doing and observes my reactions like a hawk. Now there has been an absolute turn around in his reaction, not only he gets startled but petrified he runs close to me. Having never seen him startled when inside the house, I can only infer he got fear from me (Mirror Neurons in work?). Since this got interesting and I don't get startled anymore by that creepy noise. In fact, I look forward to watch the hilarious reaction from Max esp. when he is anxious swallows with that cutest gulppp mimicking Jerry (of Tom and Jerry). It's going to be interesting if one of these days Max can un-learn the fear since now that he sees me not startled anymore.

What I've been reading

Now that I have a become a big fan (here and here) of Robert Sapolsky, I had to read his most famous book - Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers : The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping. Sapolsky has a very special gift, its not easy to write about the "science of stress" and make the reader feel like he is reading Catcher in the rye. I cannot think of a better book to start this new year with. His insights are going to help me till my last breath (I better heed else I have to face an expedited journey to the last breath!!).

I have thing about the final chapter of any book I read. Besides the thrill of finishing the book, what the final chapter epitomize probably remains the most significant part of the book at-least in my perspective. The kicker with this book was Sapolsky quotes my favorite serenity prayer, the first lines of which I usually find solace and from one my favorite teacher (and here).

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference." - Reinhold Niegnhur.
(More on that prayer some other time and how it's often misinterpreted.)

One of the weirdest thing before finishing this book was I was stressed like hell last weekend. Yes, there was that late night Avatar factor, bone chilling cold making me flirt with SAD et al but amidst all this I was focusing intensely not being stressed since this booked opened an avalanche of life ruining "factors" that stress can bring in gleefully. This was very interesting since today I am more serene and it reminds me on that famous testosterone experiment. It's funny how life forces us in a hard way to experience things which once while reading was fascinating but not so fascinating when experiencing oneself. Knowing the science behind the crappy anxiety inside me didn't help much initially but it was a tremendous serenity booster after some introspection. Most of the stuff that ruins us psychologically is caused by figment of our own imagination, beginning a relay race ruining our health, body, family and ad infinitum. So whenever I start to hypothesizing in excess, I usually think of this famous Mark Twain quote

"I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened."

The Neuroscience of Pregnancy

Another post to tabulate the neural representations, flow to neurotransmitters and harmones. Also featuring Oxytocin and Cortisol:

"Pregnancymassive neuroendocrine changes leading to adaptations organized by the mother’s brain. These changes are necessary for the different phases of pregnancy and motherhood. requires many adaptations to new situations. These changes are accompanied by massive neuroendocrine changes leading to adaptations organized by the mother’s brain. These changes are necessary for the different phases of pregnancy and motherhood.
First optimization is needed for the growth and protection of the fetus, next parturition has to be timely and uncomplicated, next maternal behavior such as caring and defending the young is important together with the start of lactation. It’s not easy to understand the complex interaction between female- and pregnancy hormones and their interaction with the maternal brain.
At the start of pregnancy the brain controls the increased appetite necessary for the pregnancy and the expansion of the blood volume as well as deeper breathing. The brain also prevents further ovulations through the pituitary gland.
The most important female hormones secreted in massive amounts during pregnancy are oestrogen en progesterone. They are very lipid soluble and easily penetrate the brain. Their ratio change the balance between inhibition and excitation. The stages of the pregnancy are signaled to the brain by the pattern of their secretion. Labor starts after the progesterone to oestrogen ratio strongly declines.
The fetus is during pregnancy protected from stress hormones such as cortisol by “in-built” mechanisms. The stress system (HPA-axis) activity is reduced during pregnancy, the responsiveness of the system to a wide range of physical and psychological stressors is reduced. If all this fails, the placenta produces an enzyme that acts as a barrier against maternal stress hormones. It converts these stress hormones (cortisol) to inactive metabolites.
The other most important female hormone for pregnancy and it’s effects on the brain is Oxytocine. When the ratio of progesterone to oestrogen drops, oxytocine is released and stimulates expulsive uterine contractions (labor), it reduces the anxiety of the first exposure to the screaming and noisy newborn, it encourages maternal behavior and the oxytocine pulses due to nipple sucking starts the breast feeding. Prolactin also increased at the end of pregnancy which is also important for breast feeding and maternal behavior."

As always, nature has provided an in-built mechanism to suppress Cortisol in fetus. The question is, can we bio-mimic it naturally (sans pills) in adults?

An Education

Watched the Oscar buzzing movie, "An Education" and I had mixed feeling. No doubt, it's a great movie and I loved the ending. My mixed feeling is more about the ground reality than about the movie.

Most of the "common sense" wisdom is already out there but yet every generation perceptually re-learns the same wisdom through a hard way and worse most don't even learn.

Carey Mulligan gave the performance of her life as Jenny. I am saying this even though I never rooted for her even for a moment since I loathe all the dopamine driven hedonic idiocy she was doing.  I was expecting her to fail in life, hold a grudge but she proved me wrong. I loved it. "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger" and that's the spirit of this movie. This movie hit close to home and I was stressed out watching this movie. The ending changed it all and the best part is it can be emulated in real life sans the quixotic sliver screen fiction, only if we self-relect, shed our egos et al.

Jenny graduated in life, the moment she said sorry to her teacher. World can use more Jenny's.

Dog saves boy from Cougar

Another day in the life of a homosapien with a helping hand from a dog (thanks). It would nice if we stop using words like "Master", "Owner", "Loyal" et al.

"Austin Forman was in his family's garden in Boston Bar with Angela, the family's 18-month-old pet dog, when he was charged by the wild cat.

Angel positioned herself between her young master and the cougar, sustaining puncture wounds.

"I was really scared. At first, I didn't know it was a cougar. I thought it was another dog," Austin told the Canadian news website CTV News on Sunday. "As soon as it went underneath the light, I saw that it was a cougar. I knew at that moment, I had to go inside."

The boy fled into his home, yelling: "A cougar is eating Angel!"

Sherri Forman, Austin's mother, called police, and a nearby constable from the RCMP sped to the scene, where the wild cat was attacking the dog.

The cougar had dragged Angel under the porch, where it continued to savage the dog's neck and face despite the officer firing two rounds into its hind quarters.

When the officer finally shot and killed the wild cat, its jaws remained closed on the dog's face.

When the cat was finally killed, the dog was silent for a few moments, then took a big gasp of air and got to her feet. The dog, which has a swollen eye, was expected to recover with the help of a local vet."

The Truth

Blogging has been a great outlet but the truth is I haven't put my heart and soul into it completely yet. Yes, it does show up once in a while but not always. The point is I am trying to make it a habit for starters rather than an outlet since I never intended this to be an outlet. I rather have it as a habit for a long time than just a virtual outlet. Finding solace in the deafening intellectual isolation has been a rough ride and there are zillion unanswered questions dangling in the space of life. There is this urge to find answers to them all but the "gut" knows finding peace with the pragmatic reality will answer all of them.

The words here are going to be there for a long long time and it takes time to immerse myself here like I do with Max. I think of it as a test for my patience and an experiment with neural plasticity, with the words here being the purveyor for my memories with Max.

If not anything just the thought that I started this when Max was by side is more than enough to continue this till that flesh inside my skull comprehends the world.

Consoling my conscience - Talk by Jonathan Safran

Considerable amount of my time in the latter months of last year was invested in pondering (and here) on the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran (without even reading the book).





Besides the dissonance of eating other creatures for umami, the best lesson to be learnt from Jonathan is how to keep the passion and politeness in balance. Great messages and messiahs have been lost in time since most of them got carried away by the passion (leading to perceptual ad hominem).
Zen master Linji (founder of Buddhist sect Rinzai) said - "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him". Of-course it doesn't imply literally but yet we can interpret this phrase in lot of ways. I usually like to interpret this in a non-religious way. It's never about us and its about the message we carry. Drowning in self-admiration, pride, ego et al completely negates the message, leave alone the significance of the message. I admire Jonathan's syllogism, which is always in prefect harmony without even a tinge of emotions going off balance. 

Caught in Avatar epidemic

There has been a surfeit of Avatar everywhere these days. Even David Brooks wrote a blunt column today on the movie. Avatar is a hackneyed story re-packaged with some unprecedented technology. But obviously this is not a movie to be watched on DVD, so I am going tonight after a surprise discovery that the theatre near by has an I-MAX screen. I am sure I will not be disappointed.
2008 was the first year in my life in which I didn't watch a single movie at a theatre. Probably that's why I nudged to visit the theatre the very first week of 2009.

The Road to Personalized Medicine (via genome revolution)

Personalized medicine is something that will completely change the landscape of the medicine for good. All the current health care issues et al will be relic sometime this century. For all its shortcomings and apocalyptic visions bio-tech revolution vividly provides, no one can argue about its ability to end lot of suffering. That sole reason has been my urge to learn a thing or two about it.
A very informative new book Language of Life by Francis S. Collins, offers a pleasant prospect. This doesn't sound like a book to lend from library but I am sure, I will paying Amazon for it. Great review:

"As an introduction to the science that could one day deliver routine personalised medicine, this is an excellent book. Collins gives an impressively up-to-date treatment of the genetics of cancer, race, infectious disease, ageing, the brain and our varying responses to drugs. The narrative is strongest when he frames the issues through real stories of individual patients.

But Collins also wants to provide a contemporary "user's guide", concluding each chapter with a section entitled: "What you can do now to join the personalized medicine revolution." Again, it's hard not to question his timing. He offers sage advice on drawing up a family health history, and getting screened for early signs of conditions to which you are prone. But there is little on how to interpret genetic tests, and some comments smack of desperation.

"Personalizing your approach to avoiding infectious diseases includes knowing and practicing the principles of safe sex," Collins tells us, leaving readers to wonder where the personalisation of this ubiquitous message comes in.

I see Collins as a cheerleader for a revolution that hasn't arrived quite yet, and I fear that his enthusiasm has blinded him to some potential pitfalls. In his concluding chapter, Collins presents two visions of the future: one in which members of a nuclear family live to a contented old age thanks to personalised medicine and one in which they are condemned to early graves through obesity and ignorance."

Neuroscience of Avatar

In his book Mirroring People, Marco Iacoboni wrote about a famous Israeli actor mentioning mirror neurons in his acceptance speech during an award ceremony. Movies are probably going to be the first industry (other than the TV commercials) to cash-in on the emerging neuroscience research.
I am yet to watch the movie Avatar but  good thing I didn't watch it before reading this fascinating "neuro centric" review of the movie by Jonah Lehrer.

"The experiment was simple: they showed subjects a vintage Clint Eastwood movie ("The Good, The Bad and the Ugly") and watched what happened to the cortex in a scanner. To make a long story short, the scientists found that when adults were watching the film their brains showed a peculiar pattern of activity, which was virtually universal. (The title of the study is "Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision".) In particular, people showed a remarkable level of similarity when it came to the activation of areas including the visual cortex (no surprise there), fusiform gyrus (it was turned on when the camera zoomed in on a face), areas related to the processing of touch (they were activated during scenes involving physical contact) and so on. Here's the nut graf from the paper:

 

This strong intersubject correlation shows that, despite the completely free viewing of dynamical, complex scenes, individual brains "tick together" in synchronized spatiotemporal patterns when exposed to the same visual environment.

 

But it's also worth pointing out which brain areas didn't "tick together" in the movie theater. The most notable of these "non-synchronous" regions is the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with logic, deliberative analysis, and self-awareness. (It carries a hefty computational burden.) Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we're engaged in intense "sensorimotor processing" - and nothing is more intense than staring at a massive screen with Dolby surround sound while wearing 3-D glasses - we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas. The scientists argue that such "inactivation" allows us to lose ourself in the movie:

 

Our results show a clear segregation between regions engaged during self-related introspective processes and cortical regions involved in sensorimotor processing. Furthermore, self-related regions were inhibited during sensorimotor processing. Thus, the common idiom ''losing yourself in the act'' receives here a clear neurophysiological underpinnings.

 

What these experiments reveal is the essential mental process of movie-watching. (Other research has also emphasized the ability of stories to blur the difference between fiction and reality.) This doesn't mean that every movie needs to be an action packed spectacle, just as Greenberg was wrong to suggest that every painting should imitate Pollock. But I think it helps reveal why Avatar is such a success. At its core, movies are about dissolution: we forget about ourselves and become one with the giant projected characters on the screen. In other words, they become our temporary avatars, so that we're inseparable from their story. (This is one of the reasons why the Avatar plot is so effective: it's really a metaphor for the act of movie-watching.*) And for a mind that's so relentlessly self-aware, I'd argue that 100 minutes of self-forgetting (as indicated by a quieting of the prefrontal cortex) is a pretty nice cognitive vacation. And Avatar, through a variety of technical mechanisms - from the astonishing special effects to the straightforward story to the use of 3-D imagery - manages to induce those "synchronized spatiotemporal patterns" to an unprecedented degree. That is what the movies are all about, and that is what Avatar delivers.

 

*And just because I've already gone off the deep end of pretentiousness, I thought I though should mention the parable that Avatar made me think of. I found the quote via Borges, but it's from the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi:

 

Once Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuangzi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi"