Letting your imagination run away with you may actually influence how you see the world. New research from Vanderbilt University has found that mental imagery–what we see with the “mind’s eye”–directly impacts our visual perception.

The research was published online June 26 by the journal Current Biology.

“We found that imagery leads to a short-term memory trace that can bias future perception,” Joel Pearson, research associate in the Vanderbilt Department of Psychology. and lead author of the study, said. “This is the first research to definitively show that imagining something changes vision both while you are imagining it and later on.”

“These findings are important because they suggest a potential mechanism by which top-down expectations or recollections of previous experiences might shape perception itself,” Pearson and his co-authors wrote.

It is well known that a powerful perceptual experience can change the way a person sees things later. Just think of what can happen if you discover an unwanted pest in your kitchen, such as a mouse. Suddenly you see mice in every dust ball and dark corner–or think you do. Is it possible that imagining something, just once, might also change how you perceive things?

“You might think you need to imagine something 10 times or 100 times before it has an impact,” Frank Tong, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study, said. “Our results show that even a single instance of imagery can tilt how you see the world one way or another, dramatically, if the conditions are right.”

To test how imagery affects perception, Pearson, Tong and co-author Colin Clifford of the University of Sydney had subjects imagine simple patterns of vertical or horizontal stripes, which are strongly represented in the primary visual areas of the brain. They then presented a green horizontal grated pattern to one eye and a red vertical grated pattern to the other to induce what is called binocular rivalry. During binocular rivalry, an individual will often alternately perceive each stimulus, with the images appearing to switch back and forth before their eyes. The subjects generally reported they had seen the image they had been imagining, proving the researcher’s hypothesis that imagery would influence the binocular rivalry battle.

Additional experiments found that the effect of imagery on perception was approximately the same as showing the research subject a faint representation of one of the patterns between trials. Stronger shifts in perception were found if subjects either viewed or imagined a particular pattern for longer periods of time. They found that both imagery and perception can lead to a build-up of a “perceptual trace” that influences subsequent perception.

Pearson, Clifford and Tong also discovered that changing the orientation of the image from what had been imagined greatly reduced the impact of imagery on perception. Because orientation is processed in early visual areas, this suggests that imagery’s interaction with perception may occur at early stages of visual processing.

The new findings offer an objective tool to assess the often-slippery concept of imagination.

“It has been very hard to pin down in the laboratory what exactly someone is experiencing when it comes to imagery, because it is so subjective,” Tong said. “We found that the imagery effect, while found in all of our subjects, could differ a lot in strength across subjects. So this might give us a metric to measure the strength of mental imagery in individuals and how that imagery may influence perception.”

The findings may also help settle a longstanding debate in the research community over whether mental imagery is visual – that one imagines something just as one sees it – or more abstract.

“More recently, with advances in human brain imaging, we now know that when you imagine something parts of the visual brain do light up and you see activity there,” Pearson said. “So there’s more and more evidence suggesting that there is a huge overlap between mental imagery and seeing the same thing. Our work shows that not only are imagery and vision related, but imagery directly influences what we see.”

The mystery of why one person becomes hooked on alcohol, heroin, sex or gambling, and another remains free of addiction, lies deep in the brain and is largely determined by our genes.

Professor Wim van den Brink, from the Academic Medical Centre at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and a leading expert in the field of addiction, told the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists today (Friday 4 July) that addicts have fewer dopamine or pleasure receptors in the brain and consequently seek out more and more stimulation.

“Addicts find it difficult to receive pleasure,” said Prof van den Brink. “They are not likely to enjoy most of the ordinary things most of us enjoy, experiences such as a day at the beach or night at a club. They are looking for more and more stimulus.”

However, Professor van den Brink stated that a person’s genetic vulnerability to addiction does not automatically translated into real alcohol and drug disease – there are also environmental influences.

He said: “You might start off smoking or taking cocaine, and that first introduction is very much determined by your environment. But to stick with it and become dependent on it is genetically determined.”

Ironically, if someone continues to take their substance of choice, the number of dopamine receptors drop even more. “In this way addicts become even more interested in drugs and drug-using friends,” said Prof van den Brink.

The emotional memory of the ‘wonderful experience and the drive to repeat it leads to craving and relapse, said Prof van den Brink. Moreover, addicts fail to understand, or register, the conflict between the short-term pleasure the substance gives them and the damage long-term addiction can do.

Reference
The Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Imperial College, London, 1 – 4 July 2008

The study is the work of researchers at Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), Houston, Texas, the Texas Children’s Hospital, and University College London, and is published online in the 1st July issue of the journal Pediatrics.

Dr Lane Strathearn, assistant professor of pediatrics at BCM and and a research associate at the college’s Human Neuroimaging Laboratory, said in a statement:

“The relationship between mothers and infants is critical for child development.”

“For whatever reason, in some cases, that relationship doesn’t develop normally. Neglect and abuse can result, with devastating effects on a child’s development,” he added.

For the study, Strathearn and colleagues observed the brains of 28 first-time mothers of babies aged 5 to 10 months with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner while they looked at photos of facial expressions of their own and other babies. Some of the photos showed the babies happy and smiling, and others showed the babies looking sad or with neutral facial expressions.

Specifically, the researchers measured the fMRI response to each of 6 photo-observing events: (1) own baby happy face; (2) own baby neutral face; (3) own baby sad face; (4) unknown baby happy face; (5) unknown baby neutral face; and (6) unknown baby sad face. The mothers looked at each photo randomly for 2 seconds, and there was a variable 2 to 6 second pause between each photo.

The fMRI scanner measured blood flow in the brain, giving rise to the expression that the brain “lights up” in areas of increased blood flow, which shows where the brain is more active at that time.

The results showed that:

• When the mothers looked at their own baby’s face, certain dopamine-related reward centres in their brains “lit up”.
• The brain areas that appeared to be most affected were the ventral tegmental area and the substantia nigra regions (part of the midbrain reward system); the striatum (involved in reward, cognition, and motor functions); two frontal lobe regions and a primary motor area.
• The two frontal lobe regions that lit up were: (1) the medial prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and insula cortex (involved with emotion processing), and (2) the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (involved in cognition).
• The nigrostriatal brain regions interconnected by dopaminergic neurons, including the substantia nigra and dorsal putamen, lit up when the mothers saw happy, but not neutral or sad photos of their own babies.
• On the whole, the mothers reacted more strongly to their own babies’ faces than to the unknown babies’ faces, with the strongest reactions being to happy faces, then neutral, then sad.

The researchers concluded that when first-time mothers see their own baby’s facial expression it activates an extensive network of brain connections that integrate emotional and cognitive signals and direct them to motor and behavioural outputs.

“Dopaminergic reward-related brain regions are activated specifically in response to happy, but not sad, infant faces,” wrote the researchers, who suggested that:

“Understanding how a mother responds uniquely to her own infant, when smiling or crying, may be the first step in understanding the neural basis of mother-infant attachment.”

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter involved in many brain functions, including motivation, emotion processing, thinking, sleep, mood, attention, learning and motor control.

The researchers said they were surprised that the mothers did not react as strongly to their babies’ sad faces as they did to their smiling faces. They expected to see an equally strong, but perhaps different reaction when mothers saw their babies’ crying faces.

Strathearn said that the brain areas that lit up for the mothers, are the same as the ones that light up in experiments on drug addiction.

“It may be that seeing your own baby’s smiling face is like a ‘natural high’, the strongest activation was with smiling faces,” said Strathearn.

“What’s in a Smile? Maternal Brain Responses to Infant Facial Cues.”
Lane Strathearn, Jian Li, Peter Fonagy, and P. Read Montague
Pediatrics Vol. 122 No. 1 July 2008, pp. 40-51
DOI:10.1542/peds.2007-1566

Regarding the graduate school search…you can also go to http://www.gradschools.com/ to search for graduate school programs.

To start with though, here are some health education or related grad school programs in the NYC area.  I don’t know if they have distance learning programs/classes.

Teachers College-Columbia University
Graduate degrees in Health Education
http://www.tc.columbia.edu/hbs/HealthEd/

Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health
Graduate degrees in Health Promotion
http://www.mailman.hs.columbia.edu/sms/programs/Programshealthpromotion.html

New York University
MPH in Global Public Health – Health promotion
http://www.nyu.edu/mph/academics/concentrations/health.promo.html

MPH in Community Public Health
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/nutrition/masters/community_public_health

Hunter College, City University of New York
MPH in Community Health Education
http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/shp/comheMPH/index.htm

Lehman College, City University of New York
Masters in Health Education
http://www.lehman.edu/deannss/healthsci/programcourse.html

Long Island University – Brooklyn Campus
Masters in Community Health
http://www.brooklyn.liu.edu/health/mscomhel.html

SUNY Stony Brook
MPH in Community Health
http://www.stonybrookmedicalcenter.org/body.cfm?id=1941#Communityhealth

Imagine a photograph showing your friend’s face. Although you might think that every single detail in his face matters to recognize him, previous experiments have shown that the brain prefers a rather coarse resolution instead.

This is tantamount to that a small rectangular photograph of about 30 to 40 pixels in width (showing only the face from left ear to right ear) is optimal.

But why?

A hint comes from an analysis of many face images. It turns out that the eyes and the mouth are responsible for setting the resolution level.

Looking at eyes and mouth at a coarse resolution gives the most reliable signals for recognition, and the brain adapted to this property.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
www.publishing.royalsociety.org/proceedingsb

A unique new study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institute (KI) suggests that the attitude of families and the public have little impact on if adults decide to have sex with persons of the same or the opposite sex. Instead, hereditary factors and the individual’s unique experiences have the strongest influence on our choice of sexual partners.

The study is the largest in the world so far and was performed in collaboration with the Queen Mary University of London. More than 7,600 Swedish twins (men and women) aged 20-47 years responded to a 2005 – 2006 survey of health, behaviour, and sexuality. Seven percent of the twins had ever had a same-sex sexual partner.

Publication: ‘Genetic and Environmental Effects on Same-sex Sexual Behaviour: A Population Study of Twins in Sweden’, Niklas Långström, Qazi Rahman, Eva Carlström, Paul Lichtenstein, Archives of Sexual Behaviour, 7 June 2008, doi 10.1007/s10508-008-9386-1.

- high quality schools
- safe neighborhoods and workplaces
- a cleaner environment
- reducing poverty
- desegregating our health care system
- protecting and nurturing the physical, mental and social development of children under the age of 5
- empowering communities to solve problems
- imposing stricter tobacco control standards
- providing health care for legal immigrants who are ineligible for Medicaid the first five years they are in the U.S.

The rescue worker squeezed his hand through all the debris just to confirm that she’s dead. He shouted a few times, using his baton to knock a few times on the bricks.. but there was no response inside. When the crowd walked to the next building, the team leader suddenly ran back again, shouting, “come quickly!!!” He came to her dead body, and used all his might to feel under the woman’s body. He seems to have felt something.. then he shouted, “there’s someone, there’s a child, still alive”.

After some struggle, the team and volunteers helped to clear all the debris apart, and took out her child from under her body. He was wrapped in a red blanket with yellow floral patterns. He’s about 3 or 4 months old. Because of his mother’s protection, he was completely unscathed. When they carried him out, he was still sleeping peacefully. His sleeping face warmed everyone’s heart. The accompanying doctor performed some checks on him, and found a hand phone inside the blanket. He read the screen and found that it wrote the following, all entered in the phone. “My dearest child, if you are able to survive, you must remember that I love you”. The doctor who has experienced many births and deaths in life through his career, cried too at this moment. The phone was passed around. Everyone who saw it couldn’t help shedding tears either. (Source: Xinhua Internet Discussion Forum)

Background information:

On Monday, May 12, at 2.28 p.m. Beijing time (6:28 GMT), a major earthquake, measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, jolted southwestern China’s Sichuan Province.

The confirmed death toll from the disaster has risen to 32,476 by 2:00pm Sunday, May 17, 2008, and the toll would possibly rise to more than 50,000 as many, still buried in rubbles, are feared dead.
And on Sunday, China Seismological Bureau Sunday revised the magnitude of the earthquake from 7.8 to 8.0 on the Richter scale.

The number of injured in magnitude 8.0 earthquake reached 220,109, it said.

In Sichuan alone, a total of 31,978 people were killed since Monday’s deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake, with 209,905 others injured.

Statistics from the emergency response office show that the death toll in Deyang and Mianyang cities of the province hit 10,341 and 11,874 respectively.

The office also gave a breakdown of the death toll in other areas as 4,156 in Chengdu, 2,586 in Guangyuan, 2,871 in Aba and 23 in Ya’an.

Outside Sichuan, the death toll was 364 in Gansu Province, 113 in Shaanxi Province, 16 in Chongqing Municipality, two in Henan Province, one in Yunnan Province, one in Hubei Province, and one in Hunan Province.

where to get last news?
english.sina.com/z/080512sichuanquake/index.shtml
english.gov.cn/
english.people.com.cn/
news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=china+earthqu…
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036059/
topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/earthquakes/si…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hzdkl/sets/72157605059158003/

US scientists studying how the brain behaves during decision making have discovered that when people are confronted with moral decisions, they think about efficiency in one part of the brain, and equity in another part of the brain that deals with emotions, and the latter tends to win, suggesting that a sense of fairness is fundamental to human nature.

The study is the work of researchers at University of Illinois and the California Institute of Technology, and appears in the 8th May issue of Science.

What is the better decision: to give more food to a few hungry people (the efficient choice), or let some food go to waste so that everyone gets a fair share (the more equitable choice)?

This was the dilemma faced by participants in the study, whose brains were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they considered a series of tough decisions in a scenario involving allocating food to children in a Ugandan orphanage.

In setting up this study the researchers wanted firstly to explore whether equity or efficiency was stronger to our sense of justice, and secondly, they wanted to find out how big a role emotions played in resolving such questions.

These two questions have been at the heart of longstanding debates about “distributive justice”.

Co-principal investigator Ming Hsu, a fellow of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, said that what makes us moral, and how we make trade offs, the fundamentals of moral choices, is a question that interests many scientists.

Hsu said many of the subjects said afterwards that “This is the worst experiment I’ve ever been in. I never want to do anything like this again!”

The participants were given the following scenario.

Each child in the orphanage starts with a monetary equivalent of 24 meals, an actual gift from the researchers to the orphanage.

Then, a number of meals is to be cut from the children’s allotments. The number that is cut depends on choices the participant makes.

Each decision, where the participant has to choose one of two options, comprises a moral dilemma where one option is efficient, and the other option is equitable. For instance, one could choose to take 15 meals from one child (option 1) or 13 meals from one child and 5 meals from another child (option 2). In option 1 fewer meals are lost (more efficient), and in option 2 more meals are lost (less efficient) but the burden is more “fairly” distributed.

Hsu and colleagues said that this type of decision is a good example of a distributive justice dilemma, where each option is compelling, but you can’t have both, so you have to trade one off against the other.

The participants made their decisions by watching a computer animation where they were shown pictures of two choices at a time, each being a photograph of the children affected and a number showing the number of meals that would be lost if they chose that option. They chose their option by selecting a lever that changed the path of a ball that was slowly moving across the screen.

The results showed that participants overwhelmingly chose equity over efficiency.

“They were all quite inequity averse,” said Hsu, who explained that the findings support other research that suggests people are fairly intolerant of inequity.

While the participants watched the screen and made their selections, the researchers observed their brains with fMRI scanners. They were particularly interested in the brain activity at the time they made the decision.

Three regions of the brain, the insula, putamen and caudate, were involved in different ways, at different points in the decision process.

The insula was active when equity changes were being considered, while the putamen was active when efficiency changes were being considered. And the caudate appeared to integrate equity and efficiency when the decision was taken.

Hsu said that the involvement of the insula suggests that emotion is involved when a person is thinking about inequity.

Studies have shown that the insula, which is involved in awareness of bodily states and emotions, becomes active when people feel hungry, crave drugs, or have intense feelings like anger, fear, disgust and happiness. Other studies have also suggested it mediates fairness.

The authors said the putamen and the caudate regions of the brain become activate during reward-related learning.

Hsu described what they saw. At first “you’re seeing the signal in the insula and the putamen,” he said, but “when they hit the lever you see the insula activation. And when the ball gets to the end you see (activation of) the caudate,” he added.

Hsu explained that:

“The putamen is responding only to the chosen efficiency, which is how many meals get taken away from the kids or how many meals they end up with.”

“The insula, however, responded to how equitably the burden of lost meals was distributed,” said Hsu.

The authors wrote that the results showed how the brain “encodes two considerations central to the distributive justice calculus and shed light on the cognitivist/sentimentalist debate regarding the psychological underpinnings of distributive justice”.

They suggested the findings support the notion that “a sense of fairness is fundamental to distributive justice, but, as suggested by moral sentimentalists, is rooted in emotional processing”.

On a more general level they suggested that:

“Emotional responses related to norm violations may underlie individual differences in equity considerations and adherence to ethical rules.”

“The Right and the Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency.”
Ming Hsu, Cédric Anen, and Steven R. Quartz.
Science.Published Online May 8, 2008.
DOI: 10.1126/science.1153651.