Get your mind ready for a new term that seems to be gaining some currency – “connectome.”  When I first encountered the word, I understood that it was about connections in the brain but for some reason I encoded the word as “connect to me.” But the final emphasis is on “tome” as in “home” not “to me,” so the word sounds like (and is meant to evoke the sense of) the genome. The term suggests that the power of the brain is not to be found in its component parts, but in the way that these component parts are connected.

The term was first coined by Olaf Sporns (U. of Indiana) in a 2005 paper entitled “The Human Connectome: A Structural Description of the Human Brain.” For Sporns, the connectome refers to a mapping of connections between regions of the brain. Sporns called for research that would provide a “comprehensive structural description of the network of elements and connections forming the human brain.” And, he proposed to call this dataset the “human connectome.”

Sporn argued that the mapping of regional connections would significantly “increase our understanding of how functional brain states emerge from their underlying structural substrate.” In 2010, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the $30 million Human Connectome Project to map these regional connections.

Sebastian Seung, a young MIT professor and researcher feels that we need to go one step farther, mapping not only regions of the brain, but also mapping each and every neuronal connection.  We have a hundred billion neurons in the brain, and a thousand times more connections, so Seung’s goal is daunting, but he thinks it is possible in the future. He discusses his ideas in his first book called “Connectome.”

I spoke with Seung at a book reading at Washington DC’s well-known independent book store, Politics and Prose.  Seung is a Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Physics at MIT and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  He is handsome, witty, prodigiously smart and in his a spiffy jacket, jeans and shiny gold sneakers, displays an unassuming charm.   Candidly, this young thinker looks much too young to have achieved such status, but is his ideas have already reached TED audiences and his book will certainly continue to intrigue others.

Sueng and his MIT colleagues are currently developing techniques that he hopes will eventually map all of the neuronal connections in the brain. Seung showed slides of a labor intensive technique he developed that colorizes thin slices of brain tissue and then pieces them together, one slice at a time, to construct the locations of neurons and their connection points, the synapses.  For additional background I suggest a few minutes viewing that TED video online called “Sebastian Seung: I am My Connectome.”  And, also check out a “citizen science” project put together by Seung, called Eyewire, (http://eyewire.org/) where you can help map the neuronal structure of the human retina.

I asked Seung if we will ever be able to map neuronal connections in a living brain.  He said the hope is to use ever more powerful neuroimaging machines to chart neuronal connections in living, active brains. The current technology, he explained, does not get anywhere near the resolution that is needed but improvements to the technology are in the works.

I had been curious whether glial cells might play a role in the connectome research.  Glial cells make up an estimated 80% or so of the brain and they were once thought to be little more than structural helpers for the neurons. But recent research by Douglas Fields (see his book, The Other Brain) and others clearly demonstrates that glial cells communicate with each other and also communicate with neurons. They play a much more important role in brain processing than had previously been imagined.  When I inquired about a the role of glial cells in the human connectome, Sueng said that while his current book focuses exclusively on neuronal connections, glial cells would clearly need to be factored into the understanding of the connectome.

Sueng likes to say that “you are your connectome,” meaning that our personal identity is encoded in the pattern of connections between neurons. These basic patterns are initially established by our inherited genes, but are constantly being modified by experience and interaction with the environment.  Seung summarizes the types of change that are possible by offering “four R’s:”

Reweighting means changes in the strengths of synapses.

Reconnection is the creation and elimination of synapses.

Rewiring is the creation and elimination of neural branches.

Regeneration is the creation and elimination of neurons.

To understand how the brain produces feelings of love and compassion, for example, or why one brain is more creative than another, we will need to understand how the active connections in the brain animate the various functional areas. It will be fascinating to monitor the progress of The Human Connectome Project as well as the pioneering work of Sebastian Seung and his colleagues at MIT.

On February 2, I had the honor of moderating the first in a series of presentations on the arts and the brain, hosted by Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The series is the brainchild of Strathmore’s Lauren Campbell. The first session featured Dr. Gay Powell-Hanna, Executive Director of NCCA and Dr. Bruce Miller Director of The Memory and Aging Center at UCSF Dr. Miller is one of the leading experts on dementia and creativity.

Miller began his talk by commenting on the important connection between the rise of creativity and the evolutionary development of the human brain. Miller showed pictures of the magnificent cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira as examples of the sudden explosion of culture that appeared in the archeological record roughly 50,000 years ago. Miller’s mother was an artist and a great fan of the cave paintings. Miller recalled his mother telling him not to make the mistake of thinking of the cave paintings as “primitive” art. “These were very sophisticated and skilled artists” she explained. This relatively sudden appearance of sophisticated art surely signaled, Miller suggested, a significant change in the human brain. Something about the human brain changed – something that supported the creation and appreciation of art and culture.

Dr. Miller’s work with neurodegenerative diseases and patients suffering from various forms of dementia, has, ironically, given him insights into the workings of the creative brain. Miller has had the opportunity to work with a number of artists suffering from dementia and has been able to track the progression of the disease and its impact on the artistic expression. He has found that different dementias create different deficits in creative ability, with some types of dementia even enhance creative output.

Research by Bill Seeley, a colleague of Miller’s has made it clear that neurodegenerative diseases are not diffuse and random, but instead target specific, large-scale distributed networks in of brain cells. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, targets degeneration in the hippocampus and circuits in the back of the brain. Miller showed a progression of self-portraits by artist William Utermohlen, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. In a 2006 NY Times article about Utermohlen, Miller explained that “Alzheimer’s affects the right parietal lobe in particular, which is important for visualizing something internally and then putting it onto a canvas,” Dr. Miller said. “The art becomes more abstract, the images are blurrier and vague, more surrealistic. Sometimes there’s use of beautiful, subtle color.” The final self-portrait is a disembodied head that seems to materialize out of wispy clouds of charcoal grey smudges. In Miller’s opinion, this is one of Utermohlen’s most beautiful pieces.

Frontotemporal dementia, as the name implies, targets regions towards the front of the brain. And, in some cases, this particular dementia stimulates an outpouring of creativity in patients who had never before done any previous art work. One patient, who suffered from a combination of bi-polar disorder, Frontotemporal dementia and ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, had never created visual art before. But at the earliest stages of the diseases he developed a compulsion for painting that persisted throughout his life. He painted daily until his motor deficits made it impossible for him to hold a paintbrush.

Another Frontotemporal dementia patient of Miller’s was the Canadian painter Anne Adams, who left her work as a scientist to follow her new obsession to paint, an obsession that coincided with the early onset of the disease. Her most famous work, (described in more detail in another blog) is called “Unraveling Bolero,” a brilliantly conceived and executed representation of the musical piece Bolero by Maurice Ravel. Unbeknownst to Adams, Ravel wrote Bolero in the early stages of his own Frontotemporal dementia. With Frontotemporal dementia, areas of the so-called executive brain are compromised by areas that process sensory input are spared, perhaps resulting in the outburst of fascination with colors and shapes.

Miller cited the work done by NCCA and it’s member organizations as very important efforts that can help prevent the onset of neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Hanna, during her remarks mentioned the seminal research done by Dr. Gene Cohen that demonstrated that engagement in arts programs improved mood and health metrics in subjects who averaged 80 years of age.

NCCA, in association with the Gerontological Association of America (GSA) honors the memory and work of Dr. Cohen by presenting an annual Gene Cohen Creativity and Aging Research award. Last year’s recipients were the husband and wife team of Helga and Tony Noice who have a body of work demonstrating the health, mood and cognitive benefits of participation in a theatre training intervention. This year’s winner is Dr. Barry Bittman, has demonstrated how music interventions modulate human stress responses.

Dr. Hanna cited Miller’s work as an example of how creativity can be an important outlet for people suffering from dementia, enabling them to find areas of strength that have been spared by the disease, and by providing them with continued areas of satisfaction and personal fulfillment.

In 1986, Dr. Anne Adams, a scientist at the University of British Columbia, made a rather sudden shift away from science and began an almost obsessive commitment to art. Around this time, Adams developed acoustic neuroma, a tumor attached to the acoustic nerve. The tumor proved to be benign, but the condition required regular brain scans.

Then, in 2000, her family began to notice problems. Adams started having trouble finding words and doing simple math. In 2002, Dr. Adams was diagnosed with a variety of Frontotemporal dementia called primary progressive aphasia, or PPA.

In 2004, Dr. Adams visited the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, run by Dr. Bruce Miller, an expert in Frontotemporal dementia. Comparing the scans that had been done to monitor Adams’ acoustic necrosis with current scans of her brain, Miller and his colleagues recognized that “changes were apparent.”

Neuroimaging analyses done by Miller’s team revealed that despite degeneration on the left side of Adams’ brain, she had increased volumes of grey matter in areas of the right hemisphere that are associated with “heteromodal and polysensory integration.” “The findings suggest,” Dr. Miller, says, “that structural and functional enhancements in non-dominant posterior neocortex may give rise to specific forms of visual creativity that can be liberated by dominant inferior frontal cortex injury.”

Back in 1994, before any signs of trouble, Adams had become fascinated with the music of French composer, Maurice Ravel. At the age of 53, Adams painted a strikingly beautiful visual analysis of the musical score of Ravel’s masterpiece Bolero that she called “Unraveling Bolero.” “Bolero is an exercise in compulsivity, structure and perseveration,” Dr. Miller observes. Adams’ painting captures the obsessive repetition with repeated variations of rectangular structures. Unbeknownst to Adams, Ravel had also been diagnosed with Frontotemporal dementia and began showing symptoms of the disease in 1928 when he too was 53 years old.

William W. Seeley and other collaborators in Dr. Miller’s lab published a 2007 article in Oxford Journals about Adams, noting that Adams had a unique “capacity to create expressive transmodal art,” and suggested that this capacity may reflect “an increased subjective relatedness among internal perceptual and conceptual images.”  While one part of her brain was getting weaker, it is possible that the visual and auditory areas of Adams’ brain were becoming more robust and better connected to each other.

The story of Anne Adams is striking reminder that people with dementia can continue to retain areas of great strength and satisfaction. “We used to think dementias hit the brain diffusely,” says Dr. Miller, “Nothing was anatomically specific. That is wrong. We now realize that when specific, dominant circuits are injured or disintegrate, they may release or disinhibit activity in other areas. In other words, if one part of the brain is compromised, another part can remodel and become stranger.”  Dementia changed Dr. Adams, but through her fascination with music and art, she was able to reinvented herself, discover new ways to express her intellect and creativity, and continue to make important contributions to her community.

On Thursday evening, February 3, I will have the honor of moderating the first in a series of presentations on the arts and the brain, hosted by Strathmore Music Center. The series is the brainchild of Strathmore’s education and development manager, Lauren Campbell.

“Scientists are discovering amazing things about the way our minds work,” says Campbell. “We wanted to provide a forum to explore those discoveries in relation to what we do best here – the arts.”

The series is like “chocolate for the brain,” for me. Since my days as an actor I have been captivated by the strange and wonderful gyrations of human behavior. Ultimately, investigations of behavior lead to the brain, and the past two decades have seen an explosion of research on the neurological foundations of human behavior. I am increasingly convinced that human brains are built to be creative and that exercise of our creative abilities – as participants or as audiences — strengthens our brains and protects them against cognitive decline. Lauren and I discovered that we share a passion for what famed biologist E. O. Wilson calls “consilience,” the coupling of science and the humanities.

The first in the five-part series is called, “The Mature Amateur – Creativity and the Aging Brain.” The session (February 2, at 7:00 PM) features Dr. Bruce Miller of UCSF who is an expert on dementia who has done fascinating research on Frontotemporal dementia and a small subset of patients who experience a flourishing of creative expression brought on by the dementia itself.  Dr. Miller is joined by Gay Powell Hanna, Ph.D., M.F.A. who is the Executive Director of the National Center for Creative Aging (NCCA). NCCA is a nonprofit dedicated to fostering an understanding of the vital relationship between creative expression and the quality of life for older adults.

On April 5, I will be working with Mark Chalfont and members of the Washington Improvisational Theatre on a session called “Your Brain on Laughter – the Neuroscience of Humor and Improvisation.” Other sessions offer a stellar lineup of scientists and artists.

On March 15, famed cognitive neuroscientist Michael Posner is joined by his son, Aaron Posner, an award winning theatre director to explore “The Theatre of the Brain.”

The March 29 session, “Music Cognition and Perception” will feature performance and discussion by Vijay Lyer, one of America’s most acclaimed young jazz musicians who did his Ph.D. dissertation at UC Berkeley on music perception and cognition.

The final session, on April 26, “Your Brain on Jazz – The Neuroscience of Jazz Improvisation,” features a neuroscientist who is plays jazz. Dr. Charles Limb of Johns Hopkins University has conducted a series of Neuroimaging experiments that explore musical improvisation.

Look for blog postings on each of these sessions.

The evidence is mounting that behavioral and lifestyle approaches are the most effect ways to maintain your brain health, enhance your cognitive abilities and ward off cognitive decline and dementia.

What are these behavioral and lifestyle approaches? New research emerges every day and adds to our understanding of what causes cognitive decline and what can actually protect our brains. Because this expanding flood of information can be confusing and contradictory, mindRAMP organizes the emerging research into clusters of brain health advice.  We are currently working with six key areas that we call the CogWheels of Brain Health, which are summarized below and discussed in more detail on the mindRAMP website and in mindRAMP publications.

In addition to the six CogWheel areas, it is clearly essential that we maintain our general health and keep chronic diseases, particularly cardiovascular disease, under control.  Our body and brain work together as an integrated system – like cogwheels in a complex mechanism.  If one part of the system is failing, the entire system is compromised.

One of the revelations of modern neuroscience is that the brain remains “plastic,” or malleable and changeable, throughout our lifetime. Your brain continues to grow or shrink in response to what you do, what you think and what you experience. You actually shape your brain through the choices you make. There is an undeniable message from all this research: You can promote the health and vitality of your brain if you adopt the appropriate protective behaviors.

Good News!  All of these CogWheels are easily accessible. The recommendations are risk free and inexpensive. You need no expensive machinery or bags of drugs. What you do need is knowledge and a lifelong resolve to take action to protect the health and functionality of your precious brain.

Learn!  Do it!

The Six CogWheels of Brain Health

Physical Exercise – Facts: Movement and exercise promote cardiovascular health and produce beneficial substances such as BDNF, a brain-derived chemical that stimulates growth and repair of brain cells.  Do It: Avoid sitting for extended periods of time. Regularly stand, stretch, and move around. Do exercise that gets your heart beating faster. Use your muscles; exercise your balance.

Mental Exercise – Facts: Mental stimulation builds reserves of healthy brain structures that compensate for natural wear & tear of the brain and protect against decline. Do It:  Engage in lifelong learning and creativity.

Social Engagement – Facts: Human beings thrive when engaged with others and suffer when we isolated and alone.  Do It: Stay engaged with family, friends, pets and plants. Meet new people. Volunteer. Engage in group activities.

Stress Management – Facts: Chronic, unrelieved stress is toxic.  It lowers our ability to fight illness and repair body and brain damage. Do It: Avoid stressful situations. Change what you can; adjust to what cannot be helped.  Laugh.  Move.

Sleep, Naps and Mental Rest - Facts: Brain and body are restored and repaired during sleep. Memory is enhanced by rest and sleep. Do It: Get a good 6- 8 hours of sleep a night and take regular, planned, mindful naps during the day.

Diet & Nutrition – Facts: Your brain is fueled by a combination of the liquid, food and oxygen you consume.  Do It: Drink enough water. Breathe healthy air. Eat a largely plant-based diet with lots of fruit and vegetables. Avoid fried foods. Avoid overeating and drink one glass of wine. Savor your food.

Take a moment to think about each of these CogWheels.  How are you doing in each area? Are you getting enough regular physical exercise, controlling stress, getting enough sleep and eating well? Are you spending enough time with people you love and find stimulating? Are you challenging your brain? Identify the CogWheels that need work and resolve to make improvements.

Key words: brain health, enhanced cognition, prevention of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

The creative cycle is built on the belief that the creative process generally follows a standard sequence of activities. While there is surely a lot of looping back within the framework, most creative projects follow a predictable sequence of activities.

Frequently, creative projects get sidetracked, short-circuited or bogged down because they skip a vital phase of this process. For example, we identify a “Saturation” phase that includes the process of skill-building. If I want to become a painter I need to put in the time to learn how to draw, how to control the brush, how to work with the pigment. If I skip that important phase – never learning to draw, mix colors or control my brush – I will never be able to effectively transfer the wonderful visions in my mind onto the canvas. I won’t be able to play the music I hear in my head unless I learn to press the right keys on the piano.

Creativity can also get derailed because each phase requires a different combination of cognitive skills. We run into trouble when we don’t know how to match the correct cognitive skill to the appropriate phase, or haven’t learned how to effectively inhibit one skill while activating another.  We need to learn the role of timing.  We need to learn when conscious and deliberate thinking and decision-making works best and when we need to rely on gut feelings and unconscious thinking.

For example, the Saturation phase is also a learning and research phase. It engages our abilities of pattern recognition and what is called “convergent” thinking, the ability to summarize and categorize. The next phase, “Manipulation,” is the phase when we try to generate and hold onto multiple ideas as we think outside the box.  This phase requires us to inhibit the convergent thinking of the Saturation phase, while activating “Divergent” thinking skills. Rather than find patterns we need to break them. Rather than group elements into a single category, we need to deconstruct concepts and get down to individual ideas and elements, so that we can experiment with them, mixing and matching in new ways throughout the Manipulation phase.

We can improve our creative abilities by:  1) learning the phases of the creative cycle, 2) understanding which thinking skills are required for each phase, and 3) learning how to inhibit one cognitive function while activating another.

The Creative Cycle (in brief)

Motivation – Some form of cognitive dissonance motivates an emotional drive for change, change that ranges from an improvement of an existing item or idea to the invention of a new product.  A mental image of a desired future state is generated.  A goal is established.

 
Activation – Active thinking about how to achieve the desired goal is initiated and sustained. Cognitive attention is focused on how to achieve the goal and a plan of action may be formulated.

 
Saturation – Research and learning are focused around topics that seem most relevant to achieving the goal. Skills needed to achieve the goal are identified and practiced.   Convergent thinking is stressed.

 
Manipulation – Conscious attention is focused on generating new ideas, new and innovative approaches. Divergent thinking and imagination are stressed.

 
Incubation – Based on the work of the previous phases, the conscious mind primes the unconscious mind by targeting an unresolved issue or problem that impedes progress towards the goal.  Unconscious thinking is given time to work, often while distracted by other activities such as exercise, a bath, meditation, socializing, sleep or a nap.

 
Illumination – Illumination occurs when one or more resolutions to the targeted problem are formulated. This takes place either through conscious thought (Manipulation) or as a result of unconscious thinking (Incubation).  When unconscious thinking presents a resolution to conscious awareness, it is experienced as a moment of insight when we say or think:  AHA!

 
Verification – The proposed resolution must be tested and evaluated. Does it resolve the problem? Does it work?  Does it reach the goal? Is it actionable, feasible, replicable, and sustainable?  What can be learned from failure?  Will success lead to a “What if?” moment?

Those who are familiar with the mindRAMP Creative Cycle will note that we have gently rearranged and manipulated the phases a bit.  In keeping with good creative practice, we have continued to research the process and believe that the cycle needs to better reflect what we have learned . . . so far.

Motivation: The first phase, for example, had been called the Initiation Phase or the Getting Started phase. All creative projects need a spark to get started. We are now calling this initial phase the “Motivation” phase to focus on this important emotional driver of behavior.  Motivation that starts a creative project can be internal or external and, quite often, the source of the motivation will influence how subsequent activities are carried out.

Activation: The other change is to make “Activation” the second phase of the cycle. In the previous version, we had an “Implementation” Phase that followed the “Illumination” phase.  The problem with the former structure was that it implied that there was no action or implementation until the moment of insight. But that is clearly not the case. We realized that the entire cycle involved activity and action. The previous “Implementation” phase made the point that having an insight was not enough. The insight needs to be turned into action, the vision needs to be implemented and made concrete. We believe that by placing “Activation” towards the beginning of the cycle we better capture the idea that action is integral to each and every step of the process, without losing the point that insight is only valuable if it is implemented.

Key words: Improve creative abilities, creativity, creative cycle, the creative process, divergent thinking skills, convergent thinking, incubation, gut feelings, unconscious thinking.

by Michael C. Patterson

Quantity matters. We often think of geniuses and experts as having a unique gift for producing high quality works every single time they put pen to paper or paint to canvass. In reality, gifted artists probably generate more trash than the average amateur dabbler.

The more paintings or first drafts an artist produces, the more likely she is to produce one really special work of art. Some even suggest that the one key variable that distinguishes works of genius from run-of-the-mill creation is the volume of output. The more that is created, the more likelihood there is of creating a work of true genius. Why would this be?

The most obvious reason is that greater volume of output increases the likelihood of — purely by chance — coming up with an excellent piece of work. Modern photographic equipment, for example, enables even an amateur photographer to take hundreds of photographs in a matter of seconds. The automatic adjustments on the camera will make sure that the camera is focused properly and is set on an acceptable aperture (is this an accurate description?). The trick for the amateur photographer in this scenario is to take thousands of pictures and then cull through them to select the one or two that are the best of the lot. Show the few winners to family and friends and spare them the others.

No artist of quality displays all of his or her work. They only make public the best of their output. So, the more output they generate the greater the possibility of producing a high quality piece.

But there is a more important reason that quantity leads to quality, and it has to do with the dopaminergic system. They key to success is learning and improving through trial and error. A large part of what separates expert from amateur is that the expert has learned from her failures and mistakes and effectively uses this developing knowledge to figure out how to produce increasingly successful work. This learning manifests itself as an innate aesthetic sense of what pleases the eye or ear and what doesn’t.

The dopanimergic system is the brain’s mechanism for learning through trial and error and for developing an aesthetic “feel” for what works. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is a key ingredient of the brain’s reward system. When we experience a positive event, a little burst of dopamine gives us the feeling of pleasure. We like pleasure, and will learn to seek out those activities that produce the bursts of dopamine on a consistent basis. In this manner, dopamine helps the brain learn and decide what actions to take. We take actions that give us pleasure. Actions that fail to produce a burst of dopamine are experienced as disappointing and negative.

This process becomes an important prediction mechanism for the brain. In test monkeys, a squirt of sweet juice into the mouth produces a burst of dopamine. After a few trials, an auditory tone that precedes the squirt of juice will also trigger the burst of dopamine, because the brain has learned that the tone has proven to reliably lead to a squirt of sweetness. The tone has become a proxy for the original event. As Jonah Lehrer points out in his book How We Decide, “this process can be indefinitely extended: the dopamine neurons can be made to respond to the light that precedes the tone that precedes the juice, and so on)” (Lehrer, 36-37). [The accumulation of proxies can become so long that we may lose sight of the original stimulus, which is how neuroscientists think we become addicted to substances that are anything but good for us.]

The ability to predict reliable outcomes also establishes the mechanism for what is called “prediction error signals.” As long as predictions are fulfilled all is well. Push the appropriate lever and get a squirt of juice. But if the monkey expects a jolt of dopamine and receives none, alarms go off. Something is wrong! The expected outcome did not materialize. Some neuroscientists apparently call this the “Oh, shit” circuit. The prediction was wrong and needs revision. In this way, through trial and error, the brain learns to make ever more accurate predictions. The more trails, the more data to add to the computation and the more refined the predictions can become.

The monkey might learn, for example, that the squirt only arrives every third time it pushes the lever. That is useful information. Our monkey won’t get upset when the first two pushes produce no sweet reward. Eventually, the dopamine response will adjust and will only anticipate reward on the third try.

The dopamine response is communicated to the rest of the brain and body as emotions. The monkey, (or flight controller, jazz musician, etc. — anyone making quick and complex decisions) doesn’t make the decision by rationally evaluating options. They just have a gut feeling that one option is better than another. One musical note will sound better than another. One color will be more interesting than another. One flight path will land the plane safely while another will expose it to danger. What is the source of our gut feelings?

The “Oh, shit” signal emanates from an area of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The ACC sends the warning signal to both the hypothalamus, which raises blood pressure and pumps adrenaline into the blood to get the body ready for action, and to the thalamus, which raises the signal to the level of conscious awareness. After a dopamine neuron sends the warning signal to the ACC, the ACC communicates with other parts of the brain through spindle neurons that are much longer than the average neuron and also send signals faster than other neurons. In this way the prediction results are communicated instantly to the rest of the brain and are experienced as feelings.

We feel these emotions, and therefore have a gut-feeling about things, well in advance of our ability to rationally and consciously think about reasons for having those feelings. In a creative and artistic setting, these gut feelings become the foundation of aesthetic judgment. The jazz musician doesn’t have time to consciously consider the subtleties of music theory when selecting the next note to improvise. They rely on their gut feel to allow their unconscious, automatic systems to play the right notes. Their conscious mind would only get in the way.

These gut feelings are the result of feedback from hours of practice and trial and error. The dopamine system continually processes the success or failure of artistic choices continuing to hone the skill.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. The quantity of output from constant practice gives the dopaminergic system the chance to refine its prediction and prediction-error systems. The artist who focuses on correcting failures and figuring out how to consistently trigger the rewards of dopamine bursts is cultivating her aesthetic instincts.

By Michael Patterson, MALS

One of the primary goals of mindRAMP & Associates is to translate the complexities of brain research into easy-to-understand language for a popular audience. My colleague, Roger Anunsen, and I are always on the lookout for useful metaphors that will help us explain difficult neuroscience concepts.

I recently found a nice use of a railroad metaphor in a fascinating article by Earl K. Miller and Jonathan D. Cohen in the 2001 Annual Review of Neuroscience (Vol. 24: 167-202), titled “An Integrative Theory of Prefrontal Cortex Function.” [The article explains a model for how the brain orchestrates thought and action in accordance with internal goals. The authors propose that, “cognitive control stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that represent goals and the means to achieve them” (Miller & Cohen, 2001).]

At one point, when describing the distinct roles of the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) Miller & Cohen say, “To use the railroad metaphor, the hippocampus is responsible for laying down new tracks and the PFC is responsible for flexibly switching between them.” What an elegant and clear way to capture the incredibly complexity of two key cognitive functions – the consolidation of new memories and effective cognitive control of neural networks.

I applaud Miller & Cohen, not only for their important research but also for their commitment to explaining their concepts in clear, straightforward English. I am always grateful when I find research reports that shun insider jargon, comprehensible to only a limited community. The best way to confront growing science illiteracy among the general population is to speak plainly and employ effective metaphors that help non-experts grasp fundamental science concepts.

By Michael C. Patterson, MALS

Different eras tend to use the technology of the day to explain the workings of the brain, with computer metaphors being popular today. My colleague Roger Anunsen and I, however, have begun using a somewhat retro metaphor to describe brain activity – the inter-state highway system.

We started using the metaphor to describe the reserve theory and the role both brain and cognitive reserve play in brain health. The reserve theory suggests that the brain is better able to compensate for the insults and injuries that accumulate with the advance of years when it has: a) more healthy brain cells, and b) a more robust set of cognitive strategies.

It is like having backup troops to call in to action if the first line of defense falters. Aghh! I used a military metaphor! I hate that.

The brain sets goals and takes action. Let’s use the goal of a cross-country trip as a metaphor for a cognitive challenge faced by our brain. Our goal is to get from Washington DC to Portland Oregon. If there is only one highway linking the two cities, we need to make sure that the road is well maintained (brain health). If the single road is filled with potholes and constructions sights, or if there aren’t enough lanes to accommodate the volume of traffic, our trip across country will take much longer than we had planned (reduced processing speed).

Even worse, if the bridge over the Mississippi gets ripped out by a flood (we suffer a stroke), our trip is thwarted altogether. The only route from DC to Portland is no longer operational.

The situation would be very different, however, if we have taken the time and effort to construct a robust interstate highway system with lots of different roads connecting at lots of different points around the country, (i.e. lots of healthy brain cells and lots of redundant, networked connections). With increased options, when we confront potholes or a downed bridge (brain injuries), we can choose alternate routes. We can work our way around the obstacles and complete our trip.

A reserve of healthy brain cells and redundant neural networks appears to offer greater opportunity to compensate for age-related cognitive decline. Research findings have shown that years of education and higher literacy provide protection against dementia, probably for these very reasons. Complex thinking across a lifetime probably builds up robust reserves of active brain cells and complex, inter-connected networks of information and concepts.