Did walking help Theresa May decide on a snap election? | Daniel Glaser

It was during a walking holiday in Snowdonia, says Theresa May, after ‘long and hard’ reflection that she made the decision to call a June election. So much for walking and creative inspiration. But is there a connection between the two?

Neuroscience would say that depends on the difficulty of the task. Using a mathematical example, you can test this out for yourself. When you start with an easy challenge like counting in fives, fast walking isn’t a problem, but try multiplying 37 and 23 and you’ll find your feet slow down no matter how hard you try and keep up the pace.

We only struggle to walk and problem solve when the task is sufficiently difficult (if deciding on an election was a no-brainer for May, it’s unlikely her walking pace suffered). Various theories have been advanced to explain the finding, but really it’s down to attention being a limited resource in the brain. It’s not as good at multitasking as you’d expect. In May’s case, it could even be that the opposite was happening; the effort required to maintain a steady walking pace distracted her from the everyday preoccupations of running the country, enabling her to hatch a fiendish plot to steal a march on the opposition.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

Did walking help Theresa May decide on a snap election? | Daniel Glaser

What novels reveal about our brains | Daniel Glaser

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

Psychological thrillers are a great way of understanding the skewed perception of first-person consciousness

With the hotly anticipated Into The Water by Paula Hawkins out next month, the interest in psychological thrillers isn’t going away. The genre’s preoccupations are shared with neuroscience – in particular, how we process memory. But it’s not recent breakthroughs within neuroscience and psychology that make it such a rich seam for novelists.

In fact, there haven’t really been any, although much new data about the brain is available, thanks to imaging techniques, neuroscience projects and interest from venture capitalists into artificial intelligence, our basic view of it is not that different to what it was 20 years ago. Now novels offer the most realistic accounts of first-person consciousness, particularly psychological thrillers that rely on skewed perception and unreliable narrators. This style, suggesting that what we experience isn’t objective reality but rather a story we tell ourselves, is closer to the truth than most psychological theories. When we can finally explain how the brain works, perhaps scientific representations will be more accurate. But for now, the novel is the real story.

Continue reading…

What novels reveal about our brains | Daniel Glaser

How the brain keeps track of time | Daniel Glaser

Why isn’t Easter the same date each year? Unlike Christmas, it relies on different religious calenders and astronomy tricks, in particular the Spring Equinox and the full moon, meaning it is complex to co-ordinate. The most we achieve are close matches: a lunar month is just over four weeks of earth days; a solar year is near to 12 lunar months. But if you make that rule absolute, things gradually get out of sync.

Our own bodies share similar issues when it comes to circadian rhythms. Although individual cells isolated in a dish display a roughly 24-hour cycle, they need to be synchronised for a whole organism to work effectively. In studies where respondents ‘free-run’, ie where they are shielded from time cues – light, sound or action – the internal body clock shifts to a cycle of a little more than 24 hours, gradually losing sync with the day.

There are pathways to transmit light from the retina to the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a tiny bit of brain above the crossing of the optic nerves: the central timekeeper. Complex feedback mechanisms keep the whole thing running. For religious dates and biology, controlling cycles is a tricky business.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

How the brain keeps track of time | Daniel Glaser

How the brain makes body parts move | Daniel Glaser

In a recent groundbreaking operation, a man paralysed from the neck down is now, after eight years, able to eat and drink without assistance – all thanks to the power of thought.

The story has captured everyone’s imagination because it seems miraculous that paralysis can be reversed simply by our thoughts. But neuroscientists have always known the information is there, it’s just a question of how you read it out.

In this instance scientists did not tap into the spinal cord. Instead, they used an implant in the patient’s head to read out his intentions from the motor cortex. In this part of the brain, which plans and controls movements, the various parts of the body are laid out like a map. This means that the intended actions can be read out by a sensor, like a message on a mobile. The scientists can then ‘spy’ on the signals and work out the neural trace of his movements. They are then relayed directly to the muscles, allowing the patient to move his arm.

It turns out that in neuroscience as in life, it’s often worth cutting out the middle man and tracing a story directly to its source.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

How the brain makes body parts move | Daniel Glaser

Why dissecting the brain only gives us half its story | Daniel Glaser

News that a man captured and killed the UK’s rarest butterfly reminds us how much biology relies on Wordsworth’s famous line, ‘murdering to dissect’.

The obsessive collector appreciates the butterfly’s beauty by killing it and pinning it to a board. In neurobiology, historically, researchers relied on slicing up the brain to understand more about its structure. But ‘murdering to dissect’ hasn’t always given us the best picture. When Renaissance physicians examined the cerebrospinal fluid in the brain that runs to the spinal cord, they assumed – wrongly – that this liquid transmitted impulses. And when Aristotle noticed the fine network of blood vessels in the folded surface of the brain, he believed its function was as a radiator. Neither error could have persisted if they had been able to conduct live experiments.

Dissection alone led to all sorts of mistaken conclusions, which is why modern neuroscience tries as far as possible to study the brain in action. If you want to truly understand and appreciate something, be it a brain or a butterfly, better to observe it in the wild and not just pinned to a board.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

Why dissecting the brain only gives us half its story | Daniel Glaser

How self-employment affects the brain | Daniel Glaser

The current debate about the rights of the self-employed raises the question of how much control we have over our work. Is an Uber driver really their own boss if they are controlled by a corporation? And how much does it affect work performance?

A great deal, from a neuroscientific perspective. There is a crucial difference between movements you control and movements you make when you slavishly follow external direction. The cerebellum predicts what these movements will be depending on how planned they are. If, for example, you move your arm to follow a dot on the screen, rather than tracing your own path, the brain activations will be different.

When you have no idea what you’re doing in advance, your movements are inherently more clumsy – the body works better when you are in charge. Being able to predict them enables you to regulate, flexibly and gracefully, and adapt in response to changing circumstances.

Similarly, self-employment, where you actually make your own plans and decide what you want to do, could benefit everyone, but the gig economy doesn’t allow for this degree of autonomy.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

How self-employment affects the brain | Daniel Glaser

Limits on learning to speak English like a native | Daniel Glaser

Is there a better way to judge who should live where and what belonging to a country really means? Something more enlightened than the permanent residency form that has provoked so much criticism recently. Sadly, a neuroscientific approach to how language marks you out as a recent arrival is unlikely to be any more forgiving. Although very young children respond equally to all languages, infants raised in a Japanese-only environment start to lose the ability to distinguish ‘l’ and ‘r’ sounds between six and 12 months old. English-speaking children get better at making the distinction.

Even if you learn a second language to a very high standard, you’ll never speak it like a native unless you were exposed to it by around the age of eight. This is mirrored by brain scans. Languages you learn after eight go into a subtly different area of the brain to those acquired earlier.

None of this suggests that we should include MRI scans in nationality tests. But it does show how hard we must work to implement modern and enlightened standards to determine who gets to live where.

Listen to this week’s podcast at theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/neuroscientist-explains

Limits on learning to speak English like a native | Daniel Glaser

Why we have a quirky love of the qwerty keyboard | Daniel Glaser

The news that Tom Hanks is writing a book of short stories, inspired by his love of typewriters – he owns over a hundred – is a timely reminder of what a strange device it is.

The original Qwerty keyboard, sold to Remington back in 1873, was designed to slow you down because mechanical typewriters with keys that followed each other too quickly led to jamming. But how can it be that in the digital age, a product designed to be inefficient has lasted?

Neuroscientists would say it’s down to how good we are at generating – and remembering – precise and arbitrary movement sequences with our fingers. These patterns can take the motor cortex – the brain’s movement control centre – days or weeks to consolidate but once fixed, are extremely difficult to ‘unlearn’.

Even the sight of a different layout (try searching for French Azerty) can, anecdotally, produce weird feelings in your fingertips, thanks to the deep association between the visual and the mechanical. Another reason this fossilised relic from the mechanical age is likely to be around for years to come.

Listen to this week’s podcast at theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/neuroscientist-explains

Why we have a quirky love of the qwerty keyboard | Daniel Glaser

Teaching morality to robots | Daniel Glaser

Every week comes a new warning that robots are taking over our jobs. People have become troubled by the question of how robots will learn ethics, if they do take over our work and our planet.

As early on as the 1960s Isaac Asimov came up with the ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ outlining moral rules they should abide by. More recently there has been official guidance from the British Standards Institute advising designers how to create ethical robots, which is meant to avoid them taking over the world.

From a neuroscientist’s perspective, they should learn more from human development. We teach children morality before algebra. When they’re able to behave well in a social situation, we teach them language skills and more complex reasoning. It needs to happen this way round. Even the most sophisticated bomb-sniffing dog is taught to sit first.

If we’re interested in really making robots think more like we do, we can’t retrofit morality and ethics. We need to focus on that first, build it into their core, and then teach them to drive.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London. Listen to this week’s podcast at theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/neuroscientist-explains

Teaching morality to robots | Daniel Glaser

How the brain stores memories | Daniel Glaser

Every week there is a new dementia study, raising hopes that we can find a way to halt memory loss. Interestingly, in any form of dementia our memories don’t vanish immediately but fade gradually – our memory systems have a property known as ‘graceful degradation’.

In a computer, each item of information is stored in a specific location. If part of the memory or hard drive becomes corrupted, a specific fact or image is lost instantly. The brain works differently by splitting up memories into overlapping patterns across a network of thousands and millions of neurons. As memory fades, there is a gradual deterioration in the ability to recall efficiently.

We have the added benefit of many more memory triggers if we want to recall, say, a specific address. Any element of the memory can bring it back – from a photograph, to the sound of a squeaky gate or a dodgy paving stone underfoot. Compared to a computer, it’s a much more resilient way of storing valuable information – probably a good thing since you can’t back up your brain.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London. Listen to this week’s podcast at theguardian.com/science/audio

How the brain stores memories | Daniel Glaser

How music affects the brain | Daniel Glaser

La La Land is tipped for Oscar success following its triumph at the Golden Globes. Some have wondered if its appeal is partly as an escapist response to these troubled times.

Whether or not such a retreat is politically helpful, there is sound neurobiology behind it. Patients with even fairly advanced dementia can still respond to a piece of music if they were familiar with it in their youth. It can be comforting, but also allow them to engage and even dance.

Evidence suggests music and dance have therapeutic value for patients with Parkinson’s disease, inspiring them to perform movements which they normally can’t do. But the most moving biological phenomenon is in stroke patients who have lost the power of speech. For some, the brain areas responsible for singing words are distinct and can be spared from damage which destroys the main speech areas. These patients can sing all the words of a song, but can’t repeat them in prose or even say their own name.

If politics renders us speechless, there is comfort to be had in activating our neural song centres, if only for refuge.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

How music affects the brain | Daniel Glaser

Changing the way you think | Dan Glaser

Many of us may already be struggling with our New Year’s resolutions, but at least we can take comfort in modern neuroscience. Forty years ago, we’d have been less hopeful.

Back then neuroscience would say that the brain was fixed after early childhood. One famous experiment in the 1960s showed that if kittens were placed in a visually deprived environment in the days and weeks after birth, their sight as older cats would be impaired.

Similar experiences later in life did not have this effect, which fitted with the idea that what happens in early childhood changes our brains fundamentally, but they’re fixed after that point.

However, since then, more evidence has been found for the growth of new nerve cells in adult brains. Knowing this may help us to break bad habits and make new ones. So neuroscience has caught up with common sense and accepts the idea that new brain circuits can form as a result of experience. And if you take one thing away from this column, it’s because something in the structure of your brain has changed.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of the Science Gallery at King’s College London

Changing the way you think | Dan Glaser

The mental benefits of art history: why we must keep the A level | Daniel Glaser

Just when we thought we were going to lose art history A level, the government recently announced a reprieve. As Anish Kapoor said: ‘Art and art history are the study of what inspires and guides the poetic in us.’

Studying art can have a dramatic effect on our brain activity, too. What we know changes how we look at things and this is easy to prove in the art world. Scientists have tracked the movements of an art historian’s eyes: the results show how they scan, fixate and linger on particular points of the canvas reveals their skill and is entirely different to someone with an untrained eye.

We know that every area of expertise changes our view of the world, so why concentrate on art historians? Simply because they are the easiest to study, as they’re often focusing on one static image at a time – unlike film critics, racing drivers or neurosurgeons. This may reassure parents worried about the gravitas of the subject. Now they know that if their children immerse themselves in art history, they will develop such a specialist skill it will produce a  change in their brains. Maybe more government ministers should study it, too.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

The mental benefits of art history: why we must keep the A level | Daniel Glaser

The psychology behind a nice cup of tea | Daniel Glaser

As the temperature drops, you might find yourself reaching for a hot cup of coffee or tea, or warm mulled wine or cider more often than usual. But this may not just be because of the obvious benefits of warming your hands around the cup and banishing the cold from your belly.

In fact, studies have shown there’s a psychological element to choosing hot drinks – they can actually make us feel cosier and friendlier. In an experiment, people were asked to rate strangers on how welcoming and trustworthy they thought they were. Holding a warm cup of coffee made them rate the strangers higher on these attributes, while holding a cold drink had the opposite effect.

Those holding hot drinks were also more likely to be generous, and less likely to display behaviour thought of as selfish. This is due to the strong linguistic and metaphorical links created in the brain by repeatedly using the words ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ to describe personalities.

The same applies with sweetness. People who have eaten something sugary are more likely to describe a person positively – as ‘sweet’. Time to put the kettle on, perhaps.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

The psychology behind a nice cup of tea | Daniel Glaser

Why your brain makes you hate certain foods | Daniel Glaser

Mealtime is a common battleground in many families. Exasperated parents may be relieved to learn their children’s fussy eating might not be their fault. New research suggests picky eaters are just as likely to be influenced by their genes as environmental factors. But fussy children can grow into fussy adults – so if there’s one food you particularly despise, it’s worth thinking back to what might have caused this.

Young children have many more sweet tastebuds than adults to encourage them to drink milk and not eat bitter berries. Over time, tastebuds are ‘pruned’ to tolerate many new flavours. But a single bad experience can be enough to put someone off a food for life.

Violent vomiting after eating dodgy fish or a terrible tantrum before eating spinach can create an almost permanent connection in the brain between the food and a strong adverse reaction to it. The psychologist Martin Seligman, who tested this theory on rats, called it ‘sauce-béarnaise syndrome’ after his own bad experience with a gone-off French dish.

Time to stop nagging the kids to eat spinach or brussels sprouts, perhaps.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

Why your brain makes you hate certain foods | Daniel Glaser

What makes us think a wine tastes good? | Daniel Glaser

Chinese wine tasters beat the French team in a shock victory at the world blind tasting championships last weekend, in what organisers called a ‘thunderbolt in the wine world’. China put its success down to knowledge and luck.

The way a glass of wine tastes is influenced by a range of different signals, from smell and temperature to your surroundings, mood and what it looks like. In a well-known example, if you dye white wine red, it tastes completely different (even though the dye doesn’t change the taste) and most people won’t recognise it as white wine. Even when it’s a high quality white wine, once food colouring is added, experts will say: ‘I don’t know what this is, but it’s not very good.’

It’s because our perception system works according to expectations. If you think a wine will be good or bad, or red or white, the brain primes itself to taste it in that way, regardless of what the tongue’s sensors tell it. It is so subjective that it is actually closer to what we might describe as ‘good taste’ – a synthetic combination of sensory information, knowledge – and a degree of showmanship.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

What makes us think a wine tastes good? | Daniel Glaser

How the brain knows where we are in bed | Daniel Glaser

Tracey Emin has recreated her notorious 1998 artwork My Bed for a new exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Your bed might not be quite as messy as Tracey’s, but most people would admit to accumulating some level of clutter around their mattress.

Even in the dark, grabbing a glass of water, a pair of socks or a packet of condoms is surprisingly easy. How do your hands know where to reach when you can barely see a thing?

The answer lies in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex, which contains lots of different virtual maps of your current location. Each one is centred on different parts of the body or the space you’re in – it’s the brain’s way of understanding the world at your fingertips, around your head, and on the other side of the room.

As you toss and turn at night, the mind adapts its ‘virtual map’ of your bed relative to your sleeping position. It’s a little like when you tap the red compass on Google maps on your phone, and the map swivels around to fit your location. This means when you wake up you aren’t totally disorientated, and can easily find what you need – even if, like Emin, there’s also lots of stuff you want to avoid.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

How the brain knows where we are in bed | Daniel Glaser

What happens to your brain when you faint? | Daniel Glaser

Hillary Clinton’s stumble at a 9/11 anniversary ceremony last Sunday may have been pounced on by her critics, but many also pointed out that she still managed to fulfil her obligations despite suffering from pneumonia.

The knees buckling, as Clinton’s did, is a classic symptom of fainting. Weak and wobbly legs might seem to be caused by the reduction in blood pressure that often results in fainting. But, in fact, this lack of oxygen being pumped around the body does not affect the limbs directly. Instead, it’s a reaction sparked by the brain to ensure its own survival, as limited oxygen supply is so dangerous. If the brain is starved of oxygen for more than a minute or two it is irreversibly damaged.

While fainting carries the risk of hitting your head, evolution has judged a potential knock to be less dangerous than the threat of oxygen starvation. So, the brain sends a signal to the leg muscles to stop working. This gets the head closer to the level of the heart quickly, where less pumping effort is needed to receive a life-saving supply of blood. Ironically this is exactly the kind of tough call a future commander in chief might be called upon to make.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

What happens to your brain when you faint? | Daniel Glaser

Why nose picking is so appealing? | Daniel Glaser

Police officers in the Philippines have been banned from picking their noses on duty to stop them ‘creating a negative impression’ in public. But why, despite disgusted reactions, is this particular bad habit so enduring?

One reason humans find nose picking so rewarding is because the parts of the cortex connected to the hand and the face are so close together. Buried in the central sulcus of the brain, a groove down the side of the middle of your head, is a map-like representation of the entire surface of the body, called the homunculus.

The body is three dimensional, but as the cortex is like a sheet of paper scrunched up to fit inside the skull, to fit it on to a 2D map requires certain cuts and juxtapositions. So, the representation of the hand ends up adjacent to the representation of the face. This nearness probably explains in part why touching the face and playing with the lips, nose and cheeks feels so satisfying.

It is also why, sometimes, amputees who experience ‘phantom’ itches in their non-existent limb, can relieve these by scratching their face. Doesn’t make seeing other people’s bogies any nicer, though.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

Why nose picking is so appealing? | Daniel Glaser

Struggling to understand killers | Daniel Glaser

After last week’s wave of tragic attacks in Germany, Boris Johnson was criticised for publicly speculating that Islamist extremism was behind the shooting in Munich.

While our new foreign secretary’s comments may have been inappropriate – and wrong – his brain, like most people’s, was subject to an overwhelming impulse to find a possible motivation for an action as soon as it occurs.

Our desire to understand the motivations of a killer involves a particular part of the brain called the ‘temporo-parietal junction’. Also known as the ‘mindreading’ area of the brain, it automatically ascribes possible incentives, beliefs and desires to others.

This reflex developed to help us socialise, but is so powerful that we also apply it to inanimate objects such as computers, shouting, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ as they crash yet again. Even a pair of triangles can appear to exhibit personal motivations, as proved by a psychological test called the Heider-Simmel animation.

However, while Boris’s brain is partly to blame for his speculations, unfortunately it couldn’t help him keep them to himself.

Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London

Struggling to understand killers | Daniel Glaser