Author Archives: Kamin

Making Chocolate like a Pro

Have you ever watched a circus performer juggle for hundreds of people or a master chef expertly flip an omelet? Have you ever seen an elegant display of technique that takes some people years to master and thought to yourself: “yeah I think I can do that”? Well maybe you haven’t, but last week during our visit to the Musée de Chocolat, I had this experience.

Ok maybe not that exact thought process. In truth, when the master chocolatier asked the group: “ok who wants to try,” it was more along the lines of: “yeah, let’s see what happens.” As I took the triangles in my hands I really had no idea what I was doing, but after a small point of clarification, my hands started mixing the chocolate exactly how I had seen him do it. In fact it was going so well that he turned to me and asked: “have you done this before?” To which my reply was simply: “nope.”

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The workshop continued in much the same manner where he would show us how to do a step in the chocolate making and I would reenact exactly what I had seen. Afterward I started wondering how a motion so complex could come so naturally to me.

A recent study has analyzed the role of the action observation network (AON), a network of sensorimotor regions in the brain, in the presence of familiar and unfamiliar actions (Gardner et al., 2015). The researchers asked the participants to watch a short video of dance moves and at the end of it, were asked to pick which of two options should follow in the sequence. The control group was asked to follow the dot sequence that was displayed on the same videos and afterwards had to choose which color was the last one pictured. For the duration of the test, participants were in an fMRI machine so that the investigators could record their brain activity. After the testing and recording, the participants rated the familiarity of the actions in the videos.

When Gardner and his colleagues examined the brain scans of each participant group, they found that the action-focused group showed greater activation in their motor cortices than the dot-focused group. Additionally, the more familiar tasks resulted in increased activity in the AON. The researchers then tested for the connectivity between the inferior parietal lobule (IPL), the middle temporal gyrus (MPG), and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and from these tests developed a working model of how this system works in the presence of familiar motion stimuli.

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The IFG and MTG receive input from the movement stimulus and relay this information back to the IPL. The connections between these three regions can also be modified by familiarity by a currently unknown pathway.

Now let’s return to my example of chocolate making (mmm… chocolate…). When I watched the professional chocolatier scraping the chocolate around the marble, the movement triggered the AON in my brain. Even though I had never performed this particular action, I have had many years of experience cooking and it is likely that this somehow contributed to the “familiarity modulation” the study discusses ultimately allowing me to make delicious chocolate with my friends.

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-Kamin Bouguyon

References:

Gardner, T., Goulden, N. & Cross, E.S. (2015) Dynamic Modulation of the Action Observation Network by Movement Familiarity. The Journal of Neuroscience, 35, 1561-1572.

An Ambulance in a Traffic Jam

I’ve often wondered if any good could possibly come from a city full of the constant hustle of urban life. Cars always seem to be coming and going, zipping by on the streets below my window. Then the ambulance speeds past, its siren wailing, as it seeks the nearby hospital. Suddenly I am thrust into memory from last week.

The Bastille

Cars honk to one another as if speaking their own language. Smaller and more agile mopeds cut between them acting like they own the road. Firemen have positioned themselves along the sidewalk and are passing out fliers to anyone who will listen. The wail of a siren stuck in traffic was the centerpiece of a small Parisian intersection near the Bastille. My friends and I paused for a moment, mesmerized by the sounds, lights, and the notion that an ambulance with siren wailing could possibly be halted on its life-saving journey. Our stomachs growl in contempt of our delay so we continue shuffling along the sidewalk seeking nourishment after the morning’s academics, the smell of the boulangeries wafting invitingly towards us.

A delicious looking piece of artwork

The cool breeze from the window brings me back to present. I now wonder how it is that I could remember that instant so clearly, yet there is nothing to say of its significance. As far as I could tell, there was no reason for this memory to be so strong.

The answer lies in the recent work of James Cousins and his colleagues (2014) regarding cued memory reactivation during slow-wave sleep. In his experiment, Cousins subjected his participants to a specific cognitive task and simultaneously played a series of tones. The researchers then put the participants to sleep while monitoring their brain activity. During slow-wave sleep, some of the participants were played the series of tones from the test, while others listened to brown noise (notably different than the “brown note”). Participants were woken up in the morning, allowed to gather their senses, and then retested on the cognitive task.

Sleepy-time cap

Cousins and his colleagues discovered that while the control participants who listened to brown noise all night slightly improved after having learned the task, the participants who were played the tone series improved significantly more. The researchers concluded that, during slow-wave sleep, auditory stimulation enhances the consolidation of related memories by the hippocampus.

Now lets get back to my ambulance example. After experiencing the piercing cry of the ambulance stuck in traffic on that small back road, my brain had begun creating a memory of this experience. That night as I drifted into slow-wave sleep, the sirens from the ambulances on the street below wailed past, causing my hippocampus to replay that particular memory. Over the course of the night, unbeknownst to me, this seemingly irrelevant memory became a recurrent experience.

The Bastille on a map of Paris

I can no longer remember what I did end up eating for lunch that day, nor what we discussed in class. But thanks to my hippocampus and the sleepless city, I will long remember that ambulance stuck in traffic on a sunny morning in downtown Paris.

-Kamin Bouguyon

References:

Cousins, J.N., El-Deredy, W., Parkes, L.M., Hennies, N. & Lewis, P.A. (2014) Cued Memory Reactivation during Slow-Wave Sleep Promotes Explicit Knowledge of a Motor Sequence. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34, 15870-15876.