Tag Archives: ACC

L and R: Brain and Politics

Posted on June 17, 2019 by | 2 comments

Do you hear the people sing? Singing a song of angry men? It’s the music of the yellow vests who shut down subway stops on weekends.

As dedicated as I have been to eating Saturday brunch, the yellow vests (gilets jaunes to the French) have been just as dedicated to convening on Saturday afternoons to protest. The yellow vests are a French populist group mostly made up of members of the working and middle classes who express frustration about slipping standards of living. For the past few months since October 2018, the yellow vests have been showing up every weekend in major Paris locations to protest for lower fuel taxes, redistribution of wealth, an increase in minimum wage, and even the resignation of French President Macron (Diallo, 2018). I remember reading throughout the semester New York Times articles about these protests back when I was in America, and it all seemed very removed from where I was at the time. But now, there is no way to forget when every weekend I receive an email from our study abroad program center about the yellow vests’ path of protest for the weekend and have to track what popular tourist areas will be out of commission for the day. Indeed, Les Mis was not all that misleading. It seems that since the beheading of Queen “Let Them Eat Cake,” the French people have not been able to shake the love of a good revolution or protest from their society. But it is definitely not only the French that enjoy political demonstrations; from 1960s UC Berkeley students to my pink knitted hat compatriots, America has a its own unique history with political movements. I wanted to know – what is it about politics that seems so intrinsic and enticing that people are motivated to come out, rain or shine, to walk around and yell collectively??

major sites of closure yellow vest protests have caused

Part of the reason that being a part of a political movement can be so enthralling is the association with a political party that people flaunt. This gives members of the group a sense of belonging, which is a basic human need involving complex emotions of love, pride, and emotional excitement (Jasper, 2011). In America and many other nations, there is a divide between the liberal left and the conservative right. The ideological labels of “left” and “right” have been around since the time Christian symbolism associated right with “liking for or acceptance of social and religious hierarchies” and the left with “equalization of conditions through the challenge of God and prince.” This fundamental difference in political ideology has remained relatively intact throughout the centuries since then (Jost, 2014). While for many year scientists have assumed political orientation to be solely the result of upbringing and environmental factors, there have recently been studies identifying biological influences on individual’s political attitudes. This field of study falls under neuropolitics, or the study of how neuroscience and political science intersect (Schreiber, 2017).

In a 2011 study that tried to elucidate whether brain structure differences could be linked to political associations, the brain region of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was studied. The ACC has connections to both the “emotional” limbic system” and “cognitive” prefrontal cortex of the brain and is involved with conflict monitoring – the task of detecting conflicts in information processing and then signaling when increased cognitive control must be recruited (Yeung, 2013). The 90 young adult test subjects were first asked to self-report their political attitude on a five-point scale ranging from “very liberal” to “very conservative.” Although a simple scale, this self-reported result has been shown to accurately predict voting behavior. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans that show detailed images of the brain were then taken of each subject to assess differences in volume of ACC. Results of their scans after controlling for age and gender variables showed that increased gray matter volume in the ACC was significantly associated with liberalism. This hinted that individuals with larger ACC may tolerate uncertainty and conflicts better and allow them to hold more liberal views. The same study also looked at the amygdala, which is involved in processing emotional responses such as fear and aggression, to look for links between gray matter volume of amygdala and political ideology. By evaluating amygdala volume and political attitudes, researchers saw there was an increased amygdala volume associated with conservatism, suggesting that conservatives respond to threatening situations with more aggression and have a heightened sensitivity to fear (Kanai et al., 2011).

a. Results showing ACC volume in comparison with political ideology
b. Results showing amygdala volume in comparison with political ideology

Of course, the question of “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” also applies here: are people more inclined to lean a certain political direction based on biologically predetermined brain differences or do people’s political ideology lead to slight but significant changes in brain structure? I would have been interested to hear if the researchers had any thoughts on this or had long-term data comparing subjects to look for correlations that may have helped answer this question. The researchers also mention a stipulation to their results that abstract reasoning and thinking often requires widespread brain regions and cannot be traced back to one specific brain region. Additionally, a recent review of neuropolitics warns people of the “pathologisation of politics” which essentially chalks up political problems into biological deviations (Altermark & Nyberg, 2018). I think this is especially pertinent as weaponizing neuroscience in order to reduce those you do not agree with is not the purpose of studying the brain. Overall, no matter left or right, remember the brain functions best with both working together!

 

Bibliography

Altermark, N., Nyberg, L. (2018) Neuro-Problems: Knowing Politics Through the Brain. Culture Unbound, 10, 31-48.

Diallo, R. (2018, December 19). Why are the ‘yellow vests’ protesting in France? Al Jazeera, Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/yellow-vests-protesting- france-181206083636240.html

Jasper, J.M. (2011) Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research. Annual Review of Sociology, 37, 285-303.

Jost, J.T., Nam, H.H., Amodio, D.M. & Van Bavel, J.J. (2014) Political Neuroscience: The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship. Political Psychology, 35, 3-42.

Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C. & Rees, G. (2011) Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Curr Biol, 21, 677-680.

Schreiber, D. (2017) Neuropolitics: Twenty years later. Politics and the Life Sciences, 36, 114- 131, 118.

Yeung, N. (2013). Conflict monitoring and cognitive control. In: Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Neuroscience (Ochsner, K. and Kosslyn, S., eds), Oxford University Press (in press).

Image 1: https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2019-02-09/more-violence-in-paris- as-yellow-vests-keep-marching

Image 2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46499996 Image 3: Kanai et al., 2011

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La Rage dans les Rues

Posted on June 11, 2017 by | 3 comments

Whether it’s Friday evening during rush hour or Sunday morning or Tuesday at 2am, I always get to enjoy the lovely sounds of vehicles in Paris. Vehicles communicate in the most loud and obnoxious way, and I’m convinced that it’s even worse than fifteen American college students causing a raucous in the metro. See, these vehicles communicate sans blinkers or small toots. Instead, they scream at each other with blaring horns that could last up to five full seconds. And here I am on the edge of Paris city limits, my window overlooking a busy street and the perimeter highway.

View of the perimeter highway from my window

I know the traffic in Atlanta is bad, but at least cars don’t have conversations via honking there. I’m beginning to think that honking is a subset of the French language. It most likely has developed due to the insane intersections like the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe.

Check out this video to see the roundabout in action: https://youtu.be/-2RCPpdmSVg

Traffic around the Arc de Triomphe

So what is behind this road rage of sorts? Impatience. The unwillingness to wait for someone or something and tending to be quickly irritated. While I don’t have any tendencies towards road rage, this is a concept I very much relate to. Pretty much everywhere I go, people walk incredibly slowly and often block the path I’m trying to walk on, and I don’t particularly enjoy it. I think we all get frustrated at some point during each day, but what causes some people to act out this frustration while others let it go? Do some people have more angry personalities than others? Studies have shown that even mentally healthy individuals can engage in consequential acts of aggression (Anderson & Bushman, 2002), and some people have higher tendencies toward acts of aggression than others (Bettencourt et al., 2006). There are two types of aggressive personalities: general and displaced. When people with high displaced aggression are provoked, they harm innocent others and report increased levels of romantic partner abuse and driving aggression, whereas people with high general aggression do not (Denson et al., 2006).

Much of research concerning driving risk has found that emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness are factors in aggressive driving, which leads to risky driving outcomes (Chraif et al., 2016), but few studies have related behavioral observations and subjective ratings to particular areas of the brain. An fMRI study by Denson et al. (2009) sought out to better understand the neural processes underlying risk for aggression. Participants were provoked during a simple task through interruptions, and during one, the experimenter condescendingly implied that the participant was not intelligent enough to follow basic directions.

Figure 1 from Denson et al. (2009)

Interestingly, results from the fMRI imply that there is a neural basis for differences in aggressive behavior. Just seconds after being insulted, there were differences between activated regions of the brain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), that correlated with different aggressive personalities. Individual differences in general aggression and the subjective experience of anger were more strongly correlated with activity of a region associated with the intensity of anger (dACC), whereas individual differences in displaced aggression were more strongly correlated with activity in a region associated with self-reflection and emotional regulation (mPFC) (Figure 1). Essentially, these data suggest that activity in these brain regions contributes to the differences in personality and behavior in response to provocation.

While Denson et al.’s results were convincing, especially through the use of a real-world provocation, I would love to see researchers take this study one step further to observe behavioral variances between those with different aggressive personalities. Though a bit of a stretch, with more research, one might find activation of the mPFC higher in those with road rage. Current models indicate that road rage is an incredibly complex phenomenon, with many contributing psychological factors (Lajunen & Parker, 2001). Perhaps cultural differences play a role, as well, in determining which type of aggressive personality an individual develops. If so, I would guess that the French are prone to high displaced aggression!

 

References:

Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2002). Human aggression. Annual review of psychology, 53(1), 27-51.

Bettencourt, B., Talley, A., Benjamin, A. J., & Valentine, J. (2006). Personality and aggressive behavior under provoking and neutral conditions: a meta-analytic review. Psychological bulletin, 132(5), 751.

Chraif, M., Aniţei, M., Burtăverde, V., & Mihăilă, T. (2016). The link between personality, aggressive driving, and risky driving outcomes–testing a theoretical model. Journal of Risk Research, 19(6), 780-797.

Denson, T. F., Pedersen, W. C., & Miller, N. (2006). The displaced aggression questionnaire. Journal of personality and social psychology, 90(6), 1032.

Denson, T. F., Pedersen, W. C., Ronquillo, J., & Nandy, A. S. (2009). The angry brain: Neural correlates of anger, angry rumination, and aggressive personality. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 21(4), 734-744.

Lajunen, T., & Parker, D. (2001). Are aggressive people aggressive drivers? A study of the relationship between self-reported general aggressiveness, driver anger and aggressive driving. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 33(2), 243-255.

Traffic around the Arc de Triomphe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2RCPpdmSVg

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Why put so much effort into learning a second language?

Posted on June 22, 2015 by | 6 comments

I have loved the study of French language since the day I started classes in 9th grade. Even though Neuroscience is my primary major, my French second major has always been a passion and an outlet from core sciences. While this is my 3rd time in Paris, I’ve (finally) noticed that fluency is coming more naturally, even when I’m flipping between conversations and homework in French to texts and Skype sessions in English. As a double major in French and Neuroscience, (naturally) I was interested in finding out how language development and the brain’s response are interconnected.

I have stayed with 3 homestays and lived in the Cité Universitaire over the past 5 years. [image souce: Google maps]

Over the past 5 years, I have stayed with 3 homestays and lived in the Cité Universitaire. [image souce: Google maps]

Paris is an ideal place to begin an inquiry into language and speech. The earliest roots can be attributed to the work pioneered here by Paul Broca, the French physician and anatomist, who studied the speech production centers of the brain – now termed Broca’s area.

The brain Broca studied at Musée Dupuytren [image source: google images]

I visited the brain Broca studied at Musée Dupuytren [image source: Google images]

Advances in technology not available to Broca in the 1800s allow us to use neuroimaging methods to reveal specific functional brain patterns in learning a second language. After doing some research on the effect of bilingualism on the brain, I think that what I’ve been experiencing in my studies abroad is likely an actual change in brain structure. A property known as plasticity is the ability of the brain to physically and functionally change in response to factors such as environmental stimuli or cognitive demand (Stein et al., 2010). This process occurs in everyone who learns or speaks a second language, which turns out to be over half the global population (Bialystok and Barac, 2013). Learning a language in addition to your native tongue induces these changes in the brain (Stein et al., 2010). While this process occurs regardless of age, the speed of plasticity directly correlates to the long-term proficiency of an individual (Stein et al., 2010). So, relative to the time I started learning French in 9th grade, my immersion experience these last six months has allowed my brain to greatly pick up speed in making physical and functional changes compared to my 15-year-old self.

Not only is the study of French language a passion, being bilingual (or as close as I’ll ever get) advances cognitive control meaning that bilinguals develop better decision making and conflict mediation skills than monolinguals, according to the bilingual cognitive advantage hypothesis (Bialystok and Barac, 2013). This development results from a bilingual’s ability to better monitor life-long experience, cultural sensitivity, and mentally separate and switch between two languages (Stein et al., 2010).

A study in 2011 tested the impact of bilingualism on conflict monitoring and found that bilinguals not only resolve cognitive conflicts more efficiently (meaning with less neural input), but that their brain also better sorts and makes sense of conflicting input (Abutelabi et al, 2011). Using a group of 17 highly proficient German-Italian bilinguals and 14 Italian monolinguals, researchers studied the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the brain center involved with language control and monitoring conflicting information, through blood flow measurements in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. Participants were then asked to perform language and non-language switching tasks. For the language-switching task, monolinguals were presented with a set of 32 different pictures and asked to produce a noun or a verb associated with the picture based on a color-coded system (red for nouns and green for verbs). Bilinguals were then shown these same pictures, but asked to describe the picture in either German or Italian, per another color-coded system (green for German and blue for Italian). Researchers found that ACC activity was significantly increased in bilinguals. For the non-language switching task, the participants were presented with a cross in the middle of the screen to fixate their line of sight during the entire trial. Five arrows then appeared in randomized order and direction and the participants were asked to identify the direction of the center arrow only.

A schematic of the visual task presented (Albutelabi et al., 2011).

A schematic of the visual task presented (Albutelabi et al., 2011).

Here, the bilinguals required less ACC activity while still outperforming monolinguals in accuracy. These results show that bilinguals are more efficitvely and efficiently able to distinguish the direction of the center arrow surrounded by the swtiching stimuli.

I loved that this study incorporated both a language switching task and a non-verbal task, which shows that the two tasks were carried out by the brain in the same region and thereby lends credit to the idea that development of the ACC in the study of a second language has positive effects in other parts of our daily lives. However, I wish that Albutelabi et al. had used participants of varying degrees of proficiency to see if the bilingual advantage spans across any second language learner.

Independent of my improved ability to find the best pastry in Paris due to increased language proficiency, I hope that I will have gained a life-long advantage to greater health and mental acuity. Not only have Paris and my French studies given me a greater awareness and appreciation of the world, increased neuroplasticity will allow me to use these now more refined areas, giving me confidence to switch between subjects and focus in on information relevant to the task at hand. This will come in particularly useful in my pre-dental studies along with other future endeavors, as lifelong bilingual experience may serve as a major deterrent to the onset of age-related cognitive decline (Grogan et al., 2012).

I shadowed a French general dentist in the 11th arrondissement.

This semester, I shadowed a French general dentist in the 11th arrondissement.

As I end my time in this beautiful city, I will keep my experiences (and brand new brain) pour toujours.

~ Amy Yeh

References

Abutalebi J, Della Rosa PA, Green DW, Hernandez M, Scifo P, Keim R, Cappa SF, Costa A (2011) Bilingualism Tunes the Anterior Cingulate Cortex for Conflict Monitoring. Cerebral Cortex 22:2076–2086.

Bialystok, E., & Barac, R. (2013). The psycholinguistics of bilingualism. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Grogan A, Jones OP, Ali N, Crinion J, Orabona S, Mechias ML, Ramsden S, Green DW, Price CJ (2012). Structural correlates for lexical efficiency and number of languages in non-native speakers of English. Neuropsychologia 50(7): 1347-1352.

Stein M, Federspiel A, Koenig T, Wirth M, Strik W, Wiest R, Brandeis D, Dierks T (2010) Structural plasticity in the language system related to increased second language proficiency. Cortex 48:458-465.

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