Scientists have discovered that a system in our brain which responds to actions we are watching, such as a dancer's delicate pirouette or a masterful martial arts move, reacts differently if we are also skilled at doing the move. The University College London (UCL) study, published in the latest online edition of Cerebral Cortex, may help in the rehabilitation of people whose motor skills are damaged by stroke, and suggests that athletes and dancers could continue to mentally train while they are physically injured.
In the UCL study, dancers from the Royal Ballet and experts in capoeira - a Brazilian martial arts form - were asked to watch videos of ballet and capoeira movements being performed while their brain activity was measured in a MRI scanner. The same videos were shown to normal volunteers while their brains were scanned.
The UCL team found greater activity in areas of the brain collectively known as the 'mirror system' when the experts viewed movements that they had been trained to perform compared to movements they had not. The same areas in non-expert volunteers brains didn't care what dance style they saw.
While previous studies have found that the system contains mirror neurons or brain cells which fire up both when we perform an action and when we observe it, the new study shows that this system is fine tuned to each person's 'motor repertoire' or range of physical skills. The mirror system was first discovered in animals and has now been identified in humans. It is thought to play a key role in helping us to understand other people's actions, and may also help in learning how to imitate them.
This research may have an incredibly important practical application: lazier ways to learn!
Professor Patrick Haggard of UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience says: "We've shown that the mirror system is finely tuned to an individual's skills. A professional ballet dancer's brain will understand a ballet move in a way that a capoiera expert's brain will not. Our findings suggest that once the brain has learned a skill, it may simulate the skill without even moving, through simple observation. An injured dancer might be able to maintain their skill despite being temporarily unable to move, simply by watching others dance. This concept could be used both during sports training and in maintaining and restoring movement ability in people who are injured."
It is still necessary to develop enough in some skill to that one will have a mind trained to learn from watching experts perform.
Dr Daniel Glaser of UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience says: "Our study is as much a case of 'monkey do, monkey see' as the other way round. People's brains appear to respond differently when they are watching a movement, such as a sport, if they can do the moves themselves.
"When we watch a sport, our brain performs an internal simulation of the actions, as if it were sending the same movement instructions to our own body. But for those sports commentators who are ex-athletes, the mirror system is likely to be even more active because their brains may re-enact the moves they once made. This might explain why they get so excited while watching the game!"
Deborah Bull, Creative Director at Royal Opera House (ROH2), says: "We are delighted to be working with Patrick Haggard, our Associate Scientist, on this fascinating area of research. As a former dancer, I have long been intrigued by the different ways in which people respond to dance. Through this and future research, I hope we'll begin to understand more about the unique ways in which the human body can communicate without words."
Videos are still greatly underutilized as a means of training and education. Videos of college courses on every subject ought to be widely and cheaply available. Surely governments spend enough money funding unversities and schools that some of the teaching that they fund can be recorded and made available for free download. Also, every type of performance training such as ballet and other forms of dance could have training sessions and performances recorded at many angles for use in schools. Then even children in rural areas could pursue types of training that are now accessible only to much more urbanized populations. Such recordings would also be of value to many city dwellers who can not afford expensive lessons. The process of education is still too stuck in old formats of delivery. Education should become as modernized by technology as retail, communications, factories, and transportation devices have bcome.
Samuel M. McClure, now at Princeton University, Jian Li at Baylor College of Medicine, and a number of colleagues at Baylor have found that brand preferences are measurable using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans.
The preference for Coke versus Pepsi is not only a matter for the tongue to decide, Samuel McClure and his colleagues have found. Brain scans of people tasting the soft drinks reveal that knowing which drink they're tasting affects their preference and activates memory-related brain regions that recall cultural influences. Thus, say the researchers, they have shown neurologically how a culturally based brand image influences a behavioral choice.
These choices are affected by perception, wrote the researchers, because "there are visual images and marketing messages that have insinuated themselves into the nervous systems of humans that consume the drinks."
Even though scientists have long believed that such cultural messages affect taste perception, there had been no direct neural probes to test the effect, wrote the researchers. Findings about the effects of such cultural information on the brain have important medical implications, they wrote.
Advertising may be contributing to the obesity epidemic.
"There is literally a growing crisis in obesity, type II diabetes, and all their sequelae that result directly from or are exacerbated by overconsumption of calories. It is now strongly suspected that one major culprit is sugared colas," they wrote.
My prediction: Some day people will be able to elect to be put under brain scanners and shown a series of advertising images to discover which advertisers have done the best job of programming them to like their products. Then some drug combination or other therapy will be available to deliver in conjunction with an image of some product to cause the cancellation of the neural pattern that makes one favor that product.
Besides the health implications of studying soft drink preference, the researchers decided to use Coke and Pepsi because-- even though the two drinks are nearly identical chemically and physically--people routinely strongly favor one over the other. Thus, the two soft drinks made excellent subjects for rigorous experimental studies.
In their study, the researchers first determined the Coke versus Pepsi preference of 67 volunteer subjects, both by asking them and by subjecting them to blind taste tests. They then gave the subjects sips of one drink or the other as they scanned the subjects' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this widely used imaging technique, harmless magnetic fields and radio signals are used to measure blood flow in regions of the brain, with such flow indicating brain activity levels. In the experiments, the sips were preceded by either "anonymous" cues of flashes of light or pictures of a Coke or Pepsi can.
The experimental design enabled the researchers to discover the specific brain regions activated when the subjects used only taste information versus when they also had brand identification. While the researchers found no influence of brand knowledge for Pepsi, they found a dramatic effect of the Coke label on behavioral preference. The brand knowledge of Coke both influenced their preference and activated brain areas including the "dorsolateral prefrontal cortex" and the hippocampus. Both of these areas are implicated in modifying behavior based on emotion and affect. In particular, wrote the researchers, their findings suggest "that the hippocampus may participate in recalling cultural information that biases preference judgments."
The researchers concluded that their findings indicate that two separate brain systems--one involving taste and one recalling cultural influence--in the prefrontal cortex interact to determine preferences.
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex gets programmed by advertising.
We delivered Coke and Pepsi to human subjects in behavioral taste tests and also in passive experiments carried out during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Two conditions were examined: (1) anonymous delivery of Coke and Pepsi and (2) brand-cued delivery of Coke and Pepsi. For the anonymous task, we report a consistent neural response in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that correlated with subjects' behavioral preferences for these beverages. In the brand-cued experiment, brand knowledge for one of the drinks had a dramatic influence on expressed behavioral preferences and on the measured brain responses.
They found that the knowledge of the Coke brand exerted a more powerful effect upon the brain than knowledge of the Pepsi brand. Given that Coke is the bigger seller what is to be expected. Dr. Read Montague, director of the Brown Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor, said the brain scans allowed him to predict preference before a sip was taken.
Functional magnetic resonance imaging allowed Montague to predict fairly accurately which people preferred Coke or Pepsi before they even took a sip.
“We were stunned by how easy this was,” Montague said. “I could tell what they were going to do by looking at their brain scans.”
A large portion of the market value of Coca Cola is the result of patterns of neural network connections which Coke advertising has created in hundreds of millions of people.
Surely there are similar neural phenomena causing national loyalties, religious loyalties, and other preferences.