When Bob went out to the beach, he couldn’t stop oogling Hilda in the yellow polka dot bikini. They were both attending a steamy neurobiology conference. With his heart beating rapidly, he decided to ask her out to a gourmet meal at Chipotle. Lucky for Bob, she was hungry after surfing all day so she said “sure-rritos.” Hilda’s puns only reinforced Bob’s initial attraction. “What a woman!” Bob thought. They walked to his car. She reached over to hold his hand, at which point his stomach flipped with nervousness. They both smiled.

He leaned over and whispered
“Hilda, it’s about time I let you know how I feel. You light up my ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum and raphe nuclei.”
Hilda was so touched, she screamed out “I love you too Bob!”

Your brain has a circuit for snuggling with schnookums. You might have expected that being in love activates a reward pathway.

But here is one surprising detail: heartache is akin to “craving”…the kind of craving seen in drug addiction.

This is a very well-written article that links the placebo effect with conditioning. Just like Pavlov’s dogs were conditioned to salivate at the ring of a bell, your immune system can be conditioned to start the healing process at the sight of a doctor’s coat.

Just for fun…

To determine whether it was possible to predict the trajectory of monkeys’ hands from the signals, the scientists fed the mass of neural signal data generated during many repetitions of these tasks into a computer, which analyzed the brain signals. In this analysis, the scientists used simple mathematical methods and artificial neural networks to predict hand trajectories in real time as the monkeys learned to make different types of hand movements.

“We found two amazing things,” said Miguel Nicolelis, associate professor of neurobiology at Duke. “One is that the brain signals denoting hand trajectory show up simultaneously in all the cortical areas we measured. This finding has important implications for the theory of brain coding, which holds that information about trajectory is distributed really over large territories in each of these areas even though the information is slightly different in each area.

“The second remarkable finding is that the functional unit in such processing does not seem to be a single neuron,” Professor Nicolelis said. “Even the best single-neuron predictor in our samples still could not perform as well as an analysis of a population of neurons. So this provides further support to the idea that the brain very likely relies on huge populations of neurons distributed across many areas in a dynamic way to encode behavior.”

Music and the Brain

Here are an amazing number of stories that deal with the notion of music and language. Diana Deutch from UCSD discusses her studies how infants that are raised in different language context will have differing abilities to acquire perfect pitch. She demonstrates that children that have a tonal language (such as Chinese) will develop a much keener sense of pitch than those that have a “flat” language as their first tongue.

Conversely, despite more than 4000 languages still extant on Earth, there are some common sounds or tones that are pervasive across all languages from Hindi to Finnish. These include tones that denote approval, prohibition, attention. These tones are a form of universal language that denote touch.
Even further, there is a story about the (in)famous 1913 debut of Stravinski’s ‘Rite of Spring’ which actually led to rioting. The music actually induced behaviours outside the realm of the reasonable. This leads to a fascinating series of neurological studies of the affect that dissonant sounds have on the auditory cortex.