I talked to Silva about the new show, President Obama's research push and what we still do not know about the human mind.

Your show is predicated on the idea that many people do not really understand how their own brain works. Why do you think that is?

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BEFORE: Your everyday snapshot of the neurochemical and electrical activity in the brain of a scientist going about her or his normal business. Incredibly complicated, yes, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary.

AFTER: All hell breaks loose! We've got damage reports pouring in from every sector, captain!

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Cognition-Boosting Compounds

It's news chocolate lovers have been craving: raw cocoa may be packed with brain-boosting compounds. Researchers at the University of L'Aquila in Italy, with scientists from Mars, Inc., and their colleagues, published findings last September that suggest cognitive function in the elderly is improved by ingesting high levels of natural compounds called flavanols found in cocoa. The study included 90 individuals with mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to Alzheimer's disease. Subjects who drank a cocoa beverage containing either moderate or high levels of flavanols daily for eight weeks demonstrated greater cognitive function than those who consumed low levels of flavanols on three separate tests that measured factors that included verbal fluency, visual searching and attention.

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Remember the Seinfeld episode where Jerry’s penis has an argument with his brain and loses? It’s a classic: We’ve all been torn between love/lust and logic. (If you haven't, check for a belly button because this isn’t your home world.) This brilliant bit of comedy is totally relatable but a little misleading in one way: The brain is the one that sends signals to the penis in the first place. It’s pretty reliably running things, IMing the other body parts like crazy, regulating chemicals, making calculations and responding to stimuli, half the time without you even knowing about it. There’s a reason “the brains of the outfit” denotes someone who is really in charge.

So why does the brain sometimes signal us to do stupid things, especially in regard to sex and relationships? Isn’t that a little like one conjoined twin punching the other in the mouth? How does the brain decide who attracts us? What is it doing behind our backs, and how do we change as we mature?

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As reported by Science Daily:

One of the main characteristics of Alzheimer's disease is the production in the brain of a toxic molecule known as amyloid beta. Microglial cells, the nervous system's defenders, are unable to eliminate this substance, which forms deposits called senile plaques.

The team led by Dr. Serge Rivest, professor at Université Laval's Faculty of Medicine and researcher at the CHU de Québec research center, identified a molecule that stimulates the activity of the brain's immune cells. The molecule, known as MPL (monophosphoryl lipid A), has been used extensively as a vaccine adjuvant by GSK for many years, and its safety is well established.

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Nobody questions the notion that heavy drinking during pregnancy is harmful. It can cause facial abnormalities, central nervous system problems and stunted growth. But evidence regarding the effects of light or occasional drinking is mixed. In five epidemiological studies published in 2012, medical psychologist Erik Mortensen of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues found that five-year-old children born to women who had one to four drinks a week during pregnancy displayed no deficits in general intelligence, attention or other types of higher-order thinking. On the other hand, in 2011 psychiatrist Nancy Day of the University of Pittsburgh and her colleagues reportedthat teens born to women who averaged more than one drink a week during pregnancy were twice as likely as those born to nondrinkers to have conduct disorder, a condition characterized by theft, deceit or violence.

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Singing, dancing, and drumming.

That’s the conclusion of a study by University of Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar. He and his colleagues report people who have just been playing music have a higher tolerance for pain—an indication their bodies are producing endorphins, which are sometimes referred to as natural opiates.

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Freestyling is to rap as improvisation is to jazz. Rather than reciting a pre-written rhyme, or reading off pages of sheet music, the artist stands up onstage and channels the Muse directly, no filter: whatever comes up, comes out. There are some rules, of course. Trumpet players have to stay in the right key and follow, say, a 12-bar count; emcees have to keep time with the beat, and recycling old material is frowned upon. Aside from that, it’s an artistic free-for-all.

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The late-afternoon session pushed well past the end of the day; questions just kept coming. It was a scene, Zeisel marveled—all this interest in neuroscience—that would not have taken place just a few years earlier.

Zeisel is a sociologist and architect who has researched the design of facilities for Alzheimer’s patients. Architects, he explains, “understand about aesthetics; they know about psychology. The next depth to which they can go is understanding the brain and how it works and why do people feel more comfortable in one space than another?”

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“I was forgetting more than I was learning,” he said. “With every chapter in the textbook came a hundred more vocabulary words. The language and the culture were accessible, but I also had a job to do. So I didn’t—and couldn’t—spend all my time studying.” Joseph cast about online for help and came across LinguaStep, an online Arabic-language program that quizzes a user in vocabulary and adapts to a user’s specific rate of learning.

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Well, aside from the hyperbole (“entire”?), I’m happy to agree with him about the cells in our brains and to affirm that evolution doesn’t stop at the neck. But let’s remember that particle physics doesn’t stop at the neck, either. So does this mean that psychologists ought to be paying a lot more attention to quarks and leptons? Presumably not. The point here is that, although psychology needs to be consistent with the facts of particle physics or of evolution, just how much any branch of science can reveal about our minds is always an open question, to be decided on a case by case basis. In the case of physics, the answer is probably not all that much. In the case of evolution, I believe it is rather more. But not as much, I suspect, as Jabr thinks.

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But too often, people suffering from anxiety disorders fail to respond to the all-clear signal. This leaves them in an ongoing state of heightened tension, which—if it lasts long enough, or gets triggered often enough—can take a severe physical and mental toll. Why are some of us able to relax, while others stay on guard long after any danger has passed?

An answer that could point the way toward breakthrough therapies is emerging from complementary studies of humans and mice. But Ahmad Hariri, a neurobiologist at Duke University, crystallizes the idea with a different animal altogether. He refers to the amygdala, which has been called “the fear center of the brain,” as a sort of watchdog. “A watchdog responds reflexively to threat,” he notes. It’s up to its owner to say ‘That’s enough. I heard you bark. I checked it out. It’s okay.’”

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If we succeed in meeting still formidable challenges, the first ceremonial kick of the World Cup game may be made by a paralyzed teenager, who, flanked by the two contending soccer teams, will saunter onto the pitch clad in a robotic body suit. This suit—or exoskeleton, as we call it—will envelop the teenager's legs. His or her first steps onto the field will be controlled by motor signals originating in the kicker's brain and transmitted wirelessly to a computer unit the size of a laptop in a backpack carried by our patient. This computer will be responsible for translating electrical brain signals into digital motor commands so that the exoskeleton can first stabilize the kicker's body weight and then induce the robotic legs to begin the back-and-forth coordinated movements of a walk over the manicured grass. Then, on approaching the ball, the kicker will visualize placing a foot in contact with it. Three hundred milliseconds later brain signals will instruct the exoskeleton's robotic foot to hook under the leather sphere, Brazilian style, and boot it aloft.

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Across the United States—and in developed nations around the world—twenty-somethings like Hannah are taking longer to finish school, leave home, begin a career, get married and reach other milestones of adulthood. These trends are not just anecdotal; sociologists and psychologists have gathered supporting data. Robin Marantz Henig summarizes the patterns in her 2010 New York Times Magazine feature:

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The researchers, based at the University of Rochester (U.R.), University of Oslo and Stony Brook University, describe this new system in the journal Science Translational Medicine today. The study adds to the evidence that the star-shaped cells called astrocytes play a leading role in keeping the nervous system in good working order.

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