A beginner's guide to sex differences in the brain

By Donna Maney, Emory Professor of Psychology

Asking whether there are sex differences in the human brain is a bit like asking whether coffee is good for you – scientists can’t seem to make up their minds about the answer. In 2013, for example, news stories proclaimed differences in the brain so dramatic that men and women “might almost be separate species.” Then in 2015, headlines announced that there are in fact no sex differences in the brain at all. Even as I write this, more findings of differences are coming out.

So which is it? Are there differences between men’s and women’s brains – or not? To clear up the confusion, we need to consider what the term “sex difference” really means in the scientific literature.

To illustrate the concept, I’ve used a web-based tool I helped develop, SexDifference.org, to plot some actual data. The three graphs below show how measurements from a sample of people are distributed along a scale. Women are represented in pink, and men in blue. Most people are close to the average for their sex, so that’s the peak of each “bump.” People on the left or right side of the peak are below or above average, respectively, for their sex. I’ve added individual data points for three hypothetical study subjects Sue, Ann and Bob. Not real people, just examples. Their data points are superimposed on the larger data set of hundreds of people.

Before we get into the brain, let’s look at a couple of familiar sex differences outside the brain. Many of us, if asked to describe how men’s bodies differ from women’s, would first mention the sex difference in external genitalia. The graph below depicts the number of nontransgender adults that have a “genital tubercle derivative” (clitoris or penis) of a given size.

Size of human genitalia. Data from Wallen and Lloyd, 2008. (Graphic by Donna Maney.)

All of the women in this sample, including our hypothetical Sue and Ann, fall within a certain range. All of the men, including Bob, fall into a different range. With relatively rare exceptions, humans can be accurately categorized into sexes based on this measure.

Sex differences in human height. Data from Sperrin, et al., 2015. Graphic by Donna Maney. 

Next, let’s consider another difference that we can all see and understand: the sex difference in height. Here, we see overlap, depicted in purple. Unless a person is very tall or very short, knowing only that person’s height will not allow us to categorize that person as male or female with much certainty. Yet, even though we all know that some women are taller than some men, we would probably all call this a sex difference.

A typical sex difference in the human brain. Data from Tunc et al., 2016. (Graphic by Donna Maney.) 

Now let’s consider a typical sex difference inside the human brain. This graph depicts a sex difference in structural connectivity, or the degree to which networks of brain areas are interconnected, as reported in a recent study (the median effect size from the study is shown). The distributions of values for men and women are essentially the same; they overlap by 90 percent. Sue and Bob have fairly similar values, and Ann’s value is higher than the average man’s. We can see that this sex difference in the brain is quite different from the sex difference in genital measurements. With only the measurement of brain connectivity, the odds of correctly guessing a person’s sex might be as low as 51 out of 100. Since the odds aren’t perfectly 50:50, this is technically a sex difference. The term means that sex explains a portion of the variability in a trait, not that men take one form and women another. There may be a few more women at one end of the range and a few more men at the other, but for the majority, the trait is not that related to sex.

Small differences such as this one are important. The discovery of any sex difference is valuable for scientists and physicians because it points to other, more meaningful sources of variation. Because the sexes differ according to factors such as genes, hormones, and environment, a sex difference in the brain provides clues about the impact of these other factors on the brain. Following up on those clues helps us understand why susceptibility to disease, efficacy of drugs and even the course of normal development are different among all individuals, not just between men and women.

Despite their relevance to human health, the scientific value of sex differences is rarely discussed in the news media. Instead, sex differences become clickbait for promoting stereotypes. Small differences in the brain have been reported to explain a wide variety of presumably sex-typical behaviors, from hunting to cleaning the house. Although it makes intuitive sense that a difference in the brain must translate to a difference in behavior, there is very little evidence linking any sex difference in the human brain directly to a particular function or behavioral outcome. So think twice before you assume that greater brain connectivity confers better multitasking or map-reading skills.

The graphs above are meant to illustrate why it’s not particularly informative to ask a yes-or-no question like “Do the sexes differ?” We need to ask more sophisticated questions: to what extent do the sexes differ? How much do they overlap?

Any decent scientific report of a sex difference contains all of the information needed to answer these questions. But not many journalists look at the actual report; they often rely on press releases, which may misrepresent the nature and meaning of a difference. As a result, the headlines can turn out to be wrong. For example, in the 2013 study reportedly showing that men and women differ profoundly, the sexes overlapped by an average of more than 86 percent. And the 2015 study that supposedly showed no sex differences in the brain? The authors never actually made such a claim. In fact, they provided a long list of bona-fide sex differences.

The next time you read about a sex difference, if you have access to the research report you can graph the difference yourself on SexDifference.org. Enter the average value (reported as the “mean”) and variance (reported as the “standard deviation”) for each sex. The tool will automatically draw a graph and calculate the degree of overlap. You can then see for yourself the extent to which the trait is related to sex.

Don’t be surprised if you can’t find the values you need to graph the difference. The authors may not report them, or they may not have actually compared the sexes. Take, for example, the report last year on thermal comfort in office buildings. The media were aflutter for days, explaining why women are always cold at the office. A quick look at the scientific paper itself shows that there were no men in the study at all! This makes calculating the overlap a bit problematic.

Overlap between the sexes may seem so obvious that it needs no discussion. But its underappreciation is leading educators to separate boys and girls into single-sex classrooms in order to accommodate their different brains, and physicians to consider sex, instead of more relevant factors such as body weight, when prescribing drugs. Although well-intentioned, these practices amount to stereotyping because they assume the distribution looks like the top graph above when it may look more like the bottom one.

Nearly every day, new research is published that, if overinterpreted, could be used to promote sex stereotypes. Most neuroscientists are not interested in doing that. The few neuroscientists who do overinterpret their data, often to the great delight of the media and the public, provide fuel for discriminatory practices and cast the entire field in a negative light. The best way to deal with dubious interpretations is to examine the data and draw our own conclusions. The data will speak for themselves.

This article was first published in The Conversation.

Top image: Thinkstock.com

Beauty and brains: Best-in-breed show dog assists with Emory neuroscience on the side

Emory alum Lindsay Fetters and her best-in-breed winning vizsla, Eli, enjoy their moment at the Westminster Kennel Club. (Photos by Teddy Lei.)

By Carol Clark

The crowd applauded as Atlanta resident and Emory alum Lindsay Fetters, clad in a powder-blue suit dress, dashed into the ring with Eli, a graceful, spirited vizsla with a golden-brown coat. It was the recent Westminster Kennel Club’s best sporting dog competition. Fetters and Eli had just won a best-in-breed event at the show – making Eli the top vizsla in the country. Fresh from this victory, the pair seemed to glow as they glided across the green carpet.

Dog lovers around the country were watching the TV broadcast from Madison Square Garden as the announcer gave a bit of backstory: “Eli’s a participant in the Dog Project at Emory University, which is where dogs go into MRIs fully awake and unrestrained so we can learn a little more about their intellectual and emotional abilities.”

That’s right. While Eli did not take the prize for best sporting dog, he did get a nod for being the only Westminster show dog that assists with neuroscience research in his spare time.

“After we won best in breed and moved on to the sporting event, I had to fill out a card for the announcer to say some unique things about Eli, so I put down the Dog Project,” says Fetters, who is the owner, breeder and handler of Eli. “The general public watches the show and I wanted people to know that these dogs are much more than just pretty faces. Many of these dogs do therapy work and other important things.

Celebrating with a high five

“Also, I love Emory, so I wanted to plug it as much as I could,” adds Fetters, who received her MBA from Goizueta Business School in 2014.

Emory neuroscientist Gregory Berns watched the Westminster show from Atlanta. Berns is the director of Emory’s Center for Neuropolicy and also heads up the Dog Project, which is researching evolutionary questions surrounding humans’ best, and oldest, friend. The project, which began with two dogs and has since expanded to 80, was the first to train dogs to voluntarily enter a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and remain motionless during scanning, without restraint or sedation. The Dog Project has already identified regions of the canine brain associated with reward and processing faces and scents.

“Lindsay and Eli have been part of the Dog Project almost since the beginning and they have participated in four experiments,” Berns says. “Now that Eli’s won best in breed, I worry that maybe he will be having too much fun fulfilling his stud duties to stay involved in our research.”

Fetters was introduced to dog shows early by her mother, who specialized in Irish setters. “I started showing her Irish setters when I was four years old,” Fetters says.

By the time she was 15, she wanted her own dog to show, and chose the Hungarian vizsla, a medium-sized canine bred for hunting and pointing birds, known for its energy and intelligence. “I named my first vizsla Traitor, because I was cheating on the Irish setters,” Fetters recalls. (Eli, now six-and-a-half-years-old, is the offspring of Traitor.)

While she was still in high school, Fetters began working part-time at a non-profit in Alpharetta called Canine Assistants, which trains service dogs for people with disabilities. She continued working there throughout her undergraduate years at the University of North Georgia, and even after she graduated.

“It was a great job,” Fetters says. “I trained the dogs, and I loved being with them. And then I trained the people how to use the dogs. It was really rewarding to know you were enriching someone’s life. People with disabilities are often used to having a caregiver. But having these dogs makes them a caregiver, in a sense, which is empowering. I saw some people who previously rarely left their house find a sense of purpose when they got the dog. They would start getting up to care for their dog and go for walks and then decide to start school or find a job.”

"It’s hard to explain the feeling of being recognized on a national level with a dog that you raised and trained," Fetters says.

By 2013, Fetters decided that, after 15 years at Canine Assistants, she wanted dogs to just be her passion and not her job. She had already started looking at MBA programs. She was studying for her GMAT at a coffee shop when another customer noticed her Canine Assistants t-shirt and told her about the Dog Project.

“I thought it was really fascinating,” Fetters says. “I like the science behind the Dog Project, and also the challenge of getting a dog to be still in an MRI machine with all the noise and distractions.”

Plus, Eli needed a job, she says. “He’s very task-oriented and needs a lot of interaction. He’s really energetic so staying very still in an MRI is difficult for him but he loves a challenge. He especially likes the treats he gets afterwards.”

During high school and her undergraduate years, Fetters had worked so she wanted to quit her job and devote herself fully to enjoying the student life while getting an MBA. She found her match at the Goizueta one-year MBA program, where she focused on business management.

“When I toured Emory, I knew it was for me,” Fetters says. “I immediately felt at home there: I love the Emory culture and the sense of community, especially within the business school.”

A highlight was her experience in the Gouizeta Advanced Leadership Academy. “For spring break, we went sailing in the British Virgin Islands,” Fetters says. “We worked in teams and were given new challenges every day.” One day she was a navigator and the next day the captain.

“The year at Goizueta changed my whole life,” Fetters says. “I met friends that I will have forever, along with top professors and alumni that I can learn from and call on for advice. It opened my eyes to all the opportunities out there.”

Fetters found a great job as an asset manager at the Goddard Investment Group, a commercial real estate investment firm. Eli is part of the team.

“He goes to work with me every day and sits at my feet in my office,” Fetters says. “My boss is a great dog person and all my co-workers love Eli. He sometimes delivers mail to people because he loves to carry things around. He also enjoys just visiting peoples’ offices to get a treat.”

Every workday, Eli stops in at the convenience store in the office building where the owner gives him a boiled egg. “He doesn’t even have to pay for his egg like everyone else,” Fetters says. “She peels it for him and breaks it into little pieces and hands it to him. His nickname is Prince Eli and he definitely lives up to that.”

When he’s not raising office spirits or assisting in neuroscience, Eli dabbles in acting. Watch for his subtle performances in the Sundance Original TV series, “The Red Road.” Going against type, Eli acted sad while sitting next to a tombstone and afraid as a policeman chased him off a porch.

When they returned to work, Eli and Fetters were greeted with flowers and a party. (Courtesy Lindsay Fetters.)

Eli already had a huge fan base as he set off to compete at the Westminster Kennel Club, the most prestigious dog show in the United States and one of the oldest of any sporting events, now in its 140th year. Fetters and Eli had spent many weekends during the past year competing at dog shows across the country. Eli ranked among the top five vizslas, earning him an invitation to Westminster.

He did not disappoint. “He was kind of a super star the day he won best of breed, happy and outgoing and just wagging his tail the whole time,” Fetters says. “He’s just a heck of a show dog and embodies the ideal vizsla: Light-footed, graceful, smooth and really muscled. He looks like a dog that could go out into the field and hunt all day.”

Fetters is no slacker herself. “Winning best of breed at the Westminster Kennel Club is the thrill of a lifetime, something I’ve dreamt of since I was old enough to watch TV,” she says. “I’m not a professional, but I was showing against professionals in that venue, so to win was a huge honor. It’s hard to explain the feeling of being recognized on a national level with a dog that you raised and trained.”

Fetters’ cell phone and email were soon flooded with messages of congratulations. The Wall Street Journal ran a photo of Eli giving Fetters a high five and the Denver Post ran of a photo of him holding his best-of-breed ribbon.

When Fetters and Eli finally returned to the humdrum work-a-day world of their office, they were greeted with a surprise celebration party.

You will be glad to learn that Eli remains grounded. Yes, he’s in demand for stud services. To Eli, however, sex is not as important as relationships.

“We plan to keep doing the Dog Project,” Fetters says. “Both of us are at our best when we’re busy and interacting with others. And Eli enjoys learning the tasks and getting the attention from the people involved. He’s a little bit of a ham.”

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Not all psychopaths are criminals: Some of their traits are tied to success

Tom Skeyhill made grandiose claims about his combat experience during the World War I battle of Gallipoli.

By Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld and Emory Ph.D. candidate Ashley Watts

Tom Skeyhill was an acclaimed Australian war hero, known as “the blind solider-poet.” During the monumental World War I battle of Gallipoli, he was a flag signaler, among the most dangerous of all positions. After being blinded when a bomb shell detonated at his feet, he was transferred out.

After the war he penned a popular book of poetry about his combat experience. He toured Australia and the United States, reciting his poetry to rapt audiences. President Theodore Roosevelt appeared on stage with him and said, “I am prouder to be on the stage with Tom Skeyhill than with any other man I know.” His blindness suddenly disappeared following a medical procedure in America.

But, according to biographer Jeff Brownrigg, Skeyhill wasn’t what he seemed. The poet had, in fact, faked his blindness to escape danger.

That’s not all. After a drunken performance, he blamed his slurred speech on an unverifiable war injury. He claimed to have met Lenin and Mussolini (there is no evidence that he did), and spoke of his extensive battle experience at Gallipoli, when he had been there for only eight days.



You have to be pretty bold to spin those kinds of self-aggrandizing lies and to carry it off as long as Skeyhill did. Although he never received a formal psychological examination (at least to our knowledge), we suspect that most contemporary researchers would have little trouble recognizing him as a classic case of psychopathic personality, or psychopathy. What’s more, Skeyhill embodied many elements of a controversial condition sometimes called successful psychopathy.

Despite the popular perception, most psychopaths aren’t coldblooded or psychotic killers. Many of them live successfully among the rest of us, using their personality traits to get what they want in life, often at the expense of others.

Psychopathy is not easily defined, but most psychologists view it as a personality disorder characterized by superficial charm conjoined with profound dishonesty, callousness, guiltlessness and poor impulse control. According to some estimates, psychopathy is found in about one percent of the general population, and for reasons that are poorly understood, most psychopaths are male.

That number probably doesn’t capture the full number of people with some degree of psychopathy. Data suggest that psychopathic traits lie on a continuum, so some individuals possess marked psychopathic traits but don’t fulfill the criteria for full-blown psychopathy.

Not surprisingly, psychopathic individuals are more likely than other people to commit crimes. They almost always understand that their actions are morally wrong – it just doesn’t bother them. Contrary to popular belief, only a minority are violent.

Read the whole story in The Conversation. 

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Singing in the brain: Songbirds sing like humans

"In terms of vocal control, the bird brain appears as complicated and wonderful as the human brain," says biologist Samuel Sober, shown in his lab with a pair of zebra finches. (Photo by Ofer Tchernichovski.)

By Carol Clark

A songbirds’ vocal muscles work like those of human speakers and singers, finds a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research on Bengalese finches showed that each of their vocal muscles can change its function to help produce different parameters of sounds, in a manner similar to that of a trained opera singer.

“Our research suggests that producing really complex song relies on the ability of the songbirds’ brains to direct complicated changes in combinations of muscles,” says Samuel Sober, a biologist at Emory University and lead author of the study. “In terms of vocal control, the bird brain appears as complicated and wonderful as the human brain.”

Pitch, for example, is important to songbird vocalization, but there is no single muscle devoted to controlling it. “They don’t just contract one muscle to change pitch,” Sober says. “They have to activate a lot of different muscles in concert, and these changes are different for different vocalizations. Depending on what syllable the bird is singing, a particular muscle might increase pitch or decrease pitch.”

Previous research has revealed some of the vocal mechanisms within the human “voice box,” or larynx. The larynx houses the vocal cords and an array of muscles that help control pitch, amplitude and timbre.

Instead of a larynx, birds have a vocal organ called the syrinx, which holds their vocal cords deeper in their bodies. While humans have one set of vocal cords, a songbird has two sets, enabling it to produce two different sounds simultaneously, in harmony with itself.

“Lots of studies look at brain activity and how it relates to behaviors, but muscles are what translates the brain’s output into behavior,” Sober says. “We wanted to understand the physics and biomechanics of what a songbird’s muscles are doing while singing.”

The researchers devised a method involving electromyography (EMG) to measure how the neural activity of the birds activates the production of a particular sound through the flexing of a particular vocal muscle.

The results showed the complex redundancy of the songbird’s vocal muscles. “It tells us how complicated the neural computations are to control this really beautiful behavior,” Sober says, adding that songbirds have a network of brain regions that non-songbirds do not.

The study was co-authored by Kyle Srivastava, a graduate student of the Emory and Georgia Tech Biomedical Engineering Doctoral Program, and Coen Elemans, a biologist from the University of Southern Denmark and a former visiting professor at Emory, funded by the Emory Institute for Quantitative Theory and Methods and the National Institutes of Health.

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Study shows how algal toxin damages sea lions' brains and behavior

Neuroscientist Peter Cook with one of the sea lions that served as a control during the study. (Photos courtesy of the Marine Mammal Center.)

By Carol Clark

A study of wild California sea lions provides the first neurobiological evidence for how a naturally occurring algal toxin affects both the brains and behavior of the animals, leading to significant deficits in spatial memory. The journal Science is publishing the findings, showing how domoic acid damages the sea lions’ hippocampus and disrupts an important neural network.

“We were able to correlate the extent of the hippocampal damage to specific behavioral impairments relevant to the animals’ survival in the wild,” says lead author Peter Cook, a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University. Cook conducted the sea lion research while a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he is continuing to expand on it at Emory.

“Our research provides a way to model the behavioral and biological effects of this toxin in a large-brain mammal,” Cook says. “Better understanding of these effects may also help us identify subtle effects in humans that may be at risk.”

Although cases of fatal human domoic acid poisoning are rare, due to careful monitoring of fisheries, it is unclear if there are effects that go undetected in communities that eat unmonitored seafood.

"Sea lions are like sentinels of ocean health," Cook says, "because when they are in distress, they will almost always swim to shore."

Warming oceans and agricultural runoff may be two factors contributing to an increase in harmful algae blooms, including the planktonic algae Pseudo-nitzschia. The algae produces domoic acid, a potent neurotoxin. During large blooms, the acid can become concentrated in the tissues of shellfish and in fish that feed on the algae. Sea birds and marine mammals that consume these marine organisms can then become poisoned.

Whales and dolphins are also likely impacted by domoic acid, Cook says, although they are more difficult to study than sea lions. “Sea lions are like sentinels of ocean health,” he says, “because when they are in distress, they will almost always swim to shore. We can measure their neurobiology in ways that we can’t in other animals that may also be in distress.”

Wildlife suffering from domoic acid toxicity can display a range of odd behaviors, including seizures, lethargy, disorientation, excessive friendliness or aggressiveness. The condition is often fatal.

Poisoned birds spawned a film.

In 1961, Monterey Bay summer resident Alfred Hitchcock was captivated by reports of frenzied sooty shearwaters. It was a mystery why flocks of the birds were seen regurgitating anchovies, flying into objects and dying in the streets. The incident inspired one of Hitchcock’s most famous films, “The Birds.”

Scientists did not connect domoic acid toxicity to strange behavior by wildlife in the region until the 1990s, when masses of brown pelicans became disoriented and died.

This year, the west coast experienced a massive algae bloom, the largest ever recorded. It extended from Southern California to Alaska, prompting numerous closures of shellfish fisheries.

Large algae blooms attract large schools of fish that feed on them, such as anchovies and sardines. That, in turn, attracts the sea lions. “They are opportunistic feeders and they like to gorge themselves when they have the chance,” Cook says.

Prior research has characterized some of the clinical effects of domoic acid poisoning, but Cook wanted to assess the behavioral effects in wild animals and measure the correlation between the biological changes.

During a three-year period, the research team studied 30 California sea lions undergoing veterinary care and rehabilitation at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito. The study included animals with and without symptoms of brain damage caused by exposure to domoic acid.

The sea lions underwent behavioral tests to assess their spatial memory and brain imaging (MRI). The results documented impaired performance on short- and long-term spatial memory tasks in animals with lesions on the right side of the hippocampus. The lesions appear similar to those seen in humans with medial temporal lobe epilepsy.

While acute poisoning can cause seizures and disorientation in sea lions, brain lesions develop over time, likely as a result of the chronic epileptic condition caused by one or more exposures to the toxin, Cook says. “We don’t know how heavy the exposure needs to be, or how often repeated, to cause this kind of brain damage, and we don’t know the effects of repeated low-dose exposure.”

The team also used functional MRI to look at the effects of domoic acid exposure on important brain networks. They found that sea lions with symptoms of toxic exposure had greatly reduced connectivity between the hippocampus and the thalamus, a pathway known to be essential for the formation of episodic memory – memories of events and experiences.

“This is the first evidence of changes to brain networks in exposed sea lions, and suggests that these animals may be suffering a broad disruption of memory, not just spatial memory deficits,” Cook says.

The sea lion study provides rare experimental evidence linking a naturally occurring neurotoxic effect to behavioral impairment in a wild animal. “Nature was doing the dosing. Our study was a natural experiment, giving it ecological validity,” Cook says. “Animals are complicated and they live in complicated environments that are changing really fast in ways that can have a negative impact on a wide range of species.”

Co-authors of the study also include researchers from the University of California, Davis, AnimalScan Advanced Veterinary Imaging, Pennington Biomedical Research Center; the Marine Mammal Center and the Shedd Aquarium. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Lucile Packard Foundation.

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Babies have logical reasoning before age one, study finds

Deductive problem solving was previously thought to be beyond the reach of babies, says Emory psychologist Stella Lourenco.

By Carol Clark

Human infants are capable of deductive problem solving as early as 10 months of age, a new study finds. The journal Developmental Science is publishing the research, showing that babies can make transitive inferences about a social hierarchy of dominance.

“We found that within the first year of life, children can engage in this type of logical reasoning, which was previously thought to be beyond their reach until the age of about four or five years,” says Stella Lourenco, the Emory University psychologist who led the study.

The researchers designed a non-verbal experiment using puppet characters. The experiment created scenarios among the puppets to test transitive inference, or the ability to deduce which character should dominate another character, even when the babies had not seen the two characters directly interact with one another. A majority of the babies in the experiment, who were ages 10 to 13 months, showed a pattern consistent with transitive inference.

“Everybody knows that babies learn rapidly, like little sponges that soak in incredible amounts of knowledge,” Lourenco says. “This finding tells us about how humans learn. If you can reason deductively, you can make generalizations without having to experience the world directly. This ability could be a crucial tool for making sense of the social relationships around us, and perhaps complex non-social interactions.”

During the 1960s, developmental psychologist Jean Piaget showed that children could solve transitive inference problems around the age of seven or eight. For example, if you know that Paul is taller than Mary, and that Mary is taller than Jack, then you can infer indirectly that Paul must be taller than Jack. You don’t need to see Paul and Jack standing side-by-side to draw this conclusion.

For years, the prevailing philosophy in cognitive psychology was that children younger than seven were mostly illogical and incapable of transitive inference. Then, during the late 1970s, researchers found that by reducing the complexity of transitive inference problems, children as young as four could solve them.

Lourenco, whose research has shown that babies have numerical reasoning and can understand relationships of magnitude, suspected that infants were also capable of transitive inference.

A screen shot of a video from one of the experiments shows a subject watching the puppets interact.

For the current study, Lourenco teamed up with co-authors Robert Hampton, an Emory psychologist whose lab at Yerkes National Primate Research Center has demonstrated that monkeys can engage in transitive inference, and Regina Paxton Gazes, a former graduate student in the Hampton lab and post-doctoral fellow at Zoo Atlanta. Gazes, who is now on the psychology faculty at Bucknell University, designed the non-verbal experiments for the human infants.

In the first experiment, the babies were shown a video of three puppets arranged in a row. The puppets – an elephant, a bear and a hippopotamus, were similar in size but arranged in a left to right social hierarchy. The elephant is holding a toy, but the bear reaches over and forcibly takes the toy from the elephant. Next, the hippopotamus takes the toy from the bear. These scenarios suggested that the bear is more dominant than the elephant, and the hippo is more dominant than the bear.

Finally, the babies were shown a scenario where the elephant takes the toy from the hippo. This scenario held the gaze of most the babies in the experiment for longer than the other scenarios.

“Dominance by the elephant violates the expected transitive-inference relationship, since the bear took the toy from the elephant and the hippo took the toy from the bear,” Lourenco explains. “The babies look longer and pay greater attention to the scenario that violates the transitive inference as they try to figure out why it is different from what they would have predicted.”

In a second experiment, the researchers introduced a fourth character, a giraffe, that had not yet interacted with the others in the familiarization phase. The giraffe was novel and had not previously displayed dominance behavior. The infants did not pay more attention to scenarios involving the giraffe, whether or not it displayed dominance.

The researchers also conducted control experiments with infants. For the controls, the hippo always displayed dominant behavior and the elephant always displayed subordinate behavior.

The data supported that the majority of the infants who were shown unexpected dominance behaviors, or 23 out of 32, were engaging in transitive inference when they gazed at scenarios of unexpected behavior by the puppets, compared to other scenarios. The researchers hypothesize that transitive inference for social dominance is evolutionarily important, so the mechanisms to support this type of logical reasoning are in place early.

“It’s remarkable that the infants could make these inferences about social dominance with minimal presentation,” Gazes says. “It suggests an early emerging, and perhaps evolutionary ancient ability, that is shared with other animals.”

In addition to exploring important science questions about how the mind develops, the findings could aid in determining whether infants are on track in the learning process. “Since a majority of babies show the ability to engage in this kind of logical problem solving, our paradigm could certainly become an important tool for assessing normative cognitive development,” Lourenco says.

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How babies use numbers space and time

Top image: Thinkstockphoto

BRAIN Initiative grant to fund study of sensory-motor circuitry

"We hope that our project will lead to an algorithm for basal ganglia and motor control circuits involved in movement control," says Emory neuroscientist Dieter Jaeger. (Emory Photo/Video)

To move or not to move. That is the question the brain grapples with routinely as it receives a stimulus, decides whether to direct the body to respond with an action, then sends the appropriate signals to control the behavior. It is a common and fundamental process, but we know little about how the brain actually does it.

“New technology allows us to monitor brain activity at high spatial and temporal resolution, and do so over long periods of time,” says Dieter Jaeger, a neuroscientist in Emory University’s Department of Biology. “This technology is finally opening the door to address questions related to the circuits involved in coordinating the relationship between neural sensing and physical action.”

Jaeger recently received a grant from the National Institutes of Health BRAIN Initiative to explore these questions about neural circuitry. He shares the $1.7 million award with Garrett Stanley, a neuroscientist in the Emory-Georgia Tech Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME). The BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) was launched by President Obama in 2014 as part of a widespread effort to gain fundamental insights for treating a range of brain disorders.

Areas of the brain involved in sensory input and movement include the basal ganglia, the thalamus and the cortex. What’s less clear is how neural activity flows through these areas, connecting a sensation to a decision to make a movement. Debilitating and difficult to treat neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and dystonia are caused by dysfunction of this circuitry.

The Stanley lab specializes in tactile sensing and information processing, while the Jaeger lab is focused on motor and muscle coordination and control.

Image from the cover of the NIH brochure, "The BRAIN Initiative."

For their BRAIN project, Stanley and Jaeger are combining their two areas of expertise and experimenting with a mouse model. Techniques such as genetic voltage sensing will allow them to gain images of cortical electrical activity, with millisecond precision.

“We understand a lot about the biology of the brain,” Jaeger says. “The challenge now is to move beyond biology to algorithm. We hope that our project will lead to an algorithm for basal ganglia and motor cortical circuits involved in movement control.”

Such an algorithm could generate a computer program to simulate activity of the brain. “We could use this computer program to make predictions and run simulations,” Jaeger says. “It would be a great tool to test our understanding and compare against data. It’s important, because without such a tool, many clinical approaches to brain malfunction are groping in the dark.”

“Gaining basic insights into motor circuit function may reveal new possibilities for the treatment of neural diseases, as well as a better understanding of deep brain stimulation treatments already in use,” adds Stanley.

The project grew out of another collaboration between Jaeger and Stanley. They are also co-principal investigators of an NIH-sponsored training grant in computational neuroscience, which targets a new generation of scientists bound together through questions about how the brain computes.

 “Through this interaction, Dieter and I got to know each other better, started to talk more science, and eventually came up with this project,” Stanley says.

In U.S. politics, does narcissism trump all?

Donald Trump at a recent campaign rally. Photo by Michael Vadon.

Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld and his graduate student Ashley Watts recently co-authored an opinion piece for the New York Times entitled "The Narcissist in Chief." Below is an excerpt:

"The political rise of Donald J. Trump has drawn attention to one personality trait in particular: narcissism. Although narcissism does not lend itself to a precise definition, most psychologists agree that it comprises self-centeredness, boastfulness, feelings of entitlement and a need for admiration. We have never met Mr. Trump, let alone examined him, so it would be inappropriate of us to offer a formal assessment of his level of narcissism. And in all fairness, today’s constant media attention makes a sizable ego a virtual job requirement for public office. Still, the Trump phenomenon raises the question of what kinds of leaders narcissists make. Fortunately, a recent body of research has suggested some answers.

"In a 2013 article in Psychological Science, we and our colleagues approached this question by studying the 42 United States presidents up to and including George W. Bush. ...

"We found that narcissism, specifically 'grandiose narcissism' — an amalgam of flamboyance, immodesty and dominance — was associated with greater overall presidential success. (This relation was small to moderate in magnitude.) The two highest scorers on grandiose narcissism were Lyndon B. Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt, the two lowest James Monroe and Millard Fillmore."

Read the whole article in the New York Times.

If you'd like to hear more on the topic, Ashley Watts will be giving a talk titled "Should We Worry about a Narcissist in the Oval Office?" on Thursday, September 17, as part of this month's Nerd Nite Atlanta. The line-up of three speakers starts at 8 pm at Manuel's Tavern.

Related:
Grandiose narcissism reflects U.S. presidents light and dark sides
Psychopathic boldness tied to U.S. presidential success

Why women rule, and other hot science topics at the Decatur Book Festival

Illustration: Don Morris

Women can forget about equality with men, warns Emory anthropologist Mel Konner.

It’s even better than that. Why should women embrace mere equality when their movement is toward superiority? It is maleness that has Konner worried in his latest book, “Women After All: Sex, Evolution and the End of Male Supremacy,” which looks at the history and future of gender and power dynamics.

Konner will be one of the featured authors in the ever-popular Science track of the Decatur Book Festival this weekend. He’ll take the stage at 3 pm on Saturday, September 5, at the Marriot Conference Center.

The last line of Konner’s book jacket reads: “Provocative and richly informed, ‘Women After All’ is bound to be controversial across the sexes.”

As Konner acknowledges on his personal web site, the first murmurings came about after a short adaptation of the book ran in the Wall Street Journal. Hundreds of angry men responded within a couple of days. His wife, home alone during that period, double-locked the door. Konner’s editor at the Wall Street Journal apologized for failing to instruct him not to read the comments.

For his part, Konner is hiding in plain sight, saying “Clearly, I’ve touched a nerve, and I’m happy about that.”

Konner talks about a future that his grandson will inhabit, a “new world” that “will be better for him because women help run it.”

You can read more about Konner’s book in the latest issue of Emory Magazine.

Another provocative issue at the intersection of science and society is explored in “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationships with Immunization,” by Emory historian Elena Conis. She will discuss her book at 4:15 pm on Saturday at the Marriott Conference Center.

Dogs process faces in specialized brain area, study reveals

The dogs were trained to view both video images and static images on a screen while undergoing fMRI. Photo by Gregory Berns.

By Carol Clark

Dogs have a specialized region in their brains for processing faces, a new study finds. PeerJ published the research, which provides the first evidence for a face-selective region in the temporal cortex of dogs.

“Our findings show that dogs have an innate way to process faces in their brains, a quality that has previously only been well-documented in humans and other primates,” says Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and the senior author of the study.

Having neural machinery dedicated to face processing suggests that this ability is hard-wired through cognitive evolution, Berns says, and may help explain dogs’ extreme sensitivity to human social cues.

Berns heads up the Dog Project in Emory’s Department of Psychology, which is researching evolutionary questions surrounding man’s best, and oldest, friend. The project was the first to train dogs to voluntarily enter a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and remain motionless during scanning, without restraint or sedation. In previous research, the Dog Project identified the caudate region of the canine brain as a reward center. It also showed how that region of a dog’s brain responds more strongly to the scents of familiar humans than to the scents of other humans, or even to those of familiar dogs.

For the current study, the researchers focused on how dogs respond to faces versus everyday objects. “Dogs are obviously highly social animals,” Berns says, “so it makes sense that they would respond to faces. We wanted to know whether that response is learned or innate.”

Dogs are hard-wired to respond to faces through cognitive evolution, the study suggests.

The study involved dogs viewing both static images and video images on a screen while undergoing fMRI. It was a particularly challenging experiment since dogs do not normally interact with two-dimensional images, and they had to undergo training to learn to pay attention to the screen.

A limitation of the study was the small sample size: Only six of the eight dogs enrolled in the study were able to hold a gaze for at least 30 seconds on each of the images to meet the experimental criteria.

The results were clear, however, for the six subjects able to complete the experiment. A region in their temporal lobe responded significantly more to movies of human faces than to movies of everyday objects. This same region responded similarly to still images of human faces and dog faces, yet significantly more to both human and dog faces than to images of everyday objects.

If the dogs’ response to faces was learned – by associating a human face with food, for example – you would expect to see a response in the reward system of their brains, but that was not the case, Berns says.

A previous study, decades ago, using electrophysiology, found several face-selective neurons in sheep.

“That study identified only a few face-selective cells and not an entire region of the cortex,” says Daniel Dilks, an Emory assistant professor of psychology and the first author of the current dog study.

The researchers have dubbed the canine face-processing region they identified the dog face area, or DFA.

Humans have at least three face processing regions in the brain, including the fusiform face area, or FFA, which is associated with distinguishing faces from other objects. “We can predict what parts of your brain are going to be activated when you’re looking at faces,” Dilks says. “This is incredibly reliable across people.”

One hypothesis is that distinguishing faces is important for any social creature.

“Dogs have been cohabitating with humans for longer than any other animal,” Dilks says. “They are incredibly social, not just with other members of their pack, but across species. Understanding more about canine cognition and perception may tell us more about social cognition and perception in general.”

Related:
What is your dog thinking?
Scent of the familiar: You may linger like perfume in your dog's brain

Should babies be screened for autism risk?

Karen Rommelfanger, neuroethics program director at the Emory Center for Ethics, co-wrote an opinion piece for The Conversation with Jennifer Sarrett, lecturer at Emory's Center for the Study of Human Health. Below is an excerpt:

For children with autism, early intervention is critical. Therapies and education – especially in the first two years of life – can facilitate a child’s social development, reduce familial stress and ultimately improve quality of life.

But while we can reliably diagnose autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at 24 months, most children are diagnosed much later. This is largely due to a lack of resources, poor adherence to screening guidelines and the fact that primary care physicians are often uncomfortable talking about autism risk to parents.

But what if we could use a simple, routine test to screen every baby for autism? It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Larger-scale clinical trials for an eye-tracking device that could be used to predict autism are slated to begin this year. This presents a new and unique set of ethical concerns.

Technologies that predict the possibility of a neurological disorder have the weight of affecting conceptions of not just "what" these children have but "who" these children will become. As a neuroethicist and autism researcher, we believe it is time to have a conversation about these technologies, and what it will mean for parents and children or for people with autism.

Many researchers have found that autistic children prefer to look at different things than typically developing children. This is called gaze preference. In fact, gaze preference changes can be detected prior to the onset of autism. Researchers have been using eye-tracking devices to record where babies gaze when viewing videos of social scenes. And they have been using this device not to diagnose autism, but to predict autism.

A 2013 study using an eye-tracking device found that differences in gaze preference can be detected in infants as young as two months. When viewing videos, the infants who look at mouths more than eyes and objects more than people are more likely to later be diagnosed with autism. These infants experienced a decline in attention to other people’s eyes.

The researchers from this study are working to replicate these findings in larger studies and are heading up the development of the eye-tracking device slated for clinical trials this year, and should the trials be successful, researchers will seek FDA approval for the device.

Read the whole article in The Conversation.

First images of dolphin brain circuitry hint at how they sense sound

By Carol Clark

Neuroscientists have for the first time mapped the sensory and motor systems in the brains of dolphins. Proceedings of the Royal Society B is publishing the results, showing that at least two areas of the dolphin brain are associated with the auditory system, unlike most mammals that primarily process sound in a single area.

“Dolphins are incredibly intelligent, social animals and yet very little is known about how their brains function, so they have remained relatively mysterious,” says Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University and lead author of the study. “We now have the first picture of the entire dolphin brain and all of the white matter connections inside of it.”

The researchers applied a novel technique of diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) on the preserved brains of two dolphins who died after stranding on a beach in North Carolina more than a decade ago. The method for using DTI on a non-living brain was developed relatively recently and had previously only been used for research on deceased humans, primates and rats.

The study focused on the dolphin auditory system, since dolphins – along with several other animals, such as bats – use echolocation to sense their environments. “We found that there are probably multiple areas in the dolphin brain associated with auditory information, and the neural pathways look similar to those of a bat,” Berns says. “This is surprising because dolphins and bats are far apart on the evolutionary tree. They diverged tens of millions of years ago but their brains may have evolved similar mechanisms for using sound not just to hear, but to also create mental images.”

Dolphins emit clicks, squawks, whistles and burst-pulse sounds to communicate, navigate and hunt. Echolocation allows them to perceive objects by bouncing sound off surfaces.

“For decades, we’ve thought of the dolphin brain as having one primary auditory region,” says co-author Lori Marino, a neuroscientist specializing in the brains of dolphins, whales and other cetaceans. “This research shows that the dolphin brain is even more complex than we realized.” 

Formerly on the faculty at Emory, Marino is currently the executive director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy in Utah. Emory houses a number of preserved cetacean brains collected by Marino, via colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, from stranding events. Various environmental agencies respond when dolphins and whales are beached, in an effort to save the animals and return them to the sea. If the animals die, parts of them may be preserved for use in scientific research.

The current study used the brains of a common dolphin and a pantropical dolphin from the Emory collection.

Previous investigations using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have revealed the complex anatomy of cetacean brains. But MRI scans only capture images of the brain’s basic structure. DTI focuses on the brain’s white matter, or the fiber pathways that connect neurons and different regions of the brain’s gray matter. DTI can detect the movement of water molecules along these fiber tracks.

The researchers used a special DTI technique for post-mortem brains developed by study co-authors Sean Foxley, Saad Jbabdi and Karla Miller at the University of Oxford. In a living, human brain, a DTI scan takes about 20 minutes. Scanning a post-mortem brain takes much longer, however, since it contains less water.

The dolphin brains posed a particular challenge since they are large – about the size of footballs – and had been preserved for years. They retained only small amounts of the water normally found in healthy tissue.

The researchers hypothesize that dolphins have more than one neural area associated with sound because they are using sound for different purposes.

“The signal was very weak, but it was there,” Berns says. “Each of the specimens required nearly 12 hours of scanning.” The data from the DTI scans allowed the researchers to map out the white matter pathways, essentially the wiring diagram for the dolphin brain, in high detail.

The results show that the dolphin auditory nerve enters the brain stem region and connects both to the temporal lobe (the auditory region of many terrestrial mammals) and to another part of the brain near the apex known as the primary visual region. The researchers hypothesize that dolphins have more than one neural area associated with sound because they are using sound for different purposes.

Dolphins emit clicks, squawks, whistles and burst-pulse sounds to communicate, navigate and hunt. Echolocation allows them to perceive objects by bouncing sound off surfaces.

“Dolphins are the most sophisticated users of biological sonar in the animal kingdom,” Marino says. “They can find fish hidden from sight in sand with ease.”

Experiments have shown that dolphins can echolocate on a hidden, complex 3-D shape and then pick out that shape by sight. “They can rapidly move back and forth between their senses of sight and sound,” Marino says. One dolphin’s echolocation signals and echoes may be picked up by another dolphin, she adds. “They have a complex communication system and a unique ability to emit different types of sounds, like a click and a whistle, simultaneously.”

The researchers hope that their map of dolphin neural circuitry will help unlock secrets of the dolphin mind, including how they communicate and perceive their environment.

“Our study was the first to use this DTI technique on a dolphin brain, and on a specimen that was more than a decade old,” Berns says. “Our success opens up the possibility of using this tool to study the archived brains of all sorts of amazing animals in museum collections around the world.”

Related:
What is your dog thinking? Brain scans unleash canine secrets

BEINGS launches work on global consensus for ethical course of biotech

Novelist Margaret Atwood on stage at BEINGS with cognitive scientist Steven Pinker (center) and Thierry Magnin, who is a physicist, Catholic priest and professor of ethics.

By Carol Clark

Some of the world’s preeminent scientists and bioethicists gathered with leaders of philosophy, sociology, law, policy and religion in Atlanta May 18-20 for BEINGS 2015. The landmark summit launched work on a global consensus for the direction of biotechnology for the 21st century.

The setting for this futuristic event: The Tabernacle, an historic former church turned music venue, with red walls swirled with murals and wood floors that creak like the deck of a ship. Novelist Margaret Atwood, creator of fictional laboratory creatures such as the pigoon, gave a keynote.

“The lid is off the Pandora’s Box of genetic modification,” Atwood said. “This is a pivotal moment. Deliberate well. Keep the bar high. Take precautions.”

And with that, the tumultuous voyage began.

BEINGS, short for Biotech and the Ethical Imagination: A Global Summit, was organized by Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics. “The idea is audacious,” Wolpe admitted of their plan to write global guidelines for the aspirations, ethics and policies of biotechnology within the next eight months.

Paul Root Wolpe on the potential and perils of biotechnology:


The BEINGS delegates are up to the task, he added. About 135 delegates from 25 countries joined the summit to take up the challenge of charting a course for how biotechnology can best contribute to human flourishing while navigating the potential perils and ethical pitfalls.

Tensions soon emerged as delegates from different perspectives took the microphone.

Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker threw down the deregulatory gauntlet. “Stay out of the way” of biotech innovation, he urged, as scientists seek to prevent, treat and cure diseases. He cited major improvements in life expectancy around the world largely due to biomedical breakthroughs.

Pinker downplayed fears of eugenics and “designer” babies, while others countered that we are living in a world of competition and should be extremely concerned about the potential power to “edit” the genes of the human germline.

Princeton’s Ruha Benjamin, author of “People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier,” called for the inclusion of those who identify as disabled in discussions about the goals and policies of biotechnology. “Anything less is presumptive and paternalistic,” she said.

It’s important to think about how to distribute benefits, added Benjamin, an assistant professor of African American Studies focused on issues of science and health. “There is no such thing as trickle-down biotech.”

Benjamin and three other delegates summarized their thoughts in an opinion piece for the Guardian: “As we pursue promising treatments, we should also be asking what we are trying to treat; whether it is best treated biomedically; who is included as funders, patients, donors and scientists; who is left out; who profits; and whether or not the treatment masks, depoliticizes, or exacerbates political and social inequality.”

By the afternoon of the first day of the summit, Wolpe said he knew the gathering was going to be a success. “I could tell by the tone of the conversation, and how people were lining up at the microphones to speak, that we had struck a chord,” he says. “We need to bridge a tension in philosophies, but both sides believe that curing human diseases and stopping suffering is an important goal. We have to get outside of the theoretical arguments and start talking about practical, specific issues.”

BEINGS divided discussions into the following major topic areas.

Aspirations and Goals: How should we think about differing goals of biotechnology, from making money, to curing disease, to understanding the basic nature of the organic world, to promoting human flourishing?

Alien Organisms and New (ID)entities: Cellular biotechnologies enable us to engineer novel organisms for industrial, environmental or therapeutic purposes. How might these organisms modify existing social systems and ecosystems, and how do we balance innovation with responsibility?

Bioterror/Bioerror: What are the potential dangers of synthetic biological materials and pathogens in terms of accidents or criminal intent?

Ownership: Should custom-designed genetic material or organisms be subject to patents and copyright?

Donorship: How can government and private sector entities collaborate to protect donors and create standards for bio- and stem-cell banks?

“All voices have a place,” Wolpe stressed. “We don’t have to agree on everything. Wherever we have honest, important disagreement in an area, we will note it in the final document.”

At the end of the summit, more than 80 delegates committed to actively working on writing the guidelines for the five major topic areas. Another 30 agreed to serve as reviewers and editors as drafts are ready. Their goal is to have a final document by next January, which they will submit for publication by a major journal.

“We do not represent just a single segment of society or government body or special interest,” Wolpe says. “We’re a group of global citizens who believe that for biotechnology to be used successfully it has to be used ethically. We as a group can create a document that is persuasive and has value.”

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Blurring the lines between life forms

A physicist's guide to foam and fortune

From foam to Frankenstein: Sidney Perkowitz enjoys a cappuccino (extra foam) at the Ink and Elm in Emory Village. So far this year he has published his first e-book, Universal Foam 2.0, and started work on a new book project, "Frankenstein 2018." (Photo by Carol Clark)

By Carol Clark

You never know what’s going to bubble up on the agenda of physicist Sidney Perkowitz, Emory Candler Professor of Physics Emeritus. Since the 76-year-old Perkowitz retired in 2011, he seems to pop up everywhere, from the Atlanta Science Festival to South Korean national television to a high-level policy meeting in Washington DC.

After 42 years of research and teaching at Emory, he has shifted his focus from the lab and classroom to the wider world. His mission: Communicating science in ways that get people interested and better informed.

“You’re doing something good for society if you can convey science well to a lay person,” Perkowitz says. “You can have an influence over everyone from a child to a congressman.”

Perkowitz began writing about physics for a general audience when he was about 50. “It forced me to be humble because I had a lot to learn,” he says. “Several editors really helped improve my writing. One gave me this great tip: “Remember, you don’t want to simplify the science. You want to simplify the writing.’”

Perkowitz has written six books about physics geared for a lay audience. His most successful, “Universal Foam,” was published in 2001 and remained in print through 2008, including five foreign editions. The book describes the myriad incarnations and inherent mysteries of foam, from densely packed bubbles floating atop a cappuccino to ocean white caps, soap bubbles, and exotic foamy materials used in aerospace and medicine.

Watch a clip from an English-language version of a South Korean documentary inspired by Perkowitz' book on foam, including interviews with Perkowitz:


Last fall, the book brought a Korean television film crew to Perkowitz’s door. “The filmmakers had contacted me out of the blue and said they wanted to make a documentary for children based on the book,” he says. “They sent over a cameraman, a sound guy, a director and a translator.”

So that’s how Perkowitz found himself in his kitchen, brewing a cappuccino as he was being interviewed about the wonders of foam. “We had a wonderful time,” he says of the experience. “The most amazing part was they paid me! It wasn’t a lot, but I was just doing it for fun. So that was a pretty great deal.”

The documentary, “Bubbles That Can Change the World,” was funded by the South Korean government and shown throughout the country as a way to inspire children’s interest in science.

After the publisher stopped putting out new editions of “Universal Foam,” Perkowitz obtained the rights so that he could update it himself as an e-book in January. He titled it “Universal Foam 2.0” “It’s amazingly easy,” Perkowitz says of the process of producing an e-book. He adds that he primarily did it to gain experience with e-books, and doesn’t expect it to sell many copies at this stage. “I just love learning something new and being engaged,” he explains. “And I want to feel that I’m doing something useful for science.”

During the past four years, Perkowitz has also written 20 magazine articles, given public talks, and serves on the science outreach committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which takes him to Washington DC occasionally.

A selection of some of the many editions of Mary Shelley's classic "Frankenstein." (Andy Marbett)

Perkowitz is now at work on this seventh book, which has the working title "Frankenstein 2018." He is both contributing a chapter and co-editing the book, an anthology due out March 11, 2018, the bicentennial of the publication of Mary Shelley’s novel.

“There is something in humanity that wants to find a way to create life and to live forever. But that same desire is also full of fear,” Perkowitz says of the enduring appeal of Frankenstein.

The subject is more relevant than ever. Emory’s Center for Ethics is hosting a major international gathering in Atlanta May 17 to 19, to discuss both aspirations and guidelines for the era of synthetic biology. Biotechnology and the Ethical Imagination: A Global Summit (BEINGS) will bring together delegates from the top 30 biotechnology producing countries of the world.

“The idea of genetic engineering and creating an entirely new being is the 21st-century version of Frankenstein,” Perkowitz says. “Earlier, creating life was envisioned as stitching together dead body parts and zapping them with electricity. Now it’s about getting a micro-scalpel and moving around genes. Some people are afraid of genetically modified food. Imagine how they’ll feel about genetically modified animals and people.”

Perkowitz’ co-editor for the book project is Eddy Von Mueller, an Emory lecturer in film and media studies. The two have already rounded up a dozen contributors for the project, from religion, the arts and sciences, and secured a contract from Pegasus Books.

“Frankenstein is taught often in college classrooms, so we think this anthology might be a good seller as a textbook,” Perkowitz says. “The publisher agreed.”

Graduate strives to help female scientists in Africa

Emory graduate Kwadwo "Kojo" Sarpong, a native of Ghana, felt compelled to do something about the opportunity gap in Africa between men and women scientists. Emory Photo/Video.

By Kimber Williams, Emory Report

When a White House invitation to the first U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit showed up in his email last year, Emory senior Kwadwo Sarpong didn’t give it much thought. “I honestly thought it was some kind of a joke,” says Sarpong, who graduated from Emory this month with a degree in neuroscience and behavioral biology (NBB). 

But when a second invitation soon followed, Sarpong took notice.

“The Obama Administration’s Office of Public Engagement was interested in what I was doing to bridge the opportunity gap between male and female scientists in Africa,” explains Sarpong, who is known to his friends as “Kojo.”

That’s how Sarpong, who is from Ghana, found himself attending an event with top African officials, international leaders and U.S. cabinet members, where he represented the African Research Academies for Women (ARA-W), an organization that he co-founded to nurture the interests of aspiring female scientists in Africa by providing hands-on experience in research laboratories.

Sarpong arrived in Atlanta in 2009 with one goal: education.

Growing up in Ghana, the youngest of four boys, he was deeply aware of shortcomings within the nation’s healthcare system. When one of his brothers became ill with paralytic polio, he recalls that some blamed it on evil spirits.

Stricken with severe fevers while growing up, Sarpong spent considerable time in hospitals himself, an experience that would feed a budding interest in medicine.

During his first year of studies at the University of Ghana, Sarpong was thrilled to learn he’d “won a green card” and the chance to travel to the U.S. “Like a lot of African students, I had very high hopes and dreams — I was going to transfer directly into an American university,” he recalls, smiling. “Instead, I ended up living with my cousin in Atlanta and working as a housekeeper at a medical center and a cashier and warehouse associate at Walmart.”

As friends back in Ghana were preparing to graduate from college, Sarpong studied their Facebook photos. While their lives were moving forward, his seemed stuck. “Everybody thinks that you come to America and your life will change,” Sarpong says. “I was beginning to wonder if I had made a mistake.”

In time, he began taking classes in chemistry at Georgia Perimeter College. Motivated by his brother’s experience with polio, “I became very interested in neuroscience,” he says.

With the help of Emory’s Initiative to Maximize Student Development — a program funded by the National Institutes of Health to expand scientific workforce diversity — Sarpong arrived as a transfer student in Fall 2013.

Talking about his experiences one day with a friend who had graduated from the University of Ghana, he was shocked to learn that she had taken a job as a bank teller — the only position she could find. “There is nothing here for women in science,” she told him.

Sarpong felt compelled to do something about the opportunity gap that exists in Ghana — and much of the developing world — between men and women in the sciences. “Ghana is still a male-dominated culture,” he explains. “I began thinking about what I could do to create social change with something I really love — research.”

Read more in Emory Report.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the 'teen brain' defense

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's police mug shot.

Emory psychologist Scott Lilienfeld is guest blogging in the Washington Post, along with psychiatrist Sally Satel of the American Enterprise Institute, about neuroscience and the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The trial is now in the penalty phase after Tsarnaev was found guilty in the Boston Marathon bombing. Following is an excerpt from today's article by Lilienfeld and Satel:

"By saying that Tsarnaev possessed an 'immature teen brain,' the defense is citing a well-established neuroscientific finding that the killer’s brain, like all teenage brains, was still in a formative stage. Indeed, researchers have shown that the human brain is not fully developed until the mid-20s.

"The 'immature brain' and its implications for reduced culpability has become a staple of the juvenile justice movement. The National Juvenile Justice Network has asserted that brain science 'gives advocates and lawyers working on behalf of juveniles scientific proof for their claims.'

"At least five percent of all murder cases that go to trial feature the introduction of neuroscience evidence, according to Nina Farahany, professor of law at Duke University. Ten years ago, that percentage was less than 0.01 percent. Fully 24 percent of capital cases invoke neuroscience as part of a mitigation strategy."

Read the whole article in the Washington Post.

The economics of hypnotic meditation

Graduating senior Hal Zeitlin is set to begin a one-year internship with The Levy Centers for Mind-Body Medicine and Human Potential. He then plans to join the Houston Teach for America corps.

To graduate with honors from the Emory College of Arts and Sciences, students must complete an honors thesis, a comprehensive project that involves months of original research and analysis on a topic of their choice under the guidance of a faculty adviser. The result is a final paper and an oral defense of their thesis to a faculty committee.

Hal Zeitlin's thesis is entitled: "Silent Economics: The Cooperative Effects of Hypnotic Meditation." His adviser was Kelli Lanier, instructor of economics.

"I examined the impact of meditation alone versus the same meditation preceded by hypnotic relaxation procedures on the economic cooperative behavior of 160 undergraduates," Zeitlin explains. "Hypnotic meditation is used to relax a meditator before they practice any scientifically valid form of meditation. There was a significant change of relaxation within the hypnotic group, greater than the change in the meditation-only group. The meditation-only group maintained cooperative behavior for two of three rounds, and the hypnotic group for all three. Since these results could be attributed to random variation, I recommend that the study be repeated with a larger sample."

A growing amount of scientific evidence has revealed that certain meditation practices can positively change the human brain. "I am interested in helping to introduce scientifically valid meditation practices into American schools, for the benefit of youth," Zeitlin says. "My thesis experience provided me an opportunity to begin a professional investigation into meditation and its effects on pro-social behavior."

Read about more honors thesis projects in Emory Report.

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