An Online Course in Contemplative Neuroscience Increases Dispositional Mindfulness and Reduces Meditation Barriers.

Teaching contemplative neuroscience is emerging as a way to increase the reach and relevance of our field to a wider undergraduate population while also encouraging the beneficial practice of contemplation. In-person classes on the topic have been shown to improve both academic learning and attitudes towards science and meditation. Here we show that a short-term, asynchronous online course in contemplative neuroscience had comparable benefits. Students completed the Determinants of Meditation Practice Inventory (DMPI; Williams et al., 2011) and the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS; Brown and Ryan, 2003) at the start and end of the course. Their scores showed reduced barriers to meditation and improved mindfulness after the course, changes predictive of a range of positive behavioral and well-being outcomes. Students also rated the course as highly effective in advancing neuroscience understanding and competency. A comparison group (from an online general psychology class) showed no increase in mindfulness and a significantly weaker reduction in meditation barriers. This success of an online class in both academic and social-emotional learning is promising given the rapid growth of online instruction and the improved access it can provide to non-traditional students. The class format together with its health-relevant topic could thus be a valuable tool for reaching a more diverse student body while at the same time promoting practices linked to both personal and societal benefits.

Neuroscience and Sustainability: An Online Module on "Environmental Neuroscience".

Neuroscience has extensive and vital applications to environmental sustainability that have yet to be fully integrated into undergraduate education: The neurotoxicity of common chemicals and the health dangers of anthropogenic sensory noise are well known. Research on the neural bases for value-based decision making has implications for pro-environmental efforts. Neural and sensory responses to nature exposure show health benefits of such 'green' experiences. Despite these implications, the term "environmental neuroscience", in sharp contrast to "environmental psychology", is virtually unheard of in undergraduate education. Here we present a model for explicitly integrating environmentally-relevant neuroscience content into an undergraduate class without sacrificing its standard range of materials. Students completed a stand-alone online "Environmental Neuroscience Module" by reading and reflectively writing about popular science articles on environmentally-applied neuroscience issues. Results show that students saw the module as enhancing their understanding of class material and their application of neuroscience to sustainability and their lives. Students showed better performance on a knowledge test of environmental neuroscience relative to a control group. They also showed higher self-ratings of connectedness to nature, a robust predictor of eco-friendly behaviors. The module might thus serve as an efficient model for enriching neuroscience education through environmental applications while also fostering its contribution to sustainability efforts. Our approach might also point to novel ways of integrating neuroscience with disciplines like environmental studies and of reaching a diverse student body by teaching neuroscience in the context of important societal issues.

Integrating Brain Science into Health Studies: An Interdisciplinary Course in Contemplative Neuroscience and Yoga.

As neuroscience knowledge grows in its scope of societal applications so does the need to educate a wider audience on how to critically evaluate its research findings. Efforts at finding teaching approaches that are interdisciplinary, accessible and highly applicable to student experience are thus ongoing. The article describes an interdisciplinary undergraduate health course that combines the academic study of contemplative neuroscience with contemplative practice, specifically yoga. The class aims to reach a diverse mix of students by teaching applicable, health-relevant neuroscience material while directly connecting it to first-hand experience. Outcomes indicate success on these goals: The course attracted a wide range of students, including nearly 50% non-science majors. On a pre/post test, students showed large increases in their knowledge of neuroscience. Students' ratings of the course overall, of increases in positive feelings about its field, and of their progress on specific course objectives were highly positive. Finally, students in their written work applied neuroscience course content to their personal and professional lives. Such results indicate that this approach could serve as a model for the interdisciplinary, accessible and applied integration of relevant neuroscience material into the undergraduate health curriculum.

Dark adaptation and purkinje shift: a laboratory exercise in perceptual neuroscience.

The systematic measurement of luminance thresholds during dark adaptation usually requires advanced optical equipment not available in most undergraduate classes. Here we describe an easy, inexpensive alternative that uses a printed grayscale to measure visual thresholds. Adaptation curves found with this method are comparable to those found with the technologically advanced tools in the standard literature and even show the shift from cone to rod vision at around 4-8 minutes. The exercise can furthermore be easily combined with a demonstration of the Purkinje shift (the different spectral sensitivity of the rod and cone systems) and of multi-sensory integration across vision, touch and proprioception. The lab allows students to collect, graph and analyze both qualitative and quantitative data. Student ratings of the activity are highly positive, even when compared to other visual neuroscience labs. The activity provides an effective and accessible tool for teaching several important neuroscience concepts, including retinal circuitry, spectral sensitivity, and multi-sensory integration.

Speeded reaching movements around invisible obstacles.

We analyze the problem of obstacle avoidance from a Bayesian decision-theoretic perspective using an experimental task in which reaches around a virtual obstacle were made toward targets on an upright monitor. Subjects received monetary rewards for touching the target and incurred losses for accidentally touching the intervening obstacle. The locations of target-obstacle pairs within the workspace were varied from trial to trial. We compared human performance to that of a Bayesian ideal movement planner (who chooses motor strategies maximizing expected gain) using the Dominance Test employed in Hudson et al. (2007). The ideal movement planner suffers from the same sources of noise as the human, but selects movement plans that maximize expected gain in the presence of that noise. We find good agreement between the predictions of the model and actual performance in most but not all experimental conditions.

A visually-induced eyelid droop illusion as a classroom demonstration of cross-modality.

Cross-modality, or the interaction between the different senses, has emerged as a fundamental concept in perceptual neuroscience and psychology. The traditional idea of five separate senses with independent neural substrates has been invalidated by both psychophysical findings of sensory integration and neurophysiological discoveries of multi-modal neurons in many areas of the brain. Even areas previously thought to be unimodal have been shown to be influenced by other senses, thus establishing multisensory integration as a key principle of perceptual neuroscience. There are several obstacles to students' understanding of the concept. First, everyday subjective experience is modal: one sees, hears, smells the world and is rarely aware that these seemingly separate impressions are in reality fully integrated with each other. Second, standard content in undergraduate classes and textbooks still emphasizes the modal model of the senses and their corresponding brain areas and rarely mentions cross-modal phenomena. Third, feasible classroom demonstrations of cross-modality are few, making it difficult to provide students with first-hand experience that would aid their understanding of the principle. This article describes an accessible and effective classroom demonstration of cross-modality between low-level vision, touch and proprioception. It consists in the illusion of eyelid droop in one eye when the other eye has been dark-adapted and when both eyes are exposed to the dark. The perceptual effect is dramatic and reliable. It illustrates cross-modality at a fundamental level of perception and might provide a means to help integrate the teaching of the concept into the standard content of undergraduate classes.

Successful integration of interactive neuroscience simulations into a non-laboratory sensation & perception course.

Laboratory core courses in neuroscience at small liberal arts colleges are few in number and thus under great pressure to offer active laboratory explorations of a wide range of topics. Furthermore, traditional lab activities require substantial resources in terms of space, time, equipment and organization, further limiting the extent to which a school can provide students with important interactive neuroscience experiences in the classroom. Previous work has shown that interactive computer simulations can successfully replace more traditional lab activities in an introductory neuroscience laboratory (Bish and Schleidt, 2008). The present work shows that similar activities can also enhance the learning experience in a midsize, non-laboratory Sensation & Perception (S&P) course. While this course is considered a supporting or elective, rather than a core course in most neuroscience programs, its subject matter lends itself to the in-depth exploration of several key topics in cognitive neuroscience. The success of using computer-based neuroscience activities in a class like S&P might thus point to effective ways in which to distribute the interactive exploration of some neuroscience topics to supporting courses in the curriculum, thereby easing the pressure on the few core laboratory courses to cover all aspects of the field.

Feeling darkness: a visually induced somatosensory illusion.

Although the five primary senses have traditionally been thought of as separate, examples of their interactions, as well as the neural substrate possibly underlying them, have been identified. Arm position sense, for example, depends on touch, proprioception, and spatial vision of the limb. It is, however, unknown whether position sense is also influenced by more fundamental, nonspatial visual information. Here, we report an illusion that demonstrates that the position sense of the eyelid partly depends on information regarding the relative illumination reported by the two eyes. When only one eye is dark-adapted and both eyes are exposed to a dim environment, the lid of the light-adapted eye feels closed or "droopy." The effect decreases when covering the eye by hand or a patch, thus introducing tactile information congruent with the interocular difference in vision. This reveals that the integration of vision with touch and proprioception is not restricted to higher-level spatial vision, but is instead a more fundamental aspect of sensory processing than has been previously shown.

Distortions of perceived length in the frontoparallel plane: tests of perspective theories.

The perceived length of a line segment in a frontoparallel plane is sometimes affected by the presence of other line segments in the visual field. Perspective theories attribute such interactions to size-constancy scaling: The configuration of line segments present in the visual field includes depth cues that trigger size scaling of each line segment. In three experiments, we test this claim for a range of simple configurations composed of two line segments joined at a point. These configurations include the inverted T configuration of the bisection illusion, as well as the L configuration of the horizontal-vertical illusion. We conclude that the available depth cues, even when supplemented by known biases in perspective interpretations, do not account for observed distortions in judgments of relative length.