The art of film: Perspective on neural clues to repeated attraction to movie watching.

This article about possible neural underpinning of repeated attraction to watching movies is dedicated to the memory of Prof. Eran Zaidel, who made outstanding contributions to neuroscience (and loved watching movies). The film is an art form crafted by multiple artists from diverse fields, contributing specialized skills, talents, and creativity to the final product. Attention-attraction to all artworks has deep biological roots. Movies have been attracting audiences repeatedly ever since they were introduced over 100 years ago. Although countless studies analyzed the nature of the art, the neural underpinning of repeated attraction to viewing movies has been understudied. Here, clues gleaned from non-film findings are proposed. The perspective suggests that functions of the mesolimbic "reward pathway" associated with pleasure and joy, the brain regions responding to facial beauty, to pictorial art aesthetics, and to music listening with increased dopamine levels are all recruited in the repeated attraction.

Triple-action of the standardized antidiabetic polyherbal extract; Synacinn™ through upregulation of GLUT4 and inhibition of DPP(IV), α-amylase, and α-glucosidase activity.

INTRODUCTION: Synacinn™ is a standardized polyherbal supplement for diabetes mellitus which is formulated from Andrographis paniculata, Curcuma xanthorrhiza, Cinnamomum zeylanicum, Eugenia polyantha, and Orthosiphon stamineous. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This study aimed to elucidate the antidiabetic potential of Synacinn™ on three specific actions, including 1) the insulin sensitivity and glucose transport on dexamethasone-induced insulin-resistance 3T3-L1 adipocytes, 2) the inhibitory capacity on postprandial enzyme activity (α-amylase and α-glucosidase), and 3) the inhibitory activity of hepatic DPP(IV) enzyme. RESULTS: Results showed that insulin resistance of 3T3-L1 adipocytes may be developed by prolonging the exposure of 1µg/ml of dexamethasone for >48 hours. The insulinresistance condition was minimized by the treatment of 10 µg/ml of Synacinn™ which significantly improved the insulin-stimulated glucose utilization by 10.6%. Meanwhile, insulin-stimulated glucose utilization in normal adipocytes was also attenuated by 9.2%. At the cellular level, Synacinn™ attenuated glucose utilization mainly by upregulating GLUT4 protein expression by 1.71 fold. Additionally, Synacinn™ is a potent inhibitor for the activity of α-amylase and α-glucosidase with IC50 of 0.467 mg/mL and 0.245 mg/mL, respectively. Synacinn™ also controlled the glycemic index through inhibition of hepatic DPP(IV) enzyme with IC50 of 1.11 mg/mL. CONCLUSION: Results suggested that Synacinn™ reduced diabetes mellitus through sensitizing the cellular glucose utilization, reducing the postprandial carbohydrate degradation, and inhibiting the hepatic DPP(IV) enzyme function.

Braque and Kokoschka: Brain Tissue Injury and Preservation of Artistic Skill.

The neural underpinning of art creation can be gleaned following brain injury in professional artists. Any alteration to their artistic productivity, creativity, skills, talent, and genre can help understand the neural underpinning of art expression. Here, two world-renown and influential artists who sustained brain injury in World War I are the focus, namely the French artist Georges Braque and the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka. Braque is particularly associated with Cubism, and Kokoschka with Expressionism. Before enlisting, they were already well-known and highly regarded. Both were wounded in the battlefield where they lost consciousness and treated in European hospitals. Braque's injury was in the left hemisphere while Kokoschka's was in the right hemisphere. After the injury, Braque did not paint again for nearly a whole year while Kokoschka commenced his artistic works when still undergoing hospital treatment. Their post-injury art retained the same genre as their pre-injury period, and their artistic skills, talent, creativity, and productivity remained unchanged. The quality of their post-injury artworks remained highly regarded and influential. These neurological cases suggest widely distributed and diffuse neural control by the brain in the creation of art.

Where does brain neural activation in aesthetic responses to visual art occur? Meta-analytic evidence from neuroimaging studies.

Here we aimed at finding the neural correlates of the general aspect of visual aesthetic experience (VAE) and those more strictly correlated with the content of the artworks. We applied a general activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to 47 fMRI experiments described in 14 published studies. We also performed four separate ALE analyses in order to identify the neural substrates of reactions to specific categories of artworks, namely portraits, representation of real-world-visual-scenes, abstract paintings, and body sculptures. The general ALE revealed that VAE relies on a bilateral network of areas, and the individual ALE analyses revealed different maximal activation for the artworks' categories as function of their content. Specifically, different content-dependent areas of the ventral visual stream are involved in VAE, but a few additional brain areas are involved as well. Thus, aesthetic-related neural responses to art recruit widely distributed networks in both hemispheres including content-dependent brain areas of the ventral visual stream. Together, the results suggest that aesthetic responses are not independent of sensory, perceptual, and cognitive processes.

Brain intersections of aesthetics and morals: perspectives from biology, neuroscience, and evolution.

For centuries, only philosophers debated the relationship between aesthetics and morality. Recently, with advances in neuroscience, the debate has moved to include the brain and an evolved neural underpinning linking aesthetic reactions and moral judgment. Biological survival emphasizes mate selection strategies, and the ritual displays have been linked to human aesthetics in the arts, in faces, and in various daily decision making. In parallel, cultural human practices have evolved to emphasize altruism and morality. This article explores the biological background and discusses the neuroscientific evidence for shared brain pathways for aesthetics and morals.

The face, beauty, and symmetry: perceiving asymmetry in beautiful faces.

The relationship between bilateral facial symmetry and beauty remains to be clarified. Here, straight head-on photographs of "beautiful" faces from the collections of professional modeling agencies were selected. First, beauty ratings were obtained for these faces. Then, the authors created symmetrical left-left and right-right composites of the beautiful faces and asked a new group of subjects to choose the most attractive pair member. "Same" responses were allowed. No difference between the left-left and right-right composites was revealed but significant differences were obtained between "same" and the left-left or right-right. These results show that subjects detected asymmetry in beauty and suggest that very beautiful faces can be functionally asymmetrical.

The alien hand syndrome: classification of forms reported and discussion of a new condition.

The term "alien hand" refers to a variety of clinical conditions whose common characteristic is the uncontrolled behavior or the feeling of strangeness of one extremity, most commonly the left hand. A common classification distinguishes between the posterior or sensory form of the alien hand, and the anterior or motor form of this condition. However, there are inconsistencies, such as the phenomenon of diagonistic dyspraxia, which is largely a motor syndrome despite being more frequently associated with posterior callosal lesions. We discuss critically the existing nomenclature and we also describe a case recently reported by us which does not fit any previously reported condition, termed agonistic dyspraxia. We propose that the cases of alien hand described in the literature can be classified into at least five broad categories: (i) diagonistic dyspraxia and related syndromes, (ii) alien hand, (iii) way-ward hand and related syndromes, (iv) supernumerary hands and (v) agonistic dyspraxia.

Hemifield memory for attractiveness.

In order to determine whether or not facial attractiveness plays a role in hemispheric facial memory, 35 right-handed participants first assigned attractiveness ratings to faces and then performed a recognition test on those faces in the left visual half-field (LVF) and right visual half-field (RVF). We found significant interactions between the experimental factors and visual half-field. There were significant differences in the extreme ends of the rating scale, that is, the very unattractive versus the very attractive faces: Female participants remembered very attractive faces of both women and men, with memory being superior in the RVF than in the LVF. In contrast, the male participants remembered very unattractive faces of both women and men; RVF memory was better than the LVF for women faces while for men faces memory was superior in the LVF. The interactions with visual half-field suggest that hemispheric biases in remembering faces are influenced by degree of attractiveness.

Relationship between facial asymmetry and judging trustworthiness in faces.

Nonverbal facial signals provide valuable information for successful social interactions. Previous findings showed left-right facial asymmetry in attractiveness, smiling, and health in faces, and here we investigated the asymmetrical status of trustworthiness. Pairs of left-left and right-right faces from 38 photographs were viewed by participants who judged which member of the pair looked the most trustworthy. The results were compared to attractiveness and smiling judgements (Zaidel, Chen, & German, 1995). We found that trustworthiness was more related to attractiveness than to smiling in the women's faces, but no significant asymmetry for trustworthiness was found; in the men's faces, trustworthiness was neither related to attractiveness nor to smiling, nor was there a significant asymmetry. Taken together, trustworthiness as a facial display is complex; even when it appears to confirm the "halo effect", its expression is not strongly left-right asymmetrical in contrast to attractiveness or smiling.

Brain and face: communicating signals of health in the left and right sides of the face.

In human communication and mate selection the appearance of health sends signals regarding biological fitness. We compared the appearance of health in the sides of the face to previous results on left-right facial asymmetry in the appearance of beauty (1). The stimuli were created by aligning the left and right sides of the face each with its own mirror image. Here, participants viewed 38 pairs of left-left and right-right faces and judged which member of the pair looked healthier. No significant interaction emerged between decision (health vs attractiveness) and face side. Rather, in women's faces right-right was significantly more healthy and attractive than left-left, while in men's faces there was no significant left-right difference. In biology and evolution, health and beauty are closely linked and the findings here confirm this relationship in human faces.

Hemispheric effects of canonical views of category members with known typicality levels.

Is there a preferred hemispheric canonical view of a concept? We investigated this question in a natural superordinate category membership decision task using a hemifield paradigm. Participants had to decide whether or not an image of an object lateralized in the left (LVF) or right (RVF) visual half-field is a member of a predesignated superordinate category. The objects represented high, medium, or low typicality levels, and each object had six different perspective views (front, front-right, front-left, side, back-left, and back-right). The latency responses revealed a significant interaction of Hemi Field X View X Typicality (there wasno hemifield difference in accuracy). The findings confirm the presence of asymmetry in stored concepts in long-term memory and suggest, in addition, a hemispheric canonical view of these concepts, a view strongly related to typicality level.

Functional asymmetry in the human face: perception of health in the left and right sides of the face.

The expression of health on the human face, like beauty or emotions, is an important biological display. Previous findings of left-right functional asymmetry in facial attractiveness and the linkage of attractiveness and health in evolutionary biology notions have prompted the present study. A total of 38 pairs of left-left and right-right facial composites were viewed by 24 subjects on a computer screen, and the task was to decide which member of the pair looked healthier or there was no difference. The results revealed a significant interaction between face side and sex of face. Right-right composites of women's faces were judged significantly healthier than left-left, whereas in men's faces, no significant left-right difference emerged. As these results parallel previous findings of attractiveness in the identical set of faces, we propose that evolutionary biology notions linking the appearance of health and of attractiveness apply to the human face as well.

Regional differentiation of neuron morphology in human left and right hippocampus: comparing normal to schizophrenia.

Regional differentiation based on size, form, and orientation angle of the soma of individual neurons in human post-mortem hippocampus was determined through correlations between pairs of hippocampal subfields in each side separately. The neurons were previously measured on a computer. In the normal cases, a left-right asymmetrical pattern of regional differentiation based on soma size emerged, while for form and orientation angle, the patterns appeared symmetrical. In schizophrenia, regional soma size, form, and orientation variability were expressed largely symmetrically. Regional correlations based on neuronal density revealed an asymmetrical hemispheric pattern in the normal cases versus a nearly symmetrical pattern in schizophrenia. Taken together, the inter-regional correlations favor a hippocampal landscape that deviates in each side from connectivity based on the canonical trisynaptic hippocampal circuitry. It is proposed that during morphogenesis, rudimentary inter-regional networks are formed through specific interactions between regional neurons; these networks are present in the adult hippocampus and may be vulnerable in brain diseases.

Preventing drowsiness accidents by an alertness maintenance device.

The reported experiment investigated in an advanced driving simulator whether drivers' alertness can be maintained in drowsiness-inducing conditions by a special game-like system, a 'gamebox'. Drowsiness was assessed by self-rating and eye-closures. Mental effort was assessed by a subjective workload rating scale and by a physiological measure (the 0.1 Hz component of heart rate). Driving quality and safety were assessed by steering movements, time-to-line crossings, and by the occurrence of safety-related driving errors--solid line crossings, driving off-road incidents and accidents. When driving with the gamebox, drivers reported a lower degree of drowsiness and fewer instances of sleep episodes as compared to a control condition. Driving with the device resulted in fewer incidents and accidents, and these occurred later in the session. The quality of vehicle control deteriorated progressively over the course of the session, but less so in the gamebox condition. Hence, the results corroborate the notion that mental activity counteracts drowsiness in prolonged driving.

Quantitative morphology of human hippocampus early neuron development.

Previous findings in adults revealed significant hemispheric asymmetry in the size of neuronal somata in hippocampal subfield CA2 (the resistant sector) with no age-related changes. A paucity of quantitative data on the developmental status of these protected neurons has led to the investigation of their morphology in comparison to neurons in adjacent subfield CA3, bilaterally. Bilateral coronal sections from postmortem hippocampus, 24 to 76 weeks postmenstrual age (gestational age plus postnatal age), were studied. The neurons were digitized and measured on a computer. Soma size correlated positively and significantly with age in CA2 and CA3, bilaterally. CA2 somata were significantly larger (left, 34%; right, 32%) than adjacent CA3 somata. Variability in soma form or size increased appreciably with age, in both subfields, bilaterally, while variability in soma orientation was weakly correlated with brain growth. The results suggest that in early development there are similarities in hemispheric growth patterns in CA2 and CA3. Large CA2 soma size implies axonal connectivity to distantly located targets very early in development. The results have functional implications, including memory, to brain development.

Observations on the relationship between verbal explicit and implicit memory and density of neurons in the hippocampus.

The relationship between neuronal density and verbal memory in left and right hippocampal subfields was investigated in patients who underwent surgery for alleviation of temporal lobe epilepsy. The surgery consisted of unilateral partial removal of the hippocampus along with the anterior temporal lobe and amygdala. Study 1 looked at post-surgical explicit vs implicit verbal memory for lists of words while Study 2 looked at pre- and post-surgical explicit memory for word pairs. Left subfield CA1 appeared to be the most consistently involved in explicit and implicit memory. The results of the two studies confirm presence of hemispheric asymmetry in verbal memory. The notion that hippocampal control of memory is most apparent in post-surgical performance is discussed.

Size, shape, and orientation of neurons in the left and right hippocampus: investigation of normal asymmetries and alterations in schizophrenia.

OBJECTIVE: Schizophrenia may involve the two cerebral hemispheres differentially. This study was conducted to determine whether left and right hippocampal neuronal size, shape, and orientation are normally asymmetrical or asymmetrically affected in schizophrenia. METHOD: The authors examined postmortem tissue from the left and right hippocampus of 17 normal individuals and 14 individuals with schizophrenia. They measured the size, shape, and variability in orientation of pyramidal neurons in hippocampal subfields CA1-CA4 and the subiculum in computer images of 10-micron coronal sections stained with cresyl violet. RESULTS: Both neuronal size and shape showed significant effects of diagnosis and a three-way interaction between diagnosis, hemisphere, and subfield. Neurons of the schizophrenic subjects were smaller than those of the normal subjects in the left CA1, left CA2, and right CA3 subfields; their shape differed from that of the normal subjects in the left CA1, left subiculum, and right CA3 subfields. There were no group differences in variability of neuronal orientation, but neurons in the CA3 genu in the schizophrenic subjects were less variable on the right than on the left. In the normal subjects, except for larger neurons in the left than in the right CA2 subfield and some left-right differences in variability of neuronal orientation, no statistically significant asymmetries were observed. CONCLUSIONS: The data confirm that hippocampal neuronal size is decreased in schizophrenia and reveal that the shape of neurons is altered, supporting the view that hippocampal cytoarchitectural abnormalities may be part of the cerebral substrate of schizophrenia. They also provide further evidence that the abnormalities are localized and lateralized.

The hippocampus in schizophrenia: lateralized increase in neuronal density and altered cytoarchitectural asymmetry.

BACKGROUND: The histological basis of schizophrenia is unknown, but it appears to affect the hippocampal and neocortical cytoarchitecture. Some cytoarchitectural parameters normally differ between the two cerebral hemispheres. Moreover, schizophrenia is associated with altered structural cerebral asymmetry. However, few cytoarchitectural studies of schizophrenia have taken the question of asymmetry fully into account. METHODS: We performed a morphometric post mortem study of neuronal density in sections from the left and right hippocampus (dentate gyrus, CA4, CA3, CA1 and subiculum) of 22 schizophrenics and 18 normal subjects. We also determined the correlations of neuronal density between pairs of subfields as an index of their inter-relationship; a previous study had found correlations in the left but not the right hippocampus of normal subjects. RESULTS: There were three differences in the schizophrenics compared to the controls. (1) neuronal density was increased in right CA3 (by 25%) and right CA1 (by 22%); (2) neuronal density correlated strongly between homologous left and right subfields (i.e. inter-hippocampally) for CA4, CA3, CA1 and subiculum, in normals this occurs only for dentate gyrus and CA4; and (3) intrahippocampal correlations of neuronal density between pairs of subfields were similar in both hippocampi of the schizophrenia cases, unlike their asymmetrical distribution in controls. CONCLUSIONS: The alterations may be part of the histological substrate of schizophrenia. The nature of the findings is consistent with a neurodevelopmental origin, and with a disease process that affects cerebral asymmetry and leaves its imprint upon the hippocampal cytoarchitecture.

Brain asymmetry and facial attractiveness: facial beauty is not simply in the eye of the beholder.

We recently reported finding asymmetry in the appearance of beauty on the face [Zaidel et al., Neuropsychologia, Vol. 33, pp. 649-655, 1995]. Here, we investigated whether facial beauty is a stable characteristic (on the owner's very face) or is in the perceptual space of the observer. We call the question 'the owner vs observer hypothesis'. We compared identity judgements and attractiveness ratings of observers. Subjects viewed left-left and right-right composites of faces and decided which most resembled the normal face (Experiment 1). Identity judgements (resemblance) are known to be associated with perceptual factors in the observer. Another group viewed the same normal faces and rated them on attractiveness (Experiment 2). In each experiment, there were two separate viewing conditions, original and reversed (mirror-image). Lateral reversal did affect the results of Experiment 1 (confirming previous findings [Bennett et al., Neuropsychologia, Vol. 25, pp. 681-687, 1987; Gilbert and Bakan, Journal of Anatomy, Vol. 183, pp. 593-600, 1993]) but did not affect the results of Experiment 2. The fact that lateral reversal did not affect the results of Experiment 2 suggests that facial attractiveness is more dependent on physiognomy (of the owner) and less dependent on an asymmetrical perceptual process (in the observer) than is facial identity. The results are discussed in the context of beauty's biological significance and facial processing in the brain.