Brain hacking study: Train your cingulate cortex to reduce bias and regulate emotions

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Don’t Like Their Faces? Train Your Brain to Feel More Pos­i­tive (IEEE Spectrum):

“Like it or not, we often have pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive feel­ings about a total stranger based sole­ly on the looks of his or her face…Last week, researchers described, in the jour­nal PLOS Biol­o­gy, a brain train­ing sys­tem that can alter emo­tions evoked by the sight of someone’s face. With just a few days of train­ing, study vol­un­teers felt more pos­i­tive­ly or neg­a­tive­ly about a pho­to of a stranger…

The fact that the brain activ­i­ty mon­i­tored over the course of the exper­i­ment was going on in the cin­gu­late cor­tex helped land the group’s work a spot in PLOS Biol­o­gy. Pre­vi­ous research sug­gest­ed that brain activ­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive reac­tions to faces comes from mul­ti­ple brain regions. Kawato’s group says it is the first to show that focus­ing on just the cin­gu­late cor­tex is suf­fi­cient for manip­u­lat­ing both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive facial preferences.

That region of the brain is already known to play an impor­tant role in affec­tive dis­or­ders such as depres­sion, PTSD, and pho­bias, says Kawa­to. Being able to manip­u­late that part of the brain in order to affect facial pref­er­ence (which is an emo­tion­al con­di­tion), bodes well for the group’s chances for tar­get­ing debil­i­tat­ing men­tal disorders.”

Study: Dif­fer­en­tial Acti­va­tion Pat­terns in the Same Brain Region Led to Oppo­site Emo­tion­al States (PLOS Biology)

• Abstract: In human stud­ies, how aver­aged acti­va­tion in a brain region relates to human behav­ior has been exten­sive­ly inves­ti­gat­ed. This approach has led to the find­ing that pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive facial pref­er­ences are rep­re­sent­ed by dif­fer­ent brain regions. How­ev­er, using a func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) decod­ed neu­ro­feed­back (Dec­Nef) method, we found that dif­fer­ent pat­terns of neur­al acti­va­tions with­in the cin­gu­late cor­tex (CC) play roles in rep­re­sent­ing oppo­site direc­tions of facial pref­er­ence. In the present study, while neu­tral­ly pre­ferred faces were pre­sent­ed, mul­ti-vox­el acti­va­tion pat­terns in the CC that cor­re­spond­ed to high­er (or low­er) pref­er­ence were repeat­ed­ly induced by fMRI Dec­Nef. As a result, pre­vi­ous­ly neu­tral­ly pre­ferred faces became more (or less) pre­ferred. We con­clude that a dif­fer­ent acti­va­tion pat­tern in the CC, rather than aver­aged acti­va­tion in a dif­fer­ent area, rep­re­sents and suf­fices to deter­mine pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive facial pref­er­ence. This new approach may reveal the impor­tance of an acti­va­tion pat­tern with­in a brain region in many cog­ni­tive functions.

Learn more:

• Per­spec­tive: Neu­ro­feed­back treat­ment for ADHD is gain­ing strong support
• Can brain train­ing work? Yes, if it meets these 5 conditions