Image by sultmhoor via Flickr

Here are this morning’s:

* Does racism affect teamwork in the NBA? — nope — I wasn’t aware of any such theory outside of this paper, but I don’t follow sports

* Chocoholic mice fear no pain — chocolate-craving mice are ready to tolerate electric shocks to get their fix — next up, humans

* Intrusive images and intrusive verbal thoughts are different phenomena — intrusive images are a a hallmark of post-traumatic disorder — understanding these basic processes is likely to be valuable in developing more effective treatments for PTSD that focus on maximizing change in verbal thoughts and intrusive images separately

* Patients with amygdala injury unafraid to gamble — looked at two women who had a rare condition which produced lesions on their amygdalae but no other brain damage — the patients whose amygdalae were damaged would play even if there was a much poorer ratio between gains and losses, and one sometimes played even if the potential loss was greater than the potential gain

* Speaking of charity as a signal for mating — Lap Dances for Haiti — “You don’t hear much about strip clubs giving back to the community.”

Follow Neuroworld on Twitter: @ryansager

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Dan Ariely (of Predictably Irrational fame) is writing a new column in Wired UK. His first looks at the truth behind bonuses:

More than anything, argue the bankers, pay should motivate: huge bonus cheques are to ensure superior performance from superior talent.

On this point, the bankers are wrong. We’ve recently gathered evidence suggesting that dangling exorbitant sums of money in front of workers doesn’t improve performance. If anything, it negatively affects it.

…

To see the effect of bonuses on performance, Nina Mazar (assistant professor of marketing, Toronto University), Uri Gneezy (professor of economics and strategy, University of California, San Diego), George Loewenstein (professor of economics, Carnegie Mellon, Pennsylvania) and I conducted three experiments. In one we gave subjects tasks that demanded attention, memory, concentration and creativity. We asked them, for example, to assemble puzzles and to play memory games while throwing tennis balls at a target. We promised about a third of them one day’s pay if they performed well. Another third were promised two weeks’ pay. The last third could earn a full five months’ pay. (Before you ask where you can participate in our experiments, I should tell you that we ran this study in India, where the cost of living is relatively low.)

What happened? The low-and medium-bonus groups performed the same. The big-bonus group performed worst of all.

Why this happens isn’t entirely clear — though, nervousness brought on by high stakes could be involved. An experiment on public scrutiny showed similar results: a little improved performance, a lot hurt performance.

Image by James Jordan via Flickr

I missed two days last week, so here are some extras:

* The bank-as-lottery gains momentum in Michigan — a savings nudge — more than 11,000 Michigan residents opened accounts through the contest, saving $8.6 million throughout 2009

* A sarcasm mark — you can pay $1.99 for lifetime use of this new communications tool — yeah, right

* The uselessness of testing kids as gifted — what percentage of 4-year-olds who scored 130 or above would do so again as 17-year-olds? — about 25 percent

* The economics of supermarkets in snowstorms — people are forced to visit the store, more or less — the previous calculations of mass vs. niche goods are no longer appropriate for the new emergency

* Why won’t the University of Washington release its TV data? — the founders of Baby Einstein sue — “If the University stands behind the research, it should be more than happy to release the raw data right down to the last decimal point.”

* Standing in line — the case for our least-favorite activity — our ability to wait in line, to not squabble and bite each other as we approach the desk or counter or velvet rope, is a triumph of what anthropologists call “stable cooperative equilibrium”

* Paul Romer on charter cities — forget aid — people in the poorest countries like Haiti need new cities with different rules, and developed countries should be the ones that build them

* Horizontal evolution — genes are exchanged from other organisms, not from ancestors — not your father’s evolution

* How to make good experiences even better — and bad ones worse — interruption

* To feel good, reach for the sky — upward physical movement inspires positive memories — more embodied cognition

Follow Neuroworld on Twitter: @ryansager

Salvation for locked-in patients — those so completely paralyzed that they can’t speak, or often even blink to let us know that there’s a consciousness still there trapped inside their bodies — may be a long, long way away. But something else important is drawing closer: ways for these patients to communicate with the outside world. The New York Times carried a story Wednesday about a team of researchers in Britain and Belgium who have been studying patients in vegetative states, trying to make contact. Out of 54 vegetative and “minimally conscious” patients, five turned out to be reachable via fMRI:

To open a channel of communication, they instructed one of them, the 29-year-old man, to associate thoughts about tennis with “yes” and thoughts about being in his house with “no.”

They then asked questions, repeating the procedure numerous times, switching the associations — tennis with yes, then with no — to make sure the patient was in fact making conscious choices. The researchers had previously tested the technique in healthy volunteers.

“We asked basic biographical questions, like ‘Is your father’s name Thomas?’ and ‘Have you ever been to the United States?’ ” said Adrian M. Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, who developed the method and was a co-author of the paper. “We then checked whether the answers were correct. They were.”

Thinking about playing tennis made brain regions associated with movement light up on the scanner; thinking about being in a house made regions associate with spatial relationships light up. And, thus, the researchers were able to create a very simple, very indirect language for “yes” and “no.”

Getting “yes” or “no” answers, however, isn’t the limit of what we may be able to do for locked-in patients in the near future. Take, for instance, this remarkable work, published in PLoS ONE. In short, what this team of scientists is creating is a speech synthesizer that would plug directly (and, after implantation, wirelessly) into a locked-in person’s brain.

We’ve already seen systems that allow locked-in patients to type (even Tweet!) through a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) using technologies like EEG helmets. But these BCI typing systems are very slow and labor intensive. The ultimate, long-term goal of this BCI speech-synthesizer technology would be to use signals from the brain’s speech motor cortex (the part of the brain that tells your voice what to do) to create something approximating actual, real-time speech.

You can take a look at this diagram to get a sense of what the system does:

Signals collected from an electrode implanted in the subject's speech motor cortex are amplified and sent wirelessly across the scalp as FM radio signals. The signals are then routed to an electrophysiology recording system for further amplification, analog-to-digital conversion, and spike sorting. The sorted spikes are sent to a Neural Decoder which translates them into commands for a Speech Synthesizer. Audio signals from the synthesizer are fed back to the subject in real time. (from PLoS ONE)

Basically, through electrodes implanted in the brain, it sends a wireless signal to a neural decoder, which then tells the speech synthesizer what to do. The system was tested on a 26-year-old male suffering from locked-in syndrome due to a brain stem stroke incurred at age 16. The stroke left the brain areas responsible for consciousness, cognition, and higher-level aspects of movement control intact, while eliminating nearly all voluntary movement.

While this young man’s abilities with the synthesizer are, in the words of the study, “limited to producing a small set of vowels,” it’s the proof-of-concept that matters here. The researchers found that even in a very short training session with the system, the participant’s average hit rate in being able to create a desired sound rose from 45% on the first block to 70% on the last block across sessions — reaching a high of 89% in the last block of the last session.

You can see how the training works in the video below: