Supportive social interactions in adulthood are important for your ability to stave off cognitive decline despite brain aging or neuropathological changes such as those present in Alzheimer’s disease, a new study finds.
In the study, published in JAMA Network Open, researchers observed that simply having someone available most or all of the time whom you can count on to listen to you when you need to talk is associated with greater cognitive resilience—a measure of your brain’s ability to function better than would be expected for the amount of physical aging or disease-related changes in the brain, which many neurologists believe can be boosted by engaging in mentally stimulating activities, physical exercise, and positive social interactions.
“We think of cognitive resilience as a buffer to the effects of brain aging and disease,” says lead researcher Joel Salinas, MD, the Lulu P. and David J. Levidow Assistant Professor of Neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and member of the Department of Neurology’s Center for Cognitive Neurology. “This study adds to growing evidence that people can take steps, either for themselves or the people they care about most, to increase the odds they’ll slow down cognitive aging or prevent the development of symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease—something that is all the more important given that we still don’t have a cure for the disease.”
An estimated 5 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive condition that affects mostly those over 65 and interferes with memory, language, decision-making, and the ability to live independently. Dr. Salinas says that while the disease usually affects an older population, the results of this study indicate that people younger than 65 would benefit from taking stock of their social support. For every unit of decline in brain volume, individuals in their 40s and 50s with low listener availability had a cognitive age that was 4 years older than those with high listener availability.
“These four years can be incredibly precious. Too often we think about how to protect our brain health when we’re much older, after we’ve already lost a lot of time decades before to build and sustain brain-healthy habits,” says Dr. Salinas. “But today, right now, you can ask yourself if you truly have someone available to listen to you in a supportive way, and ask your loved ones the same. Taking that simple action sets the process in motion for you to ultimately have better odds of long-term brain health and the best quality of life you can have.”
Dr. Salinas also recommends that physicians consider adding this question to the standard social history portion of a patient interview: asking patients whether they have access to someone they can count on to listen to them when they need to talk.
“Loneliness is one of the many symptoms of depression, and has other health implications for patients,” says Dr. Salinas. “These kinds of questions about a person’s social relationships and feelings of loneliness can tell you a lot about a patient’s broader social circumstances, their future health, and how they’re really doing outside of the clinic.”
How the Study Was Conducted
Researchers used one of the longest running and most closely monitored community-based cohorts in the U.S., the Framingham Heart Study (FHS), as the source of their study’s 2,171 participants, with an average age of 63. FHS participants self-reported information on the availability of supportive social interactions including listening, good advice, love and affection, sufficient contact with people they’re close with, and emotional support.
Study participants’ cognitive resilience was measured as the relative effect of total cerebral brain volume on global cognition, using MRI scans and neuropsychological assessments taken as part of the FHS. Lower brain volumes tend to associate with lower cognitive function, and in this study, researchers examined the modifying effect of individual forms of social support on the relationship between cerebral volume and cognitive performance.
The cognitive function of individuals with greater availability of one specific form of social support was higher relative to their total cerebral volume. This key form of social support was listener availability and it was highly associated with greater cognitive resilience.
Researchers note that further study of individual social interactions may improve understanding of the biological mechanisms that link psychosocial factors to brain health. “While there is still a lot that we don’t understand about the specific biological pathways between psychosocial factors like listener availability and brain health, this study gives clues about concrete, biological reasons why we should all seek good listeners and become better listeners ourselves,” says Dr. Salinas.
A new study suggests that human intelligence may have evolved in response to the demands of caring for infants.
Steven Piantadosi and Celeste Kidd, assistant professors in brain and cognitive sciences, developed a novel evolutionary model in which the progression of high levels of intelligence may be driven by the demands of raising offspring. Their meta-analysis study is available online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ Early Edition.
“Human infants are born far more immature than the infants of other species. For example, giraffe calves are able to stand-up, walk around, and even flee from predators within hours of their births. By comparison, human infants cannot even support their own heads,” said Kidd.
“Our theory is that there is a kind of self-reinforcing cycle where big brains lead to very premature offspring and premature offspring lead to parents having to have big brains. What our formal modeling work shows is that those dynamics can result in runaway pressure for extremely intelligent parents and extremely premature offspring,” said Piantadosi.
In other words, because humans have relatively big brains, their infants must be born early in development while their heads are still small enough to ensure a safe delivery. Early birth, though, means that human infants are helpless for much longer than other primates, and such vulnerable infants require intelligent parents. As a result, selective pressures for large brains and early birth can become self-reinforcing—potentially creating species like humans with qualitatively different cognitive abilities than other animals.
Piantadosi and Kidd tested a novel prediction of the model that the immaturity of newborns should be strongly related to general intelligence. “What we found is that weaning time—which acts as a measure of the prematurity of the infants—was a much better predictor of primate’s intelligence than any of other measures we looked at, including brain size, which is commonly correlated with intelligence,” said Piantadosi.
The theory may also be able to explain the origin of the cognitive abilities that make humans special. “Humans have a unique kind of intelligence. We are good at social reasoning and something called ‘theory of mind’—the ability to anticipate the needs of others, and to recognize that those needs may not be the same as our own,” said Kidd, who is also the director of the Rochester Baby Lab. “This is an especially helpful when taking care of an infant who is not able talk for a couple of years.”
“There are alternative theories of why humans are so intelligent. A lot of these are based on factors like living in a harsh environment or hunting in groups,” said Piantadosi. “One of the motivating puzzles of our research was thinking about those theories and trying to see why they predict specifically that primates or mammals should become so intelligent, instead of other species that faced similar pressures.”
The key is live birth. According to the researchers, the runaway selection of intelligence requires both live birth of a single offspring and large brains—distinctive features of higher mammals.
“Our theory explains specifically why primates developed superintelligence but dinosaurs—who faced many of the same environmental pressures and had more time to do so—did not. Dinosaurs matured in eggs, so there was no linking between intelligence and infant immaturity at birth,” said Kidd.
Even before infants understand their first words, they have already begun to link language and thought. Listening to language boosts infant cognition. New evidence provides even greater insight into the crucial role of language exposure in infants’ first months of life, according to Northwestern University research.
Prior research has found that infants come into the world equipped with an initially broad link, one that encompasses the communicative signals of both humans and nonhuman primates. At 3 months old, listening to both human and nonhuman primate (lemur) vocalizations supports infants’ ability to form categories, a building block of cognition. But by 6 months, the link has narrowed, with only human vocalizations supporting categorization. Infants’ initially broad link to cognition is sculpted by their experience.
Northwestern researchers sought to understand what mechanisms underlie this rapid tuning process and document in a new study the crucial role of experience as infants tune this link specifically to human language.
In the experiments, the researchers found that merely exposing 6-month-old infants to nonhuman primate vocalizations permits them to preserve, rather than sever, their early link between these signals and categorization. Exposing infants to backward human speech – a signal that fails to support categorization in the first year of life – does not have this advantage.
“This new evidence illuminates the central role of early experience as infants specify which signals, from an initially broad set, they will continue to link to core cognitive capacities,” said
Danielle R. Perszyk, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.
The research, which underscores the importance of language exposure in the first months of life, also has far-reaching implications for early language and cognitive development.
“It provides a unique vantage point from which to consider the intricate interface between capacities inherent in the human infant and the shaping force of experience,” said Sandra Waxman, senior author of the study, director of the Project on Child Development, faculty fellow in Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research and the Louis W. Menk Chair in Psychology at Northwestern.
“Although experience may play little, if any role, in picking out the broad set of signals that infants first link to cognition, here we show that experience is essential in guiding infants, with increasing precision, to single out which signals from the initially privileged set they will continue to link to meaning and which they will tune out,” Waxman said.
A baby’s cry not only commands our attention, it also rattles our executive functions—the very neural and cognitive processes we use for making everyday decisions, according to a new University of Toronto study.
“Parental instinct appears to be hardwired, yet no one talks about how this instinct might include cognition,” says David Haley, co-author and Associate Professor of psychology at U of T Scarborough.
“If we simply had an automatic response every time a baby started crying, how would we think about competing concerns in the environment or how best to respond to a baby’s distress?”
The study looked at the effect infant vocalizations—in this case audio clips of a baby laughing or crying—had on adults completing a cognitive conflict task. The researchers used the Stroop task, in which participants were asked to rapidly identify the color of a printed word while ignoring the meaning of the word itself. Brain activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG) during each trial of the cognitive task, which took place immediately after a two-second audio clip of an infant vocalization.
The brain data revealed that the infant cries reduced attention to the task and triggered greater cognitive conflict processing than the infant laughs. Cognitive conflict processing is important because it controls attention—one of the most basic executive functions needed to complete a task or make a decision, notes Haley, who runs U of T’s Parent-Infant Research Lab.
“Parents are constantly making a variety of everyday decisions and have competing demands on their attention,” says Joanna Dudek, a graduate student in Haley’s Parent-Infant Research Lab and the lead author of the study.
“They may be in the middle of doing chores when the doorbell rings and their child starts to cry. How do they stay calm, cool and collected, and how do they know when to drop what they’re doing and pick up the child?”
A baby’s cry has been shown to cause aversion in adults, but it could also create an adaptive response by “switching on” the cognitive control parents use in effectively responding to their child’s emotional needs while also addressing other demands in everyday life, adds Haley.
“If an infant’s cry activates cognitive conflict in the brain, it could also be teaching parents how to focus their attention more selectively,” he says.
“It’s this cognitive flexibility that allows parents to rapidly switch between responding to their baby’s distress and other competing demands in their lives—which, paradoxically, may mean ignoring the infant momentarily.”
The findings add to a growing body of research suggesting that infants occupy a privileged status in our neurobiological programming, one deeply rooted in our evolutionary past. But, as Haley notes, it also reveals an important adaptive cognitive function in the human brain.
So somatic narcissism and cerebral narcissism are established categories, but consider: one way to get self-esteem supply is to be More Moral. I think this is a useful category of narcissism which is very under-recognized.
Narcissism is largely support beams for injured self-esteem. Something you can always lean on to feel good about yourself no matter how much the world hits you with hurtful judgment, shame, embarrassment, ostracism, and so on. Something that lets you reliably do ego-saving or face-saving redirects like “whatever, I’m still better”, ideally while adding “in every way that matters”.
Somatic narcissism does that by taking pride in bodily or physical things. Cerebral narcissism does that by taking pride in mental things. Moralistic narcissism does that by taking pride in things highly esteemed as moral - honesty, religious piety, altruism, being virtuous, unmasking bad people, persecuting evil, and so on.
I think a whole lot of narcissism goes unnoticed because it looks like moral righteousness, zeal, or extremism aligned with widely held values.
Butnot with nearly the same urgency or priority as criticisms that seem genuinely intended to contain something constructive.
In the moment: save it for later. Only give a chimp criticism enough room in your mind to make you falter once you are sure it is safe and ethical to relent, ease up, or self-doubt. Can you still act as you should if you let it in?
In the long term: treat it with suspicion. Like food found sitting out in enemy territory. It could be good and helpful to eat, but it could also be poisoned, a trap, or a diversion. Is it worth the time and effort, now, here?
The biggest practical consequence of competence reflection is that we are always understanding the world through a reflective fog.
Just like in a normal fog, up close you see things as they are, but the further away from you the more things fade into the fog. Unlike a normal fog, this fog is like a mirror. It reflects you and the stuff around you. So instead of getting an obvious cue that you are looking at something too hidden by fog, you see a false clear view. When you glimpse an idea’s outline in the fog, you see it painted with reflections of other ideas near you.
This doesn’t even apply to just “better” versus “worse” thinking. First, there are many directions of competence - you can be better in some directions and worse in others. Second, some directions are just different ways of thinking, not measurable better or worse. Third, a “smarter” person does not necessarily see farther - most forms of “better” are different positions in the fog, not vision range. Seeing farther in the fog is a separate skill: remembering how you used to think, finding new ways to think, and trying more of those ways on when interpreting anything.
Important to keep in mind when interpreting why people do things: we cannot see cognition which is better than the best we can conceive of.
Wecan see stuff which we can already do in our mind, done with more speed, capacity, endurance, or reliability.
Wecan see someone getting better results, and think that their mind is doing something better than anything our mind can see.
We can even easily imagine a mind doing something better than we can without actually being able to imagine that better something.
But when just looking at evidence of cognition that your mind can’t even create, what is your idea-fitting going to do? Probably the same thing it normally does: try projecting cognition that you actually can do onto it.
So we often assume that when faced with a “smarter” or “better” mind, or even a “worse” or different mind, it’ll be obvious. But often, we just see our own competence - or incompetence - reflected back.
One thing I’ve been realizing for a while now is that arrogance and conceitedness and so on, is not a question of objective merit, it’s a question of self-esteem neediness - narcissism, in a sense.
Like, it doesn’t matter how great I am, what matters is that I give too many fucks about how great I am. The problematic part isn’t recognizing above-average merit in the self - the problematic part is giving any amount of fucks about it, at an emotional level. Giving too much fucks about your merit relative to others, or about getting accurate recognition for it, is what motivates the bad stuff.
The more I understand the narcissism in myself, the more I see the image of Narcissus looking at his reflection as apt.
I’ve said before that this image misses a critical point: that narcissists are best understood as having trouble seeing themselves well, and severely hurt by seeing themselves poorly, rather than as constantly seeing themselves well. This is still true, but it was incomplete.
The missing part is this: narcissism is not so much the wrong relationship with your reflection, as much as it is too much of that relationship.
Near as I can tell, past a certain point, the improvement is to just find a way to truly not care. Not cover deep true acute caring with the chosen and declared value of not caring. Not protect against the pain of our perceived flaws with true evidence of our above-average merits. But just… look less often at the reflection.
Of course this is an interlocking process where you achieve not looking by having enough experienced evidence that you don’t need to look, and yeah, having true merit and only reasonable flaws is part of getting to that point.
But past a certain point, a big part of being less narcissistic is practicing not looking, not checking your reflection, I mean especially not even the reflection in your mind, practicing just more fully doing whatever you are doing in the moment.
While the positive impact of breastfeeding on babies is well known, little is known about the positive benefits for the mother. A new study reveals women who breastfed their children performed better on cognitive tests at age 50 than those who fed their children with an alternative method.
An sich wäre es möglich, daß zur Erhaltung des Lebenden gerade Grund-Irrthümer nöthig wären, und nicht „Grund-Wahrheiten“. Es könnte z.B. ein Dasein gedacht werden, in welchem Erkennen selber unmöglich wäre, weil ein Widerspruch zwischen absolut Flüssigem und der Erkenntniß besteht: in einer solchen Welt müßte ein lebendes Geschöpf erst an Dinge, an Dauer usw. glauben, um existiren zu können: der Irrthum wäre seine Existenz-Bedingung. Vielleicht ist es so.
– Nietzsche
[In itself it would be possible that, for the preservation of life, precisely fundamental errors would be necessary, and not “fundamental truths”. For example, one could imagine a being in which thinking itself was not possible, because a contradiction exists between the absolute flux and cognition. In such a world, a living being would have to first believe in things, persistence, etc. in order to exist: error would be its condition of existence. Perhaps this is the case.
Millions of older people with poor vision are at risk of being misdiagnosed with mild cognitive impairments, according to a new study by the University of South Australia.
Cognitive tests that rely on vision-dependent tasks could be skewing results in up to a quarter of people aged over 50 who have undiagnosed visual problems such as cataracts or age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
Q: Why does my cat understand so many of the words that I say and I understand almost none of his vocalizations? A: There are a lot of factors at play here, so if you want a TLDR answer, you’re out of luck. First, some basics: Some cats are smarter than other cats. And there is a lot we don’t know about animals and cognition. And because cats in particular can’t be bribed reliably with food or a…
It’s another Wacky Wednesday, so here’s our wacky question of the week: Q: Do cats plot to overthrow their human masters? A: This is a fun question, and I do appreciate the fun/silly factor. However, I’m going to answer this one factually, since that’s what I do. Cats generally see as as equals, not superior (like dogs see us) or inferior (like 80% of cat memes would have you believe). Cats are…
Continuing from Part 1, where I explained how we came to keep Stiles, and his relationships with our other cats… Kiki loves elephants and whales, and especially loves watching them if David Attenborough is narrating. She taught Stiles this love of whales, elephants, and David Attenborough from an early age. He’s particularly fond of baby elephants. He hops up on my desk to watch the You Tube…
Today is Stiles’s 2nd birthday. I’ve tried so many different times to figure out how to tell Stiles’s story, and how much he has come to mean to me. I touched on his story a bit when I wrote about his mother, Freya, and also when I wrote about Kagetora. But those mentions barely scratch the surface. I’m going to break this up into several parts since it would make a blog post that is way too…
Q: Do Cats Think They’re Humans? A: I’m not exactly sure where you got this idea, but it’s a rather simple answer: No. So why bring it up? Because there’s this ridiculous related notion that cats think that we are strange-looking cats. By that logic, they would have to think that their dog friends, bunny friends, and other animal friends are also strange-looking cats, but we know they don’t. Cats…
Children younger than about 18 months don’t recognize themselves in the mirror, and this video shows the development of self-awareness via this construct. So cute.
I just remembered that apes smile when hostile. This isn’t a happy scene. This monkey has full meter and a full screen projectile in it’s move list. This is an invitation to death.
Humans have this distress response too! If you watch the smaller of their young you will spot the occasional baring of teeth in upsetting situations. You can see this with adult humans as well, but it’s harder to catch because they have a fairly deep somatic vocabulary assigned to smiles; it is probably easiest to recognise after minor injury like stubbing a toe or receiving an injection.
It’s a lot of fun comparing how related species have related behaviours, and also neat to contrast how they have specialised them!
this is interesting but
If you watch the smaller of their young
why did you word it like that
Thanks for the question! My area of expertise is more generally avian than it is mammalian (or primate), so I don’t really know the technical nomenclature for the specific stage of human offspring development I mean to communicate.
With the vocabulary I have the closest I can get semantically is ‘mid-nestling to fledgling fresh-fallen from the nest’ but the concepts don’t quite map to how human offspring develop. Another way to phrase it is able to move around under their own power but still heavily dependent on parental intervention for survival.
Hope this helps clear things up! Have a nice day :)
You studied birds so long you forgot that the word toddler exists and I think that’s just delightful.
So funny thing with primates (especially apes) is that they “smile” in a number of ways. And it’s way more nuanced than you think. (This is what happens when an intelligent social species relies heavily on non-vocal social cues).
1.The play face smile. Here we see the relaxed open mouth with a droopy lower lip exposing the bottom teeth. Often accompanied by low guttural chimp laughter. This face is both an invitation to play and a way for individuals to check in and make sure everyone is still having a good time while playing. You younger siblings out there know how “playing” with your elder brother/sister is all well and good until “it’s Not Funny Anymore Cause That Really Hurt, Twin!!!” (No? Just me? Damn.)
2.Silent bared teeth display which can be an appeasement gesture / sign of submission as they try to avoid possible conflict. Tense mouth and at least partially exposed upper & lower teeth. This is kinda on a spectrum and go from something little like “hey that termite mound snack looks good, can I get in on that too?” all the way up to…
3.The Fear Grimace. It is what is sounds like. “I am afraid and I don’t want to fight. I’m submitting. Please don’t hurt me.” Mouth may be somewhat open, lips are tense and retracted, and teeth very visible (possibly with some partial gum exposure). See the female below on the right who is fear grimacing at her screaming friend.
4.The scream. “I’m upset and I DO NOT LIKE THIS!!!!” Fight or flight is going down and screaming animal is in the thick of it. Lips are completely retracted, full teeth & gum exposure, and mouth is open in a loud scream vocalization. See the female on the Left in the above photo as she screams at something (/someone) off camera.
5.Neutral face. Talk about going from the highest high to the lowest low. This is a chill happy primate at a low arousal state. Casual relaxed face and eyes. Not challenging anyone, but not seeking out a particular grooming/play buddy either. Just watching the world go by for a bit.
This is just a general example of the gorgeously nuanced field of facial communication in primates. If I had to pick (without audio / video / context clues) I would say the bonobo in the OP is doing a silent bared teeth display begging for something towards shore (thus the extended hand) possibly edging more towards a fear grimace. They aren’t exhibiting any overt aggression, but that by no means makes them safe to be around.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Love,
Your friendly neighborhood Ethologist / Primatologist
Sources:
Marina Davila-Ross, Goncalo Jesus, Jade Osborne, Kim A. Bard. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) Produce the Same Types of ‘Laugh Faces’ when They Emit Laughter and when They Are Silent. PLOS ONE, 2015; 10 (6): e0127337 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0127337.
Parr LA, Waller BM. Understanding chimpanzee facial expression: insights into the evolution of communication. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2006;1(3):221-228. doi:10.1093/scan/nsl031.
