You’ll have heard of Pavlov’s dogs, conditioned to expect food at the sound of a bell. You might not have heard that a scarier experiment – arguably one of psychology’s most unethical – was once performed on a baby.

In it, a 9-month-old, at first unfazed by the presence of animals, was conditioned to feel fear at the sight of a rat. The infant was presented with the animal as someone struck a metal pole with a hammer above his head. This was repeated until he cried at merely the sight of any furry object – animate or inanimate.

The “Little Albert” experiment, performed in 1919 by John Watson of Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, was the first to show that a human could be classically conditioned. The fate of Albert B has intrigued researchers ever since.

Hall Beck at the Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, has been one of the most tenacious researchers on the case. Watson’s papers stated that Albert B was the son of a wet nurse who worked at the hospital. Beck spent seven years exploring potential candidates and used facial analysis to conclude in 2009 that Little Albert was Douglas Merritte, son of hospital employee Arvilla.

A life cut short

Douglas was born on the same day as Albert and several other points tallied with Watson’s notes. Tragically, medical records showed that Douglas had severe neurological problems and died at an early age of hydrocephalus, or water on the brain. According to his records, this seems to have resulted in vision problems, so much so that at times he was considered blind.

Beck and his colleagues reanalysed grainy video footage of Watson’s experiments, in which they claim Little Albert shows behavioural deficits that were “grossly abnormal”. These included being unusually uninterested in the animals when he was initially presented with them, and some kind of perception problem. They consulted with two clinicians, who suggested that Albert showed signs of neurological damage that fitted with Merritte’s medical records, discovered at a later date. Could Watson have known about this impairment and lied when he said that he had chosen Albert because he was a healthy, psychologically stable, baby?

If correct, “the significance of Beck’s revelation was that it indicated the scale and nature of the researcher’s dubious practices was far greater than previously supposed,” says Alex Haslam, a psychologist at the University of Exeter, UK.

But not everyone was won over. “When Beck claimed he had discovered Little Albert I was so excited,” says Russ Powell at MacEwan University in Alberta, Canada, “but then I started finding inconsistencies.”

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Most of us wish we ate better. I know I certainly do. But when hunger strikes, and you’re standing in line at the grab-and-go food joint, that salad seems really lackluster sitting next to that tasty-looking cookie. I can’t help but think that my diet — and my waistline — would look a lot better if I just craved lettuce a little more.

Now a new study shows that although we may never cease to love cookies, we might be able to make that carrot a little more appealing. In overweight people, a behavioral intervention was associated with changes in how their brains responded to high- and low-calorie foods. The small pilot study is intriguing, but with just 13 participants, a larger study is needed before scientists will know if training the brain can make us abstain.

“Everyone responds more strongly to high-calorie foods than low-calorie foods. It’s just normal,” says study coauthor Susan Roberts, a behavioral nutrition scientist from Tufts University in Medford, Mass. While most people prefer brownies over beets, people who are overweight or obese have a harder time avoiding high-calorie foods, she says. “When someone becomes overweight, there’s a dampening effect on a number of brain structures, including the reward system,” she says. “It’s harder to enjoy food generally, and so when someone becomes overweight, they really want to eat those high-calorie foods, because those are the foods that activate reward systems to the biggest extent.”

Craving is a particular issue. Craving is distinct from hunger and focuses on a particular food, often foods that are high calorie. Other studies show that people who are obese have more cravings than those who are not. For the past few years, Roberts has been focused on developing a diet that targets cravings, rather than simply attacking weight. “Current programs are hard to stick with,” she says. “It’s all negative, it’s about weighing people or having enough willpower to put up with feeling unsatisfied. That is a major reason why people give up on them. Reducing cravings is one way to make it easier.”

Roberts and her colleagues came up with a behavioral intervention that combines recipes and menu plans, portion control and nutrition tips with group support sessions. A previous study from the group showed that over six months of group sessions and dieting, people did lose weight. As they did so, they also reported reduced food cravings.

The scientists wanted to know what effect this behavioral intervention might be having on the brain. They were particularly interested in reward related systems. In a study published September 1 in Nutrition and Diabetes, eight participants received the behavioral intervention (now marketed as the iDiet) for six months and had lost an average of 6.3 kilograms (13 pounds). A control group of five people was simply put on a wait list, received no behavioral training and gained an average of 2.1 kilograms (4.6 pounds) over six months.

At the beginning and end of the six-month intervention, Roberts and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital put each participant in an MRI scanner and showed them images of non-food items (a wallet or book), low-calorie food items (chicken or a healthy sandwich) and high-calorie food items (fries or mozzarella sticks). The participants were asked to rate how good they thought the food looked.

Meanwhile, the functional MRI scans detected blood oxygen levels in various parts of the brain. An increase in oxygenated blood flow to a region of the brain is thought to indicate more activity in that area. Compared with control participants, people who had been on the six-month diet showed more blood flow in the right ventral putamen when shown low-calorie food. With high-calorie food, the dieters showed a decrease in oxygenated blood flow in the left dorsal putamen compared to their wait-listed counterparts. The dieting group also rated high-calorie food as less palatable.

The putamen is a part of the brain’s striatum, an area associated with learning and reinforcement, wanting to perform a behavior again, or predicting that something is going to feel good. Roberts concluded that “it is possible to retrain your brain to like different food.” She says that the changes in blood flow indicate the six-month intervention changes the way people view the food they are faced with.

While the study holds promise for behavioral interventions targeting craving, it’s still not quite teaching your brain to love lettuce. The putamen did show more activity in response to low-calorie food, and a decrease in response to high-calorie food. But the low-calorie food was not seen as more palatable. We may grow to realize the perils of the steak, but that doesn’t make the salad taste any better.

Susan Carnell, an obesity researcher at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, says that while the brain changes are evident, it’s not clear what they mean for those on the diet. “What we don’t know is how important these striatal changes are,” she says. “They might just be one component in a much larger network of changes within the brain. They could also be the result of intervention-related changes in eating behavior and weight, rather than their cause.”

The study also raises many additional questions. No one knows if similar effects might exist in people of normal weight, or people who are severely obese. The study also could not address why the brain changes were there. Perhaps people who have been on an effective diet resist high-calorie foods more successfully. Maybe knowledge of what is a “bad” or a “good” food influences responses. Or maybe guilt over high-calorie foods plays into the results.

Carnell also notes that a study with only 13 participants has its limits. It could be that the eight participants in the intervention just happened to be different from the five controls. But she is impressed with the paper and hopes the study will be replicated with a larger group. “It’s a scientifically important study for our field,” she says. “It suggests that brain function is not ‘set’ and therefore overweight and obesity are not necessarily an individual’s ‘destiny’.”

Roberts agrees that “all nutrition science needs repeating, and that is definitely true here due to the small sample size.” She is also interested in other questions, including performing larger studies that compare her dietary intervention with others, and what other brain structures and food-related behaviors might be changed. “This is the first demonstration that these types of changes are possible,” she says. “Now we need a ton of studies to show all the brain areas that are affected.”

Your dining companion may have more influence over your eating habits than you realize.

We’ve known that people often have friends with similar body weights, but new research suggests that dining with an overweight companion may make us more likely to eat more unhealthful food.

A study in the appropriately named journal Appetite finds that undergraduates who were offered pasta and salad while eating near a 5-foot-5-inch, 126-pound woman would eat more pasta when she was zipped into a fat suit adding 50 pounds, or about 8 points, to her body mass index.

Wansink and his colleagues at Cornell recruited 82 students and one actress from upstate New York to be treated to a pasta and salad buffet lunch. The students were divided into four groups, depending on the look and behavior of the actress: no fat suit and healthful eating; fat suit and healthful eating; no fat suit and unhealthful eating; and fat suit and unhealthful eating. In this case, healthful eating meant the actress served herself a lot of salad, and unhealthful meant she piled on the pasta.

In all groups, the actress was always the first person in the room, and to draw attention to herself, she’d ask out loud, “Do I need to use separate plates for pasta and salad?”

The actress would then gather the appropriate amount of food, and sit down and push the food around (she wasn’t actually forced to eat it). After the lunch, the students filled out a questionnaire that included a question on whether they noticed the actress and what her size was.

The results surprised the researchers. The amount of food the actress put on her plate didn’t influence the students’ behavior, but her perceived weight did. When she wasn’t wearing the suit but still took a lot of pasta, the students didn’t notice. However, when she was wearing the suit, “if she was next to them or in front of them, they just took a lot of food,” says Wansink.

Wansink and colleagues say that this is only one of many factors that influence people to eat certain ways that they’re not even aware of. As we’ve previously reported, even the size of your dinner plate or the type of utensils you use can influence how much you eat and how you perceive the flavor of food.

To fight these subtle powers, he says, “It’s really important to commit to what and how much food you want to eat before you get to the restaurant. … It takes very little to throw us off our game.”

The subconscious nature of eating cues, like your companions’ size, is what makes it tricky.

“Telling them about it probably won’t change the outcome,” says Janet Polivy, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Mississauga who was not affiliated with the research.

If you often have trouble with finding the right words to express your feelings, empathizing with other people’s emotions, or waiting for your next caffeine fix, you may be alexithymic.

Alexithymia, derived from Greek for “no words for feelings,” is a personality trait characterized by difficulty recognizing and showing emotions. “Someone with alexithymia might say they have a stomachache when they are actually experiencing grief,” wrote Mike Lyvers in an email to Popular Science.

Lyvers is a psychologist at Bond University and the author of a recent study that found a link between coffee guzzling and alexithymia. It’s unclear what genetic or environmental factors cause a person to have alexithymic tendencies, but researchers are fairly confident it’s the character trait that creates a caffeine-craver, and not the other way around.

Lyvers and his colleagues surveyed 106 university students about their caffeine consumption habits and had them complete a series of questionnaires that measured their susceptibility to anxiety and alexithymia, among other psychological indicators.

They found students who scored high on the test for alexithymia consumed almost twice as much caffeine per day as others. Alexithymic students on average ingested around 500 milligrams of caffeine daily, which is equivalent to drinking three and a half cups of coffee. The study speculates their desire to get wired may stem from the cognitive-enhancing properties of caffeine — but at the potential cost of heightened anxiety, which a lot of alexithymics suffer from.

Alexithymia is associated with a cohort of other behaviors, some of which are less benign (and lesstasty) than coffee drinking.

“A significant subset of alcoholics and drug addicts are alexithymic, and this seems to be associated with worse treatment outcomes,” said Lyvers. He thinks that if scientists gain a better understanding of how and why alexithymia is correlated with mind-altering substances like alcohol, drugs and caffeine, then maybe we can find more successful ways to treat addiction in alexithymics.

Lyvers says he is now working on a study of caffeine expectations and alexithymia, which could provide insight on what drives individuals who struggle with expressiveness to reach for that extra cup of coffee.

Press the backs of your hands against the inside of a door frame for 30 seconds—as if you’re trying to widen the frame—and then let your arms down; you’ll feel something odd. Your arms will float up from your sides, as if lifted by an external force. Scientists call this Kohnstamm phenomenon, but you may know it as the floating arm trick. Now, researchers have studied what happens in a person’s brain and nerve cells when they repress this involuntary movement, holding their arms tightly by their sides instead of letting them float up. Two theories existed as to how this repression worked: The brain could send a positive “push down” signal to the arm muscles at the same time as the involuntary “lift up” signal was being transmitted to cancel it out; or the brain could entirely block the involuntary signal at the root of the nerves. The new study, which analyzed brain scans and muscle activity recordings from 39 volunteers, found that the latter was true—when a person stifles Kohnstamm phenomenon, the involuntary “lift” signal is blocked before it reaches the muscle. The difference between the repression mechanisms may seem subtle, but understanding it could help people repress other involuntary movements—including the tremors associated with Parkinson’s disease and the tics associated with Tourette syndrome, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Human sensitivity to wetness plays a role in many aspects of daily life. Whether feeling humidity, sweat or a damp towel, we often encounter stimuli that feel wet. Though it seems simple, feeling that something is wet is quite a feat because our skin does not have receptors that sense wetness. The concept of wetness, in fact, may be more of a “perceptual illusion” that our brain evokes based on our prior experiences with stimuli that we have learned are wet.

Brain scans of college students have shed light on why people learn more effectively when their curiosity is piqued than when they are bored stiff.

Researchers in the US found evidence that curiosity ramped up the activity of a brain chemical called dopamine, which in turn seemed to strengthen people’s memories.

Students who took part in the study were better at remembering answers to trivia questions when they were curious, but their memories also improved for unrelated information they were shown at the same time.

The findings suggest that while grades may have their place in motivating students, stimulating their natural curiosity could help them even more.

Chara Ranganath, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, said curiosity seemed to be piqued when people had some knowledge of a subject but were then faced with a gap in their understanding. “We think curiosity is the drive to fill that gap. It’s like an itch you just have to scratch,” he said.

Matthias Gruber, a colleague of Ranganath’s who led the study, asked students to work through a series of trivia questions. He then had them rate how confident they were that they knew the correct answer and how curious they were to find out. He then created bespoke lists of questions for each student that left out those they already knew the answers to. The remaining questions ranged from ones the students were highly curious about to others they found totally boring.

Gruber then used an fMRI scanner to monitor each student’s brain while their list of questions appeared one after another on a screen. After each question they faced a 14-second wait during which a random face flashed up for two seconds. The answer to the trivia question then appeared on the screen before the next question flashed up.

The scans revealed that when people were more curious, brain activity rose in regions that transmit dopamine signals. The neurotransmitter is intimately linked to the brain’s reward circuitry, suggesting that curiosity taps into the same neural pathways that make people yearn for chocolate, nicotine and a win at the races.

“When we compare trials where people are highly curious to know an answer with trials where they are not, and look at the differences in brain activity, it beautifully follows the pathways in the brain that are involved in transmitting dopamine signals,” said Ranganath. “The activity ramps up and the amount it ramps up is highly correlated with how curious they are.”

In memory tests an hour later, the students were better at remembering the answers to questions they were curious about. On average, they remembered 35 of 50 answers when they were curious, compared with 27 out of 50 when they were not.

The students also did better at recognising the faces that had flashed up on the screen when they were waiting for the answer to a question that made them curious. The improvement was slight, at 42% versus 38% for faces that flashed up before questions the students found boring.

The study showed that – as expected – students had better memories when their curiosity was piqued. To find out if the effect was brief or longer-lasting, they ran another series of tests.

Gruber invited a different group of students into the lab and put them through the same regime of reading trivia questions, watching faces flash up, and seeing the answers. This time Gruber tested their memories a full day later. The students still fared better when they had been curious, suggesting that the improvement in memory was more than momentary.

“There are times when people feel they can take in a lot of new information, and other times when they feel their memories are terrible,” said Ranganath. “This work suggests that once you light that fire of curiosity, you put the brain in a state that’s more conducive to learning. Once you get this ramp-up of dopamine, the brain becomes more like a sponge that’s ready to soak up whatever is happening.”

Ranganath said the findings are in line with theories that give dopamine a key role in stabilising or consolidating memories. The research is published in the journal, Neuron.

Guillén Fernández at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in the Netherlands said: “Understanding the mechanistic underpinning of how we learn is of utmost importance if we want to optimise knowledge acquisition in education.

“The brain is the most individual organ we have. The authors of this report show nicely that individual differences in curiosity are associated with differential abilities to learn new information.”

The idea that during sleep our minds shut down from the outside world is ancient and one that is still deeply anchored in our view of sleep today, despite some everyday life experiences and recent scientific discoveries that would tend to prove that our brains don’t completely switch off from our environment.

On the contrary, our brains can keep the gate slightly open. For example, we wake up more easily when we hear our own name or a particularly salient sound such as an alarm clock or a fire alarm compared to equally loud but less relevant sounds.

In research published in Current Biology, we went one step further to show that complex stimuli can not only be processed while we sleep but that this information can be used to make decisions, similarly as when we’re awake.

Our approach was simple: We built on knowledge about how the brain quickly automates complex chores. Driving a car, for example, requires integrating a lot of information at the same time, making rapid decisions and putting them into action through complex motor sequences. And you can drive all the way  home without remembering anything, as we do when we say we’re on “automatic pilot.”

When we’re asleep, the brain regions critical for paying attention to or implementing instructions are deactivated, of course, which makes it impossible to start performing a task. But we wanted to see whether any processes continued in the brain after sleep onset if participants in an experiment were given an automatized task just before.

To do this, we carried out experiments in which we got participants to categorize  spoken words that were separated into two categories: words that referred to animals or objects — for example “cat” or “hat,” in a first experiment; then real words like “hammer” vs. pseudo-words (words that can be pronounced but are found nowhere in the dictionary) like “fabu” in a second one.

Participants were asked to indicate the category of the word that they heard by pressing a left or right button. Once the task became more automatic, we asked them to continue to respond to the words, but they were also allowed to fall asleep. Since they were lying down in a dark room, most of them fell asleep while words were being played.

At the same time we monitored their state of vigilance thanks to EEG electrodes placed on their head. Once they were asleep, and without disturbing the flow of words they were hearing, we gave our participants new items from the same categories. The idea here was to force them to extract the meaning of the word (in the first experiment) or to check whether a word was part of the lexicon (in the second experiment) in order to be able to respond.

Of course, when asleep, participants stopped pressing buttons. So in order to check whether their brains were still responding to the words, we looked at the activity in the motor areas of the brain. Planning to press a button on your left involves your right hemisphere and vice-versa. By looking at the lateralization of brain activity in motor areas, it is possible to see whether someone is preparing a response and toward which side. Applying this method to our sleepers allowed us to show that even during sleep, their brains continued to routinely prepare for right and left responses according to the meaning of the words they were hearing.

Even more interesting, at the end of the experiment and after they woke up, participants had no memory of the words they heard during their sleep, though they recalled the words heard while they were awake very well. So not only did they process complex information while being completely asleep, but they did it unconsciously. Our work sheds new light about the brain’s ability to process information while asleep but also while being unconscious.

This study is just the beginning. Important questions have yet to be answered. If we are able to prepare for actions during sleep, why is it that we do not perform them? What kind of processing can or cannot be achieved by the sleeping brain? Can sentences or series of sentences be processed? What happens when we dream? Would these sounds be incorporated into the dream scenery?

But most importantly, our work revives that age-old fantasy of learning during our sleep. It is well known that sleep is important to consolidate previously learned information or that some basic form of learning like conditioning can take place while we are asleep. But can more complex forms of learning take place and what would be the cost in terms of what sacrifices the brain would make to do this?

Sleep is important for the brain and total sleep deprivation leads to deathafter about two to four weeks. Indeed, it should be borne in mind that sleep is a crucial phenomenon and universal to all animals. We proved here that sleep is not an all-or-none state, not that forcing our brain to learn and do things during the night would be ultimately beneficial in the long run.

What we see in the mirror

As part of the ERC’s IdeasLab session in Tianjin (China) on Wednesday 10 September, Dr Fotopoulou will be addressing the question of the embodied self. Her presentation will focus on the relationship between how we see our bodies and how we protect ourselves against an uncritical internalisation of these images. “By giving so much significance to outside images, we forget about what happens inside – how we process these images, how we filter these perceptions and what this does to our sense of self”, she says.

Dr Fotopoulou’s ERC project ranges beyond questions of body image into the role of primary body signals. Signals from the body are known to be processed in hierarchically organised re-mappings in the brain. However, it remains unknown how the brain integrates them to give rise to our awareness of ourselves as embodied beings. These signals can be roughly divided into three areas – signals from inside the body, from outside and those we receive from others. They are, perhaps inevitably, interrelated. How the inside of the body makes us feel, for example when our heart is racing, is inextricably linked to what we see in the mirror as well as to the perceptions we have absorbed from others.

Bodily signals continuously condition our sense of self, but we are only really aware of them when something goes wrong: “when you are walking somewhere, you are concentrating not on your sense of the bodily self moving through space but on reaching your destination. But if you trip, then you are suddenly jolted into a sense of your self failing to negotiate a pavement“, Dr Fotopoulou says.

Processing pain 

One particularly interesting aspect of this research is the group’s investigation of the experience of pain. “The link between stimulus and damage when we feel pain, the perception of pain is not a category in the brain. Instead, our response to pain is based on our previous experience of it,” Dr Fotopoulou explains. “When a child falls over, there is a delay. The child stops and watches its mother. If the mother reacts dramatically, the child will start to cry. If the mother’s response is more practical, the child is much more likely to pick themselves up and carry on. In other words, the child’s experience of pain is conditioned by their mother’s sense of how much danger they are in.”

How mind–body processes can affect healing 

The awareness of the relationship between the body and the self is significant when studying the experiences of brain damaged patients. Dr Fotopoulou and her team are particularly interested in patients who deny their conditions, or who are unaware of them – who believe that they retain motion in a paralysed side after a stroke for example. This kind of self-deception can inhibit treatment: it is difficult to treat a patient who does not believe that there is anything wrong with them.

“Brain damaged patients are traditionally treated as broken-down machines in neurological terms,” Dr Fotopoulou explains. “But their problems are psychological as well as physical. By applying cognitive neuroscience methods when treating a small number of patients we have demonstrated that disorders that were previously thought to be intractable can be treated. Studies of this kind are vital: working with patients whose sense of self is fractured can teach us not only about their disorders but also tell us something about how these mechanisms function in healthy individuals.”

The hope is that these findings can be fed into future policy decisions about the treatment of brain damaged patients: particularly in terms of the importance of psychotherapy as part of the rehabilitation process.

ERC funding has enabled Dr Fotopoulou and her team to set up a truly interdisciplinary project. “We have been given the luxury of time to apply a wide range of methods and tools from disciplines as diverse as philosophy and psychology. We have the freedom to pursue the best science without any external pressures – to develop ideas and to publish only when the science is ready.” Dr Fotopoulou and her team are based at University College London (UCL), UK.