James' World 2

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Neuroscientists have observed for the first time how structures deep in the brain are activated when the brain becomes aware of its own thoughts, known as conscious perception.

The brain is constantly bombarded with sights, sounds, and other stimuli, but people are only ever aware of a sliver of the world around them—the taste of a piece of chocolate or the sound of someone’s voice, for example. Researchers have long known that the outer layer of the brain, called the cerebral cortex, plays a part in this experience of being aware of specific thoughts.

The involvement of deeper brain structures has been much harder to elucidate, because they can be accessed only with invasive surgery. Designing experiments to test the concept in animals is also tricky. But studying these regions would allow researchers to broaden their theories of consciousness beyond the brain’s outer wrapping, say researchers.

“The field of consciousness studies has evoked a lot of criticism and scepticism because this is a phenomenon that is so hard to study,” says Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. But scientists have increasingly been using systematic and rigorous methods to investigate consciousness, she says.

Aware or not

In a study published in Science today, Mingsha Zhang, a neuroscientist at Beijing Normal University, focused on the thalamus. This region at the centre of the brain is involved in processing sensory information and working memory, and is thought to have a role in conscious perception.

Participants were already undergoing therapy for severe and persistent headaches, for which they had thin electrodes injected deep into their brains. This allowed Zhang and his colleagues to study their brain signals and measure conscious awareness.

The participants were asked to move their eyes in a particular way depending on whether they noticed an icon flash onto a screen in front of them. The icon was designed so that the participants would be aware of its appearance only about half of the time.

During the tasks, the researchers recorded neural activity in multiple regions of the brain, including the thalamus and the cortex. This is the first time that such simultaneous recordings have been made in people doing a task that is relevant to consciousness science, says Christopher Whyte, a systems neuroscientist at the University of Sydney in Australia. The work “is really pretty remarkable,” he says, because it allowed the team to look at how the timing of neural activity in different regions varied.

Gatekeeper

The activity in the participants’ thalamus and prefrontal cortex when they were aware of the icon’s appearance was markedly different from the activity when they were not. The activity when they were aware of the icon appeared earlier and was stronger in sections of the thalamus than in sections of the cortex, and seemed to be coordinated across the two areas. This suggests that the thalamus acts as a filter and controls which thoughts get through to awareness and which don’t, says Mac Shine, a systems neuroscientist at the University of Sydney.

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A sunken ‘pyramid’ located near Taiwan has researchers rethinking everything they know about ancient civilizations. Discovered near the Ryukyu Islands of Japan in 1986, the Yonaguni monument is a striking structure with sharp-angled steps and a pyramid shape. Sitting just 82 feet below sea level, it stands roughly 90 feet tall and is made entirely of stone, which has led many to believe it might be a man-made structure.

However, tests of the stone reveal it to be over 10,000 years old, meaning that if this pyramid was built by humans, it would have been constructed before the region sank underwater—more than 12,000 years ago. This would place it several thousand years older than known ancient monuments such as the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. The discovery challenges existing theories about the timeline of human civilization, suggesting the possibility of an advanced society predating known ancient cultures.

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As an internist and pediatrician, he ran a University of Illinois Health clinic providing primary care and resources for at-risk mothers and their children. When interviewing new moms about their needs, many responded with: “This extra support is really great, but could you see my husband? … Could you see my baby’s father?”

Wainwright realized that to truly help moms at the clinic, they needed to treat postnatal depression in dads, too. So he piloted an innovative study on screening fathers.

“The American Academy of Pediatrics tells us that we should be screening moms, our moms are telling us that we should be talking to dads, so what would it look like to start … integrating fathers into the care we provide?” Wainwright said.

Christine Kowaleski, a psychiatric nurse practitioner at Crouse Health and co-chair of the New York chapter of Postpartum Support International (PSI), receives similar requests. She has found that some men choose not to speak up because they are so focused on providing for their family.

“[Postpartum] is all about mom and baby for dads,” she said. “There’s only so much emotional space in a room, and if mom is taking up that space … dad is kind of left out of that room.”

New dad depression tends to be triggered by difficult situations like trouble conceiving, traumatic births, NICU stays, or supporting mom’s mental health. Research shows at least 10% of fathers are affected, but both Kowaleski and Wainwright say that the real number might be higher. To understand why it gets overlooked, we talked to two dads who lived with it, and we asked the experts to explain the subtle warning signs.

Symptom #1: Acting Withdrawn, Separated Or Distant

When a mom and newborn get attention, dad can feel pushed aside. With no positive reinforcement, he might become insecure in his new role.

“Moms bond very quickly with the baby, but it takes dads about two months, so for those two months they are kind of outside looking in,” said Kowaleski.

One father we spoke to, who wants to remain anonymous, started feeling distant on the day his twins were born. Twin Dad was at the hospital waiting to be brought in for his wife’s routine C-section. When the medical staff came, they said an emergency C-section was performed and the twin boy and girl had already been delivered.

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When my older son Jack, was in high school, he accepted a summer job selling solar panels door-to-door. My first reaction was to tell him not to do it. I felt protective—afraid of the rejection he would face on doorsteps all summer long. I just couldn’t see how my thoughtful son, a good athlete and straight A student, could cope with so much failure.

As a parent, it’s natural to want to shield your kids from failure. But we often hover over our kids in what are arguably low-stakes situations, inadvertently robbing them of essential learning experiences and causing anxiety rather than the confidence we had intended to build.

Instead, we can learn to let kids fail well.

To be fair, we are in a bind: if we overprotect, we are ridiculed as helicopter parents, but if we underprotect, we suffer the potentially catastrophic consequences of a child’s immature decision-making. Making the job even harder, every few years the parenting pendulum seems to swing: the three-martini playdate replaces the anxious co-piloted playdate and back again. It’s easy to see why parents are torn: Should you let children make their own mistakes, or stay close by, removing obstacles, limiting risks, and preventing failure? Struggling to manage the bind, parents suffer. And so do their kids.

But there is a path forward that avoids either/or thinking and helps kids build good judgment to accompany a learning-oriented, adventuresome spirit. It supports kids in pursuing the right kind of failures, while helping them avoid danger. Extrapolating from my organizational research and personal experience, I think it’s a parent’s responsibility to help children develop the failure muscles they need to stretch and learn, and to grow into responsible members of society. To do this, we need to examine two dimensions of failure science: assessing the context for risk and understanding that failures are not all alike.

Consider three kinds of failure I’ve identified in my research: basic, complex, and intelligent.

Basic failures have single causes—usually a simple mistake. They are preventable. This is why we childproof our homes when children are small, and ensure that medicine bottles can’t be opened without the strength to twist and pinch. Basic failures don’t bring new knowledge, and most of us would be better off avoiding them (such as by paying attention when we’re following a recipe). But they’re part of the experience for any child learning to master a new topic or skill, and it’s good to remind children to take the time to learn from mistakes, so they can keep improving.

Complex failures have multiple causes—each innocuous on its own—that come together to produce havoc. You forget to charge your cell phone, get stuck behind an overturned truck on the highway, can’t reach your spouse, and miss the day care pick up. Most complex failures can be prevented with vigilance, but we’ve all had days where everything goes wrong, and these kinds of failures will continue to slip through in our increasingly complex and interconnected world. We should learn from them and move on.

The intelligent failures are the ones that matter here, the ones parents should let happen to help children thrive.

It starts with learning to reframe failure as a source of discovery and personal development. I believe that most of us, to live the fullest lives, should experience more failures, not fewer. Whether it’s tennis champion Roger Federer winning only 54 percent of the thousands of points he played in his illustrious career (proving that, as he put it, “even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play”) or top chemistry professor Jennifer Heemstra saying that 90 percent of the experiments in her lab end in failure, the most successful among us have long demonstrated that you have to be willing to fail. So why do so many parents feel a need to protect their children from failure?

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