Back to Table of Contents | January 2012

Pulse

Big Ideas on the Prairie

Gustavus Adolphus College hosts world-class neuroscientists.

By Carmen Peota

Gustavus Adolphus College, in the small southwestern Minnesota town of St. Peter, is home to one of the state’s treasures—the Nobel Conference. Every fall, the liberal arts college brings in top scientists for the two-day event. The conference was launched in 1963, when the college’s then-president approached the Nobel Foundation, asking for permission to hold a science conference using the Nobel name.

Attending the conference is an exhilarating and exhausting experience, as the first lecture of each day starts at 10 a.m. and the last at 8 p.m., and the metal folding chairs set in long rows in the college’s field house feel less comfortable with each speaker. However, about 5,000 enthusiastic people attend the event each year, a testament to the fortitude and curiosity of Minnesotans.

This year, eight speakers from disciplines ranging from biology to theology took on the theme “The Brain and Being Human.” Here’s a sampling from Day 1.

The opening speaker was Larry Young, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta. Young’s interest is the neurobiology of social attachments, that is, the biochemicals and processes responsible for one being bonding with another. To learn more about how this works, Young has been studying the hamster-like prairie vole, the only vole species that mates for life. Among his discoveries is the fact that prairie voles, unlike other species of voles, have receptors in their brains for oxytocin, the molecule that’s produced in the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood stream in high amounts during pregnancy to promote contraction of the uterus and milk ejection. And he’s shown that when the receptors for oxytocin are blocked, prairie voles become as disinterested in one another as other species of voles.

Young believes that what he’s learning about the brain circuitry of prairie voles might have implications for people with autism spectrum disorders, which are characterized by deficits in social engagement. He speculates that a disruption in brain circuitry disables an autistic person’s ability to form the attachments other people do.

The question is whether doses of oxytocin might help those with autism. In a few studies, oxytocin delivered intranasally has been shown to increase the length of time someone will spend looking at the eye region of a face, enhance the ability to infer emotions, enhance empathy, improve memory of faces, increase socially reinforced learning, and increase the general saliency of social stimuli.

Vilayanur Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, who has been described as a medical Sherlock Holmes, discussed his interest in finding brain-based explanations for unusual conditions. One is synesthesia, the phenomenon where one sensory experience triggers another. For example, someone might see a certain color when they encounter a certain number.

As Ramachandran explains it, the condition is common—about one in 30 people have it—and a matter of genetics and brain anatomy. People with the gene for synesthesia have a hyperconnectivity between certain brain regions, often ones that are adjacent to one another.

Helen Mayberg, M.D., professor of psychiatry and neurobiology at Emory University School of Medicine, who pioneered deep brain stimulation for depression in 2002, described how the advent of imaging enabled researchers to identify parts of the brain most affected in people with depression. She also explained the rationale that led her to think that electrical stimulation of the brain might alleviate depression. Mayberg said treatment for depression ought to be viewed as an attempt to restore brain dynamics. And, she said, she sees psychiatry undergoing a conceptual evolution, moving from a focus on brain chemistry to a focus on brain circuitry.

If there is a main take-away from this year’s Nobel Conference, it’s that we are finding biological bases—neurons, pathways, regions, circuits—for things we’ve long relegated to the nonmaterial realm of mind, mood, and spirit. Yet with every gain in knowledge comes awareness of all that we do not yet know about the brain—and hence, ourselves. Still, this is an exciting time for neuroscience and those who follow it, and Gustavus gathered a set of fascinating speakers this year.