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ver the past decade, academicsaround the world have become ever more in-terested in the brain. It’s now common to seethe prefix “neuro-” attached to a range ofseemingly unrelated fields, as students and

faculty members explore notions of brain and mind from an ever-increasingnumber of angles.

Duke, for example, has a Neurohumanities Research Group, co-chaired byRomance studies professor Deborah Jenson and neuroscience professorsMichael Platt and Lasana Harris. Duke’s Center for Interdisciplinary DecisionScience (D-CIDES) is one of the nation’s leading research groups on the topic.But why all this focus on the brain? And why now?

For one thing, advances in brain imaging technology have begun to makethings that were once murky “comprehensible, available,” says Priscilla Wald,a professor of English who writes about literature and science. These images,

along with the insights they provide, give us a sense of self-discovery.“Our interest in the brain,” she says, “follows very logically from genomics,”

a field that has also dominated academia in recent years. “We’re discoveringnew ways in which we’re hard-wired.”

“We want to know who we are,” she says. “The more information we get,the more fascinating it is to us.”

In this issue, Duke Magazine explores some of the many ways that studentsand faculty members in Trinity College of Arts & Sciences are engaging withthe brain. This engagement ranges from philosophers developing a new un-derstanding of morality, to Creole students assessing posttraumatic stressdisorder in the context of Haiti, to neuroscientists exploring the implicationsof brain plasticity. But it starts with Laurent Dubois, a professor of Romancestudies and history, and the zombie, an unthinking, unfeeling creature char-acterized by—and symbolic of—a lack of agency.

-Jacob Dagger, special sections editor

Thinking about the Brain

Why We’re Fascinated With ZombiesThe creatures’ origins and continuing relevance

It seems like you can’t turn around these days without bumping into a zombie.They’re everywhere—chasing Rick and the gang on AMC’s hit show The Walk-ing Dead, threatening group exercise classes at your local gym, popping up iniPhone apps. And they’re frightening, if sometimes a little cheesy.

But where do these unthinking, unfeeling, flesh-hungry monsters come from? Itturns out that the zombie actually does have a basis in history—albeit not in its cur-rent, monstrous form.

The zombie, according to Laurent Dubois, Marcello Lotti Professor of Romancestudies and history, originated in the Vodou culture of Haiti, where, some anthro-pologists have suggested, secret societies used poisons to seemingly kill, and thenresurrect and control, individuals they wished to punish. Dubois is also codirectorof the Franklin Humanities Institute’s Haiti Laboratory, sponsored by HumanitiesWrit Large.

“The existence of the zombie as an actual phenomenonis probably quite marginal,” Dubois says. But in a countrythat suffered a particularly oppressive colonial experienceat the hands of the French, the metaphor of one personbeing completely controlled by another—or, in otherwords, enslaved—resonated powerfully.

“The zombie is the ultimate embodiment of a situationof subjection, in which you have lost your agency. You area body that can work and be told what to do, but otherwiseyou’ve lost any capacity to decide or to act.”

Whispers about zombies rose and fell throughout Hai-tian history, peaking in times of stress. The U.S. occupiedHaiti from 1915 to 1934, and during that time, Ameri-can companies entered the country in search of businessopportunities. With the government’s approval, they ex-propriated land and began to develop large-scale, labor-intensive sugar plantations, which hadn’t been seen in Haitisince the days of slavery.

“In that context,” Dubois explains, “there was a resur-gence and multiplication of stories about zombies, in par-ticular around a company called HASCO,” the HaitianAmerican Sugar Corporation.

The first American zombie film,1932’s White Zombie,actually portrayed zombies as undead slaves working on aHaitian sugar plantation. The movie was based on TheMagic Island, a book by explorer William Seabrook, whovisited the country during the U.S. occupation.

Once the zombie shuffled its way into American culture,it became tangled with other science-fiction tropes, and inthe 1960s and 1970s, began to take on some of the more vi-

olent characteristics we associate with it today. The mode of transmission has also mor-phed over the years to reflect contemporary anxieties, ranging from poison in Haiti, toextraterrestrial radiation in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, to out-of-control viruses inrecent tellings.

But even in this new context, zombie myths continue to draw on fears of losingone’s sense of control and individuality. Some critics have suggested that modernzombie films are actually critiques of our consumer culture. “Part of it is the questionof how consumer culture might depersonalize us, alienate us, break down the otherkinds of relationships and turn us into these endlessly hungry machines,” Duboissays. “But I also think that it reflects our inability to think clearly about the economicreality in which we live. We’re subjected to these huge forces, and yet it’s not reallyclear how we’re supposed to face them.”

As in Haiti, we face our fears by turning them into zombies. Or we run.

“You are abody thatcan workand be toldwhat to do,but other-wise you’velost any capacity todecide or to act.”

2 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu

Annie McDonough first traveled toHaiti in October 2010 as a soph-omore, just eight months after a

massive earthquake shook the country,leaving hundreds of thousands dead andhundreds of thousands more homeless.

Her initial reaction was one of shock.“It was the poorest country I’d ever beento at that time,” she recalls. “There was somuch to take in when I landed in Port-au-Prince. It was crowded. There was lots oftraffic. Eight months after the earthquake,the city was still devastated. There werepiles of rubble everywhere, and so manycollapsed houses.”

In the wake of the deadly earthquake,humanitarians from around the worldrushed to provide immediate aid to thecountry in need, to stanch the bleeding.But McDonough, now a senior double-majoring in Romance studies and psychol-ogy, was there as part of a delegation fromDuke’s Haiti Lab, which was taking alonger-range view of the trauma inflictedon the country. The trip was the firstchance to test out a questionnaire that hadbeen adapted from English to Creole in thelab, and was aimed at assessing posttrau-matic stress disorder (PTSD) among sur-vivors of the earthquake.

In the two years since, members of thelab, along with two groups of studentsfrom DukeEngage, an immersive serviceprogram first launched in 2007, have madeseveral more trips to the country to con-duct surveys. By running statistical analy-ses of their data, senior neuroscience majorFontasha Powell determined that the sur-vey method was scientifically valid. Theynow hope their results, which show thatabout 30 percent of interviewees sufferfrom what they label “high distress,” willmotivate the Haitian government, as wellas non-governmental agencies working inHaiti, to devote more time and resourcesto providing mental health care.

The idea to study PTSD in Haiti was con-ceived by Deborah Jenson, a professor ofRomance studies and codirector of Duke’sHaiti Lab. Over the course of her career,Jenson has studied and written extensivelyon literary representations of traumathroughout history, especially in post-rev-

DocumentingTraumaDuke’s Haiti Lab assesses PTSDin post-earthquake Haiti, spurschange.

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studies and Romance studies double-major, visited Haiti three times to conductsurveys, including a two-month stint withDukeEngage in the summer of 2011.Denike says that during that trip, whichwas student-led, the four-person team re-ally came together. During the day, theywould interview the residents of a nearbytent camp, documenting their survival sto-ries and walking them through the H-SPRINT-E, as the Creole version of thePTSD survey is called. “Faculty memberswould come to visit for a few days, but forthe most part, we were left to deal withthings, work together, try to problemsolve,” Denike says.

The two-month trip also gave the two,who have both studied Creole at Duke, theopportunity to become a part of the com-munity.

“Hearing statistics about [poverty anddestruction in] Haiti is one thing, but sit-ting down with someone, hearing abouthow their life has changed, seeing theirchildren running around outside withoutshoes on or seeing how they are strugglingto make ends meet every day is another,”McDonough says. “Being out in the fieldand connecting with those people was a re-ally incredible experience.”

With each trip, faculty members andstudents have seen conditions in the coun-try improve. On their most recent trip,

T R I N I T Y C O L L E G E O F A R T S & S C I E N C E S

olutionary France and former Frenchcolonies. She had never before focused onthe clinical implications of trauma, but see-ing the damage and subsequent sufferingin Haiti changed that.

“After the earthquake,” she says, “it justseemed like a natural question: What wasgoing on with this massive trauma?”

Over that spring and summer, Jensonworked with Jacques Pierre, a visiting lec-turer in the Romance studies departmentwho teaches Duke’s Creole languageclasses, to modify the SPRINT-E (ShortPosttraumatic Stress Disorder Rating In-terview, Expanded version), a common di-agnostic questionnaire originally developedat Duke to assess trauma, so that it wouldresonate with native Haitians. They brokesome complex questions into two parts—in order to fit Haitian Creole, which em-ploys a simpler sentence structure thanEnglish—and modified others so that theywould make sense in the context of localcultural norms. They collaborated withKathy Walmer, an adjunct assistant profes-sor at the Duke Global Health Institutewho runs DukeEngage in Haiti and Fam-ily Health Ministries, a Durham-basednonprofit working in Haiti, to organizetheir research trips to Léogâne, a hard-hitcity southwest of the capital.

McDonough, along with senior JennDenike, an African & African American

which took place last May, just afterspring-semester finals, the team posed asecond set of questions to tent-camp resi-dents, asking where people turned whenthey experienced anxiety, depression, andother symptoms of PTSD. They also sur-veyed local doctors and town officialsabout mental-health resources, in order todetermine whether the community wasaware of existing resources.

The lab is making the new H-SPRINT-E questionnaire available to governmentagencies and local nonprofits.

“Our hope is that our research will beable to inform mental-health services inLéogâne and help people cope with earth-quake trauma and other trauma in theirlives,” McDonough says, “and that they’llbe able to do so in a Haiti-specific, orLéogâne-specific, way.” ■

“Hearing statistics about [poverty and destruction in] Haiti is one thing, but sitting

down with someone, hearing about how theirlife has changed, seeing their children

running around outside without shoes on or seeing how they are struggling to make

ends meet every day is another.”

Elisa

beth

Mich

el ’11

Situation on the ground: Physical rebuilding has been slow but steady in Léogâne. Below, McDonough takes a break from conducting surveys to hang out with local children in a tent camp.


In the fall of 2000, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong was giving alecture for an introductory class in moral philosophy at Dart-mouth College when he was interrupted by a student raisingher hand.

When he called on her, she asked him to explain the basis fora particular understanding of morality. He enjoyed philosophicaldebate, and matter-of-factly explained the philosophical under-pinnings of that view. But his explanation proved unsatisfactory.

“I’m not asking that,” she said. “I want to know what psycho-logical mechanisms lead people to have those beliefs.”

Her question annoyed him at first. “It’s embarrassing to standup in front of 100 intro students and be asked an obviouslymeaningful and important question, and not have anything tosay,” says Sinnott-Armstrong, nowthe Chauncey Stillman Professor ofpractical ethics in Duke’s depart-ment of philosophy.

But it was also timely; brain scien-tists, working with new scanningtechnology, had not long beforebegun to unravel some of the mys-teries about why we do the things wedo. The student’s question stuckwith Sinnott-Armstrong, an empiri-cist who likes to learn through ex-perimentation, and he vowed to findan answer.

Today, Sinnott-Armstrong is adriving force behind Duke’s recentlylaunched MADLAB—the MADstands for “moral attitudes and deci-sion-making”—an interdisciplinaryteam of scholars from around TrinityCollege of Arts & Sciences and theuniversity at large that has come to-gether to try to make sense of a con-cept that has intrigued philosophersfor centuries.

The lab, hosted and supported bythe Kenan Institute for Ethics, is co-directed by three Trinity professors:Phil Costanzo, professor of psychol-ogy and neuroscience; Steve Vaisey,associate professor of sociology; andSinnott-Armstrong, who has a jointappointment at Kenan, and whohas, over the past twelve years, ded-icated himself to the study of moral-ity and moral decision-making,often in collaboration with mem-bers of the growing cognitive neu-roscience community.

Most of the lab’s members—a

mix of postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and even ahandful of undergrads—come from the humanities and the so-cial sciences.

“MADLAB,” Costanzo explains, “was an attempt to bring to-gether the interests in moral acquisition and moral action in so-ciety that existed in sociology, in psychology, in philosophy, andin neuroscience. And to try to put those individuals together ina group to maybe advance at the borders, at the margins of eachof the fields.... To truly live out this interdisciplinary mandatethat I think is going to define the future of academics: That in-dividual disciplines will still be important, but where critical ad-vances and creative advances might come is in fact in theinterstices, in the interfaces between these.”

ON A MONDAY MORNING in No-vember, a dozen members of theMADLAB meet up in a classroom inthe West Duke building, across thehall from the Kenan Institute’s head-quarters. As they remove jackets andpull out iPads, they chat about therecent election.

A little after 8 a.m., Andrew Miles,a graduate student in sociology whois working with Vaisey, begins to givea talk about a current project he’sworking on that deals with moralityin politics.

Members are working on a varietyof projects: There are philosophersstudying the concept of virtue, andwhether virtues are in fact charactertraits; Dmitri Putilin, a graduate stu-dent in psychology, spent the pastyear in India collecting data to showthe effect that different religious be-liefs and experiences have on well-being; Liz Victor, a graduate studentin clinical psychology, is looking athow moral identity affects sexualrisk-taking in college students. Andthey are using different methods,from sociological surveys, to eye-tracking experiments, to brain scans.

AROUND THE TIME THAT the stu-dent in Sinnott-Armstrong’s philos-ophy class asked him the questionabout the behavioral basis for moral-ity, scientists were beginning to usea new tool to study the brain. Func-tional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) was first demonstrated on

Telling Right From WrongAn interdisciplinary group of scholars, led by a neuroscience-obsessed philosopher,comes together to better understand the basis of morality.

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More Brains, PleaseWho’s studying the brain at Duke? A better ques-tion would be who isn’t. The MADLAB is just one of many interdisciplinary groups aimed at helping us to understand the the brain.

• “Exploring the Mind”- From the moment they arriveon campus, freshmen in this Focus cluster are thinkingabout the brain. While taking courses in linguistics, cultural anthropology, and neuroscience, they engagewith a range of brain-related topics. They’ll consider, forexample, the cellular and molecular basis of learning and memory, how culture shapes the brain, and the relationship between cognition and language.

• “Brain and Society”- One of five pilot areas for thenew Bass Connections program. Sophomores and juniorsstart with a gateway course—say, “Neuroethics”—thensign up in small groups to pursue a research project aspart of a vertically integrated lab that includes facultymembers from two or three departments, postdocs, andgraduate students. The research and subsequent course-work, as well as related extracurricular activities, arelargely student-directed.

• Duke Institute for Brain Sciences - Based on the name,you’d think this institute, founded in 2007, would be partof the School of Medicine, but you’d be wrong. Aimed atadvancing “interdisciplinary research and education thattransforms our understanding of brain function and trans-lates into innovative solutions for health and society,” theinstitute does include doctors, but also pulls faculty mem-bers from departments like economics, computer science,evolutionary anthropology, physics, and philosophy. It’shome to Duke’s undergraduate neuroscience major.

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the human brain in 1992. It workedby studying the blood flow in thebrain, illuminating which regionswere active when a person was doinga specific task. In the early days,fMRI was used to deepen our under-standing of things like vision.

But by the early 2000s, a newbreed of cognitive neuroscientists hadbegun using it to tackle more com-plex brain functions. For example, fMRI could be used to seewhich parts of the brain were most active during moral or eco-nomic decision-making.

The first experiments using fMRI to study the brain duringmoral decision-making were published in 2001. “All of a sudden,you could actually see what’s going on in the brain while peopleare thinking about moral issues,” Sinnott-Armstrong says. “Youcould not do that before 2000. You could do behavioral studiesor questionnaires, but you couldn’t look at the neural basis for it.”

Before long, Sinnott-Armstrong and his student, Jana SchaichBorg, were collaborating with neuroscientists on studies.

Over the years, Sinnott-Armstrong has been involved in astaggering variety of studies at the confluence of moral philsophyand neuroscience. One study, for example, demonstrated thatcontrary to a model that many philosophers have long taken asa given, there isn’t actually a unified sense of morality. Instead,there are different neural networks activated in weighing themorality of different types of actions. Consider an act causing

physical harm and an act of dishonesty—to our brains, these acts are distinct, evenif both are immoral.

Sinnott-Armstrong has done some of hismost intriguing studies in collaborationwith Kent Kiehl, a professor of neuro-science at the University of New Mexicoand one of the world’s leading experts onthe brains of psychopaths, who operates amobile fMRI unit that he uses to scan thebrains of inmates in the New Mexicoprison system. As a philosopher, Sinnott-Armstrong is drawn to the concept ofstudying people who do not abide by nor-mal moral codes. Kiehl’s research involvesparsing out exactly what makes a psy-chopath’s brain different, and how that dif-ference maps onto morality. Is it thatpsychopaths do not know what is moral?Or is it that they can discern what is moral,but morality does not matter to them?

THE MADLAB PARTICIPANTS are not theonly researchers at Duke interested instudying the neural bases for morality.Lasana Harris, assistant professor of psy-chology and neuroscience, has long beeninterested in social cognition. Using fMRItechnology, Harris studies a concept knownas dehumanization. “Dehumanization,”Harris explains, “is the idea that in somecontexts, it might be advantageous not tothink about what is going on in the mindsof other people.” Harris has found differentpatterns of brain activation when subjects

are shown stereotypical images of stigmatized people—for exam-ple, a drug addict or a homeless person—as compared to an imageof someone to whom they can relate. Subjects tend to dehumanizewhen viewing those images—that is, their reaction to what mightbe a painful image is not to think about the pain that the personin the picture might suffer. Harris has reached out to Sinnott-Armstrong to test this concept on psychopaths. Their researchaims to determine whether and when psychopaths dehumanize.

Harris predicts that further research and technological advanceswill help us answer some of the most difficult questions we face.“Will we understand genocide?” Harris asks. “I believe so. We arefar away still. We can show you pretty pictures of what is lightingup in the brain, but that’s not enough to answer complicated ques-tions like why does somebody decide to do something evil?” Still,Harris explains, we have come a long way in explaining and un-derstanding phenomena like dehumanization, and he sees promisein studies of moral decision-making. “We’ll figure out a lot of theseproblems in the next century.” ■

Is it that psychopaths do not know what ismoral? Or is it that theycan discern what ismoral, but morality doesnot matter to them?

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Neuroplasticity Historical HighlightsChristina Williams, professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of undergraduate studies for theneuroscience major, explains how we changed our minds about changing minds.

BATTLING AGING—In 1997, RobertoCabeza, then on the faculty at Universityof Alberta, published a study demonstratingthat when older adults and younger adultscompleted the same cognitive task, theolder adults showed bilateral brain activation,while the younger adults showed activationon only one side of the brain. “Our hy-pothesis,” says Cabeza, who has continuedto study aging and memory as an associateprofessor of psychology and neuroscienceat Duke, “was that the change was com-pensatory in the sense that it helped olderadults’ performance by recruiting additionalbrain regions.” Consistent with this hy-

pothesis are more recentstudies showing that high-performing older adultshave more bilateral acti-vation—and perform aswell as younger adults—while low-performing old-er adults have less bilateralactivation. Cabeza explains that bilateralactivation is like using two hands to lift aheavy object rather than one hand to liftsomething lighter. Cabeza also studies thephysical changes that take place in thebrain when people create and retrievememories.

RUNNING AWAY FROM CANCER—In 2010, Christina Williams, professor ofpsychology and neuroscience, publishedthe results of a study showing that exercisemay combat the negative side effects ofwhole-brain irradiation (WBI), in collabo-ration with Lee Jones, associate professor ofradiation oncology in the Duke Cancer In-stitute. WBI is commonly used to treat pa-tients with brain cancer and other types ofadvanced cancers, but patients often com-plain of cognitive decline in the monthsfollowing treatment. As Williams explains,WBI halts the formation of new neurons;

as existing neurons age, the lack of newgrowth affects cognitive function.Williams and Jones discovered, how-ever, that aerobic exercise could jump-start neurogenesis and reduce cognitivedecline. Ongoing research suggests thatbeing fit before undergoing chemother-apy causes a patient to be more resilientto the detrimental effects of the treat-ment. Williams and others are in theprocess of identifying and applying themechanisms underlying this phenome-

non. “Most people don’t exercise becauseit’s good for their brain,” Williams posits.“They exercise because it’s good for theirheart and their lungs and their muscles. Butthe fact that exercise is seriously good forneuroplasticity in the brain motivates meto exercise more than physical fitness.”

Fifty years ago, brain scientists operated on the assumptionthat after humans achieved adulthood, everything—at least,as far at the brain was concerned—was downhill. As the brain

aged, the only changes were negative ones: cell death, the loss ofconnectivity, and the deterioration of brain function, commonly ex-emplified by a failing memory. Then a series of discoveries changedthe landscape of brain science, demonstrating that neurogenesis—or the formation of new neurons—continued to take place in healthyadult brains, and that synapses, the connections between neurons,were constantly changing (see timeline below). Each discovery con-travened the dominant assumptions of its time, but ultimately ledbrain scientists to accept that our brains are plastic, or ever-changing.

At Duke, the concept of neuroplasticity informs theeveryday work of researchers in psychology and neuro-science.

NeuroplasticityChanging our understanding of the brain

“Most people

don’t exercise because it’s good for their

brain.”

1962—Joseph Altman, working at MIT, found that adults cats, rats, andguinea pigs demonstrated adult neuro-genesis—that is, new neurons werebeing born in already formed brains.Altman’s discovery was ridiculed, ignored, and nearly forgotten.

1960s—A team of researchers at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, in-cluding Marian Diamond, Mark Rosen-zweig, and David Krech, began toexperiment with enriching the environ-ments of lab rats. As Christina Williamsexplains, “They showed that if youraised a rat in an enriched environment,changed its toys every day, gave it other

animals to interact with, made its lifemore novel on a day-to-day basis, thatwhen it grew up there were parts of itsbrain with more synapses, more con-nections compared to rats who lived incages.” The cerebral cortex in the ratsthat grew up in an enriched environ-ment was physically larger than that ofother rats. Later studies showed that thiswas true even if the enrichment startedlater in the rats’ lives.

1970s—Michael Merzenich, a neurosci-entist at the University of California, SanFrancisco, identified evidence of plastic-ity at the cortical level. According toWilliams, “Merzenich had a big impact

on people’s ability to think of plasticityas bigger than just minuscule molecularchanges in synapses. He showed thatyou could get really big structuralchanges.”

1990s—Elizabeth Gould and BruceMcEwen, working at Rockefeller Univer-sity, reinvigorated Altman’s discoveriesusing new techniques. Williams saysthat even at that time, there wereprominent scientists working againstGould—common wisdom was that thebrain just did not change like that. In1999, Gould, then a professor at Prince-ton, published a paper showing neuro-genesis in the hippocampi of marmosets.


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News You Can UseYour brain is plastic. Given the right stimuli,it will continue to produce new neurons,which will form new synapses, regardless ofage. So what can you do to move thisprocess along? There are lots of tips floatingaround. Some are helpful; others, not somuch. Scott Huettel Ph.D. ’99, Jerry G. andPatricia Crawford Hubbard Professor of psy-chology and neuroscience, breaks thingsdown, giving advice on which suggestionsyou should follow, and which you can ignore.

The Eyes and EarsHave It

Humans are visual creatures, but we constantly use sound to help interpret vi-sual cues, according to Jennifer Groh, professor of psychology and neuro-science. It is this combination of visual information and sound that makes up

our sense of space. Our brains innately and constantly cross check sight and soundsensory data and recalibrate to update our awareness of where things are around us.

Neurons in the visual system create maps out of spatial information—essentiallycreating snapshots of our surroundings. Sound, on the other hand, comes from all di-rections. So instead of making another map, the brain cleverly encodes auditory in-formation in the firing rates for the visual neurons—creating a rich multidimensionalmashup of sight/sound data. This process happens below the level of our awareness.“Look at the ventriloquism effect,” Groh says. “You see the puppet’s mouth moving,you hear the words, and your brain assigns that sound to the puppet’s mouth. Butyou didn’t consciously decide that.” Duke research is helping scientists gain insightinto the complex information processing that creates our spatial awareness.

Want to or Have to?

Pelin Cayirlioglu Volkan, an assistant professor ofbiology, is studying fruit flies and mosquitos tohelp figure out how sensory systems, and the biological makeup of the brain in

general, affect behavior—initially in fruit flies, but also in humans. She wants to un-derstand how seemingly tiny tweaks to our neural circuitry can lead to larger, morevisible changes in the way we act. This work will yield insights about how much ofwhat we do is our own choice versus driven by genetic imperative.

Both fruit flies and mosquitos can sense carbon dioxide, but for fruit flies, CO2 isa stress signal telling others to move away, whereas to mosquitos it means an animalis nearby and dinner is waiting. One of Volkan’s current projects involves working toswitch the neural circuits of the two insects to see if she can get a mosquito to actlike the fruit fly and vice versa. Through experiments like this, she can better under-stand how much gene expression controls the overall behavior of the insect.

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SENSORYInputs

Why We Search in Vain

If you are concerned about terrorists on airplanes, it turnsout you shouldn’t distract the baggage screeners at the air-port. Steve Mitroff, professor of psychology and neuro-

science, has found that screeners do pretty well at findingunallowables during baggage screening—but if they are distracted, they might not findevery unallowable item in a person’s bag. His recent findings suggest that an initialfind temporarily monopolizes the mind’s memory resources, making it easier to missother problems in the typically charged environment of the airport security line.Mitroff, who has a lab at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, is also looking athow Transportation Security Administration policies—including timing screeners andrequiring a minimum distance between bags—affect multiple-target search accuracy.

Mitroff ’s research to better understand the so-called “satisfaction of search” effectand how to prevent it could also have profound inplications for health care. In thissense, a baggage screener is not so different from a radiologist technician looking atX-ray scans—it is important to find all anomalies.

Exercise and eat rightThis is a big—if not the biggest—one. “The mostimportant activity for maintaining brain health aswe age isn’t mental, but physical,” Huettel says.“Overall cardiovascular health, as well as othermarkers of a healthy lifestyle, are more importantthan any other factor for our brain health.”Suggestion: Follow

Take up a hobby“Enriching activities, especially those that broadenyour experience—like reading new genres or takingup a new hobby—can improve psychological healthand provide stimulation, as well as help to maintaincognitive abilities.”Suggestion: Follow

Practice, practice, practiceA big industry has developed around computergames and workbooks guaranteed to “train yourbrain.” But according to Huettel, it’s mostly market-ing and hype. “Contrary to popular belief, braintraining has little to no effect on your ‘brain age.’ Youget better at specific activities not because yourbrain is getting younger, but simply because youpractice those games. They don’t tend to lead togeneral improvements in function.” Crosswords andSudoku are slightly better, at least as one ingredient“in a rich intellectual life, but they don’t ‘train yourbrain’ in any meaningful way either.”Suggestion: Ignore

Spend time with friends“Having a supportive social network and engagingwith other people regularly can help with brainhealth—and overall well-being.”Suggestion: Follow

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8 www.dukemagazine.duke.eduLes Todd

Growing up in Charlotte, Minali Nigam al-ways looked up to Harshada Rajani, an in-telligent and outgoing family friend eight

years her senior. When Rajani chose to attendDuke as an undergraduate, Nigam took note. Bothwere interested in medicine, and after graduating,Rajani ’07 enrolled at Duke’s School of Medicine.

Nigam was shocked when, in November 2008,Rajani suffered a bilateral brain stem stroke, causedby a blood clot, just a few weeks shy of her twenty-fourth birthday. Rajani was paralyzed from the nosedown, but her cognitive abilities were intact. Andas she began to recover, in baby steps, she started ablog to chronicle her experiences—the ups anddowns, fears, successes, and disappointments.

Nigam, now a sophomore at Duke majoring inpsychology, has been inspired by Rajani’s struggle. “I looked up toHarshada growing up. To see her in this state where she couldn’tcommunicate or move” was shocking, Nigam recalls. “But thenshe started writing this amazing blog about her experiences andwhat it’s like to not be able to communicate to others.”

Rajani, Nigam says, gave an eloquent voice toothers who have similar brain injuries. Readingabout Rajani’s condition, Nigam became interestedin neurological disorders in general, and sought away to help. She approached Christina Williams,the director of undergraduate studies for neuro-science, from whom she was taking “BiologicalBases of Behavior,” and Hunt Willard, the directorof the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Pol-icy, whom she met through the Focus program.

With the two providing advice along the way,she founded NeuroCare, a campus-based groupthat aims to educate the public about brain injuriesand neurological disorders. The group, which hasabout eighty active members, engages in a widerange of activities. In its first year, members offered

self-assessment tests for depression to Duke students and passedout guides about campus resources, conducted a letter-writingcampaign to encourage legislators to devote more money to brainresearch, and visited local elementary schools to educate childrenabout preventing traumatic head injuries.

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TRINITYStudentsSTUDENT PROFILE

Empathy, Outreach, and Passion: Minali Nigam

Inspired: A friend’s moving blog motivated Nigam to take action.

Getting a closer look: Undergrads enrolled in Neuroscience382: “Functional Neuroimaging” visit the Brain Imaging andAnalysis Center’s functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) machine. Over the course of the semester, studentsstudy brain anatomy and physiology, learn how fMRI worksand how to analyze brain scans, and design their own exper-iments to be carried out on actual human volunteers. Withsample sizes of two or three, the results of the research won’tadd much to the scientific literature, but they give studentsuseful, and unique, hands-on lab experience. Above, a scanconducted by students in a previous semester shows that incertain areas of the brain, brand-name products elicit greateractivation than non-brand-name products.


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