Eyes closed shut, mind wide open
Neuroscience

Eyes closed shut, mind wide open


There always seems to be a story in the news about the latest findings showing this or that brain area is activated when someone’s jealous, embarrassed or solving a crossword. But activated relative to what resting baseline? After all, unless you’re testing a group of Buddhist monks, it’s probably unrealistic to expect participants to think of absolutely nothing as they lie in the brain scanner.

Now Martin Wiesmann and colleagues have shown that another complicating issue, even in the complete pitch dark, is whether participants have their eyes open or shut.

They found that when participants closed their eyes in the dark, brain areas related to vision, touch, hearing, balance, smell and taste were all activated relative to when they lay in the dark with their eyes open. By contrast, lying in the dark with their eyes open, activated participants’ brain areas related to attention and eye movement.

The researchers said the findings point to the there being two kinds of mental activity: “…with the eyes closed, an ‘interoceptive’ state characterised by imagination and multisensory activity, in contrast to an ‘exteroceptive’ state, with the eyes open, characterised by attention and oculomotor activity”.

“It therefore seems critical that subjects do not change the state of their eyes during an experiment”, they added.

Wiesmann and his colleagues said more research was needed to test whether the increased sensory activity observed in the brain when someone closes their eyes in the dark is also accompanied by an enhancement of their sensory acuity.
__________________________________

Wiesmann, M., Kopietz, R., Albrecht, J., Linn, J., Reime, U., Kara, E., Pollatos, O., Sakar, V., Anzinger, A., Fest, G., Bruckmann, H., Kobal, G. & Stephan, T. (2006). Eye closure in darkness animates olfactory and gustatory cortical areas. NeuroImage, 32, 293-300.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Link to critique of functional brain imaging by Paul Bloom, writing in Seed Magazine. Open access.




- Moving The Eyes But Not Looking - Why Do We Do It?
You've probably noticed how people move their eyes about when in the midst of conversation, often in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with looking at the scene around them. In fact these 'non-visual gaze patterns' also occur when we're...

- The Brain Invigorated By Light
Twenty minutes of bright white light delays sleepiness, and sends a stimulating wave through the brain, enhancing neural activity even during tasks that have nothing to do with vision. Gilles Vandewalle and colleagues used an optic fibre to shine bright...

- Humans Don't Smell That Bad
Watch any dog sniffing its way down the street and it’s obvious they’re expert at localising smells. They seem to know which direction a smell is coming from, much as we do with sounds and, of course, sights. We can certainly tell where a smell is...

- Neural Correlates Of A Mystical Experience In Carmelite Nuns
The title of this article by Beauregard and Paquette is a little misleading, because "God can’t be summoned at will." Beauregard M, Paquette V. (2006). Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns. Neurosci Lett. Jul 25; [Epub ahead...

- Cooperative Eye Hypothesis
Story on the evolution of vision in humans & primates: Opinion: For Human Eyes Only MICHAEL TOMASELLO New York Times, 1/13/07 "Trying to explain why the whites of human eyes are larger than those of other primates leads to one of the deepest and most...



Neuroscience








.