Visual perception is not a passive process: in order to efficiently process visual input, the brain actively uses previous knowledge  and expectations about what the world should look like. However, perception is not only influenced by previous knowledge. Especially the perception of emotional stimuli is influenced by the emotional state of the observer. In other words, how we perceive the world does not only depend on what we know of the world, but also by how we feel. In this study, we further investigated the relation between mood and perception.We let observers do a difficult stimulus detection task, in which they had to detect schematic happy and sad faces embedded in noise. Mood was manipulated by means of music. We found that observers were more accurate in detecting faces congruent with their mood, corroborating earlier research. However, in trials in which no actual face was presented, observers made a significant number of false alarms. The content of these false alarms, or illusory percepts, was strongly influenced by the observers' mood.As illusory percepts are believed to reflect the content of internal representations that are employed by the brain during top-down processing of visual input, we conclude that top-down modulation of visual processing is not purely predictive in nature: mood, in this case manipulated by music, may also directly alter the way we perceive the world. One of the key tasks of the visual system is to provide the brain's executive systems with a stable, meaningful representation of the visual environment. This is not a trivial task, though: sensory input is often noisy, and more often than not open to several interpretations. In order to effectively process visual input, top-down information processing plays an important role in visual perception. The brain actively uses contextual information to generate a priori hypotheses about the most likely interpretation of specific sensory input Top-down effects do not only speed up perceptual processing, they also affect perceptual awareness. In a recent psychophysical investigation, it was shown that observers perceive the color of a black-and-white picture of a banana as slightly yellowish – an effect attributed to a top-down filling in process, guided by memory: you know that bananas are yellow, so the brain fills in that color automatically However, the ‘Bayesian priors’ used in visual information processing are not set by perceptual memory alone. Higher level concepts, such as expectancy can affect subjective perception, too. When observers are led to believe that wearing a pair of glasses that have no effect on perception will make them see a multistable stimulus in one specific way, they overwhelmingly report that specific percept Apparently, how we perceive our environment is for a large part determined by what we think. However, perceptual processing is not only influenced by cognitive or meta-cognitive processes. Emotion, and in particular mood, have been demonstrated to have an equally strong effect on perceptual processing. Mood affects the focus of processing: negative mood is associated with ‘local’ processing, whereas positive mood is associated with ‘global’ processing. When participants have to retell a brief story they had to memorize, participants in a negative mood tend to report details, whereas participants in a positive mood tend to report the gist of the story. Interestingly, in perceptual processing, a similar effect is observed. In an experiment in which participants had to rate whether a target object was more similar to an object that matched its global features or an object that matched its local features, participants in a negative mood showed a bias for the local features, whereas participants in a positive mood showed a bias for global features Not surprisingly, mood also has profound effects on the processing of emotional visual stimuli. Humans show a bias towards negative emotional material, the so-called negativity bias. This bias is already evident within the earliest stages of perceptual processing of pictures with emotional content. A positive mood however, induced by a brief music clip played right after presentation of an emotional picture, overcomes this negativity bias, as shown using brain evoked potentials Summarizing, our visual representation of the world around us is not only affected by what we think or what we believe. How we feel has a profound impact on the ‘picture in our mind’ as well. In the present study, we further investigate the effect of mood, as induced by music, on top-down processing of visual information. We let observers do a difficult stimulus detection task, in which they had to detect schematic emotional faces embedded in noise, whilst listening to music that made them happy or sad. Critically, we left out the targets in half of all trials. In line with earlier studies, we found strong mood-congruency effects, that is, participants were better in detecting mood-congruent faces. However, participants also made a significant number of false alarms. The content of these illusory percepts was also strongly modulated by mood, showing that mood not only enhances sensitivity to mood-congruent features in visual input, but can even determine content of visual perception in absence of real visual input.The study was approved by the local Ethics Committee (“Ethische Commissie van het Heymans Instituut voor Psychologisch Onderzoek”) and conducted according to the Declaration of Helsinki. Written informed consent was obtained from all observers.Observers were 43 healthy first year students  in the International Bachelor's Programme in Psychology of the University of Groningen with normal or corrected-to-normal vision.Stimuli were constructed using Matlab R14 , and consisted of a 140×140 pixels array of random noise, with a circle with a diameter of 74 pixels present in the centre, with slightly elevated contrast. All 255 values of the grayscale palette were used to construct the random noise images. Target stimuli contained also a pair of eyes, eyebrows, and a mouth within the circle, forming a schematic face with a sad or a happy expression. Schematic faces have been shown to carry similar emotional content as real faces, and may thus be used to study the effects of emotion in perception tasks Stimulus presentation was done using in-house written software . Stimuli were presented on a 19″ Philips Brilliance 190B TFT monitor  with a resolution of 800×600 pixels; viewing distance was approximately 80 cm. Trials were animations of 9 frames, with each frame presented for approximately 107 ms. The fifth frame of each animation was accompanied by a cue (a grey square around the noise patch) and contained a target stimulus in 50% of all trials. Target presence and target identity (happy or sad) were chosen at random in each trial to avoid expectancy or learning effects. Noise patches were chosen at random from a series of 500 different noise images; targets, if present, were chosen from a series of 50 happy and 50 sad images. Please note that only the noise pattern added to these images was different – the schematic faces were identical in all trials in which a real target was presented.After each trial, participants had to indicate whether they had seen a sad face or a happy face by using the computer keyboard , or to withhold from responding when they had not seen a face. They were specifically instructed to be conservative with their responses, i.e. to only respond when they were absolutely sure to have seen a face. No feedback was given.Participants were instructed to bring at least 15 minutes of songs that made them feel happy and 15 minutes of songs that made them feel sad. They were left completely free in their choice of musical style, and indeed the material widely varied between subjects (e.g. ‘Under the Bridge’ by The Red Hot Chili Peppers or Mozart's ‘Requiem’).Participants' mood was assessed using the Self Assessment Manakin, a non-verbal assessment technique to measure the pleasure, arousal, and dominance associated with a person's affective state, and is widely used in emotion research The experiment consisted of three experimental conditions: a condition in which the participants performed the task without music (no music condition), a condition in which they listened to happy music, and a condition in which they listened to sad music. Participants listened to their own material whilst performing two blocks of 100 trials of the task in each of the three conditions . Each condition lasted at most 10 minutes, and music was played throughout the entire condition. Music was played via an MP3-player over headphones. Participants chose a volume that they found comfortable. The order of the conditions was counterbalanced over all participants. Participants' mood was assessed using the SAM at the start of the experiment, and immediately after each condition.Data were analyzed using SPSS version 16.0 . Repeated measures ANOVAs, with type of music as within-subject factor with three levels , were conducted on the three scales of the SAM , the detection and identification rates for happy and sad faces, the proportion of false alarms, and the proportion of false alarms classified as happy faces.Music significantly affected mood, as measured with the valence scale of the SAM, F = 43,639, p = 0.00000. Participants reported a significantly more positive mood as compared with the no music condition after listening to happy music (p = 0.0000), and a more negative mood after listening to sad music (p = 0.00065). Arousal was also significantly elevated by music, F = 3,26, p = .044; there was no significant difference between happy and sad music. No significant effects on the dominance scale of the SAM were observed.Overall, participants performed the stimulus detection task very well (average correct detection and identification rate were both 83%). Stimulus detection rates were elevated in the music conditions as compared with the no music condition, albeit not significantly  = 2.817; p = 0.065). Moreover, music did have a significant effect on emotion identification  = 10.200; p = 0.00000): while listening to happy music, participants were more accurate in detecting happy faces then when listening to sad music and vice versa  – see However, we also found strong effects of music in trials in which no real stimulus was presented. Participants reported slightly more false alarms in the music conditions than in the no music condition, but this effect was not significant  = 1,357; p = 0.263). However, whether people reported a happy face or sad face while in fact there was none was strongly affected by music: the proportion of happy faces reported was significantly higher in the happy music condition than in the other two conditions  = 9.969, p = 0.00036) – see We have shown that in a challenging stimulus detection task, participants' conscious reports about stimuli are not only affected by previous knowledge and expectation, but also by mood. Participants were more sensitive to mood-congruent emotional stimuli, and showed a bias towards reporting false alarms that were mood-congruent in trials in which no stimuli were presented. These results are in line with the earlier discussed studies on the effects of mood on visual processing: observers become more sensitive to facial features that are congruent with their own emotional state Mood congruency effects in emotion perception may be explained in two different ways: first, it may be the case that post-perceptual decision processes are biased. In that case, the perceptual representation of an emotional face is not affected by mood – only post-perceptual processing is, for example, by an adjustment of decision thresholds Our data seems to favour this latter hypothesis. Apart from replicating earlier work on increased sensitivity to mood-congruent facial expressions, we report that observers' reports during false alarms were also strongly biased by mood. Given that our participants were instructed to only report presence of a face when they were absolutely sure a face was presented, it is reasonable to assume these false alarms were truly reflect ‘illusory percepts’, as opposed to guesses in response to an ambiguous stimulus. Several studies have attributed illusory percepts to ‘pure top-down’ processing, and indeed report activity in visual areas when participants report to have seen a highly expected stimulus while in fact no stimulus has been presented Extrapolating this to the present results, we may assume that top-down modulation of perceptual processing is not just driven by visual context, memory, or expectation. Apparently, emotional state can also influence processing of perceptual input in a top-down manner, and alter the contents of visual awareness, even in absence of structured visual input. Mood dependency of top-down processing would go against the idea that top-down modulations are purely ‘predictive’ or ‘Bayesian’ in nature: the mood of the observer has obviously no effect on the likelihood of encountering mood-congruent emotional stimuli. So, what may be the functional significance of mood-dependent top-down modulation of visual processing?It is interesting to note that recent studies have found modulation of early visual cortex activity as a function of subjective reward value Our results show that our conscious experience of the world may be less objective than we think. Conscious experience does not only reflect ‘what is out there’, but also our previous knowledge and expectation


Temperature has profound effects on a wide range of parameters of neural activity at various scales  of 2,3  = 〈 X(t)X(t′)〉, and the result of its own action on the system, proportional to the response function XR(t − t′), i.e., how X responds at time t to a small perturbation at time t'  = ∫tt′XRdτ is the integrated response.For a system at equilibrium, these two opposing effects give the correct energy, i.e., the one predicted by T of the bath with which the system is in equilibrium is the ratio between the response to an external field conjugate to some observable and the corresponding autocorrelation function in the unperturbed system  ensures that, for a system at equilibrium, the temperature em Kubo, .In terms of brain activity, the FDT would say that stimulus-evoked brain responses can be understood through a suitable observation of the correlation of brain fluctuations at rest Papo, . TemperaT quantifies the relation between energy fluctuations and the heat capacity VC:If the observable is the local signal energy, as is typically the case in functional imaging or electrophysiological studies, VC measures the number of states accessible per temperature unit  is the fluctuation-dissipation ratio (FDR), and the ordinary FDT is recovered for X = 1  ∝ T/X allows quantifying the distance to equilibrium, and the extent to which the FDT is violated, at a given scale of activity.Out of equilibrium, the equilibrium temperature Kurchan, . Teff isages, the number of dynamically accessible configurational states diminishes  = ∂ 〈C(t)〉/∂T . Estimates of Tt ~ 40–60 s  against XC, and regarding brain stimulation and more generally cognitive demands can be thought of as fields pushing brain activity away from equilibrium, so that the FDT no longer holds. For instance, χ may be elicited by trains of stimuli of measurable frequency distribution  dependence on t and wt helps determining aging properties and FDT violations  vs. , and by following the evolution of the linear response to a perturbation applied at wt. Deviations from the FDT can be estimated by plotting χ  against the correlation for fixed wt, varying t between wt and infinity  with an appropriate ansatz (Berthier et al., The estimated effT could be estimated with a temporal precision ranging from the order of the temporal window within which correlations and responses are evaluated, up to Tt, in the tens of seconds range (Sukstankii and Yablonskiy, Depending on the recording technique, We proposed a method to measure brain temperature from any kind of non-invasive recording, which takes into account the non-equilibrium, multiscale nature of brain activity.Effective temperature can identify, at various spatial and temporal scales the non-equilibrium regime at which the brain is working.order parameter i.e., as a collective variable describing brain activity, but also as a control parameter, steering it to various regimes. Intuitively, cognitive processes such as learning or reasoning may be characterized as thermally-guided searches within and modifications of a complex landscape (Sherrington, Temperature can be treated not only as an One could observe how temperature varies during the execution of a cognitive task, and then how phase transitions may occur, using temperature as a control parameter and some other property of neural activity as the order parameter.More generally, assessing temperature and thermal history enables both a dynamical characterization of brain activity and a complete reconstruction of its thermodynamics, affording neuroscientists a description of the object of their investigations with a sound physical basis.


Bacteria frequently exhibit cooperative behaviors but cooperative strains are vulnerable to invasion by cheater strains that reap the benefits of cooperation but do not perform the cooperative behavior themselves. Bacterial genomes often contain mobile genetic elements such as plasmids. When a gene for cooperative behavior exists on a plasmid, cheaters can be forced to cooperate by infection with this plasmid, rescuing cooperation in a population in which mutation or migration has allowed cheaters to arise. Here we introduce a second plasmid that does not code for cooperation and show that the social dilemma repeats itself at the plasmid level in both within-patch and metapopulation scenarios, and under various scenarios of plasmid incompatibility. Our results suggest that although plasmid carriage of cooperative genes can provide a transient defense against defection in structured environments, plasmid and chromosomal defection remain the only stable strategies in an unstructured environment. We discuss our results in the light of recent bioinformatic evidence that cooperative genes are overrepresented on mobile elements. Microorganisms are now known to display all of the hallmarks of a complex and coordinated social life , 2007.The production of public goods, which are costly to the producer while benefiting other members of the population, is possibly the most common form of social behavior in microbes . As suchBacterial genomes often contain mobile genetic elements such as conjugative plasmids or lysogenic phages . A bacteEscherichia and Shigella genomes, found that secreted proteins were overrepresented on mobile elements . All phenotypic cooperators pay a cost c and confer a benefit b to the local population, which can be used by all N members of the local population. v on the host and segregates  at a rate s. From these rates, we can write the following equations:We start by imagining a population of defectors, the density of which is given by r(1 −N/k)). All strains have the same intrinsic growth rate, r, and baseline carrying capacity in the absence of social interaction, k . N is the total population size . The strains D and mD are competitively equivalent (apart from their infection status and its effects) thus an increase in the number of either D or mD will have a negative impact on others due to competition for limiting resources  via mass action transmission  the underlying demography of birth and death is described by the logistic growth model (on model ). Our mosmission .D*= 1, D*m= 0, if β > s+v+c . Thus cooperation can be restored by a mobile genetic element if the rate of horizontal transfer is greater than the combined costs of cooperation, carriage, and loss by segregation.Analysis of model 1 reveals that cooperative plasmid carriers can invade a pure defection equilibrium mD) could persist due to horizontal defection, thus restoring cooperation. However, bacterial populations harbor multiple types of plasmids. A second plasmid, which does not code for cooperation, could invade a population of cooperative plasmids. Here, we therefore extend the model of iD), as well as cooperator (mD) plasmids. We assume that both m and i plasmids belong to the same incompatibility group, meaning that i plasmid carriers cannot be infected with m plasmids and vice versa. Susceptible (D) individuals are infected by the m plasmid at rate h and by the i plasmid at rate α.The model of i and m plasmids, transmission rates disappear as there are no uninfecteds (D) in this simple model. This model has two equilibria: D*m= 1 +b−s−v−c, D*m= 0 and D*m= 0, D*m= 1 −s−v. The first equilibrium, consisting only of the cooperator plasmid, m, is always unstable, due to the costs of cooperation (c > 0). The second equilibrium  is stable if the costs of plasmid carriage are not excessive . Thus interaction between the plasmids collapses to the familiar result of a chromosomal cooperator versus defector model, with the social dilemma played out among plasmids as opposed to chromosomes. As expected, cells not engaging in cooperative behavior exclude cooperative cells (As we assume incompatibility between ve cells .iD (in the limit of no segregation) is stable in this system . This pure iD equilibrium is stable provided v < c, v < 1 and iD dominates provided the cost of plasmid carriage is not prohibitive and the rate of transmission is sufficiently high. Coupled with pairwise analyses  is described in Extending the previous analyses we can determine whether pure gligible . Thus, ai and m plasmid types, that is, that they belong to the same incompatibility group and therefore could not stably coexist in the same cell   . An analimD can persist in the population, that is, cooperation can be restored, depending on the degree of incompatibility ( j) between the i and m plasmids.This suggests iiD cells can invade and dominate imD  defector plasmid is introduced, we find that  Dim see . TherefoE (empty), or dominated by one of the cell types m, Cm, DiC, D, D, or mD. Cooperator patch phenotypes are labeled i, CmC, C, and mD. Defector patch phenotypes are D and iD. It is assumed that, when resident and propagule patches are different in both cooperator and infection status, infection status is most transmissible. Thus the arrival of both mC and mD propagules in a C patch is assumed to generate mC patches only . Additionally it is assumed that cooperator groups are more productive . As stated, cooperator patches are more productive . Noninfected patches are colonized by mobile elements at rate β. Productivity is assumed to be determined by phenotype, cooperator or defector, as opposed to plasmid carriage.Here, we explore whether infectious cooperative C→mC) but it can be maintained by the manipulative plasmid m  is always stable if a/e > d/g. Furthermore, if it assumed that there is some redundancy cost to mC  the conclusion will be a metapopulation consisting of E (empty patches) and mD (plasmid cooperators). Thus all occupied patches will be cooperative due to carriage of the sole mobile element m, and the Cooperation cannot be maintained in this system by pure chromosomal cooperation when β > 0 . Given E, and chromosomal cooperator, C, and defector, D, patches  recapture those of chromosomal cooperators and defectors. Likewise, we see that the metapopulation dynamics for empty patches,  patches  are mirr patches .C, D, mC, mD, iC, iD) for this scenario (model 6 below), the parameters for which listed in To more fully understand the dynamics of cooperative plasmids in spatially structured populations we have modeled the complete system . This condition, combined with the higher productivity of phenotypic cooperators (a > d), allows mobile cooperation to dominate a metapopulation provided the i plasmid does not have a higher rate of transfer  than are chromosomal cooperators (by D) .Thus, although any new chromosomally coded cooperative trait will be outcompeted by noncooperating strains within a patch, certain settings (such as the absence of null plasmids) can allow the spread of a cooperative trait on a plasmid within a patch (model 1) and also within a metapopulation (models 4 and 5) in agreement with 0R, is greater than one. Our results show that plasmid-borne cooperation is not evolutionarily stable in well-mixed populations . Here, wimD becomes dominant but it is then replaced by iiD (models 3 and A2). These models suggest that, contrary to Smith's statement, horizontal transfer of cooperative traits cannot function as a stable mechanism for the evolutionary maintenance of cooperation within patches as these plasmids are vulnerable to being outcompeted by plasmids not coding for cooperation. The end result is that cooperation is not stable within a well-mixed patch, regardless of whether a cooperative gene is found on a chromosome or a plasmid, and whether cooperative and noncooperative plasmids are incompatible.In the short term, we do indeed see cooperation restored by the mobile element in the absence of competitor null plasmids, but longer term dynamics suggest that this is not a stable end-point. Our analyses of well-mixed populations suggest that, once introduced, a “null” or noncooperative mobile genetic element can outcompete the cooperative mobile element  and all C is always defeated by D and cannot invade iD thus removing any advantage to the incorporation of the cooperative gene onto the chromosome.It has been suggested that, in the long term, beneficial genes cannot be maintained on plasmids as they will ultimately be sequestered onto the host chromosome and the plasmid will then be unable to persist . If the E, C, D and E, mD, iD) when competing with chromosomal variants in a metapopulation mobile cooperation can become the dominant strategy (model 6), which supports the view of Nogeuira et al that there may be an advantage to cooperative traits being mobile.In contrast to A limiting assumption of our metapopulation study is that of within-patch homogeneity. Our models have focused on bacterial traits that function as public goods. The production of extracellular iron-scavenging molecules (siderophores) is an excellent example of a cooperative trait necessary for virulence in bacterial infections , and lowIn summary, this study has shed further light on the role of mobile genetic elements in bacterial social evolution, illustrating that mobile cooperator advantage is at best only transitory in an unstructured environment. In a structured environment, it appears that mobile cooperation can be dominated by virtue of its transmission and the high productivity of cooperators. Although previous models  have sug


The dentate gyrus (DG) is postulated to be a “pattern separator” Marr, . Yet, thThe work of Marr, Rolls, and Treves outlined the potential role of the DG as a pattern separator Marr, . In tryiThe computational models sought to establish an efficient encoding method. That is, they required that ensemble activity in the CA3 was sufficiently non-redundant given similar input information in order to reduce interference between separately encoded information. They postulated that the DG could function to orthogonalize inputs to the CA3 neural network. The DG is ideally suited for this role; a DG granule cell has a low contact probability with any given CA3 pyramidal cell, which means that two distinct subsets of granule cell activity will elicit unique cell-population activity in the CA3 Rolls, . Given tThe computational work outlines pattern separation as it pertains to neural networks; input information is represented as either similar or dissimilar vectors, the CA3 memory network is an algebraic matrix, and the outputs of the matrix are orthogonalized vectors. Despite the mathematical underpinnings, the insights of the model are obvious, powerful, and clever. Most importantly for this opinion, however, is the fact that pattern separation is realized at the cell population level. Given an input from the EC, the ultimate goal is unique ensemble encoding at the level of the CA3 Figure . ConsideSEC is high (high similarity), then SCA3 should be low (low similarity). This implies that a function of the DG is to decrease the similarity of its input, such that:The computational models state that similar inputs from the EC will produce orthogonalized outputs in CA3. Thus, if And thus,SDG > SCA3], it is imperative to note that there are conditions whereby this separation may be arbitrary, and even unnecessary. Consider a situation where SEC = 0 . Any further separation accomplished by the DG is pointless, since SCA3 = 0 by virtue of the EC, and not the DG. There are a few important implications from this analysis. Firstly, pattern separation is not a phenomenon unique to only a few regions, such as the DG  should be considered a measureable property of any region in a network. Secondly, pattern separation defined at the cell population level is inherently an inter-regional phenomenon, since input similarities must be measured against output similarities. Thus, to establish a region as a pattern separator, one must analyze the similarity of its input region as well as its output region. It is not sufficient to simply measure the similarity of the output, since one can imagine a situation where a region necessarily receives already separated information. Considering the very nature of our sensory system (different sensory stimuli elicit different stimuli sensing cells) it is logical to assume that pattern separation can occur serially before reaching the DG, in the sensing organs, relay nuclei, sensory cortices, etc. In fact, sparse coding for visual processing has been illustrated in the primary visual cortex in macaques  shifts toward the cell population evoked by the originally encoded input (I1) as time elapses.In other words, the cell population evoked by a subset of a given input ; however, the rate of firing of these cells changes in each environment  population activity in the EC, DG, and CA3 is measured during performance of a discrimination task, and (2) causality is determined by manipulating cellular pattern separation. As such, there is a need for care when making conclusions from behavioral data, and when relating behavioral data to electrophysiological data and computation models.A recent trend in the pattern separation literature is to define pattern separation as the literal behavioral ability to discriminate related stimuli  (Clelland et al., The term “pattern separation” should refer to the manifestation of computational orthogonalization, whereby overlapping cell populations corresponding to given input stimuli diverge as population activity is measured across regions. As stated previously, this formalizes as:The term “behavioral pattern separation” should no longer be used, as it is synonymous with “behavioral discrimination.” Both terms are consistent with a pattern separation mechanism at the level of the cell ensemble, but the term “behavioral pattern separation” is often mistakenly interpreted as synonymous with the definition stated in #1, and even as synonymous with orthogonalization. Thus, the term “behavioral discrimination,” or just “discrimination,” should be used when describing this behavioral phenomenon.Pattern separation can be defined computationally, at the level of the cell population, at the level of the single cell, or behaviorally. Given the complex nature of the term and the connotations that it carries, it is important to establish some operational definitions. Here are some suggestions:Although computational modeling of ensemble activity, rate coding of neurons, and behavioral discrimination are each potentially linked to pattern separation, they are not equivalent processes, and thus cannot be used interchangeably under the umbrella term “pattern separation.”


From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.”Kafka’s nightmarish tale captures the essence of unexpected uncontrollable life-defining horror, likely caused by Gregor Samsa’s inability to cope with societal and family pressures. His predicament, much like any severe disfiguring and disabling illness, would isolate and eventually kill him. Transformative experiences have been the domain of poets and artists alike because artistic sensibility heightens awareness of reality, prompting them to seek a better or more comprehensible alternative. Such seems to be the goal of Stelios Faitakis, who from his native Greece has set out to understand and convey to all a meaningful version of the world around him.“I was raised in the west suburbs of Athens,” recounted Faitakis in a 2007 interview, “a place occupied mostly by the working class.” A serious injury during childbirth left him with substantial paralysis of the right arm and, despite extensive surgical and other interventions, it would limit his activities, including painting, to his left arm. “Both my parents were workers in a gold chain factory…. They are not what we’d call ‘artists,’ although when I see my mother creating new designs… my artistic nature has some root there…. Also my grandfather… was a good draftsman…. I have painted since childhood.”Overcoming family opposition, Faitakis found his way into the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts in Athens, where he set out on his artistic journey, guided as much by his affinity to mathematics as by Eastern mysticism. Suspicious of authority and large organized institutions, he is self-reliant and openly critical of political oppression. “As long as I can remember, I’ve been an anarchist.” He views art as an inclusive and enlightening agent. His first efforts to reach the public came as graffiti―in the streets of his hometown and later on the walls of the Academy. “Working for the public for me means mostly painting outdoors in the open, in the streets, where everyday people pass to go to their jobs…. Athens… begs to be painted.” His murals have now dotted the globe, from European cities to Miami’s Wynwood Art District.“From the beginning, I chose to paint narrative pictures, like a still from a theatrical play: human characters in some environment doing some action—the simplest scenario possible,” with hidden meanings, “as an extra for the more demanding eyes.” His heavily populated canvases and murals of common folk at work and play have been likened to the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder; Mexican muralism, a monumental form of wall painting accessible to the masses; Japanese screen painting; and the Cretan School, whose style of icon painting, also seen in the work of El Greco, flourished during the late Middle Ages and peaked after the fall of Constantinople, becoming a major force in Greek painting during the 15th through the 17th centuries.But what has brought Faitakis into his own is a consistent reference to art forms rooted in the Byzantine tradition. “It would never be possible for me to neglect this element…. I paint about Humanity and its relation to itself… so my characters flow in a golden world…. Simple, ordinary colors coexist with metallic/light reflecting colors…. The gold refers to eternity, universal time.” The tradition relies on exegesis, “Art should be used as a tool for human beings to… grow.” In Faitakis’ work, monastic settings, precipitous mountains, and hermetic deserts unite with urban scenes, political unrest, and common ailments to seek resolution in unorthodox ways. “Art opens the human being to the use of capabilities that our modern civilization has shrunk, such as intuition and inspiration.”Kakerlaken sind die Zukunft, on this month’s cover, repetitive detailed patterns and elements from psychology, the natural sciences, popular wisdom, and political allegory unite with humor and drama to create aggressive commentary. Perspective is achieved by stacking objects on top of each other. Buildings, decaying cities and surroundings, complex geometric and floral designs, and message ribbons portray, without physical barriers or reference to place and time, the universe. Size denotes importance, so the insect containing the urban scene, placed in full frontal position and regalia, spells an ominous message: vermin can outnumber, outdo, and outlive the human community. Larger than life and wearing a person’s head, this all-weather vector feeds on poverty, ignorance, disease, and death.In Frustrated by the state of affairs, the painter abandons the mundane and, like W.B. Yeats, sails to Byzantium—not a destination but an idea. For as the poet says, “the only way for the soul to learn to sing is to study “monuments of its own magnificence.” In the vernacular of a bygone culture, he transcends reality to transform obscure troublesome prospects to legible content accessible to all. As the Kafkaesque scenario unfolds, modern inventions move in and out the stylized landscape―a giant electronic screen; helicopters buzzing like giant insects with petal-like rotors, steam haloes, and landing limbs. A tiny human lurks in a shadowy crevice on the side. Beyond exegesis, this eerie scene invites anagogical interpretation.Much like a scientist with a microscope, Faitakis amplifies figures and their surroundings to take a closer look at vermin and force the viewer to experience their presence and resilience. But in painting this anthropomorphic insect, he also creates an icon of the ubiquitous vector, which transmits viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens between humans and animals, forming a bridge over spatial, behavioral, and ecologic barriers and promoting the emergence of disease. Yellow fever virus is transmitted from monkeys to humans by mosquitoes; Lyme disease, from rodents to humans by ticks. And though Faitakis’ insect contains the city, a vector is not just a vessel. Always evolving as part of the elaborate transmission mechanism, a vector provides the pathogen itself ways to evolve, creating even more opportunities for disease emergence.Kakerlaken sind die Zukunft adds another dimension to Faitakis’ surreal universe. And like the sociopolitical elements, these interactions are staggering and require deeper understanding that may reside “as in the gold mosaic of a wall” at the convergence of human behavior, vector biology, climate, and land use.The complexity of human-animal-vector interactions underlying


Yamagishi suggested that rejection of unfair offers could occurr without people’s concerning of maintaining social fairness, and could be driven by negative emotions. However, as anonymity was not sufficiently guaranteed in Yamagishi’s study, the rejection rates in their experiments may have been influenced by people’s concerns of protecting personal reputation  in addition to negative emotions; thus, it was unclear whether the rejection was driven by negative emotions, or by reputational concerns, or both. In the present study, with specific methods to ensure anonymity, the effect of reputational concerns was successfully ruled out. We found that in a private situation in which rejection could not be driven by reputational concerns, the rejection rates of unfair offers were significantly larger than zero, and in public situations in which rejection rates could be influenced by both negative emotions and reputational concerns, rejection rates were significantly higher than that in the private situation. These results, together with Yamagishi’s findings, provided more complete evidence suggesting (a) that the rejection of unfair offers can be driven by negative emotions and (b) that deliberate cognitive processing of the consequences of the behavior can increase the rejection rate, which may benefit social cooperation.The rejection of unfair offers can be affected by both negative emotions  and deliberate cognitive processing of behavioral consequences . However, whether negative emotions are sufficient to motivate this behavior is still controversial. With modified ultimatum games, a recent study (Yamagishi T,  The rejection of unfair offers is crucial in maintaining social fairness and cooperation Recently, it has been suggested that in the UG, (a) negative emotions play an important role in the responder’s rejection behaviors A recent related behavioral study provided some evidence to address this question For the different settings in IG and PIG, Yamagishi proposed that, in IG, responders may imagine the proposers’ feelings of knowing the responders’ choices. Thus, the responders could conclude that the rejection behaviors, as a “symbolic punishment to the unfair proposer”, may be helpful in maintaining social fairness 1. In social decision-making tasks, it has been found that the presence of an audience, even if it is only the experimenter, can cause significant changes in participants’ behaviors However, we found that, in Yamagishi’s study, responders’ anonymity was not sufficiently guaranteed, i.e., when the responders were making decisions, they may have perceived that their individual choices were known by the experimenters In our current study, using specific setting in which no one could know responders individual decisions, responders’ anonymity was ensured in our private situation, thus, in this situation, the effect of reputational concerns would be ruled out. Consequently, if responders rejected unfair offers in the private situation, they could be driven by negative emotions. We hypothesized that the rejection rates in the private situation would be lower than those in public situations. More importantly, by comparing the rejection rates in the private situation with zero, we may demonstrate whether the rejection was only based on the reputational concerns, thus find further evidence to address the question: can the rejection of unfair offers be driven by negative emotions?In our study, we renamed the two games as “informed impunity game”  and “non-informed impunity game” . We examined responders’ rejection rates in these two games when they made choices with anonymity or been observed by an experimenter. Participants’ rejection in the non-informed-IG in anonymous condition can be regarded as taking place in a private situation in which no one (including the experimenter) would know a participant’s individual decision, while other situations can be regarded as public situations.Note 1. In Yamagishi’s study, in the “strategy method” and “one-shot method” settings, each participant received an envelope from an experimenter, which contained the decision sheets. The participant then made a decision individually and sealed it into the envelope without being seen by anyone else. After that, the participant gave the envelope to an experimenter and waited, and later on, the same experimenter would return the envelope back to the participant . Although participants were told that they would never directly interact with the experimenters who knew their individual choices, they could have felt that their choices were known by the experimenter who had taken and returned their envelopes. In the “repeated one-shot method,” participants’ choices were recorded individually with computers, thus participants may also have felt that the experimenters knew their individual choices. In other words, since it was possible for experimenters to know participants’ individual choices in Yamagishi’s study, it cannot be ruled out the possibility that participants sensed that their decisions were made in public situations. In our present study, specific settings in the private situation eliminated the possibility for anyone to be aware of each participant’s individual choice . Consequently, participants could feel assured that their decisions were not known by anyone (including the experimenters).The study and the consent procedure were approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Science & Technology of China (USTC) according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinkioral.As the key of this study was to obtain participants’ rejection rates on unfair offers under truly private situation, anonymity must be guaranteed in our study. Therefore, beside our specific experiment settings, to further ensure participants’ sense of anonymity, we obtained oral consents of participants without requiring them to give their personal identification, which made them feel less identifiable. In a previous study with anonymity, researchers also did not obtain information about participant’s personal identification for ensuring anonymity  Evolution and Human Behavior 28: 75–84).In our study, the oral consent was obtained in following procedure. After complete description of the study to the participants, participants who did not want to continue were allowed to leave, so that participant’s stay in the classroom was regarded as his/her consent of involvement in the study. This procedure was supervised by at least three experimenters and documented (written) by an experimenter.Regarding the participants aged 16/17 - these young students were of comparable intelligence and ability to adult students in the USTC, and able to take charge of their behaviors including taking part in some simple behavior studies. According to the law in China: “A minor aged 10 or over shall be a person with limited capacity for civil conduct and may engage in civil activities appropriate to his age and intellect; in other civil activities, he shall be represented by his agent ad litem or participate with the consent of his agent ad litem”, from the “General Principles of the Civil Law of the People’s Republic of China”, Article 12 in Chapter II. Therefore, we got the consents from the participants’ selves rather than from their legal guardians  for the involvement of our current simple behavior study.Four hundred and twenty seven students  at the University of Science & Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China, participated in our experiment. All played the role of responder. We employed a two-by-two design, including two games, “informed impunity game” (informed-IG) and the “non-informed impunity game,” (non-informed-IG) in each of two conditions, anonymous and experimenter conditions. Both the game and condition factors were manipulated as between-participants factors. Each participant performed one game in one condition with two paradigms: a behavioral paradigm and a questionnaire paradigm.In the present study, we adapted the settings that had been used by previous studies on other tasks One at a time, each participant then went to the front of the classroom and took an envelope from a box that contained about 200 envelopes of different types according to our task design. Each envelope contained (a) the rules, which were printed on a sheet of paper, and explained whether the participant was playing the informed IG or the non-informed IG; (b) the “real” proposal by a “proposer”: a number-stamp printed on the paper represented the money a proposer offered; no actual proposers were involved in any of our experiments, but participant (who played the role of responders) was told that he/she would receive a proposal from a “real” proposer who had “participated” an earlier session of our experiments and been required to “give” a proposal in the games; (c) the money offered to the responder according to the proposal; and (d) a decision sheet with all nine possible proposals from 9∶1  to 1∶9 . Please see After taking the envelope, each participant, also one at a time, went into a separate cubicle beside the classroom to make a decision. In the sessions of experimenter condition, there was one experimenter in the cubicle who observed each participant’s decision-making behavior. The participant was not allowed to communicate with the experimenter. In the sessions of anonymous condition, there was no one in the cubicle. Two games were carried out in a given condition in each session. In the cubicle, (a) in the behavioral paradigm, the participant made a decision upon the “real” proposal according to the rules (informed IG or non-informed IG), if the participant accepted the proposal, he/she would take the money; otherwise, he/she would leave the money in the envelope; (b) in the questionnaire paradigm, the participant decided whether to accept or reject each of the nine possible proposals (ranging from 9∶1 to 1∶9) by marking (printing with a stamp) their decision on the corresponding place on the sheet. Participants did not get money when responding to the questionnaire paradigm, and their actual outcomes were determined only by whether they accepted or rejected the proposal (took the money or left it in the envelope).not be attributed to the responders’ deliberate cognitive processing of the consequence of their rejection behavior, e.g. reputational concerns, but could be driven by negative emotions.Thereafter, the participant sealed the envelope, went back into the classroom, and dropped the envelope into a ballot box (a box with a narrow split on the top). The participant could then leave or go back to his/her seat in the classroom. Only after one participant finished all steps above could the next participant start the task. Participants who stayed in the class room were not allowed to communicate. With this procedure, in the non-informed IG under anonymous condition, no one (including the experimenter and the proposer) could know a given participant’s individual decision; therefore, each participant could trust that the decision-making was truly private. As we reasoned in the part of Introduction, responders’ rejection of unfair offers in the non-informed IG under anonymous condition could n = 92 for informed-IG and 92 for non-informed-IG) or the experimenter condition (n = 127 for informed-IG and 116 for non-informed-IG). They all completed the decision sheet in the questionnaire paradigm. To elicit responders’ decision on unfair offers in the questionnaire paradigm, about 85% of the envelopes contained “real” proposals of 8∶2  n = 78 in informed-IG and n = 83 in non-informed-IG), and the experimenter condition (98 in informed-IG and 96 in non-informed-IG). The results from these 355 participants were regarded as the responders’ decisions toward unfair offers in the behavioral paradigm.According to the condition in each session and the envelope type taken by each participant, all 427 participants were assigned to the anonymous condition  were obtained as their decisions on unfair offers in each game in each condition.2 (1)  = 0.014 p = 1.000, ns.). However, in the anonymous condition, the rejection rate in the informed-IG (52.6%) was significantly higher than that in the non-informed-IG   = 7.465 p = 0.007), and the rejection rate in the non-informed-IG was significantly larger than zero (χ2 (1)  = 30.829 p<0.001).As shown in 2 (1)  = 14.023 p<0.001, and χ2 (1)  = 13.080 p<0.001), and the rejection rate in the informed-IG in the anonymous condition was not significantly different from those in the informed-IG and non-informed-IG in the experimenter condition .The rejection rate in the non-informed-IG in the anonymous condition was also significantly lower than those in informed-IG and non-informed-IG in the experimenter condition  were significantly larger than rejection rates in the private situation (non-informed-IG in the anonymous condition). This increase may be due to the effect of responders’ cognitive processing of their behavioral consequences. Cognitive functions that specifically deal with the social environment can acquire and process information from the environment. Thus, a small change in the environment could make a big difference in behavior stability of social decision-making. This notion is in line with Yamagishi’s suggestion that emotion can be “as a commitment device” to ensure the consistence of people’s behavior on unfair offers efficiency of social decision-making behaviors in complicated and flexible situations.It has been suggested that when people make social decisions in a rich and interactive environment, both affective factors (such as negative emotions) and cognition are functioning In conclusion, we found that people’s rejection rates of unfair offers were significantly larger than zero in a private situation, which provided further evidence suggesting that rejection of unfair offers can be driven by negative emotions. The higher rejection rates in public situations suggested that deliberate cognitive processing of the consequences of the behavior, such as reputational concerns, could increase the rejection rate, which may benefit social cooperation.Behavioral, brain imaging and neuropsychological studies in future are needed to further clarify the behavioral characteristics, biological basis, and individual differences in rejection of unfair offers, so as to explore the nature of the behaviors in social decision-making under given situations. Especially, to assure anonymity, the present study did not obtain any debriefing data (such as survey evidence) to quantitatively test whether participants indeed experienced negative emotions when they were confronted with unfair offers. Future studies with more sophisticated design which can get participants’ emotion reactions under anonymity are asking for. Moreover, people usually exhibit more altruism behaviors as the “social distance” decrease Note 2. In a recent review Text S1Information about each testing session.(PDF)Click here for additional data file.Text S2Information about the envelopes and our experiment settings.(PDF)Click here for additional data file.Text S3Statistic results of rejection rates in questionnaire paradigm.(PDF)Click here for additional data file.


Pneumocephalus is uncommon in craniofacial trauma and a rare occurrence in non-contact sports. It may be asymptomatic or present with signs of increased intracranial pressure and the majority of cases will resolve with conservative management. However, there should be a high index of clinical suspicion to recognise, diagnose, and manage it appropriately, as complications may be fatal.To our knowledge, this is the first case report of pneumocephalus secondary to a “minor” head injury during a soccer match.We outline the management of this condition and highlight signs that should generate a high index of suspicion. Pneumocephalus, also known as intra-cerebral aerocele or pneumatocele, is defined as the presence of gas within any of the intracranial compartments of the cranial vault . It is uWe herein report on a case of a 17-year-old male who presented with asymptomatic pneumocephalus associated with craniofacial trauma after a soccer match. The pathophysiological mechanisms, diagnosis, and management are discussed with reference to the current literature.We report the case of a 17-year-old male who self-presented to the minor injuries section of our emergency department after a soccer match. He reported a right sided facial swelling and pain following a mid-air collision with another player two hours earlier. He also reported having had an episode of epistaxis, and after blowing his nose, he was unable to actively open his right eye.On examination, he had no neurological deficit and his Glasgow Comma Score was 15/15. He had a superficial laceration above his right eyebrow and a palpable depression in the right supraorbital region. He was actively unable to open his right eye and his vision was blurred. He had no diplopia or nystagmus. There were no clinically evident signs of basal skull fracture. Plain radiographs were obtained and demonstrated a displaced fracture of the supraorbital rim Figure . A CT ofAntibiotic prophylaxis was administered intravenously and opinions from the neurosurgery, maxillofacial surgery, and ophthalmology departments were sought. He was neurologically observed for 12 hours in our clinical decision unit after which a consensus was reached that no acute intervention was required. He was transferred to the maxillofacial surgery department the following morning and was administered a broad-spectrum oral antibiotic for one week, after which he was assessed for surgical repair of the injury.The first description of intracranial pneumocephalus provided by Thomas in 1866 was discovered during the autopsy of a trauma patient  and the Pneumocephalus is a rare complication of non-contact sports, such as soccer, with the exception of diving, where it is more commonly seen. Although typically asymptomatic in patients, pneumocephalus of sufficient volume can manifest in signs of increased intracranial pressure analogous to those of a cerebral bleed, such as headaches, nausea, vomiting, confusion, hemiparesis, and abducens nerve palsy ,6.There are two mechanisms implicated in the generation of pneumocephalus, “ball valve” and “inverted bottle”. The “ball valve” theory suggests that positive pressure via nose blowing, coughing, and Valsalva manoeuvers, as demonstrated in our case, forces air through the cranial defect, which may resist the outflow of air. Significant resistance may lead to a tension pneumatocele . In the Plain films can be used to demonstrate large collections of air and facial bone fractures. However, this has largely been superseded with the advent of CT. Air has a Hounsfield coefficient of −1000 on CT, which enables the sensitive and specific detection of even minute quantities of intracranial air; 0.5 mL of air can be visualized with CT in contrast to 2 mL, which is the minimum that can be seen with plain films . HoweverEmergency medicine physicians should beware of triaged “minor” cranio- or maxillofacial trauma. There should be a high index of clinical suspicion of complications, such as pneumocephalus, that may arise from seemingly “minor” trauma. Pneumocephalus may be asymptomatic or present as a space-occupying lesion. It requires prompt recognition and management to prevent unwanted morbidity and mortality such as meningitis or a cerebrospinal fluid fistula.Physicians should be aware of this clinical entity and consider it in their differential diagnosis. CT is the most useful diagnostic tool and should be considered in accordance with the patient’s clinical examination and local guidelines in patients with facial trauma. These injuries require a multidisciplinary team approach and are best managed in facilities with specialist cover onsite.Written informed consent was obtained from the patient’s guardian/parent/next of kin for the publication of this report and any accompanying images.The authors declare that they have no competing interests.EC wrote article, EQ reviewed literature, JR supervised and reviewed manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.


Understanding the genetic basis of diseases is key to the development of better diagnoses and treatments. Unfortunately, only a small fraction of the existing data linking genes to phenotypes is available through online public resources and, when available, it is scattered across multiple access tools.Neurocarta is a knowledgebase that consolidates information on genes and phenotypes across multiple resources and allows tracking and exploring of the associations. The system enables automatic and manual curation of evidence supporting each association, as well as user-enabled entry of their own annotations. Phenotypes are recorded using controlled vocabularies such as the Disease Ontology to facilitate computational inference and linking to external data sources. The gene-to-phenotype associations are filtered by stringent criteria to focus on the annotations most likely to be relevant. Neurocarta is constantly growing and currently holds more than 30,000 lines of evidence linking over 7,000 genes to 2,000 different phenotypes.Neurocarta is a one-stop shop for researchers looking for candidate genes for any disorder of interest. In Neurocarta, they can review the evidence linking genes to phenotypes and filter out the evidence they’re not interested in. In addition, researchers can enter their own annotations from their experiments and analyze them in the context of existing public annotations. Neurocarta’s in-depth annotation of neurodevelopmental disorders makes it a unique resource for neuroscientists working on brain development. There is a tremendous amount of research focusing on understanding the genetic basis of disease. Studies use a wide range of strategies, including targeted gene approaches, genome-wide screens, and animal models. As such studies continue to proliferate and provide insights on specific disorders, it is important to integrate the information in order to make the best use of the data and increase the level of insight that can be gained from new studies. Knowledge that crosses studies and disorders can be used to perform meta-analyses, to uncover commonalities among conditions, and to tease apart the factors that contribute to phenotypes that make up a disorder. However, currently, information about the genetic and molecular basis of diseases is distributed among a range of specialized or generic data resources, hindering its optimal use . ExampleThe resource we describe was motivated by the establishment of a large Canadian research network “NeuroDevNet”, with the goal of translating knowledge into improved diagnosis, prevention and treatment of neurodevelopmental disorders ,12. To fNeurocarta is an online resource focusing on the genetic basis of neurodevelopmental disorders. In addition to containing manually curated information on disorders of interest to neurodevelopmental researcher, Neurocarta aggregates data from multiple disease gene resources so that the neurodevelopmental annotations can be examined in the context of other disease annotations, providing a better understanding of how generic the function of the gene might be.Neurocarta was developed as an extension of Gemma , a databNeurocarta benefits from the registration system implemented in Gemma  allowinghttp://www.chibi.ubc.ca/Gemma/neurocartaStatistics.html). Figure Our database currently contains more than 30,000 lines of evidence linking over 7,000 genes to 2,000 different phenotypes . As described next, for other databases we used a combination of automatic and semi-automatic methods for mapping.OMIM, RGD, and CTD: These three resources provide OMIM or MeSH terms that we mapped to DO terms as follows. First, we use the Xref mappings provided in the Human_DO.obo ontology file, which covers about 50% of the phenotype-gene mappings in these resources. For the remaining that use terms lacking a DO Xref, we use the NCBO Annotator Web service  followedWhile the Neurocarta framework is generic, our curation team is focusing on annotations relevant to our primary research interest, neurodevelopmental disorders. In-depth annotations have been produced on the following Disease Ontology terms (including respective children terms): (i) “Autism Spectrum Disorder” ; (ii) “Cerebral Palsy” ; (iii) “Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder” ; (iv) “Epilepsy” (DOID_1826); and (v) and “Intellectual disability” (DOID_1059). When necessary, phenotype descriptions were complemented with more descriptive Human or Mammalian Phenotype Ontology terms such as “Memory impairment” (HP_0002354), “EEG abnormality” (HP_0002353), or “decreased brain size” (MP_0000774). Curators review the literature using PubMed searches across all fields  using queries such as “epilepsy” AND “genetics”. We avoid making searches that are gene-centric, except as a secondary mechanism to find additional citations on a gene-phenotype relationship identified through initial screening. When possible, review papers are used to identify primary research papers, which are then curated as “Experimental Type Evidence”. The curators record details about the experiment using controlled vocabularies, categorized as (for example) “Bio Source”, “Experiment Design”, or “Developmental Stage”. The criterion for inclusion is an experimentally-supported statement linking the gene to the phenotype. The exception is genome-wide studies where the results were not yet confirmed by follow-up experiments. The curated papers involve a wide variety of experiments including both animal models and human studies. For the former, if the authors describe the animal model as a specific model for the disorder of interest, the curators associate the gene studied in the paper directly to the human disease. If the authors describe an endophenotype that is related to the disease, the gene is associated to the endophenotype only. In some cases, review papers are used as the source of the annotations instead of drilling down to the original research papers. In that case, it is curated as “Literature Type Evidence” with no details about the experiments. To help users navigate through the evidence, we are, when possible, associating phenotypes to genes in a species-specific way. So, for instance, if the evidence comes from an experiment done in rats, it will be linked in Neurocarta to the rat gene.Figure Neurocarta was originally conceived to help researchers identify candidate genes that might be involved in their disorder of interest, based on existing knowledge, and put that information in the context of other phenotypes associated with the genes. Neurocarta allows users to extract the list of genes that have been associated to a specific disorder, look at the detail of the evidence, and apply further selection criteria. It can also be used to identify relevant literature pertaining to a gene or phenotype of interest. By aggregating data from multiple sources, we enable a global view of each gene’s involvement in diseases, facilitating the identification of genes specifically involved in one disorder versus genes involved in many disease processes. Such candidate gene lists can be used by researchers who perform genome-wide studies, helping them identifying the most likely candidates in their results. It can also inform more targeted approaches as to which gene to include in the study. Another unique aspect of Neurocarta is the ability that users have to enter their own annotations. This enables them to share unpublished results with collaborators as well as put their findings in the context of existing data and facilitate interpretation.-15; FASD = 5.9 × 10 -3; CP = 7.8 × 10-2). In addition, our results suggested that genes associated with FASD were more multifunctional than those associated with ASD or CP. We hypothesized that this might be due to the experimental approaches used to study FASD. Indeed, 98% of the FASD studies in Neurocarta are targeted  against only 55% for ASD and 72% for CP, respectively. The multifunctionality bias in FASD candidate genes might thus be due to researchers choosing well-characterized genes for their studies rather than the genome-wide approaches mostly used in ASD research represented in the database. This might also explain the fact that, in Neurocarta, ASD has the largest fraction of specific genes, as mentioned above.We gathered positive associations from Neurocarta . There were 14,983 unique gene-phenotype associations, consisting of many-to-many relationships between 4,560 genes and 1,555 phenotypes (Disease Ontology terms only). We decided to focus our analysis on neurodevelopmental disorders since we performed in-depth annotations on them. We categorized the genes based on which disease they were annotated for  and defined them as being “specific” if they were only associated with this one disease (Table Several genotype to phenotype databases have been created with the idea of aggregating data from several sources in a common standardized online tool . Some ofWe are planning several lines of improvements to Neurocarta’s data and software layers. Neurocarta currently includes very few data from genome-wide association studies because of the high rate of false positives that can arise from these data. We have included data from PDGene, AlzGene, and MSGene but only the top results that reached significance in their meta-analyses of the data. In the case of ADHDgene, we have decided to incorporate their Hot Gene list even though it was only based on the number of studies a gene was identified in. We are currently investigating different options to incorporate the most significant results from additional genetic association data from public resources such as GAD , GWASdb Neurocarta is a new online resource linking genes to phenotypes. It brings together data from a wide variety of public resources and from manual curation of the literature. It is unique in that it allows users to enter their own annotations and keep them private if they wish to. In-depth annotations of genes involved in brain development disorders are available but Neurocarta is not restricted to a single disease. Instead, Neurocarta enables users to visualize all diseases their gene of interest might be associated with. This allows users not only to extract candidate gene lists from the system, but also to identify which of these genes are the most specific to their disorder of interest and to quickly find papers supporting these associations. Our analysis of the data in the context of neurodevelopmental disorders demonstrates that existing annotations linking genes to phenotypes are skewed to genes that are well known and involved in many biological functions. Neurocarta exposes this problem and makes it easier for researchers to focus their attention on more “specific” genes.http://neurocarta.chibi.ubc.ca.Neurocarta is publicly available at ADHDgene: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder gene database; AlzGene: Alzheimer’s disease gene database; ASD: Autism spectrum disorder; CP: Cerebral palsy; CTD: Comparative toxicogenomics database; FASD: Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder; GAD: Genetic association database; GO: Gene ontology; GWASdb: Genome-wide association study database; IEA: Inferred from electronic annotation; ISS: Inferred from sequence or structural similarity; MSGene: Multiple sclerosis gene database; NAS: Non-traceable author statement; NCBI: National Center for Biotechnology Information; OMIM: Online mendelian inheritance in man; PDGene: Parkinson’s disease gene database; RGD: Rat genome database; SFARI: Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative.The authors declare that they have no competing interests.EPC oversaw the development of Neurocarta and drafted the manuscript. CC conducted the data analysis. FL, NSG, and AZ developed Neurocarta. AL, ML, CK, WK, LT curated the data and tested the user interface. PP led the project and helped draft the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.


This paper traces the formation of the German “Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung” , whose constitutive branches in Munich and Berlin were originally founded as inlets for alternatives to Wundtian experimental psychology from France and England, that is, experimental researches into hypnotism and alleged supernormal phenomena. By utilizing the career trajectories of Max Dessoir and Albert von Schrenck-Notzing as founding members of the “Gesellschaft,” this paper aims to open up novel perspectives regarding extra-scientific factors involved in historically determining the epistemological and methodological boundaries of nascent psychology in Germany. Philosophische Studien in 1881 ultimately signified the institutionalization of the “new psychology” in Germany. A field hitherto little explored by historians is the German reception of alternatives to physiological psychology, notably English and French psychical research and studies in hypnotism, as negotiated at the International Congresses of Psychology from 1889 to 1909. A small but visible forum for psychologists dissatisfied with the Wundtian dominance of nascent German psychology serving as a conduit for French and English strands of experimental psychology was the “Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung” , with the philosopher-psychologist Max Dessoir (1867–1947) as the secretary of its Berlin section and the physician Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929) leading the Munich branch. The “Gesellschaft,” founded in November 1890, was an amalgamation of two previously existing associations, the “Psychologische Gesellschaft”  in Munich, cofounded by Schrenck-Notzing, and the “Gesellschaft für Experimental-Psychologie”  in Berlin under the leadership of Max Dessoir.The establishment of Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory of experimental psychology in Leipzig in 1879 and foundation of his journal fin-de-siècle German occultism, Corinna although historians have been strangely reluctant to examine these two developments together [i.e. the co-emergence of psychical research and academic psychology], there is much evidence to suggest that no history of German psychology will be complete without such an examination. (p. 45)In her groundbreaking study of Following Treitel's hint, this paper offers an expansion of Heather Historians of psychology remember Max Dessoir, a student of Wilhelm Dilthey, Adolf E. Fick, and Hermann Munk, as the author of the first comprehensive bibliography of hypnotism in German , for pubUtilizing the history of Dessoir's and Schrenck-Notzing's involvement in shaping the new science of psychology, this article traces the formation of the “Gesellschaft für Psychologische Forschung” to identify German conduits of French and English strands of experimental psychology as an alternative to Wundtian physiological psychology and its offshoots. Moreover, it argues for the importance of extra-scientific factors that have resulted in the segregation of certain controversial research questions from the agenda of academic psychology, which some of the founding figures of modern psychology in Europe and America had considered legitimate fields of scientific investigation.Sphinx in January of the same year by the jurist, colonial politician, and theosophist Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden (1846–1916), a central figure in the sphere of German-language intellectuals interested in the “occult.” A previously existing journal concerned with alleged psychic phenomena had been Psychische Studien, founded by the Russian councilor of the state Alexandr Aksakov (1832–1903) in 1874 and edited by the excommunicated theologian Gregor Constantin Wittig (1834–1908).Sphinx by stressing the need for an alternative to Psychische Studien, which was narrowly focused on debates around spiritism.Prior to their fusion in 1890, both the Munich “Psychologische Gesellschaft” (MPG) and the Berlin “Gesellschaft für Experimental-Psychologie” (GEP) were founded as psychical research societies similar to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in England, whose research program—studies of telepathy, apparitional experiences, mediumship, and hypnotism—they attempted to emulate.ksakov 182–1903 inSphinx was tailored around the promotion of the “transcendental psychology” of Carl du Prel (1839–1899) as outlined in his Philosophie der Mystik (Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) and eloquently defending it from critics Du Prel's “monistic” transcendental psychology dominated the lenlehre , in whicSphinx became one of the most important—if not the most important—early German periodicals serving as a conduit for the latest works in hypnotism from France and England. For instance, the journal published German translations of articles by authors such as Hippolyte Sphinx , du Prel stressed that thought-reading, clairvoyance, action at a distance, and other phenomena tabooed by orthodox science had been reported throughout history and could therefore not simply be dismissed without examination. Complaining that these transcendental functions of the soul had been monopolized by institutionalized religion since antiquity, du Prel demanded that psychologists should study these phenomena experimentally rather than dismiss them It is clear enough that spiritism will not be banished by mere exclamations of authority from the standpoint of preconceived systems; he who wants to abolish it depends on its investigation just as much as he who wants to promote it.In accordance with his previous critiques of modern science's loss of synthetic perspective in the course of disciplinary specialization , 1882b, concluding that if there was a science that could ill afford premature theoretical commitment by willfully excluding the study of phenomena apt to fundamentally outstrip a reductive physiological framework, it was psychology (p. 36).Sphinx editor Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden was directly involved in the formation of the MPG as a founding member and vice president, he was, though less immediate, also instrumental in the foundation of the GEP by Dessoir, the art historian Friedrich Goeler von Ravensburg, the police superintendent Johannes von Manteuffel, and the bookseller and editor Hans Natge in January 1888. This is exemplified in his friendship with and support of the young Max Dessoir, who, still a student, was a regular Sphinx contributor before and after the foundation of the GEP. Dessoir's letters to HübbeWhile Sphinx collaborators who, though initially supporting the project of an empirically based transcendental psychology in principle, were critical of du Prel's approach. As early as 1886, he expressed his frustration with du Prel, who, Dessoir complained to Hübbe, “wishes to base a general metaphysical inference on 2 facts.”Sphinx in his letters to Hübbe, which he believed was “absolutely necessary.”my feeling alone).16rest assured that I will find means and ways to help us get going. Moreover, Hartm.[ann] says that he will gladly do anything he can; also Goeler, both of whom ask me to pass on their regards. However, the content must change as well. Don't resent me, but not even the healthiest stomach can eventually tolerate those du Prelian tapeworms The formation of the Berlin “Gesellschaft für Experimental-Psychologie”Sphinx : Naming At the time of the GEP's foundation, conflicts between Schrenck's and du Prel's camps within the MPG had become overt although they did not appear to be limited to scientific disagreements alone. In 1888, MPG president Bayersdorfer apparently threatened to exclude Schrenck from the society if the latter was to follow through his intention to sue a patient who had claimed that Schrenck's hypnotic treatment had harmed him, which Bayersdorfer deemed a political fiasco , p. 65. 19Both Dessoir's and Schrenck's increasing distance from du Prel significantly correlated with their entering academia, i.e., Schrenck's MD degree in 1888, and Dessoir's PhD degree in 1889. Moreover, the schism within the MPG corresponded with a number of notable changes in the official positions of Schrenck and Dessoir regarding the “supernormal,” of which the ultimate split between Schrenck and his former mentor seemed but a symptom.proof of the facts of super-sensory thought-transference: all that matters now is merely to ascertain the conditions of such transference” , paraps.[ychology] would thus be the doctrine of the anomalous phenomena of the soul.”27Around the same time, another important influence on young Dessoir was beginning to form, namely, his collaboration with the ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905). In July 1887, Dessoir mentioned to Hübbe: “By the way, I am pursuing a little e Sphinx . Bastiane Sphinx . The takProbably the most decisive factor contributing to Dessoir's modified official standpoint regarding the supernormal was the need to respond to negative publicity in 1888 and 1889. First, the involvement of GEP members  in the investigation of a “poltergeist” case in Resau near Berlin dramatically backfired on the public image of the society. The episode centered around Karl Wolter, a 14-year-old peasant boy, in whose presence raps were heard, windows were smashed, and objects and foods were thrown or moved without visible causation. Under considerable involvement of the press, the case quickly turned into a witch hunt, resulting in the underage Karl Wolter's sentencing for two weeks’ prison and four weeks’ detainment for public nuisance in 1889 in the second instance. As Following the Resau controversy, the GEP's publicity was not exactly helped by an attack in early 1889 by the rising star of German experimental psychology, Hugo Münsterberg, in Freiburg. In a talk on “thought-transference,” the ambitious psychologist protested that the activities of the Berlin and Munich psychological societies would severely delay the establishment of German academic psychology because of their association with spiritualism. After fueling public fears of the “occult” as a threat to social order, Münsterberg explained that academic psychologists like himself could not be held responsible for “all those unmethodically gathered miracles, which sail under the flag of experimental psychology, just as little as astronomy is responsible if nowadays someone publishes astrological prophecies, or as chemistry if someone promises to make gold through alchemical art” , p. 3 anAllgemeinen Zeitung, a widely read newspaper. The printed version of the talk roughly coincided with the publication of Dessoir's celebrated work Das Doppel-Ich, which Dessoir had presented to the GEP on March 12, 1889.With Resau and direct attacks by representatives of academic psychology drastic measures were needed to promote the public image of the GEP and its sister-society in Munich. Thus, following the exodus of du Prel's camp from the MPG, Dessoir gave a programmatic talk to the MPG on June 27, 1889, titled “On the scope and methods of the psychological societies,” which was published on October 17, 1889, in the supplement of the Doppel-Ich as the first installment of the transactions (Schriften) of the GEP in summer 1889 can be regarded as serving a twofold purpose: First, as an attempt at introducing Pierre Janet's and Theodule Ribot's “experimental psychopathology” to German psychology and to reconcile it with German physiological psychology. Second, by making his strictly positivistic model of dissociation as an alternative to du Prel's theory of the “transcendental subject” the trademark of the GEP, Dessoir aimed to once and for all cleanse the society from any “occult” connotations. Joining the choir of orthodox psychology, Dessoir now explained any nonphysiological interpretation of ostensible supernormal phenomena in terms of an unscientific “need to believe” that would necessarily contaminate the outcome of investigations. Accordingly, Dessoir disqualified du Prel and his camp by stating that “surely, the disjunction of a transcendental Subject from the empirical self as proposed by du Prel has hardly a higher value than that of an interpretation of certain facts due to a metaphysical need to believe”  of resonating brain states or other physiological correlates. Thus, Dessoir ensured that psychologists of Preyer's, Wundt's, and Münsterberg's ilk no longer needed to worry about any barefaced metaphysical implications of hypnotism, automatisms, and dissociation as emphasized by du Prel.The publication of Dessoir's believe” , p. 30. Allgemeine Zeitung article on the psychological societies officially cemented the new orientation of the GEP in the public mind and was the crucial step toward its fusion with the “new” MPG in the following year. This is obvious from Dessoir's characterization of the Munich Society under the leadership of Schrenck:Whereas the works published during its first cycle of existence were more of a philosophical nature, since recently it has wholly followed the inductive mode of investigation and the more cautious proceedings of its sister societies  and is now continuing to work, under the aegis of Dr. von Schrenck, in the sense of current science. Dessoir's Following this epistemic rehabilitation of the group around Schrenck, it was important to stress the difference between the “new” MPG and du Prel's association, which Dessoir referred to as a small group of men “who believe in a magnetic agent alongside suggestion, in the somnambulic faculties denied by medicine, and in spiritism in the actual sense of the word” (p. 1). Dessoir claimed that benefits of research in hypnotism and the psychology of dissociation as conducted by the GEP and MPG would involve advances in medical therapy and, for society at large, the “safety from superstitious tendencies” by scientifically illuminating psychological phenomena whose false interpretation posed a danger to public welfare (p. 2). Explicitly appealing to academic psychologists for support and cooperation, Dessoir proclaimed that it was the task of scientific psychology to disentangle the “stepchildren of official science”—mental phenomena such as hypnotism and automatisms—from their occult ballast.Schneckenhausphilosophen) who have constructed a pseudo-psychology (Zopfpsychologie) out of their fossil systems”  were “people who never went through the educational mills of natural-scientific or medical studies, laymen in the worst sense of the word, armchair philosophers To counter Dessoir's insinuation of du Prel's society being an ideological spiritist rather than a research association, du Prel remarked that it also involved skeptics, just as the GEP had members who were spiritists. Pointing to the inclusion of psychical research in the program of the first International Congress of Physiological Psychology in Paris, du Prel called to mind that the psychological societies abroad were composed of individuals with a diversity of convictions ranging from materialism to spiritism. Stressing the epistemic pluralism of the international psychological societies, du Prel stated that his association likewise admittedDoppel-Ich. In his redefinition of the tasks of psychological societies, a man milking the buck, while next to him stands a nanny goat with a bursting udder. This, however, Herr Dessoir does not do; he does milk the nanny goat, but he holds a sieve through which pass all those facts which he does not require for his aprioristic system. Du Prel then criticized Dessoir's Sphinx, who, in accordance with Cesare Lombroso (a corresponding member of the GEP) and Adolf Bastian, maintained the intrinsically regressive and pathological nature of both genius and the belief in “mystical” or “supernormal” phenomena , “Ludwig Brunn’ was none other than Max Dessoir himself.32The implicit charge of opportunism by the “spiritist” du Prel against the budding academic Dessoir gains an interesting momentum when we consider Dessoir's public coinage of the term “Parapsychologie” in the same year.henomena . Withoutry cause .31 Dessory cause , p. 344.ry cause , p. 615nVierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie (coedited by Wundt). Without offering an explanation for his radical change of mind, Dessoir now used the label “experimental pathopsychology” to cover the very class of phenomena he had previously defended from sweeping pathologization. Moreover, while in 1889 he still admitted an unexplainable rest of supernormal phenomena, he now plainly denied their existence, explaining, for example, that thought-transference could be reduced to muscle-reading  in Munich  of the Munich society, which, in a letter to Hübbe in August 1887, Dessoir refused.39This was shortly before Schrenck's critique of Dessoir's bibliography, and it seems that it was only after the schism between Schrenck and du Prel in 1889 that Dessoir and Schrenck buried their differences, started communicating, and even promoted one another's work. For example, Dessoir would describe the acceptance of Schrenck's thesis on the therapeutic effects of hypnotism by the prestigious medical faculty of Munich university as an important breakthrough for medical hypnotism in Germany, comparing its import with that of the installment of the first regular lecture series at a German university on hypnotism by Wilhelm Preyer in Berlin in the following year .Although Schrenck's professed change of perspective was less radical than that of Dessoir, his rejection of the former mentor were just as active and programmatic. The first public attack on du Prel occurred in 1889, when Schrenck reviewed an essay by du Prel regarding the problem of hypnotic crime . Using tThe fusion of the GEP and MPG into the “Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung” (GfpF) in November 1890 marked a point of no return, particularly in Dessoir's agenda to normalize controversial phenomena related to hypnotism. In addition to the overwhelming hostility of orthodox science, the church, the law, and not least the liberal German press to spiritism and occultism and anything that appeared remotely associated with it,Sphinx article signed by Schrenck with his actual name was thus published in 1889 and concerned hypnotherapy rather than psychical research 42Around the time of the fusion of the GEP and MPG, Dessoir was preparing a career in physiological psychology, working on his MD degree in Hermann Munk's laboratory in Berlin. William James’ student Charles Augustus Strong visited Munk's laboratory in January 1890, where he also met Dessoir, with whom he experimented on frogs. Strong reported to James that he attended a meeting at the GEP and thatSchriften (transactions) of the GfpF, fittingly titled “On the tasks and methods of psychology” , the discoverer of paraffin and creosote, claimed to have discovered a subtle force that was supposed to be visible to specially predisposed persons or “sensitives.” After the SPR had failed to replicate Reichenbach's findings and concluded that most effects reported by his “sensitives” were likely due to unwitting suggestion by the experimenter, the scientific cash value of the “odic force” diminished considerably in psychical research.50en par with authors such as August Forel, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Albert Moll, published a highly acclaimed book on the hypnotherapeutic “treatment” of homosexuality , which coincided with Hübbe-Schleiden's decision to change the focus of the Sphinx from psychical research to theosophy. This prevented Dessoir and Schrenck from continuing to associate their names (and even pseudonyms) with the Sphinx, and by 1893, du Prel also ceased to supply the journal with articles.The year 1892 saw further events that proved significant for the careers of Dessoir and Schrenck. Dessoir continued his path into the safe havens of academia by obtaining his second doctorate, that is, an MD degree with a thesis on the “Hautsinn” (“skin sense”), as well as his habilitation .Philosophische Studien and separately as well as in the second edition of his Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology. Both texts contained direct attacks on the psychological societies in Munich and Berlin . Sidgwick's claim is consistent with a remark by Carl Stumpf, who would later reminisce: “In 1896 von Shrenck-Notzing [sic] and I took charge of the preparations for the Third International Congress of Psychology in Munich, also of its direction […]. I endeavored to prevent hypnotic and occult phenomena from occupying the foreground, as had been the case in former sessions” , p. 404.Schriften of the GfpF continued to be published until 1916. In 1906, Schrenck appeared to still support the society financially. This is implied by a letter from Hübbe-Schleiden to fellow theosophist Ludwig Deinhard in November 1906, where Hübbe expressed astonishment about a recent resolution in the GfpF, according to which foreign members were to be reimbursed for their travel expenses, which, Hübbe remarked, was a considerable sum in the case of Hugo Münsterberg, who meanwhile was running the psychology laboratory at Harvard.57While Schrenck ultimately took his departure from sexology and hypnotherapy research by 1911 to devote himself almost exclusively to the investigation of mediumship and poltergeist phenomena for the rest of his life, the The Berlin section became increasingly dominated by Albert Moll, who used the society as a forum for his ruthless war against proponents of both psychical research and alternative and lay medicine . When ScA close analysis of the formation of the GfpF and the early careers of its founders, which intersected with the making of modern psychology at a critical junction, reveals that the German example is also apt to revise popular presentist historiographies of psychical research framing its demise in simplistic terms of the victory of science and rationality over stubborn remnants of superstition e.g., . Contrar60Finally, far from strictly limiting itself to a national context, the German example offers a novel analytical angle for an appreciation of the fundamentally opposed visions and agenda of the very “fathers” of modern psychology, Wilhelm Wundt and William James. While Wundt remained opposed to psychical research and hypnotism, James became increasingly influenced by the ideas of Frederic W. H. Myers (see, e.g.,