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Researchers uncovered for the first time what happens in animals’ brains when they learn from subconscious, visual stimuli. In time, this knowledge can lead to new treatments for a number of conditions. The study, a collaboration between KU Leuven, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Harvard was published in Neuron.

An experienced birdwatcher recognises many more details in a bird's plumage than the ordinary person. Thanks to extensive training, he or she can identify specific features in the plumage. This learning process is not only dependent on conscious processes. Previous research has shown that when people are rewarded during the presentation of visual stimuli that are not consciously perceivable, they can still perceive these stimuli afterwards.

Although this is a known phenomenon, researchers were unsure as to how exactly this unconscious perceptual learning comes about. To find out, Professor Wim Vanduffel and colleagues studied the brains of two rhesus monkeys before and after they were exposed to subconscious visual stimuli.

Dopamine

The researchers activated part of the reward system at the base of the brain stem, the ventral tegmental area. This includes cells that produce dopamine, a molecule that is also released when you receive a reward. "Dopamine is a crucial messenger molecule of our motor and reward systems, and is extremely important for learning and enjoyment,” says Vanduffel. Activating the ventral tegmental area released dopamine, among other things. "By stimulating the brain area directly, we can causally link the activity in that area to perception or complex cognitive behaviour,” explains Vanduffel.

(Image caption: The ventral tegmental area contains, among others, cells that produce dopamine)

While the brain area was activated, the monkeys were shown virtually invisible images of human faces and bodies. Because the images were very blurry and the monkeys had to perform a very different and difficult task at the same time, they could not consciously perceive these images. The same process was followed during the control tests, but the brain was not stimulated.

When the monkeys received subconscious visual stimuli while the ventral tegmental area was stimulated, they knew details about those images afterwards. For example, they knew whether the bodies shown were turned to the left or to the right. This was not the case when there had been no brain stimulation.

"Thanks to this experiment, we can demonstrate for the first time a direct causal relationship between this brain region and, as a result, also the likely link between dopamine and the subconscious learning of complex visual stimuli."

(Image caption: The parts in the darker colour regulate, among others, the production of dopamine. Disturbances in this region can lead to Parkinson's disease and other conditions. Credit: Shutterstock)

The researchers also made a brain scan of the animals before and after the test. "We can see the blood flow in the brain, which gives an indication of which neurons are active. The more blood flow, the more activity,” explains Vanduffel. The scans showed that the task caused activity in the visual cortex of the brain and in areas important for memory. "With this data, we can zoom in to find out what is happening exactly at a neuronal level in these brain areas, in future experiments."

"Since Freud’s insights in the 20th century, the scientific community has been wondering how subconscious sensations can affect us. Thanks to the present awareness that there is a strong resemblance between humans and monkeys, and new and advanced technologies, we can finally map such processes physiologically."

Parkinson's disease

Disturbances in the dopaminergic system can lead to numerous psychiatric and motor disorders, such as depression, addiction and Parkinson's disease. A better understanding of how this system works, in various forms of learning, is therefore crucial to developing targeted therapies for these conditions.

"Parkinson's is a motor disorder and is caused by dopamine-producing neurons dying off. However, current dopamine treatments may produce side effects because they also trigger the entire reward system, which not only reduces motor symptoms but can also lead to addictive behaviour." Fundamental research into the functioning of these brain areas will eventually lead to more targeted treatments with fewer side effects.

Plasticity

This insight is also useful in situations such as trauma, ageing or oncological problems where an increase in brain plasticity, i.e. the ability to change, could be very useful. "By stimulating areas of the brain that produce dopamine, we could, for example, enable people to regain their speech more quickly or improve their motor skills after an accident or illness. This could even be done through medication, although we are still a long way from that,” explains Vanduffel.

My drunk ass had actually walked home without them, pounded on my apartment door, gotten let in by my rightfully-disgruntled roommate, and proceeded to pass out on the couch.  Apparently I puked in the toilet before passing out.  I do not remember this part.

The next morning, I schlepped back to the frat house.  I stood there, right in front of the front door.  This was a novel experience for me.  I’d never been at a frat house in broad daylight before.

A boy, presumably, of the house, asked me what I was doing. 

“I lost my keys in here last night,” I called back.  “I was seeing if I could go in and look for them?”

He opened the door and gestured for me to come in.

“Go wherever you want.”

I’d never seen a frat house post-party before.  Wandering up the stairs and through the halls, I was surrounded by hungover and still-drunk frat boys stumbling around in their socks and sandals and gym shorts, seeking out food and showers like moths to a porch light.  A few of them threw puzzled glances my way.  I’m sure they thought I was some post-bacchanalia hallucination.

I entered one room where a boy was drunkenly watching some Old Yeller-esque movie on a tiny TV in the corner of his room from his bed.

“Do you like dog movies?” he asked, voice all mumbly from grogginess and also from the fact that his face was squished against his pillow and half-buried by his blanket.

I told him I did.

He mumbled again, pleased, and asked what I was doing.  I told him I was looking for my keys.

“Sorry, I haven’t seen any keys around here.”

I didn’t doubt him.

Twenty minutes had passed.  I’d searched just about every bedroom and nuclear-waste-dump-site of a bathroom in that house.  I’d given up on ever finding my keys and was prepared to beg my roommates’ forgiveness and get a new set copied.

As I stood there in the hallway, silently bewailing my predicament, a particularly-burly frat boy approached me.

“You need help with something?”

“I lost my keys here last night and I can’t find them, I’ve looked everywhere.”

“What do they look like?  I’ll put it into the group chat.”  He was already pulling out his phone.

No one ever checks a group chat, I thought, but what the hell.  It was worth a shot.  “Um, it’s just a ring of keys.  The keychain is a pink plastic cat, though, like yea big.  Like bright pink, you can’t miss it.”

He nodded, presumably typing this description faithfully into the group chat.

“Alright, I sent the message out.  Good luck.”

And with that, he turned and left.

A few moments later, I heard a distant thundering.  It was coming from upstairs, and it was getting louder and louder.  One assumes that how I felt in that moment was how Simba felt seeing the wildebeest stampede through the ravine as a horde of large young men all thundered down the stairs, making a beeling for me.

“Someone tell the girl!” One of them shouted, faceless in the mob.  “Girl!  Hey, GIRL!!!  We found your keys, girl!!!”

They circled around me.  I hadn’t felt that small since I was maybe eleven years old.  One of them split himself off from the crowd.

“Are these -” he pulled out a ring of keys from his pocket, “your keys?”

And lo, there was the distinctive bright millennial pink cat keychain dangling off the ring.

“Yes,” I whispered.  “Oh my god, yes.”

“EYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!”

The cheer went up.

We all love disaster movies! The cool special effects, the underdog stories, the underlying themes of hope. As cool as they are, they do tend to use misconceptions about natural disasters. This normally wouldn’t be an issue since Hollywood will always embellish but it’s important to know the true science behind these phenomena should you ever encounter them.

1) Pyroclastic flows will kill you almost instantly, you cannot survive a direct hit

Movies guilty of this: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Dante’s Peak

Pyroclastic flows exceed 100km/h and reach temperatures over 1,000°C. You definitely cannot outrun it in either car or on foot. The boiling hot toxic gas, ash, and lava in the flow will kill you instantly and pummel your smoking corpse into oblivion. Sorry, Chris Pratt.

2) Tsunamis do not crest, they are more like a sudden flood than a wave

Movies guilty of this: Literally any movie with a tsunami ever

Tsunamis are massive and sudden floods caused by the displacement of ocean water due to earthquakes or massive landslides. They’re not tidal waves and thus do not crest. It’s poetic, but inaccurate.

3) Hail is always spherical and doesn’t fall in big cinder blocks of ice

Movies guilty of this: The Day After Tomorrow

Hail can get quite large and can definitely be fatal, but they are exclusively spherical. Hail is formed by water droplets cycling through the updrafts of a thunderstorm and the rotational movements make the resulting hail a ball.

Looks more like a stage hand is throwing the remains of an ice swan than a hail storm

4) You cannot freeze instantaneously. Not even in space.

Movies guilty of this: The Day After Tomorrow, Geostorm, The Cloverfield Paradox, Sunshine

Space, and certain places on Earth, can get exceedingly cold. The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was −89.2 °C. That’s damn cold. But you still wouldn’t flash freeze into a peoplesicle within mere seconds. Intense cold can kill you quickly if you’re completely exposed but it would still take time before your body would be a thoroughly frozen chunk of meat. As for space, it can get quite cold, but it’s also an empty vacuum. There’s nothing around you but empty void, which means there’s also nothing to transfer your body heat away from you. Without convection, your body heat would be lost via radiation and that can take a long time.

5) Earthquakes over 10 on the Richter scale are physically impossible on Earth.

Movies guilty of this: 10.5

You would need a massive fault line to carry that sort of energy. Something on the scale of going through the earth’s core. Which does not exist . Even then, if such an earthquake would occur, the planet would literally explode.A 15 magnitude earthquake would release energy on the magnitude of 1x10^32 joules. That, coincidentally, is the same amount of energy contained in the gravitational binding of the Earth. Simply put, anything greater than 9.9 on the Richter scale is impossible and would cause the Earth to explode.

6) California will and can not sink into the Pacific like a big slab, and it can’t break away from the rest of the US.

Movies guilty of this: 2012, 10.5

Most movies cite the San Andreas fault as the reason for the cleavage, but even this isn’t enough. The San Andreas fault is a transform fault, meaning the North American plate and the Pacific Plate are slowly horizontally grinding past each other, not pushing away. As California is a part of the greater Pacific plate, it literally could not snap free from it to “sink into the sea”. Because if the entire tectonic plate underneath California where to flip over and sink then the entire ocean would drain away into the mantle.

7) You can’t sink in lava. You also can’t stand near it without being burned.

Movies guilty of this: Volcano, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

Lava is molten rock, and is incredibly dense. In fact, it’s three times as dense as humans, who are mostly water. If you were to cannonball into a lava pit, you would dip in a bit before bouncing to the top and floating. You would also burn up and die super quickly. Because fresh lava can exceed 1,200°C! Even standing a couple feet away from a lava flow, you would feel the intense heat radiation. You would lose your eyebrows and probably the top layer of your skin if you stood too close. There’s a reason why volcanologists wear protective suits. Sam and Frodo would have been roasted.

NASA’s newest planet-hunting satellite — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS for short — has just released its first science image using all of its cameras to capture a huge swath of the sky! TESS is NASA’s next step in the search for planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets.

This spectacular image, the first released using all four of TESS’ cameras, shows the satellite’s full field of view. It captures parts of a dozen constellations, from Capricornus (the Sea Goat) to Pictor (the Painter’s Easel) — though it might be hard to find familiar constellations among all these stars! The image even includes the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, our galaxy’s two largest companion galaxies.

The science community calls this image “first light,” but don’t let that fool you — TESS has been seeing light since it launched in April. A first light image like this is released to show off the first science-quality image taken after a mission starts collecting science data, highlighting a spacecraft’s capabilities.

TESS has been busy since it launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. First TESS needed to get into position, which required a push from the Moon. After nearly a month in space, the satellite passed about 5,000 miles from the Moon, whose gravity gave it the boost it needed to get into a special orbit that will keep it stable and maximize its view of the sky.

During those first few weeks, we also got a sneak peek of the sky through one of TESS’s four cameras. This test image captured over 200,000 stars in just two seconds! The spacecraft was pointed toward the constellation Centaurus when it snapped this picture. The bright star Beta Centauri is visible at the lower left edge, and the edge of the Coalsack Nebula is in the right upper corner.

After settling into orbit, scientists ran a number of checks on TESS, including testing its ability to collect a set of stable images over a prolonged period of time. TESS not only proved its ability to perform this task, it also got a surprise! A comet named C/2018 N1 passed through TESS’s cameras for about 17 hours in July.

The images show a treasure trove of cosmic curiosities. There are some stars whose brightness changes over time and asteroids visible as small moving white dots. You can even see an arc of stray light from Mars, which is located outside the image, moving across the screen.

Now that TESS has settled into orbit and has been thoroughly tested, it’s digging into its main mission of finding planets around other stars. How will it spot something as tiny and faint as a planet trillions of miles away? The trick is to look at the star!

So far, most of the exoplanets we’ve found were detected by looking for tiny dips in the brightness of their host stars. These dips are caused by the planet passing between us and its star – an event called a transit. Over its first two years, TESS will stare at 200,000 of the nearest and brightest stars in the sky to look for transits to identify stars with planets.

TESS will be building on the legacy of NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which also used transits to find exoplanets. TESS’s target stars are about 10 times closer than Kepler’s, so they’ll tend to be brighter. Because they’re closer and brighter, TESS’s target stars will be ideal candidates for follow-up studies with current and future observatories.

TESS is challenging over 200,000 of our stellar neighbors to a staring contest! Who knows what new amazing planets we’ll find?

The TESS mission is led by MIT and came together with the help of many different partners. You can keep up with the latest from the TESS mission by following mission updates.