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Showing posts with label Stanford University. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stanford University. Show all posts
Working from home gets a bad rap. Google the phrase and examine the results — you’ll see scams or low-level jobs, followed by links calling out “legitimate” virtual jobs.
But Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Nicholas Bloom says requiring employees to be in the office is an outdated work tradition, set up during the Industrial Revolution. Such inflexibility ignores today’s sophisticated communications methods and long commutes, and actually hurts firms and employees.
“Working from home is a future-looking technology,” Bloom told an audience during TEDxStanford, which took place in April. “I think it has enormous potential.”
To test his claim, Bloom, with co-researchers James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying, studied China’s largest travel agency, Ctrip. Headquartered in Shanghai, the company has 20,000 employees and a market capitalization of about $20 billion.
The company’s leaders — conscious of how expensive real estate is in Shanghai — were interested in the impact of working from home. Could they continue to grow while avoiding exorbitant office space costs? They solicited worker volunteers for a study in which half worked from home for nine months, coming into the office one day a week, and half worked only from the office.
Bloom tracked these two groups for about two years. The results? “We found massive, massive improvement in performance — a 13% improvement in performance from people working at home,” Bloom says.
Two reasons led to that uptick: First, people working from home actually work their full shift. In the office, people might be delayed by traffic, take a long lunch with a colleague, or leave work early to let a repair person in. They are less likely to be on the clock for the full workday.
Second, Bloom says, people at home are able to concentrate better. “The office is actually an amazingly noisy environment. There’s a cake in the break room; Bob’s leaving, come join. The World Cup sweepstakes is going. Whatever it is, the office is super-distracting.”
Also, his study found that resignations at the company dropped by 50% when employees were allowed to work from home. “Not only do the employees benefit (by working from home), but the managers benefit because they can spend less of their time painfully advertising, recruiting, training, and promoting.”
Bloom says the experiment led Ctrip to roll out a work-from-home option to all its employees. The company reported that it made about $2,000 more profit per person at home, Bloom says.
Bloom hopes this example helps kill the negative stereotypes of working from home. “For employees, they’re much more productive and happier. For managers, you don’t have to spend so much time recruiting and training people. For firms, you make far more profit. For society, there’s a huge saving of reducing congestion, driving times and, ultimately, pollution.
“There’s not much to lose, and there’s a lot to gain,” he says.
Zen Buddhist priest urges Stanford graduates to cultivate spiritual practices
Baccalaureate speaker Zoketsu Norman Fischer told graduates that their promising lives would be filled with challenges, but love and a regular spiritual practice that has no agenda would bolster them for the journey ahead.
Video by Kurt Hickman
Baccalaureate, a multifaith celebration during Commencement weekend, featured spiritual songs and readings from a variety of traditions.
Addressing the Class of 2014, Zoketsu Norman Fischer, a Zen Buddhist priest and poet, urged Stanford graduates to cultivate regular spiritual practices to survive the difficult human journey of life with their "hearts intact" and their "love generous and bright."
Fischer, who spoke Saturday morning in the Main Quad at Baccalaureate, a multifaith celebration for graduating students and their families and friends, titled his address, "How to Survive Your Promising Life."
Fischer, the founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation, said the defining characteristic of a spiritual practice is that it must be "useless, absolutely useless."
"You've been doing lots of good things for lots of good reasons for a long time now," he said, "for your physical health, your psychological health, your emotional health, for your family life, for your future success, for your economic life, for your community, for your world. But a spiritual practice is useless. It doesn't address any of those concerns. It's a practice that we do to touch our lives beyond all concerns – to reach beyond our lives to their source."
Fischer, a former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, the oldest and largest Buddhist institution in the West, said his practice for many years has been simply to sit in silence.
He said spiritual practices come from love, encourage love and produce more love. They require imagination and are unlimited in their variety.
"Whether or not you believe in God, you could pray," he said. "You can contemplate spiritual texts or art, poetry, sacred music. You could just walk quietly on the Earth as a spiritual practice. You could gaze at the landscape or the sea or the sky. A little tip: If you're ever in trouble, look up at the sky for a few minutes and you'll feel better."
Among the other spiritual practices Fischer offered was compassion – going toward, rather than turning away from, the suffering of others and your own suffering.
"Can you become softened and brought to wisdom by the unavoidable pain of yourself or others?" he asked.
Or you could practice gratitude, he said. He recommended that the first thing graduates do each morning is "train yourself to close your eyes, just be quiet for a moment, and say softly to yourself the word 'grateful,' and see what comes into your mind."
Fisher urged the graduates to think seriously about creating spiritual practices, but not without a certain amount of joy and lightness.
"Today you are hurtling out of heaven," he said. "Where in the world will you land? When you get there, what in the world are you going to do? What is really worthwhile and what is just a distraction – no matter how much people tell you it's not? This is not a simple thing. You're going to have to figure these things out. Nobody but you can do that."
The Baccalaureate celebration opened with a solemn Buddhist call to prayer performed on a singing bowl and ended with a dramatic drumming blessing, Tatsumaki (Whirlwind), performed by Stanford Taiko.
In between there was an invocation, "A Prayer of the Ojibway Nation"; a benediction; and two readings: "I Have Learned So Much," by Hafiz of Shiraz, and a Zen-inspired translation of Psalm 124 by Fischer.
Stanford Talisman, a student a cappella group, performed two songs, "Wanting Memories," a song of the African diaspora, and "One by One," a Xhosa song that was inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement.
Student reflection
Senior Konstantine Buhler, who offered the student reflection, began his address by singing a chant: May their memory be eternal.
Buhler, who majored in management science and engineering and minored in art history and computer science, said those are the words of grief and loss of a loved one in the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church.
"When these words are sung in my church, they bring my grandmother to tears," he said. "They make my mother feel pain and my father cringe. These words bring a vein to my uncle's forehead and a frown to my sister's beautiful face. They burn. But as the chant concludes, they soothe and elevate us."
Buhler said that in his religion, when someone "falls asleep into eternity," or dies, "it is the honor of those still living to carry on his or her memory, to ensure that his or her memory is eternal."
He asked the graduates to meditate with him, or pray, around three memories.
First, Buhler asked them to open their hearts and remember a loved one who was not present at Baccalaureate.
"Yes, there are only 4,000 seats in the Quad, but physical constraints do not apply to heaven or jannah or olam ha-ba," he said. "Take a moment and remember these people. Close your eyes and picture them sitting next to you. See that loved one smile. She's so happy. He's so proud. May their memory be eternal."
Buhler also asked the graduates to remember Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid fever when he was only 15 years old, and to remember Jane and Leland Stanford, who built the university in memory of their only child.
Finally, he asked the graduates to shut their eyes once more and remember their time at Stanford, a chapter of their lives that was closing all too quickly.
"Yes, countless hours in the library," he said. "And yes, lots of struggle. But now, let us select what we will bring with us to eternal memory. Let us bring the love and the kindness and the peace that we have experienced on this 'gloriously paradisaical' campus. Let us leave behind any pain. Let us bring the warmth of our friends' embraces and, of course, of the California sun. Let us hold onto the knowledge that we fought for and the friendships that we built. And of course, look around you; let us bring the jubilant memories of the loved ones who surround us today in pride and joy and love. May these memories be eternal."
Commencement speakers Bill and Melinda Gates briefly donned 'nerd glasses' and Melinda told the Class of 2014: 'Some people call you nerds - and you claim the label with pride.' Added Bill: 'Well, so do we.' (Photo: L. A. Cicero)
Stanford Report, June 15, 2014
Bill and Melinda Gates tell Stanford grads: Channel empathy with optimism
At Stanford's 123rd Commencement, Bill and Melinda Gates, co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, urged graduates to change the world through optimism and empathy. Truly connect with the poor and sick, they advised, and channel those experiences into making the world a better place.
Video by Kurt Hickman
Highlights of Bill and Melinda Gates' Commencement address
At Stanford's 123rd Commencement, Bill and Melinda Gates, co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, challenged Stanford graduates to change the world by channeling empathy with optimism.
Technological innovation is important, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told a sea of Stanford graduates on a breezy Sunday morning in Stanford Stadium. But technology for technology's sake alone creates a dilemma.
"If rich kids got computers and poor kids didn't, then technology would make inequality worse," he said. "Technology should benefit everybody."
The Gateses delivered Stanford's first joint Commencement address. They spoke of the "digital divide" between rich and poor, and their heart-wrenching experiences with the poor and sick in places like South Africa and India.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the world's most influential philanthropic organizations involved in reducing poverty, boosting global health and improving the U.S. educational system.
"My visit to Soweto [South Africa] became an early lesson in how naïve I was. I had seen statistics on poverty, but I had never really seen poverty," Bill Gates said. In Soweto, he witnessed people living in tin shacks with no electricity, no running water and no toilets.
He realized that innovation alone could not solve the world's toughest problems. Empathy and compassion for the poor, sick and needy was just as important. So the couple began funding programs that make a difference – such as one that improved the survival rate of a deadly form of tuberculosis from 50 percent to 80 percent.
Over the last 10 years, Melinda Gates added, the foundation has helped sex workers build support groups, speak out for safe sex and fight the scourge of AIDS. "The stigma of AIDS is vicious – especially for women – and the punishment is abandonment," she said.
Her husband told the students not to turn away from the poor and sick.
"Even in dire situations, optimism can fuel innovation and lead to new tools to eliminate suffering. But if you never really see the people who are suffering, your optimism can't help them. You will never change their world," he said.
The 2014 Commencement ceremony began with Stanford's nontraditional procession called the Wacky Walk. To kick off the festivities, students entered the stadium wearing costumes, holding banners and balloons and waving signs, both goofy and sentimental.
Stanford granted 1,687 bachelor's degrees, 2,313 master's degrees and 1,006 doctoral degrees. The graduates include 135 undergraduate students from 51 countries outside the United States and 1,113 graduate students from 83 countries other than the United States.
"The modern world is an incredible source of innovation and Stanford stands at the center of that, creating new companies, new schools of thought, prize-winning professors, inspired art and literature, miracle drugs and amazing graduates," said Bill Gates.
Melinda Gates added, "Some people call you nerds – and you claim the label with pride."
"Well, so do we," the couple declared, as they momentarily donned stereotypical "nerd" glasses held together with tape.
About Stanford, Bill Gates said, "This is where genius lives. There is a flexibility of mind here – an openness to change, an eagerness for what's new. This is where people come to discover the future and have fun doing it."
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has 30 research projects underway at Stanford on a variety of topics, from studying how to cure the worst diseases to helping more low-income students go to college.
Bill Gates noted that empathy "tears down barriers and opens up new frontiers for optimism."
As for Stanford's newly minted graduates, he told them that they, too, will encounter serious human suffering one day.
"When it happens, and it will, don't turn away from it; turn toward it," he said.
Parents, students filled with pride
"The faculty were amazing," said Jack Detzner from Silver Springs, Maryland. His son, Adam Stob Detzner, graduated with honors and a bachelor's degree in music. "This was truly a chance for him to grow," said his dad.
Frederica Ferrell's son, Paul Ferrell, graduated with a master's degree in public policy. "This was a great education for him," his mom said.
Paul Ferrell added, "The professors are incredible and world class. I just want to thank everyone who helped get me here today."
Samuel Bakouch earned a master's degree in management science and engineering. He was motivated by the Stanford environment, he said: "The people here, the spirit here – everybody's really open. It's exciting today."
Stanford President John L. Hennessy and Provost John Etchemendy spoke to the crowd and conferred the degrees to the students.
"As you leave Stanford, I hope you carry a deep appreciation of the values and traditions that are everlasting as well as a willingness to be bold and to approach challenges with a fresh perspective," said Hennessy.
He noted that Stanford's first president, David Starr Jordan, spoke of the balancing of the old and the new in the Stanford educational approach and building a "school which may last as long as human civilization."
Hennessy added, "Today, 123 years later, we have established some traditions, but we have not forgotten President Jordan's exhortation."
Hennessy also paid tribute to Herbert Hoover, a Stanford alumnus and the 31st president of the United States. He led the cause of Belgian food relief in World War I and spearheaded a similar hunger effort in Germany after WWII.
"A compassionate man, he never sought recognition for his many acts of generosity," said Hennessy.
Two Stanford professors discuss their new book, Scaling Up Excellence, which reveals how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right growth mindset in their organization.
Eight years ago, over dinner and a bottle of wine,Hayagreeva (Huggy) Rao and Robert Sutton realized they needed better answers for the students of a Stanford management education program, Customer-Focused Innovation, they were running. The business executives appreciated what the pair had to say about reducing bureaucracy in an organization and enabling creativity, but invariably asked, “How do we scale this?”
So, the longtime collaborators set out to find the answer. For more than seven years, they interviewed business leaders, reviewed research, and studied and conducted case studies about the mindset and strategies companies can use to spread excellence within an organization. The result is their book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, which will be published in February.
We recently sat down with the pair to discuss key ideas from the book. Excerpts:
You begin your book by saying that companies that want to spread excellence have the “problem of more.” What exactly do you mean by that?
Rao: To put it simply, the problem of “more” is that organizations have pockets of goodness, and what you want is more of the goodness. At the same time that you’re adding good — by adding pockets or expanding them — you want to make sure you get rid of the bad. So, the problem of “more” is the problem — the challenge — of proliferating goodness.
Sutton: And the word “problem” is important because when things get bigger or you spread them farther, not everything that happens is good. There's this notion of growth and progress in America, that everything gets better as it gets bigger. But it’s a messy process. There will be things that annoy you. And the more you want to scale, probably, the more you have to suffer personally, which is not something I think leaders want to hear.
So how do leaders actually get through that?
Rao: You can have the illusion of drawing up nice little organizational charts and figuring out what growth looks like, but they’re all things on paper. In reality you need both story and structure. What I mean by story is lofty, inspirational messaging about excellence. But you also need the structure — the plumbing, if you will — the unglamorous parts of scaling. If you don’t have both of those, you’re never going to get anywhere.
Sutton: There’s always this challenge, as you get bigger, about structure. If people are telling the same story, you can have less bureaucracy, less micromanagement. But you do need some authority. And people like Twitter’s Chris Fry and Steve Greene, who grew Salesforce from 40 to 600 people, and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz — all of them make this argument that you should have a little less structure than you think you need. Then, wait for things to break a little bit as a sign that you should add just a little bit more. Greene called this light structure “running a little bit hot.” If you’re a little bit too heavy, it feels like you’re walking in muck. And, if you’re way too light, things fall apart. So, the ideal condition for scaling is that little things should be breaking all the time, but not the big things.
You make the point that if you’re adding new processes or people, naturally you will need to find ways to subtract — or stop doing — other things. How do you do that?
Rao: That’s what we refer to as “cognitive load.” If the load is too great, there’s a coordination circus. If I’ve got to run an idea by a bunch of people in order to do some single thing, I’m going to give up because it’s too much effort. When Bob and I teach executives, sometimes we say, “Hey, how about having a rule that says ‘If you want to have a meeting, kill an existing meeting.’” Now, that sounds quite obvious, but they say, “Really?” They haven’t even questioned the idea that meetings are to be added, that calendars are to be monopolized. It’s no wonder in a large company you feel like a victim.
Sutton: Now, that’s not true of all companies. Take Apple and Wal-Mart — those are two companies where they have a culture of small teams, so they have fewer meetings and people actually are doing the work most of the time. A lot of this depends on leadership and focus. The question is: “Where is your focus?”
Is there any common thread among organizations that are successful at spreading excellence?
Rao: They tend to “connect and cascade,” as we call it. You connect people so that you cascade the right behaviors throughout the organization. The real problem of scaling excellence is ignorance. What is an excellent organization? One that doesn't repeat the same mistakes. And when do you repeat mistakes? When the connections inside organizations are weak or atrophied. If people aren't connecting, your ignorance multiplies.
Sutton: And I think the important part for senior leaders is to find a way that people can share information in reasonably efficient ways. We talk about many ways in the book, but I really like the example of Salesforce under Steve Greene and Chris Fry — they had a policy where engineers were free to change jobs within the company. So, every four months they’d have an internal job fair, like a bazaar with booths, where people would walk around and learn about what other teams were working on. The policy had many advantages, but one was a higher collective understanding of how the piece of code they’re working on fit into the overall whole.
What’s are the implications of the size of your organization on a scaling effort — going from, say, two to 20 people versus 2,000 to 10,000?
Rao: Going from two to 20, you're probably all still sitting in the same room. It’s just a bigger room.
Sutton: Then there’s a next level, 150 to 200, where you can no longer recognize all the names and faces, and up from there. The thing that companies that were successful at scaling all have in common — regardless of size — is that they were thinking of scaling as spreading a mindset, not a footprint. One person who demonstrates this well is John Lilly, the former CEO of Mozilla, who grew the company from 12 to about 500 people. John told us, “When we were 40 or 50 people, I was always changing my mind, but as the company got bigger I had to stifle myself.” He had to be sure he said the same thing over and over so that people wouldn’t get conflicting messages. This is true all the way up to truly huge companies. As Huggy says, if you've all got the same poetry in your head — these mantras like “The Customer is Boss” — they actually drive a bunch of decisions. It lets everybody be on the same page and know where they’re heading.
Rao: The other thing I want to add is when you become larger, what’s unsaid also increases in an organization. The phrase we like to use is: “Smart people inside large organizations become dumb.” They become mute. And so the real problem for a large company is to figure out what’s not being said. Because if you only make decisions on the basis of what's being said, you can go off track pretty quickly.
So how do you build the right mix of people for positive growth?
Rao: This is a big, big thing. Scaling doesn’t just require stars. It requires Sherpas as well — the people who get you to the summit each day. Now, in order to make sure that the Sherpas are taken care of, you should hire managers who are prone to feeling guilty. This idea is based on actual research done by a PhD student and Frank Flynn, a colleague here at Stanford.
I think about the U.S. army general in the Korean War that we talk about in the book, Matthew Ridgway. He says, “The hard decisions are not the ones you make in the heat of battle.” A lot of people can do that. The hard part is actually sitting in a meeting and speaking your mind about a bad idea that’s going to put thousands of lives in jeopardy — and convincing the decision makers that it’s a stupid idea. The kinds of people who are going to do that are people who put the interests of others above their own.
Sutton: It’s interesting, the people who are really good at getting things done, they’re not just optimists. In fact, research shows they have high positive and high negative affect, which means they’re really optimistic and confident things will turn out in the end, but they’re really, really worried about every little detail and how it’s going to screw things up.
The two things I would add are that you should make sure to have as many women as possible, because the more men you have in a group, the dumber it gets, controlling for their IQ. There’s actually very good evidence of that. And, that you want people with a sense of accountability, who feel like “I own the place, and the place owns me.” They will push themselves and each other, feel obligated to teach and to learn.
You mention that some mistakes are part of any scaling effort. But what are the kinds of mistakes that can cause failure?
Sutton: When we looked at cases where scaling failed, they seemed to have the trifecta of illusion, incompetence, and impatience; this idea of “We’re going to do it all at once, we don’t have time to slow down and do it right. But we’re so great, we can do it.” You can see it, for example, in what the Obama administration did with their healthcare rollout. Apparently, the guy in charge was some career bureaucrat who didn’t really understand how to do it but was a good politician, so he was competent at the wrong thing. But that creates a scenario where you’re turning other people incompetent.
So, how do you start a successful scaling effort?
Rao: One thing to keep in mind is that scaling doesn't mean “Waiting for Godot” — you know, wait for the new boss, wait for a new opportunity, wait for new technology. In reality, you better do something. One good way to develop a plan is to do a pre-mortem: Take a team of people, and get half of them to imagine the plan has been put in motion and failed terribly. Then write a story of why that happened. And get the other half to imagine that it succeeded, and write a story of how that happened. The advantage of this is you get more of the unsaid said. You can actually make sure those small details that bite you don’t get in the way. Often, scaling doesn't work because the mistakes you make early on aren’t caught until it's too late.
Sutton: We talked to a top executive who turned around the largest company in Australia, who had the top 100 or so folks write him a 2-page memo about what they should do to turn around the organization. And he said, “I just talked to each person for an hour, and took the best ideas.” That said, we also found a single person who wanted to spread an idea, and so began by redecorating her cubicle and starting small, informal training sessions for colleagues. The bottom line is: In every case of successful scaling, you start where you are with what you have.
Stanford scholars explore how the path you take affects your career prospects.
It’s one of the first questions John-Paul Ferguson hears from the first year students in the strategy course he teaches each year at Stanford Graduate School of Business: Is it better to have a career as a specialist, or take the path less traveled and develop a broad skill set from a range of experiences and areas?
Ferguson and his colleague, Sharique Hasan, had their assumptions as to the answer, and it was easy to romanticize one notion over another. But the truth is, “It’s a very hard thing to know,” Ferguson says. “For most folks, we can’t tell.” There are far too many variables.
Then the professors got excited. If they looked at the officers in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) — the bureaucratic service of the government of India and one of the most prestigious careers in the country — there was a natural data set to study. Here were talented individuals chosen for a coveted sector. And once inside, they moved positions, without their control. That was the key: These more than 4,000 individuals selected for the IAS from 1974-2008 didn’t get to pick how generalized or specialized they were in the career paths to the coveted and highly selective positions within the system.
“The IAS can be thought of a system that sifts through the population to identify individuals with comparable high ability, assigns those individuals careers that vary in the diversity of the constituent experiences, and evaluates those individuals for a common set of rewards,” the authors write in their recent report for Administrative Science Quarterly.
Ferguson and Hasan not only were interested in the question of specialization versus broad experience, but also they were interested in whether its importance varied at different stages of the officers’ careers. What they found was that specialization helps at all stages.
Early in the officers’ careers, the authors conclude, specialization signals general ability. Specialized officers get promoted more, but not necessarily to do jobs in their specialization. Later, those who have specialized are rewarded for the skills they have acquired. To some extent, specialization produced a self-fulfilling prophecy, “wherein people who specialize acquire skills and thus have incentives to continue specializing.”
Ferguson mentions that, if a person moves around from career to career, “you can’t tell if they’re good at everything or bad at everything. For most people, it makes sense to specialize.” A diverse work history, the study concludes, hurts one’s chances of promotion.
That said, Ferguson also wants to emphasize that one of the benefits of a student’s period in business school is the chance to experiment with different career options. “That’s the time when it doesn’t hurt them,” he says. “This is the chance they have to get a little bit of experience. You want to sample as many different kinds while you’re in business school.
Given these findings, Ferg
uson and Hasan are now interested in taking the next step in their research. Whereas the IAS enabled them to explore a pool of employees changing jobs under one employer, the authors would next like to examine this question of specialization among candidates who change both jobs and employers.
'Love hormone' may play wider role in social interaction than previously thought, scientists say
BY BRUCE GOLDMAN
Robert Malenka and Gul Dolen found that the hormne known as oxytocin plays a stronger role in social bonding than previously thought. Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that oxytocin — often referred to as "the love hormone" because of its importance in the formation and maintenance of strong mother-child and sexual attachments — is involved in a broader range of social interactions than previously understood. The discovery may have implications for neurological disorders such as autism, as well as for scientific conceptions of our evolutionary heritage. Scientists estimate that the advent of social living preceded the emergence of pair living by 35 million years. The new study suggests that oxytocin's role in one-on-one bonding probably evolved from an existing, broader affinity for group living. Oxytocin is the focus of intense scrutiny for its apparent roles in establishing trust between people, and has been administered to children with autism spectrum disorders in clinical trials. The new study, published Sept. 12 in Nature, pinpoints a unique way in which oxytocin alters activity in a part of the brain that is crucial to experiencing the pleasant sensation neuroscientists call "reward." The findings not only provide validity for ongoing trials of oxytocin in autistic patients, but also suggest possible new treatments for neuropsychiatric conditions in which social activity is impaired. "People with autism-spectrum disorders may not experience the normal reward the rest of us all get from being with our friends," said Robert Malenka, MD, PhD, the study's senior author. "For them, social interactions can be downright painful. So we asked, what in the brain makes you enjoy hanging out with your buddies?" Related News » Why the thrill is gone: Scientists identify potential target for treating major symptom of depression » Neuroscience of need Some genetic evidence suggests the awkward social interaction that is a hallmark of autism-spectrum disorders may be at least in part oxytocin-related. Certain variations in the gene that encodes the oxytocin receptor — a cell-surface protein that senses the substance's presence — are associated with increased autism risk. Malenka, the Nancy Friend Pritzker Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has spent the better part of two decades studying the reward system — a network of interconnected brain regions responsible for our sensation of pleasure in response to a variety of activities such as finding or eating food when we're hungry, sleeping when we're tired, having sex or acquiring a mate, or, in a pathological twist, taking addictive drugs. The reward system has evolved to reinforce behaviors that promote our survival, he said. For this study, Malenka and lead author Gül Dölen, MD, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in his group with over 10 years of autism-research expertise, teamed up to untangle the complicated neurophysiological underpinnings of oxytocin's role in social interactions. They focused on biochemical events taking place in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens, known for its centrality to the reward system. In the 1970s, biologists learned that in prairie voles, which mate for life, the nucleus accumbens is replete with oxytocin receptors. Disrupting the binding of oxytocin to these receptors impaired prairie voles' monogamous behavior. In many other species that are not monogamous by nature, such as mountain voles and common mice, the nucleus accumbens appeared to lack those receptors. "From this observation sprang a dogma that pair bonding is a special type of social behavior tied to the presence of oxytocin receptors in the nucleus accumbens. But what's driving the more common group behaviors that all mammals engage in — cooperation, altruism or just playing around — remained mysterious, since these oxytocin receptors were supposedly absent in the nucleus accumbens of most social animals," said Dölen. The new discovery shows that mice do indeed have oxytocin receptors at a key location in the nucleus accumbens and, importantly, that blocking oxytocin's activity there significantly diminishes these animals' appetite for socializing. Dölen, Malenka and their Stanford colleagues also identified, for the first time, the nerve tract that secretes oxytocin in the region, and they pinpointed the effects of oxytocin release on other nerve tracts projecting to this area. Mice can squeak, but they can't talk, Malenka noted. "You can't ask a mouse, 'Hey, did hanging out with your buddies a while ago make you happier?'" So, to explore the social-interaction effects of oxytocin activity in the nucleus accumbens, the investigators used a standard measure called the conditioned place preference test. "It's very simple," Malenka said. "You like to hang out in places where you had fun, and avoid places where you didn't. We give the mice a 'house' made of two rooms separated by a door they can walk through at any time. But first, we let them spend 24 hours in one room with their littermates, followed by 24 hours in the other room all by themselves. On the third day we put the two rooms together to make the house, give them complete freedom to go back and forth through the door and log the amount of time they spend in each room." Mice normally prefer to spend time in the room that reminds them of the good times they enjoyed in the company of their buddies. But that preference vanished when oxytocin activity in their nucleus accumbens was blocked. Interestingly, only social activity appeared to be affected. There was no difference, for example, in the mice's general propensity to move around. And when the researchers trained the mice to prefer one room over the other by giving them cocaine (which mice love) only when they went into one room, blocking oxytocin activity didn't stop the mice from picking the cocaine den. In an extensive series of sophisticated, highly technical experiments, Dölen, Malenka and their teammates located the oxytocin receptors in the murine nucleus accumbens. These receptors lie not on nucleus accumbens nerve cells that carry signals forward to numerous other reward-system nodes but, instead, at the tips of nerve cells forming a tract from a brain region called the dorsal Raphe, which projects to the nucleus accumbens. The dorsal Raphe secretes another important substance, serotonin, triggering changes in nucleus accumbens activity. In fact, popular antidepressants such as Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft belong to a class of drugs called serotonin-reuptake inhibitors that increase available amounts of serotonin in brain regions, including the nucleus accumbens. As the Stanford team found, oxytocin acting at the nucleus accumbens wasn't simply squirted into general circulation, as hormones typically are, but was secreted at this spot by another nerve tract originating in the hypothalamus, a multifunction midbrain structure. Oxytocin released by this tract binds to receptors on the dorsal Raphe projections to the nucleus accumbens, in turn liberating serotonin in this key node of the brain's reward circuitry. The serotonin causes changes in the activity of yet other nerve tracts terminating at the nucleus accumbens, ultimately resulting in altered nucleus accumbens activity — and a happy feeling. "There are at least 14 different subtypes of serotonin receptor," said Dölen. "We've identified one in particular as being important for social reward. Drugs that selectively act on this receptor aren't clinically available yet, but our study may encourage researchers to start looking at drugs that target it for the treatment of diseases such as autism, where social interactions are impaired." Malenka and Dölen said they think their findings in mice are highly likely to generalize to humans because the brain's reward circuitry has been so carefully conserved over the course of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This extensive cross-species similarity probably stems from pleasure's absolutely essential role in reinforcing behavior likely to boost an individual's chance of survival and procreation. The study was funded by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative and the Walter and Idun Berry Foundation. Additional Stanford co-authors were technician Ayeh Darvishzadeh and former undergraduate Kee Wui Huang, now a neuroscience graduate student at Harvard University. View at the original source
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