The secret life of emotions.

Another demonstration that we can be nudged by unconscious emotional stimuli - that both global and specific emotional responses can be induced without awareness. From the discussion of an article with the title of this post from Ruys and Stapel, whose results show:

...that specific emotions can be elicited without conscious awareness of their cause...disgusting pictures (presented for 120 msec, not perceived) increased cognitive accessibility of disgust words and feelings of disgust. Similarly, fearful pictures increased cognitive accessibility of fear words and feelings of fear. When exposure to the priming stimuli was super-quick (40 msec), global mood, rather than a specific emotion, was evoked. These findings... empirically demonstrate (a) that specific emotions can be evoked without conscious awareness of their cause, (b) that unconscious exposure to emotion-eliciting pictures can evoke the specific corresponding emotion and does not evoke other emotions of similar valence, and (c) that unconscious emotion induction develops from elicitation of global affect to elicitation of specific emotions.

Our Racist, Sexist Selves

Kristof has a great Op-Ed piece int he Sunday NYTimes with the title of this post. You should check out the psychological experiments that you can do online. You may think you are not prejudiced, but these "implicit attitude tests" might show otherwise.

How our brains process inequity in rewards.

This work suggests that the calculation of social standing - as indexed by payment - may be an unconscious and automatic process in the brain. The previous post on monkeys judging inequity in rewards suggests an evolutionary origin in earlier primate behavior. Here we have a very similar experiment done on humans, with fMRI data that we can't get from the monkeys. The results provide neurophysiological evidence for the importance of social comparison on reward processing in the human brain. Several studies show that most of us place as much value on relative remuneration, comparing ourselves with others, as on its absolute level. In the current work, when subjects were given different compensation for solving the same puzzle, this was reflected by different activation levels in the ventral striatum, a brain region known to be involved in the comparison of predicted and actually received rewards (i.e., reward prediction error). Here is the abstract from Fliessbach et al., followed by a figure from the paper:

Whether social comparison affects individual well-being is of central importance for understanding behavior in any social environment. Traditional economic theories focus on the role of absolute rewards, whereas behavioral evidence suggests that social comparisons influence well-being and decisions. We investigated the impact of social comparisons on reward-related brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). While being scanned in two adjacent MRI scanners, pairs of subjects had to simultaneously perform a simple estimation task that entailed monetary rewards for correct answers. We show that a variation in the comparison subject's payment affects blood oxygenation level–dependent responses in the ventral striatum. Our results provide neurophysiological evidence for the importance of social comparison on reward processing in the human brain.

Figure - Glassbrain projection of brain regions showing stronger BOLD responses in conditions in which a subject received a reward while the other did not compared with conditions in which a subject did not receive a reward at all.

This is Your Brain on Politics

Marco Iacoboni, whose work I have mentioned before, has together with several collaborators performed brain imaging experiments on 20 swing voters who indicate willingness to vote for a candidate from either party in the Nov. 2008 presidential elections. They summarize their findings in an Op-Ed piece in the Nov. 11 New York Times. There is a slide show you might like to watch. While insiders in the imaging business go apoplectic over simplistic interpretations of averaged data taken from a small number of subjects using ambiguous protocols with dubious controls, some correlations do emerge that "make sense." (See these comments on the article as 'junk science'.) For example: anterior cingulate (conflict resolution) associates with Hillary Clinton; or amygdala (anxiety) and insula (disgust) correlates with viewing the words "Democrat" or "Republican" but not "independent". One bit I found interesting: "Barack Obama and John McCain have work to do. The scans taken while subjects viewed the first set of photos and the videos of Mr. McCain and Mr. Obama indicated a notable lack of any powerful reactions, positive or negative."

Slide 2
Photos of Hillary Clinton elicited increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain that processes conflicting impulses, in swing voters who reported having an unfavorable opinion of her.

Silent Minds

I want to point you to an excellent article by Jerome Groopman, with the title of this post, that appeared in a recent New Yorker Magazine. It describes recent work showing that brain imaging of some vegetative patients reveals responses to faces, and other visual and auditory inputs, that are indistinguishable from those of normal subjects (note: there are approximately 35,000 Americans in a vegetative state and another 280,000 in a minimally conscious state). Responses during various mental tasks, such as resolving ambiguous sentences or imagining playing a tennis game, can also be normal. This shows that an assumption held by doctors for decades - that vegetative patients lack capacity for conscious thought - is incorrect. Other vegetative patients (such as Terri Schiavo), in contrast, can show almost no cortical activity.

This all suggests a better medical definition of consciousness is required - such as the ability to report to ourselves or others the content of the representations in our brains, to sustain these representations over time and broadcast them broadly within the brain.

Conscious awareness not required for planning and execution of actions

Damage to parts of the visual cortex can cause blindsight or agnosia, in which conscious awareness of an object is absent but subject can still make accurate judgements about it. Binsted et al al offer an interesting demonstration that this phenomenon is is part of the normal functioning of the visual system. They used the masking paradigm shown in the figure below to abolish conscious perception of an object, and found that subjects could point to that object as easily as to one that was perceived. Here is their abstract, followed by the central figure.

After lesions to primary visual cortex, patients lack conscious awareness of visual stimuli. Interestingly, however, some retain the ability to make accurate judgments about the visual world (i.e., so-called blindsight). Similarly, damage to inferior occipitotemporal regions of cortex (e.g., lateral occipital cortex) can result in an inability to perceive object properties while retaining the ability to act on them (i.e., visual form agnosia). In the present work, we demonstrate that the ability to interact with objects in the absence of conscious awareness is not isolated to those with restricted neuropathologic conditions. Specifically, neurologically intact individuals are able to program and execute goal-directed reaching movements to a target object without awareness of extrinsic target properties; they accurately tune the dynamics of their movement and modulate it online without conscious access to features of the goal object. Thus, the planning and execution of actions are not dependent on conscious awareness of the environment, suggesting that the phenomenon of blindsight (and agnosia) reflect normal conditions of the visual system.

Fig. 1. Display sequence for experiment. Participants initially observed a fixation cross and home position. After a variable foreperiod (1–3 s), an array of circles appeared; one circle was identified as the target by 4 red cue circles. In all cases the participant was asked to point to the middle of the target as quickly and accurately as possible. (a) Unconscious condition. The red cue circles remained present after removal of the array. This results in object substitution masking (4, 14), where participants have no conscious access to target properties (e.g., size). (b) Conscious condition. The red cue circles were removed concurrently with the array. In this condition, participants could consciously report the target properties.

Who's Minding the Mind?

There is a great article with the title of this post by Benedict Carey in the July 31 NYTimes Science section (PDF here). It deals with a topics touched on by many posts in this blog: how our unconscious mind nudges our actions and decisions. The process is usually refered to as "priming." Here are a few clips from the article:

...study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup....That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.

...people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.

The article mentions a study cited in a previous post here:

... a team of English and French neuroscientists performed brain imaging on 18 men and women who were playing a computer game for money. The players held a handgrip and were told that the tighter they squeezed when an image of money flashed on the screen, the more of the loot they could keep...As expected, the players squeezed harder when the image of a British pound flashed by than when the image of a penny did — regardless of whether they consciously perceived the pictures, many of which flew by subliminally. But the circuits activated in their brains were similar as well: an area called the ventral pallidum was particularly active whenever the participants responded...This area is located in what used to be called the reptilian brain, well below the conscious areas of the brain...The results suggest a “bottom-up” decision-making process, in which the ventral pallidum is part of a circuit that first weighs the reward and decides, then interacts with the higher-level, conscious regions later, if at all.

Scientists have spent years trying to pinpoint the exact neural regions that support conscious awareness, so far in vain. But there’s little doubt it involves the prefrontal cortex, the thin outer layer of brain tissue behind the forehead, and experiments like this one show that it can be one of the last neural areas to know when a decision is made...This bottom-up order makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. The subcortical areas of the brain evolved first and would have had to help individuals fight, flee and scavenge well before conscious, distinctly human layers were added later in evolutionary history. In this sense, unconscious goals can be seen as open-ended, adaptive agents acting on behalf of the broad, genetically encoded aims — automatic survival systems.

...the new research on priming makes it clear that we are not alone in our own consciousness. We have company, an invisible partner who has strong reactions about the world that don’t always agree with our own, but whose instincts, these studies clearly show, are at least as likely to be helpful, and attentive to others, as they are to be disruptive.

Our prefrontal control system is altered by unconscious stimuli.

Lau et al. (PDF here) used fMRI to test

..whether unconscious information can influence the cognitive control system in the human prefrontal cortex. Volunteers had to prepare to perform either a phonological judgment (whether the word is bisyllabic) or a semantic judgment (whether the word refers to concrete objects) on an upcoming word, based on the instruction given at the beginning of each trial. However, in some trials they were visually primed to prepare for the alternative (i.e., "wrong") task, and this impaired their performance. This priming effect is taken to depend on unconscious processes because the effect was present even when the volunteers could only discriminate the identity of the primes at chance level. Furthermore, the effect was stronger when the visibility of the prime was near zero than when the visibility of the prime was significantly higher. When volunteers were unconsciously primed to perform the alternative task, there was also decreased neural activity in the brain areas relevant to the instructed task and increased neural activity in the brain areas relevant to the alternative task, which shows that the volunteers were actually engaged in the wrong task, instead of simply being distracted. Activity in the mid-dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was also found to be associated with this unconscious priming effect. These results suggest that the cognitive control system in the prefrontal cortex is not exclusively driven by conscious information, as has been believed previously.

Neural activity associated with priming. (Click to enlarge). Data were extracted from the brain areas that were previously found to be associated with the Phonological task (left ventral premotor area) and the Semantic task (left inferior frontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus). The location of these is schematically illustrated on the brain above. Here, task relevant means activity from the Semantic areas when the volunteers were instructed to perform the Semantic task, and activity from the Phonological areas when they were instructed to perform the Phonological task. Task irrelevant means the activity was extracted from the alternative areas, which was more important for the primed task than the instructed task. When the visibility of the primes was low (LoVis), which means the priming effect was strongest, activity in task-relevant areas was significantly reduced (p = 0.019), and activity in task-irrelevant areas was significantly increased (p = 0.045). This suggests that the volunteers were actually engaged in exercising the wrong neural circuits when they were primed to perform the wrong task. This effect is not present when the visibility of the primes was high (HiVis), suggesting that this effect could not be attributable to the degree of conscious perception of the prime. This is reflected by a three-way interaction between Task Relevance (i.e., activity in task relevant areas vs activity in task irrelevant areas), Congruency (Con; between prime and instruction), and Visibility (of the prime) (p = 0.040). InCon, Incongruency; n.s., not significant.

Mid-DLPFC and unconscious priming. (Click to enlarge) Lau et al. looked for activity in the brain that was associated with the unconscious priming effect in general, regardless of which task was explicitly cued, by testing for the interaction between Congruency (Con; between prime and instruction) and Visibility (of the prime). This test revealed activity in the mid-DLPFC (right; x = –38). This effect was specific to the Low-Visibility condition, in which volunteers did not consciously perceive the primes. InCon, Incongruency; n.s., not significant; HiVis, high visibility; LoVis, low visibility.

Neuroimaging of Subliminal Motivation

Pessiglione et al. (PDF here) do an interesting experiment in which they flash a picture of either a penny or a pound coin for 17, 50, 100 msec. followed by a masking picture. Subjects can report seeing the last, but not the first two images, so these first two are assumed to be subliminal. To characterize the effects of the monetary stakes, they recorded not only brain activity but also skin conductance and hand-grip force. Skin conductance response (SCR) is linked to autonomic sympathetic arousal and is interpreted as reflecting an affective evaluation of the monetary stake. Online visual feedback of the force exerted was displayed as a fluid level moving up and down within a thermometer depicted on the screen (see figure). Subjects were instructed that the higher the fluid level rose, the more of the monetary stake they would get to keep. At the end of the trial, subjects were given visual feedback of the amount of money that they had accumulated.

The incentive force task. Successive screens displayed in one trial are shown from left to right, with durations in ms. Coin images, either one pound (£1) or one penny (1p), indicate the monetary value attributed to the top of the thermometer image. The fluid level in the thermometer represents the online force exerted on the hand grip. The last screen indicates cumulative total of the money won so far...

The data show that the 50 msec stimulus of a pound coin image, which is not reported as seen, causes an increase in skin conductance and activity in the ventral pallidum that is almost as large as the increase caused by the 100 msec stimulus, which is seen. Both activities are much lower for the one penny stimulus. (Ventral pallidal neurons encode rewarding properties of environmental stimuli, and are thought to play a role in incentive motivation.)

Caudate, putamen, and accumbens are shown in green; external and internal pallidum are shown in blue, with limbic sectors in violet.

Brain imaging can infer your hidden intentions....

As a followup to the 3/14 posting on NeuroLaw, this report from Haynes et al. seems relevant. Here is their abstract, along with a figure from their paper:

When humans are engaged in goal-related processing, activity in prefrontal cortex is increased. However, it has remained unclear whether this prefrontal activity encodes a subject's current intention. Instead, increased levels of activity could reflect preparation of motor responses, holding in mind a set of potential choices, tracking the memory of previous responses, or general processes related to establishing a new task set. Here we study subjects who freely decided which of two tasks to perform and covertly held onto an intention during a variable delay. Only after this delay did they perform the chosen task and indicate which task they had prepared. We demonstrate that during the delay, it is possible to decode from activity in medial and lateral regions of prefrontal cortex which of two tasks the subjects were covertly intending to perform. This suggests that covert goals can be represented by distributed patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex, thereby providing a potential neural substrate for prospective memory. During task execution, most information could be decoded from a more posterior region of prefrontal cortex, suggesting that different brain regions encode goals during task preparation and task execution. Decoding of intentions was most robust from the medial prefrontal cortex, which is consistent with a specific role of this region when subjects reflect on their own mental states.

Left: A spherical searchlight centered on one voxel (vi) was used to define a local neighborhood. For each scanning run, the spatial response pattern in this local spherical cluster was extracted during preparation of either subtraction or addition. We then trained a pattern classifier with a subset of the data to recognize the typical response patterns associated with covert preparation of the two mathematical operations (see Experimental Procedures) and measured the local decoding accuracy. Then, the searchlight was shifted to the next spatial location.

Middle: Highlighted in green are medial brain regions (superimposed on a saggital slice of an anatomical template image) where this local classifier was able to decode significantly above chance which intention the subjects were covertly holding in an independent test data set. Highlighted in red are regions where it was possible to decode the intention during the execution of the task.

The End Of The 'Natural'

This stimulating essay by Andy Clark I pass on in its entirety:

I am optimistic that the human race will continue to find ways of enhancing its own modes of thought, reason, and feeling. As flexible adaptive agents we are wide open to a surprising variety of transformative bodily and mental tricks and ploys, ranging from the use of software, sports regimes and meditational practice, to drug therapies, gene therapies, and direct brain-machine interfaces.

I am optimistic that, stimulated by this explosion of transformative opportunities, we will soon come to regard our selves as constantly negotiable collection of resources, easily able to straddle and criss-cross the boundaries between biology and artifact. In this hybrid vision of our own humanity I see increased potentials not just for repair but for empowerment, expansion, recreation, and growth. For some, this very same hybrid vision may raise specters of coercion, monstering and subjugation. For clearly, not all change is for the better, and hybridization (however naturally it may come to us) is neutral rather than an intrinsic good. But there is cause for (cautious) optimism.

First, there is nothing new about human enhancement. Ever since the dawn of language and self-conscious thought, the human species has been engaged in a unique 'natural experiment' in progressive niche construction. We engineer our own learning environments so as to create artificial developmental cocoons that impact our acquired capacities of thought and reason. Those enhanced minds then design new cognitive niches that train new generations of minds, and so on, in an empowering spiral of co-evolving complexity. The result is that, as Herbert Simon is reputed to have said, 'most human intelligence is artificial intelligence anyway'. New and emerging technologies of human cognitive enhancement are just one more step along this ancient path.

Second, the biological brain is itself populated by a vast number of hidden 'zombie processes' that underpin the skills and capacities upon which successful behavior depends. There are, for example, a plethora of such unconscious processes involved in activities from grasping an object all the way to the flashes of insight that characterize much daily skilful problem-solving. Technology and drug based enhancements add, to that standard mix, still more processes whose basic operating principles are not available for conscious inspection and control. The patient using a brain-computer interface to control a wheelchair will not typically know just how it all works, or be able to reconfigure the interface or software at will. But in this respect too, the new equipment is simply on a par with much of the old.

Finally, empirical science is at last beginning systematically to address the sources and wellsprings of human happiness and human flourishing, and the findings of these studies must themselves be taken as important data points for the design and marketing of (putative) technologies of enhancement.

In sum, I am optimistic that we will soon see the end of those over-used, and mostly ad hoc, appeals to the 'natural'...

Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgment

Cushman, Young, and Hauser. at Harvard, ask...

Is moral judgment accomplished by intuition or conscious reasoning?

They

...investigated three principles that guide moral judgments: (a) Harm caused by action is worse than harm caused by omission, (b) harm intended as the means to a goal is worse than harm foreseen as the side effect of a goal, and (c) harm involving physical contact with the victim is worse than harm involving no physical contact.

They note that

A critical ingredient missing from the current debate is an experimental method that clearly links data on moral judgment with data on moral justification. Without establishing that an individual uses a specific moral principle, it makes little sense to ask whether the content of that principle is directly available to conscious reasoning. Therefore, in the present study, we first identified three moral principles used by subjects in the judgment of moral dilemmas, and then explored the extent to which subjects generated justifications based on these principles....Asking whether these principles are invoked to explain moral judgments, we found that subjects generally appealed to the first and third principles in their justifications, but not to the second.

These experiments support the view:

that moral judgment can be accomplished by multiple systems: Some moral principles are available to conscious reflection—permitting but not guaranteeing a role for conscious reasoning—whereas others are better characterized by an intuitionist model.

Take Marc Hauser's Moral Sense Test

Attentional deficit overcome by fearful body language stimulus

Tamietto et al report in J. Cog. Neurosci. the interesting observation that patients having right parietal lobe damage which makes them inattentive to their left visual field notice fearful body language stimuli in that left visual field much more readily than neutral or happy body language. This demonstrates that despite pathological inattention and parietal damage, emotion and action-related information in fearful body language may be extracted automatically, biasing attentional selection and visual awareness. Apparently a neural network in intact fronto-limbic and visual areas still mediates reorienting of attention and preparation for action upon perceiving fear in others.

Brain-o-vision - Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?

I want to pass on this stimulating Nature review by Daniel Wegner of "Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?", Pockett, Banks, and Gallagher, Eds. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006.

Imagine a gadget, call it "brain-o-vision," for brain scanning that doesn't create pictures of brains at all. That's right, no orbs spattered with colorful "activations" that need to be interpreted by neuroanatomists. Instead, with brain-o-vision, what a brain sees is what you get--an image of what that brain is experiencing. If the person who owns the brain is envisioning lunch, up pops a cheeseburger on the screen. If the person is reading a book, the screen shows the words. For that matter, if the brain owner is feeling pain, perhaps brain-o-vision could reach out and swat the viewer with a rolled-up newspaper. Brain-o-vision could give us access to another person's consciousness (1). Figure Credit: Joe Sutliff


Technologies for brain-o-vision are beginning to seem possible. We are learning how brain activations map onto emotions, memories, and mental processes, and it won't be long before we might translate activations into Google searches for images of what the brain is thinking. There is a specific brain area linked with face perception (2), for instance, and even a neuron that fires when it sees Jennifer Aniston (3). So why, in principle, shouldn't we be able to scan a brain and discover when it is looking at her--and eventually even learn what she's wearing? Of course, it may be many years to the beta version. But imagine that everything works out and brain-o-vision goes on sale at Wal-Mart. Could the device solve the problem of whether consciousness causes behavior?

With direct evidence of a person's consciousness, we could do science on the question. We could observe regularities in the relation between consciousness (say, a thought of sipping coffee) and behavior (the actual drink). If the consciousness always preceded the behavior (and never occurred without being followed by the behavior), we could arrive at the inductive inference of causation and, as scientists, be quite happy that we had established a causal connection. In fact, this is the project about which several of the contributors to Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? (Marc Jeannerod, Richard Passingham and Hakwan Lau, Suparna Choudhury and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore) give masterful reports (using measures of consciousness other than brain-o-vision). So what's the problem? Why is the issue so vexing that this book and many others have taken up the question? Certainly, one snag is that we don't yet have brain-o-vision. But that's not the full story. There is a key sidetrack on the way to establishing this causal inference that has left philosophers and scientists in a muddle for years.

The problem is that we each have our own personal brain-o-vision shimmering and blaring in our heads all day long. We have our own consciousness, and we find its images mesmerizing. The picture that our minds produce shows what looks exactly like a causal relationship: I thought of drinking the coffee and then I did it. This apparent relationship anchors our intuition about the conscious causation of behavior so deeply that it is difficult to understand that this causal inference is something that ought to be a scientific matter, not an intuitive one. We can't turn off the inner television and try to figure out what really happened. Each of the volume's contributors struggles to find some rapprochement between the personal experience of conscious causation and the possibility that consciousness might not cause behavior--leaving the experience an illusion.

An occasional undercurrent in the volume is the idea that exceptions to the standard inner experience of conscious causation should be discarded as uninformative. For example, Libet's classic finding (4) that brain activation precedes the reported conscious experience of willing action is often cited as evidence that consciousness is not the initial cause of behavior, and that it instead occurs in a chain of events initiated by brain events. Several contributors examine this finding in creative ways--but, curiously, others belittle the finding as a laboratory-bound oddity. The dismissal of exceptional cases extends to some chapters that question the value of examining any unusual lapses of conscious causation--such as those in hypnosis, facilitated communication, schizophrenia, or psychogenic movement disorders or in automatisms such as dowsing and table-turning. These anomalous cases sometimes reveal that the experience of conscious causation can diverge from the actual causal circumstances surrounding behavior. We need to understand such cases to establish when it is that consciousness thinks it is causing behavior. Exploring a phenomenon by studying its boundaries is a standard operating procedure of science, and it is curious that some students of mind would wish such informative exceptions swept under the rug.

Research into conscious causation is complicated by the fact that the scientists and philosophers studying the problem are people. Our own personal brain-o-vision leads us to idealize apparent conscious causation and disparage exceptions. We may not be able to turn off our own consciousness and consider the question dispassionately, but it probably would help.

References and Notes

1. Thanks to D. Dennett for this idea.
2. N. Kanwisher, J. McDermott, M. M. Chun, J. Neurosci. 17, 4302 (1997).
3. R. Q. Quiroga, L. Reddy, G. Kreiman, C. Koch, I. Fried, Nature 435, 1102 (2005).
4. B. Libet, Behav. Brain Sci. 8, 529 (1985).

A new description of our inner lives....

I rarely mention my internal experience and sensations on this blog - first, because I have viewed readers as "wanting the beef," objective stuff on how minds work. Second and more important, because my experience of noting the flow of my brain products as emotion laced chunks of sensing/cognition/action - knowing the names of the neurotransmitters and hormones acting during desire, arousal, calming, or affiliation - strikes me as a process which would feel quite alien to most people. Still, if we are materialists who believe that someday we will understand how the brain-body generates our consciousness and sense of a self, we will be able to think in terms like the following (a quote taken from Larissa MacFarquhar's profile of Paul and Patricia Churchland in the Feb. 12 New Yorker Magazine):

"...he and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that consitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor... as people learn to speak differently they will learn to experience differently, and sooner or later even their most private introspections will be affected. Already Paul feels pain differently than he used to: when he cut himself shaving now he fells not "pain" but something more complicated - first the sharp, superficial A-delta-fibre pain, and then a couple of seconds later, the sickening, deeper feeling of C-fibre pain that lingers. The new words, far from being reductive or dry, have enhanced his sensations, he feels, as an oenophile's complex vocabulary enhances the taste of wine."

"Paul and Pat, realizing that the revolutionary neuroscience they dream of is still in its infancy, are nonetheless already preparing themselve for this future, making the appropriate adjustments in their everyday conversation. One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. "She said, 'Paul, don't speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocortocoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren't for my endogenous opiates I'd have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I'll be down in a minute.' " Paul and Pat have noticed that it is not just they who talk this way - their students now talk of psychopharmacology as comfortably as of food."

Neuroscience will change society

Interesting reflections by Marco Iacoboni, one of the discoverers of mirror neurons, which have been mentioned a number of times in this blog:

"...a concept that emerges from recent neuroscience research is that humans are "wired for empathy". We have cells in our brains that make us understand each other in a simple, unmediated, automatic manner. But, if our neurobiology makes us wired for empathy, why is our world so full of atrocities?

The explanation for this apparent paradox is probably as follows. The neurobiological mechanisms that make us wired for empathy work at a pre-reflective, automatic, implicit level. Our societies are built on deliberate, reflective, explicit discourse. The two different levels of implicit and explicit mental processes rarely intersect; indeed there is evidence that they can often dissociate. This is probably why the massive belief systems—from religious to political ones—that operate at the deliberate, reflective level are able to divide us in such a powerful way even though our neurobiology should bring us together.

The good news is that the awareness of neurobiological mechanisms that make us wired for empathy is entering the public discourse.... This awareness won't go away and will seep through the reflective level of our mental processes. Indeed, people seem to have an intuitive understanding of how neural mechanisms for empathy work. It seems that people 'recognize' how their brain works, when they are told about it. People can finally articulate what they already 'knew' at a pre-reflective level. My optimism is that this explicit level of understanding of our empathic nature will at some point dissolve the massive belief systems that dominate our societies and that threaten to destroy us."

MindBlog's 1st Anniversary - Dangerous Ideas

Here is the Feb. 8 2006 post ("Dangerous Ideas") with which I started this blog, no less relevant now than a year ago.

Edge.org is a website sponsored by the "Reality Club" (i.e. John Brockman, literary agent/impressario/socialite). Brockman has assembled a stable of scientists and other thinkers that he defines as a "third culture" that takes the place of traditional intellectuals in redefining who and what we are.... Each year a question is formulated for all to write on... In 2004 it was "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The question for 2005 was "What is your dangerous idea?"

The responses organize themselves into several areas. Here are selected thumbnail summaries most directly relevant to human minds. I've not included cosmology and physics. Go to edge.org to read the essays

I. Nature of the human self or mind (by the way see my "I-Illusion" essay on my website):

Paulos - The self is a conceptual chimera
Shirky - Free will is going away
Nisbett - We are ignorant of our thinking processes
Horgan - We have no souls
Bloom - There are no souls, mind has a material basis.
Provine - This is all there is.
Anderson - Brains cannot become minds without bodies
Metzinger - Is being intellectually honest about the issue of free will compatible with preserving one's mental health?
Clark - Much of our behavior is determined by non-conscious, automatic uptake of cues and information
Turkle - Simulation will replace authenticity as computer simulation becomes fully naturalized.
Dawkins - A faulty person is no different from a faulty car. There is a mechanism determining behavior that needs to be fixed. The idea of responsibility is nonsense.
Smith - What we know may not change us. We will continue to conceive ourselves as centres of experience, self-knowing and free willing agents.

II. Natural explanations of culture

Sperber - Culture is natural.
Taylor - The human brain is a cultural artifact.
Hauser- There is a universal grammar of mental life.
Pinker - People differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.
Goodwin - Similar coordinating patterns underlie biological and cultural evolution.
Venter - Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create societal conflicts.


III. Fundamental changes in political, economic, social order

O'donnell - The state will disappear.
Ridley - Government is the problem not the solution.
Shermer - Where goods cross frontiers armies won't.
Harari -Democracy is on its way out.
Csikszentmihalyi- The free market myth is destroying culture.
Goleman - The internet undermines the quality of human interaction.
Harris - Science must destroy religion.
Porco - Confrontation between science and religion might end when role played by science in lives of people is the same played by religion today.
Bering - Science will never silence God
Fisher - Drugs such as antidepressants jeopardize feelings of attachment and love
Iacoboni - Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence - the Problem with Mirrors
Morton - Our planet is not in peril, just humans are.

Thought without language - metacognition in Animals

The Dec. 15 issue of The New Scientist has an interesting article by Helen Philips, "The Known Unknown," about game playing in monkeys and dolphins that sheds light on their 'thinking about thinking' , knowing what they don't know - which appears to be a key step on the transition to full consciousnes. Here is a nice graphic from that article. (Click on the graphic to enlarge it).

Brain imaging of intuition during perceptual discovery

Volz and von Cramon at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and BrainSciences in Leipzig, Germany, have done an interesting piece of work on imaging intuition, reported in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Here is their abstract:

"According to the Oxford English Dictionary, intuition is "the ability to understand or know something immediately, without conscious reasoning." Most people would agree that intuitive responses appear as ideas or feelings that subsequently guide our thoughts and behaviors. It is proposed that people continuously, without conscious attention, recognize patterns in the stream of sensations that impinge upon them. What exactly is being recognized is not clear yet, but we assume that people detect potential content based on only a few aspects of the input (i.e., the gist). The result is a vague perception of coherence which is not explicitly describable but instead embodied in a "gut feeling" or an initial guess, which subsequently biases thought and inquiry. To approach the nature of intuitive processes, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging when participants were working at a modified version of the Waterloo Gestalt Closure Task. Starting from our conceptualization that intuition involves an informed judgment in the context of discovery, we expected activation within the median orbito-frontal cortex (OFC), as this area receives input from all sensory modalities and has been shown to be crucially involved in emotionally driven decisions. Results from a direct contrast between intuitive and nonintuitive judgments, as well as from a parametric analysis, revealed the median OFC, the lateral portion of the amygdala, anterior insula, and ventral occipito-temporal regions to be activated."


The figure above indicates some of the task and stimuli conditions used. In the object condition, participants were presented with fragmented black-and-white line drawings of common objects which were subsequently fragmented with which differed in their potential to mask the drawing. In the nonobject condition, participants were presented with meaningless fragmented black-and-white line drawings. The upper left panel (A) shows an example of a coherent trial (violin), the upper right panel (B) an example of an incoherent trial. Stimuli were presented for 400 msec and participants had 2 sec to indicate whether the fragmented line drawing depicted a possible object (left response button) or an impossible object (right response button). Stimuli were neither presented repeatedly nor were images concurrently presented in different levels of fragmentation within one individual session. Participants were encouraged to base their decision on an "initial guess" whether or not the drawing was coherent.


This next figure shows MRI data. Group-averaged activations are shown on coronal, sagittal, and axial slices of an individual brain normalized and aligned to the Talairach stereotactic space. The upper left panel shows the imaging results of the direct contrast between trials that participants judged to be meaningful with trials that participants judged to be meaningless. The upper right panel shows the imaging results from the correlational analysis of the median OFC's (mOFC) time course. In the lower panel, imaging results from the parametric analysis are shown that used a performance-dependent regressor (i.e., the percentage of correct answers per level).

The data suggest that activation within the median orbito-frontal cortex reflects intuitive processing, while activation within ventral occipito-temporal regions reflects object recognition processes.

Gender and sexual orientation regulate the effect of invisible images.

As we are contantly bombarded with vast amounts of information, selective attention mechanisms help us quickly attend to what is important while ignoring what is irrelevant. It makes ecological and evolutionary sense if important events can influence our spatial attention even before we become aware of the event. Recent studies have shown that subliminal presentation of emotional stimuli can modulate activity of the amygdala. Jiang et al ask whether activation of the emotional system directs observers' attention to the stimulus in the absence of awareness.

They show that information that has not entered our consciousness, such as interocularly suppressed (invisible) erotic pictures, can direct the distribution of spatial attention. They further show that invisible erotic information can either attract or repel observers' spatial attention depending on their gender and sexual orientation. While unaware of the suppressed pictures, heterosexual males' attention was attracted to invisible female nudes, heterosexual females' attention was attracted to invisible male nudes, gay males behaved similarly to heterosexual females, and gay/bisexual females performed in-between heterosexual males and females.

Here is their description of how information is presented so that it does not enter consciousness. "In the interocular suppression paradigm, a pair of high-contrast dynamic noise patches are presented to both sides of a fixation point in one eye, and a test picture and its scrambled control are presented to the fellow eye in spatial locations corresponding to the noise patches. Because of strong interocular suppression, the intact meaningful image and its scrambled control remain invisible for the period they are presented. If the suppressed images exert a location-specific effect on the attentional system, these images could potentially act as attentional cues that would influence the distribution of spatial attention and thus performance on a subsequent detection task."

(click on image to enlarge it)
Figure: Schematic representation of the experimental paradigm for the invisible condition. For the visible condition, the noise patches were replaced with the same pair of intact and scrambled pictures presented to the other eye. In each trial, observers pressed one of two buttons to indicate the perceived orientation (CW or CCW) of a Gabor patch (the circle with lines in the right frame) briefly presented on either side of fixation. In the invisible condition, as shown, if observers detected any difference between the two sides of the fixation, they pressed another button to abort that trial.

Heterosexual male observers were more accurate at the orientation discrimination task when the Gabor targets followed the site of the invisible nude female pictures (attentional benefit) and were less accurate when the Gabor patches were at the site of invisible nude male pictures (attentional cost). Thus, heterosexual male observers' attention was attracted to nude female images and was repelled from nude male images, even though the images were not consciously perceived by the observers. Similarly, heterosexual female participants showed an attentional benefit (attraction) to invisible nude male pictures (positive attentional effect, although they did not show a significant attentional effect to invisible nude female pictures. Gay males had a similar pattern to female participants in that invisible female nude pictures did not attract their attention while male erotic images enhanced performance. Gay/bisexual females fell in-between the heterosexual male group and the heterosexual female group.