Graphic depictions of an integrative model of mind

To hopefully enhance the chance that you will pay attention to the creative and seminal thinking in the open source Laukkonen and Slagter review article whose abstract I passed on in my July 21 post,  I now pass on their striking concluding statement and then  two graphics whose legends summarize the main ideas presented. I think this work offers a plausible and appealing integration of neuroscience and meditative traditions.  

We have taken on the daunting task of providing a theory for understanding the effects of meditation within the predictive processing framework. Contemplative science is a young field and predictive processing is a new theory, although both have roots going much farther back. All theories are subject to change, but perhaps particularly so for such new domains of enquiry. Nevertheless, we think the conditions are suitable for a more overarching theory that may also thwart further siloing and fragmentation of scientific research, as has been commonplace among the mind-sciences. A strength of our framework is its simplicity: Being in the here and now reduces predictive processing. And yet, this basic idea can explain how each meditation technique uniquely deconstructs the minds tendency to project the past onto the present, how certain insights may arise, the nature of hierarchical self-processing, and the plasticity of the human mind. There is scope here, we think, to eventually reveal what makes a meditator an expert, why meditation has such broad clinical effects, and how we might begin mitigating some of the negative consequences of meditation. Last but not least, our framework seems to bring ancient Eastern and modern scientific ideas closer together, showing how the notion of conditioned experience in Buddhism aligns with the notion of the experience-dependent predictive brain.

Fig. 1. Here we use the Pythagoras Tree to provide an intuitive illustration of how organisms represent the world with increasing counterfactual depth or abstraction. The tree is constructed using squares that are scaled down by the square root of 2 divided by 2 and placed such that the corners of the squares meet and form a triangle between them, recursively. Analogously, the brain constructs experience from temporally precise and unimodal models of present-moment sensory representations and input (e.g., pixels on a screen), into ever more abstract, transmodal, and temporally deep models (e.g., a theory paper). Meditation brings one increasingly into the present moment, thus reducing the tendency to conceptualize away from the here and now, akin to observing the pixels rather than the words. This reduction of conceptualization ought to also have profound effects on the sense of self, which also relies on abstract model building, and ultimately is said to reveal an underlying seemingly “unconditioned” state of consciousness as such (like the white background underlying the pixels).

 

Fig. 2. In this schematic we illustrate two aspects of the many-to-(n)one model. The first and most foundational proposal is that meditation gradually flattens the predictive hierarchy or ‘prunes the counterfactual tree’, by bringing the meditator into the here and now, illustrated in the left figure. Thus, meditative depth is defined by the extent that the organism is not constructing temporally thick predictions. In the right figure, we dissect the predictive hierarchy into three broad levels. We propose that thinking (and therefore the narrative self [NS]) sits at the top of the predictive hierarchy (Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010, 2019). Sensing and perceiving and therefore the embodied experiencing self [ES] sits below it (Gallagher, 2000; Seth, 2013). Finally, a basal form of self-hood characterized by the subject-object [S/O] duality sits at the earliest level. FA brings the practitioner out of the narrative self and into a more experiencing and embodied mode of being. Then, through dereification from present moment experience (including bodily sensations) OM brings the practitioner more into a state where contents of experience are treated equally, and one is able to experience non-judgmentally (sensing without appraisal), but even in very advanced states, a subject-object duality remains. During OM, certain epistemic discoveries or insights about the nature and behavior of generative models may occur. Finally, through ND practices the subject-object distinction may fall away and the background or “groundless ground” of all experience—awareness itself—can be uncovered. Another way to characterize this process is as follows: FA employs regular (conditional) attention to an object of sensing, OM employs bare (unconditional) attention, and ND practice employs reflexive awareness that permits the non-dual witnessing of the subject-object dichotomy and finally pure or non-dual awareness by releasing attention altogether.

 

 

From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind

I had a chat with my former University of Wisconsin colleague Richard Davidson during my visit to Madison, WI last week, and he pointed me to an excellent open source review article by Laukkonen and Slagter, From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind. They offer an integrated predictive processing account of three main styles of meditation. I just finished reading through their lucid account and plan to carefully re-read it several times. I pass on the summary points and abstract: 

Highlights

• Predictive processing provides a novel theoretical window on meditation. 

• Deconstructive meditations progressively reduce temporally deep processing. 

• Insight experiences arise during meditation due to Bayesian model reduction 

• Meditation deconstructs self models by reducing abstract processing. 

• Non-dual awareness or pure consciousness is the ‘here and now’.

Abstract

How profoundly can humans change their own minds? In this paper we offer a unifying account of deconstructive meditation under the predictive processing view. We start from simple axioms. First, the brain makes predictions based on past experience, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic. Second, deconstructive meditation brings one closer to the here and now by disengaging anticipatory processes. We propose that practicing meditation therefore gradually reduces counterfactual temporally deep cognition, until all conceptual processing falls away, unveiling a state of pure awareness. Our account also places three main styles of meditation (focused attention, open monitoring, and non-dual) on a single continuum, where each technique relinquishes increasingly engrained habits of prediction, including the predicted self. This deconstruction can also permit certain insights by making the above processes available to introspection. Our framework is consistent with the state of empirical and (neuro)phenomenological evidence and illuminates the top-down plasticity of the predictive mind. Experimental rigor, neurophenomenology, and no-report paradigms are needed to further understanding of how meditation affects predictive processing and the self.

Watching a brain encode present, past, and future….

We all exist as an ongoing simulation of past, present, and future in our brains, with the hallucination we take to be reality being perturbed only when our brains’ expectations are not met. Dotson and Yartsev do experiments in flying bats (of a sort not permitted in humans) that record from the hippocampus showing patterns of neuron activity of the sort needed to support this process. They find that this activity not only encodes the bat’s present location but also signals its positions in the past and future. The technology involved in doing the brain implants that record and wirelessly transmit the neuronal activity, as well as the sophisticated data analysis, is truly awesome (One has to download a massive technical supplement, much too large to include in the article, to get the details.) Here I pass on only the editor’s summary and the abstract for the article:  

Representing space in past and future

As an organism moves through space, its brain has to remember its most recent location and anticipate its future position, not just its current place in the world. Earlier studies reported so-called retrospective and prospective place coding in rats while they were running along linear tracks. However, it would be advantageous to study an animal that rapidly moves through three-dimensional space with high precision. Dotson and Yartsev recorded from flying bats to investigate whether place cell activity in hippocampus area CA1 represents local (current) or nonlocal positions. They discovered that the hippocampus not only encodes the bat's present location but also signals its positions in the past and future.

Abstract

Navigation occurs through a continuum of space and time. The hippocampus is known to encode the immediate position of moving animals. However, active navigation, especially at high speeds, may require representing navigational information beyond the present moment. Using wireless electrophysiological recordings in freely flying bats, we demonstrate that neural activity in area CA1 predominantly encodes nonlocal spatial information up to meters away from the bat’s present position. This spatiotemporal representation extends both forward and backward in time, with an emphasis on future locations, and is found during both random exploration and goal-directed navigation. The representation of position thus extends along a continuum, with each moment containing information about past, present, and future, and may provide a key mechanism for navigating along self-selected and remembered paths.

Coffee is good for you, mostly....

I am dysfunctional on waking every morning until I have had a strong cup of coffee, a personal experience that makes me want to pass on Jane Brody's nice review of studies showing that drinking coffee reduces risk of all kinds of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease, melanoma, prostate cancer, even suicide.

...in numerous studies conducted throughout the world, consuming four or five eight-ounce cups of coffee (or about 400 milligrams of caffeine) a day has been associated with reduced death rates.

But,

..coffee doesn't warrant a totally clean bill of health...The most common ill effect associated with caffeinated coffee is sleep disturbance...People vary widely in how rapidly they metabolize caffeine, enabling some to sleep soundly after drinking caffeinated coffee at dinner while others have trouble sleeping if they have coffee at lunch. But even if you can fall asleep readily after an evening coffee, it may disrupt your ability to get adequate deep sleep, Mr. Pollan states in his forthcoming book, “This Is Your Mind on Plants.”

Caffeine is one of more than a thousand chemicals in coffee, not all of which are beneficial. Among others with positive effects are polyphenols and antioxidants. Polyphenols can inhibit the growth of cancer cells and lower the risk of Type 2 diabetes; antioxidants, which have anti-inflammatory effects, can counter both heart disease and cancer, the nation’s leading killers.

Decision-making ability, psychopathology, and brain connectivity

An open access review offered by Dolan and his colleagues continues the story of correlating our human competencies with our brain structures. They describe

...a new cognitive construct—decision acuity—that captures global decision-making ability. High decision acuity prominently reflected low decision variability. Decision acuity showed acceptable reliability, increased with age, and was associated with mental health symptoms independently of intelligence. Crucially, it was associated with distinctive resting-state networks, in particular in brain regions typically engaged by decision-making tasks. The association between decision acuity and functional connectivity was temporally stable and distinct from that of IQ.

Highlights

• Young people have a general decision-making ability, which we call “decision acuity” 

• Decision acuity is reflected in how strongly connected certain brain networks are 

• Low decision acuity is associated with general social function psychopathology

Summary

Decision-making is a cognitive process of central importance for the quality of our lives. Here, we ask whether a common factor underpins our diverse decision-making abilities. We obtained 32 decision-making measures from 830 young people and identified a common factor that we call “decision acuity,” which was distinct from IQ and reflected a generic decision-making ability. Decision acuity was decreased in those with aberrant thinking and low general social functioning. Crucially, decision acuity and IQ had dissociable brain signatures, in terms of their associated neural networks of resting-state functional connectivity. Decision acuity was reliably measured, and its relationship with functional connectivity was also stable when measured in the same individuals 18 months later. Thus, our behavioral and brain data identify a new cognitive construct that underpins decision-making ability across multiple domains. This construct may be important for understanding mental health, particularly regarding poor social function and aberrant thought patterns.

Our 'Self' extends vastly beyond our brain.

I want to pass on two interesting articles that review how the self we usually take to be largely inside our heads (somewhere behind the eyes) in fact has meaning only in contexts that extend vastly beyond the little grey cells in our cranium. Annie Murphy Paul notes four basic extensions that let our brains be less workhorse, and more orchestra conductor.

...the first and most obvious being our tools. Technology is designed to fulfill just this function — who remembers telephone numbers anymore, now that our smartphones can supply them?

Our external memory stores have evolved from marks on clay tablets through printed books to bytes stored in the cloud. 

A second resource is our bodies:

The burgeoning field of embodied cognition has demonstrated that the body — its sensations, gestures and movements — plays an integral role in the thought processes that we usually locate above the neck. The body is especially adept at alerting us to patterns of events and experience, patterns that are too complex to be held in the conscious mind. When a scenario we encountered before crops up again, the body gives us a nudge: communicating with a shiver or a sigh, a quickening of the breath or a tensing of the muscles. Those who are attuned to such cues can use them to make more-informed decisions. A study led by a team of economists and neuroscientists in Britain, for instance, reported that financial traders who were better at detecting their heartbeats — a standard test of what is known as interoception, or the ability to perceive internal signals — made more profitable investments and lasted longer in that notoriously volatile profession.

This second extension is the subject of the other article I want to mention, in which Emily Underwood does a review of communication between the brain and other organs, mediated by the vagus nerve, that shapes how we think, remember, and feel (not open source, but motivated readers can obtain a copy by emailing me).

Scientists are unraveling how our organs talk to the brain and how the brain talks back. That two-way communication, known as interoception, encompasses a complex system of nerves and hormones, including the vagus nerve, a massive network of fibers that travel from nearly every internal organ to the base of the brain and back again. Scientist have long known the vagus nerve carries signals between the organs and the brainstem. But new studies show signals carried by the vagus climb beyond the brainstem and into brain regions involved in memory, emotion, and decision-making. The research is challenging traditional distinctions between disorders of the brain and body, and may even hold clues to the nature of consciousness.

Now, back to Paul's article, and her third extension of our brain:

Another extraneural resource available for our use is physical space. Moving mental contents out of our heads and onto the space of a sketch pad or whiteboard allows us to inspect it with our senses, a cognitive bonus that the psychologist Daniel Reisberg calls “the detachment gain.”...Three-dimensional space offers additional opportunities for offloading mental work and enhancing the brain’s powers. When we turn a problem to be solved into a physical object that we can interact with, we activate the robust spatial abilities that allow us to navigate through real-world landscapes. This suite of human strengths, honed over eons of evolution, is wasted when we sit still and think.

A fourth extension of our minds...

...can be found in other people’s minds. We are fundamentally social creatures, oriented toward thinking with others. Problems arise when we do our thinking alone — for example, the well-documented phenomenon of confirmation bias, which leads us to preferentially attend to information that supports the beliefs we already hold. According to the argumentative theory of reasoning, advanced by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, this bias is accentuated when we reason in solitude. Humans’ evolved faculty for reasoning is not aimed at arriving at objective truth, Mercier and Sperber point out; it is aimed at defending our arguments and scrutinizing others’. It makes sense, they write, “for a cognitive mechanism aimed at justifying oneself and convincing others to be biased and lazy. The failures of the solitary reasoner follow from the use of reason in an ‘abnormal’ context’” — that is, a nonsocial one.

All four of these extraneural resources — technology, the body, physical space, social interaction — can be understood as mental extensions that allow the brain to accomplish far more than it could on its own. This is the theory of the extended mind, introduced more than two decades ago by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers. A 1998 article of theirs published in the journal Analysis began by posing a question that would seem to have an obvious answer: “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” They went on to offer an unconventional response. The mind does not stop at the usual “boundaries of skin and skull,” they maintained. Rather, the mind extends into the world and augments the capacities of the biological brain with outside-the-brain resources.

Compared to the attention we lavish on the brain, we expend relatively little effort on cultivating our ability to think outside the brain...The limits of this approach have become painfully evident. The days when we could do it all in our heads are over. Our knowledge is too abundant, our expertise too specialized, our challenges too enormous. The best chance we have to thrive in the extraordinarily complex world we’ve created is to allow that world to assume some of our mental labor. Our brains can’t do it alone.

Bias Is a Big Problem. But So Is ‘Noise.’

I have to pass on the strong dose of sanity offered by Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues in a recent NYTimes guest essay. They make some elemental distinctions that are important to keep in mind. Some edited clips:

A bias is any predictable error that inclines your judgment in a particular direction (for instance against women or in favor of Ivy League graduates, or when forecasts of sales are consistently optimistic or investment decisions overly cautious).

There is another type of error that attracts far less attention: noise. While bias is the average of errors, noise is their variability. In a 1981 study, for example, 208 federal judges were asked to determine the appropriate sentences for the same 16 cases...The average difference between the sentences that two randomly chosen judges gave for the same crime was more than 3.5 years. Considering that the mean sentence was seven years, that was a disconcerting amount of noise...In 2015, we conducted a study of underwriters in a large insurance company. Forty-eight underwriters were shown realistic summaries of risks to which they assigned premiums, just as they did in their jobs...the typical difference we found between two underwriters was an astonishing 55 percent of their average premium.

Where does noise come from? ...irrelevant circumstances can affect judgments...a judge’s mood, fatigue and even the weather can all have modest but detectable effects on judicial decisions. Another source is general tendencies...There are “hanging” judges and lenient ones...a third source is different patterns of assessment (say, which types of cases they believe merit being harsh or lenient about). Underwriters differ in their views of what is risky, and doctors in their views of which ailments require treatment. We celebrate the uniqueness of individuals, but we tend to forget that, when we expect consistency, uniqueness becomes a liability.

Once you become aware of noise, you can look for ways to reduce it. For instance, independent judgments from a number of people can be averaged (a frequent practice in forecasting). Guidelines, such as those often used in medicine, can help professionals reach better and more uniform decisions. As studies of hiring practices have consistently shown, imposing structure and discipline in interviews and other forms of assessment tends to improve judgments of job candidates.

No noise-reduction techniques will be deployed, however, if we do not first recognize the existence of noise. Noise is too often neglected. But it is a serious issue that results in frequent error and rampant injustice. Organizations and institutions, public and private, will make better decisions if they take noise seriously.

Brain mechanism by which testosterone reduces generosity

 Interesting work from Jianxin Ou et al.:

Significance

Testosterone is associated with aggressive behavior in both animals and humans. Here, we establish a link between increased testosterone and selfishness in economic decision making and identify the neural mechanisms through which testosterone reduces generosity in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-participant study. We find that testosterone induces more selfish choices, particularly when distant others are concerned. Moreover, it disrupts the representation of other-regarding value in local activity and functional connectivity involving the temporoparietal junction and subcortical regions involved in reward processing. Our study provides causal evidence for a testosterone-mediated neurohormonal link between generosity and the valuation system.

Abstract

Recent evidence has linked testosterone, a major sex hormone, to selfishness in economic decision-making. Here, we aimed to investigate the neural mechanisms through which testosterone reduces generosity by combining functional MRI with pharmacological manipulation among healthy young males in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-subject design. After testosterone or placebo gel administration, participants performed a social discounting task in which they chose between selfish options (benefiting only the participant) and generous options (providing also some benefit to another person at a particular social distance). At the behavioral level, testosterone reduced generosity compared to the placebo. At the neural level (n = 60), the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) encoded the other-regarding value of the generous option during generous choices, and this effect was attenuated by testosterone, suggesting that testosterone reduced the consideration of other’s welfare as underpinned by TPJ activity. Moreover, TPJ activity more strongly reflected individual differences in generosity in the placebo than the testosterone group. Furthermore, testosterone weakened the relation between the other-regarding value of generous decisions and connectivity between the TPJ and a region extending from the insula into the striatum. Together, these findings suggest that a network encompassing both cortical and subcortical components underpins the effects of testosterone on social preferences.

Points on having a self and free will.

 A recent podcast by Sam Harris summarizing his ideas on the question of whether we have free will motivates me to do a further summary here…

There is a broad consensus among many disciplines that our experience of having a self or “I” is an illusion (see for example my lecture “The I-Illusion” and subsequent web lectures).  This self illusion is what has the experience of ‘free will,’ of being free to make choices. Having a self is other side of the coin of having free will.

Here is my one paragraph paraphrase of points that Sam Harris’ makes in his ‘Waking Up’ App, and book of that title, as well as his recent podcast:

We all are concatenations of previous causes with the most recent proximal cause rising from this subconscious mist.  What we take to be our 'self' or 'I' is actually the archive of our past actions and experiences, stored in long term declarative and procedural memory systems from which thoughts and actions of the present instant  seem to rise from nowhere - 'we' don't 'choose' them, they just seem to appear.  Having morality doesn't require free will, it is accomplished by having a historical coltlective record of what actions do or don't work out well, with respect to holding society together and passing on our genes. Thinking that 2 + 2 = 5 or killing other humans have bad consequences.  It is from this history of actions and expectations in our brain that the moral choices of the moment arise, again as if from nowhere.

Still, most of us, even if granting the above, can’t imagine losing our feeling of having a self, it seems too useful, we couldn’t get along without it.  This problem is addressed at the end of my “I-Illusion” talk with text based on points Wegner makes at the end of his classic 2002 book “The Illusion of Conscious Will” : 

…..the important point is that we have the experience of having free will, and it must be there for something, even if it is not an adequate theory of behavior causation....perhaps we have conscious will because it helps us to appreciate and remember what we are doing, the experience of will marks our actions for us, its embodied quality our actions from those of other agents in our environment.

We have evolved emotions of anger, sadness, fear, happiness related to survival. We can think of the emotion of agency, or conscious will, as the same sort of evolved emotion, obviously a useful capability in sorting out our physical and social world. 

The authorship emotion, an emotion that authenticates the action's owner as the self, is something we would miss if it were gone... it would not be very satisfying to go through life causing things, making discoveries, helping people, whatever.. if we had no personal recognition of those achievements.

And, this view doesn't really need to conflict with notions of responsibility and morality, because what people intend and consciously will is a basis for how the moral rightness or wrongness of an act judged. This is why mental competence is an issue in criminal trials.

So, just as in theater, art, used car sales ...and in the scientific analysis of conscious will..how things seem is more important than what they are. It seems to us that we have selves, have conscious will, have minds, are agents. While it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion, it is incorrect to call the illusion a trivial one, its invention has an obvious evolutionary rationale (along with long list of cognitive biases we seem to be hardwired with). Illusions piled on top of apparent mental causation are the building blocks of human psychology, social life, and our dominance as a species on this planet.

Avoiding psychological biases that trick your brain.

The monthly Austin Rainbow Forum discussion group which I help organize meets on the first Sunday afternoon of each month, and I thought I would pass on background material for a talk and discussion March 7 by Paul McNamara titled "Avoiding psychological bias." I also want to point to an excellent article on cognitive biases and faulty heuristics by Ben Yagoda that appeared several years ago in The Atlantic. Here is McNamara's summary that I just sent out to the discussion group's email list: 

"How we look at the world and make decisions about the ways we live our lives can be profoundly affected by many of the psychological biases which we're all susceptible to. We'll discuss thirteen common types of bias, all beginning with the letter “c”. This presentation has been adapted from the The Center for Action and Contemplation’s podcast series Learning How to See. For those who are interested, here’s a link to the six episodes podcast series: https://cac.org/podcast/learning-how-to-see/ "

The thirteen biases are: 

1. Confirmation Bias: The human brain welcomes information that confirms what it already thinks and resist information that disturbs or contradicts what it already thinks. 

2. Complexity Bias: The human brain prefers a simple lie to a complex truth. 

3. Community bias: It is very hard to see something your group doesn’t want you to see. This is a form of social confirmation bias. 

4. Complementary bias: If peope are nice to you, you’ll be open to what they see and have to say. If they aren’t nice to you, you won’t. 

5. Contact bias: If you lack contact with someone, you won’t see what they see. 

6. Conservative/Liberal bias: Conservatives and Liberals see the world differently. Liberals see through a “nurturing parent” window, and Conservatives see through a “strict father” window. Liberals value moral arguments based on justice and compassion; conservatives also place a high value on arguments based on purity, loyalty, authority, and tradition. Our brains like to see as our party sees, and we flock with those who see as we do. 

7. Consciousness bias: A person’s level of consciousness makes seeing some things possible and others impossible. Our brains see from a location.

8. Competency bias: We are incompetent at knowing how incompetent or competent we are, so we may see less or more than we think. Our brains prefer to think of ourselves as above average. 

9. Confidence Bias: We mistake confidence for competence, and we are all vulnerable to the lies of confident people. Our brains prefer a confident lie to a hesitant truth. 

10. Conspiracy Bias: When we feel shame, we are vulnerable to stories that cast us as the victims of an evil conspiracy by some enemy “other.” Our brains like stories in which we’re either the hero or the victim ... never the villain. 

11. Comfort/Complacency/Convenience Bias: Our brains welcome data that allows us to relax and be happy and reject data that require us to adjust, work, or inconvenience ourselves. 

12. Catastrophe/Normalcy Bias: Our brains notice sudden changes for the worse, but we easily miss slow and subtle changes over time. We think what is now normal always was and always will be. Our brains are wired for what feels normal. 

13. Cash Bias: It is very hard to see anything that interferes with our way of making a living. Our brains are wired to see within the framework of our economy, and we see what helps us make money.

MindBlog's 5,000th post - The milliseconds of a choice - Watching your mind when it matters.

This was going to be a post on oxytocin research...but I looked at the Blogger counter to see that it will be the 5,000th post done since the start of MindBlog in 2006.  Wow, that's a lot of words.  I've decided to note the occasion by repeating for the second time a post on material I find very fascinating. Here is the 2017 repeat of a 2014 post:

I'm finding, with increasing frequency, that an article about health or psychology in the New York Times that I find interesting has an attached note that it was first published several years earlier. While working on yesterday's MindBlog post I came across a 2014 post I wrote that I think makes some important points about our self-regulation that are worth repeating. So, I'm going to copy what the Times is doing and repeat it today. I'm tempted to edit it, but won't, beyond mentioning that I would considerably tone down my positive reference to brain training games (that I no longer indulge in). Here is the 2014 post:

This is actually a post about mindfulness, in reaction to Dan Hurley's article describing how contemporary applications of the ancient tradition of mindfulness meditation are being engaged in many more contexts than the initial emphasis on chilling out in the 1970s, and being employed for very practical purses such as mental resilience in a war zone. It seems like to me that we are approaching a well defined technology of brain control whose brain basis is understood in some detail. I've done numerous posts on behavioral and brain correlates of mindfulness meditation (enter 'meditation' or 'mindfulness' in MindBlog's search box in the left column). For example, only four weeks of a mindfulness meditation regime emphasizing relaxation of different body parts correlates with increases in white matter (nerve tract) efficiency. Improvements in cognitive performance, working memory, etc. have been claimed. A special issue of The journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience discusses issues in the research.

Full time mindfulness might be a bad idea, suppressing the mind wandering that facilitates bursts of creative insight. (During my vision research career, my most original ideas popped up when I was spacing out, once when I was riding a bike along a lakeshore path.) Many physicists and writers reports their best ideas happen when they are disengaged. It also appears that mindfulness may inhibit implicit learning in which habits and skill are acquired without conscious awareness.

Obviously knowing whether we are in an attentional or mind wandering (default, narrative) modes is useful (see here, and here), and this is where the title of this posts comes in. To note and distinguish our mind state is most effectively accomplished with a particular style of alertness or awareness that is functioning very soon (less than 200 milliseconds) after a new thought or sensory perception appears to us. This is a moment of fragility that offers a narrow time window of choice over whether our new brain activity will be either enhanced or diminished in favor of a more desired activity. This is precisely what is happening in mindfulness meditation that instructs a central focus of some sort (breathing, body relaxation, or whatever) to which one returns as soon as one notes that any other thoughts or distractions have popped into awareness. The ability to rapidly notice and attend to thoughts and emotions of these short time scales is enhanced by brain training regimes of the sort offered by BrainHq of positscience.com and others. I have found the exercises on this site, originated by Michael Merznich, to be the most useful.  It offers summaries of changes in brain speed, attention, memory, intelligence, navigation, etc. that result from performing the exercises - changes that can persist for years.

A book title that has been popping into my head for at least the last 15 years is "The 200 Millisecond Manager." (a riff on the title the popular book of the early 1980's by Blanchard and Johnson, "The One Minute Manager.") The gist of the argument would be that given in the "Guide" section of some 2005 writing, and actually in Chapter 12 of my book, Figure 12-7.

It might make the strident assertion that the most important thing that matters in regulating our thoughts, feelings, and actions is their first 100-200 msec in the brain, which is when the levers and pulleys are actually doing their thing. It would be a nuts and bolts approach to altering - or at least inhibiting - self limiting behaviors. It would suggest that a central trick is to avoid taking on on the ‘enormity of it all,’ and instead use a variety of techniques to get our awareness down to the normally invisible 100-200 msec time interval in which our actions are being programmed. Here we are talking mechanics during the time period is when all the limbic and other routines that result from life script, self image, temperament, etc., actually can start-up. The suggestion is that you can short circuit some of this process if you bring awareness to the level of observing the moments during which a reaction or behavior is becoming resident, and can sometimes say “I don’t think so, I think I'll do something else instead.”

"The 200 msec Manager" has gone through the ‘this could be a book’ cycle several times, the actual execution  bogging down as I actually got into description of the underlying science and techniques for expanding awareness. Also, I note the enormous number of books out there on meditation, relaxation, etc. that are all really addressing the same core processes in different ways.

Unethical amnesia

An interesting study from Galeotti et al. (open source):

Significance

Using large-scale incentivized online experiments, we tested two possible origins of individuals’ forgetting about their past cheating behavior in a mind game. We found that purely hedonic considerations, such as the maintenance of a positive self-image, are not sufficient to motivate unethical amnesia, but the addition of an instrumental value to forgetting triggers such amnesia. Individuals forget their past lies more when amnesia can serve as an excuse not to engage in future morally responsible behavior. These findings shed light on the interplay between dishonesty and memory and suggest further investigations of the cost function of unethical amnesia. A policy implication is that improving ethics requires making unethical amnesia more difficult for individuals.

Abstract

Humans care about morality. Yet, they often engage in actions that contradict their moral self. Unethical amnesia is observed when people do not remember or remember less vividly these actions. This paper explores two reasons why individuals may experience unethical amnesia. Forgetting past unethical behavior may be motivated by purely hedonic or affective reasons, such as the willingness to maintain one’s moral self-image, but also by instrumental or strategic motives, in anticipation of future misbehavior. In a large-scale incentivized online experiment (n = 1,322) using a variant of a mind game, we find that hedonic considerations are not sufficient to motivate the forgetting of past cheating behavior. This is confirmed in a follow-up experiment (n = 1,005) in which recalls are elicited the same day instead of 3 wk apart. However, when unethical amnesia can serve as a justification for a future action, such as deciding on whether to keep undeserved money, motivated forgetting is more likely. Thereby, we show that motivated forgetting occurs as a self-excuse to justify future immoral decisions.

Acetaminophen increases risk taking

From Keaveney et al.:

Acetaminophen (Tylenol), an analgesic and antipyretic available over-the-counter and used in over 600 medicines, is one of the most consumed drugs in the USA. Recent research has suggested that acetaminophen’s effects extend to the blunting of negative as well as positive affect. Because affect is a determinant of risk perception and risk taking, we tested the hypothesis that acute acetaminophen consumption (1000 mg) could influence these important judgments and decisions. In three double-blind, placebo-controlled studies, healthy young adults completed a laboratory measure of risk taking (Balloon Analog Risk Task) and in Studies 1 and 2 completed self-report measures of risk perception. Across all studies (total n = 545), acetaminophen increased risk-taking behavior. On the more affectively stimulating risk perception measure used in Study 2, acetaminophen reduced self-reported perceived risk and this reduction statistically mediated increased risk-taking behavior. These results indicate that acetaminophen can increase risk taking, which may be due to reductions in risk perceptions, particularly those that are highly affect laden.

Cognitive control increases honesty in cheaters but cheating in those who are honest

Abe discusses work of Speer et al. that probes:

..a long-standing paradox concerning the cognitive nature of honesty: Is it a matter of “will” or “grace”? The will hypothesis assumes that honesty requires cognitive control to suppress temptation to cheat, while dishonest behavior to serve self-interest is people’s automatic response. In contrast, the grace hypothesis assumes that honesty flows automatically without active resistance to temptation, while dishonest behavior is realized by cognitive control to override honest impulses.

Here is the Speer et al. abstract:

Every day, we are faced with the conflict between the temptation to cheat for financial gains and maintaining a positive image of ourselves as being a “good person.” While it has been proposed that cognitive control is needed to mediate this conflict between reward and our moral self-image, the exact role of cognitive control in (dis)honesty remains elusive. Here we identify this role, by investigating the neural mechanism underlying cheating. We developed a task which allows for inconspicuously measuring spontaneous cheating on a trial-by-trial basis in the MRI scanner. We found that activity in the nucleus accumbens promotes cheating, particularly for individuals who cheat a lot, while a network consisting of posterior cingulate cortex, temporoparietal junction, and medial prefrontal cortex promotes honesty, particularly in individuals who are generally honest. Finally, activity in areas associated with cognitive control (anterior cingulate cortex and inferior frontal gyrus) helped dishonest participants to be honest, whereas it enabled cheating for honest participants. Thus, our results suggest that cognitive control is not needed to be honest or dishonest per se but that it depends on an individual’s moral default.

Stepping backwards enhances cognitive control.

From Koch et al., some interesting work on the role of body locomotion in the recruitment of control processes.:

In the most fundamental and literal sense, approach refers to decreasing, and avoidance to increasing, the physical distance between the self and the outside world. In our view, body locomotion most purely taps into this fundamental nature of approach and avoidance. In everyday life, individuals typically approach desired stimuli by stepping forward and avoid aversive stimuli by stepping backward

...The idea that body locomotion may trigger approach and avoidance orientations has, so far, not been tested...we expected that stepping backward would increase the recruitment of cognitive control relative to stepping forward. To test this prediction, we gauged cognitive functioning by means of a Stroop task immediately after a participant stepped in one direction. The Stroop task requires naming the color in which stimulus words are printed while ignoring their semantic meaning, which is actually processed more automatically than the color. Cognitive control is required to override the tendency to respond to the semantic meaning and instead respond to the color.

...our study showed that stepping backward significantly enhanced cognitive performance compared to stepping forward or sideways. Considering the effect size, backward locomotion appears to be a very powerful trigger to mobilize cognitive resources. Thus, whenever you encounter a difficult situation, stepping backward may boost your capability to deal with it effectively.

Are you holding your breath?

Note; This is a repeat of a post that I did on Jan. 28, 2008. Its theme led me to develop a lecture titled "Are you holding your breath - Structures of arousal and calm." which is posted on my dericbownds.net website.  The contents of the lecture are relevant to understanding the stress we are all feeling during the current COVID-19 pandemic.  

I notice - if I am maintaining awareness of my breathing - that the breathing frequently stops as I begin a skilled activity such as piano or computer keyboarding. At the same time I can begin to sense an array of unnecessary (and debilitating) pre-tensions in the muscle involved. If I just keep breathing and noticing those tensions, they begin to release. (Continuing to let awareness return to breathing when it drifts is a core technique of mindfulness meditation). Several sources note that attending to breathing can raise one's general level of restfulness relative to excitation, enhancing parasympathetic (restorative) over sympathetic (arousing) nervous system activities. These personal points make me feel like passing on some excerpts from a recent essay which basically agrees with these points: "Breathtaking New Technologies," by Linda Stone, a former Microsoft VP and Co-Founder and Director of Microsoft's Virtual Worlds Group/Social Computing Group. It is a bit simplistic, but does point in a useful direction.

I believe that attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit and that we can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals...but... the way in which many of us interact with our personal technologies makes it impossible to use this extraordinary tool of attention to our advantage...the vast majority of people hold their breath especially when they first begin responding to email. On cell phones, especially when talking and walking, people tend to hyper-ventilate or over-breathe. Either of these breathing patterns disturbs oxygen and carbon dioxide balance...breath holding can contribute significantly to stress-related diseases. The body becomes acidic, the kidneys begin to re-absorb sodium, and as the oxygen and CO2 balance is undermined, our biochemistry is thrown off.

The parasympathetic nervous system governs our sense of hunger and satiety, flow of saliva and digestive enzymes, the relaxation response, and many aspects of healthy organ function. Focusing on diaphragmatic breathing enables us to down regulate the sympathetic nervous system, which then causes the parasympathetic nervous system to become dominant. Shallow breathing, breath holding and hyper-ventilating triggers the sympathetic nervous system, in a "fight or flight" response...Some breathing patterns favor our body's move toward parasympathetic functions and other breathing patterns favor a sympathetic nervous system response. Buteyko (breathing techniques developed by a Russian M.D.), Andy Weil's breathing exercises, diaphragmatic breathing, certain yoga breathing techniques, all have the potential to soothe us, and to help our bodies differentiate when fight or flight is really necessary and when we can rest and digest.

I've changed my mind about how much attention to pay to my breathing patterns and how important it is to remember to breathe when I'm using a computer, PDA or cell phone...I've discovered that the more consistently I tune in to healthy breathing patterns, the clearer it is to me when I'm hungry or not, the more easily I fall asleep and rest peacefully at night, and the more my outlook is consistently positive...I've come to believe that, within the next 5-7 years, breathing exercises will be a significant part of any fitness regime.

How we get stronger.

Gretchen Reynolds points to studies on weight lifting monkeys that show weight training initially prompts increases in muscle strength by increasing neural input to muscles via the reticulospinal tract. Only later do the muscles actually start to grow.

Significance Statement

We provide the first report of a strength training intervention in non-human primates. Our results indicate that strength training is associated with neural adaptations in intracortical and reticulospinal circuits, whilst corticospinal and motoneuronal adaptations are not dominant factors.

Abstract

Following a program of resistance training, there are neural and muscular contributions to the gain in strength. Here, we measured changes in important central motor pathways during strength training in two female macaque monkeys. Animals were trained to pull a handle with one arm; weights could be added to increase load. On each day, motor evoked potentials in upper limb muscles were first measured after stimulation of the primary motor cortex (M1), corticospinal tract (CST) and reticulospinal tract (RST). Monkeys then completed 50 trials with weights progressively increased over 8-9 weeks (final weight ∼6kg, close to the animal’s body weight). Muscle responses to M1 and RST stimulation increased during strength training; there were no increases in CST responses. Changes persisted during a two-week washout period without weights. After a further three months of strength training, an experiment under anesthesia mapped potential responses to CST and RST stimulation in the cervical enlargement of the spinal cord. We distinguished the early axonal volley and later spinal synaptic field potentials, and used the slope of the relationship between these at different stimulus intensities as a measure of spinal input-output gain. Spinal gain was increased on the trained compared to the untrained side of the cord within the intermediate zone and motor nuclei for RST, but not CST, stimulation. We conclude that neural adaptations to strength training involve adaptations in the RST, as well as intracortical circuits within M1. By contrast, there appears to be little contribution from the CST.

Which way are you wagging your tail?

Blakeslee writes a review (PDF here) of work by Vallortigara et al (PDF here) on emotional asymmetric tail wagging by dogs that is a further reflection of lateralized functions of the brain. Some edited clips from her article:

In most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.

At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.

Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).

In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain).

Dog tails are interesting...because they are in the midline of the dog’s body, neither left nor right. So do they show emotional asymmetry, or not?

Vallortigara et al show that when dogs were attracted to something, including a benign, approachable cat, their tails wagged right, and when they were fearful, their tails went left. It suggests that the muscles in the right side of the tail reflect positive emotions while the muscles in the left side express negative ones.

Brain asymmetry for approach and withdrawal seems to be an ancient trait..Thus it must confer some sort of survival advantage on organisms.

Animals that can do two important things at the same time, like eat and watch for predators, might be better off. And animals with two brain hemispheres could avoid duplication of function, making maximal use of neural tissue.

The asymmetry may also arise from how major nerves in the body connect up to the brain... Nerves that carry information from the skin, heart, liver, lungs and other internal organs are inherently asymmetrical, he said. Thus information from the body that prompts an animal to slow down, eat, relax and restore itself is biased toward the left brain. Information from the body that tells an animal to run, fight, breathe faster and look out for danger is biased toward the right brain.

(This is a re-posting of the MindBlog post of 4/27/2007, material as interesting and fresh today as it was then.)

The molecular choreography of acute exercise

Reynolds points to work of Contrepois et al, who had 36 volunteers, age range 40-75, complete a standard treadmill endurance test, running at an increasing intensity until exhaustion, usually after about nine or 10 minutes of exercise. Blood was drawn before, immediately after, and again 15, 30 and 60 minutes later. The measured the levels of 17,662 different molecules. Of these, 9,815 — or more than half — changed after exercise, compared to their levels before the workout.

Highlights

• Time-series analysis reveals an orchestrated molecular choreography of exercise

• Multi-level omic associations identify key biological processes of peak VO 2

• Prediction models highlight resting blood biomarkers of fitness

• Exercise omics provides insights into the pathophysiology of insulin resistance

Summary

Acute physical activity leads to several changes in metabolic, cardiovascular, and immune pathways. Although studies have examined selected changes in these pathways, the system-wide molecular response to an acute bout of exercise has not been fully characterized. We performed longitudinal multi-omic profiling of plasma and peripheral blood mononuclear cells including metabolome, lipidome, immunome, proteome, and transcriptome from 36 well-characterized volunteers, before and after a controlled bout of symptom-limited exercise. Time-series analysis revealed thousands of molecular changes and an orchestrated choreography of biological processes involving energy metabolism, oxidative stress, inflammation, tissue repair, and growth factor response, as well as regulatory pathways. Most of these processes were dampened and some were reversed in insulin-resistant participants. Finally, we discovered biological pathways involved in cardiopulmonary exercise response and developed prediction models revealing potential resting blood-based biomarkers of peak oxygen consumption.

Do you really want to make your own complex medical decisions?

From Kassirer et al.:

Over the past several decades, the United States medical system has increasingly prioritized patient autonomy. Physicians routinely encourage patients to come to their own decisions about their medical care rather than providing patients with clearer yet more paternalistic advice. Although political theorists, bioethicists, and philosophers generally see this as a positive trend, the present research examines the important question of how patients and advisees in general react to full decisional autonomy when making difficult decisions under uncertainty. Across six experiments (N = 3,867), we find that advisers who give advisees decisional autonomy rather than offering paternalistic advice are judged to be less competent and less helpful. As a result, advisees are less likely to return to and recommend these advisers and pay them lower wages. Importantly, we also demonstrate that advisers do not anticipate these effects. We document these results both inside and outside the medical domain, suggesting that the preference for paternalism is not unique to medicine but rather is a feature of situations in which there are adviser–advisee asymmetries in expertise. We find that the preference for paternalism holds when advice is solicited or unsolicited, when both paternalism and autonomy are accompanied by expert guidance, and it persists both before and after the outcomes of paternalistic advice are realized. Lastly, we see that the preference for paternalism only occurs when decision makers perceive their decision to be difficult. These results challenge the benefits of recently adopted practices in medical decision making that prioritize full decisional autonomy.