In Mexico, President Enrique Peña Nieto’s campaign and his party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, employed tools to measure voters’ brain waves, skin arousal, heart rates and facial expressions during the 2012 presidential campaign. More recently, the party has been using facial coding to help pick its best candidates, one consultant says. Some officials even speak openly about their embrace of neuropolitical techniques, and not just for campaigning, but for governing as well.
Neuromarketing consultants say they are conducting research like this in more than a dozen countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Russia, Spain and, to a much lesser extent, the United States.
One neuromarketing firm says it has worked for a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign committee to help it improve its targeting and messages.
David Plouffe, President Obama’s former campaign manager, said the tools “would be new ground for political campaigns...The richness of this data compared to what is gathered today in testing ads or evaluating speeches and debates, which is the trusty old dial test and primitive qualitative methods, is hard to comprehend. It gets more to emotion, intensity and a more complex understanding of how people are reacting.”Added note: Mexico's governing party, the PRI, has now said it will no longer employ the techniques described above.
...to a large extent, the effects of stress in the brain form a nonlinear 'inverted-U' dose-response curve as a function of stressor severity: the transition from the complete absence of stress to mild stress causes an increase in endpoint X, the transition from mild-to-moderate stress causes endpoint X to plateau and the transition from moderate to more severe stress decreases endpoint X.
A classic example of the inverted-U is seen with the endpoint of synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus, where mild-to-moderate stressors, or exposure to glucocorticoid concentrations in the range evoked by such stressors, enhances primed burst potentiation, whereas more severe stressors or equivalent elevations of glucocorticoid concentrations do the opposite11. This example also demonstrates an elegant mechanism for generating such an inverted-U12. Specifically, the hippocampus contains ample quantities of receptors for glucocorticoids. These come in two classes. First, there are the high-affinity low-capacity mineralocorticoid receptors (MRs), which are mostly occupied under basal, non-stress conditions and in which occupancy increases to saturating levels with mild-to-moderate stressors. In contrast, there are the low-affinity, high-capacity glucocorticoid receptors (GRs), which are not substantially occupied until there is major stress-induced glucocorticoid secretion. Critically, it is increased MR occupancy that enhances synaptic plasticity, whereas increased occupancy of GRs impairs it; the inverted-U pattern emerges from these opposing effects.
..in general, the effects of mild-to-moderate stress (that is, the left side of the U) are salutary, whereas those of severe stress are the opposite. In other words, it is not the case that stress is bad for you. It is major stress that is bad for you, whereas mild stress is anything but; when it is the optimal amount of stress, we love it. What constitutes optimal good stress? It occurs in a setting that feels safe; we voluntarily ride a roller coaster knowing that we are risking feeling a bit queasy, but not risking being decapitated. Moreover, good stress is transient; it is not by chance that a roller coaster ride is not 3 days long. And what is mild, transient stress in a benevolent setting? For this we have a variety of terms: arousal, alertness, engagement, play and stimulation (Fig. 1). The upswing of the inverted-U is the domain of any good educator who intuits the ideal space between a student being bored and being overwhelmed, where challenge is energized by a well-calibrated motivating sense of 'maybe'; after all, it is in the realm of plausible, but not guaranteed, reward that anticipatory bursts of mesolimbic dopamine release are the greatest19. And the downswing of the inverted-U is, of course, the universe of “stress is bad for you”. Thus, the ultimate goal of those studying stress is not to 'cure' us of it, but to optimize it.
Figure 1: Conceptualization of the inverted-U in the context of the benefits and costs of stress.
A broad array of neurobiological endpoints show the same property, which is that stress in the mild-to-moderate range (roughly corresponding to 10–20 μg dl−1 of corticosterone, the species-specific glucocorticoid of rats and mice) has beneficial, salutary effects; subjectively, when exposure is transient, we typically experience this range as being stimulatory. In contrast, both the complete absence of stress, or stress that is more severe and/or prolonged than that in the stimulatory range, have deleterious effects on those same neurobiological endpoints. The absence of stress is subjectively experienced as understimulatory by most, whereas the excess is typically experienced as overstimulatory, which segues into 'stressful'. Many of the inverted-U effects of stress in the brain are explained by the dual receptor system for glucocorticoids, where salutary effects are heavily mediated by increasing occupancy of the high-affinity, low-capacity MRs and deleterious effects are mediated by the low-affinity, high-capacity GRs.
When a novel or movie is particularly engrossing, our reactions to it may be involuntary and resistant to our attempts to counter them. We form what the philosopher Tamar Szabo Gendler calls aliefs — automatic belief-like attitudes that contrast with our well considered beliefs.
Like our involuntary screams in the theater, there may be cases of involuntary moral fictionalism or religious fictionalism as well. Among philosophical issues, though, free will seems to be the clearest case of involuntary fictionalism. It seems clear that I have free will when, for example, I choose from many options to order pasta at a restaurant. Yet few, if any, philosophical notions are harder to defend than free will. Even dualists, who believe in a nonmaterial soul, run into problems with divine foreknowledge. If God foresaw that I would order pasta, then was I really free to do otherwise, to order steak?
In the traditional sense, having free will means that multiple options are truly available to me. I am not a computer, running a decision-making program. No matter what I choose, I could have chosen otherwise. However, in a materialist, as opposed to dualist, worldview, there is no place in the causal chain of material things for the will to act in an uncaused way. Thus only one outcome of my decision-making process is possible. Not even quantum indeterminacy could give me the freedom to order steak. The moment after I recognize this, however, I go back to feeling as if my decision to order pasta was free and that my future decision of what to have for dessert will also be free. I am a free will fictionalist. I accept that I have free will even though I do not believe it.
Giving up on the possibility of free will in the traditional sense of the term, I could adopt compatibilism, the view that actions can be both determined and free. As long as my decision to order pasta is caused by some part of me — say my higher order desires or a deliberative reasoning process — then my action is free even if that aspect of myself was itself caused and determined by a chain of cause and effect. And my action is free even if I really could not have acted otherwise by ordering the steak.
Unfortunately, not even this will rescue me from involuntary free will fictionalism. Adopting compatibilism, I would still feel as if I have free will in the traditional sense and that I could have chosen steak and that the future is wide open concerning what I will have for dessert. There seems to be a “user illusion” that produces the feeling of free will.
William James famously remarked that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. Well, I cannot believe in free will, but I can accept it. In fact, if free will fictionalism is involuntary, I have no choice but to accept free will. That makes accepting free will easy and undeniably sincere. Accepting the reality of God or morality, on the other hand, are tougher tasks, and potentially disingenuous.
Research in neuroscience produces an understanding of the brain on many different levels. At the smallest scale, there is enormous progress in understanding mechanisms of neural signal transmission and processing. At the other end, neuroimaging and related techniques enable the creation of a global understanding of the brain’s functional organization. However, a gap remains in binding these results together, which leaves open the question of how all these complex mechanisms interact. This paper advocates for the role of self-organization in bridging this gap. We focus on the functionality of neural circuits acquired during individual development by processes of self-organization—making complex global behavior emerge from simple local rules.
Donald Hebb’s formula “cells that fire together wire together” may be seen as an early example of such a simple local rule which has proven successful in building associative memories and perceptual functions. However, Hebb’s law and its successors...are restricted to scenarios where the learning is driven passively by an externally generated data stream. However, from the perspective of an autonomous agent, sensory input is mainly determined by its own actions. The challenge of behavioral self-organization requires a new kind of learning that bootstraps novel behavior out of the self-generated past experiences.
This paper introduces a rule which may be expressed as “chaining together what changes together.” This rule takes into account temporal structure and establishes contact to the external world by directly relating the behavioral level to the synaptic dynamics. These features together provide a mechanism for bootstrapping behavioral patterns from scratch.
This synaptic mechanism is neurobiologically plausible and raises the question of whether it is present in living beings. This paper aims to encourage such initiatives by using bioinspired robots as a methodological tool. Admittedly, there is a large gap between biological beings and such robots. However, in the last decade, robotics has seen a change of paradigm from classical AI thinking to embodied AI which recognizes the role of embedding the specific body in its environment. This has moved robotics closer to biological systems and supports their use as a testbed for neuroscientific hypotheses.
We deepen this argument by presenting concrete results showing that the proposed synaptic plasticity rule generates a large number of phenomena which are important for neuroscience. We show that up to the level of sensorimotor contingencies, self-determined behavioral development can be grounded in synaptic dynamics, without having to postulate higher-level constructs such as intrinsic motivation, curiosity, or a specific reward system. This is achieved with a very simple neuronal control structure by outsourcing much of the complexity to the embodiment [the idea of morphological computation].
Robots collect warehoused books, weld car parts together, and vacuum floors. As the number of android robots increases, however, concerns about the “uncanny valley” phenomenon—that people dislike a vaguely human-like robot more than either a machine-like robot or a real human—remain. Mathur and Reichling revisited whether human reactions to android robots exhibit an uncanny valley effect, using a set of 80 robot head shots gathered from the Internet and a systematically morphed set of six images extending from entirely robot to entirely human. Humans did adhere to the uncanny valley curve when rating the likeability of both sets of faces; what's more, this curve also described the extent to which those faces were trusted.Here's the summary from the paper:
• Likability ratings of a large sample of real robot faces had a robust Uncanny Valley.
• Digitally composed robot face series demonstrated a similar Uncanny Valley.
• The Uncanny Valley may subtly alter humans’ trusting behavior toward robot partners.
• Category confusion may occur in the Uncanny Valley but did not mediate the effect.
Android robots are entering human social life. However, human–robot interactions may be complicated by a hypothetical Uncanny Valley (UV) in which imperfect human-likeness provokes dislike. Previous investigations using unnaturally blended images reported inconsistent UV effects. We demonstrate an UV in subjects’ explicit ratings of likability for a large, objectively chosen sample of 80 real-world robot faces and a complementary controlled set of edited faces. An “investment game” showed that the UV penetrated even more deeply to influence subjects’ implicit decisions concerning robots’ social trustworthiness, and that these fundamental social decisions depend on subtle cues of facial expression that are also used to judge humans. Preliminary evidence suggests category confusion may occur in the UV but does not mediate the likability effect. These findings suggest that while classic elements of human social psychology govern human–robot social interaction, robust UV effects pose a formidable android-specific problem.
...stimulants such as amphetamine and methylphenidate (sold under trade names such as Adderall and Ritalin, respectively) are widely used for nonmedical reasons …cognitive enhancement with stimulants is commonplace on college campuses…use by college faculty and other professionals to enhance workplace productivity has been documented…The published literature includes substantially different estimates of the effectiveness of prescription stimulants as cognitive enhancers. A recent meta-analysis suggests that the effect is most likely real but small for executive function tests stressing inhibitory control, and probably nonexistent for executive function tests stressing working memory.Farah notes several studies suggesting that the effects of Adderall and another drug, modafinil (trade name Provigil) on ‘cognitive enhancement’ are actually effects on task motivation and mood.
The newest trend in cognitive enhancement is the use of transcranial electric stimulation. In the most widely used form, called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a weak current flows between an anode and a cathode placed on the head, altering the resting potential of neurons in the current's path….Transcranial electric stimulation is expanding …with new companies selling compact, visually appealing, user-friendly devices…published literature includes a mix of findings. One recent attempt to synthesize the literature with meta-analysis concluded that tDCS has no effect whatsoever on a wide range of cognitive abilities.
Why are we so ignorant about cognitive enhancement? Several factors seem to be at play. The majority of studies on enhancement effectiveness have been carried out on small samples, rarely more than 50 subjects, which limits their power. Furthermore, cognitive tasks typically lend themselves to a variety of different but reasonable outcome measures, such as overall errors, specific types of errors (for example, false alarms), and response times. In addition, there is usually more than one possible statistical approach to analyze the enhancement effect. Small samples and flexibility in design and analysis raise the likelihood of published false positives. In addition, pharmacologic and electric enhancements may differ in effectiveness depending on the biological and psychological traits of the user, which complicates the effort to understand the true enhancement potential of these technologies. Industry is understandably unmotivated to take on the expense of appropriate large-scale trials of enhancement, given that the stimulants used are illegally diverted and transcranial electric stimulation devices can be sold without such evidence. The inferential step from laboratory effect to real-world benefit adds another layer of challenge. Given that enhancements would likely be used for years, long-term effectiveness and safety are essential concerns but are particularly difficult and costly to determine. As a result, the only large-scale trial we may see is the enormous but uncontrolled and poorly monitored trial of people using these drugs and devices on their own.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) manifests with memory loss and spatial disorientation. AD pathology starts in the entorhinal cortex, making it likely that local neural correlates of spatial navigation, particularly grid cells, are impaired. Grid-cell–like representations in humans can be measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We found that young adults at genetic risk for AD (APOE-ε4 carriers) exhibit reduced grid-cell–like representations and altered navigational behavior in a virtual arena. Both changes were associated with impaired spatial memory performance. Reduced grid-cell–like representations were also related to increased hippocampal activity, potentially reflecting compensatory mechanisms that prevent overt spatial memory impairment in APOE-ε4 carriers. Our results provide evidence of behaviorally relevant entorhinal dysfunction in humans at genetic risk for AD, decades before potential disease onset.
1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone.
3. Be generous.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life.
5. When people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them.
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.
7. Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.
8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit.
9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.
Nishi and colleagues' experimental model used an assessment of people's willingness to contribute to public goods to test how initial wealth inequality and the structure of the social network influence the evolution of inequality...can mere observation of your neighbour's wealth lead to more inequality over time, even if such information does not change economic incentives? Visible wealth might have a psychological effect by triggering social comparisons and thereby influencing economic choices that have repercussions for inequality.
...the researchers endowed all participants with tokens, worth real money...in a treatment without inequality, all participants initially received the same number of tokens; in a low-inequality treatment, participants had similar but different initial endowments; and in the high-inequality treatment there was a substantial starting difference between participants...A crucial manipulation in this experiment was wealth visibility. Under invisible conditions, the participants could observe only their own accumulated wealth. Under visibility, they could see the accumulated wealth of their connected neighbours but not the whole network....
The groups typically comprised 17 people arranged at random in a social network in which, on average, about 5 people were linked ('neighbours'). In each of the 10 rounds of the following game, participants had to decide whether to behave pro-socially ('cooperate') by reducing their own wealth by 50 tokens per connected neighbour to benefit each of them by 100 tokens, or to behave pro-selfishly ('defect') by keeping their tokens for themselves. These decisions had consequences for accumulated wealth levels and inequality. At the end of each round, the subjects learnt whether their neighbours had cooperated or defected and 30% of participants were given the opportunity to change their neighbour, that is, to either sever an existing link or to create a new one.
The authors find that, under high initial wealth inequality, visibility of neighbours' accumulated wealth increases inequality over time relative to the invisibility condition.Here is the abstract from Nishi et al.:
Humans prefer relatively equal distributions of resources, yet societies have varying degrees of economic inequality. To investigate some of the possible determinants and consequences of inequality, here we perform experiments involving a networked public goods game in which subjects interact and gain or lose wealth. Subjects (n = 1,462) were randomly assigned to have higher or lower initial endowments, and were embedded within social networks with three levels of economic inequality (Gini coefficient = 0.0, 0.2, and 0.4). In addition, we manipulated the visibility of the wealth of network neighbours. We show that wealth visibility facilitates the downstream consequences of initial inequality—in initially more unequal situations, wealth visibility leads to greater inequality than when wealth is invisible. This result reflects a heterogeneous response to visibility in richer versus poorer subjects. We also find that making wealth visible has adverse welfare consequences, yielding lower levels of overall cooperation, inter-connectedness, and wealth. High initial levels of economic inequality alone, however, have relatively few deleterious welfare effects.
INTRODUCTION: Short leukocyte telomere length (LTL) has become a hallmark characteristic of aging. Some, but not all, evidence suggests that physical activity (PA) may play an important role in attenuating age-related diseases and may provide a protective effect for telomeres. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between PA and LTL in a national sample of US adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
METHODS: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data from 1999 to 2002 (n = 6503; 20-84 yr) were used. Four self-report questions related to movement-based behaviors (MBB) were assessed. The four MBB included whether individuals participated in moderate-intensity PA, vigorous-intensity PA, walking/cycling for transportation, and muscle-strengthening activities. An MBB index variable was created by summing the number of MBB an individual engaged in (range, 0-4).
RESULTS: A clear dose-response relation was observed between MBB and LTL; across the LTL tertiles, respectively, the mean numbers of MBB were 1.18, 1.44, and 1.54 (Ptrend less than 0.001). After adjustments (including age) and compared with those engaging in 0 MBB, those engaging in 1, 2, 3, and 4 MBB, respectively, had a 3% (P = 0.84), 24% (P = 0.02), 29% (P = 0.04), and 52% (P = 0.004) reduced odds of being in the lowest (vs highest) tertile of LTL; MBB was not associated with being in the middle (vs highest) tertile of LTL.
CONCLUSIONS: Greater engagement in MBB was associated with reduced odds of being in the lowest LTL tertile.
How does lacking vs. possessing power in a social exchange affect people’s trust in their exchange partner? An answer to this question has broad implications for a number of exchange settings in which dependence plays an important role. Here, we report on a series of experiments in which we manipulated participants’ power position in terms of structural dependence and observed their trust perceptions and behaviors. Over a variety of different experimental paradigms and measures, we find that more powerful actors place less trust in others than less powerful actors do. Our results contradict predictions by rational actor models, which assume that low-power individuals are able to anticipate that a more powerful exchange partner will place little value on the relationship with them, thus tends to behave opportunistically, and consequently cannot be trusted. Conversely, our results support predictions by motivated cognition theory, which posits that low-power individuals want their exchange partner to be trustworthy and then act according to that desire. Mediation analyses show that, consistent with the motivated cognition account, having low power increases individuals’ hope and, in turn, their perceptions of their exchange partners’ benevolence, which ultimately leads them to trust.
•Preindustrial societies in Tanzania, Namibia, and Bolivia show similar sleep parametersSummary
•They do not sleep more than “modern” humans, with average durations of 5.7–7.1 hr
•They go to sleep several hours after sunset and typically awaken before sunrise
•Temperature appears to be a major regulator of human sleep duration and timing
How did humans sleep before the modern era? Because the tools to measure sleep under natural conditions were developed long after the invention of the electric devices suspected of delaying and reducing sleep, we investigated sleep in three preindustrial societies. We find that all three show similar sleep organization, suggesting that they express core human sleep patterns, most likely characteristic of pre-modern era Homo sapiens. Sleep periods, the times from onset to offset, averaged 6.9–8.5 hr, with sleep durations of 5.7–7.1 hr, amounts near the low end of those industrial societies. There was a difference of nearly 1 hr between summer and winter sleep. Daily variation in sleep duration was strongly linked to time of onset, rather than offset. None of these groups began sleep near sunset, onset occurring, on average, 3.3 hr after sunset. Awakening was usually before sunrise. The sleep period consistently occurred during the nighttime period of falling environmental temperature, was not interrupted by extended periods of waking, and terminated, with vasoconstriction, near the nadir of daily ambient temperature. The daily cycle of temperature change, largely eliminated from modern sleep environments, may be a potent natural regulator of sleep. Light exposure was maximal in the morning and greatly decreased at noon, indicating that all three groups seek shade at midday and that light activation of the suprachiasmatic nucleus is maximal in the morning. Napping occurred on fewer than 7% of days in winter and fewer than 22% of days in summer. Mimicking aspects of the natural environment might be effective in treating certain modern sleep disorders.
People cleave to ideological convictions with greater intensity in the aftermath of threat. The posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) plays a key role in both detecting discrepancies between desired and current conditions and adjusting subsequent behavior to resolve such conflicts. Building on prior literature examining the role of the pMFC in shifts in relatively low-level decision processes, we demonstrate that the pMFC mediates adjustments in adherence to political and religious ideologies. We presented participants with a reminder of death and a critique of their in-group ostensibly written by a member of an out-group, then experimentally decreased both avowed belief in God and out-group derogation by downregulating pMFC activity via transcranial magnetic stimulation. The results provide the first evidence that group prejudice and religious belief are susceptible to targeted neuromodulation, and point to a shared cognitive mechanism underlying concrete and abstract decision processes. We discuss the implications of these findings for further research characterizing the cognitive and affective mechanisms at play.