Your genes and your politics.

Here are some clips from a piece by Constance Holden reporting on presentations at the recent annual Behavior Genetics Association meeting.

Numerous studies over the past 2 decades...have indicated that genes have a significant influence over whether you're "liberal" or "conservative" on various political and social issues. Some heritability estimates have been as high as 50%. That's roughly the heritability found for many personality traits such as "extraversion" or "agreeableness," and it implies that, in a given population, about half of the variation in a particular trait is attributable to genetic differences.

Now James Fowler, UCSD, and grad student Christopher Dawes say they've produced fresh evidence that DNA also has a hand in the intensity of someone's partisan attachment and even in whether someone bothers to vote...they did that by crunching data from twin registries and the government's long-running National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (NLSAH)...they matched data on voting by 396 Los Angeles-area twins, including identical (who share 100% of their genes) and fraternal (who average 50% genetic overlap) twins, obtained from Los Angeles voter-turnout records. All twins were same-sex pairs to avoid confounding results with sex differences. The researchers corrected for environmental factors such as whether more of the identical than fraternal twins were living together, which might inflate their degree of similarity. They concluded that the correlation for voting was much higher between pairs of identical (.71) than fraternal (.50) twins. From this they estimated the heritability of voting behavior--that is, whether people eligible to vote actually do so--at 53%, suggesting that at least half the individual variation can be traced to genetic influences. They found an even higher heritability--72%--when they replicated the study with data on 806 twins from NLSAH, they reported in the May issue of the American Political Science Review.

Several groups are now trying to correlate personality data with DNA markers from studies such as NLSAH, which contains DNA as well as behavioral data from many subjects, in hope of identifying specific genes that feed into underlying traits, such as "desire for cooperation," that Fowler, for one, believes have been selected for throughout human evolution. Studies so far have focused on the same genes that are of interest in psychiatric genetics--in particular those involved with neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin that are known to be important in regulating higher brain activities.

We are talking here about the fact that genetics are important, not really going after a complex behavior like political leanings at the molecular level. What is important is that:

social scientists are plunging into biological and evolutionary issues. At least some are starting to acknowledge that humans are genetically unique individuals and not just cloned pawns of their environment. And that suggests that prophets and pundits, however prescient, are probably never going to get much better at predictions than they are now.

A Twin Valley collage

A few pics I made last Saturday in the yard of our Twin Valley home in Middleton, WI (click to enlarge).

Moral Hypocrisy

John Tierney has a nice piece in the NYTimes on studies that probe moral flip-flops of the sort evidenced in the current presidential campaign. Does the hypocrite really believe in his heart what he is saying? Clips:

In voting against the Bush tax cut in 2001, Senator John McCain said he “cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate.” Today he campaigns in favor of extending that same tax cut beyond its expiration date...Senator Barack Obama last year called himself a “longtime advocate” of public financing of election campaigns. This month, he reiterated his “support” for such financing while becoming the first major party presidential nominee ever to reject it for his own campaign...Do you think either of these men is a hypocrite?

Moral hypocrisy allows us to gain the social benefits of appearing virtuous without incurring the personal costs of virtuous behavior. If you can deceive even yourself into believing that you’re acting for the common good, you’ll have more energy and confidence to further your own interests — and your self-halo can persuade others to help you along.

But as useful as hypocrisy can be, it’s apparently not quite as basic as the human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Your mind can justify double standards, it seems, but in your heart you know you’re wrong.

The Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution

An article in PLoS Biology with the title of this post with worth a look. It describes recent work that has it origins in Charles Darwin's passage in The Descent of Man: “The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.”

If I'm Not Hot, Are You Hot or Not?

Here is a quirky piece. Check out the website indicated...

Prior research has established that people's own physical attractiveness affects their selection of romantic partners. This article provides further support for this effect and also examines a different, yet related, question: When less attractive people accept less attractive dates, do they persuade themselves that the people they choose to date are more physically attractive than others perceive them to be? Our analysis of data from the popular Web site http://HOTorNOT.com suggests that this is not the case: Less attractive people do not delude themselves into thinking that their dates are more physically attractive than others perceive them to be. Furthermore, the results also show that males, compared with females, are less affected by their own attractiveness when choosing whom to date.

WikiPathways...

I spent much of my training and early research career trying to figure out chemical pathways in cells, specifically the pathways linking light to nerve signals in our eyes. I was thus struck by this article describing evolution in the process of how the biology research community maintains and updates knowledge about complex pathway systems. It discusses WikiPathways.

Nasty, brutish and short - a record lifespan

Just to show you the opposite end of the lifespan spectrum - perhaps an antidote to our obsessing over whether we might expand human lifespan from 85 to, say, 105 - here is a curious note from the July 3 Nature on the shortest known vertebrate lifespan: three months.

The Madagascan chameleon Furcifer labordi has an annual life cycle, and spends most of its short life in the egg...Kristopher Karsten of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater and his colleagues monitored individuals from the time of hatching until death during several cycles. They found that they hatch in November; grow at astonishing rates; reach maturity by January; battle fiercely over mates, breed and lay their eggs by February; and then promptly drop dead. For the next nine months, the entire species is represented by eggs...This is the shortest lifespan ever recorded for a four-legged vertebrate animal.

Brain correlates of insight - the Eureka! moment

Jonah Lehrer, in the July 28 issue of The New Yorker, offers an article titled "The Eureka Hunt." Here is the abstract and the PDF is here (thanks to mindblog reader Gregory for the link):

Why do good ideas come to us when they do? On August 5, 1949, a firefighter named Wag Dodge survived an out-of-control fire in the Mann Gulch River Valley, in Montana. In a moment of desperate insight, he devised an escape plan by igniting the ground in front of him and laying down on the smoldering embers, inhaling the thin layer of oxygen clinging to the ground. There is something inherently mysterious about moments of insight. Dodge couldn’t explain where his idea came from. Stories like Dodge’s share a few essential features, which psychologists and neuroscientists use to define “the insight experience.” Mark Jung-Beeman, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University, has spent the past fifteen years trying to figure out what happens inside the brain when people have an insight. Jung-Beeman became interested in the nature of insight in the early nineteen-nineties, while researching the right hemisphere of the brain. Mentions Jonathan Schooler. Jung-Beeman decided to compare word puzzles—or Compound Remote Associate Problems (C.R.A.)—solved in moments of insight with those solved by methodical testing. He teamed up with John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexler University, and they combined fMRI and EEG (electroencephalography) testing to scan people’s brains while they solved the puzzles. The resulting study, published in 2004, found that people who solved puzzles with insight activated a specific subset of cortical areas. Although the answer seemed to appear out of nowhere, the mind was carefully preparing itself for the breakthrough. The suddenness of the insight is preceded by a burst of brain activity. Thirty milliseconds before the answer appears, the EEG registers a spike of gamma rhythm. A small fold of tissue on the surface of the right hemisphere, the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG), becomes unusually active in the second before the insight. Once the brain is sufficiently focused on the problem, the cortex needs to relax, to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere that will provide the insight. As Kounios sees it, the insight process is an act of cognitive deliberation transformed by accidental, serendipitous connections. Mentions Joydeep Bhattacharya and Henri Poincaré. The brain area responsible for recognizing insight is the prefrontal cortex. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at M.I.T., spent five years studying the prefrontal cortex. He was eventually able to show that it wasn’t simply an aggregator of information, but rather it was more like a conductor, waving its baton and directing the players. In 2001, Miller and Princeton neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen published an influential paper laying out their theory of how the prefrontal cortex controls the rest of the brain. It remains unclear how simple cells recognize what the conscious mind cannot. An insight is just a fleeting glimpse of the brain’s huge store of unknown knowledge.

Mendelssohn, continued

Here is the weekly posting of an portion of the house concert at Twin Valley on 6/29/08 the Andante expressivo from Mendelssohn's 2nd piano trio.

Resveratrol, anti-aging, continued...

After getting a comment about the merits of different resveratrol sources from a blog reader in response post just below , I clicked around and found this link that leads on to an instructional video, discussion of preparations, price comparisons, etc. Numerous vendors for this stuff are appearing, like a cloud of snake-oil salesmen, and one I find particularly suspect is the slick Biotivia outfit, which doesn't even state the resveratrol content of their wondrous products.

Our relationship with mirrors...

Natalie Angier offers an excellent discussion of the biology, psychology and physics of our relationship with mirrors, how they are used in studies of self awareness in humans and animals, and also in treating disorders like phantom limb syndrome, chronic pain and post-stroke paralysis. I show here a nice graphic from the article explaining why few of us understand how our mirrors images really work.

Update on drugs that might increase lifespan

Nicholas Wade covers recent work by Sirtris, a startup company recently bought by GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million dollars. The drug candidates are activators of the enzyme sirtuin, involved in the 'famine reflex' that can switch body tissues to more efficient metabolism and increase life span in mice and other beasts (see graphic below). The commercially available form is resveratrol, obtained from skins of red grapes. It actually is a mixture of compounds having many actions other than sirtuin activation, some probably undesirable. (I actually ordered the stuff from a nutritional supplement supplier, and I'm playing with the idea of trying it, maybe following blood glucose levels.... the not so minor problem being the possibility that any positive physical, psychological, or chemical reactions to the stuff might be a placebo effect.)

Psychopharma-parenting

I am usually relatively inattentive to other blogs in the "mind" area, because we tend to get into recycling each other's material, reminding me of what my grandmother told me once when I was 9 years old and we were driving through a small Texas town. I asked, "Grandmother, what do all these people do for a living?" The response was, "They take in each other's laundry."

In spite of my recycling sentiments, my thanks to MindHacks and Neuroanthropology (see blog list in right column) for pointing out this Colbert Report gem to me. (I can't understand how I missed it, the Colbert Show and the John Stewart Daily News are the only two television programs I religiously watch.)

Here is it, from two years ago on the culture that is drugging its kids:

Monoamine oxidase gene variant that correlates with aggression.

A colleague has pointed out a recent paper that compliments work mentioned in my May 14 post showing that brain monoamine oxidase activity (MAOA) levels predict male aggression. (MAOA inactivates the monoamine neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine.) The paper by Guo et al. examines the effects of a particular genetic variant of the MAOA gene, a two-fold repeat of the 30-base pair promoter region VNTR. They correlated self-reported serious and violent delinquency and the 30-bp VNTR in the MAOA gene in a cohort of 2524 adolescents and young adults in the United States in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Here, for techie readers, is their abstract:

Genetic studies of delinquent and criminal behavior are rare in spite of the wide recognition that individuals may differ in their propensity for delinquency and criminality. Using 2524 participants in Add Health in the United States, the present study demonstrates a link between the rare 2 repeat of the 30-bp VNTR in the MAOA gene and much higher levels of self-reported serious and violent delinquency. The evidence is based on a statistical association analysis and a functional analysis of MAOA promoter activity using two human brain-derived cell lines: neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y and human glioblastoma 1242-MG. The association analysis shows that men with a 2R report a level of serious delinquency and violent delinquency in adolescence and young adulthood that were about twice (CI: (0.21, 3.24), P=0.025; and CI: (0.37, 2.5), P=0.008 for serious and violent delinquency, respectively) as high as those for participants with the other variants. The results for women are similar, but weaker. In the functional analysis, the 2 repeat exhibits much lower levels of promoter activity than the 3 or 4 repeat.

MindBlog's half-sour pickle recipe

This posting falls under the "random curious stuff" category mentioned in the title box of this blog. At the social/musical at my Twin Valley home on June 29, several people asked for the recipe for the half-sour pickles we had served with gazpacho as a garnish. Here it is, the result of several trials to get them the way I like them. Not guaranteed to please all....

Deric's final half sour pickle recipe:

-2 lbs pickling cucumbers
-1 bundle of dill heads and stalks
-Wash cukes and dill, cut dill stalks to ~2-3 inch lengths, cut ends off cukes, slice cukes lengthwise if they are large.
-layer dill and cukes in container (~2 quart jar or plastic container)
-pour in water to cover, then pour this water into quart (4 cup) measuring cup to determine its volume, i.e. the desired volume for the pickling mixture to be added (should be ~ 4 cups).
-add 1/4 cup sea or kosher or pickling salt to 2 cups water, dissolve
-add 1/3 cup rice wine vinegar (or other very mild vinegar), 1/2 teaspoon whole black peppercorns, 3-4 whole coriander seeds, 1/2 teaspoon mustard seeds, 4-6 cloves fresh garlic, finely chopped.
-add water to obtain the volume determined above (~4 cups) while mixing thoroughly and pour over pickles.
-rotate jar or container at intervals to mix thoroughly, leave two days at room temperature, until a few bubbles start to appear, then put in refrigerator.
-pickles should be ready to eat after ~ 4 days, flavor improves over two weeks.

Observing nerve cells rewire themselves after stroke damage.

In a technical tour de force, Winship and Murphy use the two photon imagining technique on living adult mouse brains to observe the individual neurons close to the site of damage caused by a stroke. In the first month — when paralysis is usually at its worst — they found that some neurons ditched their speciality for one particular limb and began processing information from multiple limbs. During the following month, as the affected brain region reorganized itself more permanently, those neurons re-specialized to a new single limb. Here is their abstract:

Functional mapping and microstimulation studies suggest that recovery after stroke damage can be attributed to surviving brain regions taking on the functional roles of lost tissues. Although this model is well supported by data, it is not clear how activity in single neurons is altered in relation to cortical functional maps. It is conceivable that individual surviving neurons could adopt new roles at the expense of their usual function. Alternatively, neurons that contribute to recovery may take on multiple functions and exhibit a wider repertoire of neuronal processing. In vivo two-photon calcium imaging was used in adult mice within reorganized forelimb and hindlimb somatosensory functional maps to determine how the response properties of individual neurons and glia were altered during recovery from ischemic damage over a period of 2–8 weeks. Single-cell calcium imaging revealed that the limb selectivity of individual neurons was altered during recovery from ischemia, such that neurons normally selective for a single contralateral limb processed information from multiple limbs. Altered limb selectivity was most prominent in border regions between stroke-altered forelimb and hindlimb macroscopic map representations, and peaked 1 month after the targeted insult. Two months after stroke, individual neurons near the center of reorganized functional areas became more selective for a preferred limb. These previously unreported forms of plasticity indicate that in adult animals, seemingly hardwired cortical neurons first adopt wider functional roles as they develop strategies to compensate for loss of specific sensory modalities after forms of brain damage such as stroke.

fMRI of perspective taking with robots!

Here is a quirky item... set up a human machine interaction, and as the machine is given more human-like response characteristics, parts of our brain that do 'theory of mind' (attributing intentions to others, etc.) become active. We humanize the robot. From the paper:

When our PC goes on strike again we tend to curse it as if it were a human being. Why and under which circumstances do we attribute human-like properties to machines? Although humans increasingly interact directly with machines it remains unclear whether humans implicitly attribute intentions to them and, if so, whether such interactions resemble human-human interactions on a neural level. In social cognitive neuroscience the ability to attribute intentions and desires to others is being referred to as having a Theory of Mind (ToM). With the present study we investigated whether an increase of human-likeness of interaction partners modulates the participants' ToM associated cortical activity.

...we investigated cortical activity modulation during highly interactive human-robot game. Increasing degrees of human-likeness for the game partner were introduced by means of a computer partner, a functional robot, an anthropomorphic robot and a human partner. The classical iterated prisoner's dilemma game was applied as experimental task which allowed for an implicit detection of ToM associated cortical activity...functional imaging data revealed a highly significant linear increase of cortical activity in the medial frontal cortex as well as in the right temporo-parietal junction in correspondence with the increase of human-likeness of the interaction partner...

Most popular consciousness papers

Most popular downloads for June 2008, from the ASSC archive. Also, some of the papers from the annual meeting in Taipei are here:

1. Destrebecqz, Arnaud and Peigneux, Philippe (2005) Methods for studying
unconscious learning. In: Progress in Brain Research. Elsevier, pp. 69-80.
2207 downloads from 27 countries. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/170/
2. Koriat, A. (2006) Metacognition and Consciousness. In: Cambridge handbook
of consciousness. Cambridge University Press, New York, USA. 1437 downloads
from 24 countries. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/175/
3. Dehaene, Stanislas and Changeux, Jean-Pierre and Naccache, Lionel and
Sackur, Jérôme and Sergent, Claire (2006) Conscious, preconscious, and
subliminal processing: a testable taxonomy. Trends in Cognitive Science, 10
(5). pp. 204-211. 1047 downloads from 25 countries.
http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/20/
4. Mashour, George A. (2007) Inverse Zombies, Anesthesia Awareness, and the
Hard Problem of Unconsciousness. In: 11th Annual Meeting of the ASSC, Las
Vegas. 756 downloads from 17 countries. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/294/
5. Chalmers, David J. (2004) How can we construct a science of
consciousness? In: The Cognitive Neurosciences III. MIT Press, Cambridge,
MA. 714 downloads from 11 countries. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/28/

How we impose a natural order on events...

Goldin-Meadow et al. do interesting experiments on how speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally, finding that linguistic differences in subject-object-verb placement do not carry over into gestural depictions of the same event. (English, Chinese, and Spanish speakers typically use the order subject-verb-object to describe an event; Turkish speakers use subject-object-verb.) This suggests a natural cognitive sequence for representing events.

To test whether the language we speak influences our behavior even when we are not speaking, we asked speakers of four languages differing in their predominant word orders (English, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese) to perform two nonverbal tasks: a communicative task (describing an event by using gesture without speech) and a noncommunicative task (reconstructing an event with pictures). We found that the word orders speakers used in their everyday speech did not influence their nonverbal behavior. Surprisingly, speakers of all four languages used the same order and on both nonverbal tasks. This order, actor–patient–act, is analogous to the subject–object–verb pattern found in many languages of the world and, importantly, in newly developing gestural languages. The findings provide evidence for a natural order that we impose on events when describing and reconstructing them nonverbally and exploit when constructing language anew.

The authors speculate:

...that, rather than being an outgrowth of communicative efficiency or the manual modality, actor-patient-act may reflect a natural sequencing for representing events. Entities are cognitively more basic and less relational than actions, which might lead participants to highlight entities involved in an action before focusing on the action itself, thus situating actor and patient before action. Moreover, there is a particularly close cognitive tie between objects and actions, which would link patient to action, resulting in an actor-patient-act order.

Mendelssohn, continued

The is the weekly posting of an portion of the house concert at Twin Valley on 6/29/08 the Molto allegro ed agitato from Mendelssohn's 1st piano trio.