The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology.

I pass along some a clip from Steven Pinker’s contribution to the edge.org annual question “What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely know.” He notes a recent paper by Tooby, Cosmides, and Barrett with the title of this post, and continues:

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (one that is not taking in energy), entropy never decreases. (The First Law is that energy is conserved; the Third, that a temperature of absolute zero is unreachable.)

Why the awe for the Second Law? The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.

To start with, the Second Law implies that misfortune may be no one’s fault. The biggest breakthrough of the scientific revolution was to nullify the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose: that everything happens for a reason. In this primitive understanding, when bad things happen—accidents, disease, famine—someone or something must have wanted them to happen. This in turn impels people to find a defendant, demon, scapegoat, or witch to punish. Galileo and Newton replaced this cosmic morality play with a clockwork universe in which events are caused by conditions in the present, not goals for the future. The Second Law deepens that discovery: Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than to go right. Houses burn down, ships sink, battles are lost for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not just arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can not to become our food. What needs to be explained is wealth. Yet most discussions of poverty consist of arguments about whom to blame for it. More generally, an underappreciation of the Second Law lures people into seeing every unsolved social problem as a sign that their country is being driven off a cliff. It’s in the very nature of the universe that life has problems. But it’s better to figure out how to solve them—to apply information and energy to expand our refuge of beneficial order—than to start a conflagration and hope for the best. 

Dual streams of speech processing.

A large number of studies have documented how visual information in the brain is processed in dual streams of information: dorsal (where is it?), and ventral (what is it?). Fridriksson et al. have now applied a dual route model to speech processing that distinguishes form to meaning from form to articulation processing, and  I pass on their abstract plus one graphic showing the brain regions they are dealing with:

Several dual route models of human speech processing have been proposed suggesting a large-scale anatomical division between cortical regions that support motor–phonological aspects vs. lexical–semantic aspects of speech processing. However, to date, there is no complete agreement on what areas subserve each route or the nature of interactions across these routes that enables human speech processing. Relying on an extensive behavioral and neuroimaging assessment of a large sample of stroke survivors, we used a data-driven approach using principal components analysis of lesion-symptom mapping to identify brain regions crucial for performance on clusters of behavioral tasks without a priori separation into task types. Distinct anatomical boundaries were revealed between a dorsal frontoparietal stream and a ventral temporal–frontal stream associated with separate components. Collapsing over the tasks primarily supported by these streams, we characterize the dorsal stream as a form-to-articulation pathway and the ventral stream as a form-to-meaning pathway. This characterization of the division in the data reflects both the overlap between tasks supported by the two streams as well as the observation that there is a bias for phonological production tasks supported by the dorsal stream and lexical–semantic comprehension tasks supported by the ventral stream. As such, our findings show a division between two processing routes that underlie human speech processing and provide an empirical foundation for studying potential computational differences that distinguish between the two routes.

Component 1 (Form-to-meaning processing necessary for single word and sentence comprehension, also reversed (meaning-to-form processing) to support lexical–semantic aspects of speech production) is represented in Left, Component 2 (form-to-articulation processing) is represented in Center (Component 2a), and Component 2 modulated by a lesion component derived from lesion maps is represented in Right (Component 2b).

The effect of status on stress depends on the stability of the hierarchy.

In most human societies, individuals with higher socioeconomic status live longer, experience increased well-being, and have lower rates of stress-related diseases such as cardiovascular conditions and type 2 diabetes, benefits that may be explained in part by the stress-buffering effects of status. Knight and Mehta provide evidence that this effect depends on how stable the social hierarchy is. They suggest that during times of hierarchical instability, when status could change, that high status might boost, not buffer, stress responses. I want to pass on their description of how social status and hierarchy stability were experimentally manipulated in the undergraduate participants in their study, followed by their abstract.

We tested our predictions by experimentally manipulating social status and hierarchy stability in undergraduate participants (n = 118; 57.3% female; age: M = 19.8) who were recruited for course credit. Participants were told that, on the basis of their responses to prelaboratory questionnaires, they had been assigned to complete an upcoming puzzle-building task as either a “manager” (high status) or “builder” (low status), and that another participant (actually a confederate) would perform the unassigned role. Participants were told specifically that the assignment was based on their “leadership skills and experience” to connect the role assignment to prestige. In reality, roles were randomly assigned. Participants were also told that the manager would be in charge of directing subordinates in the building process and would evaluate the “builder” at the end of the task to determine how to split bonus money.

Next, all participants were asked to complete the The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), a 5-min speech about one’s qualification for a job and a 5-min serial subtraction math task in front of a panel of observers. To manipulate hierarchy stability, participants were told that their role (manager/builder) could change based on the speech/math task (unstable hierarchy) or that their performance on the task would not affect their role assignment (stable hierarchy). A 5-min preparation period was completed in the presence of a sex-matched confederate to increase the salience of the manipulations. Panelists and confederates were blind to participants’ assigned conditions. Participants provided informed consent to participate in a group activity and perform a speech task. The University of Oregon’s Institutional Review Board approved all methods.

Hormones were assayed from saliva collected via passive drool ∼10 min after arriving at the laboratory (baseline), as well as 0, 20, and 40 min after the TSST. Participants responded to a prompt asking how “in control” they felt after assignment to status and stability conditions and after the TSST, which was included as a separate item in a broader measure of self-reported affect. Three independent observers rated videos of each participant’s speech for status-relevant behaviors and two items that assessed overall interview performance

Abstract

High social status reduces stress responses in numerous species, but the stress-buffering effect of status may dissipate or even reverse during times of hierarchical instability. In an experimental test of this hypothesis, 118 participants (57.3% female) were randomly assigned to a high- or low-status position in a stable or unstable hierarchy and were then exposed to a social-evaluative stressor (a mock job interview). High status in a stable hierarchy buffered stress responses and improved interview performance, but high status in an unstable hierarchy boosted stress responses and did not lead to better performance. This general pattern of effects was observed across endocrine (cortisol and testosterone), psychological (feeling in control), and behavioral (competence, dominance, and warmth) responses to the stressor. The joint influence of status and hierarchy stability on interview performance was explained by feelings of control and testosterone reactivity. Greater feelings of control predicted enhanced interview performance, whereas increased testosterone reactivity predicted worse performance. These results provide direct causal evidence that high status confers adaptive benefits for stress reduction and performance only when the social hierarchy is stable. When the hierarchy is unstable, high status actually exacerbates stress responses.

What is different about the brains of “superagers”?

Barrett and colleagues have performed fMRI studies on “superagers” age 60-80, and find that superagers not only perform similarly to young adults on memory testing, they also do not show the patterns of brain atrophy typical of aging in “emotional” (midcingulate cortex and the anterior insula) regions that are major hubs for general communication throughout the brain, serving language, stress, internal organ regulation, and sensory coordination. These are the default mode network well known to be involved in episodic memory function, and the salience network implicated in attention, executive control, and motivational and inhibitory processes integral to memory encoding and retrieval. The authors suggest that the key to maintaining these areas and their function is strenuous physical and mental athleticism, working hard at difficult tasks, whether physical or mental.

Here is a graphic from the article followed by the abstract:

Superaging signature. The figure shows key nodes of the salience network (blue) and default mode network (yellow) where superagers and young adults are indistinguishable in cortical thickness. Preserved thickness in these regions is what distinguishes superagers from typical older adults.

Abstract

Decline in cognitive skills, especially in memory, is often viewed as part of “normal” aging. Yet some individuals “age better” than others. Building on prior research showing that cortical thickness in one brain region, the anterior midcingulate cortex, is preserved in older adults with memory performance abilities equal to or better than those of people 20–30 years younger (i.e., “superagers”), we examined the structural integrity of two large-scale intrinsic brain networks in superaging: the default mode network, typically engaged during memory encoding and retrieval tasks, and the salience network, typically engaged during attention, motivation, and executive function tasks. We predicted that superagers would have preserved cortical thickness in critical nodes in these networks. We defined superagers (60–80 years old) based on their performance compared to young adults (18–32 years old) on the California Verbal Learning Test Long Delay Free Recall test. We found regions within the networks of interest where the cerebral cortex of superagers was thicker than that of typical older adults, and where superagers were anatomically indistinguishable from young adults; hippocampal volume was also preserved in superagers. Within the full group of older adults, thickness of a number of regions, including the anterior temporal cortex, rostral medial prefrontal cortex, and anterior midcingulate cortex, correlated with memory performance, as did the volume of the hippocampus. These results indicate older adults with youthful memory abilities have youthful brain regions in key paralimbic and limbic nodes of the default mode and salience networks that support attentional, executive, and mnemonic processes subserving memory function.

In the NYTimes piece describing this work Barrett suggests:

The road to superaging is difficult, though, because these brain regions have another intriguing property: When they increase in activity, you tend to feel pretty bad — tired, stymied, frustrated. Think about the last time you grappled with a math problem or pushed yourself to your physical limits. Hard work makes you feel bad in the moment. The Marine Corps has a motto that embodies this principle: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” That is, the discomfort of exertion means you’re building muscle and discipline. Superagers are like Marines: They excel at pushing past the temporary unpleasantness of intense effort. Studies suggest that the result is a more youthful brain that helps maintain a sharper memory and a greater ability to pay attention.

How to market the reality of climate change more effectively.

Baldwin and Lammers perform several studies to show that conservative are positively affected by past but not by future-focused environmental comparisons. In one of the studies, for example, subjects were shown a set of satellite images of a river basin either full of water or dried up. The authors manipulated temporal comparisons by describing the photographs as reflecting changes in the environment from the past to the present (past-focused condition) or reflecting expected changes in the environment from the present to the future (future-focused condition). Participants then reported their proenvironmental attitudes. Conservatives were more proenvironmental after the past to present description than the present to future description. Here are their summaries:

Significance

Political polarization on important issues can have dire consequences for society, and divisions regarding the issue of climate change could be particularly catastrophic. Building on research in social cognition and psychology, we show that temporal comparison processes largely explain the political gap in respondents’ attitudes towards and behaviors regarding climate change. We found that conservatives’ proenvironmental attitudes and behaviors improved consistently and drastically when we presented messages that compared the environment today with that of the past. This research shows how ideological differences can arise from basic psychological processes, demonstrates how such differences can be overcome by framing a message consistent with these basic processes, and provides a way to market the science behind climate change more effectively.

Abstract

Conservatives appear more skeptical about climate change and global warming and less willing to act against it than liberals. We propose that this unwillingness could result from fundamental differences in conservatives’ and liberals’ temporal focus. Conservatives tend to focus more on the past than do liberals. Across six studies, we rely on this notion to demonstrate that conservatives are positively affected by past- but not by future-focused environmental comparisons. Past comparisons largely eliminated the political divide that separated liberal and conservative respondents’ attitudes toward and behavior regarding climate change, so that across these studies conservatives and liberals were nearly equally likely to fight climate change. This research demonstrates how psychological processes, such as temporal comparison, underlie the prevalent ideological gap in addressing climate change. It opens up a promising avenue to convince conservatives effectively of the need to address climate change and global warming.

I used to be a human being - how technology almost killed me.

Andrew Sullivan does a striking piece, describing a process that began with his daily immersion in The Daily Dish, an early blog that was a precursor of everything to come. Here are some clips...you should read the whole article.

I was…a very early adopter of what we might now call living-in-the-web. And as the years went by, I realized I was no longer alone. Facebook soon gave everyone the equivalent of their own blog and their own audience. More and more people got a smartphone — connecting them instantly to a deluge of febrile content, forcing them to cull and absorb and assimilate the online torrent as relentlessly as I had once. Twitter emerged as a form of instant blogging of microthoughts. Users were as addicted to the feedback as I had long been — and even more prolific. Then the apps descended, like the rain, to inundate what was left of our free time. It was ubiquitous now, this virtual living, this never-stopping, this always-updating. I remember when I decided to raise the ante on my blog in 2007 and update every half-hour or so, and my editor looked at me as if I were insane. But the insanity was now banality; the once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone.

…the rewards were many: an audience of up to 100,000 people a day…a way to measure success — in big and beautiful data — that was a constant dopamine bath for the writerly ego.

I tried reading books, but that skill now began to elude me. After a couple of pages, my fingers twitched for a keyboard. I tried meditation, but my mind bucked and bridled as I tried to still it…Although I spent hours each day, alone and silent, attached to a laptop, it felt as if I were in a constant cacophonous crowd of words and images, sounds and ideas, emotions and tirades..I’d begun to fear that this new way of living was actually becoming a way of not-living.

…my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time...And so I decided, after 15 years, to live in reality.

Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human.

By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook “friend,” an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s “contacts,” efficient shadows of ourselves...When we enter a coffee shop in which everyone is engrossed in their private online worlds, we respond by creating one of our own. When someone next to you answers the phone and starts talking loudly as if you didn’t exist, you realize that, in her private zone, you don’t. And slowly, the whole concept of a public space — where we meet and engage and learn from our fellow citizens — evaporates.

Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety...You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away...Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.

...our need for quiet has never fully gone away, because our practical achievements, however spectacular, never quite fulfill us. They are always giving way to new wants and needs, always requiring updating or repairing, always falling short. The mania of our online lives reveals this: We keep swiping and swiping because we are never fully satisfied. The late British philosopher Michael Oakeshott starkly called this truth “the deadliness of doing.” There seems no end to this paradox of practical life, and no way out, just an infinite succession of efforts, all doomed ultimately to fail.

The Judeo-Christian tradition recognized a critical distinction — and tension — between noise and silence, between getting through the day and getting a grip on one’s whole life. The Sabbath — the Jewish institution co-opted by Christianity — was a collective imposition of relative silence, a moment of calm to reflect on our lives under the light of eternity. It helped define much of Western public life once a week for centuries — only to dissipate, with scarcely a passing regret, into the commercial cacophony of the past couple of decades. It reflected a now-battered belief that a sustained spiritual life is simply unfeasible for most mortals without these refuges from noise and work to buffer us and remind us who we really are. But just as modern street lighting has slowly blotted the stars from the visible skies, so too have cars and planes and factories and flickering digital screens combined to rob us of a silence that was previously regarded as integral to the health of the human imagination...This changes us. It slowly removes — without our even noticing it — the very spaces where we can gain a footing in our minds and souls that is not captive to constant pressures or desires or duties. And the smartphone has all but banished them.

I haven’t given up, even as, each day, at various moments, I find myself giving in. There are books to be read; landscapes to be walked; friends to be with; life to be fully lived. And I realize that this is, in some ways, just another tale in the vast book of human frailty. But this new epidemic of distraction is our civilization’s specific weakness. And its threat is not so much to our minds, even as they shape-shift under the pressure. The threat is to our souls. At this rate, if the noise does not relent, we might even forget we have any.

Resetting the clock of aging - at least in mice.

I pass on a few clips from Nicholas Wade's recent discussion of work done by researchers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA.

In the first attempt to reverse aging by reprogramming the genome, they have rejuvenated the organs of mice and lengthened their life spans by 30 percent. The technique, which requires genetic engineering, cannot be applied directly to people, but the achievement points toward better understanding of human aging and the possibility of rejuvenating human tissues by other means.

The aging process is clocklike in the sense that a steady accumulation of changes eventually degrades the efficiency of the body’s cells. In one of the deepest mysteries of biology, the clock’s hands are always set back to zero at conception...Ten years ago, the Japanese biologist Shinya Yamanaka amazed researchers by identifying four critical genes that reset the clock of the fertilized egg. The four genes are so powerful that they will reprogram even the genome of skin or intestinal cells back to the embryonic state.

The Salk Inst. researchers, using whole animals, tested the idea:

...that reprogramming is a stepwise process, and that a small dose of the Yamanaka factors might rejuvenate cells without the total reprogramming that converts cells to the embryonic state...The solution his team developed was to genetically engineer mice with extra copies of the four Yamanaka genes, and to have the genes activated only when the mice received a certain drug in their drinking water, applied just two days a week...“What we saw is that the animal has fewer signs of aging, healthier organs, and at the end of the experiment we could see they had lived 30 percent longer than control mice,” Dr. Izpisua Belmonte said.

Dr. Izpisua Belmonte believes these beneficial effects have been obtained by resetting the clock of the aging process. The clock is created by the epigenome, the system of proteins that clads the cell’s DNA and controls which genes are active and which are suppressed...He sees the epigenome as being like a manuscript that is continually edited. “At the end of life there are many marks and it is difficult for the cell to read them,” he said...What the Yamanaka genes are doing in his mice, he believes, is eliminating the extra marks, thus reverting the cell to a more youthful state.

Dr. Izpisua Belmonte said he was testing drugs to see if he could achieve the same rejuvenation as with the Yamanaka factors. The use of chemicals “will be more translatable to human therapies and clinical applications.”

Killing old cells to stay young.

I want to pass on one of Science Magazine's choices for the top ten scientific breakthroughs of the year.

Pricey plastic surgery won't stop you from getting old. Nor will dietary supplements, testosterone injections, or those wrinkle creams that imply they'll make you look 21 again. But this year, researchers demonstrated one way to postpone some ravages of time—at least in mice. When they selectively weeded out rundown cells, the animals lived longer and remained healthier as they aged.

The infirm cells the scientists targeted had undergone a partial shutdown known as senescence, in which they lose the ability to divide. Researchers think senescence may prevent worn-out, cancer-prone cells from initiating tumors, but it may also promote aging. As we grow older, more and more cells stop reproducing, potentially robbing our tissues of the ability to replace dead or injured cells. Senescent cells also discharge molecules that can cause problems such as abnormal cell growth and inflammation.

The first study showing that eliminating senescent cells can produce health and longevity benefits, at least in middle-aged mice, came out in February. Deterioration of the animals' hearts and kidneys slowed, and they didn't sprout tumors until later in their lives. Some age-related declines, such as in memory and muscle coordination, didn't abate. Nonetheless, the rodents outlived their contemporaries by more than 20%.

In October, the same research team took aim at senescent cells from the immune system that amass in artery-clogging plaques and may drive their formation. Removing these cells from mice that are prone to atherosclerosis reduced the amount of fatty buildup in the animals' arteries by 60%, even though the rodents gorged on fat-laden food.

The multibillion-dollar question: Will taking out senescent cells help humans stay young longer? Both studies used genetically modified mice that clear away their senescent cells in response to a particular compound—a technique that isn't feasible in humans. But researchers have created several so-called senolytic drugs that slay senescent cells without genetic tinkering. Next year, scientists will launch the first clinical trial of one of those drugs in people who have arthritis.

References:

D. J. Baker et al., “Clearance of p16Ink4a-positive senescent cells delays ageing-associated disorders,” Nature 479, 232 (2 November 2016)

D. J. Baker et al., “Naturally occurring p16Ink4a-positive cells shorten healthy lifespan,,” Nature 530, 184 (11 February 2016)

B. G. Childs et al., “Senescent intimal foam cells are deleterious at all stages of atherosclerosis,” News from Science 354, 472 (28 October 2016)

Creative versus destructive chaos in Trump-land. Is there a ray of hope?

I am a member of the professional intelligentsia bubble still feeling post-traumatic stress from the presidential election. I grasp at any small reassurances that the sky may not in fact be falling, and so point to this piece by David Ignatius noting the current influence of Robert Gates, who has worked in senior national security positions for the past five presidents. Some clips:

At the top of Gates’s to-do list is striking the right balance between improving relations with Russia and appearing too cooperative with a belligerent President Vladimir Putin...“I think the challenge for any new administration would have been how to thread the needle — between stopping the downward spiral in U.S.-Russian relations, which had real dangers, and pushing back on Putin’s aggressiveness and general thuggery,” Gates said.

Gates has shared the role of informal counselor to the Trump transition team with two other veterans of the Bush administration, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who talks regularly with Vice President-elect Mike Pence, and former national security adviser Stephen Hadley. The three have a consulting firm, RiceHadleyGates, which has proposed candidates for Cabinet and sub-Cabinet jobs, including Rex Tillerson and retired Marine Gen. James N. Mattis, the choices for State and Defense, respectively.

Gates, Hadley and Rice have also talked with foreign governments that are puzzled about how to approach Trump. In an interview this week, Hadley summarized his basic advice:..“We’ve never had a populist movement or political insurgency quite like this — that actually captured the White House. That means there will be more discontinuities in our foreign policy. I’m telling people: ‘Give us some space here and have some strategic patience. And don’t overreact — even to Trump’s tweets.’ ”

One issue that worries Gates is the multiplicity of people surrounding Trump in the White House, seeking to influence an undisciplined chief executive. “What happens when someone tries to get in to see the president with a proposal or initiative and is rebuffed by one gatekeeper — and simply goes through another door? It’s a formula for a disjointed process.”

“There will be a rough break-in period,” Gates predicted. Part of the challenge is that Trump believes his success stems from his freewheeling, undisciplined style, and personal messaging through Twitter — which makes him resist limits.

Artificial intelligence ups its game

I pass on this description by John Bohannon in Science Magazine of a recent triumph of A.I.:

This year, artificial intelligence (AI) passed a significant milestone when a computer program called AlphaGo beat the world's No. 2 Go player in a five-game match. It's not the first time that AI has surpassed human mastery of a game. After all, it was 20 years ago that IBM's Deep Blue first beat Garry Kasparov in a game of chess, toppling the world champion the following year in a six-game match. But that is where the similarity ends.

The rules of Go are more straightforward than those of chess: You simply place identical stones on a grid, capturing territory by surrounding your opponent's positions. But that simplicity and openness result in an explosion in the number of possible moves for a player to consider—far more than there are atoms in the known universe. That makes it impossible for AI to beat Go masters with an approach like that used by Deep Blue, which relies on handcoded strategies from chess experts to evaluate each possible move.

Instead, AlphaGo, designed by the London-based Google subsidiary DeepMind, studied hundreds of thousands of online Go games played between humans, using those sequences of moves as data for a machine-learning algorithm. Then AlphaGo played against itself—or, rather, slightly different versions of itself—over and over, finetuning its strategies with a technique called deep reinforcement learning. The final result is AI that wins not just with brute-force calculation, but with something that looks strikingly like human intuition.

Most of the things we want AI to master involve a seemingly unmanageable number of possible decisions—walking a robot safely through a crowded room, routing driverless cars, making small talk with passengers. Because hard-coded rules fail for such tasks, AlphaGo's triumph shows just how powerful deep reinforcement learning can be.

References
D. Mackenzie, “Update: Why this week’s man-versus-Go match doesn’t matter (and what does,” News from Science (15 March 2016)
D. Silver, “Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search,” Nature 589, 224 (28 January 2016)

Making the world nicer is a tough slog - two organizations trying.

The end of 2016 approaches, I am thinking about charitable donations I have made or might make in this angry and uncertain time of huge political changes. Angry voters in Europe and America are turning back the clock, and the paradigm of America may be irreversibly changing. A collective trauma is being generated by the severing of ties that previously have bound Americans together. How might we try to be more kind, gentle, and understanding with each other?

I've decided to make year end contributions to two university associated organizations trying to promote the greater good through research, teaching, and understanding - trying to find ways to spread and promote the virtues of altruism, compassion, gratitude, empathy, forgiveness, and mindfulness. One is the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, founded by Dacher Keltner. The other is the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, led by my former colleague Richard Davidson. I would encourage MindBlog readers to check out their websites, and consider donations to both.

Our automated jobless future.

Elizabeth Kolbert offers an interesting review of ideas in several recent books dealing with our automated future. How long will it be before you lose your job to a robot? Here are a few clips:

Imagine a matrix with two axes, manual versus cognitive and routine versus nonroutine. Jobs can then be arranged into four boxes: manual routine, manual nonroutine, and so on…Jobs on an assembly line fall into the manual-routine box, jobs in home health care into the manual-nonroutine box. Keeping track of inventory is in the cognitive-routine box; dreaming up an ad campaign is cognitive nonroutine.

The highest-paid jobs are clustered in the last box; managing a hedge fund, litigating a bankruptcy, and producing a TV show are all cognitive and nonroutine. Manual, nonroutine jobs, meanwhile, tend to be among the lowest paid—emptying bedpans, bussing tables, cleaning hotel rooms (and folding towels). Routine jobs on the factory floor or in payroll or accounting departments tend to fall in between. And it’s these middle-class jobs that robots have the easiest time laying their grippers on.

How much technology has contributed to the widening income gap in the U.S. is a matter of debate; some economists treat it as just one factor, others treat it as the determining factor. In either case, the trend line is ominous. Facebook is worth two hundred and seventy billion dollars and employs just thirteen thousand people. In 2014, Facebook acquired Whatsapp for twenty-two billion dollars. At that point, the messaging firm had a grand total of fifty-five employees. When a twenty-two-billion-dollar company can fit its entire workforce into a Greyhound bus, the concept of surplus labor would seem to have run its course.

Martin Ford (author of “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future”) worries that we are headed toward an era of “techno-feudalism,” He imagines a plutocracy shut away “in gated communities or in elite cities, perhaps guarded by autonomous military robots and drones.” Under the old feudalism, the peasants were exploited; under the new arrangement, they’ll merely be superfluous. The best we can hope for, he suggests, is a collective form of semi-retirement. He recommends a guaranteed basic income for all, to be paid for with new taxes, levelled, at least in part, on the new gazillionaires.

To one degree or another, just about everyone writing on the topic shares this view. Jerry Kaplan proposes that the federal government create a 401(k)-like account for every ten-year-old in the U.S. Those who ultimately do find jobs could contribute some of their earnings to the accounts; those who don’t could perform volunteer work in return for government contributions.

...if it’s unrealistic to suppose that smart machines can be stopped, it’s probably just as unrealistic to imagine that smart policies will follow. Which brings us ... to Trump. The other day, during his “victory lap” through the Midwest, the President-elect vowed to “usher in a new Industrial Revolution,” apparently unaware that such a revolution is already under way, and that this is precisely the problem. The pain of dislocation he spoke to during the campaign is genuine; the solutions he offers are not.

A stark graphic - the income gap continues to widen.

The NYTimes piece by Patricia Cohen and graphic summaries by Ashkenas are worth reading. The top 1% and the bottom 50% have swapped their relative shares of the national income. Forty years ago, the top 1 percent of earners took home 10.5 percent of the total national income, and the bottom half earned 20 percent of it. By 2014, those percentages effectively flipped, with the top 1 percent earning a 20 percent share and the bottom half dropping to 12.5 percent.

Our Arthropod housemates.

Now I know more about what is in the haze of particles I see illuminated by the horizontal rays of the rising sun flowing through my Fort Lauderdale condo in early morning.  I pass on, under the "random curious stuff" MindBlog category,  an accounting by Madden et al. that shows the ubiquity of insects detected in settled dust samples collected from inside homes. They used a DNA-based method for investigating the arthropod diversity in homes via high-throughput marker gene sequencing of home dust. Settled dust samples were collected by citizen scientists from both inside and outside more than 700 homes across the United States, yielding the first continental-scale estimates of arthropod diversity associated with our residences. Here is a graphic (click to enlarge), in which (A) shows the Genera detected, (B) shows orders detected in at least 5% of homes. The Y-axes indicate the percentage of homes (of 651 homes with arthropods detected) where those arthropods were detected.

Reducing future fears by suppressing episodic simulation in the brain.

Benoit et al. offer some findings relevant to understanding the heightened anxiety many are feeling in the Age of Trump.

An edited summary that starts the discussion section of their paper:

Recurrently imagining dreaded future situations potentiates fears and can even support the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. We tested the hypothesis that such simulations can be suppressed with the opposite effect of down-regulating apprehensiveness. Our data indicate that future suppression is based on a brain mechanism that is remarkably similar to a system implicated in the voluntary suppression of past experiences. This mechanism recruits right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which originates an inhibitory signal that down-regulates activation in brain regions supporting both retrieval and episode-construction processes. Paralleling the suppression of recently acquired memories, the regions targeted by future suppression included the hippocampus, a structure that is fundamental for the retrieval of past episodes and the construction of coherent future and fictitious events. Critically, the suppression of recurring fears of the future differs from suppressing past events in that it also involved modulating the vmPFC (ventromedial prefrontal cortex). The mPFC fosters the integration of overlapping memories into a common representation.

A clip describing their procedure:

To examine future suppression, we adapted the “Think/No-Think” procedure, used to study the suppression of past events, to create the new “Imagine/No-Imagine” paradigm. The procedure first asked participants to describe their fears. Importantly, they only provided recurrent future fears—that is, those that they had already worried might happen before entering the experiment. Participants then gave one key detail for each fear that was typical to their recurring imaginings of it. (These typical event details served as a dependent measure; see below.) Afterward, they entered the critical Imagine/No-Imagine phase, which was composed of trials that presented reminders to these fears. For some trials, participants were asked to imagine the feared event as vividly as possible in response to the reminder (Imagine condition); for others, participants were asked to suppress their imagining of the event, upon seeing the reminder (Suppress condition). (A third of the originally provided episodes, the Baseline items, were set aside and were not cued during this phase.) Over the course of the Imagine/No-Imagine phase, participants either imagined or suppressed a feared event 12 times. Following this phase, we gave participants each reminder again and asked them to recall the typical feature of its corresponding fear. Once all typical details were tested, participants were then asked to freely imagine each episode aloud in detail for 2 min. Finally, we assessed the impact of suppression on participants’ apprehensiveness toward these future events.

Here are the significance and abstract section of their paper:

Significance 

Humans possess the remarkable ability to recombine details of divergent memories into imaginings of future events. Such imaginings are useful, for example, because they foster planning and motivate farsighted decisions. Importantly, recurrently imagining feared situations can also undermine our well-being and may even contribute to the development of anxiety. Here, we demonstrate that fearful imaginings about the future can be inhibited by neural mechanisms that help to suppress the past. Importantly, suppression reduces later apprehensiveness about the feared events, a benefit that was diminished in individuals with greater trait anxiety. This pattern suggests that the observed inhibition mechanism serves to control people’s future fears and its disruption may foster psychological disorders characterized by intrusive prospective thoughts. 

Abstract 

Imagining future events conveys adaptive benefits, yet recurrent simulations of feared situations may help to maintain anxiety. In two studies, we tested the hypothesis that people can attenuate future fears by suppressing anticipatory simulations of dreaded events. Participants repeatedly imagined upsetting episodes that they feared might happen to them and suppressed imaginings of other such events. Suppressing imagination engaged the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which modulated activation in the hippocampus and in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Consistent with the role of the vmPFC in providing access to details that are typical for an event, stronger inhibition of this region was associated with greater forgetting of such details. Suppression further hindered participants’ ability to later freely envision suppressed episodes. Critically, it also reduced feelings of apprehensiveness about the feared scenario, and individuals who were particularly successful at down-regulating fears were also less trait-anxious. Attenuating apprehensiveness by suppressing simulations of feared events may thus be an effective coping strategy, suggesting that a deficiency in this mechanism could contribute to the development of anxiety.

Can evolution have a 'higher purpose'?

I want to point to this essay by Robert Wright, author of "The Moral Animal," who makes the point that arguments that life on earth may have some larger purpose do not necessarily have to depart from a scientific worldview, invoke supernatural beings, or depart from the model of evolution by natural selection. Among these arguments are:

... “simulation” scenarios, which hold that our seemingly tangible world is actually a kind of projection emanating from some sort of mind-blowingly powerful computer; and the history of our universe, including evolution on this planet, is the unfolding of a computer algorithm...When an argument for higher purpose is put this way — that is, when it doesn’t involve the phrase “higher purpose” and, further, is cast more as a technological scenario than a metaphysical one — it is considered intellectually respectable. I don’t mean there aren’t plenty of people who dismiss it. I’m talking about how people dismiss it. [Neil deGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk find this view plausible.]

Wright quotes from a conversation with William Hamilton, who says:

There’s one theory of the universe that I rather like — I accept it in an almost joking spirit — and that is that Planet Earth in our solar system is a kind of zoo for extraterrestrial beings who dwell out there somewhere. And this is the best, the most interesting experiment they could set up: to set up the evolution on Planet Earth going in such a way that it would produce these really interesting characters — humans who go around doing things — and they watch their experiment, interfering hardly at all so that almost everything we do comes out according to the laws of nature. But every now and then they see something which doesn’t look quite right — this zoo is going to kill itself off if they let you do this or that.” So, he continued, these extraterrestrials “insert a finger and just change some little thing. And maybe those are the miracles which the religious people like to so emphasize.” He reiterated: “I put it forward in an almost joking spirit. But I think it

Another scenario:

...emerges from one version of physicist Lee Smolin’s theory of “cosmological natural selection.” Smolin thinks our universe may itself be a product of a kind of evolution: maybe universes can replicate themselves via black holes, so over time — over a lot of time — you get universes whose physical laws are more and more conducive to replication. (So that’s why our universe is so good at black-hole making!) In some variants of Smolin’s theory — such as those developed by the late cosmologist Edward Harrison and the mathematician Louis Crane — intelligent beings can play a role in this replication once their technology reaches a point where they can produce black holes. So through cosmological natural selection you’d get universes whose physical properties were more and more conducive to the evolution of intelligent life. This might explain the much-discussed observation that the physical constants of this universe seem “fine-tuned” to permit the emergence of life.

Wilson's ending points:

I think discussion of higher purpose should be respectable even in a scientific age. I don’t mean I buy the simulation scenario in particular, or the space alien scenario, or the cosmological natural selection scenario. But I do think there’s reason to suspect that there’s some point to this exercise we Earthlings are engaged in, some purpose imbued by something — and that, even if identifying that something is for now hopeless, there are grounds for speculating about what the point of the exercise is.

I won’t elaborate much on this, since I’ve done that elsewhere, arguing that higher purpose can be framed as a hypothesis, and that evidence for or against the hypothesis can be marshaled. But I will say that the evidence I see for purpose includes not just the direction of biological evolution, but the direction of technological evolution and of the broader social and cultural evolution it drives — the evolution that has carried us from hunter-gatherer bands to the brink of a cohesive global community. And if the purpose involves sustaining this direction — becoming a true global community — then it would seem to include moral progress. In particular, our purpose would involve transcending the psychology of tribalism that can otherwise divide people along ethnic, national, religious and ideological lines. Which would mean — in light of recent political and social developments in the United States and abroad — that our work is cut out for us.

Political tribes, and the psychology of liberals and conservatives.

I am using this post to pass on to MindBlog readers some background material I just sent out to members of a senior current topics discussion group that we have recently formed in Fort Lauderdale, and named "The Round Table." The session on Monday Dec. 19 is on the topic indicated by the title of this post.

Where do tribes come from? Evolutionary origins   

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2014/12/eo-wilson-and-meaning-of-human-existence.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2011/03/beginning-and-middle-of-human-history.html

What is essential human nature? Where do religion and morality come from?  How do  religious and non-religious people differ?  

http://www.moralfoundations.org/

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2007/02/human-nature-redux_20.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2007/10/moral-universals.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2014/08/origins-of-good-and-evil-in-human-babies.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2015/09/birth-of-moralizing-gods.htm

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2016/02/moralistic-gods-enhance-sociality.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2008/10/evolution-of-religious-prosociality.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2014/09/morality-how-theists-and-non-theists.html

What dynamics regulate in-group and out-group interactions and conflicts?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/opinion/sunday/the-roots-of-implicit-bias.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2014/11/a-mechanism-underlying-intractable.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2012/05/blog-post.html  brain correlates of whether we help someone suffering

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2014/09/norm-enforcement-is-biased-from-its.html

What kinds of political tribes do people belong to today?

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2016/07/the-myth-of-cosmopolitanism.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2011/02/bias-within-politics-of-professoriat.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/opinion/sunday/the-dangers-of-echo-chambers-on-campus.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/democrats-need-to-focus-on-the-gut-not-the-head/2016/12/01/dfbe7782-b803-11e6-a677-b608fbb3aaf6_story.html

http://www.alternet.org/print/election-2016/rural-america-understanding-isnt-problem

https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Their-Own-Land-Mourning/dp/1620972255/ref=as_li_ss_tl

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2016/01/our-strongest-prejudice-partisan.html

What distinguishes liberals and conservatives?

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2009/12/more-on-psychology-of-liberals-and.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2008/10/political-attitudes-vary-with.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2009/06/liberals-and-conservatives-feel.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2015/12/negative-evaluation-of.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2013/02/red-brain-blue-brain.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2008/06/why-are-conservatives-happier-than.html

How do people sustain their tribal identities, what psychological shortcuts or errors help?

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2010/08/metacognitive-deficits-in-public.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2016/04/a-succinct-list-of-some-of-our-common.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-travis-bradberry/13-cognitive-biases-that_b_13355298.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2008/06/seeing-ourselves-seeing-others-built-in.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2015/02/the-neuroscience-of-motivated-cognition.html

How can tribal animosities and conflicts be ameliorated?

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/opinion/sunday/im-prejudiced-he-said-then-we-kept-talking.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2016/06/confronting-prejudiced-brain.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2016/11/how-to-get-beyond-our-tribal-politics.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2010/04/internet-enhancing-not-diminishing.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2016/05/the-key-to-political-persuasion.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2013/05/the-limits-of-empathy.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2016/04/how-to-change-prejudicefor-real-this.html

http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2016/01/how-learning-shapes-empathic-brain.html

Bad things that happen to annoyingly happy people...

There is abundant evidence that being or appearing to be happy confers lots of advantages in life, both in personal health, relationships and in the workplace. On the down side, however, Ana Swanson points to work by Barasch et al. showing that very happy people are more likely to get ripped off:

Highlights

• We examine how the magnitude of expressed happiness influences social perception. 

• Very happy people are perceived as more naïve than moderately happy individuals. 

• Very happy people are believed to shelter themselves from negative information. 

• Very happy people are exploited in conflicts of interest and distributive negotiations. 

• We challenge prior work by identifying a disadvantage of expressing happiness.

Abstract

Across six studies, we examine how the magnitude of expressed happiness influences social perception and interpersonal behavior. We find that happiness evokes different judgments when expressed at high levels than when expressed at moderate levels, and that these judgments influence opportunistic behavior. Specifically, people perceive very happy individuals to be more naïve than moderately happy individuals. These perceptions reflect the belief that very happy individuals shelter themselves from negative information about the world. As a result of these inferences, very happy people, relative to moderately happy people, are more likely to receive biased advice from advisors with a conflict of interest and are more likely to be chosen as negotiation partners when the opportunity for exploitation is salient. Our findings challenge existing assumptions in organizational behavior and psychology by identifying a significant disadvantage of expressing happiness, and underscore the importance of examining emotional expressions at different magnitudes. We call for future work to explore how the same emotion, experienced or expressed at different levels, influences judgment and behavior.

Why does time fly when you’re having fun? Dopamine neurons…

Soares et al. find by observing timing behavior in mice that dopaminergic neurons control temporal judgments on a time scale of seconds.

Our sense of time is far from constant. For instance, time flies when we are having fun, and it slows to a trickle when we are bored. Midbrain dopamine neurons have been implicated in variable time estimation. However, a direct link between signals carried by dopamine neurons and temporal judgments is lacking. We measured and manipulated the activity of dopamine neurons as mice judged the duration of time intervals. We found that pharmacogenetic suppression of dopamine neurons decreased behavioral sensitivity to time and that dopamine neurons encoded information about trial-to-trial variability in time estimates. Last, we found that transient activation or inhibition of dopamine neurons was sufficient to slow down or speed up time estimation, respectively. Dopamine neuron activity thus reflects and can directly control the judgment of time.

Feeling confident that you know? fMRI correlates of metacognitive accuracy.

The more confident you are, the less likely you are to be correct! From Molenberghs et al:

One important aspect of metacognition is the ability to accurately evaluate one’s performance. People vary widely in their metacognitive ability and in general are too confident when evaluating their performance. This often leads to poor decision making with potentially disastrous consequences. To further our understanding of the neural underpinnings of these processes, this fMRI study investigated inter-individual differences in metacognitive ability and effects of trial-by-trial variation in subjective feelings of confidence when making metacognitive assessments. Participants (N = 308) evaluated their performance in a high-level social and cognitive reasoning task. The results showed that higher metacognitive accuracy was associated with a decrease in activation in the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, an area previously linked to metacognition on perception and memory. Moreover, the feeling of confidence about one’s choices was associated with an increase of activation in reward, memory and motor related areas including bilateral striatum and hippocampus, while less confidence was associated with activation in areas linked with negative affect and uncertainty, including dorsomedial prefrontal and bilateral orbitofrontal cortex. This might indicate that positive affect is related to higher confidence thereby biasing metacognitive decisions towards overconfidence. In support, behavioural analyses revealed that increased confidence was associated with lower metacognitive accuracy.