A Schism in Flow-land? Flow Genome Project vs. Flow Research Collective

In Nov. 2017 I did a scathing review of  the "Stealing Fire" book by Jamie Wheal and Steven Kotler - in support of expensive workshops offered by their "Flow Genome Project" - purporting to show the latest science relevant to the flow states of enhanced human performance described in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s original writings on this subject. I judged the book a mess, with very little of substance to offer. A follow up post in Sept. 2018 passed on an exchange between one dissatisfied customer and a representative of the flow genome workshops.

Given this background, I can't resist passing on to MindBlog readers an email I just received indicating that there has been trouble in Flow-land... Mr. Kotler and Mr. Wheal have apparently split up and are now present competing websites, both very slick, with Mr. Kotler's (https://www.flowresearchcollective.com) radiating a bit more gravitas than Mr. Wheal's (https://www.flowgenomeproject.com.) Here is the email:

Hey there, 

I work with Steven Kotler who is featured in this article on your site. I have a critical request to change the text and link from Flow Genome Project to Flow Research Collective as this is Steven's new company. 

Currently there is traffic that is being directed from your site to the old company that Steven resigned from and so it's important that we get this updated so that the piece is accurate and up to date. 

We are not requesting that the mention of Flow Genome Project must be withdrawn in relation to Jamie, just that we need it to be clear that Steven is with the Flow Research Collective and that we're directing toward's [sic] that site. 

Please confirm that this is possible. Thanks, 

Gabby-- Gabby Nuñez Chief Of Customer Service and Satisfaction 

W: flowresearchcollective.com

Continuing in the tradition of the "Stealing Fire" book the link in the email "this article on your site" is not to either of the posts I mention above (Nov. 2017, Sept. 2018), but to all the posts done in Nov. and Dec.  of 2017.

I'm not taking the time to look further into this, but would suggest that any potential clients of these expensive purportedly transformational programs do due diligence. CAVEAT EMPTOR!

How weight training changes the brain.

Gretchen Reynolds points to work by Kelty et al. showing that weight training in rats can ameliorate mild cognitive impairment in rats induced by a injecting a lipopolysaccharide known to induce inflammation in the brain, creating a rodent form of mild cognitive impairment or early dementia. The weight training also induces chemical factors that support new nerve cell growth. How do you get rats to train with weights? Get them to climb a ladder for a Froot Loop reward with weights gently taped to their rear ends! Do three workouts a week, increasing the load as in regular resistance training. Similar experiments (inducing mild cognitive impairment) obviously can't be done in humans, but it would be useful to look more at whether and how much weight training in humans might stimulate the appearance of nerve growth factors that support new nerve cell growth. Numerous studies have shown that aerobic exercise has this effect.

Five myths about consciousness

In a perspective piece for the Washington Post Christof Koch (chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute of Brain Science) does a brief and concise debunking of five common fables about consciousness. I suggest you give it a read. The myths are:

Humans have a unique brain.

Science will never understand consciousness.

Dreams contain hidden clues about our secret desires.

We are susceptible to subliminal messages.

Near-death 'visions' are evidence of life after death.

It’s not just how the game is played, it’s whether you win or lose

An open source article from Molina et al.:

Growing disparities of income and wealth have prompted extensive survey research to measure the effects on public beliefs about the causes and fairness of economic inequality. However, observational data confound responses to unequal outcomes with highly correlated inequality of opportunity. This study uses a novel experiment to disentangle the effects of unequal outcomes and unequal opportunities on cognitive, normative, and affective responses. Participants were randomly assigned to positions with unequal opportunities for success. Results showed that both winners and losers were less likely to view the outcomes as fair or attributable to skill as the level of redistribution increased, but this effect of redistribution was stronger for winners. Moreover, winners were generally more likely to believe that the game was fair, even when the playing field was most heavily tilted in their favor. In short, it’s not just how the game is played, it’s also whether you win or lose.

Ingroup vigilance in collectivistic cultures

Fascinating work from Liu et al., who provide a more nuanced view of how people in more collectivist cultures are more suspicious of possible unethical intentions in others than people in more individualistic cultures.

Significance

Decades of research have described East Asian cultures as collectivistic, often characterized by ingroup relationships that are harmonious and cooperative. We find evidence that people in collectivistic cultures can also be more vigilant, mindful of ingroup members’ bad intentions. Participants imagined what coworkers and classmates would do in competition. Compared with individualistic Americans, people in China expected more unethical competition. Is this a “China phenomenon” or a phenomenon of collectivistic culture? We next compared regional cultures within China to rule out between-country alternative explanations. We found that people from China’s collectivistic rice-farming regions were more vigilant than people from the individualistic wheat-farming regions. This research suggests a more balanced view of collectivism, revealing tensions that can co-occur with harmony.

Abstract

Collectivistic cultures have been characterized as having harmonious, cooperative ingroup relationships. However, we find evidence that people in collectivistic cultures are more vigilant toward ingroup members, mindful of their possible unethical intentions. Study 1 found that Chinese participants were more vigilant than Americans in within-group competitions, anticipating more unethical behaviors from their peers. Study 2 replicated this finding by comparing areas within China, finding that people from China’s collectivistic rice-farming regions exhibit greater ingroup vigilance than people from the less collectivistic wheat-farming regions. The rice/wheat difference was mediated by greater perceived within-group competition. Study 3 found that Chinese participants were more likely than Americans to interpret a peer’s friendly behavior as sabotage in disguise. We also manipulated within-group competition and found that it increased ingroup vigilance in both cultures. Finally, study 3 identified two boundary conditions where cultural differences in ingroup vigilance decrease: an unambiguously competitive win–lose situation where Americans also exhibit vigilance, and an unambiguously cooperative win–win situation where Chinese participants relax their vigilance. This research contributes to a more balanced view of collectivism, revealing its interpersonal tensions in the forms of within-group competition and ingroup vigilance.

Feeling pleasure from music - brain correlates of why people differ

From Martínez-Molina et al.:

SIGNIFICANCE

Music is one of the most important sources of pleasure for many people, but at the same time there are important individual differences in the sensitivity to musical reward. Previous studies have revealed the critical involvement of the functional connectivity between perceptual and subcortical brain areas in the enjoyment of music. However, it is unknown whether individual differences in music sensitivity might arise from variability in the structural connectivity among these areas. Here we show that structural connectivity between supratemporal and orbitofrontal cortices, and between orbitofrontal and nucleus accumbens, predict individual differences in sensibility to music reward. These results provide evidence for the critical involvement of the interaction between the subcortical reward system and higher-order cortical areas in music-induced pleasure.

Abstract

People show considerable variability in the degree of pleasure they experience from music. These individual differences in music reward sensitivity are driven by variability in functional connectivity between the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a key structure of the reward system, and the right superior temporal gyrus (STG). However, it is unknown whether a neuroanatomical basis exists for this variability. We used diffusion tensor imaging and probabilistic tractography to study the relationship between music reward sensitivity and white matter microstructure connecting these two regions via the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in 38 healthy human participants (24 females and 14 males). We found that right axial diffusivity (AD) in the STG–OFC connectivity inversely correlated with music reward sensitivity. Additionally, right mean diffusivity and left AD in the NAcc-OFC tract also showed an inverse correlation. Further, AD in this tract also correlated with previously acquired BOLD activity during music listening, but not for a control monetary reward task in the NAcc. Finally, we used mediation analysis to show that AD in the NAcc–OFC tract explains the influence of NAcc activation during a music task on music reward sensitivity. Overall, our results provide further support for the idea that the exchange of information among perceptual, integrative, and reward systems is important for musical pleasure, and that individual differences in the structure of the relevant anatomical connectivity influences the degree to which people are able to derive such pleasure.

Can an uprising of decency win the next presidential election?

I want to point to this massively cogent piece by David Brooks, and also pass on a video done by the democratic presidential candidate he mentions, Marianne Williamson. He credits her with being the only candidate who most effectively cuts to the real heart of what is at issue in the next presidential election: who we are as a people, our national character, and the moral atmosphere in which we raise our children.

It is no accident that the Democratic candidate with the best grasp of this election is the one running a spiritual crusade, not an economic redistribution effort. Many of her ideas are wackadoodle, but Marianne Williamson is right about this: “This is part of the dark underbelly of American society: the racism, the bigotry and the entire conversation that we’re having here tonight. If you think any of this wonkiness is going to deal with this dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred that this president is bringing up in this country, then I’m afraid that the Democrats are going to see some very dark days.”

And she is right about this: “We’ve never dealt with a figure like this in American history before. This man, our president, is not just a politician; he’s a phenomenon. And an insider political game will not be able to defeat it. … The only thing that will defeat him is if we have a phenomenon of equal force, and that phenomenon is a moral uprising of the American people.”

They are unready for it, but it falls on the Democrats to rebuild the moral infrastructure of our country. That does not mean standing up and saying, “Donald Trump is a racist!” 500 times a day. It means reminding Americans of the values we still share, and the damage done when people are not held accountable for trampling on them. The values are pretty basic and can be simply expressed:

Unity: We’re one people. Our leader represents all the people. He doesn’t go around attacking whole cities and regions.

Honesty: We can’t have deliberative democracy without respect for the truth. None of us want congenital liars in our homes or our workplaces.

Pluralism: Human difference makes life richer and more interesting. We treasure members of all races and faiths for what they bring to the mosaic.

Sympathy: We want to be around people with good hearts, who feel for those who are suffering, who are faithful friends, whose daily lives are marked by kindness.

Opportunity: We want all children to have an open field and a fair chance in the great race of life.

Trump has put himself on the wrong side of all these values. So Democrats, go ahead and promote your plans. But also lead an uprising of decency. There must be one Democrat who, in word and deed, can do that.

Here is the Williamson video:

What can we do when facts don't matter?

Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters are those whose lives are most diminished and compromised by his actions. They do not let facts cloud their beliefs. A similar situation is seen in the anti-science denial of the scientifically proven benefits of vaccinations or genetically modified foods. The Dunning Kruger effect is in force. Those who know the least think they are experts. As Carroll points out in his NYTimes opinion piece, only subtle persuasion can be used to nudge those who are immune to factual knowledge. Some clips:

In a paper published early this year in Nature Human Behavior, scientists asked 500 Americans what they thought about foods that contained genetically modified organisms.

The vast majority, more than 90 percent, opposed their use. This belief is in conflict with the consensus of scientists. Almost 90 percent of them believe G.M.O.s are safe — and can be of great benefit.

The second finding of the study was more eye-opening. Those who were most opposed to genetically modified foods believed they were the most knowledgeable about this issue, yet scored the lowest on actual tests of scientific knowledge.

Carroll points out that...

A great deal of science communication still relies on the “knowledge deficit model,” an idea that the lack of support for good policies, and good science, merely reflects a lack of scientific information.

The problem is that experts have been giving accurate information for years to little effect.

In 2016, a number of researchers argued in an essay that those in the sciences needed to realize that the public may not process information in the same way they do. Scientists need to be formally trained in communication skills, they said, and they also need to realize that the knowledge deficit model makes for easy policy, but not necessarily good results.

It seems important to engage the public more, and earn their trust through continued, more personal interaction, using many different platforms and technologies. Dropping knowledge from on high — which is still the modus operandi for most scientists — doesn’t work.

Politics are in our DNA - why societies evolved to have both conservatives and liberals.

Sebastian Junger points out an evolutionary rationale for the presence of both liberals and conservatives within a group - that over our evolutionary history such heterogeneity has proven to enhance a group's ability to compete with other groups. One could wish that respect for these deep roots of our current political polarization might ameliorate the culture of contempt that currently prevails between red and blue America. There are now numerous studies correlating conservative or liberal orientation with basic biological differences, notably studies on young adults showing correlations between political orientation, brain structures, and genetics. Such differences can be shaped by different socialization processes (such as strict versus nurturant family values). Yudkin reviews differences in core beliefs (on how dangerous the world is, on personal responsibility, on parenting philosophy, etc.) between conservatives and liberals to suggest that the sides are more aligned on many issues than they realize.

Here is a clip from Junger's article:

If liberalism and conservatism are partly rooted in genetics, then those worldviews had to have been adaptive — and necessary — in our evolutionary past. That means that neither political party can accuse the other of being illegitimate or inherently immoral; we are the way we are for good reason. Every human society must do two things: It must be strong enough to protect itself from outside groups, and it must be fair enough to avoid internal conflict. A society entirely composed of liberals risks being overrun by enemies, and a society entirely composed of conservatives risks breaking apart over issues of inequality — “social justice,” as it’s now termed.

Put those groups together, however, and you have addressed the two greatest threats to human welfare: enemies and discord. The task for every society, from the earliest Homo sapiens of Africa to Americans of the 21st century, is to accommodate different values and worldviews into one ethos. It’s not easy to do, but our own genetic diversity clearly demonstrates that it’s possible. Otherwise, one set of values would have gradually dominated the other until there was no political discord at all, just a broad, flat uniformity. That may sound appealing at the moment. But in the long term, what a great loss that would be.

Re-skilling the brain.

For the first time, Oby et al (open source, nice graphics) observe the new neural activity patterns that cause a new learned behavior.

Significance

Consider a skill you would like to learn, like playing the piano. How do you progress from “Chopsticks” to Chopin? As you learn to do something new with your hands, does the brain also do something new? We found that monkeys learned new skilled behavior by generating new neural activity patterns. We used a brain–computer interface (BCI), which directly links neural activity to movement of a computer cursor, to encourage animals to generate new neural activity patterns. Over several days, the animals began to exhibit new patterns of neural activity that enabled them to control the BCI cursor. This suggests that learning to play the piano and other skills might also involve the generation of new neural activity patterns.

Abstract

Learning has been associated with changes in the brain at every level of organization. However, it remains difficult to establish a causal link between specific changes in the brain and new behavioral abilities. We establish that new neural activity patterns emerge with learning. We demonstrate that these new neural activity patterns cause the new behavior. Thus, the formation of new patterns of neural population activity can underlie the learning of new skills.

Deindividuation of outgroup faces occurs at the earliest stages of visual perception.

From Hughes et al:

A hallmark of intergroup biases is the tendency to individuate members of one’s own group but process members of other groups categorically. While the consequences of these biases for stereotyping and discrimination are well-documented, their early perceptual underpinnings remain less understood. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms of this effect by testing whether high-level visual cortex is differentially tuned in its sensitivity to variation in own-race versus other-race faces. Using a functional MRI adaptation paradigm, we measured White participants’ habituation to blocks of White and Black faces that parametrically varied in their groupwise similarity. Participants showed a greater tendency to individuate own-race faces in perception, showing both greater release from adaptation to unique identities and increased sensitivity in the adaptation response to physical difference among faces. These group differences emerge in the tuning of early face-selective cortex and mirror behavioral differences in the memory and perception of own- versus other-race faces. Our results suggest that biases for other-race faces emerge at some of the earliest stages of sensory perception.

Facial muscles in dogs evolved for interactions with humans.

From Kaminski et al. (check out the videos in the article):

Domestication shaped wolves into dogs and transformed both their behavior and their anatomy. Here we show that, in only 33,000 y, domestication transformed the facial muscle anatomy of dogs specifically for facial communication with humans. Based on dissections of dog and wolf heads, we show that the levator anguli oculi medialis, a muscle responsible for raising the inner eyebrow intensely, is uniformly present in dogs but not in wolves. Behavioral data, collected from dogs and wolves, show that dogs produce the eyebrow movement significantly more often and with higher intensity than wolves do, with highest-intensity movements produced exclusively by dogs. Interestingly, this movement increases paedomorphism and resembles an expression that humans produce when sad, so its production in dogs may trigger a nurturing response in humans. We hypothesize that dogs with expressive eyebrows had a selection advantage and that “puppy dog eyes” are the result of selection based on humans’ preferences.

Around the globe, financial temptation increases civic honesty.

Shalvi does a commentary on work by Cohn et al. Here is the Cohn et al. abstract:

Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe. In these experiments, we turned in more than 17,000 lost wallets containing varying amounts of money at public and private institutions and measured whether recipients contacted the owners to return the wallets. In virtually all countries, citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. Neither nonexperts nor professional economists were able to predict this result. Additional data suggest that our main findings can be explained by a combination of altruistic concerns and an aversion to viewing oneself as a thief, both of which increase with the material benefits of dishonesty.

It’s never simple...The tidy textbook story about the primary visual cortex is wrong.

When I was a postdoc in the Harvard Neurobiology department in the mid-1960’s I used to have afternoon tea with the Hubel and Weisel group. These are the guys who got a Nobel prize for, among other things, finding that the primary visual cortex is organized into cortical columns of cells that responded to lines that prefer different orientations. Another grouping of columns, called ‘blobs’ responded selectively to color and brightness but not orientation. These two different kinds of groups sent their outputs to higher visual areas that were supposed to integrate the information. My neurobiology course lectures and my Biology of Mind book showed drawings illustrating these tidy distinctions.

Sigh… now Garg et al. come along with two-photon calcium imaging to probe a very large spatial and chromatic visual stimulus space and map functional microarchitecture of thousands of neurons with single-cell resolution. They show that processing of orientation and color is combined at the earliest stages of visual processing, totally challenging the existing model. Their abstract:

Previous studies support the textbook model that shape and color are extracted by distinct neurons in primate primary visual cortex (V1). However, rigorous testing of this model requires sampling a larger stimulus space than previously possible. We used stable GCaMP6f expression and two-photon calcium imaging to probe a very large spatial and chromatic visual stimulus space and map functional microarchitecture of thousands of neurons with single-cell resolution. Notable proportions of V1 neurons strongly preferred equiluminant color over achromatic stimuli and were also orientation selective, indicating that orientation and color in V1 are mutually processed by overlapping circuits. Single neurons could precisely and unambiguously code for both color and orientation. Further analyses revealed systematic spatial relationships between color tuning, orientation selectivity, and cytochrome oxidase histology.