Sullivan on what has happened to the belief system of the American elites.

In a strident essay Andrew Sullivan pushes back against his critics who troll him as being a far rightist. He deflects the critique by charging that the belief system of the Democratic progressive American elites has moved much farther to the left than the Republicans have moved to the right. Some clips:

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015...What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history...The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years.

..the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.

The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”)...A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing.

The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.”...to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy...Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.

A plank of successor ideology, for example, is that the only and exclusive reason for racial inequality is “white supremacy.” Culture, economics, poverty, criminality, family structure: all are irrelevant, unless seen as mere emanations of white control. Even discussing these complicated factors is racist...The proponents of the successor ideology are] not trying to be malicious, but they are trying to basically annihilate a lot of the foundational processes that we depend upon and then remake them anew. You operate from the starting point that all the previous ideologies, methods, and processes are untrustworthy, because they produced this outcome previously, so we’ve got to remake all of them. Precisely. This is a revolution against liberalism commanded from above.

Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Non-violence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Color-blindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.

...check out Kevin Drum’s analysis of asymmetric polarization these past few decades. He shows relentlessly that over the past few decades, it’s Democrats who have veered most decisively to the extremes on policy on cultural issues since the 1990s. Not Republicans. Democrats.On immigration, Republicans have moved around five points to the right; the Democrats 35 points to the left. On abortion, Republicans who advocate a total ban have increased their numbers a couple of points since 1994; Democrats who favor legality in every instance has risen 20 points. On guns, the GOP has moved ten points right; Dems 20 points left.

It is also no accident that, as Drum notes and as David Shor has shown: “white academic theories of racism — and probably the whole woke movement in general —have turned off many moderate Black and Hispanic voters.” This is why even a huge economic boom may not be enough to keep the Democrats in power next year.

Does that mean we should support an increasingly nihilist cult on the right among the GOP? Of course not. Does it mean we should ignore its increasingly menacing contempt for electoral integrity and a stable democracy? Absolutely not. But one reason to fight for liberalism against the successor ideology is that its extremes are quite obviously fomenting and facilitating and inspiring ever-rising fanaticism in response. I fear the successor ideology’s Kulturkampf is already making the 2022 midterms a landslide for a cultish, unmoored GOP. In fighting S.I., we are also fighting Trump.

But I am not making a tactical argument here. I’m making a deeper moral argument. We can and must still fight and argue for what we believe in: a liberal democracy in a liberal society. This fight will not end if we just ignore it or allow ourselves to be intimidated by it, or join the tribal pile-ons. And I will not apologize for confronting this, however unpopular it might make me, just as I won’t apologize for confronting the poison and nihilism on the right. And if you really want to be on “the right side of liberalism,” you will join me.

Coffee is good for you, mostly....

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

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

But,

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

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

Some people have no "Minds Eye"

Carl Zimmer does a nice piece on the tens of millions of people who don't experience a mental camera. The condition has been named aphantasia, and millions more experience extraordinarily strong mental imagery, called hyperphantasia. British neurologist Adam Zeman estimates that 2.6 percent of people have hyperphantasia and that 0.7 percent have aphantasia...a website called the Aphantasia Network has grown into a hub for people with the condition and for researchers studying them.

The vast majority of people who report a lack of a mind’s eye have no memory of ever having had one, suggesting that they had been born without it. Yet...they had little trouble recalling things they had seen. When asked whether grass or pine tree needles are a darker shade of green, for example, they correctly answered that the needles are.

Researchers are .. starting to use brain scans to find the circuitry that gives rise to aphantasia and hyperphantasia. So far, that work suggests that mental imagery emerges from a network of brain regions that talk to each other...Decision-making regions at the front of the brain send signals to regions at the back, which normally make sense of information from the eyes. Those top-down signals can cause the visual regions to produce images that aren’t there.

In a study published in May, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues scanned the brains of 24 people with aphantasia, 25 people with hyperphantasia and 20 people with neither condition...The people with hyperphantasia had stronger activity in regions linking the front and back of the brain. They may be able to send more potent signals from decision-making regions of the front of the brain to the visual centers at the back.

Human behavior and the brain's white matter

I pass on a few edited clips from Filley's perspective piece in Science and the Editor's introduction describing work of Zhao et al.

...our cerebral cortex is only a few millimeters thick (the relative neglect of the rest of the brain below the cortex has prompted the term “corticocentric myopia”). Other regions relevant to behavior include the deep gray matter of the basal ganglia and thalamus, the brainstem and cerebellum, and the white matter that interconnects all of these structures. The white matter is composed of axonal tracts connecting different brain regions, and plays key roles in both normal brain function and a variety of neurological disorders. Zhao et al. have combined detailed magnetic resonance imaging–based assessment of brain structures with genetic data on nearly 44,000 individuals... On the basis of this comprehensive analysis, the authors have identified structural and genetic abnormalities associated with neurological and psychiatric disorders, as well as some nondisease traits, and have created a valuable resource providing some insights into the underlying neurobiology.

Here is the Zhao et al. abstract, followed by a graphic from Filley's review.

Brain regions communicate with each other through tracts of myelinated axons, commonly referred to as white matter. We identified common genetic variants influencing white matter microstructure using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging of 43,802 individuals. Genome-wide association analysis identified 109 associated loci, 30 of which were detected by tract-specific functional principal components analysis. A number of loci colocalized with brain diseases, such as glioma and stroke. Genetic correlations were observed between white matter microstructure and 57 complex traits and diseases. Common variants associated with white matter microstructure altered the function of regulatory elements in glial cells, particularly oligodendrocytes. This large-scale tract-specific study advances the understanding of the genetic architecture of white matter and its genetic links to a wide spectrum of clinical outcomes.

 

Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media

A disheartening analysis by Rathje et al.:  

Significance

Almost four billion people around the world now use social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and social media is one of the primary ways people access news or receive communications from politicians. However, social media may be creating perverse incentives for divisive content because this content is particularly likely to go “viral.” We report evidence that posts about political opponents are substantially more likely to be shared on social media and that this out-group effect is much stronger than other established predictors of social media sharing, such as emotional language. These findings contribute to scholarly debates about the role of social media in political polarization and can inform solutions for creating healthier social media environments.

Abstract

There has been growing concern about the role social media plays in political polarization. We investigated whether out-group animosity was particularly successful at generating engagement on two of the largest social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. Analyzing posts from news media accounts and US congressional members (n = 2,730,215), we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%. Out-group language consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of shares and retweets: the average effect size of out-group language was about 4.8 times as strong as that of negative affect language and about 6.7 times as strong as that of moral-emotional language—both established predictors of social media engagement. Language about the out-group was a very strong predictor of “angry” reactions (the most popular reactions across all datasets), and language about the in-group was a strong predictor of “love” reactions, reflecting in-group favoritism and out-group derogation. This out-group effect was not moderated by political orientation or social media platform, but stronger effects were found among political leaders than among news media accounts. In sum, out-group language is the strongest predictor of social media engagement across all relevant predictors measured, suggesting that social media may be creating perverse incentives for content expressing out-group animosity.

Seven nuggets on how we confuse ourselves about our brains and our world.

In a series of posts starting on Nov. 27, 2020 I attempted to abstract and condense the ideas in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s 2017 book “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain”. That book is a hard slog, as was my series of posts on its contents. Barrett also did her own condensation in her followup book, “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain,” that appeared in late 2020 at the same time as my posts, and I’ve finally gotten around to scanning through it. I want to pass on her brief epilogue that extracts a few crisp nuggets from her lessons:

ONCE UPON A TIME, you were a little stomach on a stick, floating in the sea. Little by little, you evolved. You grew sensory systems and learned that you were part of a bigger world. You grew bodily systems to navigate that world efficiently. And you grew a brain that ran a budget for your body. You learned to live in groups with all the other little brains-in-bodies. You crawled out of the water and onto land. And across the expanse of evolutionary time - with the innovation that comes from trial and error and the deaths of trillions of animals - you ended up with a human brain. A brain that can do so many impressive things but at the same time severely misunderstands itself.

-A brain that constructs such rich mental experiences that we feel like emotion and reason wrestle inside us 

-A brain that’s so complex that we describe it by metaphors and mistake them for knowledge 

-A brain that’s so skilled at rewiring itself that we think we’re born with all sorts of things that we actually learn 

-A brain that’s so effective at hallucinating that we believe we see the world objectively, and so fast at predicting that we mistake our movements for reactions 

-A brain that regulates other brains so invisibly that we presume we’re independent of each other 

-A brain that creates so many kinds of minds that we assume there’s a single human nature to explain them all 

-A brain that’s so good at believing its own inventions that we mistake social reality for the natural world

We know much about the brain today, but there are still so many more lessons to learn. For now, at least, we’ve learned enough to sketch our brain’s fantastical evolutionary journey and consider the implications for some of the most central and challenging aspects of our lives.

Our kind of brain isn’t the biggest in the animal kingdom, and it’s not the best in any objective sense. But it’s ours. It’s the source of our strengths and our foibles. It gives us our capacity to build civilizations and our capacity to tear down each other. It makes us simply, imperfectly, gloriously human.

In our brains everything changes

Sometimes learning the hard neuroscience of how our brains work leaves me feeling a bit queasy. The first time this happened was when I learned about the Libet experiments that showed that cells in our motor cortex start a movement well before we ‘decide’ to initiate it. “We” think we are initiating a movement when in fact “it” (those brain cells) are already well on their way to doing it. So what happened to my ‘free will’? Well...there is a work around for that problem that I explain in my “I Illusion” and subsequent web lectures. 

 A further uncomfortable jolt comes on seeing evidence the brain cells that become active during a familiar experience can change over time. Each instance of the recall of an important event can recruit a different group of nerve cells, because each time the memory is fetched from the neuronal ‘library’ it gets put back, sometimes slightly altered, in different nerve cell collections and connections. A very striking example of this has been provided by Schoonover et al. Who show that the network of nerve cells active when a particular smell triggers a specific behavior changes over time, moving to different brain areas. This is an example of ‘representational plasticity’ which is discussed in a review article by Rule et al. 

This conflicts with our common sense view of how our minds should work. If you have an experience and then later remember it, you must have put it somewhere in your brain’s library of nerve cell connections, like a book on a library shelf, so that all you have to do to remember something is go fetch it. If the experience is an emotional one it couples with a hard wired circuit for that emotion. This essentialist view of how our minds work is being thoroughly displaced as experimental evidence continues to accumulate showing that in each moment we are constructing our experience anew - reminding of the Buddhist saying that the river you view flowing past is never the same twice. The series of MindBlog posts (starting here) on the work and ideas of Barrett covers this material. 

It is from constant change and flux in our evolved neuroendocrine circuitry that we generate the illusion of certainty or constancy - expectations of selves, rules, objects, and emotions that stay in place. We model the world we expect to see before each moment we are about to enter. If our expectations are not met, then our brains perk up to adjust them appropriately.  

 

Lack of mathematical education impacts brain development and future attainment

From Zacharopoulos et al.:  

 Significance

Our knowledge of the effect of a specific lack of education on the brain and cognitive development is currently poor but is highly relevant given differences between countries in their educational curricula and the differences in opportunities to access education. We show that within the same society, adolescent students who specifically lack mathematical education exhibited reduced brain inhibition levels in a key brain area involved in reasoning and cognitive learning. Importantly, these brain inhibition levels predicted mathematical attainment ∼19 mo later, suggesting they play a role in neuroplasticity. Our study provides biological understanding of the impact of the lack of mathematical education on the developing brain and the mutual play between biology and education.

Abstract

Formal education has a long-term impact on an individual’s life. However, our knowledge of the effect of a specific lack of education, such as in mathematics, is currently poor but is highly relevant given the extant differences between countries in their educational curricula and the differences in opportunities to access education. Here we examined whether neurotransmitter concentrations in the adolescent brain could classify whether a student is lacking mathematical education. Decreased γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) concentration within the middle frontal gyrus (MFG) successfully classified whether an adolescent studies math and was negatively associated with frontoparietal connectivity. In a second experiment, we uncovered that our findings were not due to preexisting differences before a mathematical education ceased. Furthermore, we showed that MFG GABA not only classifies whether an adolescent is studying math or not, but it also predicts the changes in mathematical reasoning ∼19 mo later. The present results extend previous work in animals that has emphasized the role of GABA neurotransmission in synaptic and network plasticity and highlight the effect of a specific lack of education on MFG GABA concentration and learning-dependent plasticity. Our findings reveal the reciprocal effect between brain development and education and demonstrate the negative consequences of a specific lack of education during adolescence on brain plasticity and cognitive functions.

Decision-making ability, psychopathology, and brain connectivity

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

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

Highlights

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

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

• Low decision acuity is associated with general social function psychopathology

Summary

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

Giving help to others may increase your life span.

An interesting analysis from Chen et al.: 

Significance

Social support is a key contributor to mortality risk, with effects comparable in magnitude (though opposite in direction) to smoking and obesity. Research has largely focused on either support received or support given; yet, everyday social relationships typically involve interchanges of support rather than only giving or only receiving. Using a longitudinal US national sample, this article elucidates how the balance of social support (amount of giving one does on a monthly basis relative to receiving support) relates to all-cause mortality over a 23-y follow-up period. Although correlational, one possible implication of the findings is that encouraging individuals to give support (e.g., helping others with errands) in moderation, while also being willing to accept support, may have longevity benefits.

Abstract

While numerous studies exist on the benefits of social support (both receiving and giving), little research exists on how the balance between the support that individuals regularly give versus that which they receive from others relates to physical health. In a US national sample of 6,325 adults from the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States, participants were assessed at baseline on hours of social support given and received on a monthly basis, with all-cause mortality data collected from the National Death Index over a 23-y follow-up period. Participants who were relatively balanced in the support they gave compared to what they received had a lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who either disproportionately received support from others (e.g., received more hours of support than they gave each month) or disproportionately gave support to others (e.g., gave many more hours of support a month than they received). These findings applied to instrumental social support (e.g., help with transportation, childcare). Additionally, participants who gave a moderate amount of instrumental social support had a lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who either gave very little support or those who gave a lot of support to others. Associations were evident over and above demographic, medical, mental health, and health behavior covariates. Although results are correlational, one interpretation is that promoting a balance, in terms of the support that individuals regularly give relative to what they receive in their social relationships, may not only help to strengthen the social fabric of society but may also have potential physical health benefits.

Our 'Self' extends vastly beyond our brain.

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

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

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

A second resource is our bodies:

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

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

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

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

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

A fourth extension of our minds...

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

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

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

A.I. should be afraid of us.

Alan Burdick does a nice summary of some recent work on interactions between humans and artificial intelligence algorithms designed to appear empathetic:

Numerous studies have found that when people are placed in a situation where they can cooperate with a benevolent A.I., they are less likely to do so than if the bot were an actual person...We basically treat a perfect stranger better than A.I.

A study by Deroy and colleagues found

...that people were less likely to cooperate with a bot even when the bot was keen to cooperate. It’s not that we don’t trust the bot, it’s that we do: The bot is guaranteed benevolent, a capital-S sucker, so we exploit it.

That conclusion was borne out by reports afterward from the study’s participants. “Not only did they tend to not reciprocate the cooperative intentions of the artificial agents,” Dr. Deroy said, “but when they basically betrayed the trust of the bot, they didn’t report guilt, whereas with humans they did.” She added, “You can just ignore the bot and there is no feeling that you have broken any mutual obligation.”

This could have real-world implications. When we think about A.I., we tend to think about the Alexas and Siris of our future world, with whom we might form some sort of faux-intimate relationship. But most of our interactions will be one-time, often wordless encounters. Imagine driving on the highway, and a car wants to merge in front of you. If you notice that the car is driverless, you’ll be far less likely to let it in. And if the A.I. doesn’t account for your bad behavior, an accident could ensue.

“What sustains cooperation in society at any scale is the establishment of certain norms,” Dr. Deroy said. “The social function of guilt is exactly to make people follow social norms that lead them to make compromises, to cooperate with others. And we have not evolved to have social or moral norms for non-sentient creatures and bots...what guarantees that the behavior that gets repeated, and where you show less politeness, less moral obligation, less cooperativeness, will not color and contaminate the rest of your behavior when you interact with another human?"

There are similar consequences for A.I., too. “If people treat them badly, they’re programed to learn from what they experience,” she said. “An A.I. that was put on the road and programmed to be benevolent should start to be not that kind to humans, because otherwise it will be stuck in traffic forever...

There we have it: The true Turing test is road rage. When a self-driving car starts honking wildly from behind because you cut it off, you’ll know that humanity has reached the pinnacle of achievement. By then, hopefully, A.I therapy will be sophisticated enough to help driverless cars solve their anger-management issues.

Your blood proteins can tell you the best kind of exercise for your body

Since I am heading into my 80th year, and realizing that any further years must be regarded as a gift from nature, I'm attentive to anything that NYTimes "Phys Ed" columnist Gretchen Reynolds (who is no spring chicken) writes about exercise and aerobic fittness (both of which are strongly linked to longevity.) Most recently, she describes work by Robbins et al. that finds a correlation between the levels of different blood proteins and how individual respond to exercise.

If we all begin the same exercise routine tomorrow, some of us will become much fitter, others will get a little more in shape, and a few of us may actually lose fitness. Individual responses to exercise can vary that wildly and, until now, unpredictably. But a fascinating new study of more than 650 men and women suggests that the levels of certain proteins in our bloodstreams might foretell whether and how we will respond to various exercise regimens.

Using state-of-the-art molecular tools, the scientists began enumerating the numbers and types of thousands of proteins in each of the 654 people’s bloodstreams. Then they tabulated those figures with data about everyone’s aerobic fitness before and after their five months of exercise...The levels of 147 proteins were strongly associated with people’s baseline fitness, the researchers found. If some of those protein numbers were high and others low, the resulting molecular profiles indicated how fit someone was.

More intriguing, a separate set of 102 proteins tended to predict people’s physical responses to exercise. Higher and lower levels of these molecules — few of which overlapped with the proteins related to people’s baseline fitness — prophesied the extent to which someone’s aerobic capacity would increase, if at all, with exercise...Finally, because aerobic fitness is so strongly linked to longevity, the scientists crosschecked levels of the various fitness-related proteins in the blood of people enrolled in a separate health study that included mortality records, and found that protein signatures implying lower or greater fitness response likewise signified shorter or longer lives.

Taken as a whole, the new study’s results suggest that “molecular profiling tools might help to tailor” exercise plans. Someone whose bloodstream protein signature suggests he or she might gain little fitness from a standard, moderate walking, cycling or swimming routine, for instance, might be nudged toward higher-intensity workouts or resistance training.

Equality and Equity in the Life Sciences

After yesterday's heavy post describing 'Four Americas.' - with the last listed being 'Justice America' - rising out of the age of the Millenials and addressing the systemic racism that has permeated American life and politics since the 1700's - I decided to take a brief rest by going back to my reviewing of the tables of contents of various life science journals, a respite, I thought, of looking at politically neutral basic science. No such luck...nothing is politically neutral in these times...virtually all of the journals I look at are attempting to examine and atone for their past inattention to issues of equality and equity. From the tables of contents of the first four journals in my queue of Journals to have a look at:

From Cell: Affirming NIH’s commitment to addressing structural racism in the biomedical research enterprise

NIH has acknowledged and committed to ending structural racism. The framework for NIH’s approach, summarized here, includes understanding barriers; developing robust health disparities/equity research; improving its internal culture; being transparent and accountable; and changing the extramural ecosystem so that diversity, equity, and inclusion are reflected in funded research and the biomedical workforce.

From Current Biology: Trends Voices: On inclusion and diversity

Meet with us to share personal stories of your experience as a scientist, as well as accounts of what you’re doing to redress existing bias in scientific inquiry, for the benefit of science and society. Book a meeting.

From Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

News Feature: Keeping Black students in STEM

From Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience:

The neural underpinnings of making racial distinctions.