The God Effect

Here I pass on another bit, by Marina Krakovsky, in the NY Times Magazine's Dec. 9 "Ideas" issue. She summarizes work by Canadian psychologists Shariff and Norenzayan published in Psychological Science:

Some anthropologists argue that the idea of God first arose in larger societies, for the purpose of curbing selfishness and promoting cooperation. Outside a tightly knit group, the reasoning goes, nobody can keep an eye on everyone’s behavior, so these cultures invented a supernatural agent who could. But does thinking of an omniscient God actually promote altruism? The University of British Columbia psychologist Ara Norenzayan wanted to find out.

In a pair of studies published in Psychological Science, Norenzayan and his student Azim F. Shariff had participants play the so-called “dictator game,” a common way of measuring generosity toward strangers. The game is simple: you’re offered 10 $1 coins and told to take as many as you want and leave the rest for the player in the other room (who is, unbeknown to you, a research confederate). The fair split, of course, is 50-50, but most anonymous “dictators” play selfishly, leaving little or nothing for the other player.

In the control group of Norenzayan’s study, the vast majority of participants kept everything or nearly everything — whether or not they said they were religious. “Religious leaders always complain that people don’t internalize religion, and they’re right,” Norenzayan observes.

But is there a way to induce generosity? In the experimental condition, the researchers prompted thoughts of God using a well-established “priming” technique: participants, who again included both theists and atheists, first had to unscramble sentences containing words such as God, divine and sacred. That way, going into the dictator game, players had God on their minds without being consciously aware of it. Sure enough, the “God prime” worked like a charm, leading to fairer splits. Without the God prime, only 12 percent of the participants split the money evenly, but when primed with the religious words, 52 percent did.

When news of these findings made headlines, some atheists were appalled by the implication that altruism depends heavily on religion. Apparently, they hadn’t heard the whole story. In a second study, the researchers had participants unscramble sentences containing words like civic, contract and police — meant to evoke secular moral institutions. This prime also increased generosity. And unlike the religious prime, it did so consistently for both believers and nonbelievers. Until he conducts further research, Norenzayan can only speculate about the significance: “We need that common denominator that works for everyone.

A Mea Culpa - Pinker and his critics

I think in general that Steven Pinker goes way overboard on the nativist angle, and so recently approvingly passed on this Churchland review in the Nov. 1 issue of Nature critical of Pinker's new book, "The Language of Thought." - I hadn't actually read the book. These retorts by Marc Hauser and Pinker himself in the Dec. 6 issue make me realize that I should have. I have zapped my original post, and I'm now going to read the book......(one thing about doing a blog is that you read fewer good long books). I admit to a residual grumpyness about Pinker (a brilliant man) from his visit to Wisconsin a number of years ago as a featured speaker. He was dragged through the usual torture of serial 30 minute interviews with local "prominent persons" (I was the Zoology Chair at that time), and during our conversation I found him to be quite remote. At his talk he read from a typescript - word for word - a lecture that I had already heard twice before.

Seasonal Affective Disorder - an evolutionary relic?

Friedman offers a succinct summary of information of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), with some interesting facts.

Epidemiological studies estimate that its prevalence in the adult population ranges from 1.4 percent (Florida) to 9.7 percent (New Hampshire).

In one study, patients with SAD

...had a longer duration of nocturnal melatonin secretion in the winter than in the summer, just as with other mammals with seasonal behavior.Why did the normal patients show no seasonal change in melatonin secretion? One possibility is exposure to industrial light, which can suppress melatonin.
...The effects of light therapy are fast, usually four to seven days, compared with antidepressants, which can take four to six weeks to work.
...People are most responsive to light therapy early in the morning, just when melatonin secretion begins to wane, about eight to nine hours after the nighttime surge begins...How can the average person figure that out without a blood test? By a simple questionnaire that assesses “morningness” or “eveningness” and that strongly correlates with plasma melatonin levels. The nonprofit Center for Environmental Therapeutics has a questionnaire on its Web site (www.cet.org).

"Mental reserves" as antidote to Alzheimer's disease

A fascinating aspect of various kinds of debilitation (back pain, heart attacks, dementia) is that degenerative changes in anatomy commonly associated with them (disk and vertebral degeneration, cardiac vessel blockage, brain lesion and beta-amyloid plaques-shown in figure) are often observed on autopsy in physically and mental robust people, who have shown no symptoms of debilitation. What is different about them? Apparently their bodies were able to do a more effective 'work around' or compensation for the damage. A relevant article by Jane Brody in the December 11 New York Times deals with evidence that cognitive reserves, the brain’s ability to develop and maintain extra neurons and connections between them may later in life help compensate for the rise in dementia-related brain pathology that accompanies normal aging. Some edited clips:

Cognitive reserve is greater in people who complete higher levels of education. The more intellectual challenges to the brain early in life, the more neurons and connections the brain is likely to develop and perhaps maintain into later years... brain stimulation does not have to stop with the diploma. Better-educated people may go on to choose more intellectually demanding occupations and pursue brain-stimulating hobbies, resulting in a form of lifelong learning...novelty is crucial to providing stimulation for the aging brain...as with muscles, it’s “use it or lose it.” The brain requires continued stresses to maintain or enhance its strength...In 2001, ... a long-term study of cognitively healthy elderly New Yorkers....found, on average, those who pursued the most leisure activities of an intellectual or social nature had a 38 percent lower risk of developing dementia. The more activities, the lower the risk...the most direct route to a fit mind is through a fit body...physical exercise “improves what scientists call ‘executive function,’ the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that’s appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory.

This point about exercise and executive function was the subject of my Nov. 15 post.

Ambiguity Promotes Liking

For the seventh consecutive December, the New York Times magazine (Dec. 9 issue) has looked back on the passing year through the special lens of 'ideas'. Here is one of their brief essays, and I will pass on a few more in subsequent posts:

Ambiguity Promotes Liking

By MARINA KRAKOVSKY

Is it true that familiarity breeds contempt? A psychology study published this year concludes that the answer is yes. It seems we are inclined to interpret ambiguous information about someone optimistically, assuming we will get along. We are usually let down, however, when we learn more.

A team of researchers, led by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School, looked at online daters’ opinions of people they were about to meet for the first time and compared those ratings with another group’s post-date impressions. Before the date, based on what little information the daters saw online, most participants rated their prospective dates between a 6 and a 10 on a 10-point scale, with nobody giving a score below a 3. But post-date scores were lower, on average, and lots of people deemed their date a total dud.

Why? For starters, initial information is open to interpretation. “And people are so motivated to find somebody they like that they read things into the profiles,” Norton says. If a man writes that he likes the outdoors, his would-be mate imagines her perfect skiing companion, but when she learns more, she discovers “the outdoors” refers to nude beaches. And “once you see one dissimilarity, everything you learn afterward gets colored by that,” Norton says.

The letdown from getting more information isn’t true just for romance. In one experiment, the researchers showed college students different numbers of randomly selected traits and asked them to rate how much they’d like the person described. For the most part, the more traits participants saw, the less they said they would like the other person. But another group of students had overwhelmingly said they would like people more after learning more about them.

We make this mistake, the researchers say, largely because we can all recall cases of more knowledge leading to more liking. “You forget the people in your third-grade class you didn’t like; you remember the people you’re still friends with,” Norton explains.

Most popular consciousness articles for November

From the monthly report of downloads from the eprint archives of the Assoc. for the Study of Consciousness:

1. Sagiv, Noam and Ward, Jamie (2006) Crossmodal interactions: lessons from
synesthesia. In: Visual Perception, Part 2. Progress in Brain Research,
Volume 155. 1404 downloads from 17 countries.
http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/224/
2. David, Elodie and Laloyaux, Cédric and Devue, Christel and Cleeremans,
Axel (2007) Change blindness to gradual changes in facial expressions.
Psychologica Belgica, in press. 1299 downloads from 12 countries.
http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/256/
3. Koriat, A. (2006) Metacognition and Consciousness. In: Cambridge handbook
of consciousness. Cambridge University Press, New York, USA. 1088 downloads
from 21 countries. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/175/
4. Mashour, George A. (2007) Inverse Zombies, Anesthesia Awareness, and the
Hard Problem of Unconsciousness. In: 11th Annual Meeting of the ASSC, Las
Vegas. 976 downloads from 18 countries. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/294/
5. Rosenthal, David (2007) Consciousness and its function. In: 11th annual
meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, 22-25
June 2007, Las Vegas, USA. 971 downloads from 19 countries.
http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/293/

Delayed maturation of the cortex in children with ADHD

From Shaw et al., a very straightforward study showing that normal thickness of the cerebral cortex develops more slowly in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This kind of finding makes it even more disturbing that ADHD continues to be pervasively over-diagnosed in children, who are then drugged with Ritalin when they should just be left alone to let things straighten out in their own good time.

There is controversy over the nature of the disturbance in brain development that underpins attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In particular, it is unclear whether the disorder results from a delay in brain maturation or whether it represents a complete deviation from the template of typical development. Using computational neuroanatomic techniques, we estimated cortical thickness at >40,000 cerebral points from 824 magnetic resonance scans acquired prospectively on 223 children with ADHD and 223 typically developing controls. With this sample size, we could define the growth trajectory of each cortical point, delineating a phase of childhood increase followed by adolescent decrease in cortical thickness (a quadratic growth model). From these trajectories, the age of attaining peak cortical thickness was derived and used as an index of cortical maturation. We found maturation to progress in a similar manner regionally in both children with and without ADHD, with primary sensory areas attaining peak cortical thickness before polymodal, high-order association areas. However, there was a marked delay in ADHD in attaining peak thickness throughout most of the cerebrum: the median age by which 50% of the cortical points attained peak thickness for this group was 10.5 years (SE 0.01), which was significantly later than the median age of 7.5 years (SE 0.02) for typically developing controls. The delay was most prominent in prefrontal regions important for control of cognitive processes including attention and motor planning. Neuroanatomic documentation of a delay in regional cortical maturation in ADHD has not been previously reported.

Figure - The age of attaining peak cortical thickness in children with ADHD compared with typically developing children. (A) dorsal view of the cortical regions where peak thickness was attained at each age (shown, ages 7–12) in ADHD (Upper) and typically developing controls (Lower). The darker colors indicate regions where a quadratic model was not appropriate (and thus a peak age could not be calculated), or the peak age was estimated to lie outside the age range covered. Both groups showed a similar sequence of the regions that attained peak thickness, but the ADHD group showed considerable delay in reaching this developmental marker. (B) Right lateral view of the cortical regions where peak thickness was attained at each age (shown, ages 7–13) in ADHD (Upper) and typically developing controls (Lower). Again, the delay in ADHD group in attaining peak cortical thickness is apparent.

A happy ending.....

Here is a feel-good story to start the week...

Good feelings.....

A bit off the track for this blog, but it is the season for good feelings, so I pass on this alternative video for the new new Erasure single "I Could Fall In Love With You" (which I saw during happy hour yesterday at a video bar, and then found on YouTube).

Brief exposure to media violence alters cortical networks regulating reactive aggression.

This article from Kelly et al. in PLoS One biology is worth a look...here are some clips:

Media depictions of violence, although often claimed to induce viewer aggression, have not been shown to affect the cortical networks that regulate behavior...Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that repeated exposure to violent media, but not to other equally arousing media, led to both diminished response in right lateral orbitofrontal cortex (right ltOFC) and a decrease in right ltOFC-amygdala interaction. Reduced function in this network has been previously associated with decreased control over a variety of behaviors, including reactive aggression. Indeed, we found reduced right ltOFC responses to be characteristic of those subjects that reported greater tendencies toward reactive aggression. Furthermore, the violence-induced reduction in right ltOFC response coincided with increased throughput to behavior planning regions...These novel findings establish that even short-term exposure to violent media can result in diminished responsiveness of a network associated with behaviors such as reactive aggression.

The spotlight of our attention blinks ~ 7 times per second

This work argues that when we try to attend to multiple relevant targets we do so sequentially rather regarding them in parallel, at a rate of about 7 items per second. I was unable to download the supplement describing the mathematical details of the psychometric modeling they used to distinguish sequential from parallel. Here is the abstract from the article by VanRullen et al.:

Increasing evidence suggests that attention can concurrently select multiple locations; yet it is not clear whether this ability relies on continuous allocation of attention to the different targets (a "parallel" strategy) or whether attention switches rapidly between the targets (a periodic "sampling" strategy). Here, we propose a method to distinguish between these two alternatives. The human psychometric function for detection of a single target as a function of its duration can be used to predict the corresponding function for two or more attended targets. Importantly, the predicted curves differ, depending on whether a parallel or sampling strategy is assumed. For a challenging detection task, we found that human performance was best reflected by a sampling model, indicating that multiple items of interest were processed in series at a rate of approximately seven items per second. Surprisingly, the data suggested that attention operated in this periodic regime, even when it was focused on a single target. That is, attention might rely on an intrinsically periodic process.

Voluntary movements influence what we see

If our left and right eyes are shown different figures, a competition ensues during which we alternatively perceive one or the other of the figures. Maruya et al. do experiments showing that physical body movements that correlate with one of the figures can enhance the duration of the intervals during which that figure is being seen. This is a nice example of the influence of action on perception. Here is their abstract, a figure, and a clip of their discussion:

Converging lines of evidence point to a strong link between action and perception. In this study, we show that this linkage plays a role in controlling the dynamics of binocular rivalry, in which two stimuli compete for perceptual awareness. Observers dichoptically viewed two dynamic rival stimuli while moving a computer mouse with one hand. When the motion of one rival stimulus was consistent with observers' own hand movements, dominance durations of that stimulus were extended and, remarkably, suppression durations of that stimulus were abbreviated. Additional measurements revealed that this change in rivalry dynamics was not attributable to observers' knowledge about the condition under test. Thus, self-generated actions can influence the resolution of perceptual conflict, even when the object being controlled falls outside of visual awareness.

Figure - Schematic depiction of the rivalry stimuli (a) and diagrams illustrating the four kinds of trials (b). In the experiment, the reversed configuration of the stimuli, with the sphere exposed to the left eye and the grating exposed to the right eye, was also used. In (b), each diagram shows the dots' movement, the observer's hand movement, and the observer's perception of the stimuli, as a function of time. The diagrams in the upper row illustrate the sphere-dominant condition, and the diagrams in the lower row illustrate the sphere-suppressed condition; manual (MAN) trials are shown on the left, and the corresponding automatic trials are shown on the right. The dashed orange outlines indicate the period during which sphere rotation followed the rotation in the training phase, and the green arrows show the correspondence between the sphere-rotation profiles in manual and automatic trials (see the text).

It is well established that the dynamics of binocular rivalry are governed by a host of stimulus variables—including contrast, motion, and figural complexity—that, together, fall within a category defined as "stimulus strength." In our study, motor control behaved as if it, too, belonged in this category. But by what means could motor control affect the stimulus strength of a rival target? One reasonable hypothesis can be derived from the widely held view that visually guided actions are mediated by neural events in brain areas forming the so-called dorsal-stream pathway (Goodale & Milner, 1992). Among other things, this pathway is specialized for visuo-motor transformations underlying motor planning of intentional actions (Andersen & Buneo, 2002). It is also known (Fang & He, 2005) that neural activity within this pathway remains strong during both dominance and suppression phases of binocular rivalry, unlike activity in the ventral-stream pathway, where activity fluctuates during rivalry. Thus, it is conceivable that during both dominance and suppression phases, actions and their visual consequences are registered within dorsal-stream structures involved in the control of visually guided actions. Through feedback, lateral interconnections, or both, this dorsal-stream activity, in turn, could modulate neural events in brain areas where rivalry does transpire.

Scientific Imagery

During 1959-62 I did research on the blood oxygen transport protein Hemoglobin, and I remember how excited I was by the Harvard lectures at which Perutz and Kendrew presented the first three dimensional protein structures determined by X-ray diffraction. The figure at left showing the structure of the muscle oxygen storage protein myoglobin is from a 1962 Scientific American article by Kendrew.

Goodsell and Johnson, in an article in PLoS Biology, describe several of the challenges facing artists who try to represent complex biological structures, who must selectively disclose, distort, and fill in gaps. The article contains several elegant graphics.

Subliminal Smells Can Guide Social Preferences

Here is the abstract of an interesting article by Li et al. in Psychological Science, followed by a figure showing the experimental paradigm:

It is widely accepted that unconscious processes can modulate judgments and behavior, but do such influences affect one's daily interactions with other people? Given that olfactory information has relatively direct access to cortical and subcortical emotional circuits, we tested whether the affective content of subliminal odors alters social preferences. Participants rated the likeability of neutral faces after smelling pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant odors delivered below detection thresholds. Odor affect significantly shifted likeability ratings only for those participants lacking conscious awareness of the smells, as verified by chance-level trial-by-trial performance on an odor-detection task. Across participants, the magnitude of this priming effect decreased as sensitivity for odor detection increased. In contrast, heart rate responses tracked odor valence independently of odor awareness. These results indicate that social preferences are subject to influences from odors that escape awareness, whereas the availability of conscious odor information may disrupt such effects.

Figure - The experimental paradigm. First, participant specific odor detection thresholds were determined using an ascending-staircase procedure. Then, participants completed an odor-detection and likeability judgment task. In this example, the detection threshold was at dilution 20, so dilution 22 was used in the main task. In that task, participants sniffed a bottle, indicated whether or not it contained an odor, viewed a face stimulus, and finally rated the likeability of the face. For a subset of the participants, heart rate was recorded.

Using Neuroimaging to Resolve the Psi Debate

Moulton and Kosslyn offer a study in J. Cog. Neurosci attempting to find evidence for the psi effect in brain imaging experiments. Here is their abstract, followed by some edited clips and a figure from the paper:

Parapsychology is the scientific investigation of apparently paranormal mental phenomena (such as telepathy, i.e., "mind reading"), also known as psi. Despite widespread public belief in such phenomena and over 75 years of experimentation, there is no compelling evidence that psi exists. In the present study, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used in an effort to document the existence of psi. If psi exists, it occurs in the brain, and hence, assessing the brain directly should be more sensitive than using indirect behavioral methods (as have been used previously). To increase sensitivity, this experiment was designed to produce positive results if telepathy, clairvoyance (i.e., direct sensing of remote events), or precognition (i.e., knowing future events) exist. Moreover, the study included biologically or emotionally related participants (e.g., twins) and emotional stimuli in an effort to maximize experimental conditions that are purportedly conducive to psi. In spite of these characteristics of the study, psi stimuli and non-psi stimuli evoked indistinguishable neuronal responses—although differences in stimulus arousal values of the same stimuli had the expected effects on patterns of brain activation. These findings are the strongest evidence yet obtained against the existence of paranormal mental phenomena.

In our experiment, participants played one of two roles: "sender" and "receiver." On each trial, sender participants viewed a randomly selected target stimulus from outside the scanner (see Figure), and tried to send this information to the receiver participant by mental means alone. While the senders were doing this, receiver participants completed a simple binary guessing task, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor their brain activity. On each trial of the guessing task, the receivers sequentially viewed two stimuli, guessed which one was the stimulus being "sent" (i.e., the psi stimulus), and then saw the psi stimulus a second time. This paradigm allowed us simultaneously to test all three hypothesized mechanisms of psi: telepathy (i.e., "mind reading"), clairvoyance (i.e., direct sensing of remote events), and precognition (i.e., knowing future events). The sender served as the potential telepathic source, the sender's computer monitor served as the potential clairvoyance source, and the second presentation of the psi stimulus served as the potential precognition source.

Figure 1 A schematic of one trial. In this trial for the receiver, the non-psi stimulus appears first and the psi stimulus second. The third stimulus presentation (feedback) in each trial is always the same as the psi stimulus. The sender sees only the psi stimulus for each trial.

The results support the null hypothesis that psi does not exist. The brains of our participants—as a group and individually—reacted to psi and non-psi stimuli in a statistically indistinguishable manner. Given the relatively large number of participants, the use of fixed-effects statistics, the extensive activation elicited separately by both types of stimuli, the subtle psychological effects revealed in the much smaller data set from a single participant, and the non-psi effects we documented on a group level using identical statistical criteria, a lack of statistical power does not reasonably explain our results. Even if the psi effect were very transient, as are many mental events, it should have left a footprint that could be detected by fMRI—as did the other subtle effects we detected. In particular, the large and massively significant activation revealed by our arousal contrast shows that that the psi effect, if it exists, must be substantially smaller than the effect of arousal on brain activity.

But what of the truism that one cannot affirm the null hypothesis? We note that some null results should be taken more seriously than others. ....Consider the possibility of water on Mars. If a set of close-up images of its surface failed to capture frozen lakes, few would accept the nonexistence of Martian water. Yet if a planetwide analysis of its subsurface soil content failed to show telltale signs of water, most would accept the null hypothesis of a Martian desert. Past null results from parapsychology are comparable to scattered snapshots of the surface in that they measure a small sample of outwardly observable variables. The current neuroimaging approach, however, seeks anomalous knowledge at its source, inside the brain, using methods validated by cognitive neuroscience. It is also exhaustive...the study incorporated methodological variables (e.g., biological and emotional relatedness of participants, evocative stimuli) widely considered to facilitate psi by parapsychologists. As such, the current null results do not simply fail to support the psi hypothesis: They offer strong evidence against it. If these results are replicated over a range of participants and situational contexts, the case will become increasingly strong, with as much certainty as is allowed in science, that psi does not exist.

Brain responses that predict athletic performance

An Italian group, studying a group of expert golfers, has found that before a successful golf putt EEG (electroencephalogram) high-frequency alpha waves (10-12 Hz) over frontal motor areas are smaller in amplitude. Here is their abstract from the Journal of Physiology article:

It is not known whether frontal cerebral rhythms of the two hemispheres are implicated in fine motor control and balance. To address this issue, electroencephalographic (EEG) and stabilometric recordings were simultaneously performed in 12 right-handed expert golfers. The subjects were asked to stand upright on a stabilometric force platform placed at a golf green simulator while playing about 100 golf putts. Balance during the putts was indexed by body sway area. Cortical activity was indexed by the power reduction in spatially-enhanced alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (13-30 Hz) rhythms during movement, referred to a pre-movement period. It was found that the body sway area displayed similar values in the successful and unsuccessful putts. In contrast, the high-frequency alpha power (about 10-12 Hz) was smaller in amplitude in the successful than in the unsuccessful putts over the frontal midline and the arm and hand region of the right primary sensorimotor area; the stronger the reduction of the alpha power, the smaller the error of the unsuccessful putts (i.e. distance from the hole). These results indicate that high-frequency alpha rhythms over associative, premotor and non-dominant primary sensorimotor areas subserve motor control and are predictive of the golfer’s performance.

The Other-Race Effect -Perceptual Narrowing develops during infancy

We are more susceptible to recognition errors when a target face is from an unfamiliar racial group, rather than our own racial group. This is referred to as the "other race effect." An interesting study from Kelly et al. looks at the development of this effect in human infants under one year of age:

Experience plays a crucial role in the development of face processing. In the study reported here, we investigated how faces observed within the visual environment affect the development of the face-processing system during the 1st year of life. We assessed 3-, 6-, and 9-month-old Caucasian infants' ability to discriminate faces within their own racial group and within three other-race groups (African, Middle Eastern, and Chinese). The 3-month-old infants demonstrated recognition in all conditions, the 6-month-old infants were able to recognize Caucasian and Chinese faces only, and the 9-month-old infants' recognition was restricted to own-race faces. The pattern of preferences indicates that the other-race effect is emerging by 6 months of age and is present at 9 months of age. The findings suggest that facial input from the infant's visual environment is crucial for shaping the face-processing system early in infancy, resulting in differential recognition accuracy for faces of different races in adulthood.

Figure - Sample stimuli from the Chinese male and Middle Eastern female conditions. The habituation face is shown at the top of each triad. The test faces (novel and familiar) are shown underneath.

The stimuli were 24 color images of male and female adult faces (age range = 23–27 years) from four different ethnic groups (African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caucasian). All faces had dark hair and dark eyes so that the infants would be unable to demonstrate recognition on the basis of these features. The images were photos of students. The Africans were members of the African and Caribbean Society at the University of Sheffield; the Asians were Han Chinese students from Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, Hangzhou, China; the Middle Easterners were members of the Pakistan Society at the University of Sheffield; and the Caucasians were psychology students at the University of Sheffield.

Blue light changes our brains

A new light sensitive system has recently been discovered in the ganglion cells of the retinas, which send signals to the rest of the brain. These cells contain light sensitive melanopsin, most sensitive to blue wavelengths between 460 and 480 nm. The responses triggered by blue light takes seconds to develop and persist for minutes, unlike the rapid and transient responses of our rod and cone photoreceptor cells. Recent work has shown that brain activity related to a working memory task is maintained (or even increased) by blue (470 nm) monochromatic light exposure, whereas it decreases under green (550 nm) monochromatic light exposure. Vandewalle et al. now show that activation of this system causes changes in brain areas related to working memory:

Figure - activity increase in left thalamus.

"We exposed 15 participants to short duration (50 s) monochromatic violet (430 nm), blue (473 nm), and green (527 nm) light exposures of equal photon flux (1013ph/cm2/s) while they were performing a working memory task in fMRI. At light onset, blue light, as compared to green light, increased activity in the left hippocampus, left thalamus, and right amygdala. During the task, blue light, as compared to violet light, increased activity in the left middle frontal gyrus, left thalamus and a bilateral area of the brainstem consistent with activation of the locus coeruleus.

These results support a prominent contribution of melanopsin-expressing retinal ganglion cells to brain responses to light within the very first seconds of an exposure. The results also demonstrate the implication of the brainstem in mediating these responses in humans and speak for a broad involvement of light in the regulation of brain function."

The internet as a return to oral culture

This piece by Alex Wright in the Dec. 2 NY Times is worth passing on in its entirety. It makes the point that the style of human interaction fostered by social websites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Second Life have much in common with prehistoric oral culture. Humans evolved with speech, not the extremely recent invention of writing.

The growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life has thrust many of us into a new world where we make “friends” with people we barely know, scrawl messages on each other’s walls and project our identities using totem-like visual symbols. We’re making up the rules as we go. But is this world as new as it seems?

Academic researchers are starting to examine that question by taking an unusual tack: exploring the parallels between online social networks and tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and “friending,” they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral communication. “Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication. “We evolved with speech,” he says. “We didn’t evolve with writing.”

The growth of social networks — and the Internet as a whole — stems largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like “talking” than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and, lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using services like Twitter and Facebook status updates (usually proving Gertrude Stein’s maxim that “literature is not remarks”). “If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can’t help but see it everywhere,” says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons who is developing a new course to explore the emergence of oral culture online. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.”

An early student of electronic orality was the Rev. Walter J. Ong, a professor at St. Louis University and student of Marshall McLuhan who coined the term “secondary orality” in 1982 to describe the tendency of electronic media to echo the cadences of earlier oral cultures. The work of Father Ong, who died in 2003, seems especially prescient in light of the social-networking phenomenon. “Oral communication,” as he put it, “unites people in groups.” In other words, oral culture means more than just talking. There are subtler —and perhaps more important — social dynamics at work.

Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. Now he applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users. “In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

In tribal societies, people routinely give each other jewelry, weapons and ritual objects to cement their social ties. On Facebook, people accomplish the same thing by trading symbolic sock monkeys, disco balls and hula girls. “It’s reminiscent of how people exchange gifts in tribal cultures,” says Dr. Strate, whose MySpace page lists his 1,335 “friends” along with his academic credentials and his predilection for “Battlestar Galactica.”

As intriguing as these parallels may be, they only stretch so far. There are big differences between real oral cultures and the virtual kind. In tribal societies, forging social bonds is a matter of survival; on the Internet, far less so. There is presumably no tribal antecedent for popular Facebook rituals like “poking,” virtual sheep-tossing or drunk-dialing your friends. Then there’s the question of who really counts as a “friend.” In tribal societies, people develop bonds through direct, ongoing face-to-face contact. The Web eliminates that need for physical proximity, enabling people to declare friendships on the basis of otherwise flimsy connections.

“With social networks, there’s a fascination with intimacy because it simulates face-to-face communication,” Dr. Wesch says. “But there’s also this fundamental distance. That distance makes it safe for people to connect through weak ties where they can have the appearance of a connection because it’s safe.” And while tribal cultures typically engage in highly formalized rituals, social networks seem to encourage a level of casualness and familiarity that would be unthinkable in traditional oral cultures. “Secondary orality has a leveling effect,” Dr. Strate says. “In a primary oral culture, you would probably refer to me as ‘Dr. Strate,’ but on MySpace, everyone calls me ‘Lance.’ ”

As more of us shepherd our social relationships online, will this leveling effect begin to shape the way we relate to each other in the offline world as well? Dr. Wesch, for one, says he worries that the rise of secondary orality may have a paradoxical consequence: “It may be gobbling up what’s left of our real oral culture.” The more time we spend “talking” online, the less time we spend, well, talking. And as we stretch the definition of a friend to encompass people we may never actually meet, will the strength of our real-world friendships grow diluted as we immerse ourselves in a lattice of hyperlinked “friends”?

Still, the sheer popularity of social networking seems to suggest that for many, these environments strike a deep, perhaps even primal chord. “They fulfill our need to be recognized as human beings, and as members of a community,” Dr. Strate says. “We all want to be told: You exist.”

The human mind intuits probability at one year of age.

This interesting work (PDF here) shows that 12 month old infants have expectations about future single events never before seen, based on their likelihood. The authors presented movies in which three identical objects and one different in color and shape bounced randomly inside a container with an open pipe at its base, as in a lottery game. After 13 s, an occluder hid the container and one object, either one of the three identical objects (probable outcome) or else the different one (improbable outcome), exited from the pipe. The infants looked significantly longer when they witnessed the improbable outcome.

The authors also show that it only after ~3 years of age that children can overrule their probabilistic intuition when an experienced frequency of outcome disagrees with prior probability.

The article's introduction (slightly edited) sets the context for the work:

Rational agents should integrate probabilities in their predictions about uncertain future events. However, whether humans can do this, and if so, how this ability originates, are controversial issues. One influential view is that human probabilistic reasoning is severely defective, being affected by heuristics and biases. Another influential view claims that humans are unable to predict future events correctly without experiencing the frequency of past outcomes. Indeed, according to this view, in the environment in which we evolved only "the encountered frequencies of actual events" were available, hence predicting the probability of an event never before observed is meaningless.

A third, largely unexplored view is that intuitions about possible future events ground elementary probabilistic reasoning. Against this view, several classic, although not unchallenged, studies seemingly show that probabilistic reasoning appears late in development and requires frequency information. However, if, as Laplace wrote, probability theory "makes us appreciate with exactitude that which exact minds feel by a sort of instinct", humans must have intuitions about probabilities early in their life. The present work supports this view.