Obama and Neuroeconomics

In the New York Review of Books John Cassidy offers an interesting review of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.

If Obama isn't an old-school Keynesian, what is he? One answer is that he is a behavioralist—the term economists use to describe those who subscribe to the tenets of behavioral economics, an increasingly popular discipline that seeks to marry the insights of psychology to the rigor of economics...One of the reasons this approach has proved so popular is that it appears to provide a center ground between the Friedmanites and the Keynesians, whose intellectual jousting dominated economics for most of the twentieth century...Thaler and Sunstein lay out a number of principles that can be used to encourage better choice-making, and they apply them to various topical issues, including retirement saving, health care, and the environment. In a number of cases, the measures that Thaler and Sunstein recommend are mirrored by proposals in Obama's voluminous policy papers, which can be downloaded from his Web site.

Why Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?

Napier and Jost offer an interesting perspective in their article in Psychological Science. Here is an edited excerpt from their general discussion:

In three studies, using nationally representative samples from the United States and nine additional countries, we consistently found that conservatives (or right-wingers) are happier than liberals (or left-wingers). This ideological gap in happiness is not accounted for by demographic differences or by differences in cognitive style (liberals becoming less satisfied with their current situation because of the deleterious effects of rumination and introspection - versus conservatives tending to prefer relatively simple, unambiguous answers to life's questions). We did find, however, that the rationalization of inequality—a core component of conservative ideology — helps to explain why conservatives are, on average, happier than liberals. These findings are consistent with system-justification theory, which posits that viewing the status quo (with its attendant degree of inequality) as fair and legitimate serves a palliative function. The studies suggest that conservatism provides an emotional buffer against the negative hedonic impact of inequality in society.

The relation between political orientation and self-reported happiness as a function of the Gini inequality index, 1974 through 2004.

Only a theory!

Toasting the Joys of Imbibing Properly

Check out this review by Dwight Garner of "EVERYDAY DRINKING - The Distilled Kingsley Amis". The book deals with more than the physical manifestations of a hangover:

...What also urgently needs to be treated, he observed, is the metaphysical hangover — “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” that looms on the grizzled morning after...Amis recommended, among other things, a course of “hangover reading,” one that “rests on the principle that you must feel worse emotionally before you start to feel better. A good cry is the initial aim."..Thus he suggested beginning with Milton — “My own choice would tend to include the final scene of ‘Paradise Lost,’ ” he wrote, “with what is probably the most poignant moment in all our literature coming at lines 624-6” — before running through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eric Ambler and, finally, a poulticelike application of light comedies by P. G. Wodehouse and Peter De Vries.

Seeing ourselves / Seeing others - built in errors

Emily Pronin writes a review article in Science Magazine to which my first reaction was "Duh... so what else is new?" But as I looked at it a second time my "who needs to write this down, it is just common sense" reaction began to yield to realizing that the sort of systematic list she offers is useful - way in which intrinsic differences in 1st person (introspective, immersed in our own sensations, emotions, and cognitions) and 3rd person perspectives (extrospective, dominated by what behavior can be observed externally) are guaranteed to lead conflicts in judgements of our own and others behavior. Here are a few clips:

Positive illusions. People tend to have inflated views of themselves and their futures. For example, they think that they are more likely to become wealthy, and less likely to contract contagious diseases, than those around them. This unrealistic optimism partially stems from people's attentional focus on their own (but not others') internal desires and intentions .

Interpersonal knowledge. People overestimate how much they can learn about others from brief encounters such as job interviews (10). At the same time, they think others can get only a glimpse of them from such encounters. As a result, people generally feel they know others better than others know them

Pluralistic ignorance. People often misconstrue the thoughts and motives of others. In cases of "pluralistic ignorance," those misconstruals occur even though others share one's own motives and beliefs and act in the same way as oneself . An example... occurs when an audience of people all succeed in concealing their distraction and boredom during a long lecture and they then assume that they are the only ones not interested and engaged. In another example, college students often forgo trying to make friends with students of other races (even though they would like to be friends) because they interpret those others' lack of trying as indicating lack of interest. Both these examples involve people judging others based on overt behavior (e.g., failing to make social overtures) but themselves based on internal states (e.g., wanting friendship but fearing rejection)

Miscommunications. People often fail miserably in their efforts to communicate. These communication breakdowns (whether they involve negotiating peace agreements, giving driving directions, or navigating romantic relationships) often reflect the fact that people know what they intend or mean to communicate, while others focus on what they actually say. For example, negotiators can fail to outwardly express their interest in cooperating, because their internal awareness of that interest (gained through introspection) blinds them to the fact that the other side sees only their behavior, which often lacks clear signs of that motive

Conformity. People are influenced by those around them (and by the mass media) in everything from fashion tastes to political views; but, they generally deny that and see themselves as alone in a crowd of sheep.

Conclusions. It is almost axiomatic that as long as people are in a position to perceive themselves and to perceive others, differences in those perceptions will exist and will engender disagreement, misunderstanding, and conflict. When people judge themselves based on their good intentions but others based on their less-good behavior (or based on cynical assumptions about human nature), they are likely to feel resentful and disappointed over others' failure to meet them halfway. When people view their own perceptions and beliefs as objective reflections of reality but others' as distorted by bias, they are likely to feel frustrated and angry over others' unwillingness to be fair and reasonable. And, such feelings are likely to breed aggression and conflict.

This picture may sound dismal, but there is hope. Misunderstandings can be averted by those aware of the psychological processes involved in self and social perception. Those individuals can be mindful that it is not only their own behavior that is sensitive to the constraints of the situation, but others' as well. Perhaps this could prompt them to show more charity when others fail to meet expectations. Those individuals also can recognize that others' mistakes and errors may not be the result of conscious malice but rather of unintended influences that those others would themselves decry. And, those individuals might remind themselves that there often is a wide gulf between intention and action, but that it is only reasonable and fair to apply the same standard of judgment to others as to oneself. Following these guidelines would not just be socially charitable— it would also be scientifically informed.

Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes

My son Jonathan sent me this link to an engaging talk by Dan Dennett given some time ago. I heard it back then, and think it is worth passing on...

Valse Romantique

Debussy. Someone who listened my recording of this on YouTube asked how to get the sheet music to this piece, and as I sent them the information and listened it again, I decided to relay it on to MindBlog as a bit of relief from the more brainy stuff.

Growing new brain cells enhanced by social contact

From the editor's choice section of the May 30 issue of Science, a suggestion that increased social input from a larger number of other animals enhances the survival of new brain cells in brain areas involved in communication:

Out With the Old, In With the New

Might this adage, which some pundits have claimed as the basis for the vernal electoral calamities that have befallen the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, apply equally forcefully to the turnover of neurons in the brain? Adar et al. have performed a painstaking histological and immunofluorescence accounting of the survival likelihoods of newly born neurons in the brain of the zebra finch, a songbird that serves as an animal model for studying innate and learned influences on vocal communication. They focused on the nidopallium caudale (NC) region because it participates in auditory processing and is activated by social stimuli (other songbirds in this notably social species). By varying the complexity of the social environment, they found that the youngest cells--which had recently migrated from the site of their birth and were still becoming integrated, quite literally, as they established syn-aptic connections with existing NC neurons--were more likely to have survived if the bird had been exposed to a large group of male and female birds; conversely, in birds housed with only one other individual, the survival of older (though still relatively young) cells was enhanced. One interpretation of these data is that an increase in demand--in the form of an upturn in auditory/social inputs needing to be processed--acts as a selective pressure favoring the survival of new recruits.

The neural circuits of free choice

We often face alternatives that we are free to choose between. Planning movements to select an alternative involves several areas in frontal and parietal cortex. Pesaran et al. have looked at activity of single brain neurons in these areas when monkeys are free to choose which movement among several alternatives to make versus when they are following instructions. Correlations between simultaneously recorded spikes and local field potentials in dorsal premotor and parietal reach regions (which are anatomically connected into long-range circuits) increase during the free choice condition. They propose that a decision circuit featuring a sub-population of cells in frontal and parietal cortex may exchange information to coordinate activity between these areas, with cells participating in this decision circuit influencing movement choices by providing a common bias to the selection of movement goals.

The futurist: machines as smart as ourselves

John Tierney does a nice write up of the debate over the ideas of futurist Ray Kurzweil. (I've always thought that Kurzweil was simple proof of the proposition that if you propose any 10 crazy things, one of them will turn out to be right. People remember the correct prophesy, and forget the mistakes.) Still.... the guy has been right on a number of times. Here is part of the discussion of our cognitive/emotional repertoire being bested by machines ( (possibly piggybacked onto our biological hardware). This event is referred to as "the singularity." Kurzweil proposes that:

..by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves...This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain’s circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly...“My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,” Dr. Ramachandran said. “You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”...Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades....He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.

“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”

Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.

You should also check out John Horgan's caustic comments on the whole singularity bit in a special IEEE spectrum feature, which ends with:

Let's face it. The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision. The science-fiction writer Ken MacLeod has dubbed it “the rapture for nerds,” an allusion to the end-time, when Jesus whisks the faithful to heaven and leaves us sinners behind.

Such yearning for transcendence, whether spiritual or technological, is all too understandable. Both as individuals and as a species, we face deadly serious problems, including terrorism, nuclear proliferation, overpopulation, poverty, famine, environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and AIDS. Engineers and scientists should be helping us face the world's problems and find solutions to them, rather than indulging in escapist, pseudoscientific fantasies like the singularity.

Sarcasm and the right parahippocampal gyrus...

Getting inside someone's else's head to realize when they are ironic, sarcastic, or angry is one of our most advanced 'theory of mind' capabilities. You would expect the brain imaging people to show the frontotemporal lobe to light up when sarcasm is being detected, since one of the early signs of frontotemporal dementia is loss of the ability to detect sarcasm. Hurley describes the work of Rankin and others looking at brain correlates of being able to detect sarcasm based entirely on paralinguistic (non-verbal) cues (check out the link to the videos used).

...magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain lost among those who failed to perceive sarcasm was not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language and social interactions, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests....The right parahippocampal gyrus must be involved in detecting more than just visual context — it perceives social context as well....The discovery fits with an increasingly nuanced view of the right hemisphere’s role...The left hemisphere does language in the narrow sense, understanding of individual words and sentences...But it’s now thought that the appreciation of humor and language that is not literal, puns and jokes, requires the right hemisphere.

So is it possible that Jon Stewart, who wields sarcasm like a machete on “The Daily Show,” has an unusually large right parahippocampal gyrus?..“His is probably just normal,” Dr. Rankin said. “The right parahippocampal gyrus is involved in detecting sarcasm, not being sarcastic...I bet Jon Stewart has a huge right frontal lobe; that’s where the sense of humor is detected on M.R.I.”...A spokesman for Mr. Stewart said he would have no comment — not that a big-shot television star like Jon Stewart would care about the size of his neuroanatomy.

Social heirarchy, stress, and diet

I become increasingly convinced over time that much of what runs our behavior is is the same stuff that runs a macaque monkey, with the human self conscious rationalizing overlay mainly being a window dressing. This is why I find numerous bits of work that have emerged from Yerkes Primate Research group (the subject of this and other previous posts) so fascinating.

A recent report from Wilson et al. is an extension of work by Seligman and many others that has shown that one's role in a hierarchy, or relative position in a gradient of personal helplessness to power, is a fundamental determinant of individual well being in both animal and human societies. Subordinate individuals show more chronic stress, anxiety-like behaviors, and susceptibility to disease. Wilson et al. show that socially subordinate macaque females consume more high caloric food and weigh more, and feed both during daylight and night (unlike dominants) .

Tierney notes the similarity of this result and the famous Whitehall study of British civil servants, which found that lower-ranking workers were more obese than higher-status workers. Even though the subordinate workers were neither poor nor lacked health care, their lower status correlated with more health problems. He also mentions the experiments of Zellner, who:

...tested both men and women by putting bowls of potato chips, M&Ms, peanuts and red grapes on a table as the participants in the study worked on solving anagrams. Some of the people were given unsolvable anagrams, and they understandably reported being more stressed than the ones given easy anagrams...The stress seemed to affect snacking in different ways for each sex. The women given solvable puzzles ate more grapes than M&Ms, while the women under stress preferred M&Ms. The men ate more of the high-fat snacks when they were not under stress, apparently because the ones who got the easy anagrams had more time to relax and have a treat.

Spatial memory requires new nerve cells.

At least this appears to be the case in mice. Here is the abstract from Dupre et al.

The dentate gyrus of the hippocampus is one of the few regions of the mammalian brain where new neurons are generated throughout adulthood. This adult neurogenesis has been proposed as a novel mechanism that mediates spatial memory. However, data showing a causal relationship between neurogenesis and spatial memory are controversial. Here, we developed an inducible transgenic strategy allowing specific ablation of adult-born hippocampal neurons. This resulted in an impairment of spatial relational memory, which supports a capacity for flexible, inferential memory expression. In contrast, less complex forms of spatial knowledge were unaltered. These findings demonstrate that adult-born neurons are necessary for complex forms of hippocampus-mediated learning.

(More specifically, the experiments involved generating transgenic mice that selectively overexpressed the pro-apoptotic protein Bax in neural precursor cells in an inducible manner. Overexpression of Bax removed newly born cells in the adult dentate gyrus and caused a strong deterioration in the relational processing of spatial information in the Morris water maze. Animals were unaffected when tested on simpler forms of spatial knowledge; nor were they affected in tasks where memory could be acquired without the hippocampus.)

Sex differences in judging attractiveness - brain correlates

When selecting mates, men place greater importance on attractiveness than do women, whereas women favor status and resources more so than men. The reasons behind these differences can be rationalized from both evolutionary and sociocultural perspectives. Cloutier et al use fMRI to examine the possibility that attractive faces of the opposite sex simply have different reward value for men and women. They show that brain reward circuits (nucleus accumbens [NAcc], orbito-frontal cortex [OFC]) exhibit a linear increase in activation with increased judgments of attractiveness. Their analysis further reveals sex differences in the recruitment of OFC, which distinguished attractive and unattractive faces only for male participants. In short, brain regions involved in identifying the potential reward value of a stimulus are more active when men view attractive women than when women view attractive men.


Figure - Axial sections display the left NAcc (top) and right NAcc (middle) and a sagittal section displays mOFC (bottom) spherical regions of interest superimposed on normalized anatomic images. Graphs to the right of each image display signal change (parameter estimates) for attractive and unattractive faces across female and male participants relative to the baseline fixation. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean. Activity in the left and right NAcc was greater for attractive than unattractive faces irrespective or the participants' sex. Activity in the mOFC exhibited an interaction between facial attractiveness and participant sex displaying greater activity for attractive than unattractive faces only for male participants.

Body odors - brain processing different from similar common odors

Here is an edited paste-up of text and abstract from Lundström et al.

Humans are highly accurate at identifying individuals based solely on their body odors, being able to use signals conveyed in body odor to make accurate kin–nonkin judgments, and to detect minute differences in genetic composition of unknown individuals. While visual and auditory stimuli of high social and ecological importance are processed in the brain by specialized neuronal networks, such specialized processing has not yet been demonstrated for olfactory stimuli. The authors used positron emission tomography to ask whether the central processing of body odors differs from perceptually similar non-body odors as women smelled odors collected from friends and non-friends who had slept for seven nights with tight cotton t-shirts with cotton nursing pads sewn into the underarm area. Body odors activated a network consisting of the posterior cingulate cortex, occipital gyrus, angular gyrus, and the anterior cingulate cortex, none of which is believed to be related to olfactory processing. However, together they form an interesting pattern. Posterior cingulate cortex is known to be active in response to emotional stimuli, whereas the anterior cingulate cortex is believed to regulate attentional efforts. This suggests processing of body odors is similar to what previously has been demonstrated for highly emotional stimuli, such as visual images of snakes, where the posterior cingulate cortex works in concert with the anterior cingulate cortex. A separation in the processing of odors based on their source was observed. Smelling a friend's body odor activated regions previously seen for familiar stimuli, whereas smelling a stranger activated amygdala and insular regions akin to what has previously been demonstrated for fearful stimuli.

The data provide evidence that social olfactory stimuli of high ecological relevance are processed by specialized neuronal networks, just as has been demonstrated for auditory and visual stimuli.

Update on resveratrol and aging...

Check out Nicholas Wade's article in today's NY Times. It includes mention of the report in a PLoS ONE article by Prolla and Weindruch's group here at Wisconsin that both caloric restriction and low amounts of resveratrol (near the amount of resveratrol and resveratrol-like compounds found in a 5 ounce glass of red wine) are sufficient to inhibit gene expression profiles associated with cardiac and skeletal muscle aging, and prevent age-related cardiac dysfunction. Dietary resveratrol also mimics the effects of caloric restriction in insulin mediated glucose uptake in muscle.

Brain Rules

I've been sent a review copy of "Brain Rules" by John Medina. The book, which includes a DVD, is an exuberant and entertaining hodgepodge of material thrown together out of which the author extracts "12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School." The DVD has a perky in your face Dr. Medina leading you through the storyline. It is an enjoyable self help book, I think aimed at hooking readers less sophisticated than most of you who read this blog. A companion website offers supplemental material and references supporting each brain rule. (I find the references idiosyncratic and a bit dated). Here are the author's bottom line rules:

EXERCISE | Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.
SURVIVAL | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.
WIRING | Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.
ATTENTION | Rule #4: We don't pay attention to boring things.
SHORT-TERM MEMORY | Rule #5: Repeat to remember.
LONG-TERM MEMORY | Rule #6: Remember to repeat.
SLEEP | Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.
STRESS | Rule #8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way.
SENSORY INTEGRATION | Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.
VISION | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.
GENDER | Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.
EXPLORATION | Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

Healing and sedative effects of music.

An article by David Dobbs describes the work of musician/surgeon Claudius Conrad, who suggests that music may exert healing and sedative effects partly through a paradoxical stimulation of a growth hormone generally associated with stress rather than healing. His study, published in Critical Care Medicine:

...was fairly simple. The researchers fitted 10 postsurgical intensive-care patients with headphones, and in the hour just after the patients’ sedation was lifted, 5 were treated to gentle Mozart piano music while 5 heard nothing...The patients listening to music showed several responses that Dr. Conrad expected, based on other studies: reduced blood pressure and heart rate, less need for pain medication and a 20 percent drop in two important stress hormones, epinephrine and interleukin-6, or IL-6. Amid these expected responses was the study’s new finding: a 50 percent jump in pituitary growth hormone...The question is whether the jump in growth hormone actually drives the sedative effect or is part of something else going on.

The Evolution of Music

In the May 15 issue of Nature Josh McDermott discusses ideas about the evolution of music:

The mere presence of music in every known culture implies some genetic basis. But music varies dramatically from culture to culture, and many aspects of musical behaviour seem at best only weakly constrained by genetics. Whereas our ability to hear pitch intervals, for instance, could well be biologically rooted in the hardware of the auditory system, our emotional response to particular scales or chords seems likely to be acquired from exposure to a particular culture. Interactions between genes and environment are complex, and unravelling their contributions is not easy, but studies of music in different cultures and of musical development offer some hope.

A number of interesting music-related traits emerge in human infants with fairly minimal musical input, providing some evidence for innate constraints. Babies notice when the notes of a melody are reordered, but not when they are shifted to a different pitch range. Infants, like adults, are sensitive to the relationships between notes, which is preserved in transposition, but altered by reordering. Infants also tend to be captivated by music relative to many other stimuli. Not all music is equivalent to them — they prefer combinations of notes that are judged by adults to sound pleasing, or consonant (the perfect fifth, for instance), over combinations that are less pleasing, or dissonant (a minor second). Infants may even extract metre from music: they react when the rhythm changes from a march to a waltz.
Universal appeal

Features of music that occur repeatedly around the world despite the substantial cultural variation in music also provide clues to genetically constrained mechanisms. Lullabies seem to qualify as a rare universal — nearly every culture has a genre of music geared towards infants, and there is considerable consistency in how they sound, generally being slow, repetitive and featuring descending pitch contours. Other features that are common, if not completely universal, among cultures include the inclination to dance to music, musical metre, and the hierarchical organization of pitch, giving structural prominence to particular notes over others.

Neurobiology of trust

The June 2008 issue of Scientific American has an article by Zak on the neurobiology of trust, and the hormone oxytocin. I've previously mentioned Zak's work, and if you enter 'oxytocin' in MindBlog's search box in the left column you will pull up numerous previous posts on oxytocin, trust, and affiliative behaviors, some of which the Zak article mentions (for example, inhaling a nasal spray containing oxytocin increases trusting behaviors). I thought I would show one graphic from the article relevant to the fact that trust is among the strongest known predictors of a country’s wealth. Nations with low levels tend to be poor. Societies with low levels are poor because the inhabitants undertake too few of the long-term investments that create jobs and raise incomes. Such investments depend on mutual trust that both sides will fulfill their contractual obligations.