The poor payoff of pleasure postponed.

An interesting article describing work of Harvard Business School assistant professor Anat Keinan, in collaboration with Columbia Business School professor Ran Kivetz.

Keinan and Kivetz set out to see if they could observe, in formal studies, people overestimating discipline’s payoff and underestimating future feelings of having missed out. Time after time, when subjects were asked to recall situations in which they had to choose between work and pleasure, their responses emulated those of the Columbia doctoral students. More of the subjects who’d chosen play over work recently expressed regret, but those numbers reversed for choices made in the distant past. For instance, college students said they’d spent too much time relaxing during a recent winter break, but when they considered the previous year’s break, they said they’d spent too much time studying and working.

They call the habit of overestimating the benefits one will receive in the future from making responsible decisions now "hyperopia" - the name, drawn from ophthalmology, means “farsightedness.” It works to our detriment by driving people to underconsume precisely those products and experiences that they enjoy the most.

Guilt and atonement in child development.

Tierney does an interesting piece on work by Kochanska and colleagues showing how guilt in children, which usually appears during their second year, develops along side effortful self-control to inhibit impulsive behaviors that might hurt themselves or others. A deficit in either can be compensated by increased strength of the other, but a deficit in both guilt behavior and self-control increases the probability of sociopathic behaviors. To prevent guilt over a particular bad event from generalizing into shame (which has repeatedly been found to be unhealthy, as in "I'm a bad person"), it is important to have some sort of atonement process to round off the process. The article gives interesting examples of this process.

Running helps your knees?

I'm a physically active person, and feel strange if I have missed a day of going to the university gym to swim, run, or do weights. At 67 years of age I also fret about the point at which strengthening and healthy changes being to be overshadowed by inflamatory reactions in body joints. Thus I was struck by this piece in the NYTimes, reporting exactly the opposite of the conventional wisdom, namely that running is good for your knees. The article contains a link to some neat exercises for strengthening muscle than can take some of the load off the knee joint itself.

Anxious temperament correlates with serotonin transporter availability.

Richie Davidson, Ned Kalin, and their collaborators here at Wisconsin make interesting observations on a groups of rhesus monkeys in which the relationship between regional brain glucose metabolism and anxious temperament had previously been established. Here is their abstract:

The serotonin transporter (5-HTT) plays a critical role in regulating serotonergic neurotransmission and is implicated in the pathophysiology of anxiety and affective disorders. Positron emission tomography scans using [11C]DASB [11C]-3-amino-4-(2-dimethylaminomethylphenylsulfanyl)-benzonitrile] to measure 5-HTT availability (an index of receptor density and binding) were performed in 34 rhesus monkeys in which the relationship between regional brain glucose metabolism and anxious temperament was previously established. 5-HTT availability in the amygdalohippocampal area and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis correlated positively with individual differences in a behavioral and neuroendocrine composite of anxious temperament. 5-HTT availability also correlated positively with stress-induced metabolic activity within these regions. Collectively, these findings suggest that serotonergic modulation of neuronal excitability in the neural circuitry associated with anxiety mediates the developmental risk for affect-related psychopathology.

Phantom

Grieg Lyric Pieces Op 62 no 5, Phantom

Aging may enhance procedural skill acquisition

While I notice that my short term memory is getting worse, I have felt (through my practicing and learning of new piano pieces) that my procedural learning capabilities are improving with age. In this light I found these observations from Brown et al. interesting:

It is well known that certain cognitive abilities decline with age. The ability to form certain new declarative memories, particularly memories for facts and events, has been widely shown to decline with advancing age. In contrast, the effects of aging on the ability to form new procedural memories such as skills are less well known, though it appears that older adults are able to acquire some new procedural skills over practice. The current study examines the effects of normal aging on procedural memory more closely by comparing the effects of aging on the encoding or acquisition stage of procedural learning versus its effects on the consolidation, or between-session stage of procedural learning. Twelve older and 14 young participants completed a sequence-learning task (the Serial Reaction Time Task) over a practice session and at a re-test session 24 hours later. Older participants actually demonstrated more sequence skill during acquisition than the young. However, older participants failed to show skill improvement at re-test as the young participants did. Age thus appears to have a differential effect upon procedural learning stages such that older adults' skill acquisition remains relatively intact, in some cases even superior, compared to that of young adults, while their skill consolidation may be poorer than that of young adults. Although the effect of normal aging on procedural consolidation remains unclear, aging may actually enhance skill acquisition on some procedural tasks.

Surowiecki on health care and status quo anxiety

In theory, the public overwhelmingly supports health care reform. James Surowiecki has a piece in the current New Yorker that suggests several reasons that they go all wobbly when it actually comes to making fundamental change. First is the "endowment effect" - the mere fact that you have something leads you to overvalue it. If people have insurance, most will value it highly, no matter how flawed the current system. Talk of changing the system accentuates the endowment effect. Last year a poll found that only 29% of likely voters found the US health care system good or excellent. When asked the same question last month 48% rated it highly, and health care delivery hadn't changed that much in the intervening 11 months! Adding to the endowment effect is the status quo bias. Most people are inclined to keep things the way they are. We feel the pain of losses more than we enjoy the pleasures of gain. So, when we think about change we focus more on what we might lose than what we might gain. Most people who don't feel good about the present system still feel anxious about whatever will replace it.

Surowiecki suggests that the key may be to work with, rather than against, people's desire for security. This is why Obama has repeatedly stressed that if people like the health care they have, they can keep it. Also, changing the system so that people can get affordable health care, while banning bad behavior on the part of insurance companies, will make it more likely that people can preserve their current level of coverage. The message should be that if we want to protect the status quo, we need to reform it.

An iPhone "Happiness" App

I've mentioned the work of Lyubomirsky in a previous post. She now has collaborated with people at Signal Patterns, a developer of psychology-based web and mobile applications, to generate an iPhone App meant to facilitate the basic exercises outlined in her book.

More on stress and the brain.

There seems to be a surge recently in articles on stress in the brain. Here I point you to two pieces: work from McEwen and collaborators showing that acute stress enhances glutamatergic transmission in prefrontal cortex and facilitates working memory, and Admon et al.'s study of new recruits to the Israeli military that shows that an individual's amygdalar reactivity (i.e., predated neural sensitivity) before stress is predictive of later vulnerability to stress and stress symptoms.

Cultural and Biological evolution similar, or not?

Strimling et al. develop a simple model to test the most popular recent evolutionary hypothesis about culture, memetics, which maintains that cultural evolution is the playing field of selfish memes. Simply put, the idea is that the success of cultural traits is determined by their inherent power to spread between human minds. The analysis, based on their model which considers the diffusion and retention of cultural variants (ideas), suggests that the possibility to predict long-term cultural evolution by some success index, analogous to biological fitness, depends on whether individuals have few or many opportunities to learn. Their abstract:

Although genetic information is acquired only once, cultural information can be both abandoned and reacquired during an individual's lifetime. Therefore, cultural evolution will be determined not only by cultural traits' ability to spread but also by how good they are at sticking with an individual; however, the evolutionary consequences of this aspect of culture have not previously been explored. Here we show that repeated learning and multiple characteristics of cultural traits make cultural evolution unique, allowing dynamical phenomena we can recognize as specifically cultural, such as traits that both spread quickly and disappear quickly. Importantly, the analysis of our model also yields a theoretical objection to the popular suggestion that biological and cultural evolution can be understood in similar terms. We find that the possibility to predict long-term cultural evolution by some success index, analogous to biological fitness, depends on whether individuals have few or many opportunities to learn. If learning opportunities are few, we find that the existence of a success index may be logically impossible, rendering notions of “cultural fitness” meaningless. On the other hand, if individuals can learn many times, we find a success index that works, regardless of whether the transmission pattern is vertical, oblique, or horizontal.

Summer evenings

As summer winds down, I've decided to record a few more Grieg lyrical pieces.

Monkeys affiliate with humans who imitate them.

It is generally thought that imitation is one mechanism through which cultural learning occurs. When others mimic us, we like them more, empathize with them more, and are more helpful and generous toward them. Recent work with capuchin monkeys suggests that imitation may of general importance in enhancing prosocial social behaviors, suggesting that the social consequences of mimicry may have deeper evolutionary roots than previously thought. Paukner et al. find that these animals behave in a more affiliative manner, as assessed by direction of gaze, physical proximity, and token exchange, toward humans who imitate them as compared to humans who perform the same movements, but not at the same time.

What distinguishes our minds from those of other creatures?

The September issue of the Scientific American (the 'Origins Issue') has an article by Marc Hauser in which he makes a list of what he considers distinctive human competencies (enter 'Hauser' in the search box in the left column to see my previous posts mentioning Hauser's work). Here is a clip from the article:

Although humans share the vast majority of their genes with chimps, studies suggest that small genetic shifts that occurred in the human lineage since it split from the chimp line produced massive differences in computational power. This rearranging, deleting and copying of universal genetic elements created a brain with four special properties. Together these distinctive characteristics, which I have recently identified based on studies conducted in my lab and elsewhere, constitute what I term our humaniqueness. The first such trait is generative computation, the ability to create a virtually limitless variety of “expressions,” be they arrangements of words, sequences of notes, combinations of actions, or strings of mathematical symbols. Generative computation encompasses two types of operation, recursive and combinatorial. Recursion is the repeated use of a rule to create new expressions. Think of the fact that a short phrase can be embedded within another phrase, repeatedly, to create longer, richer descriptions of our thoughts– for example, the simple but poetic expression from Gertrude Stein: “A rose is a rose is a rose.” The combinatorial operation, meanwhile, is the mixing of discrete elements to engender new ideas, which can be expressed as novel words (“Walkman”) or musical forms, among other possibilities.

The second distinguishing characteristic of the human mind is its capacity for the promiscuous combination of ideas. We routinely connect thoughts from different domains of knowledge, allowing our understanding of art, sex, space, causality and friendship to combine. From this mingling, new laws, social relationships and technologies can result, as when we decide that it is forbidden [moral domain] to push someone [motor action domain] intentionally [folk psychology domain] in front of a train [object domain] to save the lives [moral domain] of five [number domain] others.

Third on my list of defining properties is the use of mental symbols. We can spontaneously convert any sensory experience—real or imagined— into a symbol that we can keep to ourselves or express to others through language, art, music or computer code.

Fourth, only humans engage in abstract thought. Unlike animal thoughts, which are largely anchored in sensory and perceptual experiences, many of ours have no clear connection to such events. We alone ponder the likes of unicorns and aliens, nouns and verbs, infinity and God. Although anthropologists disagree about exactly when the modern human mind took shape, it is clear from the archaeological record that a major transformation occurred during a relatively brief period of evolutionary history, starting approximately 800,000 years ago in the Paleolithic era and crescendoing around 45,000 to 50,000 years ago. It is during this period of the Paleolithic, an evolutionary eyeblink, that we see for the first time multipart tools; animal bones punctured with holes to fashion musical instruments; burials with accoutrements suggesting beliefs about aesthetics and the afterlife; richly symbolic cave paintings that capture in exquisite detail events of the past and the perceived future; and control over fire, a technology that combines our folk physics and psychology and allowed our ancestors to prevail over novel environments by creating warmth and cooking foods to make them edible.

Stressed Memories

Following this week's (accidental) emphasis on stress and its effects, I'll point out an article by Henckens et al. on the enhancement of memory by stress, apparently through hypervigilant sensory processing, even though hippocampal activation is diminished. (Chronic stress is known to damage and shrink the hippocampus):

Stressful, aversive events are extremely well remembered. Such a declarative memory enhancement is evidently beneficial for survival, but the same mechanism may become maladaptive and culminate in mental diseases such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Stress hormones are known to enhance postlearning consolidation of aversive memories but are also thought to have immediate effects on attentional, sensory, and mnemonic processes at memory formation. Despite their significance for our understanding of the etiology of stress-related mental disorders, effects of acute stress at memory formation, and their brain correlates at the system scale, remain elusive. Using an integrated experimental approach, we probed the neural correlates of memory formation while participants underwent a controlled stress induction procedure in a crossover design. Physiological (cortisol level, heart rate, and pupil dilation) and subjective measures confirmed acute stress. Remarkably, reduced hippocampal activation during encoding predicted stress-enhanced memory performance, both within and between participants. Stress, moreover, amplified early visual and inferior temporal responses, suggesting that hypervigilant processing goes along with enhanced inferior temporal information reduction to relay a higher proportion of task-relevant information to the hippocampus. Thus, acute stress affects neural correlates of memory formation in an unexpected manner, the understanding of which may elucidate mechanisms underlying psychological trauma etiology.

Stem cells generate an entire functioning eye!

Mair describes work by Viczian et al. who show that frog cells forced to express seven transcription factor genes form functioning eyes in tadpoles. (The transcription factors are proteins that bind to DNA and turn on a panel of genes involved in building the eye).

Some neat visual illusions.

Check out this Illusion Sciences blog from Arthur Shapiro.

Chronic stress dials the brain from adaptive to habitual behaviors.

Sousa's group makes interesting observations on brain changes caused by chronic stress. There is a distinctive shift away from adaptive goal directed decision making towards habitual routines that can persist in spite of being inappropriate. Chronic stress actually causes opposing structural changes in the associative and sensorimotor corticostriatal circuits underlying these different behavioral strategies, with atrophy of medial prefrontal cortex and the associative striatum and hypertrophy of the sensorimotor striatum. The change is reversible: rats given a four week vacation from the bullying and tasers used for the stress-out reverted to normal behaviors. Angier's review points out the obvious relevance of such observation to our human behavior:

If after a few months’ exposure to our David Lynch economy, in which housing markets spontaneously combust, coworkers mysteriously disappear and the stifled moans of dying 401(k) plans can be heard through the floorboards, you have the awful sensation that your body’s stress response has taken on a self-replicating and ultimately self-defeating life of its own, congratulations. You are very perceptive. It has....Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist who studies stress at Stanford University School of Medicine, said, “This is a great model for understanding why we end up in a rut, and then dig ourselves deeper and deeper into that rut.”...The truth is, Dr. Sapolsky said, “we’re lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren’t working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it’s time to try something new.”

With regard to the reversibility of the behavior:

According to Bruce S. McEwen, head of the neuroendocrinology laboratory at Rockefeller University, the new findings offer a particularly elegant demonstration of a principle that researchers have just begun to grasp. “The brain is a very resilient and plastic organ,” he said. “Dendrites and synapses retract and reform, and reversible remodeling can occur throughout life.”

The stress response is essential for maneuvering through a dynamic world — for dodging a predator or chasing down prey, swinging through the trees or fighting off disease — and it is itself dynamic. As we go about our days, Dr. McEwen said, the biochemical mediators of the stress response rise and fall, flutter and flare. “Cortisol and adrenaline go up and down,” he said. “Our inflammatory cytokines go up and down.”...The target organs of stress hormones likewise dance to the beat: blood pressure climbs and drops, the heart races and slows, the intestines constrict and relax. This system of so-called allostasis, of maintaining control through constant change, stands in contrast to the mechanisms of homeostasis that keep the pH level and oxygen concentration in the blood within a narrow and invariant range.

Unfortunately, the dynamism of our stress response makes it vulnerable to disruption, especially when the system is treated too roughly and not according to instructions. In most animals, a serious threat provokes a serious activation of the stimulatory, sympathetic, “fight or flight” side of the stress response. But when the danger has passed, the calming parasympathetic circuitry tamps everything back down to baseline flickering...In humans, though, the brain can think too much, extracting phantom threats from every staff meeting or high school dance, and over time the constant hyperactivation of the stress response can unbalance the entire feedback loop. Reactions that are desirable in limited, targeted quantities become hazardous in promiscuous excess. You need a spike in blood pressure if you’re going to run, to speedily deliver oxygen to your muscles. But chronically elevated blood pressure is a source of multiple medical miseries.

Why should the stressed brain be prone to habit formation? Perhaps to help shunt as many behaviors as possible over to automatic pilot, the better to focus on the crisis at hand. Yet habits can become ruts, and as the novelist Ellen Glasgow observed, “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”

The smell of stress activates our amygdala.

To continue the topic of an earlier post on the smell of emotion, I would like to point out work from Mujica-Parodi et al. Their abstract:

Alarm substances are airborne chemical signals, released by an individual into the environment, which communicate emotional stress between conspecifics. Here we tested whether humans, like other mammals, are able to detect emotional stress in others by chemosensory cues. Sweat samples collected from individuals undergoing an acute emotional stressor, with exercise as a control, were pooled and presented to a separate group of participants (blind to condition) during four experiments. In an fMRI experiment and its replication, we showed that scanned participants showed amygdala activation in response to samples obtained from donors undergoing an emotional, but not physical, stressor. An odor-discrimination experiment suggested the effect was primarily due to emotional, and not odor, differences between the two stimuli. A fourth experiment investigated behavioral effects, demonstrating that stress samples sharpened emotion-perception of ambiguous facial stimuli. Together, our findings suggest human chemosensory signaling of emotional stress, with neurobiological and behavioral effects.

Independence of our logical inference and natural language

Monti et al. examine the proposition that logic inference recruits neural structures traditionally engaged by linguistic processing, and make some very interesting points. Their abstract:

Is human thought fully embedded in language, or do some forms of thought operate independently? To directly address this issue, we focus on inference-making, a central feature of human cognition. In a 3T fMRI study we compare logical inferences relying on sentential connectives (e.g., not, or, if … then) to linguistic inferences based on syntactic transformation of sentences involving ditransitive verbs (e.g., give, say, take). When contrasted with matched grammaticality judgments, logic inference alone recruited “core” regions of deduction [Brodmann area (BA) 10p and 8m], whereas linguistic inference alone recruited perisylvian regions of linguistic competence, among others (BA 21, 22, 37, 39, 44, and 45 and caudate). In addition, the two inferences commonly recruited a set of general “support” areas in frontoparietal cortex (BA 6, 7, 8, 40, and 47). The results indicate that logical inference is not embedded in natural language and confirm the relative modularity of linguistic processes.

A sane article on life-extending drugs.

Nicholas Wade offers one of the best reviews I have seen of work with drugs like resveratrol, which mimic the effect or caloric restriction in animal tests. A companion article by Arnquist notes the proliferation of web sites making unproven health claims and using false celebrity product endorsements for anti-aging and weight-loss pills made from resveratrol. (previous MindBlog postings in this areas can be found by clicking on aging in the topics list in the left column of this web page.) Here are clips from the Wade article which point out reservations about the existing studies:

...the whole phenomenon of caloric restriction may be a misleading result unwittingly produced in laboratory mice. The mice are selected for quick breeding and fed on rich diets. A low-calorie diet could be much closer to the diet that mice are adapted to in the wild, and therefore it could extend life simply because it is much healthier for them...To decide whether life extension by caloric restriction is an artifact of mice in captivity, why not try it on wild mice? Just such an experiment has been done by Steven N. Austad of the University of Texas Health Science Center. Dr. Austad reported that caloric restriction did not extend the average life span of wild mice, suggesting the diet’s benefits are indeed an artifact of mice in captivity. But others interpret his results differently. Richard A. Miller of the University of Michigan, says the maximum life span of the wild mice was extended, and so the experiment was a success for caloric restriction.

With reference to the study at Wisconsin on caloric restriction in monkeys:

The monkeys who had spent 20 years on caloric restriction were in better health than their normally fed counterparts, and suffered less diabetes, cancer and heart disease, apparently confirming that caloric restriction holds off the degenerative diseases of aging in primates as well as rodents...But as for life span, the diet extended life significantly only if the researchers excluded deaths that were apparently unrelated to aging, such as under the anesthesia necessary to take blood samples. When all deaths were counted, life span was not significantly extended...Some researchers think it is perfectly valid to ignore such deaths. Others note that in mouse studies one just counts the numbers of dead mice without asking what they died of, and the same procedure should be followed with monkeys, since one cannot be sure if a death under anesthesia might have been age related.

Another point:

...last month the results with another substance, the antifungal drug rapamycin, were published (see my July 22 post) Rapamycin was found to extend mice’s lives significantly even though by accident the mice were already the equivalent of 60 years old when the experiment started...Rapamycin has nothing to do with caloric restriction, so far as is known, but the study provided striking proof that a chemical can extend life span.