MindBlog on the road.

Over the past month of unseasonably cold weather here in Middleton Wisconsin my movement has become increasingly stiff and arthritic, so today I am loading up the car and driving with my two abyssinian cats to Fort Lauderdale for the winter, unable to predict the frequency of posts for the next few days. The picture shows a Maple tree in my front yard.

A jaded view....

A less positive view of humankind than the one described in the previous post - from the Oct. 26 issue of The New Yorker. The caption: "Well, that was a waste of time." :

Nature's lessons for a more kind society.

Blog reader Gary Olson has pointed me to his review of Franz De Waal's new book
"The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons For A Kinder Society." From that review:

de Waal provides compelling support for the proposition that humans are “preprogrammed to reach out.” From dolphins ferrying injured companions to safety and grieving elephants, baboons and cats (yes, even cats) to commiserating mice and hydrophobic chimps risking death to save a drowning companion, this is a major contribution to understanding the biological genesis of our inborn capacity for empathy, hence morality.

In seven crisply written and wholly accessible chapters de Waal methodically demolishes the rationale behind Gordon Gekko’s admonition in the film "Wall Street" that greed “captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”...De Waal objects to an unrestrained market system, not capitalism itself. He prefers that the economic system be mitigated by more attention to empathy in order to soften its rough edges...Nevertheless, de Waal seriously underestimates certain capitalist imperatives and the role played by elites in cultivating callousness, thereby undermining social solidarity, reciprocity and empathy. Capitalist culture devalues an empathic disposition, and, as Erich Fromm argued some fifty years ago, there is a basic incompatibility between the underlying principles of capitalism and the lived expression of an ethos of empathy.

Learning sculpts our spontaneous resting brain activity.

Lewis et al. have demonstrated that learning an attention-demanding visual task modifies the spontaneous correlation of activity in the resting human brain - suggesting that the functional architecture of the brain is partly a product of previous experience. At left is a clay model representation of the human brain provided by Lewis, colored to indicate putative areas in frontal, temporal, and parietal cortex changed by a task. The abstract:

The brain is not a passive sensory-motor analyzer driven by environmental stimuli, but actively maintains ongoing representations that may be involved in the coding of expected sensory stimuli, prospective motor responses, and prior experience. Spontaneous cortical activity has been proposed to play an important part in maintaining these ongoing, internal representations, although its functional role is not well understood. One spontaneous signal being intensely investigated in the human brain is the interregional temporal correlation of the blood-oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal recorded at rest by functional MRI (functional connectivity-by-MRI, fcMRI, or BOLD connectivity). This signal is intrinsic and coherent within a number of distributed networks whose topography closely resembles that of functional networks recruited during tasks. While it is apparent that fcMRI networks reflect anatomical connectivity, it is less clear whether they have any dynamic functional importance. Here, we demonstrate that visual perceptual learning, an example of adult neural plasticity, modifies the resting covariance structure of spontaneous activity between networks engaged by the task. Specifically, after intense training on a shape-identification task constrained to one visual quadrant, resting BOLD functional connectivity and directed mutual interaction between trained visual cortex and frontal-parietal areas involved in the control of spatial attention were significantly modified. Critically, these changes correlated with the degree of perceptual learning. We conclude that functional connectivity serves a dynamic role in brain function, supporting the consolidation of previous experience.

Monkeys drumming - a gestural origin of speech and music?

From Remediosa, Logothetisa, and Kaysera:

Salient sounds such as those created by drumming can serve as means of nonvocal acoustic communication in addition to vocal sounds. Despite the ubiquity of drumming across human cultures, its origins and the brain regions specialized in processing such signals remain unexplored. Here, we report that an important animal model for vocal communication, the macaque monkey, also displays drumming behavior, and we exploit this finding to show that vocal and nonvocal communication sounds are represented by overlapping networks in the brain's temporal lobe. Observing social macaque groups, we found that these animals use artificial objects to produce salient periodic sounds, similar to acoustic gestures. Behavioral tests confirmed that these drumming sounds attract the attention of listening monkeys similarly as conspecific vocalizations. Furthermore, in a preferential looking experiment, drumming sounds influenced the way monkeys viewed their conspecifics, suggesting that drumming serves as a multimodal signal of social dominance. Finally, by using high-resolution functional imaging we identified those brain regions preferentially activated by drumming sounds or by vocalizations and found that the representations of both these communication sounds overlap in caudal auditory cortex and the amygdala. The similar behavioral responses to drumming and vocal sounds, and their shared neural representation, suggest a common origin of primate vocal and nonvocal communication systems and support the notion of a gestural origin of speech and music.


Characteristics of drumming sounds. (A) In this example, a macaque drums by firmly grasping the cage door with his forelimbs and shaking it vigorously and repeatedly. The inset displays the typical facial expression during drumming: open-mouth threatening, staring, forward directed pinnae. (B) Drumming sounds are acoustically distinct from typical vocalizations such as screams, grunts, or pant-threats. The repetitive beat pattern of the drumming sound produced by this action is visible in the time-frequency spectrum. The black line displays the power spectrum.

Meditation training can enhance the stability of our attention

Several groups collaborate to show that meditation training can can significantly affect attention and brain function.

The capacity to stabilize the content of attention over time varies among individuals, and its impairment is a hallmark of several mental illnesses. Impairments in sustained attention in patients with attention disorders have been associated with increased trial-to-trial variability in reaction time and event-related potential deficits during attention tasks. At present, it is unclear whether the ability to sustain attention and its underlying brain circuitry are transformable through training. Here, we show, with dichotic listening task performance and electroencephalography, that training attention, as cultivated by meditation, can improve the ability to sustain attention. Three months of intensive meditation training reduced variability in attentional processing of target tones, as indicated by both enhanced theta-band phase consistency of oscillatory neural responses over anterior brain areas and reduced reaction time variability. Furthermore, those individuals who showed the greatest increase in neural response consistency showed the largest decrease in behavioral response variability. Notably, we also observed reduced variability in neural processing, in particular in low-frequency bands, regardless of whether the deviant tone was attended or unattended. Focused attention meditation may thus affect both distracter and target processing, perhaps by enhancing entrainment of neuronal oscillations to sensory input rhythms, a mechanism important for controlling the content of attention. These novel findings highlight the mechanisms underlying focused attention meditation and support the notion that mental training can significantly affect attention and brain function.

Election night 2008: testosterone level of male McCain voters dropped

Stanton et al. collected saliva samples from 183 study participants before and after the results of the 2008 presidential election were announced. The results show that male Barack Obama voters (winners) had stable post-outcome testosterone levels, whereas testosterone levels dropped in male John McCain and Robert Barr (Libertarian candidate) voters (losers). There were no significant effects in female voters. These results were consistent with earlier studies showing testosterone decreases in male supporters of an athletic team after it loses a game.

Emotional contagion without conscious awareness

Tamietto et al. make the fascinating observation that unseen emotionally expressive facial or body movements (stimuli presented to the blind portion of the visual field of patients with damage to their visual cortex) cause arousal and facial reactions. They suggest that emotional contagion represents affective reactions mediated by visual pathways of old evolutionary origin that bypass cortical vision and allow emotion communication and affect sharing. Here is their abstract:

The spontaneous tendency to synchronize our facial expressions with those of others is often termed emotional contagion. It is unclear, however, whether emotional contagion depends on visual awareness of the eliciting stimulus and which processes underlie the unfolding of expressive reactions in the observer. It has been suggested either that emotional contagion is driven by motor imitation (i.e., mimicry), or that it is one observable aspect of the emotional state arising when we see the corresponding emotion in others. Emotional contagion reactions to different classes of consciously seen and “unseen” stimuli were compared by presenting pictures of facial or bodily expressions either to the intact or blind visual field of two patients with unilateral destruction of the visual cortex and ensuing phenomenal blindness. Facial reactions were recorded using electromyography, and arousal responses were measured with pupil dilatation. Passive exposure to unseen expressions evoked faster facial reactions and higher arousal compared with seen stimuli, therefore indicating that emotional contagion occurs also when the triggering stimulus cannot be consciously perceived because of cortical blindness. Furthermore, stimuli that are very different in their visual characteristics, such as facial and bodily gestures, induced highly similar expressive responses. This shows that the patients did not simply imitate the motor pattern observed in the stimuli, but resonated to their affective meaning. Emotional contagion thus represents an instance of truly affective reactions that may be mediated by visual pathways of old evolutionary origin bypassing cortical vision while still providing a cornerstone for emotion communication and affect sharing.

Health improves during economic depressions.

Having to live more lean and mean in economically hard times is apparently good for us. From Granados and Roux:

Recent events highlight the importance of examining the impact of economic downturns on population health. The Great Depression of the 1930s was the most important economic downturn in the U.S. in the twentieth century. We used historical life expectancy and mortality data to examine associations of economic growth with population health for the period 1920–1940. We conducted descriptive analyses of trends and examined associations between annual changes in health indicators and annual changes in economic activity using correlations and regression models. Population health did not decline and indeed generally improved during the 4 years of the Great Depression, 1930–1933, with mortality decreasing for almost all ages, and life expectancy increasing by several years in males, females, whites, and nonwhites. For most age groups, mortality tended to peak during years of strong economic expansion (such as 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1936–1937). In contrast, the recessions of 1921, 1930–1933, and 1938 coincided with declines in mortality and gains in life expectancy. The only exception was suicide mortality which increased during the Great Depression, but accounted for less than 2% of deaths. Correlation and regression analyses confirmed a significant negative effect of economic expansions on health gains. The evolution of population health during the years 1920–1940 confirms the counterintuitive hypothesis that, as in other historical periods and market economies, population health tends to evolve better during recessions than in expansions.

The nagging thing you don't understand about yourself

The 150th issue of the British Psychological Association's Research Digest email has posted a series of fascinating responses by leading psychologists to the request that they look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves.

The ages of mankind

Here is a neat graphic from the New York Times, apparently motivated by a paper this month in The Lancet saying that half of all the babies born in developed countries in 2007 will live to be 104. This suggests the addition of a 4th life stage, "Old old age" to current categories of youth, adulthood, and old age. The graphic depicts the stages of life as viewed in different historical eras by a variety of writers.

The 'society of selves' in each of us

David Brooks does a nice layman's summary titled "Where the Wild Things Are" of our modern views on how an individual's 'character' is composed - not from the top down by a single unifying feature, but rather from a pandora's box of possible selves, each of which can appear under a particular set of circumstances.

The Fat and Short of It

Engber writes a brief article on the fact that not only are there correlations between excess fat and health risk, but also shorter height correlates with increased coronary heart disease, diabetes or stroke. Also,

In the labor market, the effects of height and weight tend to run in parallel. A 2004 study by John Cawley of Cornell University found that severely obese white women who weigh more than two standard deviations above average — women who weigh, for example, more than 212 pounds if they’re 5 feet 4 inches tall — are paid up to 9 percent less for their work. Likewise, a decrease in a man’s height to the 25th percentile from the 75th — roughly to 5 feet 8 inches from 6 feet— is associated with, on average, a dip in earnings of 6 to 10 percent...And like obese people, short people are less likely to finish college than those of average weight. A paper from the July issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology used survey data from more than 450,000 adults to conclude that male college graduates are, on average, more than an inch taller than men who never finished high school.

Social threat activates our body's inflammatory chemistry

This work from Dickerson et al. is both fascinating and frightening. It provides a more detailed glimpse of how social threat can transmute into self-destructive body chemistry.

This study experimentally tested whether a stressor characterized by social-evaluative threat (SET), a context in which the self can be judged negatively by others, would elicit increases in proinflammatory cytokine activity and alter the regulation of this response. This hypothesis was derived in part from research on immunological responses to social threat in nonhuman animals. Healthy female participants were assigned to perform a speech and a math task in the presence or absence of an evaluative audience (SET or non-SET, respectively). As hypothesized, stimulated production of the proinflammatory cytokine tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) increased from baseline to poststressor in the SET condition, but was unchanged in the non-SET condition. Further, the increases in TNF-α production correlated with participants' cognitive appraisals of being evaluated. Additionally, the ability of glucocorticoids to shut down the inflammatory response was decreased in the SET condition. These findings underscore the importance of social evaluation as a threat capable of eliciting proinflammatory cytokine activity and altering its regulation.

Genetic influences increase between early and middle childhood.

From Davis et al.:

The generalist genes hypothesis implies that general cognitive ability (g) is an essential target for understanding how genetic polymorphisms influence the development of the human brain. Using 8,791 twin pairs from the Twins Early Development Study, we examine genetic stability and change in the etiology of g assessed by diverse measures during the critical transition from early to middle childhood. The heritability of a latent g factor in early childhood is 23%, whereas shared environment accounts for 74% of the variance. In contrast, in middle childhood, heritability of a latent g factor is 62%, and shared environment accounts for 33%. Despite increasing importance of genetic influences and declining influence of shared environment, similar genetic and shared environmental factors affect g from early to middle childhood, as indicated by a cross-age genetic correlation of .57 and a shared environmental correlation of .65. These findings set constraints on how genetic and environmental variation affects the developing brain.

Cognitive enhancement may come at a cost.

Johan Leher has contributed a fascinating article to Nature News (PDF here) that discusses the 30 or more strains of mice that have been genetically altered to have enhanced memory and problem solving capabilities, and more generally addresses the issue of cognitive enhancement in humans. Many of the mouse mutants have enhanced long term potentiation (LTP) at synapses (a few nerve transmissions between nerve cells enhance further transmissions). LTP is a fundamental feature of learning and memory, and it appears that by increasing its plasticity it is possible to increase cognitive capacity.

The downside of enhancing memory, at least in some unusual humans who have extraordinary memory abilities, is that they appear to be locked in details, unable to understand metaphors or generalize. Martha Farah notes that some human experiments with amphetamines show a trade-off between enhanced attention and performance on creative tasks. "The brain may have made a compromise in that having a more accurate memory interferes with the ability to generalize...You may need a little noise in order to be able to think abstractly, to get beyond the concrete and literal." A further issue is non-cognitive side effects, which have been demonstrated in mice, such as enhanced sensitivity to pain.

The Teddy Bear Effect

An interesting article from Livingston and Pearce, "The Teddy-Bear Effect: Does Having a Baby Face Benefit Black Chief Executive Officers?" The abstract:

Prior research suggests that having a baby face is negatively correlated with success among White males in high positions of leadership. However, we explored the positive role of such "babyfaceness" in the success of high-ranking Black executives. Two studies revealed that Black chief executive officers (CEOs) were significantly more baby-faced than White CEOs. Black CEOs were also judged as being warmer than White CEOs, even though ordinary Blacks were rated categorically as being less warm than ordinary Whites. In addition, baby-faced Black CEOs tended to lead more prestigious corporations and earned higher salaries than mature-faced Black CEOs; these patterns did not emerge for White CEOs. Taken together, these findings suggest that babyfaceness is a disarming mechanism that facilitates the success of Black leaders by attenuating stereotypical perceptions that Blacks are threatening. Theoretical and practical implications for research on race, gender, and leadership are discussed.

Perpetual revelations

Ross Douthat reviews a book, "The Case for God" by Karen Armstrong, that tries to land somewhere between the militant atheists and the religious fundamentalists. Armstrong makes a case for an approach to religion:

...which emphasizes the pursuit of an unknowable Deity, rather than the quest for theological correctness ... compatible with a liberal, scientific, technologically advanced society. She argues that it’s actually truer to the ancient traditions of Judaism, Islam and (especially) Christianity than is much of what currently passes for “conservative” religion. And the neglect of these traditions, she suggests, is “one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so troublesome today.”

Both modern believers and modern atheists, Armstrong contends, have come to understand religion primarily as a set of propositions to be assented to, or a catalog of specific facts about the nature of God, the world and human life. But this approach to piety would be foreign to many premodern religious thinkers, including the greatest minds of the Christian past, from the early Fathers of the Church to medieval eminences like Thomas Aquinas.

These and other thinkers, she writes, understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought but something they did.” Their God was not a being to be defined or a proposition to be tested, but an ultimate reality to be approached through myth, ritual and “apophatic” theology, which practices “a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred” and emphasizes what we can’t know about the divine. And their religion was a set of skills, rather than a list of unalterable teachings — a “knack,” as the Taoists have it, for navigating the mysteries of human existence.

Taking it lying down...

Many cognitive neuroscience measurements are made on subjects who are supine, as for example in an MRI scanner. Given that body postures can affect behaviors (as when slumped postures lead to more 'helpless' behaviors, or erect posture with chest protruding enhances confident behavior) Harmon-Jones and Peterson compared the brain responses of subjects to anger-inducing insults while in either an upright or reclined position . It is know that left prefrontal cortex is more activated than the right prefrontal cortex during the experience of anger, particularly anger associated with approach motivational inclinations. They found, consistent with an embodied motivation prediction, that a insult delivered to subjects in an upright condition produced greater relative left lateral frontal activity than insults in a reclined condition - which produced about the same relative left lateral frontal activity as the neutral-upright condition.

Rational Irrationality

John Cassidy, in an interesting article in The New Yorker, discusses the inner logic of an economy like ours, in which behavior that is perfectly reasonable on the individual level produces calamity when aggregated in the marketplace. During both rises and falls in the markets, very small perturbations can be magnified by interlocking feedback loops that cause the economy to balloon into either a bubble or a crash.

Calvin Trillin, in a humorous but dead-on piece, has a much more simple model for the meltdown. Wall Street used to be run by the bottom third of the college class, the people who took gut general education courses (such as the Geology course referred to as "Rocks for Jocks"), and they weren't smart enough to invent all these fancy derivative investment vehicles. Then the upper third of the class that used to become teachers, doctors, or lawyers decided they needed to make more money. Mathematicians and physicists poured in to investment houses and invented all the complicated and sophisticated schemes that brought down the system.