The populist addiction

I thought this Op-Ed piece by David Brooks was worth passing on.  He notes that populism and elitism are really mirror images of one another, both manichean simplifications of complex multidimensional issues into stark good and evil extremes.

A clever treatment for tinnitus

Okamoto et al. find that they can reduce brain activity related to tinnitus by exposing chronic tinnitus patients to self-chosen, enjoyable music, which has been modified (“notched”) to contain no energy in the frequency range surrounding the individual tinnitus frequency:

Maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization may contribute to the generation and maintenance of tinnitus. Because cortical organization can be modified by behavioral training, we attempted to reduce tinnitus loudness by exposing chronic tinnitus patients to self-chosen, enjoyable music, which was modified (“notched”) to contain no energy in the frequency range surrounding the individual tinnitus frequency. After 12 months of regular listening, the target patient group (n = 8) showed significantly reduced subjective tinnitus loudness and concomitantly exhibited reduced evoked activity in auditory cortex areas corresponding to the tinnitus frequency compared to patients who had received an analogous placebo notched music treatment (n = 8). These findings indicate that tinnitus loudness can be significantly diminished by an enjoyable, low-cost, custom-tailored notched music treatment, potentially via reversing maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization.

Social structure influences language structure.

Lupyan and Dale do a statistical analysis of over 2,000 languages to show that

...languages spoken by large groups have simpler inflectional morphology than languages spoken by smaller groups, as measured on a variety of factors such as case systems and complexity of conjugations. Additionally, languages spoken by large groups are much more likely to use lexical strategies in place of inflectional morphology to encode evidentiality, negation, aspect, and possession.

This suggests that

...just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used.

Resting brain default mode activity under genetic control

From Glahn et al:

The default-mode network, a coherent resting-state brain network, is thought to characterize basal neural activity. Aberrant default-mode connectivity has been reported in a host of neurological and psychiatric illnesses and in persons at genetic risk for such illnesses. Whereas the neurophysiologic mechanisms that regulate default-mode connectivity are unclear, there is growing evidence that genetic factors play a role. In this report, we estimate the importance of genetic effects on the default-mode network by examining covariation patterns in functional connectivity among 333 individuals from 29 randomly selected extended pedigrees. Heritability for default-mode functional connectivity was 0.424 ± 0.17 (P = 0.0046). Although neuroanatomic variation in this network was also heritable, the genetic factors that influence default-mode functional connectivity and gray-matter density seem to be distinct, suggesting that unique genes influence the structure and function of the network. In contrast, significant genetic correlations between regions within the network provide evidence that the same genetic factors contribute to variation in functional connectivity throughout the default mode. Specifically, the left parahippocampal region was genetically correlated with all other network regions. In addition, the posterior cingulate/precuneus region, medial prefrontal cortex, and right cerebellum seem to form a subnetwork. Default-mode functional connectivity is influenced by genetic factors that cannot be attributed to anatomic variation or a single region within the network. By establishing the heritability of default-mode functional connectivity, this experiment provides the obligatory evidence required before these measures can be considered as endophenotypes for psychiatric or neurological illnesses or to identify genes influencing intrinsic brain function.

Fig. 1 (A) Group-ICA map of the default-mode network derived from resting state scans of 333 individuals from large extended pedigrees. (B) Significant genetic correlations for functional connectivity between heritable regions in the default-mode network. The left parahippocampal gyrus (green) was genetically correlated with the posterior cingulate/precuneus (yellow), medial prefrontal (blue), right cerebellar (red), and right temporal-parietal (pink) regions. In addition, the posterior cingulate/precuneus, medial prefrontal, and right cerebellar regions form a circuit influenced by the same genetic factors. (C) Significant environmental correlations between these same regions.

The pattern of significant environmental correlations differed dramatically from those of the genetic correlations (Fig. 1C). Environmental correlations typically result from unmeasured aspects of the environment or correlated measurement errors. The right temporal–parietal region was significantly correlated with the posterior cingulate/precuneus and medial prefrontal cortex. Neither of these regions showed significant genetic correlations. In addition, the right cerebellum and medial prefrontal cortex had a significant environmental correlation.

Distinguish Democrats and Republicans from their faces.

Here is a quirky item... it turns out that we can guess the political affiliation of someone, more accurately than by chance, by looking at their photograph. Faces perceived to be more powerful are more likely to be perceived as Republicans. Faces perceived as warmer are more likely to also be perceived as Democrats!

The secret life of chaos.

The BBC has produced a beautiful program on Chaos theory. The mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern, transforming simplicity into complexity. A YouTube version can be viewed here, the BBC web version plays only in the UK. The clip below is the first installment in the six part series.

Thinking of God moves attention

Here is an interesting tidbit:

The concepts of God and Devil are well known across many cultures and religions, and often involve spatial metaphors, but it is not well known if our mental representations of these concepts affect visual cognition. To examine if exposure to divine concepts produces shifts of attention, participants completed a target detection task in which they were first presented with God- and Devil-related words. We found faster RTs when targets appeared at compatible locations with the concepts of God (up/right locations) or Devil (down/left locations), and also found that these results do not vary by participants’ religiosity. These results indicate that metaphors associated with the divine have strong spatial components that can produce shifts of attention, and add to the growing evidence for an extremely robust connection between internal spatial representations and where attention is allocated in the external environment.

Speech perception requires motor system activation.

Yuen et al. find that specific articulatory commands are activated automatically and involuntarily during speech perception, and suggest, in a broader framework, that perception of action entails activation of the motor system. Their behavioral evidence backs up functional MRI studies that have demonstrated that the brain regions involved in the perception of speech overlap with those involved in the production of speech. They reasoned that if articulatory information is activated in speech perception, then this information should interfere with articulation in a scenario in which participants are asked to produce a target syllable while listening to a different auditory distractor. Their approach was to investigate how an auditory distractor impacts upon the actual articulation of a different target. The thought was that if articulatory information is activated in speech perception, then that information might interfere with speech production by introducing particular distortions of the target syllable that reflect the articulatory properties of the distractor. Here is their abstract:

Emerging neurophysiologic evidence indicates that motor systems are activated during the perception of speech, but whether this activity reflects basic processes underlying speech perception remains a matter of considerable debate. Our contribution to this debate is to report direct behavioral evidence that specific articulatory commands are activated automatically and involuntarily during speech perception. We used electropalatography to measure whether motor information activated from spoken distractors would yield specific distortions on the articulation of printed target syllables. Participants produced target syllables beginning with /k/ or /s/ while listening to the same syllables or to incongruent rhyming syllables beginning with /t/. Tongue–palate contact for target productions was measured during the articulatory closure of /k/ and during the frication of /s/. Results revealed “traces” of the incongruent distractors on target productions, with the incongruent /t/-initial distractors inducing greater alveolar contact in the articulation of /k/ and /s/ than the congruent distractors. Two further experiments established that (i) the nature of this interference effect is dependent specifically on the articulatory properties of the spoken distractors; and (ii) this interference effect is unique to spoken distractors and does not arise when distractors are presented in printed form. Results are discussed in terms of a broader emerging framework concerning the relationship between perception and action, whereby the perception of action entails activation of the motor system.

Rats can learn a cooperation game.

Yet another supposed barrier between human and animal smarts has fallen,  the assumption that only humans have the cognitive capabilities to play the famous 'Prisoner's Dilemma' game, i.e. to engage in reciprocity, which requires numerical discrimination, memory, and control of temporal discounting. Viana et al.:

We use an iterated PD game to test rats (Rattus norvegicus) for the presence of such cognitive abilities by manipulating the strategy of the opponent, Tit-for-Tat and Pseudo-Random, or the relative size of the temptation to defect. We found that rats shape their behaviour according to the opponent's strategy and the relative outcome resulting from cooperative or defective moves. Finally, we show that the behaviour of rats is contingent upon their motivational state (hungry versus sated).

Watching our brain decide when it has enough information

Once we think we have sufficient data for a decision, our brains constrain the accumulation of addition information. de Lange et al. actually view this process using magnetoencephalography (MEG, which records the weak magnetic signals generated by brain activity):

In the last decade, great progress has been made in characterizing the accumulation of neural information during simple unitary perceptual decisions. However, much less is known about how sequentially presented evidence is integrated over time for successful decision making. The aim of this study was to study the mechanisms of sequential decision making in humans. In a magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we presented healthy volunteers with sequences of centrally presented arrows. Sequence length varied between one and five arrows, and the accumulated directions of the arrows informed the subject about which hand to use for a button press at the end of the sequence (e.g., LRLRR should result in a right-hand press). Mathematical modeling suggested that nonlinear accumulation was the rational strategy for performing this task in the presence of no or little noise, whereas quasilinear accumulation was optimal in the presence of substantial noise. MEG recordings showed a correlate of evidence integration over parietal and central cortex that was inversely related to the amount of accumulated evidence (i.e., when more evidence was accumulated, neural activity for new stimuli was attenuated). This modulation of activity likely reflects a top–down influence on sensory processing, effectively constraining the influence of sensory information on the decision variable over time. The results indicate that, when making decisions on the basis of sequential information, the human nervous system integrates evidence in a nonlinear manner, using the amount of previously accumulated information to constrain the accumulation of additional evidence.

One thing that doesn't deteriorate as we age!

Kadota and Gomi find that our speed of detecting visual stimuli in our peripheral visual field during reaching movements shows little decay with aging, in contrast to other visual functions.

It is well established that humans can react more quickly to a visual stimulus in the visual field center than to one in the visual periphery and that the reaction to a stimulus in the visual periphery markedly deteriorates with aging. These tendencies are true in conventional discrimination-reaction tasks. Surprisingly, however, we found that they are entirely different when reactions are induced by the same visual stimuli during reaching movements. The reaction time for a stimulus in the visual periphery was significantly faster than in the central vision, and age-related slowing of reactions to the stimulus in the visual periphery were quite small, compared to that observed in the conventional reaction tasks. This inconsistent slowing of reactions in different motor conditions underscores a distinctive visuomotor pathway for online control, which is more robust against age-related deterioration.

Why I am a snowbird...

Scenes from the yard in my Wisconsin home. Beautiful, but chilly. 

A thought to speech machine.

When I was a post-doctoral fellow in the Neurobiology Dept. at Harvard Medical School in 1967-68, I regularly attended tea time discussions in the Hubel and Wiesel laboratory (These guys got a Nobel Prize a few years later for their work on how the visual cortex works). I recall being astounded by their discussions about experiments with microelectrodes implanted in a monkey brain that were finding that the activity of almost any nerve cell reported by an electrode could be trained to fire on demand by operant conditioning (for example, a cell being trained that a certain pattern of its activity could produce a reward stimulus like fruit juice). This memory came back to me when Mindblog reader Tristan emailed me excited about work (which turns out to have been in my queue of potential post topics) that is a logical extension of those experiments over 40 years ago.

This work by Guenther et al. implanted in the motor cortex a long-term cone electrode that records from neurites that grow onto its recording surface. The subject was a 26 year old male suffering from locked-in syndrome due to a brain stem stroke incurred at age 16, leaving the brain areas responsible for consciousness, cognition, and higher-level aspects of movement control intact while eliminating nearly all voluntary movement. They were able to effect some speech restoration by decoding continuous auditory parameters for a real-time speech synthesizer from neuronal activity during attempted speech reported by implanted motor cortex electrode. The paper has interesting figures and a video. Here is a central summary figure:

Black circles and curved arrows represent neurons and axonal projections, respectively, in the neural circuitry for speech motor output. The volunteer's stroke-induced lesion in the efferent motor pathways (red X) disconnects motor plans represented in the cerebral cortex from the speech motoneurons, thus disabling speech output while sparing somatic, auditory, and visual sensation as well as speech motor planning centers in cerebral cortex. Signals collected from an electrode implanted in the subject's speech motor cortex are amplified and sent wirelessly across the scalp as FM radio signals. The signals are then routed to an electrophysiology recording system for further amplification, analog-to-digital conversion, and spike sorting. The sorted spikes are sent to a Neural Decoder which translates them into commands for a Speech Synthesizer. Audio signals from the synthesizer are fed back to the subject in real time. [Abbreviation: PrCG = precentral gyrus.]

Distinguishing a new evolutionary track?

This interesting article considers society as an evolutionary track distinct from culture and genes, noting that social and cultural units relate to different informational categories (roles versus beliefs); they are learned in different ways (experience versus interpretation), and have different accuracy and consistency requirements (necessary versus unnecessary). The authors consider cultural exaptation in footbinding, marriage form, and religious practices in early 20th-century Taiwan. (Exaptation refers to a trait evolving because it serves one particular function, but subsequently having the unintended consequence of serving another.) Their analysis notes changes in religious and grave-site rituals that were an unintended and unintuitive consequence of legally imposed changes in footbinding in southwestern Taiwan early in the century. This provides a demonstration of how associations across distinct social and cultural inheritance tracks - having different evolutionary dynamics - affect behavior. Here is the abstract:

Social theorists have long recognized that changes in social order have cultural consequences but have not been able to provide an individual-level mechanism of such effects. Explanations of human behavior have only just begun to explore the different evolutionary dynamics of social and cultural inheritance. Here we provide ethnographic evidence of how cultural evolution, at the level of individuals, can be influenced by social evolution. Sociocultural epistasis—association of cultural ideas with the hierarchical structure of social roles—influences cultural change in unexpected ways. We document the existence of cultural exaptation, where a custom's origin was not due to acceptance of the later associated ideas. A cultural exaptation can develop in the absence of a cultural idea favoring it, or even in the presence of a cultural idea against it. Such associations indicate a potentially larger role for social evolutionary dynamics in explaining individual human behavior than previously anticipated.

Internet hive mind - the madness of crowds

John Tierney does an interesting review of computer guru Jaron Lanier's new book "You Are Not a Gadget." which is a manifesto against “hive thinking” and “digital Maoism” - by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity. Lanier (slightly edited):

...blames the Web’s tradition of “drive-by anonymity” for fostering vicious pack behavior on blogs, forums and social networks. He acknowledges the examples of generous collaboration, like Wikipedia, but argues that the mantras of “open culture” and “information wants to be free” have produced a destructive new social contract....“The basic idea of this contract,” he writes, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.” ...masses of “digital peasants” are forced to provide free material to a few “lords of the clouds” like Google and YouTube.

Mr. Lanier was once an advocate himself for piracy, arguing that his fellow musicians would make up for the lost revenue in other ways. Sure enough, some musicians have done well selling T-shirts and concert tickets, but it is striking how many of the top-grossing acts began in the predigital era, and how much of today’s music is a mash-up of the old....“It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump,” Mr. Lanier writes. Or, to use another of his grim metaphors: “Creative people — the new peasants — come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.”...To save those endangered species, Mr. Lanier proposes rethinking the Web’s ideology, revising its software structure and introducing innovations like a universal system of micropayments.

Category errors in politics (the rage of the left) and mind science

Hendrik Hertzberg, in an interesting piece in the Jan. 11 issue of The New Yorker 'Talk of the Town' section, comments on the alienation and disappointment of the liberal left with the health care reform bill in congress.  He cites this as an example of John Ruskin's "Pathetic Fallacy' (Violent feelings producing in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things - as in anthropomorphic treatment of inanimate objects as if they had human feelings, thought, or sensations).  A more recent description would be philosopher Gilbert Ryle's 'Category Error' - ascribing a property to a thing that could not possibly have that property. (We do this with our minds, taking our 'selves' to be 'real,' rather being a illusory model generated by our brain hardware, cf. The I-Illusion). Anyway, from Hertzberg's article:

...It's the false attribution of human feelings, thoughts, or intentions to inanimate objects, or to living entities that cannot possibly have such feelings, thoughts, or intentions...The American government has its human aspects - it is staffed by human beings, mostly - but its atomized, at-odds-with-itself legislative structure (House and Senate, each with its arcane rules, its semi-feudal committee chairs, andits independently elected members, none of whom are accountable or fully responsible for outcomes) make it more like an inanimate object. In our sclerotic lawmaking process, it is not enough that the President, a majority of bothy House of Congress, and a majority of the voters at he last election favor extending health care to all citizens.

The left-wing critics are right about the conspicuous flaws of the pending health-care reform - its lack of even a weak "public option," its too meager subsidies, its windfalls for Big Pharma...etc. But it is nonsense to attribute the less than fully satisfactory result to the alleged perfidy of the President or "the Democrats." The critics' indignation would be better be direction at what an earlier generation malcontents called "the system" - starting, perhaps, with the Senate's filibuster rule, an inanimate object if there ever was one.

Hertzberg goes on to point out that the senate defeat of John F. Kennedy's health care reform attempts in 1962 was reversed only after his assassination, and establishing Medicare required both Lyndon Johnson's landslide election and his legendary legislative talents.

The health-care bill now being kicked and prodded and bribed toward passage will not "do the job," either - only part of it. Are Barack Obama and the Demoncrats in Congress doing enough? No. But they are doing what's possible. That may be pathetic, but it's no fallacy.

High-Tech Sex... and gestural interactions with electronics

Would RealTouch have saved Elliot Spitzer or Tiger Woods? I doubt it. An article on the Adult Entertainment Expo that follows the Consumer Electronics Show discusses several new approaches to mechanically providing our titillation. I was particularly struck by the RealTouch site, which has a promotional video, as well as the YouTube clip below. I wonder if their library of on demand movies that synch with the device includes any gay porn? Again, I doubt it......By the way, some fascinating new technology for interacting with television and computers using body gestures was noted at the Consumer Electronic Show).

Attention alters appearance

An interesting article by Störmer et al. addresses the neural basis of our phenomenological experience, probing a central question in perception: Does attention alter our subjective experience of the world? The authors found that attention increases the perceived contrast of visual stimuli (sine wave gratings) by boosting early sensory processing in the visual cortex. Here are some slightly edited clips from a review by Carrasco in the same journal:

Voluntary attention refers to the sustained, endogenous directing of attention to a location in the visual field. Involuntary attention is the transient, exogenous capture of attention to a location, brought about by a sudden change in the environment. (Visual attention can be covertly deployed, without eye movements. We use covert attention routinely in everyday situations, when we search for objects, drive a car, cross the street, play sports, or dance, as well as in social situations—for example, when moving the eyes would provide a cue to intentions that we wish to conceal.)... Störmer et al. modified an existing experimental paradigm in two insightful and exciting ways to investigate the effect of attention on appearance with concurrent electrophysiological and behavioral measures. First, to eliminate any possibility of intramodal sensory interactions between the cue and the stimulus, they used a lateralized auditory cue rather than a visual cue. This modification enabled the authors to study the effects of cross-modal attention on appearance. Second, they recorded evoked electrical fields on the scalp—event-related potentials (ERPs)—from visual cortex in response to the cued target as observers judged the relative contrast of visual stimuli presented to the right and left visual fields. ERPs are electrophysiological responses that arise during sensory, cognitive, and motor processing, which provide precise information about the time course of information processing. In this study, they help pinpoint the level of processing at which attention exerts its effect on judgments of contrast appearance. Short-latency evoked responses, P1 (90–150 ms) and N1 (180–240 ms), reflect early sensory processes that can be modulated by selective attention; longer-latency components (250–500 ms) arise from multiple cortical generators and reflect postperceptual processing, including decision-making, working memory encoding, and response selection.

Here is the abstract from the article:

The question of whether attention makes sensory impressions appear more intense has been a matter of debate for over a century. Recent psychophysical studies have reported that attention increases apparent contrast of visual stimuli, but the issue continues to be debated. We obtained converging neurophysiological evidence from human observers as they judged the relative contrast of visual stimuli presented to the left and right visual fields following a lateralized auditory cue. Cross-modal cueing of attention boosted the apparent contrast of the visual target in association with an enlarged neural response in the contralateral visual cortex that began within 100 ms after target onset. The magnitude of the enhanced neural response was positively correlated with perceptual reports of the cued target being higher in contrast. The results suggest that attention increases the perceived contrast of visual stimuli by boosting early sensory processing in the visual cortex.

The Messiah Complex

Yes,  of course I went to see Avatar in 3-D IMAX.  Loved it. (The picture shows Deric using a chemical depressant to recover from the sensory overload, at a dinner with friends afterwards.) I thought David Brook's column on the movie was a treat,  and have to agree with his critical points:

...would it be totally annoying to point out that the whole White Messiah fable, especially as Cameron applies it, is kind of offensive?...It rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration...It’s just escapism, obviously, but benevolent romanticism can be just as condescending as the malevolent kind — even when you surround it with pop-up ferns and floating mountains.

Breaking the addiction to connectivity and networking.

This post is a personal note.......As the holidays have drawn to a close and I am overloaded and  behind on almost everything,  I realize yet again that I spend an inordinate amount of time 'just checking' a continuous incoming flux of emails, listserves, google alerts, tweets, SMS messages.  This time spent thinking in multiple small (Twitter is 140 character) chunks is time subtracted from thinking in more depth (or at least in paragraph size chunks!).  The post I did recently on this issue obviously hasn't influenced my behavior.  So, one of my new year's resolutions has been to cancel subscriptions to virtually everything, and check email only twice a day. Removing my google alerts and hitting the 'unsubscribe' link on many incoming emails has reduced my email volume by half. Ignoring Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and all their 'friend' requests has made life a bit more manageable (I regret being 'unfriendly,' but it can't be helped). I'm finding that the connectivity of email exchanges related to mindblog.dericbownds.net is almost more than I can handle.  I  haven't really gotten into either Facebook or LinkedIn (interesting experiments, but no thank you), so I've decided to condense down to spending time only on this blog and an occasional 'tweet' as my venues for reaching out to others. Anyone who wishes to chat with me can easily find my email address, and the email exchanges I have had with  mindblog readers have been engaging and worthwhile.   It begins to feel like a shroud is slowly lifting.....    is it possible that I am beginning to smash my mind's  "Twittering Machine"?  (The figure is the classic Paul Klee painting of that title).