Everybody have fun.

Elizabeth Kolbert writes a very accessible article (PDF here) having the title of this post in the March 22 issue of The New Yorker. The topic is happiness, how to measure it, and why we are so bad at knowing what will actually make us happy (the paradox of "the happy peasant and the miserable millionaire"). It covers the same territory as the Daniel Gilbert book "Stumbling on Happiness" that I abstracted in MindBlog several years ago (enter Gilbert in the search box in the left column to find those posts).

Cooperative behavior cascades in human social networks

Fowler and Christakis, in an open access article in PNAS, demonstrate that one cooperative act has a multiplying effect. In an iterative game, when a subject gives money to help someone else, the recipients of that cash then became more likely to give their own money away in the next round. This leads to a cascade of generosity, in which the itch to cooperate spreads first to three people and then to the nine people that those three people interact with, and then to the remaining individuals in subsequent waves of the experiment. (Uncooperative behavior can spread and persist as well.)  Here is one of their figures. 

Figure - A hypothetical cascade. This diagram illustrates the difference between the spread of the interpersonal effects across individuals and the persistence of effects across time. We abstract from the numerous interactions that take place between individuals in these experiments to focus on a specific, illustrative set of pathways. Cooperative behavior spreads three degrees of separation: if Eleni increases her contribution to the public good, it benefits Lucas (one degree), who gives more when paired with Erika (two degrees) in period 2, who gives more when paired with Jay (three degrees) in period 3, who gives more when paired with Brecken in period 4. The effects also persist over time, so that Lucas gives more when paired with Erika (period 2) and also when paired with Lysander (period 3), Bemy (period 4), Sebastian (period 5), and Nicholas (period 6). There is also persistence at two degrees of separation, because Erika givesmore not only when paired with Jay (period 3) but also when paired with Harla (period 4) and James (period 5). All the paths in this illustrative cascade are supported by significant results in the experiments, and it is important to note that if Eleni decreases her initial contribution, her uncooperative behavior can spread and persist as well.

More on mindfulness meditation and emotional muscle

A reader of Monday's post asked if I could post abstracts from the special issue (on Mindfulness meditation) of the journal Emotion mentioned in that post. I thought the abstracts were open access, but apparently they are not. Here I pass on a PDF of the introductory article by Williams that summarizes the contributions (Mindfulness and psychological process. Williams, J. Mark G.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 1-7.)

Below I show the table of contents and a few abstracts from the issue (email me if you have further requests).

Empirical explorations of mindfulness: Conceptual and methodological conundrums. Davidson, Richard J.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 8-11.
[Research on mindfulness is entering a new era and coming into the mainstream. The group of articles in this Special Issue exemplifies research on the impact of mindfulness on, or the relation between mindfulness and, different components of emotion processing and emotion regulation. Affective processes are a key target of contemplative interventions. The long-term consequences of most contemplative traditions include a transformation of trait affect. After all, if change was not enduring and did not impact everyday life, it would be of little utility. This brief commentary highlights several important conceptual and methodological issues that are central to research on mindfulness, particularly as it is applied to transforming emotion. The term “mindfulness” has been used to refer to an extraordinarily wide range of phenomena in this group of articles, ranging from mindfulness as a state, to mindfulness as a trait and finally mindfulness as an independent variable, that is, something this is manipulated in an experiment. It is imperative that we always qualify our use of this term by the methods we use to operationalize the construct. The measurement of mindfulness and the duration of its training, and the development of adequate comparison conditions against which to compare mindfulness training remain as important issues for further study. Moreover additional research attention on the potential targets within the emotion domain of contemplative practices is required. Great progress has been in this research area and we have much to look forward in the future.]

Dispositional mindfulness and depressive symptomatology: Correlations with limbic and self-referential neural activity during rest. Way, Baldwin M.; Creswell, J. David; Eisenberger, Naomi I.; Lieberman, Matthew D.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 12-24.  
[ To better understand the relationship between mindfulness and depression, we studied normal young adults (n = 27) who completed measures of dispositional mindfulness and depressive symptomatology, which were then correlated with (a) rest: resting neural activity during passive viewing of a fixation cross, relative to a simple goal-directed task (shape-matching); and (b) reactivity: neural reactivity during viewing of negative emotional faces, relative to the same shape-matching task. Dispositional mindfulness was negatively correlated with resting activity in self-referential processing areas, whereas depressive symptomatology was positively correlated with resting activity in similar areas. In addition, dispositional mindfulness was negatively correlated with resting activity in the amygdala, bilaterally, whereas depressive symptomatology was positively correlated with activity in the right amygdala. Similarly, when viewing emotional faces, amygdala reactivity was positively correlated with depressive symptomatology and negatively correlated with dispositional mindfulness, an effect that was largely attributable to differences in resting activity. These findings indicate that mindfulness is associated with intrinsic neural activity and that changes in resting amygdala activity could be a potential mechanism by which mindfulness-based depression treatments elicit therapeutic improvement....dispositional mindfulness and depressive symptomatology show opposite relationships with resting activity in the right amygdala, indicating that this may be a potential mechanism linking mindfulness-based treatments with reductions in depressed mood and relapse risk. That resting state activity differences largely explained the differences in emotional reactivity underscores the importance of understanding intrinsic activity within the brain. Perhaps it is fitting that mindfulness, a practice focused on observant contemplation rather than action, is associated with neural activity when an individual is just “being” rather than “doing.”]

Minding one’s emotions: Mindfulness training alters the neural expression of sadness. Farb, Norman A. S.; Anderson, Adam K.; Mayberg, Helen; Bean, Jim; McKeon, Deborah; Segal, Zindel V.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 25-33.
[Recovery from emotional challenge and increased tolerance of negative affect are both hallmarks of mental health. Mindfulness training (MT) has been shown to facilitate these outcomes, yet little is known about its mechanisms of action. The present study employed functional MRI (fMRI) to compare neural reactivity to sadness provocation in participants completing 8 weeks of MT and waitlisted controls. Sadness resulted in widespread recruitment of regions associated with self-referential processes along the cortical midline. Despite equivalent self-reported sadness, MT participants demonstrated a distinct neural response, with greater right-lateralized recruitment, including visceral and somatosensory areas associated with body sensation. The greater somatic recruitment observed in the MT group during evoked sadness was associated with decreased depression scores. Restoring balance between affective and sensory neural networks—supporting conceptual and body based representations of emotion—could be one path through which mindfulness reduces vulnerability to dysphoric reactivity.]

Effects of mindfulness on meta-awareness and specificity of describing prodromal symptoms in suicidal depression. Hargus, Emily; Crane, Catherine; Barnhofer, Thorsten; Williams, J. Mark G.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 34-42.
Cortical thickness and pain sensitivity in zen meditators. Grant, Joshua A.; Courtemanche, Jérôme; Duerden, Emma G.; Duncan, Gary H.; Rainville, Pierre; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 43-53.

Examining the protective effects of mindfulness training on working memory capacity and affective experience. Jha, Amishi P.; Stanley, Elizabeth A.; Kiyonaga, Anastasia; Wong, Ling; Gelfand, Lois; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 54-64.
[...findings suggest that sufficient mindfulness training practice may protect against functional impairments associated with high-stress contexts. ]

Differential effects on pain intensity and unpleasantness of two meditation practices. Perlman, David M.; Salomons, Tim V.; Davidson, Richard J.; Lutz, Antoine; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 65-71.

A preliminary investigation of the effects of experimentally induced mindfulness on emotional responding to film clips. Erisman, Shannon M.; Roemer, Lizabeth; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 72-82.

Effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) on emotion regulation in social anxiety disorder. Goldin, Philippe R.; Gross, James J.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 83-91.

Expressive flexibility. Westphal, Maren; Seivert, Nicholas H.; Bonanno, George A.; Emotion, Vol 10(1), Feb, 2010. pp. 92-100.

The Schubert Fantasy - part 2

Part 2 of the Schubert fantasy, part I was posted Monday. I'm playing the treble, David Goldberger is playing the base.

Our face recognition capability has a strong genetic component

While we have strong evidence for genetic effects on basic sensory processes (such as inherited color vision defects) evidence for genetic control of specific higher cognitive processes - (as distinct, for example, from more multi-domain processes like general intelligence or 'g') - has been harder to obtain. Wilmer et al. (open access) now report twin studies that offer strong evidence that face recognition ability has a strong genetic component, and that experience or environment plays a surprisingly small role. People are not 'all face recognition experts,' and this variation has now been shown to have a largely genetic basis:

Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.70) was more than double the dizygotic twin correlation (0.29), evidence for a high genetic contribution to face recognition ability. Low correlations between face recognition scores and visual and verbal recognition scores indicate that both face recognition ability itself and its genetic basis are largely attributable to face-specific mechanisms. The present results therefore identify an unusual phenomenon: a highly specific cognitive ability that is highly heritable. Our results establish a clear genetic basis for face recognition, opening this intensively studied and socially advantageous cognitive trait to genetic investigation.

Comments on "Statins enchance memory"

Readers who were interested in the recent post on statins should have a look at the comments that have come in. They note studies showing adverse effects of statins on cognition and memory.

Text without context and the death of culture

Michiko Kakutani writes an excellent article in last Sunday's NYTimes. The article is so rich that you really must read the whole thing, but I will pass on a few clips here. The article starts with reference to David Shields new book "Reality Hunger" which consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers.

...fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” ..“Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”

...the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”...It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”

Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.

More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.

Given the constant bombardment of trivia and data that we’re subjected to in today’s mediascape, it’s little wonder that noisy, Manichean arguments tend to get more attention than subtle, policy-heavy ones; that funny, snarky or willfully provocative assertions often gain more traction than earnest, measured ones; and that loud, entertaining or controversial personalities tend to get the most ink and airtime. This is why Sarah Palin’s every move and pronouncement is followed by television news, talk-show hosts and pundits of every political persuasion. This is why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right and Michael Moore on the left are repeatedly quoted by followers and opponents. This is why a gathering of 600 people for last month’s national Tea Party convention in Nashville received a disproportionate amount of coverage from both the mainstream news media and the blogosphere.

For his part Mr. Lanier says that because the Internet is a kind of “pseudoworld” without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, he argues, it can also devolve into a “Lord of the Flies”-like nastiness, with lots of “bullying, voracious irritability and selfishness” — qualities enhanced, he says, by the anonymity, peer pressure and mob rule that thrive online.

As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”

To Mr. Lanier...the prevalence of mash-ups in today’s culture is a sign of “nostalgic malaise.” “Online culture,” he writes, “is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”

He points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”

Brain changes caused by forced right-handedness

Klöppel et al. make the interesting observation that plastic changes occur not only in primary sensory-motor cortex but also deep structures of the brain in adult "converted" left-handers who were forced as children to become dextral writers:

Does a conflict between inborn motor preferences and educational standards during childhood impact the structure of the adult human brain? To examine this issue, we acquired high-resolution T1-weighted magnetic resonance scans of the whole brain in adult "converted" left-handers who had been forced as children to become dextral writers. Analysis of sulcal surfaces revealed that consistent right- and left-handers showed an interhemispheric asymmetry in the surface area of the central sulcus with a greater surface contralateral to the dominant hand. This pattern was reversed in the converted group who showed a larger surface of the central sulcus in their left, nondominant hemisphere, indicating plasticity of the primary sensorimotor cortex caused by forced use of the nondominant hand. Voxel-based morphometry showed a reduction of gray matter volume in the middle part of the left putamen in converted left-handers relative to both consistently handed groups. A similar trend was found in the right putamen. Converted subjects with at least one left-handed first-degree relative showed a correlation between the acquired right-hand advantage for writing and the structural changes in putamen and pericentral cortex. Our results show that a specific environmental challenge during childhood can shape the macroscopic structure of the human basal ganglia. The smaller than normal putaminal volume differs markedly from previously reported enlargement of cortical gray matter associated with skill acquisition. This indicates a differential response of the basal ganglia to early environmental challenges, possibly related to processes of pruning during motor development.

A Schubert fantasy (part I) for Monday morning

This is a recording of a 4-hands Schubert piano piece played in concert in Fort Lauderdale, FL, March 7, 2010, by myself (treble) and David Goldberger (base). Because YouTube has a 10 minutes length limit on videos, I have broken the ~20 minute video into three chunks (parts 1, 2, and 3) which I'm posting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of this week.

Training emotional muscles of the brain - special issue of Emotion

The February issue of the journal Emotion is devoted to studying psychological, physiological, emotional correlates of mindfulness meditation. One interesting study from Grant et al. suggest we can train the 'emotional muscle' of our brain.  They turned up the heat on a metal cube applied to the legs of 17 male and female Zen meditation practitioners between the ages of 22 and 57, and 18 matched controls. On average, the meditators, who had between 2 and 30 years of daily practice, tolerated an extra 2°C before saying they were in moderate pain. The team then took MRI scans of the subjects and measured the thickness of several pain-processing cortical regions. The meditators had greater thickness in the region of the anterior cingulate cortex thought to mediate pain's unpleasantness. Here is their abstract:

Zen meditation has been associated with low sensitivity on both the affective and the sensory dimensions of pain. Given reports of gray matter differences in meditators as well as between chronic pain patients and controls, the present study investigated whether differences in brain morphometry are associated with the low pain sensitivity observed in Zen practitioners. Structural MRI scans were performed and the temperature required to produce moderate pain was assessed in 17 meditators and 18 controls. Meditators had significantly lower pain sensitivity than controls. Assessed across all subjects, lower pain sensitivity was associated with thicker cortex in affective, pain-related brain regions including the anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral parahippocampal gyrus and anterior insula. Comparing groups, meditators were found to have thicker cortex in the dorsal anterior cingulate and bilaterally in secondary somatosensory cortex. More years of meditation experience was associated with thicker gray matter in the anterior cingulate, and hours of experience predicted more gray matter bilaterally in the lower leg area of the primary somatosensory cortex as well as the hand area in the right hemisphere. Results generally suggest that pain sensitivity is related to cortical thickness in pain-related brain regions and that the lower sensitivity observed in meditators may be the product of alterations to brain morphometry from long-term practice.

Statins enhance memory

I started taking low doses of a generic statin (Simvastatin) several years ago not because my cholesterol needed lowering, but because I had read about anti-inflammatory effects of the drug. (And it seems to me increases in inflammatory processes are a central issue in aging). Statins also appear to have beneficial effects on the central nervous system. They improve the outcome of stroke and traumatic brain injury, their use has been associated with a reduced prevalence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and dementia. Man et al (Neuroscience, Volume 166, Issue 2, 17 March 2010, Pages 435-444) have now found that simvastatin, widely used in humans, enhances learning and memory in non-transgenic mice as well as in transgenic mice with AD-like pathology on a mixed genetic background. On looking for mechanisms that might underlie these beneficial effects they find that statins enhance a synaptic process called long term potentiation that is a central component of learning and memory.

A lipstick that signals how turned on you are?

An item plucked at random from 'the stream': A new lipstick has gone on sale that the manufacturer claims shows, by changing color, when women are in the mood for sex (by 'reacting with a woman's body chemistry...duh,do I believe this??....maybe temperature sensitive lipstick?)

The lip product changes from clear to deep crimson as the wearer feels more and more frisky. It works by reacting with a woman's body chemistry. Each $18.50 tube comes with a color chart so men can figure out how aroused their partner is feeling. The Mood Swing Emotionally Activated Lip Gloss was invented in California by Too Faced makeup brand."The colors change depending on your emotional state," a spokesperson from Too Faced told The Sun.Celebrity fans include singer Katy Perry, who is engaged to funnyman Russell Brand."This is the ultimate date ice-breaker," dating expert Lorraine Adams said."But using it every day could get embarrassing. Would you really want the man next to you on the bus to know if you're turned on?"

Stress makes men prefer dissimilar mates.

Lass-Hennemann et al. make the interesting observation that men, who generally prefer mates that resemble themselves, switch to preferring dissimilar mates after they are subjected to a very simple stress procedure (holding their right hand in ice water for three minutes). This conforms with research in animals showing that individuals under stress are willing to mate with a wider variety of partners. Attraction to the images shown was measured by an interesting technique, noting startle eyeblink responses to a burst of white noise. Those in a more upbeat frame of mind (i.e. feeling attraction) flinch less. Scratching around for a possible evolutionary rationale for this behavior, one suggestion is that when conditions seem favorable men have the option of picking physically similar mates, whom they subconsciously deem dependable partners who will nurture their offspring. But in stressful times, during which human survival is less guaranteed, men would be more willing to risk a physically dissimilar partner in order to father as many children as possible.

Here is a figure describing how the stimulus photographs were morphed:

Image editing procedure: the nude woman's detailed face (1) was morphed with the portrait picture of the participant (2). The morphing software produces two output images, a shape-only morph (3a) and a combined shape-colour morph (3b). In a second step, the shape-colour morph is used as a semi-transparent layer on top of the shape-only morph. All artefacts of the morphing procedure are eliminated. The resulting image (4) was photo-mounted on the woman's body in a last step (5). The resulting image was used as a stimulus (the image was not masked in the experiment).

Streaming: new culture or cultural dissolution?

Following the thread of Monday's post on the lost art of the R.S.V.P. , I was struck by this Huffington Post bit on the SXSW  (South by Southwest) conference in Austin this past weekend - "Life is but a stream" - that from my point of view points to a future of everyone swirling in a present-centered miasma...

...Activity Streams, Social Objects and a little glimpse into how the data that is our lifestream will grow. And soon.

...SXSW, of course, isn't about the techies, it's about musicians and filmmakers, right? Not so different, as it turns out. They're all developers. All techies. Not just because of the digitization of the music and film industries, but because these are all people who make something from nothing. Inventors. Artists. Creatives. What less people saw coming, I think, was how creative the tech crowd is. How well they fit in and belong with the musicians and movie-makers.

Where does good music come from? Where does great movie writing come from? Some kind of emotional center. So, it was interesting to hear ZeFrank, a guy most people probably refer to as a "viral video maker" talking so much about emotional content. And the guy delivers on it, too. Much of what he has on his site not only will make you think, it reaches you at that emotional center. And it all relies on social experiments.

...Social Objects, Mediated Artifacts and Life Streams are simply techie ways of saying that a system is being engineered that will better capture how you live. That's all. Right now, computers put things into folders, but that's going to change real fast. How? That's not how this works.

If you've written a song, you can relate to this. It's a play between your feeling and the notes available to you. Back and forth. What's happening right now online is that new notes are being added to the scale. What is the future? Listen to the artists. They're all here at SXSW.

Lesion mapping of our brain's general intelligence system.

Adolphs, Damasio, Tranel, and collaborators have published a fascinating open access study in which they report results of having administered standard general intelligence tests to 241 neurologic patients who were being evaluated in connection with their enrollment in the Iowa Cognitive Neuroscience Patient Registry at the University of Iowa, over the course of approximately 2 decades. They found statistically significant associations between g and damage to a remarkably circumscribed, although distributed, network in frontal and parietal cortex, critically including white matter association tracts and frontopolar cortex. They suggest hat general intelligence draws on connections between regions that integrate verbal, visuospatial, working memory, and executive processes. In particular they found a region in the left frontal pole (white circles in Figure 3) that is unique to g and not captured by other subtests. A clip from their discussion:

The largest overlap between WAIS subtests and g was found for Arithmetic, Similarities, Information, and Digit Span; the former two tests also exhibited the greatest conjunction with g. These subtests assess verbal knowledge about the world, verbal reasoning, and abstraction, as well as working memory capacity, and are associated with the left inferior frontal gyrus, the superior longitudinal/arcuate fascicule, and to some degree with parietal cortex (Fig. 3). This suggests that g draws on the combination of conceptual knowledge and working memory, and that the communication between areas associated with these capacities is of crucial importance. Such an interpretation is consistent with the Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT), which postulates roles for cortical regions in the prefrontal (Brodman Area 6, 9–10, 45–47), parietal (BA 7, 39–40), occipital (BA 18–19), and temporal association cortex (BA 21, 37). Our results emphasize the important role of white matter tracts in binding the proposed regions together into a unified system subserving g, in line with a recent study relating white matter integrity to intellectual performance: the study reported significant correlations between integrity of the superior fronto-occipital fasciculus and full-scale intelligence quotient (IQ) (a measure related, but not identical, to g).

One of the caveats they mention:

.... Spearman's g disregards theories of multiple intelligences and does not incorporate specific emotional abilities. Therefore we may have isolated an anatomical network important for processing external stimuli, which might operate in parallel with others that are more critical for stimulus reward processing and interoception.

The decay of sympathy...

Brooks does a concise piece on how the innate sense of fairness and sympathy that we exhibit towards each other in small groups (as in the U.S. Senate as it used to exist) vanishes when groups are in competition with each other (as in the Senate now).  The story of human evolution is the story of competition between groups of humans that are held together internally by more generous and empathetic behaviors than the groups exhibit towards each other.  Clips:

In the United States, leaders in the House of Representatives have done an effective job in getting their members to think in group, not person-to-person, terms. Members usually vote as party blocs. Individuals have very little power. That’s why representatives are often subtle and smart as individuals, but crude and partisan as a collective. The social psychology of the House is a clan psychology, not an interpersonal psychology.

The Senate, on the other hand, has historically been home to more person-to-person thinking. This is because the Senate is smaller and because of Senate rules. Until recently, the Senate leaders couldn’t just ram things through on party-line votes. Because a simple majority did not rule, and because one senator had the ability to bring the whole body to a halt, senators had an incentive, every day, to develop alliances and relationships with people in the other party.

But power trumps principle. In nearly every arena of political life, group relationships have replaced person-to-person relationships. The tempo of the Senate is now set by partisan lunches every Tuesday, whereas the body almost never meets for conversation as a whole. The Senate is now in the process of using reconciliation — rule by simple majority — to try to pass health care.

We have a political culture in which the word “reconciliation” has come to mean “bitter division.” With increasing effectiveness, the system bleaches out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy.

Belief in free will is a belief in vitalism

Any readers who have checked out my web lectures or podcasts (particularly the "I-Illusion") know how I deal with the topic of free will and determinism.  I would recommend that those of you interested in this topic read this excellent open access essay in PNAS by Anthony Cashmore. (Figure 1 is a nice summary of models for the flow of information between unconscious neural activity and conscious thought.) The abstract and a figure:

It is widely believed, at least in scientific circles, that living systems, including mankind, obey the natural physical laws. However, it is also commonly accepted that man has the capacity to make “free” conscious decisions that do not simply reflect the chemical makeup of the individual at the time of decision—this chemical makeup reflecting both the genetic and environmental history and a degree of stochasticism. Whereas philosophers have discussed for centuries the apparent lack of a causal component for free will, many biologists still seem to be remarkably at ease with this notion of free will; and furthermore, our judicial system is based on such a belief. It is the author’s contention that a belief in free will is nothing other than a continuing belief in vitalism—something biologists proudly believe they discarded well over 100 years ago.

Figure (click to enlarge) - Models for the flow of information between unconscious neural activity and conscious thought. In A, the commonly accepted model is shown whereby WILL influences conscious thought and, in turn, unconscious neural activity, to direct behavior. The difficulty with this model is that there is no causal component directing WILL. In B, a causal component for WILL is introduced; however WILL now simply reflects unconscious neural activity and GES (genes, environment, and stochasticism). That is, WILL loses its “freedom.” In C, WILL is dispensed with, and conscious thought is simply a reflection of unconscious neural activity and GES. Conscious thought is now primarily a means of following—more than a means of influencing—the direction of behavior by unconscious neural activity. This subservient role of conscious thought in directing behavior in model C, is indicated by the dotted arrow 2 (contrasting with the solid line for the corresponding arrow in A and B).

The lost art of the R.S.V.P.

Cooper does a NYTimes op-ed piece that perfectly describes my own experience (and frustration) when I have sent out invitations to a music afternoon at my Madison WI.  home. It is worth passing on here:

HERE’S an etiquette experiment for you: E-mail an invitation for a party, one month out, to 45 friends. Request an R.S.V.P. Provide a follow-up e-mail message, two weeks later, politely reminding them to get back to you....How many will?...My experiment arose from plans for an evening of food, drink and literature, with readings by myself and two other writers, at a restaurant. Not exactly a drop-in-if-you’re-around kind of thing, so I asked friends to R.S.V.P. My initial message brought in a dozen responses, and the follow-up a few more, but days before the event I had a paltry 23. Not 23 who planned to come, but 23 who had bothered to respond. Half my invitees had blown me off. Why? I wasn’t peddling life insurance, after all.

Asking around, I discovered that the phenomenon is widespread. One friend of mine e-mailed invitations to a baby shower, and a third of the recipients failed to respond. Another announced a happy hour at her house and received a dozen yeses — only to find her party besieged by 35 people....What’s preventing us from executing this basic social task? Is it the medium? Do Evites somehow not feel like “real” invitations? Is it our busy lives, so overbooked and overwhelmed we’ve drawn up the castle gates? Don’t invite me out this month, I’m ensconced! Or is it simple rudeness? Try as I might to understand, I kept feeling dissed.

What’s clear is how hard the R.S.V.P. rubs against the grain of contemporary life. In requesting people to anchor a plan in the distant future of a month hence, you are demanding a kind of navigation that Americans increasingly do not practice. We prefer to remain flexy, solidifying our plans incrementally as the date approaches. Let’s talk tomorrow. I’ll call you when I’m on the road. Cellphones in hand, we microadjust our schedules as they unfold around us. We’re like the air traffic controllers of our own lives.

It wasn’t always so. A while ago I made a lunch date with an elderly couple. As the day approached with no subsequent corroboration, I felt a strange excitement. Would all three of us just show up? We did, and I realized that what I felt was a small nostalgic thrill over social arrangements that seemed straight out of Jane Austen.

But back to my party. The day before the big event, I sent a final e-mail message, thanking “the half of you who responded for helping keep the dying art of the R.S.V.P. alive.” This irked missive flushed out a final 10 hangdog respondents. But there remained a gang of 12 — the dirty dozen, the truly hardcore, fanatical nonresponders — who couldn’t even be shamed into R.S.V.P.ing...In the end, perhaps they were merely following the French literally: Respond, if you please. Left over from a time when graciousness couched demands as requests, the R.S.V.P. no longer functions. I therefore propose an update, something still French but a bit more ... frank — the R.V.O.M.:  Répondez Vite — ou Mourir!     (Respond Quickly, or Die!)

Brain regions and the DC metro

A reader's comment on last Wednesday's post points to a graphic (see below, click on it to enlarge) showing an amazingly credible mapping of brain regions onto the Washington, DC metro system.

New nerve cell growth in stress-induced social avoidance.

Lagace et al. look at changes in the dentate gyrus region of the hippocampus to probe why some people are resilient to long-term chronic stress while others develop maladaptive functioning. They examined chronic social defeat stress in a mouse model, finding that synthesis of new nerve cells is increased after social defeat stress selectively in mice that display persistent social avoidance. Irradiation that halts formation of these new nerve cells inhibits appearance of social avoidance, suggesting a functional role for adult-generated dentate gyrus neurons. The data show that the time window after cessation of stress is a critical period for the establishment of persistent cellular and behavioral responses to stress and that a compensatory enhancement in neurogenesis is related to the long-term individual differences in maladaptive responses to stress.