The fraying thread of civil society

I wanted to pass on this link to an article in this morning's NYTimes by Mat Bai that seems especially cogent. It deals with the independent voters whose actions appear to be pivotal in the coming elections. He describes the convening by three (non-sponsored) political and corporate marketing consultants of small focus groups of self-identified independent voters who are friends or relatives of one another, meeting in a participant’s living room.

The dominant theme of the discussion, in which jobs and taxes came up only in passing, seemed to be the larger breakdown of civil society — the disappearance of common courtesy, the relentless stream of data from digital devices, the proliferation of lawsuits and the insidious influence of media on their children...One woman described a food fight at the middle school that left a mess school employees were obliged to clean up, presumably because the children couldn’t be subjected to physical labor. A man complained about drivers who had grown increasingly hostile and inconsiderate on the roads, which drew nods of assent all around...The economy was discussed mostly in connection with these other stresses. “We all think that if we had a lot of money,” one woman said, “everything would slow down and we could enjoy ourselves.”

These voters did not hate politicians. They simply saw both parties, along with the news media and big business, as symptoms of the larger societal ailment. And this underlying perception, that politicians in Washington conduct themselves just as childishly and with the same lack of accountability as the students throwing chicken casserole in the lunchroom, may well be the principal emotion behind the electorate’s propensity to vote out whoever holds power.

Brain correlates of introspective accuracy.

Knowing whether confidence predicts accuracy would be very useful, for example, in evaluating conflicting courtroom testimony in statements from witnesses who seem more or less confident. In a fascinating article, Fleming et al. find a relationship between the brain scans of people obtained by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and how seriously we should take their expressed level of confidence. They use a simple perceptual task, detecting the contrast between light and dark bars in a grating, which makes it possible to obtain both an objective measure of how accurate subjects are and a subjective measure of how confident they are in their judgments. They construct a measure of how accurate subjects are in their confidence judgments. The capacity for introspection, which can be regarded as one facet of metacognition (thinking about thinking), is shown to vary across individuals and to correlate positively with the gray matter volume of the frontopolar cortex (the frontmost region of the brain) and also with white matter in the tracts of the corpus callosum that connect these regions in the left and right hemispheres. From the abstract:

We show that introspective ability is correlated with gray matter volume in the anterior prefrontal cortex, a region that shows marked evolutionary development in humans. Moreover, interindividual variation in introspective ability is also correlated with white-matter microstructure connected with this area of the prefrontal cortex. Our findings point to a focal neuroanatomical substrate for introspective ability, a substrate distinct from that supporting primary perception.

Mindblog does another anti-aging experiment.

I find myself both spooked and sparked by my second foray into anti-aging chemistry (the first being the unsuccessful resveratrol dalliance described in a previous post.) A colleague pointed me to work of Bruce Ames and collaborators (also here) which has led to the marketing by Juvenon of a dietary supplement containing Acetyl L-carnitine, alpha-lipoic acid, and the B-vitamin biotin. Experiments on rats show that these compounds reverse the age related decay in energy metabolism in mitochondria and also inhibit oxidative damage to mitochondrial lipids. So... the idea is that these supplements might energize and juice you up a bit.  The Juvenon supplement contains (per day) 600 mcg biotin, 2000 mg of acetyl-L-carnitine, and 800 mg of alpha lipoic acid.  I though $40 was a bit steep for a 30 day supply, and so I bought the equivalent supplements from Swanson Health Products for significantly less money.  I decided to take 600 mg of the carnitine/day, 1000 mg/day of the alpha lipoic acid,  and 1000 mcg/day of biotin,  half at breakfast, half at lunch (by the way, this is slightly less than 1% of the levels used in the rat experiments.) From the homework I have done so far, the levels of these supplements being taken have no documented adverse side effects.

The results?  Well.... sufficiently dramatic that I really can't credit that it is all a placebo effect,  because I go into any such experiment as an unbeliever... The first several days I felt a phase change, a  step up in energy level and kinetic energy that made me like a 20-something again, a bit incredulous, as in "whoa.. where did this come from."  With both brain and body feeling like an automobile engine running at 2,000 r.p.m. even when it was not in gear,  I cut the levels of the supplements by a half after three days.   After another three days of energy I didn't know what to do with,  generating what felt like excess brain and body "noise,"  I stopped the supplement,  deciding that my normal fairly robust daily routines (including daily gym work or swimming, running, or weights) apparently had all the energy they needed.

Any experiences or references from blog readers would be appreciated.

A Brahms Romance

Two Sundays ago my partner and I hosted a Sunday afternoon musical/social at our home on Twin Valley Rd. in Middleton Wisconsin.  I decided to record two of the pieces I played that I have not yet put on YouTube.  In this post I pass on the Brahms Romance,  as well as the program and program notes for that afternoon.

F.  Chopin
 Nocturne Op. 27 no. 2  
Prelude Op. 28 no. 17
Polonaise Op. 26 no. 1

E. Grieg
 Lyric Pieces
Op. 43, no. 5 Erotic Piece 
Op. 47, no. 5 Melancholy 
Op. 54, no. 4,  Notturno  

J. Brahms
 Capriccio, Op. 76 no. 8
Romanze, Op. 118 no. 5
Intermezzo Op. 119 no. 3

C. Debussy
Reverie
Minuette from Suite Bergmanesque
Valse Romantique 

The music this afternoon is a brisk tour of  four 19th century composers,  Chopin, Brahms, Grieg, and Debussy, playing  three short pieces composed by each.  Each of these romantic pieces has rich emotional content. 

I'll start with Chopin, born in 1810, died in 1849. He  was a child prodigy and a child of privilege. When he was 21, he was traveling to Paris at the time of the 1831 polish uprising which was suppressed by Russian troops. He stayed in Paris.  He was praised by Robert Schumann and befriended by the Rothschild banking family. He knew Franz Liszt, and  in 1836, about a year after he had written the Nocturne and Polonaise I'm playing, and a year before the Prelude,  he met George Sand at a party given by Franz Liszt's mistress.  He was with Sand from 1837 to 1847,  and died at age 39 .  The bulk of his music, virtually all for piano, was written in the 1830s. 

Next,  I jump ahead to Edvard Grieg (1843 to 1907)  to do three of his lyric pieces, composed in 1886 to 1891.  These lyric pieces were among his most popular works, each trying to elicit a specific mood or emotion,  obvious from their titles.  He knew and was influenced by Franz Liszt, who praised these pieces.     

Then back to Brahms, 1833 to 1897, who also knew Liszt and considered him a great pianist.  However, Brahms led a crusade against what he considered some of the wilder excesses of Wagner and Liszt,  and in 1860 wrote a manifesto against them  in what is called the war of the romantics.   The Capriccio I'm going to do was composed in 1878, at the height of his popularity.  In 1890, when he was 57,  Brahms resolved to give up composing, but could not, and a number of masterpieces followed. The Romanze and Intermezzo I'm going to play were composed in 1893. 

The Debussy pieces I'm going to do are selections of  his early work,  written in this period,  around 1890.  Debussy was influenced by Cesar Franck, Wagner, and Massenet, and in this early period was developing his own musical language independent of their styles.  The minuet is like an impressionistic baroque dance,  and the reverie and valse romantique have very sonorous halo effects that foreshadow the more mature Debussy works between 1900 and 1915.    Debussy lived from 1862 to 1918. 

The new international economic order.

Under the 'random curious stuff' category in MindBlog's banner description, I thought this article by Anatole Kaletsky was cogent, if depressing, and so pass on some clips. The article begins with a discussion of Japan's recent decision to manipulate the value of its currency:

With Chinese economic policy now serving as a model for other Asian countries, Japan was faced with a stark choice: back United States criticisms that China is artificially keeping down the value of its currency, the renminbi, or emulate China’s approach. It is a sign of the times that Japan chose to follow China at the cost of irritating America...Japan’s action suggests that, in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the dominance of free-market thinking in international economic management is over. Washington must understand this, or find itself constantly outmaneuvered in dealings with the rest of the world. Instead of obsessing over China’s currency manipulation as if it were a unique exception in a world of untrammeled market forces, the United States must adapt to an environment where exchange rates and trade imbalances are managed consciously and have become a legitimate subject for debate in international forums like the Group of 20.

The fact is that the rules of global capitalism have changed irrevocably since Lehman Brothers collapsed two years ago — and if the United States refuses to accept this, it will find its global leadership slipping away. The near collapse of the financial system was an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment of revelation.

If market forces cannot do something as simple as financing home mortgages, can markets be trusted to restore and maintain full employment, reduce global imbalances or prevent the destruction of the environment and prepare for a future without fossil fuels? This is the question that policymakers outside America, especially in Asia, are now asking. And the answer, as so often in economics, is “yes and no.”

Yes, because markets are the best mechanism for allocating scarce resources. No, because market investors are often short-sighted, fail to reflect widely held social objectives and sometimes make catastrophic mistakes. There are times, therefore, when governments must deliberately shape market incentives to achieve objectives that are determined by politics and not by the markets themselves, including financial stability, environmental protection, energy independence and poverty relief.

What if America decides to ignore the global reinvention of capitalism and opts instead for a nostalgic rerun of the experiment in market fundamentalism? This would not prevent the rest of the world from changing course.

Rather, it would make it likely that the newly dominant economic model will not be a product of democratic capitalism, based on Western values and American leadership. Instead, it will be an authoritarian state-led capitalism inspired by Asian values. If America opts, for the first time in history, for nostalgia and ideology instead of pragmatism and progress, then the new model of capitalism will probably be made in China, like so much else in the world these days.

Continuation of "The Secret" scam in "The Power" exploits design weakness in our minds.

The immensely popular book "The Secret" and its sequel "The Power" explicate the "law of attraction," which states that whatever you experience in life is a direct result of your thoughts. (A previous mindblog post on "The Secret" has received 31 comments.) Two psychology professors, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, suggest that this basic idea, which has been around for millennia:

...might best be understood as an advanced meme — a sort of intellectual virus — whose structure has evolved throughout history to optimally exploit a suite of weaknesses in the design of the human mind.

They then list several of the ploys or cognitive tricks used by author Rhonda Byrne, which include

-using what psychologists call “social proof.” People like to do things other people are doing because it seems to prove the value of their own actions. That is why QVC displays a running count of how many viewers have bought each item for sale, and why advice seems more credible if it appears to come from many different people rather than one…

-quoting sages like Thoreau, Gandhi and St. Augustine. This ploy, an example of a related logical fallacy called the argument from authority, taps our intuitive beliefs so forcefully that we psychology professors spend time training our introductory students to actively resist it.

-activating what might be called the illusion of potential, our readiness to believe that we have a vast reservoir of untapped abilities just waiting to be released. This illusion helps explain the popularity of products like “Baby Mozart” and video games that “train your brain” and entertain you at the same time. Unfortunately, rigorous empirical studies have repeatedly shown that none of these things bring about any meaningful improvement in intelligence.

-larding the text with references to magnets, energy and quantum mechanics. This last is a dead giveaway: whenever you hear someone appeal to impenetrable physics to explain the workings of the mind, run away — we already have disciplines called “psychology” and “neuroscience” to deal with those questions…pseudoscientific jargon serves mostly to establish an “illusion of knowledge,” as social scientists call our tendency to believe we understand something much better than we really do. In one clever experiment by the psychologist Rebecca Lawson, people who claimed to have a good understanding of how bicycles work (and who ride them every day) proved unable to draw the chain and pedals in the correct location.

-exploiting the human tendency to see things that happen in sequence — first the positive thinking, then the positive results — as forming a chain of cause and effect. This is even more likely to happen when all the stories we hear fit an expected pattern, a phenomenon psychologists call “illusory correlation.” If we hear only about the crazy coincidences (“I was thinking about getting the job offer, and right then I got the call!”), not the unconnected events (“I thought about getting the offer, but it never came” or “I wasn’t thinking about the offer, then I got it”) or even the nonevents (“I didn’t think I would get the offer, and indeed I didn’t get it”), then we get a distorted picture.

The powerful psychology behind these rhetorical tricks can distract readers from the larger illogic of ­Byrne’s books. What if a thousand people started sincerely visualizing winning the entire $200 million prize in this week’s Lotto? How would the universe sort out that mess? But it’s useless to argue with books like “The Secret” and “The Power.” They demonstrate an exquisite grasp of the reality of human nature. After all, the only other force that could explain how Rhonda Byrne put two books on top of the best-seller list is the law of attraction itself.

Our brain connections become more sparse and sharp with aging.

I have the clear feeling that my 68-year old brain is more rye-crisp and sharp, less likely to experience rich emotional immersions in a passing moment, than my 28-year old brain was. I wonder if part of the explanation for this is suggested by work of Dosenbach et al., who recently have developed an index of resting-state functional connectivity (how tightly neuronal activities in distinct brain regions are correlated) from several three different data sets based on fMRI scans of 150 to 200 individuals from ages 6 to 35 years old. Networks become more sparse and sharp with brain maturation, as long-range connections increase while short-range connections decrease. Here is their abstract and a summary figure from the paper (I don't understand the statistics, but do give definitions of the abbreviations):

Group functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging (fcMRI) studies have documented reliable changes in human functional brain maturity over development. Here we show that support vector machine-based multivariate pattern analysis extracts sufficient information from fcMRI data to make accurate predictions about individuals’ brain maturity across development. The use of only 5 minutes of resting-state fcMRI data from 238 scans of typically developing volunteers (ages 7 to 30 years) allowed prediction of individual brain maturity as a functional connectivity maturation index. The resultant functional maturation curve accounted for 55% of the sample variance and followed a nonlinear asymptotic growth curve shape. The greatest relative contribution to predicting individual brain maturity was made by the weakening of short-range functional connections between the adult brain’s major functional networks.

Figure (click to enlarge): fcMVPA (functional connectivity multivariate pattern analysis) connection and region weights. The functional connections driving the SVR (support vector machines regression) brain maturity predictor are displayed on a surface rendering of the brain. The thicknesses of the 156 consensus functional connections scale with their weights. Connections positively correlated with age are shown in orange, whereas connections negatively correlated with age are shown in light green. Also displayed are the 160 ROIs (regions of interest) scaled by their weights (1/2 sum of the weights of all the connections to and from that ROI). The ROIs are color-coded according to the adult rs-fcMRI (resting state functional connectivity MRI networks) (cingulo-opercular, black; frontoparietal, yellow; default, red; sensorimotor, cyan; occipital, green; and cerebellum, dark blue).

High income improves life evaluation, but not emotional well-being

Yet another incisive bit from Kahneman and coworkers:

Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience—the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. We find that emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale) have different correlates. Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.

Worm brains N' Us - a hint of the ancestral brain

Tomer et al. have combined gene expression profiling with image registration to find that the mushroom body of the segmented annelid worm Platynereis dumerilii shares many features with the mammalian cerebral cortex. They suggest that the mushroom body and cortex evolved from the same structure in the common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates, before the appearance of bilateral symmetry in animals. Here is their summary:

The evolution of the highest-order human brain center, the “pallium” or “cortex,” remains enigmatic. To elucidate its origins, we set out to identify related brain parts in phylogenetically distant animals, to then unravel common aspects in cellular composition and molecular architecture. Here, we compare vertebrate pallium development to that of the mushroom bodies, sensory-associative brain centers, in an annelid. Using a newly developed protocol for cellular profiling by image registration (PrImR), we obtain a high-resolution gene expression map for the developing annelid brain. Comparison to the vertebrate pallium reveals that the annelid mushroom bodies develop from similar molecular coordinates within a conserved overall molecular brain topology and that their development involves conserved patterning mechanisms and produces conserved neuron types that existed already in the protostome-deuterostome ancestors. These data indicate deep homology of pallium and mushroom bodies and date back the origin of higher brain centers to prebilaterian times.

The Willy Street Fair - the 70's still live in Madison, WI....

Williamson Street in Madison Wisconsin is like a time capsule from the hippie era of the 1970's. Here is a brief collage from the parade at the annual Willy Street fair that I attended yesterday with my partner Len.

Choice blindness at the marketplace

Hall et al. do a nice demonstration of the extent to which we can delude our sensory capacities to justify a choice or preference we have previously made:

We set up a tasting venue at a local supermarket and invited passerby shoppers to sample two different varieties of jam and tea, and to decide which alternative in each pair they preferred the most. Immediately after the participants had made their choice, we asked them to again sample the chosen alternative, and to verbally explain why they chose the way they did. At this point we secretly switched the contents of the sample containers, so that the outcome of the choice became the opposite of what the participants intended. In total, no more than a third of the manipulated trials were detected. Even for remarkably different tastes like Cinnamon-Apple and bitter Grapefruit, or the smell of Mango and Pernod was no more than half of all trials detected, thus demonstrating considerable levels of choice blindness for the taste and smell of two different consumer goods.

Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind?

I'm bouncing the post in the queue for today to bring forward this article by Jaron Lanier, from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine education issue, which I think you should read in its brief entirety. Here is just one clip to whet your appetite:

How can you be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education? Education — in the broadest sense — does what genes can’t do. It forever filters and bequeaths memories, ideas, identities, cultures and technologies. Humans compute and transfer nongenetic information between generations, creating a longitudinal intelligence that is unlike anything else on Earth. The data links that hold the structure together in time swell rhythmically to the frequency of human regeneration. This is education.

Now we have information machines. The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgment of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. If we romanticize information that shouldn’t be shielded from harsh calculations, we’ll suffer bad teachers and D.J.’s and their wares.

Right now, many of these decisions are being made by the geeks of Silicon Valley, who run a lot of things that other people pretend to run. The crucial choice of which intergenerational information is to be treated as computational grist is usually not made by educators or curriculum developers but by young engineers.

Do social moods predict financial markets, not vice versa?

The proverb "This too shall pass" , has multiple ancient sources. The version beginning with the Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur has the phrase inscribed on a ring given to great king, which therefore has the ability to make a happy man sad and a sad man happy. Consonant with this proverb, a recent book by John Casti ("Mood Matters - From Rising Skirt Lengths to the Collapse of World Powers", recently reviewed by Richard Taylor) suggests that swings in the public mood between optimism and pessimism occur in natural cycles, recognizable patterns as function of time. Casti suggest that it is these cycles that drive the peaks and troughs of financial waves, which recur at increasingly fine time scales, representing one of the earliest noted fractal patterns in a physical system. He presents a number of detailed cases that argue for mood changes preceding and influencing unfolding events, rather than vice versa. His argument is opinionated, meant to be a foil its conventional wisdom opposite, that mood is set by financial markets. He runs through a comprehensive set of examples which include the lack of long-term response of the financial markets (and therefore social mood) to dramatic events such as Pearl Harbor and John F. Kennedy's assassination. Casti suggest that the financial market serves as an optimal choice for a sociometer to measure public mood, since it is largely determined by it. (He also reviews other measures that might be used to measure optimism for the future, such as rising or falling birth rates, skyscraper construction, car color, rise and fall of skirt length, and music trends.)

Internet and Society - Swept into Superficiality

Smallwood reviews Carr's recent book "The Shallows - What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains"

As was the case for books, the development of the Internet has had a powerful influence on the way we think...In today's world of Google and Wikipedia, one hardly needs to be able to remember anything at all...Sites such as Facebook allow us to maintain social groups that far exceed the size of those in pre-Internet society...Carr's radical message is that the volume of content that we can access is increasing with a trajectory that outstrips even the most optimistic rates of evolutionary change for the physical matter of our brains. Carr argues that faced with this blizzard of content, we can no longer engage in detailed and thoughtful analysis. Rather, the rapid expansion in information has been accompanied by an increasingly superficial level of analysis.

Carr also proposes that the Internet's influence on our cognition is amplified by its design. One of Google's stated aims is to make knowledge as accessible as possible. In sharp contrast to authors such as Tolstoy or Steinbeck who demanded studious attention from their readers, the Internet aims to deliver an information fix with minimal effort...Search engines are not only experts in providing content, they are also experts in what we want...unlike books, which yielded cultural change that emphasized concentration and disciplined thought, the Internet (either by design or accident) is creating a society that specializes in the superficial.

Language about motion causes motion adaptation of our visual cortex.

Here are some fascinating observations from Dils and Boroditsky, who ask:

To what extent is hearing a story about something similar to really witnessing it? What is the nature of the representations that arise in the course of normal language processing? Do people spontaneously form visual mental images when understanding language, and if so how truly visual are these representations?

We test whether processing linguistic descriptions of motion produces sufficiently vivid mental images to cause direction-selective motion adaptation in the visual system (i.e., cause a motion aftereffect illusion). We tested for motion aftereffects (MAEs) following explicit motion imagery, and after processing literal or metaphorical motion language (without instructions to imagine). Intentionally imagining motion produced reliable MAEs. The aftereffect from processing motion language gained strength as people heard more and more of a story (participants heard motion stories in four installments, with a test after each). For the last two story installments, motion language produced reliable MAEs across participants. Individuals differed in how early in the story this effect appeared, and this difference was predicted by the strength of an individual’s MAE from imagining motion. Strong imagers (participants who showed the largest MAEs from imagining motion) were more likely to show an MAE in the course of understanding motion language than were weak imagers. The results demonstrate that processing language can spontaneously create sufficiently vivid mental images to produce direction-selective adaptation in the visual system. The timecourse of adaptation suggests that individuals may differ in how efficiently they recruit visual mechanisms in the service of language understanding. Further, the results reveal an intriguing link between the vividness of mental imagery and the nature of the processes and representations involved in language understanding.

Here is their description of motion aftereffects and their measurement.

The MAE arises when direction-selective neurons in the human visual area MT+ complex lower their firing rate as a function of adapting to motion in their preferred direction. The net difference in the firing rate of neurons selective for the direction of the adapting stimulus relative to those selective for the opposite direction of motion produces a motion illusion. For example, after adapting to upward motion, people are more likely to see a stationary stimulus or a field of randomly moving dots as moving downward, and vice versa. To quantify the size of the aftereffect, one can parametrically vary the degree of motion coherence in the test display of moving dots. The amount of coherence necessary to null the MAE provides a nice measure of the size of the aftereffect produced by the adapting stimulus.

Children, Wired: For Better and for Worse

Today's children are growing very different brains because of their interaction with technology. Baveller et al. review work showing that video games designed to be reasonably mindless result in widespread enhancements of various abilities, acting as exemplary learning tools. In another recent paper,  Green et al. show that action video games improve probabilistic inference, which provides a general mechanism for why action video game playing enhances performance in a wide variety of tasks. The Baveller review notes that “Good” things can be bad and “Bad” things can be good. The best current research suggests that “baby DVDs,” or media designed to enhance the cognitive capabilities of infants and toddlers produce no changes in cognitive development. Playing violent action video games, where avatars run about elaborate landscapes while eliminating enemies with well-placed shots, turns out to enhance vision, attention, cognition, and motor control.

For instance, action video game experience heightens the ability to view small details in cluttered scenes and to perceive dim signals, such as would be present when driving in fog. Avid players display enhanced top-down control of attention and choose among different options more rapidly. They also exhibit better visual short-term memory, and can more flexibility switch from one task to another.

The contrast between the widespread benefits observed after playing action video games and the limited value of training on “mini brain games” suggests that we may need to drastically rethink how educational games should be structured. While action game developers intuitively value emotional content, arousing experiences, and richly structured scenarios, educational games have until now, for the most part, shied away from these attractive features that video games offer. Instead, educational games have mostly exploited the interactivity and the repetitive nature of practice-makes-perfect that computer-based games can afford—often reducing the experience to automated flashcards.

Work is beginning to show how the brain is altered by learning games.

A recent seminal study compared the impact of playing a grapheme-to-phoneme game versus a mathematics game in 6- to7-year-olds on the maturation of the visual word form area (VWFA), a brain area important in mediating literacy. As assessed by functional magnetic resonance imaging, the group trained with the phoneme-to-grapheme game showed greater maturation of the VWFA than the control group, suggesting direct involvement of the VWFA in the acquisition of reading skills...Experimental trainees demonstrated significant brain changes from pre- to post-test compared with the control group, but with no significant behavioral improvement differences. Thus, brain-imaging studies may provide a more sensitive assay of the effects of technology than do behavioral studies.

Aging - How alcohol is good for you

Numerous studies have shown that non-drinkers tend to die before moderate drinkers. Jonah Lehrer points to a striking (and reassuring to me) long term study that fills in more detail, finding over a period of twenty years that the death rate among non-drinkers is twice that of moderate drinkers. Chunks from the abstract:

The sample at baseline included 1,824 individuals between the ages of 55 and 65. The database at baseline included information on daily alcohol consumption, sociodemographic factors, former problem drinking status, health factors, and social-behavioral factors. Abstention was defined as abstaining from alcohol at baseline. Death across a 20-year follow-up period was confirmed primarily by death certificate.

Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem drinking status, existing health problems, and key sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors, as well as for age and gender, substantially reduced the mortality effect for abstainers compared to moderate drinkers. However, even after adjusting for all covariates, abstainers and heavy drinkers continued to show increased mortality risks of 51 and 45%, respectively, compared to moderate drinkers.

Leher notes that apart from anti-aging antioxidant or cardiac and circulatory effects of alcohol, a correlation of alcohol and socializing and its chemical correlates (dopamine, oxytocin, etc.) should be considered.

A Dictionary of the Near Future

Douglas Coupland has produced a clever and alarming dictionary of the near future (which seems to actually be applying to the present moment). Here are just a few of his entries:

BELL’S LAW OF TELEPHONY No matter what technology is used, your monthly phone bill magically remains about the same size.
DENARRATION The process whereby one’s life stops feeling like a story.
DESELFING Willingly diluting one’s sense of self and ego by plastering the Internet with as much information as possible. (See also Omniscience Fatigue; Undeselfing)
DIMANCHOPHOBIA Fear of Sundays, a condition that reflects fear of unstructured time. Also known as acalendrical anxiety.
FICTIVE REST The inability of many people to fall asleep until after reading even the tiniest amount of fiction.
FRANKENTIME What time feels like when you realize that most of your life is spent working with and around a computer and the Internet.
INSTANT REINCARNATION The fact that most adults, no matter how great their life is, wish for radical change in their life. The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.
INTRAVINCULAR FAMILIAL SILENCE We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.
INTERNAL VOICE BLINDNESS The near universal inability of people to articulate the tone and personality of the voice that forms their interior monologue.
MALFACTORY AVERSION The ability to figure out what it is in life you don’t do well, and then to stop doing it.
OMNISCIENCE FATIGUE The burnout that comes with being able to know the answer to almost anything online.
PROCELERATION The acceleration of acceleration.
PSEUDOALIENATION The inability of humans to create genuinely alienating situations. Anything made by humans is a de facto expression of humanity. Technology cannot be alienating because humans created it. Genuinely alien technologies can be created only by aliens. Technically, a situation one might describe as alienating is, in fact, “humanating.”
ROSENWALD’S THEOREM The belief that all the wrong people have self-esteem.
UNDESELFING The attempt, usually frantic and futile, to reverse the deselfing process.

(please ignore -technorati probe- YFTQH7ZAY5KS)

Men's dance moves that catch a woman's eyes.

A loyal mindblog follower who occasionally sends me stuff he finds interesting has just forwarded this gem,  the associated videos are here and here.   The abstract:

Male movements serve as courtship signals in many animal species, and may honestly reflect the genotypic and/or phenotypic quality of the individual. Attractive human dance moves, particularly those of males, have been reported to show associations with measures of physical strength, prenatal androgenization and symmetry. Here we use advanced three-dimensional motion-capture technology to identify possible biomechanical differences between women's perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ male dancers. Nineteen males were recorded using the ‘Vicon’ motion-capture system while dancing to a basic rhythm; controlled stimuli in the form of avatars were then created in the form of 15 s video clips, and rated by 39 females for dance quality. Initial analyses showed that 11 movement variables were significantly positively correlated with perceived dance quality. Linear regression subsequently revealed that three movement measures were key predictors of dance quality; these were variability and amplitude of movements of the neck and trunk, and speed of movements of the right knee. In summary, we have identified specific movements within men's dance that influence women's perceptions of dancing ability. We suggest that such movements may form honest signals of male quality in terms of health, vigour or strength, though this remains to be confirmed.

Differences in brain connectivity drive cognitive differences

Forstmann et al. do some interesting work on examining pathways that regulate how readily we respond (i.e. decrease response thresholds) to decisions varying in their demands for speed versus accuracy. The figure showing the relevant structures (the striatum and subthalmic nucleus in the basal ganglia which are regulated by the cortex, click to enlarge) is taken from an academic website. Their abstract:

When people make decisions they often face opposing demands for response speed and response accuracy, a process likely mediated by response thresholds. According to the striatal hypothesis, people decrease response thresholds by increasing activation from cortex to striatum, releasing the brain from inhibition. According to the STN hypothesis, people decrease response thresholds by decreasing activation from cortex to subthalamic nucleus (STN); a decrease in STN activity is likewise thought to release the brain from inhibition and result in responses that are fast but error-prone. To test these hypotheses—both of which may be true—we conducted two experiments on perceptual decision making in which we used cues to vary the demands for speed vs. accuracy. In both experiments, behavioral data and mathematical model analyses confirmed that instruction from the cue selectively affected the setting of response thresholds. In the first experiment we used ultra-high-resolution 7T structural MRI to locate the STN precisely. We then used 3T structural MRI and probabilistic tractography to quantify the connectivity between the relevant brain areas. The results showed that participants who flexibly change response thresholds (as quantified by the mathematical model) have strong structural connections between presupplementary motor area and striatum. This result was confirmed in an independent second experiment. In general, these findings show that individual differences in elementary cognitive tasks are partly driven by structural differences in brain connectivity. Specifically, these findings support a cortico-striatal control account of how the brain implements adaptive switches between cautious and risky behavior.