The Empathetic Brain

Christian Keyser, who does research on mirror neurons at The Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, sent me an email yesterday pointing out his new book on human empathy. My scan of the copy he sent to me finds the book to written in a friendly, engaging, and accessible style for a non-technical audience. I point it out here because it is available as a Kindle Book at Amazon, and the price is right ($3.00).

The quest for validation.

Out of the virtual diarrhea of commentary on Anthony Weiner's weiner, the commentary by Ross Douthat struck a chord with me, and so I muse a bit following these clips from his piece:

In the sad case of Representative Anthony Weiner’s virtual adultery, the Internet era’s defining vice has been thrown into sharp relief. It isn’t lust or smut or infidelity, though online life encourages all three. It’s a desperate, adolescent narcissism...his “partners” existed less to titillate him than to hold up mirrors to his own vanity...a growing body of research suggests that American self-involvement is actually reaching an apogee in the age of Facebook and Twitter.. In a culture increasingly defined by what Christine Rosen describes as the “constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves),” just being a United States congressman isn’t enough. You have to hit the House gym and look good coming out of the shower, and then find a Twitter follower who’s willing to tell you just “how big” you really are...Facebook and Twitter did not forge the culture of narcissism. But they serve as a hall of mirrors in which it flourishes as never before — a “vast virtual gallery,” as Rosen has written, whose self-portraits mainly testify to “the timeless human desire for attention.”

After feeling a bit superior reading this article about 'poor Anthony Weiner' I turn it around to try this as a description of myself. Why do I write this blog, why do I put effort into piano performance and posting the videos of recent playing? In my most lucid moments I genuinely feel that the "I-it" relationship is primary, my own personal experience of immersing myself in great ideas or great music, and then secondarily sharing this experience with others. But it is also the case that another Deric, the kid who showed up at 4th grade show-and-tell with his grandfather's dress U.S. Calvary sword to impress everyone, is a motive engine. So I also stand guilty as charged above. Still, "the timeless human desire for attention" is the inborn mechanism by which our brains grow and we become selves by mirroring and then internalizing the selves of others. To do this we must grab the attention of others, and thus have a desire to perform so that they will be impressed. At some point, however, we hope to have ourselves more or less together as adults, and let go off our earlier insatiable longing for validation. (It is not surprising that the most common outlets for remnants of this longing are real or imagined fantasies of sexual attractiveness.)

Shame and honor drive cooperation

In Biological Letters, an interesting and simple result from Jacquet et. al.:

Can the threat of being shamed or the prospect of being honoured lead to greater cooperation? We test this hypothesis with anonymous six-player public goods experiments, an experimental paradigm used to investigate problems related to overusing common resources. We instructed the players that the two individuals who were least generous after 10 rounds would be exposed to the group. As the natural antithesis, we also test the effects of honour by revealing the identities of the two players who were most generous. The non-monetary, reputational effects induced by shame and honour each led to approximately 50 per cent higher donations to the public good when compared with the control, demonstrating that both shame and honour can drive cooperation and can help alleviate the tragedy of the commons.

Debate on optimal mechanisms for political and social change

David Brooks has done what seems to me a balanced piece on the fundamental philosophical issues underlying the current debate on reform of entitlements, role of government,etc. I find myself less reflexively opposed to his conservative sympathies after reading his description of different strategies for effecting change. The basic issue boils down to "What is the best mechanism for effecting change in enormously complex social systems." Brooks, in the tradition of the British philosopher Oakeshott (seems to me he should have referenced his own essay on Oakeshott), thinks that decentralized bottom-up market based solutions are the best way to reform medical care, noting that

...competition-based plans (favored by Republicans) have improved outcomes in many places. Such plans cover employees of the University of California and state employees in California, Wisconsin and Minnesota. They also note that the Medicare prescription drug benefit also uses a competition model. Consumers have been adept at negotiating a complex marketplace, and costs are 41 percent below expectations.

The alternative (liberal, Democratic) view is that the best mechanism of change is top-down control that

...seeks to concentrate decision-making and cost-control power in the hands of centralized experts. Under the Obama health care law, a team of 15 officials will be created to discover best practices and come up with cost-cutting measures. There will also be a Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation in Washington to organize medical innovation. Centralized officials will decide how to set national reimbursement rates.

They argue that

Health care is phenomenally complicated. Providers have much more information than consumers. Insurance companies are rapacious and are not in the business of optimizing care.

Brooks:

...there is no dispositive empirical proof about which method is best — the centralized technocratic one or the decentralized market-based one. Politicians wave studies, but they’re really just reflecting their overall worldviews. Democrats have much greater faith in centralized expertise. Republicans (at least the most honest among them) believe that the world is too complicated, knowledge is too imperfect. They have much greater faith in the decentralized discovery process of the market.

So here we go, another either/or Manichean kind of presentation... maybe we should reference a biological model, take a lesson from how our brains organize our behavior, both from the bottom up AND from the top down, with feedback loops continually connecting the two.

Searching for the True Self

Joshua Knobe writes a piece for The Stone, a forum for contemporary philosopers in The New York Times Opinionator. The issue posed is:

...which aspect of a person counts as that person’s true self?

Many believe that the true self lies precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions...If we look to the philosophical tradition, we find a relatively straightforward answer to this question. This answer, endorsed by numerous different philosophers in different ways, says that what is most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection. A person might find herself having various urges, whims or fleeting emotions, but these are not who she most fundamentally is. If you want to know who she truly is, you would have to look to the moments when she stops to reflect and think about her deepest values.

...people outside the world of philosophy...are immediately drawn to the very opposite view. The true self, they suggest, lies precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while our ability to reflect is just a hindrance that gets in the way of this true self’s expression.

Knobe describes an 'experimental philosophy' experiment done with another colleague that presented a series of question to liberals and conservatives and found a systematic connection between people’s own values and their judgments about the true self. Conservative participants were more inclined to say that a person’s true self had emerged on conservative items, while liberals were more inclined to say that the person’s true self had emerged on liberal items.

Knobe has an appointment at Yale in both Cognitive Science and in Philosophy. He is a co-editor, with Shaun Nichols, of the volume “Experimental Philosophy.” Given his cognitive science appointment, I am struck that he doesn't bring up the question of whether "The True Self" is a viable concept at all, given what we now know about how our brains clearly construct not one, but a multitude of selves, all of which are essentially confabulations tested by their utility (see the sundry web lectures I list in the left column of this blog).

A devolution of modern nation states?

I've been reading Fukayama's new book on the origins of political order and the evolution, first in England, of government with the three pillars of (1) The rule of law, (2) Strong central authority, and (3) Accountability of the leader. This is the form to which advanced modern nation states nominally adhere (even if they hold sham elections, are kleptocracies lacking rule of law, or have no check on central authority - think of Russia, China, former Soviet republics, or many African states.)

It strikes me that an consequence of the ultra-connectivity allowed by the internet may be a devolution of this nation state model, as an echo chamber mechanism allows people with different political or religious philosophies - the modern equivalent of the tribes that have dominated most of human history - to sequester themselves with like minded people reinforcing and making more extreme their world view. Thus we have phenomena like our current failure of U.S. governance as conservative and liberal camps appear to care more about their tribal agendas than the viability of the larger nation state. We seem to be moving in the direction of Afganistan or Iraq, where tribal loyalties are currently preventing the formation of effective modern nation states.

(Added note on 6/10/11 - Today's NYTimes has an interesting related piece by Roger Cohenwhich is well worth reading, from which I pull this quote:

...at a time of economic hardship, the movements in the West with momentum are nationalist — like Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France or the Tea Party movement in the United States. Tribe trumps technology’s integrative tug. But the engine of that tug is remorseless and will in time prevail.

Chopin Fantasy in F Minor

This is the third piece played in a house concert for friends at my home on Twin Valley Road in Middleton WI, on May 22, 2011. I'm doing just one run through of each of the pieces from that concert, this recording was made on June 3. I'm not patient enough to do the multiple takes that would be required to get a version without a section of scrambled notes happening at some unpredictable point.

Dopamine gene variants correlate with learning style.

In the Editor's choice section of the recent Science magazine Pamela Hines points to work by Kegel et al.:

Some children, particularly those with a more fearful temperament, are more sensitive than others to the influence of parents, teachers, and environment. Studying preschoolers, Kegel et al. attempt to link this with a particular genetic polymorphism. Children played a literacy-geared computer game that delivered instruction and assignments to all participants, but differed in whether it delivered feedback about the children's choices. A feature that distinguished the groups of children was whether they carried the long variant of the dopamine D4 receptor gene, which is associated with lower dopamine reception efficiency. Children who carried this polymorphism were more susceptible to the effects of feedback from the computer program. They outperformed the control group when feedback guided their learning, and they did worse than the control group when feedback was absent. In contrast, children with the short variant of the gene seemed to be unruffled by the presence or absence of feedback. For education, just as for shoes, a good fit to the individual produces the best result.

Here is the Kegel et al. abstract:

Not every child seems equally susceptible to the same parental, educational, or environmental influences even if cognitive level is similar. This study is the first randomized controlled trial to apply the differential susceptibility paradigm to education in relation to children's genotype and early literacy skills. A randomized pretest–posttest control group design was used to examine the effects of the Intelligent Tutoring System Living Letters. Two intervention groups were created, 1 receiving feedback and 1 completing the program without feedback, and 1 control group. Carriers of the long variant of the dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4 7-repeat) profited most from the computer program with positive feedback, whereas they performed at the lowest level of early literacy skills in the absence of such feedback. Our findings suggest that behind modest overall educational intervention effects a strong effect on a subgroup of susceptible children may be hidden.

A Haydn Fantasy

This Haydn Fantasy in C Major is the second piece performed in a house concert for friends on May 22, 2011. This recording was made on June 3, 2011 on my Steinway B at Twin Valley in Middleton Wisconsin.

Social influence undermines "The Wisdom of Crowds"

Interesting observations from Lorenz et al:

Social groups can be remarkably smart and knowledgeable when their averaged judgements are compared with the judgements of individuals. Already Galton [Galton F (1907) Nature 75:7] found evidence that the median estimate of a group can be more accurate than estimates of experts. This wisdom of crowd effect was recently supported by examples from stock markets, political elections, and quiz shows [Surowiecki J (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds]. In contrast, we demonstrate by experimental evidence (N = 144) that even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks. In the experiment, subjects could reconsider their response to factual questions after having received average or full information of the responses of other subjects. We compare subjects’ convergence of estimates and improvements in accuracy over five consecutive estimation periods with a control condition, in which no information about others’ responses was provided. Although groups are initially “wise,” knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines the wisdom of crowd effect in three different ways. The “social influence effect” diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error. The “range reduction effect” moves the position of the truth to peripheral regions of the range of estimates so that the crowd becomes less reliable in providing expertise for external observers. The “confidence effect” boosts individuals’ confidence after convergence of their estimates despite lack of improved accuracy. Examples of the revealed mechanism range from misled elites to the recent global financial crisis.

Antiinflammatory drugs oppose antidepressant drug action

Life just got much more complicated for doctors prescribing both antidepressant and anti-inflamatory drugs to the same patient. Greengard and colleagues have found a specific molecular pathway linking cytokines and the actions of antidepressant drugs. Their findings confound established wisdom, because they imply that brain cytokines exert antidepressant actions and mediate the influences of the principal serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant drugs. Doctors now should weigh the benefits of antiinflammatory agents against their possible lessening of the effectiveness of antidepressant drugs.

Anti-inflammatory drugs achieve their therapeutic actions at least in part by regulation of cytokine formation. A “cytokine hypothesis” of depression is supported by the observation that depressed individuals have elevated plasma levels of certain cytokines compared with healthy controls. Here we investigated a possible interaction between antidepressant agents and anti-inflammatory agents on antidepressant-induced behaviors and on p11, a biochemical marker of depressive-like states and antidepressant responses. We found that widely used anti-inflammatory drugs antagonize both biochemical and behavioral responses to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). In contrast to the levels detected in serum, we found that frontal cortical levels of certain cytokines (e.g., TNFα and IFNγ) were increased by serotonergic antidepressants and that these effects were inhibited by anti-inflammatory agents. The antagonistic effect of anti-inflammatory agents on antidepressant-induced behaviors was confirmed by analysis of a dataset from a large-scale real-world human study, “sequenced treatment alternatives to relieve depression” (STAR*D), underscoring the clinical significance of our findings. Our data indicate that clinicians should carefully balance the therapeutic benefits of anti-inflammatory agents versus the potentially negative consequences of antagonizing the therapeutic efficacy of antidepressant agents in patients suffering from depression.

The echo chamber online.

Natasha Singer does an interesting article noting Eli Pariser's new book “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You,” and citing the opinions of several web gurus on how we are increasingly being encased in cocoons of information (passed through filters knowing our previous behavior) that reinforce our existing opinions and tastes.

Mozart - Fantasia in C Minor

Len and I held our annual Musical/Social at our Twin Valley Road home Sunday afternoon May 22. I performed this program for about 50 friends:

An afternoon of Fantasias:
Mozart - Fantasia in C Minor
Haydn - Fantasia in C Major
Chopin - Fantasy in F Minor
Liszt - Années de pèlerinage - Vallee d'Obermann
Debussy - Estampes III. Jardins sous la pluie

I did a video recording of the performance, but the conditions were not optimal, with background noises, etc.. so I am over the next period of time going to make a proper high quality audio recording of each of the pieces, synching it a video recording stripped of its lower quality sound. The upload of the first of these to YouTube is below, The Mozart Fantasia in C Minor.

“Representational rigidity” in our aging brains

Great...here we have Yassa et al. showing how a portion of the brain is doing what my knee joints are slowing doing, becoming more rigid with age. They look at the "place cells" in the hippocampus thought to be involved with discriminating between similar patterns. Long-term memory functions deteriorate with age, and the hippocampus, which play a role in learning new facts and remembering events, is one the sites that undergo the earliest changes.

Converging data from rodents and humans have demonstrated an age-related decline in pattern separation abilities (the ability to discriminate among similar experiences). Several studies have proposed the dentate and CA3 subfields of the hippocampus as the potential locus of this change. Specifically, these studies identified rigidity in place cell remapping in similar environments in the CA3. We used high-resolution fMRI to examine activity profiles in the dentate gyrus and CA3 in young and older adults as stimulus similarity was incrementally varied. We report evidence for “representational rigidity” in older adults’ dentate/CA3 that is linked to behavioral discrimination deficits. Using ultrahigh-resolution diffusion imaging, we quantified both the integrity of the perforant path as well as dentate/CA3 dendritic changes and found that both were correlated with dentate/CA3 functional rigidity. These results highlight structural and functional alterations in the hippocampal network that predict age-related changes in memory function and present potential targets for intervention.

MindBlog posts this summer.

With the arrival of the summer, and the start of my 11th year as an emeritus (i.e. retired) University of Wisconsin professor, I am wanting to relax the self-imposed obligation or drumbeat of a daily blog post. I am keenly aware of how my attentional capacities are slowly waning, as the number of little grey cells between the ears decreases. The time I spend scanning the tables of contents of various journals, reading a much larger number of articles than are mentioned in posts, and frequently settling for ‘good enough’ blog posts, is detracting from my getting into potential longer term personal and professional projects. So, for the next period of time, I'm going to spend less time cruising for material, and have a go at only posting what I come across that really strikes me.

Nightclub owner? Use perfume...

Here is an amusing bit...not surprisingly, smells in the environment change behavior. The summary from Science Alert:

In nightclubs, body odors and the stench of stale beer stand out. Most nightclubs now forbid smoking which, for better or worse, used to cover up those smells. Can giving patrons whiffs of something more fragrant make them happy and coax them into buying more drinks? A private company called MoodScent in Amsterdam, whose mission is to "revolutionize the nightclub experience," thinks so. Along with a pair of university researchers, they pumped orange, seawater, and peppermint scents into a set of three clubs in Germany and Holland over different nights. They filmed the clubbers and rated them on their dancing, and had them fill out questionnaires as they left. Online in Chemosensory Perception this month, the authors report that visitors were more cheerful, danced harder, and were more confident in approaching the opposite sex when there was a scent—it didn't matter which one. The clubs' alcohol sales were higher, too.

Control your spotlight

Here are excerpts from Jonah Lehrer's contribution to the Edge.org question "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"  He discusses Mischel's work showing that it is not willpower, but "strategic allocation of attention" that leads to successful life outcomes.  His simple experiment was to offer 4-year olds either one marshmallow immediately, or two marshmallows if they waited while he stepped out for a few minutes. Mischel:

...discovered something interesting when he studied the tiny percentage of kids who could successfully wait for the second treat. Without exception, these "high delayers" all relied on the same mental strategy: they found a way to keep themselves from thinking about the treat, directing their gaze away from the yummy marshmallow. Some covered their eyes or played hide-and-seek underneath the desk. Others sang songs from "Sesame Street," or repeatedly tied their shoelaces, or pretended to take a nap. Their desire wasn't defeated — it was merely forgotten. ...Mischel refers to this skill as the "strategic allocation of attention," and he argues that it's the skill underlying self-control. Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that's wrong — willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory.

...this cognitive skill...seems to be a core part of success in the real world...when Mischel followed up with the initial subjects 13 years later — they were now high school seniors — he realized that performance on the marshmallow task was highly predictive on a vast range of metrics. Those kids who struggled to wait at the age of four were also more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. Most impressive, perhaps, were the academic numbers: The little kid who could wait fifteen minutes for their marshmallow had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

These correlations demonstrate the importance of learning to strategically allocate our attention. When we properly control the spotlight, we can resist negative thoughts and dangerous temptations. We can walk away from fights and improve our odds against addiction. Our decisions are driven by the facts and feelings bouncing around the brain — the allocation of attention allows us to direct this haphazard process, as we consciously select the thoughts we want to think about.

Furthermore, this mental skill is only getting more valuable. We live, after all, in the age of information, which makes the ability to focus on the important information incredibly important. (Herbert Simon said it best: "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.") The brain is a bounded machine and the world is a confusing place, full of data and distractions — intelligence is the ability to parse the data so that it makes just a little bit more sense. Like willpower, this ability requires the strategic allocation of attention.

Predicting the conscious experience of other people

Here is a fascinating abstract for one of the lectures, by Geraint Rees and colleagues, at the upcoming 15th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. Mind reading with machines may be closer than we think.

There has been considerable interest in using multivariate decoding techniques applied to fMRI signals in order to decode the contents of consciousness. The use of such signals has inherent disadvantages due to the delay of the hemodynamic response. Moreover to date it has not been shown possible to generalize the decoding of brain signals from one individual to another. This limits the potential utility of such approaches. Here we used a different approach that circumvented these difficulties by using magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals to decode the contents of consciousness, and to test whether such correlates generalized reliably across individuals. We recorded the MEG of 8 healthy participants while they viewed an intermittently presented binocular rivalry stimulus consisting of a face and a grating. Using a leave-one-out cross-validation procedure, we trained support vector machines on the MEG signals to decode the rivalry percept. Decoding was significantly better than chance in all participants. We then tested whether a support vector machine trained on MEG signals from one participant could successfully decode the rivalry percept of another. Again, decoding accuracy was significantly better than chance. These findings demonstrate that it is possible to decode perception independently of physical stimulation using MEG signals in near real time in a way that generalizes across individuals. Our findings indicate that certain neural mechanisms universally covary with the contents of visual consciousness, and mark a potentially important step in the design of devices for decoding the contents of consciousness in individuals unable to report their experience behaviorally.

Musical experience enhances hearing in the aging brain

Parbery-Clark et al. perk me up a bit with this bit of work, suggesting that without my musical training, my increasing difficulty in hearing speech in noise might be worse!

Much of our daily communication occurs in the presence of background noise, compromising our ability to hear. While understanding speech in noise is a challenge for everyone, it becomes increasingly difficult as we age. Although aging is generally accompanied by hearing loss, this perceptual decline cannot fully account for the difficulties experienced by older adults for hearing in noise. Decreased cognitive skills concurrent with reduced perceptual acuity are thought to contribute to the difficulty older adults experience understanding speech in noise. Given that musical experience positively impacts speech perception in noise in young adults (ages 18–30), we asked whether musical experience benefits an older cohort of musicians (ages 45–65), potentially offsetting the age-related decline in speech-in-noise perceptual abilities and associated cognitive function (i.e., working memory). Consistent with performance in young adults, older musicians demonstrated enhanced speech-in-noise perception relative to nonmusicians along with greater auditory, but not visual, working memory capacity. By demonstrating that speech-in-noise perception and related cognitive function are enhanced in older musicians, our results imply that musical training may reduce the impact of age-related auditory decline.

Guilt motivates cooperation

An article by Chang et al. in Cell examines neural, psychological, and economic bases of guilt aversion. They use fMRI during a game involving trust to demonstrate that signals rising in the insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and elsewhere promote cooperative behavior in the game, possibly facilitated by the psychological motivation to avoid disappointing others. The abstract includes an outline summary and a video discussion of the work.

Highlights
Guilt can be formally operationalized as failing to live up to another's expectations
Guilt aversion motivates cooperative behavior
Decisions which minimize future guilt are associated with insula, SMA, DLPFC, TPJ
Decisions which maximize financial reward are associated with vmPFC, NAcc, DMPFC

Summary
Why do people often choose to cooperate when they can better serve their interests by acting selfishly? One potential mechanism is that the anticipation of guilt can motivate cooperative behavior. We utilize a formal model of this process in conjunction with fMRI to identify brain regions that mediate cooperative behavior while participants decided whether or not to honor a partner's trust. We observed increased activation in the insula, supplementary motor area, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), and temporal parietal junction when participants were behaving consistent with our model, and found increased activity in the ventromedial PFC, dorsomedial PFC, and nucleus accumbens when they chose to abuse trust and maximize their financial reward. This study demonstrates that a neural system previously implicated in expectation processing plays a critical role in assessing moral sentiments that in turn can sustain human cooperation in the face of temptation.