How we listen to music...

Adam Gopnik has a very nice essay in The New Yorker on the mysteries of sound and the quest for 3-D recording. I was struck by his description of how the way we listen to music has changed. (I sometimes think with nostalgia about growing up in a 1950's household where "Hi Fidelity" was taken very seriously, trying as closely as possible to re-create the experience in the concert hall. Good old analog vinyl records played on mechanically sophisticated turntables with fancy diamond needles tracking the grooves, state of the art amplifiers, and speakers.... And now I have the best quality wireless speaker one can get, but it still must depend entirely on the compressed audio computer file formats such as .mp3 or.aiff, that throw away the richness I used to know.) His comments on how the music listening of his teen-age kids has changed, they:

...have an entirely different way of listening. They ignore the glowing-tube amp and classy articulate speakers in our living room; they bounce instead to tinny earbuds, and often spend hours listening to Taylor Swift or Radiohead on the still more tinny speakers of their computers. Sound quality seems secondary to some other thing they take from music...they have a more limited conception of larger forms, of the... of the symphony's three or four parts, of the swell and structure of a cantata. It isn't a question of classical tastes against pop; it's a question of small forms heard in motion against large form heard with solemn intent. "Sgt. Pepper: baffles them as much as Beethoven's Ninth. They snatch at music as we snatched at movies, filling our heads with plural images.

Gopnik's article presents fascinating interviews with current music researchers, from engineers like Edgar Choueiri to brain scientists such as Zatorre and Levitin at McGill University in Montreal. (MindBlog has several posts on their work.)

Internal threats to our bodies trigger different fear system from external threats.

A large volume of work has documented the amygdala's role in fear, and now Feinstein et al. present a surprising finding that carbon dioxide inhalation evokes fear and panic in three patients with bilateral amygdala damage (who feel no fear from external threats). These results indicate that the amygdala is not required for fear triggered internally rather than by external threats.  Here is the abstract:

Decades of research have highlighted the amygdala's influential role in fear. We found that inhalation of 35% CO₂ evoked not only fear, but also panic attacks, in three rare patients with bilateral amygdala damage. These results indicate that the amygdala is not required for fear and panic, and make an important distinction between fear triggered by external threats from the environment versus fear triggered internally by CO₂.

Why do these 'fearless' patients feel fear when CO₂ levels in their blood are increased? The authors suggest:

...that all of these other stimuli were exteroceptive in nature, mainly processed through visual and auditory pathways that project to the amygdala. In contrast, CO₂ acts internally at acid-activated chemoreceptors and causes an array of physiological changes. Thus, CO₂ might engage interoceptive afferent sensory pathways that project to the brainstem, diencephalon and insular cortex. In addition, many brain areas outside the amygdala possess CO2 and pH-sensitive chemoreceptors, including acid-sensing ion channels. Thus, CO₂ may directly activate extra-amygdalar brain structures that underlie fear and panic, which may help to explain the apparent discrepancy between these findings and previous work in mice. In either case, our results indicate that, in humans, the internal threat signaled by CO₂ is detected and interpreted as fear and panic despite the absence of an intact amygdala.

Wisconsin Public Radio series on consciousness

I've been wanting to point to an engaging series of interviews on consciousness presented by Wisconsin Public Radio either for listening, or in transcript form.  A wide range of philosophers, scientists, and new age gurus are engaged, including Marvin Minsky, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, Alva Noe, Susan Blackmore, David Chalmers, Christof Koch, Guilio Tononi,  Stanislav Grof, Michael Gazzaniga, Depak Chopra, V.S. Ramachandran, Oliver Sacks, and many others.  It's quite an amazing and extensive list.   

We can retroactively edit our conscious experience.

Have you ever had the experience of tuning out someone who was droning on in a conversation or lecture that was boring you, then when suddenly being challenged by "Are you listening, what did I just say?," being surprised that you could summon up some recall of what they said, even though you had been completely ignoring it? This would be an example of how our perceptions and our consciousness can be two different things. We experience time very differently from what it really is, subjective and objective time are not the same. Our consciousness is more than just a movie that's playing in your head that you see once the processing is done. For example, recent work from Sergent and collaborators suggests that we can go back in time for at least a half a second and reintegrate something into our experience that we had previously ignored. From a review by Tia Ghose:

Study participants were shown groups of lines appearing in a circle on either the right or the left side of the screen before they disappeared. Sometimes the lines were too faint to consciously notice, while other times they were very obvious. In some of the trials where the lines were very faint, the researchers drew participants' attention to the spot where the lines had been by briefly dimming the circle — creating more contrast between the circle and the background. That "cueing of attention" happened up to a half-second after the lines disappeared. Afterward, the team asked the students what they saw. When the team had drawn attention to the spot where the lines had been, people were more likely to report having seen them "quite well." In essence, the participants had experienced retro-perception, the bizarre experience in which their brains added the lines to their conscious memory after the lines had disappeared.

Here is the Sergent et al. abstract:

Is our perceptual experience of a stimulus entirely determined during the early buildup of the sensory representation, within 100 to 150 ms following stimulation? Or can later influences, such as sensory reactivation, still determine whether we become conscious of a stimulus? Late visual reactivation can be experimentally induced by postcueing attention after visual stimulus offset [5]. In a contrary approach from previous work on postcued attention and visual short-term memory, which used multiple item displays [6 and 7], we tested the influence of postcued attention on perception, using a single visual stimulus (Gabor patch) at threshold contrast. We showed that attracting attention to the stimulus location 100 to 400 ms after presentation still drastically improved the viewers’ objective capacity to detect its presence and to discriminate its orientation, along with drastic increase in subjective visibility. This retroperception effect demonstrates that postcued attention can retrospectively trigger the conscious perception of a stimulus that would otherwise have escaped consciousness. It was known that poststimulus events could either suppress consciousness, as in masking, or alter conscious content, as in the flash-lag illusion. Our results show that conscious perception can also be triggered by an external event several hundred ms after stimulus offset, underlining unsuspected temporal flexibility in conscious perception.

Deric Bownds' MindBlog - 7th Anniversary

I just realized that today, 7 years ago on Feb. 8, 2006, was my first posting on this blog, which I started after reading a New York Times article on the emerging blogging craze. Now, 3,024 posts later, I'm sort of incredulous that it has stayed around so long. It appears, from Feedburner monitoring that has been going on since June of 2006, that there are now about 2,500 subscribers to MindBlog's feed, there are an average of ~380 significant engagements of readers with the blog every day, and there have been a total of about 1.5 million views. The paste in below shows postings that have received with most views. Just keeping up with MindBlog maintenance is a bit of effort. Every week 3-4 emails come in requesting quest postings or cross links, or offering revenue opportunities. My cut and paste boilerplate response: "I find that I'm receiving a large number of similar requests,  and have a policy of entering on my site only content that I initiate.   I have no commercial links on the site and am uninterested in revenue." 

I must apologize if your comments do not appear immediately, but I've been forced to start reviewing them again to weed out those that are are platitudes with links to commercial sites - they  now outnumber legitimate comments. 

About this time every year I have an identity crisis over whether I should continue the blog and/or develop a next lecture/essay topic, and/or write a book, spend more time with my piano...or just lie in the sun a bit more...  I usually just keep plugging along doing what I have been doing... Soon to be 71 years old, I find the motivation to change my habits declining.  And,  I am gratified by the occasional "thank you for the blog"  email that I get. 

The cocktail party effect is enhanced by vision.

Golumbic et al. show that watching someone we are trying to hear and understand in a crowded noisy setting sharpens up the auditory processing in our brains that suppresses unwanted sounds from our surround:

Our ability to selectively attend to one auditory signal amid competing input streams, epitomized by the “Cocktail Party” problem, continues to stimulate research from various approaches. How this demanding perceptual feat is achieved from a neural systems perspective remains unclear and controversial. It is well established that neural responses to attended stimuli are enhanced compared with responses to ignored ones, but responses to ignored stimuli are nonetheless highly significant, leading to interference in performance. We investigated whether congruent visual input of an attended speaker enhances cortical selectivity in auditory cortex, leading to diminished representation of ignored stimuli. We recorded magnetoencephalographic signals from human participants as they attended to segments of natural continuous speech. Using two complementary methods of quantifying the neural response to speech, we found that viewing a speaker's face enhances the capacity of auditory cortex to track the temporal speech envelope of that speaker. This mechanism was most effective in a Cocktail Party setting, promoting preferential tracking of the attended speaker, whereas without visual input no significant attentional modulation was observed.

These neurophysiological results underscore the importance of visual input in resolving perceptual ambiguity in a noisy environment. Since visual cues in speech precede the associated auditory signals, they likely serve a predictive role in facilitating auditory processing of speech, perhaps by directing attentional resources to appropriate points in time when to-be-attended acoustic input is expected to arrive.

Aging, sleep, and memory.

Events during a day that we think important to remember are held in short term memory storage by an active hippocampus. Then, during deep, non-REM, slow brain wave sleep, enhanced connectivity between the hippocampus and frontal cortex cortex allow transfer of the information to long term storage in frontal and temporal lobes. It is also know that the duration of this deep sleep diminishes as our frontal lobes diminish in size (atrophy) with aging. Mandor et al., in worked pointed to in an article by Benedict Carey, have done an interesting study suggesting that the interaction of these factors represents a neuropatholgical pathway associated with cognitive decline in later life. Here is their abstract:

Aging has independently been associated with regional brain atrophy, reduced slow wave activity (SWA) during non–rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and impaired long-term retention of episodic memories. However, whether the interaction of these factors represents a neuropatholgical pathway associated with cognitive decline in later life remains unknown. We found that age-related medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) gray-matter atrophy was associated with reduced NREM SWA in older adults, the extent to which statistically mediated the impairment of overnight sleep–dependent memory retention. Moreover, this memory impairment was further associated with persistent hippocampal activation and reduced task-related hippocampal-prefrontal cortex functional connectivity, potentially representing impoverished hippocampal-neocortical memory transformation. Together, these data support a model in which age-related mPFC atrophy diminishes SWA, the functional consequence of which is impaired long-term memory. Such findings suggest that sleep disruption in the elderly, mediated by structural brain changes, represents a contributing factor to age-related cognitive decline in later life.

Racial essentialism correlates with less domain-general creativity.

Interesting observations from a group at Tel Aviv University:

Individuals who believe that racial groups have fixed underlying essences use stereotypes more than do individuals who believe that racial categories are arbitrary and malleable social-political constructions. Would this essentialist mind-set also lead to less creativity? We suggest that the functional utility derived from essentialism induces a habitual closed-mindedness that transcends the social domain and hampers creativity. Across studies, using both individual difference measures (in a pilot test) and experimental manipulations, we found that an essentialist mind-set is indeed hazardous for creativity, with the relationship mediated by motivated closed-mindedness. These results held across samples of majority cultural-group members (Caucasian Americans, Israelis) and minority-group members (Asian Americans), as well as across different measures of creativity (flexibility, association, insight). Our findings have important implications for understanding the connection between racial intolerance and creativity.

Some details: Participants in the study were primed by reading an article that vividly described fictitious scientific research supporting either racial essentialist or nonessentialist beliefs, respectively. (Work by others had established the effectiveness of these articles in activating racial essentialism or nonessentialism mind-sets). A control group read neither article. Then, in an ostensibly unrelated research project, they measured creativity in the three conditions using the Remote Associates Test (RAT). This task, which assesses participants’ ability to form a new combination that links mentally distant associative elements, requires identifying a single target word that is strongly associated with three distinct stimulus words (e.g., given the words “manners,” “round,” and “tennis,” the correct answer would be “table”). Their experiment suggesting closed-mindedness as the mediator of the essentialism-creativity link used the same priming procedure and assayed insight creativity using the Duncker candle problem, in which participants have to figure out how — using only a candle, a pack of matches, and a box containing tacks — they can attach the candle to a wall so that the candle burns properly without dripping wax on the table or floor. (The correct solution requires the ability to relax preexisting assumptions about functions of the items and use the box of tacks as a candleholder.)

"Chasing Ice" - watching a glacier calving

 I have to pass on this amazing video shared by Wisconsin colleague John Young, showing one of the breakdowns of a glacier that has retreated as much in the past 10 years as in the previous 100 years:

Early musical training - sensitive period in brain white matter plasticity

MindBlog has noted a number of studies that document beneficial effects of early music training on adult brain function. Now Steele and collaborators make observations that may partially explain why musicians such as Yo-Yo Ma, Oscar Peterson, and Pablo Casals, who all began training in early childhood before the age of 7 years, are so highly skilled. The authors examine the bundle of nerve fibers, the corpus callosum, that links our two cerebral hemispheres. Playing a musical instrument requires the coordinated action of the two hands and interhemispheric interactions mediated by the corpus callosum have been shown to play a prominent role in bimanual coordination. They measure the connectivity of this nerve fiber bundle using MRI. Edited from their introduction:

...there may be a sensitive period when early musical training has greater effects on the brain and behavior than training later in life...A sensitive period is defined as a developmental window where experience has long-lasting effects on the brain and behavior ...studies in animals show that exposure or training during specific periods in development can produce enhanced structural and functional plasticity in visual, auditory, and somatosensory regions of the brain...Evidence for sensitive periods in humans comes from studies of second language learning showing that early exposure results in greater proficiency, studies of deaf children showing that receiving cochlear implants earlier results in better language development, and studies of blind persons showing greater neuronal reorganization following early blindness.

Musicians are an excellent model for investigating possible sensitive period effects on brain and behavior, as training often begins early and is quantifiable...Evidence for a possible sensitive period for musical training came from a study showing that the anterior corpus callosum (CC) was larger in musicians than non-musicians, and that the difference was greater for those who began training before the age of 7 years...However, none of these studies controlled for the fact that musicians who begin earlier typically have more training than those who begin later.

Here is their abstract:

Training during a sensitive period in development may have greater effects on brain structure and behavior than training later in life. Musicians are an excellent model for investigating sensitive periods because training starts early and can be quantified. Previous studies suggested that early training might be related to greater amounts of white matter in the corpus callosum, but did not control for length of training or identify behavioral correlates of structural change. The current study compared white-matter organization using diffusion tensor imaging in early- and late-trained musicians matched for years of training and experience. We found that early-trained musicians had greater connectivity in the posterior midbody/isthmus of the corpus callosum and that fractional anisotropy in this region was related to age of onset of training and sensorimotor synchronization performance. We propose that training before the age of 7 years results in changes in white-matter connectivity that may serve as a scaffold upon which ongoing experience can build.

The promise and perils of oxytocin.

Greg Miller summarizes some consequences of recent work showing that oxytocin promotes trust and cooperation, and makes people more attuned to social cues.  It has some not so sweet aspects also.  He mentions a number of the studies I've cited in previous mindblog posts (just enter oxytocin in the search box in the left column to display them):

Now psychiatrists have caught oxytocin fever...Many psychiatric conditions have social symptoms, such as the characteristic lack of empathy in autism, the attachment anxiety of borderline personality disorder, and the paranoia of schizophrenia. Yet no drugs currently approved for psychiatric use directly target social behavior...But as researchers have continued to explore the hormone's effect on human behavior, a darker side has emerged. Oxytocin seems to promote aggression or other antisocial behavior in some circumstances. Its effects also appear to vary depending on a person's genetic makeup and psychological status. And no one knows what long-term oxytocin treatment does to the developing human brain. Disconcertingly, one recent study found that male voles treated for several weeks with oxytocin nasal spray around the time of adolescence later exhibited impaired social bonding with females... thus, there is concern about giving oxytocin to children before more is known about the hormone's developmental effects.

...the more recent oxytocin research in humans has frequently found its way into tabloids. In one of the first eye-catching studies in 2005 students who got oxytocin were more trusting...A torrent of studies followed, suggesting that oxytocin not only increases trust and cooperation, but also boosts social perceptiveness, such as face recognition and the ability to read what's on someone's mind from the look in their eyes.

A number of clinical trials suggest oxytocin causes a modest improvement in children and adults with autism, also in social behavior of psychotic patients, but reservations are raised by the vole studies showing early administration of oxytocin disturbs adult bonding and reproductive behavior, and by human studies showing that while it increases altruistic behavior towards in-group individuals, it increases aggression towards out group people.

How our brains judge risk and effort.

Burke et al. do a nice piece of work showing that the risk of an option for action is encoded by the anterior insula and the effort required for that action is coded in mid-cingulate and supplementary motor area. If there is a need to do so, the frontal pole integrates effort and risk costs through functional coupling with the SMA and insula.

Rewards in real life are rarely received without incurring costs and successful reward harvesting often involves weighing and minimizing different types of costs. In the natural environment, such costs often include the physical effort required to obtain rewards and potential risks attached to them. Costs may also include potential risks. In this study, we applied fMRI to explore the neural coding of physical effort costs as opposed to costs associated with risky rewards. Using an incentive-compatible valuation mechanism, we separately measured the subjective costs associated with effortful and risky options. As expected, subjective costs of options increased with both increasing effort and increasing risk. Despite the similar nature of behavioral discounting of effort and risk, distinct regions of the brain coded these two cost types separately, with anterior insula primarily processing risk costs and midcingulate and supplementary motor area (SMA) processing effort costs. To investigate integration of the two cost types, we also presented participants with options that combined effortful and risky elements. We found that the frontal pole integrates effort and risk costs through functional coupling with the SMA and insula. The degree to which the latter two regions influenced frontal pole activity correlated with participant-specific behavioral sensitivity to effort and risk costs. These data support the notion that, although physical effort costs may appear to be behaviorally similar to other types of costs, such as risk, they are treated separately at the neural level and are integrated only if there is a need to do so.

Moral roots of environmental attitudes.

From Feinberg and Willer:

Americans’ attitudes about the environment are highly polarized, but it is unclear why this is the case. We conducted five studies to examine this issue. The first two studies demonstrated that liberals, but not conservatives, view the environment in moral terms and that this tendency partially explains the relation between political ideology and environmental attitudes. The second two studies did content analyses of newspaper op-eds and public-service announcements and found that contemporary environmental discourse is based largely on moral concerns related to harm and care, which are more deeply held by liberals than by conservatives. However, in a final study we found that reframing proenvironmental rhetoric in terms of purity, a moral value resonating primarily among conservatives eliminated the difference between liberals’ and conservatives’ environmental attitudes. These results establish the importance of moralization as a cause of polarization on environmental attitudes and suggest that reframing environmental discourse in different moral terms can reduce the gap between liberals and conservatives in environmental concern.

The Biology of Fear

I want to point to a good open source review article in Current Biology on the brain correlates of fear, by Ralph Adolphs. You might find the summary graphics useful. The summary:

Each of us has felt afraid, and we can all recognize fear in many animal species. Yet there is no consensus in the scientific study of fear. Some argue that ‘fear’ is a psychological construct rather than something discoverable through scientific investigation. Others argue that the term ‘fear’ cannot properly be applied to animals because we cannot know whether they feel afraid. Studies in rodents show that there are highly specific brain circuits for fear, whereas findings from human neuroimaging seem to make the opposite claim. Here, I review the field and urge three approaches that could reconcile the debates. For one, we need a broadly comparative approach that would identify core components of fear conserved across phylogeny. This also pushes us towards the second point of emphasis: an ecological theory of fear that is essentially functional. Finally, we should aim even to incorporate the conscious experience of being afraid, reinvigorating the study of feelings across species.

You are going to die...

The "Opinionator" online commentary feature of the New York Times has another engaging contribution in its "Anxiety" series, from Tim Kreider, author of collections of essays and cartoons. He starts with a visit to a posh retirement community his mother has decided to enter, which she describes as "like a college dorm, except the boys aren't as good-looking." In spite of her enthusiasm, he feels sadness, which he then realizes is mainly selfish, because the family home he grew up in is being sold, the familiar phone number lost. Some clips of sections that struck me:

Plenty of people before me have lamented the way that we in industrialized countries regard our elderly as unproductive workers or obsolete products, and lock them away in institutions instead of taking them into our own homes out of devotion and duty...what I wonder about is what it's doing to the rest of us...I think we also segregate the elderly from the rest of society because we're afraid of them, as if age might be contagious. Which, it turns out, it is.

Segregating the old and the sick enables a fantasy, as baseless as the fantasy of capitalism's endless expansion, of youth and health as eternal, in which old age can seem to be an inexplicably bad lifestyle choice...So that when through absolutely no fault of your own your eyesight begins to blur and you can no longer eat whatever you want without consequence and the hangovers start lasting for days, you feel somehow ripped off, lied to. Aging feels grotesquely unfair. As if there ought to be someone to sue.

Because of all the stories we've absorbed, we vaguely imagine that our lives will take the shape of a narrative - the classic Aristotelian ramp diagram of gradual rising action (struggle and setbacks), climax (happy marriage, professional success), and a brief, cozy denoument (kicking back with family and friends, remembering the good times on a porch someplace pretty). But life is not shaped like a story; it's an elongate and flattened bell curve, with an attenuated, anticlimactic decline as long as its beginning. Friends have described seeing their parents lose their faculties one by one, in more or less the reverse order that their young children are acquiring them.

On the desire for life extension therapies:

I am all for raging against the dying of the light, and if they ever develop DNA rejuvenation or some other longevity technique I will personally claw, throttle and gouge my way through Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch and any number of other decrepit billionaires in order to be first in line.

But we don't have a choice. You are older at this moment than you've ever been before, and it's the youngest you're ever going to get. The mortality rate is holding at a scandalous 100 percent. Pretending death can be indefinitely evaded with hot yoga or a gluten-free diet or antioxidants or just by refusing to look is craven denial.

Thoughts as material objects - impact on evaluations

It's hard to get rid of unwanted thoughts. What about just throwing them in the garbage like unwanted objects? In some conditions might we discard our thoughts as easily as we dispose of objects? If Mr. Descartes was right (straw man, I know), a thought cannot literally be thrown into the garbage, because it does not have a material or physical nature. If a component of our cognition is taken to be a physical object, we should be able to discard it. Briñol et al. make some observations relevant to these points. Their experiments involved subjects writing down positive and negative thoughts about their bodies. First, their abstract:

In Western dualistic culture, it is assumed that thoughts cannot be treated as material objects; however, language is replete with metaphorical analogies suggesting otherwise. In the research reported here, we examined whether objectifying thoughts can influence whether the thoughts are used in subsequent evaluations. In a firstexperiment participants wrote about what they either liked or disliked about their bodies. Then, the paper on which they wrote their thoughts was either ripped up and tossed in the trash or kept and checked for errors. When participants physically discarded a representation of their thoughts, they mentally discarded them as well, using them less in forming judgments than did participants who retained a representation of their thoughts. A second experiment replicated this finding and also showed that people relied on their thoughts more when they physically kept them in a safe place—putting their thoughts in their pockets—than when they discarded them. A final study revealed that these effects were stronger when the action was performed physically rather than merely imagined.

Now, a bit more detail on the first experiment:

The experiment was presented as a study on body image. All participants received written instructions asking them to complete several tasks. As part of the first task, each participant was randomly assigned to generate and write down either positive or negative thoughts about his or her own body during a 3-min period. In the positive-thoughts condition, participants were told to list as many positive thoughts about their bodies as they could; in the negative-thoughts condition, participants were told to list as many negative thoughts about their bodies as they could (e.g., Killeya & Johnson, 1998). Examination of the thoughts listed indicated that all participants followed the instructions.

After listing his or her thoughts, each participant was randomly assigned to either the thought-disposal or the control condition. All participants were asked to look back at the thoughts they wrote. In the thought-disposal condition, participants were asked to contemplate their thoughts and then throw them into the trash can located in the room, because their thoughts did not have to remain with them. In the control condition, participants were asked to contemplate their thoughts and to check for any grammar or spelling errors they could find.

The dependent variable in our analysis was participants’ attitudes toward their bodies. Participants were told that they should record these attitudes because their self-image might have influenced their previous responses. Attitudes were assessed using three 9-point semantic-differential scales (e.g., bad-good, unattractive-attractive, like-dislike). Ratings were highly intercorrelated (α = .88), so we averaged them (after reverse scoring as appropriate) to create a composite attitude index. Higher values on this index indicated more favorable attitudes.

From their discussion:

Consistent with our hypothesis that a thought-disposal treatment can influence judgments by invalidating people’s thoughts, results showed that the attitudes of participants who physically threw their thoughts away showed less impact of the thought-direction induction than did the attitudes of participants who physically retained their thoughts....It is important to note that because the treatment was induced after thoughts were already generated, it could not affect the valence or the number of participants’ thoughts. Rather, the treatment decreased the strength of the influence that participants’ thoughts had on their attitudes.

What we should fear...

Gary Marcus does a review of some answers to the annual question of John Brockman's edge.org, "What *should* we be worried about?" On the question of whether we are psychologically and politically constituted to worry about what we most need to worry about, Marcus suggests:

that there is good reason to think that we are not inclined that way, both because of an inherent cognitive bias that makes us focus on immediate concerns (like getting our dishwasher fixed) to the diminishment of our attention to long-term issues (like getting enough exercise to maintain our cardiovascular fitness) and because of a chronic bias toward optimism known as a “just-world fallacy” (the comforting but unrealistic idea that moral actions will invariably lead to just rewards).

A theme throughout the collection is what Stanford psychologist Brian Knutson calls “metaworry”. His metaworry is that:

...actual threats [to our species] are changing much more rapidly than they have in the ancestral past. Humans have created much of this environment with our mechanisms, computers, and algorithms that induce rapid, “disruptive,” and even global change. Both financial and environmental examples easily spring to mind.… Our worry engines [may] not retune their direction to focus on these rapidly changing threats fast enough to take preventative action.

Brain correlates of developing intuition.

An interesting open access study from Wan et al.:

The superior capability of cognitive experts largely depends on automatic, quick information processing, which is often referred to as intuition. Intuition develops following extensive long-term training. There are many cognitive models on intuition development, but its neural basis is not known. Here we trained novices for 15 weeks to learn a simple board game and measured their brain activities in early and end phases of the training while they quickly generated the best next-move to a given board pattern. We found that the activation in the head of caudate nucleus developed over the course of training, in parallel to the development of the capability to quickly generate the best next-move, and the magnitude of the caudate activity was correlated with the subject's performance. In contrast, cortical activations, which already appeared in the early phase of training, did not further change. Thus, neural activation in the caudate head, but not those in cortical areas, tracked the development of capability to quickly generate the best next-move, indicating that circuitries including the caudate head may automate cognitive computations.

A few pictures showing location of the caudate head (pointed to by to line in right figure):

How procrastination gets things done...

John Tierney writes a delightful piece on not getting some things done. He notes several authors' comments on procrastination:

The key to productivity, John Perry argues in “The Art of Procrastination,” is to make more commitments — but to be methodical about it...At the top of your to-do list, put a couple of daunting, if not impossible, tasks that are vaguely important-sounding (but really aren’t) and seem to have deadlines (but really don’t). Then, farther down the list, include some doable tasks that really matter.,,“Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list,” Dr. Perry writes. “With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.”

Robert Benchley:

“The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one,” he wrote. “The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

Piers Steel ("The Procrastination Equation", 2011):

For most of us, procrastination can be beaten down, but not entirely beaten…My best trick is to play my projects off against each other, procrastinating on one by working on another….We are willing to pursue any vile task as long as it allows us to avoid something worse.

Procrastinators rarely sit around absolutely idle. The author Raymond Chandler forced himself to write detective stories by setting aside 4 hours each day with two rules:

a) You don’t have to write.

b) You can’t do anything else.

Another rule from Perry:

Never do today any task that may disappear by tomorrow.

Hedonic adaptation - where did the warm glow go?

Obtaining something we want follows a very stereotyped course, as noted in Oscar Wilde's famous aphorism: "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." Or, consider the scene from the musical "Stop the World, I want to get off." in which the character at the climax of a song are entwined in a happy summation...the music stops...the characters keep holding their position, and keep holding....and keep holding...begin to wobble just a bit...wobble a bit more...and finally fall apart.

Why is the warm glow on attaining some we desire sustained? Why is happily-ever-after so rare? The issue, in terms of relationships, is addressed in Jane Brody recent review of writing and studies on keeping love alive in relationships. The happiness boost that occurs with marriage lasts only about two years, after which people revert to their former levels of happiness - or unhappiness, and infatuation and passion have even shorter life spans. The phenomenon is dubbed "hedonic adaptation" by psychologists - things that thrill us tend to be short-lived. (The reaction of many brain circuits to repeated stimulation is to decrease their reactivity or output, an example being the mesolimbic dopamine system, whose role in the brain reward system is controversial.)

 Lyubomirsky's new book "The Myth of Happiness" deals with this situation and notes techniques, backed by recent research, that help relationships evolve into companionate love, composed more of deep affection, connection and liking (I just downloaded a test sample from Amazon to my iPad to check it out). Barbara L. Fredrickson, author of the forthcoming "Love 2.0" specifies that a flourishing relationship needs three times as many positive emotions as negative ones.

The advice on relationships all seems to boil down to "practice a bit more kindness and gratitude".   I have to say, that when I've been able to budge my curmudgeonly nature enough to actually do this for brief periods of time, it has worked wonders!