Several perspectives on rich versus poor.

The latest issue of Psychological Science has several articles reflecting different perspectives on rich and poor people:

An analysis noting that residents of poor nations have a greater sense of meaning in life than residents of wealthy nations:

Using Gallup World Poll data, we examined the role of societal wealth for meaning in life across 132 nations. Although life satisfaction was substantially higher in wealthy nations than in poor nations, meaning in life was higher in poor nations than in wealthy nations. In part, meaning in life was higher in poor nations because people in those nations were more religious. The mediating role of religiosity remained significant after we controlled for potential third variables, such as education, fertility rate, and individualism. As Frankl (1963) stated in Man’s Search for Meaning, it appears that meaning can be attained even under objectively dire living conditions, and religiosity plays an important role in this search.

Observations on distorted perceptions of incomes and income inequality in America:

Three studies examined Americans’ perceptions of incomes and income inequality using a variety of criterion measures. Contrary to recent findings indicating that Americans underestimate wealth inequality, we found that Americans not only overestimated the rise of income inequality over time, but also underestimated average incomes. Thus, economic conditions in America are more favorable than people seem to realize. Furthermore, ideological differences emerged in two of these studies, such that political liberals overestimated the rise of inequality more than political conservatives. Implications of these findings for public policy debates and ideological disagreements are discussed.

And, an examination of cognitive and behavioral implication of self-affirmation among the poor:

The poor are universally stigmatized. The stigma of poverty includes being perceived as incompetent and feeling shunned and disrespected. It can lead to cognitive distancing, diminish cognitive performance, and cause the poor to forego beneficial programs. In the present research, we examined how self-affirmation can mitigate the stigma of poverty through randomized field experiments involving low-income individuals at an inner-city soup kitchen. Because of low literacy levels, we used an oral rather than written affirmation procedure, in which participants verbally described a personal experience that made them feel successful or proud. Compared with nonaffirmed participants, affirmed individuals exhibited better executive control, higher fluid intelligence, and a greater willingness to avail themselves of benefits programs. The effects were not driven by elevated positive mood, and the same intervention did not affect the performance of wealthy participants. The findings suggest that self-affirmation can improve the cognitive performance and decisions of the poor, and it may have important policy implications.

A technique for enhancing error awareness in older age.

Harty et al. note yet another salutary effect of transcranial direct current stimulation. A small voltage applied across the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex enhances error awareness (by 10-12%) in older people. Their studies were done on 106 healthy oder adults 65-86 years of were recruited for four separate experiments. They used.

...a Go/No-go response inhibition task in which subjects are presented with a serial stream of single-color words, with congruency between the semantic meaning of the word and its font color manipulated across trials. Subjects were trained to respond with a single-speeded left mouse button press in situations where the meaning of the word and the font color in which it was presented were congruent (Go trial) and to withhold this response when either of two different scenarios arose: (1) when the word presented on the current trial was the same as that presented on the preceding trial (Repeat No-go trial), and (2) when the meaning of the word and its font color did not match (Stroop No-go trial). In the event of a commission error (failure to withhold to either of these No-go trials), subjects were trained to signal their “awareness” by making a speeded right mouse button press... Stimulation was delivered by a battery-driven DC Brain Stimulator Plus (NeuroConn), through a pair of 35 cm2 saline-soaked sponge electrodes. Current strength was 1 mA in all experiments. This produced current densities of 0.028 mA/cm2 at the skin surface of the scalp...In all four experiments, subjects underwent both Real and Sham tDCS in a single-blind, crossover manner.

Their abstract:

The ability to detect errors during cognitive performance is compromised in older age and in a range of clinical populations. This study was designed to assess the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on error awareness in healthy older human adults. tDCS was applied over DLPFC while subjects performed a computerized test of error awareness. The influence of current polarity (anodal vs cathodal) and electrode location (left vs right hemisphere) was tested in a series of separate single-blind, Sham-controlled crossover trials, each including 24 healthy older adults (age 65–86 years). Anodal tDCS over right DLPFC was associated with a significant increase in the proportion of performance errors that were consciously detected, and this result was recapitulated in a separate replication experiment. No such improvements were observed when the homologous contralateral area was stimulated. The present study provides novel evidence for a causal role of right DLPFC regions in subserving error awareness and marks an important step toward developing tDCS as a tool for remediating the performance-monitoring deficits that afflict a broad range of populations.

Time, Money, and Morality

Gino and Mogilner note "It seems that a day does not go by without some unethical behavior by a politician, movie star, professional athlete, or high-ranking executive making the headlines. Although less sensational, revelations of cheating have also crept into the sciences, and continue to show up in classrooms, businesses, and marriages."

They proceed to reflect on unethical behavior in people who also strive to maintain a positive self-concept, with morality being central to peoples' self-image. They:

...focus on two triggers that may influence self-reflection and are ubiquitous enough in the environment to have a chance at instigating a widespread effect on unethical behavior: money and time...We specifically predicted that priming people to think about time, rather than money, would lead them to behave more ethically by encouraging them to reflect on who they are and making them more conscious of how they conduct themselves so as to maintain a positive self-image. We tested this hypothesis across four experiments in which we primed participants to think about time or money and observed their tendencies to cheat for monetary or personal gain.

In a first experiment they primed participants with money, time, or neither and then completed a numbers game in which they had the opportunity to cheat by overstating their performance, thereby taking unearned money. Participants primed in the money condition were more likely to cheat.

The second experiment used the numbers game with time or money primes but half the participants were told “This game is an intelligence test that is designed to assess your likelihood to be successful in the future.” and the other half told “This game is a personality test that is designed to assess what type of person you are.” As in the first experiment, participants threw their actual matrix work sheets into a recycle bin, so that they believed they could overreport their performance (i.e., cheat) without getting caught. "In actuality, as in Experiment 1, we were able to match participants’ work sheets with the collection slips on which they reported their performance." The result: "when the game was framed as an intelligence test did thinking about money lead to greater cheating than thinking about time. When the game was framed as a personality test, there was no difference in cheating between the money and time conditions.

A third experiment manipulated self-reflection with a mirror to find that when self-reflection was triggered through the use of a mirror, participants primed with money behaved the same way as those primed with time.

The fourth experiment suggested that "priming time reduces cheating by increasing self-reflection, and priming money increases cheating by lowering self-reflection. By measuring self-reflection directly through self-reports, this experiment provided further evidence for the hypothesized role of self-reflection as the psychological mechanism linking time, money, and morality."

Here is the abstract of the article:

Money, a resource that absorbs much daily attention, seems to be involved in much unethical behavior, which suggests that money itself may corrupt. This research examined a way to offset such potentially deleterious effects—by focusing on time, a resource that tends to receive less attention than money but is equally ubiquitous in daily life. Across four experiments, we examined whether shifting focus onto time can salvage individuals’ ethicality. We found that implicitly activating the construct of time, rather than money, leads individuals to behave more ethically by cheating less. We further found that priming time reduces cheating by making people reflect on who they are. Implications for the use of time primes in discouraging dishonesty are discussed.

Default mode network: the seat of literary creativity?

Wise et al. offer an article with the title of this post in Trends in Cognitive Sciences that comments on the brain areas that consistently become active in different subjects when spoken and written versions of a narrative are presented. They found

...a distribution of correlated activity in the midline posterior cortex and bilateral posterior inferior parietal cortex. This forms the posterior part of the so-called default mode network (DMN; Figure 1), a system classically associated with the introspective mind. It has been observed before, in another meta-analysis of language studies, one that set out to reveal the semantic system [ref]. The authors of that review, and others since (ref), have discussed how memories, semantic and personal, emotions, theory of mind, and no doubt many other mental functions are linked through the DMN. This would suggest that overlapping components of the DMN are functionally interconnected with many separate brain systems, including those for language and semantics, and indeed this is turning out to be the case (refs).

Spot the literary network: the default mode network (DMN) viewed from different angles (colors are intended for illustrative purposes only; data from [ref]). The medial posterior cingulate (PCC) and inferior posterior parietal components (IPP) were implicated in linguistic processing by Regev et al. [ref], but we suggest that due to the widespread connectivity of the DMN, these regions are related to higher order ‘literary’ processing.

Optimism correlates with poor results

Richtel points to work by Sevincer et al. that makes the counter-intuitive observation that optimistic language in newspaper articles and presidential addresses is a predictor of poor economic performance. This actually is consonant with research that has shown that fantasies not tempered by realistic assessment of challenges are less likely to yield results. (People who fantasize about the success of their with control program are less likely to loose pounds). Perhaps people who fantasize an imaged outcome imagine that obtaining it will be easy, and thus work less hard. More sober assessment yields better results.

Previous research has shown that positive thinking, in the form of fantasies about an idealized future, predicts low effort and poor performance. In the studies reported here, we used computerized content analysis of historical documents to investigate the relation between positive thinking about the future and economic development. During the financial crisis from 2007 to 2009, the more weekly newspaper articles in the economy page of USA Today contained positive thinking about the future, the more the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined in the subsequent week and 1 month later. In addition, between the New Deal era and the present time, the more presidential inaugural addresses contained positive thinking about the future, the more the gross domestic product and the employment rate declined in the presidents’ subsequent tenures. These counterintuitive findings may help reveal the psychological processes that contribute to an economic crisis.

Dangerous behaviors and the corporate consumption complex.

Mark Bittman points to Nicholas Freudenberg's new book,  a right-on exposition and summary of

...“the corporate consumption complex,” an alliance of corporations, banks, marketers and others that essentially promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles... it’s unlikely there’s a cabal that sits down and asks, “How can we kill more kids tomorrow?” But Freudenberg details how six industries — food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical and automotive — use pretty much the same playbook to defend the sales of health-threatening products. This playbook, largely developed by the tobacco industry, disregards human health and poses greater threats to our existence than any communicable disease you can name...All of these industries work hard to defend our “right” — to smoke, feed our children junk, carry handguns and so on — as matters of choice, freedom and responsibility. Their unified line is that anything that restricts those “rights” is un-American...Yet each industry, as it (mostly) legally can, designs products that are difficult to resist and sometimes addictive... The food industry has created combinations that most appeal to our brains’ instinctual and learned responses.

...we need to be asking not “Do junk food companies have the right to market to children?” but “Do children have the right to a healthy diet?” (In Mexico, the second question has been answered positively. Shamefully, we have yet to take that step.) The question is not only, “Do we have a right to bear arms?” but also “Do we have the right to be safe in our streets and schools?” In short, says Freudenberg: “The right to be healthy trumps the right of corporations to promote choices that lead to premature death and preventable illnesses. Protecting public health is a fundamental government responsibility; a decent society should not allow food companies to convince children to buy food that’s bad for them or to encourage a lifetime of unhealthy eating.”

More on building brains with video games

Nick Bilton does a brief piece on how trying to win various kinds of video games enhances subsequent performance on real world attention and memory tests.

Daphné Bavelier, a neuroscientist with the University of Rochester, found that people who play first-person shooter video games for two weeks can improve visual attention, mental reasoning and decision-making skills. A 2007 study by Iowa State University psychologists compared surgeons who played video games to those who didn’t and found that, during laparoscopic surgeries, the gamers were 27 percent faster and made 37 percent fewer mistakes than nongamers. And decades of research around Tetris has shown that playing it for extended periods may increase memory and cognitive skills.

....the goal is to figure out what makes a game addictive on a neurological level, then to couple this with brain research showing how play can improve the mind...imagine five years from now that you go to the doctor with a problem and he prescribes an F.D.A.-approved video game for you to download and play for two weeks.

Want to remember something? Have some coffee!

Here is the brief abstract from Borota et al., followed by a graphic summary of the results offered by Favila and Kuhl:

It is currently not known whether caffeine has an enhancing effect on long-term memory in humans. We used post-study caffeine administration to test its effect on memory consolidation using a behavioral discrimination task. Caffeine enhanced performance 24 h after administration according to an inverted U-shaped dose-response curve; this effect was specific to consolidation and not retrieval. We conclude that caffeine enhanced consolidation of long-term memories in humans.

Figure: Effect of post-encoding caffeine on memory. On day 1, subjects viewed a series of images of everyday objects and made a judgment about whether each image was likely to be found indoors or outdoors. Immediately after completing this task, they took either caffeine or placebo. Measured caffeine levels fully returned to baseline by the next day. On day 2, subjects were given a surprise memory test. Subjects viewed a series of images and decided whether each image was new (not seen on day 1), old (identical to one of the images from day 1) or similar (a different exemplar of one of the images seen on day 1). The probability of correctly labeling similar images as similar (instead of old) was reflected by a lure discrimination index that corrected for potential response bias. Subjects who received 200 or 300 mg of caffeine after the study period on day 1 showed enhanced lure discrimination on day 2 compared with subjects who received placebo. At 100 mg, caffeine did not enhance test performance, nor did caffeine administered just before the memory test (not shown).

Cognitive aging - a dark side to environmental support?

Lindenberger and Mayr make some very interesting points on the consequences of shifting during aging from self initiation to environmental support in performing tasks. This hits me right between the eyes, as I have been noticing lately how much more likely I am to be working on tasks that are generated by, or reactive to, to my immediate physical, social, financial environment than on projects (like generating music and writing) that I initiate and stay focused on. The Lindenberger and Mayr paper (available to motivated readers who email me) reviews a number of studies beyond the original work on memory by Craik, studies that generalize the effects of self initiated versus environmental support to other cognitive areas such as visual and auditory control. Across processing stages and modalities, older adults are more likely to be guided by external cues than younger adults are. Here I pass on summary points, abstract, and a clip from the discussion.

• Perceptual salience rather than attentional focus governs stimulus processing in old age.
• Older adults rely more on environmental prompts for action than younger adults do.
• Environmental support helps older adults to perform but results in loss of internal control.
• The structure of the environment matters, especially for older adults.

It has been known for some time that memory deficits among older adults increase when self-initiated processing is required and decrease when the environment provides task-appropriate cues. We propose that this observation is not confined to memory but can be subsumed under a more general developmental trend. In perception, learning or memory, and action management, older adults often rely more on external information than younger adults do, probably both as a direct reflection and indirect adaptation to difficulties in internally triggering and maintaining cognitive representations. This age-graded shift from internal towards environmental control is often associated with compromised performance. Cognitive aging research and the design of aging-friendly environments can benefit from paying closer attention to the developmental dynamics and implications of this shift.

Environmental support has a bright and a dark side: it helps aging individuals to perform but comes with a loss in internal control. It follows that the environment matters, especially in old age. The initiation and maintenance of internal control are costly, both cognitively and metabolically and these costs appear to increase from early to late adulthood. By the time they have reached old age, individuals have acquired a behavioral repertoire that is likely to match the regularities and affordances of the environments they live in. The tendency of older adults, both automatic and deliberate, to outsource control to the environment may be inefficient at times, but cost-effective in the long run if the cuing structure of the environment corresponds to their goals and needs. Engineers, psychologists, and aging individuals themselves need to keep this in mind as they design and use adaptive technology in the pursuit of successful aging.

A brain basis for musical hallucinations

Kumar et al. report their findings from an unusual opportunity that presented itself when a retired London schoolteacher, Sylvia, reported to her doctors that she increasingly was hearing music, as if it were completely real, in the absence of a source for the music. (People with musical hallucinations usually are psychologically normal — except for the music they are sure someone is playing. ) Sylvia volunteered for a study by Kumar et al. that made use of the fact that real music can sometimes quiet the imaginary music, in effect masking music hallucination. Playing Bach for 30 seconds was used to damp down the hallucinations while the teacher's brain activity was being monitored by MEG (magnetic recordings), and when the real music stopped the teacher reported the strength of hallucinations as they returned. The brain regions becoming more active as hallucinations returned were the same as those activated by listening to real music. From Zimmer’s review of this work, a suggested model for what is happening:

Our brains… generate predictions about what is going to happen next, using past experiences as a guide. When we hear a sound, for example — particularly music — our brains guess at what it is and predict what it will sound like in the next instant. If the prediction is wrong — if we mistook a teakettle for an opera singer — our brains quickly recognize that we are hearing something else and make a new prediction to minimize the error….people with musical hallucinations often have at least some hearing loss. Sylvia, for example, needed hearing aids after getting a viral infection two decades ago.

The model of our brain as a prediction-generating machine

...could explain why some people with hearing loss develop musical hallucinations. With fewer auditory signals entering the brain, their error detection becomes weaker. If the music-processing brain regions make faulty predictions, those predictions only grow stronger until they feel like reality.

This model:

...could explain why real music provides temporary relief for musical hallucinations: the incoming sounds reveal the brain’s prediction errors. And it may also explain why people are prone to hallucinate music, and not other familiar sounds.

Here is the Kumar et al. abstract:

The physiological basis for musical hallucinations (MH) is not understood. One obstacle to understanding has been the lack of a method to manipulate the intensity of hallucination during the course of experiment. Residual inhibition, transient suppression of a phantom percept after the offset of a masking stimulus, has been used in the study of tinnitus. We report here a human subject whose MH were residually inhibited by short periods of music. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) allowed us to examine variation in the underlying oscillatory brain activity in different states. Source-space analysis capable of single-subject inference defined left-lateralised power increases, associated with stronger hallucinations, in the gamma band in left anterior superior temporal gyrus, and in the beta band in motor cortex and posteromedial cortex. The data indicate that these areas form a crucial network in the generation of MH, and are consistent with a model in which MH are generated by persistent reciprocal communication in a predictive coding hierarchy.

The right temperature for a stroking caress

We apparently have sensory nerves in our skin that are exquisitely tuned for human hedonic, affiliative contact. From Ackerley et al.:

Human C-tactile (CT) afferents respond vigorously to gentle skin stroking and have gained attention for their importance in social touch. Pharmacogenetic activation of the mouse CT equivalent has positively reinforcing, anxiolytic effects, suggesting a role in grooming and affiliative behavior. We recorded from single CT axons in human participants, using the technique of microneurography, and stimulated a unit's receptive field using a novel, computer-controlled moving probe, which stroked the skin of the forearm over five velocities (0.3, 1, 3, 10, and 30 cm s−1) at three temperatures (cool, 18°C; neutral, 32°C; warm, 42°C). We show that CTs are unique among mechanoreceptive afferents: they discharged preferentially to slowly moving stimuli at a neutral (typical skin) temperature, rather than at the cooler or warmer stimulus temperatures. In contrast, myelinated hair mechanoreceptive afferents proportionally increased their firing frequency with stroking velocity and showed no temperature modulation. Furthermore, the CT firing frequency correlated with hedonic ratings to the same mechano-thermal stimulus only at the neutral stimulus temperature, where the stimuli were felt as pleasant at higher firing rates. We conclude that CT afferents are tuned to respond to tactile stimuli with the specific characteristics of a gentle caress delivered at typical skin temperature. This provides a peripheral mechanism for signaling pleasant skin-to-skin contact in humans, which promotes interpersonal touch and affiliative behavior.

Passing ADHD from one generation to the next.

Prenatal and early postnatal exposure of the developing brain to nicotine (PNE) is a major risk factor for inducing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Children born to mothers who smoke cigarettes before, during, or immediately after pregnancy have a twofold higher risk of developing ADHD. Zhu et al. show that hyperactivity and attention deficits induced by putting nicotine in the drinking water of pregnant mice is transmitted from one generation to the next via the maternal but not the paternal line of descent. The authors note:

A plausible mechanism for the transgenerational transmission of the PNE-induced brain and behavioral changes is heritable epigenetic modifications of the germ cell genome. Nicotine is known to produce DNA methylation in a number of genes, including the gene coding for monoamine oxidase, a key enzyme in the metabolism of dopamine and other monoamines.

Restoring vision to blind mice (and humans with RP or AMD?) with a photoswitch.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and retinitis pigmentosa (RP) affect millions of people around the world and in their advanced stages lead to blindness. Studies in mouse models of these diseases have shown some promise in restoring vision but are either invasive (i.e., implantation of electronic chips) or irreversible (i.e., transplantation of photoreceptor progenitors or viral expression of optogenetic tools). Tochitsky et al. (click on the link to see the authors' fancy PR video of the work) have now performed introcular injection of a synthetic small molecule called DENAQ which is a red-shifted K+ channel photoswitch that exhibits trans to cis photoisomerization with visible light (450–550 nm) and relaxes rapidly to the trans configuration in the dark A single injection photosensitizes blind retinas with no photoreceptors to daylight intensity white light for a period of days with no toxicity. It restores light-elicited behavior and enables visual learning in blind mice. It is a prime drug candidate for vision restoration in patients with end-stage RP and AMD.

Figure of DENAQ from Mourot et al., ACS Chem. Neurosci., 2011, 2 (9), pp 536–543AMD.

Predicting risky choices from brain activity patterns

Helfinstein et al. find some predictive neural correlates of avoiding versus taking risks. Even course global patterns of brain activity reflect enhanced activity when preparing to avoid a risk, suggesting that risk taking may reflect a failure of control systems necessary to initiate a safe choice. It is changes in regions related to risk aversion that most reliably predict whether a subject will make a risky or safe choice. They

...used the Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART), in which subjects receive points as they pump up balloons but risk losing those points should the balloon explode before they choose to stop pumping and “cash out.” Each pump opportunity is a risky decision, where subjects must choose whether to pump again to gain more points or to cash out to secure those points already accrued. The structure of the task, where subjects make sequential risky choices with feedback, is common to many real-world risk-taking situations and matches both the economic and lay definition of risk, in that each successive pump opportunity for a given balloon has both greater variance in possible outcomes and increased exposure to loss. Performance on this task has also been shown, in numerous behavioral studies, to relate to self-reported sensation seeking and to naturalistic risk-taking behaviors, such as smoking, drug use, sexual risk-taking, and unsafe driving behaviors. Because performance on this task consistently correlates with naturalistic risk-taking behaviors, the cognitive processes at work during the task are likely to be comparable to those used during real-world risky decision making.

Here is their abstract:

Previous research has implicated a large network of brain regions in the processing of risk during decision making. However, it has not yet been determined if activity in these regions is predictive of choices on future risky decisions. Here, we examined functional MRI data from a large sample of healthy subjects performing a naturalistic risk-taking task and used a classification analysis approach to predict whether individuals would choose risky or safe options on upcoming trials. We were able to predict choice category successfully in 71.8% of cases. Searchlight analysis revealed a network of brain regions where activity patterns were reliably predictive of subsequent risk-taking behavior, including a number of regions known to play a role in control processes. Searchlights with significant predictive accuracy were primarily located in regions more active when preparing to avoid a risk than when preparing to engage in one, suggesting that risk taking may be due, in part, to a failure of the control systems necessary to initiate a safe choice. Additional analyses revealed that subject choice can be successfully predicted with minimal decrements in accuracy using highly condensed data, suggesting that information relevant for risky choice behavior is encoded in coarse global patterns of activation as well as within highly local activation within searchlights.

Senior Coolness

Swiss researchers Zimmermann and Grebe describe the outcome of analysis of in-depth interviews in German with 65 people aged 77 to 101, which runs counter to the narrative of very old age which tends to focus on deterioration, dementia and burden. Their subjects seem to rise above their problems with a kind of emotional nonchalance, take pleasure in the things they still can do, and choose not do dwell on issues of pain and other problem they can do little about. Here are the highlights and abstract from their article. The article cites many examples from their interviews to make their case (motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article by emailing me).

Highlights

• Public perceptions of old age (80 +) focus largely on deficiency and loss.
• By contrast, elderly people (80 +) report ways in which they are able to live well.
• Living well in old age can be associated with the capacity to “keep cool”.
• This “senior coolness” renders personal and societal problems manageable.

Abstract

With demographic change becoming an ever more pressing issue in Germany, old age (80 +) is currently talked about above all in terms of being a problem. In mainstream discourse on the situation of the oldest old an interpretive framework has emerged that effectively rules out the possibility of people living positively and well in old age. With regard to both individual (personal) and collective (societal) spheres, negative images of old age dominate public debate. This is the starting point for an interdisciplinary research project designed to look at the ways in which people manage to “live well in old age in the face of vulnerability and finitude” — in express contrast to dominant negative perspectives. Based on the results of this project, the present article addresses an attitudinal and behavioral mode which we have coined “senior coolness”. Coolness here is understood as both a socio-cultural resource and an individualized habitus of everyday living. By providing an effective strategy of self-assertion, this ability can, as we show, be just as important for elderly people as for anyone else. “Senior coolness” is discussed, finally, as a phenomenon that testifies to the ways elderly people retain a positive outlook on life — especially in the face of difficult circumstances and powerful socio-cultural pressures.

In a similar vein, I would recommend reading New Yorker writer Roger Angell's article "This Old Man" about his life in the nineties.

Mindfulness and corporate America’s bottom line.

New Republic senior editor Evgeny Morozov writes a piece called “The Mindfulness Racket”. (I have been working on a brain/mind web lecture on the mindfulnesness / attentional / default / upstairs / downstairs themes, but the deluge of articles in these area is beginning to make me feel like I'm carrying coals to Newcastle.) Some edited clips from Morozov's article:

Mindfulness on the cover of Time magazine...Huffington publications’ stress-tracking app named “GPS for the Soul”…”digital sabbath”…”digital detox”…In essence, we are being urged to unplug-for an hour, a day, a week - so that we can resume our usual activities with even more vigor upon returning to the land of distraction..In our maddeningly complex world, where everything is in flux and defies comprehension, the only reasonable attitude is to renounce any efforts at control and adopt a Zen-like attitude of non-domination.

Huffington hopes that the pursuit of mindfulness can finally reconcile spirituality and capitalism…”So yes, I do want to talk about maximizing profits and beating expectations - by emphasizing the notion that what’s good for us as individuals is also good for corporate America’s bottom line”…

But couldn’t the “disconnectionists”…pursue an agenda a tad more radical than “digital detoxification”? Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic complains “Individuals unplugging is not actually an answer to the biggest technological problems of our time just as any individual’s local, organic dietary habits don’t solve global agriculture’s issues.”

…why we disconnect matters: We can continue in today’s mode of treating disconnection as a way to recharge and regain productivity, or we can view it as a way to sabotage the addiction tactics of the acceleration distraction complex that is Silicon Valley. The former approach is reactionary but the latter can lead to emancipation, especially if such acts of refusal give rise to genuine social movements that will make problems of time and attention part of their political agendas - and not just the subject of hand-wringing by the Davos-based spirituality brigades…. We must be mindful of all this mindfulness.

Meditation and brain imaging of two kinds of love.

Judson Brewer and collaborators perform fMRI scans of experienced practitioners of loving kindness meditation, which fosters feelings of selfless love for others. Their abstract (below) notes their observations (but doesn't emphasize one of their more interesting findings: that the tranquility of selfless love without expectation of reward lowers activation of the areas activated by romantic love - which are the same reward areas activated by cocaine.)

Loving kindness is a form of meditation involving directed well-wishing, typically supported by the silent repetition of phrases such as “may all beings be happy,” to foster a feeling of selfless love. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the neural substrate of loving kindness meditation in experienced meditators and novices. We first assessed group differences in blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal during loving kindness meditation. We next used a relatively novel approach, the intrinsic connectivity distribution of functional connectivity, to identify regions that differ in intrinsic connectivity between groups, and then used a data-driven approach to seed-based connectivity analysis to identify which connections differ between groups. Our findings suggest group differences in brain regions involved in self-related processing and mind wandering, emotional processing, inner speech, and memory. Meditators showed overall reduced BOLD signal and intrinsic connectivity during loving kindness as compared to novices, more specifically in the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC/PCu), a finding that is consistent with our prior work and other recent neuroimaging studies of meditation. Furthermore, meditators showed greater functional connectivity during loving kindness between the PCC/PCu and the left inferior frontal gyrus, whereas novices showed greater functional connectivity during loving kindness between the PCC/PCu and other cortical midline regions of the default mode network, the bilateral posterior insula lobe, and the bilateral parahippocampus/hippocampus. These novel findings suggest that loving kindness meditation involves a present-centered, selfless focus for meditators as compared to novices.

Neural signature of our own-race bias.

Wiese et al. examine the N170 signal (a component of event related potentials, or ERP recorded from electrodes placed on the head, which is maximal over occipito-temporal electrode sites). It has been linked with the structural encoding of faces. They suggest that ethnicity effects in the N170 reflect an early categorization of other-race faces into a social out-group, resulting in less efficient encoding and thus decreased memory.

Participants are more accurate at remembering faces of their own relative to another ethnic group (own-race bias, ORB). This phenomenon has been explained by reduced perceptual expertise, or alternatively, by the categorization of other-race faces into social out-groups and reduced effort to individuate such faces. We examined event-related potential (ERP) correlates of the ORB, testing recognition memory for Asian and Caucasian faces in Caucasian and Asian participants. Both groups demonstrated a significant ORB in recognition memory. ERPs revealed more negative N170 amplitudes for other-race faces in both groups, probably reflecting more effortful structural encoding. Importantly, the ethnicity effect in left-hemispheric N170 during learning correlated significantly with the behavioral ORB. Similarly, in the subsequent N250, both groups demonstrated more negative amplitudes for other-race faces, and during test phases, this effect correlated significantly with the ORB. We suggest that ethnicity effects in the N170 reflect an early categorization of other-race faces into a social out-group, resulting in less efficient encoding and thus decreased memory. Moreover, ethnicity effects in the N250 may represent the “tagging” of other-race faces as perceptually salient, which hampers the recognition of these faces.

Awesome Images

I want to pass on to MindBlog reader two striking galleries of open access images. The first is Science Magazine's Visualization Challenge. One of its striking images is "Cortex in Metallic Pastels":

The second collection shows natural and manmade places with very unusual colors.

The social (and medical) pathology of correlating inner worth with wealth.

A recent piece by Wilkinson and Pickett in the NYTimes deserves notice. They comment on how wealth inequality is not only divisive and socially corrosive, but also damaging to individuals' mental health. They cite their work showing that:

...major and minor mental illnesses were three times as common in societies where there were bigger income differences between rich and poor. In other words, an American is likely to know three times as many people with depression or anxiety problems as someone in Japan or Germany.

Another study

...looking at the 50 American states, discovered that after taking account of age, income and educational differences, depression was more common in states with greater income inequality. Another, which combined data from over 100 surveys in 26 countries, found that schizophrenia was about three times as common in more unequal societies as it was in more equal ones.

Other clips:

...a wide range of mental disorders might originate in a “dominance behavioral system.” This part of our evolved psychological makeup, almost universal in mammals, enables us to recognize and respond to social ranking systems based on hierarchy and power...One of the important effects of wider income differences between rich and poor is to intensify the issues of dominance and subordination, and feelings of superiority and inferiority.

Humans instinctively know how to cooperate and create social ties, but we also know how to engage in status competition — how to be snobs and how to talk ourselves up. We use these alternative social strategies almost every day of our lives, but crucially, inequality shifts the balance between them...It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we become less nice people in more unequal societies. But we are less nice and less happy: Greater inequality redoubles status anxiety, damaging our mental health and distorting our personalities — wherever we are on the social spectrum.

The article doesn't mention the physical effects that are another major consequence of inequality. Feeling inferior correlates with feeling more helpless than powerful, and hundreds of studies have shown that feelings of helplessness lead to increased disease, lowered immune function, increased anxiety, etc. (enter 'helplessness' in the search box in the left column to see Mindblog posts on this topic.)