Trust and the poverty trap.

from Jachimowicz et al:

Significance

More than 1.5 billion people worldwide live in poverty. Even in the United States, 14% live below the poverty line. Despite many policies and programs, poverty remains a domestic and global challenge; the number of US households earning less than $2/d nearly doubled in the last 15 y. One reason why the poor remain poor is their tendency to make myopic decisions. With reduced temporal discounting, low-income individuals could invest more in forward-looking educational, financial, and social activities that could alleviate their impoverished situation. We show that increased community trust can decrease temporal discounting in low-income populations and test this mechanism in a 2-y field intervention in rural Bangladesh through a low-cost and scalable method that builds community trust.

Abstract

Why do the poor make shortsighted choices in decisions that involve delayed payoffs? Foregoing immediate rewards for larger, later rewards requires that decision makers (i) believe future payoffs will occur and (ii) are not forced to take the immediate reward out of financial need. Low-income individuals may be both less likely to believe future payoffs will occur and less able to forego immediate rewards due to higher financial need; they may thus appear to discount the future more heavily. We propose that trust in one’s community—which, unlike generalized trust, we find does not covary with levels of income—can partially offset the effects of low income on myopic decisions. Specifically, we hypothesize that low-income individuals with higher community trust make less myopic intertemporal decisions because they believe their community will buffer, or cushion, against their financial need. In archival data and laboratory studies, we find that higher levels of community trust among low-income individuals lead to less myopic decisions. We also test our predictions with a 2-y community trust intervention in rural Bangladesh involving 121 union councils (the smallest rural administrative and local government unit) and find that residents in treated union councils show higher levels of community trust and make less myopic intertemporal choices than residents in control union councils. We discuss the implications of these results for the design of domestic and global policy interventions to help the poor make decisions that could alleviate poverty.

The heart trumps the head : Desirability bias in political belief revision.

From Tappin et al.

Understanding how individuals revise their political beliefs has important implications for society. In a pre-registered study (N=900) we experimentally separated the predictions of two leading theories of human belief revision—desirability bias and confirmation bias—in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. Participants indicated who they desired to win, and who they believed would win, the election. Following confrontation with evidence that was either consistent or inconsistent with their desires or beliefs, they again indicated who they believed would win. We observed a robust desirability bias—individuals updated their beliefs more if the evidence was consistent (versus inconsistent) with their desired outcome. This bias was independent of whether the evidence was consistent or inconsistent with their prior beliefs. In contrast, we find limited evidence of an independent confirmation bias in belief updating. These results have implications for the relevant psychological theories and for political belief revision in practice.

In a NYTimes piece pointing to (marketing) their study, the authors note that:

Our study suggests that political belief polarization may emerge because of peoples’ conflicting desires, not their conflicting beliefs per se. This is rather troubling, as it implies that even if we were to escape from our political echo chambers, it wouldn’t help much. Short of changing what people want to believe, we must find other ways to unify our perceptions of reality.

Opioids regulate oxytocin enhancement of social attention.

From Monte et al. work suggesting that the effectiveness of oxytocin in treating social dysfunction might be enhanced by the simultaneous administration of opioid blockers.

Significance

In the past decade, there has been an increase in studies using oxytocin (OT) for improving social cognition, but results have been inconsistent. In this study, we took advantage of the physiological relationship between the opioid and OT systems and tested the benefit of administering OT under simultaneously induced opioid antagonism during dyadic gaze interactions. Coadministration of OT and opioid blocker leads to supralinear enhancement of prolonged and selective attention to a live partner and increases interactive gaze after critical social events. Furthermore, we provide neurogenetic evidence in the human brain supporting the interaction between specific opioid receptor genes and the genes for OT processing. Our results suggest a new avenue for amplifying the efficacy of OT in clinical populations.

Abstract

To provide new preclinical evidence toward improving the efficacy of oxytocin (OT) in treating social dysfunction, we tested the benefit of administering OT under simultaneously induced opioid antagonism during dyadic gaze interactions in monkeys. OT coadministered with a μ-opioid receptor antagonist, naloxone, invoked a supralinear enhancement of prolonged and selective social attention, producing a stronger effect than the summed effects of each administered separately. These effects were consistently observed when averaging over entire sessions, as well as specifically following events of particular social importance, including mutual eye contact and mutual reward receipt. Furthermore, attention to various facial regions was differentially modulated depending on social context. Using the Allen Institute’s transcriptional atlas, we further established the colocalization of μ-opioid and κ-opioid receptor genes and OT genes at the OT-releasing sites in the human brain. These data across monkeys and humans support a regulatory relationship between the OT and opioid systems and suggest that administering OT under opioid antagonism may boost the therapeutic efficacy of OT for enhancing social cognition.

Visual category selectivity is innate.

Interesting work from Hurk et al., who find that the brains of people blind since birth show category specific activity patterns for faces, scenes, body parts, and objects, meaning that this functional brain organization does not depend on visual input during development.

Significance

The brain’s ability to recognize visual categories is guided by category-selective ventral-temporal cortex (VTC). Whether visual experience is required for the functional organization of VTC into distinct functional subregions remains unknown, hampering our understanding of the mechanisms that drive category recognition. Here, we demonstrate that VTC in individuals who were blind since birth shows robust discriminatory responses to natural sounds representing different categories (faces, scenes, body parts, and objects). These activity patterns in the blind also could predict successfully which category was visually perceived by controls. The functional cortical layout in blind individuals showed remarkable similarity to the well-documented layout observed in sighted controls, suggesting that visual functional brain organization does not rely on visual input.

Abstract

To what extent does functional brain organization rely on sensory input? Here, we show that for the penultimate visual-processing region, ventral-temporal cortex (VTC), visual experience is not the origin of its fundamental organizational property, category selectivity. In the fMRI study reported here, we presented 14 congenitally blind participants with face-, body-, scene-, and object-related natural sounds and presented 20 healthy controls with both auditory and visual stimuli from these categories. Using macroanatomical alignment, response mapping, and surface-based multivoxel pattern analysis, we demonstrated that VTC in blind individuals shows robust discriminatory responses elicited by the four categories and that these patterns of activity in blind subjects could successfully predict the visual categories in sighted controls. These findings were confirmed in a subset of blind participants born without eyes and thus deprived from all light perception since conception. The sounds also could be decoded in primary visual and primary auditory cortex, but these regions did not sustain generalization across modalities. Surprisingly, although not as strong as visual responses, selectivity for auditory stimulation in visual cortex was stronger in blind individuals than in controls. The opposite was observed in primary auditory cortex. Overall, we demonstrated a striking similarity in the cortical response layout of VTC in blind individuals and sighted controls, demonstrating that the overall category-selective map in extrastriate cortex develops independently from visual experience.

Preferences for group dominance underlie social inequality and violence across societies

Work of Kunst et al. provided in open source text  whose findings suggest that societal inequality is reflected in people’s minds as dominance motives that underpin ideologies and actions that ultimately sustain group-based hierarchy.:

Significance

Individuals differ in the degree to which they endorse group-based hierarchies in which some social groups dominate others. Much research demonstrates that among individuals this preference robustly predicts ideologies and behaviors enhancing and sustaining social hierarchies (e.g., racism, sexism, and prejudice). Combining aggregate archival data from 27 countries (n = 41,824) and multilevel data from 30 US states (n = 4,613) with macro-level indicators, we demonstrate that the degree of structural inequality, social instability, and violence in different countries and US states is reflected in their populations’ minds in the form of support of group-based hegemony. This support, in turn, increases individual endorsement of ideologies and behaviors that ultimately sustain group-based inequality, such as the ethnic persecution of immigrants.

Abstract

Whether and how societal structures shape individual psychology is a foundational question of the social sciences. Combining insights from evolutionary biology, economy, and the political and psychological sciences, we identify a central psychological process that functions to sustain group-based hierarchies in human societies. In study 1, we demonstrate that macrolevel structural inequality, impaired population outcomes, socio-political instability, and the risk of violence are reflected in the endorsement of group hegemony at the aggregate population level across 27 countries (n = 41,824): The greater the national inequality, the greater is the endorsement of between-group hierarchy within the population. Using multilevel analyses in study 2, we demonstrate that these psychological group-dominance motives mediate the effects of macrolevel functioning on individual-level attitudes and behaviors. Specifically, across 30 US states (n = 4,613), macrolevel inequality and violence were associated with greater individual-level support of group hegemony. Crucially, this individual-level support, rather than cultural-societal norms, was in turn uniquely associated with greater racism, sexism, welfare opposition, and even willingness to enforce group hegemony violently by participating in ethnic persecution of subordinate out-groups. These findings suggest that societal inequality is reflected in people’s minds as dominance motives that underpin ideologies and actions that ultimately sustain group-based hierarchy.

The wisdom of crowds for visual search.

Juni and Eckstein show that perceptual decisions about large image data sets (as from medical and geospatial imaging) that are made by a group are more likely to be correct if group members' confidences are averaged than if a simple majority vote is taken:

Significance

Simple majority voting is a widespread, effective mechanism to exploit the wisdom of crowds. We explored scenarios where, from decision to decision, a varying minority of group members often has increased information relative to the majority of the group. We show how this happens for visual search with large image data and how the resulting pooling benefits are greater than previously thought based on simpler perceptual tasks. Furthermore, we show how simple majority voting obtains inferior benefits for such scenarios relative to averaging people’s confidences. These findings could apply to life-critical medical and geospatial imaging decisions that require searching large data volumes and, more generally, to any decision-making task for which the minority of group members with high expertise varies across decisions.

Abstract

Decision-making accuracy typically increases through collective integration of people’s judgments into group decisions, a phenomenon known as the wisdom of crowds. For simple perceptual laboratory tasks, classic signal detection theory specifies the upper limit for collective integration benefits obtained by weighted averaging of people’s confidences, and simple majority voting can often approximate that limit. Life-critical perceptual decisions often involve searching large image data (e.g., medical, security, and aerial imagery), but the expected benefits and merits of using different pooling algorithms are unknown for such tasks. Here, we show that expected pooling benefits are significantly greater for visual search than for single-location perceptual tasks and the prediction given by classic signal detection theory. In addition, we show that simple majority voting obtains inferior accuracy benefits for visual search relative to averaging and weighted averaging of observers’ confidences. Analysis of gaze behavior across observers suggests that the greater collective integration benefits for visual search arise from an interaction between the foveated properties of the human visual system (high foveal acuity and low peripheral acuity) and observers’ nonexhaustive search patterns, and can be predicted by an extended signal detection theory framework with trial to trial sampling from a varying mixture of high and low target detectabilities across observers (SDT-MIX). These findings advance our theoretical understanding of how to predict and enhance the wisdom of crowds for real world search tasks and could apply more generally to any decision-making task for which the minority of group members with high expertise varies from decision to decision.

Listener evaluations of new and old Italian violins

From Fritz et al.:

Old Italian violins are routinely credited with playing qualities supposedly unobtainable in new instruments. These qualities include the ability to project their sound more effectively in a concert hall—despite seeming relatively quiet under the ear of the player—compared with new violins. Although researchers have long tried to explain the “mystery” of Stradivari’s sound, it is only recently that studies have addressed the fundamental assumption of tonal superiority. Results from two studies show that, under blind conditions, experienced violinists tend to prefer playing new violins over Old Italians. Moreover, they are unable to tell new from old at better than chance levels. This study explores the relative merits of Stradivari and new violins from the perspective of listeners in a hall. Projection and preference are taken as the two broadest criteria by which listeners might meaningfully compare violins. Which violins are heard better, and which are preferred? In two separate experiments, three new violins were compared with three by Stradivari. Projection was tested both with and without orchestral accompaniment. Projection and preference were judged simultaneously by dividing listeners into two groups. Results are unambiguous. The new violins projected better than the Stradivaris whether tested with orchestra or without, the new violins were generally preferred by the listeners, and the listeners could not reliably distinguish new from old. The single best-projecting violin was considered the loudest under the ear by players, and on average, violins that were quieter under the ear were found to project less well.

Solitary discourse yields deeper understanding than solitary description.

Zavals and Kuhn show that imagining a discourse between advocates of two political candidates yields a richer representation than solitary evaluation of the candidates' merits:

Young adults received information regarding the platforms of two candidates for mayor of a troubled city. Half constructed a dialogue between advocates of the candidates, and the other half wrote an essay evaluating the candidates’ merits. Both groups then wrote a script for a TV spot favoring their preferred candidate. Results supported our hypothesis that the dialogic task would lead to deeper, more comprehensive processing of the two positions, and hence a richer representation of them. The TV scripts of the dialogue group included more references to city problems, candidates’ proposed actions, and links between them, as well as more criticisms of proposed actions and integrative judgments extending across multiple problems or proposed actions. Assessment of levels of epistemological understanding administered to the two groups after the writing tasks revealed that the dialogic group exhibited a lesser frequency of the absolutist position that knowledge consists of facts knowable with certainty. The potential of imagined interaction as a substitute for actual social exchange is considered.

Detecting both facial and olfactory cues of sickness in others

From Regenbogen et al.:

Significance

In the perpetual race between evolving organisms and pathogens, the human immune system has evolved to reduce the harm of infections. As part of such a system, avoidance of contagious individuals would increase biological fitness. The present study shows that we can detect both facial and olfactory cues of sickness in others just hours after experimental activation of their immune system. The study further demonstrates that multisensory integration of these olfactory and visual sickness cues is a crucial mechanism for how we detect and socially evaluate sick individuals. Thus, by motivating the avoidance of sick conspecifics, olfactory–visual cues, both in isolation and integrated, may be important parts of circuits handling imminent threats of contagion.

Abstract

Throughout human evolution, infectious diseases have been a primary cause of death. Detection of subtle cues indicating sickness and avoidance of sick conspecifics would therefore be an adaptive way of coping with an environment fraught with pathogens. This study determines how humans perceive and integrate early cues of sickness in conspecifics sampled just hours after the induction of immune system activation, and the underlying neural mechanisms for this detection. In a double-blind placebo-controlled crossover design, the immune system in 22 sample donors was transiently activated with an endotoxin injection [lipopolysaccharide (LPS)]. Facial photographs and body odor samples were taken from the same donors when “sick” (LPS-injected) and when “healthy” (saline-injected) and subsequently were presented to a separate group of participants (n = 30) who rated their liking of the presented person during fMRI scanning. Faces were less socially desirable when sick, and sick body odors tended to lower liking of the faces. Sickness status presented by odor and facial photograph resulted in increased neural activation of odor- and face-perception networks, respectively. A superadditive effect of olfactory–visual integration of sickness cues was found in the intraparietal sulcus, which was functionally connected to core areas of multisensory integration in the superior temporal sulcus and orbitofrontal cortex. Taken together, the results outline a disease-avoidance model in which neural mechanisms involved in the detection of disease cues and multisensory integration are vital parts.

Optimal incentives for collective intelligence

Mann and Helbing devise a game-theoretic model of collective prediction showing that an antidote to groupthink and conformity is to reward those who have shown accuracy when the majority opinion has been in error:

Significance

Diversity of information and expertise among group members has been identified as a crucial ingredient of collective intelligence. However, many factors tend to reduce the diversity of groups, such as herding, groupthink, and conformity. We show why the individual incentives in financial and prediction markets and the scientific community reduce diversity of information and how these incentives can be changed to improve the accuracy of collective forecasting. Our results, therefore, suggest ways to improve the poor performance of collective forecasting seen in recent political events and how to change career rewards to make scientific research more successful.

Abstract

Collective intelligence is the ability of a group to perform more effectively than any individual alone. Diversity among group members is a key condition for the emergence of collective intelligence, but maintaining diversity is challenging in the face of social pressure to imitate one’s peers. Through an evolutionary game-theoretic model of collective prediction, we investigate the role that incentives may play in maintaining useful diversity. We show that market-based incentive systems produce herding effects, reduce information available to the group, and restrain collective intelligence. Therefore, we propose an incentive scheme that rewards accurate minority predictions and show that this produces optimal diversity and collective predictive accuracy. We conclude that real world systems should reward those who have shown accuracy when the majority opinion has been in error.

Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth

A review from McGann noting work that shows no anatomical basis for supposing human olfaction to be inferior to animals, although variation in the olfactory receptor molecules in different species does cause differences in which odors are best detected:

Structured Abstract

BACKGROUND

It is widely believed that the human sense of smell is inferior to that of other mammals, especially rodents and dogs. This Review traces the scientific history of this idea to 19th-century neuroanatomist Paul Broca. He classified humans as “nonsmellers” not owing to any sensory testing but because he believed that the evolutionary enlargement of the human frontal lobe gave human beings free will at the expense of the olfactory system. He especially emphasized the small size of the human brain’s olfactory bulb relative to the size of the brain overall, and noted that other mammals have olfactory bulbs that are proportionately much larger. Broca’s claim that humans have an impoverished olfactory system (later labeled “microsmaty,” or tiny smell) influenced Sigmund Freud, who argued that olfactory atrophy rendered humans susceptible to mental illness. Humans’ supposed microsmaty led to the scientific neglect of the human olfactory system for much of the 20th century, and even today many biologists, anthropologists, and psychologists persist in the erroneous belief that humans have a poor sense of smell. Genetic and neurobiological data that reveal features unique to the human olfactory system are regularly misinterpreted to underlie the putative microsmaty, and the impact of human olfactory dysfunction is underappreciated in medical practice.

ADVANCES

Although the human olfactory system has turned out to have some biological differences from that of other mammalian species, it is generally similar in its neurobiology and sensory capabilities. The human olfactory system has fewer functional olfactory receptor genes than rodents, for instance, but the human brain has more complex olfactory bulbs and orbitofrontal cortices with which to interpret information from the roughly 400 receptor types that are expressed. The olfactory bulb is proportionately smaller in humans than in rodents, but is comparable in the number of neurons it contains and is actually much larger in absolute terms. Thus, although the rest of the brain became larger as humans evolved, the olfactory bulb did not become smaller. When olfactory performance is compared experimentally between humans and other animals, a key insight has been that the results are strongly influenced by the selection of odors tested, presumably because different odor receptors are expressed in each species. When an appropriate range of odors is tested, humans outperform laboratory rodents and dogs in detecting some odors while being less sensitive to other odors. Like other mammals, humans can distinguish among an incredible number of odors and can even follow outdoor scent trails. Human behaviors and affective states are also strongly influenced by the olfactory environment, which can evoke strong emotional and behavioral reactions as well as prompting distinct memories. Odor-mediated communication between individuals, once thought to be limited to “lower animals,” is now understood to carry information about familial relationships, stress and anxiety levels, and reproductive status in humans as well, although this information is not always consciously accessible.

OUTLOOK

The human olfactory system is increasingly understood to be highly dynamic. Olfactory sensitivity and discrimination abilities can be changed by experiences like environmental odor exposure or even just learning to associate odors with other stimuli in the laboratory. The neurobiological underpinnings of this plasticity, including “bottom-up” factors like regulation of peripheral odor receptors and “top-down” factors like the sensory consequences of emotional and cognitive states, are just beginning to be understood. The role of olfactory communication in shaping social interactions is also actively being explored, including the social spread of emotion through olfactory cues. Finally, impaired olfaction can be a leading indicator of certain neurodegenerative diseases, notably Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. New experimentation will be required to understand how olfactory sequelae might also reflect problems elsewhere in the nervous system, including mental disorders with sensory symptomatology. The idea that human smell is impoverished compared to other mammals is a 19th-century myth.

A moralistic bias in our default representation of what is possible.

From Phillips and Cushman:

Significance

As humans, we think not only about what is, but also what could be. These representations of alternative possibilities support many important cognitive functions, such as predicting others’ future actions, assigning responsibility for past events, and making moral judgments. We perform many of these tasks quickly and effortlessly, which suggests access to an implicit, default assumption about what is possible. What are the default features of the possibilities that we consider? Remarkably, we find a default bias toward representing immoral or irrational actions as being impossible. Although this bias is diminished upon deliberative reflection, it is the default judgments that appear to support higher-level cognition.

Abstract

The capacity for representing and reasoning over sets of possibilities, or modal cognition, supports diverse kinds of high-level judgments: causal reasoning, moral judgment, language comprehension, and more. Prior research on modal cognition asks how humans explicitly and deliberatively reason about what is possible but has not investigated whether or how people have a default, implicit representation of which events are possible. We present three studies that characterize the role of implicit representations of possibility in cognition. Collectively, these studies differentiate explicit reasoning about possibilities from default implicit representations, demonstrate that human adults often default to treating immoral and irrational events as impossible, and provide a case study of high-level cognitive judgments relying on default implicit representations of possibility rather than explicit deliberation.

Osteoarthritis attenuated by removing senescent cells.

Jeon et al. use a model of anterior cruciate ligament surgery to show that senescent cells assemble in the traumatized knee joint and trigger development of osteoarthritis and cartilage erosion in mice. By injecting a drug that causes the specific removal of these cells, the arthritis symptoms are alleviated, and cartilage regeneration and recovery are improved. Here is their technical abstract:

Senescent cells (SnCs) accumulate in many vertebrate tissues with age and contribute to age-related pathologies, presumably through their secretion of factors contributing to the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). Removal of SnCs delays several pathologies and increases healthy lifespan8. Aging and trauma are risk factors for the development of osteoarthritis (OA), a chronic disease characterized by degeneration of articular cartilage leading to pain and physical disability. Senescent chondrocytes are found in cartilage tissue isolated from patients undergoing joint replacement surgery, yet their role in disease pathogenesis is unknown. To test the idea that SnCs might play a causative role in OA, we used the p16-3MR transgenic mouse, which harbors a p16INK4a (Cdkn2a) promoter driving the expression of a fusion protein containing synthetic Renilla luciferase and monomeric red fluorescent protein domains, as well as a truncated form of herpes simplex virus 1 thymidine kinase (HSV-TK). This mouse strain allowed us to selectively follow and remove SnCs after anterior cruciate ligament transection (ACLT). We found that SnCs accumulated in the articular cartilage and synovium after ACLT, and selective elimination of these cells attenuated the development of post-traumatic OA, reduced pain and increased cartilage development. Intra-articular injection of a senolytic molecule that selectively killed SnCs validated these results in transgenic, non-transgenic and aged mice. Selective removal of the SnCs from in vitro cultures of chondrocytes isolated from patients with OA undergoing total knee replacement decreased expression of senescent and inflammatory markers while also increasing expression of cartilage tissue extracellular matrix proteins. Collectively, these findings support the use of SnCs as a therapeutic target for treating degenerative joint disease.

The Science of Consciousness

In 1994 I went to the first of what has become an annual gathering, sponsored by the Center for Consciousness Studies of the University of Arizona, of researchers, mystics, and random wackos, all interested in understanding the scientific basis of consciousness. In attending the first few of these conferences I made connections with others in the field, like Daniel Dennett, that motivated me to develop the course notes from a new offering I put together the University of Wisconsin "The Biology of Mind" into a book with the same title. This year's meeting in La Jolla, CA., has the usual mixture of hard science and far-out speculation. Just looking at the titles of the main talks is an interesting read, and I paste in those here:

Plenary Program 

Can Machines Be Conscious?

Sir Roger Penrose, Oxford, 'How can Consciousness Arise within the Laws of Physics?'

Joscha Bach, Harvard, 'Consciousness as a Memory of Coordinating Attention: The Conductor Model of Consciousness'

Hartmut Neven, Google , Quantum AI, 'Possible Roles of Quantum Effects and Subjective Experience in Artificial Intelligence' 

Language and Consciousness

Noam Chomsky, MIT, 'Language and Unconscious Mental Acts' 

Thomas Bever, U Arizona, 'Three Aspects of (Un)conscious Processing in Language and its Normal Use'

Michael J Spivey, UC Merced, 'Language, Consciousness and Embodied Cognition' 

Biophysics 1 - Memory, Spin and Anesthesia

Matthew Fisher, UC Santa Barbara, 'Are We Quantum Computers, or Merely Clever Robots?' 

Travis Craddock, Nova Southeastern U, 'A Unitary Mechanism of Anesthesia?: Altering Collective Oscillations in Microtubules' 

Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation 

Marom Bikson, CCNY/CUNY, 'Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation Devices to Change Thought and Behavior' 

John Allen, Arizona, 'Transcranial Ultrasound, Mood, and Resting State Network Connectivity' 

Marvin Berman, VieLight, 'Integrating Noninvasive Photobiomodulation and Neuromodulation' 

Michael Rohan, Harvard, 'The Effects of Low Field Magnetic Stimulation on Mood and Brain Function' 

Physics, Cosmology and Consciousness

Ivette Fuentes, U Nottingham, 'Gravity in the Quantum Lab' 

Brian Keating, UCSD, 'Conscious Cosmos' 

​James Tagg, Cengine, Penrose Institute, 'Are Human Beings Computers?' 

Music and the Brain

Elaine Chew, Queen Mary University London, 'Mind over Music Perception'

Scott Makeig, UCSD, 'Mind Over Consciousness?'  

Neuroscience and Consciousness 1

Stephen Grossberg, Boston U, 'The Varieties of Brain Resonances and the Conscious Experiences They Support' 

Georg Northoff, U Ottawa, 'Temporo-Spatial Theory of Consciousness' 

Friday, June 9, 2017

Neuroscience and Consciousness 2 - Anomalies

Daniel P. Sheehan, U San Diego, 'It's About Time: Experiments in Consciousness and Retrocausation' 

Peter Fenwick, UC London, 'A Meditation Teacher Who Can 'Transmit' Subjective Light/Energy'​

Lakhmir S. Chawla, George Washington U, 'End-of-Life Brain Activity' 

Biophysics 2 - Memristors in the Brain?

Leon Chua, UCSF, 'Brains are Made of Memristors' 

Jack A. Tuszynski, U Alberta, 'Microtubules as Subcellular Memristors'   

Neuroscience and Consciousness 3

Gentry Patrick, UCSD, 'Destruction as a Means of Remodeling: The Many Roles of Ubiquitin at the Synapse' 

VS Ramachandran, UCSD, 'Embodied Brains and Disembodied Minds' 

Charles F. Stevens, Salk Institute, UCSD, 'The Evolutionary Brain Mechanisms That Underlie Consciousness' 

Saturday, June 10, 2017

Vibrations, Resonance and Consciousness

Anirban Bandyopadhyay, NIMS, Tsukuba, 'Vibrational Frequencies of Biomaterials are the Key to Integration of Information' 

Jiapei Dai, South Central University, China, 'Biophotonic Activities and Transmission in Relation to Consciousness' 

Erik Viirre, UCSD, 'Auditory Vibrations and Frequencies: Sounds in Your Head'   

Eastern Philosophy

Xu Yingjin, Fudan University, China, 'Contemporary Theories of Consciousness and Nishida's notion of 'Basho'' 

Deepak Chopra, Chopra Foundation, 'Mind, Body, and Universe as Human Constructs'  

Origin and Evolution of Life and Consciousness

Bruce Damer, UC Santa Cruz, 'The Origin of Life and Consciousness' 

Alysson R. Muotri, UCSD, 'Cerebral Organoids for Neurodevelopmental and Evolutionary Studie's 

Stuart Hameroff, U Arizona, 'The 'Quantum Pleasure Principle' - Did Life Evolve to Feel Good?'  

Our brains have an innate knowledge of tools.

From Striem-Amit et al.:

Significance

To what extent is brain organization driven by innate genetic constraints, and how dependent is it on individual experience during early development? We show that an area of the visual system that processes both hands and tools can develop without sensorimotor experience in manipulating tools with one’s hands. People born without hands show typical hand–tool conjoined activity, in a region connected to the action network. Taken with findings from studies with people born blind, who also show intact hand and tool specialization in the visual system, these findings suggest that no specific sensory or motor experience is crucial for domain-specific organization of visual cortex. Instead, the results suggest that functional brain organization is largely innately determined.

Abstract

The visual occipito-temporal cortex is composed of several distinct regions specialized in the identification of different object kinds such as tools and bodies. Its organization appears to reflect not only the visual characteristics of the inputs but also the behavior that can be achieved with them. For example, there are spatially overlapping responses for viewing hands and tools, which is likely due to their common role in object-directed actions. How dependent is occipito-temporal cortex organization on object manipulation and motor experience? To investigate this question, we studied five individuals born without hands (individuals with upper limb dysplasia), who use tools with their feet. Using fMRI, we found the typical selective hand–tool overlap (HTO) not only in typically developed control participants but also in four of the five dysplasics. Functional connectivity of the HTO in the dysplasics also showed a largely similar pattern as in the controls. The preservation of functional organization in the dysplasics suggests that occipito-temporal cortex specialization is driven largely by inherited connectivity constraints that do not require sensorimotor experience. These findings complement discoveries of intact functional organization of the occipito-temporal cortex in people born blind, supporting an organization largely independent of any one specific sensory or motor experience.

The invisibility cloak illusion - You're too focused on what you're focused on.

Boothy does a summary of her work with Clark and Bargh. Some slightly edited clips:

That coffee stain on your shirt, those mismatched earrings you absent-mindedly selected this morning...people do not notice those things as much as you think...In a classic study from the 1990s, for example, participants put on a shirt emblazoned with the face of the singer Barry Manilow and then walked into a room full of people... It turned out that the number of people who actually noticed noticed was half the number they had thought.

...here’s the bad news. Most of the time, when you’re minding your own business and feeling relatively inconspicuous, you’re being watched much more than you realize...In one experiment, we asked two strangers participating in our study to arrive in our lab at the same time. They were seated in a waiting room and told that the experimenter was running a little behind schedule...Unbeknown to the participants, the study had begun the moment they walked into the waiting room. The real reason they were made to wait was to give them an opportunity to watch — and to feel observed or unobserved by — each other.

Once the participants were in their private rooms, one of them was asked to write down anything he or she noticed or thought about the other person, and then to report on a numerical scale how much he or she had observed the other person. The other participant was asked to write down anything he or she believed the other person had noticed or thought about him or her, and then to estimate how much the other person had observed him or her, using the same scale...Although people surreptitiously noticed all kinds of details about each other — clothing, personality, mood — we found that people were convinced that the other person wasn’t watching them much, if at all.

So other people notice our coffee stains less than we think, but they watch us in general more than we think. The problem, in both cases, is that we project the focus of our attention onto others...In short, we pay too much attention to what we’re paying attention to.

Increasing honesty in humans with noninvasive brain stimulation

Maréchal et al. show that a bit of electricity applied to your right prefrontal cortex makes you half as likely to be dishonest.  Hmmm..... I wonder if we could get a battery and a few small wires into the "Make America Great Again" baseball cap that Trump wears?

Significance

Honesty affects almost every aspect of social and economic life. We conducted experiments in which participants could earn considerable amounts of money by cheating on a die-rolling task. Cheating was substantial but decreased by more than one-half during transcranial direct current stimulation over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This stimulation-induced increase in honesty was functionally specific: It did not affect other types of behavioral control related to self-interest, risk-taking, and impulsivity. Moreover, cheating was only reduced when it benefited the participants themselves rather than another person. Thus, the human brain implements specialized processes that enable us to remain honest when faced with opportunities to cheat for personal material gain. Importantly, these processes can be strengthened by external interventions.

Abstract

Honesty plays a key role in social and economic interactions and is crucial for societal functioning. However, breaches of honesty are pervasive and cause significant societal and economic problems that can affect entire nations. Despite its importance, remarkably little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms supporting honest behavior. We demonstrate that honesty can be increased in humans with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Participants (n = 145) completed a die-rolling task where they could misreport their outcomes to increase their earnings, thereby pitting honest behavior against personal financial gain. Cheating was substantial in a control condition but decreased dramatically when neural excitability was enhanced with tDCS. This increase in honesty could not be explained by changes in material self-interest or moral beliefs and was dissociated from participants’ impulsivity, willingness to take risks, and mood. A follow-up experiment (n = 156) showed that tDCS only reduced cheating when dishonest behavior benefited the participants themselves rather than another person, suggesting that the stimulated neural process specifically resolves conflicts between honesty and material self-interest. Our results demonstrate that honesty can be strengthened by noninvasive interventions and concur with theories proposing that the human brain has evolved mechanisms dedicated to control complex social behaviors.

The fading American dream in a nutshell...

From Chetty et al.:

We estimated rates of “absolute income mobility”—the fraction of children who earn more than their parents—by combining data from U.S. Census and Current Population Survey cross sections with panel data from de-identified tax records. We found that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Increasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. However, distributing current GDP growth more equally across income groups as in the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the “American dream” of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is shared more broadly across the income distribution.

Our spatial memory is driven by perceived animacy of simple shapes.

Chin points to work of van Buren and Scholl who use “wolfpack” animations of dart shapes whose points track the movement of a disc (the prey) to show that these are more readily remembered than identical animations in which the dart points are oriented away from or perpendicular to the prey. Perceiving such moving shapes as animate reinforces visual memory and has possibly been important in human evolution. The abstract of the article:

Even simple geometric shapes are seen as animate and goal-directed when they move in certain ways. Previous research has revealed a great deal about the cues that elicit such percepts, but much less about the consequences for other aspects of perception and cognition. Here we explored whether simple shapes that are perceived as animate and goal-directed are prioritized in memory. We investigated this by asking whether subjects better remember the locations of displays that are seen as animate vs. inanimate, controlling for lower-level factors. We exploited the ‘Wolfpack effect’: moving darts (or discs with ‘eyes’) that stay oriented toward a particular target are seen to be actively pursuing that target, even when they actually move randomly. (In contrast, shapes that stay oriented perpendicular to a target are correctly perceived to be drifting randomly.) Subjects played a ‘matching game’ – clicking on pairs of panels to reveal animations with moving shapes. Across four experiments, the locations of Wolfpack animations (compared to control animations equated on lower-level visual factors) were better remembered, in terms of more efficient matching. Thus perceiving animacy influences subsequent visual memory, perhaps due to the adaptive significance of such stimuli.

Semantics and the science of fear - the amygdala doesn't 'cause' fear.

Here are some core clips from an article in which Joseph Ledoux updates an idea he proposed several decades ago:

…that objectively measurable behavioral and physiological responses elicited by emotional stimuli were controlled nonconsciously by subcortical circuits, such as those involving the amygdala, while the conscious emotional experience was the result of cortical (mostly prefrontal) circuits that contribute to working memory and related higher cognitive functions. Building on a distinction emerging in the study of memory, I referred to these as implicit (nonconscious) and explicit (conscious) fear circuits

He has come to realize:

...that the implicit–explicit distinction had less traction in the case of emotions than in memory. The vernacular meaning of emotion words is simply too strong. When we hear the word ‘fear’, the default interpretation is the conscious experience of being in danger, and this meaning dominates. For example, although I consistently emphasized that the amygdala circuits operate nonconsciously, I was often described in both lay and scientific contexts as having shown how feelings of fear emerge from the amygdala. Even researchers working in the objective tradition sometimes appear confused about what they mean by fear; papers in the field commonly refer to ‘frightened rats’ that ‘freeze in fear’. A naïve reader naturally thinks of frightened rats as feeling ‘fear’. As noted above, using mental state terms to describe the function of brain circuits infects the circuit with surplus meaning (psychological properties of the mental state) and confusion invariably results.

Recently, I have … abandoned the implicit–explicit fear approach in favor of a conception that restricts the use of mental state terms to conscious mental states. I now only use ‘fear’ to refer to the experience of fear. It is common these days to argue that folk psychological ideas will be replaced with more accurate scientific constructs as the field matures. Indeed, for nonsubjective brain functions, subjective state labels should be eliminated. This is what I had in mind when I proposed calling the amygdala circuit a defensive survival circuit instead of a fear circuit (see Figure). However, the language of folk psychology describes conscious experiences, such as fear, just fine.

Figure - The Two-Circuit View of Threat Processing and the Experience of Fear. (A) In the two-circuit model, threats are processed in parallel by subcortical and cortical circuits. A subcortical defensive survival circuit centered on the amygdala initiates defensive behaviors in response to threats, while a cortical (mostly prefrontal) cognitive circuit underlying working memory gives rise to the conscious experience of fear. In many situations, survival circuit activity also contributes, albeit indirectly, to fearful feelings. (B) Conscious feelings of fear are proposed to emerge in the cortical circuit as a result of information integration in working memory, including information about sensory and various memory representations, as well as information from survival and arousal circuit activity within the brain, and feedback from body responses.

Psychology is different from other sciences, and has hurdles that they lack. Atoms do not study atoms, but minds study mental states and behaviors. When we engage in psychological research, we must take care to account for the prominent role of subjective experiences in our lives, while also being careful not to attribute subjective causes to behaviors controlled nonconsciously. Conflation of behavioral control circuits with subjective states by indiscriminate use of subjective state terms for both behavioral control circuits and conscious experiences is not a problem restricted to fear. It is present in many areas, including motivation, reward, pain, perception, and memory, to name a few obvious ones. Fear researchers, by addressing this issue, might well set an example that also paves the way for crisper conceptions in other areas of research.