Transparency is the mother of 'fake news'

Stanley Fish, writing in the NYTimes "The Stone" series suggests that fake news is in large part a product of the enthusiasm for transparency and absolutely free speech. I suggest you read the whole piece. Below are a few clips.

The problem is..

...that information, data and the unbounded flow of more and more speech can be politicized — it can, that is, be woven into a narrative that constricts rather than expands the area of free, rational choice. When that happens — and it will happen often — transparency and the unbounded flow of speech become instruments in the production of the very inequalities (economic, political, educational) that the gospel of openness promises to remove. And the more this gospel is preached and believed, the more that the answer to everything is assumed to be data uncorrupted by interests and motives, the easier it will be for interest and motives to operate under transparency’s cover.

This is so because speech and data presented as if they were independent of any mechanism of selectivity will float free of the standards of judgment that are always the content of such mechanisms. Removing or denying the existence of gatekeeping procedures will result not in a fair and open field of transparency but in a field where manipulation and deception find no obstacles. Because it is an article of their faith that politics are bad and the unmediated encounter with data is good, internet prophets will fail to see the political implications of what they are trying to do, for in their eyes political implications are what they are doing away with.

...human difference is irreducible, and there is no “neutral observation language” (a term of the philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s in his 1962 book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”) that can bridge, soften, blur and even erase the differences. When people from opposing constituencies clash there is no common language to which they can refer their differences for mechanical resolution; there are only political negotiations that would involve not truth telling but propaganda, threats, insults, deceptions, exaggerations, insinuations, bluffs, posturings — all the forms of verbal manipulation that will supposedly disappear in the internet nirvana.

They won’t. Indeed, they will proliferate because the politically angled speech that is supposedly the source of our problems is in fact the only possible route to their (no doubt temporary) solution. Speech proceeding from a point of view can at least be recognized as such and then countered. You say, “I know where those guys are coming from, and here are my reasons for believing that we should be coming from some place else” — and dialogue begins. It is dialogue inflected by interests and agendas, but dialogue still. But when speech (or information or data) is just sitting there inert, unattached to any perspective, when there are no guidelines, monitors, gatekeepers or filters, what you have are innumerable bits (like Lego) available for assimilation into any project a clever verbal engineer might imagine; and what you don’t have is any mechanism that can stop or challenge the construction project or even assess it. What you have, in short, are the perfect conditions for the unchecked proliferation of what has come to be called “fake news.”

Industrial revolutions are political and social wrecking balls.

I want to point to yet another impressive bit of research and writing by Thomas Edsall, who gives one of the most clear pictures I have seen of current political and economic changes. Edsall begins with a few quotes from Klaus Schwab at Davos in January 2016 on the bright side of the 'fourth industrial revolution' (cf. my posts on Schwab and Davos on Jan. 28, Jan. 29, and Feb. 9, 2016.) and then the downside. Compared with previous industrial revolutions,

...the fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country. And the breadth and depth of these changes herald the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance.

And, in a huge understatement:

As automation substitutes for labor across the entire economy, the net displacement of workers by machines might exacerbate the gap between returns to capital and returns to labor.

Edsall quotes from various authors:

On balance, near-term AI will have the greatest effect on blue collar work, clerical work and other mid-skilled occupations. Given globalization’s effect on the 2016 presidential election, it is worth noting that near-term AI and globalization replace many of the same jobs...Robots, autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, drones and the Internet of Things are moving ahead rapidly and transforming the way businesses operate and how people earn their livelihoods. For millions who work in occupations like food service, retail sales and truck driving, machines are replacing their jobs.

AI’s near-term effect will not be mass unemployment but occupational polarization resulting in a slowly growing number of persons moving from mid-skilled jobs into lower wage work

The concern is not that robots will take human jobs and render humans unemployable. The traditional economic arguments against that are borne out by centuries of experience...the problem lies in the process of turnover, which could lead to sustained periods of time with a large fraction of people not working...not all workers will have the training or ability to find the new jobs created by AI. Moreover, this “short run” could last for decades and, in fact, the economy could be in a series of “short runs” for even longer.

A populist politician who campaigned on AI-induced job loss would start with ready-made definitions of the "people” and the “elite” based on national fault lines that were sharpened in the 2016 presidential election. This politician also would have a ready-made example of disrespect: the set of highly educated coastal “elites” who make a very good living developing robots to put “the people” out of work.

...both technology and trade seem to drive structural changes which are consequential for voting behavior...Job losses in manufacturing due to automation do create fertile territory for continued populist appeal...In fact, some of the places where Trump made the biggest gains relative to McCain or Romney are in the heartland of heavy manufacturing where robots did lead to losses of manufacturing jobs...David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., examined the political consequences in congressional districts hurt by increased trade with China and found a significant increase in the election of very conservative Republicans.

Rather than directly opposing free trade policies, individuals in import-exposed communities tend to target scapegoats such as immigrants and minorities. This drives support for right-wing candidates, as they compete electorally by targeting out-groups...in areas affected by trade, the scapegoating of immigrants takes place across the board and is not limited to manufacturing workers.

The hard core of Trump’s voters — more than half of all Republican voters don’t just approve of him, but strongly approve — have, in turn, demonstrated a willingness to deify the president no matter what he does or says — a deification dependent in no small part on Trump’s adoption of new communications technologies like Twitter.

The determination of the Trump wing of the Republican Party to profiteer on technologically driven economic and cultural upheaval — and the success of this strategy to date — suggests that the party will continue on its path. For this reason and many others, it is critically important that Democrats develop a more far-reaching understanding of the disruptive, technologically fueled economic and cultural forces that are now shaping American politics — if they intend to steer the country in a more constructive direction, that is.

How not to mind if someone is lying...

Daniel Effron describes the means by which Trump supporters, aware that many of his statements are falsehoods, manage to temper their potential anger.

Mr. Trump’s representatives have used a subtle psychological strategy to defend his falsehoods: They encourage people to reflect on how the falsehoods could have been true.

Effron's research has confirmed the effectiveness of this tactic. He asked

...2,783 Americans from across the political spectrum to read a series of claims that they were told (correctly) were false. Some claims, like the falsehood about the inauguration crowd, appealed to Mr. Trump’s supporters, and some appealed to his opponents: for instance, a false report (which circulated widely on the internet) that Mr. Trump had removed a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office.

All the participants were asked to rate how unethical it was to tell the falsehoods. But half the participants were first invited to imagine how the falsehood could have been true if circumstances had been different. For example, they were asked to consider whether the inauguration would have been bigger if the weather had been nicer, or whether Mr. Trump would have removed the bust if he could have gotten away with it.

The results of the experiments... show that reflecting on how a falsehood could have been true did cause people to rate it as less unethical to tell — but only when the falsehoods seemed to confirm their political views. Trump supporters and opponents both showed this effect.

Again, the problem wasn’t that people confused fact and fiction; virtually everyone recognized the claims as false. But when a falsehood resonated with people’s politics, asking them to imagine counterfactual situations in which it could have been true softened their moral judgments. A little imagination can apparently make a lie feel “truthy” enough to give the liar a bit of a pass.

These results reveal a subtle hypocrisy in how we maintain our political views. We use different standards of honesty to judge falsehoods we find politically appealing versus unappealing. When judging a falsehood that maligns a favored politician, we ask, “Was it true?” and then condemn it if the answer is no.

In this time of “fake news” and “alternative facts,”...Even when partisans agree on the facts, they can come to different moral conclusions about the dishonesty of deviating from those facts. The result is more disagreement in an already politically polarized world.

More on the vagaries of expertise

To follow up on yesterday's post on the illusion of having skills, I want to point to two other articles in this vein. Herrera notes work showing that:

...in group-work settings, instead of determining whether a given person has genuine expertise we sometimes focus on proxies of expertise — the traits and habits we associate, and often conflate, with expertise. That means qualities such as confidence, extroversion and how much someone talks can outweigh demonstrated knowledge when analyzing whether a person is an expert...In other words, your brain can instinctively trust people simply because they sound as if they know what they’re talking about.

And, Gibson reviews the work of Tom Nichols, reflected in his book "The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Expertise and Why It Matters." Nichols...

...had begun noticing what he perceived as a new and accelerating—and dangerous—hostility toward established knowledge. People were no longer merely uninformed, Nichols says, but “aggressively wrong” and unwilling to learn. They actively resisted facts that might alter their preexisting beliefs. They insisted that all opinions, however uninformed, be treated as equally serious. And they rejected professional know-how, he says, with such anger. That shook him.

Skepticism toward intellectual authority is bone-deep in the American character, as much a part of the nation’s origin story as the founders’ Enlightenment principles. Overall, that skepticism is a healthy impulse, Nichols believes. But what he was observing was something else, something malignant and deliberate, a collapse of functional citizenship. “Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue...To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything.”

Readers regularly approach Nichols with stories of their own disregarded expertise: doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians who’ve gotten used to being second-guessed by customers and clients and patients who know little or nothing about their work. “So many people over the past year have walked up to me and said, ‘You wrote what I was thinking,’” he says.

The illusion of skill acquisition.

Kardas and O'Brien document how watching others perform can foster an illusion of skill acquisition. Their abstract:

Modern technologies such as YouTube afford unprecedented access to the skilled performances of other people. Six experiments (N = 2,225) reveal that repeatedly watching others can foster an illusion of skill acquisition. The more people merely watch others perform (without actually practicing themselves), the more they nonetheless believe they could perform the skill, too (Experiment 1). However, people’s actual abilities—from throwing darts and doing the moonwalk to playing an online game—do not improve after merely watching others, despite predictions to the contrary (Experiments 2–4). What do viewers see that makes them think they are learning? We found that extensive viewing allows people to track what steps to take (Experiment 5) but not how those steps feel when taking them. Accordingly, experiencing a “taste” of performing attenuates the illusion: Watching others juggle but then holding the pins oneself tempers perceived change in one’s own ability (Experiment 6). These findings highlight unforeseen problems for self-assessment when watching other people.

Protein synthesis in brain tissue is much higher than previously thought.

Smeets et al. use stable isotope methodology during temporal lobe resection surgery to demonstrate protein synthesis rates exceeding 3% per day, suggesting that brain tissue plasticity is far greater than previously assumed.

All tissues undergo continuous reconditioning via the complex orchestration of changes in tissue protein synthesis and breakdown rates. Skeletal muscle tissue has been well studied in this regard, and has been shown to turnover at a rate of 1–2% per day in vivo in humans. Few data are available on protein synthesis rates of other tissues. Because of obvious limitations with regard to brain tissue sampling no study has ever measured brain protein synthesis rates in vivo in humans. Here, we applied stable isotope methodology to directly assess protein synthesis rates in neocortex and hippocampus tissue of six patients undergoing temporal lobectomy for drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy (Clinical trial registration: NTR5147). Protein synthesis rates of neocortex and hippocampus tissue averaged 0.17 ± 0.01 and 0.13 ± 0.01%/h, respectively. Brain tissue protein synthesis rates were 3–4-fold higher than skeletal muscle tissue protein synthesis rates (0.05 ± 0.01%/h; P < 0.001). In conclusion, the protein turnover rate of the human brain is much higher than previously assumed.

Electrical brain stimulation enhances visual memory performance

Kucewicz et al. study patients with epilepsy undergoing evaluation for resective surgery to show that stimulation of the lateral temporal cortex, but not the hippocampus, parahippocampal neocortex or prefrontal cortex, increases the number of words that patients can remember.:

Direct electrical stimulation of the human brain can elicit sensory and motor perceptions as well as recall of memories. Stimulating higher order association areas of the lateral temporal cortex in particular was reported to activate visual and auditory memory representations of past experiences (Penfield and Perot, 1963). We hypothesized that this effect could be used to modulate memory processing. Recent attempts at memory enhancement in the human brain have been focused on the hippocampus and other mesial temporal lobe structures, with a few reports of memory improvement in small studies of individual brain regions. Here, we investigated the effect of stimulation in four brain regions known to support declarative memory: hippocampus, parahippocampal neocortex, prefrontal cortex and temporal cortex. Intracranial electrode recordings with stimulation were used to assess verbal memory performance in a group of 22 patients (nine males). We show enhanced performance with electrical stimulation in the lateral temporal cortex (paired t-test, P = 0.0067), but not in the other brain regions tested. This selective enhancement was observed both on the group level, and for two of the four individual subjects stimulated in the temporal cortex. This study shows that electrical stimulation in specific brain areas can enhance verbal memory performance in humans.

A morning cortisol pulse is crucial for normal cognitive and emotional responses.

From Kalafatakis et. al.:

Significance

The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis is a critical neurohormonal network regulating homeostasis and coordinating stress responses. Here we demonstrate that an oscillating pattern of plasma cortisol is important for maintenance of healthy brain responses as measured by functional neuroimaging and behavioral testing. Our data highlight the crucial role of glucocorticoid rhythmicity in (i) modulating sleep behavior and working memory performance, and (ii) regulating the human brain’s responses under emotional stimulation. Current optimal cortisol replacement therapies for patients with primary or secondary adrenal insufficiently are associated with poor psychological status, and these results suggest that closer attention to aspects of chronotherapy will benefit these patients and may also have major implications for improved glucocorticoid dynamics in stress and psychiatric disease.

Abstract

Glucocorticoids (GCs) are secreted in an ultradian, pulsatile pattern that emerges from delays in the feedforward-feedback interaction between the anterior pituitary and adrenal glands. Dynamic oscillations of GCs are critical for normal cognitive and metabolic function in the rat and have been shown to modulate the pattern of GC-sensitive gene expression, modify synaptic activity, and maintain stress responsiveness. In man, current cortisol replacement therapy does not reproduce physiological hormone pulses and is associated with psychopathological symptoms, especially apathy and attenuated motivation in engaging with daily activities. In this work, we tested the hypothesis that the pattern of GC dynamics in the brain is of crucial importance for regulating cognitive and behavioral processes. We provide evidence that exactly the same dose of cortisol administered in different patterns alters the neural processing underlying the response to emotional stimulation, the accuracy in recognition and attentional bias toward/away from emotional faces, the quality of sleep, and the working memory performance of healthy male volunteers. These data indicate that the pattern of the GC rhythm differentially impacts human cognition and behavior under physiological, nonstressful conditions and has major implications for the improvement of cortisol replacement therapy.

Sitting is bad for your brain...

It is well known that sitting for long periods each day correlates with higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, and mortality rate. Siddarth et al. at UCLA now show a correlation of sedentary behavior with reduced thickness of the medial temporal lobe of our brains, which contains the hippocampus and is central to learning and memory. Their abstract:

Atrophy of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) occurs with aging, resulting in impaired episodic memory. Aerobic fitness is positively correlated with total hippocampal volume, a heavily studied memory-critical region within the MTL. However, research on associations between sedentary behavior and MTL subregion integrity is limited. Here we explore associations between thickness of the MTL and its subregions (namely CA1, CA23DG, fusiform gyrus, subiculum, parahippocampal, perirhinal and entorhinal cortex,), physical activity, and sedentary behavior. We assessed 35 non-demented middle-aged and older adults (25 women, 10 men; 45–75 years) using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire for older adults, which quantifies physical activity levels in MET-equivalent units and asks about the average number of hours spent sitting per day. All participants had high resolution MRI scans performed on a Siemens Allegra 3T MRI scanner, which allows for detailed investigation of the MTL. Controlling for age, total MTL thickness correlated inversely with hours of sitting/day (r = -0.37, p = 0.03). In MTL subregion analysis, parahippocampal (r = -0.45, p = 0.007), entorhinal (r = -0.33, p = 0.05) cortical and subiculum (r = -0.36, p = .04) thicknesses correlated inversely with hours of sitting/day. No significant correlations were observed between physical activity levels and MTL thickness. Though preliminary, our results suggest that more sedentary non-demented individuals have less MTL thickness. Future studies should include longitudinal analyses and explore mechanisms, as well as the efficacy of decreasing sedentary behaviors to reverse this association.

Brain signals predict who we will like in the future.

From Zerubavel et al.:

Significance

When joining a group, we may initially like some individuals more than others. Likewise, certain group members may be particularly drawn to us. Over months of interaction, these attractions inevitably change and typically become reciprocated. This study uses fMRI to predict such changes in liking. Specifically, we measure newly acquainted group members’ reward system responses to images of one another’s faces. We find that T1 neural responses predict whom one will like in the future. More strikingly, we find that others’ T1 neural responses to us predict whom we will like months later, at T2. This brain-based mechanism helps explain how group members’ initially unreciprocated liking sentiments become mutually reciprocated. This study reveals how our brains interdependently shape interpersonal relationships.

Abstract

Why do certain group members end up liking each other more than others? How does affective reciprocity arise in human groups? The prediction of interpersonal sentiment has been a long-standing pursuit in the social sciences. We combined fMRI and longitudinal social network data to test whether newly acquainted group members’ reward-related neural responses to images of one another’s faces predict their future interpersonal sentiment, even many months later. Specifically, we analyze associations between relationship-specific valuation activity and relationship-specific future liking. We found that one’s own future (T2) liking of a particular group member is predicted jointly by actor’s initial (T1) neural valuation of partner and by that partner’s initial (T1) neural valuation of actor. These actor and partner effects exhibited equivalent predictive strength and were robust when statistically controlling for each other, both individuals’ initial liking, and other potential drivers of liking. Behavioral findings indicated that liking was initially unreciprocated at T1 yet became strongly reciprocated by T2. The emergence of affective reciprocity was partly explained by the reciprocal pathways linking dyad members’ T1 neural data both to their own and to each other’s T2 liking outcomes. These findings elucidate interpersonal brain mechanisms that define how we ultimately end up liking particular interaction partners, how group members’ initially idiosyncratic sentiments become reciprocated, and more broadly, how dyads evolve. This study advances a flexible framework for researching the neural foundations of interpersonal sentiments and social relations that—conceptually, methodologically, and statistically—emphasizes group members’ neural interdependence.

You're as old as you feel...

The cliche continues to be backed up by data indicating that it is correct. Marlene Cimons does a piece pointing to recent work on attitude and aging. A well know paradox of old age is that as people's minds and bodies deline, instead of feeling worse about their lives, they feel better. A large internet survey by Chopik et al. of over half a million people showed that, consistently across age groups, people report themselves to feel about 20% younger than their current age. People who go against common negative view about aging to feel positive about aging are less likely to develop dementia. In a study of 4,765 dementia free subjects age 60 or older Levy et al. found that people with the  ε4 variant of the APOE gene (one of the strongest risk factors for dementia) who had positive age beliefs were 50% less likely to develop dementia.

A workshop on music and the brain.

I want to point to this open access article describing an NIH/Kennedy Center workshop on music and the brain, hosted by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins, soprano Renée Fleming, and Kennedy Center (KC) President Deborah Rutter. Descriptions of the various workshops, in addition to waffling and hot air, include some useful links to basic research articles on music and the brain. Here is a clip from the introduction:

The workshop was organized around the three life stages—childhood, adulthood, and aging. In each session, a panel of 25 experts (listed in Table 1) discussed recent breakthroughs in research and their potential therapeutic applications. Over the course of a day and a half, the panelists recommended basic and applied research that will: (1) increase our understanding of how the brain processes music; (2) lead to scientifically based strategies to enhance normal brain development and function; and (3) result in evidence-based music interventions for brain diseases. In the sections that follow, we will review the discussions from the workshop and highlight the major recommendations that emerged. Finally, we will discuss how funding agencies, scientists, clinicians, and supporters of the arts can work together to catalyze further progress.

The article is worth a read for those (like myself) interested in music and the brain. The workshop on music and the adult brain discusses the effect of musical training on adult brain structure and function. Here are the topics:

“Building”: Music and the Child’s Brain

Music as a Therapeutic Intervention in Children

“Engaging”: Music and the Adult Brain

Music as a Therapeutic Intervention in Adults: Overlapping Circuits Suggest Potential Mechanisms

“Sustaining”: Music and the Aging Brain

Music as a Tool for Restoring Function in the Aging Brain

Risk tolerance is predicted by amygdala-prefrontal cortex connectivity

Hoon et al. show that more nerve connections between our amygdala and the rest of the brain increase our tolerance for risk.

Highlights

•Neural markers for risk tolerance were investigated with multimodal imaging data 

•Risk tolerance correlated with amygdala-medial prefrontal cortex connectivity 

•Risk tolerance correlated with amygdala structure

Summary

Risk tolerance, the degree to which an individual is willing to tolerate risk in order to achieve a greater expected return, influences a variety of financial choices and health behaviors. Here we identify intrinsic neural markers for risk tolerance in a large (n = 108) multimodal imaging dataset of healthy young adults, which includes anatomical and resting-state functional MRI and diffusion tensor imaging. Using a data-driven approach, we found that higher risk tolerance was most strongly associated with greater global functional connectivity (node strength) of and greater gray matter volume in bilateral amygdala. Further, risk tolerance was positively associated with functional connectivity between amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex and negatively associated with structural connectivity between these regions. These findings show how the intrinsic functional and structural architecture of the amygdala, and amygdala-medial prefrontal pathways, which have previously been implicated in anxiety, are linked to individual differences in risk tolerance during economic decision making.

Propagation of economic inequality through reciprocity and reputation.

Interesting work from Hackel and Zaki...an excerpt from their introduction, followed by their abstract:

Reciprocity and reputation are cornerstones of both evolutionary accounts of prosociality and evidence-based policy suggestions for amplifying cooperation on a large scale. For instance, people are more likely to vote, donate blood, and conserve energy when their actions are observable by others.

In studies of reciprocity, participants typically start out with an even distribution of wealth By contrast, the real world features enormous and rising economic inequality. We propose that when initial distributions of wealth are unequal, reciprocity and reputation might exacerbate economic inequality.

One possible mechanism is reward-based reinforcement learning, through which people associate actions with rewards Consider two “givers,” one of whom starts with a $100 endowment and the other of whom starts with a $20 endowment. If each giver shares half of his or her resources, each exhibits equal levels of generosity but provides differing levels of reward value, or raw capital, to beneficiaries. When people experience repeated pairings of a stimulus with reward, they are more likely to return to that stimulus . Similarly, we suggest that rewards build positive affect toward another person—even when those rewards do not reflect the giver’s generosity—and these positive associations can color later choices of people with whom to interact.

The abstract:

Reciprocity and reputation are powerful tools for encouraging cooperation on a broad scale. Here, we highlight a potential side effect of these social phenomena: exacerbating economic inequality. In two novel economic games, we manipulated the amount of money with which participants were endowed and then gave them the opportunity to share resources with others. We found that people reciprocated more toward higher-wealth givers, compared with lower-wealth givers, even when those givers were equally generous. Wealthier givers also achieved better reputations than less wealthy ones and therefore received more investments in a social marketplace. These discrepancies were well described by a formal model of reinforcement learning: Individuals who weighted monetary outcomes, rather than generosity, when learning about interlocutors also most strongly helped wealthier individuals. This work demonstrates that reciprocity and reputation—although globally increasing prosociality—can widen wealth gaps and provides a precise account of how inequality grows through social processes.

Seeing what you feel - unconscious affect drives perception

Siegle et al. provide yet another example of how it is impossible to separate emotions from cognition and perception:

Affective realism, the phenomenon whereby affect is integrated into an individual’s experience of the world, is a normal consequence of how the brain processes sensory information from the external world in the context of sensations from the body. In the present investigation, we provided compelling empirical evidence that affective realism involves changes in visual perception (i.e., affect changes how participants see neutral stimuli). In two studies, we used an interocular suppression technique, continuous flash suppression, to present affective images outside of participants’ conscious awareness. We demonstrated that seen neutral faces are perceived as more smiling when paired with unseen affectively positive stimuli. Study 2 also demonstrated that seen neutral faces are perceived as more scowling when paired with unseen affectively negative stimuli. These findings have implications for real-world situations and challenge beliefs that affect is a distinct psychological phenomenon that can be separated from cognition and perception.

Why exercise alone may not cause weight loss.

Gretchen Reynolds points to work by Lark et al. showing that mice given the opportunity to exercise on a running wheel then are more lazy the rest of the time than mice who don't exercise. Thus the effects of voluntary exercise can be countered by a reduction in nonexercise activity. This may explain why numerous studies in recent years examining exercise and weight loss in both humans and animals have concluded that exercise, by itself, is not an effective way to drop pounds.

How our "I" is like a virtual reality headset.

I pass on some clips from Joshua Rothman's article on the ideas of Metzinger, Blanke and others regarding the actual nature of our experienced selves, ideas that rise from virtual embodiment experiments in which subjects become convinced that they are someone else. The work challenges our understanding of who and what we are.

…reality, as we experience it, might be a mental stage set—a representation of the world, rather than the world itself. Having an O.B.E. (out of body experience) could be like visiting the set at night, when it wasn’t being used…Some internal mental system must function as an invisible, unconscious set dresser, making an itch feel like an itch, coloring the sky blue and the grass green.

It isn’t just that we live inside a model of the external world, Metzinger wrote. We also live inside models of our own bodies, minds, and selves. These “self-models” don’t always reflect reality, and they can be adjusted in illogical ways. They can, for example, portray a self that exists outside of the body—an O.B.E.

Metzinger and Blanke set about hacking the self-model. Along with the cognitive scientists Bigna Lenggenhager and Tej Tadi, they created a virtual-reality system designed to induce O.B.E.-like episodes. In 2005, Metzinger put on a virtual-reality head-mounted display—a headset containing a pair of screens, one for each eye, which together produce the illusion of a 3-D world. Inside, he saw his own body, facing away from him, standing in a room. (It was being filmed by a camera placed six feet behind him.) He watched as Lenggenhager stroked its back. Metzinger could feel the stroking, but the body to which it was happening seemed to be situated in front of him. He felt a strange sensation, as though he were drifting in space, or being stretched between the two bodies. He wanted to jump entirely into the body before him, but couldn’t. He seemed marooned outside of himself. It wasn’t quite an out-of-body experience, but it was proof that, using computer technology, the self-model could easily be manipulated. A new area of research had been created: virtual embodiment.

With a team of various collaborators, Slater and Sanchez-Vives have created many other-body simulations; they show how inhabiting a new virtual body can produce meaningful psychological shifts. In one study, participants are re-embodied as a little girl. Surrounded by a stuffed bear, a rocking horse, and other toys, they watch as their mother sternly demands a cleaner room. Afterward, on psychological tests, they associate themselves with more childlike characteristics. (When I tried it, under the supervision of the V.R. researcher Domna Banakou, I was astonished by my small size, and by the intimidating, Olympian height from which the mother addressed me.) In another, white participants spend around ten minutes in the body of a virtual black person, learning Tai Chi. Afterward, their scores on a test designed to reveal unconscious racial bias shift significantly. “These effects happen fast, and seem to last,” Slater said. A week later, the white participants still had less racist attitudes. (The racial-bias results have been replicated several times in Barcelona, and also by a second team, in London.) Embodied simulations seem to slip beneath the cognitive threshold, affecting the associative, unconscious parts of the mind. “It’s directly experiential,” Slater said. “It’s not ‘I know.’ It’s ‘I am.’ ”

 “I think that, in the human self-model, there are many layers. Some layers are transparent, like your bodily perceptions, which seem absolutely real. You just look”—he gestured toward a chair next to us—“and the chair is there. Others are opaque, like our cognitive layer. When we’re thinking, we know that our thoughts are internal mental constructs, which could be true or false.” As a philosopher, Metzinger’s method has been to see if the transparent can be made opaque. In books such as “Being No One” and “The Ego Tunnel,” he aims to show that aspects of our experience which we take to be real are actually “complex forms of virtual reality” created by our brains.

Imagine that you are sitting in the cockpit of an airplane, surrounded by instruments and controls. It’s a futuristic cockpit, with no windows; where the windshield would be, a computer displays the landscape. Using this cockpit, you can pilot your plane with ease. Still, there are questions you are unable to answer. Exactly what kind of plane are you flying? (It could be a Boeing 777 or an Airbus A380.) How accurate is the landscape on the screen? (Perhaps night-vision software has turned night to day.) When you throttle up the engines, you feel a rumbling and hear a roar. Does this mean the plane is accelerating—or could those effects have been simulated? Both scenarios might be true. You could be using a flight simulator to fly a real plane. This, in Metzinger’s view, is how we live our lives.

The instruments in an airplane cockpit report on pitch, yaw, speed, fuel, altitude, engine status, and so on. Our human instruments report on more complicated variables. They tell us about physical facts: the status of our bodies and limbs. But they also report on mental states: on what we are sensing, feeling, and thinking; on our intentions, knowledge, and memories; on where and who we are. You might wonder who is sitting in the cockpit, controlling everything. Metzinger thinks that no one is sitting there. “We” are the instruments, and our sense of selfhood is the sum of their readouts. On the instrument panel, there is a light with a label that says “Pilot Present.” When the light is on, we are self-conscious; we experience being in the cockpit and monitoring the instruments. It’s easy to assume that, while you’re awake, this light is always on. In fact, it’s frequently off—during daydreams, during much of our mental life, which is largely automatic and unconscious—and the plane still flies.

Two facts about the cockpit are of special importance. The first is that although the cockpit controls the airplane, it is not itself an airplane. It’s only a simulation—a model—of a larger, more complex, and very different machine. The implication of this fact is that the stories we tell about what happens in the cockpit—“I pulled up on the stick”; “I touched my jacket”—are very different from the reality of what is happening to the system as a whole. The second fact, harder to grasp, is that we cannot see the cockpit. Even as we consult its models of the outer and inner worlds, we don’t experience ourselves as doing so; we experience ourselves as simply existing. “You cannot recognize your self-model as a model,” Metzinger writes, in “Being No One.” “It is transparent: you look right through it. You don’t see it. But you see with it.” Our mental models of reality are like V.R. headsets that we don’t know we are wearing. Through them, we experience our own inner lives and have inner sensations that feel as solid as stone. But in truth:

Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. . . . You are such a system right now. . . . As you read these sentences, you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model activated by your brain.

Do you know what an ‘illusion of control’ is?” he asked, mischievously. “If people are asked to throw dice, and their task is to throw a high number, they throw the dice harder!” He believes that many experiences of being in control are similarly illusory, including experiences in which we seem to control our own minds. Brain imaging, for example, shows that our thoughts begin before we’re aware of having them. But, Metzinger said, “if a thought crosses the boundary from unconsciousness to consciousness, we feel, ‘I caused this thought.’ ” The sensation of causing our own thoughts is also just another feature of the self-model—a phantom sensation conjured when a readout, labelled “thinking,” switches from “off” to “on.” If you suffer from schizophrenia, this readout may be deactivated inappropriately, and you may feel that someone else is causing your thoughts. “The mind has to explain to itself how it works,” he said, spreading his hands.

Lately, Metzinger has been thinking about his own experience as a meditator. At the center of the meditative experience is the exercise and cultivation of mental autonomy: when the meditator’s mind wanders, he notices and arrests that process, gently returning his mental focus to his breath. “The mind says, ‘I am now re-directing the flashlight of my attention to this,’ ” Metzinger said. “But the thought ‘I am redirecting my mind-wandering’ might itself be another inner story.” He leaned back in his chair and laughed. “It might be that the spiritual endeavor for liberation or detachment can lead to new illusions.”

…you are not the model. You are the whole system—the physical, biological organism in which the self-model is rendered, including its body, its social relationships, and its brain. The model is just a part of that system.” The “I” we experience is smaller than, and different from, the totality of who and what we are.

It turns out that we do, in this sense, possess subtle bodies; we also inhabit subtle selves. While a person exists, he feels that he knows the world and himself directly. In fact, he experiences a model of the world and inhabits a model of himself. These models are maintained by the mind in such a way that their constructed nature is invisible. But it can sometimes be made visible, and then—to a degree—the models can be changed. Something about this discovery is deflating: it turns out that we are less substantial than we thought. Yet it can also be invigorating to understand the constructed, provisional nature of experience. Our perceptions of the world and the self feel real—how could they feel otherwise?—but we can come to understand our own role in the creation of their apparent realness.

Andy Clark on extended mind, A.I., and predictive processing

I want to point to a New Yorker article by Larissa MacFarquhar describing the evolution of the ideas of philosopher of mind Andy Clark.

The first section of the article follows Clark's development of the idea that our minds must be defined as extended beyond our bodies to include the tools in our environment without which they cannot function:

Clark started musing about the ways in which even adult thought was often scaffolded by things outside the head. There were many kinds of thinking that weren’t possible without a pen and paper, or the digital equivalent—complex mathematical calculations, for instance. Writing prose was usually a matter of looping back and forth between screen or paper and mind: writing something down, reading it over, thinking again, writing again. The process of drawing a picture was similar. The more he thought about these examples, the more it seemed to him that to call such external devices “scaffolding” was to underestimate their importance. They were, in fact, integral components of certain kinds of thought. And so, if thinking extended outside the brain, then the mind did, too.

It then describes his moving into artificial intelligence and robotics, encountering the work of Rodney Brooks at M.I.T:

Maybe the way to go was building an intelligence that developed gradually, as in children—seeing and walking first. Perhaps intelligence of many kinds, even the sort that solved theorems and played chess, emerged from the most basic skills—perception, motor control...While constructing a robot that he called Allen, Brooks decided that the best way to build its cognition box was to scrap it altogether. ...It was controlled by three objectives—avoid obstacles, wander randomly, seek distance—layered in a hierarchy, such that the higher could override the lower...It would make no plans. It would simply encounter the world and react.

Robots like Allen... seemed to Clark to represent a fundamentally different idea of the mind. Watching them fumble about, pursuing their simple missions, he recognized that cognition was not the dictates of a high-level central planner perched in a skull cockpit, directing the activities of the body below. Central planning was too cumbersome, too slow to respond to the body’s emergencies. Cognition was a network of partly independent tricks and strategies that had evolved one by one to address various bodily needs. Movement, even in A.I., was not just a lower, practical function that could be grafted, at a later stage, onto abstract reason. The line between action and thought was more blurry than it seemed. A creature didn’t think in order to move: it just moved, and by moving it discovered the world that then formed the content of its thoughts.

Then, how does the brain make sense of the world?

To some people, perception—the transmitting of all the sensory noise from the world—seemed the natural boundary between world and mind. Clark had already questioned this boundary with his theory of the extended mind. Then, in the early aughts, he heard about a theory of perception that seemed to him to describe how the mind, even as conventionally understood, did not stay passively distant from the world but reached out into it. It was called predictive processing.

It appeared that the brain had ideas of its own about what the world was like, and what made sense and what didn’t, and those ideas could override what the eyes (and other sensory organs) were telling it. Perception did not, then, simply work from the bottom up; it worked first from the top down. What you saw was not just a signal from the eye, say, but a combination of that signal and the brain’s own ideas about what it expected to see, and sometimes the brain’s expectations took over altogether.

One major difficulty with perception, Clark realized, was that there was far too much sensory signal continuously coming in to assimilate it all. The mind had to choose. And it was not in the business of gathering data for its own sake: the original point of perceiving the world was to help a creature survive in it. For the purpose of survival, what was needed was not a complete picture of the world but a useful one—one that guided action. A brain needed to know whether something was normal or strange, helpful or dangerous. The brain had to infer all that, and it had to do it very quickly, or its body would die—fall into a hole, walk into a fire, be eaten.

So what did the brain do? It focussed on the most urgent or worrying or puzzling facts: those which indicated something unexpected. Instead of taking in a whole scene afresh each moment, as if it had never encountered anything like it before, the brain focussed on the news: what was different, what had changed, what it didn’t expect...This process was not only fast but also cheap—it saved on neural bandwidth, because it took on only the information it needed—which made sense from the point of view of a creature trying to survive...To Clark, predictive processing described how mind, body, and world were continuously interacting, in a way that was mostly so fluid and smoothly synchronized as to remain unconscious.

And, summarizing paragraphs,

He knew that the roboticist Rodney Brooks had recently begun to question a core assumption of the whole A.I. project: that minds could be built of machines. Brooks speculated that one of the reasons A.I. systems and robots appeared to hit a ceiling at a certain level of complexity was that they were built of the wrong stuff—that maybe the fact that robots were not flesh made more of a difference than he’d realized. Clark couldn’t decide what he thought about this. On the one hand, he was no longer a machine functionalist, exactly: he no longer believed that the mind was just a kind of software that could run on hardware of various sorts. On the other hand, he didn’t believe, and didn’t want to believe, that a mind could be constructed only out of soft biological tissue. He was too committed to the idea of the extended mind—to the prospect of brain-machine combinations, to the glorious cyborg future—to give it up.

In a way, though, the structure of the brain itself had some of the qualities that attracted him to the extended-mind view in the first place: it was not one indivisible thing but millions of quasi-independent things, which worked seamlessly together while each had a kind of existence of its own. “There’s something very interesting about life,” Clark says, “which is that we do seem to be built of system upon system upon system. The smallest systems are the individual cells, which have an awful lot of their own little intelligence, if you like—they take care of themselves, they have their own things to do. Maybe there’s a great flexibility in being built out of all these little bits of stuff that have their own capacities to protect and organize themselves. I’ve become more and more open to the idea that some of the fundamental features of life really are important to understanding how our mind is possible. I didn’t use to think that. I used to think that you could start about halfway up and get everything you needed.”

Baby Boomers reaching the end of their To-Do list

A few clips from an engaging piece by Patricia Hampl on the maturing of the baby boomer generation, those born in 1946 or later - who came of age during the Vietnam War era. (Born in 1942, I qualify as being on the leading edge of this generation.)

Life, if you’re lucky, is divided into thirds, my father used to say: youth, middle age and “You look good.”...By the time you’ve worked long enough, hard enough, real life begins to reveal itself as something other than effort, other than accomplishment...It’s a late-arriving awareness of consciousness existing for its own sake...in this latter stage of existence, to have only one task: to waste life in order to find it.

...now the boomers are approaching the other side...the other side of striving...The battle between striving and serenity may be distinctly American. The struggle between toil and the dream of ease is an American birthright, the way a Frenchman expects to have decent wine at a reasonable price, and the whole month of August on vacation...The essential American word isn’t happiness. It’s pursuit.

But how about just giving up? What about wasting time? Giving up or perhaps giving over. To what? Perhaps what an earlier age called “the life of the mind,” the phrase that describes the sovereign self at ease, at home in the world. This isn’t the mind of rational thought, but the lost music of wondering, the sheer value of looking out the window, letting the world float along...That’s what that great American lounger Whitman did. “I loaf and invite my soul,” he wrote. “I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.” In this way he came to his great conception of national citizenship for Americans, “the dear love of comrades.” His loafing led to solidarity.

Loafing is not a prudent business plan, not even a life plan, not a recognizably American project. But it begins to look a little like happiness, the kind that claims you, unbidden. Stay put and let the world show up? Or get out there and be a flâneur? Which is it? Well, it’s both.

Maybe this is what my father’s third stage of life is about — wondering, rather than pursuing. You look good — meaning, hey, you’re still alive, you’re still here, and for once you don’t really need to have a to-do list.

Basal forebrain and default mode network regulation.

The basal forebrain is an ascending, activating, neuromodulatory system involved in wake–sleep regulation, memory formation, and regulation of sensory information processing. Nair et al. show that it also influences (in mice) the default mode brain network that is active (as in mind wandering) when the brain's attention is not directed externally, as during tasks or exploration. They suggest that basal forebrain nuclei might be target regions for up or down regulation during default mode dysfunction during epilepsy or major depressive disorder.

The default mode network (DMN) is a collection of cortical brain regions that is active during states of rest or quiet wakefulness in humans and other mammalian species. A pertinent characteristic of the DMN is a suppression of local field potential gamma activity [~ 40 Hz brain waves] during cognitive task performance as well as during engagement with external sensory stimuli. Conversely, gamma activity is elevated in the DMN during rest. Here, we document that the rat basal forebrain (BF) exhibits the same pattern of responses, namely pronounced gamma oscillations during quiet wakefulness in the home cage and suppression of this activity during active exploration of an unfamiliar environment. We show that gamma oscillations are localized to the BF and that gamma-band activity in the BF has a directional influence on a hub of the rat DMN, the anterior cingulate cortex, during DMN-dominated brain states. The BF is well known as an ascending, activating, neuromodulatory system involved in wake–sleep regulation, memory formation, and regulation of sensory information processing. Our findings suggest a hitherto undocumented role of the BF as a subcortical node of the DMN, which we speculate may be important for switching between internally and externally directed brain states. We discuss potential BF projection circuits that could underlie its role in DMN regulation and highlight that certain BF nuclei may provide potential target regions for up- or down-regulation of DMN activity that might prove useful for treatment of DMN dysfunction in conditions such as epilepsy or major depressive disorder.