Oliver Sacks - The Machine Stops

I want to point MindBlog readers to a wonderful short essay written by Oliver Sacks before his death from cancer, in which he notes the parallels between the modern world he sees around him and E.M. Forster's prescient classic 1909 short story "The Machine Stops," in which Forster imagined a future in which humans lived in separate cells, communicating only by audio and visual devices (much like today the patrons of a bar at happy hour are more likely to looking at their cells phones than chatting with each other.) A few clips:

I cannot get used to seeing myriads of people in the street peering into little boxes or holding them in front of their faces, walking blithely in the path of moving traffic, totally out of touch with their surroundings. I am most alarmed by such distraction and inattention when I see young parents staring at their cell phones and ignoring their own babies as they walk or wheel them along. Such children, unable to attract their parents’ attention, must feel neglected, and they will surely show the effects of this in the years to come.

I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.

I worry more about the subtle, pervasive draining out of meaning, of intimate contact, from our society and our culture. When I was eighteen, I read Hume for the first time, and I was horrified by the vision he expressed in his eighteenth-century work “A Treatise of Human Nature,” in which he wrote that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” As a neurologist, I have seen many patients rendered amnesic by destruction of the memory systems in their brains, and I cannot help feeling that these people, having lost any sense of a past or a future and being caught in a flutter of ephemeral, ever-changing sensations, have in some way been reduced from human beings to Humean ones.

I have only to venture into the streets of my own neighborhood, the West Village, to see such Humean casualties by the thousand: younger people, for the most part, who have grown up in our social-media era, have no personal memory of how things were before, and no immunity to the seductions of digital life. What we are seeing—and bringing on ourselves—resembles a neurological catastrophe on a gigantic scale.

I see science, with its depth of thought, its palpable achievements and potentials, as equally important; and science, good science, is flourishing as never before, though it moves cautiously and slowly, its insights checked by continual self-testing and experimentation. I revere good writing and art and music, but it seems to me that only science, aided by human decency, common sense, farsightedness, and concern for the unfortunate and the poor, offers the world any hope in its present morass. This idea is explicit in Pope Francis’s encyclical and may be practiced not only with vast, centralized technologies but by workers, artisans, and farmers in the villages of the world. Between us, we can surely pull the world through its present crises and lead the way to a happier time ahead. As I face my own impending departure from the world, I have to believe in this—that mankind and our planet will survive, that life will continue, and that this will not be our final hour.

Flash judgement based on appearance.

I want to point to two articles on how we make rapid judgements based on first impressions.

Torodov's essay in aeon is a fascinating review of the history of studies on flash judgement of faces.  Here is  one clip:

Competence is perceived as the most important characteristic of a good politician. But what people perceive as an important characteristic can change in different situations. Imagine that it is wartime, and you must cast your presidential vote today. Would you vote for face A or face B in Figure 1 below? Most people quickly go with A. What if it is peacetime? Most people now go with B.

These images were created by the psychologist Anthony Little at the University of Bath and his colleagues in the UK. Face A is perceived as more dominant, more masculine, and a stronger leader – attributes that matter in wartime. Face B is perceived as more intelligent, forgiving, and likeable – attributes that matter more in peacetime. Now look at the images in Figure 2 below.

You should be able to recognise the former president George W Bush and the former secretary of state John Kerry. Back when the study was done, Kerry was the Democratic candidate running against Bush for the US presidency. Can you see some similarities between images A (Figure 1) and C (Figure 2), and between images B (Figure 1) and D (Figure 2)? The teaser is that the images in Figure 1 show what makes the faces of Bush and Kerry distinctive. To obtain the distinctiveness of a face, you need only find out what makes it different from an average face – in this case, a morph of about 30 male faces. The faces in Figure 1 were created by accentuating the differences between the shapes of Bush’s and Kerry’s faces and the average face shape. At the time of the election in 2004, the US was at war with Iraq. I will leave the rest to your imagination. 

What we consider an important characteristic also depends on our ideological inclinations. Take a look at Figure 3 below. Who would make a better leader?

...whereas liberal voters tend to choose the face on the left, conservative voters tend to choose the face on the right. These preferences reflect our ideological stereotypes of Right-wing, masculine, dominant-looking leaders, and Left-wing, feminine, non-dominant-looking leaders.

Hu et al. study first impressions of personality traits from body shapes.  Here is their abstract, followed by a summary figure click to enlarge):

People infer the personalities of others from their facial appearance. Whether they do so from body shapes is less studied. We explored personality inferences made from body shapes. Participants rated personality traits for male and female bodies generated with a three-dimensional body model. Multivariate spaces created from these ratings indicated that people evaluate bodies on valence and agency in ways that directly contrast positive and negative traits from the Big Five domains. Body-trait stereotypes based on the trait ratings revealed a myriad of diverse body shapes that typify individual traits. Personality-trait profiles were predicted reliably from a subset of the body-shape features used to specify the three-dimensional bodies. Body features related to extraversion and conscientiousness were predicted with the highest consensus, followed by openness traits. This study provides the first comprehensive look at the range, diversity, and reliability of personality inferences that people make from body shapes.

Figure - (click to enlarge). A subset of body stereotypes we created from single or multiple bodies that received extreme ratings on individual traits (for the entire set. The figure is organized to show sample traits with positive and negative combinations of valence (V) and agency (A). For example, Row 1 shows bodies that have negative valence (heavier) and negative agency (less shaped, more rectangular).

A few anti-technology screeds:

German artist, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl writes an impassioned diatribe titled "Technology Has Destroyed Reality":

In this new age of artificial stupidity, technological disruption has turned destructive. Its greatest victim is reality itself...It is a far cry from an earlier period of digital expansion, when internet communication was seen to promote global exchange and understanding...The online world seemed like a Disney vision of multiculturalism, promoting sterile tolerance from above. Now technology divides and fragments; it identifies and ranks people.

The norms of reality TV have found a foothold in the digital age. The point is not that there is no reality — the point is that it’s every fact for itself, competing against all others, while social media multiply alternative versions of it...This is our real, existing digital world: nothing more than hourly waves of feverish and toxic agitation, played out over stale mainstream channels that discourage innovation and experimentation, drown in excruciating advertisements and drain people’s attention and souls...An unpopular truth cannot survive online in such a world, because traction is privileged over veracity. And to artificially stupid automatons and algorithms, reality is defined as brute quantity, by ranking, ratings and elimination.

And author Erin Griffith does two pieces. "Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?" very much describes the culture of techie 20-35 year old workers in Austin, Texas - where I now live - where performative workaholism and 18 hour work days have become a lifestyle.

“Owning one’s moment” is a clever way to rebrand “surviving the rat race.” In the new work culture, enduring or even merely liking one’s job is not enough. Workers should love what they do, and then promote that love on social media, thus fusing their identities to that of their employers...This is toil glamour, and it is going mainstream. Most visibly, WeWork — which investors recently valued at $47 billion — is on its way to becoming the Starbucks of office culture. It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries...Rather than just renting desks, the company aims to encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds...The ideal client, one imagines, is someone so enamored of the WeWork office aesthetic...that she sleeps in a WeLive apartment, works out at a Rise by We gym, and sends her children to a WeGrow school.

In the same vein see Roger Cohen's piece on the harm in hustle culture.

Griffith's second piece, "The Other Tech Bubble", describes the growing disenchantment with tech companies:

As headlines have exposed the troubling inner workings of company after company, startup culture no longer feels like fodder for gentle parodies about ping pong and hoodies. It feels ugly and rotten. Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. It’s a powerful and potentially sinister collector of personal data, a propaganda partner to government censors, and an enabler of discriminatory advertising.

In 2008, it was Wall Street bankers. In 2017, tech workers are the world’s villain. “It’s the exact same story of too many people with too much money. That breeds arrogance, bad behavior, and jealousy, and society just loves to take it down,” the investor said. As a result, investors are avoiding anything that feels risky. Hunter Walk, a partner with venture capital firm Homebrew, which invested in Bodega, attributes the backlash to a broader response to power. Tech is now a powerful institution, he says. “We no longer get the benefit of the doubt 100 percent of the time, and that’s okay.”

Evidence is mounting that that the world is no longer fascinated with Silicon Valley: It’s disturbed by its callous behavior. But it will take a massive shift to introduce self-awareness to an industry that has always assumed it was changing the world for the better. Cynics would argue it doesn’t matter. The big tech companies are too big to fail, too complicated to be parsed or regulated, and too integral to business, the economy, and day-to-day life. We’re not going to abandon our cell phones or social networks. This is how we live now.

And finally, a cartoon from the NYTimes on our evolution:

Successes of advantaged group members get more attention.

Kteily et al. show how political ideology shapes the amplification of the accomplishments of disadvantaged vs. advantaged group members:

Significance

Inequality prospers when successes of advantaged group members (e.g., men, whites) get more attention than equivalent successes of disadvantaged group members (e.g., women, blacks). What determines whose successes individuals deem worth promoting vs. those they ignore? Using hundreds of thousands of tweets from the 2016 Olympics, we show that liberals are much more likely than conservatives to shine a spotlight on black and female (vs. white and male) US gold medalists. Two further experiments provide evidence that such differential amplification of successful targets is driven by a motivation—higher among liberals—to raise disadvantaged groups’ standing in service of equality. We find that liberals drive differential amplification more than conservatives and establish a behavioral mechanism through which liberals’ egalitarian motives manifest.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an increased public outcry in certain quarters about a perceived lack of attention given to successful members of disadvantaged groups relative to equally meritorious members of advantaged groups, exemplified by social media campaigns centered around hashtags, such as #OscarsSoWhite and #WomenAlsoKnowStuff. Focusing on political ideology, we investigate here whether individuals differentially amplify successful targets depending on whether these targets belong to disadvantaged or advantaged groups, behavior that could help alleviate or entrench group-based disparities. Study 1 examines over 500,000 tweets from over 160,000 Twitter users about 46 unambiguously successful targets varying in race (white, black) and gender (male, female): American gold medalists from the 2016 Olympics. Leveraging advances in computational social science, we identify tweeters’ political ideology, race, and gender. Tweets from political liberals were much more likely than those from conservatives to be about successful black (vs. white) and female (vs. male) gold medalists (and especially black females), controlling for tweeters’ own race and gender, and even when tweeters themselves were white or male (i.e., advantaged group members). Studies 2 and 3 provided experimental evidence that liberals are more likely than conservatives to differentially amplify successful members of disadvantaged (vs. advantaged) groups and suggested that this is driven by liberals’ heightened concern with social equality. Addressing theorizing about ideological asymmetries, we observed that political liberals are more responsible than conservatives for differential amplification. Our results highlight ideology’s polarizing power to shape even whose accomplishments we promote, and extend theorizing about behavioral manifestations of egalitarian motives.

The decay of cognitive diversity - global WEIRDing is upon us

I recommend that you read this brief piece by Kensy Cooperrider, a cognitive scientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He notes that just as we are beginning to appreciate that most behavioral sciences have focused on a small sliver of humanity - people from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic societies (i.e. WEIRD) - younger generations of the indigenous people across the world who have had distinctive and different ways of parsing the world are becoming increasingly WEIRD. A few clips:

For centuries, Inuit hunters navigated the Arctic by consulting wind, snow and sky. Now they use GPS. Speakers of the aboriginal language Gurindji, in northern Australia, used to command 28 variants of each cardinal direction. Children there now use the four basic terms, and they don’t use them very well. In the arid heights of the Andes, the Aymara developed an unusual way of understanding time, imagining the past as in front of them, and the future at their backs. But for the youngest generation of Aymara speakers – increasingly influenced by Spanish – the future lies ahead.

Cooperrider proceeds to describe numerous examples of cognitive diversity that are disappearing, differences in how we relate to space, time, numbers, nature, each other, how we filter our experiences and allocate our attention.

Facial masculinity does not indicate immunocompetence

From Zeidi et al.:

Significance

Facial masculinity has been considered a sexual ornament in humans, akin to peacock tails and stag antlers. Recently, studies have questioned the once-popular view that facial masculinity is a condition-dependent male ornament signaling immunocompetence (the immunocompetence handicap hypothesis). We sought to rigorously test these ideas using high-resolution phenotypic (3D facial images) and genetic data in the largest sample to date. We found no support for the immunocompetence handicap hypothesis of facial masculinity in humans. Our findings add to a growing body of evidence challenging a popular viewpoint in the field and highlight the need for a deeper understanding of the genetic and environmental factors underlying variation in facial masculinity and human sexual dimorphism more broadly.

Abstract

Recent studies have called into question the idea that facial masculinity is a condition-dependent male ornament that indicates immunocompetence in humans. We add to this growing body of research by calculating an objective measure of facial masculinity/femininity using 3D images in a large sample (n = 1,233) of people of European ancestry. We show that facial masculinity is positively correlated with adult height in both males and females. However, facial masculinity scales with growth similarly in males and females, suggesting that facial masculinity is not exclusively a male ornament, as male ornaments are typically more sensitive to growth in males compared with females. Additionally, we measured immunocompetence via heterozygosity at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a widely-used genetic marker of immunity. We show that, while height is positively correlated with MHC heterozygosity, facial masculinity is not. Thus, facial masculinity does not reflect immunocompetence measured by MHC heterozygosity in humans. Overall, we find no support for the idea that facial masculinity is a condition-dependent male ornament that has evolved to indicate immunocompetence.

Oligarchia - the rise of autonomous analog computing

I want to pass on the final paragraphs of a piece done by George Dyson for Edge.org:

We assume that a search engine company builds a model of human knowledge and allows us to query that model, or that some other company (or maybe it’s the same company) builds a model of road traffic and allows us to access that model, or that yet another company builds a model of the social graph and allows us to join that model — for a price we are not quite told. This fits our preconceptions that an army of programmers is still in control somewhere but it is no longer the way the world now works.

The genius — sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental — of the enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way through the looking-glass and emerged as something else. Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled, with no central model except the traffic itself. The successful social network is no longer a model of the social graph, it is the social graph. This is why it is a winner-take-all game. Governments, with an allegiance to antiquated models and control systems, are being left behind.

These new hybrid organizations, although built upon digital computers, are operating as analog computers on a vast, global scale, processing information as continuous functions and treating streams of bits the way vacuum tubes treat streams of electrons, or the way neurons treat information in a brain. Large hybrid analog/digital computer networks, in the form of economies, have existed for a long time, but for most of history the information circulated at the speed of gold and silver and only recently at the speed of light.

We imagine that individuals, or individual algorithms, are still behind the curtain somewhere, in control. We are fooling ourselves. The new gatekeepers, by controlling the flow of information, rule a growing sector of the world.

What deserves our full attention is not the success of a few companies that have harnessed the powers of hybrid analog/digital computing, but what is happening as these powers escape into the wild and consume the rest of the world.

The next revolution will be the ascent of analog systems over which the dominion of digital programming comes to an end. Nature’s answer to those who sought to control nature through programmable machines is to allow us to build machines whose nature is beyond programmable control.

Feedspot: MindBlog in top 100 psychology blogs

I am clueless about monitoring traffic on MindBlog, have been puzzled why I get 3-5 emails a week wanting to contribute content, share content, sell me some editing or other services, assist in 'monetizing' my site more effectively. Google is constantly on my case to place advertisements on MindBlog. My cut and paste answer to all such emails is "I must decline your kind offer. MindBlog is my own idiosyncratic hobby, and I only post content that I initiate. I am not concerned about number of followers, and have no interest in revenue." A recent offer to provide editing services finally clued me in to at least one source that contributes to all these emails. They sent their solicitation to the top 100 Psychology Blog identified by feedsport.com. Turns out that MindBlog is currently number 46.

Fake News: The misinformation machine.

I want to pass on the abstract of a Science article by Grinberg et al. and parts of a commentary on it, work on what misinformation is and how it operates that was immediately picked by by national media. Starting with the commentary by Derek Ruths:

In recent years, there has been an explosion of research trying to understand misinformation: what it is, how it operates, and what impacts it has on the world. On the surface, this roiling field seems to produce as many paradoxes and conflicting results as it does potential insights. For example, some studies suggest that bots (internet robots) play a limited role, whereas other studies suggest that bots drive the diffusion of misinformation. It is ironic that the field of research on misinformation has come to resemble the very thing it studies. What is true? What is actually known about misinformation and its impacts on society? A single research paper may interrogate only one aspect of what is a complex misinformation machine, making it tempting to see other papers as providing competing views, when they are, in fact, often entirely complementary windows into a much larger process. Grinberg et al. illustrate the necessity of thinking of misinformation as a process.

Grinberg et al. show that online, mostly political misinformation is shared and seen by only a very small fraction of Twitter users...to small communities that engage with questionable media sources. To do this, they used a clever method to find humans (as opposed to bots) on Twitter: They matched U.S. voter registration records against Twitter accounts. Each Twitter user's political orientation was then estimated using the celebrity and news accounts they followed.

There is a key blind spot in the current research: rumors. Although there has been work on the broad phenomenon of rumoring online and its connection to misinformation, there is a serious need for a better understanding of how fake news stories transform into rumors and to what extent these rumors can amplify beliefs and infiltrate other communities.

Progress here might help explain one of the most curious and unexplained findings of the Grinberg et al. paper: that conservatives are significantly more inclined to share and see fake news than liberals. Perhaps this is the whole story: Conservatives have a weakness for fake news. More likely, though, is that liberals embed misinformation in different ways and spread it through means that we, as of now, do not have reliable ways of measuring. When we begin to uncover these mechanisms, it will be important to place them within the context of the much larger misinformation system within which they operate.

Here is the Grinberg et al.abstract:

The spread of fake news on social media became a public concern in the United States after the 2016 presidential election. We examined exposure to and sharing of fake news by registered voters on Twitter and found that engagement with fake news sources was extremely concentrated. Only 1% of individuals accounted for 80% of fake news source exposures, and 0.1% accounted for nearly 80% of fake news sources shared. Individuals most likely to engage with fake news sources were conservative leaning, older, and highly engaged with political news. A cluster of fake news sources shared overlapping audiences on the extreme right, but for people across the political spectrum, most political news exposure still came from mainstream media outlets.

Default mode network as seat of our ego - The entropic brain hypothesis

I want to recommend Chapter 5 of Michael Pollan's recent book "How to change your mind," on the neuroscience of the psychedelic experience, as an excellent description of the functions of the default mode network (DMN) of our brain mentioned in the previous post. Pollan points to a 2014 article by Carhart-Harris et al. (open source, which I regret not having been aware of earlier) titled "The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs." The article presents evidence that the DMN is the core component of our self or ego. It's activity is reduced during the psychedelic experience, during meditation by experienced meditators, and in young children who have not yet formed strong egos, allowing the expression of a more open and naive primary kind of consciousness. This primary consciousness is more disorganized, has higher entropy. The DMN is a secondary sort of consciousness that normally inhibits this primary consciousness to enforce a stable ego and lower entropy. The Carhart-Harris et al. article is quite long and dense, so the authors try to condense their points down to a summary graphic that I though worth passing on to MindBlog readers (click to enlarge):

Legend - This schematic is intended to summarize much of what this paper has tried to communicate. It shows an “inverted u” relationship between entropy and cognition such that too high a value implies high flexibility but high disorder, whereas too low a value implies ordered but inflexible cognition. It is proposed that normal waking consciousness inhabits a position that is close to criticality but slightly sub-critical and primary states move brain activity and associated cognition toward a state of increased system entropy i.e., brain activity becomes more random and cognition becomes more flexible. It is proposed that primary states may actually be closer to criticality proper than secondary consciousness/normal waking consciousness.

Homo Prospectus - the brain as a time traveler - augmentation by A.I.?

Steve Johnson does an engaging article on the discovery and significance of the default mode network of our brains, which has been the subject of numerous MindBlog posts. This system recruits association cortices of the brain that are the last to become fully operational and our brain development continues through early adulthood, into our 20s. It is central to our internal mind wandering between past, present, and future.

...this aptitude for cognitive time travel, revealed by the discovery of the default network, may be the defining property of human intelligence. “What best distinguishes our species,” Seligman wrote in a Times Op-Ed with John Tierney, “is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future.” He went on: “A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise.”

Johnson discusses the augmentation of our future predicting by A.I. algorithms:

Accurate weather forecasting is merely one early triumph of software-based time travel: algorithms that allow us to peer into the future in ways that were impossible just a few decades ago...In machine-learning systems, algorithms can be trained to generate remarkably accurate predictions of future events by combing through vast repositories of data from past events. An algorithm might be trained to predict future mortgage defaults by analyzing thousands of home purchases and the financial profiles of the buyers, testing its hypotheses by tracking which of those buyers ultimately defaulted.

Machine-learning systems will also be immensely helpful when mulling decisions that potentially involve a large number of distinct options. Humans are remarkably adept at building imagined futures for a few competing timelines simultaneously: the one in which you take the new job, the one in which you turn it down. But our minds run up against a computational ceiling when they need to track dozens or hundreds of future trajectories. The prediction machines of A.I. do not have that limitation, which will make them tantalizingly adept at assisting with some meaningful subset of important life decisions in which there is rich training data and a high number of alternate futures to analyze.

These algorithms can help correct a critical flaw in the default network: Human beings are famously bad at thinking probabilistically. The pioneering cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky once joked that where probability is concerned, humans have three default settings: “gonna happen,” “not gonna happen” and “maybe.” We are brilliant at floating imagined scenarios and evaluating how they might make us feel, were they to happen. But distinguishing between a 20 percent chance of something happening and a 40 percent chance doesn’t come naturally to us. Algorithms can help us compensate for that cognitive blind spot.

Whether you find the idea of augmenting the default network thrilling or terrifying, one thing should be clear: These tools are headed our way. In the coming decade, many of us will draw on the forecasts of machine learning to help us muddle through all kinds of life decisions: career changes, financial planning, hiring choices. These enhancements could well turn out to be the next leap forward in the evolution of Homo prospectus, allowing us to see into the future with more acuity — and with a more nuanced sense of probability — than we can do on our own. But even in that optimistic situation, the power embedded in these new algorithms will be extraordinary, which is why Ludwig and many other members of the A.I. community have begun arguing for the creation of open-source algorithms, not unlike the open protocols of the original internet and World Wide Web. Drawing on predictive algorithms to shape important personal or civic decisions will be challenging enough without the process’s potentially being compromised or subtly redirected by the dictates of advertisers. If you thought Russian troll farms were dangerous in our social-media feeds, imagine what will happen when they infiltrate our daydreams.

TODAY, IT SEEMS, mind-wandering is under attack from all sides. It’s a common complaint that our compulsive use of smartphones is destroying our ability to focus. But seen through the lens of Homo prospectus, ubiquitous computing poses a different kind of threat: Having a network-connected supercomputer in your pocket at all times gives you too much to focus on. It cuts into your mind-wandering time. The downtime between cognitively active tasks that once led to REST states can now be filled with Instagram, or Nasdaq updates, or podcasts. We have Twitter timelines instead of time travel. At the same time, a society-wide vogue for “mindfulness” encourages us to be in the moment, to think of nothing at all instead of letting our thoughts wander. Search YouTube, and there are hundreds of meditation videos teaching you how to stop your mind from doing what it does naturally. The Homo prospectus theory suggests that, if anything, we need to carve out time in our schedule — and perhaps even in our schools — to let minds drift.

According to Marcus Raichle at Washington University, it may not be too late to repair whatever damage we may have done to our prospective powers. A few early studies suggest that the neurons implicated in the default network have genetic profiles that are often associated with long-term brain plasticity, that most treasured of neural attributes. “The brain’s default-mode network appears to preserve the capacity for plasticity into adulthood,” he told me. Plasticity, of course, is just another way of saying that the network can learn new tricks. If these new studies pan out, our mind-wandering skills will not have been locked into place in our childhood. We can get better at daydreaming, if we give ourselves the time to do it.

What will happen to our own time-traveling powers as we come to rely more on the prediction machines of A.I.? The outcome may be terrifying, or liberating, or some strange hybrid of the two. Right now it seems inevitable that A.I. will transform our prospective powers in meaningful new ways, for better or for worse. But it would be nice to think that all the technology that helped us understand the default network in the first place also ended up pushing us back to our roots: giving our minds more time to wander, to slip the surly bonds of now, to be out of the moment.

The emotional dimension of pain.

Corder et al. examine the unpleasant percept that dominates the affective dimension of pain, which is coupled with but distinct from the motivational drive to engage protective behaviors that limit exposure to noxious stimuli:

Pain is an unpleasant experience. How the brain’s affective neural circuits attribute this aversive quality to nociceptive information remains unknown. By means of time-lapse in vivo calcium imaging and neural activity manipulation in freely behaving mice encountering noxious stimuli, we identified a distinct neural ensemble in the basolateral amygdala that encodes the negative affective valence of pain. Silencing this nociceptive ensemble alleviated pain affective-motivational behaviors without altering the detection of noxious stimuli, withdrawal reflexes, anxiety, or reward. Following peripheral nerve injury, innocuous stimuli activated this nociceptive ensemble to drive dysfunctional perceptual changes associated with neuropathic pain, including pain aversion to light touch (allodynia). These results identify the amygdalar representations of noxious stimuli that are functionally required for the negative affective qualities of acute and chronic pain perception.

Social networks explain academic success and failure.

Interesting work from Stadtfeld et al.:

Significance

Understanding the factors that explain academic failure and success of university students is a core interest of educational researchers, teachers, and managers. We demonstrate how the dynamic social networks that informally evolve between students can affect their academic performance. We closely followed the emergence of multiple social networks within a cohort of 226 undergraduate university students. They were strangers to each other on their first day at university, but developed densely knit social networks through time. We show that functional studying relationships tended to evolve from informal friendship relations. In a critical examination period after one year, these networks proved to be crucial: Socially isolated students had significantly lower examination grades and were more likely to drop out of university.

Abstract

Academic success of students has been explained with a variety of individual and socioeconomic factors. Social networks that informally emerge within student communities can have an additional effect on their achievement. However, this effect of social ties is difficult to measure and quantify, because social networks are multidimensional and dynamically evolving within the educational context. We repeatedly surveyed a cohort of 226 engineering undergraduates between their first day at university and a crucial examination at the end of the academic year. We investigate how social networks emerge between previously unacquainted students and how integration in these networks explains academic success. Our study measures multiple important dimensions of social ties between students: their positive interactions, friendships, and studying relations. By using statistical models for dynamic network data, we are able to investigate the processes of social network formation in the cohort. We find that friendship ties informally evolve into studying relationships over the academic year. This process is crucial, as studying together with others, in turn, has a strong impact on students’ success at the examination. The results are robust to individual differences in socioeconomic background factors and to various indirect measures of cognitive abilities, such as prior academic achievement and being perceived as smart by other students. The findings underline the importance of understanding social network dynamics in educational settings. They call for the creation of university environments promoting the development of positive relationships in pursuit of academic success.

How exercise protects memory.

Gretchen Reynolds points to an interesting study on a mouse model for Alzheimer's disease by Lourenco et al. showing that exercise causes an increase in the level of a small protein,irisin, that boosts synaptic plasticity and memory. Here is the technical abstract:

Defective brain hormonal signaling has been associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a disorder characterized by synapse and memory failure. Irisin is an exercise-induced myokine released on cleavage of the membrane-bound precursor protein fibronectin type III domain-containing protein 5 (FNDC5), also expressed in the hippocampus. Here we show that FNDC5/irisin levels are reduced in AD hippocampi and cerebrospinal fluid, and in experimental AD models. Knockdown of brain FNDC5/irisin impairs long-term potentiation and novel object recognition memory in mice. Conversely, boosting brain levels of FNDC5/irisin rescues synaptic plasticity and memory in AD mouse models. Peripheral overexpression of FNDC5/irisin rescues memory impairment, whereas blockade of either peripheral or brain FNDC5/irisin attenuates the neuroprotective actions of physical exercise on synaptic plasticity and memory in AD mice. By showing that FNDC5/irisin is an important mediator of the beneficial effects of exercise in AD models, our findings place FNDC5/irisin as a novel agent capable of opposing synapse failure and memory impairment in AD.

Can psychological scientists make the world a better place?

I want to point to the January 2019 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science that addresses the question asked in the title of this post. It includes open source articles from more than 20 renowned psychological scientists. The issue is devoted to highlighting the ways that psychological scientists are currently applying their knowledge and skills to make the world a better place. From the introduction to the issue by Gruber et al.:

Psychological science is a multifaceted “hub science”, relevant and connected to many other disciplines. Rapid technological advances have enabled scientists to measure psychological phenomena from bodily responses invisible to the human eye through broad group behavior in large societies and then apply these findings to real-world issues to enhance human well-being and enact real-world behavioral and policy changes. Yet despite this remarkable progress, critical global issues face our society that call for immediate attention and action from psychological scientists. For example, within the past decade, we have seen escalating rates of serious and costly mental-health challenges in young adults and concurrent failure to provide mental-health treatment to those who need it the most; increases in self-reported loneliness and isolation that may compromise physical and mental health; high rates of sexual harassment and incivility toward women in the workplace and in science itself; political policy decisions that actively harm vulnerable children and their parents seeking refuge and a better life; seeming lack of concern for the welfare of many sentient nonhuman species; and rapid environmental degradation and climate change.

In the face of these and other ominous challenges, we argue that the time is ripe for our field to engage more deeply with societal issues. As a discipline that intersects with many other disciplines and with the public directly, psychological science is well positioned to contribute to cultivating a healthier, happier, and more sustainable world.

The passing of governance to corporate oligarchies serving the top 10%?

Three recent articles suggest to me a direction for our future. Bret Stephens' article describes the U.S. and Great Britain as rudderless and scarcely able to govern themselves, never mind shape world order. Several other Western democracies are facing crises in governance. Into this void steps Larry Fink (the chief of BlackRock and the world's biggest investor) whose annual letter lectures corporations that it is now their duty to look beyond profits, and contribute to society, serving a social purpose. The mega-corporations that dominate the U.S. and international capital flows are now a more stable buffer against chaos that any individual governments. BUT, ultimately who do these titans serve? Not the top 0.1%, but, as matthew stewart documents in excruciating detail, a more broad aristocracy, in America the top 9.9%. His article presents a mind-numbing list of the hundreds  of ways, both through legal and social customs, that the meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people's children.

The bacteria in your gut reveal your true age.

Galkin et al. find that the composition of our gut microbiota can approximately reveal our age. Some microbes become more abundant with aging while others decrease. Their abstract:

The human gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem that both affects and is affected by its host status. Previous analyses of gut microflora revealed associations between specific microbes and host health and disease status, genotype and diet. Here, we developed a method of predicting the biological age of the host based on the microbiological profiles of gut microbiota using a curated dataset of 1,165 healthy individuals (1,663 microbiome samples). Our predictive model, a human microbiome clock, has an architecture of a deep neural network and achieves the accuracy of 3.94 years mean absolute error in cross-validation. The performance of the deep microbiome clock was also evaluated on several additional populations. We further introduce a platform for biological interpretation of individual microbial features used in age models, which relies on permutation feature importance and accumulated local effects. This approach has allowed us to define two lists of 95 intestinal biomarkers of human aging. We further show that this list can be reduced to 39 taxa that convey the most information on their host's aging. Overall, we show that (a) microbiological profiles can be used to predict human age; and (b) microbial features selected by models are age-related.

Upstairs/ Downstairs in our Brain - Who (or what) is running our show?

I want to pass on to MindBlog readers the lecture notes and slides from a talk I gave yesterday to "NOVA" - one of five senior learning programs hosted by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at the Univ. of Texas. The talk has the title of this post. Here is a final summary slide from the talk:

Upstairs/Downstairs - Who or what is running our show?

I.  What is happening as our “I” acts and senses in the world?

  A. Our subjective “I” is predictions that are late to sensing and acting.

  B.  What we experience is our prediction of what is out there, or what the sensory consequence of our actions will be

  C. We can place our experienced body inside or outside our actual one.

  D. The “I” or self that we experience is an illusion, a virtual avatar in our brain.

II.  What behaviors are coming from upstairs and downstairs?

   A. Downstairs dominates rapid actions and judgements.

   B. Upstairs modulates this with slower reasoned responses.

   C. Reasons and emotions cause each other.

   D. Different personality types have different upstairs profiles.

III.  What is happening in paying attention versus mind wandering?

  A. Mind wandering is a transient loss of mental autonomy.

  B. Mind wandering and default mode networks stabilize our self model. 

  C. Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation.

  D. A wandering mind can be an unhappy mind.

IV. How might we observe and influence what our brains are doing?

  A.  Attention can be trained by meditation-like activities

  B.  Attention training, like training for other skills, causes brain changes. 

  C.  Attention training can allow more autonomy in choosing actions and emotions, making us more pilot than passenger of our ship.  

Why 2018 was the best year in human history.

Nicholas Kristof provides an antidote to the doom and gloom surrounding national and international politics in his Op-Ed piece, which is essentially an update of Pinker's recent book "Enlightenment Now," which I made the subject of several MindBlog posts starting last March 1st.  News media thrive on reporting wars, massacres and famines but are less focused on progress. Meanwhile, in the background, a lot of boring good stuff is happening which is ignored by the press. Clips on what happened in 2018:

 - Each day on average, about another 295,000 people around the world gained access to electricity for the first time...another 305,000 were able to access clean drinking water for the first time...an additional 620,000 people were able to get online for the first time...86 percent of all 1-year-olds have been vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis

-about 4 percent of children worldwide now die by the age of 5. That’s still horrifying, but it’s down from 19 percent in 1960 and 7 percent in 2003.

 -nine out of 10 Americans say in polls that global poverty is worsening or staying the same, when in fact the most important trend in the world is arguably a huge reduction in poverty... in the early 1980s, 44 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty (defined as less than about $2 a person per day). Now, fewer than 10 percent of the world’s population lives in extreme poverty, as adjusted for inflation.

Different meditation practices differently buffer from stress.

A group at the University of Wisconsin lead by my colleague Richard Davidson looks a the effects of different styles of brief contemplative practices:

Mindfulness practices are increasingly being utilized as a method for cultivating well-being. The term mindfulness is often used as an umbrella for a variety of different practices and many mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) contain multiple styles of practice. Despite the diversity of practices within MBIs, few studies have investigated whether constituent practices produce specific effects. We randomized 156 undergraduates to one of four brief practices: breath awareness, loving-kindness, gratitude, or to an attention control condition. We assessed practice effects on affect following brief training, and effects on affect and behavior after provocation with a stressor (i.e., Cold pressor test). Results indicate that gratitude training significantly improved positive affect compared to breath awareness (d = 0.58) and loving-kindness led to significantly greater reductions in implicit negative affect compared to the control condition (d = 0.59) immediately after brief practice. In spite of gains in positive affect, the gratitude group demonstrated increased reactivity to the stressor, reporting the CPT as significantly more aversive than the control condition (d = 0.46) and showing significantly greater increases in negative affect compared to the breath awareness, loving-kindness, and control groups (ds = 0.55, 0.60, 0.65, respectively). Greater gains in implicit positive affect following gratitude training predicted decreased post-stressor likability ratings of novel neutral faces compared to breath awareness, loving-kindness, and control groups (ds = - 0.39, -0.40, -0.33, respectively) as well. Moreover, the gratitude group was significantly less likely to donate time than the loving-kindness group in an ecologically valid opportunity to provide unrewarded support. These data suggest that different styles of contemplative practice may produce different effects in the context of brief, introductory practice and these differences may be heightened by stress. Implications for the study of contemplative practices are discussed.