A third visual pathway specialized for social perception.

Fourty years after Ungerleider and Mishkin proposed our current model of the primate cortex as using two major visual pathway along its ventral and dorsal surfaces that respectively specialize in computing the 'what' and 'where' content of visual stimuili, Pitcher and Ungerleider now summarize evidence that this picture has to be expanded to include a third pathway specialized for moving social visual perceptions, especially of faces. Here are their core points, following by a descriptive graphic from their article.

The two-visual pathway model of primate visual cortex needs to be updated. We propose the existence of a third visual pathway on the lateral brain surface that is anatomically segregated from the dorsal and ventral pathways.

The third pathway exists in human and non-human primates. In humans, the third pathway projects from early visual cortex into the superior temporal sulcus (STS). In macaques the third pathway projects from early visual cortex into the dorsal bank and fundus of the STS.

The third pathway has distinct functional properties. It selectively responds to moving faces and bodies. Visual field-mapping studies show that the third pathway responds to faces across the visual field to a greater extent than the ventral pathway.

The third pathway computes a range of higher sociocognitive functions based on dynamic social cues. These include facial expression recognition, eye gaze discrimination, the audiovisual integration of speech, and interpreting the actions and behaviors of other biological organisms.

 

ADDED NOTE: Leslie Ungerleider died as 2020 drew to a close. She was a towering figure in the neuroscience community. This obituary by Sabine Kastner in Neuron pays her a fitting tribute.

Endorsement of dominant masculinity best predicts 2016 and 2020 voting and candidate evaluations.

Vescio and Schermerhorn carry out studies of several thousand individuals showing that men’s and women’s endorsement of hegemonic masculinity predicted support for Trump better than other suggested causes: antiestablishment, antielitist, and nativist populism, as well as to sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. I want to also point readers to the Thomas Edsall essay "White Riot", which makes some of the same points.

(I use the word 'dominant' rather than 'hegemonic' in the title of this post because hegemonic is frequently used in political discourse as a pejorative term, like other blanket terms such as hetero-normative.) 

Here is their significance statement and abstract, the  link above takes you to the whole text containing details of their studies and summary charts. .

Significance

Donald J. Trump’s history-making ascension from nonpolitician to president of the United States has been attributed to the antiestablishment, antielitist, and nativist populism of Trump voters, as well as to sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Based on the findings of seven studies involving 2,007 people, men’s and women’s endorsement of hegemonic masculinity predicted support for Trump over and beyond the aforementioned factors, even when controlling for political party affiliation. Results highlight the importance of looking beyond social identity–based conceptualizations of masculinity to fully consider how men’s and women’s endorsement of cultural ideologies about masculinity legitimate patriarchal forms of dominance and reify gender-, race-, and class-based hierarchies.

Abstract

This work examined whether the endorsement of the culturally idealized form of masculinity—hegemonic masculinity (HM)—accounted for unique variance in men’s and women’s support for Donald Trump across seven studies (n = 2,007). Consistent with our theoretical backdrop, in the days (Studies 1 and 2) and months (Studies 3 through 6) following the 2016 American presidential election, women’s and men’s endorsement of HM predicted voting for and evaluations of Trump, over and above political party affiliation, gender, race, and education. These effects held when controlling for respondents’ trust in the government, in contrast to a populist explanation of support for Trump. In addition, as conceptualized, HM was associated with less trust in the government (Study 3), more sexism (Study 4), more racism (Study 5), and more xenophobia (Study 6) but continued to predict unique variance in evaluations of Trump when controlling for each of these factors. Whereas HM predicted evaluations of Trump, across studies, social and prejudiced attitudes predicted evaluations of his democratic challengers: Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020. We replicate the findings of Studies 1 through 6 using a nationally representative sample of the United States (Study 7) 50 days prior to the 2020 presidential election. The findings highlight the importance of psychological examinations of masculinity as a cultural ideology to understand how men’s and women’s endorsement of HM legitimizes patriarchal dominance and reinforces gender, race, and class-based hierarchies via candidate support.

How oxytocin enhances male sexual activity

An article by Oti et al. in Current Biology makes me want to buy an oxytocin inhaler (just google oxytocin nasal spray). I'll pass on the highlights and a graphic summary (click to enlarge), and you can see the technical summary by clicking on the link to the article. 

 • Oxytocin receptors are expressed in spinal ejaculation generator (SEG) neurons 

• Oxytocin directly activates SEG neurons and influences male sexual function in rats

 • Release of oxytocin in the lumbar spinal cord is not limited to conventional synapses

 • Released oxytocin acts by diffusion—a localized volume transmission—in the cord

How technology destroys bonding cultural narratives

I am on the mailing list of Mark Manson's weekly newsletter, find myself repeatedly annoyed by its arrogant tone and obscene prose, but then appreciate some episodes of his clear thinking, one of which describing his summary thoughts on culture I pass on here:

- A culture is defined by the shared values among a group of people. These values are represented and supported by shared narratives.

- Cultural narratives survive because they are repeated. The more they are repeated and believed, the more fundamental they become to the identity of the group.

- When cultural narratives cease to be repeated, they cease to be part of the culture, and the values they represent are dropped from the group’s identity and decision-making.

- In this way, culture frames the battles of economics and politics—as culture dictates what is valuable and important to the group and then politics and economics enact those values in the real world.

- Technology fundamentally alters culture because technology can unintentionally shape and determine what narratives are broadcast the furthest, loudest, and most frequently.

The whole problem with social media is that the narratives that spread the furthest and loudest on these platforms tend to be anti-establishment and contrarian. These are the narratives that get repeated the most often, and therefore these become the narratives that come to define our culture.

But these narratives are hollow. They tear down structures but build nothing back up in their place. They point out the flaws of our experts and institutions and disregard the many things they get right.

This is why we’ve seen so many grassroots protest movements around the world the past ten years with no real aim or policy ideas—from Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party all the way up to the shitlords and morons invading the US Capitol last week. The narrative is pure victimhood and destruction. There is no countervailing narrative for responsibility and creation.

This is the sense of growing nihilism that I wrote about in Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope. The narratives that expose everything that is wrong in the world are repeated incessantly, while the narratives of everything that is right and going well struggle to find an interested audience. The result is a culture of fragility, where every group somehow simultaneously feels victimized and entitled to impose their narrative onto others.

How mice feel each other's pain or fear

The abstract from Smith et al, who show the brain basis of empathetic behaviors in mice that mirror those in humans:

Empathy is an essential component of social communication that involves experiencing others’ sensory and emotional states. We observed that a brief social interaction with a mouse experiencing pain or morphine analgesia resulted in the transfer of these experiences to its social partner. Optogenetic manipulations demonstrated that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and its projections to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) were selectively involved in the social transfer of both pain and analgesia. By contrast, the ACC→NAc circuit was not necessary for the social transfer of fear, which instead depended on ACC projections to the basolateral amygdala. These findings reveal that the ACC, a brain area strongly implicated in human empathic responses, mediates distinct forms of empathy in mice by influencing different downstream targets. 

Here is a summary graphic from a perspective by Klein and Gogolla (click to enlarge):

Cults, cabals, white power, and Trumpism

The men of "all men are created equal" in the U.S. Declaration of Independence - white male property owners -  have remained the American ruling class for more than 200 years as voting rights have been extended to women and people of color who will soon account for more that half the population. The only means by which a white minority can maintain power is to suppress voting by minorities who are becoming majorities,  and to follow the scripts of Turkey, Poland, or Hungary in transitioning to an authoritarian rule that masquerades as democracy. (Fortunately Trump has been too inept to pull this off, but the next time we may not be so lucky.) 

The threatened white minority, particularly its fundamentalist christian faction that wants to impose a Taliban-like religious state,  forms the core constituency of the Trumpism cult (aka, the Republican party) and many of its members adhere to faith in fact challenged conspiracy theories that invoke hidden cabals actually running the show (QAnon, Pizzagate, the election theft conspiracy, etc.). 

Harari does a nice piece (you should read it) on the lure of cabal theories and their inherent falsehood. His core points:

The Structure - Cabal theories argue that underneath the myriad events we see on the surface lurks a sinister group... the basic structure remains the same: The group controls almost everything that happens, while simultaneously concealing this control. 

The Lure - Cabal theories are able to attract large followings in part because they offer a single, straightforward explanation to countless complicated processes...if I believe some kind of cabal theory, I enjoy the comforting feeling that I do understand everything... this offers me entree into an exclusive circle — the group of people who understand. It elevates me above the intellectual elite and the ruling class: professors, journalists, politicians. I see what they overlook — or what they try to conceal.  

The Flaw - Cabal theories suffer from the same basic flaw: They assume that it is relatively easy to manipulate the world. A small group of people can understand, predict and control everything, from wars to technological revolutions to pandemics...Whether you’ve served on a school board or local council, or merely tried to organize a surprise birthday party for your mom, you probably know how difficult it is to control humans. You make a plan, and it backfires. You try to keep something a secret, and the next day everybody is talking about it. ...Global cabal theories ask us to believe that while it is very difficult to predict and control the actions of 1,000 or even 100 humans, it is surprisingly easy to secretly puppet master nearly eight billion. 

The Reality - There are, of course, many real conspiracies in the world. Individuals, corporations, organizations, churches, factions and governments are constantly hatching and pursuing various plots. But that is precisely what makes it so hard to predict and control the world in its entirety...Realizing that no single cabal can secretly control the entire world is not just accurate — it is also empowering. It means that you can identify the competing factions in our world, and ally yourself with some groups against others. That’s what real politics is all about.

Environmental noise degrades learning and memory

Sobering observations from Zhang et al on our hippocampus-related learning and memory:

Significance

The noise pollution accompanying industrialization is a risk factor to human health. Here, we show in a rodent model that even moderate-level noise at ∼65 dB SPL that has little effect on stress status can substantially impair hippocampus-related learning and memory by altering the plasticity of synaptic transmission. It is possible that because moderately loud noise does not affect peripheral hearing per se, the negative impacts of chronic exposure to such noise are currently not well characterized. Our results indicate the importance of more thoroughly defining these possibly hitherto unappreciated hazards of noise pollution in modern human environments.

Abstract

The neural mechanisms underlying the impacts of noise on nonauditory function, particularly learning and memory, remain largely unknown. Here, we demonstrate that rats exposed postnatally (between postnatal days 9 and 56) to structured noise delivered at a sound pressure level of ∼65 dB displayed significantly degraded hippocampus-related learning and memory abilities. Noise exposure also suppressed the induction of hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP). In parallel, the total or phosphorylated levels of certain LTP-related key signaling molecules in the synapses of the hippocampus were down-regulated. However, no significant changes in stress-related processes were found for the noise-exposed rats. These results in a rodent model indicate that even moderate-level noise with little effect on stress status can substantially impair hippocampus-related learning and memory by altering the plasticity of synaptic transmission. They support the importance of more thoroughly defining the unappreciated hazards of moderately loud noise in modern human environments.

A reality-challenged America of echo chambers and cults

Following the recent drama of a mob motivated by a fraudulent theory briefly taking over America's capitol building I want to pass on a number of interesting pieces relevant to these times in which the behaviors of followers of Trumpism, QAnon and Election fraud conspiracies seem to mirror those of Wokeness and Critical Race Theory. Cults of the right and left provide motivation and reassuring 'theories of everything' to explain society's ills. 

Farhad MKanjoo writes on how the sprawling online conspiracy network QAnon is at the center of Trump's attempt to overturn the election. 

 A PNAS journal club article and a brief review by Wright, "Shouting in a Political Echo Chamber," describe work by Wang et al. on a model showing how polarization emerges on social media during political campaigns

 Edsall, in a typically scholarly piece, reviews debate on whether the sociopathic role of social media in spreading and reinforcing broad acceptance of lies has wrecked free speech enough to require a rexamination of the right guaranteed by the first amendment. A debate has broken out over whether the once-sacrosanct constitutional protection of the First Amendment has become a threat to democracy.

 LaFrance gets even more cosmic in her Atlantic article titled "Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine" (if you have time for only one of these articles, I guess this is the one I would recommend). Having resisted the temptation to pass on clips from the articles referenced above (the post would get to long), I will go ahead with one clip from LaFrance, who says that Facebook

...took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of QAnon, for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That’s because Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.

The giants of the social web—Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram; Google and its subsidiary YouTube; and, to a lesser extent, Twitter—have achieved success by being dogmatically value-neutral in their pursuit of what I’ll call megascale. Somewhere along the way, Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.

Limitations to the Doomsday Machine comparison are obvious: Facebook cannot in an instant reduce a city to ruins the way a nuclear bomb can. And whereas the Doomsday Machine was conceived of as a world-ending device so as to forestall the end of the world, Facebook started because a semi-inebriated Harvard undergrad was bored one night. But the stakes are still life-and-death. Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.

 

Are we the cows of the future?

One of the questions posed by Yuval Harari in his writing on our possible futures is "What are we to do with all these humans who are, except for a small technocratic elite, no longer required as the means of production?" Esther Leslie, a professor of political aesthetics at Birkbeck College, University of London, does an essay on this issue, pointing out that our potential futures in the pastures of digital dictatorship — crowded conditions, mass surveillance, virtual reality — are already here. You should read her essay, and I passon just a few striking clips of text:

...Cows’ bodies have historically served as test subjects — laboratories of future bio-intervention and all sorts of reproductive technologies. Today cows crowd together in megafarms, overseen by digital systems, including facial- and hide-recognition systems. These new factories are air-conditioned sheds where digital machinery monitors and logs the herd’s every move, emission and production. Every mouthful of milk can be traced to its source.

And it goes beyond monitoring. In 2019 on the RusMoloko research farm near Moscow, virtual reality headsets were strapped onto cattle. The cows were led, through the digital animation that played before their eyes, to imagine they were wandering in bright summer fields, not bleak wintry ones. The innovation, which was apparently successful, is designed to ward off stress: The calmer the cow, the higher the milk yield.

A cow sporting VR goggles is comedic as much as it is tragic. There’s horror, too, in that it may foretell our own alienated futures. After all, how different is our experience? We submit to emotion trackers. We log into biofeedback machines. We sign up for tracking and tracing. We let advertisers’ eyes watch us constantly and mappers store our coordinates.

Could we, like cows, be played by the machinery, our emotions swayed under ever-sunny skies, without us even knowing that we are inside the matrix? Will the rejected, unemployed and redundant be deluded into thinking that the world is beautiful, a land of milk and honey, as they interact minimally in stripped-back care homes? We may soon graze in the new pastures of digital dictatorship, frolicking while bound.

Leslie then describes the ideas of German philosopher and social critic Theodor Adorno:

Against the insistence that nature should not be ravished by technology, he argues that perhaps technology could enable nature to get what “it wants” on this sad earth. And we are included in that “it.”...Nature, in truth, is not just something external on which we work, but also within us. We too are nature.

For someone associated with the abstruseness of avant-garde music and critical theory, Adorno was surprisingly sentimental when it came to animals — for which he felt a powerful affinity. It is with them that he finds something worthy of the name Utopia. He imagines a properly human existence of doing nothing, like a beast, resting, cloud gazing, mindlessly and placidly chewing cud.

To dream, as so many Utopians do, of boundless production of goods, of busy activity in the ideal society reflects, Adorno claimed, an ingrained mentality of production as an end in itself. To detach from our historical form adapted solely to production, to work against work itself, to do nothing in a true society in which we embrace nature and ourselves as natural might deliver us to freedom.

Rejecting the notion of nature as something that would protect us, give us solace, reveals us to be inextricably within and of nature. From there, we might begin to save ourselves — along with everything else.

Cuttlefish can pass the marshmellow test.

Cephalopod mullusks like octopuses or cuttlefishes show remarkable intelligence. My most engaged and soothing viewing experience during the pandemis has been watching "My Octopus Teacher" on Netflix. Now recent work pointed to by Greenwood shows that cuttlefish can pass the famous marshmellow test, forgoing immediate gratification if experience has shown that waiting produces a larger reward:

Decision-making, when humans and other animals choose between two options, is not always based on the absolute values of the options but can also depend on their relative values. The present study examines whether decision-making by cuttlefish is dependent on relative values learned from previous experience. Cuttlefish preferred a larger quantity when making a choice between one or two shrimps (1 versus 2) during a two-alternative forced choice. However, after cuttlefish were primed under conditions where they were given a small reward for choosing one shrimp in a no shrimp versus one shrimp test (0 versus 1) six times in a row, they chose one shrimp significantly more frequently in the 1 versus 2 test. This reversed preference for a smaller quantity was not due to satiation at the time of decision-making, as cuttlefish fed a small shrimp six times without any choice test prior to the experiment still preferred two shrimps significantly more often in a subsequent 1 versus 2 test. This suggests that the preference of one shrimp in the quantity comparison test occurs via a process of learned valuation. Foraging preference in cuttlefish thus depends on the relative value of previous prey choices.

The brains of friends have similar brain functional connectivities.

From Hyhon et al.: 

Significance

In what ways are we similar to our friends? Here, we characterized the social network of residents of a remote village, a subset of whom contributed personality and neuroimaging data. We demonstrate that similarity in individuals’ resting-state functional connectomes predicts individuals’ proximity in their real-world social network, even when controlling for demographic characteristics and self-reported personality traits. Our results suggest that patterns of functional brain activity during rest encode latent similarities (e.g., in terms of how people think and behave) that are associated with friendship. Taken together, integrating neuroimaging and social network analysis can offer novel insights into how the brain shapes or is shaped by the social networks that it inhabits.

Abstract

People often have the intuition that they are similar to their friends, yet evidence for homophily (being friends with similar others) based on self-reported personality is inconsistent. Functional connectomes—patterns of spontaneous synchronization across the brain—are stable within individuals and predict how people tend to think and behave. Thus, they may capture interindividual variability in latent traits that are particularly similar among friends but that might elude self-report. Here, we examined interpersonal similarity in functional connectivity at rest—that is, in the absence of external stimuli—and tested if functional connectome similarity is associated with proximity in a real-world social network. The social network of a remote village was reconstructed; a subset of residents underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. Similarity in functional connectomes was positively related to social network proximity, particularly in the default mode network. Controlling for similarities in demographic and personality data (the Big Five personality traits) yielded similar results. Thus, functional connectomes may capture latent interpersonal similarities between friends that are not fully captured by commonly used demographic or personality measures. The localization of these results suggests how friends may be particularly similar to one another. Additionally, geographic proximity moderated the relationship between neural similarity and social network proximity, suggesting that such associations are particularly strong among people who live particularly close to one another. These findings suggest that social connectivity is reflected in signatures of brain functional connectivity, consistent with the common intuition that friends share similarities that go beyond, for example, demographic similarities.

The changing geography of social mobility in the United States

From Connor and Storper:

New evidence shows that intergenerational social mobility—the rate at which children born into poverty climb the income ladder—varies considerably across the United States. Is this current geography of opportunity something new or does it reflect a continuation of long-term trends? We answer this question by constructing data on the levels and determinants of social mobility across American regions over the 20th century. We find that the changing geography of opportunity-generating economic activity restructures the landscape of intergenerational mobility, but factors associated with specific regional structures of interpersonal and racial inequality that have “deep roots” generate persistence. This is evident in the sharp decline in social mobility in the Midwest as economic activity has shifted away from it and the consistently low levels of opportunity in the South even as economic activity has shifted toward it. We conclude that the long-term geography of social mobility can be understood through the deep roots and changing economic fortunes of places.

Commentaries on our times

I have accumulated a number of articles on our current political and social issues that I think offer interesting perspectives. I was about to delete them from my queue for MindBlog posts because I don't want to tilt MindBlog's content too far towards the social versus the biological drivers of our behaviors, but instead I'm noting several in this post, with a brief description of, or clip of text from, each: 

This brief Robert Reich article in The Guardian expands the idea of the broken window theory concerning law enforcement in poor communities to include America’s most powerful breaking windows with impunity, while a growing fraction of the population is becoming accepting of such rogue behaviors. 

And, a clip from David Brooks’ Annual Sidney awards article notes recent writing by Fukuyama and Burton:

This was a year when the very foundations of society seemed to be crumbling, and there were many fine essays about that. Francis Fukuyama wrote “Liberalism and Its Discontents” in American Purpose, which is the best single primer to the long-running debate about the liberal order.

“Classical liberalism can best be understood as an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity,” Fukuyama writes. It does this by “deliberately not specifying higher goals of human life.” It leaves people free to decide their own values, their own form of worship. Liberalism is thus perpetually unsatisfying to those trying to build a perfectly just or virtuous society because it is neutral about many ultimate concerns. There’s a void that often gets filled with consumerism...Fukuyama honestly faces the shortcomings of liberalism, and then makes the core point that the alternative to slow, deliberative liberalism is inevitably some form of violence.

Tara Isabella Burton takes the argument one level deeper in her essay “Postliberal Epistemology” in Comment. Liberalism, she argues, was based on a view of the human person now being rejected on left and right. A person, Enlightenment liberalism holds, is essentially rational and disembodied. If people use reason properly, they will come to the same logical results...For more and more millennials, in particular, she argues, this view is insufficient: “In rendering human rationality disembodied, it also renders human beings interchangeable, reproducible, not incarnations but instantiations of a vague generic.” Burton’s essay takes some work, but it profoundly captures the way so many young people on left and right feel alienated from and unseen by the structures of society.

Then, here are some more I liked…

Thomas Edsall's article, The Resentment That Never Sleeps notes that

...diminished status has become a source of rage on both the left and right, sharpened by divisions over economic security and insecurity, geography and, ultimately, values.

More and more, politics determine which groups are favored and which are denigrated...Roughly speaking, Trump and the Republican Party have fought to enhance the status of white Christians and white people without college degrees: the white working and middle class. Biden and the Democrats have fought to elevate the standing of previously marginalized groups: women, minorities, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and others.

And, from polymath Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, a brief piece, What We Get Wrong About America’s Crisis of Democracy:

We are told again and again that American democracy is in peril and may even be on its deathbed....Lurking behind all of this is a faulty premise—that the descent into authoritarianism is what needs to be explained, when the reality is that . . . it always happens. The default condition of humankind is not to thrive in broadly egalitarian and stable democratic arrangements that get unsettled only when something happens to unsettle them. The default condition of humankind, traced across thousands of years of history, is some sort of autocracy...The interesting question is not what causes autocracy (not to mention the conspiratorial thinking that feeds it) but what has ever suspended it.

Matriliny reverses gender disparities in inflammation and hypertension.

Fascinating obeervations from Reynolds et al.: 

Significance

Greater autonomy afforded to women in matrilineal societies has been hypothesized to benefit women’s health. Among the Mosuo, a society with both matrilineal and patrilineal subpopulations, we found that gender disparities in chronic disease are not only ameliorated but reversed in matriliny compared with patriliny. Gender disparities in health and chronic disease can thus be tied directly to cultural influences on health, including inequalities in autonomy and resource access between men and women.

Abstract

Women experience higher morbidity than men, despite living longer. This is often attributed to biological differences between the sexes; however, the majority of societies in which these disparities are observed exhibit gender norms that favor men. We tested the hypothesis that female-biased gender norms ameliorate gender disparities in health by comparing gender differences in inflammation and hypertension among the matrilineal and patrilineal Mosuo of China. Widely reported gender disparities in health were reversed among matrilineal Mosuo compared with patrilineal Mosuo, due to substantial improvements in women’s health, with no concomitant detrimental effects on men. These findings offer evidence that gender norms limiting women’s autonomy and biasing inheritance toward men adversely affect the health of women, increasing women’s risk for chronic diseases with tremendous global health impact.

The generic "you" enhances connection between people and ideas

An interesting piece from Orvell et al.:

Creating resonance between people and ideas is a central goal of communication. Historically, attempts to understand the factors that promote resonance have focused on altering the content of a message. Here we identify an additional route to evoking resonance that is embedded in the structure of language: the generic use of the word “you” (e.g., “You can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes”). Using crowd-sourced data from the Amazon Kindle application, we demonstrate that passages that people highlighted—collectively, over a quarter of a million times—were substantially more likely to contain generic-you compared to yoked passages that they did not highlight. We also demonstrate in four experiments (n = 1,900) that ideas expressed with generic-you increased resonance. These findings illustrate how a subtle shift in language establishes a powerful sense of connection between people and ideas.

Sixteen facial expressions occur in similar contexts worldwide .

I want to pass on this article by Cowen et al., which was the subject of a comment made on my December 2 post "Emotions are constructed, and are not universal." Here is the abstract:

Understanding the degree to which human facial expressions co-vary with specific social contexts across cultures is central to the theory that emotions enable adaptive responses to important challenges and opportunities. Concrete evidence linking social context to specific facial expressions is sparse and is largely based on survey-based approaches, which are often constrained by language and small sample sizes. Here, by applying machine-learning methods to real-world, dynamic behaviour, we ascertain whether naturalistic social contexts (for example, weddings or sporting competitions) are associated with specific facial expressions14 across different cultures. In two experiments using deep neural networks, we examined the extent to which 16 types of facial expression occurred systematically in thousands of contexts in 6 million videos from 144 countries. We found that each kind of facial expression had distinct associations with a set of contexts that were 70% preserved across 12 world regions. Consistent with these associations, regions varied in how frequently different facial expressions were produced as a function of which contexts were most salient. Our results reveal fine-grained patterns in human facial expressions that are preserved across the modern world.

Here is one fragment from the main text of the article:

Specific contexts including fireworks, weddings and sporting competitions are reliably and differentially associated with 16 patterns of dynamic facial expression, such as those often labelled awe, contentment and triumph by English speakers, in a similar manner across world regions. In total, 70% of the variance in the context–expression association was found to be preserved in all 12 world regions that we examined. In revealing universals in expressive behaviour throughout the modern world, our findings directly inform the origins, functions and universality of emotion.

It is important to note that the authors were careful to point out that these studies were done on behaviors throughout "the modern world" and used emotion categories defined in English. The results do not in fact contradict the assertions of Barrett that emotions do not have universal facial fingerprints, if data from the non-modern world of isolated tribes is taken into account. (see my post on chapter 3 of her book "Emotions are not universal")

Hallucinogens at a prehistoric rock art site.

Interesting work from Robinson et al. on stoned stone-age artists (open access article, see comment below)! 

Significance

Proponents of the altered states of consciousness (ASC) model have argued that hallucinogens have influenced the prehistoric making of images in caves and rock shelters. However, the lack of direct evidence for the consumption of hallucinogens at any global rock art site has undermined the ASC model. We present the first clear evidence for the ingestion of hallucinogens at a rock art site, in this case, from Pinwheel Cave, California. Quids in the cave ceiling are shown to be Datura wrightii, a Native Californian entheogen, indicating that, rather than illustrating visual phenomena caused by the Datura, the rock paintings instead likely represent the plant and its pollinator, calling into question long-held assumptions about rock art and the ASC model.

Abstract

While debates have raged over the relationship between trance and rock art, unambiguous evidence of the consumption of hallucinogens has not been reported from any rock art site in the world. A painting possibly representing the flowers of Datura on the ceiling of a Californian rock art site called Pinwheel Cave was discovered alongside fibrous quids in the same ceiling. Even though Native Californians are historically documented to have used Datura to enter trance states, little evidence exists to associate it with rock art. A multianalytical approach to the rock art, the quids, and the archaeological context of this site was undertaken. Liquid chromatography−mass spectrometry (LC-MS) results found hallucinogenic alkaloids scopolamine and atropine in the quids, while scanning electron microscope analysis confirms most to be Datura wrightii. Three-dimensional (3D) analyses of the quids indicate the quids were likely masticated and thus consumed in the cave under the paintings. Archaeological evidence and chronological dating shows the site was well utilized as a temporary residence for a range of activities from Late Prehistory through Colonial Periods. This indicates that Datura was ingested in the cave and that the rock painting represents the plant itself, serving to codify communal rituals involving this powerful entheogen. These results confirm the use of hallucinogens at a rock art site while calling into question previous assumptions concerning trance and rock art imagery.

A musical offering for this day.

I'm grateful to a number of MindBlog viewers for their positive feedback on the recent series of posts on Barrett's book on emotions, and I thought I would pass on as a seasonal gift this YouTube video of the beginning of the Bach Christmas Oratorio showing a piano version of its orchestral musical score scrolling past as the performance proceeds. I enjoy sightreading the score on my Steinway B with the YouTube sound turned down a bit. 

(My YouTube channel shows some of my solo piano and chamber music efforts.)

The plasticity of well-being and the cultivation of human flourishing

I pass on the abstract of an open source article in PNAS contributed by my former colleague Richard Davidson and his colleages at the University of Wisconsin Center for Healthy Minds. I recomment that you read the whole article.

Research indicates that core dimensions of psychological well-being can be cultivated through intentional mental training. Despite growing research in this area and an increasing number of interventions designed to improve psychological well-being, the field lacks a unifying framework that clarifies the dimensions of human flourishing that can be cultivated. Here, we integrate evidence from well-being research, cognitive and affective neuroscience, and clinical psychology to highlight four core dimensions of well-being—awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. We discuss the importance of each dimension for psychological well-being, identify mechanisms that underlie their cultivation, and present evidence of their neural and psychological plasticity. This synthesis highlights key insights, as well as important gaps, in the scientific understanding of well-being and how it may be cultivated, thus highlighting future research directions.

Barrett's grand finale... From Brain to Mind: The New Frontier

Following our last installment on the emotions of animals, this post arrives at Barrett's final take home messages in Chapter 13 of "How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain." This is the final installment in a series of MindBlog posts that began on Nov. 18. The previous installment of this series covered Chapter 12, on the emotions of animals.

…the essences of the mind receive a makeover every century or two, and for the most part, the idea of mental organs has pretty much stuck around.* Casting away those essences remains a challenge today because the brain is wired to categorize, and categories breed essentialism. Every noun we utter is an opportunity to invent an essence without intending to do so.

As we amass petabytes of brain data with our twenty-first-century tech toys, however, the media, venture capitalists, most textbooks, and some scientists are still interpreting that data with a seventeenth-century theory of the mind (having upgraded to a fancy version of phrenology from Plato 1.0). Neuroscience has delivered a far better understanding of the brain and its function than our own experiences ever could, not just for emotion but for all mental events.

You perceive emotions without formal instruction, but that does not mean that emotions are innate or independent of learning. What’s innate is that humans use concepts to build social reality, and social reality, in turn, wires the brain. Emotions are very real creations of social reality, made possible by human brains in concert with other human brains.

Your mind is not a battleground between opposing inner forces—passion and reason—that determine how responsible you are for your behavior. Rather, your mind is a computational moment within your constantly predicting brain.

Your brain predicts with its concepts, and while scientists debate whether certain concepts are innate or learned, it’s unquestionable that you learned a slew of them as your brain wired itself to its physical and social surroundings. Those concepts come from your culture and help negotiate the quintessential dilemma of living in groups—getting ahead versus getting along—a tug-of-war that has more than one solution. On balance, some cultures favor getting along, while others favor getting ahead.

All these discoveries reveal a crucial insight: The human brain evolved, in the context of human cultures, to create more than one kind of mind. People in Western cultures, for example, experience thoughts and emotions as fundamentally different and sometimes in conflict. At the same time, Balinese and Ilongot cultures, and to a certain extent cultures guided by Buddhist philosophy, do not make hard distinctions between thinking and feeling.

Microwiring. Neurotransmitters. Plasticity. Degeneracy. Multipurpose circuitry. Neuroscientists sum up this incredible well of variation by calling the brain a “complex system.”…Complexity implies that the wiring diagram of a brain is not a set of instructions for a single kind of mind with universal mental organs. But the human brain has few preset mental concepts, such as perhaps pleasantness and unpleasantness (valence), agitation and calmness (arousal), loudness and softness, brightness and darkness, and other properties of consciousness. Instead, variation is the norm. The human brain is structured to learn many different concepts and to invent many social realities, depending on the contingencies it is exposed to.

A human brain can create many kinds of minds, yet all human minds do have some common ingredients. For millennia, scholars believed that the inevitable bits of the mind were essences, but they are not. The ingredients are three aspects of the mind that we’ve encountered in this book: affective realism, concepts, and social reality. They (and perhaps others) are inevitable and therefore universal, barring illness, based on the anatomy and function of the brain.

Affective realism, the phenomenon that you experience what you believe, is inevitable because of your wiring. The body-budgeting regions in your interoceptive network—your inner loudmouthed, mostly deaf scientist with a megaphone—are the most powerful predictors in your brain, and your primary sensory regions are eager listeners. Body-budget predictions laden with affect, not logic and reason, are the main drivers of your experience and behavior. We all think a food “is delicious” as if the flavor were embedded in the food, when flavor is a construction and the deliciousness is our own affect. When a soldier in a warzone perceives a gun in someone’s hands when no gun is present, he might actually see that gun; it’s not a mistake but a genuine perception. Judges who are hungry during parole hearings render more negative decisions.

The second inevitability of the mind is that you have concepts, because the human brain is wired to construct a conceptual system. You build concepts for the smallest physical details, like fleeting bits of light and sound… What is not inevitable, however, is that you have particular concepts. Sure, everyone may have some basic concepts as a function of their wiring, such as “Positive” versus “Negative,” but not every mind has distinct concepts for “Feeling” and “Thinking.” Any set of concepts that helps you regulate your body budget and stay alive, as far as your brain is concerned, will do just fine.

Concepts are vital to human survival, but we must also be careful with them because concepts open the door to essentialism. They encourage us to see things that aren’t present. … the classical view of emotion, whose mental organs are a human invention that mistakes the question for the answer.

Concepts also encourage us not to see things that are present. One illusory stripe of a rainbow contains an infinite number of frequencies, but your concepts for “Red,” “Blue,” and other colors cause your brain to ignore the variability. Likewise, the frowny-faced stereotype of “Sadness” is a concept that downplays the great variation in that emotion category.

The third inevitability of the mind that we’ve discussed is social reality. When you are born, you can’t regulate your body budget by yourself—somebody else has to do it. In the process, your brain learns statistically, creates concepts, and wires itself to its environment, which is filled with other people who have structured their social world in particular ways. That social world becomes real to you as well. Social reality is the human superpower; we’re the only animal that can communicate purely mental concepts among ourselves. No particular social reality is inevitable, just one that works for the group (and is constrained by physical reality).

When you create social reality but fail to realize it, the result is a mess. Many psychologists, for example, do not realize that every psychological concept is social reality. We debate the differences between “will power” and “tenacity” and “grit” as if they were each distinct in nature, rather than constructions shared through collective intentionality. We separate “emotion,” “emotion regulation,” “self-regulation,” “memory,” “imagination,” “perception,” and scores of other mental categories, all of which can be explained as emerging from interoception and sensory input from the world, made meaningful by categorization, with assistance from the control network. These concepts are clearly social reality because not all cultures have them, whereas the brain is the brain is the brain. So, as a field, psychology keeps rediscovering the same phenomena and giving them new names and searching for them in new places in the brain. That’s why we have a hundred concepts for “the self.” Even brain networks themselves go by multiple names. The default mode network, which is part of the interoceptive network, has more aliases than Sherlock Holmes.

When we misconstrue the social as the physical, we misunderstand our world and ourselves. In this regard, social reality is a superpower only if we know that we have it.

***

From these three inevitabilities of the mind, we see that construction teaches us to be skeptical. Your experiences are not a window into reality. Rather, your brain is wired to model your world, driven by what is relevant for your body budget, and then you experience that model as reality. Your moment-to-moment experience may feel like one discrete mental state followed by another, like beads on a string, but as you have learned in this book, your brain activity is continuous throughout intrinsic, core networks. Your experiences might seem to be triggered by the world outside the skull, but they’re formed in a storm of prediction and correction. Ironically, each of us has a brain that creates a mind that misunderstands itself.

Where construction advocates skepticism, essentialism is deeply committed to certainty. It says, “Your brain is as your mind appears to be.” You have thoughts, therefore you must have a blob in the brain for thoughts. You experience emotions, therefore you must have blobs in the brain for emotions. You see evidence of thoughts, emotions, and perceptions in other people around the world, so the corresponding brain blobs must be universal and everyone must have the same mental essences. Genes have allegedly produced a mind that is common to all humans.

Essentialism lays out not just a view of human nature but a worldview. It implies that your place in society is shaped by your genes. Therefore, if you are smarter, faster, or more powerful than others, you can justifiably succeed where others cannot. People get what they deserve and they deserve what they get. This view is a belief in a genetically just world, backed by a scientific-sounding ideology….The is another possibility…society’s stereotypes about race, which are social reality, can become the physical reality of brain wiring, the official welfare statistics are true because we, as a society, made them so. (Barrett cites research on the brain development of African American children born into poverty).

Now it’s time for me to drink my own Kool-Aid. Prediction, interoception, categorization, and the roles I’ve described for your various brain networks are not objective facts. They are concepts invented by scientists to describe the physical activity within a brain. I claim these concepts are the best way to understand certain computations being performed by neurons. However, there are many other ways to read the brain’s wiring diagram (some of which wouldn’t call it a wiring diagram at all). The theory of constructed emotion maps to the brain more closely than do so-called psychological essences or mental organs. In the future, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more useful and functional concepts for the brain’s structure emerge.

In the coming years, I hope we’ll all see fewer and fewer news stories about brain blobs for emotion in people or rats or fruit flies, and more about how brains and bodies construct emotion. In the meantime, whenever you see an essentialism-steeped news story about emotion, if you even feel a twinge of doubt, then you’re playing a role in this scientific revolution.

Like most important paradigm shifts in science, this one has the potential to transform our health, our laws, and who we are. To forge a new reality. If you’ve learned within these pages that you are an architect of your experience—and the experiences of those around you—then we’re building that new reality together.