Pavlovian conditioning can transfer from the virtual world to the real world

McCabe et al. offer an intriguing experiment showing that conditioning-dependent motivational properties can transfer from a computer game to the real world and also be expressed in terms of brain responses measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They studied healthy participants conditioned with aversive and appetitive drinks in the context of a virtual cycling race. Three days after conditioning, participants returned for a fMRI session. They used this opportunity to observe the impact of incidental presentation of conditioned stimuli on a real-world decision (seat choice, see the figures below). They found a significant influence of conditioning on seat choice and, moreover, noted that individual susceptibility to this influence was reflected in differential insula cortex responses during subsequent scanning. Thus a stimulus in a virtual environment can acquire motivational properties that persist and modify behavior in the real world.

Figure - Day 1: Pavlovian conditioning in virtual environment. Participants in the virtual cycle race were overtaken by competitors. The stimuli on the competitors' jerseys acted as CSs predicting the delivery of either pleasant or unpleasant juice. The stimulus-to-juice assignment was counterbalanced across participants.

Figure - Day 4: Real-world decision when asked to take a seat in an unoccupied waiting room before scanning. Sixteen participants chose the seat bearing a towel with the CS+app.

Language evolved to fit the human brain, rather than the reverse.

I thought this PNAS article from Chater et al. on language evolution was interesting. Here are a few excerpts from their introduction, followed by their abstract (and here is a commentary in a following issue of PNAS):

...the default prediction from a Darwinian perspective on human psychological abilities is the adaptationist view, that genes for language coevolved with human language itself for the purpose of communication...A challenge for the adaptationists is to pinpoint an evolutionary mechanism by which a language module could become genetically encoded. The problem is that many of the linguistic properties purported to be included in the language module are highly abstract and have no obvious functional basis—they cannot be explained in terms of communicative effectiveness or cognitive constraints—and have even been suggested to hinder communication...

A shift from initially learned linguistic conventions to genetically encoded principles necessary to evolve a language module may appear to require Lamarckian inheritance. The Baldwin effect provides a possible Darwinian solution to this challenge, however. Baldwin proposed that characteristics that are initially learned or developed over the lifespan can become gradually encoded in the genome over many generations, because organisms with a stronger predisposition to acquire a trait have a selective advantage. Over generations, the amount of environmental exposure required to develop the trait decreases, and eventually no environmental exposure may be needed—the trait is genetically encoded.

Chater et al. modeled several different simulations of the circumstances under which a similar evolutionary mechanism could genetically assimilate properties of language in a domain-specific module. Here is their abstract:

Language acquisition and processing are governed by genetic constraints. A crucial unresolved question is how far these genetic constraints have coevolved with language, perhaps resulting in a highly specialized and species-specific language “module,” and how much language acquisition and processing redeploy preexisting cognitive machinery. In the present work, we explored the circumstances under which genes encoding language-specific properties could have coevolved with language itself. We present a theoretical model, implemented in computer simulations, of key aspects of the interaction of genes and language. Our results show that genes for language could have coevolved only with highly stable aspects of the linguistic environment; a rapidly changing linguistic environment does not provide a stable target for natural selection. Thus, a biological endowment could not coevolve with properties of language that began as learned cultural conventions, because cultural conventions change much more rapidly than genes. We argue that this rules out the possibility that arbitrary properties of language, including abstract syntactic principles governing phrase structure, case marking, and agreement, have been built into a “language module” by natural selection. The genetic basis of human language acquisition and processing did not coevolve with language, but primarily predates the emergence of language. As suggested by Darwin, the fit between language and its underlying mechanisms arose because language has evolved to fit the human brain, rather than the reverse.

Happy 200th birthday to Charles Darwin!

MindBlog's third Podcast - Mindstuff: A user's guide

This podcast (here is the mp3, 30 min., 13.8 MB download) builds on the description of the nature and evolutionary history of our "I" that is developed in the first two Podcasts, "The I-Illusion" and "The Beast Within." In this podcast, which I am calling Mindstuff: A user's guide, I address a not-so-hidden agenda for many of us trying to understand our minds and brains: wanting to find insights or tools that bring more ease to the living of our daily lives, tools that might also enhance our effectiveness in tasks we wish to accomplish. I am adding some material to, and abstracting from, writing on my website, dericbownds.net. This is as close as I will get to offering my own version of a self-help manual that is based on our limited knowledge of how our minds actually work.

Worldwide human energy networking

In the last article of the Nature Magazine "Being Human" series, Melanie Moses discusses humanity's greatest challenge: how to reduce the demand for energy in increasingly complex, networked and energy-dependent societies. A few excerpts:

To manage our impact on the environment and understand the ramifications of our actions in an increasingly interconnected world, we need a macroscopic view as well as a detailed understanding of the structure of the networks we have created. The bigger picture is beginning to emerge from theoretical approaches that reveal the structure and dynamics of networks, how networks change as they grow, and how networks constrain individual behaviour.

The Metabolic Theory of Ecology (MTE) offers one way to understand the dynamics of flow through networks. The mathematical foundation of MTE was developed a decade ago by a group of biologists and physicists who wanted to explain why so many characteristics of plants and animals systematically depend on their mass in a very peculiar way. The theory posits that much of the life history of an animal (such as how long it lives, how often it reproduces and how much it eats) is determined by geometric and dynamic properties of the cardiovascular network that controls its metabolism.

According to the theory, the larger the animal, the longer its cardiovascular system (its network of arteries and capillaries) takes to deliver resources to its cells. That delivery time, which in turn dictates the animal's metabolic rate, is proportional to the animal's mass raised to the power of ¼. Thus, because its circulatory system works less efficiently, an elephant grows systematically more slowly than a mouse, with a slower heart rate, a lower reproductive rate and a longer lifespan

... the implications of this basic idea — that networks become predictably less efficient as they grow — are profound. Indeed, MTE offers insights that could revolutionize the way we understand, predict and manage large networked systems. As well as suggesting that larger systems process energy proportionally more slowly than smaller ones, it implies that the rate at which a system processes energy drives much of its broad-scale behaviour, whether that system is an organism, society or technology.

Several crucial messages are emerging from early work on human-engineered networks. Human societies are complex systems that persist by consuming energy, but energy consumption cannot be lessened simply by reducing individual demand. Any one person's consumption and, possibly, fertility rate, is affected by structures at higher levels. Relating the behaviour of individuals to global-scale problems will require understanding those individuals as nodes in a network, in which the behaviour of one affects the whole society and where the collective behaviour of the society constrains the behaviour of individuals.

...potentially more efficient ways to design infrastructure are emerging. My colleagues and I recently showed that some at least partially decentralized networks, such as computer networks and urban roads in cities (where half the world's population now resides), can increase in size more efficiently than purely centralized ones. For example, our models show that traffic, and so oil consumption, can be proportionally reduced as cities expand, as long as multiple recreational and commercial centres are placed near residential areas. Moreover, Luís Bettencourt and his colleagues recently showed that certain factors, such as innovation and wealth creation, increase super-linearly with city population. In this instance, the more people in a city, the more each person benefits from the collective ability to interact.

...we need to understand how social and infrastructure networks constrain individual behaviour, and structure cities and societies in ways that increase innovation-inducing interactions but reduce transport and travel distances. By doing so, we'll stand a better chance of meeting the needs of a large, voracious and growing human population without decimating the resources available to future generations.

Fingerprints enhance the sense of touch.

Here is a curious factoid, or near factoid. From Miller's review of Scheibert et al.:

After a series of experiments with a sensor designed to mimic a small patch of skin on a human fingertip, Alexis Prevost, Georges Debrégeas, and their colleagues at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris conclude that fingerprints likely enhance the perception of texture by increasing vibrations in the skin as fingers rub across a textured surface. In particular, fingerprints amplify vibrations in the frequency range that best stimulates Pacinian corpuscles, mechanoreceptors in the skin important for texture perception...The ridges made the vibrations picked up by the underlying sensor up to 100 times stronger...The new results leave open why human fingerprints are arranged in elliptical swirls....the amplification effect was strongest when the textured glass slid perpendicular to the ridges, so it's possible that the loops ensure that no matter how the fingers move, some ridges are always optimally oriented.

God needn't actually exist to have evolved

Here are some clips from a brief essay by Jesse Bering, who is director of The Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queens University, Belfast.

What if I were to tell you that God were all in your mind? That God, like a tiny spec floating at the edge of your cornea producing the image of a hazy, out-of-reach orb accompanying your every turn, were in fact an illusion, a psychological blemish etched onto the core cognitive substrate of your brain?...Consider, briefly, the implications of seeing God this way, as a sort of scratch on our psychological lenses rather than the enigmatic figure out there in the heavenly world most people believe him to be. Subjectively, God would still be present in our lives. In fact rather annoyingly so. As a way of perceiving, he would continue to suffuse our experiences with an elusive meaning and give the sense that the universe is communicating with us in various ways.

...in the natural sciences, the concept of God as a causal force tends to be an unpalatable lump of gristle. Although treating God as an illusion may not be entirely philosophically warranted, therefore, it is in fact a scientifically valid treatment. Because the human brain, like any physical organ, is a product of evolution, and since natural selection works without recourse to intelligent forethought, this mental apparatus of ours evolved to think about God quite without need of the latter's consultation, let alone his being real.

...the human brain has many such odd quips that systematically alter, obscure, or misrepresent entirely the world outside our heads. That's not a bad thing necessarily; nor does it imply poor adaptive design. You have undoubtedly seen your share of optical illusions before, such as the famous Müller-Lyer image where a set of arrows of equal length with their tails in opposite directions creates the subjective impression that one line is actually longer than the other. You know, factually, the lines are of equal length, yet despite this knowledge your mind does not allow you to perceive the image this way. There are also well-documented social cognitive illusions that you may not be so familiar with. For example, David Bjorklund, a developmental psychologist, reasons that young children's overconfidence in their own abilities keeps them engaging in challenging tasks rather than simply giving up when they fail. Ultimately, with practice and over time, children's actual skills can ironically begin to more closely approximate these earlier, favorably warped self-judgments. Similarly, evolutionary psychologists David Buss and Martie Haselton argue that men's tendency to over-interpret women's smiles as sexual overtures prompts them to pursue courtship tactics more often, sometimes leading to real reproductive opportunities with friendly women.

...from both a well-being and a biological perspective, whether our beliefs about the world 'out there' are true and accurate matters little. Rather, psychologically speaking, it's whether they work for us—or for our genes—that counts. As you read this, cognitive scientists are inching their way towards a more complete understanding of the human mind as a reality-bending prism. What will change everything? The looming consensus among those who take Occam's Razor seriously that the existence of God is a question for psychologists and not physicists.

For memory enhancement, the kind of sleep you get is important

Van Der Werf et al. have recorded electroencephalograms from people as they slept, setting off a beeping sound when the electroencephalograms were consistent with slow-wave (deeper) sleep, thus causing subjects to move into a shallower sleep stage without awakening. Although the total amount of sleep that subjects got was unchanged, these people did worse on a later test of scene recall than subjects who had slept normally. When the subjects were later scanned in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, they also showed reduced hippocampal activation while they were encoding the to-be-remembered scenes. Thus the hippocampus appears to be particularly sensitive to shallow, but intact, sleep.

The unconscious psychology of color.

When I first started the vision research laboratory I ran for 30 years at the University of Wisconsin, I experimented with the color spectrum of the fluorescent lights used over the laboratory benches. Those that had more blue and green, more like natural sunlight, clearly made my students feel more relaxed and creative. This was consonant with psychological studies that had shown reds to have more arousing and blue more calming effects humans as well as other animals. Mehta and Zhu have made some fascinating further observations reported in Science and noted in a NY Times article by Belluck which gives examples of similar studies. Work done against the background color red is relatively more accurate, while with blue it is more creative. Here is a clip from the Mehta and Zhu abstract, followed by a graphic from the NY Times article.

We demonstrate that red (versus blue) color induces primarily an avoidance (versus approach) motivation and that red enhances performance on a detail-oriented task, whereas blue enhances performance on a creative task. Further, we replicate these results in domains of product design and persuasive message evaluation, and illustrate that these effects occur outside of individuals’ consciousness . We also provide process evidence suggesting that the activation of alternative motivations mediates the effect of color on cognitive task performances.

Supersizing the Mind

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, a recent book by philosopher Andy Clark is reviewed by Melvyn Goodale in Nature, and I pass on some clips from his review, because Clark's views exactly mirror the sentiments expressed in my Biology of Mind Book:

In Supersizing the Mind, philosopher Andy Clark makes the compelling argument that the mind extends beyond the body to include the tools, symbols and other artefacts we deploy to engage the world. According to Clark and other proponents of the 'extended mind' hypothesis, the laptop on which I am writing this review is coupled to my brain and has become part of my mind. Manipulating sentences on the screen can prompt new insights and new ways of conveying ideas, a reiterative cognitive process that would be difficult to achieve without such a tool. The same argument applies to my BlackBerry, to the white board in my office, and even to the conversations I might have with my colleagues. Cognition, Clark argues, is not 'brain-bound' but a dynamic interaction between the neural circuits inside our skulls, our bodies and the objects and events in the outside world.

Clark explores in detail the consequences of embodied and extended cognition for our conscious perception of the world. He acknowledges that the "intimacy of brain, body, world, and action" must have implications for our perceptual experience, but ultimately rejects the idea of enactive perception championed by philosopher Alva Noë, in which our experience is seen as nothing more than the sensorimotor routines that we use to interact with the world. For Clark, perception is shaped by the way in which we explore this world. But at the same time, he argues, our conscious experience of objects and events is not bound to the details of the sensorimotor routines that mediate that exploration. These routines, he suggests, are controlled by encapsulated systems with operating characteristics that are not privy to conscious, or even unconscious, scrutiny and whose activity is removed from the information they convey. In rejecting Noë's sensorimotor model, Clark argues that conscious perception does not depend on a "common sensorimotor currency" but arises from a subtle interplay between brain, body and environment, "replete with special-purpose streaming and with multiple, quasi-independent forms of internal, and external, representation and processing".

If Clark is right, and I think he is, then simply studying what goes on in the brain will tell us only part of what happens as cognitive activity unfolds. To capture the richness of thought, we have to step outside the box and embrace the world beyond the skull.

MindBlog's third birthday.

This Sunday will be Mindblog's 3rd birthday, the first posting was on Feb. 8, 2006. I started it after reading an article on blogging in the New York Times, and decided that I might as well pass on some of the reading and thinking that I was doing anyway. I had no idea that by now (~1,450 posts later) it would be reaching ~10,000 people a month, of which half are in the United States. I want to thank readers who have commented on the posts or sent sent me emails with further ideas.

Apply mild electric current to your head, improve your motor skills

Balakar describes experiments of Reis et al. , who

...trained two groups of 12 volunteers each to use a joystick to move a cursor as quickly and accurately as possible through an obstacle course on a computer screen. The task was difficult enough to ensure that performance would improve over five days of practice.

During the practice sessions, all participants had electrodes connected over the primary motor cortex, the part of the brain that plans and executes movements. One group was stimulated with a mild current through the connection and the other was not. After five days of practice, the group that received the current was significantly better at the task, both in speed and accuracy.

Never ending childhood...

Alison Gopnik suggests that our new scientific understanding of neural plasticity and gene regulation, along with the global spread of schooling, will let us remain children forever — or at least for much longer.

Across species, a long childhood is correlated with an evolutionary strategy that depends on flexibility, intelligence and learning. There is a developmental division of labor. Children get to learn freely about their particular environment without worrying about their own survival — caregivers look after that...We grown-ups are production and marketing. We start out as brilliantly flexible but helpless and dependent babies, great at learning everything but terrible at doing just about anything. We end up as much less flexible but much more efficient and effective adults, not so good at learning but terrific at planning and acting.

For most of human history babies and toddlers used their spectacular, freewheeling, unconstrained learning abilities to understand fundamental facts about the objects, people and language around them — the human core curriculum. At about 6 children also began to be apprentices. Through a gradual process of imitation, guidance and practice they began to master the particular adult skills of their particular culture...School, a very recent human invention, completely alters this program. Schooling replaces apprenticeship. School lets us all continue to be brilliant but helpless babies...school is also an extension of the period of infant dependence — since we don't actually do anything useful in school, other people need to take care of us — all the way up to a Ph.D. School doesn't include the gradual control and mastery of specific adult skills that we once experienced in apprenticeship. Universal and extended schooling means that the period of flexible learning and dependence can continue until we are in our thirties, while independent active mastery is increasingly delayed.

...there may be an intrinsic trade-off between flexibility and effectiveness, between the openness that we require for learning and the focus that we need to act. Child-like brains are great for learning, but not so good for effective decision-making or productive action. There is some evidence that adolescents even now have increasing difficulty making decisions and acting independently, and pathologies of adolescent action like impulsivity and anxiety are at all-time historical highs. Fundamental grown-up human skills we once mastered through apprenticeship, like cooking and caregiving itself, just can't be acquired through schooling. (Think of all those neurotic new parents who have never taken care of a child and try to make up for it with parenting books). When we are all babies for ever, who will be the parents? When we're all children who will be the grown-ups?

Psychosocial stress inhibits prefrontal function

Wow, this piece of work is both sobering and optimistic. These imaging studies by Liston, McEwen, and Casey (full access article) show that diminished performance in an attention shifting task induced by stress correlates with reduction of functional connectivity within a frontoparietal network. These changes, however, are reversed if stress is removed. Here is their abstract:

Relatively little is known about the long-term neurobiological sequelae of chronic stress, which predisposes susceptible patients to neuropsychiatric conditions affecting the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Animal models and human neuroimaging experiments provide complementary insights, yet efforts to integrate the two are often complicated by limitations inherent in drawing comparisons between unrelated studies with disparate designs. Translating from a rodent model of chronic stress where we have shown reversible disruption of PFC function, we show that psychosocial stress induces long-lasting but reversible impairments in behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures of PFC function in humans. Twenty healthy adults, exposed to 1 month of psychosocial stress, confirmed by a validated rating scale, were scanned while performing a PFC-dependent attention-shifting task. One month later, they returned for a second scanning session after a period of reduced stress, and their performance was compared with a twice-scanned, matched group of low-stress controls. Psychosocial stress selectively impaired attentional control and disrupted functional connectivity within a frontoparietal network that mediates attention shifts. These effects were reversible: after one month of reduced stress, the same subjects showed no significant differences from controls. These results highlight the plasticity of PFC networks in healthy human subjects and suggest one mechanism by which disrupted plasticity may contribute to cognitive impairments characteristic of stress-related neuropsychiatric conditions in susceptible individuals.

Drinking coffee lowers dementia

A reassuring note for those of us who are coffee drinkers.

Synchrony and Cooperation

From Wiltermuth and Heath, slightly edited:

The decline of the bayonet and the advent of the machine gun have made marching in step a terrible, if not suicidal, combat tactic; yet armies still train by marching in step. Similarly, religions around the world incorporate synchronous singing and chanting into their rituals. Why? We suggest that acting in synchrony with others can foster cooperation within groups by strengthening group cohesion. The widespread presence of cultural rituals involving synchrony may have evolved as partial solutions to the free-rider problem, the tendency for some individuals to shoulder less than their share of the burden of producing public goods and participating in collective action.

Their abstract:

Armies, churches, organizations, and communities often engage in activities—for example, marching, singing, and dancing—that lead group members to act in synchrony with each other. Anthropologists and sociologists have speculated that rituals involving synchronous activity may produce positive emotions that weaken the psychological boundaries between the self and the group. This article explores whether synchronous activity may serve as a partial solution to the free-rider problem facing groups that need to motivate their members to contribute toward the collective good. Across three experiments, people acting in synchrony with others cooperated more in subsequent group economic exercises, even in situations requiring personal sacrifice. Our results also showed that positive emotions need not be generated for synchrony to foster cooperation. In total, the results suggest that acting in synchrony with others can increase cooperation by strengthening social attachment among group members.

Some description of the experiments:

In the first experiment an experimenter led 30 participants (60% female; mean age = 20, SD= 2.0) in groups of 3 on walks around campus. In the synchronous condition, participants walked in step. In the control condition, they walked normally. After their walk, participants completed a questionnaire designed to convince participants that they had finished the experiment....In an ostensibly separate experiment, a second experimenter conducted the Weak Link Coordination Exercise, which models situations in which group productivity is a function of the lowest level of input...the game measures expectations of cooperation.

In a second experiment groups were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: In the control condition (i.e., the no-singing, no-moving condition), participants (American students) listened to "O Canada," held a plastic cup above the table, and silently read the lyrics to the anthem. In the synchronous-singing condition, participants listened to the anthem, held the cup, and sang the words "O Canada" at the appropriate times. In the synchronous-singing-and-moving condition, participants listened to the anthem, sang the words "O Canada," and moved cups from side to side in time with the music. In the asynchronous condition, participants sang and moved cups, but participants each listened to the anthem at a different tempo, causing them to move their cups at different rates and sing "O Canada" at different times. Participants in all conditions were told that they might hear the same or different versions of "O Canada," but only participants in the asynchronous condition actually heard different versions. Participants in the two synchrony conditions cooperated more in the subsequent Weak Link Coordination Exercise described in Study 1 than did participants in the control or asynchronous conditions.

The third experiment used the same synchrony, asynchrony, and control groups as the second to show that after behaving in synchrony with others, people contribued more to a public account in a commons dilemma known as a public-goods game. Moving in synchrony boosted cooperation even when behaving cooperatively conflicted with personal self-interest.

Conceptual similarity of biological and cultural development

I found this brief essay by Brian Goodwin fascinating. I tried to reduce it to a few excerpts, but end up wanting to pass on the entire piece:

I anticipate that biology will go through a transforming revelation/revolution that is like the revolution that happened in physics with the development of quantum mechanics nearly 100 years ago. In biology this will involve the realisation that to make sense of the complexity of gene activity in development, the prevailing model of local mechanical causality will have to be abandoned. In its place we will have a model of interactive relationships within gene transcription networks that is like the pattern of interactions between words in a language, where ambiguity is essential to the creation of emergent meaning that is sensitive to cultural history and to context. The organism itself is the emergent meaning of the developmental process as embodied form, sensitive to both historical constraint within the genome and to environmental context, as we see in the adaptive creativity of evolution. What contemporary studies have revealed is that genes are not independent units of information that can be transferred between organisms to alter phenotypes, but elements of complex networks that act together in a morphogenetic process that produces coherent form and function as embodied meaning.

A major consequence that I see of this revelation in biology is the realisation that the separation we have made between human creativity as expressed in culture, and natural creativity as expressed in evolution, is mistaken. The two are much more deeply related than we have previously recognised. That humans are embedded in and dependent on nature is something that no-one can deny. This has become dramatically evident recently as our economic system has collapsed, along with the collapse of many crucial ecosystems, due to our failure to integrate human economic activity as a sustainable part of Gaian regulatory networks. We now face dramatic changes in the climate that require equally dramatic changes in our technologies connected with energy generation, farming, travel, and human life-style in general.

On the other hand, the recognition that culture is embedded in nature is not so evident but will, I believe, emerge as part of the biological revelation/revolution. Biologists will realise that all life, from bacteria to humans, involves a creative process that is grounded in natural languages as the foundation of their capacity for self-generation and continuous adaptive transformation. The complexity of the molecular networks regulating gene activity in organisms reveals a structure and a dynamic that has the self-similar characteristics and long-range order of languages. The coherent form of an organism emerges during its development as the embodied meaning of the historical genetic text, created through the process of resolving ambiguity and multiple possibilities of form into appropriate functional order that reflects sensitivity to context. Such use of language in all its manifestations in the arts and the sciences is the essence of cultural creativity.

In conclusion, I see the deep conceptual changes that are currently happening in biology as a prelude and accompaniment to the cultural changes that are occurring in culture, facilitating these and ushering in a new age of sustainable living on the planet.

MindBlog's second PodCast - "The Beast Within"

This second podcast (39 minutes, 17.9 MB, .mp3 format), like the first, is a reduced form of an essay on my website. It talks about those components of our human actions, feelings, and mental lives that are more similar to those of other animals than most of us realize, and notes the introspective access we have to these more simple levels of our mind. I am going to attempt to keep future podcasts in the 10-30 minute length range.

Note: I am very grateful for the feedback on my first podcast attempt last Wednesday ("The I-Illusion"). I am generating these in the .mp3 audio format using the Apple Garage Band Program. I don't want to get too immersed in the techie side of this, but would ask if any of you have a problem with this presentation, or would like to suggest a different presentation. I think I may have managed to make the podcasts available on iTunes via the Feedburner service.

I don't believe in atheists

The title of this post is the title of a new book by Chris Hedges. A reader pointed out this interesting interview with Hedges at Salon.com. He takes on "The New Atheists," who he accuses of preaching a fundamentalism as dangerous as the religious fundamentalist belief systems they attack, nudging the secular left to embrace the same kind of bigotry and chauvinism and intolerance that marks the radical Christian right. Both divide the world into "us" and "them" and fail to have empathy. One Hedges comment from the interview:

I write in the book that not believing in God is not dangerous. Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don't believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil. Evil is always something out there that can be eradicated. For the New Atheists, it's the irrational religious hordes. I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. Both Hitchens and Harris defend the use of torture. Of course, they're great supporters of preemptive war, and I don't think this is accidental that their political agendas coalesce completely with the Christian right.

Incorporation of misinformation during memory reconsolidation

Chan et al. report a counter-intuitive finding. You would think that because memory retrieval is a powerful memory enhancer, recalling a witnessed event prior to receiving misinformation about it should reduce eyewitness suggestibility. They report just the opposite:

People's later memory of an event can be altered by exposure to misinformation about that event. The typical misinformation paradigm, however, does not include a recall test prior to the introduction of misinformation, contrary to what real-life eyewitnesses encounter when they report to a 911 operator or crime-scene officer. Because retrieval is a powerful memory enhancer (the testing effect), recalling a witnessed event prior to receiving misinformation about it should reduce eyewitness suggestibility. We show, however, that immediate cued recall actually exacerbates the later misinformation effect for both younger and older adults. The reversed testing effect we observed was based on two mechanisms: First, immediate cued recall enhanced learning of the misinformation; second, the initially recalled details became particularly susceptible to interference from later misinformation, a finding suggesting that even human episodic memory may undergo a reconsolidation process. These results show that real-life eyewitness memory may be even more susceptible to misinformation than is currently envisioned.

It's hard to be dignified when your name is....

The figure is from Sarah Lyall's New York Times article.

Some monday morning music

A comment on the mindblog podcast I posted last week reminded me that I haven't been posted much of my music lately. I did pass on one recording made on the Steinway upright in my snowbird condo here in Fort Lauderdale last January, but this year I've decided to wait for more recordings until I get back to Madison and my Steinway B, which has a gorgeous sound. Here is a Debussy's first Arabesque done on that instrument.

The epistemology of everything

I thought this essay was so striking that I want to pass it on in its entirety (I started to excerpt chunks, but found every sentence worthwhile, and so stopped). It is completely consonant with the ideas in my "I-Illusion" lecture and podcast.

Understanding that the outside world is really inside us and the inside world is really outside us will change everything. Both inside and outside. Why?.."There is no out there out there", physicist John Wheeler said in his attempt to explain quantum physics. All we know is how we correlate with the world. We do not really know what the world is really like, uncorrelated with us. When we seem to experience an external world that is out there, independent of us, it is something we dream up...Modern neurobiology has reached the exact same conclusion. The visual world, what we see, is an illusion, but then a very sophisticated one. There are no colours, no tones, no constancy in the "real" world, it is all something we make up. We do so for good reasons and with great survival value. Because colors, tones and constancy are expressions of how we correlate with the world...The merging of the epistemological lesson from quantum mechanics with the epistemological lesson from neurobiology attest to a very simple fact: What we percieve as being outside of us is indeed a fancy and elegant projection of what we have inside. We do make this projection as as result of interacting with something not inside, but everything we experience is inside...Is it not real? It embodies a correlation that is very real. As physicist N. David Mermin has argued, we do have correlations, but we do not know what it is that correlates, or if any correlata exists at all. It is a modern formulation of quantum pioneer Niels Bohr's view: "Physics is not about nature, it is about what we can say about nature."

So what is real, then? Inside us humans a lot of relational emotions exists. We feel affection, awe, warmth, glow, mania, belonging and refusal towards other humans and to the world as a whole. We relate and it provokes deep inner emotional states. These are real and true, inside our bodies and percieved not as "real states" of the outside world, but more like a kind of weather phenomena inside us...That raises the simple question: Where do these internal states come from? Are they an effect of us? Did we make them or did they make us? Love exists before us (most of us were conceived in an act of love). Friendship, family bonds, hate, anger, trust, distrust, all of these entities exist before the individual. They are primary. The illusion of the ego denies the fact that they are there before the ego consciously decided to love or hate or care or not. But the inner states predate the conscious ego. And they predate the bodily individual...The emotional states inside us are very, very real and the product of biological evolution. They are helpful to us in our attempt to survive. Experimental economics and behavioral sciences have recently shown us how important they are to us as social creatures: To cooperate you have to trust the other party, even though a rational analysis will tell you that both the likelihood and the cost of being cheated is very high. When you trust, you experience a physiologically detectable inner glow of pleasure. So the inner emotional state says yes. However, if you rationally consider the objects in the outside world, the other parties, and consider their trade-offs and motives, you ought to choose not to cooperate. Analyzing the outside world makes you say no. Human cooperation is dependent on our giving weight to what we experience as the inner world compared to what we experience as the outer world.

Traditionally, the culture of science has denied the relevance of the inner states. Now, they become increasingly important to understanding humans. And highly relevant when we want to build artefacts that mimic us...Soon we will be building not only Artificial Intelligence. We will be building Artificial Will. Systems with an ability to convert internal decisions and values into external change. They will be able to decide that they want to change the world. A plan inside becomes an action on the outside. So they will have to know what is inside and outside...In building these machines we ourselves will learn something that will change everything: The trick of perception is the trick of mistaking an inner world for the outside world. The emotions inside are the evolutionary reality. The things we see and hear outside are just elegant ways of imagining correlata that can explain our emotions, our correlations. We don't hear the croak, we hear the frog.

When we understand that the inner emotional states are more real than what we experience as the outside world, cooperation becomes easier. The epoch of insane mania for rational control will be over...What really changes is they way we see things, the way we experience everything. For anything to change out there you have to change everything in here. That is the epistemological situation. All spiritual traditions have been talking about it. But now it grows from the epistemology of quantum physics, neurobiology and the building of robots...We will be sitting there, building those Artificial Will-robots. Suddenly we will start laughing. There is no out there out there. It is in here. There is no in here in here. It is out there. The outside is in here. Who is there?

That laughter will change everything.

Estrogen receptors in the male medial amygdala disrupt social behavior.

A series of classic studies have shown that in Prairie Voles two neuropeptides, oxytocin and vasopressin, are primary modulators of pair-bond formation and parental behaviors. Genetic manipulations have been able to switch male behaviors between pair-bonding and promiscuous, and correlations between similar behaviors in human males and their genetic variations have been found. Recently Cushing et al. have made another observation on male voles which one expects will also be carried over to human males: Prosocial behavior correlates with a low density of estrogen receptors in the lateral amygdala, and genetic manipulations which increase the number of these receptors decrease pair-bonding and prosocial behaviors. It will be interesting to follow efforts to translate these findings to human social bonding, especially in relation to neuropsychiatric disorders characterized by an inability to form normal social bonds, such as autism. Here is their abstract:

Studies using estrogen receptor (ER) knock-out mice indicate that ER masculinizes male behavior. Recent studies of ER and male prosocial behavior have shown an inverse relationship between ER expression in regions of the brain that regulate social behavior, including the medial amygdala (MeA), and the expression of male prosocial behavior. These studies have lead to the hypothesis that low levels of ER are necessary to "permit" the expression of high levels of male prosocial behavior. To test this, viral vectors were used to enhance ER in male prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster), which display high levels of prosocial behavior and low levels of MeA ER. Adult male prairie voles were transfected with ER in the MeA (MeA-ER) or the caudate–putamen (ER control) or luciferase (MeA-site-specific control), and 3 weeks later tested for spontaneous alloparental behavior and partner preference. Enhancing ER in the MeA altered/reduced male prosocial behavior. Only one-third of MeA-ER males, compared with all control males, were alloparental. MeA-ER males also displayed a significant preference for a novel female. This is a critical finding because the manipulations of neuropeptides, oxytocin and vasopressin, can inhibit the formation of a partner preference, but do not lead to the formation of a preference for a novel female. The results support the hypothesis that low levels of ER are necessary for high levels of male prosocial behavior, and provide the first direct evidence that site-specific ER expression plays a critical role in the expression of male prosocial behavior.

The dolphin as gourmet chef: how to prepare cuttlefish

From the abstract of Finn et al. :

...a wild female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops aduncus) was observed and recorded repeatedly catching, killing and preparing cuttlefish for consumption using a specific and ordered sequence of behaviours. Cuttlefish were herded to a sand substrate, pinned to the seafloor, killed by downward thrust, raised mid-water and beaten by the dolphin with its snout until the ink was released and drained. The deceased cuttlefish was then returned to the seafloor, inverted and forced along the sand substrate in order to strip the thin dorsal layer of skin off the mantle, thus releasing the buoyant calcareous cuttlebone. This stepped behavioural sequence significantly improves prey quality through 1) removal of the ink (with constituent melanin and tyrosine), and 2) the calcareous cuttlebone.

Soul-travel for selfless beings

Thomas Metzinger, one of my favorite philosophers, offers this piece on this years Edge.org question "What will change everything."

John Brockman points out that new technology leads not only to new ways of perceiving ourselves, but also to a process he calls "recreating ourselves." Could this become true in an even deeper and more radical way than through gene-technology? The answer is yes.

It is entirely plausible that we may one day directly control virtual models of our own bodies directly with our brain. In 2007, I first experienced taking control of a computer-generated whole-body model myself. It took place in a virtual reality lab where my own physical motions were filmed by 18 cameras picking up signals from sensors attached to my body. Over the past two years, different research groups in Switzerland, England, Germany and Sweden have demonstrated how, in a passive condition, subjects can consciously identify with the content of a computer-generated virtual body representation, fully re-locating the phenomenal sense of self into an artificial, visual model of their body.

In 2008, in another experiment, we saw that a monkey on a treadmill could control the real-time walking patterns a humanoid robot via a brain-machine interface directly implanted into its brain. The synchronized robot was in Japan, while the poor monkey was located thousands of miles away, in the US. Even after it stopped walking, the monkey was able to sustain locomotion of the synchronized robot for a few minutes—just by using the visual feedback transmitted from Japan plus his own "thoughts" (whatever that may turn out to be).

Now imagine two further steps.

First, we manage to selectively block the high-bandwidth "interoceptive" input into the human self-model—all the gut feelings and the incessant flow of inner body perceptions that anchor the conscious self in the physical body. After all, we already have selective motor control for an artificial body-model and robust phenomenal self-identification via touch and sight. By blocking the internal self-perception of the body, we could be able to suspend the persistent causal link to the physical body.

Second, we develop richer and more complex avatars, virtual agents emulating not only the proprioceptive feedback generated by situated movement, but also certain abstract aspects of ongoing global control itself—new tools, as Brockman would call them. Then suddenly it happens that the functional core process initiating the complex control loop connecting physical and virtual body jumps from the biological brain into the avatar.

I don't believe this will happen tomorrow. I also don't believe that it would change everything. But it would change a lot.

Neural correlates of third party punishment.

Legal decision making involves assessing the defendant's responsibility for the crime and choosing an appropriate punishment. To determine the neural correlates of these processes, Buckholtz et al. have used functional MRI to scan volunteers who made legal decisions based on written scenarios. The level of activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex correlated with the level of responsibility that the volunteers assigned to the defendant, whereas activity in the amygdala, the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex predicted punishment magnitude, indicating that distinct neural systems underlie the two processes in legal decision making. Here is their abstract:

Legal decision-making in criminal contexts includes two essential functions performed by impartial “third parties:” assessing responsibility and determining an appropriate punishment. To explore the neural underpinnings of these processes, we scanned subjects with fMRI while they determined the appropriate punishment for crimes that varied in perpetrator responsibility and crime severity. Activity within regions linked to affective processing (amygdala, medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex) predicted punishment magnitude for a range of criminal scenarios. By contrast, activity in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex distinguished between scenarios on the basis of criminal responsibility, suggesting that it plays a key role in third-party punishment. The same prefrontal region has previously been shown to be involved in punishing unfair economic behavior in two-party interactions, raising the possibility that the cognitive processes supporting third-party legal decision-making and second-party economic norm enforcement may be supported by a common neural mechanism in human prefrontal cortex.

MindBlog's first PodCast: "The I-Illusion"

Posting the podcast of the web radio show this past Monday motivated me to follow through on composing a few of my own podcasts for MindBlog. When I asked for opinions on this possibility last Oct. 31, most respondents indicated a preference for 5-30 min chunks of material. I decided to warm up by translating a lecture I have given, "The I-Illusion," into podcast form. (Here is the mp3 (10 Mb) download.) You can find the web version here. The podcast version is a condensed form of the web lecture (It is 45 min instead of 1 hr), but it has more recent material not included in the web lecture.

Seeing who we hear and hearing who we see

In an article with the title of this post Seyfarth and Cheney make the following comments on work by Proops et al.

Imagine that you're working in your office and you hear two voices outside in the hallway. Both are familiar. You immediately picture the individuals involved. You walk out to join them and there they are, looking exactly as you'd imagined. Effortlessly and unconsciously you have just performed two actions of great interest to cognitive scientists: cross-modal perception (in this case, by using auditory information to create a visual image) and individual recognition (the identification of a specific person according to a rich, multimodal, and individually distinct set of cues, and the placement of that individual in a society of many others). Proops, McComb, and Reby show that horses do it, too, and just as routinely, without any special training. The result, although not surprising, is nonetheless the first clear demonstration that a non-human animal recognizes members of its own species across sensory modalities. It raises intriguing questions about the origins of conceptual knowledge and the extent to which brain mechanisms in many species—birds, mammals, as well as humans—are essentially multisensory.

According to a traditional view, multisensory integration takes place only after extensive unisensory processing has occurred. Multimodal (or amodal) integration is a higher-order process that occurs in different areas from unimodal sensory processing, and different species may or may not be capable of multisensory integration...An alternative view argues that, although different sensory systems can operate on their own, sensory integration is rapid, pervasive, and widely distributed across species. The result is a distributed circuit of modality-specific subsystems, linked together to form a multimodal percept...A third view argues that many neurons are multisensory, able to respond to stimuli in either the visual or the auditory domain (for example), and capable of integrating sensory information at the level of a single neuron as long as the two sorts of information are congruent. As a result, “much, if not all, of neocortex is multisensory”. By this account, perceptual development does not occur in one sensory modality at a time but is integrated from the start.

Here is the experiment as described in the Proops et al. abstract:

...we use a cross-modal expectancy violation paradigm to provide a clear and systematic demonstration of cross-modal individual recognition in a nonhuman animal: the domestic horse. Subjects watched a herd member being led past them before the individual went of view, and a call from that or a different associate was played from a loudspeaker positioned close to the point of disappearance. When horses were shown one associate and then the call of a different associate was played, they responded more quickly and looked significantly longer in the direction of the call than when the call matched the herd member just seen, an indication that the incongruent combination violated their expectations. Thus, horses appear to possess a cross-modal representation of known individuals containing unique auditory and visual/olfactory information. Our paradigm could provide a powerful way to study individual recognition across a wide range of species.

Eating dirt is good for you.

I have always attributed my robust immune system (I don't get colds) to the fact that when I was 1-5 years old I was crawling or running around barefoot in the hot Texas summer, eating dirt, pill bugs, and dog shit. Brody does a nice summary of what is now the accepted view: that exposure while young to a diverse array of bacteria, viruses, and worms trains the immune system in what is and is not important, essentially programs it for later adult life. Children raised in super hygiene environments are more likely to develop allergies, asthma, and autoimmune disorders.

Seeing ourselves as eddies in the stream of entropy

Of the hundreds of essays written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth, I think one of the most engaging is offered by Matt Ridley in the Spectator magazine. A few clips:

Living beings are eddies in the stream of entropy. That is to say, while the universe gradually becomes more homogeneous and disordered, little parts of it can reverse the trend and become briefly more ordered and complex by capturing packets of energy. It happens each time a baby is conceived. Built by 20,000 genes that turn each other on and off in a symphony of great precision, and equipped with a brain of ten trillion synapses, each refined and remodeled by early and continuing experience, you are a thing of exquisite neatness, powered by glucose. Says Darwin, this came about by bottom-up emergence, not top-down dirigisme. Faithful reproduction, occasional random variation and selective survival can be a surprisingly progressive and cumulative force: it can gradually build things of immense complexity. Indeed, it can make something far more complex than a conscious, deliberate designer ever could: with apologies to William Paley and Richard Dawkins, it can make a watchmaker.

Malthus taught Darwin the bleak lesson that overbreeding must end in pestilence, famine or violence — and hence gave him the insight that in a struggle for existence, survival could be selective. But the notion that, with random variation, this selective survival could then generate complexity and sophistication where there had been none before, that it is a cumulative and creative force, is entirely his. It is also one that applies to more than the bodies of living beings.

Technology is a case in point. Although engineers are under the fond illusion that they design things, nearly all of what they do consists of nudging forward descent with modification. Every technology has traceable ancestry; ‘to create is to recombine’ said the geneticist François Jacob. The first motor car was once described by the historian L.T.C. Rolt as ‘sired by the bicycle out of the horse carriage’. Just like living systems, technologies experience mutation (such as the invention of the spinning jenny), reproduction (the rapid mechanisation of the cotton industry as manufacturers copied each others’ machines), sex (Samuel Crompton’s combination of water frame and jenny to make a ‘mule’), competition (different designs competing in the early cotton mills), extinction (the spinning jenny was obsolete by 1800), and increasing complexity (modern cotton mills are electrified and computerised).

Software inventors have learnt to recognise the power of trial and error rather than deliberate design. Beginning with ‘genetic algorithms’ in the 1980s, they designed programmes that would experiment with changes in their sequence till they solved the problem set for them. Then gradually the open-source software movement emerged by which users themselves altered programmes and shared their improvements with each other. Linux and Apache are operating systems designed by such democratic methods, but the practice has long spread beyond programmers. Wikipedia is a bottom-up knowledge repository and, though far from flawless, is proving easily capable, even in its first flush of youth, of matching expert-written encyclopaedias for accuracy and reach. It grows by natural selection among edits.

The internet is an increasingly Darwinian place, where decentralised, self-organising sophistication holds sway: swarm intelligence is the fashionable term. Trey Ratcliff, founder of a computer games company in Texas, tells me he feels more like a victim than a designer of technology’s evolution: ‘saying Edison invented the phonograph is like saying a spider invented silk’.

The Machine Stops

A large component of the current financial meltdown results from people trusting that they were being cared for by complex financial instruments that neither they nor the people who designed them really understood. It recently struck me that this sort of situation was described long ago by E.M Forster in his prescient 1909 science fiction short story "The Machine Stops." I found the text here and very much enjoyed re-reading the story. A synopsis is given by the wikipedia entry, and it can be downloaded in the various electronic formats.

MindBlog does a gig on a happiness webcast/podcast

With some trepidation I signed on to be a talking head neuroscience 'expert' on the "Make Me Happy!" Radio Show with Drs. Aymee Coget and Bob Nozik as hosts last Friday, 4-5 p.m. pacific time. The one hour show is podcast until this friday at www.AdviceRadio.com, or you can download the .mp3 file here. My interview starts 7 1/2 minutes into the program after a somewhat loopy new-agey california-style introduction. I just listened to the first few minutes of the interview, and I guess it is OK, although I'm pained that the number of "uh's" and "y'knows" is right up there with Caroline Kennedy's. I should mention to those of you who responded to my 'would you like some podcasts from MindBlog?' question affirmatively that my intentions are still good, but I just haven't found time to actually start doing them. Doing these postings and also keeping up piano performance and chamber music seems to take up more time than I have.

A new kind of mind.

In response to this years Edge question "What would change everything - What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?", Kevin Kelly sees a new kind of cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence, the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself.

...the snowballing success of Google this past decade suggests the coming AI will not be bounded inside a definable device. It will be on the web, like the web. The more people that use the web, the more it learns. The more it knows, the more we use it. The smarter it gets, the more money it makes, the smarter it will get, the more we will use it. The smartness of the web is on an increasing-returns curve, self-accelerating each time someone clicks on a link or creates a link. Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all its connected computing chips—will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.

When this emerging AI, or ai, arrives it won't even be recognized as intelligence at first. Its very ubiquity will hide it. We'll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, including scientific measurements and modeling, but because the smartness lives on thin bits of code spread across the globe in windowless boring warehouses, and it lacks a unified body, it will be faceless. You can reach this distributed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is. And because this synthetic intelligence is a combination of human intelligence (all past human learning, all current humans online) and the coveted zip of fast alien digital memory, it will be difficult to pinpoint what it is as well. Is it our memory, or a consensual agreement? Are we searching it, or is it searching us?

Most downloaded consciousness papers of 2008

The ASSC (Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness) keeps an eprints archive from which you can download a large number of papers. They report the following as the most downloaded papers of 2008:

Metacognition and Consciousness, Koriat, A. (2006) In: Cambridge handbook of consciousness. Cambridge University Press, New York, USA. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/175/ 15281 downloads from 57 countries

Methods for studying unconscious learning, Destrebecqz, Arnaud and Peigneux, Philippe (2005) In: Progress in Brain Research. Elsevier, pp. 69-80. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/170/ 14015 downloads from 64 countries

Crossmodal interactions: lessons from synesthesia, Sagiv, Noam and Ward, Jamie (2006) In: Visual Perception, Part 2 - Fundamentals of Awareness: Multi-Sensory Integration and High-Order Perception. Progress in Brain Research, Volume 155. Elsevier, pp. 259-271. ISBN 0444519270 http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/224/ 13193 downloads from 43 countries

Inverse Zombies, Anesthesia Awareness, and the Hard Problem of Unconsciousness, Mashour, George A. (2007) In: 11th Annual Meeting of the ASSC, Las Vegas. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/294/ 11421 downloads from 69 countries

Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: a testable taxonomy, Dehaene, Stanislas and Changeux, Jean-Pierre and Naccache, Lionel and Sackur, Jérôme and Sergent, Claire (2006) Trends in Cognitive Science, 10 (5). pp. 204-211. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/20/ 10094 downloads from 51 countries

Getting the dead to talk back.

In his January Scientific American column, "Skeptic", Michael Shermer writes about his experience as the token scientist invited to Univ-Con, a paranormal conference organized by Ryan Buell, the telegenic host of A&E’s television unreality series Paranormal State.

“Is Matthew there?” asked Cheyenne, directing her voice toward the box on the table in hopes that her brother would come through from the other side. “Yes,” the reply came. With the connection “validated,” Cheyenne shakily continued: “Was the suicide a mistake?” The speaker crackled, “My death was a mistake.”... Cheyenne’s life-affirming messages were coming out of Thomas Edison’s “Telephone to the Dead”—or at least a facsimile of a rumored machine that the great inventor never built. It was just one of many readings that day (at $90 a pop) conducted by Christopher Moon, senior editor and president of Haunted Times magazine.

I couldn’t hear Cheyenne’s brother, mother or any other incorporeal spirits, until Moon interpreted the random noises emanating from the machine that, he explained to me, was created by a Colorado man named Frank Sumption. “Frank’s Box,” according to its inventor, “consists of a random voltage generator, which is used to tune an AM receiver module rapidly. The audio from the tuner (“raw audio”) is amplified and fed to an echo chamber, where the spirits manipulate it to form their voices.” Apparently doing so is difficult for the spirits, so Moon employs the help of “Tyler,” a spirit “technician,” whom he calls on to corral wayward spirits to within earshot of the receiver. What it sounded like was the rapid twirling of a radio dial so that only noises and word fragments were audible.

“Well, since we know how easy it is for our brains to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise,” I continued, “how can you tell the difference between a dead person’s real words and the random noises that just sound like words?” Moon agreed, “You have to be very careful. We record the sessions and get consistency in what people hear.” I persisted: “Consistency, as in what, 95 percent, 51 percent?” “A lot,” Moon rejoined.

That evening in my keynote address I explained how “priming” the brain to see or hear something increases the likelihood that the percepts will obey the concepts. I played a part of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven backwards, in which one can hear an occasional “Satan,” and then played it again after priming their brains with the alleged lyrics on the screen. The auditory data jumped off the visual cues (the funniest being “there was a little toolshed where he made us suffer, sad Satan”—see it in my lecture “Skepticism 101” at www.skeptic.com). I also played a number of auditory illusions produced by psychologist Diana Deutsch of the University of California, San Diego (http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/), in which a repetitive tape loop of a two-syllable word educes different words and phrases in different people’s minds. These are examples of patternicity, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise (a concept I introduced in my December 2008 column), and the next day I put it to the test when Moon gave me a personal demo. With the Telephone to the Dead squawking away, I tried to connect to my deceased father and mother, asking for any “validation” of a connection—name, cause of death ... anything. I coaxed and cajoled. Nothing. Moon asked Tyler to intervene. Nothing. Moon said he heard something, but when I pressed him he came up with nothing. I willingly suspended my disbelief in hopes of talking to my parents, whom I miss dearly. Nothing. I searched for any pattern I might find. Nothing.

And that, I’m afraid, is my assessment of the paranormal. Nothing.

Predicting risk taking

From Gianotti et al., who performed EEG measurements on forty right-handed female students at the Univ. of Zurich:

Human risk taking is characterized by a large amount of individual heterogeneity. In this study, we applied resting-state electroencephalography, which captures stable individual differences in neural activity, before subjects performed a risk-taking task. Using a source-localization technique, we found that the baseline cortical activity in the right prefrontal cortex predicts individual risk-taking behavior. Individuals with higher baseline cortical activity in this brain area display more risk aversion than do other individuals. This finding demonstrates that neural characteristics that are stable over time can predict a highly complex behavior such as risk-taking behavior and furthermore suggests that hypoactivity in the right prefrontal cortex might serve as a dispositional indicator of lower regulatory abilities, which is expressed in greater risk-taking behavior.

Some clarity on alternative therapies and medical science

Mindblog reader Ian has pointed me to this essay on alternative medicine and new age spirituality by Bruce Charlton, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. His website contains other interesting bits of writing. He paints what I think should be a useful and clear distinction:

I would define alternative therapies in terms of them having non-scientific explanations. In so far as a therapy does have a biological explanation, I would regard that therapy as simply part of orthodox medicine. The crucial difference between orthodox and alternative therapies is therefore that alternative medical systems have non-scientific explanations based on spiritual, mystical, legendary or otherwise intuitively-appealing insights...I am broadly supportive of alternative and complementary therapies because I think that overall they do a great deal of good for a large number of people. But the kind of good they do is psychological and spiritual; not medical. They are about making people feel better (‘healing’) not mending their dysfunctional brains and bodies (‘curing’). Alternative therapies certainly are not a part of medical science. So, on the one hand, I would like to see alternative therapies thrive and spread, and on the other hand they should drop all their pretensions to ‘scientific’ validity. In future, alternative medicine should explicitly become part of New Age spirituality, and thereby clearly be differentiated from orthodox medicine and biological science.

He argues against the relevance of randomized trials to test alternative therapies:

...when randomised trials are used in alternative medicine, the usual process of therapeutic development is turned on-its-head. Instead of coming at the end of a long process of scientific evaluation, randomized trials are placed at the beginning of evaluation, and are indeed expected to be the only form of scientific evaluation – with randomization used in isolation with no possibility for cross-checking using other scientific methods...The problem is not so much that alternative therapy systems are scientifically primitive; it is that alternative systems are not scientific at all. By definition they do not have scientifically-grounded explanations. When the constraints of randomized trials are properly understood, it becomes clear that 'positive' trials in alternative medicine are irrelevant.

His summary:

Orthodox medicine is based on scientific theories and is properly characterized by objective evaluation criteria and formal professional structures of education and certification. Alternative healing deploys a wide range of intuitively-appealing but non-scientific explanations, and constitutes a consumer-dominated marketplace of ideas and therapies which are personally-evaluated by the client...Orthodox medicine focuses on curing disease and promoting health. But alternative therapies should be based on promoting well-being and personal fulfillment. To do this they need to be able freely to deploy poetic explanations and charismatic healers as part of the wide and growing practice of New Age spirituality.

Prosopagnosia due to reduced cortical connectivity

Prosopagnosics have impaired face recognition, but make relatively normal responses to face stimuli in core brain regions for face recognition. Thomas et. al find that it is the connectivity among these regions that is being disrupted in the disorder:

Using diffusion tensor imaging and tractography, we found that a disruption in structural connectivity in ventral occipito-temporal cortex may be the neurobiological basis for the lifelong impairment in face recognition that is experienced by individuals who suffer from congenital prosopagnosia. Our findings suggest that white-matter fibers in ventral occipito-temporal cortex support the integrated function of a distributed cortical network that subserves normal face processing.

Sex, sweat and your brain

From Zou and Chen, showing that two areas of women's brains respond to chemical signals in the sweat of sexually aroused men. Their edited abstract, and a figure:

Chemosensory communication of affect and motivation is ubiquitous among animals. In humans, emotional expressions are naturally associated with faces and voices. Whether chemical signals play a role as well has hardly been addressed. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that the right orbitofrontal cortex, right fusiform cortex, and right hypothalamus respond to airborne natural human sexual sweat (distinguishing it from neutral sweat, and a nonsocial control), indicating that this particular chemosensory compound is encoded holistically in the brain. Interestingly, with the exception of hypothalamus, neither the OFC nor the fusiform region is implicated in sexual motivation and behavior. Hence, our results implied that the chemosensory information from natural human sexual sweat was encoded more holistically in the brain rather than specifically for its sexual quality. Our findings provide neural evidence that socioemotional meanings, including the sexual ones, are conveyed in the human sweat.

Figure - Brain responses to social chemosensory compounds. a, Coronal view showing an activated area in the right orbitofrontal cortex. d. Sagittal view showing an activated region in the right fusiform gyrus.

(I might as well also repeat this link from a post several days ago, on the debate raging over MRI studies of social cognition that has been started off by a paper titled "Voodoo correlations in social neuroscience".)

Why we hiccup.

An article by Neil Shubin in the January Scientific American notes how a number of evolutionary hand-me-downs inherited from fish and tadpoles have left us with hernias, hiccups and other maladies. I thought this bit on why we hiccup was fascinating: it is because we once were tadpoles.

A spasm of the muscles in the throat and chest causes a hiccup. The characteristic “hic” sound results when we sharply inspire air while the epiglottis, a flap of soft tissue at the back of the throat, closes. All these movements are completely involuntary; we “hic” without any thought on our part. Hiccups occur for many reasons: we eat too fast or too much; even more severe conditions, such as tumors in the chest area, can bring them on. Hiccups reveal at least two layers of our history: one shared with fish, another with amphibians, according to one well-supported hypothesis. We inherited the major nerves we use in breathing from fish. One set of nerves, the phrenic, extends from the base of the skull and travels through the chest cavity and the diaphragm, among other places. This tortuous course creates problems; anything that interrupts the path of these nerves along their length can interfere with our ability to breathe. Irritation of these nerves can even be a cause of hiccups. A more rational design of the human body would have the nerves traveling not from the neck but from a spot nearer to the diaphragm. Unluckily, we became heir to this design from fishy ancestors with gills closer to the neck, not a diaphragm well below it. If the strange pathway of the nerves is a product of our fish origin, the hiccup itself may have arisen from the past we share with amphibians. It turns out that the characteristic pattern of muscle and nerve activity of hiccups occurs naturally in other creatures. And not just any creatures. More specifically, they turn up in tadpoles that use both lungs and gills to breathe. When tadpoles use their gills, they have a problem— they need to pump water into their mouth and throat and then across the gills, but they need to keep this water from entering their lungs. So what do they do? They shut the glottis to close off the breathing tube, while sharply inspiring. In essence, they breathe with their gills using an extended form of hiccup. (click on figure to enlarge it).

Species conservation - how being helpful hurts

Cornelia Dean makes note of a fact I had not thought much about. Conservation regulations that specify the minimum size of individuals that can be harvested, whether they be fish, bighorn sheep, or ginseng plants, increase the rate of evolution to favor smaller individuals that reproduce at an earlier age. This works against species health. Humans are harvesting mature adults, whereas natural predators would target smaller or weaker (old) individuals. Rates of evolutionary change are three times higher in species subject to “harvest selection” than in other species. Here is the abstract of Darimont et al.'s work.

Oxytocin makes a face in memory familiar

It is known that men treated with oxytocin perform better in inferring affective state from the eye region of human faces. Oxytocin also increases social behaviors like trust. Rimmele at al. show now that oxytocin delivered by a commercially available nasal spray (Syntocinon Spray from Novartis) selectively enhances memory encoding of faces in humans, but not of nonsocial stimuli. Here is their abstract:

Social recognition is the basis of all social interactions. Here, we show that, in humans, the evolutionarily highly conserved neuropeptide oxytocin, after intranasal administration, specifically improves recognition memory for faces, but not for nonsocial stimuli. With increased oxytocin levels, previously presented faces were more correctly assessed as "known," whereas the ability of recollecting faces was unchanged. This pattern speaks for an immediate and selective effect of the peptide strengthening neuronal systems of social memory.

Brain games for you, coming soon from Mattel

Justin Landwehr and PFSK point us to a concentration game coming from Mattel.

MRI of human social values?

I read something like this by Zahn et. al., and am fascinated at the same time I am wondering what the hell to make of it. (Here, by the way, is a disucssion of the debate raging over MRI studies of social cognition that has been started off by a paper titled "Voodoo correlations in social neuroscience".) My impression is that if you scan the MRI (magnetic resonance brain imaging) literature for all the functions that have been 'correlated with,' for example, the subgenual cingulate (in this case, guilt) or orbitofrontal-insular cortices (indignation, anger) you would find a hopelessly large list. Still, the prospect of stable neural architectures associated with different discrete social emotions is interesting. The authors suggest that social values emerge from coactivation of abstract conceptual representations within the anterior temporal lobe region (aTL, BA38/22), emotional states represented in mesolimbic and basal forebrain regions (hypothalamus, septum, VTA (ventral tegmental area), anterior insula) and emotion–action associations in OFC (orbitofrontal cortex) as well as sequential action outcomes in anterior medial PFC (prefrontal cortex) regions. They provide data...

...supporting a model in which social values draw upon stable representations of conceptual detail within the anterior temporal lobe region (aTL, BA38/22) and context-dependent representations of distinct moral sentiments within fronto-mesolimbic regions. They test a model of integration of the concepts and emotions that form social values in which social values change their emotional quality in a flexible way adapted to the context of agency. They suggest that a separation of stable context-independent representations in the aTL can be flexibly embedded within different contexts of action implementation and emotional qualities as encoded in fronto-limbic circuits to account for our ability to link social values to a wide range of interpersonal and cultural settings

The interdependency of context of actions and emotional evaluation has been a key component of the notion of values proposed by British philosophers during the 18th century. According to this stance, intuitive "moral sentiments" determine whether we perceive a behavior as constituting a virtue or vice and guide our approval or disapproval of that behavior...When we are the agent of an action conforming to our values, we may feel pride, whereas when another person is the agent, we may feel gratitude. On the negative side, when we act counter to our values, we may feel guilt and when another person acts in the same way toward us, we instead feel indignation or anger.

Here is the abstract of the paper:

Social values are composed of social concepts (e.g., "generosity") and context-dependent moral sentiments (e.g., "pride"). The neural basis of this intricate cognitive architecture has not been investigated thus far. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging while subjects imagined their own actions toward another person (self-agency) which either conformed or were counter to a social value and were associated with pride or guilt, respectively. Imagined actions of another person toward the subjects (other-agency) in accordance with or counter to a value were associated with gratitude or indignation/anger. As hypothesized, superior anterior temporal lobe (aTL) activity increased with conceptual detail in all conditions. During self-agency, activity in the anterior ventromedial prefrontal cortex correlated with pride and guilt, whereas activity in the subgenual cingulate solely correlated with guilt. In contrast, indignation/anger activated lateral orbitofrontal-insular cortices. Pride and gratitude additionally evoked mesolimbic and basal forebrain activations. Our results demonstrate that social values emerge from coactivation of stable abstract social conceptual representations in the superior aTL and context-dependent moral sentiments encoded in fronto-mesolimbic regions. This neural architecture may provide the basis of our ability to communicate about the meaning of social values across cultural contexts without limiting our flexibility to adapt their emotional interpretation.

Finger length predicts successful financial trading!

This analysis by Coates et al. is a real hoot. They find that the second-to-fourth digit ratio predicts success among high-frequency financial traders:

Prenatal androgens have important organizing effects on brain development and future behavior. The second-to-fourth digit length ratio (2D:4D) has been proposed as a marker of these prenatal androgen effects, a relatively longer fourth finger indicating higher prenatal androgen exposure. 2D:4D has been shown to predict success in highly competitive sports. Yet, little is known about the effects of prenatal androgens on an economically influential class of competitive risk taking—trading in the financial world. Here, we report the findings of a study conducted in the City of London in which we sampled 2D:4D from a group of male traders engaged in what is variously called “noise” or “high-frequency” trading. We found that 2D:4D predicted the traders' long-term profitability as well as the number of years they remained in the business. 2D:4D also predicted the sensitivity of their profitability to increases both in circulating testosterone and in market volatility. Our results suggest that prenatal androgens increase risk preferences and promote more rapid visuomotor scanning and physical reflexes. The success and longevity of traders exposed to high levels of prenatal androgens further suggests that financial markets may select for biological traits rather than rational expectations.

Insults and joys of old age...

Dwight Garner offers a review of a recent book, "Somewhere towards the end," by former prominent London book editor, 91 year old Diana Athill. ( I regret that I - like many of you, I suspect - read more book reviews than actual books.) Here are some clips that I thought interesting:

A positive aspect of the waning of sex, Ms. Athill says, “was that other things became more interesting.” ... I was surprised that this longtime fiction editor has declared that she has “gone off novels.”...Why? She no longer feels the need to parse the intricacies of human relationships and love affairs, “but I do still want to be fed facts, to be given material which extends the region in which my mind can wander.” ...The elderly, she writes, can find great enjoyment in the company of younger people. But she warns: “One should never, never expect them to want one’s company, or make the kind of claims on them that one makes on a friend of one’s own age. Enjoy whatever they are generous enough to offer, and leave it at that.”

The book ends with her realization:

“There are no lessons to be learnt, no discoveries to be made, no solutions to offer. I find myself left with nothing but a few random thoughts. One of them is that from up here I can look back and see that although a human life is less than the blink of an eyelid in terms of the universe, within its own framework it is amazingly capacious so that it can contain many opposites. One life can contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and warmth, grabbing and giving — and also more particular opposites such as a neurotic conviction that one is a flop and a consciousness of success amounting to smugness.”

The dead end of current economic models...

Here is a short and sweet statement of the futility of current models of economic recovery and growth, from a letter to the Nature editor from Hervé Philippe, a biochemist at the University of Montreal. It mirrors my own sentiment: that talk of 'restoring economic growth' in the absence of ruthless planning to achieve steady state sustainable energy fluxes on this planet is delusional.

...the prosperity [of Western societies] is mainly based on the use of non-renewable resources and therefore is probably spurious...Several hundred million years were needed to form the fossil energy that will be exhausted during a few hundred years. This is roughly equivalent to spending all one's annual income during the first 30 seconds of a year. In particular, the frenzy to automate processes in order to increase competitiveness leads to rapid exhaustion of available resources, for example through over-fishing or degradation of soils....All current growth-based economic models imply massive use of non-renewable resources and environmental degradation. These models are not sustainable, even in the short term....As early as 160 years ago, John Stuart Mill affirmed that "the richest and most prosperous countries would very soon attain the stationary state" (Principles of Political Economy Longmans, 1848). In contrast to that time, when resources were being used up at a rate that was several orders of magnitude slower than today, a phase of economic degrowth is necessary before a stationary state can be reached. It would be a major achievement of economics to achieve such a degrowth without social and political disasters.

A neurosciences site feed aggregator

I get an email a few weeks ago saying that Deric's MindBlog had been added to an "online magazine rack" called Alltop. If you are in the mood for even more sensory overload, you might check it out. (Later note: in the comment below, Justin points out that Alltop is a creation of entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki, a site

...that provides “all the top” stories for forty of the most popular topics on the Web. The headlines and first paragraph of the five most recent stories from forty to eighty sources for each topic are displayed. Alltop stories are refreshed approximately every ten minutes.

A good metaphor is that Alltop is an "online magazine rack" that displays the news from the top publications and blogs. Our goal is to satisfy the information needs of the 99% of Internet users who will never use an RSS feed reader or create a custom page. Think of it as "aggregation without the aggravation.”

Cartoon instructions for some neat sensory illusions.

This link is sent by a reader. Simple cartoon instructions from the Boston Globe for how you can cause changes in your visual images or body image, either by yourself or with a friend.