Our dread of idleness

Being a hyper-purposeful person myself, I've always been attracted to the opposite pole represented by The Idler,  both the original book and the subsequent magazine whose intention is "to return dignity to the art of loafing, to make idling into something to aspire towards rather than reject."  Thus I thought this piece by Hsee et al. worth passing on. They set up experiments in which people who voluntarily choose busyness report being happier than those who voluntarily choose idleness. Further, people who are forced into busyness report being happier than those who are forced into idleness. People choose to be idle if they do not have reason to be busy, but that even a specious justification can prompt them to seek busyness.  Here is their abstract:

There are many apparent reasons why people engage in activity, such as to earn money, to become famous, or to advance science. In this report, however, we suggest a potentially deeper reason: People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy. Accordingly, we show in two experiments that without a justification, people choose to be idle; that even a specious justification can motivate people to be busy; and that people who are busy are happier than people who are idle. Curiously, this last effect is true even if people are forced to be busy. Our research suggests that many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy.

Their (slightly edited) speculations are interesting to read:

We speculate that the concurrent desires for busyness and for justification are rooted in evolution. In their strife for survival, human ancestors had to conserve energy to compete for scarce resources; expending energy without purpose could have jeopardized survival. With modern means of production, however, most people today no longer expend much energy on basic survival needs, so they have excessive energy, which they like to release through action. Yet the long-formed tendency to conserve energy lingers, making people wary of expending effort without purpose.

Our research also complements recent research of Airely et al.  that suggests that people work in order to search for meaning (i.e., achievement and recognition), our study suggests that people search for meaning in order to work. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus’ punishment, imposed by Zeus, was to eternally roll a rock toward the top of a hill, never to arrive there. The research of Ariely et al. predicts that Sisyphus would have been happier if Zeus had allowed the rock to reach the top of the hill and had then recognized Sisyphus’ achievement. Our research suggests that Sisyphus was better off with his punishment than he would have been with a punishment of an eternity of doing nothing, and that he might have chosen rolling a rock over idleness if he had been given a slight reason for doing it.

Idleness is potentially malignant. If idle people remain idle, they are miserable. If idle people become busy, they will be happier, but the outcome may or may not be desirable, depending on the value of the chosen activity. Busyness can be either constructive or destructive. Ideally, idle people should devote their energy to constructive courses, but it is often difficult to predict which actions are constructive (e.g., are business investments or scientific discoveries always constructive?), and not every idle individual is capable of constructive contributions. Idle people often engage in destructive busyness (from inner-city crimes to cross-border wars); as Hippocrates observed in Decorum, “Idleness and lack of occupation tend―nay are dragged―towards evil.”

We advocate a third kind of busyness: futile busyness, namely, busyness serving no purpose other than to prevent idleness. Such activity is more realistic than constructive busyness and less evil than destructive busyness. However, as we demonstrated in the no-justification (same-candy or same-design) condition of our research, most people will not voluntarily choose futile busyness.

This is where paternalism can play a role. For example, homeowners may increase the happiness of their idle housekeepers by letting in some mice and prompting the housekeepers to clean up. Governments may increase the happiness of idle citizens by having them build bridges that are actually useless. Indeed, some such interventions already exist: Airports have tried to increase the happiness (or reduce the unhappiness) of passengers waiting at the baggage carousel by increasing the distance between the gate and the baggage claim area, forcing them to walk far rather than wait idly. Similar intentions may be applied at the societal level. Although these strategies may not be ethical, we believe that futile busyness trumps both idleness and destructive busyness.

Mindblog on the road

I'm in Ft. Lauderdale today through next Tuesday, attending the 85th birthday party/piano concert David Goldberger, the fellow I did a four-hands concert with last March. This may have an effect on the frequency of next week's posts.

Acetaminophen (tylenol) reduces physical and social pain.

DeWall et al. show that an anti-pain medication that acts on the brain's pain pathways, reduces both physical and social pain:

Pain, whether caused by physical injury or social rejection, is an inevitable part of life. These two types of pain—physical and social—may rely on some of the same behavioral and neural mechanisms that register pain-related affect. To the extent that these pain processes overlap, acetaminophen, a physical pain suppressant that acts through central (rather than peripheral) neural mechanisms, may also reduce behavioral and neural responses to social rejection. In two experiments, participants took acetaminophen or placebo daily for 3 weeks. Doses of acetaminophen reduced reports of social pain on a daily basis. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure participants’ brain activity, and found that acetaminophen reduced neural responses to social rejection in brain regions previously associated with distress caused by social pain and the affective component of physical pain (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula). Thus, acetaminophen reduces behavioral and neural responses associated with the pain of social rejection, demonstrating substantial overlap between social and physical pain.

A growing isolated brain can organize itself.

How much of the development of our brain's cortex depends on it being able to talk with other parts of the brain and body? Apparently, not as much as had been thought. Zhou et al. have used a mouse mutant in which the neocortex had been disconnected from the rest of the brain in order to analyze the development of the surface map (which might be compared to a geopolitical map supported by an infrastructure of shipping, communication, and regulatory networks). In normal mice, a few weeks of postnatal development complete the brain's organization; the mutant mice survive during this phase but die at about 3 weeks of age. During these weeks, the mutant mice, despite having disconnected brains, display a variety of behaviors: eating, drinking, walking, and swimming. Thus, "protomap" formation, namely cortical lamination and formation of areas, proceed normally in absence of extrinsic connections, but survival of projection neurons and acquisition of mature morphological and some electrophysiological features depend on the establishment of normal cortical–subcortical relationships.

Dopamine, Time, and Our Impulsivity

Yet another fascinating piece of work from the group around Ray Dolan at the London Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging. They show that enhancing dopamine activity can increase our propensity to choose smaller–sooner over larger–later rewards:

Disordered dopamine neurotransmission is implicated in mediating impulsiveness across a range of behaviors and disorders including addiction, compulsive gambling, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and dopamine dysregulation syndrome. Whereas existing theories of dopamine function highlight mechanisms based on aberrant reward learning or behavioral disinhibition, they do not offer an adequate account of the pathological hypersensitivity to temporal delay that forms a crucial behavioral phenotype seen in these disorders. Here we provide evidence that a role for dopamine in controlling the relationship between the timing of future rewards and their subjective value can bridge this explanatory gap. Using an intertemporal choice task, we demonstrate that pharmacologically enhancing dopamine activity increases impulsivity by enhancing the diminutive influence of increasing delay on reward value (temporal discounting) and its corresponding neural representation in the striatum. This leads to a state of excessive discounting of temporally distant, relative to sooner, rewards. Thus our findings reveal a novel mechanism by which dopamine influences human decision-making that can account for behavioral aberrations associated with a hyperfunctioning dopamine system.

Motivating only half our bodies.

Schmidt et al. do a simple experiment to show that motivation need not be a person-level concept, our left and right hemispheres can be separately motivated:

Motivation is generally understood to denote the strength of a person’s desire to attain a goal. Here we challenge this view of motivation as a person-level concept, in a study that targeted subliminal incentives to only one half of the human brain. Participants in the study squeezed a handgrip to win the greatest fraction possible of each subliminal incentive, which materialized as a coin image flashed in one visual hemifield. Motivation effects (i.e., more force exerted when the incentive was higher) were observed only for the hand controlled by the stimulated brain hemisphere. These results show that in the absence of conscious control, one brain hemisphere, and hence one side of the body, can be motivated independently of the other.

The mind is the body - tumor suppression by enriched environment

An amazing article by Cao et al. brings home the intimate attachment between mental well-being and health - in mice (and by implication, for us too).   An enriched environment promotes formation of a nerve growth factor which in turn inhibits tumor growth through a series of biochemical steps, shown in the summary graphic before the abstract. A commentary by Jonah Lehrer notes that we need "a new metaphor for the interactions of the brain and body. They aren't simply connected via some pipes and tubes. They are emulsified together, so hopelessly intertwined that everything that happens in one affects the other. Holism is the rule."

Cancer is influenced by its microenvironment, yet broader, environmental effects also play a role but remain poorly defined. We report here that mice living in an enriched housing environment show reduced tumor growth and increased remission. We found this effect in melanoma and colon cancer models, and that it was not caused by physical activity alone. Serum from animals held in an enriched environment (EE) inhibited cancer proliferation in vitro and was markedly lower in leptin. Hypothalamic brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) was selectively upregulated by EE, and its genetic overexpression reduced tumor burden, whereas BDNF knockdown blocked the effect of EE. Mechanistically, we show that hypothalamic BDNF downregulated leptin production in adipocytes via sympathoneural β-adrenergic signaling. These results suggest that genetic or environmental activation of this BDNF/leptin axis may have therapeutic significance for cancer.

How superstition improves performance

Interesting stuff from Damish et al. They demonstrate a causal effect of an activated good-luck-associated superstition on subsequent performance (using things like 'lucky charms'). Participants for whom a superstition was activated performed better in various motor and cognitive tasks compared with participants for whom no such concept was activated. Second, they showed that these performance-enhancing effects are mediated by an increase in perceived level of self-efficacy. Activating a good-luck superstition leads to improved performance by boosting people’s belief in their ability to master a task. Here is their abstract:

Superstitions are typically seen as inconsequential creations of irrational minds. Nevertheless, many people rely on superstitious thoughts and practices in their daily routines in order to gain good luck. To date, little is known about the consequences and potential benefits of such superstitions. The present research closes this gap by demonstrating performance benefits of superstitions and identifying their underlying psychological mechanisms. Specifically, four different experiments show that activating good-luck-related superstitions via a common saying or action (e.g., “break a leg,” keeping one’s fingers crossed) or a lucky charm improves subsequent performance in golfing, motor dexterity, memory, and anagram games. Furthermore, they demonstrate that these performance benefits are produced by changes in perceived self-efficacy. Activating a superstition boosts participants’ confidence in mastering upcoming tasks, which in turn improves performance. Finally, they show that increased task persistence constitutes one means by which self-efficacy, enhanced by superstition, improves performance.

Behavioral economics as a palliative cop-out

Loewenstein and Ubel make some very simple and compelling points in their article on the use of behavioral economics to guide public policy and nudge people's behavior in desired directions. They note that behavioral economics is being used as a political expedient, allowing policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics:

Take, for example, our nation’s obesity epidemic. The fashionable response, based on the belief that better information can lead to better behavior, is to influence consumers through things like calorie labeling — for instance, there’s a mandate in the health care reform act requiring restaurant chains to post the number of calories in their dishes...But studies of New York City’s attempt at calorie posting have found that it has had little impact on dieters’ choices...Obesity isn’t a result of a lack of information; instead, economists argue that rising levels of obesity can be traced to falling food prices, especially for unhealthy processed foods...To combat the epidemic effectively, then, we need to change the relative price of healthful and unhealthful food — for example, we need to stop subsidizing corn, thereby raising the price of high fructose corn syrup used in sodas, and we also need to consider taxes on unhealthful foods. But because we lack the political will to change the price of junk food, we focus on consumer behavior.

A “gallons-per-mile” bill recently passed by the New York State Senate is intended to help drivers think more clearly about the fuel consumption of the vehicles they purchase; research has shown that gallons-per-mile is a more effective means of getting drivers to appreciate the realities of fuel consumption than the traditional miles-per-gallon...But more and better information fails to get at the core of the problem: people drive large, energy-inefficient cars because gas is still relatively cheap. An increase in the gas tax that made the price of gas reflect its true costs would be a far more effective — though much more politically painful — way to reduce fuel consumption.

Thriving on selfishness

I enjoyed Marina Krakovsky's article in the April Scientific American on Omar Tonsi Eldakar's game theoretical take on why it pays for cheaters to punish other cheaters in maintaining the best balance between altruistic cooperators and defectors:

It’s the altruism paradox: If everyone in a group helps fellow members, everyone is better off—yet as more work selflessly for the common good, cheating becomes tempting, because individuals can enjoy more personal gain if they do not chip in. But as freeloaders exploit the do-gooders, everybody’s payoff from altruism shrinks.

All kinds of social creatures, from humans down to insects and germs, must cope with this problem; if they do not, cheaters take over and leech the group to death. So how does altruism flourish? Two answers have predominated over the years: kin selection, which explains altruism toward genetic relatives—and reciprocity—the tendency to help those who have helped us. Adding to these solutions, evolutionary biologist Omar Tonsi Eldakar came up with a clever new one: cheaters help to sustain altruism by punishing other cheaters, a strategy called selfish punishment.

“All the theories addressed how altruists keep the selfish guys out,” explains Eldakar, who described his model with his Ph.D. thesis adviser David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University in May 2008. Because selfishness undermines altruism, altruists certainly have an incentive to punish cheaters—a widespread behavior pattern known as altruistic punishment. But cheaters, Eldakar realized, also have reason to punish cheaters, only for motives of their own: a group with too many cheaters does not have enough altruists to exploit. As Eldakar puts it, “If you’re a single selfish individual in a group of altruists, the best thing you can do evolutionarily is to make sure nobody else becomes selfish—make sure you’re the only one.” That is why, he points out, some of the harshest critics of sports doping, for example, turn out to be guilty of steroid use themselves: cheating gives athletes an edge only if their competitors aren’t doing it, too.

Although it is hypocritical for cheaters to punish other cheaters, members of the group do not balk as long as they benefit. And when selfish punishment works well, benefit they do. In a colony of tree wasps (where workers care for the queen’s offspring instead of laying their own eggs), a special caste of wasps sting other worker wasps that try to lay eggs, even as the vigilante wasps get away with laying eggs themselves. In a strange but mutually beneficial bargain, punishing other cheaters earns punishers the right to cheat.

In the year since Eldakar and Wilson wrote up their analysis, their insights have remained largely under the radar. But the idea of a division of labor between cooperators and policing defectors appeals to Pete Richerson, who studies the evolution of cooperation at the University of California, Davis. “It’s nothing as complicated as a salary, but allowing the punishers to defect in effect does compensate them for their services in punishing other defectors who don’t punish,” he says. After all, policing often takes effort and personal risk, and not all altruists are willing to bear those costs.

Corrupt policing may evoke images of the mafia, and indeed Eldakar notes that when the mob monopolizes crime in a neighborhood, the community is essentially paying for protection from rival gangs—a deal that, done right, lowers crime and increases prosperity. But mob dynamics are not always so benign, as the history of organized crime reveals. “What starts out as a bunch of goons with guns willing to punish people [for breaching contracts] becomes a protection racket,” Richerson says. The next question, therefore, is, What keeps the selfish punishers themselves from overexploiting the group?

Wilson readily acknowledges this limitation of the selfish punishment model. Although selfish punishers allow cooperators to gain a foothold within a group, thus creating a mix of cheaters and cooperators, “there’s nothing telling us that that mix is an optimal mix,” he explains. The answer to that problem, he says, is competition not between individuals in a group but between groups. That is because whereas selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups are more likely to survive than selfish groups. So although selfish punishment aids altruism from within a group, the model also bolsters the idea of group selection, a concept that has seen cycles of popularity in evolutionary biology.

What is more, altruism sometimes evolves without selfish punishment. In a software simulation, Eldakar and Wilson have found that as the cost of punishing cheaters falls, so do the number of selfish punishers. “When punishment is cheap, lots of people punish,” Wilson explains. And among humans, there is no shortage of low-cost ways to keep others in line—from outright ostracism to good old-fashioned gossip.

Moral evaluations influence our mental state ascriptions.

Gilbert Chin, in the "Editor's Choice" section of Science, gives a nice summary of work by Uttich and Lombrozo in their Cognition article:

A robust phenomenon established empirically during the past decade is the tendency of observers to regard morally bad consequences (such as harm to the environment) that occur as a secondary effect of actions taken by an agent (such as a corporate CEO) in the course of achieving the primary effect—an increase in revenue—as having been committed intentionally. In contrast, morally good consequences in a similar scenario are judged as being incidental. A number of explanations for this asymmetry (also known as the Knobe effect) have been put forth; most prominent, perhaps, is the proposal that the moral valence of the side effect alters the observer's inference about the agent's mental state; that is, whether the CEO acted with intent. Uttich and Lombrozo bring to bear a series of vignettes in which the type of social norm (moral versus conventional), the kind of behavior (norm-conforming versus norm-violating), and the outcome valence (helpful versus harmful) were varied independently. Their results support a "rational scientist" framework, so that the observer's computation of the agent's state of mind weights actions that flout commonly accepted rules of behavior as being more informative and hence diagnostic of intentionality than conformist ones.

Here is the abstract from the article:

Theory of mind, the capacity to understand and ascribe mental states, has traditionally been conceptualized as analogous to a scientific theory. However, recent work in philosophy and psychology has documented a “side-effect effect” suggesting that moral evaluations influence mental state ascriptions, and in particular whether a behavior is described as having been performed ‘intentionally.’ This evidence challenges the idea that theory of mind is analogous to scientific psychology in serving the function of predicting and explaining, rather than evaluating, behavior. In three experiments, we demonstrate that moral evaluations do inform ascriptions of intentional action, but that this relationship arises because behavior that conforms to norms (moral or otherwise) is less informative about underlying mental states than is behavior that violates norms. This analysis preserves the traditional understanding of theory of mind as a tool for predicting and explaining behavior, but also suggests the importance of normative considerations in social cognition.

How exercise stimulates brain nerve cell growth

Human and animal brains produce new brain cells (neurogenesis), and exercise increases this process. Gretchen Reynolds reviews work of Cage and others suggesting a mechanism for how this works: exercise lowers the levels of a protein (BMP, or bone morphogenetic protein) that suppresses nerve cell division in the hippocampus. 

Factoids about aging, reaching 70

Studies suggest that aging brings a more settled and calm view of what one is, and what one is not, and a general increase in contentment. They also point to the sobering point that attentional and executive functions of one's brain apparently move (retreat) to more frontal brain structures, perhaps reflecting the increased effort and focus being required to hold things together, leaving behind fading richer and younger limbic and lower brain autopilots that once were more open to, and could juggle with, many novel contexts and feelings.

Just to keep current my list of the general litany of degenerative changes that can be observed on aging (present company excepted, of course), I thought I would point to this article from this past Sunday's NYTimes.   Kate Zernike writes about turning 70, a recent transition for Ringo Starr who gave himself a 70th birthday concert at Radio City Music Hall (it happens to me in two years).   I was most fascinated (and sobered) by what entering the +70 club gets you. I've rearranged part of their graphic to summarize some of the numbers:

A sinister bias in calling football (soccer) fouls

I came across this interesting bit from Kranjec et al. just after watching the football world cup game (Spain vs. the Netherlands) with my family and friends this past sunday.  The authors suggest that a perceptual bias associated with left to right reading might predispose referees to call fouls more frequently for right to left moving events than for right to left moving events.  Thus referees standing across from each other might call a play differently.

Distinguishing between a fair and unfair tackle in soccer can be difficult. For referees, choosing to call a foul often requires a decision despite some level of ambiguity. We were interested in whether a well documented perceptual-motor bias associated with reading direction influenced foul judgments. Prior studies have shown that readers of left-to-right languages tend to think of prototypical events as unfolding concordantly, from left-to-right in space. It follows that events moving from right-to-left should be perceived as atypical and relatively debased. In an experiment using a go/no-go task and photographs taken from real games, participants made more foul calls for pictures depicting left-moving events compared to pictures depicting right-moving events. These data suggest that two referees watching the same play from distinct vantage points may be differentially predisposed to call a foul.

The benefits of 'losing it'

Benedict Carey does an interesting article on the personal and social utility of letting out, expressing, strong spontaneous emotional reactions.   President Obama's failure to do this has led people to question his sincerity or commitment to fixing financial institutions or oil spills. This is line with Pinker's argument that emotions evolved as guarantors or our authenticity.  Such authenticity is the issue in Obama's failure to emote. A few clips:

...people develop a variety of psychological tools to manage what they express in social situations, and those techniques often become subconscious, affecting interactions in unintended ways. The better that people understand their own patterns, the more likely they are to see why some emotionally charged interactions go awry — whether from too little control or, in the president’s case, perhaps too much.

Psychologists divide regulation strategies into two broad categories: pre-emptive, occurring before an emotion is fully felt; and responsive, coming afterward... Suppression, while clearly valuable in some situations (no laughing at funerals, please), has social costs that are all too familiar to those who know its cold touch.

Pre-emptive techniques can work in more subtle ways. One of these is simple diversion, reflexively focusing on the good and ignoring the bad — rereading the praise in an evaluation and ignoring or dismissing any criticism. A 2009 study...found that people over 55 were much more likely than those aged 25 and under to focus on positive images when in a bad mood — thereby buoying their spirits. The younger group was more likely to focus on negative images when feeling angry or down... older people were twice as likely as younger ones to be “rapid regulators” — people whose mood bounced back quickly, sometimes within minutes, after ruminating on depressing memories...older people tend to regulate their emotions faster, and are not as motivated to explore negative information, to engage negative images, as younger people are...And it makes some sense that younger adults would explore the negative side of things, that they need to and maybe want to experience them to experience life as they develop their own strategies to regulate...the ability to shrug off feelings of disgust or outrage may suit an older group but strike younger people as inauthentic, even callous.

Music sightreading skill - practice doesn't make perfect

I have an ability to sightread extremely complicated and difficult music, a fact noted by my first piano teacher after my initial lesson when I was six years old. It seems obvious to me that I came wired that way, practice had very little to do with it. This attitude, which conflicts with the general view that expertise is due mainly to diligent and repetitive practice of a skill, is confirmed by recent observations of Meinz and Hambrick:

Deliberate practice—that is, engagement in activities specifically designed to improve performance in a domain—is strongly predictive of performance in domains such as music and sports. It has even been suggested that deliberate practice is sufficient to account for expert performance. Less clear is whether basic abilities, such as working memory capacity (WMC), add to the prediction of expert performance, above and beyond deliberate practice. In evaluating participants having a wide range of piano-playing skill (novice to expert), we found that deliberate practice accounted for nearly half of the total variance in piano sight-reading performance. However, there was an incremental positive effect of WMC, and there was no evidence that deliberate practice reduced this effect. Evidence indicates that WMC is highly general, stable, and heritable, and thus our results call into question the view that expert performance is solely a reflection of deliberate practice.

Goal pursuit outside our conscious awareness

Custer and Aarts expand on a favorite topic of mine (see the "I-Illusion" podcast in the left column): how our sense of authorship and agency is an illusion. They review research demonstrating that goals and the motivation to pursue them can arise unconsciously, and propose a mechanism for how this may happen. Here is a mix of their abstract, text clips, and a proposed mechanism:

People often act in order to realize desired outcomes, or goals. Although behavioral science recognizes that people can skillfully pursue goals without consciously attending to their behavior once these goals are set, conscious will is considered to be the starting point of goal pursuit. Indeed, when we decide to work hard on a task, it feels as if that conscious decision is the first and foremost cause of our behavior. That is, we are likely to say, if asked, that the decision to act produced the actions themselves. Recent discoveries, however, challenge this causal status of conscious will. They demonstrate that goals themselves can arise and operate unconsciously - actions are initiated even though we are unconscious of the goals to be attained or their motivating effect on our behavior. Social situations and stimuli in the surroundings activate or prime goals in our minds outside of our awareness, thereby motivating and guiding us.

Figure - The proposed mechanism for unconscious goal pursuit.

Experiments compatible with this model:

Neuroimaging research has discovered that reward cues are processed by limbic structures such as the nucleus accumbens and the ventral striatum. These subcortical areas play a central role in determining the rewarding value of outcomes and are connected to frontal areas in the cortex that facilitate goal pursuit. These reward centers in the brain respond to evolutionarily relevant rewards such as food and sexual stimuli, but also to learned rewards (such as money or status), or words (such as good or nice) that are associated with praise or rewards. This demonstrates that regardless of their shape or form, such positive stimuli induce a reward signal that is readily picked up by the brain.

Other recent research has demonstrated that subliminal primes that are specifically related to rewards can motivate people to increase the effort they invest in behaviors. In one study, participants could earn money by squeezing a handgrip. Before each squeeze, the money that could be earned was indicated by a 1-pound or 1-penny coin on the screen. Whereas on some trials the coin was clearly visible, on others it was presented subliminally. Thus, effects of conscious and unconscious reward cues could be compared within one experiment. It was found that people squeezed harder on high than on low reward trials, regardless of whether the reward was consciously visible or not. Moreover, this effect was accompanied by activation in the brain areas that play a role in reward processing and the recruitment of effort for action…These findings indicate that conscious and unconscious reward cues have similar effects on effort and flexible cognitive processing, which suggests that conscious awareness of rewards is not needed for goal pursuit to occur.

A smooth botox face inhibits emotion processing

Richie Davidson and collaborators at Wisconsin come up with this interesting gem, on the consequences of a face made more smooth and beautiful by Botulinum toxin injections:

How does language reliably evoke emotion, as it does when people read a favorite novel or listen to a skilled orator? Recent evidence suggests that comprehension involves a mental simulation of sentence content that calls on the same neural systems used in literal action, perception, and emotion. In this study, we demonstrated that involuntary facial expression plays a causal role in the processing of emotional language. Subcutaneous injections of botulinum toxin-A (BTX) were used to temporarily paralyze the facial muscle used in frowning. We found that BTX selectively slowed the reading of sentences that described situations that normally require the paralyzed muscle for expressing the emotions evoked by the sentences. This finding demonstrates that peripheral feedback plays a role in language processing, supports facial-feedback theories of emotional cognition, and raises questions about the effects of BTX on cognition and emotional reactivity. We account for the role of facial feedback in language processing by considering neurophysiological mechanisms and reinforcement-learning theory.

The reading module of our brains.

I’ve been meaning to mention an excellent article by Oliver Sachs in the June 28 issue of The New Yorker “A man of letters”. It describes a class of stroke patients who selectively loose the ability to read letters, frequently seeing them as some kind of foreign gibberish, yet can still write (“alexia sine agraphia”). In this article, unlike some of his others which have frustrated me by not getting down to the brain basics, he give an excellent summary of how it is that our brains come to have a specialized module for a skilled activity that was invented only ~5,000 years ago, less than an eye blink in evolutionary time. Here is my editing of chunks that give the bottom line:

There may be objects that are recognized at birth, such as faces, but beyond this the world of objects must be learned through experience and activity: looking, touching, handling, correlating the feel of objects with their appearance...Visual object recognition depends on the inferotemporal cortex..where neuronal function is very plastic...Mark Changizi and colleagues at Caltech, from examining more than a hundred ancient and modern writing systems, have shown that all of them, while geometrically very different, share certain basic topological similarities...which resemble topological invariants in a range of natural settings, leading them to hypothesize that the shapes of letters "have been selected to resemble the conglomeration of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms."

The origin of writing and reading cannot be understood as a direct evolutionary adaptation. It is dependent on the plasticity of the brain, and on the fact that, even within the small span of a human lifetime, experience - experiential selection - is as powerful an agent of change as natural selection... We are literate not by virtue of a divine intervention (which Alfred Russel Wallace proposed, contra Darwin) but through a cultural invention and a cultural selection that make a brilliant and creative new use of a preexisting neural proclivity.

Physical contact and financial risk taking

Interesting observations from Levav and Argo:

We show that minimal physical contact can increase people’s sense of security and consequently lead them to increased risk-taking behavior. In three experiments, with both hypothetical and real payoffs, a female experimenter’s light, comforting pat on the shoulder led participants to greater financial risk taking. Further, this effect was both mediated and moderated by feelings of security in both male and female participants. Finally, we established the boundary conditions for the impact of physical contact on risk-taking behaviors by demonstrating that the effect does not occur when the touching is performed by a male and is attenuated when the touch consists of a handshake. The results suggest that subtle physical contact can be strongly influential in decision making and the willingness to accept risk.

Mind reading - How to seem telepathic

Here I attempt to summarize  an article by Eyai and Epley (on enabling mind reading by matching construal levels) by patching together bits of abstract and body text.  The results make the point that accurately reading other minds to know how one is evaluated by others—or how others evaluate themselves—requires focusing one’s evaluative lens at the right level of detail:

People can have difficulty intuiting what others think about them at least partly because people evaluate themselves in more fine-grained detail than observers do. This mismatch in the level of detail at which people construe themselves versus others diminishes accuracy in social judgment. Being a more accurate mind reader requires thinking of oneself at a higher level of construal that matches the observer’s construal (Experiments 1 and 2)*, and this strategy is shown in a further experiment (experiment 4**) to be more effective in this context than perspective taking (putting oneself in other people's shoes).

*Experiment 1 involved predicting judgements of attractiveness. This experiment found subjects to be more accurate in intuiting how attractive they will be judged (by others viewing a recent photo of themselves) in the distant future than in the near future. Experiment 2 involved predicting overall impression of oneself that observers would gain from listening (in the near versus distant future) to a recording they made on various topics. Again, predictions were more accurate for the imagined distant future. Thus altering construal level (near versus distant future) can increase accuracy in two very common and important instances of mind reading in everyday life—intuiting how attractively one will be evaluated by others and intuiting others’ overall impressions of oneself.

Accurately intuiting how others evaluate themselves requires the opposite strategy—thinking about others in a lower level of construal that matches the way people evaluate themselves. **In Experiment 4, University of Chicago undergraduates (N = 62) participated in a procedure similar to that of Experiment 1, except that targets rated how attractive they found themselves, using a scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 9 (very), and observers received the construal manipulation. Observers were told that the pictures were taken earlier in the day (near condition) or a few months earlier (distant condition), and rated how attractive they thought the targets found themselves to be, using the same scale. Observers were more accurate in the near than in the distant condition.

How our brains resolve competing social signals

Zaki et al. suggest that that two systems that have been the subject of numerous MindBlog posts — the mirror neuron system (MNS) and mental state attribution system (MSAS)— are specialized for processing nonverbal and contextual social cues, respectively, and support the resolution of incongruent social cues (such as facial expression conflicting with verbal content of a message).

...we predicted that these control systems would help resolve conflict by "biasing" processing toward domain-specific neural systems involved in responding to social cues deemed to be task relevant, as reflected in perceivers' behavioral reliance on a given cue type when rating target affect. On the one hand, to the extent that perceivers behaviorally rely on nonverbal cues, biasing could increase activity in regions responsible for processing such cues, including premotor and parietal regions comprising the putative mirror neuron system (MNS). On the other hand, to the extent that perceivers deem contextual cues more relevant, processing could be biased toward systems implicated in drawing inferences about non-observable mental states such as beliefs, including the medial prefrontal, posterior cingulate, temporopolar, and temporoparietal regions comprising the mental state attribution system (MSAS). Because these systems are functionally dissociable and may in some cases inhibit each other, they are strong candidate targets for the effects of social cognitive conflict resolution.

From their abstract:

Cognitive control mechanisms allow individuals to behave adaptively in the face of complex and sometimes conflicting information. Although the neural bases of these control mechanisms have been examined in many contexts, almost no attention has been paid to their role in resolving conflicts between competing social cues, which is surprising given that cognitive conflicts are part of many social interactions. Evidence about the neural processing of social information suggests that two systems—the mirror neuron system (MNS) and mental state attribution system (MSAS)—are specialized for processing nonverbal and contextual social cues, respectively. This could support a model of social cognitive conflict resolution in which competition between social cues would recruit domain-general cognitive control mechanisms, which in turn would bias processing toward the MNS or MSAS. Such biasing could also alter social behaviors, such as inferences made about the internal states of others. We tested this model by scanning participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they drew inferences about the social targets' emotional states based on congruent or incongruent nonverbal and contextual social cues. Conflicts between social cues recruited the anterior cingulate and lateral prefrontal cortex, brain areas associated with domain-general control processes. This activation was accompanied by biasing of neural activity toward areas in the MNS or MSAS, which tracked, respectively, with perceivers' behavioral reliance on nonverbal or contextual cues when drawing inferences about targets' emotions. Together, these data provide evidence about both domain-general and domain-specific mechanisms involved in resolving social cognitive conflicts.

Figure: The presence of social cognitive response conflict (i.e., the comparison of incongruent vs congruent trials) recruited activity in several regions associated with domain-general conflict monitoring and control, including the anterior cingulate cortex, right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, right middle frontal gyrus, and posterior dorsomedial prefrontal cortex

The virtues of a wandering mind.

John Tierney's article on possible uses of mind wandering is worth reading. During our waking hours our minds seem to wander about 30% of the time.  One suggestion is that:

...There’s an evolutionary advantage to the brain’s system of mind wandering...While a person is occupied with one task, this system keeps the individual’s larger agenda fresher in mind...It thus serves as a kind of reminder mechanism, thereby increasing the likelihood that the other goal pursuits will remain intact and not get lost in the shuffle of pursuing many goals.
...Where exactly does the mind go during those moments? By observing people at rest during brain scans, a “default network” that is active when people’s minds are especially free to wander has been identified. When people do take up a task, the brain’s executive network lights up to issue commands, and the default network is often suppressed....But during some episodes of mind wandering, both networks are firing simultaneously...Why both networks are active is up for debate. One school theorizes that the executive network is working to control the stray thoughts and put the mind back on task...Another school of psychologists..theorizes that both networks are working on agendas beyond the immediate task. That theory could help explain why studies have found that people prone to mind wandering also score higher on tests of creativity.

Smilek et al., by the way, note that mind wandering can be assayed by observing blinking: during an extended period of reading, episodes of mind wandering, compared with on-task periods, contain more eye closures (blinks) and fewer fixations on the text ― even as subjects continue to scan the text.

Brain correlates of behavioral traits

A nice study from DeYoung et al. finds, among other things, that extraverts tend to have a larger-than-average orbitofrontal cortex, the region that sits behind the eyes and is especially active when the brain registers rewards. The 'new theory...'  described in their article is no big deal, it involves some reasonable arguments about what brain regions could reasonably be expected to be associated with fundamental behavioral traits such as extraversion, neuroticism, etc :

We used a new theory of the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits to generate hypotheses about the association of each trait with the volume of different brain regions. Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Extraversion covaried with volume of medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in processing reward information. Neuroticism covaried with volume of brain regions associated with threat, punishment, and negative affect. Agreeableness covaried with volume in regions that process information about the intentions and mental states of other individuals. Conscientiousness covaried with volume in lateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in planning and the voluntary control of behavior. These findings support our biologically based, explanatory model of the Big Five and demonstrate the potential of personality neuroscience (i.e., the systematic study of individual differences in personality using neuroscience methods) as a discipline.

Being calmed by a machine.

I was initially repelled by the prospect, noted in this article, of a future in which robotic animals are routinely used to sooth disoriented and distressed patients - but then thought “Hey, if there is not another human around to do the job, why object if an machine can provide neotenous (cute baby like) stimuli that dampen amygdala and sympathetic nervous system arousal.

Wealth diminishes our ability to savor the ordinary

Quoidbach et al. test

...what Gilbert has termed the experience-stretching hypothesis, that experiencing the best things in life — such as surfing Oahu’s famous North Shore or dining at Manhattan’s four-star restaurant Daniel — may actually mitigate the delight one experiences in response to the more mundane joys of life, such as sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars.

Their abstract:

This study provides the first evidence that money impairs people’s ability to savor everyday positive emotions and experiences. In a sample of working adults, wealthier individuals reported lower savoring ability (the ability to enhance and prolong positive emotional experience). Moreover, the negative impact of wealth on individuals’ ability to savor undermined the positive effects of money on their happiness. We experimentally exposed participants to a reminder of wealth and produced the same deleterious effect on their ability to savor as that produced by actual individual differences in wealth, a result supporting the theory that money has a causal effect on savoring. Moving beyond self-reports, we found that participants exposed to a reminder of wealth spent less time savoring a piece of chocolate and exhibited reduced enjoyment of it compared with participants not exposed to wealth. This article presents evidence supporting the widely held but previously untested belief that having access to the best things in life may actually undercut people’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures.

Brain imaging can predict behavior days in advance.

Falk et al. find a brain region that seems to make a more reliable report of people's intentions than their self-reported attitudes and intentions. (It does seems a bit spooky when a machine reports what we are going to do more accurately than we can.)  The medial prefrontal regions which were predictive of behavior are ones I've mentioned in a previous post that predict spontaneous motor behavior several seconds before reportable motor intentions form.  The authors measured neural activity while people were exposed to persuasive messages regarding the value of regular sunscreen use, and then used those values to predict future behavior change in the same individuals (i.e., increased sunscreen use. Successful persuasion-induced behavior change had been observed in this domain in several previous studies.)  The relevant medial prefrontal regions:

..are reliably coactivated across a host of "self" processes.....[and]  have been previously observed in multiple studies of persuasion and attitude change.. .indicating that these regions may be involved in the formation of behavioral intentions that are not accessible to conscious self-report.

Here is a figure and their abstract:

Regions associated with behavior change in a whole brain analysis. These regions have been observed as predictors of spontaneous motor behavior, before and independent of consciously reportable behavioral intentions.

Although persuasive messages often alter people's self-reported attitudes and intentions to perform behaviors, these self-reports do not necessarily predict behavior change. We demonstrate that neural responses to persuasive messages can predict variability in behavior change in the subsequent week. Specifically...a ..region of interest..in medial prefrontal cortex .. was reliably associated with behavior change...activity in this region predicted an average 23% of the variance in behavior change beyond the variance predicted by self-reported attitudes and intentions. Thus, neural signals can predict behavioral changes that are not predicted from self-reported attitudes and intentions alone. Additionally, this is the first functional magnetic resonance imaging study to demonstrate that a neural signal can predict complex real world behavior days in advance.

What we touch influences social judgements.

Here is another example of "embodied cognition"- how our physical environment can influence our thinking. In a previous post I mentioned studies showing that simply holding a warm cup of coffee prompts us to view others as emotionally warmer. And, in another post, I pointed to a study that found that holding a heavy clipboard makes us perceive social-justice issues as more important. Now Ackerman et al. ..(reviewed in ScienceNow).. expand on these studies to note that simply running your hand over sandpaper may make you view social interactions as more hostile and competitive.

Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal conceptual and metaphorical knowledge, as well as a springboard for the application of this knowledge. In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Among other effects, heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, rough objects made social interactions appear more difficult, and hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations. Basic tactile sensations are thus shown to influence higher social cognitive processing in dimension-specific and metaphor-specific ways.

More on enhanced brain processes in musicians.

From Pallesen et al.:

Musical competence may confer cognitive advantages that extend beyond processing of familiar musical sounds. Behavioural evidence indicates a general enhancement of both working memory and attention in musicians. It is possible that musicians, due to their training, are better able to maintain focus on task-relevant stimuli, a skill which is crucial to working memory. We measured the blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) activation signal in musicians and non-musicians during working memory of musical sounds to determine the relation among performance, musical competence and generally enhanced cognition. All participants easily distinguished the stimuli. We tested the hypothesis that musicians nonetheless would perform better, and that differential brain activity would mainly be present in cortical areas involved in cognitive control such as the lateral prefrontal cortex. The musicians performed better as reflected in reaction times and error rates. Musicians also had larger BOLD responses than non-musicians in neuronal networks that sustain attention and cognitive control, including regions of the lateral prefrontal cortex, lateral parietal cortex, insula, and putamen in the right hemisphere, and bilaterally in the posterior dorsal prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate gyrus. The relationship between the task performance and the magnitude of the BOLD response was more positive in musicians than in non-musicians, particularly during the most difficult working memory task. The results confirm previous findings that neural activity increases during enhanced working memory performance. The results also suggest that superior working memory task performance in musicians rely on an enhanced ability to exert sustained cognitive control. This cognitive benefit in musicians may be a consequence of focused musical training.

How we learn skilled motor sequences

Because I am a pianist, I found the following bit from Steele and Penhune to be interesting and relevant. They found that:

Performance was separated into two components: accuracy (the more explicit, rapidly learned, stimulus–response association component) and synchronization (the more procedural, slowly learned component).

Here is their whole abstract:

Our capacity to learn movement sequences is fundamental to our ability to interact with the environment. Although different brain networks have been linked with different stages of learning, there is little evidence for how these networks change across learning. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the specific contributions of the cerebellum and primary motor cortex (M1) during early learning, consolidation, and retention of a motor sequence task. Performance was separated into two components: accuracy (the more explicit, rapidly learned, stimulus–response association component) and synchronization (the more procedural, slowly learned component). The network of brain regions active during early learning was dominated by the cerebellum, premotor cortex, basal ganglia, presupplementary motor area, and supplementary motor area as predicted by existing models. Across days of learning, as performance improved, global decreases were found in the majority of these regions. Importantly, within the context of these global decreases, we found specific regions of the left M1 and right cerebellar VIIIA/VIIB that were positively correlated with improvements in synchronization performance. Improvements in accuracy were correlated with increases in hippocampus, BA 9/10, and the putamen. Thus, the two behavioral measures, accuracy and synchrony, were found to be related to two different sets of brain regions—suggesting that these networks optimize different components of learning. In addition, M1 activity early on day 1 was shown to be predictive of the degree of consolidation on day 2. Finally, functional connectivity between M1 and cerebellum in late learning points to their interaction as a mechanism underlying the long-term representation and expression of a well learned skill.

More on testosterone and human trust.

Johnson and Breedlove offer a commentary on work by Bos et al. mentioned in my June 11 post. They note that:

Women who were already skeptical in their judgment of trustworthy faces did not change their judgment under the influence of testosterone (T). Rather, it was the 12 women who gave the highest ratings of trust under placebo who became significantly more skeptical after T treatment...Because endogenously produced T levels normally vary across time, these findings ... raise the question of whether fluctuating androgen secretion may normally modulate a person’s judgment of whether to trust people. There are circadian rhythms in T secretion, in both men and women, so is there also a circadian rhythm in how they judge trustworthiness in faces? There is also variation in circulating T in women across the menstrual cycle, with a modest peak in circulating T just a few days before ovulation, the very period during which copulation is most likely to result in pregnancy. What’s more, androgens such as T have been reported to boost women’s libido in several studies, including one study using the same sublingual dose of T, which increased sexual arousal. If androgens normally boost female libido, a peak in T before ovulation makes sense to evolutionary psychologists who might expect women to be most interested in sex when they are most fertile. What the present findings suggest is that women might also reach their peak in skepticism about the trustworthiness of other people, presumably including potential mates, at about this same point in the ovulatory cycle. Heightened skepticism about a potential mate’s trustworthiness also makes evolutionary sense in scenarios where a father’s ongoing support is crucial for survival of the infant.

The review also speculates on where T may be acting in the brain:

...the amygdala has been implicated in many studies of social judgment, including making judgments about other people’s faces, and it is also a hotspot for neurons expressing the androgen receptors that T acts upon to regulate gene expression (14, 15). Thus, it is possible that T may alter social judgments by acting directly on the amygdala, perhaps, the authors suggest, by regulating the strength of signaling between the amygdala and other brain regions implicated in social evaluation, such as the orbitofrontal cortex.

Figure - Potential model for hormonal effects on interpersonal trust. The amygdala (center) is active during fearful responses or detecting threat in faces, and many neurons there possess androgen receptors, enabling them to respond to T. Bos et al. (4) suggest that T may reduce interpersonal trust by acting on vasopressinergic neurons in the amygdala to increase communication to brainstem systems that activate fearful responses, while reducing communication to orbitofrontal cortex. Oxytocin boosts interpersonal trust, perhaps by exerting opposing effects on these same systems.

Prefrontal Reward Prediction Errors in Alcohol Dependence

Park et al. (in a collaboration involving, once again,  Ray Dolan at University College) find abnormal functional connectivity between striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in alcohol-dependent patients.

Patients suffering from addiction persist in consuming substances of abuse, despite negative consequences or absence of positive consequences. One potential explanation is that these patients are impaired at flexibly adapting their behavior to changes in reward contingencies. A key aspect of adaptive decision-making involves updating the value of behavioral options. This is thought to be mediated via a teaching signal expressed as a reward prediction error (PE) in the striatum. However, to exert control over adaptive behavior, value signals need to be broadcast to higher executive regions, such as prefrontal cortex. Here we used functional MRI and a reinforcement learning task to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying maladaptive behavior in human male alcohol-dependent patients. We show that in alcohol-dependent patients the expression of striatal PEs is intact. However, abnormal functional connectivity between striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) predicted impairments in learning and the magnitude of alcohol craving. These results are in line with reports of dlPFC structural abnormalities in substance dependence and highlight the importance of frontostriatal connectivity in addiction, and its pivotal role in adaptive updating of action values and behavioral regulation. Furthermore, they extend the scope of neurobiological deficits underlying addiction beyond the focus on the striatum.

Dysregulation Nation

Judith Warner does an nice piece in the NYTimes Magazine, in which she notes that problems of self-regulation — of appetite, emotion, impulse and cupidity — may well be the defining social pathology of our time. The ideas of Peter C. Whybrow at UCLA are referenced:

...Under normal circumstances, the emotional, reward-seeking, selfish, “myopic” part of our brain is checked and balanced in its desirous cravings by our powers of cognition — our awareness of the consequences, say, of eating too much or spending too much. But after decades of never-before-seen levels of affluence and endless messages promoting instant gratification...this self-regulatory system has been knocked out of whack. The “orgy of self-indulgence” that spread in our land of no-money-down mortgages, Whybrow wrote in his 2005 book, “American Mania: When More Is Not Enough, ”has disturbed the “ancient mechanisms that sustain our physical and mental balance.”...If you put a person in an environment that worships wealth and favors conspicuous consumption, add gross income inequalities that breed envy and competition, mix in stagnant wages, a high cost of living and too-easy credit, you get overspending, high personal debt and a “treadmill-like existence,” as Whybrow calls it: compulsive getting and spending.

The “yawning void, an insatiable hunger, an emptiness waiting to be filled,” that Lasch identified as animating the typical narcissist of the 1970s has grown only deeper with the passage of time. The Great Recession was supposed to portend a scaling back, a recalibration of our lifestyle, and usher in a new era of making more of less. But the pressures that drive the dysregulated American haven’t abated any since the fall of 2008. Wall Street is resurgent, and unemployment is still high. For too many people, the cycle of craving and debt that drives our treadmill existence simply can’t be broken.

The classical art of memory

Andrea Becchetti notes a correspondence between modern understanding of memory formation in the hippocampus and techniques in the "Art of Memory" developed by Greek and Roman culture:

Formation and consolidation of declarative memories depend on the physiology of the hippocampal formation. Moreover, this brain structure determines the dynamic representation of the spatial environment, thus also contributing to spatial navigation through specialized cells such as “place” and “grid” cells (1). The most interesting recent results by Jacobs et al. (2) further this research field by showing that the entorhinal cortex contains path cells that represent direction of movement (clockwise or counterclockwise). The authors underscore that neurons in the entorhinal cortex encode multiple features of the environmental and behavioral context that can then be memorized by means of operations carried out by the hippocampus. They conclude by suggesting that a fuller characterization of these neurons’ properties and relation to the hippocampal circuit will be necessary to understand the neural basis of cognition. I fully agree with their conclusion and wish to comment on a further aspect of this complex issue, by considering psychological evidence that traces back to the ancient world and is generally neglected by modern neuroscience.

Greek and Roman culture has handed down to us the so-called “art of memory,” a set of methods aimed at improving one’s memory, described in detail by Cicero, Quintilianus, and others. The history of these concepts and their multifarious cultural meaning was masterfully treated by Rossi (3) and Yates (4). In brief, committing to memory long written pieces, word lists, series of numbers, etc. is greatly facilitated by proceeding as follows. First, one chooses a series of objects or places located in a (preferably familiar) spatial environment, such as the architecture details of a building or the landmarks of a certain route. Subsequently, these objects or places are mentally associated to the items to be remembered. The map of environmental images, which is easy to recall, thus provides a direct hint to the more abstract items. Moreover, proceeding along such a mental path directly provides the proper order of the sequence to be memorized (say a poem or speech). For example, Cicero used to associate the main points of his long speeches to specific buildings or other topographical reference points along the familiar route to the Roman Forum.

This method still constitutes the basis of modern mnemonics, which must be deeply rooted in neurology because it seems to be applied unawares even by mnemonists who have never heard of its existence. A famous example is the one described by Luria (5), who was himself unaware of the art of memory. Such venerable psychological evidence makes the neurophysiological association between orientation in space and declarative memory in the hippocampal formation even more suggestive. It supports the notion that the consolidation of human memory is guided by a partially preconfigured system related to external space representation, which may be the evolutionary basis of memory processing of more abstract entities in complex brains. These considerations may also have heuristic value in suggesting how the enthorinal cortex, the hippocampus, and the neocortex interplay during memory consolidation of complex abstract issues.

1. Moser EI Kropff E, Moser MB
(2008) Place cells, grid cells, and the brain’s spatial representation system. Annu Rev Neurosci 31:69–89.
2. Jacobs J, Kahana MJ, Ekstrom AD, Mollison MV, Fried I (2010) A sense of direction in human entorhinal cortex. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107:6487–6492.
3. Rossi P (2006) Logic and the Art of Memory (Continuum International, London).
4. Yates F (1992) The Art of Memory (Pimlico, London).
5. Luria AR (1986) The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory (Harvard Univ Press, Cambridge, MA).

Binge drinking and the adolescent brain.

Deficits in hippocampus-associated cognitive tasks are observed in alcoholic humans. Taffe et al. show that binge drinking in adolescent macaque monkeys causes long lasting decreases in hippocampus cell division, turnover, and migration. Their results:

...demonstrate that the hippocampal neurogenic niche during adolescence is highly vulnerable to alcohol and that alcohol decreases neuronal turnover in adolescent nonhuman primate hippocampus by altering the ongoing process of neuronal development. This lasting effect, observed 2 mo after alcohol discontinuation, may underlie the deficits in hippocampus-associated cognitive tasks that are observed in alcoholics.

Being hungry or full influences our risk taking.

Dolan's group does some neat experiments showing that having a full stomach makes us more risk aversive in monetary decisions. We act just like other animals, who often express a preference for risky (more variable) food sources when below a metabolic reference point (hungry), and safe (less variable) food sources when sated. We follow an ecological model of feeding behavior, not the behavior predicted by normative economic theory. Thus hormone levels that reflect our metabolic state (ghrelins signalling acute nutrient intake and leptins providing an assay of energy reserves) can, like oxytocin and testosterone, influence our economic choices.

MRI can decode subjective, but not objective, memories

In experiments that cast further doubt on claims of lie detection by fMRI measurements, Rissman et al. find that subjective memory states can be decoded accurately under controlled experimental conditions, but that fMRI has uncertain utility for objectively detecting an individual's past experiences. Here is a nice summary of their work from Gilbert Chin:

As a consequence of recent investigations that have used sophisticated methods of analyzing brain activity to propose that objective lie detection may be feasible, it has become apparent that designing a task in which subjects lie whole-heartedly and voluntarily (as opposed to being instructed to do so every fifth answer, for instance) is a nontrivial undertaking. Rissman et al. have approached this challenge by adapting a well-established laboratory paradigm—that of face recognition—to conditions that approximate those of quotidian experience. They asked subjects to study 200 faces and then interrogated them 1 hour later, using a mix of new and old test faces. The menu of responses offered a choice of (i) definitely remembered; (ii–iii) high and low confidence that the face was familiar; and (iv–v) high and low confidence that the face was new.

An analysis of brain activity during the response phase revealed distinctive patterns when old (that is, previously studied) faces were rated by the subject as definitely remembered versus strongly familiar, and also when they were rated as being strongly versus weakly familiar. In contrast, for faces rated as being weakly unfamiliar, it was not possible to tell from the neural activity patterns which were actually new and which had been seen during the study phase, and for weakly familiar faces, the new/old distinction was achievable only some of the time. Furthermore, if subjects were instead told to rate attractiveness during the study phase and then asked to categorize faces by gender during the response phase, it was not possible to diagnose which faces were new and which were not. Taken together, these findings suggest that brain activity reflects subjective, rather than objective, face recognition.

How we read the minds of others.

Tamir et al. do some interesting MRI studies that suggest that understanding the mental states of others starts with self perception as an anchor from which serial adjustments of the perceptions of others are made:

Recent studies have suggested that the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) contributes both to understanding the mental states of others and to introspecting about one's own mind. This finding has suggested that perceivers might use their own thoughts and feelings as a starting point for making inferences about others, consistent with “simulation” or “self-projection” views of social cognition. However, perceivers cannot simply assume that others think and feel exactly as they do; social cognition also must include processes that adjust for perceived differences between self and other. Recent cognitive work has suggested that such correction occurs through a process of “anchoring-and-adjustment” by which perceivers serially tune their inferences from an initial starting point based on their own introspections. Here, we used functional MRI to test two predictions derived from this anchoring-and-adjustment view. Participants (n = 64) used a Likert scale to judge the preferences of another person and to indicate their own preferences on the same items, allowing us to calculate the discrepancy between the participant's answers for self and other. Whole-brain parametric analyses identified a region in the MPFC in which activity was related linearly to this self–other discrepancy when inferring the mental states of others. These findings suggest both that the self serves as an important starting point from which to understand others and that perceivers customize such inferences by serially adjusting away from this anchor.

Figure - The relation between BOLD response and self–other discrepancy during Other trials was calculated separately for subregions of the MPFC. Although the response of dorsal MPFC (A) increased linearly with increasing self–other discrepancy, the response of ventral MPFC (B) distinguished only between trials on which self–other discrepancy was zero (overlap between self and other) versus greater than zero (discrepancy between self and other). Error bars indicate the SEM.

A bit more on the actual experimental design:

Although the specific design of the four experiments differed slightly, each required participants to answer a series of questions about their opinions and preferences and to judge how other individuals would answer the same questions. On each trial, participants saw a cue that indicated the target of the judgment (self or another person) and a brief phrase (e.g., “enjoy winter sports such as skiing or snowboarding”; “fear speaking in public”). Participants used either a four- or five-point scale either to report how well the statement described themselves or to judge how well it described the other person. Within each experiment, participants considered the same set of statements for self and other.

Before scanning, participants were told that the purpose of the experiment was to examine how people make inferences about target individuals on the basis of minimal or no information. In all studies, targets were college-aged individuals depicted by a photograph downloaded from an internet dating website, although the specific identity of individuals varied across studies.

"The Singularity" - and Singularity University

I've been meaning to point to this interesting New York Times article, on techno-utopian Singularity University (whose sponsors include Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page), which aims to enhance and prepare us for the arrival of "The Singularity" — "a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state." The article focuses on Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman:

...(who, in August)..will begin a cross-country multimedia road show to promote “Transcendent Man,” a documentary about his life and beliefs. Another of his projects, “The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,” has also started to make its way around the film festival circuit....some Singularitarians aren’t all that fond of Mr. Kurzweil...“I think he’s a genius and has certainly brought a lot of these ideas into the public discourse,” says James J. Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a nonprofit that studies the implications of advancing technology. “But there are plenty of people that say he has hijacked the Singularity term.”

Some of the Singularity’s adherents portray a future where humans break off into two species: the Haves, who have superior intelligence and can live for hundreds of years, and the Have-Nots, who are hampered by their antiquated, corporeal forms and beliefs....“The Singularity is not the great vision for society that Lenin had or Milton Friedman might have,” says Andrew Orlowski, a British journalist who has written extensively on techno-utopianism. “It is rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.”

Despite all of the zeal behind the movement, there are those who look askance at its promises and prospects...Jonathan Huebner, for example, is often held up as Mr. Kurzweil’s foil. A physicist who works at the Naval Air Warfare Center as a weapons designer, he, like Mr. Kurzweil, has compiled his own cathedral of graphs and lists of important inventions. He is unimpressed with the state of progress and, in 2005, published in a scientific journal a paper called “A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation.”..Measuring the number of innovations divided by the size of the worldwide population, Dr. Huebner contends that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873. Or, based on the number of patents in the United States weighed against the population, he found a peak around 1916. (Both Dr. Huebner and Mr. Kurzweil are occasionally teased about their faith in graphs.)

Presidential Harrisment

A clip from an article by Steve Mirsky in the June issue of Scientific American:

In early March, Harris Interactive conducted an on-line survey to gauge the attitudes of Americans toward President Barack Obama. The Harris Poll generated some fascinating data. For example, 40 percent of those polled believe Obama is a socialist. (He’s not—ask any socialist.) Thirty-two percent believe he is a Muslim. (I had predicted that a Mormon, Jew, Wiccan, atheist and Quetzalcoatl worshipper would become president before America elected a Muslim, so a third of this country actually may be quite open-minded, in an obtuse way.) Also, 14 percent believe that Obama may be the Antichrist. Of those who identified themselves as Republicans, 24 percent think Obama might be.

Concert pianists as genius models?

Not likely in my case.... but I will mention an article by Charles Ambrose in the July-August issue of American Scientist, pointed out to me by a friend who is a loyal MindBlog reader. I started this blog post at the same time I plunged into read the article, assuming I would be passing on some juicy clips, but alas have to report coming up short of much substance - although the article is worth a link because of its review of brain plasticity, and notes specific brain changes associated with development of various skilled activities. Ambrose mentions the increased areas in the parietal lobe found in Albert Einstein's brain, and then goes on to note other examples of increases in brain areas associated with expertise, as for example in professional musicians who have enlarged areas in their auditory cortex. The article doesn't even begin to engage the teaser sentence at its beginning: "What accounts for highly intelligent and greatly gifted individuals?" and is disjointed and wandering enough that I'm surprised that editors at American Scientist let it through their filters.

Antipsychotic drug shrinks the brain

It turns out that haloperidol, a commonly-prescribed antipsychotic drug, shrinks the brain within hours of administration, specifically diminishing grey-matter volume in the striatum — a region that mediates movement. The effect is reversible. The Meyer-Lindberg group doing the study suggests that by acting on Dopamine D2 receptors it may downsize synaptic connections, and thus cause the lapses in motor control that affect many patients on antipsychotics.

Sense of Wonder

As we age our brains become so stuffed with our history that we loose the capacity to open to novel experiences, to sense things with the naive freshness of a child. I pass on this brief fable by Richard A. Lovett in the June 3 Issue of Nature about a miraculous cure for this condition:

Clay Nadir wanted a book for the beach. Not just any book, but the type that makes you forget the beach, other than as the place where you discovered Jack London or Sherlock Holmes or Norman Mailer. But even on the shelves of his city's largest bookstore, he wasn't finding anything. It was as though everything new had long ago been stuffed into his brain.

Maybe he was jaded. Maybe, once you'd worked your way through Agatha Christie, no manor house would ever again hold your attention. And was The Time Machine really that good, or had it simply been a first, both for Clay and the world?

Nature writing, westerns, mountaineering, ghost stories, dysfunctional families ... literarily, Clay had been there, done that. In the past hour he'd wandered though fantasy, mystery, biography and what a friend called 'Qual. Lit.' — a conceited term if ever there was one. Quality literature, ha! As though any genre had a monopoly. Not to mention that once you'd read Nabokov and Woolf and Joyce, you could get as jaded with that stuff as anything else. Even Shakespeare you could eventually memorize.

Maybe he should try romance. He'd never dabbled in it before, so at least it would be different.

Then, in the occult section, something caught his eye. It was an odd book: black, with a red, spiral vortex on the cover. It made him think of Hitchcock's Vertigo. Now that was a movie: Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in a deceptively simple story you had to see several times to fully grasp. But once you did, so many other movies seemed so ... trivial.

The book also made him think of something from his youth. Something to do with an old TV show. What was it called? Oh yes, The Time Tunnel. Each week, they'd spun this thing like a giant pinwheel and run off to some distant era. Probably unbelievably stupid if he watched it today, but at the time it hit him like his first viewing of Doctor Who, another show involving a time vortex, plus a lot of other things he'd never seen before.

There was no author listed, and as he picked up the book, he seemed to be falling into the vortex. On the back was a simple endorsement: 'Guaranteed to restore your sense of wonder'.

Yeah, right. He'd heard that one before.

He opened it but there was no preface, no introduction, no writing at all. Just more spirals, one to a page, these in black-and-white.

He nearly set it back down, but the sense of being sucked in was too strong. It was as though the entire room were spinning: just what Jimmy Stewart's character must have felt as he looked into the depths ... Dizzying enough that Clay no longer wanted to think about Stewart or Hitchcock or old TV shows.

There was a white circle in the centre of the first spiral. Peering into it he saw flickers of motion: barely remembered images of Jimmy Stewart, Kim Novak and maybe The Time Tunnel.

With an effort, he turned the page. Another spiral, again sucking him in. This time, he saw words.

Call me Ishmael.

It was the best of times ...

In the beginning God created the heavens and earth.

Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith.

To be, or not to be ...

Rather than simply reading them, he felt as though the words were being pulled from him, faster and faster. He turned another page and another and another. It wasn't just words and videos. There were also stills: a stern-looking couple with a pitchfork; a woman with an odd half-smile. Guitar riffs, symphonies, something about Lucy in the sky with a yellow submarine. Names for these would tickle his memory then be gone, often faster than he could grasp what they had been. Something about whistling and moaning. Something about singing insects.

Then, it was over. Clay had no idea how long he'd been staring at the book. All he knew was that he'd flipped through most of the pages, but not all. He looked at the next few, but they were simply spirals. Still dizzying, but not like before. He flipped back, but there were no longer any words or images. Just paper.

There was no price tag on the book. Clay wondered briefly why it had been so captivating. Maybe he'd merely let his blood sugar dip too low. Maybe the spirals caught him off guard.

He put the book back where he'd found it, on a countertop beside a computer terminal where customers could check the store's inventory. It was as though a prior reader, if that was the proper term for the peruser of such a book, had placed it there, easy to find.

Clay still needed something for the beach.

He wandered the store, more or less at random, until he fetched up in the mystery section. Mysteries were fun, he thought, although he didn't know why. There were a lot of books and he couldn't remember which ones he'd read, so he picked the first that caught his eye.

'It was a dark and stormy night,' he read. Wow, he breathed, and was instantly hooked.

The Devil's grimmace.

An interesting fragment by Gisela Telis in ScienceNow:

When 15th-century Europeans first landed on the Bahamas, Cuba, and Hispaniola, they met with the "devil's grimace." That's what these foreigners dubbed the faces with bared teeth that adorned everything from necklaces to ceremonial bowls created by the native Taíno people. European chroniclers interpreted the motif as a ferocious animal's snarl or a skull's grimace, signs of the heathen islanders' aggression. But they were wrong, researchers report in the latest issue of Current Anthropology. By studying teeth-baring in humans, chimps, and rhesus macaques and comparing these to the Taíno depictions, scientists determined that open-lipped, closed-jaw displays show submission, benign intent, and even happiness—but not aggression. So the "fiendish" faces that so troubled Europeans were most likely just smiling, to signal—ironically enough—social cohesion and connection.

Oxytocin: out-group aggression, social cues, and amygdalar action

Three recent papers are a reflection of the recent outpouring of work on oxytocin (a peptide hormone containing the 9 amino acids shown in the figure), which (from Miller's review):

...promotes social bonding in a wide range of animals, including humans. Sold on the Internet in a formulation called "Liquid Trust," the peptide hormone is marketed as a romance enhancer and sure ticket to business success. Australian therapists are trying it alongside counseling for couples with ailing marriages. And police and military forces reportedly are interested in its potential to elicit cooperation from crime suspects or enemy agents.

The hormone is now being found to have a prickly side, and is coming to be regarded as much more than just a touchy-feely "trust hormone." De Dreu et al. have designed experiments to demonstrate that oxytocin drives a "tend and defend" response in that it promotes in-group trust and cooperation, and defensive, but not offensive, aggression toward competing out-groups.

In another study on oxytocin, Gamer et al. add to studies that have shown that oxytocin decreases aversive reactions to negative social stimuli, and find that subjects given oxytocin, relative to subjects given placebo, are more likely to make eye movements toward the eye region when viewing images of human faces. They find that subregions of the amygdala are important in mediating this effect. Oxytocin:

...attenuated activation in lateral and dorsal regions of the anterior amygdala for fearful faces but enhanced activity for happy expressions, thus indicating a shift of the processing focus toward positive social stimuli. On the other hand, oxytocin increased the likelihood of reflexive gaze shifts toward the eye region irrespective of the depicted emotional expression. This gazing pattern was related to an increase of activity in the posterior amygdala and an enhanced functional coupling of this region to the superior colliculi. Thus, different behavioral effects of oxytocin seem to be closely related its specific modulatory influence on subregions within the human amygdala.

These finding have implications for understanding the role of oxytocin in normal social behavior as well as the possible therapeutic impact of oxytocin in brain disorders characterized by social dysfunction.

The Wayward Mind

Continuing my review of old posts that have popped into my head over the past few days during mulling over this and that, I am reproducing my March 6, 2006 post in its entirety: 

I want to mention the excellent book by Guy Claxton - THE WAYWARD MIND, an intimate history of the unconscious (2005, Little, Brown, and Co., available from amazon.com). Here is a excerpt and paraphrase from pp. 348-252:

"What we call our "self " is an agglomeration of both conscious and unconscious ingredients, cans, needs, dos, oughts, thinks - the temptation is to assume that the "I" is the same in all of them - so that instead of having an intricate web of things that make me ME, I have to create a single imaginary hub around which they all revolve, to which they all refer - the attempt to keep this fiction going, to "hold it together" can become quite tiring and bothersome - If "I" am essentially reasonable, if I imagine that my zones of control - over my own feelings for example - are wider and more robust than they are, then I am going to get in a tangle trying to "control myself." If I have decided that who I am is clever, attractive, athletic, stable, creating the hub of "I" locks everything together and prevents it moving. It stops Me expanding to include the unconscious, or graciously shrinking to accommodate old age. I can not enjoy my waywardness, nor see it as an intrinsic part of ME - (note: he gives Ramachandran's two foot nose pinocchio demonstration as evidence of plasticity of self image), and then says - The orthodox sense of self is thrown by such experiences, and tends to suffer a sense-of-humour failure. It sees all waywardness as an affront, and tends to become earnest or myopic in response. In a nutshell: it is bad enough to have a nightmare, without your rattled sense of self telling you that you are going mad. Weird experience can never be just funny (as the pinocchio effect can be) or matter-of fact (as possession is in Bali), or transiently inconvenvient (as a bad dream is), or wonderful (as a mystical experience can be), or just mysterious (as a premonition might be). For the locked-up self they have to be denied, explained or dealt with. All the evidence is that a more relaxed attitude toward the bounds of self makes for a richer, easier and more creative life. Perhaps, after all, waywardness in all its forms is in need not so much of explanation, but of a mystified but friendly welcome. We can explain it if we wish, and the brain is beginning to a reasonable job. But the need to explain, when not motivated by the dispassionate curiosity of the scientist, is surely a sign of anxiety: of the desire to tame with words that which is experienced as unsettling.

Followup on acupuncture

Following the "Acupuncture's secret revealed?" post on 6/17 a reader sent me two interesting links that I want to pass on.  Body in Mind reviews a paper in Journal of Pain that finds no significant effect of physician training or expertise on outcome, and notes studies that find no difference between needle placement at classical acupuncture points and randomly placed needles, and also that patient expectations about acupuncture influence outcome. And, Eric Mead briefly lectures on "The Magic of the Placebo."

Is life worth living?

Philosopher Peter Singer, in his "Should this be the last generation" query, offers philosophical rambling of the sort that drives me up the wall, a prime example of one of the things our brains were definitely not designed to do. My bottom line is that I refuse to get excited about existential issues ("Is life worth living", etc.) beyond those I think my two abyssinian cats would find compelling...food, shelter, a place to poop, and sex. I don't think the human overlay on top of that has shown much competence with  'the meaning of it all' questions. In this territory we are like the dog being asked to understand quantum physics. Singer starts by noting 19th century German philosopher Schopenhauer's pessimism:

...the best life possible for humans is one in which we strive for ends that, once achieved, bring only fleeting satisfaction. New desires then lead us on to further futile struggle and the cycle repeats itself.

He then goes on to note more recent arguments from philosopher David Benatar:

To bring into existence someone who will suffer is, Benatar argues, to harm that person, but to bring into existence someone who will have a good life is not to benefit him or her...Hence continued reproduction will harm some children severely, and benefit none.

Benatar also argues that human lives are, in general, much less good than we think they are....we are, in Benatar’s view, victims of the illusion of pollyannaism. This illusion may have evolved because it helped our ancestors survive, but it is an illusion nonetheless. If we could see our lives objectively, we would see that they are not something we should inflict on anyone.

...the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about....So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!

Singer does end on a more upbeat note:

I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now. But justifying that choice forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?