This blog reports new ideas and work on mind, brain, behavior, psychology, and politics - as well as random curious stuff. (Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column.)
Crockett et al. have done some fascinating experiments demonstrating that increased serotonin makes individuals less likely to endorse moral scenarios that result in the infliction of personal harm to others. They examine the effects of a single high dose of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) citalopram on moral judgment in healthy volunteers using a set of hypothetical scenarios portraying highly emotionally salient personal and less emotionally salient impersonal moral dilemmas with similar utilitarian outcomes (e.g., pushing a person in front of a train to prevent it from hitting five people and flipping a switch to divert a train to hit one person instead of five people, respectively). Here is their abstract:
Aversive emotional reactions to real or imagined social harms infuse moral judgment and motivate prosocial behavior. Here, we show that the neurotransmitter serotonin directly alters both moral judgment and behavior through increasing subjects’ aversion to personally harming others. We enhanced serotonin in healthy volunteers with citalopram (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) and contrasted its effects with both a pharmacological control treatment and a placebo on tests of moral judgment and behavior. We measured the drugs' effects on moral judgment in a set of moral 'dilemmas' pitting utilitarian outcomes (e.g., saving five lives) against highly aversive harmful actions (e.g., killing an innocent person). Enhancing serotonin made subjects more likely to judge harmful actions as forbidden, but only in cases where harms were emotionally salient. This harm-avoidant bias after citalopram was also evident in behavior during the ultimatum game, in which subjects decide to accept or reject fair or unfair monetary offers from another player. Rejecting unfair offers enforces a fairness norm but also harms the other player financially. Enhancing serotonin made subjects less likely to reject unfair offers. Furthermore, the prosocial effects of citalopram varied as a function of trait empathy. Individuals high in trait empathy showed stronger effects of citalopram on moral judgment and behavior than individuals low in trait empathy. Together, these findings provide unique evidence that serotonin could promote prosocial behavior by enhancing harm aversion, a prosocial sentiment that directly affects both moral judgment and moral behavior.
In a broader context, the work by Crockett et al. supports a number of interesting conclusions. It extends prior evidence suggesting that there are at least two major pharmacological routes that modulate human social behavior: a direct route (“bottom-up”) involving prosocial neuropeptides such as oxytocin and vasopressin, which promote prosocial behaviors such as attachment, empathy, and generosity, and an indirect route (“top-down”) involving serotonin, which delimits antisocial behaviors by reducing negative affect and enhancing the aversiveness of harming others (see figure below). If this is true, functional interactions between these transmitter systems are likely. Consistent with this, Crockett et al. report a pronounced impact of serotonin augmentation on social decision making in subjects with high trait empathy, a finding suggestive of additive prosocial effects of both routes. The study also demonstrates that the effects of serotonin on prosocial behavior are relatively specific and are absent under norepinephrine augmentation with atomoxetine.
Figure - Regulatory circuits of social-emotional information processing in humans. “Top-down” control of the amygdala (AMY) arises from the anterior cingulate cortex (ACG) and ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), with the latter being particularly important for the regulation of moral behaviors. “Bottom-up” modulation arises from neurons in the hypothalamus (HYP) expressing the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin, which target distinct neuronal populations in the central amygdala. Projections from the amygdala to the brainstem, via the hypothalamus, regulate the expression of autonomic reactions to social signals. PFC, prefrontal cortex.
My Zoology Department colleague Jim Pawley (now retired, as I am) gave a talk to the Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar here at the University of Wisconsin this past Tuesday (I had done a dry run of my Istanbul lecture for this group last May), and I thought his summary of the talk would be of interest to MindBlog readers:
"Climate, energy, and the economy: A new Theory of Everything."
ABSTRACT:
During the industrial revolution, science gained a reputation for mathematical accuracy and precision. Scientific models were effective at predicting the performance of simple systems, from those that spun and wove to those that created the worldwide web. Less appreciated was the fact that these technologies worked ONLY because, during this same period, humankind had also acquired access to a new and immense store of controllable energy. Instead, we were taught that these riches were due to increases in "economic efficiency" and, like the sciences, economics promised a future that was both predictable and bright.
Then a few decades ago, one scientific discipline after another seemed to hit a wall: Although the Uncertainty Principle was at first understood only to affect very small systems, scientists began to realize that some uncertainty was unavoidable, and furthermore that, as it propagates through a complex system, the errors become so large that it is hard to have confidence in any but the broadest of predictions: often only those emerging from thermodynamics.
We had entered the Age of Chaos. Although at first some theorists hoped that "faster computers" might be the answer, in the end computers merely clarified two things: 1) that large changes were exponentially less likely than small ones and 2) that the presence of positive feedback makes it very hard to make any confident predictions, while the relative stability of our environment was based on a variety of negative feedbacks. As time went on, it became evident that most aspects of modern life, from arctic ice to advertising, from politics to preaching and from Wall Street to war, acted as though they too were largely chaotic.
In the real world, the one that now entirely relied on the technology, the advent of the Age of Chaos was not much noticed. Accurate predictions were still expected ("If we can put a man on the Moon...") from a science that now recognized that such things were impossible.
This was unfortunate because, over the past 2 centuries fossil-fuel-powered technology had allowed humans and their domestic animals to multiply until their bodies represented over 98% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass. More important still, acting either directly, by producing CO2 and other gasses that affect the climate, or indirectly, for instance by the creation of bioactive chemicals, changes to the albedo or barriers to migration, the use of fossil fuel had brought all of the major ecological systems (the atmosphere, forests, oceans etc.) near to the point of collapse.
So now, when society went to science for the precise answers needed to guide a response to these challenges, science had few simple answers, and most of these were from from thermodynamics: There is no free lunch. Use less energy or else.
Previous meetings of this forum have addressed many of these matters individually or in small groups. I have the feeling that the fact that so many of these essential but chaotic and interacting factors are approaching a critical point simultaneously adds an additional level of concern. Perhaps we can use what we have learned about chaotic systems to improve the odds? I hope to get some ideas. Or perhaps to raise the threat level...
I pass on this clip from the Oct. 8 issue of Science Magazine, struck by the verse that brings home the fact that most of the cells in our body are 'foreign' bacteria:
They Said It
What am I in truth? What am I in reality, When only one in10 of my cells Is genetically humanity?
—From "Bacteria,"one of the 20-odd songs celebrating the universe on scales fromangstroms to astronomical units in "Powers of Ten," a choralwork by composer David Haines. More than 200 singers from theWashington, D.C., area are set to perform the work on 10 Octoberat the University of Maryland, College Park, kicking off thefirst inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival. See
A group of collaborators has looked at functional connectivity measured by fMRI in ~65 year old adults before and after their separation for one year into exercise (walking, 30 individuals) and non-exercise (35 individuals) groups. In the exercising group they find increased functional connectivity associated with greater improvement in executive function, providing evidence for exercise-induced functional plasticity in large-scale brain systems in older brains. Here is their whole abstract.
Research has shown the human brain is organized into separable functional networks during rest and varied states of cognition, and that aging is associated with specific network dysfunctions. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine low-frequency (0.008 to 0.08 Hz) coherence of cognitively relevant and sensory brain networks in older adults who participated in a 1-year intervention trial, comparing the effects of aerobic and non-aerobic fitness training on brain function and cognition. Results showed that aerobic training improved the aging brain’s resting functional efficiency in higher-level cognitive networks. One year of walking increased functional connectivity between aspects of the frontal, posterior, and temporal cortices within the Default Mode Network and a Frontal Executive Network, two brain networks central to brain dysfunction in aging. Length of training was also an important factor. Effects in favor of the walking group were observed only after 12 months of training, compared to non-significant trends after 6 months. A non-aerobic stretching and toning group also showed increased functional connectivity in the DMN after 6 months and in a Frontal Parietal Network after 12 months, possibly reflecting experience-dependent plasticity. Finally, we found that changes in functional connectivity were behaviorally relevant. Increased functional connectivity was associated with greater improvement in executive function. Therefore the study provides the first evidence for exercise-induced functional plasticity in large-scale brain systems in the aging brain, using functional connectivity techniques, and offers new insight into the role of aerobic fitness in attenuating age-related brain dysfunction.
In trying to understand the sequential evolutionary steps that led to our human style self awareness, much has been made of the fact that monkeys appear to fail the mirror self recognition task, while chimpanzees, along with a few other species (including dolphins, some birds, and elephants) pass the test. My Wisconsin colleague Luis Populin now finds evidence to the contrary in the rhesus monkeys used in his experiments:
Self-recognition in front of a mirror is used as an indicator of self-awareness. Along with humans, some chimpanzees and orangutans have been shown to be self-aware using the mark test. Monkeys are conspicuously absent from this list because they fail the mark test and show persistent signs of social responses to mirrors despite prolonged exposure, which has been interpreted as evidence of a cognitive divide between hominoids and other species. In stark contrast with those reports, the rhesus monkeys in this study, who had been prepared for electrophysiological recordings with a head implant, showed consistent self-directed behaviors in front of the mirror and showed social responses that subsided quickly during the first experimental session. The self-directed behaviors, which were performed in front of the mirror and did not take place in its absence, included extensive observation of the implant and genital areas that cannot be observed directly without a mirror. We hypothesize that the head implant, a most salient mark, prompted the monkeys to overcome gaze aversion inhibition or lack of interest in order to look and examine themselves in front of the mirror. The results of this study demonstrate that rhesus monkeys do recognize themselves in the mirror and, therefore, have some form of self-awareness. Accordingly, instead of a cognitive divide, they support the notion of an evolutionary continuity of mental functions.
Benedict Carey does a nice summary article on studies that show that people date their memories of moral failings about 10 years earlier, on average, than their memories of good deeds. Here is the abstract of the paper he reviews:
Our autobiographical self depends on the differential recollection of our personal past, notably including memories of morally laden events. Whereas both emotion and temporal recency are well known to influence memory, very little is known about how we remember moral events, and in particular about the distribution in time of memories for events that were blameworthy or praiseworthy. To investigate this issue in detail, we collected a novel database of 758 confidential, autobiographical narratives for personal moral events from 100 well-characterized healthy adults. Negatively valenced moral memories were significantly more remote than positively valenced memories, both as measured by the valence of the cue word that evoked the memory as well as by the content of the memory itself. The effect was independent of chronological age, ethnicity, gender or personality, arguing for a general emotional bias in how we construct our moral autobiography.
A long standing issue in the neuroscience of emotions has been whether signals from our body (i.e. afferent visceral signals via interoceptive afferent fibers that monitor the physiological state of our internal organs) are essential for the unique experiences of distinct emotions, or whether these signals are too crude and undifferentiated to enable the wide variety of emotional feeling we can have. This issue has been difficult to resolve in the absence of methods to measure and integrate central neural responses, peripheral physiological responses, and subjective experience. Harrison et al have now used a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and simultaneous recording of autonomic influences on two independent organ systems (heart and stomach) during the experience of two different forms of disgust: core and body boundary violation disgust, induced, respectively by participants watching videos of people eating disgusting food, or of a surgical operation. Although both scenes produced strong disgust, these feelings were associated with distinct gastric and cardiac effects as well as differential activation in the insula and other brain regions. Thus, interoception could contribute to the perception of emotion. The magnitude of subjectively experienced disgust, regardless of disgust form, correlated with anterior insula activity. I pass on one figure from the paper that shows areas of the insula selectively activated by core versus body boundary violation disgust:
Figure - Insula activations to core and BBV disgust. A, Core greater than BBV disgust. B, BBV greater than core disgust. Contrast estimates show activations in circled right ventral and dorsal insula, respectively, in order (left to right): high core, low core, high BBV, and low BBV disgust.
ScienceNow does a summary of this year's ignoble prizes. This year's ceremony was an exception for including a cash prize: A $100 trillion note from Zimbabwe. (The note's actual value: nada.) One prize returns again to work that I have mentioned in a previous post, showing that slime molds can do as good or better a job than humans in designing transport networks. Here is a list of some of the others:
Engineering: Marine biologist Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse of the Zoological Society of London and colleagues for their method of collecting samples of whale snot using a remote-controlled helicopter.
Medicine: Psychologist Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and colleagues for discovering that asthma symptoms can be successfully treated with roller-coaster rides.
Physics: Public health researcher Lianne Parkin of the University of Otago in New Zealand and colleagues for proving that wearing socks on the outside of shoes reduces slips on icy surfaces.
Peace: Psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in the United Kingdom and colleagues for demonstrating that swearing alleviates pain.
Public health: Microbiologist Manuel Barbeito of the Industrial Health and Safety Office at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and colleagues for determining that microbes flourish in the beards of scientists.
Economics: The executives of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar "for creating and promoting new ways to invest money--ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof."
Chemistry: Engineer Eric Adams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and colleagues for disproving the belief that oil and water don't mix.
Management: Social scientist Alessandro Pluchino of the University of Catania in Italy and colleagues for mathematically demonstrating that organizations can increase efficiency by giving people promotions at random.
Biology: Biologist Libiao Zhang of the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom and colleagues for their study of fellatio in fruit bats.
I wanted to pass on this link to an article in this morning's NYTimes by Mat Bai that seems especially cogent. It deals with the independent voters whose actions appear to be pivotal in the coming elections. He describes the convening by three (non-sponsored) political and corporate marketing consultants of small focus groups of self-identified independent voters who are friends or relatives of one another, meeting in a participant’s living room.
The dominant theme of the discussion, in which jobs and taxes came up only in passing, seemed to be the larger breakdown of civil society — the disappearance of common courtesy, the relentless stream of data from digital devices, the proliferation of lawsuits and the insidious influence of media on their children...One woman described a food fight at the middle school that left a mess school employees were obliged to clean up, presumably because the children couldn’t be subjected to physical labor. A man complained about drivers who had grown increasingly hostile and inconsiderate on the roads, which drew nods of assent all around...The economy was discussed mostly in connection with these other stresses. “We all think that if we had a lot of money,” one woman said, “everything would slow down and we could enjoy ourselves.”
These voters did not hate politicians. They simply saw both parties, along with the news media and big business, as symptoms of the larger societal ailment. And this underlying perception, that politicians in Washington conduct themselves just as childishly and with the same lack of accountability as the students throwing chicken casserole in the lunchroom, may well be the principal emotion behind the electorate’s propensity to vote out whoever holds power.
Knowing whether confidence predicts accuracy would be very useful, for example, in evaluating conflicting courtroom testimony in statements from witnesses who seem more or less confident. In a fascinating article, Fleming et al. find a relationship between the brain scans of people obtained by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and how seriously we should take their expressed level of confidence. They use a simple perceptual task, detecting the contrast between light and dark bars in a grating, which makes it possible to obtain both an objective measure of how accurate subjects are and a subjective measure of how confident they are in their judgments. They construct a measure of how accurate subjects are in their confidence judgments. The capacity for introspection, which can be regarded as one facet of metacognition (thinking about thinking), is shown to vary across individuals and to correlate positively with the gray matter volume of the frontopolar cortex (the frontmost region of the brain) and also with white matter in the tracts of the corpus callosum that connect these regions in the left and right hemispheres. From the abstract:
We show that introspective ability is correlated with gray matter volume in the anterior prefrontal cortex, a region that shows marked evolutionary development in humans. Moreover, interindividual variation in introspective ability is also correlated with white-matter microstructure connected with this area of the prefrontal cortex. Our findings point to a focal neuroanatomical substrate for introspective ability, a substrate distinct from that supporting primary perception.
I find myself both spooked and sparked by my second foray into anti-aging chemistry (the first being the unsuccessful resveratrol dalliance described in a previous post.) A colleague pointed me to work of Bruce Ames and collaborators (also here) which has led to the marketing by Juvenon of a dietary supplement containing Acetyl L-carnitine, alpha-lipoic acid, and the B-vitamin biotin. Experiments on rats show that these compounds reverse the age related decay in energy metabolism in mitochondria and also inhibit oxidative damage to mitochondrial lipids. So... the idea is that these supplements might energize and juice you up a bit. The Juvenon supplement contains (per day) 600 mcg biotin, 2000 mg of acetyl-L-carnitine, and 800 mg of alpha lipoic acid. I though $40 was a bit steep for a 30 day supply, and so I bought the equivalent supplements from Swanson Health Products for significantly less money. I decided to take 600 mg of the carnitine/day, 1000 mg/day of the alpha lipoic acid, and 1000 mcg/day of biotin, half at breakfast, half at lunch (by the way, this is slightly less than 1% of the levels used in the rat experiments.) From the homework I have done so far, the levels of these supplements being taken have no documented adverse side effects.
The results? Well.... sufficiently dramatic that I really can't credit that it is all a placebo effect, because I go into any such experiment as an unbeliever... The first several days I felt a phase change, a step up in energy level and kinetic energy that made me like a 20-something again, a bit incredulous, as in "whoa.. where did this come from." With both brain and body feeling like an automobile engine running at 2,000 r.p.m. even when it was not in gear, I cut the levels of the supplements by a half after three days. After another three days of energy I didn't know what to do with, generating what felt like excess brain and body "noise," I stopped the supplement, deciding that my normal fairly robust daily routines (including daily gym work or swimming, running, or weights) apparently had all the energy they needed.
Any experiences or references from blog readers would be appreciated.
Two Sundays ago my partner and I hosted a Sunday afternoon musical/social at our home on Twin Valley Rd. in Middleton Wisconsin. I decided to record two of the pieces I played that I have not yet put on YouTube. In this post I pass on the Brahms Romance, as well as the program and program notes for that afternoon.
C. Debussy
Reverie
Minuette from Suite Bergmanesque
Valse Romantique
The music this afternoon is a brisk tour of four 19th century composers, Chopin, Brahms, Grieg, and Debussy, playing three short pieces composed by each. Each of these romantic pieces has rich emotional content.
I'll start with Chopin, born in 1810, died in 1849. He was a child prodigy and a child of privilege. When he was 21, he was traveling to Paris at the time of the 1831 polish uprising which was suppressed by Russian troops. He stayed in Paris. He was praised by Robert Schumann and befriended by the Rothschild banking family. He knew Franz Liszt, and in 1836, about a year after he had written the Nocturne and Polonaise I'm playing, and a year before the Prelude, he met George Sand at a party given by Franz Liszt's mistress. He was with Sand from 1837 to 1847, and died at age 39 . The bulk of his music, virtually all for piano, was written in the 1830s.
Next, I jump ahead to Edvard Grieg (1843 to 1907) to do three of his lyric pieces, composed in 1886 to 1891. These lyric pieces were among his most popular works, each trying to elicit a specific mood or emotion, obvious from their titles. He knew and was influenced by Franz Liszt, who praised these pieces.
Then back to Brahms, 1833 to 1897, who also knew Liszt and considered him a great pianist. However, Brahms led a crusade against what he considered some of the wilder excesses of Wagner and Liszt, and in 1860 wrote a manifesto against them in what is called the war of the romantics. The Capriccio I'm going to do was composed in 1878, at the height of his popularity. In 1890, when he was 57, Brahms resolved to give up composing, but could not, and a number of masterpieces followed. The Romanze and Intermezzo I'm going to play were composed in 1893.
The Debussy pieces I'm going to do are selections of his early work, written in this period, around 1890. Debussy was influenced by Cesar Franck, Wagner, and Massenet, and in this early period was developing his own musical language independent of their styles. The minuet is like an impressionistic baroque dance, and the reverie and valse romantique have very sonorous halo effects that foreshadow the more mature Debussy works between 1900 and 1915. Debussy lived from 1862 to 1918.
Under the 'random curious stuff' category in MindBlog's banner description, I thought this article by Anatole Kaletsky was cogent, if depressing, and so pass on some clips. The article begins with a discussion of Japan's recent decision to manipulate the value of its currency:
With Chinese economic policy now serving as a model for other Asian countries, Japan was faced with a stark choice: back United States criticisms that China is artificially keeping down the value of its currency, the renminbi, or emulate China’s approach. It is a sign of the times that Japan chose to follow China at the cost of irritating America...Japan’s action suggests that, in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, the dominance of free-market thinking in international economic management is over. Washington must understand this, or find itself constantly outmaneuvered in dealings with the rest of the world. Instead of obsessing over China’s currency manipulation as if it were a unique exception in a world of untrammeled market forces, the United States must adapt to an environment where exchange rates and trade imbalances are managed consciously and have become a legitimate subject for debate in international forums like the Group of 20.
The fact is that the rules of global capitalism have changed irrevocably since Lehman Brothers collapsed two years ago — and if the United States refuses to accept this, it will find its global leadership slipping away. The near collapse of the financial system was an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment of revelation.
If market forces cannot do something as simple as financing home mortgages, can markets be trusted to restore and maintain full employment, reduce global imbalances or prevent the destruction of the environment and prepare for a future without fossil fuels? This is the question that policymakers outside America, especially in Asia, are now asking. And the answer, as so often in economics, is “yes and no.”
Yes, because markets are the best mechanism for allocating scarce resources. No, because market investors are often short-sighted, fail to reflect widely held social objectives and sometimes make catastrophic mistakes. There are times, therefore, when governments must deliberately shape market incentives to achieve objectives that are determined by politics and not by the markets themselves, including financial stability, environmental protection, energy independence and poverty relief.
What if America decides to ignore the global reinvention of capitalism and opts instead for a nostalgic rerun of the experiment in market fundamentalism? This would not prevent the rest of the world from changing course.
Rather, it would make it likely that the newly dominant economic model will not be a product of democratic capitalism, based on Western values and American leadership. Instead, it will be an authoritarian state-led capitalism inspired by Asian values. If America opts, for the first time in history, for nostalgia and ideology instead of pragmatism and progress, then the new model of capitalism will probably be made in China, like so much else in the world these days.
The immensely popular book "The Secret" and its sequel "The Power" explicate the "law of attraction," which states that whatever you experience in life is a direct result of your thoughts. (A previous mindblog post on "The Secret" has received 31 comments.) Two psychology professors, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, suggest that this basic idea, which has been around for millennia:
...might best be understood as an advanced meme — a sort of intellectual virus — whose structure has evolved throughout history to optimally exploit a suite of weaknesses in the design of the human mind.
They then list several of the ploys or cognitive tricks used by author Rhonda Byrne, which include
-using what psychologists call “social proof.” People like to do things other people are doing because it seems to prove the value of their own actions. That is why QVC displays a running count of how many viewers have bought each item for sale, and why advice seems more credible if it appears to come from many different people rather than one…
-quoting sages like Thoreau, Gandhi and St. Augustine. This ploy, an example of a related logical fallacy called the argument from authority, taps our intuitive beliefs so forcefully that we psychology professors spend time training our introductory students to actively resist it.
-activating what might be called the illusion of potential, our readiness to believe that we have a vast reservoir of untapped abilities just waiting to be released. This illusion helps explain the popularity of products like “Baby Mozart” and video games that “train your brain” and entertain you at the same time. Unfortunately, rigorous empirical studies have repeatedly shown that none of these things bring about any meaningful improvement in intelligence.
-larding the text with references to magnets, energy and quantum mechanics. This last is a dead giveaway: whenever you hear someone appeal to impenetrable physics to explain the workings of the mind, run away — we already have disciplines called “psychology” and “neuroscience” to deal with those questions…pseudoscientific jargon serves mostly to establish an “illusion of knowledge,” as social scientists call our tendency to believe we understand something much better than we really do. In one clever experiment by the psychologist Rebecca Lawson, people who claimed to have a good understanding of how bicycles work (and who ride them every day) proved unable to draw the chain and pedals in the correct location.
-exploiting the human tendency to see things that happen in sequence — first the positive thinking, then the positive results — as forming a chain of cause and effect. This is even more likely to happen when all the stories we hear fit an expected pattern, a phenomenon psychologists call “illusory correlation.” If we hear only about the crazy coincidences (“I was thinking about getting the job offer, and right then I got the call!”), not the unconnected events (“I thought about getting the offer, but it never came” or “I wasn’t thinking about the offer, then I got it”) or even the nonevents (“I didn’t think I would get the offer, and indeed I didn’t get it”), then we get a distorted picture.
The powerful psychology behind these rhetorical tricks can distract readers from the larger illogic of Byrne’s books. What if a thousand people started sincerely visualizing winning the entire $200 million prize in this week’s Lotto? How would the universe sort out that mess? But it’s useless to argue with books like “The Secret” and “The Power.” They demonstrate an exquisite grasp of the reality of human nature. After all, the only other force that could explain how Rhonda Byrne put two books on top of the best-seller list is the law of attraction itself.
I have the clear feeling that my 68-year old brain is more rye-crisp and sharp, less likely to experience rich emotional immersions in a passing moment, than my 28-year old brain was. I wonder if part of the explanation for this is suggested by work of Dosenbach et al., who recently have developed an index of resting-state functional connectivity (how tightly neuronal activities in distinct brain regions are correlated) from several three different data sets based on fMRI scans of 150 to 200 individuals from ages 6 to 35 years old. Networks become more sparse and sharp with brain maturation, as long-range connections increase while short-range connections decrease. Here is their abstract and a summary figure from the paper (I don't understand the statistics, but do give definitions of the abbreviations):
Group functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging (fcMRI) studies have documented reliable changes in human functional brain maturity over development. Here we show that support vector machine-based multivariate pattern analysis extracts sufficient information from fcMRI data to make accurate predictions about individuals’ brain maturity across development. The use of only 5 minutes of resting-state fcMRI data from 238 scans of typically developing volunteers (ages 7 to 30 years) allowed prediction of individual brain maturity as a functional connectivity maturation index. The resultant functional maturation curve accounted for 55% of the sample variance and followed a nonlinear asymptotic growth curve shape. The greatest relative contribution to predicting individual brain maturity was made by the weakening of short-range functional connections between the adult brain’s major functional networks.
Figure (click to enlarge): fcMVPA (functional connectivity multivariate pattern analysis) connection and region weights. The functional connections driving the SVR (support vector machines regression) brain maturity predictor are displayed on a surface rendering of the brain. The thicknesses of the 156 consensus functional connections scale with their weights. Connections positively correlated with age are shown in orange, whereas connections negatively correlated with age are shown in light green. Also displayed are the 160 ROIs (regions of interest) scaled by their weights (1/2 sum of the weights of all the connections to and from that ROI). The ROIs are color-coded according to the adult rs-fcMRI (resting state functional connectivity MRI networks) (cingulo-opercular, black; frontoparietal, yellow; default, red; sensorimotor, cyan; occipital, green; and cerebellum, dark blue).
Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience—the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. We find that emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale) have different correlates. Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.
Tomer et al. have combined gene expression profiling with image registration to find that the mushroom body of the segmented annelid worm Platynereis dumerilii shares many features with the mammalian cerebral cortex. They suggest that the mushroom body and cortex evolved from the same structure in the common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates, before the appearance of bilateral symmetry in animals. Here is their summary:
The evolution of the highest-order human brain center, the “pallium” or “cortex,” remains enigmatic. To elucidate its origins, we set out to identify related brain parts in phylogenetically distant animals, to then unravel common aspects in cellular composition and molecular architecture. Here, we compare vertebrate pallium development to that of the mushroom bodies, sensory-associative brain centers, in an annelid. Using a newly developed protocol for cellular profiling by image registration (PrImR), we obtain a high-resolution gene expression map for the developing annelid brain. Comparison to the vertebrate pallium reveals that the annelid mushroom bodies develop from similar molecular coordinates within a conserved overall molecular brain topology and that their development involves conserved patterning mechanisms and produces conserved neuron types that existed already in the protostome-deuterostome ancestors. These data indicate deep homology of pallium and mushroom bodies and date back the origin of higher brain centers to prebilaterian times.
Williamson Street in Madison Wisconsin is like a time capsule from the hippie era of the 1970's. Here is a brief collage from the parade at the annual Willy Street fair that I attended yesterday with my partner Len.
Hall et al. do a nice demonstration of the extent to which we can delude our sensory capacities to justify a choice or preference we have previously made:
We set up a tasting venue at a local supermarket and invited passerby shoppers to sample two different varieties of jam and tea, and to decide which alternative in each pair they preferred the most. Immediately after the participants had made their choice, we asked them to again sample the chosen alternative, and to verbally explain why they chose the way they did. At this point we secretly switched the contents of the sample containers, so that the outcome of the choice became the opposite of what the participants intended. In total, no more than a third of the manipulated trials were detected. Even for remarkably different tastes like Cinnamon-Apple and bitter Grapefruit, or the smell of Mango and Pernod was no more than half of all trials detected, thus demonstrating considerable levels of choice blindness for the taste and smell of two different consumer goods.
I'm bouncing the post in the queue for today to bring forward this article by Jaron Lanier, from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine education issue, which I think you should read in its brief entirety. Here is just one clip to whet your appetite:
How can you be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education? Education — in the broadest sense — does what genes can’t do. It forever filters and bequeaths memories, ideas, identities, cultures and technologies. Humans compute and transfer nongenetic information between generations, creating a longitudinal intelligence that is unlike anything else on Earth. The data links that hold the structure together in time swell rhythmically to the frequency of human regeneration. This is education.
Now we have information machines. The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgment of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. If we romanticize information that shouldn’t be shielded from harsh calculations, we’ll suffer bad teachers and D.J.’s and their wares.
Right now, many of these decisions are being made by the geeks of Silicon Valley, who run a lot of things that other people pretend to run. The crucial choice of which intergenerational information is to be treated as computational grist is usually not made by educators or curriculum developers but by young engineers.
The proverb "This too shall pass" , has multiple ancient sources. The version beginning with the Sufi poet Attar of Nishapur has the phrase inscribed on a ring given to great king, which therefore has the ability to make a happy man sad and a sad man happy. Consonant with this proverb, a recent book by John Casti ("Mood Matters - From Rising Skirt Lengths to the Collapse of World Powers", recently reviewed by Richard Taylor) suggests that swings in the public mood between optimism and pessimism occur in natural cycles, recognizable patterns as function of time. Casti suggest that it is these cycles that drive the peaks and troughs of financial waves, which recur at increasingly fine time scales, representing one of the earliest noted fractal patterns in a physical system. He presents a number of detailed cases that argue for mood changes preceding and influencing unfolding events, rather than vice versa. His argument is opinionated, meant to be a foil its conventional wisdom opposite, that mood is set by financial markets. He runs through a comprehensive set of examples which include the lack of long-term response of the financial markets (and therefore social mood) to dramatic events such as Pearl Harbor and John F. Kennedy's assassination. Casti suggest that the financial market serves as an optimal choice for a sociometer to measure public mood, since it is largely determined by it. (He also reviews other measures that might be used to measure optimism for the future, such as rising or falling birth rates, skyscraper construction, car color, rise and fall of skirt length, and music trends.)
Smallwood reviews Carr's recent book "The Shallows - What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains"
As was the case for books, the development of the Internet has had a powerful influence on the way we think...In today's world of Google and Wikipedia, one hardly needs to be able to remember anything at all...Sites such as Facebook allow us to maintain social groups that far exceed the size of those in pre-Internet society...Carr's radical message is that the volume of content that we can access is increasing with a trajectory that outstrips even the most optimistic rates of evolutionary change for the physical matter of our brains. Carr argues that faced with this blizzard of content, we can no longer engage in detailed and thoughtful analysis. Rather, the rapid expansion in information has been accompanied by an increasingly superficial level of analysis.
Carr also proposes that the Internet's influence on our cognition is amplified by its design. One of Google's stated aims is to make knowledge as accessible as possible. In sharp contrast to authors such as Tolstoy or Steinbeck who demanded studious attention from their readers, the Internet aims to deliver an information fix with minimal effort...Search engines are not only experts in providing content, they are also experts in what we want...unlike books, which yielded cultural change that emphasized concentration and disciplined thought, the Internet (either by design or accident) is creating a society that specializes in the superficial.
Here are some fascinating observations from Dils and Boroditsky, who ask:
To what extent is hearing a story about something similar to really witnessing it? What is the nature of the representations that arise in the course of normal language processing? Do people spontaneously form visual mental images when understanding language, and if so how truly visual are these representations?
We test whether processing linguistic descriptions of motion produces sufficiently vivid mental images to cause direction-selective motion adaptation in the visual system (i.e., cause a motion aftereffect illusion). We tested for motion aftereffects (MAEs) following explicit motion imagery, and after processing literal or metaphorical motion language (without instructions to imagine). Intentionally imagining motion produced reliable MAEs. The aftereffect from processing motion language gained strength as people heard more and more of a story (participants heard motion stories in four installments, with a test after each). For the last two story installments, motion language produced reliable MAEs across participants. Individuals differed in how early in the story this effect appeared, and this difference was predicted by the strength of an individual’s MAE from imagining motion. Strong imagers (participants who showed the largest MAEs from imagining motion) were more likely to show an MAE in the course of understanding motion language than were weak imagers. The results demonstrate that processing language can spontaneously create sufficiently vivid mental images to produce direction-selective adaptation in the visual system. The timecourse of adaptation suggests that individuals may differ in how efficiently they recruit visual mechanisms in the service of language understanding. Further, the results reveal an intriguing link between the vividness of mental imagery and the nature of the processes and representations involved in language understanding.
Here is their description of motion aftereffects and their measurement.
The MAE arises when direction-selective neurons in the human visual area MT+ complex lower their firing rate as a function of adapting to motion in their preferred direction. The net difference in the firing rate of neurons selective for the direction of the adapting stimulus relative to those selective for the opposite direction of motion produces a motion illusion. For example, after adapting to upward motion, people are more likely to see a stationary stimulus or a field of randomly moving dots as moving downward, and vice versa. To quantify the size of the aftereffect, one can parametrically vary the degree of motion coherence in the test display of moving dots. The amount of coherence necessary to null the MAE provides a nice measure of the size of the aftereffect produced by the adapting stimulus.
Today's children are growing very different brains because of their interaction with technology. Baveller et al. review work showing that video games designed to be reasonably mindless result in widespread enhancements of various abilities, acting as exemplary learning tools. In another recent paper, Green et al. show that action video games improve probabilistic inference, which provides a general mechanism for why action video game playing enhances performance in a wide variety of tasks. The Baveller review notes that “Good” things can be bad and “Bad” things can be good. The best current research suggests that “baby DVDs,” or media designed to enhance the cognitive capabilities of infants and toddlers produce no changes in cognitive development. Playing violent action video games, where avatars run about elaborate landscapes while eliminating enemies with well-placed shots, turns out to enhance vision, attention, cognition, and motor control.
For instance, action video game experience heightens the ability to view small details in cluttered scenes and to perceive dim signals, such as would be present when driving in fog. Avid players display enhanced top-down control of attention and choose among different options more rapidly. They also exhibit better visual short-term memory, and can more flexibility switch from one task to another.
The contrast between the widespread benefits observed after playing action video games and the limited value of training on “mini brain games” suggests that we may need to drastically rethink how educational games should be structured. While action game developers intuitively value emotional content, arousing experiences, and richly structured scenarios, educational games have until now, for the most part, shied away from these attractive features that video games offer. Instead, educational games have mostly exploited the interactivity and the repetitive nature of practice-makes-perfect that computer-based games can afford—often reducing the experience to automated flashcards.
Work is beginning to show how the brain is altered by learning games.
A recent seminal study compared the impact of playing a grapheme-to-phoneme game versus a mathematics game in 6- to7-year-olds on the maturation of the visual word form area (VWFA), a brain area important in mediating literacy. As assessed by functional magnetic resonance imaging, the group trained with the phoneme-to-grapheme game showed greater maturation of the VWFA than the control group, suggesting direct involvement of the VWFA in the acquisition of reading skills...Experimental trainees demonstrated significant brain changes from pre- to post-test compared with the control group, but with no significant behavioral improvement differences. Thus, brain-imaging studies may provide a more sensitive assay of the effects of technology than do behavioral studies.
Numerous studies have shown that non-drinkers tend to die before moderate drinkers. Jonah Lehrer points to a striking (and reassuring to me) long term study that fills in more detail, finding over a period of twenty years that the death rate among non-drinkers is twice that of moderate drinkers. Chunks from the abstract:
The sample at baseline included 1,824 individuals between the ages of 55 and 65. The database at baseline included information on daily alcohol consumption, sociodemographic factors, former problem drinking status, health factors, and social-behavioral factors. Abstention was defined as abstaining from alcohol at baseline. Death across a 20-year follow-up period was confirmed primarily by death certificate.
Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem drinking status, existing health problems, and key sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors, as well as for age and gender, substantially reduced the mortality effect for abstainers compared to moderate drinkers. However, even after adjusting for all covariates, abstainers and heavy drinkers continued to show increased mortality risks of 51 and 45%, respectively, compared to moderate drinkers.
Leher notes that apart from anti-aging antioxidant or cardiac and circulatory effects of alcohol, a correlation of alcohol and socializing and its chemical correlates (dopamine, oxytocin, etc.) should be considered.
Douglas Coupland has produced a clever and alarming dictionary of the near future (which seems to actually be applying to the present moment). Here are just a few of his entries:
BELL’S LAW OF TELEPHONY No matter what technology is used, your monthly phone bill magically remains about the same size.
DENARRATION The process whereby one’s life stops feeling like a story.
DESELFING Willingly diluting one’s sense of self and ego by plastering the Internet with as much information as possible. (See also Omniscience Fatigue; Undeselfing)
DIMANCHOPHOBIA Fear of Sundays, a condition that reflects fear of unstructured time. Also known as acalendrical anxiety.
FICTIVE REST The inability of many people to fall asleep until after reading even the tiniest amount of fiction.
FRANKENTIME What time feels like when you realize that most of your life is spent working with and around a computer and the Internet.
INSTANT REINCARNATION The fact that most adults, no matter how great their life is, wish for radical change in their life. The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.
INTRAVINCULAR FAMILIAL SILENCE We need to be around our families not because we have so many shared experiences to talk about, but because they know precisely which subjects to avoid.
INTERNAL VOICE BLINDNESS The near universal inability of people to articulate the tone and personality of the voice that forms their interior monologue.
MALFACTORY AVERSION The ability to figure out what it is in life you don’t do well, and then to stop doing it.
OMNISCIENCE FATIGUE The burnout that comes with being able to know the answer to almost anything online.
PROCELERATION The acceleration of acceleration.
PSEUDOALIENATION The inability of humans to create genuinely alienating situations. Anything made by humans is a de facto expression of humanity. Technology cannot be alienating because humans created it. Genuinely alien technologies can be created only by aliens. Technically, a situation one might describe as alienating is, in fact, “humanating.”
ROSENWALD’S THEOREM The belief that all the wrong people have self-esteem.
UNDESELFING The attempt, usually frantic and futile, to reverse the deselfing process.
A loyal mindblog follower who occasionally sends me stuff he finds interesting has just forwarded this gem, the associated videos are here and here. The abstract:
Male movements serve as courtship signals in many animal species, and may honestly reflect the genotypic and/or phenotypic quality of the individual. Attractive human dance moves, particularly those of males, have been reported to show associations with measures of physical strength, prenatal androgenization and symmetry. Here we use advanced three-dimensional motion-capture technology to identify possible biomechanical differences between women's perceptions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ male dancers. Nineteen males were recorded using the ‘Vicon’ motion-capture system while dancing to a basic rhythm; controlled stimuli in the form of avatars were then created in the form of 15 s video clips, and rated by 39 females for dance quality. Initial analyses showed that 11 movement variables were significantly positively correlated with perceived dance quality. Linear regression subsequently revealed that three movement measures were key predictors of dance quality; these were variability and amplitude of movements of the neck and trunk, and speed of movements of the right knee. In summary, we have identified specific movements within men's dance that influence women's perceptions of dancing ability. We suggest that such movements may form honest signals of male quality in terms of health, vigour or strength, though this remains to be confirmed.
Forstmann et al. do some interesting work on examining pathways that regulate how readily we respond (i.e. decrease response thresholds) to decisions varying in their demands for speed versus accuracy. The figure showing the relevant structures (the striatum and subthalmic nucleus in the basal ganglia which are regulated by the cortex, click to enlarge) is taken from an academic website. Their abstract:
When people make decisions they often face opposing demands for response speed and response accuracy, a process likely mediated by response thresholds. According to the striatal hypothesis, people decrease response thresholds by increasing activation from cortex to striatum, releasing the brain from inhibition. According to the STN hypothesis, people decrease response thresholds by decreasing activation from cortex to subthalamic nucleus (STN); a decrease in STN activity is likewise thought to release the brain from inhibition and result in responses that are fast but error-prone. To test these hypotheses—both of which may be true—we conducted two experiments on perceptual decision making in which we used cues to vary the demands for speed vs. accuracy. In both experiments, behavioral data and mathematical model analyses confirmed that instruction from the cue selectively affected the setting of response thresholds. In the first experiment we used ultra-high-resolution 7T structural MRI to locate the STN precisely. We then used 3T structural MRI and probabilistic tractography to quantify the connectivity between the relevant brain areas. The results showed that participants who flexibly change response thresholds (as quantified by the mathematical model) have strong structural connections between presupplementary motor area and striatum. This result was confirmed in an independent second experiment. In general, these findings show that individual differences in elementary cognitive tasks are partly driven by structural differences in brain connectivity. Specifically, these findings support a cortico-striatal control account of how the brain implements adaptive switches between cautious and risky behavior.
Numerous studies have documented diminution in sensory and cognitive functions with aging, but very little is known about what is actually happening to cells in the brain. Knowing more about structural alterations as the brain ages is essential to understanding functional and cognitive changes. Richard et al.have used a simplified cortical model, the olfactory bulb in the mouse brain, to show, somewhat surprisingly, overall stability of structure and no neurodegeneration with aging. What they do observe is fine synaptic alterations that affect selected cellular compartments, and losses of synapses in specific layers. (The olfactory bulb sensory cortex is an appropriate model because it has well-known synaptic organization, and its normal and pathological aging is associated with impairment of food intake and reduced health.)
Little is known about how normal aging affects the brain. Recent evidence suggests that neuronal loss is not ubiquitous in aging neocortex. Instead, subtle and still controversial, region- and layer-specific alterations of neuron morphology and synapses are reported during aging, leading to the notion that discrete changes in neural circuitry may underlie age-related cognitive deficits. Although deficits in sensory function suggest that primary sensory cortices are affected by aging, our understanding of the age-related cellular and molecular changes is sparse. To assess the effect of aging on the organization of olfactory bulb (OB) circuitry, we carried out quantitative morphometric analyses in the mouse OB at 2, 6, 12, 18, and 24 mo. Our data establish that the volumes of the major OB layers do not change during aging. Parallel to this, we are unique in demonstrating that the stereotypic glomerular convergence of M72-GFP OSN axons in the OB is preserved during aging. We then provide unique evidence of the stability of projection neurons and interneurons subpopulations in the aging mouse OB, arguing against the notion of an age-dependent widespread loss of neurons. Finally, we show ultrastructurally a significant layer-specific loss of synapses; synaptic density is reduced in the glomerular layer but not the external plexiform layer, leading to an imbalance in OB circuitry. These results suggest that reduction of afferent synaptic input and local modulatory circuit synapses in OB glomeruli may contribute to specific age-related alterations of the olfactory function.
Certain genotypes are expressed in different forms depending upon the harshness/beneficence of social conditions; examples include the serotonin transporter gene, the monoamine oxidase A gene, the dopamine receptor gene seven-repeat polymorphism, and the glucocorticoid receptor gene. Genetic variations in these can influence expression of depressive and antisocial behaviors. Kim et al now show that an oxytocin receptor, depending on its specific genotype, is sensitive to social environment, specifically cultural norms regarding emotional social support seeking. Seeking emotional support in times of distress is normative in American culture but not in Korean culture. American participants with a GG/AG genotypes reported seeking more emotional social support than those with a AA genotype, but Korean participants did not differ by genotype. The abstract:
Research has demonstrated that certain genotypes are expressed in different forms, depending on input from the social environment. To examine sensitivity to cultural norms regarding emotional support seeking as a type of social environment, we explored the behavioral expression of oxytocin receptor polymorphism (OXTR) rs53576, a gene previously related to socio-emotional sensitivity. Seeking emotional support in times of distress is normative in American culture but not in Korean culture. Consequently, we predicted a three-way interaction of culture, distress, and OXTR genotype on emotional support seeking. Korean and American participants (n = 274) completed assessments of psychological distress and emotional support seeking and were genotyped for OXTR. We found the predicted three-way interaction: among distressed American participants, those with the GG/AG genotypes reported seeking more emotional social support, compared with those with the AA genotype, whereas Korean participants did not differ significantly by genotype; under conditions of low distress, OXTR groups did not differ significantly in either cultural group. These findings suggest that OXTR rs53576 is sensitive to input from the social environment, specifically cultural norms regarding emotional social support seeking. These findings also indicate that psychological distress and culture are important moderators that shape behavioral outcomes associated with OXTR genotypes.
Benedict Carey does a nice summary of what we do and don't know about different approaches to enhancing learning.
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review... in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas...Ditto for teaching styles...Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness...the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere have not been determined
In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying…For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.
Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.
When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall…cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.
None of ... these techniques — alternating study environments, mixing content, spacing study sessions, self-testing or all the above — will turn a grade-A slacker into a grade-A student. Motivation matters.
Inzlicht and Tullett add a bit of information to the growing field of the cognitive science of religion (which examines religious beliefs as a natural by-product of the way human minds and brains work, meeting a number of people’s myriad needs.) They find that a brain activity related to defensive responses to error (a sort of cortical 'alarm bell') is lower in religious than in non-religious individuals:
The world is a vast and complex place that can sometimes generate feelings of uncertainty and distress for its inhabitants. Although religion is associated with a sense of meaning and order, it remains unclear whether religious belief can actually cause people to feel less anxiety and distress. To test the anxiolytic power of religion, we conducted two experiments focusing on the error-related negativity (ERN)—a neural signal that arises from the anterior cingulate cortex and is associated with defensive responses to errors. The results indicate that for believers, conscious and nonconscious religious primes cause a decrease in ERN amplitude. In contrast, priming nonbelievers with religious concepts causes an increase in ERN amplitude. Overall, examining basic neurophysiological processes reveals the power of religion to act as a buffer against anxious reactions to self-generated, generic errors—but only for individuals who believe.
Well known author William Gibson (Neuromancer, and its sequels) does a brief NYTimes Op-Ed essay in which he discusses Google. His starting point is a controversial interview with Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, in which Schmidt says:
…I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.
Gibson notes that Google is:
...a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information…it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google…Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next.
We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.
Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world…We are part of a post-geographical, post-national super-state, one that handily says no to China. Or yes, depending on profit considerations and strategy. But we do not participate in Google on that level. We’re citizens, but without rights.
On the possibility of fresh identities for those who have exposed their private lives in the cloud:
I imagine that those who are indiscreet on the Web will continue to have to make the best of it, while sharper cookies, pocketing nyms and proxy cascades (as sharper cookies already do), slouch toward an ever more Googleable future, one in which Google, to some even greater extent than it does now, helps us decide what we’ll do next.
The August 30 issue of The New Yorker has an engaging article on Madan Kataria, "The Laughing Guru." Research in the field of psychoneuroimmunology has by now provided abundant evident that the opposite of laughter or light-heartedness - depression, stress, fear, or social isolation - can diminish health and suppress the immune system. Kataria's international Laughter Yoga movement is based on the premise that laughter boosts health and the immune system. Norman Cousins, who was editor of Saturday Review, wrote an influential book "Anatomy of an Illness" that described how genuine belly laughter lessened his pain from a joint disease, and several studies have shown that laughter therapy lessens pain in cancer patients. Other work has suggested that laughter may cause transient decreases in cortisol (stress hormone) and increases in endorphin (analgesic) levels, but Robert Provine and others have carried out exhaustive scientific reviews on laughter, humor, and health that conclude that there is not enough evidence of conclude much of anything, other perhaps than laughter can briefly limit physical pain.
I'm inclined to believe that there might be more to it, given numerous example of our embodied cognition. An instruction to contract the facial muscles that form a smile (with no instructions on accompanying feelings) causes slight enhancement of left/right frontal brain activity associated with more positive affect (elevation of mood), and small Botox injections that temporarily immobilize parts of the face can limit one's ability to express or feel emotions. These effects are transient, but it seems plausible to me that repetition of mechanical smiling exercises might enhance mood for extended periods of time, just as repeated meditation practice can decrease brain noise.
Relevant to today's other post on this topic, a MindBlog reader has just pointed out another good article, from the Sept. 1 New Scientist, on how words shape and enhance our cognition. The article has several links to relevant research, such as this article I was about to do a mindblog post on next week, on how assigning nonsense labels facilitates the learning of novel categories.
Just after drafting Monday's post on how cultural setting shapes our visual cognition, I read an excellent article by Guy Deutscher in the Sunday NYTimes Magazine, on how language shapes our thinking. He starts by reviewing the story of the rise and fall of "the Whorfian hypothesis," which maintained that if a language had no term for a concept (such as the future), then the speaker of that language would not be able to grasp the concept in the sense that we can. Hard data crashed the hypothesis, and the counter reaction was so severe that for many years no limits of language on basic cognition have been admitted. How it turns out that the baby may have been thrown out with the bathwater. Some clips from the article, starting with some fact about differences between languages pointed out 50 years ago by linguist Roman Jakobson:
Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey...if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.
In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love...When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant.
Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it...Did the opposite genders of “bridge” in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life?
The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us...egocentric coordinates...depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn... a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, doesn’t make any use of egocentric coordinates at all...Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like “left” or “right,” “in front of” or “behind,” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.”...languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali.
How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives..This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy...When Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldn’t explain it any more than you can explain how you know where “behind” is.
Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.
Need to put out of mind an unpleasant memory or unfulfilled desire? By offering yet another example of embodied cognition and metaphorical thinking Li et al. may have just the trick for you:
This research investigated whether the physical act of enclosing an emotionally laden stimulus can help alleviate the associated negative emotions. Four experiments found support for this claim. In the first two experiments, emotional negativity was reduced for participants who placed a written recollection of a regretted past decision or unsatisfied strong desire inside an envelope. A further experiment showed that enclosing a stimulus unrelated to the emotional experience did not have the same effect. Finally, we showed that the effect was not driven by participants simply doing something extra with the materials, and that the effect of physical enclosure was mediated by the psychological closure that participants felt toward the event.
Friedman does a nice summary of the course of drug addiction and withdrawal, noting work on brain correlates of the craving that persists after drug highs have ceased and drug usage has stopped.
DuBois et al. make observations on an accentuation bias. They explore:
...how people’s place in a power hierarchy alters their representations of valued objects. The authors hypothesized that powerlessness produces an accentuation bias by altering the physical representation of monetary objects in a manner consistent with the size-to-value relationship. In the first three experiments, powerless participants, induced through episodic priming or role manipulations, systematically overestimated the size of objects associated with monetary value (i.e., quarters, poker chips) compared to powerful and baseline participants. However, when value was inversely associated with size (i.e., smaller objects were more valuable), the powerless drew these valued objects smaller, not larger. In addition, the accentuation bias by the powerless was more pronounced when the monetary value associated with the object was greater, increased when the object was physically present, and was mediated by differences in subjective value. These findings suggest that powerlessness fosters compensatory processes that guide representations of valued objects.
In the August 24 issue of Current Biology Grüter et al. offer a description of experiments on social learning carried out by Rendell et al. that enhance the description given in the abstract of the original paper:
In humans, learning by observing or asking others can save time and effort. For example, a traveler can bypass the need to check out the numerous available restaurants in an unknown city by asking the residents where there is a good place to eat. However, relying on others can be a risky strategy. The person you rely on might have a different taste, a bad memory, or not have visited a restaurant for years. An inability to avoid out-of-date or unreliable information is considered a major pitfall of social learning. As a consequence, theory has predicted that both individuals and populations should usually employ a mixture of both social and individual learning. A new study by Rendell et al. challenges this view and argues that social learning is usually superior.... Inspired by a classic evolutionary tournament that investigated the evolution of cooperation, Rendell et al. organised a computer tournament in which social learning strategies, submitted by entrants, competed in a game of natural selection for a 10,000 Euro prize. Each strategy specified when an individual should copy another, when it should gather its own information, and when it should simply use the information it had already acquired. They found that the strategies that performed best relied almost exclusively on social learning. Because ‘demonstrators’ have information about the expected pay-off of different behaviours, they selectively perform those that are most beneficial for themselves. By doing so, they inadvertently filter information for all other individuals in the population. As a result, individuals relying mostly on copying acquire high-payoff behaviours as well.
Here is the Rendell et al abstract:
Social learning (learning through observation or interaction with other individuals) is widespread in nature and is central to the remarkable success of humanity, yet it remains unclear why copying is profitable and how to copy most effectively. To address these questions, we organized a computer tournament in which entrants submitted strategies specifying how to use social learning and its asocial alternative (for example, trial-and-error learning) to acquire adaptive behavior in a complex environment. Most current theory predicts the emergence of mixed strategies that rely on some combination of the two types of learning. In the tournament, however, strategies that relied heavily on social learning were found to be remarkably successful, even when asocial information was no more costly than social information. Social learning proved advantageous because individuals frequently demonstrated the highest-payoff behavior in their repertoire, inadvertently filtering information for copiers. The winning strategy (discountmachine) relied nearly exclusively on social learning and weighted information according to the time since acquisition.
Kurt Gray offers some interesting observations on the embodyment of moral typecasting:
Moral transformation is the hypothesis that doing good or evil increases agency—the capacity for self-control, tenacity, and personal strength. Three experiments provide support for this hypothesis, finding that those who do good or evil become physically more powerful. In Experiment 1, people hold a 5 lb. weight longer after donating to charity. In Experiment 2, people hold a weight longer when writing about themselves helping or harming another. In Experiment 3, people hold a hand grip longer after donating to charity. The transformative power of good and evil is not accounted for by affect. Moral transformation is explained as the embodiment of moral typecasting, the tendency to “typecast” good- and evildoers as more capable of agency and less sensitive to experience. This has implications for power, aging, self-control, and recovery.
Bahrami et al. find conditions under which two heads are - and are not - better than one. Science Magazine gives a nice summary:
When two people peer into the distance and try to figure out if a faint number is a three or an eight, classical signal detection theory states that the joint decision can only be as good as that of the person with higher visual acuity. Bahrami et al. propose that a discussion not only of what each person perceives but also of the degree of confidence in those assignments can improve the overall sensitivity of the decision. Using a traditional contrast-detection task, they showed that, when the individuals did not differ too much in their powers of visual discrimination, collective decision-making significantly improved sensitivity. The model offered here formalizes debates held since the Enlightenment about whether collective thinking can outperform that of elite individuals.
In everyday life, many people believe that two heads are better than one. Our ability to solve problems together appears to be fundamental to the current dominance and future survival of the human species. But are two heads really better than one? We addressed this question in the context of a collective low-level perceptual decision-making task. For two observers of nearly equal visual sensitivity, two heads were definitely better than one, provided they were given the opportunity to communicate freely, even in the absence of any feedback about decision outcomes. But for observers with very different visual sensitivities, two heads were actually worse than the better one. These seemingly discrepant patterns of group behavior can be explained by a model in which two heads are Bayes optimal under the assumption that individuals accurately communicate their level of confidence on every trial.
The latest Science Magazine 'Editor's choice' points to an interesting bit of work. It is well known that East Asians see visual scenes via a holistic mindset in contrast to the Western style of focusing on salient objects. Variation within these cultural categories (between Chinese and Japanese, for example) can be shown. Colzato et al. have looked at the linkage between religious upbringing and visual perception in three somewhat less heterogeneous populations—neo-Calvinists in the Netherlands, Roman Catholics in Italy, and Orthodox Jews in Israel—and found that adherents of each of these religions differed from atheists of the same cultural background. The Calvinists, whose tradition emphasizes the role of the individual, showed greater visual attentiveness to local features, whereas the big picture perspective was favored by Catholics and Jews, whose traditions stress social togetherness. The abstract:
Religion is commonly defined as a set of rules, developed as part of a culture. Here we provide evidence that practice in following these rules systematically changes the way people attend to visual stimuli, as indicated by the individual sizes of the global precedence effect (better performance to global than to local features). We show that this effect is significantly reduced in Calvinism, a religion emphasizing individual responsibility, and increased in Catholicism and Judaism, religions emphasizing social solidarity. We also show that this effect is long-lasting (still affecting baptized atheists) and that its size systematically varies as a function of the amount and strictness of religious practices. These findings suggest that religious practice induces particular cognitive-control styles that induce chronic, directional biases in the control of visual attention.
Carter and Weber make the interesting counter-intuitive observation that being a pollyanna does not make one more gullible (cf. with my Aug. 24 post). Their research:
...used a job interview context to investigate the relationship between peoples’ degrees of generalized trust—their default assessments of the likely trustworthiness of others—and their ability to detect lies. Participants watched videos of eight simulated job interviews: Half of the interviewees were completely truthful; half told a variety of lies to make themselves more attractive job candidates. Contrary to lay wisdom, high trusters were significantly better than low trusters were at detecting lies. This finding extends a growing body of theoretical and empirical work suggesting that high trusters are far from foolish Pollyannas and that low trusters’ defensiveness incurs significant costs.
Kober et al. provide yet another "upstairs/downstairs" story of how it takes increased activity in our frontal cortex to override addictions and cravings fueled by the deeper structures in our old mammalian brain:
The ability to control craving for substances that offer immediate rewards but whose long-term consumption may pose serious risks lies at the root of substance use disorders and is critical for mental and physical health. Despite its importance, the neural systems supporting this ability remain unclear. Here, we investigated this issue using functional imaging to examine neural activity in cigarette smokers, the most prevalent substance-dependent population in the United States, as they used cognitive strategies to regulate craving for cigarettes and food. We found that the cognitive down-regulation of craving was associated with (i) activity in regions previously associated with regulating emotion in particular and cognitive control in general, including dorsomedial, dorsolateral, and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices, and (ii) decreased activity in regions previously associated with craving, including the ventral striatum, subgenual cingulate, amygdala, and ventral tegmental area. Decreases in craving correlated with decreases in ventral striatum activity and increases in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity, with ventral striatal activity fully mediating the relationship between lateral prefrontal cortex and reported craving. These results provide insight into the mechanisms that enable cognitive strategies to effectively regulate craving, suggesting that it involves neural dynamics parallel to those involved in regulating other emotions. In so doing, this study provides a methodological tool and conceptual foundation for studying this ability across substance using populations and developing more effective treatments for substance use disorders.
Figure - Regions active during or modulated by the cognitive regulation of craving. (A) Medial (Left) and lateral (Right) views of brain regions that showed greater activation when participants used a cognitive strategy to reduce their craving. Highlighted activations are shown in regions previously implicated in regulation of aversive emotion. (B) Medial (Left) and coronal (Right) views of brain regions that showed reduced activation. Highlighted reductions are shown in regions previously reported in studies of cue-induced craving or emotion. corr, Corrected for multiple comparisons; uncorr, uncorrected for multiple comparisons.
