Yet another distortion of democracy.

An interesting study from Davis et al., on the effects of instantaneous polling while an election debate is proceeding:

A recent innovation in televised election debates is a continuous response measure (commonly referred to as the “worm”) that allows viewers to track the response of a sample of undecided voters in real-time. A potential danger of presenting such data is that it may prevent people from making independent evaluations. We report an experiment with 150 participants in which we manipulated the worm and superimposed it on a live broadcast of a UK election debate. The majority of viewers were unaware that the worm had been manipulated, and yet we were able to influence their perception of who won the debate, their choice of preferred prime minister, and their voting intentions. We argue that there is an urgent need to reconsider the simultaneous broadcast of average response data with televised election debates.

Religion and brain atrophy...

I guess I might as well continue the religion theme of yesterday's post with this piece from Owen et al., on religious factors and hippocampal atrophy in later life:

Despite a growing interest in the ways spiritual beliefs and practices are reflected in brain activity, there have been relatively few studies using neuroimaging data to assess potential relationships between religious factors and structural neuroanatomy. This study examined prospective relationships between religious factors and hippocampal volume change using high-resolution MRI data of a sample of 268 older adults. Religious factors assessed included life-changing religious experiences, spiritual practices, and religious group membership. Hippocampal volumes were analyzed using the GRID program, which is based on a manual point-counting method and allows for semi-automated determination of region of interest volumes. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was observed for participants reporting a life-changing religious experience. Significantly greater hippocampal atrophy was also observed from baseline to final assessment among born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation, compared with Protestants not identifying as born-again. These associations were not explained by psychosocial or demographic factors, or baseline cerebral volume. Hippocampal volume has been linked to clinical outcomes, such as depression, dementia, and Alzheimer's Disease. The findings of this study indicate that hippocampal atrophy in late life may be uniquely influenced by certain types of religious factors.

How to decrease belief in intelligent design

Tracy et al. make the encouraging observation that teaching existential meaning in naturalism can decrease belief in intelligent design. Their research:

...examined the psychological motives underlying widespread support for intelligent design theory (IDT), a purportedly scientific theory that lacks any scientific evidence; and antagonism toward evolutionary theory (ET), a theory supported by a large body of scientific evidence. We tested whether these attitudes are influenced by IDT's provision of an explanation of life's origins that better addresses existential concerns than ET. In four studies, existential threat (induced via reminders of participants' own mortality) increased acceptance of IDT and/or rejection of ET, regardless of participants' religion, religiosity, educational background, or preexisting attitude toward evolution. Effects were reversed by teaching participants that naturalism can be a source of existential meaning (see text clip of Dawkins' writing just below), and among natural-science students for whom ET may already provide existential meaning. These reversals suggest that the effect of heightened mortality awareness on attitudes toward ET and IDT is due to a desire to find greater meaning and purpose in science when existential threats are activated.

(sample clip from Dawkins: "It is very reasonable for humans to want to understand something of our context in a broader universe, awesome and vast. It is also reasonable for us to want to understand something about ourselves. And understanding the nature of the world and the nature of ourselves is, to a very major degree, I believe, what the human enterprise is about. Truth should be pursued, and science helps us pursue it; science gives us meaning.")

Liberal and Conservative brains

Greg Miller does a commentary on Kanai et al.'s study of correlations between political orientation and brain structure. The Kanai et al. abstract:

Highlights:

-Political liberalism and conservatism were correlated with brain structure
-Liberalism was associated with the gray matter volume of anterior cingulate cortex
-Conservatism was associated with increased right amygdala size
-Results offer possible accounts for cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives

Summary:

Substantial differences exist in the cognitive styles of liberals and conservatives on psychological measures [1]. Variability in political attitudes reflects genetic influences and their interaction with environmental factors [2,3]. Recent work has shown a correlation between liberalism and conflict-related activity measured by event-related potentials originating in the anterior cingulate cortex [4]. Here we show that this functional correlate of political attitudes has a counterpart in brain structure. In a large sample of young adults, we related self-reported political attitudes to gray matter volume using structural MRI. We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring [4] and recognition of emotional faces [5] by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work [4,6] to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes.

Multitasking compromises short term memory in seniors.

Sigh... A careful noting "by Clapp et al. of the "deficient ability to dynamically switch between functional brain networks" that I so clearly note in my 69 year old brain as I sit here in front of my new toy, an Apple 27" cinema display monitor I'm using to do four simultaneous tasks (and can't remember activities a few steps back when I switch to a different window) ..... Their basic observation is that people between the ages of 60 and 80 have significantly more trouble remembering tasks after experiencing a brief interruption than do people in their 20s and 30s.

Multitasking negatively influences the retention of information over brief periods of time. This impact of interference on working memory is exacerbated with normal aging. We used functional MRI to investigate the neural basis by which an interruption is more disruptive to working memory performance in older individuals. Younger and older adults engaged in delayed recognition tasks both with and without interruption by a secondary task. Behavioral analysis revealed that working memory performance was more impaired by interruptions in older compared with younger adults. Functional connectivity analyses showed that when interrupted, older adults disengaged from a memory maintenance network and reallocated attentional resources toward the interrupting stimulus in a manner consistent with younger adults. However, unlike younger individuals, older adults failed to both disengage from the interruption and reestablish functional connections associated with the disrupted memory network. These results suggest that multitasking leads to more significant working memory disruption in older adults because of an interruption recovery failure, manifest as a deficient ability to dynamically switch between functional brain networks.

Neuromarketing - not ready for prime time...

I don't usually react to emails suggesting that mindblog consider mentioning what turn out to be commercial sites, but I thought the points raised by Dan Hill in this article (PDF) were quite interesting, apart from the fact this his company, Sensory Logic, would like to sell your business their services on facial analysis of emotional reactions to stimuli or services. His contention is that facial coding, which follows the response of 43 facial muscles that signal emotion, is superior to other emotional monitors such as EMG (bio feedback), EEG (electrical activity on or just below the scalp), or fMRI (brain scans).

Juvenile training improves adult skills - at a cost.

Sarro and Sanes ask whether there are long-term effects of early sensory training that can only be assessed after maturation. The experiments examine auditory processing in gerbils and find that early training in detecting amplitude modulation yield adults with abilities superior to other animals trained as adults. This would probably hold for us humans, but you don't do conditioned avoidance experiments on human infants...

Sensory experience during development can modify the CNS and alter adult perceptual skills. While this principle draws support from deprivation or chronic stimulus exposure studies, the effect of training is addressed only in adults. Here, we asked whether a brief period of training during development can exert a unique impact on adult perceptual skills. Juvenile gerbils were trained to detect amplitude modulation (AM), a stimulus feature elemental to animal communication sounds. When the performance of these juvenile-trained animals was subsequently assessed in adulthood, it was superior to a control group that received an identical regimen of training as adults. The juvenile-trained animals displayed significantly better AM detection thresholds. This was not observed in an adult group that received only exposure to AM stimuli as juveniles. To determine whether enhanced adult performance was due solely to learning the conditioned avoidance procedure, juveniles were trained on frequency modulation (FM) detection, and subsequently assessed on AM detection as adults. These animals displayed significantly poorer AM detection thresholds than all other groups. Thus, training on a specific auditory task (AM detection) during development provided a benefit to performance on that task in adulthood, whereas an identical training regimen in adulthood did not bring about this enhancement. In contrast, there was a cost, in adulthood, following developmental training on a different task (FM detection). Together, the results demonstrate a period of heightened sensitivity in the developing CNS such that behavioral training in juveniles has a unique impact on adult behavioral capabilities.

Pain reduction by mindfulness meditation - brain correlates

Zeidan et al. offer these interesting results on possible consequences of a form of mindfulness meditation called Shamatha, or focused attention, which is a cognitive practice of sustaining attention on the changing sensations of the breath, monitoring discursive events as they arise, disengaging from those events without affective reaction, and redirecting attention back to the breath. Slightly edited clips from the abstract:

The subjective experience of one's environment is constructed by interactions among sensory, cognitive, and affective processes. For centuries, meditation has been thought to influence such processes by enabling a nonevaluative representation of sensory events. To better understand how meditation influences the sensory experience, we used arterial spin labeling functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the neural mechanisms by which mindfulness meditation influences pain in healthy human participants. After 4 d of mindfulness meditation training, meditating in the presence of noxious stimulation significantly reduced pain unpleasantness by 57% and pain intensity ratings by 40% when compared to rest... Meditation reduced pain-related activation of the contralateral primary somatosensory cortex [note: the noxious stimulus was a thermal stimulator placed on the rear right calf, and thus would be reported to the left (contralateral) somatosensory cortex]...Meditation-induced reductions in pain intensity ratings were associated with increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, areas involved in the cognitive regulation of nociceptive (pain) processing. Reductions in pain unpleasantness ratings were associated with orbitofrontal cortex activation, an area implicated in reframing the contextual evaluation of sensory events. Moreover, reductions in pain unpleasantness also were associated with thalamic deactivation, which may reflect a limbic gating mechanism involved in modifying interactions between afferent input and executive-order brain areas. Together, these data indicate that meditation engages multiple brain mechanisms that alter the construction of the subjectively available pain experience from afferent (incoming) information.

Self control makes us angry

In several different places I have come across this interesting article by Gal and Liu. Exerting self control is usually assoicated with positive emotions and wellbeing, but some research has also shown that exerting self control can lead to increased aggression. The authors:

...find that exerting self control is associated with angry behavior more broadly. In particular, using a “matched-choice paradigm,” we find that after exerting self control people exhibit increased preference for anger-themed content, greater interest in faces exhibiting anger, greater endorsement of anger-framed appeals, and greater irritation to others‟ attempts to control one‟s behavior.

The authors note that because the anger-related behaviors examined in their experiments are not inappropriate, they are unlikely to reflect diminished capacities of self-regulation. Three of the several possible reasons why exerting self-control might elicit (implicit) anger they list are:

Goal Frustration - primitive and evolutionary roots drive angry facial expressions and the autonomic response of facial flushing in a newborn baby when a sucking treat is removed.

Diminished sense of Autonomy - anger from the sense that one‟s sense of freedom is restricted and that one is "forced" to choose the virtuous path rather than indulgence.

Ego depletion - the state of being depleted (not having the short term goal deferred for the long term goal) makes people angry.

Dialing numbers on your cellphone can elicit concepts

Observations by Topolinski note an interesting consequence of our cell phone habits:

When people perform actions, effects associated with the actions are activated mentally, even if those effects are not apparent. This study tested whether sequences of simulations of virtual action effects can be integrated into a meaning of their own. Cell phones were used to test this hypothesis because pressing a key on a phone is habitually associated with both digits (dialing numbers) and letters (typing text messages).  In the first experiment, dialing digit sequences induced the meaning of words that share the same key sequence (e.g., 5683, LOVE). This occurred even though the letters were not labeled on the keypad, and participants were not aware of the digit-letter correspondences. In a second experiment, subjects preferred dialing numbers implying positive words (e.g., 37326, DREAM) over dialing numbers implying negative words (e.g., 75463, SLIME). Finally, subjects preferred companies with phone numbers implying a company-related word (e.g., LOVE for a dating agency, CORPSE for a mortician) compared with companies with phone numbers implying a company-unrelated word.

Outsourcing self regulation

It seems reasonable that thinking about supportive partners should be motivationally bolstering - leading us to work harder. Fitzsimonds and Finkel make observations that suggest just the opposite - that such thoughts are motivationally undermining, causing us to make less ambitious plans to pursue goals and to spend less time on the pursuit.
The their first experiment,

...participants who thought about how their partner helped them with health goals (as opposed to career goals) planned to spend less time and effort on health goals in the upcoming week. This pattern was stronger for depleted participants than for nondepleted participants.

In a second experiment,

...participants who thought about how their partner helped them with academic-achievement goals procrastinated more, leaving themselves less time for an academic task, than did participants in two control conditions. This pattern was stronger for participants who were told that procrastinating would drain their resources for the academic task than for participants who were told that procrastinating would not drain their resources for that task.

A final experiment

...found that participants who decreased their effort after thinking of an instrumental significant other reported higher relationship commitment to that individual than did participants who did not decrease their effort.

The authors suggest that:

...partners may develop shared self-regulatory systems, or “transactive self-control,” relying on each other for help with self-control. Individuals who rely on their romantic partner for help with self-control in one area may be able to conserve valuable resources for other goal pursuits. If so, such a shared self-regulatory system—although it could ironically undermine short-term outcomes, as in the case of the outsourcing phenomenon shown here—could ultimately benefit partners if it allowed them to best make use of their limited self-control resources over time.

A long, diligent life...

Lagergren reviews Friedman and Martin's recent book on the 8-decade long longevity study started in 1921 at Stanford University by Lewis Terman, which has followed the histories of 1,500 gifted children from schools in the state and followed them from the age of 11 into adulthood, collecting a variety of data to see what might predict later success and accomplishment. The recent update collects information on those who have died.

Some results are as expected, such as that smoking is bad for longevity. Others turn conventional wisdom on its head...working hard for long hours in a demanding job to achieve high status is better for your health and life expectancy than taking it easy and lacking ambition. Marriage is a blessing for men more than women; and men suffer more adverse health effects from divorce, perhaps turning to drink or drugs. The authors emphasize the benefits of an active social network — more common for women — as a buffer against life's harmful events. And they are critical of simple health advice, such as to jog or eat less fat, arguing that it is the whole approach to life that is essential, not the details. To give a person a list of health recommendations does not work, they point out, if the person cannot or does not follow them.

The best predictor of a long and healthy life turned out to be conscientiousness — the extent to which a child was prudent, dependable and persistent in the accomplishment of his or her goals...You do not become conscientious overnight. It is the long-term, determined work of adopting and sticking to healthy habits and seeking good social environments and relationships that makes the difference. Later follow-up of Terman's subjects showed that conscientiousness in middle age and later counts almost as much as in childhood... Conscientious people do more to protect their health and are less likely to engage in risky activities such as smoking, drinking or drug-taking, the study found. They also find their way to happier marriages, better friendships and optimum work situations. As a result, they are less likely to die from all causes...

Being physically active as a child is also a predictor of longevity, but only if that activity is maintained into and beyond middle age. The life-years gained by jogging may amount to no more than the time you spend doing it, the authors note. So we needn't all aim to run marathons; rather, we should just maintain an activity that we enjoy.

Disorder promotes discrimination and stereotyping

Stapel and Lindenberg find that environmental signs of disorder, such as uncollected trash at a train station or cars parked askew on a sidewalk, are sufficient to induce bystanders to desire orderliness. The consequences are that these bystanders elect to sit further from minorities when asked to fill in a survey and donated less of their payments (for participating in the survey) to help immigrants and the homeless. The desire for order is fulfilled by an increased propensity toward classification, which includes stereotyping. [One field study used the Utrecht train hub in the middle of the Netherlands, where thousands of travelers pass through on a daily basis. During a cleaners’ strike, the train station quickly turned into a dirty and disordered environment. After the station had not been cleaned for a few days in a row, the authors asked 40 travelers who were waiting for their train to participate in their study in return for a candy bar or an apple. They were asked to judge the extent to which they thought certain traits applied to a particular group (in their case, Muslims, homosexuals, and the Dutch). The laboratory experiments, where behaviors after pictures of order versus disorder were used, employed 40-70 subjects.]. Here is their abstract:

Being the victim of discrimination can have serious negative health- and quality-of-life–related consequences. Yet, could being discriminated against depend on such seemingly trivial matters as garbage on the streets? In this study, we show, in two field experiments, that disordered contexts (such as litter or a broken-up sidewalk and an abandoned bicycle) indeed promote stereotyping and discrimination in real-world situations and, in three lab experiments, that it is a heightened need for structure that mediates these effects (number of subjects: between 40 and 70 per experiment). These findings considerably advance our knowledge of the impact of the physical environment on stereotyping and discrimination and have clear policy implications: Diagnose environmental disorder early and intervene immediately.

Hurt the flesh, cleanse the soul....

Here are some summary, slightly edited, clips from an interesting study by Bastian et al. (performed on the usual batch of college undergraduates, paid $10 for their participation in the study):

Pain purifies. History is replete with examples of ritualized or self-inflicted pain aimed at achieving purification...When reminded of an immoral deed, people are motivated to experience physical pain. Student participants in the study who wrote about an unethical behavior not only held their hands in ice water longer but also rated the experience as more painful than did participants who wrote about an everyday interaction. Critically, experiencing pain reduced people’s feelings of guilt, and the effect of the painful task on ratings of guilt was greater than the effect of a similar but nonpainful task.

Pain has traditionally been understood as purely physical in nature, but it is more accurate to describe it as the intersection of body, mind, and culture. People give meaning to pain, and we argue that people interpret pain within a judicial model of pain as punishment. Our results suggest that the experience of pain has psychological currency in rebalancing the scales of justice—an interpretation of pain that is analogous to notions of retributive justice. Interpreted in this way, pain has the capacity to resolve guilt.

People are socialized to understand pain within this judicial framework. Physical pain is employed as a penalty (e.g., spanking children for misbehavior), and unexplained pain is often understood as punishment from God. The judicial model is explicit in the Latin word for pain, poena, which means “to pay the penalty.” Understood this way, pain may be perceived as repayment for sin in three ways. First, pain is the embodiment of atonement. Just as physical cleansing washes away sin, physical pain is experienced as a penalty, and paying that penalty reestablishes moral purity. Second, subjecting oneself to pain communicates remorse to others (including God) and signals that one has paid for one’s sins, and this removes the threat of external punishment. Third, tolerating the punishment of pain is a test of one’s virtue, reaffirming one’s positive identity to oneself and others.

Previous work has demonstrated that giving meaning to pain affects people’s management of that pain. By introducing the judicial model of pain, we emphasize that giving meaning to pain can also affect other psychological processes. Although additional research is needed, our findings demonstrate that experiencing pain as a penalty can cause people to feel that their guilt is resolved and their soul cleansed.

Improving your cognitive toolkit - VII

Continuation of my sampling of a few of the answers to the annual question at edge.org, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?":
Alun Anderson - Homo Dilatus

Our species might well be renamed Homo Dilatus, the procrastinating ape. Somewhere in our evolution we acquired the brain circuitry to deal with sudden crises and respond with urgent action. Steady declines and slowly developing threats are quite different. "Why act now when the future is far off," is the maxim for a species designed to deal with near-term problems and not long term uncertainties. It's a handy view of humankind which everyone who uses science to change policy should keep in their mental took kit, and one that that is greatly reinforced by the endless procrastination in tacking climate change. Cancun follows Copenhagen follows Kyoto but the more we dither and no extraordinary disaster follows, the more dithering seems just fine.

Such behaviour is not unique to climate change. It took the sinking of the Titanic to put sufficient life boats on passenger ships, the huge spill from the Amoco Cadiz to set international marine pollution rules and the Exxon Valdez disaster to drive the switch to double-hulled tankers. The same pattern is seen in the oil industry, with the Gulf spill the latest chapter in the disaster first-regulations later mindset of Homo dilatus.

Geoffrey Miller - Personality traits are continuous with mental illnesses

Our instinctive way of thinking about insanity — our intuitive psychiatry — is dead wrong... There's a scientific consensus that personality traits can be well-described by five main dimensions of variation. These "Big Five" personality traits are called openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability. The Big Five are all normally distributed in a bell curve, statistically independent of each other, genetically heritable, stable across the life-course, unconsciously judged when choosing mates or friends, and found in other species such as chimpanzees. They predict a wide range of behavior in school, work, marriage, parenting, crime, economics, and politics.

Mental disorders are often associated with maladaptive extremes of the Big Five traits. Over-conscientiousness predicts obsessive-compulsive disorder, whereas low conscientiousness predicts drug addiction and other "impulse control disorders". Low emotional stability predicts depression, anxiety, bipolar, borderline, and histrionic disorders. Low extraversion predicts avoidant and schizoid personality disorders. Low agreeableness predicts psychopathy and paranoid personality disorder. High openness is on a continuum with schizotypy and schizophrenia. Twin studies show that these links between personality traits and mental illnesses exist not just at the behavioral level, but at the genetic level. And parents who are somewhat extreme on a personality trait are much more likely to have a child with the associated mental illness.

Music and language - differing brain activations

Rogalsky et al. obtain data that fills out in much more detail a description of which brain activations overlap and which differ during the processing of speech versus music. Here is their abstract, following by a figure from the paper:

Language and music exhibit similar acoustic and structural properties, and both appear to be uniquely human. Several recent studies suggest that speech and music perception recruit shared computational systems, and a common substrate in Broca's area for hierarchical processing has recently been proposed. However, this claim has not been tested by directly comparing the spatial distribution of activations to speech and music processing within subjects. In the present study, participants listened to sentences, scrambled sentences, and novel melodies. As expected, large swaths of activation for both sentences and melodies were found bilaterally in the superior temporal lobe, overlapping in portions of auditory cortex. However, substantial nonoverlap was also found: sentences elicited more ventrolateral activation, whereas the melodies elicited a more dorsomedial pattern, extending into the parietal lobe. Multivariate pattern classification analyses indicate that even within the regions of blood oxygenation level-dependent response overlap, speech and music elicit distinguishable patterns of activation. Regions involved in processing hierarchical aspects of sentence perception were identified by contrasting sentences with scrambled sentences, revealing a bilateral temporal lobe network. Music perception showed no overlap whatsoever with this network. Broca's area was not robustly activated by any stimulus type. Overall, these findings suggest that basic hierarchical processing for music and speech recruits distinct cortical networks, neither of which involves Broca's area. We suggest that previous claims are based on data from tasks that tap higher-order cognitive processes, such as working memory and/or cognitive control, which can operate in both speech and music domains.

Figure - regions selective for speech versus music. Speech stimuli selectively activates more lateral regions in the superior temporal lobe bilaterally, while music stimuli selectively activate more medial anterior regions on the supratemporal plane and extending into the insula, primarily in the right hemisphere. (This apparently lateralized pattern for music does not mean that the right hemisphere preferentially processes music stimuli as is often assumed. An analysis in the paper also shows that music activates both hemispheres rather symmetrically; the lateralization effect is in the relative activation patterns to music versus speech.)

Elephants know when they need a helping trunk.

From de Waal and collaborators, evidence for convergent evolution of cooperation:

Elephants are widely assumed to be among the most cognitively advanced animals, even though systematic evidence is lacking. This void in knowledge is mainly due to the danger and difficulty of submitting the largest land animal to behavioral experiments. In an attempt to change this situation, a classical 1930s cooperation paradigm commonly tested on monkeys and apes was modified by using a procedure originally designed for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) to measure the reactions of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). This paradigm explores the cognition underlying coordination toward a shared goal. What do animals know or learn about the benefits of cooperation? Can they learn critical elements of a partner's role in cooperation? Whereas observations in nature suggest such understanding in nonhuman primates, experimental results have been mixed, and little evidence exists with regards to nonprimates. Here, we show that elephants can learn to coordinate with a partner in a task requiring two individuals to simultaneously pull two ends of the same rope to obtain a reward. Not only did the elephants act together, they inhibited the pulling response for up to 45 s if the arrival of a partner was delayed. They also grasped that there was no point to pulling if the partner lacked access to the rope. Such results have been interpreted as demonstrating an understanding of cooperation. Through convergent evolution, elephants may have reached a cooperative skill level on a par with that of chimpanzees.

The brains of experts - due to predispositions and/or training?

Here is how Golestant et al. frame their interesting study on the brains of expert Phoneticians - who typically spend one to four years of formal training learning to identify speech sounds and to transcribe them into an international phonetic alphabet. (Remember, you can view any of the brain structures they mention by simply entering their name in Google Image Search.) The work suggests that morphological brain differences at birth might well influence career choices. We tend to enjoy and get reinforcement for doing things we are good at. (I've always wondered about a brain correlate for my ability, from a young age, to sight read any piece of sheet music put in front of me.)

Expertise has been shown to have both functional and structural correlates in the human brain. For example, expert golfers show a different pattern of neural activity than novice golfers when planning shots, and London taxi drivers have a larger posterior hippocampal volume than matched controls. It can be difficult to establish, however, the extent to which these effects relate to preexisting differences between the novice and expert groups, or whether these effects mainly arise from training-induced plasticity. Here we investigate brain anatomy in expert phoneticians...to distinguish experience-dependent plasticity from brain structural features that existed before the onset of expertise training.

From their abstract:

...We found a positive correlation between the size of left pars opercularis and years of phonetic transcription training experience, illustrating how learning may affect brain structure. Phoneticians were also more likely to have multiple or split left transverse gyri in the auditory cortex than nonexpert controls, and the amount of phonetic transcription training did not predict auditory cortex morphology. The transverse gyri are thought to be established in utero; our results thus suggest that this gross morphological difference may have existed before the onset of phonetic training, and that its presence confers an advantage of sufficient magnitude to affect career choices. These results suggest complementary influences of domain-specific predispositions and experience-dependent brain malleability, influences that likely interact in determining not only how experience shapes the human brain but also why some individuals become engaged by certain fields of expertise.

Competitions for memory, it's stabilization, and a memory enhancer

Kuhl et al. find that the competition in the brain between old memories and new ones that are associated with the same thing (for example, an old versus a new password, or yesterday's versus today's space in the parking lot) can be observed in fMRI. They found competition between visual memories was captured in the relative degree to which target vs. competing memories were reactivated within the ventral occipitotemporal cortex. When lowered VOTC reactivation indicated that conflict between target and competing memories was high, frontoparietal mechanisms were markedly engaged, revealing specific neural mechanisms that tracked competing mnemonic evidence.

In another study on memory Diekelmann et al. show that memory reactivation has opposing effects on memory stability during wakefulness and sleep. Reactivation during slow-wave sleep following learning can stabilize memories. Reactivation during wakefulness has the opposite effect, rendering memories labile and susceptible to modest modification.

Finally Benedict Carey points to a study by Shema et al. showing that increasing levels of a brain enzyme (a protein kinase C isoform) involved in memory formation enhances long term memory. Also, Chen et al. show that injections of a different protein, a growth factor involved in memory formation (insulin-like growth factor II) can have the same effect.

Increasing the viewed size of a painful body part reduces the pain

Here's an interesting and useful bit from Mancini et al.:

Pain is a complex subjective experience that is shaped by numerous contextual factors. For example, simply viewing the body reduces the reported intensity of acute physical pain. In this study, we investigated whether this visually induced analgesia is modulated by the visual size of the stimulated body part. We measured contact heat-pain thresholds while participants viewed either their own hand or a neutral object in three size conditions: reduced, actual size, or enlarged. Vision of the body was analgesic, increasing heat-pain thresholds by an average of 3.2 °C. We further found that visual enlargement of the viewed hand enhanced analgesia, whereas visual reduction of the hand decreased analgesia. These results demonstrate that pain perception depends on multisensory representations of the body and that visual distortions of body size modulate sensory components of pain.

Dynamic Views of Mindblog

I just pulled up the Blogger edit postings page for this blog and up pops a message "Did you know that...."

Turns out they have now added "Dynamic Views" - different ways of viewing a blog (flipcard, mosaic, sidebar, and timeslide...snapshot does not work for MindBlog) Click on the Dynamic Views of MindBlog link at the upper right to view several different viewing options.

A bad taste in the mouth - more on embodied cognition and emotion

Eskine et al. provide yet another example of how emotion induced by a physical stimulus can influence a moral stance. (Previous mindblog postings have noted this effect for hard/soft or rough/smooth surfaces, hot/cold temperature stimuli, clean/dirty smells or visual images, etc.) The experimental subjects were the usual captive college psychology course undergraduates (54 of them in this case):

Can sweet-tasting substances trigger kind, favorable judgments about other people? What about substances that are disgusting and bitter? Various studies have linked physical disgust to moral disgust, but despite the rich and sometimes striking findings these studies have yielded, no research has explored morality in conjunction with taste, which can vary greatly and may differentially affect cognition. The research reported here tested the effects of taste perception on moral judgments. After consuming a sweet beverage, a bitter beverage, or water, participants rated a variety of moral transgressions. Results showed that taste perception significantly affected moral judgments, such that physical disgust (induced via a bitter taste) elicited feelings of moral disgust. Further, this effect was more pronounced in participants with politically conservative views than in participants with politically liberal views. Taken together, these differential findings suggest that embodied gustatory experiences may affect moral processing more than previously thought.

MindBlog is on the road.

This is just a note that my seasonal migration from Fort Lauderdale, FL., back to the Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison, WI., starts today as I pack my two Abyssinian cats in the car and drive first to Austin, TX. to visit my son and his wife who live in the family house I grew up in. This Sunday I will be giving a recital of Fantasies for the piano, using the Steinway B at a hall at Westminster Manor, where my parents spent their final years. Then a week or so later, cats and I continue the trip to Madison. (Any blog readers who are in the Austin area and might wish to hear the music are welcome to email me. Program: Haydn - Fantasia in C major; Mozart - Fantasia in C Minor; Chopin - Fantasy in F minor; Liszt - Années de pèlerinage - Vallee d'Obermann; Debussy - Estampes III. Jardins sous la pluie).

Blocking arthritis pain in the brain.

Understanding how inflammation works is becoming increasingly urgent to aging persons (like myself) who view with alarm the increasing reactivity of their innate immune system that can cause arthritic flare-ups, or autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases such as chronic rheumatoid arthritis. Diamond and Tracey do a brief review of interesting work by Hess et al. showing that that patients with rheumatoid arthritis who receive inhibitors of TNF, a major inflammatory cytokine, develop significant changes in brain activity before resolution of inflammation in the affected joints. From their review:

During the first century, the Roman physician Cornelius Celsus defined four cardinal signs of inflammation: redness, swelling, heat, and pain. These signs and symptoms occur during infection by invasive pathogens or as a consequence of trauma. Today, we understand the molecular basis of these physiological responses as mediated by cytokines and other factors produced by cells of the innate immune system. Cytokines are both necessary and sufficient to cause pathophysiological alterations manifested as the four cardinal signs. Importantly, this knowledge has enabled the development of highly selective therapeutical agents that target individual cytokines to prevent or reverse inflammation. For example, selective inhibitors of TNF, a major inflammatory cytokine, have revolutionized the therapy of rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and other autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases affecting millions worldwide. Now, in PNAS, Hess et al. use functional MRI to monitor brain activity and report that patients with rheumatoid arthritis who receive anti-TNF develop significant changes in brain activity before resolution of inflammation in the affected joints.

To accomplish this, the authors measured blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals in the brain after compressing the metacarpal phalangeal joints of the arthritic hand. They observe enhanced activity in the brain regions associated with pain perception, including the thalamus, somatosensory cortex, and limbic system, regions known to process body sensations and emotions associated with the pain experience ( 1). Brain activity was significantly reduced within 24 h after treatment with TNF inhibitors, a time frame that preceded any observable evidence of reduced signs of inflammation in affected joints. Clinical composite scores, comprising measurements of C-reactive protein, a circulating marker of inflammation severity, were not improved until after 24 h. This suggests that selective inhibition of TNF has a primary early effect on the nervous system pain centers.

Sleep deprivation biases economic risk-taking.

Venkatraman et al. make these fascinating observations:

A single night of sleep deprivation (SD) evoked a strategy shift during risky decision making such that healthy human volunteers moved from defending against losses to seeking increased gains. This change in economic preferences was correlated with the magnitude of an SD-driven increase in ventromedial prefrontal activation as well as by an SD-driven decrease in anterior insula activation during decision making. Analogous changes were observed during receipt of reward outcomes: elevated activation to gains in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum, but attenuated anterior insula activation following losses. Finally, the observed shift in economic preferences was not correlated with change in psychomotor vigilance. These results suggest that a night of total sleep deprivation affects the neural mechanisms underlying economic preferences independent of its effects on vigilant attention.

A revolution in evolution - cooperation

Milinski reviews Martin Novak's new book "SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed," written with journalist Roger Highfield. (This post is another instance of my passing on some information on a book that I would like very much to read, but never will find time for...).

...evolutionary theorist Martin Nowak sees cooperation as the master architect of evolution. He believes that next to mutation and selection, cooperation is the driving force at every level, from the primordial soup to cells, organisms, societies and even galaxies.

Game theory is central to Nowak's work and the book highlights five ways to work together for mutual benefit: direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, spatial games, group or multilevel selection and kin selection. Direct reciprocity is the tit-for-tat exchange of resources...Nowak believes that indirect reciprocity, where I help you and someone else helps me, is the most important mechanism driving human sociality. It enforces the power of reputation, gained by helping or refusing help, which is spread through gossip, thus selecting in evolutionary terms for sophisticated language...Cooperators can prevail through exchanges that are played out across and between networks and clusters of individuals...Multilevel or group selection follows among communities that are small, numerous and isolated

Novak shows where the experts disagree, and questions the theoretical basis of kin selection, or inclusive fitness theory. He offers:

...a new model for the evolution of sociality, in which relatedness...is a consequence rather than the cause of social behaviour. By assuming only one mutation — one that causes offspring to stay in the nest rather than leave — he claims to explain why progeny happen to be around to help their related mother.

A massive amount of data supporting the idea of kin selection has accumulated, however, and Novak actually says “kin selection is a valid mechanism if properly formulated.”

Experimental Philosophy addresses Free Will vs. Determinism

Shaun Nichols has done an interesting essay on the problem of free will, and Tierney offers a summary. In all cultures people tend to reject the notion that they live in a deterministic world without free will. From Tierney's review:

regardless of whether free will exists, our society depends on everyone’s believing it does...it's adaptive for societies and individuals to hold a belief in free will, as it helps people adhere to cultural codes of conduct that portend healthy, wealthy and happy life outcomes...The benefits of this belief have been demonstrated in research showing that when people doubt free will, they do worse at their jobs and are less honest.

The article and review note an interesting experiment in which people are asked to judge the moral responsibility of Mark, who cheats a bit on his taxes, and Bill, who falls in love with his secretary and murders his wife and kids to be with her. Most people cut Mark some slack but believe Bill fully responsible for his crime. The inconsistency makes sense if threat to social order is being factored into judging moral responsiblity.  Again, from Tierney:

At an abstract level, people seem to be what philosophers call incompatibilists: those who believe free will is incompatible with determinism. If everything that happens is determined by what happened before, it can seem only logical to conclude you can’t be morally responsible for your next action.

But there is also a school of philosophers — in fact, perhaps the majority school — who consider free will compatible with their definition of determinism. These compatibilists believe that we do make choices, even though these choices are determined by previous events and influences. In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”

Does that sound confusing — or ridiculously illogical? Compatibilism isn’t easy to explain. But it seems to jibe with our gut instinct that Bill is morally responsible even though he’s living in a deterministic universe. Dr. Nichols suggests that his experiment with Mark and Bill shows that in our abstract brains we’re incompatibilists, but in our hearts we’re compatibilists.

“This would help explain the persistence of the philosophical dispute over free will and moral responsibility,” Dr. Nichols writes in Science. “Part of the reason that the problem of free will is so resilient is that each philosophical position has a set of psychological mechanisms rooting for it.”

Us vs. Them - what shapes the urge to harm rivals?

Cikara et al. make some interesting observations on intergroup competition, using avid fans of sports teams as their experimental subjects:

Intergroup competition makes social identity salient, which in turn affects how people respond to competitors’ hardships. The failures of an in-group member are painful, whereas those of a rival out-group member may give pleasure—a feeling that may motivate harming rivals. The present study examined whether valuation-related neural responses to rival groups’ failures correlate with likelihood of harming individuals associated with those rivals. Avid fans of the Red Sox and Yankees teams viewed baseball plays while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjectively negative outcomes (failure of the favored team or success of the rival team) activated anterior cingulate cortex and insula, whereas positive outcomes (success of the favored team or failure of the rival team, even against a third team) activated ventral striatum. The ventral striatum effect, associated with subjective pleasure, also correlated with self-reported likelihood of aggressing against a fan of the rival team (controlling for general aggression). Outcomes of social group competition can directly affect primary reward-processing neural systems, which has implications for intergroup harm.

The symphony of trading.

Uzzi and colleagues have made an interesting observation. You might think that a gaggle of financial traders on a large exchange floor, who make on average about 80 trades a day, would collectively generate orders with no particular time structure. A 7-hour working day is roughly 25,000 seconds, so the chance of one employee's 80 trades randomly synchronizing with any of his colleague's is small. Uzzi's group, to the contrary, found that up to 60% of all employees were trading in sync at any one second. What's more, the individual employees tended to make more money during these harmonious bursts. Here is their abstract:

Successful animal systems often manage risk through synchronous behavior that spontaneously arises without leadership. In critical human systems facing risk, such as financial markets or military operations, our understanding of the benefits associated with synchronicity is nascent but promising. Building on previous work illuminating commonalities between ecological and human systems, we compare the activity patterns of individual financial traders with the simultaneous activity of other traders—an individual and spontaneous characteristic we call synchronous trading. Additionally, we examine the association of synchronous trading with individual performance and communication patterns. Analyzing empirical data on day traders’ second-to-second trading and instant messaging, we find that the higher the traders’ synchronous trading is, the less likely they are to lose money at the end of the day. We also find that the daily instant messaging patterns of traders are closely associated with their level of synchronous trading. This result suggests that synchronicity and vanguard technology may help traders cope with risky decisions in complex systems and may furnish unique prospects for achieving collective and individual goals.

A new view of early human social evolution

I remember firmly taking away the message from Jared Diamond's first major book ("The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal"), the message that early human tribes were bound by kinship (kin selection) as the main motive for cooperation with the group, and that human tribes (like chimpanzee tribes) were antagonistic, so that the most likely outcome of a meeting between males of two different tribes would be a battle. Not, it now turns out, if that male is your brother or cousin. Because humans lived as foragers for 95% of our species’ history, Hill et al. analyzed co-residence patterns among 32 present-day foraging societies. They found that the members of a band are not highly related. Both young males and young females disperse to other groups (in Chimps, only females disperse). And, the emergence of a pair bonding between males and females apparently has allowed people to recognize their relatives, something chimps can do only to a limited extent. When family members disperse to other bands, they are recognized and neighboring bands are more likely to cooperate instead of fighting to the death as chimp groups do. The new view would be that cooperative behavior, as distinct from the fierce aggression between chimp groups, was the turning point that shaped human evolution.
Here is the Hill et al. abstract:

Contemporary humans exhibit spectacular biological success derived from cumulative culture and cooperation. The origins of these traits may be related to our ancestral group structure. Because humans lived as foragers for 95% of our species’ history, we analyzed co-residence patterns among 32 present-day foraging societies (total n = 5067 individuals, mean experienced band size = 28.2 adults). We found that hunter-gatherers display a unique social structure where (i) either sex may disperse or remain in their natal group, (ii) adult brothers and sisters often co-reside, and (iii) most individuals in residential groups are genetically unrelated. These patterns produce large interaction networks of unrelated adults and suggest that inclusive fitness cannot explain extensive cooperation in hunter-gatherer bands. However, large social networks may help to explain why humans evolved capacities for social learning that resulted in cumulative culture.

A brief review of this work by Chapais asks the question:

...what “cognitive prerequisites” were necessary for social groups to act as individual units and coordinate their actions in relation to other units? Did hominins, for example, require a theory of mind (the attribution of mental states to others) and shared intentionality (the recognition that I and others act as a collective working toward the same goal) (10) to achieve that level of cooperation?

How to grow a human mind...

Tennenbaum et al. offer an utterly fascinating review of attempts to understand cognitive development by reverse engineering. They offer a simple description of Bayesian or probabilistic approaches that even I can (finally) begin to understand. They state the problem:

For scientists studying how humans come to understand their world, the central challenge is this: How do our minds get so much from so little? We build rich causal models, make strong generalizations, and construct powerful abstractions, whereas the input data are sparse, noisy, and ambiguous—in every way far too limited. A massive mismatch looms between the information coming in through our senses and the ouputs of cognition.

Here are several clips from the article (I can send a PDF of the whole article to interested readers). They start with an illustration (click to enlarge):

Figure Legend:
Human children learning names for object concepts routinely make strong generalizations from just a few examples. The same processes of rapid generalization can be studied in adults learning names for novel objects created with computer graphics. (A) Given these alien objects and three examples (boxed in red) of “tufas” (a word in the alien language), which other objects are tufas? Almost everyone selects just the objects boxed in gray. (B) Learning names for categories can be modeled as Bayesian inference over a tree-structured domain representation. Objects are placed at the leaves of the tree, and hypotheses about categories that words could label correspond to different branches. Branches at different depths pick out hypotheses at different levels of generality (e.g., Clydesdales, draft horses, horses, animals, or living things). Priors are defined on the basis of branch length, reflecting the distinctiveness of categories. Likelihoods assume that examples are drawn randomly from the branch that the word labels, favoring lower branches that cover the examples tightly; this captures the sense of suspicious coincidence when all examples of a word cluster in the same part of the tree. Combining priors and likelihoods yields posterior probabilities that favor generalizing across the lowest distinctive branch that spans all the observed examples (boxed in gray).

“Bayesian” or “probabilistic” are merely placeholders for a set of interrelated principles and theoretical claims. The key ideas can be thought of as proposals for how to answer three central questions:
1) How does abstract knowledge guide learning and inference from sparse data?
2) What forms does abstract knowledge take, across different domains and tasks?
3) How is abstract knowledge itself acquired?

At heart, Bayes’s rule is simply a tool for answering question 1: How does abstract knowledge guide inference from incomplete data? Abstract knowledge is encoded in a probabilistic generative model, a kind of mental model that describes the causal processes in the world giving rise to the learner’s observations as well as unobserved or latent variables that support effective prediction and action if the learner can infer their hidden state. Generative models must be probabilistic to handle the learner’s uncertainty about the true states of latent variables and the true causal processes at work. A generative model is abstract in two senses: It describes not only the specific situation at hand, but also a broader class of situations over which learning should generalize, and it captures in parsimonious form the essential world structure that causes learners’ observations and makes generalization possible.

Bayesian inference gives a rational framework for updating beliefs about latent variables in generative models given observed data. Background knowledge is encoded through a constrained space of hypotheses H about possible values for the latent variables, candidate world structures that could explain the observed data. Finer-grained knowledge comes in the “prior probability” P(h), the learner’s degree of belief in a specific hypothesis h prior to (or independent of) the observations. Bayes’s rule updates priors to “posterior probabilities” P(h|d) conditional on the observed data d:

The posterior probability is proportional to the product of the prior probability and the likelihood P(d|h), measuring how expected the data are under hypothesis h, relative to all other hypotheses h′ in H.

To illustrate Bayes’s rule in action, suppose we observe John coughing (d), and we consider three hypotheses as explanations: John has h1, a cold; h2, lung disease; or h3, heartburn. Intuitively only h1 seems compelling. Bayes’s rule explains why. The likelihood favors h1 and h2 over h3: only colds and lung disease cause coughing and thus elevate the probability of the data above baseline. The prior, in contrast, favors h1 and h3 over h2: Colds and heartburn are much more common than lung disease. Bayes’s rule weighs hypotheses according to the product of priors and likelihoods and so yields only explanations like h1 that score highly on both terms.

The same principles can explain how people learn from sparse data. In concept learning, the data might correspond to several example objects (Fig. 1) and the hypotheses to possible extensions of the concept. Why, given three examples of different kinds of horses, would a child generalize the word “horse” to all and only horses (h1)? Why not h2, “all horses except Clydesdales”; h3, “all animals”; or any other rule consistent with the data? Likelihoods favor the more specific patterns, h1 and h2; it would be a highly suspicious coincidence to draw three random examples that all fall within the smaller sets h1 or h2 if they were actually drawn from the much larger h3. The prior favors h1 and h3, because as more coherent and distinctive categories, they are more likely to be the referents of common words in language. Only h1 scores highly on both terms. Likewise, in causal learning, the data could be co-occurences between events; the hypotheses, possible causal relations linking the events. Likelihoods favor causal links that make the co-occurence more probable, whereas priors favor links that fit with our background knowledge of what kinds of events are likely to cause which others; for example, a disease (e.g., cold) is more likely to cause a symptom (e.g., coughing) than the other way around.

The authors continue by offering examples of hierarchical Bayesian models with different graphical matrices, and then argue that the Bayesian approach brings us closer to understanding cognition that older connectionist or neural network models.

...the Bayesian approach lets us move beyond classic either-or dichotomies that have long shaped and limited debates in cognitive science: “empiricism versus nativism,” “domain-general versus domain-specific,” “logic versus probability,” “symbols versus statistics.” Instead we can ask harder questions of reverse-engineering, with answers potentially rich enough to help us build more humanlike AI systems.

A new blog - David Brooks' psychology blog.

I just got around to having a look at David Brooks' relatively new psychology blog, which has some good stuff. (I spend virtually no time looking at other blogs, not having enough time to even do this one as well as I would like. Also, blogs tend to get into recycling each other, as if taking in each other's laundry).

PLEASE tell me that Brooks has a research staff looking up this stuff for him. If he is actually doing this himself, in addition to writing two NYTimes Op-Ed pieces a week, doing frequent lectures and TV appearance, carrying on several online dialogues, promoting his new book, he is a bloody superhuman....

Chaos and complexity in financial markets and nuclear meltdowns

I trust that my friend and colleague John Young will not mind my passing on his email to the Chaos and Complexity Seminar group to which we both belong at the Univ. of Wisconsin:

The NYT article "Derivatives, as Accused by Buffett"(Here is PDF of Buffett's testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission) has words that translate into our lingo of Chaos (produced by strong signals interacting nonlinearly) and Complexity (many coupled degrees of freedom).  Excerpts:

Complexity
The problems arise, Mr. Buffett said, when a bank’s exposure to derivatives balloons to grand proportions and uninformed investors start using them. It “doesn’t make much difference if it’s, you know, one guy rolling dice against another, and they’re doing $5 a throw.

...and Nonlinearity
But it makes a lot of difference when you get into big numbers.” What worries him most is the big financial institutions that have millions of contracts. “If I look at JPMorgan, I see two trillion in receivables, two trillion in payables, a trillion and seven netted off on each side and $300 billion remaining, maybe $200 billion collateralized,” he said, walking through his thinking.

...and High Amplitude Chaos
“That’s all fine. But I don’t know what discontinuities are going to do to those numbers overnight if there’s a major nuclear, chemical or biological terrorist action that really is disruptive to the whole financial system.”

And, Floyd Norris offers an  interesting article that expands on this last point in last Friday's NYTimes, noting how there was general acceptance of the idea that regulators had developed sophisticated risk models to prevent a disaster in both the financial and nuclear power industries. They both were wrong.

In Vino Veritas - Wine drinking and mortality

As a prelude to your possible weekend libations, I thought I would note that in a recent issue of PNAS Francisco Ayala offers a brief history  of wine grape cultivation from ancient to modern times, and provides this summary on the health effects of wine consumption.

The top country producers and consumers of wine are Italy, France, and Spain. The United States is fourth in production but largest in total consumption because of its large population. The average consumption per person in the United States, although it is gradually increasing, is about one glass per week compared with nearly one glass per day in the three Mediterranean countries, where it is slowly decreasing. In wine consumption per person, the United States ranks 57th in the world.

In 1819, an Irish physician, Dr. Samuel Black, attributed the much lower prevalence of angina pectoris in France than in Ireland to the “French habits and modes of living”. There is now a wealth of evidence that moderate drinking of wine, particularly red, decreases the risk for mortality. A plot of risk for dying against alcohol consumption yields a J-shaped curve, showing that moderate drinkers outlive both teetotalers and heavy drinkers and that teetotalers outlive heavy drinkers (see figure). The beneficial effects of moderate red wine drinking are often attributed to resveratrol and other polyphenols, antioxidants derived from the skins, seeds, and stems of grapes. Beneficial health effects include, first and foremost, lowered risk for cardiovascular disease but also for some forms of cancer, stroke and other cerebrovascular accidents, type 2 diabetes, macular degeneration, Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia, kidney stones and gallstones, bone density, hip fracture, and other diseases.

The J-shaped relationship between wine drinking and risk for death. (One glass of red wine contains approximately 10 grams of alcohol.)

Women's underrepresentation in science

Ceci and Williams offer an interesting perspective in an open access article. They conclude that women's underrepresentation in the sciences is due not to sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring, but rather:

...primarily to factors surrounding family formation and childrearing, gendered expectations, lifestyle choices, and career preferences—some originating before or during adolescence — and secondarily to sex differences at the extreme right tail of mathematics performance on tests used as gateways to graduate school admission.

Here is their abstract:

Explanations for women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. To better understand women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and its causes, we reprise claims of discrimination and their evidentiary bases. Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid and, if uncritically accepted as current causes of women's lack of progress, can delay or prevent understanding of contemporary determinants of women's underrepresentation. We conclude that differential gendered outcomes in the real world result from differences in resources attributable to choices, whether free or constrained, and that such choices could be influenced and better informed through education if resources were so directed. Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women's participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today's causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes. Finally, we suggest potential avenues of intervention to increase gender fairness that accord with current, as opposed to historical, findings.

All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate

The executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, wrote a fascinating piece in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. It sort of hit me between the eyes, because I am self conscious (feel like I'm being lazy, in fact, even though this blog takes a bloody lot of time to do) - about the fact that this MindBlog is mainly an aggregator, rather than a reporter of my own original ideas. (Emails from reader grateful at having been made aware of this or that bit of information temper my self flagellation just a bit.) Keller notes how:

...our fascination with capital-M Media is so disengaged from what really matters.
...Much as the creative minds of Wall Street found a way to divorce investing from the messiness of tangible assets, enabling clients to buy shadows of shadows, we in Media have transcended earthbound activities like reporting, writing or picture-taking and created an abstraction — a derivative — called Media in which we invest our attention and esteem. Possibly I am old-fashioned, but in these days when actual journalists are laboring at actual history, covering the fever of democracy in Arab capitals and the fever of austerity in American capitals, the obsession with the theoretical and self-referential feels to me increasingly bloodless...We have flocks of media oxpeckers who ride the backs of pachyderms, feeding on ticks. We have a coterie of learned analysts...who meditate on the meta of media. By turning news executives into celebrities, we devalue the institutions that support them, the basics of craft and the authority of editorial judgment.

Then he goes after the Huffington Post (which I glance at daily):

“Aggregation” can mean smart people sharing their reading lists, plugging one another into the bounty of the information universe. It kind of describes what I do as an editor. But too often it amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own Web site and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model...The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come.

...some of the great aggregators, Huffington among them, seem to be experiencing a back-to-the-future epiphany. They seem to have realized that if everybody is an aggregator, nobody will be left to make real stuff to aggregate. Huffington has therefore hired a small stable of experienced journalists, including a few from here, to produce original journalism about business and politics...if serious journalism is about to enjoy a renaissance, I can only rejoice. Gee, maybe we can even get people to pay for it.

The madness of trivial decisions

I'm sure you find yourself annoyed and paralyzed when you face the huge array of options for a single simple item that are offered on drugstore and supermarket shelves. I walked into a Target store here in Fort Lauderdale yesterday wanting to pick up a simple tube of chapstick and spent five minutes trying to figure out which of the 10 or so different varieties might correspond to the single option offered by the 7-11 Stores of my youth. Expanded options don't offer significant new freedom, they induce indecision paralysis. Jonah Lehrer points to a working paper by Sela and Burger that suggests that I am making a metacognitive error. I..

...confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance, which then leads my brain to conclude that this decision is worth lots of time and attention. Call it the drug store heuristic: A cluttered store shelf leads us to automatically assume that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t.

From the Sela and Burger draft, which describes three experiments supporting their points:

Our central premise is that people use subjective experiences of difficulty while making a decision as a cue to how much further time and effort to spend. People generally associate important decisions with difficulty. Consequently, if a decision feels unexpectedly difficult, due to even incidental reasons, people may draw the reverse inference that it is also important, and consequently increase the amount of time and effort they expend. Ironically, this process is particularly likely for decisions that initially seemed unimportant because people expect them to be easier.

If people form inferences about decision importance from their own decision efforts, then not only might increased perceived importance lead people to spend more time deciding, but increased decision time might, in turn, validate and amplify these perceptions of importance, which might further increase deliberation time. Thus, one could imagine a recursive loop between deliberation time, difficulty, and perceived importance. Inferences from difficulty may not only impact immediate deliberation, but may kick off a quicksand cycle that leads people to spend more and more time on a decision that initially seemed rather unimportant. Quicksand sucks people in, but the worse it seems the more people struggle.

Predicting volition - Free will redux

Fried et al. have now taken Libet's classic experiment (electodes on the surface of the head reporting activity in motor cortex in preparation for a movement before the subject is aware of deciding to act) to a whole new level. They recorded the activity of 1019 neurons while twelve subjects performed self-initiated finger movement. (In some cases of intractable epilepsy, intracranial electrodes are used for evaluation prior to neurosurgery. When depth electrodes are inserted into the cortical tissue itself, it is then possible to record the firing patterns of single neurons in awake, behaving humans.)  Activity increases prior to volition were mapped with greater detail, and areas that decreased in firing in preparation for movement were also found, suggesting an inhibitory component to volition.  Here is the author's summary:

* Highlights
* Progressive changes in firing rates precede self-initiated movements
* Medial frontal cortex units signal volition onset before subjects' awareness
* Prediction level is high (90%) based on neuronal responses in single trials
* Volition could arise from accumulation of ensemble activity crossing a threshold

Summary

Understanding how self-initiated behavior is encoded by neuronal circuits in the human brain remains elusive. We recorded the activity of 1019 neurons while twelve subjects performed self-initiated finger movement. We report progressive neuronal recruitment over ∼1500 ms before subjects report making the decision to move. We observed progressive increase or decrease in neuronal firing rate, particularly in the supplementary motor area (SMA), as the reported time of decision was approached. A population of 256 SMA neurons is sufficient to predict in single trials the impending decision to move with accuracy greater than 80% already 700 ms prior to subjects' awareness. Furthermore, we predict, with a precision of a few hundred ms, the actual time point of this voluntary decision to move. We implement a computational model whereby volition emerges once a change in internally generated firing rate of neuronal assemblies crosses a threshold.

From an introductory review by Haggard, a segment relevant to Libet's idea that "free will" might correspond to "free won't" - inhibition of an intended action:

A recent model of volition identified the decision of whether to act or not as an important component of volition. Fried et al.’s data suggest one mechanism that might be involved in this decision. Decreasing neurons might withhold actions until they become appropriate through tonic inhibition and then help to trigger voluntary actions by gradually removing this tonic inhibition. Competitive inhibitory interaction between decreasing and increasing neurons could then provide a circuit for resolving whether to act or withhold action. A similar model has already been proposed for decisions between alternative stimulus-driven actions in lateral premotor cortex. Libet thought that ‘‘veto decisions’’ could represent a form of pure mind-brain causation, with consciousness directly intervening to interrupt the buildup of the readiness potential. Competition between populations of medial frontal neurons may provide a simpler explanation, though it still leaves us hunting for potential "decision" areas that may modulate the competition.

Chimpanzees know that others make inferences

Tomasello's group asks whether chimpanzees can determine that another chimpanzee is guiding its actions not on the basis of visual or auditory perception but on the basis of inferences alone. This is a theoretically important question because Povinelli and others have argued that when chimpanzees seemingly understand the visual perception of others, they are only reacting to overt orienting behaviors. The current study was designed so that chimpanzees were faced with an individual who might or might not be making an inference about where food is hidden — with no diagnostic orienting behaviors at all (the chimpanzee subject could not see the other individual making its choice):

If chimpanzees are faced with two opaque boards on a table, in the context of searching for a single piece of food, they do not choose the board lying flat (because if food was under there it would not be lying flat) but, rather, they choose the slanted one— presumably inferring that some unperceived food underneath is causing the slant. Here we demonstrate that chimpanzees know that other chimpanzees in the same situation will make a similar inference. In a back-and-forth foraging game, when their competitor had chosen before them, chimpanzees tended to avoid the slanted board on the assumption that the competitor had already chosen it. Chimpanzees can determine the inferences that a conspecific is likely to make and then adjust their competitive strategies accordingly.

Improving your cognitive toolkit - VI

Continuation of my abstracting of a few of the answers to the annual question at edge.org, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?":

Clay Shirky - The Pareto Principle - "unfairness" is a law.

You see the pattern everywhere: the top 1% of the population control 35% of the wealth. On Twitter, the top 2% of users send 60% of the messages. In the health care system, the treatment for the most expensive fifth of patients create four-fifths of the overall cost...The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto undertook a study of market economies a century ago, and discovered that no matter what the country, the richest quintile of the population controlled most of the wealth. The effects of this Pareto Distribution go by many names — the 80/20 Rule, Zipfs Law, the Power Law distribution, Winner-Take-All — but the basic shape of the underlying distribution is always the same: the richest or busiest or most connected participants in a system will account for much much more wealth, or activity, or connectedness than average...this pattern is recursive. Within the top 20% of a system that exhibits a Pareto distribution, the top 20% of that slice will also account for disproportionately more of whatever is being measured, and so on.
...The Pareto distribution shows up in a remarkably wide array of complex systems. Together, "the" and "of" account for 10% of all words used in English. The most volatile day in the history of a stock market will typically be twice that of the second-most volatile, and ten times the tenth-most. Tag frequency on Flickr photos obeys a Pareto distribution, as does the magnitude of earthquakes, the popularity of books, the size of asteroids, and the social connectedness of your friends.

And yet, despite a century of scientific familiarity, samples drawn from Pareto distributions are routinely presented to the public as anomalies, which prevents us from thinking clearly about the world. We should stop thinking that average family income and the income of the median family have anything to do with one another, or that enthusiastic and normal users of communications tools are doing similar things, or that extroverts should be only moderately more connected than normal people.

This doesn't mean that such distributions are beyond our ability to affect them. A Pareto curve's decline from head to tail can be more or less dramatic, and in some cases, political or social intervention can affect that slope — tax policy can raise or lower the share of income of the top 1% of a population, just as there are ways to constrain the overall volatility of markets, or to reduce the band in which health care costs can fluctuate.

However, until we assume such systems are Pareto distributions, and will remain so even after any such intervention, we haven't even started thinking about them in the right way; in all likelihood, we're trying to put a Pareto peg in a Gaussian hole.

Daniel Goleman - Anthropocene thinking

Our planet has left the Holocene Age and entered what geologists call the Anthropocene Age, in which human systems erode the natural systems that support life...of all the global life-support systems, the carbon cycle is closest to no-return. While such "inconvenient truths" about the carbon cycle have been the poster child for our species' slow motion suicide, that's just part of a much larger picture, with all the eight global life-support systems under attack by our daily habits.

We approach the Anthropocene threat with brains shaped in evolution to survive the previous geological epoch, the Holocene, when dangers were signaled by growls and rustles in the bushes, and it served one well to reflexively abhor spiders and snakes. Our neural alarm systems still attune to this largely antiquated range of danger.

Add to that misattunement to threats our built-in perceptual blindspot: we have no direct neural register for the dangers of the Anthropocene age, which are too macro or micro for our sensory apparatus. We are oblivious to, say, our body burden, the lifetime build-up of damaging industrial chemicals in our tissues.

The fields that hold keys to solutions include economics, neuroscience, social psychology and cognitive science — and their various hybrids. With a focus on Anthropocene theory and practice they might well contribute species-saving insights. But first they have to engage this challenge, which for the most part has remained off their agenda.

When, for example, will neuroeconomics tackle the brain's perplexing indifference to the news about planetary meltdown, let alone how that neural blindspot might be patched? Might cognitive neuroscience one day offer some insight that might change our collective decision-making away from a lemmings' march to oblivion? Could any of the computer, behavioral or brain sciences come up with an information prosthetic that might reverse our course?

Cats with thumbs...

I had to pass this on (my daughter found it).

The beginning and middle of human history

Nicholas Wade has done a fascinating article on Franis Fukayama and his new book "The Origins of Political Order." (Which I've pre-ordered for my Amazon Kindle - Publishing date of April 12). The book takes off where E.O. Wilson's "Sociobiology" left off, emphasizing cultural traits built around evolved behaviors like favoring relatives, reciprocal altruism, creating and following rules, and a propensity for warfare. Starting with the transition from tribes to states (which occurred in China 1000 years earlier than in Europe, ~200 BC versus 800 AD, he describes the natural selection that occurred as European countries tried different formulas for distributing power, with only England and Denmark (almost by accident) developing the essential institutions of a strong state, the rule of law, and mechanisms to hold the ruler accountable. This successful formula then became adopted by other European states, through a kind of natural selection that favored the most successful variation. The book stops with the French revolution, and a subsequent book will continue to the present. Fukayama still thinks the modern liberal state is the "end of history" (The title of his most famous book).

In a parallel universe with no feudalism, European rulers might have been absolute, just like those of China. But through the accident of democracy, England and then the United States created a powerful system that many others wish to emulate. The question for China, in Dr. Fukuyama’s view, is whether a modern society can continue to be run through a top-down bureaucratic system with no solution to the bad emperor problem. “If I had to bet on these two systems, I’d bet on ours,” he said.

The New Humanism

Just after I look at my morning email, in which a blog reader points me to this NPR piece on David Brooks new book "The Social Animal", I open the New York Times and find Brooks' column on this subject.  Even though I don't agree with many of his conservative views, I have enormous respect for Brooks' efforts to bring the insights of modern research on how humans really work into the political policy arena. His Op-Ed piece this morning is an exceptionally well done summary of how public policy, guided by the fantasy of the rational citizen, ignores the emotional brain that is really running the show.  Below I offer some (slightly rearranged) clips. His view of many policy failures (as in public education) is that they rely

...on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions...the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

This body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

Now hundreds of thousands of researchers are coming up with a more accurate view of who we are.  When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people. The research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.
Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.
Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.
Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.
Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

Science starts early.

Frank Kell reviews experiments that show that young children are often quite adept at uncovering statistical and causal patterns, and that many foundations of scientific thought are built impressively early in our lives. Infants make causal interpretations by integrating information in ways that closely mirror adults...certain sequences of events automatically elicit thoughts of causation at all ages. In addition to figuring out the causal relations underlying novel devices, children are also sensitive to highly abstract causal patterns associated with specific “domains” that correspond roughly to...biology, physical mechanics, and psychology.

...an infant learning language, upon hearing streams of syllables, not only has to notice how often certain syllables occur but also needs to infer higher-order patterns arising from those syllables. One study showed that 5-month-old infants can handle this challenge by rapidly tracking not only the sounds of the syllables but also visual patterns associated with each syllable. In the experiment, infants looking at a computer screen were repeatedly presented with abstract patterns of syllables and shapes. An “ABB” pattern, for instance, could be represented by certain shapes corresponding to the syllables “di ga ga.” When presented with a new pattern (ABA) with new syllables—such as “le ko le”—the infants looked longer at the shapes on the screen than if the new syllables were in the old ABB pattern. This suggests that they recognized it as a new, unfamiliar correlation...6-month-olds can take the next step and infer causation from certain kinds of correlations. In these experiments, researchers measured how long infants looked at animations showing “collisions” of shapes. In some animations, one object “launched” a second one, causing it to move, as when two billiard balls collide. When shown animations in which the balls reversed roles, infants looked longer at the new pattern than at the original one.

in thinking about biological phenomena such as disease or inheritance, children may make different inferences from patterns of covariation than they do for physical phenomena such as collisions or rotating gears. Another top-down expectation that children bring to living things, but not to artifacts, is an “essentialist bias”: the idea that something you can't see (e.g., “microstructural stuff ”) causes what you can see (“surface phenomena” such as feathers or fur) and is the essence of the thing being observed. This is a guiding principle in much of formal science, even as it can also lead to false inferences, such as that species are defined by fixed essences.

A map of well-being

For the last three years, Gallup has called 1,000 randomly selected American adults each day and asked them about their emotional status, work satisfaction, eating habits, illnesses, stress levels and other indicators of their quality of life. Here is an interactive graphic summary of the results, sorted by congressional districts, and a related article.

The significance of self control.

We can't have our cake and eat it too, and every major religious tradition advocates forsaking pleasure in the moment to realize greater, deferred rewards. A recent study by Moffitt et al. statistically controls for the potential confounds of intelligence and family background in examining life outcomes in a large, nationally representative sample of New Zealanders. From their abstract:

...is self-control important for the health, wealth, and public safety of the population? Following a cohort of 1,000 children from birth to the age of 32 y, we show that childhood self-control predicts physical health, substance dependence, personal finances, and criminal offending outcomes, following a gradient of self-control. Effects of children's self-control could be disentangled from their intelligence and social class as well as from mistakes they made as adolescents. In another cohort of 500 sibling-pairs, the sibling with lower self-control had poorer outcomes, despite shared family background. Interventions addressing self-control might reduce a panoply of societal costs, save taxpayers money, and promote prosperity.